The Washington Post National Weekly - March 13, 2016

Politics Misstep taunts Rubio 4

Nation Corruption debilitates Tex. town 8

World Can kids learn the law? 10

5 Myths About heroin 23

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THE FIX CAMPAIGN *** 2016

Debate winners, losers BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

T

he 12th Republican presidential debate is over. I picked a handful of the best and worst of the night.

WINNERS

Marco Rubio: The senator from Florida was poised, confident and knowledgeable. He avoided any sort of personal attacks on Donald Trump and largely steered clear of clashing with the race’s front-runner at all. It worked.

(It also helped that Rubio had a hometown crowd ready to cheer his every word.) Watching Rubio on Thursday night, I found myself wondering where he might have been in this race if he hadn’t (a) had brain-lock in the debate just before the New Hampshire primary and (b) hadn’t spent 72 hours earlier this month getting in the gutter with Trump. Of course, that’s beside the point now. Rubio’s last hope in the race is to win Florida, denying Trump the state’s 99 delegates and praying that, somehow, the race changes drastically and puts him back in the mix. It’s a long shot.

But Rubio deserves credit for performing extremely well when the chips were down.

Donald Trump: Let me be honest here. I have no idea what to make of Trump when it comes to his debate performances. On the good side, Trump was far more measured and under control in this debate than in any of the previous ones. Gone were references to “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” and the general rhetorical nastiness that has been a Trump hallmark since he announced his candidacy. And Trump was, largely, given a pass by the other men on the stage. Rubio, clearly scorched by his collapse in the wake of his juvenile attacks on Trump, wanted no piece of him. John Kasich, with a campaign built on hope and optimism, ignored Trump. Ted Cruz occasionally engaged Trump — trying to paint him as a policy sim-

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pleton — but the real estate mogul refused to take the bait. So, that was the good side. (We’ll get to the bad side later.)

Ted Cruz: The senator from Texas succeeded at times during the debate in making it seem as though it was a one-on-one race between him and Trump. Cruz was also less deeply rehearsed in this debate — to the good.

He has a different challenge than Rubio or Kasich, who need to bend the arc of the contest.

They need a knockout of Trump; Cruz is trying

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

From left, GOP candidates Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

to beat him on points. And, on that front, this was a good debate for Cruz. He repeatedly hammered Trump’s policy solutions as nothing more than empty rhetoric. Also, Rubio’s good debate works in Cruz’s favor. Cruz can’t win Florida but needs to keep those 99 delegates away from Trump somehow.

LOSERS

Donald Trump: Imagine where Trump might be if he was willing to pick up a policy briefing book and, you know, skim it. He’s often able to coast by in these debates even with an almost total lack of policy knowledge. But he got caught flat-footed a few times in this

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one. The most painful? Trump’s clear cluelessness about Cuba policy, made all the worse by Rubio’s deep knowledge, which he dropped on Trump’s head. The question, as always with Trump, is whether his lack of engagement on policy even matters at all. It’s nothing new and he continues to win states and rack up delegates. Trump’s supporters seem uninterested in the minutiae of his policy positions. Rather they respond to his toughness and his tone.

John Kasich: Kasich wasn’t bad. He just didn’t really stand out in any meaningful way.

The Ohio governor kept up his Mr. Nice Guy routine, but it played slightly less well in this debate because everyone was much nicer to each other. Kasich’s debate performance speaks to the larger conceit his campaign is built on: Hang around, don’t make mistakes and offer yourself as an optimistic alternative.

The only way a strategy like that works, of course, is if all of the people in front of you implode or kill each other off.

Reince Priebus: This was the 12th Republican debate. It is March. Given the lateness of the hour — in terms of the primary — it is never a good sign when the chairman of the Republican National Committee has to go out before a debate and assure voters everything is going to be just fine, no need to worry, the situation is under control, please move along, nothing to see here.

CNN: Look. Just tell me EXACTLY when the debate starts. Don’t promote — with your countdown clock no less! — that the debate begins at 8:30 p.m. Eastern only to tell viewers (okay, me) when they tune in that “right at the top of the 9 p.m. hour” things will get started.

I, of course, get that CNN is making a ratings calculation here. They are betting that even if you are annoyed at their ruse, you’ll be too lazy to change the channel because, you know, it’s only 30 more minutes until the debate starts.

And, it works (on me). Still, CNN. Come on. n

CONTENTS POLITICS NATION WORLD ART COVER STORY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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POLITICS

Rubio’s fateful error: A strategy that backfired

CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

The aspirational candidate’s turn toward personally insulting Trump appalled supporters

BY P HILIP R UCKER, E D O ’ K EEFE AND M ATEA G OLD

Miami

M

arco Rubio had suffered three electoral thumpings in a row when the senator from Florida and his image-makers abruptly shifted strategy. The aspirational candidate, whose presidential campaign was built on a promise of generational change and Republican unity, would morph overnight into Donald Trump’s chief assailant.

Rubio launched what he and his team felt was an imperative assault on the front-runner at the Houston debate on Feb. 25. The

next morning at a Dallas rally, he mocked Trump mercilessly. Rubio whipped out his iPhone and, with boyish glee, read aloud the billionaire mogul’s misspelled tweets. He made fun of Trump’s makeup and “sweat mustache,” and suggested the mogul had wet his pants.

For the next three days, Rubio’s crude schoolyard taunts continued: over Trump’s made-in-China suits, his “horrible spray tan” and his small hands — a quip that, as Trump would later explain on the debate stage in Detroit, implied something else was small, too.

Rubio’s benefactors were aghast to see their candidate practicing Trump’s gutter politics. “Everyone went, ‘What?. . . Why are you going down to that level?’ ”

recalled one fundraiser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. “You might as well support Trump.”

Looking back, Rubio’s supporters see these fateful days as central to his unraveling. A strategy designed to get under Trump’s skin and force him on the defensive instead backfired on Rubio, diminishing the 44-year-old senator who had spent years trying to demonstrate presidential gravitas. At rally after rally, Rubio was unintentionally personifying the caricature that Trump was perpetually drawing of him: “Little Marco.”

The results were not pretty.

Rubio lost 18 of the next 20 contests, with his only wins in Minnesota’s caucuses and Puerto Rico’s

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio speaks to supporters during a campaign rally in Miami on Wednesday with his wife, Jeanette.

primary. The ultimate humiliation came on Tuesday, when Rubio performed so poorly in four states — he got just 5 percent in Mississippi — that he was shut out from gaining any delegates.

A reflective Rubio expressed regret Wednesday over his namecalling of Trump, saying at an MSNBC town hall that the insults had upset his children.

“In terms of things that have to do with personal stuff, yeah, at the end of the day it’s not something I’m entirely proud of,” Rubio said.

“My kids were embarrassed by it, and if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t.”

A cloud of fatalism Rubio vowed to soldier on into

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POLITICS Tuesday’s must-win Florida primary. “I will campaign as long and as hard as it takes,” the senator, joined by his wife, Jeanette, said at a Wednesday evening rally in Hialeah, a heavily Cuban American city outside of his Miami home town.

But a cloud of fatalism now hovers over his campaign. Aides on Wednesday tried to beat back rumors he would quit the race — perhaps before Thursday’s CNN debate in Miami. Donors exchanged grim messages about Rubio’s fate in Florida, where his campaign, short on cash, is running no advertisements. New polls showed him trailing Trump here badly.

Supporters in the small and subdued Hialeah crowd all but conceded defeat. “I’ve been around for a long time,” said Sal Pittelli, 70. “And you can smell the flop sweat.”

Meanwhile, rival Ted Cruz of Texas, campaigning in Miami, needled Rubio by arguing that his was the only “credible path” to deny Trump the nomination.

“It’s certainly a possibility that he could lose on Tuesday, and perhaps by double digits,” said John McKager “Mac” Stipanovich, a Tallahassee lobbyist and Rubio supporter. “He’s sworn to win, which might take some divine intervention, but that’s what he’s said, and he’s trying to persuade the people who love him and follow him that that’s the case.”

Adam Hasner, Rubio’s Florida campaign co-chairman, dismissed the suggestion that Rubio might drop out before the primary.

“He has demonstrated that he has a message that resonates and he’s the right messenger,” Hasner said. “He’s come so far in six years, to leave it a couple of yards from the goal line and taking a knee on third down? It’s just not who Marco Rubio is.”

Some Rubio associates were downright despondent about his bid. They were reticent to speak openly because they did not want to damage their friend’s prospects, but one confessed privately, “I don’t see how this campaign continues.”

Miami locals who know Rubio and his family and have supported his campaigns over the years said they blame Rubio’s advisers for improperly managing what seemed to them only a few weeks ago like a sure thing.

“Up until he started talking

CARLOS OSORIO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

about how Trump has a small penis, it was brilliant,” said the same friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. “Focusing on the size of his hands or the color of his skin — that was stupid.”

‘Pretty much finished’ There are a multitude of reasons to account for Rubio’s collapse: He is a career politician in a season when GOP primary voters crave outsiders; he was the subject of tens of millions of dollars in negative advertising from former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s super PAC; he could not raise enough money to keep up his own ad blitz; his ground game was weak; and his Senate work seeking comprehensive immigration reform constituted apostasy to many conservatives.

Yet another reason is that Rubio has no natural base. In the sprawling field, he was never the most experienced establishmentfriendly candidate (that was Bush), nor the most conservative ideological warrior (Cruz), nor the rebellious outsider (Trump).

“Beyond the appeal of his personal story, I’m not sure Marco ever grew a constituency that would carry him to the finish line,” said Stipanovich, who initially supported Bush.

Interviews with more than a dozen Rubio advisers, fundraisers and other supporters suggest that perhaps the key inflection point came in that late-February change of strategy on Trump, when Rubio

sacrificed the uplifting message that had won over late-deciding voters in Iowa and South Carolina for an all-out brawl.

That was when private pollsters tracking the race began to see Rubio’s favorability rating and his standing in the horse race stall out and soon erode.

“Those exchanges with Mr. Trump were damaging,” Al Cardenas, a conservative activist who is a Bush friend and a former Rubio employer, wrote in an email. “Perhaps not as damaging as the dismal results in Kansas, Maine and Louisiana. If you finish under 20 percent in the South, Midwest and Northeast, this far out in the campaign, you are pretty much finished.”

‘It was a conscious decision’ Rubio’s pivot to Trump was by all accounts deliberate and carefully planned. With the exception of his debate meltdown in New Hampshire — when he was mocked for robotically repeating talking points — Rubio had a strong early February, slowly gaining momentum, money and high-wattage endorsements.

Once Trump beat him and Cruz in South Carolina and Nevada, however, Rubio’s supporters agitated for him to take a more aggressive stance or risk letting Trump run away with the nomination.

Randy Kendrick, an influential conservative donor, said she and her husband, owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, encouraged Rubio to go on the offensive, “de-

Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) references hand size during a Republican presidential primary debate March 3 in Detroit.

“Focusing on the size of his hands or the color of his skin — that was stupid.”

An anonymous friend of Marco Rubio’s, talking about the candidate’s insults of Donald Trump

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fining Trump.”

“Stand up for what we believe in,” she said. “If we lose, okay. But he will be able to say, ‘We did the right thing.’ ” As the Houston debate approached, the senior leadership of Rubio’s campaign decided to go after Trump. They fed the candidate a mountain of opposition research about Trump’s business dealings and past liberal positions.

Senior adviser Todd Harris, who runs Rubio’s debate preparation sessions, helped him develop specific lines of attack that would serve Trump some of his own medicine.

“Rubio felt he needed to point out some of Trump’s massive inconsistencies — and to try to do it with a little bit of humor,” said one Republican with knowledge of the preparations, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “It was a conscious decision.”

Harris told reporters that Rubio had proved he could “mix it up” by mocking Trump. “Was it a substantive argument? No,” he admitted. “But as we’ve seen from most of, if not all of, the media coverage over the past eight months, trying to wage a battle of substance against Trump is a pretty futile effort.”

At that point, Harris described the petty attacks as a tactic, not a new strategy. “The overwhelming majority of Marco’s stump speech is positive,” he said, “and that’s not going to change.”

Not 12 hours later, Rubio’s stump speech had changed — dramatically. At a rally in downtown Dallas, Rubio spent close to eight minutes taking potshots at Trump, even as his audience’s titters turned to nervous unease.

Donors swamped Rubio and his advisers with messages urging him to abandon the insult-fest.

Eventually, after he lost 10 of 11 states on Super Tuesday, Rubio dropped the line of attack.

In the days that followed, Rubio insisted his swipes at Trump did not define his candidacy. Trump is a bully, he said, and bullies must be stood up to. Then at Wednesday’s MSNBC town hall, Rubio not only voiced regret, but also blamed the insult-spewing frontrunner for setting a juvenile tone for the entire race.

“I don’t want to be that,” Rubio said. “If that’s what it takes to become president of the United States, then I don’t want to be president.” n

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POLITICS

Skepticism of free trade alters races

BY D AVID W EIGEL AND L YDIA D E P ILLIS

Palatine, Ill.

S

ix days before the Ohio Republican primary that will either end or kickstart his presidential campaign, Ohio Gov. John Kasich was playing catch-up. He started a Wednesday swing through the Chicago suburbs at Navistar, a truck manufacturer, and recounted that the chief executive had just told him that “international bureaucrats” were taking advantage of trade deals.

“We’re not going to sit here and have the American worker beaten on because we’re relying on some international bureaucrat,” Kasich said at the factory and at a stop in Cook County.

“Now, that doesn’t make the free-traders in my party happy.

Tough. Because I am for free trade.”

Hours later, Donald Trump — who defeated Kasich in Michigan and is leading in Ohio polls — put the trade issue in his own terms.

“You know, Michigan’s been stripped,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday.

“You look at those empty factories all over the place. And nobody hits that message better than me.”

As the primary season moves to the industrial Midwest, blunt talk about trade — and deep skepticism — are winning out over nuance. Trump’s victory in Michigan was expected, but the victory of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont defied every poll and rattled a Democratic establishment that was already talking about a race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The salience of trade, in a state where unemployment had tumbled more than half since the start of the Great Recession, blindsided a Democratic Party that has struggled to find coherence between its labor base and its neoliberal leadership. It also worried Republicans, whose leaders and donors are resolutely in favor of free trade.

“There has been a bipartisan

BEV HORNE/DAILY HERALD VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Manufacturing losses in Michigan helped fuel wins by Trump and Sanders in the primary there conventional wisdom that the damage done to working-class jobs and incomes are simply part of inevitable changes, ones we cannot and should not challenge,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Even President Obama is blaming inequality problems on technological change, which is not even a plausible explanation for post-2000 America. People correctly understand that many elites simply believe that wage stagnation is something we cannot change.”

The post-2009 increase in overall employment has masked a steady decline of Midwestern manufacturing jobs. Ohio is down 6,900 manufacturing jobs from the start of 2008, according to the Labor Department, a decline of 9 percent. It has lost one-third of the factory jobs it had in 2000 — a total of 340,000.

Michigan has gained just 1,300 manufacturing jobs since the start of 2008, and it still has 285,000 fewer factory jobs than it did in 2000, a drop of 32 percent.

In Michigan, exit pollsters for the first time asked voters wheth-

er they thought trade created or took away American jobs. The “take away” faction made up 55 percent of the Republican primary vote and 57 percent of the Democratic primary vote.

Trump won the GOP faction with 45 percent, and Sanders won the Democratic side with 56 percent.

Both men spent long sections of their stump speeches to assault trade deals and the political classes that had negotiated them.

They differed only in the analysis of whether the dealmakers were venal or merely stupid.

“Many, many Republicans and far too many Democrats supported these disastrous trade policies,” Sanders said Sunday at the preprimary debate in Flint. “Not only job loss by the millions, but a race to the bottom so that new jobs in manufacturing in some cases pay 50 percent less than they did 20 years ago. How stupid is that trade policy?”

In the 2008 Democratic primary, Obama made a fitful promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it did not move votes in Ohio.

This year was different, because

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who in the 1990s supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, is trailing Donald Trump in Ohio polling.

the candidates were different.

Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said this election has elevated a candidate in each political party with a long record of questioning trade deals. She recalled Trump speaking out along with Ross Perot against NAFTA in the early 1990s, and Sanders being one of the first members of Congress to actually read the agreement in full before it was voted on.

“On a bipartisan basis, the political class in this country has underestimated the political potency of the public’s opposition to jobkilling trade agreements or have dismissed it as ill-informed,” she said. Trump and Sanders, she said, are “articulating, pretty concretely, why what’s happening has happened, and here’s how we do it differently.”

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has advised several Republican candidates on economic policy this cycle and who supports free trade, said Republicans shouldn’t be surprised that voters have turned against trade deals.

“It’s really hard and painful to find something else to do when you’re 58 years old” and laid off, he said. “Our side has to do a really better job of explaining the ways trade makes people better off.”

No one on the mainstream right has really done so. The Club for Growth, a free-market group that has poured millions of dollars into anti-Trump TV ads, has focused on the mogul-turned-candidate’s past support for Democrats and his comfort with eminent domain law.

“What’s needed now by the supporters of free trade is a public education campaign to talk to these voters and explain to them and their family members what’s at stake,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth. “It’s a matter of having an economic policy that will create new jobs to replace those jobs being lost. There’s a lot at stake here if we get into a trade war.” n

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POLITICS

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Cruz begins to court his frenemies BY

P AUL K ANE

S

en. Lindsey O. Graham couldn’t remember the last time he spoke to Ted Cruz.

“It’s been a while,” Graham (R-S.C.) said the other week.

Same for Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a first-term senator facing a difficult reelection in the fall. And Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), whose last talk with the fiery GOP presidential candidate from Texas came a “few months ago.”

“We just chatted in general,” Hatch recalled recently. At that point, Cruz had not won the endorsement of a single U.S. senator, something he had worn as a badge of honor as he railed against the “Washington cartel” of bipartisan disappointment.

But coming off several critical victories over Donald Trump, Cruz is looking for support from the very colleagues he has repeatedly infuriated. Recently, Cruz spoke to Graham about the presidential race, after a suggestion by the senator from South Carolina that conservatives may have to rally around Cruz to stop Trump from storming to the GOP nomination.

And Thursday he picked up his first Senate endorsement when Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) gave his support and called on his party to unite behind his Texas colleague.

Cruz’s recent primary wins have established him as the clear second choice to Trump, eclipsing the establishment favorite, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and setting up the possibility of a long battle throughout the spring for the ideological soul of the Republican Party.

To defeat Trump, however, Cruz must decide whether his best path is sticking to his current stand against everything and anyone in Washington, or if success will require some rapprochement with the Republican establishment, both inside and outside Washington. He may need their votes as well as their money.

For now, Graham is talking about the possibility openly, something that seemed implausible six weeks ago. That’s when Graham, shortly after ending his own presidential bid, likened Trump or Cruz

AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Coming off several primary victories, an outsider starts looking for validation from top insiders as the nominee to certain death for Republicans. “Like being shot or poisoned,” he said.

Cruz earned the enmity of his Republican colleagues within weeks of joining the Senate in early 2013. He and other junior senators earned the nickname “wacko birds” from Sen. John McCain (RAriz.) when they filibustered the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director over the agency’s use of drones. Some Republicans dubbed Cruz’s plan to shut down the government in an effort to end funding for the Affordable Care Act the “dumbest idea” ever, and another called Cruz a “bully.”

He seemingly burned his last bridge to fellow Republicans last June, as his campaign struggled for early attention, when he delivered a series of floor speeches accusing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) of lying to GOP senators about his handling of trade legislation.

But after Rubio’s disappointing showings in recent state primaries, some Republicans are

choosing the Cruz arsenic over the Trump firing squad.

“I don’t think Trump is a Republican. I don’t think he’s a reliable conservative. Ted Cruz and I have a lot of differences, but I do believe he’saconservative,Idobelievehe’sa Republican,” Graham told reporters. “Marco would be my preferred choice. I think he’s far more electable, but, you know, we’re going to play the hand we’re dealt here.”

No endorsement has been forthcoming, and last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Graham expanded on the theme to say there is “some hope with Ted, no hope with the Donald” with regard to Republicans winning the White House.

That has been an open question among Republicans for months.

Some have suggested that Trump’s outreach to white working-class voters has expanded the GOP electorate, making him more viable in a general election and helping down-ballot Republicans among voters not otherwise inclined to support them.

Others view Trump’s racially

Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.) greets attendees at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting in March.

tinged remarks as brutal fodder for Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. They view Cruz — Princeton undergraduate, Harvard Law, argued before the Supreme Court — as someone less prone to make mistakes.

Many think Cruz should stick with an approach that has taken him from obscurity to national fame in four years.

“He’s come a long way the way he is, and I don’t think changing his personality is a requisite. I think he’s got a tough, strong personality.

A lot of people think that would be good for the presidency,” Hatch, a Rubio supporter, said of Cruz.

Johnson, who is staying neutral, pointed out that voters have discounted most of Rubio’s endorsements from prominent Republicans. “Are you kind of noticing that comments by senators and congressmen and governors and endorsements aren’t really having an effect? I mean, who am I? So the voters are going to decide, and in the end, we will accept their verdict,” he said.

But others think Cruz cannot overcome Trump on his own. After Tuesday’s races, which included a win in Idaho for Cruz,, the races shift to mostly large Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic states.

Workers in those states have been hit hard by globalization, making them targets for Trump’s nativist populism.

Cruz has called on others to drop out so he can go one on one against Trump. “If you want to beat Donald Trump, we have to stand united as one,” he told supporters after his win in Kansas.

Graham says that, once Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich get to contest their home states on Tuesday, a grand negotiation must take place to consolidate forces against Trump.

Years ago, party elders such as McConnell or Hatch might have brokered that peace.

These days, no one is quite sure it can be done.

“Cruz and Rubio eventually need to combine forces,” Graham said. “I don’t know how they do it, but it would be good for the party if they could.” n

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NATION

Corruption engulfs small Texas town M ATT Z APOTOSKY Crystal City, Tex .

BY

P

acks of dogs roam the streets in this small town about 120 miles outside of San Antonio, and dozens of vacant homes and businesses have their windows barred or boarded. The city council, which is supposed to run the government, has only one member not facing federal criminal charges, and the city manager, also charged, has been suspended. In recent weeks, the water from some residents’ faucets gushed out black.

“It’s, like, this poor town,” said Tomasa Salas, 55, as she waited in front of city hall to pick up plastic jugs of water. “There is good here, too. You just got to dig really deep to find it.”

The confluence of poverty and suspected political corruption has made Crystal City a national emblem of a small town gone bad, a place where nepotism festered for so long that the FBI had to bring in nearly 100 agents to clean it up.

“If this is a wake-up call for all other towns and cities and other municipal areas, thank God,” said Councilman Joel Barajas, the only council member not facing a federal charge.

The FBI has long waged a war against corruption in small towns across the country, but the problem seems to have grown particularly acute in the southern and western parts of Texas. In recent years, the feds have charged county officials involved in bid-rigging and kickback schemes, law enforcement officers who sold drugs they seized to other traffickers and even a state judge who took bribes for favorable rulings. The FBI’s San Antonio Division launched 23 public corruption investigations in 2012, 51 in 2013 and 64 in 2014, authorities said.

In Crystal City, federal prosecutors alleged in early February that the majority of the council members were engaged in a conspiracy to help one another take bribes from those wanting to do business with the government, and one had an illicit side project: transporting illegal immigrants.

ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE WASHINTON POST

Almost every council member in Crystal City faces federal charges Rob Saale, an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s San Antonio Division, said authorities in southern Texas are battling a “perfect storm” of factors that contribute to government malfeasance. The small cities are close to the border — where Mexican drug traffickers will pay officials to facilitate their trade — and the residents are generally poor. The median household income in Crystal City, according to the most recent census data, is $24,503. When money flows in from traffickers, state grants or other sources, Saale said, elected leaders, who are not paid for their duties, are tempted to take a cut.

“When they are offered a $500, $1,000 bribe, that’s a very large

sum of money for them,” Saale said.

Residents in Crystal City had already filed a petition and court challenge to remove several council members when the FBI showed up, but replacing them has not been easy. The council needs three members present to form a quorum and call a recall election. So far, the panel has not been able to achieve it — although a judge on Thursday ordered three of them to show up and schedule the election for May, according to a lawyer in the case.

Those who manage the town’s day-to-day affairs — the police chief, the city finance director, city clerk and wastewater superintendent — say they are trying to

Bartender Robert Fiscal plays pool inside Big Rey’s Lounge in Crystal City, Tex.

pay the bills, enforce the laws and generally keep up city services while figuring out what comes next. The people who live here say they have long complained about what was happening at city hall, and they welcomed FBI agents’ descending on the council members’ homes and offices. Saale said some residents cheered as agents searched city hall.

“From day one, I been hearing that they all involved in shady stuff,” said 38-year-old Eloy Vera Jr., a regular attendee of council meetings who wants to run for council himself. “People are just upset. They want them out.”

Known in some quarters as the “Spinach Capital of the World,” Crystal City erected a statue of the

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NATION

KIN MAN HUI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

“It undermines the fabric of what we all believe good government is, and that’s what’s so frustrating.”

Small-town corruption

Okla.

N.M. Dallas El Paso

T

E

Del Rio

M

cartoon character Popeye outside city hall, and residents talk fondly of the festival held every year in honor of the vegetable. Many residents, who are predominantly Hispanic, work in the oil fields, the Del Monte plant or the school system.

Corruption, of course, exists in big cities across the country, too, and Richard Durbin, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said the dollar amounts involved in Texas cases are often minuscule by comparison. But Durbin said his office prosecutes even small-town officials because, unchecked, their misconduct can become “pervasive” and have real-life impacts on the people who elect them.

“It undermines the fabric of what we all believe good government is, and that’s what’s so frustrating about it,” he said.

Under normal circumstances, Crystal City is governed by five council members, including the mayor and mayor pro tem, who have council votes. Prosecutors charged one of them, Marco Rodriguez, in January with transporting illegal immigrants. They alleged in an affidavit that he admitted charging fees of $500 and $1,400 for trips to San Antonio. In February, they charged three more, as well as a former councilman and the city’s manager, with a range of corrupt dealings. Two — mayor Ricardo Lopez and councilman Roel Mata — have resigned, although the other two are facing the recall bid and the city manager has been suspended indefinitely.

Barajas, 55, the councilman not facing federal charges, said he suspected malfeasance when he ran for office in 2015, but he did not know the scope. Had he lost, the entire Crystal City legislature might have been facing federal charges. Barajas’s opponent, Gilbert Urrabazo, 45, who is running for a county commissioner seat, was also among those charged.

“I don’t know how it got to that, but it got there, and I think one of the main reasons is we had people that used their position for bad,” Barajas said. “I just pray for the rest of the councilmen.”

In a 14-page indictment, federal authorities alleged Lopez, 40, and Crystal City’s manager, 54year-old William James Jonas III, helped a man named Ngoc Tri Nguyen set up illegal gambling parlors in the city by waiving

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some tax payments, making sure Nguyen passed inspections and working to shut down a competitor. In exchange, federal authorities alleged, Nguyen, 38, who is known around town by the moniker “Mr. T,” gave Lopez $6,000 to buy a vehicle.

Attorneys for Roel Mata and his brother Rogelio declined to comment. Attorneys for Jonas, Rodriguez and Urrabazo — and the men themselves — did not return phone, email and handwritten messages. An attorney for Nguyen declined to comment.

Maria Sanchez Rivera, 67, a former councilwoman and mayor, said Jonas revoked her permit to operate a legal gambling-machine

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The city council of Crystal City, a border town in Texas, has been plagued by small-town corruption.

The council has only one member not facing federal criminal charges, and the city manager, also charged, has been suspended.

THE WASHINGTON POST

business that gave out prizes instead of cash in the fall of 2015, and he offered no explanation.

“They were trying to eliminate all of them, so he would be the only one,” Rivera said.

Federal authorities also alleged Jonas took $7,791 from a contractor to direct work that contractor’s way, while several other current and former council members — Rogelio Mata, 43, and Roel Mata, 44, along with Urrabazo — took a total of $4,500. In a separate instance, federal authorities alleged, Jonas told a contractor to hire an attorney to negotiate with the city, then asked the attorney to secretly give him a portion of the fee the contractor was paying.

Ricardo Lopez, the former mayor of Crystal City, Tex., is taken away from city hall by police after allegedly disrupting a council meeting in February.

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Neither contractor was identified, and the city clerk declined to identify them or immediately release records that might do so. The FBI also declined to identify them.

Federal authorities alleged the men also approved a lucrative, controversial salary of more than $200,000 for Jonas, who doubled as the city’s attorney, because of Jonas’s work soliciting bribes. It remains unclear what sparked the probe, but officials familiar with the case said the FBI had been investigating for at least three years.

The federal charges were in some ways just the beginning of Crystal City’s problems.

The next day, the water turned black in some parts of the city — a problem Wastewater Superintendent Carlos Ramirez said was caused when a years-overdue cleaning of a water tank inadvertently sent sediment pumping through the system. Ramirez said workers have flushed the system, and state and city tests showed the water is safe.

Sitting on a rusted swinging porch on his front lawn, Lopez, the now-resigned mayor, said the city “has been corrupted for many years” and his former colleagues on the council “do not understand a conflict of interest.” He declined to discuss the federal charges in detail. “If I did something wrong, it will be in a court of law to prove that,” he said.

Lopez said he would run again for mayor in May and, eventually, lieutenant governor or governor.

“Because these little towns,” he said, “they need help.”

What will happen next in Crystal City, which has a general fund of about $3 million, is largely unclear. Lawyer Javier Villalobos, who is representing residents in the recall bid, said if council members disobey the judge’s order to schedule a recall election, “I’ll be there probably Wednesday morning and filing a contempt and trying to put them in jail.”

No provision in Texas law allows the state to take over Crystal City’s government, said Bennett Sandlin, executive director of the Texas Municipal League, an organization that represents cities in Texas, including Crystal City.

“There’s literally no solution,” Sandlin said, adding that other cities have also had problems producing a quorum. “You just have to wait until the next election fills the vacancy.” n

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NATION

Can 3-year-old represent self in court?

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senior Justice Department official is arguing that 3- and 4-year-olds can learn immigration law well enough to represent themselves in court, staking out an unconventional position in a growing debate over whether immigrant children facing deportation are entitled to taxpayerfunded attorneys.

Jack H. Weil, a longtime immigration judge who is responsible for training other judges, made the assertion in sworn testimony in a deposition in federal court in Seattle. His comments highlighted the plight of thousands of juveniles who are forced to defend themselves each year in immigration court amid a surge of children from Central America who cross the southwestern U.S. border.

“I’ve taught immigration law literally to 3-year-olds and 4-yearolds,” Weil said. “It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of patience.

They get it. It’s not the most efficient, but it can be done.”

He repeated his claim twice in the deposition, also saying, “I’ve told you I have trained 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in immigration law,” according to a transcript.

“You can do a fair hearing. It’s going to take you a lot of time.”

Legal and child-psychology experts ridiculed Weil’s assertions.

“I nearly fell off my chair when I read that deposition,” said Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University who is a witness for the plaintiffs in the Seattle case. “Three- and 4-yearolds do not yet have logical reasoning abilities. It’s preposterous, frankly, to think they could be taught enough about immigration law to be able to represent themselves in court.”

Weil’s deposition came in a case in which the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant rights groups are seeking to require the government to provide appointed counsel for every indigent child who cannot afford a lawyer in immigration court proceedings.

The Justice Department is contesting the lawsuit.

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A Justice Dept. official argues preschoolers can learn immigration law when facing deportation Weil, in a brief email, said his statements don’t “present an accurate assessment of my views on this topic” and were being “taken out of context.” He said he would need Justice Department permission to speak further and did not respond to subsequent emails.

Lauren Alder Reid, a spokeswoman for the department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), said in a statement: “At no time has the Department indicated that 3 and 4 year olds are capable of representing themselves. Jack Weil was speaking in a personal capacity and his statements, therefore, do not necessarily represent the views of EOIR or the Department of Justice.”

She added that Weil’s comments “must also be taken in context as part of a 4-hour deposition in which Mr. Weil spoke about various techniques, procedures, and safeguards that can be employed by immigration judges, as warranted, to provide fundamentally fair hearings to all respondents in immigration proceedings.”

Weil is not just any immigration official. As an assistant chief immigration judge in EOIR’s Office of the Chief Immigration Judge — which sets and oversees policies for the nation’s 58 immigration courts — he is responsible for coordinating the Justice Department’s training of immigration judges.

And it was the government itself that offered up Weil as an expert witness in the Seattle case, ACLU attorneys said. Justice Department attorneys in January also submitted his deposition in court to support the government’s response to a motion by plaintiffs.

Ahilan Arulanantham, deputy legal director at the ACLU of Southern California and the attorney who questioned Weil in the deposition, said he initially thought the judge had misspoken, “because what he said was so outrageous.”

Although a network of pro bono organizations and a Justice Department program try to help children find attorneys — some paid for by the government — many children are forced to fend for

A woman and child turn themselves into Border Patrol in Rio Grande City, Tex., after illegally crossing the border.

Advocates for immigrants say children cannot adequately defend themselves in court.

themselves. According to Justice Department figures, 42 percent of the more than 20,000 unaccompanied children involved in deportation proceedings completed between July 2014 and late December had no attorney. It is unclear how often children 5 or younger are forced to defend themselves, but attorneys and advocates for immigrants said it does happen.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other Democrats this month introduced a bill mandating government-appointed counsel for children in immigration court who had crossed the border alone or are victims of other duress such as abuse or torture.

At such hearings, children face the same charges as adults, ranging from entering the country illegally to overstaying their visas.

The children — most of whom cannot speak English and must use government-provided interpreters — are generally asked questions by judges such as when they arrived in the United States and whether they faced persecution in their home countries, according to court documents and immigration attorneys.

In the Seattle case, the ACLU is arguing that failure to provide counsel for indigent children in immigration court violates the U.S. Constitution and federal immigration laws.

The ACLU filed the case in July 2014 — along with the American Immigration Council; the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project; Public Counsel, a public interest law firm; and K&L Gates, a Seattle law firm — on behalf of what are now 14 juvenile plaintiffs in deportation proceedings. Three of the plaintiffs are younger than 5.

The Justice Department, which was sued along with DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services, is disputing the idea that all children are entitled to an attorney. “Nothing in the Constitution requires the taxpayers to provide counsel to minors in immigration court,” Justice Department lawyers said in a 2014 motion. Doing so would cause “potentially enormous taxpayer expense,” they said. n

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Concerns as deep as the basements It’s difficult to build up, so the fabulously wealthy in London burrow instead, irking their neighbors

Jon Hunt, founder of the Foxtons real estate group, originally had plans for a megabasement under his home that included a Ferris wheel for his vehicles.

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ven by the lavish standards of west London’s numerous multimillionaires, Jon Hunt’s plans for a new basement went way beyond extravagant.

A resident of Kensington Palace Gardens — the most expensive street in Britain — Hunt planned a five-story basement that would house a car museum, a tennis court, an elevator, a swimming pool and a rotating Ferris wheel for the vehicles.

Citing her diplomatic rights under the Vienna Convention of 1961, Hunt’s next-door neighbor, French Ambassador Sylvie Bermann, took legal action. She lost a battle at the High Court last year but is now launching a legal challenge at the Court of Appeal.

Ambassadors from Saudi Arabia, Japan, Lebanon, Russia and India — not known for backing one another — also live on the street and have opposed the construction. They all signed a recent letter of protest sent to the Foreign Office and the Crown Estate, the property company that owns the land.

London is often a battleground for clashes between big-splash projects and old-school sensibilities. There has been much handwringing over London’s changing skyline, for instance, and worthies such as Prince Charles are apt to pipe up with unsolicited opinions.

But this spat, concentrated in one of London’s swankiest neighborhoods, has property owners wrestling with a problem unique to the ultra-rich — how to build a mega-basement without infuriating the neighbors.

Hunt is not the first to cross his neighbors with such plans. The mega-basement craze here began around the turn of the millennium when it was often the most economical way to carve out extra space. With strict rules against extending aboveground and the phenomenal expense of selling up, many of the fabulously wealthy opted to simply burrow down instead.

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Jon Hunt’s gigantic basement The billionaire has scaled back proposals for his Kensington Palace Gardens home — on the most expensive street in Britain — following opposition from neighbors, including nearby diplomats.

Source: Nissen Richards Studio

But there is nothing simple about digging in central London, where residents live cheek by jowl and a spaghetti network of underground trains runs deep beneath the surface. Digging out London clay is hard work involving trucks, jackhammers and excavators.

Neighbors complain of unbearable noise and traffic problems that can go on for months or even years. Some are concerned about the safety of their homes.

Amanda Frame, the chairman of the Kensington Society, a residents association, said that on some streets the enthusiasm for mega-basements spread quickly.

“I call it the Ebola syndrome,” Frame said. “If one street had one, then suddenly everyone would start putting in applications, and there are streets that are just riddled with them.”

She said that Hunt’s plans, first submitted in 2008, drew attention from the wealthy, who were impressed by his bold imagina-

THE WASHINGTON POST

tion, and by the local council, which was energized to address the growing concerns triggered by mega-basements.

London’s well-heeled have used their cavernous caves to house cinemas, gyms, climbing walls, Turkish baths, bowling alleys and ballrooms. One hedge-fund manager built a four-story basement that included a 16-foot-deep swimming pool and a high-diving board.

“It’s a really big centralLondon problem,” said Karen Buck, the member of Parliament for Westminster North who has seen the number of approvals for basement excavations in the London borough of Westminster almost double between 2010 and 2014.

She said that most people don’t take umbrage with their neighbors extending properties per se but that it can be a tougher sell when their neighbors are seen to be building an underground lair for entertainment only.

To be sure, London’s basement wars are largely concentrated in a few select areas and in some cases involve foreigners swooping in to buy and renovate properties they rarely live in. The Evening Standard newspaper once called the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea a “ghost town of the super-rich.”

But locals who do live there have fought back, and last year new rules were implemented restricting subterranean developments. Now, property owners in the borough can build only a onestory basement in most cases, and it can extend underneath only 50 percent of the garden. Other boroughs in central London have imposed or are considering similar restrictions.

One homeowner made headlines last year after her plans for a new house with a two-story basement were rejected. She then painted the exterior of her existing house with red and white stripes in what many saw as a flamboyant snub to the neighborhood.

Hunt lives in the same borough, but his initial proposals were approved before the new restrictions took effect.

Hunt, who declined to be interviewed, is the founder of the real estate giant Foxtons and lives in a white mansion that once belonged to the Russian Consulate.

His house is a short stroll from Kensington Palace, the London residence of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

In a new application submitted in January, Hunt significantly scaled back his basement plans — the new drawings don’t appear to show a Ferris wheel. The borough of Kensington and Chelsea could rule on his resubmitted application this month, but objections have already rolled in.

“Whether Hunt is taking this to extremes, I’ll leave it to others to decide,” Henry Pryor, a London property expert, said. “But there is a theory here that an Englishman’s home is his castle, but it turns out, there are an awful lot of things that you can’t do despite the fact that the castle is yours.” n

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A spray-paint portrait gallery blooms W ILLIAM B OOTH Jerusalem BY

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good argument can be made that the soul of Jewish Jerusalem is the old Mahane Yehuda market, known as “the shuk.” Now it is set to become the largest Jewish portrait gallery in the world.

The open-air food mart is a beautiful chaos of jostling capitalism 51/2 days a week, while at night, it is dark and spooky. A good place to be a rat, or better, a cat.

But in the past few years, the shuk has transformed itself into an improbable nightlife hot spot, the narrow alleys and stalls taken over by dozens of micropubs, fish-andchips joints and live music bars.

If there is a slice of hip in fusty Jewish Jerusalem, this is it.

And now a prolific street artist and his pal are adding the color.

There are about 360 metal shutters that roll down to protect the fruit, fish and bakery stalls at night. Solomon Souza has spraypainted portraits on 140 of them.

He has another few months to go and thinks he and other artists will do a couple hundred more.

Using spray cans he pulls out of grocery sacks, Souza has painted portraits of Jews, famous and obscure. There is the founding generation of Israel: David Ben-Gurion, featured upside down, and Golda Meir, Menachem Begin and Ze’ev Jabotinsky (but pointedly no Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat).

He has painted famous Jews, such as Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg, and the medieval philosopher and astronomer Maimonides, and the less well-known, such as Gracia Mendes Nasi, a spice trader and perhaps the wealthiest Jewish woman in the Renaissance world, who helped resettle Jews in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee in the 16th century, making her an early Zionist.

There is a portrait of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent executed in Pakistan by al-Qaeda operatives in 2002, whose lastwordswere“Myfather’sJewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. . . . ”

DAVID VAAKNIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

An old Jerusalem market is becoming an homage to famous Jews There is Bob Marley, too. (Babylon, Zion, Rastafarians; it is a complicated connection, but it works.

Also, at night, the shuk smells like marijuana; it is not legal in Israel but is tolerated.)

Souza is a 22-year-old transplant from London. Mostly selftaught, he can paint up to four shutters a night.

On a recent day, Souza and his crew walked from their nearby home over to the shuk, lugging cans of paint and video equipment.

At the Levi brothers’ falafel shop, they scraped and cleaned the metal shutters as Souza asked his friends whom he should paint.

He did not have a plan, but he did have a smartphone. Someone suggested Lucy Aharish, a Muslim Arab Israeli and popular TV news anchor. Souza found a photo of Aharish he liked on Google Imag-

es, then put on his gas mask and went to work, a can of paint in his right hand, the phone photo in his left.

Souza will not paint a shutter unless shopkeepers give their permission. His artistic partner and the P.T. Barnum of the team, Berel Hahn, prowls the shuk during the day, cajoling vendors to allow their shutters to be sprayed.

“At first we got a bunch of requests to paint the shopkeepers’ favorite rabbis, so a lot of the early shutters are old men, which is fine, but our friends said, ‘Hey, where are the women? Where’s everybody else?’ ” said Hahn, 26, a transplant from Crown Heights in Brooklyn who wears a goldsequined yarmulke.

Souza painted many grandfathers of today’s stall owners; other vendors tell the artist to paint

Artist Solomon Souza, left, and Berel Hahn, who came up with the idea of painting Mahane Yehuda market, pose by a portrait of Arab Israeli news anchor Lucy Aharish.

whomever he likes. The pair ask not only for permission to paint, but also for a donation. Many shop owners decline; some offer to buy the paint.

“This is a labor of love,” Hahn said.

Hahn said the idea is to paint “everybody who helped the Jews get here, to support indigenous Jewish culture.” He said one day he had a vision. “I saw the shuk exploding at night with color and history.”

Sara Hannah Ekaireb, 20, a New Yorker spending the year in a religious studies program in Jerusalem, said she comes to the shuk most evenings and enjoys seeing how the project is taking shape.

“It’s fun to see snippets of Jewish history with this work,” she said. “Although I think there could be more women.” n

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The monk who influenced Apple BY

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obert Palladino’s name appears nowhere in Steve Jobs’s lengthy authorized biography, but he had an enduring influence on Jobs and the business empire he erected.

Jobs sat in on Palladino’s calligraphy class at Portland’s Reed College, which eventually inspired the elegance for which Apple computers are renowned, the tech icon recalled in his famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford University.

“It was the first computer with beautiful typography,” Jobs said. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

Palladino’s legacy will forever be tied to what he taught Jobs during his brief, aborted stint in college, a craft the professor honed over nearly two decades of monastic life.

Palladino, who died in late February at 83, joined the Trappist order of monks in New Mexico in 1950, according to a 2003 profile in Reed Magazine.

Just 17 at the time, his handwriting attracted the attention of the monastery scribe, who worked with him on his art.

Five years later, Palladino moved to Lafayette, Ore., where local artists brought news of a skilled amateur to Lloyd Reynolds, an icon in the field and the creator of Reed’s calligraphy program.

“We corresponded a bit, and one day he came out and spent the entire day helping me to improve my writing,” Palladino recalled in 2008 for a Reed College oral history project.

He left monastic life and began studying under Reynolds in 1968. A year later, Reynolds retired, leaving the program in Palladino’s hands. That same year, 1969, Palladino married his wife, Catherine. In 1970, they had a son.

Then, in 1972, Jobs came to campus.

The future Apple co-founder enrolled in Reed College that year but dropped out after a single semester. He remained on cam-

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A college calligraphy class inspired Steve Jobs later as he designed the Mac and its typography pus, however, to attend classes that interested him, as he explained in that 2005 commencement address at Stanford.

Palladino’s calligraphy course was among them, he said: “Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the

Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

Just as Jobs never forgot that course, Palladino never forgot his student.

“My first impression was that all the other students really liked him,” Palladino told the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Appelo, a Reed graduate himself, for a 2011 story. “That surprised me, because there were all these geniuses floating around, and Steve was a dropout. But they detected greatness even then.”

In that interview, Palladino described Jobs as being “as nice a guy as you could meet,” despite the reputation he would later develop as the mercurial and incisive head of Apple.

Their relationship outlasted the class, too, Palladino recalled in the 2008 oral history interview.

A 1982 syllabus cover page for Robert Palladino's calligraphy class. At top, Palladino, circa 1978.

“He came back afterwards and consulted me about Greek letters for a type font,” Palladino said. “I don’t know if he ever used my Greek letters, or if he just used them as a starting point, but we had a good time. He was educating me about what a computer is, as I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about.”

Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976; Palladino taught until 1984.

On retiring, Palladino moved with his wife onto a 20-acre farm, where they raised sheep, according to a 2013 Catholic Sentinel profile.

She died in 1987.

He became a priest in 1995.

Despite his decades working for the church and teaching scores of students, Palladino knew his legacy would be as the man whose art inspired an iconic brand — ironic though that may be.

“He found it amusing that he would be remembered primarily as the calligraphy teacher of Steve Jobs, especially since Robert did not own and never used a computer,” Calligraphy Initiative Coordinator Gregory MacNaughton said in a Reed College statement announcing Palladino’s death.

Jobs was just one of hundreds of students Palladino taught, at Reed, and also at Portland State University, Marylhurst University and the Portland Art Museum, according to the 2003 profile.

He hand-lettered all of the medical licenses for the state of Oregon for a time and lectured far and wide.

He also taught other famous students, including Sumner Stone, famous for his work at Adobe and creating the ITC Stone font.

Palladino worked as a professional calligrapher from 1969 until his death on Feb. 26, according to the Archdiocese of Portland.

“Ethically, Steve was as nice a guy as you could meet,” Palladino told the Hollywood Reporter in 2011, after Jobs died. “A real nice fellow.”

The publication noted, however, that “Palladino’s attempts to get back in touch with Jobs after fame struck were rebuffed by Apple, whose office responded with a silence stonier than any Trappist’s.” n

If you keep your heart active, it’ll likely return the favor for many years

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BY DAVID BROWN

hen someone dies in the intensive care unit, the first thing the nurse does is turn off the EKG monitor. That’s because the heart can go on depolarizing — writing its electrical signature on the screen, if not actually pumping blood — for many minutes after everything else stops. It’s creepy, but touching, too. The heart is the soldier who can’t bear to surrender until long after the battle is lost.

Because the heart is the last organ to die, it’s no surprise that medicine has expended much effort to get it to live longer. What’s surprising is that the best strategy is to work it harder, not go easy on it. The ceaselessly pumping organ is happiest if you test its limits in a controlled fashion on a regular basis.

In other words, if you exercise.

Exercise requires time and tolerance for discomfort, and you can’t store it up. For that reason, it lags behind other behaviors that doctors, the government and our consciences tell us to do (or not do). Only 50 percent of American adults get at least 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week, which is the current recommendation. Larger fractions of people aren’t obese (65 percent), get at least seven hours of sleep a night (65 percent) and don’t smoke (83 percent).

Nevertheless, there’s no getting around the benefits of exercise. The evidence keeps piling up.

Over the past two decades, research has shown that exercise reduces the risk of heart attack, helps control weight, decreases inflammation, lowers the risk of developing diabetes and certain cancers, increases the chances of survival after a heart attack, lifts mood, slows the decline of sexual performance and pro-

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JUN CEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY longs independent living in the very old.

“It’s really hard to find something that is not improved with exercise,” said Michael J. Blaha, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a researcher in the field. “Everyone can benefit from it. Even at higher age, when you’re at increased risk of dying, exercise is able to add time to your life.”

Small benefits that add up Although many organs, and the body as a whole, are helped by exercise, the cardiovascular system — the heart and blood vessels — is helped the most.

Many people think exercise’s principal benefit operates through blood lipids, the compounds that contribute to artery-clogging atherosclerotic plaques. In fact, exercise alone has only a small effect on them. Total cholesterol, LDL (the dreaded “bad cholesterol”) and triglycerides go down a little, and HDL (“good cholesterol”) increases. However, the dramatic improvement in lipid profiles that many firsttime exercisers report is more an effect of weight loss than exercise per se.

Instead, exercise’s action on the heart and the blood vessels is the sum of small benefits acting through many physiological pathways.

Exercise lowers blood pressure. It makes the body more sensitive to the action of insulin, which lowers blood glucose. It makes platelets — the mini-cells that trigger clots in strokes and heart attacks — less sticky, and increases the amount of clot-dissolving enzyme in the blood. It reduces some markers of bodywide inflammation, such as C-reactive protein. It slows the accumulation of calcium in arterial walls, a risk factor for heart attack.

It increases the nitric oxide made by arteries, which allows them to expand and carry more blood when circumstances demand. Exercise also lowers the resting heart rate, which benefits the heart over the long run.

Studies in lab animals show that moderate-intensity exercise has measurable and even visible effects on the heart.

The body loses muscle mass with age, and the heart, being mostly muscle, isn’t spared. (A 70-year-old man has roughly 30 percent fewer heart muscle cells than a man in his 20s.)

Exercise slows the process. It reduces the rate at which cells are lost both through wear and tear and through the programmed process of cell death called apoptosis. Aging rats forced to swim an hour a day have hearts far younger-looking — less thickened and scarred — than their sedentary brethren.

On your feet What it all adds up to is longer life.

But it isn’t an all-or-nothing relationship.

Instead, the more a person exercises, the more the risk of heart attack and premature death goes down. Only at extreme and prolonged exercise do worrisome effects appear, and even then there’s no evidence that such behavior shortens life. (See accompanying article.)

This “dose-response” relationship is apparent as soon as you get off the couch and do

Benefits of exercise Lowers blood pressure.

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Makes the body more sensitive to the action of insulin, which lowers blood glucose. l

Reduces some markers of bodywide inflammation, such as Creactive protein.

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Slows the accumulation of calcium in arterial walls.

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Increases the nitric oxide made by arteries, which allows them to expand and carry more blood when circumstances demand.

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almost anything. It’s like a signing bonus.

A study of 221,000 Australians age 45 and older found that those who simply stood more than two hours a day had a death rate 10 percent lower than people who stood for less than two hours when followed over the course of four years. People on their feet for eight hours a day had a 24 percent lower death rate.

If you walk instead of stand, the payoff, not surprisingly, is bigger. A study of 1,239 Japanese men recruited at age 64 found that those who walked at least two hours a day had half the chance of dying over a 10-year period as those who walked less than 30 minutes a day.

In general, the greater a person’s exercise capacity, the lower the risk of dying. That became clear when researchers looked at the experience of 33,000 people (with an average age of 57) who took exercise stress tests at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit.

Treadmills measured the intensity of their exertion in METs (metabolic equivalent of task). A MET is the ratio of energy expended during an activity to energy expended while sitting motionless. Working at a computer is 1.5 METs. Bicycling at less than 10 mph requires 4 METs, and very brisk walking requires 5 METs; both fall into the category of moderate-intensity activity. Playing basketball is 8 METs, and running at a 10-minutesper-mile pace is 10 METs. They are considered

Lowers the resting heart rate, which benefits the heart over the long run.

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vigorous-intensity activities.

In the 10 years after the stress tests, 41 percent of men and 23 percent of women who didn’t achieve 6 METs had died. However, for those who achieved more than 12 METs, mortality was only 3 percent for the men and 1 percent for the women. (All the patients in this comparison were taking statin drugs to lower their cholesterol).

Fitness paid off, even among people unlucky enough to suffer heart attacks. A study published last month using the same group of patients found that the risk of dying in the month after a heart attack was 14 percent in the under-6-METs group but only 6 percent in the over-12-METs group.

“Your baseline fitness now predicts your survival of that first heart attack. That’s an important message,” said Blaha, one of the authors of the new study.

Exercise’s ability to reduce a person’s chances of dying from cardiovascular disease extends well beyond the weekly 150 minutes of moderate exercise (or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise) currently recommended for adults.

An analysis of data from studies in the United States, Europe and Taiwan found the mortality risk bottomed out when a person did nine hours of moderate exercise or 4.8 hours of vigorous aerobic exercise per week (roughly 31/2 times the recommended amount). At that point, a person’s risk of cardiovascular death was half that of someone who didn’t exercise at all.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that exercise isn’t enough. You also have to stop sitting around when you’re not exercising. It turns out that sedentary behavior — defined as anything that takes less than 1.5 METs of effort — increases the risk of cardiovascular disease even if a person gets enough exercise.

A study of AARP members who got at least seven hours a week of moderate-to-vigorous exercise found that over an eight-year period, people who watched at least seven hours of TV per day were twice as likely to die of heart disease as people who watched less than an hour. Other studies have found similar effects.

The average American spends more than half of all waking hours in sedentary behavior, principally commuting or sitting in front of a computer screen or television. There are no government guidelines on the matter, but some experts say 10,000 footsteps a day — the equivalent of five miles of walking — should be the goal. (That would more than satisfy the exercise recommendation if done briskly enough.)

Track your steps Taking that many steps is virtually impossible in an indoor job, even with standing desks and walking meetings. Nevertheless, people can make headway with the help of devices that count steps and chart them by hour, day, month and year.

“Tracking what’s happening is half the battle in pretty much everything that involves changing behavior,” said Haitham M. Ahmed, another preventive cardiologist at Hopkins. n

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COVER STORY

Heart disease is different for women, but it’s still deadly BY

L AURA H AMBLETON

How are men’s and women’s hearts different?

Anatomically, men and women have similar hearts. But physiologically, men and women have different hormones, and blood vessels respond to those hormones. Women have cyclical hormones because of menstruation, pregnancy and menopause.

As women get older, especially after menopause, they have more incidents of high blood

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very year about 610,000 American men and women die from heart disease; that’s 1 in every 4 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a leading cause of death for both genders.

Where men and women differ is how they respond to heart disease and how they manifest symptoms. Roughly two-thirds of women who suddenly die of coronary heart disease never show any advance signs. And that grab-yourchest, crushing, fall-over kind of pain is not what most feel when they have a heart attack.

“Women will describe a discomfort, or they will have pain in their jaws or necks,” said Annabelle Santos Volgman, a professor of medicine at Chicago’s Rush College of Medicine and medical director of the Rush Heart Center for Women. “They’ll have nausea or just not feel well. They have more vague symptoms than men.”

As a result, doctors often misdiagnose women, Volgman said. Volgman is a co-author of a recently released study done for the American Heart Association about sex-specific differences in heart disease. She recently talked with The Post about this issue.

pressure. They tend to not want to get treated.

They tend to want to try lifestyle changes. If, after three months, lifestyle changes don’t lower cholesterol and blood pressure, women should not be in denial. They need medication. They need to understand they are at risk of having a heart attack and dying.

Men describe an elephant sitting on their chest during a heart attack. What about women?

For women, it’s very subtle. They usually have some sensation in their chests. They describe it as heaviness or discomfort. I’ll say, “We need to do some testing because of the chest pain.” Women get upset, saying they don’t have chest pain. They have a different perception of pain. They don’t like to use the word “pain.”

What can be done about that?

We haven’t educated women, especially African American and Hispanic women, well

enough. So many women are unaware heart disease is the number-one killer. They worry about breast cancer because they hear a lot about that. That’s why we want to put it out there that heart disease is their number-one threat.

If you are worried or have any symptoms in your chest, shortness of breath, pressure in chest, nausea, unexplained fatigue, go to your doctor and get tested for heart disease.

We have a simple blood test now that is sex-specific that is really helpful for women.

It’s called the Corus CAD test and incorporates age, sex and gene-expression measurements into a single score that indicates any likelihood of obstructive coronary artery disease.

Should women start asking for this test during their yearly checkup?

When you go to the doctor, he or she should assess your symptoms and check risk factors.

If you are complaining of symptoms that could trigger thoughts of heart disease, the doctor

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COVER STORY will get an EKG [electrocardiogram]. Also, specifically ask for the Corus CAD test if you are worried or have symptoms in your chest.

What lifestyle changes should women with high blood pressure follow?

Try to get 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day, five or six days a week. Get a Fitbit or use your phone to see how many steps you are getting in a day. If you are getting 10,000 steps in a day, that’s pretty good.

Eating healthy foods, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, is so important. Vitamins, which are so healthy and important, come from fruits and vegetables, not from supplements. A lot of the supplements are processed, so a lot of the vitamins are changed once they are put in supplements. Decrease your saturated fat intake. Decrease sugar and refined carbs.

When you talk about family risk factors, what should women look for?

Learn about your family history. Learn how your father or mother died, or your grandparents. Officially, when we talk about family history, we are talking about men who had heart attacks at less than 55 years of age and women at less than 65 years of age. If the heart attack occurred after that, we don’t consider that a family-history risk factor.

We can get risk factors from genetic testing, and the cost of genetic testing has markedly decreased so that it’s not that expensive to know what your risk factors are. I do this especially with patients with a family history.

A patient will say, “My father had a heart attack in his 50s, but he smoked. He was heavy and didn’t exercise.” These tests help me distinguish patients with family history [who] truly have the risk.

Any patients with a family history should have advanced lipid testing [to measure the “bad cholesterol” lipoproteins associated with an increased occurrence of heart attacks and strokes]. Women, especially those of South Asian and African American heritage, have a higher risk for lipoprotein (a).

Risk of death For joggers in Rhode Island from 1975 to 1980, it was one death for every 792,000 hours of exercise.

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In a chain of health clubs with 3 million members, it was one death for every 2.57 million workouts.

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A study of 10.9 million participants in half- and full marathons over a 10-year period found one cardiac arrest for every 200,000 participants.

(About a quarter of the victims survived).

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Intense exercise is more likely to help than kill

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ost people who have spent a lot of time in the gym, on the trail or in the pool have heard of someone who keeled over dead, or near dead, while exercising.

The early years of the running boom had the shocking example of Jim Fixx, who died while running at age 52 in 1984, seven years after the publication of his popular “The Complete Book of Running.” (An autopsy revealed severe coronary artery disease.) More recently, ultramarathoner Micah True, a hero of Christopher McDougall’s 2009 book, “Born to Run,” died on a run at age 58; at autopsy, his heart was grossly enlarged. And there’s the original marathoner, ancient Greece’s Pheidippides, who is said to have run 25 miles from Marathon to Athens, yelled “Nike!” (“Victory!”) and collapsed dead.

Can exercise kill you? For an unlucky few, the answer is yes. Should that scare people away from such endurance sports as marathons, triathlons, bike races and open-water swims? Most experts would say, “Definitely not.”

“I don’t think there is danger out there.

There’s no study that shows that endurance athletes live shorter lives,” said Paul D. Thompson, chief of cardiology at Connecti-

Should everyone get genetic testing to find out any hidden risk factors?

Every woman should have her risks assessed. There are free screenings. The national organization WomenHeart [is] pairing with Burlington Coat Factory to do free screenings.

They check blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose to make sure someone isn’t diabetic.

These are the basic tests when we do hearthealthy screenings.

And those specific symptoms for heart disease for women?

There is a great website, gospreadtheword.com. If people go to that website, it talks about symptoms of heart disease. Go to know your testing options or know your symptoms. It actually asks you what your symptoms are and will give you an idea of what you should do after you answer a few questions. n

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Erin Agan of Nashville, N.C., cools off while running the Myrtle Beach Marathon last weekend.

cut’s Hartford Hospital, who has studied the effects of extreme exercise.

That said, there are some interesting asterisks.

There’s little doubt that when a person exercises vigorously — hard enough to raise the pulse and respiratory rates — he or she has a transiently higher risk of sudden death than when sitting at rest. For joggers in Rhode Island from 1975 to 1980, it was one death for every 792,000 hours of exercise. In a chain of health clubs with 3 million members, it was one death for every 2.57 million workouts. A study of 10.9 million participants in half- and full marathons over a 10-year period found one cardiac arrest for every 200,000 participants. (About a quarter of the victims survived).

While such events are impossible to predict, one can guard against them by . . . exercise. The “habitually sedentary” are 50 times as likely to die during vigorous exercise as are people who exercise that way more than five times a week.

The overwhelming evidence, however, is that physical fitness brings longevity. A study of 15,000 former Olympians from nine countries found that they lived, on average, three years longer than the general population.

And 2,600 elite Finnish athletes lived six years longer than army recruits, who themselves were a fit group.

Nevertheless, a few studies suggest there is a J-shaped curve in the relationship between exercise and mortality, with the most extreme exercisers at greater risk than the somewhat less fanatical. (It should be called a “backwards-J-shaped curve,” as that’s how it looks.)

In most studies, however, the trend is not statistically significant.

Other studies have found that some marathoners leak cardiac enzymes (indicative of damage to heart cells) after races. Some endurance athletes have unexpectedly large amounts of calcium in their coronary arteries. Some studies show a higher incidence of atrial fibrillation in endurance athletes compared with less-extreme exercisers.

These findings baffle researchers. There may be a subset of people for whom endurance training is hazardous, and one day it may be possible to identify them. Until then, experts warn against making too much of the studies.

“Until we have stronger evidence that this is a harmful practice, we cannot tell people to stop doing high-level exercise,” said Erin D. Michos, a 41-year-old preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University. n — David Brown

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BOOKS

Storied rivalry of three NCAA coaches N ON-FICTION

T THE LEGENDS CLUB Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry

By John Feinstein Doubleday.

404 pp. $27.95

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his may be very difficult for college basketball fans of Duke, North Carolina and North Carolina State to understand at first. But John Feinstein’s new book, “The Legends Club,” is a love story. It features three legendary coaches of the most prestigious college basketball programs in the country who faced off as intense rivals and later came to admire and respect one another.

Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano combined have won eight national college basketball championships since 1982 for their Atlantic Coast Conference schools, located within a half-hour’s drive of each other in North Carolina. Smith, who died last year at age 83, coached for 36 years at the University of North Carolina, reaching 11 Final Fours and winning two national championships. Krzyzewski is currently coaching his 36th season at Duke, where he has taken the Blue Devils to 12 Final Fours and five national championships — including last year. Valvano was around the pair for only a decade as the coach at North Carolina State, but he made his mark on college basketball less by winning his one national championship than by fighting a courageous but ultimately losing battle against cancer shortly after he was forced out of his job at the school.

Over the years, they gradually developed a mutual admiration for one another. First recognizing each man’s unique talents, the coaches came to understand that whenever they faced one another, they were in the presence of greatness in an era unlike any other in college basketball history.

Smith’s greatness was most evident in his ability to use every tiny psychological advantage to get under an opposing coach’s skin.

Krzyzewski brought heightened levels of mental toughness honed in his pre-Duke years as an Army cadet and coach, qualities he has

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passed on to his players. Valvano was a brilliant basketball strategist and a charmer for whom the sport often wasn’t enough.

Feinstein was present for nearly every big moment of the almost 40-year odyssey thoroughly covered in the book. He grew to know each of the key characters as a Duke graduate and longtime reporter of all major happenings in college basketball for The Washington Post and other publications. He also offers a steady supply of behind-the-scenes stories: We are there when Smith is hung in effigy by dissatisfied North Carolina fans early in his career and when Krzyzewski repeatedly fears for his job during his early, frustrating years at Duke. Flowing throughout is the omnipresent Valvano. He may have had the shortest career (indeed, the shortest life) of the three men who are central to the story, but he perhaps loomed larger than the others after his death at age 47.

There were times when these three giants did not like one another. That was particularly

Clockwise from top left: University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith in 1982; Jim Valvano, coach at North Carolina State, in 1983; Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski in 1999.

the case for Smith and Krzyzewski; Feinstein points out that in the 1980s, the ACC was ultra-competitive.

Smith and Krzyzewski battled each other over recruits, calls from officials and the behavior of the infamous “Cameron Crazies,” who employed some rather unconventional methods to display their loyalty to Duke over the years, much to Smith’s chagrin.

But as the book looks back at these complicated relationships, we see how over time the coaches’ positions toward one another gradually softened to respect, then to something much more.

There are occasions when Feinstein lets his obvious Duke bias seep in. And there are times when the big-picture story gets bogged down as he rehashes the minutiae of particular games and seasons.

But mostly, Feinstein entertains readers with fair, objective observations and his unique inside access gained not only through years of his coverage but also through many new interviews with former players, coaches and administrators. He also

spoke to many sources from opposing schools, affording his tale much-needed balance and outside perspective.

And Feinstein gleaned insights from the wives of the three coaches. All three women offer details drawn from private moments with their famous husbands.

The mercurial Valvano experienced his first and only national championship so quickly after arriving at North Carolina State that it left him forever searching for what Feinstein calls “The Next Thing.” He didn’t find it until he faced premature death from cancer, when his manner of dealing with the disease served as an inspiration to others. Feinstein gives us the moving words Valvano spoke in his final public appearances and notes that the coach’s lasting legacy is the V Foundation for Cancer Research, which has raised more than $150 million since the coach’s death in 1993.

Krzyzewski was at his rival’s side when Valvano died in 1993, having grown closer to Jimmy V during his illness. Krzyzewski also visited Smith shortly before he died last year after a battle with dementia. By his own admission, Krzyzewski came to love both men before their deaths — and told them so. Feinstein brings us into the rooms where these emotional farewells took place, just as he takes us along for the wild, sometimes rocky ride that got the coaches there.

In a famous speech before he died, Valvano implored all of us to attempt to do three things each day: laugh, think and cry. He would be pleased with “The Legends Club” because it will evoke all three from readers, no matter where their college basketball allegiances lie. n Menzer is the author of “Four Corners: How UNC, N.C. State, Duke and Wake Forest Made North Carolina the Center of the Basketball Universe.” He is a digital content producer for Fox Sports.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Lively narration of detective’s exploits

History written on the faces of men

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M ICHAEL D IRDA

hat could be more appropriate than to listen to, rather than read, the tales of Max Carrados? Among the greatest of the so-called rivals of Sherlock Holmes, this suave, rich and kindly amateur detective is blind, having lost his sight in a riding accident. Yet, as he emphasizes, when one sense is taken away, the other four — with effort and training — can be augmented. Carrados’s fingertips have now grown so sensitive that they can make out a newspaper’s headlines. Just as astonishingly, he employs his leisure time in the study of ancient coins.

Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) published three collections about his exceptional sleuth. One additional story appeared in a miscellany called “The Specimen Case” (1924). Wordsworth Editions offers a fat omnibus paperback containing everything; “Best Max Carrados Stories,” chosen by E.F. Bleiler, is available in an old Dover Books edition.

In a welcome new audiobook, “The Tales of Max Carrados,” Stephen Fry reads 11 of these brilliant stories. The versatile, sometimes controversial actor has already played the seemingly omniscient Mycroft Holmes — in the film “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.” That he should now narrate these seems oddly fitting.

The precision and clarity of Fry’s enunciation cannot fail to enchant — we Americans are suckers for British accents — and he can effortlessly shift to an Irish lilt, a Yankee twang or the voice of a working-class Cockney. He is quite irresistible.

Like Sherlock Holmes, Bramah’s detective has a taste for the theatrical. In Carrados’s first exploit, “The Coin of Dionysius,” an inquiry agent named Louis Carlyle doubtfully hands him a Sicilian tetradrachm, then snidely demands of the blind man, “What do you make of it?” Carrados fingers the coin, weighs it in his hand and even touches it with his tongue.

“Well?” the smug Carlyle asks, and Carrados answers: “ ‘Of course I have not much to go on, and if I was more fully in your confidence I might come to another conclusion — ’ “ ‘Yes, yes,’ interposed Carlyle, with amused encouragement. “ ‘Then I should advise you to arrest the parlourmaid, Nina Brun, communicate with the police authorities of Padua for particulars of the career of Helene Brunesi, and suggest to Lord Seastoke that he should return to London to see what further depredations have been made in his cabinet.”

Although they cannot see, Carrados’s eyes appear quite normal, and he sometimes passes himself off as sighted. For example, in “The Missing Witness Sensation,” he blithely guides another blind man through a park to a waiting taxi.

Humor, ranging from wit to broad farce,furtherenhancesthese charming stories. The villas on Heronsbourne Place, we are told, are not just highly desirable: “The local house agent described them as ‘delightfully old-world’ or ‘completely modernized,’ according to the requirement of the applicant.”

The cases chosen for this new audiobook are nothing if not various: Our hero exposes a German spy, thwarts the theft of Shakespeare’s bones, accounts for “the curious circumstances of the two left shoes” and even saves the life of a little boy wasting away on an eerie country estate.

As good as it is, though, my only complaint against “The Tales of Max Carrados” is that it leaves out some of the most dazzling cases, notably “The Knight’s Cross Signal Problem,” “The Disappearance of Marie Severe” and “The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage.” Can we hope that in the future Fry be induced to record even further adventures of this genial detective? n Dirda writes regular reviews for The Washington and is the author of “Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living With Books.”

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THE TALES OF MAX CARRADOS

By Ernest Bramah Narrated by Stephen Fry Audible Studios. $24.

11 hours, 27 minutes

OF BEARDS AND MEN The Revealing History of Facial Hair

By Christopher Oldstone-Moore University Of Chicago Press. 338 pp. $30

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D ANIEL A KST

hen House Speaker Paul D. Ryan came back from the Thanksgiving break with a beard, the rest of Washington played Freud, analyzing the move for every whisker of meaning. No wonder: The last speaker with a beard served in 1925.

Of course, a beard has never been just a bunch of facial hair. In Ryan’s case, it may well be a way to separate himself from the rest of the Republican establishment.

But men grow beards for all kinds of reasons, including a weak chin, high testosterone or bad skin — not to mention the desire to look older or younger, more respectable or more radical, more worldly or more godly. It can imply courage — the verb form, to beard, means to challenge a formidable opponent — but also reticence. A beard can be a disguise, after all, not just for the wearer’s face, but (when it walks and talks) for his or her sexual orientation.

In “Of Beards and Men,” the historian Christopher OldstoneMoore plumbs the many meanings of facial hair in Western history.

Since Alexander the Great, he tells us, “shaving has been the default mode of masculine style, punctuated by four great beard movements”: insecond-century Rome, part of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the second half of the 19th century.

Otherwise, having a beard was usually a way to make a statement by departing from the norm.

The author writes well, and his erudition is impressive, enabling readers to learn all kinds of interesting things from this zigzag chronicle, which is basically a history of Western civilization as written on the faces of its leading men. Who knew, for example, that in 1968 Fidel Castro’s regime barred facial hair for students at the University of Havana?

A chapter titled “How Jesus Got His Beard” notes that we really have no idea what Jesus looked like. For centuries after his death, he was more often depicted clean-

shaven “because this image best suited Roman sensibilities.” Starting in the Middle Ages, OldstoneMoore argues, he was portrayed bearded to humanize him while distinguishing the savior from those shown around him.

But the author’s obsessive exegesis leads him onto some fragile limbs. Many of his explanations for why beards cropped up in one particular time and place seem like after-the-fact rationalizations, akin to those offered by analysts to explain daily movements of the stock market. Tarzan was clean-shaven, he implies, because Edgar Rice Burroughs understood that “men of the twentieth century were afraid of the ape within and worried about maintaining selfdiscipline.” Yet surely Victorian men, as Jekyll and Hyde so powerfully remind us, worried about this as much or more, and they were sumptuously bearded.

Similarly, was Alexander trying to channel Achilles and Heracles by shaving, as Oldstone-Moore suggests, or was he merely embarrassed that his youth made a bushy beard impossible? The author finds cultural significance in every whisker (or absence thereof ), yet he tells us little about how men actually shaved, or whether the rise of individualism, mass media or indoor plumbing might have influenced fashions in facial hair.

The average Joe is largely missing from this account, at least until the past century or so, when he’s mostly bare-faced. In most of the nation, beards are not that popular — even though gender roles have sharply converged, and by the author’s logic, this should motivate men to lay down their razors. Stubble, on the other hand, is in, and there’s evidence that women like it. Evidently, they still want men to be masculine, but not too much so.

Or at least that’s today’s story. n Akst is a writer and critic in New York’s Hudson Valley.

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OPINIONS

How women are helping Afghanistan advance LAURA BUSH is an honorary co-chair of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council and chair of the Women’s Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute.

Fifteen years ago, if you were a woman in Afghanistan, you could be beaten for laughing in public or if your shoes made noise. You could be beaten or killed for going out alone, unaccompanied by a male guardian. Covered by burqas, women became strangers. Waiting in bread lines in Kabul, they learned to recognize each other from the sound of their voices and the faces of male children with them.

Today, one of those women, Nasima Rahmani, is a leading lawyer and educator, working toward her PhD. And she is not alone. Women in Afghanistan are changing their lives and their nation.

Fifteen years ago, barely 5,000 girls were enrolled in primary school. Soon that number will exceed 3 million. Thirty-six percent of teachers are women.

Afghanistan’s first lady, Rula Ghani, has launched a project to establish a female-only university, run by women. In government, women hold 69 seats in parliament. There are four female government ministers and two female provincial governors. Thousands of women have started their own businesses.

On Tuesday, International Women’s Day, the George W. Bush Institute released a new book, “We Are Afghan Women: Voices of Hope.” The book recounts inspiring stories such as Rahmani’s, reminding us of both the challenges Afghan women have endured and the incredible successes they have achieved.

It is hard to find another country where women have made such substantial gains against such overwhelming odds in so short a time. In the United States, women won the right to vote in 1920, but it wasn’t until 1969 that nearly all of the elite Ivy League universities started admitting women. By 1961, only 20 women were serving in Congress. In the age of Twitter and Instagram, it

can be hard to remember that real change takes time.

We should not underestimate the challenges that women in Afghanistan still face. Later this month, the country will observe the one-year anniversary of the brutal mob murder of a young woman named Farkhunda, who was falsely accused of burning a Koran. There are regular reports of attacks on girls’ schools and attacks on female students. Last July, three girls, ages 16 through 18, had acid thrown in their faces as they walked to school in Herat province. Violence against women remains a serious problem.

Yet I am hopeful. I am hopeful because of the skills, determination and abilities of Afghanistan’s women.

When Sakena Yacoobi stood in a filthy, crowded Afghan refugee camp, she knew the one thing that every Afghan needed was an education. She opened 15 schools for 21,000 refugees. Today, one of her programs in Afghanistan teaches women to read, write and do math using cellphones.

Naheed Farid, a young member of Afghanistan’s parliament, faced death threats when she ran for office. Her face was cut out of campaign posters and opponents promised to dishonor her fatherin-law’s family. But her husband and father-in-law insisted she continue. Now she advocates for

JAWED TANVEER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

An Afghan woman reads poems about love — a previously taboo topic.

women and children and serves on the parliament’s international relations committee.

Afghanistan is at a crossroads.

It is a global hot spot that before 9/11 became a terrorist haven, and it is a young country: The median age is 18.3 years. U.S. policy in Afghanistan must be consistent. Afghanistan is a resilient society. The best way to build on this resilience is to be predictable in our support. If the United States turns its back on Afghanistan, other forces will step in to erase the hard-won but fragile gains that have been made.

We can and must help Afghanistan create a better future. We need to ensure that Afghanistan cannot again become a terrorist haven or fall to the Taliban or the Islamic State.

In the interest of our own national security, we must assist Afghan security forces. I welcome President Obama’s decision to maintain a U.S. military presence through 2016 and beyond. We know, and the Afghan people know, that we will not have troops in Afghanistan forever, but the country remains fragile, and the cost of leaving Afghanistan is too high.

We, and the entire international community, should continue to provide significant development assistance in the

areas of health care, entrepreneurship and education.

We know this assistance works. A 2013 Rand Corp. study found Afghanistan’s metrics have improved in nearly every area of development. By maintaining our presence and support, we are encouraging the Afghan government to keep its security commitments to the Afghan people and to build on economic and anti-corruption reforms and the rule of law. That is why it is critically important that any peace achieved through negotiations between Afghan leaders and the Taliban is not made at the expense of Afghan women. A return to policies that made the Taliban notorious in the 1990s would be traumatic not just for women but also for the stability of the country.

We must never forget that what happens in Afghanistan — and elsewhere in the world — matters to us here at home. The Afghan people are not asking us to solve their problems; they are asking us to remain engaged so that they have the space and opportunity to create their own solutions. As American University of Afghanistan’s first female valedictorian, Onaba Payab, told me: “This is a reminder that we are not alone in those tough places, that there are people who care about us.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The debate we need on Libya JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post. He writes a biweekly column.

If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton really are our choices in the presidential election this fall, we’ll witness an ugly debate about the great wall of Mexico, emails, Trump University and, here and there, maybe trade or torture. But we also could hear a lot about a small North African country of 6 million people, Libya — and we should.

Trump will point to Libya as prime evidence of Clinton’s incompetence. He’ll claim she pushed for U.S. intervention in the 2011 revolution against dictator Moammar Gaddafi and the result was a disaster: chaos, civil war, a new base for the Islamic State and the slaying of a U.S. ambassador.

Gaddafi, Trump now says, should have been left in place. Clinton might well respond that NATO’s air operation prevented genocide on a Syrian scale — and that Trump strongly supported the operation at the time.

Unlike a lot of what may pass for campaign debate, this would be an argument worth having.

Libya is not only a story of U.S. failure but also a problem that the next president will have a chance to get right. As the Pentagon brass have been warning with rising alarm, the Islamic State is methodically building a base in the country. It could become the new Islamic State headquarters if Iraq and Syria are overrun, and it could serve as an easy launching pad for attacks on Western capitals. Another U.S. plunge into

Libya is a matter of when and how — not if.

Fortunately, news organizations have done some thorough reporting of what went wrong the first time. Poring over the accounts, what’s striking is the degree to which President Obama, who ran against the war in Iraq, nevertheless repeated most of George W. Bush’s Iraq mistakes in Libya.

First was the failure to do any planning for “the day after” the dictator’s fall. Obama said the United States and its NATO allies “underestimated the need to come in full force” after the war — just like Bush did in Baghdad.

Then there was the overreliance on smooth, Englishspeaking, exiled politicians who assured Washington that they could take over Libya and quickly

build a new order. Clinton, according to the New York Times, was charmed by Mahmoud Jibril, the U.S.-educated head of an opposition council; like Iraq’s Ahmed Chalabi, who wooed the Bushes, Jibril proved to have far less influence in his native country than he did in Washington.

Last but not least was the U.S. decision to focus on political benchmarks while ignoring the mounting security problems.

While militias looted weapons from Gaddafi’s stockpiles and forced interim authorities to put their gunmen on official payrolls, American diplomats worked on plans for quick elections.

Of course, Obama did not deploy hundreds of thousands of troops, as Bush did. But that may explain the main difference between Iraq and Libya. In Iraq, jihadist forces were all but wiped out by the U.S. military, which also trained and equipped a substantial national army. Had Obama not prematurely withdrawn all U.S. forces, the Islamic State might never have gained a foothold.

Some in the Obama administration seem to have taken the Libya failure as a lesson in the futility of all U.S. ventures in the Middle East. We tried occupying Iraq and Afghanistan,

goes the logic; we adopted a light footprint in Libya; we stayed out of Syria altogether. In every case, the result was a disaster. Maybe the Middle East is just too hard.

That, of course, is the Trumpian view. If there is an alternative, it will come, oddly, from Clinton, whose push for the Libyan intervention was in keeping with a broader inclination to assert U.S. power more frequently and with more muscle than Obama has.

She argued for a greater U.S. commitment to Libyan security after Gaddafi’s downfall, and for military support of Syrian rebels, only to be overruled by the White House. She appears to understand that the serial U.S. failing in the Middle East was not that it tried but that it did not try hard enough. Washington failed to plan, minimized resources at crucial moments and pulled out too quickly.

Clinton’s answer to a congressional committee grilling her on Libya last year contains the seeds of a doctrine. “America must lead in a dangerous world,” she said. “When America is absent . . . extremism takes root, aggressors seek to fill the vacuum and security everywhere is threatened.” That would make a good answer when the campaign debate turns to Libya. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2016

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OPINIONS

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

The car century was a mistake J. H. CRAWFORD is the author of “Carfree Cities” and “Carfree Design Manual,” and publisher of Carfree.com.

We must first remember that all cities were car-free little more than a century ago. Not all cities responded to the advent of automobiles with the same enthusiasm as the cities of the United States. In fact, some cities never did adopt the car. Venice was unwilling to destroy itself in order to build streets wide enough for cars, and therefore has never had them except in a sliver near the mainland. The same situation exists in the Medina of Fez, Morocco, and several other North African cities. These districts are usually the most vibrant parts of their cities.

Cars were never necessary in cities, and in many respects they worked against the fundamental purpose of cities: to bring many people together in a space where social, cultural and economic synergies could develop. Because cars require so much space for movement and parking, they work against this objective — they cause cities to expand in order to provide the land cars need.

Removing cars from cities would help to improve the quality of urban life.

Transport modes have always exerted a strong influence on the basic arrangement of cities. The current form began to emerge in the 15th century, when the advent of horse-drawn carriages led to a demand for wide, straight streets. This requirement was adopted by Renaissance planners

in most of Europe, and most urban plans of the past 500 years have straight streets that are relatively wide and corners that accommodate turning carriages.

In many ways, this change was a harbinger of the automobile.

Transport, however, is not the only important use of streets.

Streets are also our most important public social spaces.

Most cities in Europe now acknowledge the terrible damage cars have done to this use, which is why cities all across Europe are discouraging automobile use in favor of walking, cycling and public transport.

Good public transport coupled with fast, safe, pleasant walking and bicycling can easily meet the need for movement within our cities. It is true that buses and streetcars do intrude on the main streets to an appreciable degree,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY SACK FOR THE STAR TRIBUNE

but many streets will be entirely free of this annoyance. In the ideal case, public transport systems are constructed underground. (Ideally, transport systems should never be elevated, because of the ugliness, intrusion and noise that that causes.) This will not be practical in many existing cities because of the cost, and some burden of street traffic will have to be endured.

A more serious objection to the car-free city is the movement of freight. When building a city, it is a simple matter to arrange delivery of shipping containers to the places they are needed without impinging on streets. In existing cities, freight delivery systems will have to be arranged on a case-by-case basis.

Amsterdam could, with little difficulty, deliver freight using its canal network. Cities that adopt streetcars for passenger service can use the same infrastructure to deliver freight at night.

Removing vehicles from our streets would make urban life cheaper, safer, quieter and more pleasant. Repurposed parking spaces and, in some cases, travel lanes would provide ample land for walking and cycling, plus any essential street-running public services, such as light rail, trash collection and emergency

services. The surplus land can be devoted to public purposes — imagine Manhattan with sidewalks 15 feet wider and room for sidewalk cafes.

Governments should welcome the change. The cost of supporting car traffic far exceeds the revenue generated by user fees. In Europe, it is the densest places that are first made carfree, and the pedestrian traffic generated by these places is the heaviest in the city. Stores and restaurants thrive in these areas.

I believe that the social benefits alone entirely justify the change. Imagine a busy city that is calm, quiet and beautiful.

Other car-free areas are immensely popular with residents and tourists alike.

Shopkeepers have often opposed these changes, only to discover that their business improved once cars were gone.

It is true that a certain degree of convenience must be sacrificed for this change. However, the benefits are large, and we can expect significant improvements in public health as people return to more active modes of transport. The noise reduction alone is a significant public health benefit.

The car century was a seductive mistake. It’s time to move on. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Heroin BY

M AIA S ZALAVITZ

America’s epidemic of heroin and prescription­pain­reliever addic­ tion is worse than ever: Deaths from overdoses of opioids (the drug category that includes heroin and prescription analgesics such as Vicodin) reached an all­time high in 2014, rising 14 percent in a sin­ gle year. But because drug policy has long been a political and cultur­ al football, myths about opioid addiction abound.

1

Most heroin addiction starts with a legitimate pain prescription.

Overwhelmingly, prescriptiondrug misusers are not pain patients. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more than 75 percent of recreational opioid users in 201314 got pills from sources other than doctors, mainly friends and relatives. Even among this group, moving on to heroin is quite rare: Only 4 percent do so within five years; just 0.2 percent of U.S. adults are current heroin users.

The proportion of patients who become newly addicted to opioid medications during pain treatment is also low. A 2010 Cochrane review — considered the gold standard for basing medical practice on evidence — found an addiction rate of less than 1 percent.

Like 90 percent of addictions, the vast majority of prescriptiondrug problems start with experimentation in adolescence or early adulthood, typically after or alongside binge drinking, marijuana smoking and cocaine use. Having a prior or current addiction to another drug is the best predictor of developing problems with prescription drugs.

2

The best treatment for heroin addiction is inpatient rehab.

Many who run inpatient programs reject the ongoing use of anti-addiction medication.

Similarly, most drug courts and many state Medicaid programs also deny continuing access to the

two best-studied maintenance medications, methadone and buprenorphine (Suboxone).

The position that residential treatment centers and their abstinence-only philosophies are superior to medication ignores overwhelming data and keeps families from seeking the best care. Research on more than 150,000 patients receiving treatment for opioid addiction in Britain found that people in abstinence-only care had double the death rate of those who received ongoing maintenance treatment. And other studies find that maintenance medication cuts death rates by 70 percent or more. This is why the World Health Organization, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Institute of Medicine and the White House drug czar’s office all agree that maintenance treatment — indefinite, possibly lifelong medication use — is superior to abstinence rehab for opioid addiction.

3

Recovery from heroin addiction is rare.

Early evidence for this idea came from studies of Vietnam veterans, who, as young men, should have had particularly high addiction and relapse risk. Heroin and opium were cheap and easily available to U.S. servicemen overseas; nearly half tried these drugs, and half of these soldiers became addicted. But upon returning home, just 12 percent of those who had been addicted relapsed within three years, and only 2 percent were still addicted at the end of the study — nowhere

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Terry Walsh, fire deputy chief in Portland, Maine, responds to a possible heroin overdose by an 18-year-old male last summer.

near the 60 percent relapse rate reported by rehabs. Fewer than half got any treatment, and it didn’t make a difference in terms of who recovered.

So why do heroin addicts appear so hopeless in the public imagination? Because people who quit on their own don’t show up for treatment — and so, while they are included in large epidemiological studies, they aren’t included in treatment research. This means that rehabs see only the worst cases, leading to an unduly pessimistic picture of recovery.

4

Tough love is the only thing that works.

Research shows that the opposite is true. Like any other human beings, people with addiction respond best to being treated with dignity and respect.

Programs that nonjudgmentally distribute clean needles, provide overdose-reversal drugs or offer safe spaces for injection do not prolong addiction; a Canadian study found that 57 percent of people who came to a safe injection facility to shoot up ultimately entered treatment. An approach for helping addicted family members that uses kindness, rather than confrontation or detachment, was

found in another study to be twice as effective as a traditional confrontational “intervention” — and no studies show that harsh treatment or incarceration is superior to empathetic care.

5

Whites have recently become the majority of people with heroin addiction.

Major media outlets have run stories about this, often citing a study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, which found that 90 percent of new heroin users in the past decade were white.

What most of them omit is that the same study showed that whites have made up more than half of all heroin addicts since the early 1970s and hit 80 percent before 2000.

The reason for the misperception is political: Politicians from the first “drug czar,” Harry Anslinger, in the 1930s to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s have portrayed heroin and other illegal drugs as a black or “foreign” problem in order to justify tough policies. n Szalavitz is a journalist and author, most recently, of the forthcoming “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addictions.”

SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2016

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