Underground Philadelphia: Frank Gehry

Philadelphia Art Museum selects Gehry to design gallery space

Associated Press | October 19, 2006

PHILADELPHIA One of the world’s boldest architects, Frank O. Gehry, has been selected to design a large underground gallery space for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gehry is famous for dramatic sculptural buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall he completed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2002. This $500 million (€398 million) expansion will be taking place 30 feet (9 meters) below the Philadelphia museum’s east plaza and within its monumental stone base, not so adaptable to Gehry’s use of swirling forms or titanium-clad fins, but The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday that he relished an underground challenge. Gehry told the newspaper in a telephone interview that his friend Gail Harrity, who oversaw construction of the Guggenheim unit in Bilbao, Spain, and is now chief operating officer of the Philadelphia museum, had asked if he would be interested in a subterranean venture. “I said, ‘Yes. It would be great to try to make beautiful music with a building with no exterior,’” Gehry said. “I love the idea of trying to carve into the ground.” The museum’s plan calls for adding 80,000 square feet (7,200 square meters) of galleries, mainly to house large contemporary sculpture, Asian art, and special exhibits. Gehry said he envisions punching holes through museum floors to create high vertical spaces. Museum Director Anne d’Harnoncourt said the museum board considered more than 20 renowned architects, and chose Gehry because of his skill in sculpting display space and bringing natural light into interiors.

The new Barajas Airport: Madrid

 

With Wavy Airport, Rogers Merits Stirling Prize

Bloomberg News | Colin Amery

Oct. 18 – What is it about Madrid’s airport that makes it so special? How has it become the only airport in the world to win the coveted Stirling Prize for its U.K. architects, Richard Rogers Partnership?

Now that the fuss and excitement of the jury’s deliberations and the partying in London’s trendy Roundhouse is over, it is worth looking hard at Rogers’s triumph. There is no doubt that he deserved the prize. He actually had two buildings in the short list — the Spanish airport and the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff.

The airport is way ahead as a stylish and adventurous concept; the Welsh Assembly is good yet more routine. Rogers is not just an architect. Tony Blair made him a Labour life peer and he is politically active. He wrote a White Paper for the U.K. government in 2000 grandly entitled “Towards an Urban Renaissance.”

Some of the gloss on this document was dimmed by the opening that year of the Millennium Dome, which Rogers designed and was a failure both as a building and as an event.

Rogers has always been controversial. He trained at the Architectural Association in London and at the Yale School of Architecture, graduating in 1962. Yale was where he met Norman Foster and after returning to Britain he set up practice as Team Four, with Foster and their wives, both of them architects too.

This firm lasted a while, but Rogers’s big break was winning the international competition with a fellow Italian — Rogers was born in Florence in 1933 of Anglo-Italian parentage.

Exposed Innards

That Italian was Renzo Piano, and together they designed the Pompidou Center in Paris that established the style in which the building’s service ducts and stairs and escalators were exposed on the outside of the building. This approach reaches its apotheosis in London’s Lloyd’s Building which was completed in 1984. Some of Rogers’s crueler critics dubbed the style “Bowelism” as it exposed a building’s inner workings.

It also exposed the vast difference between Rogers and his former partner. Foster’s designs are infinitely more refined and cool than the edgy and expressionist works of Rogers. The structure of a Rogers building is usually visible and often emphasized. There is an edginess, almost a flaunting of elements that is very much of our time.

It is a relief that Rogers’s buildings are not too smooth. They have a kind of modern earthiness, something that you can also experience in his wife Ruth Rogers’s new-style Italian cooking at London’s River Cafe. It must be the Italian in him.

`Spectacular Spaces’

Madrid’s Barajas Airport was described by Rogers at the prize giving as “a hymn to travel, to the excitement of travel.” His aim had been to create a great wave of a roof and wherever possible bring daylight into the public spaces. It is the roof that excited the jury which also praised “the sheer scale and the spectacular spaces and also the straightforward linear diagram of the plan.”

The architect wanted spaces uncluttered by shops, stairs and escalators and for passengers in the new terminal to feel “stress free.” This is achieved by the lovely roof that swoops above you and is lined with beautiful bamboo and frequently punctuated with oval skylights.

Although the building is long — one kilometer (some three- quarters of a mile) — and large — one million square meters (11 million square feet) — the spaces are subtly divided by elements of elegant steel structure that are painted in a graduated color scheme to avoid dull uniformity.

Airports are places you go through. They need to be simple to understand so that your route to the plane is clear and the collection of your luggage is simple. It is not the architect’s fault that planes and airports are getting larger and larger. What Rogers has achieved at this Madrid terminal is clarity and elegance and structural vigor.

Heathrow’s Wave

He has applied a similar approach to London’s Heathrow Terminal Five, which will open its first phase in 2008. The single-wave roof is an engineering triumph and we can’t blame Rogers for the doubling of road traffic to and from Heathrow that the increase in passengers will cause.

At least, he will have given us an attractive place to wait. The long vistas of the Barajas Terminal are memorable and the quality of light is superb. Rogers and his Spanish partners, Lamela Studios, have helped airport design really take off.

R W Apple 1934 – 2006: Profile

Calvin Trillin | New Yorker | 2003 

There is a consensus in the trade, I am pleased to report, that Johnny Apple—R. W. Apple, Jr., of the New York Times—is a lot easier to take now than he once was. Even Apple believes that. When I asked him not long ago about the paragraph in Gay Talese’s 1969 book on the Times, “The Kingdom and the Power,” which presents him as a brash young eager beaver, he said it was, alas, “quite an accurate portrait,” although he doesn’t recall boasting in the newsroom that while covering the war in Vietnam he had personally killed a few Vietcong—the remark that, in Talese’s account, led an older reporter to say, “Women and children, I presume.” In speaking of those early days, Apple said, “I was desperate to prove myself.”

You could argue, I suppose, that, in the words of a longtime colleague, “he doesn’t have to argue the case anymore.” In a forty-year career with the newspaper, he has been a political reporter whose stories at times seemed to set the agenda for a Presidential campaign; a war reporter who led the Times coverage in Vietnam for two years in the late sixties, and its coverage of the Gulf War a quarter of a century later; a foreign correspondent who has been in a hundred and nine countries (yes, he keeps a tally); the newspaper’s premier writer of analytical pieces from Washington; and, these days, a wide-ranging writer on culture and travel and, especially, food. Of course, it’s always possible that Apple’s accomplishments are not, in fact, the principal source of his mellowing. There are any number of other theories about what might account for descriptions of the mature Apple that actually employ the word “endearing”—theories that include the possibility that we’ve simply grown used to him. “It’s like having a big old Labrador dog,” Jim Wooten, of ABC, said recently of Apple. “He knocks over the lamp with his tail. He slobbers on everything. But you still love him.”

It is certainly true that Apple, at sixty-eight, could hardly be described as having shyly withdrawn from the spotlight. In a trade whose flamboyant characters are increasingly in short supply, he is still so widely discussed among reporters that Apple stories constitute a subgenre of the journalistic anecdote. Apple stories often portray R. W. Apple, Jr., checking into a hotel so staggeringly expensive that no other reporter would dare mention it on his expense account, or confidently knocking out a complicated lead story at a political convention as the deadline or the dinner hour approaches, or telling a sommelier that the wine won’t do (even if the sommelier has brought out the most distinguished bottle in that part of Alabama), or pontificating on architecture or history or opera or soccer or horticulture. He still travels grandly and eats prodigiously. In Apple stories that take place in restaurants or hotels or even newsrooms, the verb used to describe his manner of entry is normally “swept in.”

Although people often find him charming, he is still capable of reducing a news clerk or a waiter or a campaign travel coördinator to tears now and then—like an ogre past his scariest days who just wants to keep his hand in. All in all, I can imagine that people who meet R. W. Apple, Jr., for the first time in his maturity might assume that some time-travel production of “The Man Who Came to Dinner” had managed to land Sir John Falstaff for the role of Sheridan Whiteside.

Physically, Apple is more noticeable than ever. He has a round face and a pug nose that give him a rather youthful appearance; a former colleague once said that when Apple flashes his characteristic look of triumph he resembles “a very big four-year-old.” His form reflects the eating habits of someone who has been called Three Lunches Apple, a nickname he likes. Andrew Rosenthal, now the deputy editorial-page editor of the Times, once said that Johnny Apple had the best mind and the worst body in American journalism. Apple famously sees to his early-morning tasks—sending off a flurry of e-mails, perusing his investments, absorbing the newspapers—while encased in one of the brightly striped nightshirts made for him by Harvie & Hudson, of Jermyn Street, the same firm that makes his dress shirts, so that a house guest not yet fully recovered from a late night at the Apple table can be startled by the impression that a particularly festive party tent has somehow found its way indoors.

Apple’s method of locomotion—which he accomplishes in short, almost dainty steps—has some resemblance to a man carefully steering a large stomach down a narrow path that is being cleared at that very moment by native bearers; it is easily mistaken for a swagger. He speaks with as much authority as he ever did, whether the conversation is on the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles or on which three zinfandels are the zinfandels worth drinking. To characterize the great man’s speaking style, collectors of Apple stories often use the phrase “holding forth,” although he is also, truth be told, someone who takes in just about everything everyone else in the conversation says and files it away in what Morley Safer, of CBS, who has been a friend of Apple’s since they were in Vietnam together, calls “that Palm Pilot of a brain he has.” On the whole, what Apple says while holding forth is considered by his friends worth listening to. The way Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, puts it is “I’d like to hear Apple on almost any subject, reserving the right to tell him he’s full of shit.”

During Apple’s early days on the paper, he was resented by his colleagues for getting plum assignments without going through the seven levels of purgatory then expected of new boys at the Times. To some people in the newsroom, his enthusiasm seemed indistinguishable from buttering up superiors. It didn’t help that Apple’s contemporaries on the paper were under the impression that he was making more money than they were. “Apple bragged he was being paid fifty dollars more than he actually was, which would have made him the highest-salaried reporter in the city room, except for Homer Bigart,” Arthur Gelb, then the deputy metropolitan editor, writes in his forthcoming memoir, “City Room.” (As Apple remembers it, he did get paid more than the others, the Times having matched his salary when he came over from NBC, and word spread through an overheard telephone conversation.) It probably also didn’t help that Apple seemed not to notice the effect that all of this was having on his colleagues. “A cape buffalo is what a cape buffalo is,” Jim Wooten told me, at which point I limited him to two animal images in discussing Apple. “It rambles through the brush. It eats what it wants to eat. It does whatever it wants to do, without knowing how much other animals resent it.”

Early on, Apple was jumped over more senior reporters to become the Times bureau chief in Albany. “John had developed skills that none of us yet had,” I was told by Sydney Schanberg, who was in the bureau, but “he needed training in socialization issues.” One of the other reporters in the bureau was Doug Robinson, who became the city editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Robinson, now retired, would not be thought of as someone who always took a completely respectful view of people he worked for, having got into the habit at one point in his Times career of calling the executive editor a “borderline psychotic” and describing the managing editor, the second-in-command, as “a man who couldn’t find kitty litter in a cat box.” In Albany, Robinson recalls, Johnny Apple was resented partly for an air of superiority that was galling to the other reporters, “particularly when they realized, upon sober reflection, that he was superior. That was the part that was the hardest to take—that he was so damn good.”

Robinson was the protagonist of what I’m tempted to call the authorized version of the most often told Apple story: Statehouse reporters who hung out at a local bar, having decided that their conversation was overly dominated by complaints about Johnny Apple, agreed that anyone who mentioned Apple’s name would have to put a quarter in a drink fund—an agreement that made cocktail hour more soothing until, as Robinson recalled recently, “I came in, and I said, ‘That son of a bitch! He’s done it again!’ And I pulled out a whole fistful of quarters, laid them on the table, and excoriated Apple for fifteen minutes.”

Apple stories often come in multiple versions, and a lot of tales that may not be true have attached themselves to him, in the way that a lot of quotes have attached themselves to, say, Dorothy Parker or Yogi Berra. Correcting some of them recently, Apple said that it’s not true that he conspired on his first honeymoon to book a cabin on a ship to Naples next to the cabin of the then publisher, Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger (Apple insists that the booking was coincidental). He says he never owned part of a British football team and never chartered a plane to catch up with a political campaign after oversleeping, although he has chartered some planes in his time. It is not true that he once put in for a fur coat on an expense account from Iceland, or maybe Greenland, and, having had that item rejected, filed expenses for the same total again without mentioning the coat and attached a note saying, “Find it.” (That’s an old chestnut told about any number of foreign correspondents; Apple’s coat was down, was bought in Finland, and was paid for by the Times.) It is not true that in the most recent political convention in Los Angeles he stayed in a suite at the Bel-Air while just about everyone else from the Times was at a charmless commercial hotel; he says that the room he stayed in at the Bel-Air, being decently commodious, may simply have given the impression of being a suite.

Apple now tells Apple stories on himself. In a speech at the Century Club not long ago, he said that when he arrived at Princeton he decided it might be advantageous to claim a home town with a bit more cachet than Akron (“just till I got my feet on the ground”), and chose one he’d seen mentioned in the golf results as the home of the Winged Foot Golf Club. Unfortunately, he had never heard the name of the place pronounced, and was thus able to set off great hilarity among a group of Eastern-boarding-school graduates—the sort that some Midwestern high-school boys at Princeton then referred to as Tweedy Shitballs—by saying that he was from “Mamma-ronn-nick.”

He knows Apple stories about his girth and Apple stories about his tendency to hold forth—a state that Tom Brokaw has referred to as being “in full Apple.” He loves the story about a dinner-table conversation early in his experience as a stepfather. His first marriage had broken up in the seventies, in Washington, when he fell in love with Betsey Brown, a charming woman who speaks in the sort of plummy accent heard among Richmond débutantes discussing cocktail napkins but happens to be a Bryn Mawr graduate who reads more newspapers than Apple does. She was also married, and she had two children. (“Within a limited social circle in Washington,” Apple now says, “I think it would be fair to say that it was a brief but fairly vivid scandal.”)

A trip to Europe had not completely melted the hearts of the children, John and Catherine Brown, who were unaccustomed to being herded through quite that many cathedrals that intently by someone with that much information at his fingertips and that many reference books in his satchel. Then, at dinner one evening, an American Indian design on Betsey’s dress inspired the assigning of Indian names, until everyone had one but R. W. Apple, Jr. “That’s easy,” John Brown, who was then about nine, finally said. “You’re Sitting Bullshit.” As Catherine tells the story, there was a moment of shocked silence, and then “Johnny gave one of his full-body laughs.” After that, the children felt free to name Apple’s stomach—Eugene, and, eventually, Eugene Maximus.

In support of the notion that Apple is something like a lovable old Labrador, it should be said that many Apple stories portray him as enormously generous—generous with his hospitality and generous with the telephone numbers of his sources and generous with his good offices at the Times for someone he thinks should work there and generous with his restaurant recommendations (“The only place in Scotland to have Scottish beef is in Linlithgow, and here’s the name of the owner . . .”). The political-campaign reporters who rode one bus or another with him—people like Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, and Curtis Wilkie, of the Boston Globe, and Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, of the Baltimore Sun—liked to play jokes on him and liked to complain about him, but, as Germond said recently, “Most of us had an affection for John, even when he was at his most bumptious.”

A Times contemporary of Apple’s has pointed out that the Apple stories that “make you shudder” tend to date back to the sixties. A number of them were collected in “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s book on the reporters covering the 1972 Presidential campaign—a book that served for years as the standard text on R. W. Apple, Jr. “Read one way, the book is immensely flattering to me,” Apple told me. “Read another way, it basically says I’m an asshole.” The book angered Apple—although one Apple-mellowing theory holds that it did him the favor of providing the cape buffalo a glimpse of how some of the other animals might view him.

What was flattering to Apple in “The Boys on the Bus” was, by and large, its discussion of his competence as a reporter. A McGovern worker was quoted describing his first glimpse of how the national press operates: “Johnny Apple of the New York Times sat in a corner and everyone peered over his shoulder to find out what he was writing.” Apple’s competitors give him mixed reviews on the 1972 campaign—some of them believe he became too attached to the string of endorsements that Edmund Muskie was accumulating—but virtually all of them say, without being asked, that his campaign coverage four years later was worthy of a Pulitzer, a prize he has never won. David Broder, of the Washington Post, told me that in 1976 Apple “damn near invented the Iowa caucuses” as a serious element of the Presidential campaign—it was Apple who first spotted the potential strength of Jimmy Carter—and after that, as Curtis Wilkie has put it, “he ran rings around everyone.”

What Crouse referred to as Apple’s “braggadocio, his grandstanding, his mammoth ego” dominated the portrait in “The Boys on the Bus.” An account of Apple’s first meeting with David Halberstam is fairly typical of Crouse’s Apple stories. It describes Apple sauntering over to Halberstam’s desk to inform him, at some length, that at a party the previous evening—a party that included some Sulzberger cousins and a Times vice-president—Halberstam’s name had been mentioned quite favorably. Finally, Crouse wrote, “Halberstam said his first words to Johnny Apple: ‘Fuck off, kid!’ “

Looking back, Halberstam says of Apple’s behavior in those early days, “When it was egregious, which was often, it was never out of malice.” Halberstam believes that young reporters at the Times—most of them edgy and competitive and still not certain that they deserved to be where they seemed to have fetched up—found Apple hard to take partly because of “a fear that he symbolized your own lesser self.” That’s not far from the notion that Apple differed from his contemporaries at the Times not so much in what he was like as in the fact that he let it show—or, in Crouse’s shrewd phrase, that he stuck out “in a business populated largely by shy egomaniacs.” In Halberstam’s view, “It would be interesting to know what went on in Akron to produce this fearful insecurity—the ego, the unfinished quality that made him even worse than the rest of us.”

Unable to match his father’s athletic exploits, the younger Apple became a voracious consumer of information about sports and, eventually, the sports editor of the newspaper at Western Reserve Academy—an institution that reminds some people of a small New England boarding school in a small New England town, although the town, Hudson, is about halfway between Akron and Cleveland. By the time he got to Princeton and entered what was then called the “heeling competition” required of those who wanted to work on the Princetonian, his writing was already fluid enough to astonish his classmates—a fact he credits partly to the stern efforts of an English teacher at Reserve named Franklyn S. (Jiggs) Reardon, who, in class and on the student newspaper, demanded clear and concise prose. Young Apple had the nearly maniacal energy that eventually resulted in the back-to-back interviews and blizzard of telephone calls that characterized his political reporting. He was also displaying the sort of intense curiosity that can seem to suck all the information out of the room, although the focus of his curiosity was not always on the courses he had signed up to take.

At the time, the Princetonian had what amounted to a board of advisory grownups, and the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal—Barney Kilgore, who happened to live in Princeton—was among its members. Once Apple was informed that he would not be continuing at the university, Kilgore arranged for him to work at the Journal, and he eventually got his degree from the Columbia School of General Studies. The Journal employment lasted until there was a lengthy meeting to discuss why other bureaus were getting a certain type of piece in the paper so much more often than the New York bureau, and young Johnny Apple finally said, “Maybe they don’t have to spend their time in chickenshit meetings like this.”

At least that’s Apple’s story. I’m not sure I’d take it literally. Not that Apple is one of those reporters, much written about of late, whose copy has often been treated with some suspicion by their colleagues. (Some time before the revelations last spring that ended the editorship of Howell Raines and resulted in the departure of Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg, Apple says, he warned Raines that Bragg was such a reporter.) One foreign correspondent who often covered the same stories as Apple told me, “He’s a very good and careful writer, but when he’s talking there’s some self-aggrandizement—a need to oversell and put the best coloration on his exploits.”

When Apple is talking about a decision at the Times, for instance, his first-person plural sometimes makes the decision sound like, in the words of one colleague, “what Arthur and I worked out.” When I asked Apple the precise circumstances of his second expulsion from Princeton, he told me what he had once told Brian Lamb, of C-span, during a television interview—that it came about because he’d criticized the university administration during a campaign the Princetonian was waging against anti-Semitism in the eating-club system. Many of his contemporaries on the Princetonian remember Apple fondly as a great character among the almost willfully bland undergraduates of the fifties Ivy League, but they’re certain that nothing the newspaper wrote about the club system, a perennial target of the Prince, had anything whatever to do with his departure. Apple, when pressed, said that the dean, after citing papers unwritten and classes cut and chapel (then compulsory at Princeton) unattended, implied that some of these offenses might have been overlooked if Apple hadn’t been such a troublemaker as chairman of the Princetonian. Although it’s an oversimplification to say so, I think that people who have known Johnny Apple over the years tend to discount a bit whatever he says about himself and to trust whatever he writes in the New York Times.

In discussions of Apple-mellowing, nobody much goes for my theory that Johnny Apple was saved by gluttony. I’m still attracted by the notion, though, that his outsized supply of energy and drive and competitiveness was drained off at table, in the savoring of a decent Burgundy or the perfect crab cake. (I was present when he found what he described in the Times as his “nominee for the single best crab dish in Baltimore, if not the Western Hemisphere”—the jumbo-lump crab cake at Faidley Seafood, in the Lexington Market—and I can testify that his look of triumph did give him some resemblance to a very big four-year-old.)

Some of the people who don’t go for my theory say that Apple was a glutton to start with, and some, of course, believe that he has not yet been saved. I developed the theory in the mid-seventies, when Apple arrived in London as bureau chief. At the time, I mentioned one piece of evidence in a book, giving Apple the nom de table of Charlie Plum, as I have done in print now and then: “In an effort to find the perfect dining spot he had eaten in sixty French restaurants in London within a few months. (When Plum’s friends are asked to name his principal charms, they often mention relentlessness.)”

Even before then, Apple had a serious interest in good meals and good wine. When he was in the Washington bureau in the early seventies, before he went to London, colleagues found that a casual “Let’s get a bite of lunch” could mean going across the street to what was then one of the fanciest French restaurants in town and having a three-course meal with appropriate wine. Given the fact that most reporters think a bite of lunch has something to do with a B.L.T., Apple’s food and wine standards became an obvious target for pranks: sending a bottle of Lancer’s rosé over to his table during a political convention in Kansas City; phoning him in the guise of a fawning reader to ask his advice on the proper wine for wild, as opposed to domestic, goose; concocting a scheme in Iran to refill bottles Apple had obtained from the Shah’s cellar with what Horace Rumpole would call the local plonk.

The pranks had no effect at all on Apple’s dining habits. At some point during his long stint in London, he began putting his eating adventures into print, taking advantage of the fact that, as he puts it, “Americans, or at least New York Times readers, care about a broader spectrum of British life than they do about French or German or Japanese life.” He is not the sort of food writer who makes reservations in the name of Nero Wolfe characters or slips in quietly disguised as the Korean consul-general. In restaurants or anywhere else, Apple seems more comfortable once the people he’s dealing with are aware of his rank and station. The simplest description I’ve heard of his customary reception at a restaurant is “Everybody falls to the ground when Johnny walks in.”

The Apple-at-table stories that don’t involve his three-lunch capacity involve his standards. When his dining companion at the Kansas City restaurant, B. Drummond Ayres, then also of the Times, refused to let him send the bottle of Lancer’s away—after a long day talking to politicians and a long wait for service, Ayres was ready to start in on any tipple available—Apple hid it under the table. On a Presidential visit Bill Clinton made to Africa, Apple had dinner one night in Kampala, Uganda, whose restaurant possibilities he had, of course, researched in some depth before leaving Washington. “We go to what Johnny has found out is the best Indian restaurant in the country,” Maureen Dowd, who was in Apple’s party that evening, told me. “We’re the only ones in the restaurant. That would worry some people, but Johnny knows it’s the right place because he’s there.” After tucking in his napkin, she went on, Apple said, in stentorian tones that seemed to be addressed to no one in particular, “No prawns at this altitude!” That remains a phrase that Apple watchers occasionally use to greet each other—”No prawns at this altitude!”

“Oscar Wilde said that a man who could command a London dinner table can rule the world,” I was told not long ago by the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who became friendly with Apple when the Apples lived in London, “and Johnny always commanded the dinner table.” Dworkin was one of the eight people gathered for Apple’s fiftieth-birthday luncheon, held at Gidleigh Park—a Devon country inn and restaurant that had been celebrated by Apple in the Times and eventually won what was apparently the first Michelin star ever awarded to an establishment run by Americans. (As a Midwesterner, albeit a Midwesterner with made-to-order English shirts, Apple is particularly proud that Paul and Kay Henderson, who run the place, both graduated from Purdue.)

In a private dining room, the celebrants, including the Hendersons, consumed Beluga caviar, sautéed foie gras with quince sauce, salad of red mullet and lettuce with olive-oil-and-coriander dressing, tagliatelle with white truffles, partridge mousse with morels and spinach, roasted saddle of hare, Muenster and single Gloucester cheeses, mango and eau-de-vie-de-poire sorbets, gâteau marjolaine, coffee, and six wines—all from 1934, the year of Apple’s birth. “Around five or five-thirty, I was as close to death by eating as I’ve ever been,” Dworkin told me. “We were about to break up and go up to the bedroom and have a nap. Then Apple was saying, ‘We have to have a talk about dinner. Just a quick word. We’ve eaten rather well. So something simple. I have an idea. The truffles that came with the tagliatelle came boxed in rice. You could make us a risotto out of the rice the truffles came in. Let’s have a Saint-Julien, a late-growth Saint-Julien. A ’79 would be all right.’ “

Much of this eating and travel is, of course, underwritten by the Times. When it comes to what Homer Bigart used to call “feeding at the Sulzberger trough,” it is widely acknowledged that R. W. Apple, Jr., is without peer. Joe Lelyveld, who even as executive editor was not known for demanding a prime position at the trough, once stopped in London when he was the foreign editor and took his bureau chief to dinner—a lavish dinner, as it turned out, since his bureau chief was R. W. Apple, Jr. When the check arrived, Apple reached over to scoop it up. “You better let me take this,” he said. “They’d never believe it coming from you.”

I once suggested to Apple that he bequeath his expense accounts to the Smithsonian Institution. “But the Times has them,” he said. “I turned them in.” He sounded a bit regretful, it seemed to me, that he was not in a position to give posterity an opportunity to inspect some of his more stunning creations. At the Times, the various departments have what is called a cost center—what amounts to a budget line. The foreign desk has a cost center. The editorial board has a cost center. R. W. Apple, Jr., has a cost center. “It’s been my fate and privilege over the years to sit next to various people who were approving Apple’s expense accounts,” Al Siegal says. “There were hoots, and once in a while you’d look up and the person—these were various assistant managing editors—was shaking his head and reading off ‘Wine from my cellars . . .’ ” Siegal, who is a great admirer of R. W. Apple, Jr., thinks that, all in all, the Times has received good value.

Asked about having his own cost center, Apple is suddenly overcome with modesty. “It’s because I write for all these different parts of the paper,” he told me. Not long ago, Apple was appointed an associate editor of the Times, a position that is something of an honorific, and some acquaintances asked what difference the new title would make, since he already seemed to do whatever he wanted. Before being named associate editor, Apple said, there were two hotels he could not stay in on his expense account. Now, as he interprets company policy, he can.

It was not the first time that Apple had lost his trademark enthusiasm for the task at hand. A decade earlier, just after he’d returned from London to be the Times’ chief Washington correspondent, there had been a period when he seemed to have lost interest in pursuing the usual political stories or even in showing up regularly at the bureau. “That was a precursor of finally deciding I just don’t want to do this again and again and again,” he told me. “I loved doing it when there was a big story running and I could make a contribution. But just to write routine political and foreign stuff, I thought, Oh man!”

Newspaper reporting of the sort that regularly results in front-page stories in the Times—that is, reporting that has to do with politics or government or foreign policy—is repetitious work. A lot of distinguished reporters eventually get the feeling that they’ve done what is essentially the same story one too many times. Some of them become columnists, but that was not in store for Apple. The absence of an ideological point of view may be an advantage in a Q-head writer but it is a disadvantage in a columnist. At the Times, Apple was regarded as someone with a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of politics, but not as a singular political thinker. Whether or not he ever yearned for a column, as some of his friends maintain, he now says that it wouldn’t have been a good fit. “I’m not any good at writing columns in which I say what this country needs or what the world needs is the following,” he told me. “I see two sides to too many things.”

The path he did take had its origin in his days in the London bureau, when he had begun to write about food and travel. Toward the end of his stint as bureau chief, he’d written a series of travel pieces in Europe—pieces that were eventually collected in a book called “Apple’s Europe.” At the time, Apple’s increasing interest in writing about bistros and cathedrals was causing some uneasiness among his masters in New York. But, looking back recently on the sort of writing he had done toward the end of his London stay, Apple said, “That was sort of the beginning of my reinventing myself.”

Not long after he stepped down as Washington bureau chief, the Times made Apple something called chief correspondent—essentially a ticket to write about whatever interested him. Betsey Apple—who, together with her children, can be thought of as another theory of what mellowed R. W. Apple, Jr.—had suggested a travel series about American cities similar to the series Apple had done in Europe. As the trips evolved, she was usually at the wheel while her husband deconstructed the maps with an adroitness that presumably comes from having had to find his way around strange cities in a hundred and nine different countries. She continued in that role in the next series, on food, in which she is routinely mentioned once in each piece, more or less in the way Hitchcock put in a fleeting appearance in each movie. Last fall, at the Southern Foodways Alliance conference on barbecue, in Oxford, Mississippi, Betsey Apple introduced herself to one of the participants by saying, “I’m Betsey. I drive Mister Daisy.”

Apple watchers have interpreted Apple’s emergence as a food writer in a number of ways. Some of them see it as the Times rewarding so many years of extraordinary service by putting Apple out to a particularly luxuriant pasture. Some see it as Apple’s response to having been deprived of the few rewards of the business that have not been bestowed on him—a column or a Pulitzer or an editorship—by following the maxim that living well is the best revenge. Bill Keller and his recent predecessors see it as extending into the so-called special sections of the paper—the sections that increasingly are becoming fundamental to the identity of the Times and to its commercial well-being—the work of a reporter who is, in Keller’s words, “as much a marquee name in the food section as he is in the political pages.” That’s the way Apple sees it.

The change in portfolio has made Apple an unusual figure in Washington. He retains all the trappings associated with members of what is sometimes called the permanent government. He has a house in Georgetown. He has known most of the capital’s principal players for years. (He met George Bush and Al Gore in 1970, when they were serving their fathers as drivers in unsuccessful Senate campaigns; the President, it almost goes without saying, calls him Juanito.) But what he normally writes about day to day is not, say, the future of the North Atlantic alliance but where to find herring that actually tastes like herring. Apple’s friends like to tease him about the switch in subject matter. But they believe that he has emerged triumphant at a time in his career when a lot of reporters who never came in from the field are faced with a choice I used to think of as the Ottawa bureau or the bottle. The byline of R. W. Apple, Jr., still regularly appears in the Times, often on stories from places that make his colleagues muse on what the fanciest hotel there is really like. “He’s got a second act,” Ben Bradlee said of Apple not long ago, “and he probably has others up his sleeve, just in case he eats all the food in the world.”

With R. W. Apple, Jr., triumph is a given. He approaches food writing the same way he approached political reporting or war reporting or parachuting in. In preparation for the Baltimore piece that uncovered the blissful crab cake, he told me, he had reread some Mencken and reread some of Russell Baker’s memoir of growing up in Baltimore and spent a lot of time on the Internet and on the phone. When he wasn’t indulging in one of his three lunches in Baltimore, he was in his room finishing up a piece on the early-twentieth-century East Bay architect Bernard Maybeck (“a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels, and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena”) and a travel piece on Bermuda that began, “When Claudio Vigilante was a waiter at Le Gavroche, the last redoubt of classic French haute cuisine in London . . .”

At the time I spoke to Apple in Gloucestershire, he had sixteen or seventeen notebooks filled with research from the Far East trip, but it seemed likely he’d be interrupted by war in Iraq before he transformed them all into Times stories. The Times’ plans for war coverage included calling him from the table for Q-head duty. When the war started, Apple did return to writing Q-heads—which, as it turned out, drew some of the same sort of criticism that had been directed at him during the Afghanistan campaign. Keller believes that, as the Times allows more analytical writing in news stories, it is becoming less tied to the notion that “every big news event has to be accompanied by a story about what you were supposed to think about that news event.” Still, at the time when war with Iraq seemed imminent, an old Times hand told me that it would probably constitute what the management considered “a Johnny Apple moment.”

By late spring, Apple was mining the notebooks. The Asia trip had been designed to produce eight pieces for the Times, not to speak of a piece on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gidleigh Park. He had already published a piece on eating dim sum in Hong Kong, but he had before him a piece on Vietnamese pho and a piece on mangosteens in Bangkok and a piece on pepper in Kerala and a piece on Keralan cuisine and a travel piece on Bangkok. A lengthy piece on Singapore street food appeared in the Times earlier this month. The reporting, if that’s the word, had required eighteen eating stops in a single, sixteen-hour day. Cautioned by his guide to taste rather than eat, Apple wrote, “I tried, but I failed. More gourmand than gourmet, I finished much of what was put before me.” Presumably, he will now be referred to by some—maybe even by me—as Eighteen Lunches Apple. Relentlessness remains one of Charlie Plum’s principal charms.

Pink Purge

Some Seek ‘Pink Purge’ in the GOP

Johanna Neuman | Los Angeles Times | October 18, 2006

WASHINGTON — In recent years, the Republican Party aimed to broaden its appeal with a “big-tent” strategy of reaching out to voters who might typically lean Democratic. But now a debate is growing within the GOP about whether the tent has become too big — by including gays whose political views may conflict with the goals of the party’s powerful evangelical conservatives. Some Christians, who are pivotal to the GOP’s get-out-the-vote effort, are charging that gay Republican staffers in Congress may have thwarted their legislative agenda. There even are calls for what some have dubbed a “pink purge” of high-ranking gay Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the administration.
The long-simmering tension in the GOP between gays and the religious right has erupted into open conflict at a sensitive time, just weeks before a midterm election that may cost Republicans control of Congress.

“The big-tent strategy could ultimately spell doom for the Republican Party,” said Tom McClusky, chief lobbyist for the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group. “All a big-tent strategy seems to be doing is attracting a bunch of clowns.”

Now the GOP is facing a hard choice — risk losing the social conservatives who are legendary for turning out the vote, or risk alienating the moderate voters who are crucial to this election’s outcome.

“There’s a huge schism on the right,” said Mike Rogers, a gay-rights activist who runs a blog to combat what he calls hypocrisy among conservative gay politicians. “The fiscal conservatives are furious at the religious conservatives, because they need the moderates for economic policy. But they need the social conservatives to turn out the vote.”

A recent incident that upset social conservatives involved remarks by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week. With First Lady Laura Bush looking on, Rice swore in Mark R. Dybul as U.S. global AIDS coordinator while his partner, Jason Claire, held the Bible. Claire’s mother was in the audience, and Rice referred to her as Dybul’s “mother-in-law.”

“The Republican Party is taking pro-family conservatives for granted,” said Mike Mears, executive director of the political action committee of Concerned Women for America, which promotes biblical values. “What Secretary Rice did just the other day is going to anger quite a few people.”

It’s not just anger at Rice that worries Republicans; it’s the possible effect on evangelical voters next month.

The Dybul incident “was totally a damper to the base that we need to turn out,” said the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, a California lobbying group that focuses on religious and social issues.

Adding to the conservative Christians’ disaffection has been a new book asserting that the White House used President Bush’s faith-based initiative for political purposes while mocking evangelicals behind their backs.

The tension between Republican gays and evangelicals has been highlighted in recent weeks by the scandal involving Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who resigned over explicit messages he sent to underage male House pages.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said in a television interview last week that there should be an investigation into whether gay congressional staffers were responsible for covering up for Foley.

Perkins also has questioned whether gay Republican staffers on Capitol Hill have torpedoed evangelicals’ priorities, such as a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. “Has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and/or staffers?” he asked in an e-mail to supporters.

Some social conservatives deny they are interested in removing gay staffers from the party.

“We’re not calling for what I’ve heard referred to as a pink purge,” McClusky said. “We’re asking that members [of Congress] might want to reflect on who’s serving them: Are they representing their boss’ interest?”

Mears of Concerned Women for America said purging gays from the GOP would not necessarily help the evangelical cause. “If you get rid of all the homosexuals in Congress and on the staff, you’d still have Republicans like Chris Shays [the Connecticut congressman] and Susan Collins [the Maine senator] pushing the gay agenda.”

This week, a list that is said to name gay Republican staffers has been circulated to several Christian and family values groups — presumably to encourage an outing and purge. McClusky acknowledged seeing the list but said his group did not produce it and had no intention of using it.

Still, gay Republican staffers on Capitol Hill say it feels as if the noose is tightening. Fearful of having their names on such a list and losing their jobs after the election, they are trying to keep a low profile.

None of the gay Republican staffers contacted for this article would speak for the record.

But Eric Johnson, a former GOP staffer who left the party over its policies on gays and who now works for a Democrat on the Hill, said many of his old friends were worried.

“There’s a real concern, a legitimate concern, about a lower glass ceiling — preventing them from attaining higher positions in the party,” Johnson said. “Most Republicans do lip service to the conservative side of gay issues. But on hiring practices, most of them have been pretty reasonable.”

Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage, has a campaign manager who is gay. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who linked gay sex to bestiality, has a press secretary who is gay. Both senators are in perilous races for reelection, and neither staffer would comment.

The GOP has at times seemed a bit disjointed in its approach to gay issues. Political advisor Karl Rove ran Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 by mobilizing opposition to same-sex marriage, even as Vice President Dick Cheney said consenting adults of any orientation should be free to marry. Cheney’s daughter Mary is a lesbian, and her partner was welcomed at presidential events.

The president recently reappointed Israel Hernandez, a gay man who had been a personal aide to Bush when he was Texas governor, to be assistant secretary of Commerce and head of an international trade office.

The Republican National Party says its tent is open to anyone who shares its political views.

“The Republican Party welcomes individuals from all walks of life,” said Republican National Committee Press Secretary Tracey Schmitt.

Regarding the threat of losing support from social conservatives, she added: “Our core supporters understand that a Congress led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi [the Senate and House minority leaders] would be devoid of a values agenda. They are mobilized and committed to electing Republicans on Nov. 7.”

The Disposable American

 

Impending Third Worldization of America? 

The essential point of The Disposable American is that layoffs, or involuntary separations, have become commonplace as a company strategy to enhance the bottom-line with profound consequences to not only the laid-off employees, but to many other parties, including family, community, and the company itself. Three main “myths” are promulgated concerning layoffs: (1) the flood of layoffs over the last twenty years is not indicative of a foreseeable, long-term trend to instability in employment; (2) laid-off workers have lost value and must correct that through training and education, and failure to do so is confirmation of personal shortcomings; and (3) layoffs are no more than issues of cost savings and wages lost with human concerns being irrelevant. These myths capture the stance that corporations and governmental agencies, employment consultants, and the mainstream media typically take regarding layoffs.But the author rejects those simplistic and convenient myths. He contends that this multi-decade trend of layoffs is a decided break from the employer-employee rapport that existed for the seventy years before the 1970s. Companies are now mostly not restrained by strong unions. Employment-at-will has become the operative policy in lieu of the restrictions found in bargaining agreements that require “just cause” for layoffs. In other words, companies layoff arbitrarily because they can get away with it.The author is especially concerned about the psychological devastation that often accompanies layoffs that is unacknowledged in official statistics. It is not unknown that individuals’ self-esteem is largely tied to their jobs. Yet employers, who at one time regarded themselves as a part of communities, seem ever more willing to force communities and families to be the sole shock absorber for the damage of their actions. The author profiles several people in their attempts to get back on their feet: several aircraft mechanics and a variety of white-collar workers, though many of them did have substantial resources to weather unemployment.There is considerable evidence that layoffs may produce short-term results, generally via increased stock prices. But companies can lose critical skills in layoffs, perhaps not realized, in addition to overburdening remaining employees. Layoff artists can often be gone before the full impact of their gutting becomes evident.

The most cynical myth is that education and training will result in getting better jobs after being laid off. The first problems are identifying viable fields, finding appropriate training, and being financially supported during training periods. However, the vast majority of projected jobs into the 21st century will require little more than a high school diploma. Even though the myth persists, funding for re-training is so miniscule as to be virtually non-existent. It is easier to hold that the unemployed have simply failed to apply themselves than to seriously examine the validity of the existence of jobs for so-called “symbolic analysts.” The reality is that most of those who find work after being laid off are underemployed and paid substantially less.

The author is surely correct to call for communities to band together to slow down corporate layoffs and to require humane and realistic dealings with those laid off. Requiring annual certified reports by corporations detailing involuntary separations would give unwelcome exposure. Among other suggestions: labor law reform, mandatory severance pay, fair trade policies, and retraining options. In addition, the author wants the huge tax hit that states take in bidding for company relocations to be stopped. Obviously, those funds would go a long way in rebuilding infrastructure and easing the pain of unavoidable layoffs.

The book is an even-handed look at the phenomenon of layoffs in the US. The author seems to view the economic culture of the US more benignly than some might. Many view the relatively harmonious thirty years after WWII as an aberration in the generally contentious relations between employers and employees that has existed since the rise of industrialization. Yet layoffs in the context of globalization are new. The author offers his suggestions with little commentary on their feasibility. Giving the current political climate, it really seems quite likely that the situation will become far worse, literally transforming America into a Third World country of have and have-nots.

Best macaroni and cheese!

Los Angeles Times | October 4, 2006

Total time: 1 hour, 10 minutes | Servings: 12 to 16

Note: Use large shells such as chiocciole or conchiglie, or large elbow macaroni.

Ingredients 

1/2 cup panko bread crumbs

1 teaspoon melted butter

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

1/2 cup flour

5 cups milk

1/2 teaspoon dry mustard

1/4 teaspoon white pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon salt

1 bay leaf

4 cups shredded mild cheddar cheese, divided

3 cups shredded Swiss Gruyère cheese

1 pound shells or elbow macaroni, cooked according to package directions in salted water

1/2 cup heavy cream

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Toss the panko bread crumbs with the melted butter on a small baking pan. Toast the bread crumbs until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.

2. In a large saucepan, heat the butter over medium heat until melted, then stir in the flour. Heat and stir until the mixture is smooth and bubbling, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in the milk. Add the dry mustard, white and cayenne pepper, nutmeg, salt and bay leaf. Heat and stir to boiling, then reduce the heat to a low simmer and cook 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove thebay leaf.

3. Stir in 3 cups of the cheddar and all the Gruyère until melted. Pour the sauce over the cooked macaroni in a large bowl, stirring until all of the macaroni is coated. Pour the macaroni into a well-buttered 9-by-13-inch casserole. Drizzle heavy cream around the edges of the casserole. Sprinkle on it the remaining 1 cup cheddar cheese, then the toasted bread crumbs.

4. Cover the casserole with aluminum foil. Bake 20 minutes. Remove the foil and bake uncovered an additional 10 minutes. Put under a preheated broiler for 5 minutes.

Each of 16 servings: 415 calories; 19 grams protein; 28 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram fiber; 25 grams fat; 15 grams saturated fat; 75 mg. cholesterol; 565 mg. sodium.

Ann Richards: 1933 – 2006

Ann Richards on How to Be a Good Republican:

You have to believe that the nation’s current 8-year prosperity was due to the work of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but yesterday’s gasoline prices are all Clinton’s fault.

You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.

You have to be against all government programs, but expect Social Security checks on time.

You have to believe that AIDS victims deserve their disease, but smokers with lung cancer and overweight individuals with heart disease don’t deserve theirs.

You have to appreciate the power rush that comes with sporting a gun.

You have to believe…everything Rush Limbaugh says.

You have to believe that the agricultural, restaurant, housing and hotel industries can survive without immigrant labor.

You have to believe God hates homosexuality, but loves the death penalty.

You have to believe society is color-blind and growing up black in America doesn’t diminish your opportunities, but you still won’t vote for Alan Keyes.

You have to believe that pollution is OK as long as it makes a profit.

You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don’t pray to Allah or Buddha.

You have to believe Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde were really faithful husbands.

You have to believe speaking a few Spanish phrases makes you instantly popular in the barrio.

You have to believe that only your own teenagers are still virgins.

You have to be against government interference in business, until your oil company, corporation or Savings and Loan is about to go broke and you beg for a government bail out.

You love Jesus and Jesus loves you and, by the way, Jesus shares your hatred for AIDS victims, homosexuals, and President Clinton.

You have to believe government has nothing to do with providing police protection, national defense, and building roads.

You have to believe a poor, minority student with a disciplinary history and failing grades will be admitted into an elite private school with a $1,000 voucher.

The Boom Gets a Little More Room in Laguna Beach

Former co-owners of the landmark gay bar get an 11-month lease and will look for a new location

David Kelly | Los Angeles Times | August 18, 2006

The Boom Boom Room, a gay bar that became an icon in Laguna Beach and beyond, won a reprieve this week after the new owner agreed to extend its lease rather than close it as planned next month.

“It’s like Christmas in August,” said Fred Karger, who has campaigned to keep the bar open. “Now that it’s staying open, I think the chances are greater that it will remain open permanently.”

 Steven Udvar-Hazy, an aircraft-leasing mogul from Beverly Hills, bought the Coast Inn and adjoining Boom Boom Room last year in a deal worth nearly $13 million. He was unavailable for comment Thursday, but an assistant said the new lease was for 11 months.

In a recent interview with The Times, the billionaire said he planned on building an upscale hotel on South Coast Highway where the inn and bar now stand. The older, more raffish Boom Boom Room, he said, didn’t seem “compatible” with that vision.

Former owners Patrick O’Loughlin and James Marchese, who still run the bar and hotel, have retained the legal rights to the name Boom Boom Room and said they hope to open a new Boom elsewhere.

“We are looking for a place in Southern California but not in Laguna Beach,” O’Loughlin said.

He said the new lease, finalized Monday, made economic sense for the new owner, who needs time to get his plans together and obtain permits before beginning construction.

Karger began efforts to save the bar (www.savetheboom.com) in May to protect what he and others believe is a historic piece of Laguna Beach history. The Coast Inn and Boom Boom Room, built in 1927, became a magnet for gays the world over in the mid-’70s.

But in recent years, as the city’s median home price grew to $1.5 million, its gay population dwindled. O’Loughlin and Marchese said they sold the bar when it no longer made economic sense to keep it open.

Robert Gentry, a former mayor and the nation’s first openly gay mayor, said the city now has time to decide how much it supports the gay community.

“The Boom is a very strong symbol of the role of the gay community in Laguna Beach history, in its current status and in its future,” he said. “I think bringing people together to talk about the role of the gay community creates a level of awareness and political strength that motivates elected officials.”

Karger said he would present to community leaders after Labor Day a petition with more than 5,000 signatures asking to keep the bar open. Whether that will persuade them to join the fight remains in question.

Mayor Steve Dicterow said the bar’s new lease was “ecstatically good news.”

“I think it’s a long-standing institution in Laguna Beach and just shows that private people can work out their own problems,” he said. But the mayor said he would not pressure Udvar-Hazy to keep the place open.

Councilwoman Toni Iseman said the town is not just losing gays; it is losing schoolteachers, professors and artists because of housing costs. Still, she said, the city would give the Boom Boom Room “moral support.”

“It’s another of our icons that is being threatened, but on a practical level, private property is private property, and it’s really up to the new owner,” she said.

She said that if Udvar-Hazy builds a swanky hotel, it too could be a gay gathering point: “If this new place is filled with gays, I doubt the owner will mind.”

Rumsfeld: I have never painted a rosy picture

the donald

Posted by ro @ 2:46 pm in the news | www.rosie.com

Rumsfeld and Iraq

Author: Candace Gorman | pickup from Rosie O’Donnell blog

“I have never painted a rosy picture [about the war in Iraq]. I have been very measured in my words and you’d have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I’ve been excessively optimistic.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, in testimony before Senate Committee on Armed Services, Aug. 3, 2006

“The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld, Nov. 14, 2002

“And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld, Feb. 7, 2003

“”The increased demand on the force we are experiencing today is likely a ’spike,’ driven by the deployment of nearly 115,000 troops in Iraq. We hope and anticipate that that spike will be temporary. We do not expect to have 115,000 troops permanently deployed in any one campaign.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld, Feb. 4, 2004

QUESTION: “One clarification on ‘the long war.’ Is Iraq going to be a long war?”
RUMSFELD: “No, I don’t believe it is.”
– Press briefing, Feb. 1, 2006

H. Candace Gorman

Did I Hear ‘Yogurt Soju?’

 

Soju. The national drink of Korea.

I think it’s one of the biggest selling spirits in the world. The Thirsty Traveler said something akin to that.

I had mentioned before that I had discovered some great soju cocktails at Indio. Since then, I have successfully attempted to recreate them at home, particularly the yogurt soju cocktail.

It is built like a highball, meaning that the ingredients are poured directly into the glass in a certain order with no stirring or shaking.

Soju Yogurt Cocktail 

1 shot of Soju
Fill glass 2/3 full with Drinkable Plain Yogurt
Top with Lemon Lime Soda (Sprite, Chilsung Cider, 7-Up)

I have always had it without ice, but I’m sure ice is a welcome option on a hot day. It’s a very refreshing drink and not as high in alcohol as other highballs. This means you can drink a lot of these and not get dehydrated while having your summer BBQs.

www.zenkimchi.com/FoodJournal

 

Hillary as Senate Majority Leader?

www.thewashingtonnote.com | Steven C. Clemons

 

Harry Reid May Ask Senator Clinton to Preempt Presidential Ambitions to Succeed Him as Senate Majority/Minority Leader

Some high level Democratic Party political insiders have shared with TWN details of a potential shift in vectors for several of the major political stars in that party.

First of all, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, whom most give high marks for the manner in which he has stewarded the Dems in the Senate despite the absence of a clear Democratic Party chief, has sent private signals to Senator Hillary Clinton and other stalwarts of the party that he “would like to” step down from his post in early 2009. Reid has not stated definitively that he will — but he apparently prefers “whipping” the Party from behind and the side rather than serving as commander-in-chief on the Senate floor.

What Reid is offering Senator Hillary Clinton is his total, robust support to succeed him as Senate Majority Leader if she elects not to pursue the Democratic nomination for President.

Many are realizing that the electoral map is not something one can wave a magic wand over and reverse the views of 42% of Americans who believe that they know Hillary Clinton well and have strongly formed views of her and will not vote for her under any conditions — according to recent polls. Reports are that Senator Clinton herself knows this and that her own enthusiasm for running actually trails that of her husband, her advisors, and her staff — whose enthusiasm for the race is ranked in that order with Hillary the least enthusiastic.

When the beard is too painful to remove

Jane Gross | NY Times

They spend decades denying their sexual confusion to themselves and others. They generally limit their encounters with men to anonymous one-night stands and tell all manner of lies if their wives suspect.They consider themselves to be devoted husbands, conscientious fathers and suburban homeowners, and what typically brings them to the point of crisis in their 40’s, 50’s and even 60’s is their first emotional connection with another man.For gay men in heterosexual marriages, even after the status quo becomes unbearable, the pull of domestic life remains powerful. Many are desperate to preserve their marriages — to continue reaping the emotional and financial support of wives, and domestic pleasures like tucking children in at night. The demand for support groups for gay, married men, as well as traffic in Internet chat rooms, shows that so-called “Brokeback” marriages have hardly disappeared, as many experts assumed they would, even in an age when gay couples, in certain parts of the country, live openly and raise children just like any family.Leaving a marriage and setting up housekeeping with a gay partner is not what most married gay men have in mind when they join a support group, according to Stephen McFadden, a clinical social worker, who runs such groups in Manhattan. Instead, Mr. McFadden and others in the field say, their clients generally start out committed to the opposite goal.

Even after a pained awakening or acknowledgment of their sexual orientation, these men want to save their marriages, Mr. McFadden and others say, either by lying, promising their wives they will not have sex with men or persuading them to accept their double lives.

Yet, such arrangements succeed for only “a small percentage’’ of couples, Mr. McFadden and other therapists said, but the stubborn attempt often makes these men unwelcome or uncomfortable in support groups for gay fathers, which are easy to find but largely the province of men who are long divorced.

One support group member, Steve T., is a Long Island doctor, married to his high school sweetheart and the father of three school-age sons. He said he felt the sting of judgment when he tried a group for gay fathers. “They thought my desire to stay married was part of my denial,’’ said Dr. T., who would do almost anything to keep his family together and his suburban lifestyle intact, even after telling his wife that he is gay.

She is his “best friend’’ and the “perfect co-parent,’’ said the 44-year-old doctor, who agreed to be interviewed on condition he not be fully identified and his secrets thus revealed to relatives, neighbors and patients. He enjoys the social life of a popular suburban couple, adores his in-laws and wants to live in the same home as his children.

But he also wants to continue a love affair with a man like himself: married, with children, a lawn to mow and a comfortable life. And until a few weeks ago, Dr. T. said, “this was working great in terms of getting our needs met and not disrupting our families.’’

Dr. T.’s wife had agreed she could live with his sexual orientation provided he didn’t act on it. So he lied and said his homosexual relationship did not include sex. But she wasn’t fooled and forced him to move into an in-law apartment in the family home, a way station to a more formal separation.

This development has left him stunned, one moment sympathetic to his wife’s position and the next disbelieving that they can’t work it out. “I love her, but she wants me to be in love with her,” Dr. T. said. “She wants to be my one and only. Everything we have will be at risk if, God forbid, we divorce.’’

Data on these marriages is scarce and unreliable because of the various ways of defining “gay’’ in demographic research. Studies in the 1970’s and 80’s, using inconsistent methodology, found anywhere from one-fifth to one-third of gay men were or had at one time been married. All the therapists and gay men interviewed for this article assumed that percentage would be far lower in today’s more accepting society.

But Gary J. Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute, a research group that studies gay issues at U.C.L.A., blended data for The New York Times from the 2000 Census and a 2002 federal survey of family configurations, and found that the percentage of gay men who had ever been married could be as high as 38 percent — or as low as 9 percent — depending on whether respondents were asked their sexual orientation, whom they had sex with or whom they found attractive.

Of the 27 million American men currently married, Mr. Gates found, 1.6 percent, or 436,000, identify themselves as gay or bisexual. Of the 75 million men who have ever been married, 1.8 percent, or 1.3 million, identify themselves that way. But, in both cases, when the men are asked about behavior if they have ever had sex with men, not what they consider their sexual orientation, the number of men who have ever been married doubles.

The sort of arrangement Dr. T. hoped for — a proper marriage and one or more relationships with men on the side — is not unheard of. Cole Porter pulled it off and so did James McGreevey, New Jersey’s former governor, who left office, and his wife, in 2004. Mr. McGreevey, 48, has spent the last year writing a memoir, “The Confession,’’ to be released on Sept. 19, and recently, with his new partner, Mark O’Donnell, 42, moved into a Georgian mansion in Plainfield, N.J.THE specter of AIDS has led to a formal and presumably safe way for gay married men to have it all, known as a Closed-Loop Relationship. Instead of risky promiscuous sex, a married man has two “monogamous’’ relationships, one with his wife and one with another man, usually married. Done according to the rules, enumerated on Web sites and online support groups, all four parties agree to this setup.“It’s an approach which people hoped would be a compromise solution,’’ said Michael, the Web master of www.marriedgay.org, a site based in Manchester, England, who declined to give his last name out of deference to his wife, whom he no longer lives with. “But it’s easier said than done.’’Closed-Loop Relationships are anathema to Bonnie Kaye, the former wife of a gay man, who runs the Web site www.gayhusbands.com and conducts “How to Come Out to Your Wife’’ workshops. “If they’re too selfish to leave, I won’t work with them,’’ Ms. Kaye said. “If they love their wives, they need to give them their lives back.’’Deception remains common. An unscientific survey of visitors to www.marriedgay.org found that more than half of the married gay respondents said their wives did not know of their sexual inclinations. Of those, a slim majority were considering whether to come clean but a third said “never.’’Men who are forthcoming with their wives, and then divorce or separate, report surprise that what happens afterward is often vastly harder than the process of ending the marriage.Scott W., 64, a retired school teacher and real estate agent, relieved his occasional need for homosexual sex with anonymous encounters on East Hampton Beach without quite labeling himself as gay or bisexual. Only when he fell for someone, who rejected him because he was married, did Scott conclude he had to divorce a woman he loved and had been with for 24 years. That process, as these things go, was without acrimony, said Scott, a former member of Mr. McFadden’s support group, and he remains close to her and his two grown sons.But looking for love in late middle age, Scott said, is a frustrating ordeal. After a brief “slut phase,’’ he had “the naïve idea I’d find someone right away.’’ Instead, he has learned he is ill-suited, or too old, for gay night life. “They want to go out at 11 o’clock,’’ Scott said, “and I want to go to sleep at 11 o’clock. Plus, in those places, there’s too much noise and confusion.’’He eats dinner most nights at the bar of an East Side restaurant that attracts an older gay clientele. The conversation is lively, Scott said, but he hasn’t found anyone to date. Recently, a married gay man left his business card but Scott threw it away. He is not looking for a one-night stand.Scott’s loneliness after divorce is common among middle-aged men, according to Dr. Richard A. Isay, 69, the first openly gay member of the American Psychoanalytic Association who himself left a heterosexual marriage about 20 years ago, when he was already in a gay relationship that he remains in today. Dr. Isay said he came slowly to understand his patients’ sense of isolation during three decades of practice, and therefore has modified his advice to gay married men.

“I beg them to take it slow because it’s difficult to find the substitute for the love and companionship of a longtime spouse,’’ said Dr. Isay, author of “Commitment and Healing: Gay Men and the Need for Romantic Love” (Wiley, 2006). “They must take that loss into consideration.’’

The loss comes on top of the adolescent awkwardness of not knowing the social norms of a new world, described on the blog www.comingoutat48.blogspot.com. Its author, who identifies himself only as Chris, writes of changing his clothes many times before heading to his first gay bar, finding it empty and not realizing he had arrived too early. He writes of not understanding the sexual terminology in gay personal ads and looking for an “always gay’’ man to teach him what he needed to know. In an e-mail exchange, Chris compared the experience to “living abroad,’’ where the “thrill of a new place’’ competes with “the deep loneliness’’ of unfamiliarity. It is not, he said “the existential loneliness of not knowing who you are and where you belong, but the loneliness of ‘What am I going to do this weekend?’ ‘How am I supposed to behave?’ or ‘When will the phone start to ring?’ ’’Even in the security of a six-year relationship with a man, John. J., 53, resists divorcing his wife of 30 years. “I am still so in love with her,’’ he said, speaking on the condition he not be fully identified because his parents, in-laws and colleagues do not know the details of his separation. “And there’s nobody else I’d use that word for.’’John said he had no moral choice but to leave his marriage once he “let the emotional aspect’’ of his attraction to men into his life. “That had been the realm of me and my wife,’’ he said. “So that’s the line of demarcation. The two, for me, are mutually exclusive. But divorce? I can’t imagine the finality of that. I have doubts all the time.’’

Paradise Bought in Los Angeles

 

The home of Avi and Joyce Arad in North Beverly Park in Los Angeles 

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

WHEN Irena Medavoy decided to build her dream home, on two flat acres above Beverly Hills, one thing was really important. “I wanted it warm, cozy, informal,” she said, before demonstrating how the living room converts into a screening room. At the push of a button, a 20-foot-wide screen descended from the ceiling and three huge speakers rose from beneath the wood parquet floor. At the other end of the room, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase sank — Batcave-like — revealing a projection room hidden behind it.

By the standards of North Beverly Park, the gated community where Mrs. Medavoy and her husband, the Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy, live, their home — 11,000 square feet in an East Coast traditional style — actually is cozy.

That’s because other houses in this intensely private, security-obsessed community for Hollywood potentates, business tycoons and movie and sports stars are even larger, more on the order of small hotels: 20,000, 30,000 or, in a couple of cases, more than 40,000 square feet. When Eunice Kennedy Shriver visited the Medavoys during a reception for President Vicente Fox of Mexico, she said of their spread, “I didn’t even know they built houses like this anymore,” her hostess recalled.

In an age of gilded real estate excess, massive homes are nothing new. Still, the scale of Beverly Park is striking, with one palacelike home next to another like a billionaires’ Levittown. East Coast visitors often react with wonder-cum-horror at the neighborhood, while even in Hollywood’s monied upper echelons, some consider Beverly Park to be too much.

“You won’t find anywhere a concentration of such large homes,” said Joyce Rey, who heads the estates division for Coldwell Banker on the West Side of Los Angeles. “You’ll find a large estate in Bel Air, or a few large estates. But you won’t find a concentration of houses, and new houses, with such large square footage.”

How did it happen? “We’ve had a concentration of the rich getting richer, and that’s really propelled the construction of these homes,” she said.

But there’s also the question of keeping up with the neighbors, when the neighbors are a Who’s Who of show business elite. Eddie Murphy lives in a 45,000-square-foot Italianate compound (alone, apparently, since his divorce in April). Nearby are the homes of Barry Bonds, Reba McEntire, Rod Stewart, Sylvester Stallone, Denzel Washington, the Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, the billionaire Haim Saban and Avi Arad, the recently retired Marvel chairman who is now a producer.What binds this group together is not so much work or leisure pursuits, but a baseline of stratospheric wealth or fame and a keen desire for privacy. In a city where paparazzi roam like packs of wild dogs, you will never see one in, or even near, Beverly Park, whose main entrance is hidden down a long road to a secure gatehouse off San Ysidro Drive. A second entrance is off Mulholland Drive, that winding road that traces the ridge above the wealthy West Side.

In many ways, the neighborhood is a testament to the power of changed perspective, providing Los Angeles’s micro-club of superrich and superfamous a place to feel normal. In a gated community like this, what may be too much to outsiders is validated by neighbors, whose own choices suggest that huge feels just right.

“When you come here, you can see everyone creates his own environment,” Mrs. Medavoy said. “The Stallones’ is very Italian. Denzel’s is like a small Hotel du Cap. Jami Gertz has a Southern colonial.”

Residents insist that their gated paradise is a real neighborhood and a true community, if a wealthy one, with Halloween shindigs for the kids, friendly movie screenings and dinner parties.

“This isn’t Versailles, and I’m not Marie Antoinette,” insisted Joyce Arad, who might have made the remark because her house, completed in 2003, is a three-story palace built in classical 18th-century French style. The kitchen has two vast stone islands with copper pots hanging around each of them, though Mrs. Arad confesses that she doesn’t cook much. Outside is an elegant swimming pool designed to look like the reflecting pond of a chateau, along with several outdoor living areas, with fireplaces and fountains. “I wanted it to be homey and authentic-feeling,” she said.

The culture of Beverly Park is secretive, even paranoid, and a couple of residents who gave interviews urged caution and begged anonymity, so as not to arouse the wrath of the homeowners’ association. In the center of Beverly Park is an elaborate four-acre children’s park, usually empty. Indeed, there are almost no people visible in Beverly Park, except for domestic workers, gardeners and construction workers, as building continues apace on the handful of remaining lots, watched only by the hidden security cameras that are everywhere. Mrs. Medavoy, who once disdained the impulse of the wealthy to hide behind gates, now says she wouldn’t live anywhere else. “There is nothing that compares to this in the world,” she said. “It would be like the Hamptons, gated.”

Created 16 years ago, North Beverly Park began as a 250-acre swath of flat, empty scrub. A pair of developers divided the land into 64 lots of two acres, selling for $3.5 million to $6 million each (though they now go for much more). The location — less than 10 minutes by car to Rodeo Drive — along with the guarantees of privacy, were an immediate draw. The lots sold to Hollywood insiders and stars with big, big money, some of whom have bought additional lots to create compounds.

Irena Medavoy outside her 11,000-square-foot home.

Even Brian Adler, one of the two developers, has been surprised at the size of the homes. “I purposely cut the lots so they would be two acres, level,” he said in an interview. “At that point I wasn’t sure if people would be happiest at 12,000, 16,000 or 20,000 square feet. But with the economy doing as well as it has, people built bigger.”

He went on: “When you bring in your wish list — a major gym, a major home theater, the wife wanting an office, the husband wanting an office — and then frustration over not using the lot for a garage,” you end up with massive homes. That, anyway, is how Mr. Adler ended up building a 10,000-square -foot underground garage in the last spec house he built in Beverly Park, a 35,000-square-foot mansion. The home sold in 2004 for $30 million, the largest sum yet paid for a home in Beverly Park. (He said he was barred from disclosing the identity of the buyer.)

Avi and Joyce Arad moved from Connecticut and landscaped their property not just with full-growth trees but with many tons of dirt to create a hillside for a Provençal-style garden. To the Arads, who made their first fortune from Mr. Arad’s toy inventions, Beverly Park was an adjustment from the East Coast sensibility. But they too built a dream house to scale.

“I was kind of shocked at first — how big it is,” said Mrs. Arad, a sculptor. “But you get used to it. Now all the closets are full.”

“There is a real sense of community here,” Mrs. Arad continued. “We know our neighbors. We’ve had dinner with them: Sumner Redstone and Paul Reiser.”

On a recent Friday, Mrs. Medavoy set the table for her weekly dinner and a movie, mostly for neighbors. That night’s feature was “The Break-Up” with Jennifer Aniston, just out in theaters, which a messenger from Universal had just delivered in metal movie cans.

Mrs. Medavoy screeched as she glanced at the delivery. ” ‘United 93′?” she said in horror. “I have 20 people coming over — Sumner, everybody — and they’re expecting to see ‘The Break-Up.’ ” She ran after the delivery man, who checked his truck and found the comedy. All was well in the neighborhood.

There is, however, a dark side to Beverly Park, and Jeanette and Robert Bisno — next-door neighbors of the Medavoys — have glimpsed it. In 2002 the Bisnos were sued in Los Angeles Superior Court by the North Beverly Park Home Owners Association for infractions of the community’s convenants.

What did the Bisnos do? One big problem was their overdone gates. Also, their dinosaur topiary peeked above their hedge to the street, and there were some problems with “the installation and maintenance of trash cans,” according to court papers.

Along with its unique benefits — the exclusive list of neighbors, security cameras, constant patrols by guards — Beverly Park expects residents to abide by a 70-page homeowners’ covenant. A sample rule: “No dwelling shall be constructed or maintained on any residential lot which has a floor area less than 5,000 square feet.”

In testimony in 2003 by Cindy Adler, a member of the architectural review committee and Brian Adler’s sister, the Bisnos’ gates were deemed too “Vegas” for Beverly Park.

But the Bisnos’s main infraction was installing an eight-foot abstract sculpture in their front courtyard of what some interpret to be a woman on her back with her legs in the air. The Bisnos bought the sculpture, which is called “À Bras Ouvert,” or “Open Arms,” on a trip to France, where they saw it on the Place Vendôme in front of the Ritz.

The sculpture seemed to offend a powerful member of the homeowners association, Christine Hazy, who lives across the street from the Bisnos in one of Beverly Park’s largest estates. (Her husband, Steven Udvar-Hazy, runs a multibillion-dollar airline leasing company, International Lease Finance Corporation.)

In a three-and-a-half-week trial in 2004, accusations flew, feelings were hurt. “Rod Stewart and Sylvester Stallone have, or had, yellow houses,” and no action was taken against them, the Bisnos’ lawyer complained in court papers.

Mr. Bisno is convinced that Mrs. Hazy has a vendetta against him. “We’ve had previous disagreements,” he said this month. “When we first moved in, she rejected my yellow paint and my gate. And I told her in words and substance that she was crazy.”

Mrs. Hazy’s lawyer, Marc Rohatiner, said the case was a garden variety instance of a resident breaking the rules, but with someone who would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to make the point.

“The kind of allegations Mr. Bisno made is typical of so many cases, but in this case you had someone willing to pursue it to such lengths over something not very significant,” he said, though he acknowledged that it was the association that sued Mr. Bisno before sparking a countersuit.

Mrs. Bisno said that her family had been harassed during the dispute, with the sculpture and surrounding gardens toilet-papered, trampled and strewn with debris. Given Beverly Park’s security, she wondered, who could have done such a thing?

But in the end the Bisnos lost the case and an appeal. They have filed a motion to vacate the judge’s decision.

Still, there may be a silver lining. The Bisnos were in the middle of a divorce at the time of the lawsuit. Now all that seems behind them. They have bought a larger property two doors up from the Hazys, where they intend to build their next dream home.

With all the hassles, they want to stay in Beverly Park? “It’s a great place to live,” Mr. Bisno said. As for the sculpture, which they will take with them, he said, “Hopefully we’ll get the same treatment as the rest of our neighbors. And if we don’t, we’ll take her to court.”

Women I like: Cyndi Lauper, Rosie O’Donnell

Aboard the 2006 gay family cruise to Alaska…

Pride Santa Fe: award winner!

“BROKEBACK RANCH”

 FLOAT TAKES 2ND PLACE AT 2006 PRIDE ON THE PLAZA PARADE!

The Brokeback Ranch & Friends float was designed on one hot summer afternoon. Visual and historical references were keenly kept to the movie “Brokeback Mountain”. Bales of hay, a canvas tent, two pairs of denim booted feet sticking out, the rose (“stem the rose”), grass, the 1957 Chevy Truck (the apex and highpoint), the American Flag (4th of July), and most of all….the comical yet beautiful sheep adorning the truck drew laughs and wild applause! Not to mention, the dance remix of “Brokeback Mountain” pumping down the parade route!!  We thank all those who supported us!!

Chris, Caroline, Ian, Greg,& Frank (DJ Santa Fe) thank you from the bottom of their “Brokeback Mountain” hearts!

“Everybody line up! The show is about to start! Places! Beautiful! No ugly entries allowed! Parade Fashionista!

“Roy” (57 Chevy) sits patiently for the parade to begin!

Whats this? Two men in a tent? Hmmmmm?

“We’re ready for our closeup, Mr. Ang Lee!”

THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN 

By ANA MARIA TRUJILLO | The New Mexican
Sunday, June 25, 2006

Riders on horseback was a first for the annual Pride on the Plaza Parade through downtown Santa Fe on Saturday, which this year adopted a celebration of gay cowboys as its theme.The New Mexico Gay Rodeo Association won a $500 first prize for its entry: an 8-foot cowboy boot with spur followed by a pair of men on horses.

Among the judges was Diana Ossana, who shared an Academy Award this year as co-writer of the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, the film about two rugged cowboys who fall in love.

“It’s incredible work that you’re doing, and I’ll do anything to support it,” Ossana said before announcing the winners. “There are two things that I’m really proud of — my daughter Sarah and this film, Brokeback Mountain.”

The parade was a highlight of an 11-day arts-and-culture festival sponsored by the Human Rights Alliance.

“This is the day when we all get together in one place to really celebrate, have a good time and be out and be who we are,” said Donald Stout, president of the alliance and one of the parade’s organizers.

 

 

Felix Ortiz, center left, and Gerardo Ramires dance at Pride on the Plaza on Saturday, June 24, 2006, in Santa Fe, N.M.  The day included a gay pride parade, free HIV testing, vendors, face painting, and food. (Mercedes Krsytal DeVoue, Miss New Mexico de Rodeo 2007) 

Celebrate people did. Hundreds danced to the music of Samba Fe, browsed displays of jewelry and art, ate fajitas made by local vendors and strolled around the Plaza wearing brightly colored leis of artificial flowers given out by 1st Metropolitan Mortgage of Santa Fe.Nearly 40 booths offered various types of information and goodies. HIV testing was provided by Southwest Comprehensive AIDS Research and Education. The Department of Health offered vaccines for hepatitis A and B and screening for hepatitis A and B and syphilis.

But the parade along Old Santa Fe Trail from the Capitol area to the Plaza helped set the tone for the day.

Among the 33 entries were frightening, oversized puppets representing “big alcohol” and “big tobacco” and a truck modeled after one driven by Brokeback character Jack Twist, with a replica of the cowboys’ campsite in the truck bed.

The parade’s grand marshal was Mayor David Coss, who told the crowd, “My wife, Carol, and I are honored to be part of what you’re doing for human and civil rights here in Santa Fe.”

The $250 second prize awarded by the judges went to The Santa Fe Chile Company for its float titled “Daisy Dukes and Cowgirl Boots,” filled with hay, balloons and ladies in very short shorts. The $100 third-prize winner was the Mountain Center’s entry, which featured belly dancers moving to Latin pop music by Colombian singer Shakira.

“San Francisco ain’t got nothing on us,” said one spectator as he enjoyed the music of Samba Fe.

(Note: The Santa Fe New Mexican erroneously reported the second place winner (see above) “Brokeback Ranch” won second place!

Cheney’s Cheney

THE HIDDEN POWER

The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror.

by JANE MAYER

Photos: Associated Press

New Yorker | 2006-07-03

On December 18th, Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, joined other prominent Washington figures at FedEx Field, the Redskins’ stadium, in a skybox belonging to the team’s owner. During the game, between the Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys, Powell spoke of a recent report in the Times which revealed that President Bush, in his pursuit of terrorists, had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without first obtaining a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by federal law. This requirement, which was instituted by Congress in 1978, after the Watergate scandal, was designed to protect civil liberties and curb abuses of executive power, such as Nixon’s secret monitoring of political opponents and the F.B.I.’s eavesdropping on Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon had claimed that as President he had the “inherent authority” to spy on people his Administration deemed enemies, such as the anti-Vietnam War activist Daniel Ellsberg. Both Nixon and the institution of the Presidency had paid a high price for this assumption. But, according to the Times, since 2002 the legal checks that Congress constructed to insure that no President would repeat Nixon’s actions had been secretly ignored.

According to someone who knows Powell, his comment about the article was terse. “It’s Addington,” he said. “He doesn’t care about the Constitution.” Powell was referring to David S. Addington, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff and his longtime principal legal adviser. Powell’s office says that he does not recall making the statement. But his former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, confirms that he and Powell shared this opinion of Addington.

Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”

The overarching intent of the New Paradigm, which was put in place after the attacks of September 11th, was to allow the Pentagon to bring terrorists to justice as swiftly as possible. Criminal courts and military courts, with their exacting standards of evidence and emphasis on protecting defendants’ rights, were deemed too cumbersome. Instead, the President authorized a system of detention and interrogation that operated outside the international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Terror suspects would be tried in a system of military commissions, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, devised by the executive branch. The Administration designated these suspects not as criminals or as prisoners of war but as “illegal enemy combatants,” whose treatment would be ultimately decided by the President. By emphasizing interrogation over due process, the government intended to preëmpt future attacks before they materialized. In November, 2001, Cheney said of the military commissions, “We think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve.”

Yet, almost five years later, this improvised military model, which Addington was instrumental in creating, has achieved very limited results. Not a single terror suspect has been tried before a military commission. Only ten of the more than seven hundred men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo have been formally charged with any wrongdoing. Earlier this month, three detainees committed suicide in the camp. Germany and Denmark, along with the European Union and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, have called for the prison to be closed, accusing the United States of violating internationally accepted standards for humane treatment and due process. The New Paradigm has also come under serious challenge from the judicial branch. Two years ago, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled against the Administration’s contention that the Guantánamo prisoners were beyond the reach of the U.S. court system and could not challenge their detention. And this week the Court is expected to deliver a decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case that questions the legality of the military commissions.

For years, Addington has carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket; taped onto the back are photocopies of extra statutes that detail the legal procedures for Presidential succession in times of national emergency. Many constitutional experts, however, question his interpretation of the document, especially his views on Presidential power. Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School, and the head of the New York Bar Association’s International Law committee, said that Addington and a small group of Administration lawyers who share his views had attempted to “overturn two centuries of jurisprudence defining the limits of the executive branch. They’ve made war a matter of dictatorial power.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who defined Nixon as the extreme example of Presidential overreaching in his book “The Imperial Presidency” (1973), said he believes that Bush “is more grandiose than Nixon.” As for the Administration’s legal defense of torture, which Addington played a central role in formulating, Schlesinger said, “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world—ever.”

Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’ ” Richard A. Epstein, a prominent libertarian law professor at the University of Chicago, said, “The President doesn’t have the power of a king, or even that of state governors. He’s subject to the laws of Congress! The Administration’s lawyers are nuts on this issue.” He warned of an impending “constitutional crisis,” because “their talk of the inherent power of the Presidency seems to be saying that the courts can’t stop them, and neither can Congress.”

The former high-ranking lawyer for the Administration, who worked closely with Addington, and who shares his political conservatism, said that, in the aftermath of September 11th, “Addington was more like Cheney’s agent than like a lawyer. A lawyer sometimes says no.” He noted, “Addington never said, ‘There is a line you can’t cross.’ ” Although the lawyer supported the President, he felt that his Administration had been led astray. “George W. Bush has been damaged by incredibly bad legal advice,” he said.

David Addington is a tall, bespectacled man of forty-nine, who has a thickening middle, a thatch of gray hair, and a trim gray beard, which gives him the look of a sea captain. He is extremely private; he keeps the door of his office locked at all times, colleagues say, because of the national-security documents in his files. He has left almost no public paper trail, and he does not speak to the press or allow photographs to be taken for news stories. (He declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.)

In many ways, his influence in Washington defies conventional patterns. Addington doesn’t serve the President directly. He has never run for elected office. Although he has been a government lawyer for his entire career, he has never worked in the Justice Department. He is a hawk on defense issues, but he has never served in the military.

There are various plausible explanations for Addington’s power, including the force of his intellect and his personality, and his closeness to Cheney, whose political views he clearly shares. Addington has been an ally of Cheney’s since the nineteen-eighties, and has been referred to as “Cheney’s Cheney,” or, less charitably, as “Cheney’s hit man.” Addington’s talent for bureaucratic infighting is such that some of his supporters tend to invoke, with admiration, metaphors involving knives. Juleanna Glover Weiss, Cheney’s former press secretary, said, “David is efficient, discreet, loyal, sublimely brilliant, and, as anyone who works with him knows, someone who, in a knife fight, you want covering your back.” Bradford Berenson, a former White House lawyer, said, “He’s powerful because people know he speaks for the Vice-President, and because he’s an extremely smart, creative, and aggressive public official. Some engage in bureaucratic infighting using slaps. Some use knives. David falls into the latter category. You could make the argument that there are some costs. It introduces a little fear into the policymaking process. Views might be more candidly expressed without that fear. But David is like the Marines. No better friend—no worse enemy.” People who have sparred with him agree. “He’s utterly ruthless,” Lawrence Wilkerson said. A former top national-security lawyer said, “He takes a political litmus test of everyone. If you’re not sufficiently ideological, he would cut the ground out from under you.”

Another reason for Addington’s singular role after September 11th is that he offered legal certitude at a moment of great political and legal confusion, in an Administration in which neither the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, nor the national-security adviser was a lawyer. (In the Clinton Administration, all these posts, except for the Vice-Presidency, were held by lawyers at some point.) Neither the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, nor the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, had anything like Addington’s familiarity with national-security law. Moreover, Ashcroft’s relations with the White House were strained, and he was left out of the inner circle that decided the most radical legal strategies in the war on terror. Gonzales had more influence, because of his longtime ties to the President, but, as an Administration lawyer put it, “he was an empty suit. He was weak. And he doesn’t know shit about the Geneva Conventions.” Participants in meetings in the White House counsel’s office, in the days immediately after September 11th, have described Gonzales sitting in a wingback chair, asking questions, while Addington sat directly across from him and held forth. “Gonzales would call the meetings,” the former high-ranking lawyer recalled. “But Addington was always the force in the room.” Bruce Fein said that the Bush legal team was strikingly unsophisticated. “There is no one of legal stature, certainly no one like Bork, or Scalia, or Elliot Richardson, or Archibald Cox,” he said. “It’s frightening. No one knows the Constitution—certainly not Cheney.”

Conventional wisdom holds that September 11th changed everything, including the thinking of Cheney and Addington. Brent Scowcroft, the former national-security adviser, has said of Cheney that he barely recognizes the reasonable politician he knew in the past. But a close look at the twenty-year collaboration between Cheney and Addington suggests that in fact their ideology has not changed much. It seems clear that Addington was able to promote vast executive powers after September 11th in part because he and Cheney had been laying the political groundwork for years. “This preceded 9/11,” Fein, who has known both men professionally for decades, said. “I’m not saying that warrantless surveillance did. But the idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play. It was Cheney and Addington’s political agenda.”

Addington’s admirers see him as a selfless patriot, a workaholic defender of a purist interpretation of Presidential power—the necessary answer to threatening times. In 1983, Steve Berry, a Republican lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, hired Addington to work with him as the legislative counsel to the House Intelligence Committee; he has been a career patron and close friend ever since. He said, “I know him well, and I know that if there’s a threat he will do everything in his power, within the law, to protect the United States.” Berry added that Addington is acutely aware of the legal tensions between liberty and security. “We fought ourselves every day about it,” he recalled. But, he said, they concluded that a “strong national security and defense” was the first priority, and that “without a strong defense, there’s not much expectation or hope of having other freedoms.” He said that there is no better defender of the country than Addington: “I’ve got a lot of respect for the guy. He’s probably the foremost expert on intelligence and national-security law in the nation right now.” Berry has a daughter who works in New York City, and he said that when he thinks of her safety he appreciates the efforts that Addington has made to strengthen the country’s security. He said, “For Dave, protecting America isn’t just a virtue. It’s a personal mission. I feel safer just knowing he’s where he is.”

Berry said of his friend, “He’s methodical, conscientious, analytical, and logical. And he’s as straight an arrow as they come.” He noted that Addington refuses to let Berry treat him to a hamburger because it might raise issues of influence-buying—instead, they split the check. Addington, he went on, has a dazzling ability to recall the past twenty-five years’ worth of intelligence and national-security legislation. For many years, he kept a vast collection of legal documents in a library in his modest brick-and-clapboard home, in Alexandria, Virginia. One evening several years ago, lightning struck a nearby power line and the house caught fire; much of the archive burned. The fire started at around nine in the evening, and Addington, typically, was still in his office. His wife, Cynthia, and their three daughters were fine, but the loss of his extraordinary collection of papers and political memorabilia, Berry said, “was very hard for him to accept. All you get in this work is memorabilia. There is no cash. But he’s the type of guy who gets psychic benefit from going to work every day, making a difference.”

Though few people doubt Addington’s knowledge of national-security law, even his admirers question his political instincts. “The only time I’ve seen him wrong is on his political judgment,” a former colleague said. “He has a tin ear for political issues. Sometimes the law says one thing, but you have to at least listen to the other side. He will cite case history, case after case. David doesn’t see why you have to compromise.” Even Berry offered a gentle criticism: “His political skills can be overshadowed by his pursuit of what he feels is legally correct.”

Addington has been a hawk on national defense since he was a teen-ager. Leonard Napolitano, an engineer who was one of Addington’s close childhood friends, and whose political leanings are more like those of his sister, Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, joked, “I don’t think that in high school David was a believer in the divine right of kings.” But, he said, Addington was “always conservative.”

The Addingtons were a traditional Catholic military family. They moved frequently; David’s father, Jerry, an electrical engineer in the Army, was assigned to a variety of posts, including Saudi Arabia and Washington, D.C., where he worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a teen-ager, Addington told a friend that he hoped to live in Washington himself when he grew up. Jerry Addington, a 1940 graduate of West Point who won a Bronze Star during the Second World War, also served in Korea and at the North American Air Defense Command, in Colorado; he reached the rank of brigadier general before he retired, in 1970, when David was thirteen. David attended public high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his father began a second career, teaching middle-school math. His mother, Eleanore, was a housewife; the family lived in a ranch house in a middle-class subdivision. She still lives there; Jerry died in 1994. “We are an extremely close family,” one of Addington’s three older sisters, Linda, recalled recently. “Discipline was very important for us, and faith was very important. It was about being ethical—the right thing to do whether anyone else does it or not. I see that in Dave.” She was reluctant to say more. “Dave is most deliberate about his privacy,” she added.

Socially, Napolitano recalled, he and Addington were “the brains, or nerds.” Addington stood out for wearing black socks with shorts. He and his friends were not particularly athletic, and they liked to play poker all night on weekends, stopping early in the morning for breakfast. Their circle included some girls, until the boys found them “too distracting to our interest in cards,” Napolitano recalled.

When he and Addington were in high school, Napolitano said, the Vietnam War was in its final stages, and “there was a certain amount of ‘Challenge authority’ and alcohol and drugs, but they weren’t issues in our group.” Addington’s high-school history teacher, Irwin Hoffman, whom Napolitano recalled as wonderful, exacting, and “a flaming liberal,” said that Addington felt strongly that America “should have stayed and won the Vietnam War, despite the fact that we were losing.” Hoffman, who is retired, added, “The boy seemed terribly, terribly bright. He wrote well, and he was very verbal, not at all reluctant to express his opinions. He was pleasant and quite handsome. He also had a very strong sarcastic streak. He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable.”

Addington graduated in 1974, the year that Nixon resigned. In the aftermath of Watergate, liberal Democratic reformers imposed tighter restraints on the President and reined in the C.I.A., whose excesses were critiqued in congressional hearings, led by Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, that exposed details of assassination plots, coup attempts, mind-control experiments, and domestic spying. Congress passed a series of measures aimed at reinvigorating the system of checks and balances, including an expanded Freedom of Information Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law requiring judicial review before foreign suspects inside the country could be wiretapped. It also created the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which oversee all covert C.I.A. activities.

After high school, Addington pursued an ambition that he had had for years: to join the military. Rather than attending West Point, as his father had, he enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis. But he dropped out before the end of his freshman year. He went home and, according to Napolitano, worked in a Long John Silver’s restaurant. “The academy wasn’t academically challenging enough for him,” Napolitano said.

Addington went to Georgetown University, graduating summa cum laude, in 1978, from the school of foreign service; he went on to earn honors at Duke Law School. After graduating, in 1981, he married Linda Werling, a graduate student in pharmacology. The marriage ended in divorce. His current wife, Cynthia, takes care of their three girls full-time.

Soon after leaving Duke, Addington started his first job, in the general counsel’s office at the C.I.A. A former top agency lawyer who later worked with Addington said that Addington strongly opposed the reform movements that followed Vietnam and Watergate. “Addington was too young to be fully affected by the Vietnam War,” the lawyer said. “He was shaped by the postwar, post-Watergate years instead. He thought the Presidency was too weakened. He’s a believer that in foreign policy the executive is meant to be quite powerful.”

These views were shared by Dick Cheney, who served as chief of staff in the Ford Administration. “On a range of executive-power issues, Cheney thought that Presidents from Nixon onward yielded too quickly,” Michael J. Malbin, a political scientist who has advised Cheney on the issue of executive power, said. Kenneth Adelman, who was a high-ranking Pentagon official under Ford, said that the fall of Saigon, in 1975, was “very painful for Dick. He believed that Vietnam could have been saved—maybe—if Congress hadn’t cut off funding. He was against that kind of interference.”

Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has spent considerable time working with Cheney and Addington in recent years, believes that they are still fighting Watergate. “They’re focussed on restoring the Nixon Presidency,” she said. “They’ve persuaded themselves that, following Nixon, things went all wrong.” She said that in meetings Addington is always courtly and pleasant. But when it comes to accommodating Congress “his answer is always no.”

In a revealing interview that Cheney gave last December to reporters travelling with him to Oman, he explained, “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of Presidential power and authority. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs.” Further, Cheney explained, it was his express aim to restore the balance of power. The President needed to be able to act as Alexander Hamilton had described it in the Federalist Papers, with “secrecy” and “despatch”—especially, Cheney said, “in the day and age we live in . . . with the threats we face.” He added, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think the world we live in demands it.”

At the C.I.A., where Addington spent two years, he focussed on curtailing the ability of Congress to interfere in intelligence gathering. “He was a rookie, plenty bright,” Frederick Hitz, another C.I.A. lawyer, who later became Inspector General, recalled. After the Church and Pike hearings, legislators came up with hundreds of pages of oversight recommendations, he said. “Addington was very pro-agency. He was trying to figure out how to comply with government oversight without getting hog-tied.” Addington viewed the public airings of the C.I.A.’s covert activities as “an absolute disaster,” Berry recalled. “We both felt that Congress did great harm by flinging open the doors to operational secrets.”

When Addington joined the C.I.A., it was directed by William J. Casey, who also regarded congressional constraints on the agency as impediments to be circumvented. His sentiment about congressional overseers was best captured during a hearing about covert actions in Central America, when he responded to tough questioning by muttering the word “assholes.” After Reagan’s election in 1980, the executive branch was dominated by conservative Republicans, while the House was governed by liberal Democrats. The two parties fought intensely over Central America; the Reagan Administration was determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Using their constitutional authority over appropriations, the Democrats in Congress forbade the C.I.A. to spend federal funds to support the Contras, a rightist rebel group. But Casey’s attitude, as Berry recalled it, was “We’re gonna fund these freedom fighters whether Congress wants us to or not.” Berry, then the staff director for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, asked Casey for help in fighting the Democrats. Soon afterward, Addington joined Berry on Capitol Hill.

When the Iran-Contra scandal broke, in 1986, it exposed White House arms deals and foreign fund-raising designed to help the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua. Members of Congress were furious. Summoned to Capitol Hill, Casey lied, denying that funds for the Contras had been solicited from any foreign governments, although he knew that the Saudis, among others, had agreed to give millions of dollars to the Contras, at the request of the White House. Even within the Reagan Administration, the foreign funding was controversial. Secretary of State George Shultz had warned Reagan that he might be committing an impeachable offense. But, under Casey’s guidance, the White House went ahead with the plan; Shultz, having expressed misgivings, was not told. It was a bureaucratic tactic that Addington reprised after September 11th, when Powell was left out of key deliberations about the treatment of detainees. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s aide, said that he was aware of Addington’s general strategy: “We had heard that, behind our backs, he was saying that Powell was ‘soft, but easy to get around.’ ”

The Iran-Contra scandal substantially weakened Reagan’s popularity and, eventually, seven people were convicted of seventeen felonies. Cheney, who was then a Republican congressman from Wyoming, worried that the scandal would further undercut Presidential authority. In late 1986, he became the ranking Republican on a House select committee that was investigating the scandal, and he commissioned a report on Reagan’s support of the Contras. Addington, who had become an expert in intelligence law, contributed legal research. The scholarly-sounding but politically outlandish Minority Report, released in 1987, argued that Congress—not the President—had overstepped its authority, by encroaching on the President’s foreign-policy powers. The President, the report said, had been driven by “a legitimate frustration with abuses of power and irresolution by the legislative branch.” The Minority Report sanctioned the President’s actions to a surprising degree, considering the number of criminal charges that resulted from the scandal. The report also defended the legality of ignoring congressional intelligence oversight, arguing that “the President has the Constitutional and statutory authority to withhold notifying Congress of covert actions under rare conditions.” And it condemned “legislative hostage taking,” noting that “Congress must realize . . . that the power of the purse does not make it supreme” in matters of war. In his December interview with reporters, Cheney proudly cited this document. “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed in the Iran-Contra committee, the Iran-Contra report, in about 1987,” he said. “Part of the argument was whether the President had the authority to do what was done in the Reagan years.”

Addington and Cheney became a formidable team, but it was soon clear that Addington would not join Cheney as a politician. Adelman recalled Addington’s personality as “dour,” adding that, “unlike with Dick, I never saw much of a sense of humor. Cheney can be witty and funny. David is sober. I didn’t see him at social events much.” But, he added, “Dick wasn’t looking for friends at work. He was looking for performance. And David delivers. He’s efficient and dedicated. He’s a doer.” He went on, “Cheney’s not a lawyer, so he would defer to David on the law.”

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed Cheney Secretary of Defense. Cheney hired Addington first as his special assistant and, later, as the Pentagon’s general counsel. At the Pentagon, Addington became widely known as Cheney’s gatekeeper—a stickler for process who controlled the flow of documents to his boss. Using a red felt-tipped pen, he covered his colleagues’ memos with comments before returning them for rewrites. His editing invariably made arguments sharper, smarter, and more firm in their defense of Cheney’s executive powers, a former military official who worked with him said.

At the Pentagon, Addington took a particular interest in the covert actions of the Special Forces. A former colleague recalled that, after attending a demonstration by Special Forces officers, he mocked the C.I.A., which was constrained by oversight laws. “This is how real covert operations are done,” he said. (After September 11th, the Pentagon greatly expanded its covert intelligence operations; these programs have less congressional oversight than those of the C.I.A.) Cheney, throughout his tenure as Defense Secretary, shared with Addington a pessimistic view of the Soviet Union. Both remained skeptical of Gorbachev long after the State Department, the national-security adviser, and the C.I.A. had concluded that he was a reformer. “They were always, like, ‘Whoa—beware the Bear!’ ” Wilkerson recalled. They immersed themselves in “continuity of government exercises”—studying with unusual intensity how the government might survive a nuclear attack. According to “Rise of the Vulcans,” a history of the period by James Mann, Cheney, more than once, spent the night in an underground bunker.

A decade later, when hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Addington, perhaps more than anyone else in the U.S. government, was ready to act. During the Clinton Presidency, he had worked as a lawyer for various business interests, such as the American Trucking Associations, and in 1994 he had led an exploratory Presidential campaign for Cheney, who decided against running. Once Cheney became Vice-President, Addington helped oversee the transition, setting up the most powerful Vice-Presidency in America’s history. Addington’s high-school friend Leonard Napolitano said Addington told him that he and Cheney were merging the Vice-President’s office with the President’s into a single “Executive Office,” instead of having “two different camps.” Napolitano added, “David said that Cheney saw the Vice-President as the executive and implementer of the President.” Addington created a system to insure that virtually all important documents relating to national-security matters were seen by the Vice-President’s office. The former high-ranking Administration lawyer said that Addington regularly attended White House legal meetings with the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. He received copies of all National Security Council documents, including internal memos from the staff. And, as a former top official in the Defense Department, he exerted influence over the legal office at the Pentagon, helping his protégé William J. Haynes secure the position of general counsel. A former national-security lawyer, speaking of the Pentagon’s legal office, said, “It’s obvious that Addington runs the whole operation.”

In the days after September 11th, a half-dozen White House lawyers had heated discussions about how to frame the Administration’s legal response to the attacks. Bradford Berenson, one of the participants, recalled how “raw” feelings were at the time: “There were thousands of bereaved American families. Everyone was expecting additional attacks. The only planes in the air were military. At a moment like that, there’s an intense focus on responsibility and accountability. Preventing another attack should always be within the law. But if you have to err on the side of being too aggressive or not aggressive enough, you’d err by being too aggressive.”

Berry said that Addington felt this keenly. “I’ve talked to David about this a little. Psychologically, it’s really taxing to read every day not about one or two but about a dozen, or two dozen, legitimate reports about efforts to take out U.S. citizens. . . . There’s a little bit of a bunker mentality that set in among some of the national-security-policy officials after 9/11.”

Almost immediately, other Administration lawyers noticed that Addington dominated the internal debates. His assumption, shared by other hard-line lawyers in the White House counsel’s office and in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was that the criminal-justice system was insufficient to handle the threat from terrorism. The matter was settled without debate, Berenson recalled: “There was a consensus that we had to move from retribution and punishment to preëmption and prevention. Only a warfare model allows that approach.”

Richard Shiffrin, the former Pentagon lawyer, said that during a tense White House meeting held in the Situation Room just a few days after September 11th “all of us felt under a great deal of pressure to be willing to consider even the most extraordinary proposals. The C.I.A., the N.S.C., the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department all had people there. Addington was particularly strident. He’d sit, listen, and then say, ‘No, that’s not right.’ He was particularly doctrinaire and ideological. He didn’t recognize the wisdom of the other lawyers. He was always right. He didn’t listen. He knew the answers.” The details of the discussion are classified, Shiffrin said, but he left with the impression that Addington “doesn’t believe there should be co-equal branches.” Another participant recalled, “If you favored international law, you were in danger of being called ‘soft on terrorism’ by Addington.” He added that Addington’s manner in meetings was “very insistent and very loud.” Yet another participant said that, whenever he cautioned against executive-branch overreaching, Addington would respond brusquely, “There you go again, giving away the President’s power.”

Some of the protests from Democrats about the Administration’s legal arguments and some of the declarations of high principle from Republicans are mere partisan gestures. Both sides have changed their views about the need for a strong President, depending on whether they were in power. “It’s a matter of degree,” the liberal Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said. “War always expands the powers of the Presidency. And Presidents always overreach.” Lincoln infamously suspended habeas-corpus rights during the Civil War, locking up thousands of Confederate sympathizers without due process, and Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than a hundred thousand innocent Japanese-Americans. “Someone said that this Administration is monarchical,” Wilentz added. “That’s just rhetoric. We’re not a dictatorship. At the same time, this White House has assumed powers for itself that no previous Administration has done.” Bush’s defenders frequently cite the example of Lincoln as a justification for placing national security above the rule of law. But Schlesinger, in his book “War and the American Presidency” (2004), points out that Lincoln never “claimed an inherent and routine right to do what [he] did.” The Bush White House, he told me, has seized on these historical aberrations and turned them into a doctrine of Presidential prerogative.

On September 25th, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo declaring that the President had inherent constitutional authority to take whatever military action he deemed necessary, not just in response to the September 11th attacks but also in the prevention of any future attacks from terrorist groups, whether they were linked to Al Qaeda or not. The memo’s broad definition of the enemy went beyond that of Congress, which, on September 14th, had passed legislation authorizing the President to use military force against “nations, organizations, or persons” directly linked to the attacks. The memo was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel who worked closely with Addington, and said, in part, “The power of the President is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces, because the power of the Commander-in-Chief is assigned solely to the President.” The memo acknowledged that Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but argued that it was a misreading to assume that the article gives Congress the lead role in making war. Instead, the memo said, “it is beyond question that the President has the plenary Constitutional power to take such military actions as he deems necessary and appropriate to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on September 11, 2001.” It concluded, “These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.”

Another memo sanctioned torture when the President deems it necessary; yet another claimed that there were virtually no valid legal prohibitions against the inhumane treatment of foreign prisoners held by the C.I.A. outside the U.S. Most of these decisions, according to many Administration officials who were involved in the process, were made in secrecy, and the customary interagency debate and vetting procedures were sidestepped. Addington either drafted the memos himself or advised those who were drafting them. “Addington’s fingerprints were all over these policies,” said Wilkerson, who, as Powell’s top aide, later assembled for the Secretary a dossier of internal memos detailing the decision-making process.

On November 13, 2001, an executive order setting up the military commissions was issued under Bush’s signature. The decision stunned Powell; the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; the highest-ranking lawyer at the C.I.A.; and many judge advocate generals, or JAGs, the top lawyers in the military services. None of them had been consulted. Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, who had argued for trying terror suspects in the U.S. courts, was also bypassed. And the order surprised John Bellinger III, the National Security Council legal adviser and deputy White House counsel, who had been formally asked to help create a legal method for trying foreign terror suspects. According to multiple sources, Addington secretly usurped the process. He and a few hand-picked associates, including Bradford Berenson and Timothy Flanigan, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, wrote the executive order creating the commissions. Moreover, Addington did not show drafts of the order to Powell or Rice, who, the senior Administration lawyer said, was incensed when she learned about her exclusion.

The order proclaimed a state of “extraordinary emergency,” and announced that the rules for the military commissions would be dictated by the Secretary of Defense, without review by Congress or the courts. The commissions could try any foreign person the President or his representatives deemed to have “engaged in” or “abetted” or “conspired to commit” terrorism, without offering the right to seek an appeal from anyone but the President or the Secretary of Defense. Detainees would be treated “humanely,” and would be given “full and fair trials,” the order said. Yet the order continued that “it is not practicable” to apply “the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.” The death penalty, for example, could be imposed even if there was a split verdict. Moreover, in December, 2001, the Department of Defense circulated internal memos suggesting that, in the commission system, defendants would have only limited rights to confront their accusers, see all the evidence against them, or be present during their trials. There would be no right to remain silent, and hearsay evidence would be admissible, as would evidence obtained through physical coercion. Guilt did not need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The order firmly established that terrorism would henceforth be approached on a war footing, endowing the President with enhanced powers.

The precedent for the order was an arcane 1942 case, ex parte Quirin, in which Franklin Roosevelt created a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had infiltrated the United States via submarines. The Supreme Court upheld the case, 8–0, but even the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has called it “not this Court’s finest hour.” Roosevelt was later criticized for creating a sham process. Moreover, while he used military commissions to try a handful of suspects who had already admitted their guilt, the Bush White House was proposing expanding the process to cover thousands of “enemy combatants.” It was also ignoring the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, having codified procedures for courts-martial in 1951, had rendered Quirin out of date.

Berenson said, “The legal foundation was very strong. F.D.R.’s order establishing military commissions had been upheld by the Supreme Court. This was almost identical. What we underestimated was the extent to which the culture had shifted beneath us since World War Two.” Concerns about civil liberties and human rights, and anger over Vietnam and Watergate, he said, had turned public opinion against a strong executive branch: “But Addington thought military commissions had to be a tool at the President’s disposal.”

Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy’s chief JAG until June, 2002, said that he and the other JAGs, who were experts in the laws of war, tried unsuccessfully to amend parts of the military-commission plan when they learned of it, days before the order was formally signed by the President. “But we were marginalized,” he said. “We were warning them that we had this long tradition of military justice, and we didn’t want to tarnish it. The treatment of detainees was a huge issue. They didn’t want to hear it.” In a 2004 report in the Times, Guter said that when he and the other JAGs told Haynes that they needed more information, Haynes replied, “No, you don’t.” (Haynes’s office offered no comment.)

At the Defense Department, Shiffrin, the deputy general counsel for intelligence, and a career lawyer rather than a political appointee, was taken aback when Haynes showed him the order. Earlier in Shiffrin’s career, at the Justice Department, his office had been in the same room where the Nazi defendants were tried, and he had become interested in the case, which he said he regarded as “one of the worst Supreme Court cases ever.” He recalled informing Haynes that he was skeptical of the Administration’s invocation of Quirin. “Gee, this is problematic,” Shiffrin told him.

Marine Major Dan Mori, the uniformed lawyer who has been assigned to defend David Hicks, one of the ten terror suspects in Guantánamo who have been charged, said of the commissions, “It was a political stunt. The Administration clearly didn’t know anything about military law or the laws of war. I think they were clueless that there even was a U.C.M.J. and a Manual for Courts-Martial! The fundamental problem is that the rules were constructed by people with a vested interest in conviction.”

Mori said that the charges against the detainees reflected a profound legal confusion. “A military commission can try only violations of the laws of war,” he said. “But the Administration’s lawyers didn’t understand this.” Under federal criminal statutes, for example, conspiring to commit terrorist acts is a crime. But, as the Nuremburg trials that followed the Second World War established, under the laws of war it is not, since all soldiers could be charged with conspiring to fight for their side. Yet, Mori said, a charge of conspiracy “is the only thing there is in many cases at Guantánamo—guilt by association. So you’ve got this big problem.” He added, “I hope that nobody confuses military justice with these ‘military commissions.’ This is a political process, set up by the civilian leadership. It’s inept, incompetent, and improper.”

Under attack from defense lawyers like Mori, the military commissions have been tied up in the courts almost since the order was issued. Bellinger and others fought to make the commissions fairer, so that they could withstand court challenges, and the Pentagon gradually softened its rules. But Administration lawyers involved in the process said that Addington resisted at every turn. He insisted, for instance, on maintaining the admissibility of statements obtained through coercion, or even torture. In meetings, he argued that officials in charge of the military commissions should be given maximum flexibility to decide whether to include such evidence. “Torture isn’t important to Addington as a scientific matter, good or bad, or whether it works or not,” the Administration lawyer, who is familiar with these debates, said. “It’s more about his philosophy of Presidential power. He thinks that if the President wants torture he should get torture. He always argued for ‘maximum flexibility.’ ”

Last month, Addington lost this internal battle. The Administration rescinded the provision allowing coerced testimony, after even the military officials overseeing the commissions supported the reform. According to a senior Administration legal adviser who participated in discussions about the commissions, Addington remained opposed to the change. “He wanted no changes,” the lawyer said. “He said the rules were good, right from the start.” Addington accused officials who were trying to reform the rules of “giving away the President’s prerogatives.”

President Bush has blamed the legal challenges for the delays in prosecuting Guantánamo detainees. But many lawyers, even some inside the Administration, believe that the challenges were inevitable, considering the dubious constitutionality of the commissions. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hamdan case is expected to establish whether the commissions meet basic standards of due process. The Administration lawyer isn’t sanguine about the outcome. “It shows again that Addington overreached,” he said.

Meanwhile, Addington has fought tirelessly to stem reform of other controversial aspects of the New Paradigm, such as the detention and interrogation of terror suspects. Last year, he and Cheney led an unsuccessful campaign to defeat an amendment, proposed by Senator John McCain, to ban the abusive treatment of detainees held by the military or the C.I.A. Government officials who have worked closely with Addington say he insists that legal flexibility is necessary, because of the iniquity of the enemy; moreover, he does not believe that the legal positions taken by the Bush Administration in the war on terror have damaged the country’s international reputation. “He’s a very smart guy, but he gives no credibility to those who say these policies are hurting us around the world,” the senior Administration legal adviser said. “His feeling is that there are no costs. He’ll say people are just whining. He thinks most of them would be against us no matter what.” In Addington’s view, critics of the Administration’s aggressive legal policies are just political enemies of the President.

Yet, from the start, some of the sharpest critics of detainee-treatment policies have been military and law-enforcement officials inside the Bush Administration; people close to it, like McCain; and our foreign allies. Just a few months after the Guantánamo detention centers were established, members of the Administration began receiving reports that questioned whether all the prisoners there were really, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had labelled them, “the worst of the worst.” Guter said that the Pentagon had originally planned to screen the suspects individually on the battlefields in Afghanistan; such “Article 5 hearings” are a provision of the Geneva Conventions. But the White House cancelled the hearings, which had been standard protocol during the previous fifty years, including in the first Gulf War. In a January 25, 2002, legal memorandum, Administration lawyers dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “obsolete,” “quaint,” and irrelevant to the war on terror. The memo was signed by Gonzales, but the Administration lawyer said he believed that “Addington and Flanigan were behind it.” The memo argued that all Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees were illegal enemy combatants, which eliminated “any argument regarding the need for case-by-case determination of P.O.W. status.” Critics claim that the lack of a careful screening process led some innocent detainees to be imprisoned. “Article 5 hearings would have cost them nothing,” the Administration lawyer, who was involved in the process, said. “They just wanted to make a point on executive power—that the President can designate them all enemy combatants if he wants to.”

Guter, the Navy JAG, said that, before long, he and other military experts began to wonder whether the reason they weren’t getting much useful intelligence from Guantánamo was that, as he puts it, “it wasn’t there.” Guter, who was in the Pentagon on September 11th, said, “I don’t have a sympathetic bone in my body for the terrorists. But I just wanted to make sure we were getting the right people—the real terrorists. And I wanted to make sure we were doing it in a way consistent with our values.”

While the JAGs’ questions about the treatment of detainees went largely unheeded, he said, the C.I.A. was simultaneously raising similar concerns. In the summer of 2002, the agency had sent an Arabic-speaking analyst to Guantánamo to find out why more intelligence wasn’t being collected, and, after interviewing several dozen prisoners, he had come back with bad news: more than half the detainees, he believed, didn’t belong there. He wrote a devastating classified report, which reached General John Gordon, the deputy national-security adviser for combatting terrorism. In a series of meetings at the White House, Gordon, Bellinger, and other officials warned Addington and Gonzales that potentially innocent people had been locked up in Guantánamo and would be indefinitely. “This is a violation of basic notions of American fairness,” Gordon and Bellinger argued. “Isn’t that what we’re about as a country?” Addington’s response, sources familiar with the meetings said, was “These are ‘enemy combatants.’ Please use that term. They’ve all been through a screening process. We don’t have anything to talk about.”

A former Administration official said of Addington’s response, “It seemed illogical. How could you deny the possibility that one or more people were locked up who shouldn’t be? There were old people, sick people—why do we want to keep them?” At the meeting, Gordon and Bellinger argued, “The American public understands that wars are confusing and exceptional things happen. But the American public will expect some due process.”

Addington and Gonzales dismissed this concern. The former Administration official recalled that Addington was “the dominant voice. It was a non-debate, in his view.” The confrontation made clear, though, that Addington had been informed early that there were problems at Guantánamo. “There wasn’t a lack of knowledge or understanding,” the former official said.

Addington has proved deft at outmaneuvering his critics. Documents embarrassing to Addington’s opponents have been leaked to the press, if not necessarily by him. A top-secret N.S.C. memo describing Powell’s request to reconsider the suspension of the Geneva Conventions appeared in the Washington Times the day after it was circulated to the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Vice-President; the article cited unnamed sources who accused Powell of “bowing to pressure from the political left.” The Administration lawyer said, “The way Addington works, he controls the flow of information very tightly.” Addington chastised a Justice Department official who showed a legal opinion on the treatment of detainees to the State Department. He repeatedly directed Gonzales, the White House counsel, to keep Bellinger, the N.S.C. lawyer, out of meetings about national-security issues. “Lip-lock” is the word Addington’s old Pentagon colleague Sean O’Keefe, now the chancellor of Louisiana State University, used to describe his discretion. “He’s like Cheney,” O’Keefe said. “You can’t get anything out of him with a crowbar.” The Administration lawyer said, “He’s a bully, pure and simple.” Several talented top lawyers who challenged Addington on important legal matters concerning the war on terror, including Patrick Philbin, James Comey, and Jack Goldsmith, left the Administration under stressful circumstances. Other reform-minded government lawyers who clashed with Addington, including Bellinger and Matthew Waxman, both of whom were at the N.S.C. during Bush’s first term, have moved to the State Department.

Waxman, a young lawyer who headed the Pentagon’s office of detainee affairs, departed soon after he had a major confrontation with Addington over the issue of clarifying military rules for the treatment of prisoners. Waxman believed that international standards for the humane treatment of detainees should be followed, and argued for reforms in the Army Field Manual. He hoped to reinstate the basic standards that are specified in the Geneva Conventions. This meant the prohibition of torture, overt acts of violence, and “outrages on personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Although the Vice-President’s office is not part of the military chain of command, last September Addington summoned Waxman to his office and berated him. Waxman declined to comment on the incident, but a former colleague in the Pentagon, in whom Waxman confided, said that Addington accused Waxman of wanting to fight the war on terror his own way, rather than the President’s way. The Army Field Manual still hasn’t been revised, and, according to those involved, Addington and his protégé Haynes remain the major obstacles.

Last fall, Richard Shiffrin, the Pentagon lawyer who was left out of the Administration’s initial discussions of the military commissions, learned from the Times about the Administration’s decision to sanction warrantless domestic electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency. This was remarkable, because Shiffrin was the Pentagon lawyer in charge of supervising the N.S.A.’s legal advisers. “It was exceptional that I didn’t know about it—extraordinary,” Shiffrin said. “In the prior Administration, on anything involving N.S.A. legal issues I’d have been made aware. And I should have been in this one.”

Shortly after September 11th, Addington and Cheney, without alerting Shiffrin, held meetings with top N.S.A. lawyers in the Vice-President’s office and told them that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, had the authority to override the FISA statutes and not seek warrants from the special court. According to the Times, Addington and Cheney pushed the N.S.A. to engage in practices that the agency thought were illegal, such as the warrantless wiretapping of American suspects making domestic calls. General Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A., who was recently confirmed as director of the C.I.A., has denied being pressured. Shiffrin, however, doubted that the N.S.A. lawyers were expert enough in Article II of the Constitution, which defines the President’s powers, to argue back. He described the Administration’s legal arguments on wiretapping as “close calls.”

Others are more critical. Fourteen prominent constitutional scholars, representing a range of political views, recently wrote an open letter to Congress, claiming that the N.S.A. surveillance program “appears on its face to violate existing law.” The scholars noted that Bush had made no effort to amend the FISA law to suit national-security needs—he simply ignored it. The Republican legal activist Bruce Fein said, “What makes this so sinister is that the members of this Administration have unchecked power. They don’t care if the wiretapping is legal or not.” But the former high-ranking Administration lawyer suggested that the situation is more serious than an intentional infraction of the law. “It’s not that they think they’re skirting the law,” he said. “They think that this is the law.”

Fein suggested that the only way Congress will be able to reassert its power is by cutting off funds to the executive branch for programs that it thinks are illegal. But this approach has been tried, and here, too, Addington has had the last word. John Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, put a provision in the Pentagon’s appropriations bills for 2005 and 2006 forbidding the use of federal funds for any intelligence-gathering that violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of American citizens. The White House, however, took exception to Congress’s effort to cut off funds. When President Bush signed the appropriations bills into law, he appended “signing statements” asserting that the Commander-in-Chief had the right to collect intelligence in any way he deemed necessary. The signing statement for the 2005 budget, for instance, noted that the executive branch would “construe” the spending limit only “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief, including for the conduct of intelligence operations.”

According to the Boston Globe, Addington has been the “leading architect” of these signing statements, which have been added to more than seven hundred and fifty laws. He reportedly scrutinizes every bill before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power. These wars of words are yet another battlefront between Addington and Congress, and some constitutional scholars find them troubling. Few of the signing statements were noticed until one of them was slipped into Bush’s signing of the McCain amendment. The language was legal boilerplate, reserving the right to construe the legislation only as it was consistent with the Constitution. But, considering that Cheney’s office had waged, and lost, a public fight to defeat the McCain amendment democratically—the vote in the Senate was 90–9—the signing statement seemed sneaky and subversive.

Earlier this month, the American Bar Association voted to investigate whether President Bush had exceeded his constitutional authority by reserving the right to ignore portions of laws that he has signed. Richard Epstein, the University of Chicago law professor, said, “What’s frightening to me is that this Administration is always willing to push the conventions to the limits—and beyond. With his signing statements, I think the President just goes too far. If you sign these things with a caveat, do the inferior officers follow the law or the caveat?”

Bruce Fein argues that Addington’s signing statements are “unconstitutional as a strategy,” because the Founding Fathers wanted Presidents to veto legislation openly if they thought the bills were unconstitutional. Bush has not vetoed a single bill since taking office. “It’s part of the balancing process,” Fein said. “It’s about accountability. If you veto something, everyone knows where you stand. But this President wants to do it sotto voce. He wants to give the image that he’s accommodating on torture, and then reserves the right to torture anyway.”

David Addington is a satisfactory lawyer, Fein said, but a less than satisfactory student of American history, which, for a public servant of his influence, matters more. “If you read the Federalist Papers, you can see how rich in history they are,” he said. “The Founders really understood the history of what people did with power, going back to Greek and Roman and Biblical times. Our political heritage is to be skeptical of executive power, because, in particular, there was skepticism of King George III. But Cheney and Addington are not students of history. If they were, they’d know that the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what they’ve done.”

Role model

Bonobo Sex and Society

The behavior of a close relative challenges assumptions about male supremacy in human evolution by Frans B. M. de Waal (Originally published in the March 1995 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, pp. 82-88)

Frans B. M. de Waal was trained as an ethologist in the European tradition, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht in 1977. After a six-year study of the chimpanzee colony at the Arnhem Zoo, he moved to the U.S. in 1981 to work on other primate species, including bonobos. He is now a research professor at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta and professor of psychology at Emory University. The Bonobo The bonobo is one of the last large mammals to be found by science. The creature was discovered in 1929 in a Belgian colonial museum, far from its lush African habitat. A German anatomist, Ernst Schwarz, was scrutinizing a skull that had been ascribed to a juvenile chimpanzee because of its small size, when he realized that it belonged to an adult. Schwarz declared that he had stumbled on a new subspecies of chimpanzee. But soon the animal was assigned the status of an entirely distinct species within the same genus as the chimpanzee, Pan.The bonobo was officially classified as Pan paniscus, or the diminutive Pan. But I believe a different label might have been selected had the discoverers known then what we know now. The old taxonomic name of the chimpanzee, P. satyrus – which refers to the myth of apes as lustful satyrs – would have been perfect for the bonobo.The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression. Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations – and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobo’s rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.

A Near Relative This finding commands attention because the bonobo shares more than 98 percent of our genetic profile, making it as close to a human as, say, a fox is to a dog. The split between the human line of ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo is believed to have occurred a mere eight million years ago. The subsequent divergence of the chimpanzee and the bonobo lines came much later, perhaps prompted by the chimpanzee’s need to adapt to relatively open, dry habitats [see "East Side Story: The Origin of Humankind," by Yves Coppens; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, May 1994].In contrast, bonobos probably never left the protection of the trees. Their present range lies in humid forests south of the Zaire River, where perhaps fewer than 10,000 bonobos survive. (Given the species’ slow rate of reproduction, the rapid destruction of its tropical habitat and the political instability of central Africa, there is reason for much concern about its future.) If this evolutionary scenario of ecological continuity is true, the bonobo may have undergone less transformation than either humans or chimpanzees. It could most closely resemble the common ancestor of all three modern species. Indeed, in the 1930s Harold J. Coolidge – the American anatomist who gave the bonobo its eventual taxonomic status – suggested that the animal might be most similar to the primogenitor, since its anatomy is less specialized than is the chimpanzee’s. Bonobo body proportions have been compared with those of the australopithecines, a form of prehuman. When the apes stand or walk upright, they look as if they stepped straight out of an artist’s impression of early hominids. Not too long ago the savanna baboon was regarded as the best living model of the human ancestor. That primate is adapted to the kinds of ecological conditions that prehumans may have faced after descending from the trees. But in the late 1970s, chimpanzees, which are much more closely related to humans, became the model of choice. Traits that are observed in chimpanzees – including cooperative hunting, food sharing, tool use, power politics and primitive warfare – were absent or not as developed in baboons. In the laboratory the apes have been able to learn sign language and to recognize themselves in a mirror, a sign of self-awareness not yet demonstrated in monkeys. Although selecting the chimpanzee as the touchstone of hominid evolution represented a great improvement, at least one aspect of the former model did not need to be revised: male superiority remained the natural state of affairs. In both baboons and chimpanzees, males are conspicuously dominant over females; they reign supremely and often brutally. It is highly unusual for a fully grown male chimpanzee to be dominated by any female. Enter the bonobo. Despite their common name – the pygmy chimpanzee – bonobos cannot be distinguished from the chimpanzee by size. Adult males of the smallest subspecies of chimpanzee weigh some 43 kilograms (95 pounds) and females 33 kilograms (73 pounds), about the same as bonobos. Although female bonobos are much smaller than the males, they seem to rule.

Graceful Apes In physique, a bonobo is as different from a chimpanzee as a Concorde is from a Boeing 747. I do not wish to offend any chimpanzees, but bonobos have more style. The bonobo, with its long legs and small head atop narrow shoulders, has a more gracile build than does a chimpanzee. Bonobo lips are reddish in a black face, the ears small and the nostrils almost as wide as a gorilla’s. These primates also have a flatter, more open face with a higher forehead than the chimpanzee’s and – to top it all off – an attractive coiffure with long, fine, black hair neatly parted in the middle.Like chimpanzees, female bonobos nurse and carry around their young for up to five years. By the age of seven the offspring reach adolescence. Wild females give birth for the first time at 13 or 14 years of age, becoming full grown by about 15. A bonobo’s longevity is unknown, but judging by the chimpanzee it may be older than 40 in the wild and close to 60 in captivity. Fruit is central to the diets of both wild bonobos and chimpanzees. The former supplement with more pith from herbaceous plants, and the latter add meat. Although bonobos do eat invertebrates and occasionally capture and eat small vertebrates, including mammals, their diet seems to contain relatively little animal protein. Unlike chimpanzees, they have not been observed to hunt monkeys. Whereas chimpanzees use a rich array of strategies to obtain foods – from cracking nuts with stone tools to fishing for ants and termites with sticks – tool use in wild bonobos seems undeveloped. (Captive bonobos use tools skillfully.) Apparently as intelligent as chimpanzees, bonobos have, however, a far more sensitive temperament. During World War II bombing of Hellabrun, Germany, the bonobos in a nearby zoo all died of fright from the noise; the chimpanzees were unaffected. Bonobos are also imaginative in play. I have watched captive bonobos engage in “blindman’s buff.” A bonobo covers her eyes with a banana leaf or an arm or by sticking two fingers in her eyes. Thus handicapped, she stumbles around on a climbing frame, bumping into others or almost falling. She seems to be imposing a rule on herself: “I cannot look until I lose my balance.” Other apes and monkeys also indulge in this game, but I have never seen it performed with such dedication and concentration as by bonobos. Juvenile bonobos are incurably playful and like to make funny faces, sometimes in long solitary pantomimes and at other times while tickling one another. Bonobos are, however, more controlled in expressing their emotions – whether it be joy, sorrow, excitement or anger – than are the extroverted chimpanzees. Male chimpanzees often engage in spectacular charging displays in which they show off their strength: throwing rocks, breaking branches and uprooting small trees in the process. They keep up these noisy performances for many minutes, during which most other members of the group wisely stay out of their way. Male bonobos, on the other hand, usually limit displays to a brief run while dragging a few branches behind them. Both primates signal emotions and intentions through facial expressions and hand gestures, many of which are also present in the nonverbal communication of humans. For example, bonobos will beg by stretching out an open hand (or, sometimes, a foot) to a possessor of food and will pout their lips and make whimpering sounds if the effort is unsuccessful. But bonobos make different sounds than chimpanzees do. The renowned low-pitched, extended “huuu- huuu” pant-hooting of the latter contrasts with the rather sharp, high-pitched barking sounds of the bonobo.

Love, Not War My own interest in bonobos came not from an inherent fascination with their charms but from research on aggressive behavior in primates. I was particularly intrigued with the aftermath of conflict. After two chimpanzees have fought, for instance, they may come together for a hug and mouth-to-mouth kiss. Assuming that such reunions serve to restore peace and harmony, I labeled them reconciliations.Any species that combines close bonds with a potential for conflict needs such conciliatory mechanisms. Thinking how much faster marriages would break up if people had no way of compensating for hurting each other, I set out to investigate such mechanisms in several primates, including bonobos. Although I expected to see peacemaking in these apes, too, I was little prepared for the form it would take. For my study, which began in 1983, I chose the San Diego Zoo. At the time, it housed the world’s largest captive bonobo colony – 10 members divided into three groups. I spent entire days in front of the enclosure with a video camera, which was switched on at feeding time. As soon as a caretaker approached the enclosure with food, the males would develop erections. Even before the food was thrown into the area, the bonobos would be inviting each other for sex: males would invite females, and females would invite males and other females. Sex, it turned out, is the key to the social life of the bonobo. The first suggestion that the sexual behavior of bonobos is different had come from observations at European zoos. Wrapping their findings in Latin, primatologists Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck reported in 1954 that the chimpanzees at Hellabrun mated more canum (like dogs) and bonobos more hominum (like people). In those days, face-to- face copulation was considered uniquely human, a cultural innovation that needed to be taught to preliterate people (hence the term “missionary position”). These early studies, written in German, were ignored by the international scientific establishment. The bonobo’s humanlike sexuality needed to be rediscovered in the 1970s before it became accepted as characteristic of the species. Bonobos become sexually aroused remarkably easily, and they express this excitement in a variety of mounting positions and genital contacts. Although chimpanzees virtually never adopt face-to-face positions, bonobos do so in one out of three copulations in the wild. Furthermore, the frontal orientation of the bonobo vulva and clitoris strongly suggest that the female genitalia are adapted for this position. Another similarity with humans is increased female sexual receptivity. The tumescent phase of the female’s genitals, resulting in a pink swelling that signals willingness to mate, covers a much longer part of estrus in bonobos than in chimpanzees. Instead of a few days out of her cycle, the female bonobo is almost continuously sexually attractive and active. Perhaps the bonobo’s most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other primate, is genito-genital rubbing (or GG rubbing) between adult females. One female facing another clings with arms and legs to a partner that, standing on both hands and feet, lifts her off the ground. The two females then rub their genital swellings laterally together, emitting grins and squeals that probably reflect orgasmic experiences. (Laboratory experiments on stump- tailed macaques have demonstrated that women are not the only female primates capable of physiological orgasm.) Male bonobos, too, may engage in pseudocopulation but generally perform a variation. Standing back to back, one male briefly rubs his scrotum against the buttocks of another. They also practice so-called penis-fencing, in which two males hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together. The diversity of erotic contacts in bonobos includes sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual’s genitals and intense tongue-kissing. Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed. It appears to be a completely natural part of their group life. Like people, bonobos engage in sex only occasionally, not continuously. Furthermore, with the average copulation lasting 13 seconds, sexual contact in bonobos is rather quick by human standards. That sex is connected to feeding, and even appears to make food sharing possible, has been observed not only in zoos but also in the wild. Nancy Thompson-Handler, then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, saw bonobos in Zaire’s Lomako Forest engage in sex after they had entered trees loaded with ripe figs or when one among them had captured a prey animal, such as a small forest duiker. The flurry of sexual contacts would last for five to 10 minutes, after which the apes would settle down to consume the food. One explanation for the sexual activity at feeding time could be that excitement over food translates into sexual arousal. This idea may be partly true. Yet another motivation is probably the real cause: competition. There are two reasons to believe sexual activity is the bonobo’s answer to avoiding conflict. First, anything, not just food, that arouses the interest of more than one bonobo at a time tends to result in sexual contact. If two bonobos approach a cardboard box thrown into their enclosure, they will briefly mount each other before playing with the box. Such situations lead to squabbles in most other species. But bonobos are quite tolerant, perhaps because they use sex to divert attention and to diffuse tension. Second, bonobo sex often occurs in aggressive contexts totally unrelated to food. A jealous male might chase another away from a female, after which the two males reunite and engage in scrotal rubbing. Or after a female hits a juvenile, the latter’s mother may lunge at the aggressor, an action that is immediately followed by genital rubbing between the two adults. I once observed a young male, Kako, inadvertently blocking an older, female juvenile, Leslie, from moving along a branch. First, Leslie pushed him; Kako, who was not very confident in trees, tightened his grip, grinning nervously. Next Leslie gnawed on one of his hands, presumably to loosen his grasp. Kako uttered a sharp peep and stayed put. Then Leslie rubbed her vulva against his shoulder. This gesture calmed Kako, and he moved along the branch. It seemed that Leslie had been very close to using force but instead had reassured both herself and Kako with sexual contact. During reconciliations, bonobos use the same sexual repertoire as they do during feeding time. Based on an analysis of many such incidents, my study yielded the first solid evidence for sexual behavior as a mechanism to overcome aggression. Not that this function is absent in other animals – or in humans, for that matter – but the art of sexual reconciliation may well have reached its evolutionary peak in the bonobo. For these animals, sexual behavior is indistinguishable from social behavior. Given its peacemaking and appeasement functions, it is not surprising that sex among bonobos occurs in so many different partner combinations, including between juveniles and adults. The need for peaceful coexistence is obviously not restricted to adult heterosexual pairs.

Female Alliance Apart from maintaining harmony, sex is also involved in creating the singular social structure of the bonobo. This use of sex becomes clear when studying bonobos in the wild. Field research on bonobos started only in the mid-1970s, more than a decade after the most important studies on wild chimpanzees had been initiated. In terms of continuity and invested (wo)manpower, the chimpanzee projects of Jane Goodall and Toshisada Nishida, both in Tanzania, are unparalleled. But bonobo research by Takayoshi Kano and others of Kyoto University is now two decades under way at Wamba in Zaire and is beginning to show the same payoffs.Both bonobos and chimpanzees live in so-called fission – fusion societies. The apes move alone or in small parties of a few individuals at a time, the composition of which changes constantly. Several bonobos traveling together in the morning might meet another group in the forest, whereupon one individual from the first group wanders off with others from the second group, while those left behind forage together. All associations, except the one between mother and dependent offspring, are of a temporary character. Initially this flexibility baffled investigators, making them wonder if these apes formed any social groups with stable membership. After years of documenting the travels of chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains, Nishida first reported that they form large communities: all members of one community mix freely in ever changing parties, but members of different communities never gather. Later, Goodall added territoriality to this picture. That is, not only do communities not mix, but males of different chimpanzee communities engage in lethal battles. In both bonobos and chimpanzees, males stay in their natal group, whereas females tend to migrate during adolescence. As a result, the senior males of a chimpanzee or bonobo group have known all junior males since birth, and all junior males have grown up together. Females, on the other hand, transfer to an unfamiliar and often hostile group where they may know no one. A chief difference between chimpanzee and bonobo societies is the way in which young females integrate into their new community. On arrival in another community, young bonobo females at Wamba single out one or two senior resident females for special attention, using frequent GG rubbing and grooming to establish a relation. If the residents reciprocate, close associations are set up, and the younger female gradually becomes accepted into the group. After producing her first offspring, the young female’s position becomes more stable and central. Eventually the cycle repeats with younger immigrants, in turn, seeking a good relation with the now established female. Sex thus smooths the migrant’s entrance into the community of females, which is much more close-knit in the bonobo than in the chimpanzee. Bonobo males remain attached to their mothers all their lives, following them through the forest and being dependent on them for protection in aggressive encounters with other males. As a result, the highest-ranking males of a bonobo community tend to be sons of important females. What a contrast with chimpanzees! Male chimpanzees fight their own battles, often relying on the support of other males. Furthermore, adult male chimpanzees travel together in same-sex parties, grooming each other frequently. Males form a distinct social hierarchy with high levels of both competition and association. Given the need to stick together against males of neighboring communities, their bonding is not surprising: failure to form a united front might result in the loss of lives and territory. The danger of being male is reflected in the adult sex ratio of chimpanzee populations, with considerably fewer males than females. Serious conflict between bonobo groups has been witnessed in the field, but it seems quite rare. On the contrary, reports exist of peaceable mingling, including mutual sex and grooming, between what appear to be different communities. If intergroup combat is indeed unusual, it may explain the lower rate of all-male associations. Rather than being male- bonded, bonobo society gives the impression of being female- bonded, with even adult males relying on their mothers instead of on other males. No wonder Kano calls mothers the “core” of bonobo society. The bonding among female bonobos violates a fairly general rule, outlined by Harvard University anthropologist Richard W. Wrangham, that the sex that stays in the natal group develops the strongest mutual bonds. Bonding among male chimpanzees follows naturally because they remain in the community of their birth. The same is true for female kinship bonding in Old World monkeys, such as macaques and baboons, where males are the migratory sex. Bonobos are unique in that the migratory sex, females, strongly bond with same-sex strangers later in life. In setting up an artificial sisterhood, bonobos can be said to be secondarily bonded. (Kinship bonds are said to be primary.) Although we now know HOW this happens – through the use of sexual contact and grooming – we do not yet know WHY bonobos and chimpanzees differ in this respect. The answer may lie in the different ecological environments of bonobos and chimpanzees – such as the abundance and quality of food in the forest. But it is uncertain if such explanations will suffice. Bonobo society is, however, not only female-centered but also appears to be female-dominated. Bonobo specialists, while long suspecting such a reality, have been reluctant to make the controversial claim. But in 1992, at the 14th Congress of the International Primatological Society in Strasbourg, investigators of both captive and wild bonobos presented data that left little doubt about the issue. Amy R. Parish of the University of California at Davis reported on food competition in identical groups (one adult male and two adult females) of chimpanzees and bonobos at the Stuttgart Zoo. Honey was provided in a “termite hill” from which it could be extracted by dipping sticks into a small hole. As soon as honey was made available, the male chimpanzee would make a charging display through the enclosure and claim everything for himself. Only when his appetite was satisfied would he let the females fish for honey. In the bonobo group, it was the females that approached the honey first. After having engaged in some GG rubbing, they would feed together, taking turns with virtually no competition between them. The male might make as many charging displays as he wanted; the females were not intimidated and ignored the commotion. Observers at the Belgian animal park of Planckendael, which currently has the most naturalistic bonobo colony, reported similar findings. If a male bonobo tried to harass a female, all females would band together to chase him off. Because females appeared more successful in dominating males when they were together than on their own, their close association and frequent genital rubbing may represent an alliance. Females may bond so as to outcompete members of the individually stronger sex. The fact that they manage to do so not only in captivity is evident from zoologist Takeshi Furuichi’s summary of the relation between the sexes at Wamba, where bonobos are enticed out of the forest with sugarcane. “Males usually appeared at the feeding site first, but they surrendered preferred positions when the females appeared. It seemed that males appeared first not because they were dominant, but because they had to feed before the arrival of females,” Furuichi reported at Strasbourg. Occasionally, the role of sex in relation to food is taken one step further, bringing bonobos very close to humans in their behavior. It has been speculated by anthropologists – including C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University and Helen Fisher of Rutgers University – that sex is partially separated from reproduction in our species because it serves to cement mutually profitable relationships between men and women. The human female’s capacity to mate throughout her cycle and her strong sex drive allow her to exchange sex for male commitment and paternal care, thus giving rise to the nuclear family. This arrangement is thought to be favored by natural selection because it allows women to raise more offspring than they could if they were on their own. Although bonobos clearly do not establish the exclusive heterosexual bonds characteristic of our species, their behavior does fit important elements of this model. A female bonobo shows extended receptivity and uses sex to obtain a male’s favors when – usually because of youth – she is too low in social status to dominate him. At the San Diego Zoo, I observed that if Loretta was in a sexually attractive state, she would not hesitate to approach the adult male, Vernon, if he had food. Presenting herself to Vernon, she would mate with him and make high- pitched food calls while taking over his entire bundle of branches and leaves. When Loretta had no genital swelling, she would wait until Vernon was ready to share. Primatologist Suehisa Kuroda reports similar exchanges at Wamba: “A young female approached a male, who was eating sugarcane. They copulated in short order, whereupon she took one of the two canes held by him and left.” Despite such quid pro quo between the sexes, there are no indications that bonobos form humanlike nuclear families. The burden of raising offspring appears to rest entirely on the female’s shoulders. In fact, nuclear families are probably incompatible with the diverse use of sex found in bonobos. If our ancestors started out with a sex life similar to that of bonobos, the evolution of the family would have required dramatic change. Human family life implies paternal investment, which is unlikely to develop unless males can be reasonably certain that they are caring for their own, not someone else’s, offspring. Bonobo society lacks any such guarantee, but humans protect the integrity of their family units through all kinds of moral restrictions and taboos. Thus, although our species is characterized by an extraordinary interest in sex, there are no societies in which people engage in it at the drop of a hat (or a cardboard box, as the case may be). A sense of shame and a desire for domestic privacy are typical human concepts related to the evolution and cultural bolstering of the family. Yet no degree of moralizing can make sex disappear from every realm of human life that does not relate to the nuclear family. The bonobo’s behavioral peculiarities may help us understand the role of sex and may have serious implications for models of human society. Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female- centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent. In the end, perhaps the most successful reconstruction of our past will be based not on chimpanzees or even on bonobos but on a three-way comparison of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.

Social Organization among Various Primates BONOBO Bonobo communities are peace-loving and generally egalitarian. The strongest social bonds are those among females, although females also bond with males. The status of a male depends on the position of his mother, to whom he remains closely bonded for her entire life. CHIMPANZEE In chimpanzee groups the strongest bonds are established between the males in order to hunt and to protect their shared territory. The females live in overlapping home ranges within this territory but are not strongly bonded to other females or to any one male. GIBBON Gibbons establish monogamous, egalitarian relations, and one couple will maintain a territory to the exclusion of other pairs. HUMAN Human society is the most diverse among the primates. Males unite for cooperative ventures, whereas females also bond with those of their own sex. Monogamy, polygamy and polyandry are all in evidence. GORILLA The social organization of gorillas provides a clear example of polygamy. Usually a single male maintains a range for his family unit, which contains several females. The strongest bonds are those between the male and his females. ORANGUTAN Orangutans live solitary lives with little bonding in evidence. Male orangutans are intolerant of one another. In his prime, a single male establishes a large territory, within which live several females. Each female has her own, separate home range. To find out more about bonobos, check out: Bonobo Protection Fund Bonobo Links Sex-crazed Bonobos May be More Like Humans Human DNA is 98.4 percent identical to the DNA of chimps and bonobos, a lesser-known chimp-like ape. FURTHER READING The Pygmy Chimpanzee : Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Edited by Randall L. Susman. Plenum Press, 1984. The Communicative Repertoire of Captive Bonobos (Pan Paniscus) Compared to that of Chimpanzees. F.B.M. de Waal in “Behaviour,” Vol. 106, Nos. 3-4, pages 183-251; September 1988. Peacemaking Among Primates F.B.M. de Waal. Harvard University Press, 1989. Understanding Chimpanzees (Special Publication) Edited by Paul Heltne and Linda A. Marquardt. Harvard University Press, 1989. The Last Ape : Pygmy Chimpanzee Behavior and Ecology by Takayoshi Kano. Stanford University Press, 1992. Chimpanzee Cultures by R. Wrangham, W. C. McGrew, F.B.M. de Waal and P. Heltne. Harvard University Press, 1994. Bonobo The Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal, 1997.

Missing Bruges: night canal

Missing Bruges: Cathedral of the Holy Blood

Missing Bruges: bridging

Missing Bruges: tourist view, view of tourists

Missing Bruges: allee

Missing Bruges: dusk

Missing Bruges: Beguinage

 

Missing Bruges: belfry

Missing Bruges: belfry

 

Missing Bruges: map

Missing Bruges: looks good

Madonna in Manhattan

Madonna 2006 tour: Confessions On A Dance Floor

World Cup: world-class hair

If only Serbia and Montengro played as well as forward Danijel Ljuboja’s hair looks, they would still be alive in the World Cup. We especially like the look of Ljuboja’s locks when pictured next to the world’s roundest ball. Separated at birth?

 

Photos: 6 rows above: 1st row: Xavier, Portugal; David Beckham, United Kingdom. 2nd row: Umit Davala, Turkey. 3rd row: Clint Mathis, USA; Taribo West, Nigeria; Ahn Jung Wang, Korea. 4th row: Ronaldinho, Brazil; Carles Puyol, Spain. 5th row: Kazayuki Toda, Japan. 6th row: Ronaldo, Brazil

Photos: Loco, Angola; Christian Wilhelmsson, Sweden

Now that we have seen 16 of the 32 teams in the World Cup, some early favorites are emerging for the coveted Worst Hair award.

Angola defender Loco takes the Ronaldo-circa-2002 look to a new level with the half-cut dreadlock look. Do you suppose he got a discount for only having 50% of his hair cut?

Sweden’s Christian Wilhelmsson takes us back to the 80s with an impressive flowing rat tail (couldn’t find an actual picture of it, but this one gives you an idea of what that dude is all about.) that could very well poke out an eye or two in his next match.

Who will emerge to challenge these players for this prestigious honor? We should know more after the next few days.

Djibril Cissé, France

Bleach It Like Beckham

By ERIC WILSON
New York Times | June 15, 2006

THERE was nothing exciting about David Beckham’s hair.

After England’s 1-0 victory in its World Cup opener against Paraguay on Saturday, won by a free kick mistakenly rebounded into the goal by the opposing captain, the team was exhausted. A bigger disappointment, for aesthetically minded soccer fans, was that David Beckham’s tresses — normally the beau ideal of the soccer world’s array of aggressively directional haircuts — were just tired. His previous dos have included a frosted fauxhawk, blond cornrows and a confection of rooster’s peaks, but on Saturday Mr. Beckham’s hair was, like his game, neatly prostrate and minimally styled. Mere gel, in soccer, is a letdown.

”The British players are tidied up now,” said Howard McLaren, the creative director of the Bumble & Bumble salon in Manhattan. Was there a tinge of disappointment in his voice at the recollection of what Mr. Beckham’s fauxhawk did for men’s grooming during the last World Cup in 2002, when the look was widely imitated?

”If you look at the long hair of players from Argentina and Brazil, they are constantly pulling it out of their mouths, which can be distracting,” Mr. McLaren added. ”But they are willing to pay that price for the way their hair looks.”

When you are viewed from overhead on a television set for hours on end, hairstyle is substance.

American sports fans are largely unaccustomed to the personal style that is routinely on display at the World Cup. But from now until the final game on July 9, the soccer peacocks will be difficult to ignore. Viewers will see glimpses of Angola’s defender, Loco, who wears only a beanstalk patch of braids sprouting from his forehead; Christian Wilhelmsson, a midfielder from Sweden, who has unruly blond spikes and a retro rat’s tail; Danijel Ljuboja, a forward from Serbia and Montenegro whose dye design recalls the white stripes of a skunk; and Fernando Torres, a forward from Spain, who arrived in Germany with a bleach-mottled mullet. When the Japanese team lined up against Australia on Monday, the field looked like a hairstylist convention — progressive dye jobs versus chippy spikes.

That so much attention is paid to players’ hair and to the customary postgame swapping of jerseys no doubt contributes to soccer’s standing in the United States as a vanity sport, even though it is the most popular one in other parts of the world. But with the global exposure of the World Cup, players who are famous in their home countries — and emulated by local fans — are now influencing style around the world, setting trends, endorsing designer brands and appearing in advertising campaigns.

”There’s a euphoria about soccer players like I’ve never seen here before,” said Timothy Everest, the London tailor who outfitted Mr. Beckham for his wedding. ”When they were doing the walkabout here before the World Cup, it was reminiscent of the Beatles.”

Soccer players are passionately studied on and off the field by billions of fans, and designers and athletic clothing brands have responded by courting the most stylish ones. Mr. Beckham has been both celebrated and reviled as soccer’s most famous clotheshorse, capable of igniting debates on diamond earrings and multistrand beaded necklaces for men, but he is not alone.

There were fashionista footballers before him — George Best and Charlie George in England and Charlie Miller in Scotland, to name a few. And many more have since turned up in the front rows of fashion shows and posed seductively for men’s wear designers, pushing Mr. Beckham, the once unrivaled star of metrosexuality, to fashion’s equivalent of the bench.

”I really like Hide Nakata,” said Italo Zucchelli, the men’s wear designer for Calvin Klein. Mr. Zucchelli is Italian and therefore is familiar with the international stars of soccer, among them Hidetoshi Nakata, a 29-year-old midfielder playing for Japan.

Mr. Nakata was a star player in the Asian leagues before he was recruited to an Italian team in 1998, and his style and interest in fashion often draw comparisons to Mr. Beckham. After Mr. Nakata began turning up at the runway shows of Giorgio Armani in Milan and Dior in Paris, often wearing racy T-shirts under a blazer or a fur-trimmed bomber jacket, he became known as the ”Asian Becks.”

”Beyond the fact he is a really beautiful man, he has a very nice style,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”He plays with fashion like all of them now, but in a cooler, more sophisticated way than many others.”

Other designers and fashion houses — John Galliano, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and H&M — have cited soccer as inspiration for their collections, some claiming that soccer players have more style than other athletes. When Mr. Armani announced this month that he would outfit the English team for their appearances off the field at the World Cup, he said, ”Footballers are today’s new style leaders.” This is a bold endorsement from a designer who has usually expended his marketing energy on dressing blue-chip movie stars.

Mr. Armani cast the Brazilian midfielder Kaká in his new ads for Emporio Armani, and Andriy Shevchenko, a forward from Ukraine, in an ad for Armani Collezioni. Mr. Shevchenko, 29, has an interest in promoting Mr. Armani’s designs, as he also operates the Armani Collezioni and Armani Jeans franchises in Kiev. Dolce & Gabbana, which designs uniforms for the Milan team’s regular season, has cast five of its members in a provocative new underwear campaign, posing in a locker room.

Greg Williams, a partner at the media consulting company art/words/pictures and a former editor of Arena magazine, wrote about the relationship between soccer players and fashion for the catalog of an exhibition on sports and culture that is opening on Wednesday in Florence called ”Human Game: Winners and Losers.” Mr. Williams compared the athletes’ celebrity to that of actors and musicians: ”Fifteen years ago you’d hire a young white rapper with a six-pack named Marky Mark. Today you hire a Swedish soccer player with a panther tattooed on his abdomen.”

Mr. Zucchelli noted that Calvin Klein hired that model, Freddie Ljungberg, for its underwear campaign because soccer players were becoming more like media stars, especially in Europe where the company is expanding. The ads not only enhanced Mr. Ljungberg’s celebrity, they digitally altered his physique. (No, not that. Mr. Ljungberg’s panther tattoo is actually on his back.)

”Playing with fashion allows you to create a character out of yourself,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”People respond to that.”

The current interest in soccer players echoes the intense branding that has become pervasive in sporting events with a high international profile. Zinédine Zidane of the French team is the face of Dior’s Eau Savage, and Lukas Podolski of Germany sells Axe body spray.

Certainly the athletes are aware that a commercially appealing package can reap financial benefits. ”What we have seen, especially in Europe, is this sort of fashion-conscious persona many of them have created,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”There is this very hairstyled player with supercontrived, huge sunglasses and a lot of jewelry. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.”

If the players were not so talented, the level of style competitiveness would threaten to eclipse the sport. Ronaldinho, the Brazilian held up as the world’s most talented player, wears his hair long and wavy, pulled back to reveal gaudy earrings with his number in diamonds, and adorably pulls his cuffs down over his hands during warm-ups.

Djibril Cissé, a 24-year-old striker from France, is among the most visually imposing players, often appearing with platinum-dyed facial hair. He is also wont to remove his shirt during play (and shorts in the case of a pinup calendar) to reveal a set of angel’s wings tattooed onto his back. Mr. Cissé was sidelined from the World Cup last week when he broke his leg.

There are American athletes who are known for their flamboyant style — Dennis Rodman, the Williams sisters or Johnny Weir — but in this country there is a puritanical tendency to play down individuality. Think of the constant nattering about hem lengths in basketball and resistance to facial hair in baseball, which is even codified by the New York Yankees’ stubble ban, known informally as the Mattingly rule.

Soccer players embrace their eccentricities, a tendency that Mr. McLaren of Bumble & Bumble suggests is explained by the pride of those with humble roots who have achieved international success.

”Usually it is the normal kids who become talented,” he said. ”It’s not like a tennis star whose parents spend millions training them to become a star. It’s the more common person who has contact with the streets at a young age. They are exposed more to street-level culture. They tend to pick up on that a bit more.”

It’s a theory, but it does not take into account the styles born of other sports. Just Tuesday, a television report noted a rise in sales of capri pants in Spain, linking the phenomenon to the tennis victory of Rafael Nadal. He wore them at the French Open on Sunday.

Hair History: 2002 World Cup

Hair in the many colours of the rainbow. Hair in all shapes and sizes. No hair.
However you look at it, hair was the fashion statement of the 2002 World Cup.The short back and sides is out – except for losing teams. The Mohawk, the chin lock, the skinhead, the dreadlock, the 1970’s long flowing locks look – even some styles you’d never dare wear in the streets – were in.It seemed as though a player was as likely to arrive at a game with hair dye in his kit as his football boots.

Wacky Aki
What does it all mean? Is it just vanity or something deeper?

Top Japanese hair stylist Aki Watanabe, who does the hair of Japan’s French coach, Philippe Troussier, when he is in Tokyo, says that in the modern game hair has become the only way for a player to standout and express his individuality.Watanabe, whose salon is a magnet for Japanese and foreigners alike, says that as a result of the explosion of money in football through marketing and advertising contracts what a player wears is tightly controlled.“The only thing he has control over is his hair,” Watanabe told Reuters. “If he wants to make a statement that he is a warrior, he wears a mohawk. If he wants to say to opponents ‘Beware I am a hard man’, he shaves his head.”In short, hair can get you noticed! Watanabe says that in the era of football globalisation, where players have become mercenaries seeking the highest wages anywhere in the world, a stand-out hair style is a way to be noticed by talent scouts.“If you’re trying to break into the big time, you change your hair style or colour so you leap out from the other players on the field, not just with your skill but your look,” he added.

Chin lock

The award for the standout hair – singular – went to Nigerian defender Efe Sodje (pictured right): an example of a player still trying to be noticed and get into the big money bracket.Sodje, who used to play for Crewe Alexandra, sported a chin lock. The single-strand of beard, in the national colour of green, jutted out from his face at a gravity-defying, guaranteed to attract an opponent’s attention. “My wife spent hours doing it for me,” he said.

Beckham’s locks
Even for an established star like England captain and fashion icon David Beckham, his hair style causes as much comment as his ball skills.

In fact, he sets trends and he’s been copied by the likes of Japan’s Kazuyuki Toda (pictured left).Beckham’s ever-changing hairstyles always attract media attention. When Beckham, wearing a modified mohawk with a black stripe down the middle of his blond hair, was replaced midway through England’s 1-1 draw with Sweden, one fan commented: “He was obviously having a bad hair day.”

The Mullet returns
Even long hair is beginning to make a comeback both on and off the pitch.

Senegal’s French coach, Bruno Metsu (pictured right), and Cameroon’s German coach, Winfried Schaefer, both favoured shoulder-length locks.England’s goalkeeper David Seaman even joined in the anti-fashion race by sporting a ponytail for the last few seasons.

Just dying to play
Hair colour, not style, has become the hallmark of 2002 World Cup co-hosts Japan and South Korea as much as their rise as Asian football powers.The Japan team sported some seven hair colours from several shades of brown, via the bright crimson, once orange, of midfielder Kazuyuki Toda to the silver locks of midfielder Junichi Inamoto, hero of Japan’s surprise 2-2 draw with Belgium. South Korea’s multi-coloured hair took the team all the way to the semis!

Hair stylist Watanabe credits Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata with starting the present worldwide craze for standout hair.The naturally black haired Nakata dyed his hair red at the 1998 World Cup in France to catch the eye of European scouts.“A change of hair made all the difference to Nakata’s career,” says Watanabe.

Cool up top
Most players on both teams sport the clean cut, short back and sides that would make a 1950’s school sportsmaster proud but is unlikely to provoke a squeal from a 21st century teenage girl.

“He is just so kakkoii,” schoolgirl Saori Shinohara said on the eve of the tournament, using the Japanese word for “cool” to describe England captain Beckham.“Everything,” she replied, when asked what it was about David Beckham that she liked.So the lesson is – to get ahead in the World Cup, get a hairstyle!