The Washington Post National Weekly - November 27, 2016

Politics Trump’s global empire raises red flags 4

Nation Female firefighters face many struggles 8

World Israeli settlement faces eviction 10

5 Myths The Puritan chapter of American history 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

THE CROSSING These migrants died in anonymity, trying to cross the border.

A Texas doctor works to get them home. PAGE 12

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2016

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THE FIX

The hollow threat BY

P HILIP B UMP

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hen Kellyanne Conway, who ran President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign and now works with his transition team, said this past week that Trump doesn’t plan to follow through with one of the central promises of his campaign — to prosecute Hillary Clinton — there was a tacit admission that Trump’s threats were all campaign rhetoric.

Conway said that Trump won’t “be pursuing investigations” against Clinton and suggested that Republicans in Congress probably would get that message.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Conway said, “I think when the presidentelect, who’s also the head of your party now, Joe, tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content to the members.”

“Look,” she added, “I think he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States and things that sound like the campaign aren’t among them.”

But what’s missing from Conway’s response is the simple, important fact that Trump, as president, doesn’t have the authority to demand that Clinton be prosecuted.

Columbia Professor Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who has consulted with the Justice and Treasury departments, explained how and where the president can leverage his authority over the government’s criminal investigatory mechanisms.

Richman said that the president can, through his attorney general, target broad areas for focus.

“Certainly as the head of the executive branch, the president has considerable sway over policy decisions, as to what kinds of cas-

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es or what types of offenses will get priority,” he said, referring to things like corruption or fraud. “But a huge line has always been drawn between general priorities and specific cases, and there are a considerable number of conventions, protections and institutional frameworks in place to keep presidents out of particular cases.”

DARREN MCCOLLESTER/GETTY IMAGES

A Trump supporter wears a Hillary for Prison T-shirt during a rally in New Hampshire.

Richman points out that it’s not completely unheard of for a president to seek to target individuals, citing the example of New York drug dealer Nicky Barnes, who appeared on the front of the New York Times Magazine in 1977 to President Jimmy Carter’s annoyance.

“But particularly post-Watergate, there really have been efforts to very much patrol communications between the White House and the Justice Department,” he said. “Usually there is a designated person in the [White House] counsel’s office; there are very closely

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 7

watched and monitored counterparties in the Justice Department to make sure that very little is done with respect to particular cases.”

The goal is simple: to maintain the independence of federal investigators and prosecutors from political influence. “I think the bottom line is, I think both sides realize that if prosecutors become seen as carrying water for the president, it will not be a good thing for federal enforcement in general, or for that case in particular,” he said. The system is designed to prevent the occupant of the White House from using federal investigations for political purposes in precisely the way that Trump once threatened to do.

Richman pointed out how many layers a potential prosecution would need to filter through: the FBI, the lawyers in the Justice Department (who, he points out, “generally are not shrinking violets when it comes to complaints of political interference"), the judiciary — and ultimately the jury that would have to convict.

“There are all these different institutions that are required for a criminal case to go forward and to conclusion that are not beholden to the president and are very much not intended to be beholden to the president,” he added.

In brushing away the idea that Trump would transform his frequent campaign pledge into reality, Conway suggested that the president-elect was being generous, not that he didn’t have the power to act anyway.

“I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her honest or trustworthy,” Conway added, “but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing.”

In a Fox News poll conducted right before the election, a majority of Americans said they thought Trump wasn’t honest or trustworthy either. n

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

4 8 10 12 18 20 23

ON THE COVER The skull of a border crosser found on a ranch in Laredo, Tex. In a 10-county swath of Texas, more than 100 migrants have died this year.

Photograph by RICKY CARIOTI, The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

The risks of Trump’s global empire

BY D REW H ARWELL AND A NU N ARAYANSWAMY

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urkey is a nation in crisis, scarred by government crackdowns after a failed coup attempt and on a potential collision course with the West. It is also home to a valuable revenue stream for the presidentelect’s business empire: Trump Towers Istanbul.

Donald Trump’s company has been paid up to $10 million by the tower’s developers since 2014 to affix the Trump name atop the luxury complex, whose owner, one of Turkey’s biggest oil and media conglomerates, has become an influential megaphone for the country’s increasingly repressive regime.

That, ethics advisers said, forces the Trump complex into an unprecedented nexus: as both a potential channel for dealmakers seeking to curry favor with the Trump White House and a potential target for attacks or security risks overseas.

The president-elect’s Turkey deal marks a harrowing vulnerability that even Trump has deemed “a little conflict of interest”: a private moneymaker that could open him to foreign influence and tilt his decision-making as America’s executive in chief.

But the ethics experts eyeing Trump’s empire are now warning of many others, found among a vast assortment of foreign business interests never before seen in past presidencies. At least 111 Trump companies have done business in 18 countries and territories across South America, Asia and the Middle East, a Washington Post analysis of Trump financial filings shows.

The business interests range from sprawling, ultraluxury real estate complexes to one-man holding companies and branding deals in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Panama and other countries, including some where the United States maintains sensitive diplomatic ties.

Some companies reflect longestablished deals while others were launched as recently as

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Business interests could allow foreign influence or be attack targets Trump’s campaign, including eight that appear tied to a potential hotel project in Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Arab kingdom that Trump has said he “would want to protect.”

Trump has refused calls to sell or give his business interests to an independent manager or “blind trust,” a long-held presidential tradition designed to combat conflicts of interest. Now, policy and ethics experts are scrambling to assess the potential dangers of public rule by a leader with a vast web of private business deals.

“There are so many diplomatic, political, even national security risks in having the president own a whole bunch of properties all over the world,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.

“If we’ve got to talk to a foreign government about their behavior, or negotiate a treaty, or some

country asks us to send our troops in to defend someone else, we’ve got to make a decision. And the question becomes: Are we going in out of our national interest or because there’s a Trump casino around?” Painter added.

The Post analysis is based on the most recent financial-disclosure reports filed by Trump’s campaign in May. The self-reported data was unverified by regulators, meaning the reports may not have shown all of Trump’s foreign deals or assets.

The disclosures offer a glimpse at how extensive Trump’s empire has become, including five-star hotels in Canada and Panama, elite golf courses in Ireland and Scotland, and a luxury-resort project now under development in Indonesia, home to more Muslims than any country in the world.

But the filings, the most comprehensive public documents of Trump’s business empire, largely

President-elect Donald Trump walks out of the clubhouse at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster Township, N.J., on Nov. 20.

lack details for many of the companies’ status or ambitions.

Trump has refused to allow for a closer accounting of his investments or to release documents, such as his tax returns, that could provide more detail on his foreign accounts.

The companies have helped spread the Trump brand internationally and injected millions of dollars into the president-elect’s umbrella company, the Trump Organization, which continues to launch and invest in new deals for projects around the globe.

Though Trump rose to prominence as a New York builder, most of the Trump Organization’s business growth in recent years has been through real estate, management and licensing deals with developers and investors overseas.

Many of those deals involve licensing the Trump name: a valuable quantity when Trump was a famous businessman, now made

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POLITICS more lucrative when attached to a U.S. head of state. Trevor Potter, a former Federal Election Commission chairman and general counsel for George H.W. Bush, said foreign investors could seek to seal deals with Trump’s children in hopes of cozying up or currying favor with America’s businessman in chief.

Other Trump properties, like most large projects in the real estate industry, are buoyed by a river of loans, including from big banks in China and Germany.

Deutsche Bank, Trump’s biggest lender, is negotiating what could be a multibillion-dollar settlement over housing-crisis-era abuses with the Justice Department, whose leaders will be Trump appointees.

That foreign presence has become inseparable from the Trump brand and marketing. After Trump’s electoral victory, the Trump Organization congratulated the president-elect and then shortly after posted a flyover video of the “ultra exclusive” Trump Tower Punta del Este, a helipadtopped condo tower licensing Trump’s name on the coast of Uruguay.

Trump’s presidential biography on a government website, greatagain.gov, originally included a celebration of Trump’s foreign holdings and “properties around the globe.” That reference has since been removed. Trump representatives would not say why.

Foreign investors have nevertheless taken pride in Trump’s accomplishment. In India, Trump has licensed his brand to Trump Tower Mumbai, a luxury condo project being developed by Lodha Group, a real estate giant whose founder is a wealthy politician in the country’s governing party.

The president-elect and his children also met with some of Trump’s Indian business partners the other week, during which they discussed the U.S. relationship with India, according to the Economic Times, an Indian newspaper. Lodha declared in one promotion: “Congratulations Mr. President-Elect. The Trump name is rising high in Mumbai too.”

Most government officials must follow strict conflict-ofinterest regulations designed to block public servants from making decisions in their own private interest. But presidents are largely exempt from those rules for fear

The president-elect’s global business empire Donald Trump’s real estate, management and branding empire has claimed a business interest in at least 18 countries or territories. = one company

India: 16

U.A.E.:13

Canada: 12

China: 9

Indonesia: 8

Panama: 8

Saudi Arabia: 8

Scotland: 7

Azerbaijan: 5

Brazil: 4

Ireland: 4

Israel: 4

Qatar: 4

French West Indies: 2

South Africa: 2

Turkey: 2

Uruguay: 2

Bermuda: 1

Note: Companies range from large real estate developments to small holding companies for licensing deals.

Some projects are under development, recently dissolved or connected to multiple companies.

Source: Personal financial disclosures filed on May 16, 2016

they could impede on their wideranging constitutional duties.

Many modern presidents and major nominees — including Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney — have nevertheless committed to selling or divesting their interests into a blind trust run by an independent overseer with unassailable control.

Trump has said he plans to give control of the Trump companies to his children, and the company has said the final arrangement “will comply with all applicable rules and regulations.” Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s executive vice president and general counsel, said in an interview in September, “His focus is going to be solely on improving the country.”

But congressional researchers and ethics advisers say leaving the company’s management to Trump’s children would not truly separate Trump’s private and public work.

Trump’s global business interests also make him vulnerable to legal risks, including a passage in the Constitution, known as the emoluments clause, that forbids government officials from receiving gifts from a foreign government.

A payment from a foreign official or state-owned company to a Trump hotel or other branded company could potentially violate that clause, constitutional experts said.

A group of ethics advisers, including former chief White House ethics lawyers during Democratic

CHRIS ALCANTARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

and Republican administrations, wrote Trump a letter recently urging him to sequester his business in a genuine blind trust or commit to a “clear firewall” between his Oval Office and his family.

“You were elected to the presidency with a promise to eliminate improper business influence in Washington,” they wrote. “There is no way to square your campaign commitments to the American people — and your even higher, ethical duties as their president — with the rampant, inescapable conflicts that will engulf your presidency if you maintain connections with the Trump Organization.”

The foreign deals could become an enduring target for liberals and other opponents of the Trump White House. The conflicts have even become talking points among Trump’s top supporters. In an interview on the radio show of Stephen K. Bannon, the former Breitbart News chief who has become one of the president-elect’s key advisers, Trump volunteered that he had “a little conflict of interest” in Turkey that could affect how he would handle U.S. foreign policy there. “I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s called Trump Towers. Two towers, instead of one,” Trump explained.

Bannon offered Trump a chance to respond to possible criticisms: “They say, ‘Hey look, this guy’s got vested business interests all over the world. How do I know he’s going to stand up to Turkey?’”

Trump did not directly respond.

After the coup attempt, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Er-

dogan, accused foreign leaders and top officials in the U.S. military of “siding with coup-plotters” and launched a brutal purge of Turkish critics. Turkey now jails more journalists than any country, including China, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Speaking of Erdogan, Trump said during the campaign, “I do give great credit to him for turning it around,” referring to the coup attempt. Erdogan was among the first round of foreign leaders who “offered their congratulations” to Trump after the election, his transition team said Wednesday.

Other potential Trump projects remain a mystery. In August 2015, as Trump’s presidential campaign began to take flight, Trump registered eight separate companies with names such as THC Jeddah Hotel and DT Jeddah Technical Services, financial-disclosure filings show. Their names followed a pattern set by Trump companies connected to hotel deals in foreign cities: in this case, Jiddah, the second-biggest city in Saudi Arabia.

Four of those companies, in which Trump was named president or director, remained active at the time of Trump’s May financial filing. The disclosures do not provide more detail for the companies, and Trump representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

On Aug. 21, the same day Trump created four of the Jiddah companies, he told a rally crowd in Alabama: “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

The children who Trump says will take the reins of his business empire have become a ubiquitous presence at Trump Tower, as well as key members of the transition team helping to assemble his cabinet.

Already, the family has shown how porous the wall between his business and diplomacy could be.

Trump recently welcomed Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to his New York penthouse, his first faceto-face with a foreign head of state as president-elect. Joining them was a member of Trump’s transition team and an executive vice president of his business empire: his daughter Ivanka. n

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“There are so many diplomatic, political, even national security risks in having the president own a whole bunch of properties all over the world.”

Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush

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POLITICS

Clubby Senate to test Trump’s agenda

BY E D O ’ K EEFE AND P AUL K ANE

I

t’s one of the most exclusive clubs in Washington, packed with mostly older, wealthier members and governed by a web of byzantine rules and backroom dealmaking. It’s the kind of place that business executive Donald Trump might enjoy — and that President-elect Donald Trump says he abhors.

It’s the U.S. Senate, a place critical to enacting Trump’s sweeping agenda of repealing the Affordable Care Act, overhauling the nation’s tax code, renegotiating global treaties and spending potentially trillions of dollars to build roads and bridges. But few senators will agree with everything Trump wants and fewer actually understand the incoming president. The only one who does, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), is poised to serve as attorney general.

“Look, Donald Trump’s never been in public office before. This is going to be a whole new experience for him, and we’re all going to have to learn to adjust and grow from it,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the chamber’s second-ranking Republican.

Trump’s on-again, off-again relationship with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has been under constant scrutiny, and even after Trump’s surprise victory, many insiders focused on how the 70-year-old billionaire could work with the 46-year-old speaker. But if the recent past is any indication, the dynamic to watch could actually be between Trump, the selfdescribed master negotiator, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the incoming minority leader.

An agriculture metaphor advanced by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) — who survived a tough reelection battle by sticking close to Trump — may perfectly capture this brave new Washington.

Blunt compared the fledgling power structure to a “hybrid vigor,” when animals are crossbred to create a superior species.

“You might have a hybrid vigor

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The main dynamic to watch will be among the president-elect, McConnell and Schumer in the government that Trump brings that wouldn’t be there otherwise. And hybrid vigor is usually a good thing,” he said, adding later that the McConnell-SchumerTrump combination “might be a really significant thing.”

The old dynamic saw McConnell often pulling out last-minute solutions — with the help of an elder Democratic statesman — to myriad governing crises when the House lobbed an unpassable bill to the upper chamber.

On the surface, things may not be that different. McConnell still controls a Republican Senate, and Democrats have the power to block objectionable pieces of the Trump agenda and Supreme Court nominees. Republicans could push through key pieces of Trump’s platform by using fasttrack rules for fiscal policy items — although enacting other pieces would still require 60 votes in the Senate.

It’s a situation similar to the first years of the Obama presiden-

cy, when a Democratic Congress and president muscled through many of their priorities despite a vow by McConnell to stop them and make Obama a one-term president.

But Trump’s agenda — which includes a big-spending infrastructure program and preserving Medicare and Social Security — may find more support among Democrats than Republicans.

And Democrats say, at least for now, that they will approach things differently.

“We will work with President Trump when he agrees with our positions and values, but when he goes against our values and our positions, we’ll fight him with everything we have,” Schumer said in an interview.

The senator said that he has spoken with Trump “two or three” times since the election in calls initiated by the president-elect.

Trump aides didn’t return requests for comment, and Schumer declined to specify what was dis-

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), left, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) are key to enacting President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.

cussed.

He said Democrats are eager to work with a version of the president-elect that has yet to manifest itself — a candidate who vowed to “drain the swamp” and upend the old ways of Washington and who as president-elect is interested in preserving key elements of Obamacare.

Schumer said that he hopes Trump “will not just hew to the hard-right line and realize that he won the election by attacking both the Democratic and Republican establishments. My greatest worry is that he’ll just adopt a hardright line. I think it would be bad for America and, frankly, make his presidency a flop.”

Trump tweeted last Sunday morning: “I have always had a good relationship with Chuck Schumer. He is far smarter than Harry R and has the ability to get things done. Good news!”

McConnell, who aides said is in touch frequently with Trump or his top aides, vowed in recent days to “address the real concerns of the American people, not go back and re-litigate what anybody on either side may have said during a very hotly contested presidential race.”

McConnell said that he hopes to quickly take steps to repeal President Obama’s health law, revamp the nation’s tax system, install a conservative Supreme Court justice and fill other federal judicial vacancies. Energy is another priority of McConnell’s — he has urged Trump to rapidly approve the Keystone XL pipeline and to reverse Obama-era policies that Republicans consider a “war on coal.”

Everything on the Republican wish list is likely to face some measure of Democratic opposition. But pressuring Democrats will be easier in the next two years given the 2018 political map, when 25 of the 48 members of the Senate Democratic caucus face reelection — including 10 senators from states that Trump won. Just eight Republican seats will be up for grabs.

That dynamic means McConnell should be able to pressure

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POLITICS several vulnerable Democrats to side with Republicans, including Sens. Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Jon Tester (Mont.).

Stephen K. Bannon, set to serve as Trump’s top White House strategist, told the Hollywood Reporter that he is pushing the new president to adopt “a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.” Earlier, McCaskill warned that Trump’s support for infrastructure spending would ultimately cause more heartburn for Republicans given that they fought such costly measures during Obama’s presidency.

“All we’ve heard from the Republicans is we can’t do a big spending bill unless it’s paid for, and I don’t think Donald Trump is much interested in paying for anything,” McCaskill said. “He loves OPM — ‘Other People’s Money,’ including taxpayers’.”

Schumer added that congressional Republicans would “rue the day” they try to repeal Obamacare.

“Why? Because all of a sudden they’re realizing there’s a lot of good things” in the law, he said, citing Trump’s openness to keeping protection for young people and those with preexisting conditions.

“There’s no way to keep the good things without keeping ACA,” Schumer said. Republicans “are a dog who caught the bus.”

But Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who as a failed presidential candidate got to know Trump, warned senators to tread carefully.

“Don’t stereotype him and be open-minded,” he said. “You’re missing who he is if you go in with a bunch of preconceived notions.

He’s one of the most charming people I’ve met. And he actually can be quiet and absorb stuff.”

Trump and Schumer are among the most media-savvy New Yorkers, but they don’t have a close relationship.

During the 2008 campaign cycle, Trump hosted a fundraiser for the Democrats’ Senate campaign arm, which Schumer chaired, and helped the party raise $230,000 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. Schumer said what he remembers most about Trump was “landing at LaGuardia and seeing his big plane sitting there, and I realized, what a genius — he paid the rent because it was like getting a great sign advertised because his plane said, ‘Trump.’ ” n

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Facing a young challenger, Pelosi looks to calm nerves BY

P AUL K ANE

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ouse Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is moving on several fronts to try to settle Democratic nerves after this month’s poor election results so that she can secure another term leading the caucus.

Pelosi is both looking backward at past successes for a blueprint to finally win back the majority and looking ahead by appeasing younger, ambitious lawmakers who feel left out of the 76-year-old leader’s close-knit circle of power.

Her main strategy is based not on any new agenda item or tactical messaging shift, but on the hope and expectation that Republicans will try to radically reshape federal entitlement programs in the same manner they did the last time they had unified control of the White House and Congress, in 2005.

“At that time, we committed to each other that we would be unified and disciplined,” Pelosi told The Washington Post. “[George W. Bush] had just been elected. He gave us an opportunity by saying he would partially privatize Social Security. Everybody stuck together. The opportunity that we have now is the equivalent of the opportunity we had in ’05.”

That period, leading up to the successful 2006 elections that gave Democrats a four-year hold on the majority, came just as Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) entered his second term, representing Northeast Ohio and its fading manufacturing plants. Now 43, Ryan has launched a long-shot challenge to end Pelosi’s reign in a leadership election this coming Wednesday.

For at least six years, Pelosi has had her share of internal dissidents, particularly among the Congressional Black Caucus and a few dozen Midwestern Democrats who feel alienated by the mostly coastal leadership team. But the usual suspects received a jolt from a collection of younger, junior Democrats who reacted angrily after their party gained just six seats in an election that Pelosi had pub-

licly and privately assured would result in more than 20 new seats.

Those up-and-coming Democrats have never served in the majority and worry that the top ranks of committees are filled with veterans of more than 25 years on Capitol Hill. They also see Pelosi’s inner circle dominated by a few close allies like Reps. Anna G. Es-

Democrats lost 13 seats, Pelosi created something called the Democratic Policy and Communications Center, with more than a dozen lawmakers serving on it.

However, back then, she turned the reins over to another close ally, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), and the outfit was mostly viewed as just an appendage to Pelosi’s own leader-

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wants another term in charge.

hoo (D-Calif.), Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who have served a combined 68 years in Congress.

To that end, Pelosi sent a letter to the entire caucus before the Thanksgiving holiday that outlined several proposals designed to give new leadership assignments to younger lawmakers. One would create a “vice-ranking member” to serve as the No. 2 Democrat on the panel but limit it to someone who has served four terms or less on the committee.

She also would take the current leadership post filled by Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the assistant to the leader, who has served almost 25 years, and turn it into a special slot reserved for a Democrat who has served three terms or less. This would take effect whenever Clyburn retires.

Creating new seats at the leadership table is not a new move by Pelosi in the face of a challenge.

After the disappointing 2014 midterm elections, during which

ship office. Barely a year into leading the new office, Israel announced he would not run for reelection.

Now Pelosi is proposing to keep that office but make it a position elected by the entire caucus, limiting the potential leaders of it to those Democrats who have served five terms or less.

These offerings to the next generation of Democrats might prove critical to limiting defections in this week’s contest with Ryan, because as Politico noted in its interview with Pelosi, half her caucus wasn’t serving in Congress a decade ago when she led Democrats to the majority.

At this stage, with few expecting Ryan to win, Pelosi’s image may rest on her public prediction that she already has more than twothirds of the votes from her caucus. If she rings up an overwhelming victory, her powerful hold on the caucus will remain, but a substantial number of votes for Ryan would be embarrassing. n

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NATION

These women fight more than fires D ARRYL F EARS Whiskeytown, Calif.

BY

T

he burn boss scanned the snaking trail of the Swasey Recreation Area through thick black sunglasses.

She saw firefighters scurrying on a hill above in a smoky blue haze. They were setting dozens of fires to burn away piles of sticks and shrubs that a lightning strike or cigarette butt could use to grow into a wildfire. Their work was part of a key prescribed burn training that could help them move up in rank.

But there was a much deeper meaning for burn boss Erin Banwell and the firefighters in the haze. All but a few were women, and they were taking part in the first majority-female training exchange, called WTREX, or Women-in-Fire Training Exchange, in a profession that is known for shunning women.

“We need to create a space for women to develop,” said Amanda Stamper, one of the training’s organizers, who darted up and down the trail to offer help. “They get held back on purpose because of bias. It makes it really hard for women to function well.”

During the first briefing meeting for the three-day prescribed burning in October, Kelly Martin, the fire chief at Yosemite National Park, was floored when she entered a dining hall and saw 35 women staring back at her.

“It was just, like . . . stunning,” Martin said. “I needed a moment.”

In more than three decades as a wildfire fighter, she had never seen so many female colleagues in one room at one time.

Women who fight wildfires for the federal government describe their work as isolating and lonely — and scary in a way that has nothing to do with fire. In a maledominated, hypermasculine discipline that operates like the military, they face discrimination, sexual harassment and verbal abuse.

Nearly 45 years ago, women sued for better access to firefighting jobs. Under court order, the U.S. Forest Service’s operation increased female recruitment in a

TAUHID CHAPPELL/THE WASHINGTON POST

In a male-dominated field, they frequently face discrimination and harassment and feel isolated region that includes California, where bias against women is some of the worst in the nation, civil rights advocates say.

But when the order expired 10 years ago, the number of women sharply fell because, critics say, the service failed to adequately address a chauvinist culture.

Women hold about 12 percent of the government’s permanent wildfire suppression jobs at the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, and retaining them is a challenge.

A sampling of recent complaints to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission show why many choose to leave.

Heidi Turpen, a former firefighter for the Forest Service, said that male colleagues routinely propositioned her for sex and told her that women didn’t belong at her station in the Sequoia National Forest in California.

Alisha Dabney, a former Forest Service wildfire crew member,

said she was ordered by a supervisor to report when her menstrual cycle started and was put in a headlock during an attempted rape. She said she was fired after reporting the harassment.

Anda Janik, a former firefighter who settled a claim against the Navy in 2013, was not provided with shower facilities at a fire station outside San Diego. Janik said in an interview that she was forced to knock on a battalion commander’s door each morning to ask to use his office shower.

Other women said they were propositioned for sex, inappropriately touched, stalked, photographed without their knowledge, spied on while bathing and screamed at because of their sex.

Many women said they are speaking out about abuse because of Fairfax County, Va., firefighter Nicole Mittendorff’s suicide in April. After her body was discovered in Shenandoah National Park, county fire officials discovered sexually suggestive messages

Two female firefighters work together during the 10-day Women-inFire Training Exchange in California. Ninety people from the United States and abroad applied for the WTREX program, which could accept fewer than half.

about Mittendorff on a website, messages that appeared to have been posted by her colleagues.

The Forest Service, which employs more than 10,000 federal firefighters, far more than any other agency, acknowledges past problems but said it now has zero tolerance for sexual harassment.

The agency said it requires civil rights training for every employee, conducts surveys and has bulked up its contingent of investigators and case workers for a rapid response to complaints.

“We do have positive trends,” said Lenise Lago, deputy chief for the agency’s business operations.

“Data shows that our cases of harassment based on gender are half of what they were five years ago.”

Critics say many women don’t report bad conduct because they’re afraid of repercussions.

Before Martin defied the odds to become one of the highest-ranking officers in federal wildfire suppression, she was one such woman.

In testimony before a House oversight committee in September, Martin said she was stalked during a training early in her career and spied on as she took a shower but kept quiet, as many women say they do, for fear that reporting it would hurt her career.

Martin told lawmakers that she finally came forward, at “great risk to my career,” because recent cases have shown that the kind of harassment she experienced in 1984 is still happening.

“As women, many of us feel shame and fear of coming forward to report misconduct and cannot bring ourselves to be the ones who have the difficult and painful task of speaking up about this type of serious allegation,” she said.

At a small apartment in suburban Los Angeles, Heidi Turpen held her head back to stop tears from streaming down her face.

Turpen was recalling her sixmonth stint as a seasonal worker last year for the Forest Service, a division of the Agriculture Department, in Sequoia National Forest.

She was excited to have a job doing what she loved with good pay and government benefits. But just

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2016

9

NATION three months into the season that started in June, according to her civil rights claim against the agency, the harassment started.

Turpen and another woman on her female crew were exercising with a male firefighter in a gym when another man approached: “When you’re done rubbing that [female genitalia] all over yourself,” he said, addressing the male firefighter, “you can come have a beer with us.”

The women, stunned, debated whether they should report it.

Turpen said yes; her friend declined. Turpen’s report to a supervisor triggered a talk with both men. When she returned to the gym, she was told she was banned.

She fought that decision and won.

Later, she said, when women were moved to a male barrack from an all-female barrack because of a hole in the roof, she and a friend were verbally attacked by a man within days.

The Forest Service declined to discuss individual claims, but Lesa Donnelly, vice president of the Agriculture Department’s Coalition of Minority Employees, confirmed that Turpen is one of several women who brought charges against the agency. California is an especially bad place for female firefighters, Donnelly and other women said.

Several women filed a lawsuit against the service in 1972 for failure to hire and recruit women, which resulted in a push to bring more women into firefighting after the lawsuit was settled nine years later.

“I get calls every day from women who are getting harassed,” Donnelly said. “Obviously, there are a lot of male firefighters in the agency who are pro-diversity, who want women on their crews and want women to get ahead. But there are enough misogynists who want to keep women out of the field and out of managerial positions.”

Leaning on the handle of her hatchet on the trail at the Swasey Recreational Area, Katie Sauerbrey — 5-foot-3, 118 pounds and wearing a no-nonsense expression — said she has heard it all from men: Women won’t last. They belong in the home raising families.

She dismisses it. “I’ve been at fires with a 35-pound bag on my back, a 35-pound chain saw and a 10-pound kit. If you have the mental grit to get through that, you belong,” she said. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

New U.S. weather satellite is innovation in detail, speed BY

A NGELA F RITZ

T

he United States now has a revolutionary weather satellite.

GOES-R, launched this month, will see hurricanes and blizzards with higher resolution than any other U.S. satellite of its kind. The scans will take less time and be transmitted faster. Severe storms will be more predictable through breakthrough lightning mapping.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite — R Series, or GOES-R, is a game-changer for weather forecasting, but it’s also part of a bigger picture. It joins an international network of satellites that share data freely among nearly 200 countries.

The notion of sharing weather information dates to the late 1800s, when the knowledge was essential for maritime activity.

More than a century later, an unfathomable amount of weather data is shared among 191 governments as members of the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, an agency of the United Nations. The organization’s role became crucial after the United States launched the first weather satellite in 1961 and other countries followed suit.

The international Space Age prompted WMO leaders from the United States and the U.S.S.R. to create a World Weather Watch program that allows any country to receive any meteorological data it needs to protect life and property. Global satellite data is critical to that objective. It is the backbone of forecast models, or numerical weather prediction. More than 90 percent of the data ingested by the models comes from satellites around the world.

“People don’t think about why forecasting has improved,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington. “If you look at the revolutions that made forecasting possible, numerical weather prediction is one of them, and satellites were

the other.”

They measure how the atmosphere is flowing — its wind speed and direction — based on how clouds move over time. They can see long-wave radiation escaping from the ground and oceans, which is directly related to the temperature and moisture through the depths of the atmosphere. That information, along with “ground-truth” observations from thermometers and weather balloons, is used as a starting point for the forecast. And it can be used to nudge the model back to reality if it gets off-track.

Perhaps the most significant recent example of the satellite network’s role in forecasting was Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. After the storm took a disastrous left turn onto the East Coast, researchers at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts sought to determine how critical satellites were to its accurate prediction. Without the information from polar-orbiting satellites, which can observe the entire globe in 24 hours, the forecast “would have given no useful guidance 4-5 days ahead that the storm would make landfall on the New Jersey coast,” the study concluded.

“This goes beyond simply forecasting for the public,” said Rob Masters, director of external relations for WMO. “It’s a key source for long-term forecasting and in various sectors of our economy, the environment, health and transportation of all kinds.”

With the addition of GOES-R,

the United States will have four satellites parked over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to monitor weather in North America. But the new generation bears only slight resemblance to the old.

The “camera” instrument on GOES-R — called the Advanced — doubles the resolution of the current NOAA satellites. It can scan the whole hemisphere in five minutes, and if there’s a particularly dangerous weather pattern approaching, forecasters can scan a smaller region over the United States every 30 seconds.

Sudden bursts of lightning could mean thunderstorms are becoming severe. So, GOES-R has a lightning mapper to continuously monitor and transmit all of the lightning strikes across North America and the surrounding oceans.

All of this data will be fed into weather models to improve forecast accuracy. It could extend the lead time of tornado warnings and predict the location of flash flooding before it begins. In other words, it could save more lives.

GOES-R is expected to go live in 2017. When it does, it will feed critical, lifesaving data into National Weather Service forecasts.

It will also enter a decades-long tradition of international cooperation and humanitarian goodwill.

“This is probably the most complex technology that our species is involved in — weather prediction is,” Mass said. “And we do it together as one species. It’s one of our greatest successes.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Showdown looms at Israeli outpost Jewish settlement ruled illegal but some in governing coalition oppose pending eviction, demolition

W ILLIAM B OOTH Amona, West Bank BY

N

achum Schwartz is living his dream in a trailer on a windy hill, raising his children and a flock of sheep, as one of the chosen ones.

This is the land of Abraham, he said, the biblical home of the Jews, and nobody is going to kick his family off their mountaintop.

“We belong to this land and this land belongs to us,” said the 42year-old farmer and herdsman, who was among the first Jewish pioneers to settle this outpost in 1996.

Now his dreams may be shoveled aside by Israeli bulldozers.

In a remarkable rebuke, Israel’s supreme court has ruled that the Amona settlement is illegal, built on land that belongs to Schwartz’s Palestinian neighbors.

The judges have ordered the Israeli military, which controls the occupied territory, to evict the 40 families living here and demolish their houses, alongside the kindergarten, ritual baths and synagogue, by Dec. 25.

When the Israeli army came to raze just nine homes in Amona, in 2006 and many court hearings ago, it took a battalion of soldiers and police officers in riot gear and ended in a bloody melee. Hundreds of protesters were wounded, many from baton blows and horse hooves. Three legislators were among them. About 80 security force members also were injured.

The looming demolition of Amona comes as right-wing Israelis are hailing as a near-miracle the U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump, who they pray will end decades of U.S. criticism of settlement construction on land the Palestinians want for a future state. They expect Trump will give Israel a freer hand to build where they want in the West Bank.

The stakes over the fate of this hardscrabble community of shoddy trailers are high, not just in the international arena but inside Israel. The clash is being drawn as a showdown between the authority of the high court and the governing coalition of Prime Minister

Palestinian towns Mediterranean Sea

Tel Aviv

Israeli settlements

W e s t B a n k

WEST BANK Detail

20 MILES

Silwad

Jerusalem

Israeli military base

Hebron

GAZA

Deir Jarir

ISRAEL

Beit El

Ein Yabrud

Israeli military base

Ofra

Amona

Kokhav Hashahar

Rimmonim

Deir Dibwan 1 MILE

Ramallah Pesagot Source: U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Benjamin Netanyahu.

It is also going to be a real test for Netanyahu, who was elected with help from the Jewish settlers but also fears international censure over allegations of a bold land grab. Most of the world considers all the Jewish settlements in the West Bank as illegal, not just those built on Palestinian private property. The United States calls these communities “illegitimate” and “an obstacle to peace.” Israel disputes this.

Settlement supporters in the Netanyahu government have been scrambling to find a way to save Amona — or at least save face.

The government first sought to provide alternative homes for the Amona residents by building units in a nearby settlement. The community includes about 200 children.

The Amona settlers refused.

Netanyahu then sought to postpone the eviction for seven months, but the high court said there have been enough delays and turned the appeal down.

Finally, the Israeli parliament the other week gave preliminary approval for a controversial bill, over Netanyahu’s objections, that would retroactively legalize Jewish settlements, such as Amona,

THE WASHINGTON POST

that were built on private Palestinian property.

Netanyahu has boasted that his government is the most supportive of settlers in Israeli history, but he called the legalization bill needlessly provocative.

Israel’s attorney general branded the legislation against international law; the high court could also reject it.

Critics of the legislation say it clearly crosses a line.

“I believe this law is evil,” said Talia Sasson, president of the New Israel Fund, an Israeli lawyer who was the author of a 2005 report on illegal outposts for former prime minister Ehud Olmert. “It’s so illegal in so many aspects that it’s hard to believe [the high court] would approve this law. But I can’t predict the future.”

Israel’s education minister and the leader of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, said the proposed law was fair and just.

He stressed that the Amona settlers had done nothing wrong,and that successive Israeli governments had supported the settlements, including those built on private Palestinian land.

Bennett vowed that the days of treating the 450,000 or so Jewish settlers as “second-class Israeli cit-

izens” were over.

Amona residents say the same and point to the roads, power lines, water pipes and soldiers sent to protect them as proof the government supports their community.

Thousands of homes in the Jewish settlements across the West Bank are suspected of being built on private Palestinian land, according to the parliament. A police investigation of land claims by the settlers in Amona found they had forged documents, a practice other settlements have been accused of. Settlers say they have to go through middlemen and use straw buyers because Palestinians won’t sell them land — if they did they could be ostracized as collaborators, punished by the Palestinian Authority or even killed.

The Amona eviction, if it comes, would be celebrated in the nearby Palestinian town of Silwad, just across the valley from the settlement, where a dozen families were suing to reclaim the Amona land.

The elderly Palestinian plaintiffs recall their mothers and fathers tilling the rocky soil when they were young. Sitting together in a meeting hall in Silwad, they speak with nostalgia about a longago bounty of figs and grapes, wheat and olives.

“I watched the settlers take the land,” said Mariam Hammad, 82.

“I watched, but I could not stop them.”

In Amona, the settlers deny that the Palestinian petitioners ever really owned the land — despite what the courts have found.

Issa Zayed, 57, is one of the Palestinians whose family proved to the Israeli court that they owned the property where Amona is built. He said it was a simple case, in a complex land. The land was stolen, Zayed said, period.

It must be returned, he said.

Zayed said that just as the land may be precious to Jews, it is precious to Palestinians.

Asked what would happen to him if he were to venture across the valley to walk the fields where his father farmed and spent his last day on Earth, Zayed said, “I would be shot.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Being Kim Jong Un’s doppelganger A NNA F IFIELD Taiyuan, China BY

J

ia Yongtang doesn’t have much luck with the ladies.

He thinks it’s because of all the weight he’s put on. More likely, it’s because his online dating picture shows him as the spitting image of Kim Jong Un. The North Korean leader might be one of the most reviled people in the world, but Jia has reason to be happy about the notoriety that comes with Pyongyang’s endless missile launches and occasional nuclear tests. For the past four years, Jia has been making a living, of sorts, trading on his uncanny resemblance to the young dictator.

“Some people are excited, some people are scared,” said Jia — wearing sunglasses and a navyblue Mao suit with a plastic version of the red Kim badge that all North Koreans must wear over their hearts — on the street in Taiyuan, the capital of coalproducing Shanxi province. “I get a lot of requests for selfies.”

As the world’s attention turns to Beijing to see if it will punish Kim for his ongoing nuclear defiance, the case of Jia is something of a metaphor for the complicated relations between China and North Korea.

China’s view of North Korea is very different from that of the United States. Sure, Beijing doesn’t appreciate Kim’s efforts to develop deliverable nuclear weapons, and there are signs of a slight chill on the border between the two countries, but China is not trying to bring about regime change, or much change at all.

Furthermore, there’s a kind of nostalgia here, among older people in particular, for the simpler communist life — the “good old days” before cutthroat capitalism arrived in China.

Jia, who’s about 5 foot 3, was working as a security guard in 2012 outside the Bird’s Nest, one of the stadiums built for the Beijing Olympics, when someone commented on his resemblance to Kim, who had become the third-generation leader of North Korea a few months before.

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Chinese impersonator finds modest success playing North Korean leader, but little luck in love He decided to take advantage of the likeness, but becoming a more obvious Kim Jong Un took some work. For starters, Jia weighed only 130 pounds when he decided to morph into the North Korean leader, but with some concerted fried-rice consumption, he’s managed to get to 190 pounds (about 10 pounds lighter than the Internet estimates the real Kim weighs). He grew out his bangs and now has a Kim coif so perfect that some people think it’s a wig.

He appears in character at random events and even has a brief scene at the end of a new film, called “Drunk Youth,” with the Chinese Barack Obama. Ending a meeting, the pair waves and makes peace signs at the camera.

Yes, Jia has seen “The Interview,” the Sony Pictures film about the assassination of Kim that led to the entertainment company being hacked by North Korea. He was not impressed with Randall Park, the Korean American who played the dictator.

His regular gigs involve appearing — often alongside his self-

appointed mentor, a Mao Zedong impersonator named Xiong Ding Jian — at minor events and standing around just looking like Kim. Sometimes Jia breaks into a half-intelligible speech in Korean that he’s memorized, wishing people a happy new year and saying: “I love China.”

When a reporter gently pointed out that he was saying “hello” in the South Korean way, not the version most commonly used in North Korea, Jia got defensive.

“All Koreans speak the same language,” he said. Unspoken: “Don’t mess with my art.”

Like the real Kim, this doppelganger is afraid the Americans are after him. “I’m afraid the Americans will come here to kill me.

That they’ll think I’m really Kim Jong Un and will come here to kill me,” he said, a little nervously.

On a recent day, he appeared as a judge at a talent show in a dance school here in Taiyuan, a secondtier city in China’s industrial heartland. As Taiyuan’s answer to Simon Cowell put the kids through their paces, Jia sat there in his dark

Jia Yongtang, as Kim Jong Un, helps judge a talent show in Taiyuan, China, last month. He had a natural resemblance to Kim but put on about 60 pounds and restyled his hair to better look the part.

suit and darker glasses, watching and occasionally clapping.

The kids had no idea who he was supposed to be. When one young girl’s mother said “the leader of North Korea,” the girl’s face remained blank.

Jia and Xiong came to Taiyuan at the invitation of the local cultural heritage department and appeared at events, with “Mao” praising the city’s development while “Kim” stood alongside him.

Over lunch with Jia and Xiong afterward, some locals praised the two strongmen.

“We are very honored to have them here. We have a lot of respect for North Korea and Kim Jong Un because he is the leader of a socialist country,” said one of the pair’s lunchmates, a retired military educator who uttered words that wouldn’t have been out of place in his classroom.

A businessman chimed in: “Kim Jong Un’s father had a really good friendship with China, so we like the son. We have a lot of respect for him.”

Asked further about China’s relationship with North Korea, the men demurred, saying they were just “common people” who didn’t know much about politics and suggesting that the subject was “too sensitive” to be discussed.

Asked what Mao would have made of Kim, Xiong took the diplomatic route. “I don’t know, that’s for the older generation to answer,” he said. “If his father hadn’t died, we would be closer than we are now. At that time, North Korea respected China. As Mao said, North Korea should listen to its big brother.”

“I care about the heart, not the politics, of being an actor,” Jia added.

But in matters of the heart, he’s not doing so well. Xiong and the others tease Jia for being unmarried at 34, calling him “an old man in an empty nest.”

But he rejects the suggestion that his Kim routine is damaging his chances. “I think it probably helps,” he said, adding that his profile picture entices women to start conversations with him.

“Some girls think I look like a strong leader.” n

COVER STORY

‘I can give them closure.

But I take away their hope.’

STORY BY MONICA HESSE PHOTOS BY RICKY CARIOTI IN LAREDO, TEX.

T

he man had been found two nights before on the brushland of a South Texas ranch, miles from the nearest sign of civilization, which was the back of a Wal­ mart. The Border Patrol agent who spotted him didn’t know how long the young man had been walking before he collapsed and died, and neither did Corinne Stern, the Webb County medical examiner on whose autopsy table he now lay.

He’d been carrying a backpack. The back­ pack would be how Stern began to piece togeth­ er who the man was and how she could send him back to his family, and so, early on a Sunday morning, her assistant lined up its contents, item by item. A bottle of water, mostly empty. A cellphone, protected by a passcode. A wallet, which meant nothing: Sometimes the people who entered the country by swimming and hiking across its border did so while carrying other people’s identification. A bag of corn chips, a can of tuna fish, a crumpled receipt. On his compact body, denim pants and a dark shirt.

“It looks like he did a money exchange on October 4th,” Stern said to the assistant, Gilberto Ramos, as she examined the receipt.

“For $140.” She scanned the man’s clothing.

“The shoes are pretty generic; we won’t be able to use them. What brand were his jeans?” continues on next page

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COVER STORY ***

from previous page

“Levi,” Ramos said.

“Size?”

“35x30.”

“A lot of his belongings come from the U.S., so chances are this might not have been his first time trying to cross,” Stern said, and then they were interrupted by the sound of a ringing telephone.

Ramos looked toward the landline, but it was silent. “Is that my cell?” Stern asked him. It wasn’t. “Is it yours?” she asked. Ramos shook his head.

They both looked toward the sound and the counter that held the backpack, where the dead man’s phone was ringing. *** Laredo. This was a sprawling city of a quarter-million people, with an old downtown and new shopping plazas, old casitas and new McMansions — a city whose western boundary was formed by the Mexican border, which was currently protected by turnstiles on a chaotic highway, and which Donald Trump had insisted should instead be protected by a wall.

Laredo was where Stern had arrived a decade before to become the county’s medical examiner, and where her offices were located at the end of a dusty, unmarked road. Once a month, she gathered her staff for a meeting to discuss the issue that took up more than a third of their time: identifying the people who died trying to cross the border into the United States and sending their remains home. It was her belief that burial was the way to honor that a person had existed. “That he had walked on this Earth,” she sometimes said. Burial was the acknowledgment of universal human dignity, she believed, and the physical location of a family’s grief.

“Okay, let’s start,” she said at October’s meeting, a few days before her Sunday morning autopsy. Stern crossed one cowboy-booted foot over the other and turned to the first page in a packet labeled “Decedent List As Of October 7, 2016.” It was divided into categories: whether the decedents were now in the morgue in her office or at the forensic anthropologist’s office; whether the remains had been intact or skeletal. It was six pages, single-spaced. It was too long, and, despite Stern’s having devised strategies that gave her an identification success rate of about 75 percent, it never seemed to get any shorter.

Immigration had become a flash point of the presidential election, a flurry of numbers with consequences often in dispute. In fiscal 2015, by the Department of Homeland Security’s count, about 331,000 people had been apprehended as they tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, a drop-off from the year before. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, Border Patrol agents had apprehended nearly 409,000.

Many were released to await hearings for asylum, which can take months or years.

Stern, 50, didn’t consider herself to be a political person, and her job was not to think

about the thousands of people who crossed every year in search of new beginnings. Her job was to think about the people who didn’t make it, who drowned in rivers or dropped to the ground from dehydration or from the temperatures that soared past 110 degrees.

Her job was to think about endings.

Last year, the total number of border crossers who died and arrived in her office had been 105 — more than any other jurisdiction from Texas to the Pacific Ocean. This year, her office had reached that number by the first day in October.

The tally for the calendar year was written on the whiteboard in her autopsy room: “Crossers: 105,” in red marker.

Stern knew it was only a matter of time before she received the call telling her that someone had found border crosser 106.

“Last year was busy; this year was worse,” she’d been telling people throughout the week.

She hadn’t taken a vacation in half a decade; a couple of years ago, she’d finally petitioned the county commissioners to let her cash out 169 hours of leave time she knew she’d never use.

Just this week, she had tried to take a day of rest for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. She’d celebrated by phoning her grown son, who had recently moved to Israel, but ended up back at her desk before the day was through.

“What’s the status here?” she asked at the staff meeting, pulling her red hair into a ponytail and pointing to a few case numbers on the list of decedents. A staff member explained that the remains, sent for DNA testing to a forensic anthropologist at the University of North Texas, had been identified but not yet sent back to the crossers’ home countries.

“He’s ID’d, so he doesn’t need to be sitting around on an anthropologist’s table,” Stern said. “He needs to be buried.”

“But once they’re at that office — ” a member of her staff began.

“They need to be buried,” Stern interrupted.

“Well,” the staffer started.

“Even if they’re getting an indigent burial. I don’t want them sitting on a shelf somewhere.

They need to be buried,” she said.

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans have entered the United States by crossing the Rio Grande in the past year. Some die on the journey. Outside Laredo, Tex., ranch hand Juan Ramirez, previous page, came across a migrant’s body, which Webb County Sheriff’s Deputy Mauro Lopez prepares to be brought to the medical examiner.

The most recent crosser, 105, had been found in Maverick County, no ID, no fingerprint match, and his DNA had been sent for testing. The 104th crosser was identified quickly: a 41-year-old from Mexico whose family was working with the consulate to bring home his remains. The 103 crossers who had come before them had their own sad endings or non-endings. There was a man whose entire family lived in North Carolina, who had been trying to travel to join them, and instead of a welcome party they ended up having a funeral with an urn of ashes. There was another man who was found with nothing but a roll of U.S. bills, all $100s, and a love letter in English that was too decomposed to read much of except for the last line, “I can’t wait for you to hold me again.”

Stern had learned to gently slice open the denim pockets of border crossers’ jeans, easing out waterlogged scraps of paper without tearing them: Sometimes people were identified based on scrawled phone numbers. She had learned to X-ray every patient who came in, searching for steel plates or oddly set bones, or other anomalies that could be compared to X-rays of missing people.

She had seen crossers come in with not a single identifying characteristic, and when she looked at them, she thought, “What is the population of the entire world?” because those were the odds she was dealing with: The person on her table was one of 7 billion people, and by the grace of fate that person was now lying before her and not a single one of their loved ones knew it yet.

She had far too many opportunities to reflect on this, because over the past several years, Stern had taken over the work for nine surrounding counties, a total area of 17,000 square miles.

Earlier in the week, an officer from the Honduran Consulate had brought a pile of manila folders — her own never-ending list — to Stern’s office to see whether any outstanding missing-persons cases matched people the doctor had recently identified.

The consul, Lilian Gomez, held up a picture of a young, dark-haired woman. “Her brother is calling us every week to ask if you have the DNA results.”

The brother had seen a picture of a body on a Facebook page that aimed to identify missing migrants and become convinced the dead woman was his sister.

“It’s not her,” Stern said, comparing the two pictures. She sighed and shook her head. “This person is much older. The nose is different.

The ears are different. One has curly hair and one has straight.” Stern knew the two photos didn’t match, and she also knew that grief did funny things to people’s minds.

They moved on to another case, and another. After two hours, Gomez picked up the last folder and stared at it for a moment. “This one — this one I don’t know what to do with,” she said.

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COVER STORY

“We still have him here?” asked Stern.

“Yes.” Gomez explained: The case had dragged on for months. A crosser brought to Stern’s office matched the description of a missing Honduran man. The dental records showed a match, but the family wanted more proof. Stern brought in a forensic dentist who told them the match was beyond question.

The family still didn’t believe their son could be dead, and so they were refusing to claim his remains.

“I am a Christian, I do believe in spiritual things,” Gomez said. “But the family called a lady in California.”

“A psychic?” Stern asked.

“They called a psychic. She tells them, your son is still alive. He is working on a ranch with 20 other people.”

Stern shook her head. “But if that was the case, why wouldn’t he call them?”

“Yes, exactly,” Gomez said.

Stern told Gomez that she wanted to be able to send him home. But she understood that

hope also did funny things to people. In the face of relentless sadness, a family might choose to believe something that went against the facts of the situation. They talked about giving the family more time. “I can give them closure,” she said to Gomez, finally. “But I take away their hope.” *** The office had been filled with a sense of relief at the beginning of the week; during slow periods, the staff could finally catch up on paperwork. That turned into anxious anticipation toward the end, and one of the assistants had taken to whispering, “They found a crosser?” every time the phone rang.

Late Friday, a county worker dropped by just before closing and asked whether the week had been hectic.

“Just so you know, our number this year is 105 and our numbers, total, last year were 105,” Stern answered. “And last year between Octo-

More than 100 bodies of border crossers have crossed Corinne Stern’s autopsy table this year.

They are also brought to her Webb County office from nine surrounding counties. To identify them, she carefully examines their remains (here, with technician Mateo Arredondo) and the things they carried for clues.

KLMNO WEEKLY

ber 1st and December, there were 25 crossers.

This year it’s been really hot. We’re going to get to 106.”

Stern got in her white truck and drove home to the ranch where she lived alone — a red barn house with stables where she kept goats and horses. She checked in on her pregnant mare, and she fed her dogs, and she stopped to pet her favorite goat, which had recently given birth at the advanced age of 13.

Texas was her home, and living on a ranch, with nothing to interfere with the dark, starry skies, felt right to her. She’d grown up in the state, the daughter of a World War II hero, and while she’d tried living other places after medical school, she knew she wanted to come back to Texas and she knew she wanted to be a medical examiner.

It was her father’s idea. He’d become a psychiatrist, spending 25 years working at veterans hospitals and easing serviceman after serviceman through the horrors of postcontinues on next page

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2016

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COVER STORY

from previous page

traumatic stress disorder. She’d wanted to do what he did, but when she told him that as a young girl, he said, in his frank way, “I don’t think you’d be a good psychiatrist. I think you would be a good forensic pathologist.” She didn’t ask him why, but she sensed that maybe he wanted to spare her the pain that could sometimes accompany working with the living.

The nanny goat’s kid was stillborn. Stern had helped ease it out of its mother’s womb already knowing it was too late. And then the mother had lain there, unmoving, and Stern thought she would lose her, too. But hours later, she looked down and saw another pair of tiny hoofs emerging from the birth canal.

Twins. Stern replayed that moment over and over, believing that surrounding herself by life was the only way to balance the fact that she was so often surrounded by death.

She finished up her evening chores and headed to a nearby ranch, where a family she knew had invited people over to watch a goat-roping competition.

“Daddy, it’s the doctor!” a small girl called to her father as soon as Stern arrived.

Everyone recognized the doctor. People in the city had gotten used to seeing her on television whenever there was a high-profile case, like a sensational murder, and they knew that if you were missing somebody you loved, then her office would try to help you find them. And there weren’t many Jewish women in Laredo — Stern was the only person she knew who kept kosher.

“Mirabeli! I brought some treats for you,” Stern said as the little girl climbed into her lap, and she handed her a paper bag filled with Chex Mix and Tostitos.

“C’mon, you can get him!” Stern yelled, making sure to cheer on the youngest, smallest boys in their sturdy jeans, trying their slender lassoes on the agitated goats. Just as she was beginning to relax for the weekend, her cellphone vibrated in her pocket.

“Hey, Jesse, what have you got?” she asked.

She listened while a colleague from Brooks County described a situation and then immediately dialed Francisco Gonzalez, her office’s investigator on duty that weekend. “Jesse’s bringing in a crosser from Brooks County,” she told Gonzalez over the phone. She told him to go straight to the office to meet the car carrying the crosser and said she would be in first thing Sunday morning to perform an autopsy.

A man had been found in jeans and a backpack on a ranch behind a Walmart, and crosser 106 had arrived. *** Letizia Sebastian and Enoc David Vásquez Valverde were both barely 20 when they met.

He’d come to Oaxaca from a small, poor town on the western Mexican coast and gotten a job at the animal feed store where Letizia was working, and she thought he seemed humble and had kind eyes. They married at the courthouse, they moved into her family’s

crowded house because they couldn’t afford their own place, and they had a baby girl, whom they named Zoe and dressed in pink.

The baby changed things. Enoc, now 21, wanted more for his daughter and more for their family. The couple wanted to move into their own apartment, but there was never enough work, paying never enough money. As 2016 passed, he started telling Letizia that he had friends in the United States who could help him find a job there. Finally, one day in late September she went with him to the bus station where he told her not to worry, that he was going to find them a better way of life.

The bus took him to Monterrey, a city in northern Mexico. He called her from there saying that he was staying in a hotel with some people he’d met; they would be there for four or five days until the coyote they had hired to guide them through the border said the conditions were right. A few days later they were, and at 6 p.m. on Oct. 6, Enoc sent a text telling her that tonight was the night they would cross.

Because they didn’t want to be detected, nobody in the group would be making any phone calls while they navigated the desert to the United States, he told her. The next time Letizia would hear from him, he said, would be when he’d reached the other side.

A North Carolina family mourns a 22-year-old relative at his funeral.

Stern, opposite page, combats the weariness of her job by spending time with the animals she raises on her ranch. “I surround myself with life all the time,” she says.

“It’s the only way.”

*** Less than 24 hours after Stern had received the call about crosser 106, she received two more. Crosser 107: skeletal remains, also found in Brooks County, possibly requiring DNA analysis to be identified. Crosser 108: a man found floating facedown in the Rio Grande. Less than 24 hours, and there were three more people added to her list, and three more families lacking endings.

The final one, 108, was in Webb County, Stern’s county, meaning that not only would she be responsible for his autopsy but she would also be responsible for retrieving his remains. On Saturday evening, she put on her scrubs and her tallest waterproof boots and drove past a mobile home park and a cluster of

Enoc David Vásquez Valverde is seen in a family photo with his daughter, Zoe.

palm trees to an access point on the Rio Grande, where Mexico looked so close.

“Who usually picks up the body?” the Border Patrol agent asked when she got out of her truck and made her way down the steep riverbank.

“If it’s in the water, I’ll get in and do it myself,” she said.

“We can’t assist,” he warned her.

“I know you can’t. I’ll do it.” She got in the Border Patrol boat and told the investigator who had accompanied her to wait on the banks and to ready a body bag.

The man was bloated. He had begun to decompose. Stern and Gonzalez, her investigator, maneuvered the man into the body bag that had been donated in a grant by the governor’s office because the problem of dead border crossers had reached a state of urgency. Stern and Francisco each took two of the handles on the bag. They started carrying it up the steep riverbank. Their feet slipped.

Their boots filled with mud. They started up again. They made sure not to let the bag touch the ground. They passed the bag containing the man who died in the river between the layers of barbed wire fence that protected the riverbank. They put him in their van.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Stern said to Gonzalez, and tomorrow came, and Stern was again at her table.

Now it was a little after 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning.

Crosser 106, the man who had been found behind the Walmart, was lying on her table.

He was young, she could tell that. His face was round. His eyes were closed, and he looked as if he could have been asleep.

His phone was ringing.

Stern looked at it. She hesitated. “The problem is that neither of us speaks Spanish well enough to talk with the family,” she said to Ramos, her assistant. The phone stopped, and Stern went back to work, but a few minutes later it rang again.

She paused for just a moment before walking quickly over to the phone. “Hello?” she said. “¿Hola? ¿Habla inglés?” On the other end, she heard a flurry of words in Spanish.

“Do you have anyone there who habla inglés?” she asked. “Hello?”

She gave up and pressed the end-call button, but the phone immediately rang again.

“Hello?” she said. “No hablo español bueno.

Can you call back in 20 minutes? ¿Veinte minutos?”

She hung up again. “I think that was his wife,” she told Ramos quietly.

She didn’t know whether the woman had understood her, but Gonzalez, who was fluent in Spanish, was scheduled to start his shift in 20 minutes. The phone rang again. She didn’t pick up. Five minutes later it rang again. Two minutes after that it rang again.

“She keeps calling back,” Stern said. “She keeps trying.”

Now the phone was ringing unceasingly as Stern photographed crosser 106 — his face, his body, any identifying details — and prepared

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COVER STORY

him for an autopsy. She already suspected the cause of death to be dehydration.

The phone rang, Gonzalez arrived and Stern handed it to him.

“Tell them you are with Dr. Stern in the medical examiner’s office,” she told him, coaching him quietly on the right thing to say.

“Tell them we found this phone on the body of a person who was recovered on a ranch in Brooks County, and ask if they are missing a family member.”

Several hundred miles away, the dead man’s parents sat in their home in Santo Domingo de Morelos, having just heard from their daughter-in-law that an English-speaking stranger had picked up their son’s phone.

Gonzalez translated Stern’s message to them. He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece to relay the answer. “The man says he is missing his son.”

Stern nodded. “Ask him when is the last time he saw his son.”

Gonzalez asked. “He says a few days ago.”

In the middle of the room, crosser 106 lay on the metal table. His clothing had been removed. He had been turned on his side.

“Ask him if he can describe any tattoos his son has,” she told Gonzalez.

“A scorpion,” Gonzalez responded.

On the man’s back, a scorpion curved around his shoulder blade, with a name that looked as if it could belong to a wife or girlfriend.

“With the name ‘Zoe,’ ” Gonzalez continued, listening to the father describe the tattoo on the other end. “Zoe is his little daughter.”

Stern had asked the questions in careful order, not wanting to alarm someone unnecessarily. But now there was really only one more question to ask. She searched for the Mexican identification card that had been found with crosser 106.

“Ask him what is his son’s name,” she said finally. “¿Como se llama su hijo?” Gonzalez asked.

He turned to Stern and spoke slowly and

“I don’t want them sitting on a shelf. . . . They need to be buried.”

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clearly. “His son’s name is Enoc David Vásquez Valverde.”

She looked down at the card. “Tell them that unfortunately, we have his son here,” she said.

Gonzalez did. The father accepted the news quietly, but he could hear the mother sobbing in the background.

Their son had been found, in the brushland, less than 24 hours after he had texted his wife that he was making the crossing.

“Tell him the Mexican Consulate will call him,” Stern said, explaining that it was the consulate who would help figure out how to send their son’s remains back to them.

Gonzalez hung up the phone. Stern finished her work, removed her gloves, began filling in papers. “Enoc David Vásquez Valverde,” she said, repeating the name Gonzalez had just given her, the one belonging to the man who had once been border crosser 106.

She had an ending. It was a sad one, but it was an ending and it was the best she could do. n

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BOOKS

In search of successful leadership N ONFICTION

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MAP FROM ISTOCKPHOTO

THE FIX How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline

By Jonathan Tepperman Tim Duggan. 307 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

S TEVEN. R . W EISMAN

hat could be more welcome in this cynical age than a collection of success stories proving that smart, pragmatic and farsighted leadership can solve the world’s economic and political crises?

“At a time when most of us have glumly concluded that our governments are broken and our domestic and international problems are insurmountable,” Jonathan Tepperman writes, “I aim to show how the right individuals can overcome the most intimidating obstacles — if they follow the right strategies.” Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, calls his book a “data-driven case for optimism at a moment of gathering darkness.”

“The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline” is organized around 10 case studies across the globe. Most fulfill the author’s intention to write a “good news book,” but they often lack sufficient context or qualifications that would bring his optimism into better touch with reality. One of the most remarkable case studies is Rwanda’s effort to mete out justice and reconciliation through local courts in 2 million cases in the wake of its horrific war between Hutus and Tutsis in the

1990s. No less dramatic is the author’s account of the rise of Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, the onetime rebel who led Tutsi forces to capture the capital, Kigali, and then years later set up a system to punish those guilty of genocide — and reintegrate them into society.

“You can’t do one at the expense of the other,” Kagame tells Tepperman, who goes on to note Kagame’s more recent authoritarian tendencies.

In another useful account, “The Fix” describes how President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico brought together three warring political parties to negotiate economic and political reforms, including the breakup of the failing state oil monopoly. All nations, Tepperman says, can “follow Mexico’s model — one that involved quiet negotiation, painful compromise, political leaders willing to take risks and keep their word, and above all a recognition that zero-sum politics accomplishes nothing.”

But the book’s main problem is precisely that its principal and oftrepeated point — that the instances cited provide clear lessons for other countries and leaders — is usually less than persuasive.

Canada, for instance, has surely achieved economic gains from lur-

ing immigrants and embracing a multicultural self-identity, surprising progress given that French Canadians were threatening to secede only a few decades ago. But Canadians do not have border issues like those in the United States and Europe, forcing them to cope with a flood of refugees and illegal immigrants. Canada’s welcome mat, moreover, is rolled out only to foreigners with specific skill and education levels.

Indonesia has demonstrated some success in taming and coopting Islamic extremists. But because the country is a diverse, secular and Pacific-oriented culture, it is not necessarily “an invaluable object lesson” for the Middle East, where fratricidal conflict among rival clerics, tribal groups, warlords and sects over the millennia has left a deep-rooted legacy of violence and hatred.

Closer to home, too, Tepperman tends to sugarcoat reality. He portrays former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg as a modern Pericles: “Like the city he led, much about the man — his wealth, his homes, his spending, and his policies — now seem larger than life.”

Bloomberg succeeded because he built on the accomplishments of his predecessors in creating open spaces, parks, infrastructure and

higher-education opportunities, though the earlier groundwork on those efforts goes unmentioned in this book.

“The Fix” concludes with a list of verities that could be found in a high school civics textbook: Leaders should take risks, use unconventional approaches and take advantage of crises to initiate bold actions, but they should also reject “maximalist” demands that do not allow for compromise, respect checks and balances, and avoid “costly” mistakes.

In the end, for all its informative stories, “The Fix” falls short of the promised deep dive into what ails “a world in decline,” as the book’s subtitle puts it. Tepperman remains convinced that the world’s problems result from leaders not seizing on the fixes he identifies because they “haven’t yet found the wisdom and intestinal fortitude to do what’s necessary.” It’s hard to dispute that such qualities are in short supply, but equally hard to think that they alone can save the day. n Weisman is vice president for publications and communications at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. His most recent book is “The Great Tradeoff: Confronting Moral Conflicts in the Era of Globalization.”

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Perfectly drawn short mysteries

A life promoting humanist values

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

as a great mystery writer ever gone about her craft more self-consciously than P.D. James? She demonstrated her familiarity with the genre not only in her study “Talking About Detective Fiction” (2009) but also in references to predecessors and conventions sprinkled throughout her own fiction.

In “The Mistletoe Murder,” her first and presumably only story collection (James died two years ago, at the age of 94), a nod goes to the woman often called the bestselling mystery writer of all time.

“I expect you are thinking that this is typical Agatha Christie,” writes the title story’s narrator, herself “a best-selling crime novelist.” “And you are right; that’s exactly how it struck me at the time. But one forgets . . . how similar my mother’s England was to Dame Agatha’s Mayhem Parva. And it seems entirely appropriate that the body should have been discovered in the library, that most fatal room in popular British fiction.”

“Parva,” by the way, is Latin for “small.” And Mayhem Parva is not a real town but a dig at the genteel milieu in which Christie’s principal detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, solved their cases.

The four tales in this slim volume, then, are old-fashioned, at least up to a point: no noir, yet plenty of shadows; no explicit sex, but ample erotic tension. And James spins them with the economy demanded by the short form.

Two of the stories feature that James stalwart Adam Dalgliesh, summed up by a suspect in the novel “Devices and Desires” (1989) as “Scotland Yard’s most intelligent detective.” “The Twelve Clues of Christmas” is set at a time when the future chief superintendent is a mere sergeant, and it is Dalgliesh himself who places the story in a crime-lit context. As a pedestrian leaps onto a remote road to flag down Dalgliesh’s car one winter afternoon, Dalgliesh’s “first thought was that he had

somehow become involved in one of those Christmas short stories written to provide a seasonal frisson for the readers of an upmarket weekly magazine.” As we’ve already been tipped off by the story’s title, that’s not a bad description of the tale we are actually reading.

Many writers of detective fiction deepen their novels by giving their detective a personal flaw to wrestle with as he or she tries to solve crimes. Dalgliesh’s main flaw is atypical — not a weakness (alcohol or drug abuse, say) or an impairment (blindness, amnesia, Asperger’s syndrome, etc.) but a strength. Coming to police work from a higher class than most detectives (his father went to Oxford, and he himself is a well-reviewed poet), Dalgliesh tends to assert his consummate professionalism without making allowances for his colleagues’ feelings.

My favorite story in this quartet is “The Boxdale Inheritance,” in which Dalgliesh is called upon to perform a task redolent of a Trollope novel. A clergyman who is also a family friend asks for help with a ticklish problem. He is due to inherit a small fortune from a relative who once stood trial on the charge of murdering her rich husband. She owed her acquittal solely to the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. That is, the evidence pointing to her guilt was robust but not quite conclusive. In such circumstances, the clergyman wonders, can he in good conscience accept the legacy (which he and his family could very much use)? Dalgliesh agrees to delve into the old records and see what he can find out.

I won’t tell you any more, except to note that the story shows the brilliant Dalgliesh being less nettlesome than usual. And to say what a pleasure it is to have “The Boxdale Inheritance” and its three siblings as postscripts to James’s oeuvre. n Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World.

I THE MISTLETOE MURDER And Other Stories

By P.D. James Knopf. 152 pp. $24

KENNETH CLARK Life, Art, and ‘Civilisation’

By James Stourton Knopf. 496 pp. $35

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL D IRDA

n 1969, the BBC aired a 13part documentary titled “Civilisation: A Personal View.” Hosted by an upper-class Englishman with crooked teeth and a penchant for tweed, it traced the history of European art, music and literature from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, ending on a note of slightly qualified despair. The humanist values celebrated in the series were being lost or forgotten. More and more, we worshiped the machine and the computer, and instead of living with joy, confidence and energy, we dwelt gloomily in the valley of the shadow of global destruction. Still, there had been Dark Ages in the past, and humankind just might squeak through, by — as the very first episode declared — “the skin of our teeth.”

Not surprisingly, no American TV network wanted to pick up an artsy-fartsy program highlighting a talking head who might be discoursing in front of Chartres Cathedral one week and discussing the sculptures of Bernini the next.

Oh, ye of little faith! When Washington’s National Gallery of Art arranged a special screening of “Civilisation” in the fall of 1969, the queue to see the first episode stretched down the Mall and numbered in the thousands. The gallery quickly took to running each weekly installment multiple times. Finally picked up by PBS, “Civilisation” was a television blockbuster in 1970, its companion book sold a million and a half copies in its first decade, and Sir Kenneth Clark — the subject of the superb biography “Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and ‘Civilisation’ ”

by James Stourton — emerged as high culture’s classiest superstar.

Born in 1903 as the only child of an extremely wealthy cotton thread-manufacturing family, Clark could have spent his days shooting pheasants and sailing yachts like his father, or he could have partied with the Bright Young Things depicted in the novels of his Oxford classmate Evelyn

Waugh. Instead, a love of art gave his life purpose and shape. Clark would become a collector, who acquired major works by Turner, Cézanne and Renoir; a patron, who championed contemporary British artists such as Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland; and a scholar who catalogued the da Vinci drawings in Windsor Castle and brought out important books, notably “Landscape Into Art” and “The Nude.”

Nonetheless, Clark initially made his mark in what we would now call arts administration. Following a short stint in Florence at the knee of the great painting connoisseur Bernard Berenson and the publication of a youthful book on Victorian architecture, Clark was appointed Keeper of Fine Arts at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Three years later, in 1933, when he was just 30, he became director of London’s National Gallery of Art. Deciding to step down from this post after World War II, he subsequently served on the boards of seemingly every institution that had anything to do with the arts, including the British Museum, the National Theater, the Royal Opera House, the Arts Council, the London Library and even the Independent Television Authority.

Governing all this activity lay the two-part conviction that great art enhanced people’s lives and that everyone should have access to it.

James Stourton’s “Kenneth Clark” is outstanding from every viewpoint: Its author knows the art world, having been a chairman of Sotheby’s UK; his research draws on every available resource; and he tells us both about Clark’s private life and public career in equally fascinating detail.

The chapters on the making of “Civilisation” are particularly engrossing. All in all, this is one of the best and most enjoyable biographies of the year. n Dirda reviews books on Thursdays in Style.

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OPINIONS

As a sheriff, I know jail is not always the answer AL CANNON JR. is sheriff of Charleston County, S.C.

When a Charleston, S.C., patrol officer stopped a young mother outside Walmart after store officials reported that she was shoplifting groceries, her first thought was of her children. Who would watch them if she were arrested? She could not afford the food she had taken for her family — let alone a babysitter, an attorney or bail.

As the sheriff for Charleston County, I know that if the encounter had taken place a few years ago, she would likely have gone to jail, sending her and her children’s lives into an economic and emotional tailspin. In the past, law­ enforcement officers had no alternatives to taking someone to jail for nonviolent offenses such as shoplifting.

Fortunately, that was not true in her case.

Instead, the officer employed a new approach called “cite and release.” Rather than jailing the woman for a low-level, nonviolent offense, the officer gave her a citation for shoplifting, instructed her to appear in court at a later date and let her go. She returned home to her children that day instead of spending weeks in jail awaiting trial at no benefit to public safety and to the detriment of her family.

At a time of heartbreaking turmoil over police-community relations and rising incarceration, national attention has once again turned to Charleston with the start this month of the trial of a former police officer in the tragic shooting death of Walter Scott.

Now more than ever is the time for law-enforcement leaders to acknowledge that serious problems exist in our criminal justice systems and that reform begins with us.

Law-enforcement leaders need to develop fair and effective approaches that reflect our commitment to public safety while giving people the best chance to succeed and lead productive lives. That young

mother’s story is a prime example of the kind of gains we can make and lives we can save when we rethink how our justice systems should work.

How we use jails deserves a hard look. I have more than 30 years of experience in law enforcement, and I understand firsthand our obligation to protect public safety and the challenges my officers face every day as they work hard to protect us. I also know that the number of people in U.S. jails is high, and that even a brief stay in jail can upend lives and lead to deeper involvement in the criminal justice system. Some people never recover from a stay in jail.

And the evidence shows that many of those people did not need to be there in the first place.

Local jails — intended to hold people who pose a flight risk or threat to public safety — are instead incarcerating many who commit nonviolent offenses or are unable to afford bail, negatively affecting the community and the judicial system.

In South Carolina, the average daily population in our jails has exceeded capacity since 1989.

ALEX RATHS/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

Most people are there for lowlevel offenses, not dangerous crimes. Many with mental illness and substance-abuse issues cycle in and out for minor violations.

And amid rising homelessness in our community, people who have nowhere to sleep are often jailed for trespassing.

We must ask ourselves whether putting so many people in jail for offenses unrelated to public safety is the best use of our justice system and limited resources.

These challenges are not unique to Charleston. Across the country, there are nearly 12 million jail admissions each year, and many people remain behind bars and cut off from their families and jobs simply because they cannot afford bail.

The problem is particularly acute for women: According to research from the Vera Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, the number of women in jail is up 14-fold since 1970, and about 80 percent of them are mothers.

Recognizing these troubling trends, Charleston is implementing a number of reforms to transform how we use jails that others should consider.

We are one of several jurisdictions across the country that sought and received support

from the Safety and Justice Challenge to improve local justice systems and safely reduce jail populations.

As part of holistic reform efforts, a new legal-defense program for those who are unable to afford counsel will provide an attorney to lowincome residents at their initial bond hearings, when judges determine if they can safely be released into the community while awaiting trial.

Our cite-and-release program gives my officers more discretion in how to handle low-level offenses in situations when jail is not the best outcome for anyone.

In addition, a triage center service launching next year will help officers steer people who are living with homelessness, mental illness or addiction into treatment and other services — and avoid incarceration.

We should not forget that many law-enforcement officers understand better than anyone where the problems lie in our justice systems. No one on my team wants to take someone to the county jail, away from family and livelihood, without any improvement to public safety.

Together, we must do everything we can to find fairer, more-effective approaches to justice. As a law-enforcement leader and a sheriff, I know that jail is not always the answer. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A real editor could help Facebook MARGARET SULLIVAN is The Washington Post’s media columnist.

Two days after the election of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg found himself on the hot seat.

At a tech conference, an interviewer grilled the Facebook chief executive about the fake news that proliferates on the platform, suggesting that it had swayed the election toward Trump. One widely shared story, for example, said that Pope Francis had endorsed the Republican nominee.

Zuckerberg scoffed.

“Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea,” he said.

“Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

But since then, under fire (including from President Obama, who railed against the fake-news epidemic last week), Facebook has taken some positive steps.

The other week, Zuckerberg posted about how he grasps the seriousness of the problem and outlined the ways Facebook might deal with it. He mentioned third-party verification services; better ways for users to flag hoaxes; and efforts to keep fakenews websites from getting rich on advertising dollars.

That’s welcome progress.

Now it’s time for a bolder move: Facebook should hire a top-flight executive editor and give that person the resources, power and staff to make sound editorial decisions.

Zuckerberg may not want to call this person an editor, since he has been insistent that Facebook isn’t a media company.

He sees it as a technology company, a platform for connectivity. And indeed, Facebook itself does not produce news content but merely allows its community members to share their own offerings — whether baby pictures or hoaxes about political candidates.

That’s fine. Call this person the chief sharing officer or the engagement czarina.

Whatever the title, Facebook needs someone who can distinguish a Pulitzer Prize-

winning photograph from child pornography and who can tell a baseless lie from a thoroughly vetted investigative story.

What rules the roost at Facebook is “engagement.” To oversimplify: The more an item is shared among your friends, the more likely you are to see it.

Clearly, that’s not nearly enough. What’s needed to kill fake news is ruthless factchecking, gut-checking and a big helping of common sense.

The Silicon Valley behemoth, with its billion-plus users, is a major news source — for some demographic groups, the leading one. Its influence is only going in one direction: ever upward.

Understandably, Facebook doesn’t want to turn into the world’s censor in chief. And it shouldn’t and doesn’t have to.

When Zuckerberg said recently that identifying truth is hard, Ben Smith, chief editor of BuzzFeed, had a ready answer: That might be the case, he said, “for algorithms and epistemologists. But it’s something that professional journalists are asked to do every day, and it’s not actually that complicated.”

It comes down to judgment — the kind that can’t be done by complicated code or by relying on well-intentioned but vague

“community standards.”

The need for editorial judgment at Facebook didn’t start with this post-election finger-pointing. It has been growing for many months.

In September, Facebook deleted Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prizewinning photograph of a Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack because it violated the platform’s standards on nudity and child pornography. When global outrage followed, it was restored.

Editors, of course, are far from infallible. Most of them would be quick to admit that. But this move would put someone in charge — at a high level — who could help journalists and technologists talk to one another and who could make decisions based on sound judgment.

Would it be enough to stamp out fake news? Certainly not.

But Facebook’s appointment of an executive editor would be a step forward, bringing accountability and good sense where it’s sorely needed. It would also set a good example for other tech companies and social platforms that are grappling with the same problems.

Another “pretty crazy idea”?

Maybe so. But one whose time has come. n

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OPINIONS

BY NICK ANDERSON FOR THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Learn from my family’s internment GEORGE TAKEI is an actor, activist and playwright.

Recently, Carl Higbie, an outspoken Donald Trump surrogate and former spokesman for Great America PAC, appeared on Fox News and suggested to Megyn Kelly that a national Muslim registry wasn’t a terrible idea: “We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call it what you will,” he said. Was he really citing the Japanese American internment, Kelly wanted to know, as grounds for treating Muslims the same way today? Higbie responded that he wasn’t saying we should return to putting people in camps. But then he added, “There is precedent for it.”

Stop and consider these words.

The internment was a dark chapter of American history, in which 120,000 people, including me and my family, lost our homes, our livelihoods and our freedoms because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Higbie speaks of the internment in the abstract, as a “precedent” or a policy, ignoring the true human tragedy that occurred.

I was 5 when we were forced at gunpoint from our home and sent first to live in a horse stable at a local racetrack, a family of five crammed into a single smelly stall. Weeks later, they sent us 1,000 miles east by rail car. We disembarked in the fetid swamps of Arkansas at the Rohwer Relocation Center. Really, it was a prison: Armed guards looked

down on us from sentry towers.

We understood: We were not to leave.

My parents did their best to make life seem normal. As a child, I very readily accepted our new circumstances. As far as I was concerned, it was normal to line up to use the common latrine and to eat wretched grub in a mess hall. I stood in our makeshift classroom every day and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, “With liberty and justice for all,” as I looked out the window past the U.S. flag, the barbed wire of the camp just visible behind it.

Not until I was older did I understand the irony of those words and the injustice that had been visited on so many of us.

This was an assault not only upon an entire group of Americans but upon the Constitution itself — its

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LISA BENSON

guarantees of due process and equal protection had been decimated by forces of fear and prejudice unleashed by unscrupulous politicians. It took decades for the United States to own up to what it had done and officially apologize for the internment.

This was not the first time the Trump camp had raised the internment. In late 2015, the billionaire told Time magazine that he didn’t know whether he would have supported or opposed the internment. “I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer,” he said. He nodded to the horror of the camps but tellingly did not disavow them: “I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.”

Higbie spoke similarly, saying he does not favor the idea but noting, “The president needs to protect America first.” As he told the New York Times later, “There is historical, factual precedent to do things that are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security.”

Let us all be clear: “National security” must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and

our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than our enemies.

Let us also agree that ethnic or religious discrimination cannot be justified by calls for greater security. During World War II, the government argued that military authorities could not distinguish between alleged enemy elements and peaceful, patriotic Japanese Americans. So all those of Japanese descent, including American citizens, should be presumed guilty and held without charge, trial or legal recourse, in many cases for years. The same arguments echo today: that a handful of presumed radical elements within the Muslim community mandates draconian measures against the whole, all in the name of national security.

It begins with profiling and with registries, but as Trump and Higbie have made clear, once the safety of the country is at stake, all safeguards are off and no one really can guarantee where it will end.

How terrible it is to contemplate, once again, that the government itself might become the very instrument of terror and division. That cannot happen again. We cannot allow it. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Puritans BY

L ORI S TOKES

Now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s a good time to reflect on the Puri­ tans, who fill the earliest chapters of the American story. Debates over who they were, what they stood for and how they contributed to our sense of national identity are shrouded in misunderstandings.

MYTH NO. 1 The Puritans established a theocracy.

A theocracy is a government run by religious authorities claiming divine sanction for their political leadership. In 1631, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governor, John Winthrop, expanded the franchise to all free adult males in the colony. These men voted for their representatives to the General Court (their legislature), who then voted for the governor and his council of assistants.

None of these elected officials were clergymen, because no minister was allowed to hold political office. Equally important, anyone holding political office who was censured or excommunicated by his church could not lose his office because of his religious difficulties. While it’s true that the first generation of men were required to be full church members in order to vote or hold political office, that requirement was modified in 1658 and permanently retired in 1664. The Puritan government in Massachusetts did frequently seek the advice of its ministers, but it was under no obligation to take that advice, and it frequently did not.

MYTH NO. 2 Puritans had a special hatred of American Indians.

It’s true that Puritans mistrusted Indians, deplored their religions as savagery and devil-worship, fought them, and enslaved them.

But this wasn’t much different than the approach they had taken to different groups back in Europe, where some of them, like

Underhill, fought in the Thirty Years’ War, and many pressured King James I to send English troops to assist Protestant forces on the continent.

If you had to choose a group the Puritans really had a special hatred for, it would be Catholics.

(After that came splinter groups like Quakers and Anabaptists, and then anyone else who was not a Puritan.)

In one regard, the Puritans cut Indians more slack than Catholics. They preferred to try to convert Indians first, believing that, unlike Catholics — who had sworn loyalty to the pope and chosen to resist Protestantism — the Indians couldn’t be blamed for their heathenism.

In parts of New England, Puritans and Indians lived in neighboring towns, did business with each other, sometimes worshipped together and had complex loyalties. This was evident during King Philip’s War in 1676-1677, when some settlers refused to fight their Indian neighbors.

MYTH NO. 3 Puritans hated sex.

The Puritans believed that the love between married people was the closest humans could get on Earth to experiencing the joy of being united with Christ in heaven. And love in marriage had no higher expression than sex.

The Puritan minister at Cambridge, Mass., Thomas Shepard, often described the passion people felt in marriage in his sermons: “In all marriage bonds there is a choice made, and, if love be great, there is little standing on terms — let me have him though I beg with him.”

ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

MYTH NO. 4 Puritans came to America to establish freedom of religion.

The Puritans didn’t leave England to found a society where all religions would be tolerated.

After all, they were granted the pejorative moniker “Puritan” in England because of their efforts to purge Catholic influences from the Anglican Church. They sought religious freedom only for themselves.

In 17th-century Europe, every kingdom had an official religion, and the monarch was the head of the church. There were a few exceptions, but it was certainly the case in England, where King Charles I led the Anglican Church when the Puritans left for America.

Since the Puritans wanted to change Anglican worship by, among other things, ridding priests of expensive robes, putting an end to kneeling for Communion and doing away with the Book of Common Prayer, they were persecuted for treason — for challenging the king’s authority to dictate forms of worship. So they went to America to create a political entity where their brand of “reformed” Anglicanism was the only religion.

MYTH NO.5 Puritans were relentless

witch hunters.

Because of the infamous Salem witch trials, in which 20 people accused of witchcraft were executed, the New England Puritans are often framed as a wildly superstitious and persecutory people with a special hysteria for sniffing out witchcraft.

“Witchcraft was portentous,” Stacy Schiff wrote in her recent book on the Salem trials, “a Puritan favorite.”

It’s true that the Puritans believed in witchcraft, as did every society in Europe at the time. But they were not hysterical about it, and the number of witchcraft cases that made it to court is vanishingly small. From the first witchcraft trial in New England in 1638 to the last in 1697, excluding Salem, 65 people were tried, out of a population of tens of thousands. More than half were acquitted. Only 16 were executed.

The Salem episode was the only time in Puritan New England’s history that an actual panic developed over witchcraft.

That’s what makes Salem memorable: It was an anomaly. n Stokes is an independent scholar who studies the founding decades of Puritan New England and Congregational church history.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2016

24

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