The Washington Post National Weekly - August 27, 2017

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY A bond forged behind barbed wire At a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans, a friendship built for Congress bloomed PAGE 12

Politics Generals gain influence 4

Nation Anti-vaccine forces buoyed 6

5 Myths Nuclear missiles 23

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POLITICS

A shutdown over wall funding?

BY

E LISE V IEBECK

C

onstructing a border wall is essential to President Trump — so essential, he said, he is willing to “close down” the government to get it. But what would it take for Trump to actually force a government shutdown? And how likely is that to happen because of the border-wall debate?

As congressional staffers will tell you, it’s complicated. And nobody knows exactly how Trump would react in the moment of truth.

Before now, he’s treated government shutdowns as not a big deal, even a good thing. It could be a lot harder to make that argument from the Oval Office.

Here’s a breakdown of the scenarios we could see playing out this fall — some leading to a shutdown, others keeping the government open past the Sept. 30 deadline.

Scenario 1: The government stays open because Congress passes funding for a border wall, giving Trump what he wants.

In Trump’s ideal world, Republicans would include money to construct a wall in their next government-spending measure, and that measure would pass the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Though Republicans hold majorities in both chambers, the GOP doesn’t have the 60 votes required to break a filibuster in the Senate.

And Democrats would almost certainly exercise the filibuster.

Verdict: Less likely.

Scenario 2: The government stays open because Congress approves new border security measures that satisfy Trump, even though they don’t constitute full-fledged funding for a wall.

There are intermediate border-security measures that could gain support from both parties, potentially giving Senate Majority Leader

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Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) the votes he needs to pass a spending bill that includes them. At that point it would be up to Trump to finesse his rhetoric. Could better equipment and technology be described as a “wall”? In Trump’s world, it could happen. But it’s another matter whether his base voters would accept it.

Verdict: More likely.

because McConnell breaks the legislative filibuster, allowing funding for a wall to pass.

Trump would love for McConnell to get rid of the legislative filibuster the way he did the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations. But it would require convincing more than two dozen Republicans to reject an opinion they held just a few months ago.

In April, 61 Republican and Democratic senators wrote to Senate leaders urging them to preserve the 60-vote threshold for legislation: “Regardless of our past disagreements on that issue, we are united in our determination to preserve the ability of Members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the Senate floor.”

Verdict: Less likely.

Scenario 5: The government shuts down because Congress approves a spending bill without wall funding and Trump makes good on his threat.

GREGORY BULL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Scenario 3: The government stays open because Congress passes a short-term spending bill, promising to deal with wall funding at a later date.

As the clock ticks down toward Sept. 30, lawmakers will face increased pressure to fund the government, even if just on a temporary basis. By promising to debate wall funding later, then approving a stopgap spending measure, Congress would put off a confrontation with Trump and the possibility of a shutdown.

The downside is it would complicate lawmakers’ already jam-packed legislative schedule through the end of 2017. The upside? Less trouble in the short term. This approach historically has held major appeal for lawmakers, increasing its likelihood.

Verdict: More likely.

Scenario 4: The government stays open

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 46

Trump would have to be ready to risk the political consequences of a shutdown — consequences we know he was aware of because of something he tweeted in 2013: “My sense is that people are far angrier at the President than they are at Congress re the shutdown — an interesting turn!”

Verdict: More likely.

Scenario 6: The government stays open because Congress manages to overcome Trump’s veto of a spending bill without wall funds.

Say Republicans pass a spending bill without wall funding and Trump vetoes it. If McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) can convince two-thirds of each of their chambers that keeping the government open is more important than funding the border wall, they could overcome the veto and keep the government open.

Verdict: Less likely. n

© The Washington Post

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

4 6 8 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER The site of the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming, where more than 14,000 people were confined.

Photographs by BILL O’LEARY, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Military leaders exerting influence

BY R OBERT C OSTA AND P HILIP R UCKER

H

igh-ranking military officials have become an increasingly ubiquitous presence in American political life during Donald Trump’s presidency, repeatedly winning arguments inside the West Wing, publicly contradicting the president and even balking at implementing one of his most controversial policies.

Connected by their faith in order and global norms, these military leaders are rapidly consolidating power throughout the executive branch as they counsel a volatile president. Some establishment figures in both political parties view them as safeguards for the nation in a time of turbulence.

Trump’s elevation of a cadre of current and retired generals marks a striking departure for a country that for generations has positioned civilian leaders above and apart from the military.

“This is the only time in modern presidential history when we’ve had a small number of people from the uniformed world hold this much influence over the chief executive,” said John E. McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA who served in seven administrations. “They are right now playing an extraordinary role.”

In the wake of the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville this month, five of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were hailed as moral authorities for condemning hate in less equivocal terms than the commander in chief did.

On social policy, military leaders have been voices for moderation. The Pentagon declined to immediately act upon Trump’s Twitter announcement that he would ban transgender people from the armed forces, instead awaiting a more formal directive that has yet to arrive.

Inside the White House, meanwhile, generals manage Trump’s hour-by-hour interactions and whisper in his ear — and those whispers, as with the decision this week to expand U.S. military oper-

CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some welcome them as safeguards in a volatile White House ations in Afghanistan, often become policy.

At the core of Trump’s circle is a seasoned trio of generals with experience as battlefield commanders: White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. The three men have carefully cultivated personal relationships with the president and gained his trust.

Critics of the president welcome their ascendancy, seeing them as a calming force amid the

daily chaos of the White House.

“They are standouts of dependability in the face of rash and impulsive conduct,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “There certainly has been a feeling among many of my colleagues that they are a steadying hand on the rudder and provide a sense of consistency and rationality in an otherwise zigzagging White House.”

William S. Cohen, who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, said that Trump “came in with virtually no experi-

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, previously the secretary of homeland security, is a retired Marine general.

ence in governance, and there’s no coherent strategic philosophy that he holds. There has been a war within the administration, and that has yet to be resolved. . . .

The military has tried to impose some coherency and discipline.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), an Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, praised Trump’s circle of generals and recommended McMaster and Kelly for their posts. He said the impression in some quarters that military leaders are hawks by def-

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POLITICS inition is misguided.

“What many people in Washington don’t understand is that generals are usually the most reluctant to commit troops to combat because they are the ones who have to write letters home to parents when they have fallen,” Cotton said.

Among some on the right, however, the view is more suspicious.

Some Trump supporters, for example, worry about blurring the line between military and civilian leadership, as exemplified by recent headlines at Breitbart News, the conservative website run by Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief White House strategist, who clashed with several military leaders over policy.

Trump’s announcement last week that he would escalate troop levels in Afghanistan was covered on Breitbart with alarm. Headlines warned of “unlimited war” and “nation-building” led by military leaders without links to Trump’s base.

Commentator and Trump ally Ann Coulter tweeted last week, “The military-industrial complex wins.”

The concerns extend to the political left as well. At ThinkProgress, a liberal website, recent articles have rapped Trump for having a government that benefits “military insiders.” One headline this month declared: “Military figures are taking over Trump’s administration.”

Trump has revered military brass since his youth, when he attended a New York military academy. He holds up generals as exemplars of American leadership and views them as kindred spirits — fellow political outsiders.

“To some degree, Trump is playing president, and I think the whole idea of being able to command a group of warriors is deeply satisfying to him,” McLaughlin said.

Robert M. Hathaway, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, said: “It should not surprise us.

Candidate Trump suggested he would defer to the people he called ‘my generals’ on a whole host of issues, and they are doing just that.”

Trump idolizes swaggering commanders, such as the cinematic portrayal of George S. Patton Jr., the World War II general.

But R. James Woolsey Jr., a former CIA director and undersecretary

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

“The military has tried to impose some coherency and discipline.”

William S. Cohen, defense secretary under President Bill Clinton of the Navy who advised Trump during last year’s campaign, said a better comparison to Kelly, Mattis and McMaster would be George C. Marshall Jr., the Army chief of staff during World War II who went on to serve in President Harry Truman’s Cabinet.

“I think these guys are more Marshall-like than Patton-like,” Woolsey said. “They have distinguished combat records, but they’re the sort of career military men who have the intellectual capability and propensity to deal with civilian matters.”

Kelly, Mattis and McMaster are not the only military figures serving at high levels in the Trump administration. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke each served in various branches of the military, and Trump recently tapped former Army general Mark S. Inch to lead the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Together with other allies in the administration, Kelly, Mattis and McMaster see their roles not merely as executing Trump’s directives but also as guiding him away from moves that they fear could have catastrophic conse-

quences, according to officials familiar with the dynamic.

But if a narrative takes hold that these generals are manipulating the president, Trump could rebel.

He chafes at any suggestion that he is a puppet and at the idea of his advisers receiving credit for his decisions. He reacted angrily in February when Time magazine put Bannon on its cover with the headline “The Great Manipulator.”

In his first month as chief of staff, Kelly has kept a low profile, sitting for no major interviews and discouraging aides from selfpromotion.

Democratic lawmakers are quick to criticize Trump on just about every issue, but they hold back when it comes to the preponderance of military figures in traditionally civilian positions.

“There might be a temptation to be critical of the president in this context, but I for one am glad they’re there — because they’re thoughtful . . . because they’re lawful and because they’re rational,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview. “I feel like the concern about the need to maintain civilian oversight of the military is a totally legitimate one, but that concern

National security adviser H.R. McMaster is part of a trio of generals with experience as battlefield commanders at the core of the president’s circle.

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should be addressed at a later time. In the meantime, we should be reassured that there are competent professionals there who want to make smart choices.”

That position is shared by many figures in the Republican establishment who worry about Trump’s ideas and temperament.

“The only chance we have of trying to keep this thing from blowing apart is some military discipline,” said Peter Wehner, who served in the three Republican administrations prior to this one and who opposes Trump. “It’s not military rule or a military coup.”

Although Trump mostly has been following the military’s guidance, he easily could turn away from his generals if new problems emerge, according to people close to the president.

They described Trump as with the military in spirit but guided more by his transactional instincts.

They pointed out that it took weeks for him to go along with a watered-down version of the initial proposal from Mattis and McMaster on additional troops in Afghanistan.

Trump has also had a strained relationship with McMaster for months, in part because of stylistic differences between the two men. The president has little patience for the methodical and consensus-oriented policy process that McMaster employs at the National Security Council, which counts two other generals on the senior staff.

“When you look at the president’s tensions with McMaster, you can see how he could move away from them if things don’t improve in Afghanistan over the next six months,” said a senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “He’s not giving them some sort of blank check.”

One example is retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who lasted a mere 24 days in his job as national security adviser. Trump fired him in February after Flynn was allegedly not truthful with Vice President Pence about communications with the Russian ambassador during the transition.

“Individuals can be corrupt or incompetent, and that extends at times to people in the military,” Wehner said. “Things can go wrong with anyone.” n © The Washington Post

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NATION

Anti-vaccine activists step up efforts BY

L ENA H . S UN

M

innesota’s worst measles outbreak in decades has unexpectedly energized anti-vaccine forces, who have stepped up their work in recent months to challenge efforts by public health officials and clinicians to prevent the spread of the highly infectious disease.

In Facebook group discussions, local activists have asked about holding “measles parties” to expose unvaccinated children to others infected with the virus so they can contract the disease and acquire immunity. Health officials say they are aware of the message posts but haven’t seen evidence that such parties are taking place.

The activists also used social media to urge families who do not want to immunize their children or who believe their children have been harmed by vaccines to meet in Minneapolis earlier this month with associates of Andrew Wakefield, the founder of the modern anti-vaccine movement.

The associates have been touring the United States and abroad with the former doctor’s movie, “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe,” which repeats the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and that scientists, pediatricians and the public health system are part of an elaborate conspiracy. A recent fundraiser at the clinic of a suburban Minneapolis pediatrician who supports “alternative vaccine schedules” benefited a second film that also will feature Wakefield, whose research has been retracted for falsehoods.

The activity in Minnesota has taken some immunization supporters and clinicians by surprise.

“I’m shocked by how emboldened they’ve gotten,” said Karen Ernst, executive director of Voices for Vaccines, a national parent-led group that advocates for vaccination. “I think most people thought the anti-vaccine voices would sit home and lay low. . . . Instead, they became more public, they did more outreach.”

She and others are worried

AL KNAUBER/HELENA (MONT.) INDEPENDENT RECORD

Forces energized by Minn. measles outbreak have taken some immunization backers by surprise about the potential impact elsewhere.

“Other states should be on alert, as these Minnesota antivaxxers have reach across the country” through families, schools and lawmakers, Ernst said. “And they have the money to help mobilize and finance their agenda in any other state.”

Patti Carroll, director of outreach for the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, has said a goal is to give parents more information, including about their right to refuse to vaccinate. She did not respond to emailed questions about the council’s current efforts. But an affiliated group, the Minnesota Vaccine Freedom Coalition, posted the questions on its Facebook page earlier this month and added responses.

“We are a community and advocacy group,” the post said. “We socialize, we support each other, we learn together and we lobby to protect health choice rights.”

Since the outbreak began in

late March, Minnesota public health officials have confirmed 79 local measles cases. Most involved unvaccinated preschool children in the Somali American community. More than 8,200 people were exposed in day-care clinics, schools and hospitals. Twentytwo people were hospitalized, many with high fever, breathing difficulties and dehydration.

There have been no deaths, although the disease can be fatal.

Health authorities need to wait two incubation periods — 42 days — before declaring the outbreak over. Friday was the first possible date that could happen.

Despite the anti-vaccine drumbeat, Minnesota’s Somali American community has begun to push back, according to some healthcare providers. As part of an unprecedented collaboration clinicians and public health officials launched this summer, Somali American imams are urging families to protect their children by getting the measles-mumps-ru-

Craig Egan of Tacoma, Wash., who has been following a nationwide anti-vaccination bus tour to counterprotest, debates with a woman in Montana.

Anti-vaccineation activists have been touring with a movie that repeats the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and that scientists, pediatricians and the public health system are part of an elaborate conspiracy.

bella (MMR) vaccine.

Engaging the imams and trusted providers has made an enormous difference, said Patsy Stinchfield, a pediatric nurse practitioner and infection-control expert who has led the outbreak response at the Children’s Minnesota hospital. “We have seen a major shift in the uptake of Somali families coming in for MMR.” Doctors now are seeing parents who had previously refused — sometimes repeatedly — to have their children inoculated. They “are still somewhat cautious or hesitant,” said Paula Mackey, a pediatrician at a Children’s Minnesota clinic in downtown Minneapolis. “But they have come to accept that they need to do this, that their children need this, and it’s going to be okay.”

Doctors say they had tried without success to overcome the fear and misinformation that anti-vaccine groups have planted in the Somali American community for nearly a decade. That misinformation highlights the vaccine-autism claim, despite extensive research disproving any link.

Somali American children in Minnesota had a vaccination rate of 92 percent in 2004, higher than the state average, but the rate plummeted to 42 percent by 2014.

During the measles outbreak, however, immunizations for those children, as well as for all others, have soared.

Measles, once a common occurrence, was eliminated in the United States in 2000. Experts say it has resurged in recent years, mainly because of the growing number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children or delay those vaccinations.

Even with increased attention to the disease’s dangers, the antivaccine groups “definitely are upping their outreach on the political spectrum,” said Kris Ehresmann, director of the infectious diseases division for the Minnesota Department of Health. “I don’t think the outbreak slowed them down at all,” she said. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

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In N.J., football faces uphill battle J ACOB B OGAGE West Windsor Township, N.J.

at every level of play in West Windsor have scrambled to recruit parents to sign their children up for football or give their teens permission to try the sport in high school.

In so doing, they have found that the face of the town has changed.

It used to be a haven for secondgeneration immigrants, said Steve Rome, a 1987 High School South graduate. His mother was born in Morocco, then immigrated to Israel, then the United States. His neighbors were Indian American and Asian American.

But the technology boom and high-skill jobs in biotechnology, medicine, finance and academia have attracted a new class of migrants to these suburbs, where the median annual household income is $161,750. Those parents are not signing their kids up for football at the same rate as the rest of the nation.

BY

T

he nationwide forces that are beginning to uproot football have converged at a place called High School

North.

Demographic shifts, concussions, single-sport specialization and cost — among the same issues that have caused youth football numbers to plummet around the country in recent years — have led West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North to drop varsity football this season. The Knights, with a roster of 37 players, will play a junior varsity schedule.

High School South, the other secondary school in the district, might have to do the same next year, along with high schools from four other neighboring jurisdictions, West Windsor-Plainsboro Schools Superintendent David Aderhold said.

The moves reflect a crisis for football all over the country, but one that has accelerated in this New York City bedroom community.

“We’re the leading edge of a much larger iceberg when it comes to what’s coming in youth athletics,” Aderhold said.

Football participation has dropped precipitously for some time. High school football enrollment is down 4.5 percent over the past decade, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

More schools are fielding football teams nationwide, albeit with fewer players, led by surges in such states as Oklahoma, Florida and Arkansas, which together have added 150 teams in the past five years. But other regions — namely the Midwest and Northeast — are shedding high school football programs at a significant rate. Michigan has seen a net loss of 57 teams in the past five years. Missouri has lost 24. Pennsylvania has lost 12.

Even Southern California powerhouse Long Beach Poly, which has sent dozens of players to the NFL, gave up its junior varsity squad amid low turnout this summer. Centennial High in Ellicott

MARK MAKELA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A suburban high school’s decision to disband its varsity team is part of a nationwide trend City, Md., from a region that’s a traditional football stronghold, announced this month that it would fold its varsity football team, citing a “lack of sufficient players and concern for student safety.”

Youth levels of football, leagues high schools lean on as feeder systems, saw a nearly 30 percent drop in participation between 2008 and 2013, according to data collected by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.

It has sent school officials nationwide clamoring to stabilize their varsity programs and reevaluate the game that has claimed high school Friday nights for generations.

Unique issues in the state The forces fueling those declines have come to the fore, sometimes in extremes, in West Windsor. Demographic changes have drawn families here who are less familiar with American football.

Sixty-one percent of High School

North’s 1,500-some students are Indian American and Asian American. Some of those families have clashed previously with other families, many of them white, over the role of extracurricular activities in the school district.

“We didn’t grow up with football being part of the culture,” High School North booster club president Sandy Johnson said.

Johnson is Chinese American and married to Olin Johnson, who is white and coaches one of West Windsor’s youth football teams.

“It’s a struggle when parents don’t know the sport.”

Concerns over football-related head injuries have driven some parents to lead their children away from the sport. The state’s budget cuts meant New Jersey eliminated a slew of middle school and subvarsity sports.

It has all led to North fielding a team with only five upperclassmen this fall, senior quarterback Brian Murphy said.

Football coaches and boosters

Coach Jeff Reilly addresses his High School North team.

Citing a lack of players, the New Jersey school will only field a junior varsity squad.

‘There’s a ripple effect’ Murphy threw for 24 touchdowns and more than 2,200 yards his junior season. Coaches from Yale, Villanova, Georgetown and others have asked about his college plans. Murphy has told them he will play North’s junior varsity schedule so he won’t have to transfer his senior year of high school. A Georgetown coach, his parents said, told him not to bother sending in more game tape. Coaches wouldn’t look at JV film.

This is what’s at stake should High School North lose its football team, boosters say. It would affect the recruiting and college options; the Friday night atmosphere; and the main stage for cheerleaders and North’s marching band.

Football coaches and school administrators are taking that same message to parents and toeing a thin line between encouraging them to enroll their children in football without telling them how to parent.

But the whole saga has left families wondering what West Windsor will look like without football, and what it means that their elite school district might drop a sport long viewed as central to the high school experience. n ©The Washiongton Post

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WORLD

Across Europe, the past still divides

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Nazi-era influences stir never-ending debate over monuments I SAAC S TANLEY- B ECKER Berlin BY

I

n a verdant German village, a church bell that bears a swastika tolls. Above the symbol is an inscription: “All for the Fatherland, Adolf Hitler.”

When the Nazi iconography was discovered this summer in Herxheim am Berg, some called for the bell’s removal, others for its protection as a relic of a shameful national history. The village is still deciding what to do.

Germans have a word for coming to terms with the past, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” The word, coined after World War II, has no equivalent in the English language, no analog that might inform the anguished American debate over Confederate monuments — whose defenders include not just torch-wielding neo-Nazis in Charlottesville but also President Trump.

On a continent riven in the last century by two world wars, genocide and a battle of ideas waged

across the Iron Curtain, European nations have accepted the burden of curating the tortured landscapes of their past. Symbols — insignia, flags, monuments — have become explosive at moments of regime change, as shifts in political power alter the cultural currents of the day. East-west friction particularly marks the conflict over remembrance in Europe, from de-Nazification in the Cold War era to contests today over commemoration of communism’s past.

President Trump listens as he is introduced to deliver a speech in Warsaw in July in front of a monument to the Polish resistance during World War II.

“To some extent, Germany is an exceptional case,” said Arnd Bauerkämper, a historian at the Free University in Berlin. “Only the abandonment of Nazi ideology, and the clear break with the Nazi past, enabled integration into the West — membership in NATO, German reunification. There never was such a decisive break with Confederate ideas in the United States.”

But addressing monuments to people, parties and movements that have fallen into disrepute has

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WORLD not been simple in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe. And while memorials to victims now predominate, particularly here in the former capital of the Third Reich, continuing strife over names and symbols illuminates the continent’s enduring divisions.

A statue of Franz Joseph I again occupies a prominent position in Prague, a century after Czechoslovak independence made the commemoration of an AustroHungarian emperor unthinkable.

Other figures remain unpalatable. For years, Czech officials have debated what to do with the plinth once supporting a statue of Joseph Stalin that weighed 17,000 metric tons, destroyed in 1962 as the Communist Party line turned against the Soviet dictator.

Jirina Siklova, a Czech sociologist active in the dissident Charter 77 movement, said the site remains indelibly linked to Stalin.

“It is stimulation for an explanation of this man,” she said.

“Without this statue of Stalin, and without the liquidation of this statue, the new generation and tourists wouldn’t remember this period.”

Hungary has removed Communist-era statues from their pedestals and placed them in Memento Park, an open-air museum outside Budapest. Lithuania’s Grutas Park is similar.

This has not quieted dispute over public memorials, however, particularly as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pursued nationalist politics. A monument unveiled in 2014 to mark the 70th anniversary of Hungary’s invasion by Nazi Germany was dedicated to “the victims of the German invasion.” Critics said it obscured Hungary’s involvement in the annihilation of its Jewish citizens.

This year, activists threw paintfilled balloons at a Soviet memorial in Freedom Square in Budapest, in protest of perceived Russian influence in Hungarian affairs.

Jakub Janda, deputy director of the Prague-based European Values Think-Tank, said Russian influence is inseparable from a new effort by Czech communists to commemorate Communist-era border guards, who once policed the country’s frontier with West Germany and Austria. Josef Skala, vice chairman of the Czech Communist Party of Bohemia and

MINDAUGAS KULBIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Moravia, said memorializing the guards is part of an effort to demonstrate that Czechoslovakia, in addition to the Soviet Union, was a victim in the Cold War. “I, personally, and the party I belong to do not like rewriting history,” Skala said. “We did not initiate the Cold War. We made mistakes, yes, but we were defending our interests.”

Antipathy to Russia in Poland’s ruling nationalist party, Law and Justice, has created a new row over Communist-era monuments in the former Soviet satellite state. The Polish government has set out to remove 500 Soviet monuments, as Russian senators call on President Vladimir Putin to respond with sanctions.

Statues of Stalin and Vladimir Lenin have also been toppled in Ukraine, as part of pro-Europe revolutionary activity that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Still another approach is that of Romania, which last year unveiled a new sculpture — depicting three wings pointing to the sky — that honors those who died fighting Communist rule in Romania and Bessarabia.

The German capital is a tableau of conflicting impulses. An underground transit station was renamed for Karl Marx in 1946 —

not in the Communist east but in West Berlin. Parts of the Berlin Wall remain in place, including at Checkpoint Charlie, a major tourist destination. Two years ago, the head of a giant Lenin statue was exhumed and exhibited in Berlin.

The European Union in 2005 dropped proposals to ban both Nazi and communist symbols, due to concerns for freedom of expression as well as disagreement over the scope of the prohibition. Still, many European nations bar the use of totalitarian symbolism. In parts of Eastern Europe, bans expressly extend to communist iconography. In Germany, only the prohibition on Nazi symbols and signals is unambiguous; tourists from across the globe have recently learned that giving the Nazi salute is forbidden.

Many sites associated with the Nazis stand today as haunting museums. Other structures have been demolished to thwart neoNazi pilgrimages. A prison that housed Nazi war criminals was razed in 1987, its materials ground to powder and scattered in the North Sea. But purging Germany of Nazism was not as swift as severe legal codes might suggest. Nor were the country’s motives as pure, said Jacob S. Eder, a scholar of German history and Holocaust

Workers wrap plastic over a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Grutas Park near Druskininkai, Lithuania, on Feb. 12, 2007. The park contains a sculpture garden of Communist-era statues.

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memory at the Friedrich-SchillerUniversity in Jena.

“It’s important to avoid making the mistake of thinking that now because every German city has some kind of memorial or museum to the Nazi past, that this was an easy process,” Eder said.

“It’s actually quite the opposite.”

Certain debates, he said, still confound the public. Parade grounds in Nuremberg where Hitler held massive rallies lie in disrepair. “The question is what to do with it and whether to let it just decay,” Eder said.

Controversy in the 1990s and early 2000s marked the conceptualization of the Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

“People considered it a mark of shame,” Eder said — an argument revived this year by Björn Höcke, a state leader of Alternative for Germany, a far-right party poised to enter the German Parliament for the first time in elections next month. “It was the government of Helmut Kohl that pushed for this monument, not out of a sense of moral responsibility but much more a political necessity, to improve Germany’s reputation abroad.”

From the beginning of the postwar era, as West Germany rebuilt under the Marshall Plan, external pressure guided de-Nazification.

“Our deliverance from the Nazi period wasn’t a development within Germany, but we were forced by the Allied forces to become a civilized nation again,” said Volker Beck, a Green Party lawmaker who heads the Germany-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group.

The process was faltering, as ex-Nazis sometimes found their way into power, said Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, author of “The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism.”

“But the thing that kept West Germany in the American orbit — and committed to de-Nazification — was fear of the Soviet Union,” he said. “There was no such fear in the American South.”

Marshall aid to reconstruct Western European economies hinged on strict conditions to adopt democratic policies. By contrast, a decade after the Civil War, as federal troops were withdrawn from the South, the decrees of Reconstruction went unenforced.n ©The Washington Post

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‘It’s like everyone forgot’ T HOMAS G IBBONS- N EFF Camp Shorab, Afghanistan BY

I

n Marine Brig. Gen. Roger B. Turner Jr.’s office on this small, dusty base, there is a leather couch, a map of Helmand province and a white board marked with half a dozen goals.

One of them reads: “Get thru fighting season.”

That aim — survival — demonstrates how modest U.S. ambitions in Afghanistan have become.

In 2011, when Turner was last in Afghanistan and in charge of thousands of Marines spread across a constellation of outposts in this province, the fighting season was almost distinct, lasting the summer and early fall months as Taliban militants spent revenue from the spring’s poppy harvest on ammunition. Now Turner is the first to admit that the fighting season never really ends, and the small group of 300 Marines here is trying to help the Afghan army hold a fraction of the territory U.S. troops controlled six years ago.

Turner’s unit, called Task Force Southwest, based out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., is the first Marine deployment to Helmand since 2014. His base is wedged between the headquarters for the Afghan army unit responsible for the province — the 215th Corps — and the derelict remains of Camp Leatherneck, the sprawling installation that was once home to thousands of Marines at the height of the war and may now be reopened. A third of Turner’s troops have been to Helmand before, and many of them wear bracelets commemorating their dead friends, steel reminders of the 349 Marines who died in the surrounding countryside.

Task Force Southwest represents what could be the next chapter of the United States’ longest war, which President Trump vowed in a speech Monday night to continue fighting. The Marine unit doesn’t have a combat mission — like most U.S. troops in Afghanistan since 2014 — but it’s quietly moving toward a more aggressive, hands-on effort

PHOTOS BY THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF/THE WASHINGTON POST

After nearly 16 years of war, optimism rings hollow for some Marines in Afghanistan to train and advise Afghan troops, including having Marines get closer to the front lines.

“The stronger the Afghan security forces become, the less we will have to do,” Trump said in his speech outlining his administration’s policy on Afghanistan. “Afghans will secure and build their own nation, and define their own future. We want them to succeed.”

Trump promised last week that U.S. troops “will fight to win,” and leaders such as Turner believe the Marines are trying a different approach.

“We can at least see a path forward,” Turner said, adding that the Army unit that had preceded his Marines had controlled the “hemorrhaging” in the province after the 215th Corps suffered record-high casualties in 2015 and lost two districts to the Taliban.

To some of the Marines, though, optimism, no matter how cautious, rings hollow after nearly 16 years of war and new approaches that sound a lot like the old ones.

“You know, it’s like everyone forgot,” said one Marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue frankly. “Like someone hit the reset button and now we’re out here again saying, ‘We can do this, we can win this thing.’ ” The Marines were sent to Helmand in the spring, not knowing how, or whether, the strategy might change.

The uncertainty made Gen. Robert Neller, the top Marine Corps officer, hesitant to send Marines to Helmand again after he was asked by the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan last fall, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the deliberations. Before Task Force Southwest deployed in April, Neller told the 300 Marines that part of their mission, along with assisting the Afghans, was to “not get blown up.” When Neller visited Helmand in July, and was asked by Marines what they were fighting to achieve, he was blunt that no

A Marine and a Navy corpsman from Task Force Southwest, based out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., watch Afghan soldiers conduct medical training in a mock Afghan house.

victory was in sight.

“I can’t guarantee your kids won’t be here in 20 years with another old guy standing in front of them,” he said, according to multiple Marines at the meeting.

The situation in Helmand deteriorated rapidly after the United States withdrew in 2014 as part of the Obama administration’s drawdown, leaving the 215th Corps with no advisers and air support, and a false sense of confidence that they could fight the Taliban by themselves.

Three years later, the 215th has a new commander, and U.S. and Afghan officials are confident that he can keep the Taliban from overrunning the provincial capital and motivate the ranks under him.

Maj. Gen Wali Mohammad Ahmadzai, stocky and with a thick mustache, is considered a rising star in the Afghan military. His predecessor, Maj. Gen. M. Moein Faqir, was arrested earlier this year on corruption charges, including making his troops pay for their food.

“The new corps commander is a warfighter, he wants to take the fight to the enemy,” said Col. Matthew S. Reid, the deputy commander for Task Force Southwest.

“It’s not all rosy, there’s clearly work to do. . . . They have got a lot of work to do in their basic institutional fixes — logistics, personnel, pay. The same problems they had in 2010 and 2011, they’ve kind of come back.

The Marines, drawn to Ahmadzai’s aggressiveness, have helped the Afghan commander plan and carry out operations designed to take pressure off the provincial capital and relieve some of the 215th corps’ most beleaguered troops. The missions — called expeditionary advisory packages — allow the Marines to travel with Ahmadzai close to the front, providing him with air support and reconnaissance drones to help his troops advance.

“I have not seen such support from any other unit,” Ahmadzai said of the Marines.

The U.S.-backed operations have opened up some roads leading into Marjah, a town the Ma-

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rines fought hard for in 2010, and they have also allowed the Afghans to retake a district that the Taliban has held for more than a year.

But despite some progress, the Afghans still fight — for the most part — from checkpoints, leaving them vulnerable to attack and making them difficult to monitor as the locations change hands frequently. The Marines have helped the Afghans set up a system to keep track of the more than 500 fixed positions throughout the province. In a special coordination cell, Maj. Paul Rivera has taught Afghan soldiers and police to plot their positions on Google Earth, and update them daily.

Air support has long been an issue in the province since the 2014 drawdown, and finite resources — including helicopter gunships and reconnaissance drones — need to be tightly scheduled to ensure there is constant coverage. The Afghan air force, still in its infancy, is helping, although the Afghan helicopters

and attack planes are usually used only for pre-planned missions.

Capt. Brian Hubert, a Marine officer who helps staff the command center at Camp Shorab, said the Afghans ask — often via cellphone — for some sort of air support once a day.

Without Marines in the field and a heavy reliance on video feeds, mistakes can happen. Last month, an airstrike directed by the Marines hit a cluster of Afghan local police in the Gereshk district. According to Marines who were in the command center, Turner studied the screen for several minutes — watching what he thought were Taliban, armed and dressed in civilian clothes move around — before authorizing the strike. The Marines, after consulting with Afghans on the ground, were under the impression that no government security forces were in the area. The strike killed about a dozen of the police, including a father and his two sons. The Marines gave out condolence payments to the families, a

familiar act during the last time they were deployed to the province.

“Look at Iraq, where you have guys calling for [airstrikes] with an iPad and radios and here it’s an illiterate Afghan who can’t read a map with a cellphone,” one Marine said of the difficulty of coordinating strikes with the Afghans.

To rectify gaps in air coverage, the Marines are looking at putting guided rocket artillery back in the province. With about a 40-mile range and an ability to be fired quickly and in bad weather, the rockets would free up the F-16s flying out of Bagram airbase near Kabul.

Under the watch of a pair of armed Marines near Camp Shorab, Staff Sgt. George Caldwell trained six Afghan soldiers recently on how to set up a 60mm mortar, a small piece of mobile artillery that needs to be assembled and sighted in before it can be fired. The hope is that the Afghans — after instruction from Caldwell — will then go back to

Afghan commandos with the 7th Special Operations Kandak practice moving wounded troops to an Afghan air force helicopter at Camp Bastion in Helmand province.

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their unit and train their comrades on how to use the weapon.

It’s a familiar event for Caldwell, who spent a number of deployments in Iraq and was last in Afghanistan in 2011. The U.S. military has been training the Afghans in earnest since 2007 with only incremental payoff. Of the 60 students Caldwell teaches, 20 were instructed by Marines the last time they were in Helmand.

As part of their training, Caldwell runs them through “gun drills,” pitting two teams against each other as they race to set up the gun.

One of the Afghan teams quickly assembles the mortar. Caldwell inspects and moves to the other group, which is fumbling with the weapon’s bipod.

“The biggest thing is not doing it for them, and not to interject too much,” Caldwell said. “We only kind of push the hand in the right direction; it’s up to them go forward with it. If we do it for them, we’ll be here forever.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

w

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

A friendship formed despite barriers

BY LORI ARATANI in Heart Mountain, Wyo.

hen they are together, it’s not hard to see the Boy Scouts they were when they met seven decades ago, in the barbed-wire Japanese internment camp that sprawled over desolate fields. One was imprisoned here; one belonged to the only troop that agreed to a jamboree on the inside. ¶ Norman Mineta went on to become a mayor, a Democratic congressman and a Cabinet secretary to two presidents. Alan K. Simpson went on to serve Wyoming as its Republican senator for 18 years. And they have returned to speak out against the racism that led to Heart Mountain’s opening 75 years ago this month. ¶ On this day, they are goofing around after dinner on the front porch of one of Simpson’s favorite haunts in Cody, where storefront signs once read “No Japs Allowed.” ¶ They rib each other relentlessly. Simpson, almost a foot taller, bends down to plant a goodbye kiss on Mineta’s head. When they hug, Mineta’s face is squashed into Simpson’s chest.

“You “You need need to to shave,” shave,” Mineta Mineta quips. quips.

Simpson Simpson rubs rubs his his chin chin and and grins. grins.

Nearby, Nearby, their their wives wives shake shake their their heads heads and and roll roll their their eyes. eyes. They’ve They’ve seen seen this this show show before. before.

“It’s “It’s like like they’re they’re 12 12 years years old old again,” again,” says says Deni Deni Mineta.

Mineta. “Look “Look at at the the two two of of them.” them.”

The The men, men, who who are are 85, 85, take take aa cruise cruise most most years years with with their their wives, wives, but but the the trip trip they they treasure treasure most most is isthis thisannual annualpilgrimage. pilgrimage.Their Theirpersonal personalstory storyis is aa highlight highlight for for the the former former internees internees and and their their descendants, descendants, who who visit visit and and reflect reflect on on aa particuparticularly larly dark dark chapter chapter in in American American history. history.

AMERICAN AMERICAN HERITAGE HERITAGE CENTER CENTER AT AT THE THE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF OF WYOMING WYOMING

MINETA MINETA FAMILY FAMILY

Opposite Opposite page, page, former former congressman congressman Norman Norman Mineta Mineta (D-Calif.), (D-Calif.), left, left, and and former former senator senator Alan Alan K. K. Simpson Simpson (R-Wyo.) (R-Wyo.) met met at at Heart Heart Mountain Mountain camp camp in in 1942.

1942. Top, Top, from from left, left, Pete Pete Simpson, Simpson, Houston Houston Simpson Simpson (no (no relation) relation) and and Ralph Ralph Gill Gill with with the the senator-to-be senator-to-be during during his his Scouting Scouting days days in in about about 1941, 1941, in in Jackson, Jackson, Wyo. Wyo. Above, Above, Mineta, Mineta, the the youngest youngest child child of of his his family, family, in in 1936 1936 in in California.

California. The The Minetas Minetas were were interned interned for for several several years years after after the the Pearl Pearl Harbor Harbor attack attack tipped tipped the the United United States States into into World World War War IIII and and Japanese Japanese Americans Americans on on the the Pacific Pacific Coast Coast were were confined. confined.

Leaving Leaving everything everything behind behind Two Two months months after after the the Japanese Japanese bombed bombed Pearl Pearl Harbor, Harbor, President President Roosevelt Roosevelt signed signed an an order order ordering ordering all all Japanese Japanese Americans Americans away away from from the the Pacific Pacific Coast.

Coast.

Mineta Mineta and and his his family family were were among among 120,000 120,000 who who were were “relocated” “relocated” inland inland to to one one of of 10 10 interninternment ment camps camps that that opened opened amid amid the the wartime wartime hysteria. hysteria. The The majority majority were were citizens, citizens, forced forced to to leave leave behind behind their their homes, homes, jobs, jobs, belongings belongings and and crops. crops. Families Families lost lost everything. everything. Mineta Mineta rememremembers bers tears tears streaming streaming down down his his father’s father’s face face as as they they left left San San Jose Jose and and headed headed first first for for aa way way station station at at the the Santa Santa Anita Anita Racetrack, Racetrack, then then to to the the Heart HeartMountain Mountaincamp, camp,15 15miles milesoutside outsideof ofSimpSimpson’s son’s home home town town of of Cody.

Cody.

Simpson Simpson remembered remembered how how the the rows rows of of tartarpaper paperbarracks barracksappeared appearedalmost almostovernight overnighton onaa sagebrush sagebrush flat. flat. There There was was nothing nothing near near the the camp camp but but the the railroad railroad tracks tracks that that transported transported the the internees. internees. With With more more than than 10,000 10,000 usually usually there, there, the the camp camp dwarfed dwarfed the the population population of of Cody, Cody, then then at at just just more more than than 2,500.

2,500.

“The “Thetownspeople townspeoplein inCody Codywere werenot notthrilled,” thrilled,” Simpson Simpson said. said. “We “We didn’t didn’t know know who who was was in in there there except except it it must must have have been been aa pretty pretty bad bad group group with with all all that that activity.” activity.”

“I “I remember remember the the day day we we got got there there in in NovemNovember ber [1942],” [1942],” Mineta Mineta said. said. “The “The wind wind was was blowblowing, ing, all all this this silt silt was was hitting hitting our our faces, faces, cold cold as as blazes. blazes. .. .. .. The The restrooms restrooms were were quite quite aa ways ways away, away, so so when when it it would would get get cold cold and and either either raining raining or or the the snow, snow, you you had had to to go go to to the the bathroom bathroom at at 11 11 or or 12 12 at at night night and and trudge trudge through through all all that that mud mud and and muck muck and and mire. mire.

“And “And then then each each of of the the units units had had one one single single globe globe in in the the middle middle of of the the room room and and aa potbelly potbelly stove stove in in the the middle. middle. My My job job was was to to get get the the coal coal from from the the bin bin and and then then bring bring it it — — and and that’s that’s what what kept kept us us warm.” warm.”

He He was was 11.

11.

No No schools schools had had been been built built for for the the thousands thousands of of children children who who were were among among the the internees, internees, so so to to keep keep the the children children occupied, occupied, camp camp elders elders decided decided to to form form Boy Boy Scout Scout troops. troops.

Long Long before before internment, internment, scouting scouting had had deep deep roots roots in in the the Japanese Japanese community. community. Immigrant Immigrant parents parents viewed viewed it it as as aa very very American American tradition tradition and and admired admired the the organization’s organization’s values values of of good good citizenship, citizenship, loyalty loyalty and and service. service. When When Mineta’s Mineta’s family family left left their their house house for for the the train train ride ride to to the the assembly assembly center center in in Southern Southern California, California, young young Norman Norman wore wore his his Cub Cub Scout Scout uniform. uniform.

So So Heart Heart Mountain Mountain troop troop leaders leaders wrote wrote to to troops troopsin innearby nearbytowns, towns,inviting invitingthem themto toparticparticipate ipate in in Boy Boy Scout Scout jamborees. jamborees. All All refused. refused. They They were were afraid afraid of of the the armed armed guards guards and and uneasy uneasy about about the the unfamiliar unfamiliar faces faces inside. inside.

“It “It was was aa confusing confusing time,” time,” Simpson Simpson said. said. As As aa young young boy, boy, “You “You were were sorting sorting out out your your world world when when nobody nobody was was there there to to teach teach you you what what the the continues continues on on next next page page

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BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

“ Yo u w e r e s o r t i n g o u t y o u r w o r l d . . . but you knew it was mess.” from previous page

hell was going on, but you knew it was mess.”

But his troop’s leader, Glenn Livingston, was “a scoutmaster ahead of his time,” Simpson said. He told his young scouts that the boys behind the barbed-wire fence were just like them, and he was right: The Heart Mountain scouts, Simpson said, read the same comics and earned the same merit badges.

Even as a young kid, Simpson said: “You knew these were Americans, especially when you met the Scouts. They didn’t even know where Japan was.”

By chance, he was matched up with Mineta, who remembers Simpson as a “roly-poly kid with lots of hair.”

Among their tasks that day was pitching a tent.

There is some dispute between the two, as usual, as they recount what happened next.

Mineta claimed that when it came time to build a small moat around the tent, Simpson suggested routing it so that it would flow toward the tent of another Scout — one known as a bully.

“It was no skin off my nose, so I said ‘Sure,’ ” Mineta recalled. By chance it rained, and the moat worked perfectly to flood the kid’s tent.

“Oh, he laughed, ‘hee hee hee, haw haw haw, hee hee hee,’ ” Mineta said. “I had to say, ‘Alan, stop laughing so we can get some rest.’ ” Said Simpson: “He said I laughed hideously at the event. I don’t recall any cackling, but it was fun.”

They spent a day together. Then Simpson went back to a comfortable life as the son of a prominent family in Cody. Mineta stayed behind the barbed wire for a year.

The namesake

Two roads converge That might have been that, had it not been for a small news item that ran in the Cody Enterprise in 1971.

Like the thousands of other Japanese families, Mineta and his family had returned home after the war to rebuild their lives. Mineta’s family was among the fortunate: A friend had taken care of their property, so they had a home. But prejudice persisted, and his father

when protecting

peak behind Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which aims to remind visitors of the need to uphold basic civil rights national security.

struggled to restart his insurance business.

Mineta got a business administration degree at the University of California at Berkeley, joined the Army and fought in Korea. In 1971, he was elected mayor of San Jose and became the first Japanese American to lead a major U.S. city.

Simpson, by then a young lawyer practicing in Cody, spotted an Associated Press story in the local paper about that election. Buried deep in the text was a mention that Mineta and his family had been interned at the Heart Mountain camp.

Simpson, realizing this was the same pesky kid, dashed off a note.

“Dear Norm, congratulations on being elected mayor — I have been wondering what you’ve been up to all these years . . .” Mineta recalled.

“He still complains, to this day, that I never responded to him.”

Did he?

“You know, I don’t remember that I did — so I fall silent whenever he’s talking about that,” he said with a sheepish grin.

Three years later, Mineta was elected to

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COVER STORY Congress, and Simpson wrote again. This time, the newly minted congressman wrote back.

After Simpson was elected to the Senate from Wyoming in 1978, the two former Boy Scouts finally were reunited face-to-face — 35 years after they met on the sagebrush flat.

Politically, they were opposites. Simpson is a Republican. Mineta is a Democrat.

Once, when Mineta signed on to support a gun control bill, Simpson called him up. “He said, ‘You know what gun control is in my state?’ ” Mineta recalled. “It’s how steady you hold the gun.” That argument didn’t persuade Mineta, but it did make him laugh.

The two were in Congress at the same time for 16 years. Outsiders thought their bipartisan friendship was curious.

Mineta, again: “One time this guy asked Alan, ‘I don’t understand. You’re a conservative Republican, and he’s a liberal Democrat, so what’s the big difference between you and Mineta?’ And Alan said, ‘Well, I wear a 17 1/2 shoe and he wears 8.’ ” In 1995, when Simpson decided he would not run for reelection, Mineta was among the first people he called. The exchange was trademark Simpson.

“He said, ‘I want to talk to you, and I said, ‘Why don’t you come on over Wednesday at 2 p.m.,’ ” Mineta said. “And then he said, “May I remind you that I’m a U.S. senator, and you are a mere representative of the House?’ So I said, ‘Okay you imperial so-and-so, I’ll come over to your side.’ ” Perhaps their most memorable legislative collaboration came on the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which the government formally apologized to the Japanese American internees and created a $1.25 billion trust fund to provide reparations to those who were interned. Mineta and his colleagues, including Sens. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Spark M. Matsunaga (D-Hawaii), worked with many others for more than a decade to get the bill passed.

Simpson plays down his role in the bill’s passage, but Mineta insists his friend was a key supporter despite Simpson’s opposition to the provision providing $20,000 payments to living internees. The cash payments, said Simpson on the Senate floor, would establish the wrong precedent, and, as importantly, take away from the sincerity of the apology.

“I think that that somehow is unbecoming,” he said. “It is a troubling aspect to me.”

In the same speech, however, Simpson recounted how his trip with the Boy Scouts into the Heart Mountain detention camp had “put a new twist” on his own wartime perception of Japanese Americans “because we thought of them as something else — as aliens, we thought of them as spies, we thought of them as people who were behind wire because of what they were trying to do in our country.”

Instead, he said, they were Boy Scouts from California, wearing “the same merit badges, same Scout sashes, same clothing. . . . But in my mind you had to see it, you had to have it etched on the back of the rim of your eye, to understand that these people were put in an extraordinary

PHOTOS BY HEART MOUNTAIN WYOMING FOUNDATION OKUMOTO COLLECTION

situation where they lost their constitutional rights in the United States of America. They were not, as I say, aliens. They were U.S. citizens.”

Still standing At the site of the camp where more than 14,000 people were confined, just a few old buildings remain. They have been preserved by a nonprofit foundation as part of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which aims to remind visitors of the need for tolerance and upholding basic civil rights when protecting national security.

Simpson and Mineta helped raise millions of dollars for the center, much of it by telling the story of their friendship. Mineta always tells people how much he treasures Simpson’s humor and loyalty. Simpson always expresses his admiration for how Mineta moved on after Heart Mountain to “do good,” for refusing to give in to bitterness.

In an interview in Simpson’s living room, he and Mineta reflected on their long bond.

“It wasn’t anything mystical,” Simpson said.

“It was just two boys — just two curious, inquisitive kids — pesky, good-humored, full of fun, who met each other and who remembered — at least I remembered.”

Said Mineta: “He is a great friend all around.

Even though he’s a conservative Republican, and I’m a liberal Democrat, we’re just the best of friends.”

Detainees at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming tend a garden, top, and gather coal, above, during the Second World War. Heart Mountain opened 75 years ago this month.

KLMNO WEEKLY

That makes them rare specimens of a nearly extinct species, as they well know.

“People may like the aspects . . . of bipartisanship. . . . And certainly an Asian and a Caucasian, there’s another blend,” Simpson said. “And maybe they pine for that, I don’t know.”

Up the hill from the center, an American flag flaps in the wind. At the flagpole’s base sits a plaque with the names of 800 who were drafted or enlisted from Heart Mountain. It includes 15 internees who died fighting for the United States, two of whom were awarded the Medal of Honor.

“This is not about the past,” Mineta said at the center’s opening in 2011. “This is about the future . . . because history already has the ability to repeat itself, and what you are doing here is drawing that line in the sand, to say that never again will there be something like what happened here.”

This summer, a record number of people made the pilgrimage, boarding yellow school buses that took them through fertile farmland.

First-timers such as Mitch Homma, whose parents and grandparents were interned here, joined Bacon Sakatani, now in his 80s, who has made 30 trips to Heart Mountain since his confinement there as an eighth-grader. Raymond Uno, a judge, led 50 members of his family to see where he had been interned.

For many, the trips are a contemplation of family history that is both painful and prideful.

John S. Toyama, who was born at Heart Mountain, said that one of the first times he returned to the camp as an adult, he cried.

“It was very emotional,” he said. Now, he is more at peace when he sees the mountain and wanders through the center.

“There is good energy here,” Toyama said, energies that he thinks helped the Japanese Americans interned at Heart Mountain survive.

‘Same old dust’ The visitors also see the durability of the unlikely Boy Scout friendship as a powerful energy, a testament to resilience and mutual respect. When Mineta and Simpson arrive, they are greeted like favorite uncles and dear friends. Instead of handshakes, there are hugs and kisses and, among the younger members of the crowd, plenty of selfies.

“Every year [the crowd] gets bigger, and Norm and I get smaller,” Simpson jokes to the crowd. “Thanks for keeping [Heart Mountain] alive.”

Later that afternoon, Mineta grips a cane and climbs slowly up the stairs to a refurbished barracks like the one he lived in for a year.

Internment “was a bad memory,” he had said in a previous interview. “It’s something you don’t forget, but you don’t let that become a chain around your neck.”

Now, he looks out the window.

“Same old dust is still here,” he says while picking at dirt in the windowsill. His wife takes a picture.

“Smile,” she says. n ©The Washington Post

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MONEY

Why you tip as much as you do

ISTOCK

BY

K ATHERINE L . M ILKMAN

A

t a cafe in Upstate New York, a waiter paused for a moment in the kitchen to draw a playing card from a shuffled deck before bringing a check out to a table of diners. If the card he drew was red, the waiter would give every diner at the table a high-quality chocolate in foil wrapping paper along with their bill. However, if the playing card he drew was black, the bill would come out chocolate-free.

The waiter was a (willing) participant in an experiment concocted by behavioral scientists to study how a small gift (in this case, a chocolate) could influence how much restaurant patrons decided to tip.

The standard view in the field of economics is that tipping in any service encounter where you don’t expect to be a return customer is a behavioral quirk — something that, in a world where humans are rational, return-maximizing actors, really should not happen.

It makes sense to leave a tip for your regular waiter at your regular diner or to give one to your doorman each holiday season, since the service quality you receive in the future will likely depend on those tips. But economists find it

peculiar that people tip the bellman upon departing from a hotel they’ll never visit again, a waitress at an out-of-town restaurant or a cabdriver in a big city. There’s technically no economic reason for such transactions, beyond a social expectation. And so nerdy behavioral scientists have had a field day running studies to figure out what oddities shape our decisions about tipping — decisions economic theory asserts we often shouldn’t be making in the first place.

Much of that research has been done in restaurants with unsuspecting diners following procedures like the ones at the Upstate New York cafe.

There, researchers found the average tip from diners who were offered wrapped chocolates with their check was 18 percent, but it was only 15 percent under normal circumstances. It turns out friendly gestures from your server can have a surprisingly large effect on your tipping decisions, though you may not realize it. Dozens of experiments with similar designs (using playing cards or other randomizing devices to determine what “special treatment” customers would receive) in a variety of restaurants across the country have reinforced just how much

Mood can affect how much and when people tip, research shows

small acts affect tips. For instance, tips go up two percentage points if a server writes “Thank You” on the back of a patron’s check, four percentage points if a server notes on the back of a bill that the forecast is for good weather tomorrow, eight percentage points if a server introduces him or herself by name, and five percentage points if a server touches a patron’s hand (though notably this last study was only conducted with female servers).

This evidence all points to huge benefits from making patrons feel like you have a real relationship and from taking steps to boost their mood.

And this isn’t a restaurantspecific phenomenon — it matters in cabs, too. One massive study of the tips given after 13.82 million taxi rides taken in New York City in 2009 found that mood matters even when it’s affected by factors outside of your driver’s control.

Cloud cover makes us grumpy, and researchers found that cloud cover influences tips even after accounting for other weather conditions and the season. When it’s fully overcast, a cabdriver can expect to earn an average of about a half a percentage point less in tips than when it’s completely clear and sunny.

Recent advances in technology

have made it easier to tip our tipping decisions as we interact with screens at the point of sale. Companies like Square and Uber are now suggesting a set of possible tips when we make a purchase, and these suggestions, perhaps not surprisingly, influence our choices.

A recently published study of the same 13.82 million New York City taxi rides mentioned above looked at the influence of the tip suggestions that appear on a rider’s screen when she pays her cab fare with a credit card. One cut of the data zoomed in on 100,577 daytime taxi rides initiated at LaGuardia Airport with fares of $15 or more and compared the tips riders gave when they were “randomly” put in cabs from two different companies that displayed different suggested tip percentages on their payment screens (20 percent, 25 percent or 30 percent versus 15 percent, 20 percent or 25 percent). Higher suggested tips boosted drivers’ average gratuities by about seven-tenths of a percentage point — a small but precisely estimated increase amounting to about $7 in extra tips for every $1,000 in fares.

An interesting side effect also showed up in the data, however: Rides with higher suggested tips were over 50 percent more likely to produce no tip at all. So higher suggested tips produce a bimodal response — higher average tips, but more people opting out of tipping entirely, perhaps because of their irritation with the excessively high suggestions offered on-screen.

So what’s the punchline of all this? Primarily, it’s that you’re not alone if you feel unsure about how much to tip when. Economics suggests there is no “right” answer and research shows we’re all easy marks for manipulation. If you work in the service industry, some of the studies I’ve described here should give you ideas about how to boost your tips. If you’re only a patron, my advice is you try to let go of your tipping anxiety and don’t feel too bad about following suggestions from technology (or your heart) about what to tip — everyone else does, too. n

©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

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LIFESTYLES

KLMNO WEEKLY

Prenup is starting to lose its taboo BY

J ONNELLE M ARTE

A

manda Farris works in accounting and likes to “play things safe” when it comes to her savings and investments. Her boyfriend, Andy Salmons, owns a coffee shop and is a serial entrepreneur not afraid to take risks.

The two have been together for nearly four years and are talking about marriage. But before they vow to stay together for better or worse, they’ve agreed to come up with a plan for how they would protect their finances on the — slim, they hope — chance that their relationship should head south.

“I wanted to find some middle ground,” said Farris, 31, adding that a prenuptial agreement would separate her retirement savings from Salmons’s business and the debt he took on to launch that and other ventures. “I don’t ever want my decisions to put her in jeopardy,” Salmons, 32, said.

As more millennials put off marriage until later in life than previous generations, they are more likely to have careers, businesses and property. And that, financial advisers say, has made them more protective of what they have built. As a result, the prenuptial agreement is starting to lose its taboo. For generations, the agreements have proven a sticking point for couples who deemed them unromantic. In some relationships, the contracts can signal a lack of trust or suggest that one person is foreseeing an end to the union.

But over time, the equation for when and why two people should marry has changed. In the 1970s, about 8 in 10 people had married by age 30, according to a U.S. census report. In 2016, that same percentage wasn’t reached until age 45.

Millennials are also less inclined to get married while they’re young and broke. More than half of people in their 20s and 30s say it is important for them to be financially secure before they get married, according to a 2015 survey by Allstate and the National Journal.

SHAWN POYNTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As lifestyles get complicated, more young couples are signing financial agreements before marriage That increases the chance that when two people tie the knot, each will have a career or business that they want to protect, financial advisers say.

Now, some couples are using prenups as a way for each person to protect any assets they accumulated — be it a modest condo or a promising start-up. The agreements can also help people protect future income at a time when it’s not unheard of for a popular smartphone app to bring sudden wealth or for a successful side gig to turn into a full-blown business.

A 2016 survey from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a trade association for divorce lawyers, found that 62 percent of members saw an increase in the number of couples seeking prenups over the past three years.

And 51 percent said they noticed more millennials asking for the agreements.

Prenuptial agreements are a relatively modern concept. It was only within the past 25 years or so that the contracts became widely

accepted in most states, coinciding with the rise of divorce, said John Slowiaczek, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Prenups also have evolved as relationships have changed. In the ’70s, prenuptial agreements were mainly used for estate-planning purposes, Slowiaczek said. And more commonly, those were situations where one partner had significantly more wealth or stood to inherit money.

They’re also emerging as a tool for dividing debt loads. About 41 percent of couples had student loan debt in 2013, compared with 17 percent in 1989, according to the census report.

The size of that debt burden is growing as college becomes more expensive. New college graduates left school with an average $30,100 in student loans in 2015, more than triple the average debt load of $9,400 in 1993, according to the Institute for College Access and Success, which tracks student loan debts. In situations where

Andy Salmons and Amanda Farris are considering a prenuptial agreement to separate her savings from his businesses.

one partner has significantly more debt than the other, a prenup can detail who would be responsible for paying that debt should the two divorce, Slowiaczek said.

Some couples are still using prenups for more traditional reasons.

Christopher Lee, 29, talked to his parents and then his fiancee about a prenup within days of his proposal. Lee said he knew the agreement would be important for his parents, who have a pharmaceutical consulting business and want to make sure any assets they pass along to their children would stay in the family in the event of a divorce. Lee said that he views the agreement as a form of “insurance” to keep his parents at ease and that his fiancee is “totally on board.”

To be sure, prenups are still off limits for plenty of couples. Some people view the agreements as the first step to a divorce. The contracts may also not always make sense for two people with similar financial situations.

Tyler Dolan, a 29-year-old financial planner who works mostly with millennials, said the clients he works with are more preoccupied with paying down loans and opening 401(k)s than signing prenups. But the issue comes up with people who have been married previously or who have children from a prior relationship.

Some couples are turning to legal agreements after getting married to lay out how they would divide any property, savings and debt accumulated after tying the knot. Phoebe Gavin, 30, didn’t sign a prenup when she married her husband six years ago. But now that the two are planning to invest in several rental properties, they have agreed to draw up a postnuptial agreement. The document will lay out a plan for how they would divide their properties if they ever decided to separate.

“It’s just on my mind that we should be really smart about all of our real estate investments,” Gavin said. “Marriage is a financial decision, and divorce is a financial decision, and we should be smart about that.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A love letter to a son, not technology N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

J AMIE F ISHER

J

TO SIRI WITH LOVE A Mother, Her Son and the Kindness of Machines

By Judith Newman Harper.

221 pp. $26.99

udith Newman’s twins, Gus and Henry, were born prematurely, after a difficult pregnancy. In the hospital, shortly after giving birth, Newman was visited by a friend, the editor of a parenting magazine. “She told me she knew immediately that Henry was extremely intelligent. She said nothing about Gus.” When Gus reached 10 months, Newman began to acknowledge that something might be wrong.

At a year and a half, he was more interested in acquiring the language of machines than of people. Newman joked to a friend, “I guess it’s good he’s a city child.

Soon he’ll be doing car alarms, cars backfiring, buses emitting exhaust, drive-by shootings.”

When he did begin talking, he seemed to speak without full comprehension — wailing about elephants when he used the toilet or mimicking the sponsor credits on PBS. “I remember him at four,” Newman writes, “running into my room at three a.m., for some reason screaming, ‘I DON’T LIKE WHALES.’ ” At age 6, Gus was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

Newman’s memoir-in-essays, “To Siri With Love,” takes its name from her popular New York Times article about Gus and his unusual relationship with the Apple guide Siri, but readers expecting only an extended version of that essay will find much more. Newman is a gifted personal essayist, her warmth and wit recalling Nora Ephron’s. The result is a bracingly honest chronicle of life alongside an autistic family member. For the many parents raising children with autism, the book offers both empathy and comic relief. But readers of all backgrounds will find it just as engaging. As Newman puts it: “It is a slice of life for one family, one kid. But I hope it seems sort of a slice of your life too.”

There are, particularly in the early chapters, fillips of

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self-incrimination, which serve a double function in fleshing out the family’s character. (Besides Gus, we meet Newman’s husband — a retired opera singer — and smoothly entrepreneurial Henry.) But overall, Newman isn’t interested in explaining the ontology of Gus so much as she is interested — compellingly, magically — in Gus himself.

The book is organized into thematic sections. We learn about Gus’s love life, his job prospects, his precise knowledge of the subways, his affinity for cuddles. As a result, the book is less about decontextualized science than it is about intimacy.

Chances are you, too, would much rather hear about Gus’s befuddled reaction to Simon Says than his mirror neurons.

An exemplary chapter, on traveling with Gus, punctuates screwball comedy with thoughtful melancholy. Newman explains that her son gets homesick not for people, but for things: snow globes and model trains, bedroom curtains and Disney

paraphernalia. She entices him to leave for a family trip to Orlando by sending him an email pretending to be Maleficent. “Dear Gus,” she writes in her fake persona, “Why don’t you and your mother drop by Disney World?” (“In my haste to write this email,” Newman admits, “I actually wrote, ‘Why don’t you and your mother drop by Israel?’”) They make it to Orlando, but the villains aren’t around. Newman arranges for her son to attend a Cinderella breakfast, in hopes that one of the evil stepsisters might be there.

The stepsisters are, but Gus’s preferred cereal is not. So it goes.

Newman’s narrative works on several levels. The point of the Orlando anecdote, for those readers churning through the book for helpful nuggets, is that children with autism may relate more easily to the emotions rendered so broadly by villains. But its strength lies in its full depiction of family life, and in Newman’s dry humor. “Autism awareness is all very well,” she concludes, “but the real point of this

book is to make Cheerios available at Disney World.”

That humor helps to maintain a balance. The memoir is never sappy, but it is sometimes very sad, and Newman is unafraid to depict herself in an unflattering light, in all the hardest ways — not just in the easy “Broad City” gross-out moments, but in morally difficult thinking, as when she considers what will happen to Gus in sexual maturity. Gus was 14 when Newman was writing the book. “It is very hard to say this out loud,” Newman writes. “Let me try. I do not want Gus to have children. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what I want. Don’t I?” Newman is proud that her son is a collector of noises, able to recognize the pitches of individual ambulances sight unseen. But she also knows that his talents, theoretically a point of connection, can isolate him in practice.

Gus may have perfect pitch, but he spends his choir time in a corner making train noises. Enter Siri. The voice-recognition software performs a wealth of functions for the autistic community: conversationalist, babysitter and elocution trainer. Like Disney animations, Siri provides a comforting commercial sameness.

She has enabled Gus to have real, sustained conversations, albeit ones about turtles.

“To Siri With Love” is above all a close and wise portrait, Newman’s love letter not to technology but to her son. Newman has mixed feelings about Gus’s dependency on corporate products — the heightened schmaltz of cartoon emotions, the unreal universe of screens and canned voices. But she has nothing but deep, wide love for Gus. “The screens may not be real life,” Newman concludes. “But just maybe they are providing scaffolding to help him create that life.” n Fisher is a freelance writer working on a novel set in postwar Italy. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Not your average tech-geek thriller

A sportscaster’s quiet, dark battle

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

f, like me, you are a person who feels proud of having mastered the copy-and-paste maneuver on your computer, Christopher Brookmyre’s latest thriller, “The Last Hack,” will be intimidating at first. This is a tale filled with off-putting terms such as “metadata” and “sort filters.”

But, if, like me, you are a technophobe who also loves good suspense fiction, you should stick with this story. That’s because unlike, say, the “Mission Impossible” films — with their bottomless trove of outlandish gizmos like Gecko gloves and exploding chewing gum — the techie jargon here is more decorative than essential. It’s an embellishment that lends credibility to one of the most ingenious thrillers I’ve read in a long time.

“The Last Hack” is composed of two story lines that are as elaborately knotted together as the Ethernet and printer cables on my office power strip. One narrative is told from the point of view of a young woman of color named Samantha “Sam” Morpeth. Sam is a teenage tech whiz who gives lie to the commonplace wisdom that, “there are no girls on the internet.”

Because her mother is in jail for drug possession, Sam is the sole caretaker of her younger sister, Lilly, who has Down syndrome.

Forced to leave school and work part time at a burger joint, Sam is desperately lonely and an easy target for bullies; the only place she feels strong is in the virtual world where she’s part of a group of ace hackers — all anonymous, of course — who’ve penetrated banks and businesses, mostly for the thrill of proving that they can.

But, one night, Sam finds out that her anonymity has been breached: logging onto a closed chat site, she receives a “friend invitation” from someone called “Zodiac” urging her to join a new IRC channel “#blackmail.” As soon becomes creepily evident, Zodiac knows everything about Sam, including personal details about her family and hacking history. Zodiac

demands that Sam steal the prototype and plans for a mysterious new product being developed by a secretive company named Synergis. If she doesn’t, the incriminating information Zodiac has on Sam will be sent to the police, which will send her to jail and Lilly into institutional care.

This is the point where veteran journalist Jack Parlabane (the hero of eight previous thrillers by Brookmyre) gets tangled up in Sam’s troubles. Some time ago, Sam was Jack’s online source for some crucial information that revitalized his wheezing career. He owes her, big time. So it is that the crusty old investigative reporter and the determined teenage girl join forces to infiltrate Synergis and, ultimately, neutralize Zodiac.

The central moment in this novel is the Synergis break-in, with Jack making his way deeper into the company headquarters and Sam crouched over her laptop at home, expertly directing him via a state-of-the art earpiece around CCTV cameras and into chambers protected by encrypted passwords that have to be cracked against a tight deadline. Every couple of pages or so, a glitch occurs. All of this is delicious fun until things go seriously, sickeningly haywire.

The one thing critical to a good suspense novel is, well, suspense.

But an extraordinary suspense novel has that extra something — a haunting setting, wit or, in the case of “The Last Hack,” the presence of an idiosyncratic, morally complex heroine. The immortal Lisbeth Salander, that other “girl on the Internet,” is brilliant, but deliberately difficult to cozy up to; Sam Morpeth is much more human and vulnerable. By the end of this novel, she’s not only hacked her way into high security sites like Synergis but into a reader’s affections, too. n Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University. This was written for The Washington Post.

T THE LAST HACK

By Christopher Brookmyre Atlantic Monthly. 432 pp. $25

PLAYING HURT My Journey From Despair to Hope

By John Saunders with John U. Bacon Da Capo.

293 pp. $27

l

REVIEWED BY

W IL H AYGOOD

his posthumously published memoir is dark, edgy, revelatory and quite sad. John Saunders was a much-admired ESPN sportscaster, notable for his suave delivery on air and talent for analysis amid the studio banter. He seemed totally in control. But Saunders was engulfed by demons, suffering for decades from depression. He harbored suicidal thoughts, harmed himself with razor blades, became addicted to prescription drugs and spent time in a psych ward where the screaming patients terrified him. He died Aug. 10, 2016, from a combination of ailments exacerbated by a heart attack. He was 61 years old.

Saunders, along with co-author John U. Bacon, had been working on this memoir for quite some time before he died. His hope was to shine a light from his personal perspective — a man who happened to be a well-known black broadcaster who was engaged in a years-long attempt to conceal his mental suffering.

Saunders was born in Toronto in 1955. His father, Bernie Saunders, was a tyrant, a black man in white Canada visiting his pain upon John, his oldest of three children. John was kicked, slapped, punched and made to feel worthless. His mother, Jacqueline, had her own issues: She abided the beatings and told fabulous lies. He was still a kid when an older girl molested him, more than once — incidents that forever thwarted his outlook on intimacy. In high school he played hockey, listened to Jimi Hendrix and smoked dope.

Between the drugs, the abusive father and the sexual abuse, he whirled in and out of tailspins.

He was good enough to be welcomed to Indiana University in 1974 to play hockey. But upon arrival, he was introduced to oldfashioned American racism. A hockey player, lolling about the dorm with other families during move-in week, used the n-word to refer to him. He bolted from Indi-

ana and enrolled at Western Michigan in the fall of 1974. At his new school, there was less overt racism. Still, his dream of playing hockey at Western Michigan died for two reasons: He suffered an injury, then flunked out of the university. He returned to Toronto and got into Ryerson Polytechnical Institute — now known as Ryerson University — where he got his chance to play hockey.

But all was hardly well. He got married to a nice woman but felt he didn’t deserve her, and the marriage went bust. He began hearing voices — “my own inner voice, telling me to harm myself.” He wrote a suicide note. Even though it was never sent, it’s a wincing note and shows the vise he was in.

So one wonders: How did Saunders hold it together and become so renowned? His rise began in radio, then it was back to America and work at a Baltimore television station. He was good, sharp, a beautiful mind with a beautiful delivery on air. ESPN came calling.

He rose before our eyes on those football Saturday afternoons.

All the while — and this is the madness of the disease — he was sinking. He stood atop bridges and thought of jumping. There were hospital stays. Some of the medicines worked, others were awful.

His second wife, Wanda, and two daughters loved him deeply. He had good friends inside ESPN. Though this is Saunders’s memoir, one wishes for more insight from two heroic figures: Wanda, his wife, and Bernie, the younger brother named after their father, who would often race to his brother’s side during times of crisis. As it is, this is an important book about mental illness and a man who was loved, but whose mind could never find peace. n Haygood has just been awarded the 2017-2018 Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship prize at the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Time to stop funding abstinence-only programs JOHN SANTELLI is a professor of pediatrics and public health at Columbia University, a past president of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine and a Public Voices fellow.

This was written for The Washington Post.

Buried among the many changes to health programs in this year’s federal budget was an important one for young people. Congress added new funding for abstinence­only­ until­marriage programs, bringing the annual total to $90 million. And then in July, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would end funding for the Office of Adolescent Health’s evidence­based Teen Pregnancy Prevention program next year.

That program’s mission is to test and evaluate new and old prevention programs based on the best available science. But there’s no testing needed before the office shuts down to evaluate abstinence-only education.

Research about abstinence-only programs is already quite clear, as we document in two new scientific papers in the Journal of Adolescent Health. They don’t work, and they don’t prepare young people for life.

Abstinence-only now has a new name: “sexual risk avoidance.” A new name doesn’t fix the fundamental problem.

Abstinence-only programs do a poor job of preparing young people to avoid sex. My training in pediatrics and medical ethics suggests that we instead should give young people all the information they need to protect themselves and to promote lifelong healthy sexuality.

To be sure, abstinence from sexual activity can be a healthy choice for many young people.

Some adolescents believe that sex before marriage is wrong. Many more feel they are not ready for a sexual relationship. And while some adults think abstinenceuntil-marriage programs are the only moral choice for sex education, these programs fall short of the standards of medical ethics by limiting access to important health information.

The government shouldn’t be in the business of promoting an

unrealistic and ineffective solution to adolescent sexual and reproductive health — particularly one that has been so overwhelmingly repudiated by health professionals and parents.

Early abstinence-only programs often contained medically inaccurate information. The most recent authoritative review of the scientific evidence comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC examined scientific evaluations from 66 comprehensive risk reduction programs and 23 abstinence-only programs. CDC found inconclusive evidence that abstinence-only programs helped young people delay sexual initiation; nor did they change other behaviors. In contrast, CDC found comprehensive programs had favorable effects on multiple adolescent behaviors, including sexual initiation, number of sex partners, frequency of sexual activity, use of protection (condoms, oral contraceptives, or both), frequency of unprotected sexual activity, sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy.

In other words, comprehensive sex education helps young people remain abstinent, while abstinence-only education does not.

The goal of abstinence until marriage also is increasingly improbable, given that young people in rich and poor countries

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are increasingly delaying marriage — often so young women and young men can complete education goals and begin careers — before starting a family. For young women, the median age at first marriage in the United States is 26.5 — almost nine years after they initiate sexual intercourse. For young men, the median age of marriage is nearly 30 years, 12 years after the median age at first sexual experience. Health education during adolescence forms the foundation of knowledge and skills that are needed for many years to come.

Since 1982, the government has spent over $2 billion on domestic abstinence-only education programs. Federal funding guidelines for these programs have required an exclusive focus on abstinence, forbidding accurate information of condoms and contraception, sexual orientation and other aspects of human sexuality. Some states began refusing the funding in the mid-2000s so that they could provide their constituents with the comprehensive and medically accurate information they needed; by 2009, nearly half of U.S. states were refusing abstinence-only dollars. In 2010, Congress shifted the focus of federal funding to evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs. But abstinence-only funding persisted — given renewed support from a

conservative Congress after 2010.

Mainstream health professional groups, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine, have come out strongly against abstinenceonly approaches and in support of education that promotes health sexuality. This is not surprising, given the emphasis in medical ethics on providing patients with all the information they need to make wise choices. Pediatricians feel the same way about educating children and adolescents.

Physicians aren’t the only ones who believe that adolescents should not be limited to abstinence education.

Abstinence-only has been rejected by many mainline and progressive churches. National surveys demonstrate strong support among parents for sexuality education that gives young people all the information they need to protect their health.

The adolescents that I work with think the same; they want all the information they can get. As the father of two adolescent males, I am with them.

The weight of scientific evidence is clear. Parents, health professionals, church folks, educators and young people — we all need to stand up and tell Congress and the president to stop spending on useless and harmful programs. Young people need straight talk about sex. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

It’s good to be an Earthling DAVID VON DREHLE is a Washington Post columnist.

TROY, Kan. — I’ve long had a soft spot for this little town. One rainy December night in 1980, I was driving along dark roads through the empty countryside to visit a friend at college. Two or three miles outside Troy, I learned the importance of checking the gas gauge.

A husband and wife in a pickup truck found me 15 minutes later, jogging in search of a telephone. Drenched and shivering, I had just passed the cemetery, its headstones lit by jagged lightning. My rescuers told me they saw my car with its flashers on. They stopped what they were doing to find me, a stranger lost somewhere in the storm.

The cab of their truck was wonderfully toasty. Being farm people, they had a gasoline pump in their tractor shed. They soon had me warmed, toweled, refueled and on my way — and, of course, they wouldn’t take a cent.

I returned to Troy last week, this time in daylight with a beautiful wife and four teenage children. We were there to witness the eclipse. The geometry of the universe had conspired to move Troy for one day from the edge of nowhere to the center of that narrow band in which the moon would blot out the sun. It was, perhaps, the most historic thing to happen here since Abraham Lincoln visited on a cold December day in 1859.

We drove to the hilltop on which the redbrick Doniphan County courthouse looms, and we

spread our blanket on the lawn.

Nearby were three statues that tell you more about the place than you’d learn from the census or the election returns. One commemorates wartime sacrifice and heroism. Another honors the Native Americans who once lived on this land. The third — a small replica of the Statue of Liberty — is dedicated to the thing, whatever it is, that pulls us together in times seemingly determined to drive us apart.

Troy, a community of about 1,000 people, was giving its all. A band played the blues in the town gazebo as wood-fired smokers parked nearby slow-cooked pink and crusty ribs. Bubbling vats of oil turned spiral-cut potatoes into twisty chips on a skewer, called “spud-nados.” Deep in Trump Country, I noticed that the

line was even longer at the softtaco truck across the street.

Doniphan County voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton 77 percent to 17 percent, and that’s the last I’m going to say about that, because politics was nowhere to be seen last week.

The lawn was filled with old and young, pale and dark, wide and slender, hale and frail. But not with red and blue. Everyone was an Earthling.

The surprise was how happy everyone appeared, because the sky was quilty with thick and heedless clouds. Somewhere in the firmament, the sun was being eclipsed; we knew this but couldn’t see it. A great cheer went up when the clouds thinned just enough to reveal the moon nibbling away at the sun’s left shoulder. But instead of a curtain-raising, the show abruptly ended. Rain swept in behind the cheer. All these years later, I felt as though I had brought the storm back to Doniphan County, like gum on the bottom of my shoe.

And yet, there wasn’t a groan.

Not a word of complaint. Some people sheltered on the courthouse landing, some under the nearest tree, and some simply smiled through the soaking. But hardly anyone left. The rain thickened as zero hour

approached. I began to worry that we wouldn’t notice the darkness at midday through the gloom of the storm.

Then — just as the moment of totality arrived — the rain stopped. Through scudding clouds we caught a glimpse of the final fingernail of sunlight. It disappeared and took the last of the daylight with it. And, like magic, we beheld the gift we had given up hoping for: the pulsing, dancing, delicate ring of fire that outlines a total eclipse.

Such a surge of emotion swept over us there in the dark, something primal and essentially human connecting us to one another and to all of humankind, from the Stonehenge erectors marking the solstice to the sunworshipers of ancient Egypt. We were, to borrow from the poet William Wordsworth, “surprised by joy.” We were elated in the original sense of the word, raised for a moment above ourselves.

I hope to hold on to that sense of blessing. What a treasure it is to be a passenger on this miracle planet, bathed by a reliable sun in an otherwise cold and airless vastness. To belong to a questing species, though our quests may take us in opposite directions. To be reminded of all that we share, even through storms.

Especially through storms. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

JOE HELLER FOR GREEN BAY PRESS-GAZETTE

Girls Scouts, don’t fall for this ruse PETULA DVORAK is a columnist for The Washington Post’s local team.

The Boy Scouts of America think they have the answer to their membership problems — girls.

Word got out this week that there’s a “covert campaign” to lure girls into the Boy Scouts.

(Congress: Are you seeing this? The Boy Scouts are light-years ahead of y’all on basic sustainability models here.)

This enlightenment came about because the Boy Scouts — like many organizations led by men these days — have had a tough time of things lately.

From the sexual assault scandals reaching all the way back to 1947 to their struggle with including gay men and boys to this year’s keynote speech by Bluto masquerading as the country’s president, it’s understandable that the boys are looking for a little outside help.

Their numbers are falling.

Take one look over at the Girl Scouts — I mean, c’mon, they’re a marketing powerhouse — and you’ll see the lure of girl power.

The entire nation bows to Thin Mints (or Samoas). The Girl Scouts invented s’mores. Did you even know that the Boy Scouts sell popcorn? Who ever says, “Mmm, I want some of that Boy Scout popcorn”? No one. Ever. So it’s easy to see they might want some of the girls’ mojo.

But don’t fall for it, Girl

Scouts. They only want you to save their own hides.

The caper was busted wide open this week when BuzzFeed got ahold of a letter from Girl Scouts of America President Kathy Hopinkah Hannan slamming the boys’ club for their “covert campaign to recruit girls into programs run by the Boy Scouts.”

“I formally request that your organization stay focused on serving the 90 percent of American boys not currently participating in Boy Scouts . . . and not consider expanding to recruit girls,” Hannan wrote in her letter to the president of the Boy Scouts of America, Randall Stephenson.

It’s not like it he came up with this himself. The National Organization for Women pushed

OHMAN FOR SACRAMENTO BEE

the boys in this direction earlier this year thanks to Sydney Ireland’s campaign to get the Boy Scouts to let her join and become an Eagle Scout, like her brother.

And it’s easy to cheer her on.

Four years ago, after a co-ed jamboree, Amir Arnold Gharbi — Army veteran, Eagle Scout and the father of two girls — wrote a piece in The Washington Post urging his organization to go coed: “Girl Scouting teaches youths to be strong individuals, but Boy Scouting teaches youths to be strong leaders. The organizations have different goals, different activities, different resources and different expectations for member development.”

The Girl Scouts have been criticized for, ahem, an overemphasis on the cookie part.

And for bending toward academic and artistic badges rather than hearty, outdoor activities usually associated with Scouting. They’ve answered that with a sharp bend toward science, technology, engineering and math — and totally awesome badges like “Robot Programming.”

But that tailoring also subtracts from the boys’ experience, according to sociologist Kathleen Denny, who studied the gender differences in the Boy Scouts’ and Girl Scouts’

manuals.

“I find that girls are offered more activities intended to be performed in group contexts than are boys. Boys are offered proportionately more activities with scientific content and proportionately fewer artistic activities than are girls,” she wrote. “The girls’ handbook conveys messages about approaching activities with autonomous and critical thinking, whereas the boys’ handbook facilitates intellectual passivity through a reliance on organizational scripts. ” The central question here is whether gender-separated learning opportunities help boys and girls thrive.

Both the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have wrestled with their gender boundaries, especially when it comes to transgender kids. And wouldn’t we have a better shot at true representation in America if boys grow up with female troop leaders and girls fiercely climbed trees alongside boys?

Hard to know. Here’s what I do know: Girls shouldn’t be barred from the Boy Scouts if that’s where they want to be. But the effort to undercut the Girl Scouts by stealing the lifeblood of their organization is sneaky, pathetic and shameful. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Nuclear missiles BY

C ATHERINE D ILL

AND

J OSHUA P OLLACK

North Korea’s test launches have brought the possibility of a nuclear strike firmly back into the American consciousness. A recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that three­quarters of Americans now consider North Korea to be a “critical threat” to the United States. U.S. intelligence analysts believe that North Korea may start deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as soon as next year. And they think North Korea can fit nuclear warheads onto those missiles. How easy is it to detonate a nuclear weapon on foreign soil? Here are five myths about missiles, threats and deterrence.

MYTH NO. 1 For deterrence, countries must display functional weapons.

Early in the Cold War, nations tested nuclear weapons in a variety of settings, including underwater and underground.

The United States and the Soviet Union also launched nuclear weapons on missiles, detonating them in the upper atmosphere or in space.

In 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, moving all testing underground.

Since then, the only nuclear missile test involving reentry was conducted by China on Oct. 27, 1966, with a medium-range missile. No country has ever attempted to demonstrate an ICBM in this fashion. Still, no one questions whether America, Britain, China, France or Russiahave working nuclear missiles.

MYTH NO. 2 The U.S. could destroy an enemy’s arsenal on the ground.

Little is known in detail about the current ability of the United States to seek out and destroy mobile missiles before they launch, but it has been a notoriously tough problem in the past. During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. military flew thousands of missions against Iraq’s Scud missiles but could not confirm a

single kill.

Capabilities have improved, but by all indications, the job remains difficult. Just last month, Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators that the U.S. intelligence community cannot reliably track the deployment of North Korean missiles in the field.

Two women demonstrate a “family type” bomb shelter in Milwaukee in 1958. But could an enemy missile really hit the United States?

MYTH NO. 3 The U.S. could shoot down enemy warheads in flight.

Any attempt to stop an ICBM attack would depend on the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which the United States has built and deployed for that purpose. It successfully intercepted an ICBM-class target for the first time in a test in May. Unfortunately, its overall track record is less impressive. The Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation office slammed GMD in its annual report for 2016, pointing to frequent failures, insufficient testing and inadequate radar support.It will be a very long time before the shortcomings of the program can be corrected — if ever.

between the American and Soviet air forces during the Korean War, border clashes between the U.S.S.R. and China in 1969, and a small-scale war between India and Pakistan in 1999 did not trigger mushroom clouds.

North Korea itself appears to have been, at least thus far, held back by deterrence. On June 25, 1950, the North Koreans marched south in an attempt to unify the Korean Peninsula by force. The invasion failed, leading to a grinding, three-year war, untold deaths and the destruction of North Korea’s infrastructure from the air. North Korea has never given up on its ambitions for reunification, but it has not tried to invade a second time.

Deterrence may fail eventually, but so far, it’s working.

MYTH NO. 4 Deterrence can’t work against a country like North Korea.

Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945, despite being in the arsenals of nine countries today. Dogfights

MYTH NO. 5 First-generation nuclear weapons are hard to make.

That enriching uranium is notoriously hard supposedly keeps a bomb boom at bay. But technology is no longer a serious

ASSOCIATED PRESS

barrier to making nuclear bombs.

In a forthcoming article in the Nonproliferation Review, “Opening a Proliferation Pandora’s Box,” MIT professor R. Scott Kemp describes how knowledge spread around the world about a new technique for uranium enrichment: a relatively simple and inexpensive gas centrifuge. A laboratory in the Soviet Union completed the invention in the mid-1950s, relying on the skills of German and Austrian prisoners of war.

After the prisoners went home, some of them set about recreating it, first in West Germany and then in the United States.

In the following years, countries large and small, wealthy and poor produced versions of the Soviet technology for enriching uranium. n Dill and Pollack are senior research associates at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. Pollack is also editor of the Nonproliferation Review. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017

24

GREAT WINE. GREAT FOOD. GREAT FUN. Thank you to everyone who attended the 7th Annual Wenatchee Wine & Food Festival held Saturday, August 26.

A special thank you to our participating wineries, breweries, cider and spirits distillers, eateries and the other vendors and partners who contributed to the success of this event.

And thank you to our sponsors, whose support makes this event possible.

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