Month: March 2005


  • Frank Rich FRANK RICH


    The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay







    AS Congress and the president scurried to play God in the lives of Terri Schiavo and her family last weekend, ABC kicked off Holy Week with its perennial ritual: a rebroadcast of the 1956 Hollywood blockbuster, “The Ten Commandments.”


    Cecil B. DeMille’s epic is known for the parting of its Technicolor Red Sea, for the religiosity of its dialogue (Anne Baxter’s Nefretiri to Charlton Heston’s Moses: “You can worship any God you like as long as I can worship you.”) and for a Golden Calf scene that DeMille himself described as “an orgy Sunday-school children can watch.” But this year the lovable old war horse has a relevance that transcends camp. At a time when government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma, the half-forgotten show business history of “The Ten Commandments” provides a telling back story.


    As DeMille readied his costly Paramount production for release a half-century ago, he seized on an ingenious publicity scheme. In partnership with the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a nationwide association of civic-minded clubs founded by theater owners, he sponsored the construction of several thousand Ten Commandments monuments throughout the country to hype his product. The Pharaoh himself – that would be Yul Brynner – participated in the gala unveiling of the Milwaukee slab. Heston did the same in North Dakota. Bizarrely enough, all these years later, it is another of these DeMille-inspired granite monuments, on the grounds of the Texas Capitol in Austin, that is a focus of the Ten Commandments case that the United States Supreme Court heard this month.


    We must wait for the court’s ruling on whether the relics of a Hollywood relic breach the separation of church and state. Either way, it’s clear that one principle, so firmly upheld by DeMille, has remained inviolate no matter what the courts have to say: American moguls, snake-oil salesmen and politicians looking to score riches or power will stop at little if they feel it is in their interests to exploit God to achieve those ends. While sometimes God racketeers are guilty of the relatively minor sin of bad taste – witness the crucifixion-nail jewelry licensed by Mel Gibson – sometimes we get the demagoguery of Father Coughlin or the big-time cons of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.


    The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille’s Hollywood crusades look like amateur night. This circus is the latest and most egregious in a series of cultural shocks that have followed Election Day 2004, when a fateful exit poll question on “moral values” ignited a take-no-prisoners political grab by moral zealots. During the commercial interruptions on “The Ten Commandments” last weekend, viewers could surf over to the cable news networks and find a Bible-thumping show as only Washington could conceive it. Congress was floating such scenarios as staging a meeting in Ms. Schiavo’s hospital room or, alternatively, subpoenaing her, her husband and her doctors to a hearing in Washington. All in the name of faith.


    Like many Americans, I suspect, I tried to picture how I would have reacted if a bunch of smarmy, camera-seeking politicians came anywhere near a hospital room where my own relative was hooked up to life support. I imagined summoning the Clint Eastwood of “Dirty Harry,” not “Million Dollar Baby.” But before my fantasy could get very far, star politicians with the most to gain from playing the God card started hatching stunts whose extravagant shamelessness could upstage any humble reverie of my own.


    Senator Bill Frist, the Harvard-educated heart surgeon with presidential aspirations, announced that watching videos of Ms. Schiavo had persuaded him that her doctors in Florida were mistaken about her vegetative state – a remarkable diagnosis given that he had not only failed to examine the patient ostensibly under his care but has no expertise in the medical specialty, neurology, relevant to her case. No less audacious was Tom DeLay, last seen on “60 Minutes” a few weeks ago deflecting Lesley Stahl’s questions about his proximity to allegedly criminal fund-raising by saying he would talk only about children stranded by the tsunami. Those kids were quickly forgotten as he hitched his own political rehabilitation to a brain-damaged patient’s feeding tube. Adopting a prayerful tone, the former exterminator from Sugar Land, Tex., took it upon himself to instruct “millions of people praying around the world this Palm Sunday weekend” to “not be afraid.”


    The president was not about to be outpreached by these saps. The same Mr. Bush who couldn’t be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” flew from his Crawford ranch to Washington to sign Congress’s Schiavo bill into law. The bill could have been flown to him in Texas, but his ceremonial arrival and departure by helicopter on the White House lawn allowed him to showboat as if he had just landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Within hours he turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social Security rally. “It is wise to always err on the side of life,” he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson.


    These theatrics were foretold. Culture is often a more reliable prophecy than religion of where the country is going, and our culture has been screaming its theocratic inclinations for months now. The anti-indecency campaign, already a roaring success, has just yielded a new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin J. Martin, who had been endorsed by the Parents Television Council and other avatars of the religious right. The push for the sanctity of marriage (or all marriages except Terri and Michael Schiavo’s) has led to the banishment of lesbian moms on public television. The Armageddon-fueled worldview of the “Left Behind” books extends its spell by the day, soon to surface in a new NBC prime-time mini-series, “Revelations,” being sold with the slogan “The End is Near.”


    All this is happening while polls consistently show that at most a fifth of the country subscribes to the religious views of those in the Republican base whom even George Will, speaking last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” acknowledged may be considered “extremists.” In that famous Election Day exit poll, “moral values” voters amounted to only 22 percent. Similarly, an ABC News survey last weekend found that only 27 percent of Americans thought it was “appropriate” for Congress to “get involved” in the Schiavo case and only 16 percent said it would want to be kept alive in her condition. But a majority of American colonists didn’t believe in witches during the Salem trials either – any more than the Taliban reflected the views of a majority of Afghans. At a certain point – and we seem to be at that point – fear takes over, allowing a mob to bully the majority over the short term. (Of course, if you believe the end is near, there is no long term.)


    That bullying, stoked by politicians in power, has become omnipresent, leading television stations to practice self-censorship and high school teachers to avoid mentioning “the E word,” evolution, in their classrooms, lest they arouse fundamentalist rancor. The president is on record as saying that the jury is still out on evolution, so perhaps it’s no surprise that The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a three-year-old “religious rights” unit in the Justice Department that investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept evolution as “the central, unifying principle of biology.” Cornelia Dean of The New York Times broke the story last weekend that some Imax theaters, even those in science centers, are now refusing to show documentaries like “Galápagos” or “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea” because their references to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize some audiences. Soon such films will disappear along with biology textbooks that don’t give equal time to creationism.


    James Cameron, producer of “Volcanoes” (and, more famously, the director of “Titanic”), called this development “obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science.” Faith-based science has in turn begat faith-based medicine that impedes stem-cell research, not to mention faith-based abstinence-only health policy that impedes the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and diseases like AIDS.


    Faith-based news is not far behind. Ashley Smith, the 26-year-old woman who was held hostage by Brian Nichols, the accused Atlanta courthouse killer, has been canonized by virtually every American news organization as God’s messenger because she inspired Mr. Nichols to surrender by talking about her faith and reading him a chapter from Rick Warren’s best seller, “The Purpose-Driven Life.” But if she’s speaking for God, what does that make Dennis Rader, the church council president arrested in Wichita’s B.T.K. serial killer case? Was God instructing Terry Ratzmann, the devoted member of the Living Church of God who this month murdered his pastor, an elderly man, two teenagers and two others before killing himself at a weekly church service in Wisconsin? The religious elements of these stories, including the role played by the end-of-times fatalism of Mr. Ratzmann’s church, are left largely unexamined by the same news outlets that serve up Ashley Smith’s tale as an inspirational parable for profit.


    Next to what’s happening now, official displays of DeMille’s old Ten Commandments monuments seem an innocuous encroachment of religion into public life. It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto last weekend, and what’s most scary about it is how little was heard from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to “try to undo the processes of a state court.” But faced with McCarthyism in God’s name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri Schiavo’s brain.


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  • Villanova’s Mike Nardi, left, who fouled out late in the game, falling over North Carolina’s Raymond Felton, in the second half. Felton also fouled out of the contest


    SYRACUSE REGIONAL


    North Carolina Becomes A.C.C.’s Sole Survivor


    By JOE LAPOINTE





    SYRACUSE, March 25 – When the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament began in four regionals two weeks ago, the Atlantic Coast Conference had five representatives.


    Two of them, North Carolina and Duke, were seeded No. 1. A No. 2-seeded team from the A.C.C., Wake Forest, thought it deserved better.


    But with the eventual winner of this tournament now halfway to the six victories that will bring a championship, the A.C.C. is down to one candidate, and perhaps a trifle fortunate to have that one.


    The contender is North Carolina, which obliterated an early 12-point Villanova lead, survived foul trouble, endured lapses of sloppy play and almost squandered an 11-point lead with less than five minutes left before outlasting the undermanned Wildcats for a 67-66 victory in a regional semifinal Friday night at the Carrier Dome.


    North Carolina (30-4) will face Wisconsin on Sunday for the regional championship and the right to go to the Final Four in St. Louis. The Badgers beat North Carolina State, 65-56, earlier Friday night.


    Villanova’s last chance to tie the score came with 12 seconds remaining when it appeared that Allan Ray hit a layup and was fouled. But the officials ruled that Ray had traveled when his feet got tangled with those of a defender.


    “I thought the ref called the foul – he called the walk,” Ray said. “We should have never put ourselves in that position. I can’t say that’s the reason we lost.”


    Rashad McCants said that he moved over to cover Ray in the normal defensive rotation and that Ray was surprised to discover him there. “I know I didn’t foul him,” McCants said.


    Many fans, hoping for an upset, booed heartily throughout the final moments of the game, as well as afterward.


    After the Wildcats cut the lead to a point on a 3-point field goal by Kyle Lowry with 1.8 seconds left, they got the ball back at center court on an interception of a long inbounds pass. But Lowry’s halfcourt heave did not come close to connecting.


    Randy Foye of Villanova led all scorers with 28 points. For North Carolina, McCants had 17 points and Marvin Williams 16.


    North Carolina has won the tournament three times, most recently in 1993. This season is the 20th anniversary of Villanova’s only national championship, in 1985, which it clinched with a memorable 66-64 victory over heavily favored Georgetown in the final.


    The Wildcats (24-8) played without Curtis Sumpter, their 6-foot-7 freshman forward from Brooklyn, who injured a knee in a second-round game. Sumpter led Villanova in rebounds with an average of 7.2 a game and was second in scoring at 15.3.


    Villanova opened up a 12-point lead in the first half, but the Tar Heels shaved the margin to 33-29 by intermission.


    The score was tied at 35-35 and 42-42 before Williams put North Carolina ahead by 44-42 with two free throws, and the Heels increased their lead to 5 points.


    But Villanova came back, tying the score again at 50-50 before the Heels pulled out to a 61-50 lead with less than five minutes remaining. North Carolina began to dominate the boards and pounded the ball into the paint, forcing Villanova to commit fouls. The Tar Heels took advantage of the free-throw opportunities.


    “I feel as fortunate as we can possibly feel,” said Roy Williams, the North Carolina coach. “It was a hairy game at the end.”


    Sean May expressed no regrets. “It’s all about survival,” he said. “It wasn’t pretty. It was ugly. We’ve got a lot of positives because we’re still playing.”


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    March 17, 2005

    The Tempest in the Ivory Tower


    By RACHEL DONADIO





    In 1937, H. L. Mencken offered some advice to the son of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. ”My guess is you’d have more fun at Yale than at Princeton, but my real choice is Harvard,” he wrote. ”I don’t think Harvard is a better university than the other two, but it seems that Americans set a higher value on its A.B. If I had a son I’d take him to Cambridge and chain him to the campus pump to remain there until he had acquired a sound Harvard accent. It’s worth money in this great free Republic.”


    And so it is. No university occupies a more central place in the American imagination than Harvard. In ”The Sound and the Fury,” the Compson family sells an inheritance of pastureland to send their son Quentin north to Harvard. His experience there, albeit fictional, does not become the stuff of university promotional materials. Bedeviled by a Southern past at odds with the secure respectability that Harvard promises to confer, Quentin cracks up and drowns himself in the Charles River. ”Harvard my Harvard boy Harvard harvard,” he daydreams at one point. Repeated over and over, the word is reduced to syllables, those syllables to nothing.


    Harvard, boy, Harvard. What is Harvard? That question has come to the fore more than ever during the tumultuous presidency of Lawrence H. Summers. A brilliant economist who took office in 2001, Summers has become known for his brutally direct leadership style. As one joke circulating has it, he opens his mouth only to change feet. His latest stumble came in January. In off-the-cuff remarks at a conference on women in the sciences, Summers said he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that innate gender differences might help explain why there aren’t more women in the hard sciences. Offered tentatively, his comments set off a fierce debate, at Harvard and beyond. Summers apologized to the faculty and vowed to ”temper” his ”words and actions.” But that wasn’t enough for members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who passed a no-confidence vote in Summers at a faculty meeting on March 15 – the Ides of March. Taken by secret ballot, the vote was largely symbolic and did not include professional school faculty members. Nevertheless, it was believed to be the first in the university’s history, and it sent a strong message of discontent. (The Harvard trustees have showed no sign of lessening their support for Summers, but at press time his fate remained uncertain.)


    The science comments weren’t Summers’s first misstep. Early in his tenure, he had a notoriously testy exchange with one of the stars of the university’s Afro-American studies department, Cornel West, who quit and went to Princeton after Summers questioned his gravitas. Other incidents followed, which highlighted Summers’s seeming disregard for diplomacy and alienated many on Harvard’s faculty. To some, however, the outrage was also a sign of trouble in academia – which, as the critic Stephen Metcalf recently observed in Slate, ”has devolved into a series of now highly routinized acts of flattery, so carefully attended to that one out-of-place word is enough to fracture dozens of egos.”


    But these altercations, though heated, are skirmishes in a much larger battle developing at Harvard and beyond. In some ways, it recalls the campus turmoil of the 1960′s. Only this time around, the protesters aren’t the undergraduates; they’re the faculty, who to some extent remain immersed in the values and pieties of the 60′s and are clashing with a president intent on bringing Harvard in line with today’s political and economic realities. What’s happening at Harvard goes far beyond Summers’s personality; instead, it’s about larger social and political transformations to which the academy – essentially a conservative institution made up of thousands of progressive minds – is deeply resistant.


    Much of this is mapped out in Richard Bradley’s ”Harvard Rules” (HarperCollins, $25.95), a timely new book that sets out to catalog the flaws of Larry Summers. Well-paced and juicy, it nevertheless relies heavily on innuendo and on other people’s reporting, since Summers wouldn’t grant an interview to Bradley, a former editor at George magazine. Even so, ”Harvard Rules” manages to shed much light on the current situation. In Bradley’s view, Summers’s mission has been ”to purge Harvard of the bonds that kept it from realizing its enormous potential and seeing itself in a new way – his new way. And that meant eradicating the influence of the 1960′s.”


    In some respects, Summers was a canny choice for the presidency. In his teaching days, he was the youngest professor ever given tenure at Harvard, at age 28, and was widely considered Nobel Prize material. He is a liberal, but of a particular kind. A former chief economist of the World Bank, Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and was a leading proponent of globalization when many other liberals were lamenting its discontents. Summers also hews to a kind of bottom-line market-driven thinking, which can seem deeply at odds with the humanistic values of the academy. And he is unapologetic about American power on a campus steeped in post-Vietnam ambivalence about such things.


    In Cambridge, all this made Summers ”an unabashedly mainstream figure in a highly progressive culture,” as James Traub wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2003. Yet Summers’s politics and his brashness made him appealing to the Harvard trustees, who were seeking a president to pursue a mandate all but guaranteed to win enemies. Harvard, whose endowment stands at a staggering $22.6 billion, had launched plans for a massive expansion. Spurred in part by Cambridge’s restrictive zoning, in the 1990′s Harvard bought some 200 acres in Allston, an area of Boston across the Charles River from Cambridge.


    Still in the planning phases, the expansion has been a hornet’s nest of complication, from negotiating town-gown tensions to determining which departments would be relocated. This has been especially problematic because of the university’s decentralized structure, in which each of Harvard’s professional schools and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences raise their own money and control their own budgets. Autonomy means power. As Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller report in their excellent ”Making Harvard Modern” (Oxford, 2001), when Summers’s predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, sounded out the law school in 1999 about possibly moving to Allston, they voted not even to consider it. The ”deferential” Rudenstine, as Bradley depicts him, didn’t push the matter. Summers, however, was appointed because of his willingness to ruffle feathers, with the understanding he would centralize power and guide the expansion forward. While Summers would certainly be better served if he secured the faculty’s blessing, in practice, he doesn’t need it. And so the frustrated faculty now finds itself sidelined in a crucial debate about its own future.


    Against this background, the resentment over Summers’s comments about women becomes clearer. His remarks may have been misguided, but what is the point of a university if not to provide a forum for airing controversial ideas? Summers’s comments seemed to mark a return to an earlier era in the gender debate – and so did the intensity of the response. In fact, today, the definition of feminism is open to interpretation. Now, a woman with an advanced degree can leave the workplace to become a stay-at-home mom and still be a feminist; she might even watch ”Desperate Housewives.” In the broader culture, if not on campuses, the era of political correctness is decidedly over.


    But if P.C. is over, what comes next? There’s no easy tag line for ”the oughts,” because there’s no immediately recognizable constellation of values. At moments like this, fraught with ironies and ambivalences, it’s a relief to find villains. Yet the animosity is not just toward Summers himself, but also toward his stated intent to steer Harvard closer to the mainstream.


    His presidency, which began in October 2001, has overlapped with one of the most unsettling times this nation has faced, and he has viewed that as an opportunity to redress what he has called the ”post-Vietnam cleavage between coastal elites and certain mainstream values.” He vocally supported bringing R.O.T.C. back to Harvard from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it had been exiled after Vietnam-era campus protests and where it remained because of later protests over the military’s discrimination against homosexuals. And he supported Harvard’s honoring the Solomon Amendment, which ties federal funding to universities’ allowing military recruitment on campus, something students and faculty had protested. In this way, as Bradley writes, ”Summers explicitly linked the future of the United States in its fight against terrorism with the success of Harvard.”


    In another effort to address the global situation, Summers delivered a speech on campus in September 2002 in which he criticized a campaign calling on Harvard and other universities to divest from Israel. ”Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent,” he said. As his detractors saw it, ”Summers had crafted his talk not to promote debate, but to silence it,” Bradley writes. In any case, Summers had sent a clear message, one other university presidents have been notably loath to communicate even as ugly anti-Israel sentiment in the guise of leftist open-mindedness has rippled across their campuses.


    It’s not altogether surprising, then, that Bradley’s book includes descriptions of Summers that echo familiar characterizations of President Bush. Summers ”is not an intellectual, because intellectuals know the power of doubt,” a professor and signer of the divestment petition tells Bradley. In Bradley’s view, that’s only one of his shortcomings. Among many cartoonish characterizations in ”Harvard Rules,” he dwells on Summers’s table manners and often disheveled appearance. Beyond that he emphasizes that Summers happens to be the first Jewish president of Harvard, and notes that that might inform his views on Israel and foreign policy. He also speculates about New Republic editors ”whispering” in Summers’s ear.


    All this aside, Summers and the faculty have also differed over the nature and importance of a liberal arts education. With the rallying cry that students should know the difference between a gene and a chromosome and focus more on concrete knowledge and less on ”ways of knowing,” Summers ambitiously decided to reform Harvard’s curriculum. But his method worried many in the university. In the most convincing chapter in ”Harvard Rules,” Bradley recounts how a report on the curriculum was delegated to administrators who commanded little authority and were perceived by some as puppets of Summers. What is more, Summers urged the evaluators to complete their analysis in less than a year, a remarkably short time compared with Harvard’s earlier curricular reviews. Harvard’s last major curriculum reform, in the 70′s, capped years of careful study and produced the Core Curriculum, in which students are required to take courses in set subject areas, including sciences, literature and arts, historical studies, foreign cultures, and quantitative reasoning.


    In the end, a report published in April 2003 set a series of ambitious yet vague goals, including replacing the Core Curriculum with distribution requirements and putting a greater emphasis on ”interdisciplinary courses.” One of its most striking recommendations, however, was that Harvard should ”develop distinctive course materials for use in, and potentially beyond, Harvard College,” Bradley writes. The implication was that ”at some point, Larry Summers wanted to market those courses to students around the world, to use the Harvard brand name to teach ‘foundational knowledge’ to students whether they went to Harvard College or not,” Bradley adds. This, he says, is a way ”to further stamp Harvard’s imprint on the world’s education; to promote an empire of the mind.” And that inextricably identifies Summers with the broader, more vexed debate about the role America should hold among the nations. Indeed, the animosity toward Summers is also implicitly that of an academic culture, steeped for decades in questioning authority, that has awakened to find itself an imperial power.




    In all the recent turmoil, one Harvard constituency has been strangely marginalized: its undergraduates. They are the focus of another new book, ”Privilege” (Hyperion, $24.95), a memoir by Ross Gregory Douthat, a self-important young conservative vexed by the discrepancies between the Harvard of his dreams and the Harvard of reality. Douthat, class of 2002, devotes far too many pages to his undergraduate romantic woes. Nevertheless, he paints a vivid portrait of campus life. Douthat is disappointed by the Core Curriculum and finds its offerings ”maddeningly specific and often defiantly obscure.” In Douthat’s account, few Harvard courses seem particularly worthy of export on the international market.


    Douthat, now a reporter-researcher at The Atlantic Monthly, was once employed to write SparkNotes, the cheat sheets students use to write term papers without doing the reading. He depicts his fellow Harvard undergraduates as essentially corner-cutting careerists, busy trying to score the right summer internships that will land them choice post-college gigs in Washington or New York. ”The ambitions of the undergraduates are those of a well-trained meritocratic elite, brought up to believe that their worth is contingent on the level of wealth and power and personal achievement they attain,” he writes. ”The pursuit of these goals, in turn, depends on high grades in a way it did not for an earlier generation.” Hence, the oft-heard cry, ”Look, I can’t afford a B in this class if I want to get into law school.” And hence Summers’s efforts to crack down on grade inflation at Harvard, where in 2001 about 90 percent of students graduated with honors, compared with 50 percent at Yale that year.


    Patrician Harvard is long gone. The 60′s are over, too. As Douthat notes, a Harvard undergraduate weekly founded in the 70′s with the title What Is to Be Done?, after Lenin’s Bolshevist pamphlet, is now named Fifteen Minutes. ”The change to a Warhol-inspired title says everything about the difference between that generation and mine,” he observes. The shift may also signal a return to an earlier elite model, only today’s elite are the children of the middle class, groomed on SAT prep courses and the right extracurriculars. A Harvard degree today, no less than in Mencken’s day, is worth money in this great free Republic. Now, however, the exigencies of the meritocracy require it to come with a high grade point average.


    Sensitive to economic disparities, Summers has abolished tuition – $27,448 this academic year, not including room and board, which bring the total to $42,450 – for students whose families have annual household incomes below $40,000. Yale and Princeton have made similar moves. Bradley, however, sees this as public relations as much as genuine reform, since such families had paid only $1,000 a year before. Yet what about families who earn more than $40,000 a year but still can’t pay for their children’s education without significant sacrifice? At Harvard and elsewhere, the cost of college is eroding the idea of a liberal arts education in favor of a pre-professional one. Time will tell whether Summers’s presidency will hasten that change.


    In ”Harvard Rules,” Bradley describes the case of Joe Green, an undergraduate disillusioned by his experience as a student representative on the committee evaluating the Core Curriculum. ”Green kept thinking about a question one of his professors had put to him: ‘If you could either go here and get no diploma, or not go here and get the diploma, what would you do?’ ” Bradley writes. ”It bothered Green that he couldn’t easily answer the question.” It should bother the president of Harvard, too. The answer, in the end, is the difference between a great university and a brand name.



    Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.


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  • MODERN LOVE


    Truly, Madly, Guiltily


    By AYELET WALDMAN





    I HAVE been in many mothers’ groups – Mommy and Me, Gymboree, Second-Time Moms – and each time, within three minutes, the conversation invariably comes around to the topic of how often mommy feels compelled to put out. Everyone wants to be reassured that no one else is having sex either. These are women who, for the most part, are comfortable with their bodies, consider themselves sexual beings. These are women who love their husbands or partners. Still, almost none of them are having any sex.


    There are agreed upon reasons for this bed death. They are exhausted. It still hurts. They are so physically available to their babies – nursing, carrying, stroking – how could they bear to be physically available to anyone else?


    But the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife’s passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardor on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the center of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun in whose orbit she revolves. Libido, as she once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire. There is absolute unanimity on this topic, and instant reassurance.


    Except, that is, from me.


    I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life – always vital, even torrid – is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as my own.


    But I don’t. I am far too busy worrying about what’s wrong with me. Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make? Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe?


    WHEN my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, “My God, she’s so beautiful.”


    I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father’s hooked nose. It looked better on him.


    She looked like a newborn baby, red and scrawny, blotchy faced and mewling. I don’t remember what I said to my husband. Actually I remember very little of my Percocet- and Vicodin-fogged first few days of motherhood except for someone calling and squealing, “Aren’t you just completely in love?” And of course I was. Just not with my baby.


    I do love her. But I’m not in love with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I’m not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.


    It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.


    An example: I often engage in the parental pastime known as God Forbid. What if, God forbid, someone were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of them. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child’s death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband.


    But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband’s death. Of course I would have to live. I have four children, a mortgage, work to do. But I can imagine no joy without my husband.


    I don’t think the other mothers at Mommy and Me feel this way. I know they would be absolutely devastated if they found themselves widowed. But any one of them would sacrifice anything, including their husbands, for their children.


    Can my bad motherhood be my husband’s fault? Perhaps he just inspires more complete adoration than other husbands. He cooks, cleans, cares for the children at least 50 percent of the time.


    If the most erotic form of foreplay to a mother of a small child is, as I’ve heard some women claim, loading the dishwasher or sweeping the floor, then he’s a master of titillation.


    He’s handsome, brilliant and successful. But he can also be scatterbrained, antisocial and arrogant. He is a bad dancer, and he knows far too much about Klingon politics and the lyrics to Yes songs. All in all, he’s not that much better than other men. The fault must be my own.


    I am trying to remember those first days and weeks after giving birth. I know that my sexual longing for my husband took a while to return. I recall not wanting to make love. I did not even want to cuddle. At times I felt that if my husband’s hand were to accidentally brush against my breast while reaching for the saltshaker, I would saw it off with the butter knife.


    Even now I am not always in the mood. By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat. I am also a compulsive reader. Put together fatigue and bookwormishness, and you could have a situation in which nobody ever gets any. Except that when I catch a glimpse of my husband from the corner of my eye – his smooth, round shoulders, his bright-blue eyes through the magnification of his reading glasses – I fold over the page of my novel.


    Sometimes I think I am alone in this obsession with my spouse. Sometimes I think my husband does not feel as I do. He loves the children the way a mother is supposed to. He has put them at the center of his world. But he is a man and thus possesses a strong libido. Having found something to usurp me as the sun of his universe does not mean he wants to make love to me any less.


    And yet, he says I am wrong. He says he loves me as I love him. Every so often we escape from the children for a few days. We talk about our love, about how much we love each other’s bodies and brains, about the things that make us happy in our marriage.


    During the course of these meandering and exhilarating conversations, we touch each other, we start to make love, we stop.


    And afterward my husband will say that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes, that the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.


    He seems entirely unperturbed by loving me like this. Loving me more than his children does not bother him. It does not make him feel like a bad father. He does not feel that loving me more than he loves them is a kind of infidelity.


    And neither, I suppose, should I. I should not use that wretched phrase “bad mother.” At the very least, I should allow that, if nothing else, I am good enough. I do know this: When I look around the room at the other mothers in the group, I know that I would not change places with any of them.


    I wish some learned sociologist would publish a definitive study of marriages where the parents are desperately, ardently in love, where the parents love each other even more than they love the children. It would be wonderful if it could be established, once and for all, that the children of these marriages are more successful, happier, live longer and have healthier lives than children whose mothers focus their desires and passions on them.


    BUT even in the likely event that this study is not forthcoming, even in the event that I face a day of reckoning in which my children, God forbid, become heroin addicts or, God forbid, are unable to form decent attachments and wander from one miserable and unsatisfying relationship to another, or, God forbid, other things too awful even to imagine befall them, I cannot regret that when I look at my husband I still feel the same quickening of desire that I felt 12 years ago when I saw him for the first time, standing in the lobby of my apartment building, a bouquet of purple irises in his hands.


    And if my children resent having been moons rather than the sun? If they berate me for not having loved them enough? If they call me a bad mother?


    I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.



    Ayelet Waldman is the author of the novel “Daughter’s Keeper.” This essay is adapted from “Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves” to be published by HarperCollins next month.


    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top




  • March 27, 2005

    ‘Boss Tweed’: The Fellowship of the Ring


    By PETE HAMILL




    BOSS TWEED
    The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York.
    By Kenneth D. Ackerman.
    Illustrated. 437 pp. Carroll & Graf Publishers. $27.


    IF the gods in their wisdom were to sentence me to 30 days in a prison cell with either Boss Tweed or Al Gore, I would need about 11 seconds to choose my cellmate. Welcome home, Boss.


    Condemned for my sins to an ocean cruise, I’d rather share a cabin with Tweed than any evangelist, reformer or improver of public morals, dead or alive. Give me Tweed before any crusader for earthly utopias: religious, Marxist, fascist or neocon. Save me from tinhorn messiahs, and from almost every Republican or Democrat now holding public office. In this era of true believers and invincible mediocrity, give me Tweed.


    In his excellent new biography of the Boss, Kenneth D. Ackerman tells again the story of the man who died in 1878 and remains the epitome of big-city corruption. Tweed is a wonderfully vivid subject, a man of gigantic, Rabelaisian hungers. He seems always to have wanted more. More food. More money. More power. Unfortunately, for a long time he got what he wanted.


    In the days of his glory (roughly 1863-72), in places like Delmonico’s famous restaurant, Tweed gorged on duck, oysters, tenderloin and other culinary delights, and packed more than 300 pounds onto his almost 6-foot frame. He didn’t smoke and seldom touched the booze. But as the boss of Tammany Hall, he feasted on a flood of post-Civil War money, stealing with his associates a sum that has been estimated from a low of $1 billion in today’s dollars to a high of $4 billion. The ring fittingly began as a ”lunch club” at City Hall, with Tweed at the head of the table. The others were Peter Sweeny, head of the Department of Parks; Comptroller Richard Connolly; Mayor A. Oakey Hall; a few key judges and legislators and various hungry contractors.


    ”It’s hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed’s system, though,” Ackerman writes. ”The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing and organization.”


    Much of the loot went to maintaining the system itself, in the form of overhead ladled out to corrupt minor players, particularly the upstate Republicans. But a good percentage stuck to the pudgy hands of the leadership. Without shyness or shame, Tweed in 1871 began wearing an immense 10 1/2-carat diamond stickpin, like a badge of success and command. When one of his daughters married that year, the gifts were estimated by one reporter to be worth $14 million in today’s dollars. By then Tweed was the third-largest owner of Manhattan real estate, including his own grand mansion on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, with its nearby stable full of horses. There was an estate in Greenwich, a race horse and two yachts.


    Tweed also reaped a fortune in what one Tammany philosopher later called ”honest graft.” He was welcomed to the boards of many corporations, handsomely rewarded, and confirmed in his cynicism. He knew that his charm had nothing to do with his good fortune. He controlled City Hall, the governor’s mansion in Albany, the district attorney’s office, the judiciary and Tammany Hall. Businessmen wanted to know what Tweed knew, and paid handsomely for his company.


    His company could be entertaining. Ackerman, also the author of books on President James A. Garfield and the Wall Street crash of 1869, contrasts Tweed with his later enemy, the chilly reformer Samuel J. Tilden, during their 1868 appearances before a congressional panel investigating voter frauds. Tilden was restrained, laconic, icy, his testimony filling only three pages of a thousand-page transcript. Then came the Boss: ”Tweed lit up the room. Big and boisterous, he knew how to lavish the congressmen with humor, look them in the eye, slap shoulders, shake hands, crack a joke, share a confidence, poke fun at his own girth.”


    That style was acquired on the streets of New York. Central to the style was Tweed’s knowledge of the world as it actually was, not as it should be (in that sense he was a philosophical descendant of Niccolo Machiavelli). He didn’t want to change the world. He wanted to know how it worked. Ackerman quotes Tweed in a jailhouse interview, about six months before his death:


    ”The fact is New York politics were always dishonest — long before my time. There never was a time you couldn’t buy the Board of Aldermen. . . . A politician coming forward takes things as they are.”


    Coming forward, young Tweed learned only too well to take things as they are. Curiously, Ackerman pays little attention to the nefarious Tweed predecessor, Fernando Wood, who as mayor (1855-57 and 1859-61) helped create the system of municipal corruption that Tweed and his ring later perfected. When the 29-year-old Tweed was first elected to the Board of Aldermen in 1852, its members were already known as the Forty Thieves.


    Ackerman is also sketchy on Tweed’s formative years, almost certainly because of a lack of documentation. He tells us what’s known: that as a brawny teenager Tweed was a tough street fighter in the Cherry Hill section of the Lower East Side, the son of a chair maker whose own roots went back to Scotland. The boy’s alarmed father sent him off to a New Jersey boarding school for a year, where he first studied accounting, a tool that would make possible much of his later life. Tweed became a man who could count and calculate, both the number of Irish immigrants arriving in flight from the 1840′s famine — all potential voters — or the possible markups of a street paving contract.


    We never learn the causes of Tweed’s great hungers, and never will. He seems to have written no childhood diaries or letters, stated no vaunting ambitions to his friends. We must be content with the outlines of the early career, from his years as a brawling volunteer fireman to his part in the formation in 1848 of the Americus Engine Company No. 6, better known as the Big Six. The symbol of the Big Six was a snarling Bengal tiger.


    Ackerman is superb on the creation of the Tweed system and its expansion from acceptable petty skimming to the glittering fellowship of the ring. In early 1863, with the Civil War raging and war profiteering ever expanding, Tweed became leader of the central committee of Tammany Hall. A few months later, he was elected Grand Sachem, the man at the top. Then came a turning point. When the horrific draft riots exploded on July 13, 1863, most Democrats sympathized with the protesters, if not their violence, but were timid about getting actively involved. President Lincoln’s conscription law was boneheaded and unjust, allowing rich kids to buy their way out of the draft for $300 (about $6,000 in today’s money) while Tammany’s constituents — most of them poor Irish who could never raise the payoff money — would be sent off to fight and die for the Union. But during the riots, the new Boss did not flee to a peaceful suburb. He walked the bloody streets, urging calm. Tweed did not inflame violence, he prevented it.


    In a way, that display of sensible bravery made him. The establishment nodded in approval. Newspapers applauded. Tweed did not stop with his patrols through the downtown streets. He showed an understanding of one basic principle of the realistic pol: All serious problems might not be solved, but they must be managed. Tweed worked on managing the draft mess, creating a system of exemptions (cops, firemen, militia members) and case-by-case hardship exemptions for heads of impoverished families. The city itself would find substitutes for the exempted draftees, and pay the substitutes $300 bonuses from a special fund financed by the selling of bonds on Wall Street.


    ”This way,” Ackerman writes, ”Lincoln’s army would get its soldiers and the people would get relief.”


    The draft went on, but without riots. When the war was finally over, Tweed for a long time was considered a reformer. As a state senator in Albany, heavy with cash, he fought for and won home rule for New York City. At the same time, it had been scoundrel time in the Republic since the early months of the Civil War. Respectable, well-bred patriots made immense sums selling defective rifles and ammunition to the Union armies, along with rotting food, shoddy uniforms and boots that fell apart in the rain. These habits didn’t end at Appomattox. Such men were unlikely to attack Tweed for handing out bags of cash from his hotel in Albany. And when Tweed talked later about the need to take things as they are, he wasn’t speaking only of New York. He was talking about America.


    At the same time, Tweed’s popularity kept growing, for he also did much good, taking care of his base among the mainly Irish poor. This was not a matter of ideology (although Tammany supported the cause of the Fenian rebels in Ireland and the Cuban fighters for independence from Spain). Tammany was populist but not ideological, and Tweed’s personal style remained essentially the same: the exercise of power with a conspiratorial wink.


    ”His aid took many forms,” Ackerman writes, ”state money for schools and hospitals, lumps of coal at Christmas, and city patronage jobs to put bread on family dinner tables.” Tweed crossed the barrier between church and state by providing money to the emerging Roman Catholic parochial school system (without any slippery faith-based rhetoric). But there were few protests, except among the anti-Catholic bigots. It was assumed by most others, including those who benefited most, that his generosity was all about votes. As it was. But one thing was certain: Because of Tweed, New York got better, even for the poor.


    The story of Tweed’s rise and fall is told in a crisp, clear way. Ackerman explains how Tammany was critically wounded by New York’s Orange riots — battles between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants that left 8 dead in 1870 and 67 dead in 1871. Graft was one thing, disorder another, and memories of the draft riots were still vivid. Now Tweed was under direct attack, the charge led by The New York Times of George Jones and by Thomas Nast, the brilliant cartoonist of Harper’s Weekly. Ackerman gives an excellent account of the unfairness of both, but is especially instructive about Nast, who was virulently anti-Catholic. Nast — who had created the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, and the image of Santa Claus — adopted that Bengal tiger from the Big Six as a symbol for a predatory Tammany. Ackerman is also persuasive about the way Nast invented statements for Tweed that helped bring him down, the most famous being: ”Well, what are you going to do about it?” Tweed never said it.


    But there was another factor in the great fall. Ackerman explains:


    ”The ring had only one fatal flaw: its humanity. Human beings composed it, governed by greed, vanity and fear. Greed ultimately took control; they stole too much and lost their nerve. Treachery broke the ring more than any outside force.”


    The treacherous toppled the Boss, carrying copied accounting records to The Times and forcing action against the conspirators. The ring crumpled swiftly. Connolly and Sweeny fled to Canada and Europe. The elegant Oakey Hall was acquitted twice and sailed off to exile in London. Only Tweed went to jail.


    Ackerman tells again the story of Tweed’s escape from custody in 1875, to New Jersey, Florida, Cuba and finally Spain, where he was arrested and returned to jail in New York. He would never again be free. Tweed thought he had an agreement with the state attorney general (and indirectly with Tilden, now governor of New York) to confess all, in exchange for freedom. He confessed in 1877, and was double-crossed by the lawmen and pols. Held for nonpayment of a civil judgment of $6.3 million (today more than $125 million), Tweed died at 55 in the Ludlow Street civil jail on April 12, 1878. His own fortune was long gone. His wife and most of his children were gone too.


    Surely when the news of his death spread through the city, some of Tweed’s constituents must have remembered the time in 1875 when he was taken for imprisonment to Blackwell’s Island. He was asked by a jailer to state his religion, and answered ”none.” Then he was asked his occupation.


    ”Statesman,” Boss Tweed answered.


    Across the years, I can still imagine the wink, and the cynical smile, and the dark laughter. Welcome to the cell, O lost boss. You can have the bottom bunk.




    Pete Hamill is distinguished writer in residence at New York University. His new book is ”Downtown: My Manhattan.”



    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top












  • 03/23/2005


    Villanova has faith in backup trio with Sumpter out


    By TERRY TOOHEY , ttoohey@delcotimes.com


     







    VILLANOVA – Life after Curtis Sumpter’s season-ending knee injury officially got under way at Villanova Tuesday afternoon.


    As the 6-7 junior forward worked out on a stationary bike, his teammates began preparation for Friday night’s NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 matchup with top-seeded North Carolina (29-4) at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse.


    There was no sign of panic. No dejected faces as Sumpter watched from the sideline. Basically, it was business as usual for the fifth-seeded Wildcats (24-7).

    “We feel bad for Curt,” point guard Mike Nardi said. “You hate to lose anyone, especially at this time of year, but we have to move on and that’s what we’re going to do.”

    Overcoming adversity has been a familiar refrain for the Wildcats. They have been down this road many times in the past three years and have always found a way to bounce back. This time, though, the challenge is a little more difficult. The Wildcats must replace a young man who leads the team in rebounding (7.2) and is second in both scoring (15.3) and minutes played (32.1).

    That job will fall to 6-10 junior center Jason Fraser, who is expected to start against the Tar Heels, 6-9 junior forward Marcus Austin and 7-0 junior forward/center Chris Charles.

    All three, especially Austin and Charles, are up to the task.

    “Charles and I are confident that we’ll do the job Coach (Jay) Wright wants us to do,”     Austin said. “That’s what teams are supposed to be about. If one guy goes down the next is expected to step in and do the job.”

    Fraser is the known name in that group. As a McDonald’s All-American, he is the most heralded member of Wright’s most celebrated recruiting class that also included Sumpter and guards Randy Foye and Allan Ray.

    Injuries have slowed Fraser’s progress, but the     Long Island native has been a solid contributor off the bench, averaging 6.6 points, 6.7 rebounds, 2.4 blocked shots and 21 minutes per game. Fraser came up big after Sumpter left the Florida game with a tear in the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. He scored 21 points and pulled down 15 rebounds to lead the Wildcats to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1988 with a 76-65 victory over the Gators.

    “Jay was a monster,” Ray said. “He would not be denied.” If Fraser starts, and that most likely will be a game-time decision, Austin and Charles will have to fill Fraser’s role off the bench, even though both players have seen limited action this season.

    Austin averages 10.1 minutes and just under two points and two rebounds per game. He has played in 29 of Villanova’s 31 games. Austin recorded career highs in both points (15) and rebounds (seven) in a 110-89 victory over Rutgers Jan. 18, 2003. His best effort this season was six points against La Salle and Penn.

    Charles has seen action in 19 games and averages 7.3 minutes as well as just under two points and two rebounds per game. His career highs are 10 points against     Ohio State and 12 rebounds versus Chaminade in 2003. He had eight points, five rebounds and three blocked shots in 18 minutes against the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

    “Not many people know us because we don’t play a lot of minutes, but we’re confident we can do the job,” Charles said. “We work every day in practice to be ready for the game and this is an opportunity to show what we can do.”

    The Wildcats are certain that Austin and Charles are up to the challenge.

    “No doubt about it,” sophomore forward Will Sheridan said. “We see them every day in practice. There are times when they dominate in practice. The only reason they haven’t played that much is that there are only so many minutes in a game, but we know what they can do and we have a great deal of confidence in them. We have confidence in everyone on this team.”

    It is that kind of faith that has the Wildcats thinking good thoughts even though they are a decided underdog.

    “    Carolina‘s a great team,” Ray said. “They have five or six future NBA players, but they’re not unbeatable and we’re confident that we can beat them. It won’t be easy. We have to play well. We have to defend, rebound and make shots, but we’ve beaten some of the top teams in the country this year so we know we’re capable of beating anyone.”

    Terry Toohey is the assistant sports editor of the Daily Times.


     


  • Police and firefighters secured the scene around Red Lake High School after a shooting spree Monday.


    Details Emerge About School Shooting in Minnesota


    By MONICA DAVEY
    and CHRISTINE HAUSER





    RED LAKE, Minn., March 22 -Sixteen-year old Jeff Weise wore a bulletproof vest and a police holster when he opened fire on students taking cover in a classroom and gunned down others who were fleeing in corridors during a 10-minute shooting spree at an Indian reservation school on Monday, the authorities said today.


    The shooting rampage came to an end when Mr. Weise shot and killed himself after killing nine people and wounding seven. Bullet casings littered the halls and classrooms of the school at the Red Lake Indian Reservation, an F.B.I. official, Michael Tabman, said. Mr. Tabman said the authorities believe Mr. Weise acted alone but they are investigating Internet postings on a neo-Nazi Web site left by a person who identified himself as Jeff Weise and said he lived on the reservation.


    “I guess I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations,” said the Internet posting,on which the writer also called himself “Todesengel,” Angel of Death in German.


    The killings shocked the close-knit community on the reservation, which is about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities and about 120 miles south of Canada and ishome to about 5,000 Ojibwa Indians, commonly called Chippewa.


    “Not a soul will go untouched by this tragic series of events,” said the chairman of the Red Lake tribe, Floyd Jourdain, Jr., speaking to reporters before the news conference. “It’s devastating because so many people know each other and the families.”


    Mr. Weise killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion, five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard, the authorities said.


    “We understand the enormity of this tragedy,” Mr. Tabman said.


    The killing spree, according to the F.B.I. account, started when Mr. Weise, armed with a .22-caliber handgun, went to his grandfather’s house off a wooded road, a mile or two from the high school. There, he shot dead his grandfather, Daryl Lussier, 58, a sergeant in the tribal police, and killed his companion, Michelle Sigana, 32.


    He then took Mr. Lussier’s bulletproof vest, police utility belt, marked squad car and two weapons, one a 12-gauge shotgun and the other a .40-caliber handgun. It was not clear where he obtained the .22-caliber weapon.


    Mr. Weise drove the car to the school, parked, walked inside with the weapons and immediately shot and killed the unarmed security guard, Derrick Brun, 28, who was standing near a metal detector.


    Inside the school, Mr. Weise saw a cluster of students and a teacher, according to the accounts. Wearing the bulletproof vest and belt, he chased the group into a classroom. Most of the dead were shot there. He then emerged, randomly firing at fleeing students.


    According to Mr. Tabman’s account, the police arrived and Mr. Weise fired on them, and one officer returned fire but it was unclear whether he was hit. Mr. Weise then ran back into the classroom and turned the gun on himself.


    Video cameras at the school did not have a record of the incident.


    Officials said that the barrage erupted at the 300-student Red Lake High School about 3 p.m.


    Officials at North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji, Minn., released figures today of seven wounded. Six of them have been identified. The hospital admitted three, while two were airlifted to a hospital in Fargo, N.D., for neurosurgery. The sixth was pronounced dead in the emergency room.


    Officials at the hospital said today they had prepared to receive a “deluge” of patients after being notified at about 3:15 p.m. of the shooting. They notified emergency teams and asked staff members to stay past their shifts.


    Just over an hour later, victims with gunshot wounds to the head, face and chest arrived, the officials said at a news conference.


    “Our first notification was that there was a shooting at the school in Red Lake and that there were multiple victims, and that’s as detailed as we received,” said Joe Corser, a doctor.


    “We’ve never dealt with anything like this before,” said Sheri Birkeland, a hospital press officer.


    The shooting was the worst at a school since 15 people were killed at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999, and came just 18 months after two students were fatally shot at Rocori High School in the central Minnesota town of Cold Spring, 200 miles away.


    Roman Stately, director of the Red Lake Fire Department, told The A.P. and local television stations on Monday that the police found the two bodies in the grandfather’s home an hour after the school shooting.Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota said in a news conference broadcast on television today that there would be a day of remembrance for the victims.


    Witnesses told The Pioneer, a newspaper in Bemidji, the nearest town, an hour’s drive away, that the gunman was “grinning and waving” as he fired his weapon and that students pleaded with him to stop, according to The A.P.


    “You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, Jeff, quit, quit, leave me alone, what are you doing?’ ” The A.P. quoted Sondra Hegstrom, a student, as telling The Pioneer. “I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that’s when I hid.”


    A teacher, Diane Schwanz, told The Pioneer that she herded students under benches as she dialed 911 on her cellphone.


    “I just got on the floor and called the cops,” she said.


    The tribe operates three casinos and other tourist attractions on some half-million acres.


    Clyde Bellecourt, founder of the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement, said he could not “remember anything as tragic as this happening” on a reservation.


    “Everyone in the Indian community is feeling really bad right now, whether they’re a member of the Red Lake or not, we’re all an extended family, we’re all related,” he said. “Usually this happens in places like Columbine, white schools, always somewhere else. We never hear that in our community.”


    Mr. Bellecourt and his brother Vernon, another longtime American Indian leader, said that the gunman’s grandfather had been on the local police force for perhaps 35 years, and belonged to one of the tribe’s most prominent and respected families.




    Monica Davey reported from Red Lake, Minn., for this article and Christine Hauser from New York. Jodi Wilgoren contributed reporting from Chicago; Mikkel Patesfrom Fargo, Kermit Pattison from Minneapolis and Gretchen Reuthling from Chicago.



    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top




  • British soul singer Joss Stone and her music will be featured in new advertising for Gap Inc. as the retailer replaces ‘Sex and the City’ star Sarah Jessica Parker for its summer advertising campaign. Stone arrives at the EMI post Grammy party at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills, February 13, 2005. (Gene Blevins/Reuters)








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  • Tuesday, March 22, 2005
    Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal


    Mother, son sentenced in businessman’s death



    THE ASSOCIATED PRESS







    Sante Kimes



    Kenneth Kimes




    LOS ANGELES — Five years after the pair received identical sentences for the murder of a wealthy New York socialite, a mother and son were sentenced Monday to life in prison without parole for killing a Los Angeles businessman.


    Sante Kimes, 71, was convicted in July 2004 of first-degree murder in the death of David Kazdin, whose body was found in a trash bin near Los Angeles International Airport in 1998. Her son, Kenneth Kimes, pleaded guilty to the murder in 2003 and agreed to testify against his mother.


    On Monday, Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell called Sante Kimes “one of the most evil individuals.” The judge said the younger Kimes was brutalized and manipulated by his mother but must take responsibility for his crimes.


    “At least he finally stepped up to the plate,” the judge said.


    The sentencing was the latest in a bicoastal saga in which the mother-son team murdered Kazdin and New York socialite Irene Silverman to secure a multimillion-dollar townhouse and cover up a fraudulent loan.


    Kenneth Kimes testified at his mother’s trial that she decided to kill Kazdin, an old friend, after he discovered that she had taken out a $280,000 loan by forging his signature.


    Kimes, who turns 30 on Thursday, said his mother planned the details of the killing and sent him to do the job. He testified that he shot Kazdin in the back of the head at close range and threw the body in a trash bin with the help of a person recruited from a homeless shelter.


    Kenneth Kimes testified that the two later traveled to New York in a motor home.


    The Kimeses were convicted in 2000 in New York for murdering Irene Silverman, an 82-year-old wealthy widow whose body has never been found. Prosecutors said the pair conspired to steal Silverman’s $7 million Manhattan townhouse.


    In that case, Sante Kimes was sentenced to 120 years in prison without parole, while her son received a 125-year sentence.


    In 1985, Sante Kimes was arrested in Las Vegas on charges of enslaving four Mexican maids. A jury in 1986 found her guilty of forcing involuntary servitude, unlawfully transporting illegal aliens and escaping federal custody.


    She was sentenced to five years in prison.