The Washington Post National Weekly - December 11, 2016

Politics Carson’s belief clash with HUD’s agenda 4

Nation Pentagon hid study on budget waste 8

Military Troops unmask their wounds 17

5 Myths The fall of Rome and U.S. comparisons 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

PIZZAGATE: FROM RUMOR TO HASHTAG TO GUNFIRE How the false and the very real collided at a D.C. restaurant. PAGE 12

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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

He still had the right stuff BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

I

t took astronaut John Glenn a decade to get to Washington, but once he was here, he mostly stayed put for the next 2½ decades — at least, when he wasn’t back in orbit.

From 1974 to 1999, Glenn, who died Wednesday at 95, served four terms in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Ohio. In contrast to his flashy, heroic space career, he had a reputation in Washington as more of a behind-the-scenes bipartisan lawmaker; his Senate record is a throwback to an era when dealmaking was still the norm in Washington.

There were low moments, of course, like a Senate Ethics committee declaring he had used “poor judgment” for associating with savings and loan shark Charles Keating in the 1980s deregulation crisis. (In total, five senators were caught up in the scandal.) There was a 1976 Democratic National Convention address that fell flat and cost him the vice presidency, and his failed 1984 run for president that ended with his campaign millions in debt for two decades. Glenn was also on hand with Robert Kennedy when Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.

But Glenn’s Senate career featured some big highlights. Here are three of the biggest.

1. “It wasn’t my checkbook, it was my life that was on the line.”

In 1974, during Glenn’s third attempt running for U.S. Senate in Ohio, he was again facing his nemesis Sen. Howard Metzenbaum in the Democratic primary. Metzenbaum, a selfmade millionaire, had started referring to Glenn as someone who had never held a job. In response, at a city club debate, Glenn delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his political career — and, arguably, the one that made it. Here it is: “I have spent 23 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. I was in two wars. I flew 149 missions. I

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was in the space program. It wasn’t my checkbook, it was my life that was on the line.

“You go with me as I went the other day out to a veteran’s hospital, look at those men out there with their mangled bodies in the eye and tell them they didn’t hold a job. You go

ate seat he’d hold for 2½ decades.

2. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978

John Glenn, seen in 1998, was an astronaut and U.S. senator. He died Wednesday at 95.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act is the defining piece of legislation in Glenn’s career and of the U.S. commitment to nuclear nonproliferation efforts.

The law basically required that the United States work with countries that had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if they wanted to import U.S. nuclear energy. It was the first U.S. law aimed specifically at promoting global nuclear nonproliferation, and Glenn, along with a handful of other bipartisan lawmakers, wrote it.

When he signed it into law in 1978, President Jimmy Carter said the Nuclear NonProliferation Act was “a major step forward toward fulfillment of an objective which the United States shares with other nations — a halt in the spread of nuclear weapons capability while preserving the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”

with me to any Gold Star Mother and you look her in the eye and you tell her that her son did not hold a job. You go to Arlington National Cemetery where I have more friends than I like to remember, and you think about this nation, and you tell me that those people didn’t have a job.

“I tell you, Howard Metzenbaum, you should be on your knees every day of your life thanking God that there were some men — some men — who held a job. And they required a dedication to purpose and a love of country and a dedication to duty that was more important than life itself. And their selfsacrifice is what has made this nation possible.

“I have held a job, Howard.”

The crowd erupted in applause.

Glenn went on to defeat Metzenbaum in the primary by eight points and win the Sen-

During his political career, Glenn never stopped looking to the stars. Thirty-six years after his first spaceflight, Glenn eventually persuaded NASA to send him to space again.

In 1998, after two years of lobbying, he persuaded them to include him in a Discovery space shuttle flight as “a human guinea pig for geriatric studies.”

So on Oct. 29, at age 77, Glenn blasted off again. He was the oldest person to fly in space and the only sitting member of Congress to do so. (The flight took place several months before Glenn retired from Congress.)

Along with six astronauts, Glenn spent nine days in space, where NASA studied the similarities between aging in space and on Earth — knowledge that may be crucial if humans ever want to live in space for years at a time. n

NASA VIA REUTERS

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. 9

3. A return to space

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Signs of support hang outside Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C., two days after a man from North Carolina, claiming he was investigating an Internet conspiracy theory, fired a weapon inside. Photograph by NIKKI KAHN, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Where will Carson lead HUD?

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

The Washington outsider’s ideas contrast with the huge agency’s long-standing policies

BY L ISA R EIN AND E LISE V IEBECK

D

onald Trump’s selection this past week of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development sets up what could be a collision between the nominee’s philosophical aversion to social safety-net programs and an agency that administers some of the government’s most expansive programs for helping minorities and low-income people.

If Carson remains true to his political commentary about the nation’s housing programs, he could pursue a conservative agenda sharply at odds with efforts by the Obama administration to promote racial integration in housing and with other anti-segregation policies championed by minority

groups such as the NAACP. Carson might also abandon or place new restrictions on government subsidies and other programs that conservatives criticize as fostering a culture of overreliance on government handouts, according to housing advocates alarmed by his nomination.

It could prove difficult, however, for Carson to manage, much less change, the fundamental course of an organization as massive as HUD. By his admission, Carson has never run an organization of that size and is far from fluent in housing-policy issues.

His leadership of the department will be a test case for Trump’s stated governing philosophy that it is better for Washington outsiders, even those with no policy experience, to hold the levers of federal power.

“Ben Carson has a brilliant

mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities,” Trump said in a statement announcing his decision to nominate Carson. “We have talked at length about my urban renewal agenda and our message of economic revival, very much including our inner cities. Ben shares my optimism about the future of our country and is part of ensuring that this is a Presidency representing all Americans.”

Carson is receiving counsel from Alphonso Jackson, HUD secretary under President George W. Bush, who has suggested he rely heavily on the department’s professional staff to help him set priorities when he takes over the agency. “We have discussed that over the last couple of weeks,” Jackson said in an interview. “The Senior Executive Service people at

Ben Carson, who campaigned against Donald Trump for the GOP nomination, addresses a crowd at a rally at the Cobb Energy Center in Atlanta in December 2015. Carson has been nominated to lead the Housing and Urban Development Department in Trump’s administration.

HUD are extremely intelligent and valuable to any secretary, if he will listen to them.”

Major changes to the government’s role in housing would require Congress to act, but policy experts said Carson will have the power to make many changes on his own using his department’s rulemaking authority.

He could, for instance, seek to change rules that determine who is eligible for housing assistance and institute tougher work requirements for people in subsidized housing.

Advocates said they are concerned about Carson’s comments that safety-net programs foster dependence in low-income people.

“Coming to lead an agency that serves the poorest people in the country with a philosophy of ‘If people are that poor it’s because they’re not trying hard enough’

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POLITICS could have a big impact on the people HUD serves,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

HUD, with a $49 billion budget and about 8,300 employees, has its origins in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.” Its mission includes enforcing antidiscrimination laws, assisting low-income applicants in obtaining home mortgages and operating more than 3,000 local publichousing authorities.

The agency is likely to attract attention in Trump’s administration, given the president-elect’s frequent and often criticized descriptions of hellishly violent urban communities on the campaign trail.

“You have so many things, so many problems, so many horrible, horrible problems,” Trump said at a rally before the election. “The violence. The death. The lack of education. No jobs. We’re going to work with the African American community, and we’re going to solve the problem of the inner city.”

Carson has spoken about the desperation he sees in urban areas as well but uses a more modest tone than Trump.

“We have much work to do in strengthening every aspect of our nation and ensuring that both our physical infrastructure and our spiritual infrastructure is solid,” Carson wrote in a Facebook post last month.

Congress will have a significant budgetary role in determining what pieces of Carson’s agenda take effect. Housing experts said they expect to see a decline of HUD’s already-shrinking budget, assuming that Trump follows through on his pledge to pay for increased spending on the military with cuts to domestic programs, which could narrow Carson’s range of options.

The nominee’s history gives him a pronounced, often controversial view on the roots of urban poverty.

Born into a struggling family on the southwest side of Detroit, Carson was educated at Yale University and the University of Michigan before he began a celebrated surgical career at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He credits his achievements to his Christian faith and the high expectations of his mother, an illiterate domestic servant who sought nev-

CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS

“These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse.”

Ben Carson, in a Washington Times op-ed

er to take government assistance, though she sometimes did.

“She worked very hard, leaving very early in the morning, getting back very late at night,” he said in an interview last year with The Washington Post. “Sometimes we didn’t see her for a week. She didn’t like the idea of dependency.

Even if she sometimes took government aid, she always wanted to be independent. She would get in arguments with others who would say, ‘There’s aid for dependent children — you don’t need to be working.’ ” The biggest shifts under Carson could come in the area of fair housing, experts said. The Obama administration is just starting to implement a new rule requiring local communities to study and report on patterns of racial and income disparity in housing, with HUD overseeing the strategy. The federal government is giving these communities detailed data on poverty rates, school demographics, where minority groups live and whether they are segregated from white neighborhoods.

Where segregation exists, HUD and local officials are supposed to come up with plans to reduce it.

Conservative critics have called the policy government overreach, and Carson wrote last year that requiring cities and towns to publicly report racial disparities in housing would “fundamentally change” communities by requiring affordable housing to be built in wealthier neighborhoods.

In a Washington Times op-ed, he issued a strong warning against the policy, comparing it to “mandated social-engineering schemes” typical of socialism.

“These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse,” Carson wrote. “There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.”

As housing secretary, Carson could urge Congress to take this authority away from HUD, experts said. But even if that didn’t happen, Carson could direct his staff not to enforce the rules, by moving resources out of the fair-housing

Donald Trump and Ben Carson walk to Carson’s childhood home in Detroit in September. “Ben Carson has a brilliant mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities,” Trump said.

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division and into other areas.

“Just sort of ignoring it on its own could mean much less oversight,” Yentel said.

Carson could seek guidance from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who has proposed overhauling federal housing policy using the changes to welfare in the 1990s as a model. That could mean imposing a work requirement for federal housing aid and limiting the amount of time beneficiaries may use public housing.

Housing experts said they also anticipate a shift away from enforcing fair-housing laws and responding to complaints of discrimination and toward creating more of a role for the private market in housing programs. Trump’s transition team for HUD has several members from the world of housing finance, which could help the agency provide governmentsubsidized mortgages for lowincome home buyers.

Robert Silverman, a housing expert at the University of Buffalo, predicted that Carson will reduce the level of scrutiny these lenders face about how loans are distributed to minority groups. “Less regulation will allow them to originate loans they might consider higherrisk,” Silverman said.

He also expects to see a larger role for private developers in revitalizing existing public housing apartments or building new ones, a strategy the Obama administration has used to some degree. Developers benefit from tax credits when they take on federal projects such as these, but experts say they will have less incentive to do so if Trump reduces many of their corporate taxes.

Groups representing the government’s more than 3,000 local public-housing authorities said Carson’s expected push for a weaker government hand in housing could also bring some relief from regulations they say are too timeconsuming and expensive.

“We’re concerned that HUD can’t fulfill many of its mandates,” said Tim Kaiser, executive director of the Public Housing Authorities Directors Association.

These are complex issues that bedevil policy experts, but Jackson said Carson’s leadership abilities will see him through the challenges of running HUD. “Ben is a leader, and he engenders energy in people,” he said. “I don’t want to prejudge him.” n

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POLITICS

Where the campaign hasn’t ended

BY S EAN S ULLIVAN AND E D O ’ K EEFE

W

hen Joyce Haas noticed late last month that her mailbox was stuffed fuller than usual, she chalked it up to the arrival of the holiday season.

“I thought, okay, it’s Christmas card time!” said Haas, 70, one of 538 electors from across the country who will officially pick the next president later this month.

This was no flood of season’s greetings. It was the start of what she said has been a steady stream of 150 to 200 letters, postcards and handwritten notes urging her to disregard Donald Trump’s victory in her home state of Pennsylvania and vote for someone else. She said she has received thousands more messages via email.

“To me, it has been a form of harassment,” said Haas, fully committed to voting for Trump.

Many other electors in states won by the president-elect have experienced similar pressure, with a constellation of anti-Trump activists, organized groups and rogue electors waging an urgent, long-shot attempt to prevent Trump from taking office.

Although their efforts do not appear to have put Trump’s expected victory in doubt, they have infused a normally dull quadrennial exercise with political tensions still raw a month after Trump’s defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who easily beat Trump in the popular vote but fell short in the electoral college. They have also given rise to a new round of questions about how the electoral college should operate and whether it should continue at all.

The 538 electors are to vote on Dec. 19. Before Election Day, political parties in each state chose competing rosters of electors. In states where Trump won, the Republican slate will vote this month. The number of electors in each state corresponds to the size of its congressional delegation.

There is no federal law binding electors to the results and state guidelines for electors vary. “More

KENA BETANCUR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

As members of the electoral college are lobbied to change votes, very few have been swayed than 99 percent of electors have voted as pledged” historically, according to the National Archives.

Trump would defeat Clinton 306 to 232 if all do so this month.

However, Texas elector Christopher Suprun wrote in a New York Times op-ed published online Monday that he does not plan to vote for Trump because the president-elect is “someone who shows daily he is not qualified for the office.” He urged others to rally behind a Republican alternative, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich (who later in the week asked electors not to vote for him).

Haas, vice chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, shared examples of letters and emails, including a few mailed with the same return address but signed by different people.

“Here are the reasons why you MUST vote for Secretary Clinton,” the letters read. They argue that Trump has engaged in “unethical” business practices and has appointed people with records of “BIGOTRY” to senior White House posts.

Kimba Livesay, 52, who confirmed that she spearheaded the

effort to draft and send the letters, said she started organizing a local group of about 240 women the day after the election. She called Trump “dangerous,” and she said she uses her return address in Stockton because “people were afraid to put their own return address on there.”

Ebby Amir, 28, a software engineer from New York, has collected elector contact information through Google searches and with a friend started a website called Ask the Electors, which provides people with a way to email electors with their concerns directly.

Through the group, more than 90,000 emails have been sent, he said.

“After the election, there was this sort of frustration to get involved and have more of a voice,” said Amir, who acknowledged that reversing the outcome, as he would like, is a “long shot.”

Bret Chiafalo, 38, a Democratic elector from Washington state who started the group Hamilton Electors, is talking to electors privately in hopes of persuading enough to unite behind a Republican alternative to Trump.

Demonstrators protest Presidentelect Donald Trump in front of Trump Tower in New York in the days following the election. Some Trump opponents are now contacting members of the electoral college, hoping to sway their votes.

The name of Chiafalo’s group nods to Alexander Hamilton’s writings in the Federalist Papers, which he and other Trump critics hold up as an argument that the electoral college should serve as a safeguard against allowing someone unfit to serve as president.

Many see what Chiafalo and others are doing as nothing more than sour grapes. Robert Asher, 79, a Republican elector from Pennsylvania, said he understands that some might be upset about how Trump won the presidency, but he said that anyone disputing the validity of the institution is a sore loser.

“That’s just the way elections are,” he said.

Mark Weston, an electoral college expert who has written a book, said the likelihood of electors defying Trump is “improbable” because it would require bipartisan coordination unheard of in these rancorous political times.

“One-eighth of Trump’s 306 electors, 38 of them, would need to desert him for another Republican, and then if the Democrats were to join those 38 — maybe vote for John Kasich, then Kasich could have 270 electoral votes,” he said.

“Unless the Democrats join in, no one is getting the majority, in which case the election goes to the House of Representatives, and it’s Republican.”

Clinton’s win in the overall popular vote — she leads by more than 2.6 million votes, with more ballots being tallied — has renewed consideration of whether the country should do away with the electoral college.

“It will take a little time, but I’d be surprised if we didn’t eventually shift to a popular vote for president over the next decade or so,” former vice president Al Gore told MSNBC on Monday. In 2000, Gore won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college.

Some of those involved in lobbying electors say they want to continue applying pressure on Trump in the years to come — a sign that the contentious tone of the election might linger into 2017.

“We’ll still fire up a few letters,” Livesay said. n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Trump looks toward military brass

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND M IKE D E B ONIS

P

resident-elect Donald Trump’s selection this week of retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly as secretary of homeland security — and his continued deliberations about tapping as many as two more military figures for other posts — has intensified worries among some members of Congress and national security experts that the new administration’s policies may be shaped disproportionately by military commanders.

“I’m concerned,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

“Each of these individuals may have great merit in their own right, but what we’ve learned over the past 15 years is that when we view problems in the world through a military lens, we make big mistakes.”

Despite making regular remarks on the campaign trail disparaging the nation’s generals, Trump has long shown an affinity for them. In shaping his administration, Trump has prioritized what one adviser described as “can-do, no-bull types,” which the president-elect sees as a deliberate contrast from the personnel choices President Obama has made.

If confirmed, Kelly and defense secretary nominee James Mattis, a retired Marine general with the nickname “Mad Dog,” would join retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s pick for White House national security adviser.

Meanwhile, retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus is under consideration for secretary of state, and Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers is a contender for director of national intelligence.

Other figures with military backgrounds are populating the administration as well, including Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), who graduated from West Point and served in the Army in the Gulf War, is Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, while Stephen K. Bannon, a former naval officer, will serve the president in the West Wing as chief strat-

PETER FOLEY/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Some worry about his affinity for generals after he nominates third one for a spot in his Cabinet egist and senior counselor.

Trump, who received multiple draft deferments and who has no military experience beyond his years at a military boarding school, is said to be drawn to generals by their swagger and dazzled by their tales from the battlefield.

Many of those he has been interviewing and consulting have spent much of the past decade and a half at war, intimately involved in the U.S. fight against global terrorism. Trump’s choices also are striking considering his noninterventionist posture in the campaign and sharp criticism of the war in Iraq and other military adventures.

As Trump introduced Mattis as his pick to run the Pentagon, he relished in recalling the general’s exploits, and he has likened him to George S. Patton, the legendary World War II Army general. “ ‘Mad Dog’ plays no games, right?” Trump told a roaring crowd Tuesday night in Fayette-

ville, N.C. “Led the forces that went after the Taliban and commanded the First Marine Division in Iraq. He is one of the most effective generals that we’ve had in many, many decades.”

To be confirmed, Mattis would have to receive a waiver from Congress because the law requires the defense secretary be a civilian for at least seven years before taking office. Mattis retired in 2013.

Trump’s heavy reliance on military leaders marks a departure from the previous three presidents, who tapped a few generals for the highest jobs with mixed success and relied mostly on people who had spent decades in civilian service, as politicians or academics or lawyers.

“Trump is clearly operating out of a particular model,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Almost all of his Cabinet will be made up of people from the military or people from a corporate background, and what they have in

President-elect Donald Trump stands with retired Gen. John F. Kelly last month. This past week, Trump nominated Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security.

common is strong leadership and executive decision-making.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) quipped: “It’s the G&G cabinet. It does seem to be fairly limited to Goldman Sachs and generals.”

On Capitol Hill, the two generals Trump has nominated for Senate-confirmed positions — Mattis and Kelly — have been relatively well-received.

“Can you have a Cabinet full of generals? No — [not] any more than you can have a Cabinet full of lawyers or a Cabinet full of business people or whatever,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.).

But, he said: “I’m thinking of the individuals. They’re people I have incredible respect for.”

Daniel Benjamin, the former senior counterterrorism official at the State Department in the Obama administration and now a professor at Dartmouth College, said having too many generals in what are traditionally civilian positions is “a matter of deep concern.”

“Generals as a rule believe in hierarchies and taking orders, and if the president gives them an order you have to wonder how likely they are to push back against it,” he said. “Generals have one set of skills, and diplomacy is not in the top drawer of that tool kit.”

Galston, a Democrat who served as a White House policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said the concerns about generals “charging ahead” with no regard for legal or constitutional constraints — or without a willingness to challenge the president — are misplaced. Galston said modern-day generals are trained to navigate a minefield of potential conflicts and legal concerns.

“They’re schooled to believe that if they or any subordinates receive an unlawful order, it’s not to be obeyed,” Galston said. “If you asked me, would I prefer a government of generals or a government of lawyers, that’s not an easy choice. We’ve experimented with a government of lawyers, and that hasn’t been so fantastic, has it?

Maybe it’s time to give the generals a chance.” n

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NATION

Pentagon hid $125 billion in waste Military feared findings about spending would lead to budget cuts, according to officials

BY C RAIG W HITLOCK AND B OB W OODWARD

T

he Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained

by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company. Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.

The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940.

The cost-cutting study could find a receptive audience with President-elect Donald Trump.

Bloated bureaucracy An internal Pentagon study conducted by the Defense Business Board last year found that almost one-quarter of the defense budget is spent on back-office business operations.

Core business operations $134 billion, 23% of total

$580 billion total defense budget The study also found that the Pentagon back-office bureaucracy employed more than 1 million people.

Military 298,000

Civilians 448,000

Contractors 268,000

1,014,000 total back-office personnel Military 298,000

Military personnel are counted in both of these groups.

1,300,000 troops on active duty The Pentagon has almost as many people working desk jobs in its business operations as it does active-duty troops.

1 million desk jobs For the first time, the Defense Business Board study was able to count exactly how many people were working in core business operations for the Defense Department. The study divided them into six categories.

1,014,000 personnel*

$134 billion* Supply chain and logistics Supply, transport, logistics and maintenance

457,000 personnel

207,000

Acquisition and procurement Contracting and purchasing

37.5

192,000

Real property mgmt.

Maintenance of U.S. military bases worldwide

22.6

Human-resources mgmt.

Military recruiting, civilian hiring, records and benefits administration

84,000

30,000 200k

11.4

Financial-flow mgmt.

Payroll, budgets, accounting and auditing

41,000

400k personnel

$52.1 billion

0

Health-care mgmt.

Health-care policy, oversight and administration, excluding medical care

5.4

4.1 0

20

$40 billion

Note: Figures are rounded.

Source: Defense Business Board

THE WASHINGTON POST

He has promised a major military buildup and said he would pay for it by “eliminating government waste and budget gimmicks.”

For the military, the major allure of the study was that it called for reallocating the $125 billion for troops and weapons. Among other options, the savings could have paid a large portion of the bill to rebuild the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, or the operating expenses for 50 Army brigades.

But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds.

Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper.

So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

“They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money. We proposed a way to save a ton of money,” said Robert “Bobby” L. Stein, a private-equity investor from Jacksonville, Fla., who served as chairman of the Defense Business Board.

Stein, a campaign bundler for President Obama, said the study’s data were “indisputable” and that it was “a travesty” for the Pentagon to suppress the results.

The Defense Business Board was ordered to conduct the study

by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking official. At first, Work publicly touted the efficiency drive as a top priority and boasted about his idea to recruit corporate experts to lead the way.

After the board finished its analysis, however, Work changed his position. In an interview with The Post, he did not dispute the board’s findings about the size or scope of the bureaucracy. But he dismissed the $125 billion savings

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

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NATION proposal as “unrealistic” and said the business executives had failed to grasp basic obstacles to restructuring the public sector.

“There is this meme that we’re some bloated, giant organization,” he said. “Although there is a little bit of truth in that . . . I think it vastly overstates what’s really going on.”

Work said the board fundamentally misunderstood how difficult it is to eliminate federal civil service jobs — members of Congress, he added, love having them in their districts — or to renegotiate defense contracts.

He said the Pentagon is adopting some of the study’s recommendations on a smaller scale and estimated it will save $30 billion by 2020. Many of the programs he cited, however, have been on the drawing board for years or were unrelated to the Defense Business Board’s research.

Work acknowledged that the push to improve business operations lost steam after Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was replaced by Ashton B. Carter in February 2015. Carter has emphasized other goals.

“We will never be as efficient as a commercial organization,” Work said. “We’re the largest bureaucracy in the world. There’s going to be some inherent inefficiencies in that.”

‘Dark matter’ Work, a retired Marine officer, became deputy defense secretary in May 2014. With the military budget under the most pressure since the end of the Cold War, he sought help from the Defense Business Board, an advisory panel known for producing management studies that usually gathered dust.

Work told the board that the outcome of this assignment would be different. In a memo, he directed the board to collect sensitive cost data from the military services and defense agencies that would reveal how much they spent on business operations.

Pentagon officials knew their back-office bureaucracy was overstaffed and overfunded. But nobody had ever gathered and analyzed such a comprehensive set of data before.

Some Defense Business Board members warned that exposing the extent of the problem could

Robert “Bobby” L. Stein, a privateequity investor from Jacksonville, Fla., served as chairman of the Defense Business Board.

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work ordered the Defense Business Board to conduct the study.

have unforeseen consequences.

“You are about to turn on the light in a very dark room,” Kenneth Klepper, the former chief executive of Medco Health Solutions, told Work in the summer of 2014, according to two people familiar with the exchange. “All the crap is going to float to the surface and stink the place up.”

“Do it,” Work replied.

To turn on the light, the Pentagon needed more outside expertise. A team of consultants from McKinsey was hired.

The mission would be to analyze, for the first time, dozens of databases that tracked civilian and military personnel, and labor costs for defense contractors. The problem was that the databases were in the grip of the armed forces and a multitude of defense agencies. Many had fought to hide the data from outsiders and bureaucratic rivals, according to documents and interviews.

Information on contractor labor, in particular, was so cloaked in mystery that McKinsey described it as “dark matter.”

From the outset, access to the data was limited to a handful of people. Moreover, the contract required McKinsey to report to David Tillotson III, the Pentagon’s acting deputy chief management officer. Anytime the Defense Business Board wanted the consultants to carry out a task, Tillotson would have to approve. His office — not the board — would maintain custody of the data.

Unexpected findings On Jan. 22, 2015, the full board

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has emphasized other goals, such as strengthening the Pentagon’s partnerships with high-tech firms.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has complained that 20 percent of the defense budget went to “pure overhead.”

held its quarterly public meeting to review the results of the study.

The report had a dry title, “Transforming DoD’s Core Business Processes for Revolutionary Change,” and was packed with charts and jargon. But it began plainly enough.

“We are spending a lot more money than we thought,” the report stated.

It then broke down how the Defense Department was spending $134 billion a year on business operations — about 50 percent more than McKinsey had guessed at the outset.

Almost half of the Pentagon’s back-office personnel — 457,000 full-time employees — were assigned to logistics or supply-chain jobs. That alone exceeded the size of United Parcel Service’s global workforce.

The Pentagon’s purchasing bureaucracy counted 207,000 fulltime workers. By itself, that would rank among the top 30 private employers in the United States.

More than 192,000 people worked in property management.

About 84,000 people held human-resources jobs.

The study laid out a range of options. At the low end, just by renegotiating service contracts and hiring less-expensive workers, the Pentagon could save $75 billion over five years. At the high end, by adopting more aggressive productivity targets, it could save twice as much.

After a discussion, the full board voted to recommend a middle option: to save $125 billion over five years.

“You are about to turn on the light in a very dark room. All the crap is going to float to the surface and stink the place up.”

Kenneth Klepper, a member of the Defense Business Board

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Uneasy reaction Afterward, board members briefed Work. They were expecting an enthusiastic response, but the deputy defense secretary looked uneasy, according to two people who were present.

He singled out a page in the report. Titled “Warfighter Currency,” it showed how saving $125 billion could be redirected to boost combat power. The money could cover the operational costs for 50 Army brigades, or 3,000 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for the Air Force, or 10 aircraft-carrier strike groups for the Navy.

“This is what scares me,” he said, according to the two people present. Work explained he was worried Congress might see it as an invitation to strip $125 billion from the defense budget and spend it somewhere else.

A few weeks later, Carter replaced Hagel as defense secretary.

The backlash to the $125 billion savings plan intensified.

On Feb. 6, 2015, board members briefed Frank Kendall III, the Pentagon’s chief weapons-buyer.

Kendall’s operations were a major target of the study; he oversaw an empire of purchasing agents and contractors that were constantly under attack from Congress for cost overruns and delays.

Kendall put up a fight. He challenged the board’s data and strenuously objected to the conclusion that his offices were overstaffed.

In an interview, Kendall acknowledged he was “very disappointed” by the board’s work, which he criticized as “shallow” and “very low on content.” He said the study had ignored efforts by his agencies to become more efficient, and he accused the board of plucking the $125 billion figure out of thin air.

Board members said they started to get the silent treatment from the Pentagon’s highest ranks.

Worse, the board was unable to secure an audience with Carter.

The fatal blow was struck in April. Just three months after Stein had been reappointed as board chairman, Carter replaced him with Michael Bayer, a business consultant who had previously served on the panel and clashed with Stein. Bayer declined to comment.

A few weeks later, Klepper resigned from the board. The $125 billion savings plan was dead. n

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In Philippines, killing linked to police E MILY R AUHALA Gloria, Philippines BY

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or years there have been rumors about the masked men on motorbikes.

The “vigilante killers” who stalk the Philippines ride two by two, sidling up to targets, shooting at close range. They hit their mark, then speed away. They almost always escape police.

Since President Rodrigo Duterte swept to power promising to “kill all” the country’s criminals, there have been thousands of these deaths, part of a rush of violence that has claimed at least 4,500 lives in less than five months.

Duterte has repeatedly urged on the killings, yet denies a state link. It is gangland justice, he says.

It is out of his control.

But a slaying on the island of Mindoro offers the most compelling evidence in years of what many have long believed: Some “vigilante killings” are coordinated hits with links to the police.

In October, a 51-year-old anticrime activist named Zenaida Luz stepped out of her home and was shot to death by two men on a motorbike.

Police who happened to be near the scene apprehended two suspects in flimsy disguises — not drug dealers, but high-ranking officers. Both were arrested and charged.

The case sent a shock through the Philippines. Local journalists and rights groups have worked for years to find links between summary executions and the state, stymied by the fact that few cases are ever investigated.

As a rare instance in which “riding in tandem” shooters were actually caught, and suspects actually charged, Luz’s case adds to a body of evidence that stretches back two decades to Duterte’s time as a city mayor.

Then, as now, there was talk of state-linked “death squads” targeting crime suspects and taking out foes. Then, as now, this type of killing was dismissed as drug world violence, giving would-be assassins license to shoot.

KIMBERLY DELA CRUZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As part of his drug war, President Duterte has supported vigilante hits but denied any state role “They kill activists and pass it off as drug-related, they kill their enemies and pass it off as drugrelated,” said Jose Malvar Villegas Jr., president of Citizens Crime Watch, an anti-crime group for which Luz worked. “They kill everything.”

Nobody knows why Luz was killed, but it was clearly supposed to look like it was linked to the drug trade. From the approach on motorbikes to the costumes, every step was standard operating procedure for the would-be “vigilantes” of the day.

The killers came at night, as they often do. Luz received a text message from a man who said he needed help — not unusual for an activist who took on local oligarchs and law enforcement.

About 11:40 p.m. on Oct. 9, she stepped into the humid island air and was ambushed, shot in the back, the stomach and the leg, according to the police report.

When Luz’s son Edward saw her on the pavement, he feared she had been framed. “If they weren’t

caught,” he said, “everyone would have connected my mom to drugs.”

Members of the Gloria police department were in quick pursuit.

They chased the gunmen down rural roads and saw a second motorbike — backup — peeling away.

A shootout sent the lead bike skidding. As officers approached, the injured men yelled “Tropa!

Tropa!” or “Troops! Troops!” to signal they, too, were police — Senior Inspector Magdaleno Pimentel Jr. and Inspector Markson Almeranez, dressed in a mask and a wig.

Both men were graduates of the Philippine National Police Academy assigned to work on Mindoro.

In September, Almeranez was given an award by Philippine National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa, a Duterte ally who is the face of the war on drugs.

Ruel Magtibay, a police officer from the town of Socorro, where Almeranez was the chief, said the whole station was “surprised” by the arrest but declined to specu-

Police stand guard at the home of Zenaida Luz in Gloria, Philippines. Luz, an anti-crime activist, was gunned down in October. Two highranking police officers have been charged in her death.

late on whether Luz’s death was linked to police or personal matters — both are possible, rights groups say.

Duterte’s endorsement of extrajudicial killing and hints that perpetrators will walk “serve as a dog whistle for the formation of death squads that operate at the behest of local government and police,” said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

“Once a government — any government — has implicitly or explicitly given the green light for death squads to operate, it’s extremely difficult and dangerous to keep them under control and to rein them in if or when they go rogue.”

For those who have tracked Duterte’s rise, none of this is surprising. As the mayor of Davao, a city in the southern Philippines, Duterte earned the nickname “the Death Squad Mayor” because of the hit men who stalked his streets, killing suspected criminals and government critics alike.

A 2009 investigation found that hundreds of people, including children as young as 14, were executed by assassins with ties to local officials and the police. The model was later copied by other cities, most notably Tagum, where city-supported killing teams morphed into pay-for-hit operations.

Rather than distance himself from the “Death Squad” label, Duterte embraced it. “If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination,” he told the media in 2009.

Killing became a campaign promise. “If I make it to the presidential palace,” he said when he was running for president, “I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, holdup men and do-nothings, you better get out because I’ll kill you.”

Days after Luz was slain, Duterte told the press that it was “fine” for him to encourage vigilantes. “If the vigilante would take over, I cannot control it,” he said. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

E.U.’s fate hangs in balance next year M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM Brussels BY

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urope’s leaders have a new fear — their own voters.

A ballot-box revolution is gathering steam on the troubled continent, where citizens this year have seized opportunities to depose top officials and step into the unknown. The latest ouster was Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, after his nation overwhelmingly rejected his signature reforms last weekend. But France, the Netherlands and Germany all face tough elections next year, and the fate of the European Union is in the balance.

The discontent has been fueled in part by the lingering effect of the 2008 global economic crisis, which continues to depress many of Europe’s job markets. But antiestablishment parties are thriving even in prosperous countries that escaped the worst of the pain, capitalizing on resentment toward immigrants, fears about the future and a backlash toward globalization that itself has become a global trend.

Even before the votes are cast, mainstream politicians are making concessions to thriving farleft and far-right parties in an effort to blunt their appeal.

French President François Hollande, whose popularity has scraped a record-low 4 percent, made the unprecedented announcement this month that he would not seek reelection in order for another Socialist to stand a chance at succeeding him.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday delivered a rabble-rousing call to ban “fullveil” Islamic coverings in her country, a concession to rightwing forces after she made Germany a world leader in welcoming refugees last year. She is running for reelection next fall. And Dutch leaders, facing elections in March, have been trapped between trying to maintain good relations with troubled Ukraine while obeying the will of a referendum championed by the farright that banned Dutch ratification of an E.U. trade deal with the

GREGORIO BORGIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Amid a voter rebellion, France, the Netherlands and Germany all face tough elections in 2017 country.

The troubles come even while European leaders begin to negotiate the terms of Britain’s divorce from the E.U., known as Brexit, a messy process that itself is an epochal shift for a league of countries forged in World War II’s lingering embers.

“There’s a way success breeds success with these parties,” said Mark Leonard, the head of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The Brexit vote did create a sense of the possibility of winning for Trump. His election makes it less preposterous that Marine Le Pen might win in France,” he said, referring to the far-right French leader who wants to drastically roll back E.U. powers. “And if Marine Le Pen wins in France, that will be a shock to the European system many times greater even than the Brexit vote.”

The vital signs are not all grim for European leaders. Attitudes about Brussels have grown more positive in most major countries since the British vote in June to leave the European Union — even in Britain, according to a Bertelsmann Foundation survey released last month. Researchers theorized that the bounce was driven by a newfound appreciation for the benefits of the club after the British referendum unleashed turmoil across the continent.

And Renzi may be embracing elections despite his humiliating defeat. He is seeking new elections as soon as February, local Italian media reported Tuesday, despite having his constitutional changes rejected by 59 percent of voters. Early elections would be a major gamble, since populist parties on the left and right are surging in opinion polls and the anti-euro Five Star Movement is

Anti-referendum posters showing Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi are seen in Rome. This past week, voters rejected Renzi’s proposed constitutional reforms and now Renzi is seeking new elections as soon as February.

just a hair behind Renzi’s centerleft Democratic Party in opinion polls. But Renzi may be calculating that early elections would be best for his personal political survival and that anti-system parties would be unable to form a coalition even if one of them placed first.

Even if overall feelings about the European Union are swinging slightly more positively, the trend can do little to allay voters’ specific concerns about their leaders.

The most disruptive shift in Europe next year could happen in France in May, when Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, is expected to make it to the second round of the presidential elections and could pull off an upset win.

She would represent a historic shift for a country that alongside Germany co-founded what became the European Union after World War II. “This Italian ‘no,’ after the Greek referendum [against a bailout], after Brexit, adds a new people to the list of those who wish to turn their backs on absurd European policies plunging the continent into misery,” she wrote Monday on her website.

If elected, Le Pen has vowed to hold a referendum on French membership in the E.U. And if France pulls out, many proEuropean advocates believe the entire project would fall apart.

“If Marine Le Pen wins, that will comprise an existential shock to the E.U. and for stability in Europe,” said Simon Tilford, the deputy director of the Londonbased Center for European Reform.

Amid rising resentments, many leaders have struggled to find a convincing argument why voters should believe in the E.U. and give mainstream parties a chance.

“Creating a counternarrative which takes into account the fears and the multiple uncertainties people have while turning it into a positive narrative is very difficult,” said Janis Emmanouilidis, the director of studies at the European Policy Center in Brussels. n

COVER STORY

Edgar Welch, 28, surrenders to police Dec. 4 in Washington, D.C., after firing a rifle in Comet Ping Pong.

Rumors meet reality

BY MARC FISHER, JOHN WOODROW COX AND PETER HERMANN

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hat was finally real was Edgar Welch, driving from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath a neighborhood pizza joint.

What was real was Welch — a father, former firefighter and occasional movie actor who was drawn to dark mysteries he found on the Internet — terrifying customers and workers with his assault-style rifle as he searched the restaurant, police said. He found no hidden children, no secret chambers, no evidence of a child sex ring run by the failed Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or by her campaign chief, or by the owner of the pizza place.

What was false were the rumors he had read, stories that crisscrossed the globe about a charming little pizza place that features ping-pong tables in its backroom.

The story of Pizzagate is about what is fake and what is real. It’s a tale of a scandal that

SATHI SOMA

never was, and of a fear that has spread through channels that did not even exist until recently. Pizzagate — the belief that code words and satanic symbols point to a sordid underground along an ordinary retail strip in the nation’s capital — is possible only because science has produced powerful tools to find and disseminate information.

What brought Welch to D.C. on a crisp Sunday afternoon in December was a choking mix of rumor, political nastiness, technological change and the intoxicating thrill that can come from running down a mystery.

His actions one week ago reminded Americans that last month’s election did not quite conclude the strangest political season in the nation’s history. Welch did not shoot anyone in the disturbance, but he delivered a troubling message about the shattering of trust in a troubled time.

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n Oct. 28, FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of

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COVER STORY state. New emails had been found on a computer belonging to disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Two days later, someone tweeting under the handle @DavidGoldbergNY cited rumors that the new emails “point to a pedophilia ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center.” The rumor was retweeted more than 6,000 times.

The notion quickly moved to other socialmedia platforms, including 4chan and Reddit, mostly through anonymous or pseudonymous posts. On the far-right site Infowars, talk-show host Alex Jones repeatedly suggested that Clinton was involved in a child sex ring and that her campaign chairman, John Podesta, indulged in satanic rituals.

“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on Nov. 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.” Jones eventually tied his comments about Clinton to U.S. policy in Syria.

According to YouTube, that video has been viewed more than 427,000 times.

Over the next couple of days, the wild accusations against Clinton gradually merged with a new raft of allegations stemming from WikiLeaks’ release of Podesta’s emails. Those emails showed Podesta occasionally dined at a pizza place named Comet Ping Pong.

On Nov. 7, the hashtag #pizzagate first appeared on Twitter. Over the next several weeks, it would be tweeted and retweeted hundreds or thousands of times each day.

An oddly disproportionate share of the tweets about Pizzagate appear to have come from, of all places, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Vietnam, said Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University in North Carolina. In some cases, the most avid retweeters appeared to be bots, programs designed to amplify certain news and information.

“What bots are doing is really getting this thing trending on Twitter,” Albright said. “These bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.”

Online, the more something is retweeted or otherwise shared, the more prominently it appears in social media and on sites that track “trending” news. As the bots joined ordinary Twitter users in pushing out Pizzagate-related rumors, the notion spread like wildfire. Who programmed the bots to focus on that topic remains unknown.

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n the Friday before the election, James Alefantis, who owns two restaurants on the same block in upper Northwest Washington, noticed something odd in his Instagram feed: a stream of comments calling him a pedophile.

Upset, Alefantis told some of his young

NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST

employees at Comet Ping Pong about the hateful comments, and they poked around online. They found rapidly burgeoning discussions on Reddit, 4chan and Instagram about a purported child sex ring operating out of their restaurant.

Alefantis, who grew up in an affluent section of D.C., was no stranger to politics. He had held a fundraiser for the Clinton campaign at Comet. He’d had a relationship with David Brock, the erstwhile Clinton nemesis who had a midcareer political conversion and became a pro-Clinton advocate. And Alefantis had lots of customers and friends in liberal Democratic circles.

When Alefantis opened Comet a decade ago, he’d had a run-in with an advisory neighborhood commissioner, a local official who did not like it when Comet put ping-pong tables on the sidewalk. That commissioner had warned that having game tables on the sidewalk might bring “rapes and murders” to the virtually crime-free neighborhood.

Now, a decade later, a Washington Post column about that dispute was trending on Twitter. Somewhere out there, thousands of people were hungrily searching the Internet for anything remotely troubling about Comet Ping Pong.

In the final days before the election, other shopkeepers on the block began to receive threatening phone calls and disturbing emails. Strangers from faraway places demanded to know about symbols on their shop windows or photos on their walls.

Across from Comet, at the French bistro Terasol, co-owner Sabrina Ousmaal noticed a disturbing Google review of her restaurant that alleged that Terasol, too, was involved in a plot to abuse children.

Then, more online comments appeared, focusing on a photo on Terasol’s website that showed Ousmaal and her daughter posing with Clinton, who had eaten there several years earlier. The Internet sleuths also fixated on a heart logo that appeared on the restau-

Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis speaks outside the restaurant, which reopened Tuesday. At one point last month, he and other nearby shop owners were inundated with threats online and on the phone — as many as 150 calls a day.

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rant’s site as part of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which Ousmaal, a cancer survivor, has supported for years.

“These maniacs thought that was a symbol of child pornography,” said her husband and business partner, Alan Moin. “It’s crazy.”

The family removed the symbol from their site, but the online comments adapted to the new reality: Terasol must be hiding something. The anonymous calls increased.

“What can we do?” Ousmaal said. “There is no basement. There is no tunnel. There is nothing.”

Alefantis and other merchants were mystified: Where was this all coming from? Can’t anyone make it stop?

The merchants approached Facebook and Twitter and asked that disparaging, fictitious comments about them be removed. The shopkeepers said the replies they got advised them to block individual users who were harassing them.

The owner of 4chan, Hiroyuki Nishimura, said in an email to The Post that “Pizzagate reminds me that a country indicated [there were] stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and many people and countries were deceived. It is same old story.”

Nishimura, a Japanese Internet entrepreneur, said the rumors about Comet could be false: “Some people, who believe they do something good, may be deceived by false information.” But, he said, their motive was good; they “did it for saving children.”

On Connecticut Avenue, where Comet Ping Pong is located, hate calls and death threats kept mounting. Surely, the shopkeepers thought, this will all go away after the election.

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n Election Day, Brittany Pettibone, a right-wing online activist in California who writes science-fiction novels with her twin sister, tweeted drawings of children under the label “Sexualized children, child abuse, pools, and bondage.” She wrote that the images were “a look inside Hillary Clinton’s friend Tony Podesta’s house.” Tony Podesta, a Washington lobbyist, is John’s brother.

Pettibone attached the hashtag #PizzaGate.

“We need to expose this,” she wrote in another tweet.

Dozens of commenters responded almost immediately. “How do we make this VIRAL?” one wrote.

Several of the most frequent and prominent purveyors of the Pizzagate rumors said they first learned about the supposed conspiracy from Pettibone’s postings.

“I was one of the first,” Pettibone said in a brief conversation. She said she would not take part in an interview: “I’m uninclined to speak to mainstream media because during the election cycle, they made the right look like nut jobs because we suspected Hillary had a health issue, and it turned out she did.”

For a few days after Donald Trump’s victory, a relative calm returned to Comet. But along the block, merchants were hearing from all continues on next page

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COVER STORY On Nov. 22, Reddit closed its “r/pizzagate” subreddit, a site forum focused on a particular topic. The site said it was concerned that Pizzagate posts were revealing private information about people at Comet and nearby stores. “We don’t want witch-hunts on our site,” it said. The decision sparked allegations of censorship from some people who were spreading the Pizzagate rumors. They moved their discussion to a similar site, Voat.

from previous page

manner of strange callers. At Besta Pizza, owner Abdel Hammad got an urgent message from the company that maintains his website.

A reviewer alleged that his shop’s simple, pizza-shaped logo was a symbol of child pornography. Hammad, an Egyptian immigrant who voted for Trump, was stunned.

“It’s a slice of pizza,” he said.

Hammad removed the image from his site but could not afford more than $2,000 to pay for new signs out front.

“Why did you change the website?!” anonymous callers screamed at him on the phone.

“We’re going to put a bullet in your head,” one threatened.

Down the block, at Politics and Prose Bookstore, employees noticed tweets and other online posts that included them on a list of stores linked by tunnels that do not exist.

The fact that one of the shop’s co-owners, Lissa Muscatine, had worked as Clinton’s speechwriter and adviser for two decades quickly became one more data point in the Pizzagate activists’ conspiracy theory.

Frustrated and frightened, merchants along the block talked to the police. They called the FBI, which said the threats were a local matter.

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n Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, two men carrying protest signs showed up outside Comet.

Alefantis went outside and offered the men coffee. They declined the offer.

On the phone and online, threats poured in, with as many as 150 calls a day.

The shopkeepers approached D.C. police for help. An officer advised them that the online rumormongering was constitutionally protected speech. Ousmaal replied in an email that she respects freedom of speech but that “derogatory libelous and hateful blogs and emails should not and cannot qualify.”

The officer, Anthony Baker, responded, “I don’t have anymore options to give unfortunately.” A police statement issued this past Tuesday said that the department “became aware of the fictional allegations contained in the false news story last month; however, despite postings of offensive language, we did not receive reports of any specific threats.

Officers advised the staff to immediately report to police any threats made against the establishment or individuals.”

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n Nov. 16, Jack Posobiec, a former Navy Reserve intelligence officer who had spent much of the previous year as a leader of a pro-Trump grass-roots organization, decided he’d had enough of just reading tweets and blog posts about the pizza place.

Posobiec, 31, had never eaten at Comet; he had never even heard of the place until he started reading about it on conservative, antigovernment media sites. “I didn’t pay much attention to it before Election Day because I was focused on the campaign,” he said. “With that going on, who wants to talk about pizza?”

Now, with Trump elected, he read the posts more closely. Any story that accused Clinton, John Podesta and Brock of nefarious deeds deserved some investigation, he thought. He believed the Clinton campaign was “full of secrecy and deception.”

It seemed reasonable to Posobiec that Podesta might have organized a sex ring with Brock. But the only part of the scenario that was real was that Podesta had been known to eat at Comet. This part’s false: pictures purporting to show that symbols, such as butterflies and spirals, in signs at Comet and other shops, were statements about pedophilia.

Posobiec said he was curious and confused.

He and a friend decided to go have some pizza.

They walked into Comet eight days after the election, sat down and ordered. Posobiec got the garlic knots. His friend got a beer. But they were not just hanging out. Posobiec was using his phone to broadcast his evening at Comet on Periscope, an app that allows users to stream video live.

“Part of the experience of living in 2016 is live, on-the-scene broadcasts,” he said. “People

PHOTOS BY LOGAN CYRUS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

have lost faith with government and the mainstream media being any real authority.

After the Iraq War, after Benghazi, people are searching for other sources of information. If I can do something with Periscope and show what I’m seeing with my own two eyes, that’s helpful.”

Posobiec said he never made any disturbance inside Comet, but the managers saw him take his camera into a backroom where a child’s birthday party was underway. It did not seem appropriate for a child’s party to be broadcast on a stranger’s Periscope feed. The manager asked two police officers who happened to be across the street to assist.

Posobiec and his friend “were gently refused service and asked to leave,” said a person familiar with the restaurant’s decision. Posobiec offered to pay for what he had ordered.

The manager said it was on the house.

Posobiec said he was not there to make a scene. “I didn’t have any preconceived notions,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. I thought I could just show it was a regular pizza place.”

That evening, after Posobiec was ushered out of Comet, Pettibone tweeted: “You’re my hero for doing this, Jack. Never let go.”

On Twitter, the hashtag #pizzagate peaked in the hours after Posobiec’s video appeared.

At top, the Locke Fire Department in Salisbury, N.C., where Edgar Welch worked for a time as a volunteer firefighter.

Above, downtown Salisbury. Within hours of Welch’s arrest, conspiracy theorists suggested he was planted by the government.

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arlier this fall, in Salisbury, N.C., Edgar Maddison Welch saw friends doing drugs and started preaching at them, aggressively.

Danielle Tillman, 23, was the best friend of Welch’s girlfriend. She said she had just taken acid when Welch got upset, chanting Jesus’ name at her.

“He grabbed my hand and got in my face and was like, ‘Let the demons out of her,’ ” Tillman recalled. “It was super weird.”

Welch, known to friends as Maddison, had struck friends as a sweet young man who’d had trouble finding his way. He had dabbled in acting — his father ran a small movie studio out of his house — and in writing and firefighting. None of it stuck. He liked to hike, long stretches out West, through mountain ranges, over rivers, into national forests.

A few years ago, he told his hometown newspaper that through hiking, he had broken his addiction to the Internet.

But Welch had another habit. He was arrested several times on drug charges and his name appeared on a forged prescription, according to police records. He was convicted of marijuana possession and public drinking and was sent to a substance-abuse program.

Friends say Welch, 28, in recent months grew far more outwardly religious. “He sees himself as someone who is a protector,” said his friend Charles Dobson, 28. “He is just a

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COVER STORY thrill-seeking guy.”

On his Facebook page, Welch has posted biblical verses and psalms, along with photos of his two children.

A few years ago, Welch told a longtime friend and former roommate, Dane Granberry, about stories he had read online describing miles of secret tunnels under the Denver airport. Welch, who had also been fascinated by conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks having been staged by the United States, had become obsessed with the tunnels idea and spent long hours reading articles, watching videos and searching for details.

“He’s into doing his own research,” Granberry said. “I don’t think he has very much faith in the media, but none of us do.”

Granberry said her friend needed to see things for himself.

On Friday or Saturday, Welch drove to D.C., according to court testimony. He showed up at Comet on Sunday about 3 p.m.

Gareth Wade, 47, and Doug Clarke, 50, were sitting down for pizza and beer when a server told them that someone had walked in with a gun. As Welch passed by their table, he told them to vacate the building. They rushed out.

Outside, dozens of officers swarmed the area, evacuating businesses and blocking off streets. A police helicopter circled overhead.

Inside, Welch, armed with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver and a knife, fired off two or three shots, police said.

Welch, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, remained inside for about 45 minutes, searching for underground vaults or hidden rooms, police said. At least one gunshot broke off a lock to a door. It led not to hidden sex workers but to a computer room.

The bullet damaged a computer tower.

Finally, Welch responded to police calls for him to leave the building and surrender. He put his AR-15 on top of a beer keg and his revolver on a table. He came out with his hands up, following police commands to walk backward toward them.

Welch was handcuffed, and Sgt. Benjamin Firehock asked him why he had done it. Welch said, according to the arrest affidavit, “that he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there. [Welch] stated that he was armed to help rescue them.

[Welch] surrendered peacefully when he found no evidence that underage children were being harbored in the restaurant.”

Within hours of Welch’s arrest, online conspiracy theorists had already decided that he was not one of them. Some suggested he was a “false flag,” a government plant — an enemy of their cause — who had been used in an elaborate plot to conceal the truth.

For years, people have made similar claims about everything from the 9/11 attacks (a government conspiracy to justify war, they say) to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (a government conspiracy to justify gun control, they say).

Now, in Welch’s case, the conspiracy theo-

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

rists insisted that the real news about his dangerous assault was, in fact, fake news.

F

or some months now, Stefanie MacWilliams, 24, a stay-at-home mother of a 1-year-old boy in Ontario, has written nearly every day, usually about politics, for Planet Free Will, a conservative website based in the United States. Her husband, a mechanic, is the family’s main breadwinner, but MacWilliams has been earning some money, too, writing a lot about how good Trump would be for America, and a fair amount about how bad President Obama was.

Starting in early November, MacWilliams noticed that stories based on the Podesta emails were making waves. A friend “who knows I’m interested in politics and shares conspiracy things with me” sent MacWilliams stories about Comet Ping Pong.

Then she happened upon Posobiec’s live stream from Comet. This, she decided, was a story. She told the Pizzagate tale in a YouTube video, on Twitter and on Planet Free Will.

In the third paragraph of her story, MacWilliams wrote that “we must stress that there is as yet no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.” She thought she was being quite responsible. She had read Internet chatter about strange happenings and code words, and she thought this needed investigation. She was miffed that Posobiec had been escorted out of Comet when his video tour might have gotten to the bottom of the mystery.

MacWilliams’s story spread via social media.

She became part of what she called a “worldwide citizen investigation” of Pizzagate.

When she saw Reddit and Twitter react to the conspiracy theory, respectively shutting down a discussion forum and suspending the accounts of some users, she worried that a coverup was underway.

MacWilliams calls herself a journalist, but she does not try to be “100 percent accurate,” either. She believes the beauty of the Internet is that people can crowdsource the truth.

Abdel Hammad, owner of Besta Pizza, near Comet Ping Pong, said a reviewer alleged his shop’s logo was a symbol of child pornography.

Hammad was shocked. “It’s a slice of pizza,” he said. He was among several business owners who received threats.

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Eventually, what is real will emerge, she said.

Pizzagate, she said, is “two worlds clashing.

People don’t trust the mainstream media anymore, but it’s true that people shouldn’t take the alternative media as truth, either.”

The lack of stories about Pizzagate in the mainstream press meant that the back channels of the Internet would step into the breach.

But how does this end? What could constitute proof that there is no conspiracy? Some Pizzagate buffs want a video tour showing that there are no secret rooms or tunnels. Others say they would need more.

MacWilliams remains caught up in the thrill of the chase. “There is a camaraderie to it. It is like sitting around with your friends saying, ‘What really happened to JFK?’ It is like a giant game, especially nowadays when you can crowdsource thousands of emails and figure out what’s going on. It’s like a real-life Kennedy assassination where all the stuff is at your fingertips, and it’s happening today.”

When the New York Times mentioned her site as a source of fake news, MacWilliams got a little angry, but she also had reason to smile: Traffic on Planet Free Will soared.

T

he story is everywhere. Some Americans especially keen on Pizzagate find themselves being accused of being Russian stooges, or of working for hackers intent on disrupting the American political process.

In a small city north of Tel Aviv, in the small hours of the night, Avrahaum Segol, a New Yorker who immigrated to Israel 15 years ago, makes call after call back to Washington. He says he has never been to Comet Ping Pong, but he is burning with a need to know. He found the elderly woman whose family once owned the colorful neon sign that sits over Comet’s front door. Alefantis bought the sign from a defunct liquor store in Adams Morgan.

Segol called the woman and spelled out his baroque story. He quoted from an H.G. Wells story called “In the Days of the Comet,” and he wondered whether the symbols on the sign — crescents and stars — might reveal a message about sexual misdeeds or satanic rituals.

The woman listened to some of this, then told Segol, “You’re an idiot.” She hung up.

He is undeterred. He sends letters to the president and the chief justice, and to newspaper editors and reporters, and to TV and radio hosts.

He calls The Post to explain how the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage connects with the symbols on the Comet sign. He calls to explain why his family left him. He calls to say why the death of a former CIA chief may be connected to Pizzagate. He calls to ask whether the neighborhood around Comet is known for murderers and thieves.

“We’re living in such a queer time,” Segol said.

He said his investigation of Pizzagate is “a work of art. I tell my kids, ‘There are no mysteries, only facts unknown.’ ” He asks to be contacted by email, but he warns that he does not open emails unless he knows they are coming in advance. “It’s hard to trust anyone,” he said. n

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HISTORY

An unlikely Pearl Harbor survivor BY

M ICHAEL E . R UANE

T

he tattered Pearl Harbor survivor looks every bit of 78, with weathered skin, rusty bones and the faded “U.S. Navy” emblem the old bird got before the war.

Gray from age and years in the service, the veteran of Dec. 7 sits with other World War II antiques, weary and in need of attention.

But with the 75th anniversary of the 1941 attack this past week, this survivor, like most who were there that day, has a story.

The ungainly Navy airplane at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., is one of the few original U.S. aircraft in existence that flew against the Japanese armada that day.

Then painted silver and orangeyellow, with a bright green tail and red trim, it was an unlikely combatant.

Designed as a small airliner — a “baby clipper” — it was unarmed and part of a unit called Utility Squadron One, which hauled mail, sailors and Navy photographers around the Hawaiian islands.

It had window curtains and a restroom with porcelain fixtures.

Its top speed was just over 100 mph.

With Pearl Harbor a scene of death and devastation that Sunday morning, Plane No. 1063 — its insignia a pelican carrying a mailbag — was ordered to seek out the enemy.

For armament, the 28-year-old pilot, Ensign Wesley Hoyt Ruth, and his five-man crew were issued three World War I-era rifles.

Their task: Report the location of the six Japanese aircraft carriers, two battleships, assorted escort ships and hundreds of enemy airplanes that had been involved in the attack.

“This is going to be a one-way trip,” Ruth later said he thought.

But it wasn’t.

Seventy-five years later, the Sikorsky JRS-1 amphibian, with its boat hull for the water and big tires for the runway, sits in the Udvar-Hazy Center’s restoration

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

On Dec. 7, 1941, this utility plane was tasked with finding the enemy — a probable suicide mission hangar, a venerable witness to the event that helped create modern America.

The Pearl Harbor attack, which plunged the United States into World War II, killed an estimated 2,400 Americans, wounded about 1,100, and destroyed ships, planes and facilities.

“The fact that [Ruth] got out and got back is . . . absolutely amazing,” Smithsonian museum specialist Pat Robinson said last month.

The plane would not have survived an encounter with the Japanese fleet, which it did not find, Robinson said in an interview at the center.

It was lucky not to have been shot down by jumpy American antiaircraft gunners when it returned to Pearl Harbor, he said.

And it was a miracle that it was saved from the postwar scrapheap.

“Somewhere . . . someone looking at the log books realized the significance of the airplane, and where it had been” and alerted the Smithsonian, which retrieved it

from military storage, Robinson said.

“It’s a huge deal, to have this here,” he said. “It represents American involvement in the Second World War. It was there when it started.”

Indeed, the Smithsonian would one day like to restore it. But other historic planes are in line ahead of it.

The squadron was based on Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, where the Navy’s doomed battleships were parked.

Ruth, the pilot, who later lived in the Washington area and taught at the Bullis School in Potomac, Md., was in his bachelor’s quarters on the island the morning of the attack.

A seasoned aviator, “he could fly anything,” his son, Thomas A. Ruth II, said recently.

A native of tiny De Smet, S.D., he was having breakfast when the Japanese planes came roaring in.

He thought for a moment that it might be a drill, until he saw them dropping bombs.

“Then I knew for sure that we

The Sikorsky JRS-1 amphibian, with its boat hull for the water and big tires for the runway, sits in the National Air and Space Museum’s restoration hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. It was flown by Ensign Wesley Hoyt Ruth, above, on Dec. 7, 1941.

were in for trouble,” he said.

In videotaped accounts he gave over the years, Wes Ruth said he grabbed his coat that morning, jumped into his convertible and sped with the top down for the airstrip.

“I drove as fast as I could because . . . I was concerned about getting strafed,” he said.

As the Japanese attack ended, the Americans wanted to locate the fleet from which the enemy planes had come. Ruth was ordered to go find it. “You take the first plane, the JRS,” he said a senior officer told him.

He got into the plane with copilot Emery C. “Pappy” Geise, 35, radio man Oscar W. Benenfiel Jr., plane captain Amos P. Gallupe and two other sailors, according to the Smithsonian.

Before they left, the senior officer presented them with three Springfield rifles for protection.

“We would have to shoot through the windows,” Ruth said.

He thought the chances of surviving were zero.

The brightly colored plane took off and flew north, looking for the enemy.

Hours went by.

Ruth said he flew just beneath the clouds, so he could enter the cloud cover if there was trouble.

Although the enemy fleet was still lurking north of Pearl Harbor, Ruth and his crew made no contact.

But then they had to get back to Ford Island without getting shot down by their comrades. Numerous American planes were mistaken for the enemy and shot at by nervous Americans on the ground, according to historians.

Again, Ruth and his men were lucky. They arrived unscathed.

For his actions at Pearl Harbor, Ruth was given the Navy Cross, the service’s second-highest decoration for heroism.

“Although contact with the enemy meant almost certain destruction,” his citation reads, Ruth’s courage, airmanship and skill “were at all times inspiring and in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.” n

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MILITARY

Giving their pain a face

BY M ICHAEL C HANDLER

C

A LISON

hris Stowe worked on a bomb squad during six deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Between tours he sought help for the headaches, anxiety, memory loss and other symptoms of trauma and brain injuries he suffered while being exposed to hundreds of blasts.

He tried talk therapy, medication and a self-prescribed regimen of yoga and meditation, before finding some relief in an unexpected form: a white papier-mache mask.

During an art therapy session at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, he picked up a brush and painted something he had never been able to satisfactorily describe: how he felt.

His mask showed two sides of himself: the calm exterior side-byside with a monster beneath, filled with rage, his eyes and mouth brimming with bees.

“If you imagine what a bees’ nest sounds like, the buzzing, almost surround sound,” he said.

“This is how my head feels.”

Nearly 350,000 U.S. service members have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries since 2001, according to the Defense Department. Thanks to modern body armor and military vehicles, many service members survive roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices, only to come home struggling to function.

The invisible wounds of war can be difficult to diagnose and treat.

But the military is finding that art, and mask-making in particular, can spur the healing process.

Art therapy, along with music

and creative writing, are integral parts of treatment at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence at Walter Reed in Bethesda which opened in 2010 to study and treat traumatic brain injury and the psychological conditions that often accompany it. The therapeutic arts program has shown promising results and is expected to expand to 12 military sites around the country by 2017, through a partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. Congress appropriated $1.9 million this year to fund this military “healing arts” network.

Two dozen active service members come through each month for an intensive, four-week outpatient treatment program.

During the first week, art therapist Melissa Walker gives each service member a blank mask. She invites them to explore their identities or emotions surrounding their injuries or treatment as they decorate it.

“There is something powerful in the mask,” Walker said. “It literally and figuratively encompasses the areas we are focused on here, both the physical and psychological.”

What starts as a two-hour activity often extends beyond the first session, as service members return to the studio to keep working on their masks.

Brain injuries and trauma can actually impair verbal communication, research shows, but making art can help, particularly when it comes to processing traumatic memories.

Brain scans show that when someone attempts to recall a traumatic event, the left frontal cortex of the brain — the area responsible

To help heal war’s deeper wounds, a novel Walter Reed program urges troops to paint their emotions on masks Masks at the National Intrepid Center for Excellence at Walter Reed in Bethesda, Md., show service members’ feelings.

PHOTOS BY KATHERINE FREY/ THE WASHINGTON POST

for speech and language — stays dark, while the parts of the brain that control emotion and the senses light up.

Art-making activates these same emotional and sensory areas of the brain. The job of the art therapist is to create a safe space for service member to tap into those difficult memories, and then to help them describe what they have created, opening a neural pathway that had previously been shut off.

Art therapist Melissa Walker said she has seen many soldiers make breakthroughs as they interact with the masks.

Walker was inspired to work with veterans because her grandfather, a Korean War veteran, spent his life struggling with trauma.

In the six years since the center opened, Walker has indexed more than 1,000 masks that soldiers have created and she has begun analyzing their themes.

Many masks depict physical pain (bloodshot eyes or a knife stabbing the forehead); some show literal injuries (shards of shrapnel in the face and a piece of skull surgically removed to relieve pressure in the brain). Others are metaphorical — one mask depicts a soldier’s confused thoughts as a swarm of flies coupled with a pair of chopsticks trying to capture them.

Some explore their military and national identities. Patriotism is a point of pride and an instrument of suffering, as seen in a mask that shows two small flags propped up next to the eyes as blinders.

Some of the themes include pain, both physical and emotional, as well as community, cultural

KLMNO WEEKLY

metaphors, a conflicted sense of self and death.

Some show hope and healing: A Navy nurse decorated half of her mask with sand and a large eye, representing an injury that impaired her vision, while the other side is a globe that represents a future career path in international health.

One of Walker’s patients was a senior-level service member who had been haunted by the image of a bloody face for seven years after a particularly difficult deployment, in which he suffered a concussion in mortar fire and he lost a close friend in a convoy to an improvised explosive device. He was supposed to be on the convoy; his friend had gone in his place.

For years he tried to avoid the feelings of guilt and hopelessness, but the image of the bloody face continued to haunt him. In Walker’s studio, instead of ignoring it, he made a likeness of the face. His mask was blood red with bulging eyes. In the process of making it, he began talking about it. When he was done with the mask, he put it in a box and put a lid on it. He left it for Walker to take care of.

Walker keeps it on a shelf in her studio. A year later, the soldier reported that the ghoulish visits had almost completely stopped.

Many soldiers leave their masks and memories behind. Walker’s studio is now filled with them.

They adorn the entrance to her studio, and the front lobby of the center.

Some patients leave and take their masks home, a new outlet for their stress or pain.

For the 41-year-old Stowe, years of talk therapy had not been very helpful. It was hard to sit down again and again. But with art, he did not worry about judgment, he said, and felt more in control of his emotions. Retired from the Marines after 23 years, Stowe lives in Tampa and has a civilian job at U.S. Central Command.

He has good days and bad days, he said. Some days he still hears the bees buzzing in his head.

“Those are the days that I paint,” he said.

He makes oil paintings at an in-home studio or goes out to the porch with his ukulele. Sometimes he escapes to a glass blowing studio for a few hours.

“It’s really cathartic,” he said.

“Whatever I was battling, it slowly fades away.” n

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BOOKS

Rivers hit bottom, then rose to top N ONFICTION

B LAST GIRL BEFORE FREEWAY The Life, Loves, Losses and Liberation of Joan Rivers

By Leslie Bennetts Little, Brown. 418 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

S ARA E CKEL

efore Joan Rivers came along, female comedians were essentially cartoon characters: Think Phyllis Diller in her fright wigs and clown makeup, Jo Anne Worley with her crazy laugh and candy-colored boas. Then Rivers stepped up to the mic and in her Brooklyn accent said, “Can we talk?”

Here was a comedian we’d never seen before, a woman brazenly talking about being a woman. Few topics were off limits, from sex to housework, childbirth, men and most bracing, herself. Joan Rivers built a career on poking fun at Joan Rivers: “I was so ugly that they sent my picture to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and he sent it back and said, ‘I don’t believe it,’ ” was among her classic punchlines.

“Last Girl Before Freeway,” Leslie Bennetts’s frank and compelling biography of Rivers, who died in 2014, takes its title from another Rivers joke. “I’m the last single girl in Larchmont,” she said early in her career. “My mother is desperate. She has a sign up: ‘Last Girl Before Freeway.’ ” Bennetts neither eulogizes nor judges her subject. Instead she allows her copious research — culled from original interviews, comedy documentaries, magazine articles and Rivers’s autobiographies — to tell the story.

The first half of the book reads like a good potboiler: A young woman, hungry for love and success, sees all her dreams come true after making a powerful ally, Johnny Carson, who introduces her to the world on “The Tonight Show” and subsequently makes her its permanent guest host. Later, Rivers gets the opportunity to make history as television’s first female late-night host on the (then) fledging Fox network.

Then it all goes very wrong.

Rivers’s move to Fox infuriates her mentor. He bans her from “The Tonight Show” and never speaks with her again.

In one of the book’s strongest chapters, Bennetts presents the

DAN GROSSI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

DAN STEINBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Joan Rivers is seen in 1965 and in 2009. After an ill-fated late-night show nearly ruined her career, the comedian worked for years to make a remarkable comeback, all of which is chronicled in a new book.

Carson debacle as a mystery, meticulously laying out both sides of the feud and presenting new evidence that a minor player might have been responsible for a rift so bitter it spanned decades.

The downward spiral continued. In large part because of the colossally bad management by Rivers’s husband, Edgar Rosenberg, the Fox show was quickly canceled. Rosenberg subsequently killed himself, leaving Rivers at age 54 with an empty bank account and a shattered career. After briefly contemplating her own suicide, Rivers instead began one of the most remarkable comebacks in entertainment history.

“What she accomplished over the next quarter of a century would be a stunning achievement for anyone, but for an aging woman in an unforgivingly sexist entertainment industry it was unprecedented,” Bennetts writes.

The second half of the book is devoted to Rivers’s revival, and it starts out strong. Rivers’s decision to sell a product line on QVC is presented not as the act of a bottom-feeding has-been but of an intelligent and determined woman who needed to earn her living. The book exhaustively recounts Rivers’s remarkable work ethic and versatility. Her role in

Neil Simon’s play “Broadway Bound” in 1988 garnered extremely positive — and very surprised — reviews.

Rivers also hosted a daytime talk show and a radio show, wrote and directed a Hollywood film and a Broadway play, and wrote several books. When she took to the Oscars red carpet, she forever changed the fashion industry. (Before Rivers started asking “Who are you wearing?,” designers focused on dressing supermodels, not actresses.) The year of her 80th birthday, Rivers performed 62 stand-up gigs, shot three different television shows and traveled regularly to Pennsylvania for her QVC appearances, Bennetts reports.

While Bennetts, a longtime Vanity Fair writer best known for her 2007 book “The Feminine Mistake,” plainly shows admiration for her subject, the book is no valentine. Instead, it’s a clear-eyed exploration of Rivers’s historical and cultural significance.

Quoting Gloria Steinem, Bennetts demonstrates how Rivers was one of feminism’s “transitional” women. On one hand, she was an unapologetic careerist who flagrantly disobeyed the cultural expectation that she aspire to a life of PTA meetings and country-club

lunches, instead blazing a path for a generation of female comedians.

But she was also traditional enough to give her husband nearly full rein over the business aspects of her career, despite his glaring incompetence.

Rivers’s uneven feminism — and frequently jaw-dropping meanness — is also revealed in her antithetical relationship to beauty. She ridiculed the unrealistic beauty standards women face, but she also obeyed them, subjecting herself to starvation diets and excessive plastic surgery. As her act evolved, she rigorously enforced those strictures. “As her success grew, her perspective began to shift from victim to oppressor,” Bennetts writes.

Bennetts is unflinching and fair, but in the book’s latter half, the sheer volume of dutiful reporting starts to drag down the pace.

She also relies heavily on the analysis of others.

Nevertheless, Bennetts offers an important work that lifts her much-dismissed subject to her proper place in history. You can love Joan. You can hate Joan. But “Last Girl Before Freeway” won’t let you deny her significance. n Eckel is the author of “It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single.”

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

As Eiffel Tower grows, so does love

A short life but an eternal presence

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

n an age when overexposure threatens to sap the magnitude of everything’s physical presence, the Eiffel Tower is one of those rare treasures that never loses its power to awe. Constructed for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, the iron lattice rose 1,000 feet into the sky, soaring past the Washington Monument to become, for decades, the tallest structure in the world. It remains among the world’s most-visited monuments, still inspiring a blend of recognition and surprise.

There’s a little of both those qualities in “To Capture What We Cannot Keep,” Beatrice Colin’s historical novel about the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Even while telling a very intimate story, Colin attends to the extraordinary mechanics and publicity surrounding this controversial project.

Gustave Eiffel struts through these pages, of course, but he is already distracted by his doomed Panama Canal project. Instead, the story focuses on Émile Nouguier, the elegant civil engineer who co-designed the famous tower for Eiffel’s company. We first see him floating high above Paris in a hot-air balloon. A practitioner of the latest craze — photography — he is taking aerial pictures of the city when a woman suddenly grabs his arm: “Excuse me,” she says, “but it looked like you were about to . . . fall.”

“Not today,” Émile jokes, but he is about to fall — in love. As romantic settings go, you can hardly beat floating above Paris in a balloon.

Still, this will not be an easy flight for Émile, nor for the Scottish woman who has reached out to him. She’s Mrs. Cait Wallace: 31 and widowed. After sliding perilously close to poverty, she has taken a job as a chaperone. Her charges are Alice and Jamie, the adult wards of their wealthy Glasgow uncle, who has sent them on a grand tour of Europe.

Colin is a talented literary engineer herself, even if she’s working with some rusty conceits. Émile

and Cait are both lonely adults, barred by their own versions of responsibility from pursuing happiness. They are as right for each other as any of the perfectly matched parts forged for the Eiffel Tower, but they will be the last to admit that. While Émile carries on a joyless affair with a beautiful opium addict, he knows he must find a young woman to satisfy his dying mother’s hopes for a house full of children. Cait, meanwhile, is so haunted by her failed marriage that she feels “stuck between floors, between rooms, between youth and old age, a person without status, without a husband, without a future. Was this living or merely waiting for the inevitable?” She looks forward only to “a life of polishing pews and arranging flowers, of prudence and parsimony.”

We never get to see just how well Cait could polish a pew, but she proves a rather incompetent chaperone, which supplies most of the story’s humor and calamity. Alice is pretty and Jamie is good-looking, and, naive as they are, they’re both crafty about slipping away to pursue their respective libidinous adventures in the City of Love.

If you have never read a novel by Jane Austen or watched a costume drama on BBC, “To Capture What We Cannot Keep” will provide a string of shocking plot twists. But it’s a shame the story is not more ambitious. The larger problem is a certain structural timidity that assures us early on that these dear characters are always protected no matter what challenges they may face. That’s matched by a stylistic slackness that keeps the novel from offering much beyond its pleasant plot. At the climactic moment, for instance, Cait sighs and thinks, “Rules were made to be broken, weren’t they?” — all part of a steady drizzle of cliches.

The Eiffel Tower may have ripped through the science and aesthetics of its era, but this novel about it feels small and safe. n Charles is the editor of Book World.

T TO CAPTURE WHAT WE CANNOT KEEP

By Beatrice Colin Flatiron. 289 pp. $25.99

HANK The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams

By Mark Ribowsky Liveright. 472 pp. $29.95

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REVIEWED BY

D AVID K IRBY

he soldier must have thought he was dreaming.

There he was, driving down a pitch-black road outside Shreveport, La., in the early hours of Oct. 18, 1952, when he saw a figure in a hat, boots and white suit. It was Hank Williams, out of gas and hitchhiking to the nearest filling station. Williams was at the height of his fame, but at that moment, he was like any other chump who forget to check the gauge before heading out into the darkness. He had also just gotten married; he and his latest woke up a justice of the peace who performed the ceremony at 1 a.m., even though the bride’s previous marriage wouldn’t be dissolved until 10 days later. And Williams was less than three months away from his death by heart attack in the darkness, on another country road, in another car. He was 29 years old.

Except musically, almost every choice he made was wrong, as Mark Ribowsky shows in “Hank,” a compassionate yet clear-eyed study of the iconic country star.

Williams didn’t always know where he was or what he was doing, but he did it so well that he continues to drift through our culture like a ghost, a raggedy, knee-walking drunk who sang like an angel when he was sober enough to stand in front of a mic, which was less and less often. He was the last person on Earth you’d want for a brotherin-law, and he might have worn us out and allowed us to forget him if only he had lived longer.

But there was never much chance of that. One of the musicians who played with him in the early days said, “Hank’s drinking problem was getting worse,” and Hank was only 17 at the time. Not much later, he was kicked off a regular radio gig when he showed up continually drunk for the show’s 6 a.m. start. Later, he added Nembutal and Demerol to the mix, alternating downers to numb himself with uppers so he could perform.

From childhood on, Hank suffered

terribly from back pain, but it wasn’t until he was an adult that he was diagnosed with spina bifida, a condition not many rural Alabama doctors knew about back then.

Like many a roots musician, Williams got his start singing in church as a child. In the early days of country music and the blues, the distinction between the two genres wasn’t as hard and fast as it is now, and Williams learned from performers as different as Rufus Payne, who played guitar in the streets of Montgomery for spare change, and Jimmie “the Singing Brakeman” Rodgers, a country star known for his yodeling.

Hank’s list of hits is astonishing, given his short life. It includes foot-stompers such as “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” and come-toJesus rousers such as “I Saw the Light,” as well as what just might be the saddest song in the world, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” As a songwriter, Hank always seemed to be on duty. After yet another monumental spat with his first wife, Audrey, Hank said, “She’s got the coldest heart I’ve ever seen,” and then sat down and wrote “Cold, Cold Heart,” which charted at No. 1 on the 1951 Billboard Hot Country Singles list.

Perhaps because he was always composing in his head, Hank struck others as distant. People who worked with him found him impossible to know. And in one of her more charitable moods, Audrey recalls him sitting by himself in clubs and arenas “like a little boy lost.”

As figures such as Poe, Melville, Kerouac and Springsteen have shown, there’s a shadowy restlessness to American culture, a yen to go where nobody is quite sure where you are, especially yourself.

Hank Williams was a tortured poet who died before most Americans today were born, but he’ll outlive us all. n Kirby is the author of “Crossroad: Artist, Audience, and the Making of American Music.”

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

This war was settled long ago. Christmas won.

RAY CAVANAUGH is a freelance writer from Boston.

“ ‘Merry Christmas’ — because Donald Trump is now the president, you can say it again.”

That’s how former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski teed it up for Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. Just a year ago, then-candidate Donald Trump told supporters, “If I become president, we’re all going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again, that I can tell you.” The election, read by these lights, looks like a salvo in the now decades-long, Bill O’Reilly-inspired contretemps known as the War on Christmas. And now we’re firmly in that time of year when cable talking heads flip out and blame the forces of politically correct secularism for Target cashiers who greet us with “Happy Holidays” and Starbucks baristas who pour peppermint lattes into agnostic red paper cups.

The catch: There already was a war on Christmas in the United States. It happened centuries ago, and Christmas won decisively.

There was a time when Christmas faced far more opposition than it ever could now, even in O’Reilly’s wildest nightmares. For a good chunk of the 17th century, Christmas was flatly outlawed in a number of places in Puritan America — not exactly a hotbed of secular political correctness that might draw Trump’s scorn.

Many Puritans contended that Christmas lacked biblical justification, since the Bible makes no explicit reference to Dec. 25. They viewed celebrations as the sort of pageantry and idolatry endorsed by “papists” (a derogatory term for Catholics, whom they reviled).

They looked askance at the holiday because it meant, well, mischief. While some regarded Christmas as a time of religious devotion, Steven Nissenbaum argues in “The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday” that “such people were always in the minority,”

describing Dec. 25 as an oftendisorderly affair of binge-eating, binge-drinking, parading and brawling. Gender and class roles were toppled, as the lowestranking members in the social hierarchy imitated gentlemen (competing for the distinction of “Lord of Misrule”); men dressing and acting like women, and viceversa, as they literally exchanged clothes, among other things.

All this prompted Puritans — who had scant use for the day’s licentiousness — to refer to Christmas as “Foolstide.” The pilgrims who came here in 1620 spent their first Dec. 25 doing construction. But the next Dec. 25, when William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, saw newcomers playing stool-ball (an early version of baseball), “he broke up their amusements and declared it was against his conscience that they should play while others worked.”

The no-nonsense Gov. Bradford, who died in 1657, would’ve been gratified that two years later, in 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony banned Christmas celebrations.

Even taking the day off was made

STEPHEN BRASHEAR/GETTY IMAGES

Starbucks, whose chief executive Howard Schultz is seen in March, has often been a player in the supposed “War on Christmas.”

illegal, unless of course it was a Sunday.

Not so, of course, in other areas of the New World, where Christmas cheer remained very much alive. A good deal of mirth, even celebratory gunfire, was made in parts of the South. But in much of colonial America, Christmas was Scrooged.

Even when the Massachusetts law forbidding Christmas was repealed in 1681, the day remained an object of contempt, and its celebration taboo. And a few decades later, a Boston church had its windows smashed — for celebrating Christmas.

Anti-Christmas sentiment wasn’t exclusive to Puritans.

Bruce David Forbes’s book “Christmas: A Candid History” points out how, at various times, Congregationalists, Methodists and Quakers, among others, joined in “de-emphasizing or eliminating the observance of Christmas.” Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies denounced it as a day of “sinning, sexuality, luxury, and various forms of extravagance, as though men were not celebrating the birth of the holy Jesus, but of Venus, or Bacchus, whose most sacred rites were mysteries of iniquity and debauchery.”

Though legal restrictions would relax, the negative attitude toward Christmas was sustained far beyond the Mayflower generation. Even in the early 19th century, Christmas often went

neglected by the newspapers, and was a day of significance only for certain slices of the population.

And in no state did Christmas become an official holiday until the 1830s.

However, the mid-1800s saw a Christmas renaissance. The groups which had sought to banish or suppress Christmas began modifying their positions.

No longer was it cool to be a Scrooge (a newly infamous character thanks to Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella, “A Christmas Carol,” which reinforced the idea of Christmas as a time of charity).

After the Civil War, Christmas celebrations were one way the country began to embrace a renewed national unity. Finally, in 1870, Christmas became a federal holiday.

In the original War on Christmas, it was the celebrating itself that was seen as the cultural breakdown. In the war Lewandowski imagines — and I do mean imagines — his side is all that stands between us and the breakdown of our traditions and values. Except there’s never been a time in our lives devoid of Christmas shopping, music, trees, cards or greetings. The First Amendment guarantees our right to observe it. And our right, if we choose, not to. We’ve never not been free to say “Merry Christmas,” and saying “Happy Holidays” at the mall won’t change that. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

What backyard birds can tell us DAVID HOLAHAN is a writer living in East Haddam, Conn.

I love to watch the birds, but some days I despair. After meandering for an hour about fields, streams and forests, I often see nothing — or the equivalent: only juncos, aptly named, or common sparrows.

I try to comfort myself with other natural sights and sounds, but my mind won’t have it. Where are the avian rock stars? Like those winsome warblers? Whither the preposterous pileated woodpecker (the real Woody Woodpecker)? If a scarlet tanager makes a cameo once a year, one is supposed to be grateful.

But I am not. Most birders are not. We want action, color and sweet melodies. Worst of all, sometimes delightful species are about, but they won’t stay put for a positive ID, much less a leisurely look. The very instant binoculars focus on them they are gone, higher in the canopy or behind a leafy branch. They must think I’m going to bake them in a pie.

Enter the golden-crowned kinglet, a plump little royal that is blissfully indifferent to the presence of hoi polloi. Kinglets will pose in plain view, sometimes even flitting closer to their stalkers. Birds that are this accommodating almost always are the drab ones, or the usual suspects, your chickadees and titmice.

The kinglet, however, boasts a rich palette of orange, yellow,

olive, white, black and gray, all artfully combined in a unique design that makes identification a breeze. One once landed in a bush within arm’s reach, cocked its colorful crown and stared — as if it was adding me to its life list of curiosities.

Kinglets are not common here in southeastern Connecticut, and that’s a big part of their appeal.

Also appealing is their eminent inclusivity; they don’t seem to care whom they hang out with, often flocking with other species.

If spying a kinglet or some other scintillating songbird makes for a successful walk, does that mean uneventful sorties are a bust? Now that I am retired, I have more time not only to ramble but also to ponder such riddles.

Why is it, for example, that I don’t note in my journal when I

see bluebirds, but only magnolia warblers, indigo buntings and such glitterati? In fact, bluebirds are quite fetching, but they also are common hereabout. There’s the rub. They used to be less so, and when I saw my first one years ago, I was smitten. Now we’re like old married people, barely taking note of each other as we go about our business.

In full mating plumage, male bluebirds are a brilliant azure blue about the head and back and brick red on the chest, with a white belly. The females are duller, and juveniles have a mottled look. They will sit on fence posts for minutes at a time, like practiced models. I vow to pay more attention to bluebirds in the future.

ORLIN WAGNER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A house wren brings nesting material to a birdhouse in Lawrence, Kan., in May.

Birdwatching is getting even harder because there are fewer birds every year. Two recent studies documented the decline: One, based on the annual Christmas count, reported that wintering North American birds are down by one third since 1966; the other predicts that unless conservation action is taken, more than a third of North American bird species are at risk of extinction.

We take the environment for granted, assuming it will take care of itself and will always be there for us. We rarely stop and admire the bluebirds, even if we are out looking for birds. We just experienced two years of extreme electioneering during which global warming barely came up.

One doesn’t have to have a position on climate change to appreciate that our species is having a dramatic impact on the environment, as well as on fellow travelers aboard spaceship Earth.

It isn’t just the iconic animals of Africa that are in trouble.

Even if we can summon the will to avert what virtually every scientist warns will be catastrophic warming, we nonetheless are leaving a muchdiminished place for our children and grandchildren to inhabit, not to mention kinglets.

Why would we do that? n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

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OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

Repeal and replace — responsibly MARILYN TAVENNER is president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national trade association representing the health-insurance community.

For all the uncertainty created by November’s elections, one thing is clear: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is about to undergo significant changes.

It is also clear that certain parts of the ACA have not worked as well as intended, particularly for individuals who buy health insurance on their own. As the new administration and lawmakers develop specific proposals to repeal and transition, it is imperative that they understand: Changes can either begin a stable transition to a better approach, or they can bring about even more uncertainty and instability.

Some lawmakers have talked about immediate repeal and waiting years to replace. Others have talked about a stable, secure transition to a workable replacement. That’s what will work for the American people. As a longtime health-care expert and the leader of a group that represents the nation’s health insurers, let me suggest some straightforward steps that can make this possible.

First, the foundation of effective insurance markets is continuous coverage for everyone — those who utilize insurance to obtain quality care and those who are healthy but have insurance to protect them in case they get sick.

Both types of consumers must be insured for coverage to remain affordable.

The individual mandate,

requiring everyone to have insurance, will likely be removed.

However, to continue the reforms that people want — such as making certain that those with preexisting health conditions can obtain insurance at an affordable price — we need to find alternative ways for people to get and stay covered.

Here’s why: If the majority of individuals purchasing insurance are those who require immediate medical care or have high-cost medical needs, that will undoubtedly raise costs and reduce choices. While there is no single “silver bullet” to ensure that people get and stay covered, we should use proven solutions from Medicare and private-sector employers, such as waiting periods or penalties for those who have had a break in coverage.

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY GARY MCCOY

Such continuous coverage incentives could go a long way to avoiding even higher premiums and fewer choices for everyone.

Second, it will be important for Congress and the new administration to send strong signals that they are committed to market stability in 2017 and 2018. Right now, millions of Americans are choosing a private plan for next year — and millions more will be covered by Medicaid.

The best approach to keep insurance affordable and markets stable would be to fund temporary, transitional programs. These would include maintaining subsidies for lowand moderate-income individuals to purchase insurance and financial help for plans that enroll high-cost individuals, through at least Jan. 1, 2019.

There is no question that this funding is contentious. But it is essential to deliver stable plan options and predictable premiums until a replacement plan can be designed, developed and deployed. It can help build an effective bridge from repeal to replace — without jeopardizing care and coverage for millions of Americans.

Third, Congress could reduce health-care costs for millions of Americans by eliminating the health-insurance tax on insurers.

The Affordable Care Act taxes health-insurance premiums by more than $100 billion over 10 years, raising costs for seniors on Medicare, state Medicaid programs, small businesses and hardworking families struggling to make ends meet. Eliminating this tax — which has already been suspended for 2017 — will lower premiums that millions of families and businesses pay.

Finally, the new administration can take immediate action to bring down costs for consumers by implementing effective verification of individuals’ eligibility before they enroll in an insurance plan. This would help prevent people from waiting to sign up for coverage until they’re sick, then dropping it when they’re better — which raises costs for everyone.

Americans deserve affordable coverage that works. The individual insurance market was a challenge before the ACA and continues to be one today.

Whether citizens are covered through their employer or on their own, through Medicare or Medicaid, our commitment is to find solutions that deliver shortterm stability and long-term improvement. Both are essential if repeal and replace is going to work. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The fall of Rome BY

N ATHAN P ILKINGTON

The rise of Donald Trump heralds the decline of the American idea, according to some of his critics, who’ve taken the opportunity to compare this moment to the fall of Rome’s republic in 31 B.C. or its empire in the 5th century A.D. These requiems leave a false impres­ sion of Roman antiquity and the causes of its greatest crises.

MYTH NO. 1 America is going through what republican Rome did.

These comparisons are common. Former Supreme Court justice David Souter has said that embracing an all-powerful figure who promises to solve the nation’s problems is “how the Roman republic fell.” Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, ended democracy “because he promised that he would solve problems that were not being solved,” Souter said in the 2012 quote, which resurfaced during this fall’s campaign.

But such comparisons are light on scholarship. Most experts believe there is little to compare.

Yes, the United States has seen a rise in populism, but it hasn’t experienced a microgram of the violence that accompanied the fall of the Roman republic. The end came only after numerous civil wars over offices and honor, decades of gang violence in the capital, and waves of sanctioned political murder. By that measure, Trump is no Caesar.

MYTH NO. 2 The republic collapsed because of class conflict.

The struggle between patricians and plebeians took place more than 250 years before the republic’s collapse. During an early republican period known to historians as the Conflict of the Orders, between 494 and 287 B.C., plebeians won the right to have their own magistrates — the tribunes — and to hold their own assembly to make laws for the entire Roman state. Patricians were excluded from this assembly but bound by its laws. Plebeians also gained election to the

consulship, the highest office in Rome. After 366 B.C., normally one of the two consuls was a plebeian.

Patricians and plebeians were not “classes” in the modern sense of the term. According to Roman myth, the patricians were descended from the original senators appointed by Rome’s founder, Romulus, to assist him in decision-making. Patrician status was inherited, and plebeians made up the rest of society. After the Conflict of the Orders, many plebeians became wealthy and powerful, while certain patrician families saw their fortunes decline.

MYTH NO. 3 The empire collapsed because of widespread lead poisoning.

The argument is predicated on the belief that most Romans used lead pipes to deliver water, lead cauldrons to boil wine, lead as a sweetener and lead in makeup.

But the majority of Romans were rural farmers who lived at or barely above subsistence levels; they drank from local or personal wells and lacked the means to regularly indulge in makeup and sweetened wine.

Even if the city of Rome did have fairly high levels of lead in its public water system, which some recent skeletal evidence may support, it represented only onesixtieth of the population of the empire. Lead contamination was never widespread enough to cause fertility problems, mass poisoning or other debilitating illnesses on a sufficient scale to diminish the Roman population and leave it powerless against invading armies.

ALESSANDRA TARANTINO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Remnants of ancient Rome on the city’s Palatine Hill. Is the United States facing the same kind of decline and fall? Scholars say no.

MYTH NO. 4 The empire collapsed because of barbarian invasions.

Rome didn’t succumb to a sudden influx of barbarians at the gate. Nor were Goths or other Germanic peoples “barbarian” in the modern sense of the term.

They had regularly interacted with the Roman Empire for 200 years and, in many cases, were educated, trained and employed inside its perimeters before they succeeded in destroying imperial authority in Italy, France, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa during the 5th century. At various times over these two centuries, the tribes served in Roman armies.

Alaric, who famously led the Visigothic migration through the empire to the gates of Rome (A.D. 395-410), started his military career commanding Gothic troops serving in the Roman army.

MYTH NO. 5 The empire collapsed because of Christianity.

In his monumental study “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Edward Gibbon famously proposed that Christianity sparked a decrease in civic duty and a

corresponding unwillingness to sacrifice for the empire in its period of greatest stress, ultimately leading (along with barbarian invasions) to its collapse.

But no modern scholar believes Gibbon’s thesis. A Christian Roman Empire in the east survived the Germanic migration and lived on as the Byzantine Empire for nearly another millennium. Gibbon was also aware of the fact that the Goths were Christian, but he chose to ignore this when assailing the Roman Empire for its adherence to a new faith. All parties at the end of the Roman Empire were Christian.

Thanks to Peter Brown’s magnificent work “The World of Late Antiquity,” most scholars now consider the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to be part of a larger process of transformation, not a decline and fall. Rome had become peripheral to the empire it created, whose center of political and economic life shifted to Constantinople, modern Istanbul, over the course of the 4th century. n Pilkington is a lecturer in the department of history at Columbia University.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2016

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