The Washington Post National Weekly - September 30, 2018

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SEPTEMBER 30, 2018 2 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2018

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POLITICSPOLITICS

Trump: ChinaChina seeksseeks to meddle Trump: to meddle

BY D AVID N AKAMURA

BY D AVID N AKAMURA AND E LLEN N AKASHIMA AND E LLEN N AKASHIMA in New York

Republicans are facing a difficult midterm Republicans facing a difficult midterm election cycle, and Trump has been are holding election and Trump has been holding campaign rallies in key statescycle, in support of rallies in key states in support of in New York GOP candidates. Thecampaign president’s frustration GOP candidates.

The president’s frustration with China also could be aimed at blaming hough he presented no evidence for with China couldtobe aimed at blaming presented no evidence for outside forces if the party is also unable his claims, Presidenthough Trumphehas dioutside forces if the party is unable to hisinterfering claims, President Trump has dimaintain control of Congress. rectly accused China of in of Congress. rectlythis accused The Chinese statemaintain media control purchased a the U.S. midterm elections fall inChina of interfering in The Chinese state thewar U.S.between midterm elections this fall in four-page advertising supplement in the Des media purchased a retaliation for the ongoing trade four-page advertising supplement in the Des retaliation the ongoing Moines Register in Iowa this week touting Washington and Beijing, markingfor a new front trade war between Register Iowa this week touting Washington and Beijing, China as “an example Moines for the world” andineven in the deepening hostilities that have threat- marking a new front as “anhad example for the world” and even in relations. the deepening hostilities that have threatnoting that PresidentChina Xi Jinping studied ened to upend bilateral that President Xi Jinping had studied to upend bilateral in the state when he noting was a college exchange The president madeened the allegation Wednes- relations. in theabout state when he on was a college exchange president student. Trump tweeted the ad day during his openingThe remarks at made a U.N.the allegation Wednesstudent. Trump tweeted about the ad on day during his opening remarks at a U.N. Wednesday, after his speech.

Security Council meeting on nonproliferaafter his speech.

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Post.many years in many newspapers, including administration. They tion, do notcoming want me us November, to The Washington Post. do notadministration want me or us to In a photo op with Japanese Prime Minister also will not let Moscow win because I am theadministration. first president They to ever In a to photo op with Japanese Prime Minister administration also will Shinzo not letAbe, Moscow win and because I am the first interfere presidentintothe ever Trump referred the advertising elections. challenge China on trade, we are winning Abe, referred to the advertising interfere elections. challenge Chinalevel. on trade, we areTrump’s winning remarks, supplements and saidShinzo Beijing wasTrump aiming to in ina the hastily aron trade — we are winning on every We and After supplements and said Beijing was aiming to After administration Trump’s remarks,punish in a hastily ar- through on trade — we arein winning on everymedia level. We U.S. farmers high tariffs. ranged call, a senior don’t want them to meddle or interfere our punish U.S. farmers through high tariffs. ranged call, and a senior “China administration or interfere our has is going and attacking the Farm saidinChina hurtmedia “farmers upcoming election.” don’t want them to meddle official “Chinasaid. is going and attacking the Farm has hurt and upcoming election.”

Belt,“farmers our farmers,” Trump “They’re workers in states andofficial districtssaid thatChina voted for On Thursday, China flatly denied Trump’s Belt, our ads farmers,” Trump said. “They’re districts that voted for On Thursday, China flatly Trump’s attacking our industrial — with and with thedenied president becauseworkers he stoodin upstates to theand ways accusation. the president he stood up to the ways accusation. community statements that do notattacking look like our ads,industrial they look — with ads and with China has taken advantage of ourbecause country “I believe the international statements that domade not look like ads, they look China has taken our country “I believe the international community likeofeditorial, but they’re not. They’re economically.”

The official added thatadvantage the knows very well who is most used to meddling like editorial, but they’re not. They’re made economically.”

The officialupadded that the knows very well whoShis mostactivities used to meddling

by China.” include “targeting certain districts in the internal affairs of others,” Geng upthat

by China.” include “targeting certain districtsadded in the Chinese internal Foreign affairs of others,” Geng The president Chinese markets and states withShtariffs,activities but go beyond that.”

He uang, a spokesman for The are president added that Chinese markets and states with tariffs, but go beyond He markets uang, a spokesman for thedid Chinese Foreign are downthat.” and U.S. up, implying not elaborate.

Ministry, told reporters.

He did not name the areisdown and the U.S.trade markets are up, implying did not elaborate. told reporters. not Wednesday, name the while that the United States winning Later fielding questions United States directly Ministry, but was responding to a He did that the United States is winning the trade Later Wednesday, while fielding questions United States directly but was to a war. at responding a news conference, Trump insisted: “We question about Trump’s assertion. war.Trump said. “I don’t at a news conference, insisted: “We hurt,” question Trump’s is getting have evidence. It will come out. I can’t tell you Trump“China Trump’s top national securityabout advisers told assertion. is gettingand hurt,” have It will come tellthey you attack“China Trump’s national advisers toldcome like Iitcan’t when our farmers, I Trump said. “I don’t now. But it didn’t outevidence. of nowhere.

That I out. reporters in August they hadtop not found security like put it when they stateattack our farmers, and I But itadmitted didn’t come nowhere.

I they reporters in August hadtellnot don’t like itThat when out false you.found They’venow. actually thatout of specific examples of interference ahead of thetheywill don’t it when they put out false statewill tell you. They’ve actually admitted specific examples of interference ahead the farmers.” ments.

Besidesthat that, we find like out they’re trying they’ve goneof after midterms from countries other than Russia, ments. Besides that, we gone after farmers.” countries other than Russia, to meddle in our elections, and we’re notfind out they’re trying Trump’s allegation they’ve comes weeks before the though they warned itmidterms remainedfrom a possibility. to meddle in we’re our elections, and we’re not Trump’s comesgoing weekstobefore the warned it remained a possibility. let that happen — just like not midterm elections in which pollsallegation suggest his In his remarks at thethough Securitythey Council meetgoing toRussia.” let that nhappen — just like we’re not midterm elections in whichgoing pollsto suggest In mention his remarks the Security Council meetlet thathis happen with Republican Party could suffer significant ing, Trump made no of at Russian going to let that happen with Russia.” n Republican Party could suffer significant ing,didTrump made losses. of Russian interference, though he say later that no his mention ©The Washington Post losses. interference, though he did say later that his ©The Washington Post

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CONTENTS

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CONTENTS 4 6 8 10 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Kianni Arroyo, ON COVER Kianni Arroyo, Zac LaRocca-Stravalle, twinTHE sisters POLITICS 4 Zacsisters LaRocca-Stravalle, twin sisters and Sophia, and THEAva NATION 6 twin Ava playand at aSophia, and twin sisters THEVivianna WORLDand Addeline, 8 Vivianna and Addeline, play at a family reunion in 10 the Boston area.

COVER STORY reunion Photo by CAROLYN HOUTEN of in the Boston area.

RETIREMENT 16 VANfamily Photo by CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN of The Washington Post BOOKS 18 The Washington Post OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

Should foreign aid be a cash-only transaction?

CHRISTINE EMBA is an opinion columnist and editor for The Washington Post.

“The United States is the world’s largest giver in the world, by far, of foreign aid,” said President Trump during his ad­ dress to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. Unlike some other claims he made during that speech, this hap­ pens to be true. In 2018, the United States budgeted near­ ly $40 billion for foreign aid, for interventions ranging from global health initiatives to disaster relief. ¶ But trum­ peting — or, in Trump’s case, complaining about — the big numbers leaves an essential question unanswered: Are we giving our money well?

This month, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) released the results of a landmark study on the best strategies for poverty reduction.

Many past examinations relied on comparing aid recipients with control groups that received no aid. The ones that received aid did better; no surprise there. But the new study compared the traditional approach to foreign aid against just giving the beneficiaries cash — and the results should make us think.

In rural Rwanda, where USAID is fighting child malnutrition, researchers assigned nearly 250 villages to either typical, mediated aid programs or no-strings cash transfers, and tracked the results.

One group of villages received a standard development aid program known as Gikuriro (“well-growing child” in Kinyarwanda, an official language of Rwanda) that included setting up village nutrition schools and microfinance communities alongside water and hygiene interventions, at a cost of $142 per household.

But in a second group of villages, households each

received cash grants that closely mirrored the per-household cost of the standard Gikuriro program. And a third group received an even larger cash transfer of more than $500 per household — a mobile payment sent through a nonprofit called GiveDirectly.

After a little more than a year, researchers found, neither the standard intervention nor the equivalent cash transfer had moved the needle on USAID’s major goals of improving children's health and family nutrition. (There were secondary benefits, however. Families were able to save more under the traditional approach; those who received cash equivalent were able to pay down debt.)

But things were different with the larger cash transfer: Those villages saw substantial improvements across the board.

Children were healthier, households had better diets and families were able to build wealth and buy useful assets, such as livestock.

That’s a potentially uncomfortable finding. It may well be that our complex, traditional programs aren’t more helpful than just giving the money we spend on them to recipients to spend as they see

JEAN BIZIMANA/REUTERS

A study in Rwanda found that a large cash transfer to households was more effective as foreign aid than typical, mediated aid programs.

fit. And giving cash in larger amounts could potentially be transformational over the long term.

In his own writing on the study’s results, GiveDirectly cofounder Michael Faye suggested that donors such as the United States and United Nations begin to use cash as a yardstick: “If an intervention isn’t more effective than cash, then perhaps the donor should switch gears.”

It makes sense. Cash is flexible and easy to distribute. And studies show that, generally, people use cash grants sensibly, to buy what they need — which can vary in ways even the most thoughtful aid program can’t address.

But here’s the catch: Americans really don’t like the idea of simply giving people money. We aren’t against aid or charity, of course, but that is not the same as just handing out cash for recipients to do with what they will. There is a paternalistic suspicion that they’ll waste it, or that we’ll create that much derided “culture of dependency.”

Domestically, that takes the form of closely monitored, inkind welfare: food stamps or subsidized housing, say, rather

than the equivalent outlays in cash. When we offer our help abroad, our attitude is the same.

In fact, many Americans believe we already devote much more money to foreign aid than we actually do — and they generally think that it’s too much. On average, aid is estimated as a quarter of the federal budget when, in reality, it is actually less than 1 percent.

Imagining those funds flowing directly to others in a stream of cash, rather than mediated by U.S. “expertise,” will sit even less well with the average taxpayer.

But what if that’s what works?

Maybe it is time to rethink the idea that we know better what other people need. Maybe the best way to help is to let the people decide how to help themselves. It is an attitude that could be applied domestically, as well, and one that could lend much more dignity and simplicity to our crumbling welfare state.

Later in his U.N. speech on Tuesday, the president said he would be taking a “hard look” at U.S. foreign assistance. “We will examine what is working, what is not working . . . ” If he really means it, cold hard cash may be the place to start. n

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OPINIONS

BY KEVIN SIERS FOR THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

Pandemic preparedness is lacking TOM INGLESBY AND ERIC TONER Inglesby, an infectiousdisease physician, is director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Eric Toner, an emergency physician, is a senior scholar at the center and led the Clade X pandemic exercise project. This was written for The Washington Post.

A few months ago, a disease caused by an engineered biological weapon played the antagonist in a fictional outbreak scenario that ended with more than 100 million dead and the global economy crippled.

It was a frightening story with a real message for U.S. leaders responsible for ensuring the country’s pandemic preparedness.

Nature continues to create serious biological threats, with the possibility of a deadly new pandemic influenza perhaps the most worrying. Far less recognized, but potentially even more alarming: The biotechnology revolution now underway is substantially lowering the bar for the creation of biological weapons that themselves could cause pandemics.

Policymakers need to pay much closer attention to the threats that could be posed by biologically engineered pathogens. There are still no licensed vaccines for most of the deadly viral pathogens that have occurred naturally in the past 40 years. That includes HIV, West Nile, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). A pathogen that

combined the lethality of any of these diseases with the ability to spread like influenza could cause extraordinary illness and mortality.

We and our colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security brought this threat to life in May with a tabletop exercise simulating the spread of a severe new pandemic involving a virus we called Clade X. Participants in the exercise included former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (DS.D.) playing that role as American leadership formulated its response to the threat. Former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick served as attorney general in the simulation, which included mock newscasts and emergency National Security Council meetings.

The Clade X virus’s origin as a bioengineered terrorist weapon

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

and its pandemic trajectory shed light on feasible real-world threats and serious policy challenges. The exercise made clear that the only way to stave off a catastrophic outcome would have been a global public-health system capable of rapidly detecting a nascent outbreak and responding vigorously before it could become a pandemic. Such preparedness doesn’t exist today.

Government and industry must be able to develop new medical countermeasures — and to manufacture and dispense millions of doses — within months rather than years, as current capabilities would require. The United States should place extraordinary national focus on establishing new approaches to quickly produce drugs, vaccines and rapid diagnostics for novel pathogens.

Sustained political commitment to pandemic preparedness is in some ways just as vital as the work to create medical countermeasures. The United States recognized the need by launching the Global Health Security Agenda in 2014, a five-year, $1 billion initiative.

The aim was to establish an international effort to strengthen countries’ ability to prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks.

The initiative has been embraced by more than 60 countries so far, along with the World Health Organization and other organizations. The GHSA’s successes so far include better tracking of multi-drug-resistant bacteria in Vietnam and faster responses to disease outbreaks in Uganda. But the GHSA’s funding will run out next year, and although the Trump administration has expressed support for the initiative, future U.S. financial support is uncertain.

Investing in the GHSA directly benefits the health security of the United States because viruses don’t respect borders. In the Clade X scenario, the virus first appeared in Venezuela and Germany before going global, eventually arriving in the United States. After 20 weeks, 15 million Americans were dead. The best way to prevent a local epidemic from becoming a pandemic is a robust, rapid, international public health and medical response that detects a disease early and stamps it out at its source.

If the worst-case scenario unfolds, strong pandemic preparedness planning would save millions of lives. But progress is possible only with effective leadership. n

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TOM TOLES

Politics unraveling family ties JEFF GREENFIELD is an author and veteran network news analyst.

This was written for The Washington Post.

When politicians campaign for office, it’s common to find family members by their side. These days, office-seekers might be advised to watch their backs.

In Arizona, a campaign ad released Sept. 21 features six men and women denouncing Republican Rep. Paul A. Gosar. One says the candidate “isn’t doing anything to help rural America.” Another: “Paul is absolutely not working for his district.” And: “He doesn’t have your interests at heart.” Only at the end do we learn that all six are siblings of the congressman, supporting his Democratic rival, David Brill. For the record, Gosar’s mother says she’s firmly behind him. The congressman the next day tweeted of his brothers and sisters, “like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.”

In rural Virginia last month, Bobby Goodlatte tweeted that he was donating the maximum ($2,700) to the Democrat seeking to fill the seat of a Republican congressman who had held it since 1993 — his father, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte.

In Wisconsin, a police officer, James Bryce, has appeared in an ad attacking the Democratic candidate running to replace retiring Republican Rep. Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker. “I don’t think people want to be represented by someone who’s shown contempt for those in law enforcement,” Bryce says.

He’s talking about his brother, Randy Bryce.

Wisconsin is also where the parents of Republican Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson each donated the maximum to the campaign of . . . incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin. His parents, Nicholson said, simply have different “world views.”

The first response here is to chalk these family fissures up to President Trump, whose capacity to divide brother from sister and parent from child is now a staple of media coverage. Trump’s own White House “family” is not immune to feuding: Adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband,

George, regularly issues brutal tweets about the character and fitness of her boss. Last month, the uncle of another White House adviser, Stephen Miller, wrote a scathing piece for Politico, calling him an “immigration hypocrite” for pushing draconian policies while ignoring his own family’s immigrant history.

But this is one case where Trump would have a persuasive defense: The political exploitation of family divisions long predates his administration.

Nearly a century ago, in 1920, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the late president, enthusiastically campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding; Harding’s Democratic opponent was James Cox, whose running mate was Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin. Theodore regarded FDR as a privileged dilettante: “He does not wear the brand of our family.”

Franklin returned the favor, with interest, in 1924, when Theodore ran for governor of New York against Al Smith. FDR denounced his cousin’s “wretched record” as assistant secretary of the Navy in the Harding administration. FDR’s wife, Eleanor, went him one better, touring New York state in a car with a giant papier-mache teapot — a not-so-subtle

reference to the Teapot Dome scandal that had stained the Harding administration.

But for sheer family subversion, you can’t beat the campaign that unseated Minnesota Rep. Coya Knutson 60 years ago. The first woman elected to the House from Minnesota, Knutson had won in 1954 over the opposition of her Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.

Friction with party regulars brought payback during her 1958 reelection campaign. They recruited Knutson’s estranged husband, Andy, to write — or at least sign — a letter urging his wife to “go home and make a home for your husband and son.”

Newspapers across the country reprinted it, often with the headline, “Coya, Come Home.”

She lost reelection in a strongly Democratic year to a Republican opponent whose slogan was: “A Big Man for a Man-Sized Job.” As political tactic, exploiting family splits is tempting. If candidates’ own flesh and blood won’t support them, why should voters? But it’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for candidates whose families turn against them. Campaigning is difficult enough, dealing with fundraising, 18-hour days and barrages of attack ads, without being shivved by a relative. n

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B Y M ARC F ISHER

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he subject was supposed to be the selection of a new justice on the Supreme Court. Instead Thursday’s showdown on Capitol Hill was a raw, scorched-earth confrontation across the nation’s most emotionally wrenching divides. This was men against women, right against left, a cascade of recriminations, explosions of anger, hours of tears and sobs.

A hearing that was supposed to bring clarity instead erupted in thunderclaps from the nation’s built-up tensions over how the sexes are supposed to behave with each other. Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and the woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her came before the Senate Judiciary Committee in “the wrong town at the wrong time,” as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) put it.

The result was affirmation that Washington is as broken as it has ever been. Based on what the senators in the room said, the result was, once again, people hearing mostly what they were inclined to believe. The result, far from clarity, was a rush of emotions adding up to two families left in wreckage and a political system without even a pathway to cooperation.

The day ended with discord bordering on dark visions of a hopeless future. Graham heatedly declared that “this is not a job interview. This is hell. . . . To my Republican colleagues, if you vote ‘no,’ you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.”

Yet as much as Graham saw the hearing as a sign that the nation would descend into further dysfunction, with qualified people increasingly unwilling to serve their country, it’s also true that the nation has been here before. Like this confirmation process, which led to accusations of sordid debauchery and unseemly discussions of Kavanaugh’s sexual behavior, the 1991 confrontation between then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and his accuser, law professor Anita Hill, similarly appalled and fascinated the nation.

Now, as then, the country is painfully divided. Now, as then, people lament the establishment of new lows.

Now, as then, viewers could hear what they wanted to: Chris-

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

A national divide over trust, identity and sexual politics tine Blasey Ford was at once “a nice lady who’s come forward with a hard story that’s not corroborated” (Graham) and a hero who instantly “inspired and enlightened America,” unleashing a torrent of stories of sexual assault (Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat).

Kavanaugh was cast as both a serial sex criminal and an innocent public servant whose family and reputation were shattered by scurrilous accusations.

In an ever more polarized soci-

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Protesters outside the Capitol; Christine Blasey Ford during her testimony; from left, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Sen. Kamala D. Harris before the hearing; and Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.

ety, the big stories rise up and are swiftly slotted into the nation’s partisan map. White hats and black hats, liberal or conservative, red or blue — an accelerated culture reduces everything to binary choices.

But in that small Senate hearing room, reality insisted on its complex, contradictory nature. A woman who wanted dearly to remain anonymous became instead a historic figure, a new symbol of the culture’s anguished struggle over trust, identity and sexual pol-

itics. A man who devoted his accomplished career to reaching the highest rung on the professional ladder instead became a mark of a sullied democracy and a deeply mistrustful citizenry, a nominee for the highest court in the land reduced to speaking on national television about when he lost his virginity and when, if ever, he had blacked out from drinking too much beer.

Ostensibly, the nine-hour hearing before the Judiciary Committee was the penultimate step in

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MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

the confirmation of a justice who would ensure President Trump’s legacy as the leader who solidified the conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come.

But in recent decades, the battleground of Supreme Court confirmation has assumed a different purpose, morphing into a field upon which the nation plays out its most basic and emotional divisions, faceoffs over race, civil rights and the most intimate matters of childbirth, mating and relations between the sexes.

“It’s not possible to separate what we’re going through in this hearing from the cultural moment we’re in, as women come forward with stories they’ve never told before,” said Carolyn Shapiro, director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. “There have been ideological battles about the Supreme Court since the beginning. They just didn’t take place on national TV.” Throughout the century since Senate hearings on nominees to the high court started to become regular events, public opinion has become a vital element in the ultimate decision about who gets con-

firmed. “The public’s view does play a role, and it should play a role,” Shapiro said.

Though most such hearings have focused on legal philosophy and ideology, the process is inherently political, subject to each era’s most volatile debates.

Even as Ford testified, the momentum of the #MeToo movement palpably accelerated. In congressional offices and newsrooms, women called message lines to offer their own accounts of assaults that had remained buried for years. On C-SPAN, callers unburdened themselves of stories of sexual violence, even as others declared Ford a liar. Outside the hearing room, women huddled together listening to the stream of testimony; those without earphones found themselves in a silence punctuated only by sniffles and an occasional sob.

But in the afternoon, perceptions and reactions flipped, as Kavanaugh, who had been relentlessly polite and solicitous in his earlier appearances before the committee, defended his reputation with a rhetorical blowtorch.

By turns angry, righteous, weepy and maudlin, the nominee at points seemed close to giving up

his quest to sit on the highest court of the land. He ripped into the committee’s Democrats, issuing partisan attacks, slamming the process as a “national disgrace” and “a circus. . . . You have replaced advice and consent with search and destroy.”

His language, formal and cautious before Thursday, descended to gutter level as he accused Democrats of seeking “to blow me up and take me down” and blamed the attacks he has faced on “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”

Yet as angry as he was, Kavanaugh also presented a sympathetic side, telling of his 10-yearold daughter’s desire to pray for his accuser, breaking up as he paid tribute to his father, appealing to the committee’s sense of pathos as he envisioned a future in which his shattered reputation might prevent him from ever again teaching, coaching or judging.

As two people fought for their truths, senators on both sides concluded that maybe there was no way in this process to determine definitively what had really happened.

Ford gave up her privacy and came forward out of a sense of “civic duty.” Kavanaugh passed on

A crowd gathers in the Hart Senate Office Building to protest the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as he and accuser Christine Blasey Ford testify on Capitol Hill.

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a life of big money from a big law firm and devoted his career instead to public service.

Ford told about the sexual assault that scarred her adolescence with painstaking attention to what she could and couldn’t recall, deploying science to explain the gaps in memory, showing emotion, but always with control and decorum.

Kavanaugh denied the sexual assault with anger, interruptions, aggressive language and a systematic recounting of events on a handwritten calendar that detailed his daily activities in high school three decades ago.

“It’s a big cultural moment,” Trump said at his news conference Wednesday. “Nobody knows who to believe. . . . Honestly, it’s a very dangerous period in our country. . . . When you are guilty until proven innocent — it’s not supposed to be that way.”

Yet even a traditional reliance on the rule of law and the presumption of innocence divides people these days. On the right, former Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania said Democrats “have weaponized the Me Too movement. There is a war going on here.” And on the left, calls to believe women unconditionally when they tell of sexual assaults have unleashed a steady flow of such accounts.

In a society struggling with how to know whom to believe, Thursday cast little new light. At day’s end, a Republican senator, Thom Tillis (N.C.) waved a card showing that someone had already purchased URLs for websites aimed at attacking any of several judges who might replace Kavanaugh as the nominee. Democrats continued to press for an FBI investigation into Ford’s allegations.

Ford and Kavanaugh went home to security guards and death threats and children who could hardly comprehend what had happened to their parents.

“This has been one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the United States Senate,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). He blamed “the partisan warfare of Washington.”

But there was neither clarity nor consensus anywhere in a land where one side finds it hard to believe accusers — and the other finds it equally difficult to believe the accused. n ©The Washington Post

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siblings Lack of regulation has created enormous genetic families B Y A RIANA E UNJUNG C HA in Boston Kianni Arroyo clasps 8-year-old Sophia’s hands tightly as they spin around, giggling like mad. It’s late afternoon, and there are hot dogs on the grill, bubble wands on the lawn, balls flying through the air.

The midsummer reunion in a suburb west of the city looks like any other, but these family ties can’t be described with standard labels. Instead, Arroyo, a 21year-old waitress from Orlando, is here to meet “DNA-in-laws,” various “sistermoms” and especially people such as Sophia, a cherished “donor-sibling.”

Sophia and Arroyo were both conceived with sperm from Donor #2757, a bestseller. Over the years, Donor #2757 sired at least 29 girls and 16 boys, now ages 1 to 21, living in eight states and four countries. Arroyo is on a quest to meet them all, chronicling her journey on Instagram.

“We have a connection. It’s hard to Kianni Arroyo, Zac LaRocca-Stravalle, twin sisters Ava and Sophia, and twin sisters Vivianna and Addeline, who all have the same donor father, meet up at a family reunion in the Boston area.

PHOTOS BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY cy that wants to step in to regulate or oversee the business of creating human beings,” said Kramer, whose son, Ryan, 28, has so far discovered 16 half siblings conceived with sperm from the same donor. “As wonderful as the connections are, there is an underbelly. . . . It has really revealed how this lack of regulation has had ramifications for real families.”

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

explain, but it’s there,” said Arroyo, an only child who is both comforted and weirded-out by her ever-expanding family tree.

Thanks to mail-away DNA tests and a proliferation of online registries, people conceived with donated sperm and eggs are increasingly connecting with their genetic relatives, forming a growing community with complex relationships and unique concerns about the U.S. fertility industry.

Like Arroyo, many have discovered dozens of donor siblings, with one group approaching 200 members — enormous genetic families without precedent in modern society.

Because most donations are anonymous, the resulting children often find it almost impossible to obtain crucial information.

Medical journals have documented cases in which clusters of offspring have found each other while seeking treatment for the same rare genetic disease. The news is full of nightmarish headlines about sperm donors who falsified their educational back-

grounds, hid illnesses or turned out to be someone other than expected — such as a fertility clinic doctor.

And while Britain, Norway, China and other countries have passed laws limiting the number of children conceived per donor, the United States relies solely on voluntary guidelines. That has raised fears that the offspring of prolific donors could meet and fall in love without knowing they were closely related, putting their children at risk of genetic disorders.

Now the donor-conceived community is starting to demand more government regulation — so far with mixed results. Earlier this year, Washington and Vermont became the first states to require clinics to collect donors’ medical history and to disclose that information to any resulting child. Similar bills have been introduced in California and Rhode Island.

But last month, the Food and Drug Administration rejected a petition from a donor offspring group that sought to limit the number of births per donor, man-

date reporting of donorconceived births and require donors to provide post-conception medical updates. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, wrote that such oversight exceeds the FDA’s mission, which is limited to screening donors for communicable diseases. An FDA spokeswoman declined to comment further.

Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which represents most of the nation’s fertility clinics, said such proposals would have infringed on the right to privacy and to procreate, giving government “control over who has children with whom.”

“We think these decisions are best made by the families, not by activists and certainly not by the government,” Tipton said.

The lack of federal action has infuriated members of donor families such as Wendy Kramer, a Colorado woman who penned the FDA petition.

“There is no government agen-

Kianni Arroyo, 21, hugs her half sibling Ava, 8, during the reunion.

Family clans Eighteen years ago, Kramer and Ryan founded what has since become the largest online site for the donor-conceived, the Donor Sibling Registry, or DSR. In simplest terms, the DSR is a matching site.

People type in their donor number — an anonymous code assigned by the fertility clinic — and connect with others born from sperm or eggs from the same donor. It’s all voluntary, and contact is achieved through mutual consent.

Today, the DSR has more than 60,000 members and has helped connect about 16,000 offspring with their half siblings or donors.

As the site grows, so does the potential for new connections. Ryan has discovered five “new” sisters in just the past four months.

While a growing number of the donor-conceived are seeking to connect with half siblings, it can be harder to find the donors, who may not want to be found. But Internet sleuthing and the widespread availability of genetic testing is eroding the guarantee of anonymity they once enjoyed. So far, Moore’s donor has proved elusive, but she has been in contact with several of her sons’ genetic cousins, discovered on an ancestry site.

One of the most important revelations of the DSR has been to confirm the existence of prolific sperm donors.

Many countries set strict limits on the number of offspring a donor can sire. In Britain, it’s up to 10 families; in Netherlands, 25; in Taiwan, just one. But no such laws exist in the United States, where the American Society of Reproductive Medicine recommends limiting live births per donor to 25 per 800,000 population — about the size of San Francisco or Charlotte.

In a nation of 326 million people, that works out to a staggering 10,175 possible children per donor.

Concerns about prolific donors are not theoretical. Kramer and other parents tell their kids to memorize their sperm or egg bank

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COVER STORY

name and donor number, and to share that information with potential dates. She knows of a camp counselor who stumbled onto a half brother while talking with a camper. In another case, two women searching for roommates at Tulane University discovered they were half sisters.

Donor #2757 Kianni Arroyo had to work harder to meet her genetic family.

The first person she found was her biological father.

Donor #2757 stands 5-foot-10 and weighs 185 pounds. He has hazel-green eyes, wavy brown hair and is descended from German, Irish and Native American stock.

In his profile, he’s described as a photographer with a bachelor’s degree who likes biking, surfing and writing. He donated his sperm to pay off college student loans.

The women who chose Donor #2757 did so for various reasons.

Arroyo’s mom liked his looks and his artistic background. Another woman, who would later give birth to Zac LaRocca-Stravalle, now 19, liked that he could trace his lineage to a brave military officer whose exploits were documented by historians. Rebecca, the mother of Sophia and twin Ava, thought “he seemed like someone I’d date.” (Rebecca asked that she and the twins be identified only by their first names to protect their privacy.)

Arroyo went searching for her donor’s identity in her teens and

met a person active in the donoroffspring community who had somehow gotten that confidential information. She friended her donor on Facebook and contacted him shortly before her 18th birthday. They met when he was in Orlando on a business trip. She drove to his hotel and looked for a man who looked like her.

“When I found him, I didn’t know whether to hug him or shake his hand or not touch him at all. It was really awkward,” Arroyo recalled. “But then he kind of opened his arms into a hug and accepted me. It was kind of relieving.” Donor #2757 told her he was still working as a photographer, that he was single and that he had no children of his own. Through Arroyo, he declined to be interviewed or identified, citing privacy concerns.

About a year later, the donor connected Arroyo with her first half sibling: JoAnna Alaia, 20, of Tampa, who works in business administration. She’s a twin, but her twin was not interested in meeting with Arroyo. So the two women rendezvoused near the highway, drove all night, got pulled over for speeding, and met with Donor #2757 the next day in his hometown.

Since then, their sibling group has mushroomed. Arroyo has discovered seven half siblings in Florida and seven more in New York, five in Massachusetts and four in Georgia. Because American sperm is sold widely overseas, she has also found half siblings in Australia,

Ava, 8, left, plays with her half siblings Vivianna and Addeline, twins, 8.

New Zealand and Canada.

So far, Arroyo is the oldest, but not by much. There are 10 other 20-somethings. Then there seems to be a decade-long gap before another batch of half siblings arrived, children now in elementary school.

This summer, Arroyo’s vacation plans revolved around meeting her donor siblings. She, Sophia and Ava spent a few days on Cape Cod with a 9-year-old half sister from New York. Then they hosted a cookout in the Boston area for the Massachusetts-based families.

Five of Arroyo’s half siblings were at the reunion: Sophia and Ava, LaRocca-Stravalle and another set of twins, Addeline and Vivianna Juliani, age 8. Everyone noted the family resemblance: The laid-back, sporty kids all had wide smiles and prominent dimples on their right cheeks.

Kristen Juliani, one of the twins’ two mothers, recounted how a sperm bank sales person had recommended Donor #2757 as a “model” donor. She was not thrilled to learn that her donor was so popular.

“I don’t feel great about it,” she said. “There should be a cap on sales.”

Arroyo has mixed feelings, too.

While every visit with her half siblings has been a blast, she finds it “worrying” that sperm banks permit so many children to be born from a single donor.

“Every time I find a new sibling,” she said, “I get anxiety and think to myself: When is it going to end?”

A few days before she left the reunion, Arroyo got a message from yet another half sister. Rylie Hager, 19, is a sophomore studying sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. Arroyo invited her to join a group of half siblings who planned to meet Donor #2757 in mid-August. The first night, they went bowling, and Hager noted that three of the girls were wearing the same outfit: gray tank tops and shorts.

“It’s all really crazy,” she said.

“These people are strangers, but because I’m related to them, they have all kind of accepted me.”

Hager said when she first found out about the size of her group of half siblings, she sent an alarmed text to her mom. “Is that exciting to you, or terrifying?” her mom asked.

Hager replied: “Both.” n ©The Washington Post

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Sperm donation laws by region United States Limit per donor: None; recommended 25 offspring per population of 800,000 Donor anonymity: Varies Canada Limit per donor: None; recommended 25 offspring per population of 800,000 Donor anonymity: Yes Netherlands Limit per donor: 25 offspring Donor anonymity: No Germany Limit per donor: 15 offspring Donor anonymity: No Denmark Limit per donor: 12 offspring Donor anonymity: Varies Britain Limit per donor: Can donate to up to 10 families Donor anonymity: No New Zealand Limit per donor: Can donate to up to 10 families Donor anonymity: No France Limit per donor: 10 offspring Donor anonymity: Yes China Limit per donor: 5 pregnancies Donor anonymity: Yes Taiwan Limit per donor: 1 offspring Donor anonymity: Yes Sources: Asian Journal of Andrology, July 2011. Fertility and Sterility, Jan. 2014.

Journal of Law and the Biosciences, April 2016. Reproductive Health, Jan. 2017. Council on Human Reproductive Technology (Hong Kong). Health Council of the Netherlands.

Government of New Zealand.

SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

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BOOKS

Accomplishing greatness in times of crisis N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

T IM K AINE

D LEADERSHIP In Turbulent Times

By Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster.

473 pp. $30

They were great because they possessed an outsize passion to do good for others.

oris Kearns Goodwin has spent much of her professional life grappling with the character of four American presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Beginning with a White House fellowship at the end of the Johnson administration, which accorded her direct personal access to the president until the end of his life, she has written about these leaders in insightful books over 40 years.

Her title echoing the truth of the maxim attributed to the Latin writer Publilius Syrus — “anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm” — Goodwin circles back through her understanding of the four presidents in “Leadership: In Turbulent Times,” trying to extract the basic lessons that enabled each to deal with major crises in their personal lives and in the life of their country. No one is better suited than Goodwin to make the effort, and yet her book makes plain how hard it is to capture the essence of leadership, at least when the question is approached head-on.

The four leaders make an interesting quartet. Each assumed office in crisis — LBJ and Teddy upon the assassination of a president, Lincoln at the collapse of the Union, FDR at the collapse of the economy. None had a honeymoon period to get up to speed on the massive demands placed upon them.

Goodwin’s effort to turn lessons of the four presidents from her years of scholarship into a book-length essay on leadership traits follows a basic arc. Part I explores the upbringing and emergence of ambition in each leader: the adversity of Lincoln’s boyhood and his self-fashioning into a frontier lawyer and Whig political leader, the privilege and warm family love experienced by the two Roosevelts and their surprising entrance into the hurlyburly world of New York state politics, LBJ’s early fascination

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Franklin Roosevelt overcame and learned from setbacks, tragedy and mistakes, writes Doris Kearns Goodwin.

with retail politics accompanying his father and grandfather in the Texas Hill Country and his quick rise as an ambitious young New Dealer.

Part II analyzes pivotal experiences of loss or failure each man experienced and how they grew from it: Lincoln’s desultory terms in the Illinois legislature and Congress, and his failure to secure a desired governmental post after he helped Zachary Taylor win the presidency in 1848; the death of Teddy Roosevelt’s young wife and beloved mother on the same day in 1884; FDR being diagnosed with polio in 1921; the young congressman LBJ losing a razor-thin Senate race in 1941.

Finally, Goodwin explores a pivotal period or accomplishment in each president’s term and draws out the keys to his success in negotiating it: Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy’s handling of a massive nationwide coal strike, FDR’s bold actions in the first 100 days of his presidency to save the American financial sys-

tem and restore hope to families shellshocked by the economic collapse, LBJ’s dramatic progress to advance civil rights and the social safety net. An epilogue explores how we have come to view these leaders after their deaths.

The individual stories of each president and his struggles and accomplishments command the reader’s interest. And Goodwin’s selection of leadership lessons from each president makes the book a series of case studies that you can easily see being assigned by leadership teachers. But the distilled nature of “Leadership” also obscures one of Goodwin’s tremendous strengths — her ability to situate a leader within a set of relationships. Her individual biographies all focus on the unusual relationships built by these leaders, with inner circles of family, advisers and friends but also with outside stakeholders and the larger currents and movements of their times. This dimension isn’t absent here, but the nature of the book is to push the leader front and center and let the rela-

tionships appear as background.

This is probably unavoidable in a work of this nature but tends to flatten the characters a bit — they seem more momentous when situated in their social dynamic than when isolated by a spotlight.

A positive feature for any aspiring leader, as Goodwin shows in at least three of her subjects, is that leaders truly are made, not born. LBJ and the two Roosevelts had natural talents and advantages, to be sure, but they were not supernatural. Each found ways to improve himself over time, and each learned from tragedy and mistakes. They all had obvious flaws that got in their way and even inflicted pain on people in their lives. In other words, they were a lot like all of us. But, human weakness notwithstanding, they all accomplished great things, and their accomplishments suggest that we can, too.

Lincoln, on the other hand, was sui generis. We can learn endlessly from him, but he is hard to emulate. We will probably never grasp how the self-taught Lincoln obtained the intellectual insight to place the daily struggles of his countrymen into a broader spiritual understanding of their mission as a nation. Nor is it easy to fathom how he persisted through the mass bloodshed needed to both preserve the nation and expiate the American sin of slavery without succumbing to paralyzing depression.

“Leadership: In Turbulent Times” reminds us of what American greatness means. None of these presidents were without massive ambition, and, except for Lincoln, they showed little appreciation for the virtue of humility.

But they were great because they possessed an outsize passion to do good for others and believed that American greatness was measured by our capacity to exceed simple self-interest. n Kaine represents Virginia in the U.S. Senate. This was written for The Washington Post.

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Parks losing battle to climate change BY

A LEX H ORTON

B

y 2100, visitors walking the grounds of California’s Joshua Tree National Park may view exhibits showing what will have been lost — the spiky yucca palms that inspired the park’s name, dwindled to a few rare husks.

Climate change could kill most of the park’s iconic trees, wildfires may transform the towering conifer forests at Yellowstone National Park into scarred grasslands, and once-mighty ice sheets in the north will probably melt and flow into the sea, making Glacier National Park both an obsolete name and a hard lesson about environmental degradation.

A study published last week has warned that climate change has adversely and uniquely affected many of the 417 national parks spread across the United States and its territories, according to scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and University of Wisconsin.

“Human-caused climate change exposes the U.S. national parks to severely hotter and drier conditions than the U.S. as a whole,” Patrick Gonzalez, a climate scientist at Berkeley and a lead author of the study, told The Washington Post on Tuesday.

The consequences are alarming, the study suggests. Some of the most sacred and ecologically sensitive areas in the country, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite and Denali, may decay into ghosts of their former mighty selves and be unrecognizable to future generations.

Researchers looked at data between 1895 and 2010 and concluded temperatures in national parks increased twice as much compared with other parts of the country, while precipitation fell dramatically at those parks.

That is because parks are often in places sensitive to shifts in climate. Many parks are at high elevation, where the Earth warms quickly due to a thinner atmosphere, researchers said.

Alaska is severely affected be-

GABRIEL BOUYS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

‘Severely hotter and drier conditions than the U.S. as a whole,’ face Yosemite, Grand Canyon, others cause melting snow uncovers darker surfaces that absorb heat.

Alaska is also where 63 percent of all national park area is located, the study says.

In the Southwest, rising temperatures coupled with droughts have ravaged the region, where many other parks are found.

It is vital to defend national parks, which make up 4 percent of U.S. land, researchers said, because the protective measures mean national parks are becoming even more important sanctuaries for plants and animals. And the parks hold vast amounts of watersheds to replenish drinking water, along with trees to soak up carbon.

Two centuries of burning fossil fuels have produced twice as much carbon that can be absorbed by forests and oceans, and excess carbon in the atmosphere has reflected sunlight back to the Earth, Gonzalez said. It is a natural process, but human ac-

tivity has helped add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at levels not seen for 800,000 years, he said.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the best way to reduce climate impact at the parks, the researchers said.

The National Park Service said it relies on studies, such as the newest one, to inform policy, in which climate change is one factor among others in its decisionmaking.

“It is our job to understand and know how to manage effects from a changing climate so that we may protect park resources, just as we manage the impacts of invasive species or erosion or wildfire,” said Jeremy Barnum, an agency spokesman, in a statement Tuesday.

The agency said the study describes natural events that take place “outside the climate change conversation,” such as wildfires caused by humans.

California’s Joshua Tree National Park is famed for its spiky yucca palms. But climate change may eradicate the trees, as well as the iconic features of other parks across the United States, a study has found.

But the effects of climate change on national parks are clear and documented, the researchers said.

Jack Williams, a climate researcher at the University of Wisconsin, told The Washington Post that Glacier National Park in Montana, which draws admirers for its snowy peaks and mirrorlike lakes, may lose its namesake because of rising temperatures and glaciers already in retreat.

Further north, in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, the once enormous Muir Glacier has melted hundreds of meters from the 1950s to 2010.

At Yellowstone, drought and wildfires have thinned towering forests, and scientific projections point to fires that burn more frequently. It could turn the region into rolling grasslands, Williams said.

Wildfires are naturally occurring and typically ideal for forests to clear underbrush, researchers said, but arid conditions and federal policies to stamp out fires has translated to drier and denser kindling that make fires more intense.

Gonzalez, who is also the principal climate scientist for the National Park Service but spoke about his research in his capacity at Berkeley, said Yellowstone faces another threat connected to human activity.

The winter cold used to kill bark beetles. But warmer seasons have extended the life of these insects, which can feast on trees longer and in greater numbers.

The transforming ecosystem there may also force the iconic bison and other animals away from familiar grounds, researchers said.

The researchers pointed to some solutions already underway.

Gonzalez said the agency has made efforts to identify particularly vulnerable areas in parks, along with a focus to protect areas where life may be able to take shelter and thrive in good local conditions. The parks have also focused on reducing emissions, he said. n ©The Washington Post

14 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Personality tests BY

M ERVE E MRE

In its earliest use in the 13th century, “personality” referred to the quality, character or fact of being human. By the 18th century, the word pointed to the traits that made a person a distinctive individu­ al. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of systems designed for the mass classification of human beings, including personality tests.

Today, these tests are more beloved and far­reaching than ever, espe­ cially on websites such as BuzzFeed and Facebook. These tools and typologies are based on powerful, enduring myths about what per­ sonality is and how we can measure it. Here are five.

MYTH NO. 1 Personality is innate.

Longitudinal studies have reached different conclusions about when personality becomes fixed: during one’s school years or upon one’s entry into the workforce; at 17 or 21 or 25 or 30.

Many of the systems of personality classification we use today (the MBTI, the Big Five) are based on flawed experimental design. Their conclusions were derived by studying subjects — medical students, research scientists or Air Force officers — whose results were not at all generalizable.

More important, the idea of a fixed personality is defined by and through the systems we use to assess it. Each system has its own language, its own historically and ideologically inflected understanding of what traits are determinative: Is it extroversion and introversion? Is it agreeableness or openness to new experiences? Do we assess these traits through multiplechoice questionnaires, checklists of self-descriptive adjectives, ink blots, life records or one-on-one interviews? Do we categorize them dichotomously or plot them along a bell curve? Do we present them as a portrait of the whole person or a modest exercise in trait measurement?

There is nothing innate about the way we discuss personality; it is a human invention.

MYTH NO. 2 Personality tests are based on psychological science.

Personality tests are used by psychologists and counselors.

They are taught in psychology, education and business courses.

But some of the most popular personality assessments were produced by amateurs and autodidacts. Briggs and Myers had no formal training in psychology or sociology. They were wives and mothers who believed that their daily domestic labors — managing their households, tending to the emotional needs of their children and husbands — made them especially suited to understanding individual personalities and interpersonal relations. They designed their system of types by poring over Carl Jung’s quasi-mystical opus “Psychological Types” (1921), biographies of famous men and 19th-century novels, and by deriving questions from their readings that they tested on their family members and friends around their kitchen tables.

MYTH NO. 3 The questions on personality tests are free of prejudice.

Personality tests often purport to ask questions that are neutral or unthreatening.

The MBTI’s publishers, for example, say the questions are appropriate for anyone who can read at a seventh-grade level, but

YUOAK/GETTY IMAGES

There has been no consensus about when personality becomes fixed.

that leaves out a huge swath of the world’s population. And many questions are exclusionary in their content and framing.

Some involve making decisions about what to do at parties (talk to everyone or just one person), how to plan a vacation (ahead of time or at the last minute), or how to succeed at an office job or at school. The scenarios they depict are impenetrably bourgeois; many people have never had the money, the leisure time or the opportunity to make these kinds of decisions.

MYTH NO. 4 Personality assessments are valid and reliable.

Every major personality test has faced challenges to its reliability and validity. Tests like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and Rorschach are prone to overpathologizing subjects, misidentifying them as addicts or abusers. Studies outside of literate, urban populations have failed to find support for the Big Five, another taxonomy. A 1991 study commissioned by the

National Research Council on the MBTI found that the indicator’s test-retest reliability — whether you got the same results when you took it more than once — fell woefully short of the APA’s reliability benchmarks: Only 24 to 61 percent of subjects received the same result when they took it multiple times.

MYTH NO. 5 Personality assessments are harmless fun, like astrology.

Personality tests shouldn’t always be considered a fun and unserious exercise, a distraction.

Unlike astrology, personality tests are used by powerful institutions to make decisions with far-reaching consequences.

One in five Fortune 1000 companies uses some means of personality testing to screen job candidates, both to hire the right type of person and to eliminate unfavorable types. n Emre, an associate professor of English at Oxford University, is the author of “The Personality Brokers.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

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ANIMALIA

KLMNO WEEKLY

40,000 people apply for purrfect job BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

I

t began in 2010, when a cat gave birth in Joan and Richard Bowell’s garden on the Greek island of Syros. She had two kittens, and one was ill.

The Bowells took them in and gave them names: Pepper was the mother, Tiny and Ninja the babies.

The trio joined two cats the couple had brought to Syros when they moved from Denmark, Joan’s native country, and the Bowells viewed it as a mere expansion of their two-person family. They now had not a small number of cats, but not so many that they couldn’t take the animals along when their plan to move to New York, where Richard worked with the United Nations, came to pass.

But this was Greece, where cats posing against white buildings become the subjects of many postcards, but not necessarily the objects of much affection. The Bowells kept finding felines bearing injuries and sicknesses and kittens, and soon the Bowells’ acre of island idyll had become a cat sanctuary they called God’s Little People. The name was not a statement about faith, they say, but about a philosophy — that cats are important as individuals, with a right to be free and to be cared for.

“People think animals are things that you pick up and put down, and that’s not how we thought about it,” said Richard Bowell, 66, a writer and philosopher who is originally from London. “So we had to, at some point, make a commitment that we would never leave them or leave them in a lesser state than we kept them.”

As the feline population roaming their property rose well above 60, the couple said, they realized space prevented the operation from growing much more. They wanted to finally make that move to New York, where Joan Bowell planned to establish another cat sanctuary outside the city. So on Aug. 5, she created a Facebook post soliciting applications for a modestly paid job managing God’s Little People.

The Bowells had posted a simi-

COURTESY OF JOAN AND RICHARD BOWELL

Cat sanctuary in Greece receives a flood of applications after manager opening goes viral lar ad a few years back and gotten a couple handfuls of responses. This time, they hoped for 25, maybe 50.

Within six weeks, they had nearly 40,000.

Each day in August, Joan Bowell received 1,000 to 1,600 emails.

She kept updating the Facebook post, emphasizing that the job was indeed real, and clarifying that the tiny house provided to the manager would not accommodate families or pets brought from home, and that it is a job that entails scooping poop, cleaning vomit and making “heartbreaking” decisions about gravely wounded or sick cats.

Even so, the applications kept coming, and they came from people in more than 90 nations. Some were letters from refugees who wanted to send the pay to their families back home, and some were from women seeking to flee abusive relationships, Joan Bowell said. Several were from people who had tried to run their own cat

rescues, she said.

The Bowells enlisted a half-dozen friends to help review and sort the flood of queries, which they say astonished them. Although the position is in paradise and involves many cats, Joan Bowell said it is not exactly the “dream job” so many headlines about their story declared. There is lots of feeding, medicating and taking cats to the vet to be neutered or spayed, as well as posting cat photos to Facebook, and cobbling together donations. There’s not much time for sleep, she said.

“It has been pretty much roundthe-clock for me,” said Joan Bowell, 52, an artist. “The biggest challenge is to give each of them the attention they need.”

And then there are the rescues.

Richard Bowell said his wife goes to extreme lengths to save cats, recounting a time she heard a kitten stuck inside a water tank.

The tank could not be opened, so the cat would have to come out a

Feeding time at God’s Little People cat rescue, a sanctuary in Greece.

Joan Bowell, the founder, said running the rescue is not exactly the “dream job.”

small pipe it had entered. Joan Bowell sat at the tank encouraging the cat for 12 hours, he said, and eventually she succeeded by broadcasting into the pipe a YouTube video of a mother cat calling her babies.

Not long after they started the rescue, a veterinarian on the island asked why they would bury an injured cat that was being euthanized, Richard Bowell said.

“And we said to him, ‘Well, it’s to remind ourselves of our humanity,’” he said. “When you think you can just discard things when you’re finished with them, then you do it with everything.”

The story of the job ad went viral, and the Bowells are in talks with filmmakers about a movie.

Richard Bowell said he believes the enormous response isn’t about one news report starting a spiral of coverage, or even about the Internet’s infatuation with cats. He says it, too, is about humanity.

“This is bigger than just a job on a Greek island,” he said. “There’s a kind of wish for people to return to some level of humanity at a time when things are degenerating into such inhumanity . . . people want to see a future that can be worked toward.”

Earlier this month, the Bowells had whittled the towers of applications to a handful of finalists.

Among those was 62-year-old Californian Jeffyne Telson, whose husband sent her the link to the job ad in August.

“He said, ‘Jeffyne, this job has you written all over it. Are you going to wait until you’re too old to try to access your dream?’” Telson recalled.

Her submission stood out immediately, Richard Bowell said.

The Bowells traveled to Santa Barbara to meet Telson in mid-September, and he said that “there was an instant connection between Joan and Jeffyne — and the other way around.” Telson, like Joan Bowell, was an artist. She, too, had never had children.

“It was just a match made in heaven,” Telson said.

An offer, needless to say, was made and accepted. n ©The Washington Post

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