Still here!

May 17, 2005
Who among the teenyboppers shrieking for the Rolling Stones during their first American tour in June 1964 could have possibly imagined that some of their grandchildren would be shrieking for the Stones with the same levels of delirium in 2005, more than 40 years later?

Mick Jagger’s mug may have the look of a petrified fielder’s mitt, but 25-year-old Laurin Mack of Middleburg, Va., still thinks he’s the sexiest man on the planet. “I realize he’s as old as my dad,” she said, “but it’s like a chemical reaction. He was probably born sexy.”

When the Stones first came to the states (four months after the Beatles), the Watusi and the monkey were big dances, Barry Goldwater embodied the hopes of the Republican Party, and John Kennedy had been dead less than a year. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both 17.

“It was the first time we went to Omaha that I really understood how heavy it could get,” said Keith Richards in an oral history compiled by the Canadian writer Alan Lysaght. “We were just sitting around drinking whiskey and Coke out of little cups before we went on and the cops walked in and said, ‘What’s in that cup?”‘

Richards replied, “Whiskey, sir.” A cop said, “You can’t drink that here; it’s a public place. Throw it down the drain.” Richards said, “No.”

When he looked up, Richards recalled, a loaded pistol was pointed at his head.

Three of the current Stones were on that tour — Jagger and Richards, who are now 61, and Charlie Watts, who will be 64 in two and a half weeks. Joking about their ages has proved irresistible.

The Daily News came up with titles for new songs they might consider playing on their upcoming tour, including “(I Can’t Get No) Metamucil” and “Let’s Take a Nap Together.”

A young New York Times employee was astonished to learn that Richards is old enough to have been evacuated with his family during the bombing of London by the Nazis in World War II.

You could get a ticket to a Stones concert in 1964 for $2 or $3. They didn’t have a huge hit record and were pretty widely viewed as a rowdy, unkempt imitation of the Beatles. Forget 2005 (and its top ticket price of $453). They seemed unlikely to survive until 1965.

But while no one would have guessed that the Stones were 21st-century bound, the essential ingredients for their longevity were already in place. They were decent musicians and they put on a great show. The main attraction was Jagger’s manic magnetism. Short, skinny and 21, he was a cross between a rooster and a lightning bolt.

The Stones were fun.

The whole key to the Stones was that they were masters of make-believe. They played at being blues musicians.

They gleefully marketed themselves as the outrageous, anarchic alternative to the Beatles, when in fact, as Richards noted in the oral history, the Beatles “were the same kind of blokes as us.”

Now, in the latest of their incarnations, they are charming, aged delinquents playing their former selves.

The Stones really did love the blues, and they promoted the old blues masters. But the Stones’ own music was a different story. They took the blues and wrung out the grief and sadness until all that was left in most cases was the fun. (My father would have said they took out all the vitamins.)

When the Stones, in “The Last Time,” sang, “It’s too much pain and too much sorrow,” they sounded like the happiest guys in the world. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” sounds like the temporary disappointment of a frat boy on an off night.

While entertaining, those kinds of pieces are a long way from the sound and feel of Robert Johnson singing, “Li’l girl, my life seem so misery,” or Muddy Waters begging, “Baby, please don’t go.”

The Stones learned enough from the blues to lift their best work above the level of the rock ‘n’ roll mainstream, and the rest was pretty much unadulterated fun. It’s been working for them for more than 40 years.

“You don’t find bands like that anymore,” said Brendan Burke, a 22-year-old Stones fan who graduated last year from New York University. Their age, he said, doesn’t bother him at all.

On a hunch, I asked him what he thought of as the age when people started getting old.

“Forty,” he said. There was silence on the telephone. Brendan hung in there. “Forty or 45,” he said.

Bob Herbert is a New York Times columnist

U.S. President George W. Bush prepares to speak to supporters in Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia in a Tuesday, May 10, 2005 photo. A grenade hurled in a crowd during last week’s speech by President Bush in the Georgian capital was live and considered a threat against the president, though it failed to explode

FBI Says Grenade Tossed Near Bush Was Live By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer


A hand grenade that landed within 100 feet of President Bush during his visit last week to a former Soviet republic was a threat to his life and the safety of the tens of thousands in the crowd, the FBI said Wednesday.

The grenade was live but did not explode.

The White House, which initially said Bush never was in danger, said the incident May 10 in the Georgia’s capital has led to a review of security at presidential events.

FBI agents are still investigating in Tbilisi, where tens of thousands of people heard Bush speak in strong support of Georgia’s efforts at democratic development.

It was unclear how much danger the president faced.

According to the FBI’s initial investigation, the grenade failed to explode only because of a malfunction. The activation device deployed too slowly to hit the blasting cap hard enough, agent Bryan Paarmann said.

The grenade was a knockoff of a Soviet-designed RGD-5, a fragmentation grenade with a lethal range of about 100 feet, according to a source familiar with the incident, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We consider this act to be a threat against the health and welfare of both the president of the United States and the president of Georgia as well as the multitude of Georgian people that had turned out at this event,” Paarmann said.

No one in the U.S. delegation — Bush, his staff, members of the press that accompanied him and others — saw a grenade being tossed. There was no sign that anything was amiss during the president’s half-hour appearance in Freedom Square.

Bush spoke from an armored podium on a stage shielded by bulletproof glass on the sides; there was no bulletproof shield across much of the stage’s front.

U.S. officials are trying to determine whether the grenade was thrown with the intention of doing harm or was placed in the crowd for other reasons.

“There are a lot of security measures that the Secret Service takes,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. “The Secret Service has the full trust of the president.”

The grenade’s discovery has led to questions about the adequacy of the extensive security measures used to protect the president.

The number of metal detectors set up by the Secret Service, based on predictions by Georgian authorities, proved far too few. The crowd was one of the largest Bush has addressed. After three hours, authorities were overwhelmed by the enormous number of people and let many go around the detectors.

“The Secret Service is looking into all those issues,” McClellan said.

Georgian officials have suggested the device may have been planted to undermine the upbeat relations on display between Bush and Georgia’s new West-leaning president, Mikhail Saakashvili.

The small nation has a large cast of potential culprits, including former government elites angry at Saakashvili’s anti-corruption crackdown, supporters of two separatist regions aligned with Moscow, terrorists from the Pankisi Gorge and Russian saboteurs.

A law enforcement official said there are not any individual suspects nor any claims of responsibility. A reward of about $11,000 was offered for information about those responsible.

Bush’s decision to go to Georgia — a poor, dangerous country struggling to make the transition from ex-communist backwater to economically thriving democracy — had his security detail jumpy for weeks.

At the May 10 event, Georgian police were out in force. U.S. snipers took positions on rooftops.

The grenade was wrapped in a dark plaid cloth. It was “tossed in the general direction of the main stage” about 1:30 p.m., right after Bush began speaking, and landed less than 100 feet shy of the podium, Paarmann said. After bouncing off a child’s cap, the grenade was removed by a Georgian security officer.

Bush knew nothing about the grenade until he had left the country. Georgian authorities did not tell the president’s security detail until after his plane had left for Washington.

At first, the White House said the president never was in danger. Georgian officials denied the incident had happened.

A day later, Georgian officials confirmed there had been a grenade but said it was found on the ground — not thrown, as the Secret Service had said. They also said it was an “engineering grenade” — which is not designed to spread shrapnel — and was found in inactive mode.

“Obviously we’ve learned more since,” McClellan said.

Associated Press writers Mark Sherman in Washington and Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili in Tbilisi contributed to this report

Frank Franklin II / AP
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards perform May 10 at the Juilliard School of Music in New York.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards still on a roll
In this exclusive interview, ‘Today’ host Matt Lauer talks to the rock legends before they embark on their 31st tour

They’ve been called the world’s greatest rock and roll band. Now, after 40 years of performing around the world, the legendary Rolling Stones are hitting the road again for their 31st tour. “Today” host Matt Lauer talked with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — both 61 years old and friends since they were 4 — for an exclusive interview.

Rolling out their unmistakable logo and the familiar riff of one of their all-time classic songs, the Rolling Stones offered up a raucous rock and roll invitation to fans everywhere: come along on a new world tour. They kicked it off with a surprise outdoor concert Tuesday at the Julliard School in New York City.

Matt Lauer: What got you back? Last time we talked, you said when a Rolling Stones tour ends, it’s the last thing you want to talk about.

Mick Jagger: It sort of runs in a pretty good cycle.

Keith Richards: I wait for a phone call from Mick saying, “I’m getting a bit antsy. You wanna go on a show and…”

Lauer: Is that how it happens?

Richards: Kind of.

Jagger: Well, don’t forget you gotta be a bit hard-headed. There is sort of a supply and demand thing here. If no one called up and said, “We think you should go on tour” — because there’s good times and bad times to do tours.

Richards: In a way, Mick and I got the same feeling just around the same time. And then it’s, as Mick was just saying, does all of the rest of it fall into place. You know, the business and the supply and demand of it and all of that. But as you say, we’re ready. If the demand’s there, we’ll supply.

Lauer: Inevitably, when you guys announce a tour, a couple of questions come off right off the bat. One is why? I read something you said in an interview that I thought was fascinating. You said, “Why don’t people ask that of a John Lee Hooker or someone like B.B. King or someone like that.” That you almost think there’s an inverse racism here.


Richards: In a way … I did imply that

Lauer: That when the old white guys go out on tour, people say, “Why are they going out on tour?” The jazz and blues guys go out on tour no matter what age they are.

Richards: You croak on stage, you know? I mean we’re not really different, you know. We’re just musicians. It’s other people’s bags that we get put in and because we’re white or you made a lot of money, why the hell would you want to do that? Because we love it — it’s as simple as that.

Jagger: We are musicians and we play — that’s what we do. okay. That’s your job. So you want to do [the] job that you enjoy doing. But, the other thing is that the difference perhaps between us and these other people is that we make a big noise about it.


Lauer: When you talk about the dynamic that exists between you two, and I watch you two sitting side by side — I think, Keith, you said something to the effect of, you guys like to antagonize each other.

Richards: Sometimes.

Jagger: But not too much.

Lauer: To get the blood flowing?

Richards: Yeah, but not flowing that much. Just to get it rising.

Jagger: You get to the point where you can go negative on that.

Lauer: Because it sounds like the married couple that fights so they can have great sex after they make up?

Richards: Could be.

Jagger: I don’t remember.

Lauer: You think you would have remembered that.


Richards: You know it seems to work like that. Sometimes Mick’s temperament is very different than mine. But when we start to work together, we suddenly seem to have the same.

Jagger: I think we’re both very passionate about what we do. We have different ways of working — I think everyone does.

Richards: You’re probably right there. I mean, if we didn’t care, we’d just say, “Oh, just fling a couple of songs, throw them against the wall,” you know?

Jagger says talk that this is some sort of farewell tour is simply not true. The Rolling Stones are taking it one tour at a time — promising to give each show all they’ve got.

Jagger: You go out there and put yourself on the line and you make sure you’re as good as you can possibly be. You don’t (expletive deleted) about, and you don’t rest on your laurels. You just give the best show you can — even if you feel terrible, you’ve got a cold, your back’s aching and all that crap. You do it because you are putting yourself on the line and those people have paid good money to see you, and you better be bloody good.

Herman Crisostomo for NYT
The nuclear submarine San Francisco last week in Guam, after repairs. It crashed into an undersea mountain in January.

May 18, 2005
Adrift 500 Feet Under the Sea, a Minute Was an Eternity

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

APRA HARBOR, Guam, May 16 – Blood was everywhere. Sailors lay sprawled across the floor, several of them unconscious, others simply dazed. Even the captain was asking, “What just happened?” All anyone knew for sure was that the nuclear-powered attack submarine had slammed head-on into something solid and very large, and that it had to get to the surface fast.

In the control room, a senior enlisted man shoved the “chicken switches,” blowing high-pressure air through the ballast tanks to force the vessel upward. Usually, the submarine would respond at once. But as the captain, Cmdr. Kevin G. Mooney, and top officers stared at the depth gauge, the needle refused to budge.

Moments before, they had been slipping quiet and fast through the Pacific. Now, they were stuck, more than 500 feet down.

Ten seconds passed. Then 20, 30.

“I thought I was going to die,” Commander Mooney recalled.

It would be close to a minute, but an excruciatingly long minute, before the submarine’s mangled nose began to rise, before the entire control room exhaled in relief, before the diving officer, Chief Petty Officer Danny R. Hager, began to read out a succession of shallower depths.

“I don’t know how long it was,” Chief Hager said, “but it seemed like forever.”

Last week, Navy investigators reported that a series of mistakes at sea and onshore caused the 6,900-ton submarine, the San Francisco, to run into an undersea mountain not on its navigational charts. One crewman was killed, 98 others were injured, and the captain and three other officers were relieved of their duties as a result of the Jan. 8 crash, one of the worst on an American submarine since the 1960′s.

But what is becoming clear only now, from the first interviews with Commander Mooney and 15 other officers and enlisted men, as well as a review of Navy reports, is how much worse it nearly was, and how close the San Francisco came to being lost.

The submarine crashed at top speed – 33 knots, or roughly 38 miles an hour – about 360 miles southeast of Guam. The impact punched huge holes in the forward ballast tanks, so the air being blown into them was no match for the ocean pouring in. The throttles shut, and the vessel briefly lost propulsion. As the emergency blow caught hold, mainly in the rear tanks, the sub was just drifting in the deep, its bow pointing down.

Luckily, the thick inner hull protecting the nuclear reactor and the crew’s quarters held. But within was pandemonium – bodies pinballing, heads striking steel in the warren of lethally sharp surfaces in impossibly tight spaces. There was so much blood on the instruments and on the control-room floor that the place, Chief Hager said, “looked like a slaughterhouse.”

Then chaos gave way to improvised heroism and a perilous, and finally futile, effort to rescue the most grievously injured sailor.

The merely battered ministered to the badly hurt, turning the mess hall and the officers’ wardroom into instant clinics, ripping off shirts to use as tourniquets and creating splints from cleaning brushes. When they realized that the only hope for the dying man, a young machinist’s mate named Joseph A. Ashley, was to get to a hospital, sailors cut off railings and fixtures to thread his stretcher through narrow areas. They then rigged pulleys in an effort to hoist him through the sail, at the top of the submarine, and onto a helicopter hovering just above.

To avoid detection, submarines travel silent and largely blind, relying heavily on charts, and their interpreters, to navigate the undersea landscape. The meeting of this submarine and that mountain beneath the Pacific was in many ways a stroke of hauntingly rare bad luck: everyone relied on the one chart, from a panoply of them, that lacked even a hint of the looming danger. But the submarine’s fate was also the result of a confluence of simple shipboard errors.

The Navy has placed the blame on the captain and the crew, and Commander Mooney says, “I accept full responsibility.” He acknowledges several critical mistakes, including going too fast, taking insufficient depth soundings and failing to cross-check the route with other charts.

Yet the fact that those errors happened on a boat with a highly rated commander suggests a more nuanced calculus of responsibility, raising questions about the relatively primitive state of undersea charting and the training and support of submariners.

Petty Officer Ashley’s father, Daniel L. Ashley, a Navy veteran, refuses to let the Navy off the hook. Sitting in his home outside Akron, Ohio, one recent morning, with a memorial of flags and photographs on the family organ, Mr. Ashley said he had forgiven Commander Mooney and the crew.

“I know what these men have to live with for the rest of their lives,” he said. “I feel the same pain.”

But if the Navy’s systems for supporting submarines had not also broken down, he said, “this would not have happened, and my son would be alive today.”

A Normal Saturday

As the San Francisco prepared to shove off in early January, spirits were high. Since taking over in December 2003, Commander Mooney had pushed his 136 sailors through four months of repairs and two intelligence missions. The San Francisco, previously known as a troubled boat, was winning praise in the Navy as a “Cinderella story.”

Now the submarine was headed for Brisbane, Australia, and its first liberty stop under the 40-year-old captain, a graduate of Duke University and a submarine officer for 19 years. One thing, though, was bothering him, he recalled: the basic routing instructions seemed to be late. So he told his navigators to call the Seventh Fleet in Japan and hurry them along.

The goal of the routings was to ensure that no other Navy ship would cross the submarine’s path, and they laid out a wide track to follow. But some officers had come to view these navigational guides as suggesting a measure of safety. And as the San Francisco left here on Friday, Jan. 7, the team plotting the precise route within that track focused on a single set of charts that, Navy officials agree, usually gave the most detailed view of the seabed.

Since submarines generally do not use active sonar, with its telltale pings, a good picture can be critical in avoiding mountain ranges rising from the seabed. Relying on charts, though, has always been somewhat hit or miss. Only 10 percent of the oceans have been charted by Navy survey ships. Many charts only include obstacles spotted by warships, commercial vessels or even 18th-century explorers like Captain Cook.

One poorly charted area was south of Guam, where the Navy started basing subs in 2002. So by Saturday morning, when the San Francisco entered the Caroline Islands mountain chain, there had been talk of special precautions among some of the men. But to the plotting team, the winding route down to Australia looked wide open.

To the rest of the crew, it was just a normal Saturday, which meant cleaning the boat. Lunch began at 11 a.m. – hamburgers, French fries, baked beans – and at 11:25 Commander Mooney went to the wardroom, where the officers ate. The crew’s work shift changed five minutes later, and when a line formed outside the mess, several men, including Petty Officer Ashley, decided to have a smoke first in the vessel’s tail.

Sailors said this was typical of Petty Officer Ashley, 24, an unabashed country boy who loved motorcycles, Jeeps and the boat’s diesel engine, which he cared for.

His nickname was Cooter, after a mechanic on the old television show “Dukes of Hazzard.” He was also known for his wicked Michael Jackson imitation, which one sailor called “moonwalking in cowboy boots.”

That afternoon, the plan was to slow down for drills, so with everything humming along, Lt. Cmdr. Bruce L. Carlton, the navigation officer driving the submarine, decided to get ahead of schedule by bumping up to full speed and going deeper.

A sounding taken at 11:30 a.m. confirmed what was on the charts – the ocean was 6,000 feet deep there – and the submarine began to glide down to 500 feet from 400 feet. At 11:38, a decision was made to go to 525 feet, and a junior officer recommended another sounding. But Commander Carlton did not think that was necessary, the Navy reports indicate, and none was made.

Blood and Chaos

Chief Hager, wry and wiry at 39, unbuckled his seat belt and hopped up to jot a note on a card taped to the jet-black control panel. Suddenly – it was just after 11:42 – he felt his grip on a drawer handle tighten as the submarine shuddered.

Then “came the real deal,” he said, a thunderous blast and what felt like a warp-speed gale whipping through the submarine as it froze in its tracks.

The force spun his body around – like Spiderman twisting against a wall, he said – and his hand punched through a plexiglass gauge cover. His seat ripped out of its runners and crushed his leg. Then one of the quartermasters, who had been monitoring the charts 15 feet away, came catapulting into view. He ended up knocked out on the floor, blood pouring from his forehead.

A few feet away, three more men were unconscious. One – the junior officer who had just suggested the extra sounding – was bleeding from his head and leg, and could hardly breathe. Commander Carlton, who was still in charge, had been thrown into a passageway, and blood streamed from the right side of his face as he scrambled back to the command center.

In the wardroom, Commander Mooney had been pinned into his seat, while a cook came over his shoulder and crashed into a television screen 10 feet away, cracking it in two places. Within seconds, the captain was rushing up a ladder to the control room, where the effort to blow the submarine to the surface had just begun.

Hundreds of papers that had popped out of binders were streaking dark red on the floor, and the microphones were crackling with injury reports. By 11:44, the submarine had finally broken the surface, with the captain scanning through a periscope. No ships. No wreckage. Nothing.

“I realized at that point that we had survived a collision with the bottom that was just unbelievable,” Commander Mooney said. But, he said, he “literally had no idea” what it was doing there.

And no time to figure it out: there were also serious injuries in the crew’s mess, the engine rooms and the smoking room – the other relatively open areas where men had gone flying. From the bridge atop the sail, Commander Carlton could see that the bow was damaged, raising fears of flooding.

“We were in shock,” Commander Mooney said. But everyone was running on instinct and training. Damage-control parties quickly reported that the inner hull was intact, the torpedoes and cruise missiles unscathed. The captain radioed for help and turned the boat back toward Guam. In the stern, men began bringing the injured forward, toward the wardroom and the mess.

In the smoking room, Petty Officer Ashley had been thrown about 20 feet, fracturing his skull against either metal equipment or a bulkhead doorjamb. Two sailors crouched over him.

“I didn’t know what to do,” said one of them, Bryan Barnes, a 22-year-old electrician’s mate. “So I just held his hand and talked to him until doc came back.”

When “doc,” the ship’s medic, James H. Akin, arrived, he knew instantly that they had to get Petty Officer Ashley off the boat.

Racing to Save a Life

A submarine at sea is a self-contained world in a steel bubble. One thing it does not have, though, is a doctor; the medic, an enlisted man with basic medical training, handles the run of everyday illness and injury. Now, in a full-out emergency, the medic’s first job was to get Petty Officer Ashley immobilized on a stretcher so he could be carried to the crew’s mess.

There, the chief of the boat, William Cramer, the senior enlisted man, was commanding the cleanup. His men unfurled large rolls of terry cloth to sop up the slippery goo of blood and capsized lunch, and shoved the broken plates and glasses into the galley. In the wardroom, Lt. Craig E. Litty, himself a former medic, quickly set up a triage center, where he helped bandage most of the injured men.

Corpsman Akin, at 6 foot 4 and 280 pounds the largest man onboard, set up his medical supplies on the salad bar in the mess. He stitched up the men with the worst lacerations. And he tried to keep Petty Officer Ashley alive.

The medic says he knew he was probably nursing a dying man. Still, Petty Officer Ashley held on. For 21 hours, Corpsman Akin monitored his vital signs, kept his air passages clear, and gave him oxygen and morphine. Sailors took turns holding his hand. At one point, someone brought in a CD player and put on some Hank Williams Jr.

The first rescue ship, the Coast Guard cutter Galveston Island, arrived at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. But by then, squalls had moved in, and it seemed too dangerous to try to shuttle Petty Officer Ashley over in a small boat.

The alternative seemed hardly less daring: using a helicopter to lift the wounded man and his stretcher out of a hatch on the top of the submarine’s sail.

By now, a second ship, the Stockham, had arrived. It carried more doctors and two helicopters. Around 9 a.m., as one of the helicopters hovered 10 to 15 feet above the submarine, it dangled a doctor and a corpsman into the submarine to help prepare Petty Officer Ashley for the move. The pilots had to rely on a spotter in back to keep the copter clear of the pitching submarine.

“He was giving drift calls, saying ‘Cut left,’ ‘Come right,’ ‘You’re getting too close,’ ” said one of the pilots, Ricke Harris.

Inside the submarine, Chief Cramer ordered a path cleared for the stretcher. Several men unbolted or cut off ladder railings and lockers. By late morning, men were stationed in doorways and stairwells to pass the stretcher along; one even crawled underneath and supported the stretcher on his back through the narrowest spots.

They climbed up one level and under the sail, and then another group took over, heaving on a rope and pulley to lift the stretcher up the 25-foot sail. The first effort failed when Petty Officer Ashley’s breathing tube came loose. With his condition deteriorating, a second try made it to the top.

That was when the men had an awful realization: the hatch atop the sail did not quite open the full 90 degrees. No matter how much they tried, angling this way and that, the stretcher would not slip through.

A surgeon, Chris Cook, was then lowered by cable from the copter. But Petty Officer Ashley’s heart stopped, and the men began CPR. Half an hour later, at 1:11 p.m., Dr. Cook pronounced him dead. Still, one of the sailors kept pounding.

“I looked at him and said, ‘We’re sorry,’ ” Dr. Cook recalled. ” ‘There’s nothing more we can do.’ ”

Hard Lessons

When the San Francisco pulled into Guam on Jan. 10, its bow slinking low in the water, the flags on other submarines were at half-mast, their crews lining the decks in tribute.

Looking at a picture of that moment, Commander Mooney speaks with pride of the way his crew brought the boat home. But an image discovered on the voyage back also remains seared in his mind, he says, one that helped seal his dismissal and spark broader questions about the Navy’s navigational training and support.

That image is a small, light-blue circle on a white background. It signifies a potential hazard two to three miles from where the San Francisco crashed – close enough, Commander Mooney says, that if he had known about it, he would have tried to skirt the area or asked for a new routing. Charting experts now believe that hazard was the mountain, and that its location was imprecisely reported in the days before satellites made navigational fixes more precise.

Commander Mooney said he first heard about the hazard from his boss onshore a few hours after the grounding. It is, in fact, on every chart of the area except for the one that the boat was using – the one that usually provided the most detailed picture of the seabed contours.

That revelation has been embarrassing to the Navy and the Pentagon office that prepares the charts. Moreover, investigators have found that the officer who gave the submarine its basic routing also relied only on that one chart.

Under Navy rules, the captain and his crew are solely responsible for the safety of their ship. After all, in wartime, submarines must operate without help from shore.

The captain acknowledged that he and his crew should have cross-checked the charts. But some of his officers say it was common to grab what seemed the best chart and run down the center of the basic track, as the San Francisco did. They also said they were not alone in believing that the routings were based on more substantial navigation checks. “I look at it as just a lot of really bad luck,” said Lt. Cmdr. Rick Boneau, the San Francisco’s executive officer.

Commander Boneau, Commander Carlton and an assistant navigator were relieved of their duties, and three enlisted men were reprimanded. Commander Carlton did not respond to requests for comment.

But Navy reports have found that the sea charts are not updated frequently enough and that the routings are often delivered late, limiting the time for onboard navigation checks. The accident has also stirred concerns – dating back to the advent of nuclear submarines under the legendary admiral Hyman G. Rickover – that Navy training places more emphasis on engineering than on skills like navigation.

The approach to keeping the reactor safe is to build in redundant checks and test sailors constantly. But even though inspections had found some navigation deficiencies on the San Francisco in 2004, the reports said, squadron officials in Guam did nothing to make sure the problems had been fixed.

Since the accident, the Navy has briefed hundreds of officers on the lessons to be drawn. Capt. Matt Brown, the spokesman for the Pacific Fleet, said the Navy is also looking at other changes to improve safety.

Some of the younger sailors said they had not realized how close they had come to dying until they saw the San Francisco’s mutilated bow at the dry dock here.

“Your jaw just kind of dropped open, and you wondered why you were still alive,” said Mr. Barnes, the electrician’s mate who held Joseph Ashley’s hand right after the collision. As many as 10 sailors have asked not to return to submarine duty.

Commander Mooney is working a desk job until he can retire next year. Last month he visited Petty Officer Ashley’s grave in a family plot on a hillside in West Virginia. The captain and the sailor’s father said a prayer together as they placed a Navy marker by the grave. They embraced.

Then, the captain left one final offering – his command star, buried in the dirt.

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Glen Wilson/Warner Brothers.

Steve Sansweet owns “The world’s largest private collection of ‘Star Wars’ memorabilia, outside of George, of course,” he says, referring to the films’ impressario

May 15, 2005
The Force Is With the Fans (One Superfan, in Particular)
By MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS

HE’S almost a god – he’s the closest thing there is to George Lucas,” one “Star Wars” fan exclaimed, pointing at Steve Sansweet, a short, bearded 59-year-old who looks like the love child of Buddha and George Carlin and who, as Lucasfilm’s head of fan relations, is a bona fide celebrity among devotees of the Skywalker saga.

After greeting these, his own fans, Mr. Sansweet took the stage at last year’s Comic-Con, among the largest comic book conventions. A crowd of 4,000 (including hundreds in costume) were gathered in a gigantic room at the San Diego Convention Center for a three-hour multimedia pageant of “Star Wars” nostalgia (even Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill showed up) and promotional videos announcing Lucasfilm’s major forthcoming DVD’s, video games, television shows and other products. The climax was the announcement, “for the first time anywhere on Earth,” of the title of the latest “Star Wars” film. When Mr. Sansweet strode out to dispense that manna- “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” – to the assembled hordes, they hailed him as if he were a rock star.

Last month in Indianapolis, at a “Star Wars” convention known as Celebration III, the lead-in to the premiere of the long-awaited final installment opening Thursday, he said, he “signed 1,000 autographs and posed for 2,000 pictures.” As curious as his celebrity status may be, the course that led him to this lofty peak is even curiouser.

His arrival at Lucasfilm in 1996 marked the end of a distinguished 26-year career as a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he wrote a prizewinning series of exposés of multinational bribery and served as Los Angeles bureau chief for nine years. In a recent interview at Lucasfilm’s Big Rock Ranch in San Rafael, Calif., Mr. Sansweet said he thought his two careers had much in common: “In a way I still am a journalist. I edit the ‘Star Wars’ magazines for Spain, Mexico, France, Germany, the U.S. and the U.K.”

This may seem a stretch. But Lucasfilm’s decision to make fan relations an in-house service (Mr. Sansweet’s primary title is director of content management, in the company’s marketing division) exemplifies a larger trend in the entertainment industry. Traditional journalism is losing ground as the primary distribution channel for information about stars, films and television shows. Entertainers, studios and production companies are dispensing that information directly to fans in unconventional ways, allowing greater corporate control over the public image of entertainment properties, and creating significant new revenue streams, as well.

Mr. Sansweet, who says he owns “the world’s largest private collection of ‘Star Wars’ memorabilia, outside of George, of course” (a claim called indisputable by Lisa Stevens, former president of the “Star Wars” Fan Club) began his collection in 1978 when Kenner Products released four action figures that would spawn a $9 billion marketing windfall. As his star (and salary) rose at The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Sansweet’s passion for all things “Star Wars” intensified. He added two floors to his cantilevered house in the Hollywood Hills and hired an archivist to organize the collection, which numbers some 100,000 pieces. Then he took out a second mortgage to buy some vehicle props from the films. (Today his treasures are housed in a 5,000-square-foot barn next to his home in Northern California. Mr. Sansweet declined to estimate the collection’s value but did not contradict a guess of several million dollars.)

After Mr. Lucas announced in 1994 that he would make three prequels to the first “Star Wars” trilogy, Mr. Sansweet said, “from time to time as I was falling asleep I would think, Wow, that sure would be interesting to work inside Lucasfilm while he’s making the next three movies. Part of that was my curiosity as a reporter. Part of that was my fannishness.” When he heard that the company was starting a publishing division, he called and said, “If anybody does a ‘Star Wars’ book it should be me.” (He had already written two books: “The Punishment Cure,” on aversion therapies, and a collectibles book, “Science Fiction Toys and Models.”)

Still at The Wall Street Journal, he wrote “Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible” (1992), which traced the film “from an idea in George’s head to how they did the merchandise.” He has since written 10 more “Star Wars” books, including an exhaustive collectibles encyclopedia. (Some of the books have earned him royalties on sales; others were written for flat fees with no royalties. Two forthcoming books, “Star Wars Poster Book” and “Star Wars Chronicles: The Prequels” were written on his own time, not as part of his duties at Lucasfilm.)

In the mid-1990′s he began appearing on QVC home-shopping programs to promote the books. Mr. Sansweet remembered that the host of his first show there introduced him as an editor at The Wall Street Journal and that it did not please his bosses. How could he be a serious journalist and a stark raving fan at the same time?

His boss at the time, the managing editor Paul Steiger, does not recall any conflict over Mr. Sansweet’s outside passions. “I just thought it was a kick,” Mr. Steiger said. “He was a fanatic about the topic but he was a great journalist.”

In time, the allure of the X-wing fighter prevailed. When Lucasfilm asked Mr. Sansweet if he knew anyone willing to attend fan conventions to promote the trilogy’s 1997 theatrical re-release, he asked for the job himself. He said that he took a 65 percent pay cut and that he attended 60 conventions that first year. The position became permanent, and he moved to work at Skywalker Ranch, in 1998.

Mr. Steiger was not surprised by Mr. Sansweet’s move: “I totally understand this. If Paul DePodesta wanted to give me his job as general manager of the Dodgers, I’d take it in a minute. I was delighted for Steve and saw nothing bizarre in it.”

Jim Ward, president of LucasArts and vice president of marketing, distribution and online for Lucasfilm, said he hired Mr. Sansweet because “getting the message out to the influential fans who can then disseminate that information to the whole fan base is not as easy as you might think. He has relationships that can create a groundswell among our fans on a mass basis to go out and celebrate ‘Star Wars.’ “

Not everyone at Lucasfilm, however, immediately cottoned to having a fan on staff. Haltingly Mr. Sansweet explained, “There have been cases in the past, not very many, where people who seemed to be really passionate fans but also have something a little screwed up sort of get through the interviewing process and are here and something goes really wrong.”

But Mr. Sansweet gained his colleagues’ respect and takes pains not to exploit his situation. He buys merchandise at StarWarsShop.com with the standard Lucasfilm employee discount of 10 percent. But, he added, “I’m out there at Midnight Madness at Toys ‘R’ Us and 48 Hours of the Force at Wal-Mart just like everybody else. People say, ‘What are you doing here?’ I say, ‘The same thing you’re doing here! Buying toys!’ “

Over the years his duties have grown. In addition to serving as a liaison for fans and as an ambassador to their conventions, he writes photo captions for the publicity department and helps coordinate the rollout of images and information. Two years ago he overhauled the “Star Wars” Fan Club, when Lucasfilm withdrew the license of the fan who had been club president since 1986.

“He’s a jack of all trades at the company,” Mr. Ward said. “He’s a representative of every aspect of how our fans engage in our brand, and that’s what’s fantastic about him.”

Mr. Sansweet’s expertise as a collector, too, is a resource for Lucasfilm’s business affairs and legal department in routing counterfeit merchandise. (Lucasfilm declined to make representatives of those departments available for this article.)

His insights about “Star Wars” merchandise go deeper than his talent for authentication. To the commonplace that “Star Wars” merchandising changed the feature film business, Mr. Sansweet offered a more nuanced observation: it also changed how information about entertainment is circulated. “The way ‘Star Wars’ became part of the popular culture is the merchandising,” he said. “Kids taking home the figures and the ships and wearing their Underoos. ‘Star Wars’ became ingrained because of the play patterns as well as the gossip around the playground about the film.”

Although some earlier pop icons, like Dick Tracy and Captain Video, also spawned successful merchandising industries, none had the international reach or sustained market power of “Star Wars.” And franchises like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Spider-Man” have tried to replicate the “Star Wars” formula, but none as successfully.

The circulation of information about “Star Wars” movies became inseparable from the acquisition and manipulation of toys based on the films, and that changed the nature of fandom. Children were inspired or enticed to create a new kind of play, using replicas of “Star Wars” characters to reenact a film’s stories and create new ones.

“Star Wars” merchandise also imputed fandom with business savvy. When Mr. Sansweet was a child, he assembled science-fiction model kits, which his mother threw out when he grew older “because they were dust collectors.” Today, he said, “kids know better” than to let such things happen.

For his column about collectibles in the “Star Wars” Fan Club magazine, he said, “I get letters that say, ‘I just bought a’ – fill in the blank – ‘for $7 at a flea market. How much is it worth?’ And it’s scrawled in block letters, and you know it’s from some kid 6 years old.”

As a fan, however, Mr. Sansweet finds no cause for cynicism in a generation of 6-year-olds who look at their toy chests and see dollar signs. He contends this is simply a new stage in the entertainment industry’s orchestration of commerce, art and enthusiasm.

In sustaining the Lucasfilm franchise, he said, “certainly there’s a bottom line involved but there’s even a broader strategy that can result in making money. How do we keep the fans happy? What does it take? Does it take more product? Less product? Should we go quiet for a number of years like we did after ‘Return of the Jedi’? Do we have something that we can come up with fairly quickly? How quickly? What do we do in the interim? All those things are part of the mix. And the fan base is one of the strategic considerations that go into the overall strategy of the ‘Star Wars’ brand.”

At the Celebration III fan convention in Indianapolis, Mr. Sansweet recalled, “George himself said several times, ‘Without you guys, there wouldn’t be ‘Star Wars.’ You’re the reason I was able to come back and make the new movies, and complete my story. We have all of this to thank you for.’ And it’s true. People here really believe that. And I’ve had a teensy bit to do with that sort of thing, it makes me very proud and happy.”

Despite such satisfactions, being a demigod takes its toll. During the build-up to the premiere of “Episode III,” Mr. Sansweet has subsisted on as little as 12 hours’ sleep in a week. He sometimes eats only potato chips for dinner, and he suffers daily migraine headaches. He said: “My doctor says I need to go cold turkey off the medication, but right now I can’t give up anything. He said, ‘When can you do it?’ I said, ‘I think January 2006.’ ”

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Tilly Losch,” circa 1935, by Joseph Cornell, Construction, 10 x 9¤ x 2⁄ inches ©The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York City

May 17, 2005
A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm

By DINITIA SMITH

Evolutionary scientists have never had difficulty explaining the male orgasm, closely tied as it is to reproduction.

But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant – doing their part for the perpetuation of the species – without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?

Over the last four decades, scientists have come up with a variety of theories, arguing, for example, that orgasm encourages women to have sex and, therefore, reproduce or that it leads women to favor stronger and healthier men, maximizing their offspring’s chances of survival.

But in a new book, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and professor of biology at Indiana University, takes on 20 leading theories and finds them wanting. The female orgasm, she argues in the book, “The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution,” has no evolutionary function at all.

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts – a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

In that early period, the nerve and tissue pathways are laid down for various reflexes, including the orgasm, Dr. Lloyd said. As development progresses, male hormones saturate the embryo, and sexuality is defined.

In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while “females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan.”

Nipples in men are similarly vestigial, Dr. Lloyd pointed out.

While nipples in woman serve a purpose, male nipples appear to be simply left over from the initial stage of embryonic development.

The female orgasm, she said, “is for fun.”

Dr. Lloyd said scientists had insisted on finding an evolutionary function for female orgasm in humans either because they were invested in believing that women’s sexuality must exactly parallel that of men or because they were convinced that all traits had to be “adaptations,” that is, serve an evolutionary function.

Theories of female orgasm are significant, she added, because “men’s expectations about women’s normal sexuality, about how women should perform, are built around these notions.”

“And men are the ones who reflect back immediately to the woman whether or not she is adequate sexually,” Dr. Lloyd continued.

Central to her thesis is the fact that women do not routinely have orgasms during sexual intercourse.

She analyzed 32 studies, conducted over 74 years, of the frequency of female orgasm during intercourse.

When intercourse was “unassisted,” that is not accompanied by stimulation of the clitoris, just a quarter of the women studied experienced orgasms often or very often during intercourse, she found.

Five to 10 percent never had orgasms. Yet many of the women became pregnant.

Dr. Lloyd’s figures are lower than those of Dr. Alfred A. Kinsey, who in his 1953 book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” found that 39 to 47 percent of women reported that they always, or almost always, had orgasm during intercourse.

But Kinsey, Dr. Lloyd said, included orgasms assisted by clitoral stimulation.

Dr. Lloyd said there was no doubt in her mind that the clitoris was an evolutionary adaptation, selected to create excitement, leading to sexual intercourse and then reproduction.

But, “without a link to fertility or reproduction,” Dr. Lloyd said, “orgasm cannot be an adaptation.”

Not everyone agrees. For example, Dr. John Alcock, a professor of biology at Arizona State University, criticized an earlier version of Dr. Lloyd’s thesis, discussed in in a 1987 article by Stephen Jay Gould in the magazine Natural History.

In a phone interview, Dr. Alcock said that he had not read her new book, but that he still maintained the hypothesis that the fact that “orgasm doesn’t occur every time a woman has intercourse is not evidence that it’s not adaptive.”

“I’m flabbergasted by the notion that orgasm has to happen every time to be adaptive,” he added.

Dr. Alcock theorized that a woman might use orgasm “as an unconscious way to evaluate the quality of the male,” his genetic fitness and, thus, how suitable he would be as a father for her offspring.

“Under those circumstances, you wouldn’t expect her to have it every time,” Dr. Alcock said.

Among the theories that Dr. Lloyd addresses in her book is one proposed in 1993, by Dr. R. Robin Baker and Dr. Mark A. Bellis, at Manchester University in England. In two papers published in the journal Animal Behaviour, they argued that female orgasm was a way of manipulating the retention of sperm by creating suction in the uterus. When a woman has an orgasm from one minute before the man ejaculates to 45 minutes after, she retains more sperm, they said.

Furthermore, they asserted, when a woman has intercourse with a man other than her regular sexual partner, she is more likely to have an orgasm in that prime time span and thus retain more sperm, presumably making conception more likely. They postulated that women seek other partners in an effort to obtain better genes for their offspring.

Dr. Lloyd said the Baker-Bellis argument was “fatally flawed because their sample size is too small.”

“In one table,” she said, “73 percent of the data is based on the experience of one person.”

In an e-mail message recently, Dr. Baker wrote that his and Dr. Bellis’s manuscript had “received intense peer review appraisal” before publication. Statisticians were among the reviewers, he said, and they noted that some sample sizes were small, “but considered that none of these were fatal to our paper.”

Dr. Lloyd said that studies called into question the logic of such theories. Research by Dr. Ludwig Wildt and his colleagues at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany in 1998, for example, found that in a healthy woman the uterus undergoes peristaltic contractions throughout the day in the absence of sexual intercourse or orgasm. This casts doubt, Dr. Lloyd argues, on the idea that the contractions of orgasm somehow affect sperm retention.

Another hypothesis, proposed in 1995 by Dr. Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and two colleagues, held that women were more likely to have orgasms during intercourse with men with symmetrical physical features. On the basis of earlier studies of physical attraction, Dr. Thornhill argued that symmetry might be an indicator of genetic fitness.

Dr. Lloyd, however, said those conclusions were not viable because “they only cover a minority of women, 45 percent, who say they sometimes do, and sometimes don’t, have orgasm during intercourse.”

“It excludes women on either end of the spectrum,” she said. “The 25 percent who say they almost always have orgasm in intercourse and the 30 percent who say they rarely or never do. And that last 30 percent includes the 10 percent who say they never have orgasm under any circumstances.”

In a phone interview, Dr. Thornhill said that he had not read Dr. Lloyd’s book but the fact that not all women have orgasms during intercourse supports his theory.

“There will be patterns in orgasm with preferred and not preferred men,” he said.

Dr. Lloyd also criticized work by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, who studies primate behavior and female reproductive strategies.

Scientists have documented that orgasm occurs in some female primates; for other mammals, whether orgasm occurs remains an open question.

In the 1981 book “The Woman That Never Evolved” and in her other work, Dr. Hrdy argues that orgasm evolved in nonhuman primates as a way for the female to protect her offspring from the depredation of males.

She points out that langur monkeys have a high infant mortality rate, with 30 percent of deaths a result of babies’ being killed by males who are not the fathers. Male langurs, she says, will not kill the babies of females they have mated with.

In macaques and chimpanzees, she said, females are conditioned by the pleasurable sensations of clitoral stimulation to keep copulating with multiple partners until they have an orgasm. Thus, males do not know which infants are theirs and which are not and do not attack them.

Dr. Hrdy also argues against the idea that female orgasm is an artifact of the early parallel development of male and female embryos.

“I’m convinced,” she said, “that the selection of the clitoris is quite separate from that of the penis in males.”

In critiquing Dr. Hrdy’s view, Dr. Lloyd disputes the idea that longer periods of sexual intercourse lead to a higher incidence of orgasm, something that if it is true, may provide an evolutionary rationale for female orgasm.

But Dr. Hrdy said her work did not speak one way or another to the issue of female orgasm in humans. “My hypothesis is silent,” she said.

One possibility, Dr. Hrdy said, is that orgasm in women may have been an adaptive trait in our prehuman ancestors.

“But we separated from our common primate ancestors about seven million years ago,” she said.

“Perhaps the reason orgasm is so erratic is that it’s phasing out,” Dr. Hrdy said. “Our descendants on the starships may well wonder what all the fuss was about.”

Western culture is suffused with images of women’s sexuality, of women in the throes of orgasm during intercourse and seeming to reach heights of pleasure that are rare, if not impossible, for most women in everyday life.

“Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function,” Dr. Lloyd said.

If women, she said, are told that it is “natural” to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

“Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women,” Dr. Lloyd said. “And indirectly for men, as well.”

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Lonni Sue Johnson

May 16, 2005
Why That Doggie in the Window Costs a Lot More Than You Think
By DAVID LEONHARDT

THE entry in the Zagat guide made the restaurant sound affordable. So did the menu posted near the door. Entrees were about $15. Even with wine, spending less than $80 for two people seemed like no problem.

But once you are seated, the waiter comes by and asks if he may bring you some San Pellegrino sparkling water. Whenever your glass is half-empty, he fills it, and he always replaces a finished bottle with a new one, at $10 apiece. By the time dinner is over, the bill has crept toward $130, all because you did not want to seem too chintzy to order a little fizzy water.

Welcome to the à la carte economy, where consumers seem to face new decisions every few minutes and businesses know precisely when their customers are most vulnerable. The practice of luring customers with a low list price is an old one – it’s how television pitchmen get you to buy the Veg-O-Matic – but recently it has come to dominate many areas of the modern economy. The value of being a smart consumer, like the cost of being a naïve one, has risen sharply.

A room at the Marriott may cost only $150, but the final bill looks a lot different once you have handed your car keys to the valet, used the high-speed Internet connection and eaten the $11 oatmeal. Late fees on credit cards have jumped. So have many mutual-fund fees.

Two young economists, Xavier Gabaix and David I. Laibson, have come up with a name for this practice: shrouding. Once you start to think about it, you notice shrouding almost everywhere, like the features that add to the price of a new car, the warranty from Best Buy, the burgers at the ballpark and the surcharge Ticketmaster puts on concert tickets. The price you hear is not the price you end up paying.

At first blush, shrouding sounds like just a fancy word for rip-off. Whether they are selling marked-up Pellegrino or tacking on “convenience charges,” businesses seem to be the ones benefiting from the hidden information. But that is not always the case, which is what makes the concept so interesting.

There really are two types of consumers when it comes to shrouding: one who takes advantage of the murkiness and another who gets taken advantage of. To make matters even worse, the less savvy group ends up subsidizing the more sophisticated one.

When the economy was simpler – when all phone service came from Ma Bell, for instance – there was far less room or need for shrouding. Today, with SBC, Cingular, Cablevision and Vonage all trying to woo callers, their prices must grab people’s attention. The profit can come after the customer is in the fold.

“It’s easier to customize now and create lots of different options,” Mr. Gabaix, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said.

Credit cards are the most widely understood case. Few people can tell you the late-fee penalty on their credit cards, but those fees, which have risen sharply, make up a large portion of what many users end up paying. For people who pay their entire balance every month, though, credit cards are a bizarrely good deal. A free loan, a more convenient way to shop and perhaps some frequent-flier miles, too. Who’s getting ripped off there?

It is possible only because people who run up interest charges and late fees keep the banks in business.

Mr. Laibson, a professor at Harvard, has his own favorite example of shrouding: Hewlett-Packard’s inkjet printers. The advertised price is as low as $35, but it includes no ink cartridges or paper, two necessary items for printing.

“Here’s my challenge to you,” he said. “Go to the H-P Web site and pretend to be an individual purchaser of a computer, not a business. Go to the deskjet printers. See if you can find the cost of printing on a per-page basis. That is the most important information.”

All I could find – and it took many misdirected clicks to get there – was an estimate of the number of pages each cartridge would print. A little arithmetic led to a per-page cost of about 10 cents. Print 10 pages a day, and you have already doubled the cost of that apparent bargain, the $35 printer, in little more than a month.

John Solomon, a vice president of supplies marketing at Hewlett-Packard, said the company wanted the printing industry to adopt a standard for calculating per-page cost. Without one, other companies could exaggerate the size of a cartridge’s print load, making Hewlett-Packard’s per-page cost look unfairly high, he said.

“We feel it is important, but we have hidden it. We have put it in a place that only people who really care will find it,” Mr. Solomon said. “Because it’s not really good information if there’s not a level playing field.”

If shrouding were really just a form of gouging, you would also expect new companies to enter the market and sell items for a lower, but still profitable, price. And sometimes that does happen.

Netflix has helped cause Blockbuster’s current corporate traumas by attracting people who do not want to worry about late fees, an often overlooked part of the price. “Blockbuster has made a lot of money off of people’s busy lifestyles,” said Leslie J. Kilgore, Netflix’s chief marketing officer.

More often, though, there is little chance for a competitor to make money while eliminating shrouding. Even in the printer market, some people understand the game. They print their large jobs at the office or switch to a lower-quality printer setting to use less ink on each page.

These are the smart, unprofitable customers. They are also the ones who would be attracted to a competitor that was being more upfront about prices than Hewlett-Packard. That does not make for a good business plan.

So companies have little choice but to play hide-and-seek with their prices. When enough customers catch on, businesses shroud in a new way.

As people have reduced their outstanding credit card balances, banks have increased the penalties for making a single late payment. As liquor sales have dropped, restaurants have found a new beverage to mark up: may we pour you some more Pellegrino?

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Reservoir 3
Photos Courtesy Leon Yost

One of the last of its kind in the United States, Reservoir 3 on Summit Avenue was built between 1851-74 as part of an extensive water works system that provided fresh drinking water to an expanding Jersey City and a busy immigration station known as Ellis Island. The design of the structure’s massive perimeter walls indicate influences of the Egyptian-Revival Style while its two pump houses are characterized by Romanesque-Revival features. Reservoir 3, emptied and unused, is now home to an emerging ecosystem, wetlands, and wildlife sanctuary.

May 15, 2005
An Oasis of Wilderness, in the Middle of Jersey City?
By PETER APPLEBOME
Jersey City

STEVE LATHAM had just finished giving an informal inventory of the fauna and flora flourishing against all odds in the oasis in the middle of Jersey City: red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons, swans and egrets, perch and goldfish, red oaks and birch, mulberries and black cherry trees.

And then suddenly, standing on a rock at the water’s edge, as long, thin and angular as a great blue heron, he looked up as if stunned.

“Look at this,” he said, gesturing toward the black forms of a half-dozen good-size large-mouthed bass swimming near the shore at the abandoned city reservoir in the Jersey City Heights. “Look how big they are. It’s amazing they’re even there, and look how many. I’ve never seen them like this before.”

You would think that if anyone knew all there was to know about the secret world of Reservoir 3 – built from 1871 to 1880, abandoned and forgotten around 1989, and now suddenly a public crusade – it would be Steve Latham. Mr. Latham, 49, a restaurateur on hiatus from the restaurant business, first began to explore the abandoned 14.3 acres a few years back, adopted it as a place to kayak and teach his kids about nature, and then slowly turned it into something between a cause and an obsession.

So there’s a statistical possibility that even without his interest there might be a huge banner across Central Avenue reading: “Save Reservoir 3: Hidden Jewel of Jersey City,” but it’s far more likely that if it’s still open space a decade from now, he and the residents working with him will have had a lot to do with it.

The words “Jersey City” and “wilderness” go together about as naturally as “Paris Hilton” and “reclusive,” but in this densely populated slice of Hudson County, an accident of history has allowed one almost-invisible oasis to exist in the middle of the city for almost its entire history.

Reservoir 3 – not exactly a glamorous name but the only one it has ever had – was the third part of a system created to supply the city with water from the Passaic River. Built behind imposing 20-foot-high basalt walls in Egyptian Revival style, it has an air, in old drawings and photographs, of 19th-century elegance, with Oriental rugs in the brick pump house providing an atmosphere of rather stately repose.

Eventually, water from the Boonton Reservoir replaced the increasingly dubious water from the Passaic, and it was finally closed altogether around 1989 – the water drained, the site padlocked, left behind like a spooky artifact from the city’s past. There was talk of building homes on it, or ball fields, or developing it as the other two reservoirs had been. But it didn’t happen, and even lifelong neighborhood residents never got a glimpse behind the walls.

Mr. Latham, who grew up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, decided to wander in a few times and saw the reservoir had filled naturally with snowmelt, spring water and rainwater. It had naturally reforested, it was full of wildlife, it was like a wild miracle in the middle of a congested city, with hawks circling overhead and the Empire State Building and the towers of Manhattan poking up in the distance. Not degraded, not developed, not tended. He was taken aback. “Here was this beautiful wild spot – not manicured, not planted, but planted by nature. It was this beautiful, secret spot, this very special place.”

SO he wrote a letter to the local newspaper about it, discussed it with friends, stirred up some interest and founded the Jersey City Reservoir Preservation Alliance. This year the organization, with about 50 active members, put together two public tours, the second one yesterday. They drew more than a thousand people, most of whom gawked in wonder at the hidden world in their midst.

What happens next is not clear. There is no shortage of worthy suggestions for its use, particularly as a school or ball fields. And Mr. Latham’s dream of a natural public park, with jogging trails, a waterfall, bridges, fishing, a boathouse and a windmill all ringing a pristine pond and wilderness preserve would cost millions, he admits. Still, if nothing else, he has helped make Jersey City’s secret garden at least a public secret, a place that, if it ever goes, will not go quietly without a fight.

“It’s still a gorgeous urban oasis, but it’s no longer a secret,” said Mariano Vega, a City Council member who supports keeping land as pristine as possible. “They’ve got it on people’s radar screen, which is a good thing. Because you can never again create something like that in Jersey City. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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May 16, 2005
60 Years Later, Debating Yalta All Over Again
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON

When President Bush declared on May 7 in Latvia that the 1945 Yalta agreement led to “one of the greatest wrongs of history,” he reignited an ideological debate from the era of Joseph McCarthy. For more than a week now, the left and the right have been arguing over the president’s words and rearguing the deal made by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill in an old czarist resort near the Crimean city of Yalta in the closing days of World War II.

Mr. Bush has criticized Yalta at least six other times publicly, usually in Eastern Europe, but never so harshly. In the dust kicked up by the quarreling, the central questions for White House watchers are these: How did the unexpected attack on Yalta get in the president’s speech? What drove his thinking? Did the White House expect the fallout?

First, the history and the debate.

Yalta effectively recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and set the stage for what later became known as the cold war. In the view of many conservatives, the dying Roosevelt did nothing less at Yalta than sell out Eastern Europe to Soviet control for the next 50 years. In the view of liberals, including major historians, Roosevelt ceded Poland and parts of Eastern Europe to Stalin because the Red Army controlled the territory anyway, and Yalta changed no realities on the ground. Yalta also called for free elections in Poland, which Stalin later ignored.

Mr. Bush not only sided with the conservatives in his speech in the Latvian capital, Riga, but he also took a harder-line view against Yalta than any other American president, including Ronald Reagan. By far Mr. Bush’s most hotly contested formulation was his assertion that Yalta followed in the “unjust tradition” of the secret nonaggression deal between the Nazis and the Soviets known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the British appeasement of Hitler in the Munich pact.

“Which is a bit much,” said John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, a leading historian of the cold war. “Munich and the Nazi-Soviet pact caused things to happen. Yalta didn’t change anything. If the Yalta conference had never taken place, the division of Europe into two great spheres of influence would still have happened.”

Robert Dallek, a Boston University historian and an expert on Roosevelt’s foreign policy, agreed. “Republicans have been beating on this issue since the end of the Roosevelt presidency, and they have been consistently off the mark,” he said. “This idea that Roosevelt and Churchill gave away Eastern Europe to the Soviets is nonsense.”

David M. Kennedy, a Stanford historian, put it this way: “This was a stick to beat the Democrats up with in the McCarthy era.”

Conservatives are equally adamant. In his syndicated column last Wednesday, Patrick J. Buchanan said that Mr. Bush told “the awful truth” about who really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe – “it was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century” – and that the pact that Roosevelt and Churchill co-signed at Yalta was a “monstrous lie.”

On the same day, Anne Applebaum, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote that “a small crew of liberal historians and Rooseveltians have leaped to argue that the president was wrong.” In fact, she said, Yalta and other wartime deals “went beyond mere recognition of Soviet occupation and conferred legality and international acceptance on new borders and political structures.”

At the White House, Mr. Bush’s speech was written by Michael Gerson, the assistant to the president for policy and strategic planning and the former chief speechwriter who still has a big hand in Mr. Bush’s major addresses. The language in Mr. Gerson’s Latvia speech that Yalta, in an “attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability” left a continent “divided and unstable,” built on steadily intensifying language over the previous four years.

In June 2001 in Warsaw, Mr. Bush said, “Yalta did not ratify a natural divide, it divided a living civilization.” In November 2002 in Lithuania, he declared that there would be “no more Munichs, no more Yaltas.” In May 2003 in Krakow, he said, “Europe must finally overturn the bitter legacy of Yalta.” This February in Brussels, Mr. Bush said, “The so-called stability of Yalta was a constant source of injustice and fear.”

An administration official said on Friday that in the discussions about Mr. Bush’s address – the president typically gives his speechwriters big-picture thematic direction and then has a heavy hand in the editing – the goal was to make the point that “countries need to look at their pasts.” In this case, the White House wanted to make the point that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Bush’s host the following day, should apologize for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which led to the Soviet annexation of Latvia and the other Baltic states.

So Mr. Bush’s assertion of American failure at Yalta was viewed at the White House as a model for what Mr. Putin should – but did not – do. It was also a poke in the eye to the Russians, salve to Mr. Bush’s Baltic hosts and an effort to contrast what Mr. Bush promotes as his uncompromising vision for democracy in the Middle East with what he sees as the expedience of the past.

The administration official, who requested anonymity because he said he wanted to let the president’s words speak for themselves, said the White House had not anticipated last week’s fallout, nor had anyone there discussed what he called the “nasty and stupid” Yalta politics of the McCarthy era.

“The point was, it was a lousy agreement,” the official said.

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