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Blood and Honey Photojournalist Ron Haviv cemented his reputation with these photographs from the Balkan wars of the early '90s. This online exhibit, courtesy of Photo Arts, features text and pictures from Haviv's book Blood and Honey. Several of the images may be familiar -- his most famous photograph is of a Serbian soldier kicking a dead Muslim woman. The chapters run in roughly chronological order, from "Loyalty" and "War" to "Displacement/Replacement" and "Response and Failure," and the photos speak for themselves. You can also find an excellent New York Times profile of Ron Haviv, and listen to an NPR interview

Sunday, December 05, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JOHN L. SMITH: Anything to see her smile

John L. Smith sits with his daughter, Amelia, 8, at the St. Joseph Children's Health Center after getting his head shaved Tuesday at a Phoenix barbershop, the culmination of an agreement he made after her emergency surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor. Photo by Tom Hood/The Associated Press. Before chemotherapy caused her hair to fall out, Amelia sported curly blond locks, a source of frequent compliments. Barber Bill Klaes, right, shaves John L. Smith's hair Tuesday at a Phoenix barbershop. Photo by Tom Hood/The Associated Press.

When we told Amelia that chemotherapy would make her beautiful curly hair fall out, she nodded and accepted the fact.

She was quiet for a moment.

"All my friends love me, so it will be OK," Amelia said, doing what she always does, making the best of the bad, taking the most from the least.

She took the news far better than her mom and dad, who have proudly accepted scores of compliments about those lovely blond locks for most of our daughter's eight years of life.

After emergency surgery in mid-October to remove a malignant brain tumor, she entered a world of doctors and nurses, needles and MRIs, pain and isolation, and the presence of many very sick children. As much as we want to take away her pain, the best we can do is stand by her side and comfort her whenever possible.

Truth is, I've been a fool for Amelia since the day Tricia and I brought her home. My daughter has endured my best Henny Youngman routine every day of her life. I live to make her laugh, ache to see her smile.

I was thinking of that when I told her, "If you want, Dad will cut off his hair so we can be the same."

She had been having a down day and shrugged. She said she didn't think so. I said nothing but was secretly relieved. I've never had a crush on Kojak.

After a moment, a sparkle came to her green eyes as she focused on my head and weighed the possibilities.

Then she flashed her little girl grin.

"Well, maybe," she said.

A few days later, just as the doctors had promised, her hair began falling out. She and her mother brushed it and arranged it, sprayed it and used all manner of clips, but there was no turning the tide.

When Michael from Hair In Motion finished the job with electric clippers, Amelia's long surgical scar was clearly visible, but overall she was relieved not to have to worry about her hair anymore. By then I began to believe that she'd forgotten about my promise.

On the contrary, major brain surgery had done nothing to diminish her prodigious child's memory. She voted for follicle defoliation.

That's how I found myself at The Barbers in downtown Phoenix requesting the "King and I" special.

I tried to take solace in the million-to-one shot I might look like one of those popular hip-hop rappers or at least Kojak. Bill Klaes, a barber with 40 years' experience, grabbed his clippers and said the process would be over before I knew it.

"It's not real difficult to get this one to taper in and to blend in," he said, chuckling as the clippers buzzed away.

The job was finished in the time it takes to boil an egg.

A large, weird egg.

"I'm really impressed with how that looks," the barber said.

I noted that he wore glasses and reminded him of that fact.

"Oh, I can see fine at a distance," he said.

Which, frankly, is not the first thing I look for in a barber.

He held up a mirror.

I wasn't groovin'. I was Gollum.

Visions of being mistaken for E.T. or Billy Bob Thornton in "Sling Blade" danced in my hairless head.

I wasn't hip-hop happenin'. I wasn't Kojak cool. I wasn't Yul Brynner, or even Mr. Clean.

I was the world's largest Chia Pet.

The moment of truth came when I returned to St. Joseph's Hospital, where Amelia was having an OK day.

She immediately smiled.

"You did it," she said.

"Of course," I replied.

She and her mom had read brochures on wigs and wig hats and floated a few of the options. Each was rejected. Amelia didn't want someone else's hair on her head. She wanted her own.

We even considered taking her ponytail and turning it into a hair extension but rejected that, too. Instead, her mom found her a cool blue beret.

And I noticed that for the first time since her hair loss that she left her bed and strolled the hall without wearing her beret, showing passers-by and the kids in the pediatric playroom not only her baldness but that wicked scar as well. She was more comfortable with herself, and that was the whole point of the exercise.

In the playroom Friday, Amelia couldn't wait to attend the going home party for one little girl, who had finished her last chemo treatment and celebrated with cupcakes. With her wisps of black hair returning, her shiny gold earrings gleaming, that little girl beamed from the attention.

Amelia still has a long way to go, but we're looking forward to a cupcake party of our own one day.

Meanwhile, she'll keep making the best of the bad, taking the most from the least.

Her mother will keep the faith, and I'll keep playing the clown.

Anything to see her smile.

John L. Smith's column appears Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.

Here We Gulag Again
By David Wallace-Wells
Posted Friday, June 17, 2005, at 2:37 PM PT

Bloggers are buzzing over another Guantanamo Bay/gulag comparison. They also attack—from the left and the right—an upcoming biography of Hillary Clinton and discuss some complications to the Moneyball thesis.

Here we gulag again: Republicans criticized Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin yesterday for comments made on Tuesday that compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to prisons in the "mad regimes" of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia.

"We give Durbin failing grades in attention, conduct, intelligence, knowledge, candor, logic, manners, loyalty and decency," says a stern Scott Johnson at conservative Power Line. "What's unusual about Durbin's lie is that it slanders his own country," observes Johnson's Power Line teammate Paul Mirengoff. "Normally that kind of slander is uttered only by revolutionaries seeking the violent overthrow of the government. Yet Durbin purports to be part of a loyal opposition."

"While I can muster the requisite moral outrage if necessary, what really astounds me about Durbin's comments is the political stupidity of it," says Jonah Goldberg at the National Review Online's conservative roundtable The Corner. Conservative standby Michelle Malkin has some practical advice. "What America needs is for President Bush himself to directly challenge Durbin on his treachery ... to call on Durbin to retract his remarks (not just apologize) and ask forgiveness from our troops and the American people," she writes.

Democrat Markos Moulitsas thinks Durbin's comments aren't the outrageous part of the story. "What is beyond belief is that the type of torture more at home under tyrants and dictators is being seen in camps flying the United States flag," he says at the Daily Kos. At Whiskey Bar, Bill Mon admits the comparison seems overblown. "But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy," he writes. "Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively ... well, it's getting a little more dicey. ... Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake."

Read more about Durbin and more about Guantanamo Bay.

The truth about Edward Klein's book: Slate's Mickey Kaus debunks a New York Times story that claims "Republican and conservative activists are behind a vigorous campaign to promote a controversial new biography about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, with some even suggesting that the book will help dash any presidential aspirations she might have." Kaus points to a number of conservative sites that have criticized Edward Klein's book The Truth About Hillary, which, according to a Drudge report, claims Bill raped Hillary when the couple conceived Chelsea.

"It's the kind of tawdry Weekly World News gossip/hit piece that serves no purpose but character assassination," says Captain's Quarters' saltwater conservative Ed Morrissey, who thinks the attack might backfire. "It ... makes Hillary into a victim, this time almost certainly for real—not of this purported rape, but of Klein's base attack," he says. Noting that, "You don't have to drive around with a Hillary '08 bumper sticker to see that this is over the line, disgusting garbage," the talk-radio hosts at Pundit Review agree: "This is net positive for Hillary the Prez candidate."

Liberals are, predictably, joining the fray—and not pulling punches in assaulting righties. Calling the book a relic of the '90s, Political Animal Kevin Drum argues that, together, the Clintons have since 1992 faced an entirely new kind of radical opposition. "All presidents have to put up with rhetorical excess, and all presidents have to put up with both scandal and the opponents who make hay out of them," Drum writes at the Washington Monthly. "But only Clinton was forced to deal with wingnuts as if they were serious critics."

Read more about Edward Klein and The Truth About Hillary.

Moneyball, without the money: "With all of the debate over the business logic underlying Michael Lewis' Moneyball," writes University of Chicago political scientist Daniel Drezner, "there was a simple underlying assumption behind the book—baseball teams that are successful on the field are also successful at the gate." A Wall Street Journal article on the peculiar plight of the 43-22 Chicago White Sox suggests that, at least for Drezner's local club, winning baseball games doesn't make for a winning business strategy.

Benjy at Chicagoist thinks the problem is with the team's dreary stadium, not its style of play. Other Sox fans have learned to delight where some might dishearten. "I have absolutely no problem with going to games at a ballpark that is half-full," insists South Sider Pete at springtime startup ChiSox Rants. "I'd rather not have to wait 15 minutes to take a leak or miss an entire inning waiting in line for curly fries or nachos. I like not having packed parking lots and being able avoid traffic on the Ryan by sneaking out the back exit of lot C and cutting over to I-55. If the Sox turn into the best thing since sliced bread, these advantages will be no more."

Read more about the Wall Street Journal column, and more about Moneyball.

Questions? Comments? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Vegas' Growth Is Gamble for Lake

Some fear sprawl will put more pollutants in Lake Mead and want treated sewage dumped deeper in it. Others say it'll just shift problems.

By Bettina Boxall
Times Staff Writer

June 19, 2005

Las Vegas' relentless growth has raised concerns that the city's expansion will send more pollutants into Lake Mead, hurting water quality in the nation's biggest reservoir and the source of drinking supplies for millions in Southern California and the Southwest.

With each new subdivision in the southern Nevada desert, more wastewater and urban runoff drains into Mead, a sparkling blue national recreation area but also the receptacle for all of metropolitan Las Vegas' treated sewage.

A wastewater coalition is proposing a solution: a massive pipeline that would take most of the effluent from a wash that now empties into a shallow bay and instead dump it directly into the cold depths of the lake closer to Hoover Dam. There, in theory, it would undergo more dilution and be less likely to feed surface algal blooms.

But some experts fear the pipeline project could simply export the pollution threat out of Mead to the lower Colorado River, where Southern California and Arizona draw water. "It's not a good situation for those downstream," said Alexander J. Horne, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus in environmental engineering and part of a team that reviewed computer modeling of the proposed pipeline project.

He and others argue that moving the wastewater outfall several miles south, closer to the dam, will eliminate natural scrubbing that now occurs in the wash and the lake. That could make it more likely that algae-breeding nutrients such as phosphorous will migrate out of Mead and reach the lower Colorado.

Douglas W. Karafa, program administrator for the Las Vegas Valley wastewater coalition that is overseeing the pipeline project, said that while phosphorous levels might rise slightly, they would remain well within water quality standards. "Saying there is a little more phosphorous going out of Hoover Dam doesn't necessarily relate to anything that is going to happen environmentally," Karafa said.

The ever-increasing volume of effluent draining out of the Las Vegas Valley makes it imperative, he said, that the outfall be moved from Las Vegas Wash, which carries a steady stream of treated sewage into Mead from the region's three water reclamation plants.

The daily effluent flow has swelled to 170 million gallons from 40 million gallons in the 1970s. It is projected to hit 300 million gallons by 2030 and 400 million gallons by 2050. There will be so much wastewater that planners want to use it to power an underground hydroelectric plant that would be built as part of the pipeline project.

The flow has eroded the 12-mile wash, cutting deep channels, tearing out wetlands and dumping sediment into the lake that hurts water quality.

Researchers have found that fish living near the wash's outlet in Las Vegas Bay have lower sex hormone levels and trace amounts of birth control chemicals and other compounds present in the wastewater.

Algae, which can be a pollution problem, has at times reached troubling levels in the bay, probably stoked by nutrients found in the discharge — a situation expected to worsen as the wastewater flow increases.

To ease the effect on the wash and the relatively shallow bay, the wastewater coalition is proposing a $600-million project that would divert most of the effluent into a 12-foot-wide pipeline nearly 20 miles long. The pipe would extend seven miles through the River Mountains and release the waste into the lake about 1 1/2 miles off Boulder Beach, at a depth of roughly 260 feet.

Designed to encourage dilution and to keep the effluent in an algae-hostile dark layer of the lake, the new outfall would also move the wastewater flows downstream, away from the intakes that Las Vegas uses to draws its drinking water from Mead.

But like Horne, Mic Stewart, the water quality manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, worries that moving the wastewater discharge to within about 3 1/2 miles of Hoover Dam would leave more phosphorous and other nutrients in the water to flow through the dam to the lower Colorado.

"Even a little bit of increase in phosphorous in the river could stimulate algal growth," Stewart said.

G. Chris Holdren, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation lake expert who was on the modeling review team, says the outfall move might even pose a threat to the lake above the dam. "The problems as I see them — depending on how the discharge eventually gets mixed into Lake Mead — is a potential increase in the algal blooms in the open part of the lake where it could impact recreation."

Algae can be toxic, although Mead's blooms so far have not been. Much of Mead, normally a clear blue, turned a cloudy pea green in 2001 when a giant bloom spread across its western portions. But fish and water quality were not affected.

Still, the 2001 bloom — the cause of which remains unclear — illustrated Mead's long reach. "The bloom was so extensive that it spread throughout the lower Colorado River system … and even into reservoirs in the Southland region as far south as San Diego, a distance of about 400 miles," Stewart said.

The best solution to the algae threat, he said, was to increase treatment at the wastewater plants that serve the Las Vegas Valley.

Arizona water officials have not expressed concern about the outfall move. The National Park Service, which manages the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, said it had confidence in the modeling, which indicates the new outfall area would meet water quality standards — whereas continuing to discharge all the effluent in the wash would lead to pollution problems in Las Vegas Bay.

Erik L. Orsak, environmental contaminants specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also said that pumping the effluent into a deeper portion of the lake would mean less exposure to trace chemicals for the endangered razorback sucker, a native fish that spawns at the mouth of the bay. "The middle of the basin is one of the best choices [for Mead fish] and certainly has the greatest potential for dilution," he said. Still, Orsak said he advocates more treatment at wastewater plants before the effluent reaches Mead.

But what is good for the lake's razorback suckers may not be good for the ones living below Hoover Dam in the lower Colorado, where federal officials recently launched a $626-million restoration program for native fish and plants.

"We may indeed be relocating to some degree the wildlife exposure to sites below the dam," said Timothy Gross, a research physiologist and toxicologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has helped document trace amounts of pharmaceutical compounds in Mead fish. "Water quality downstream of the dam is likely to decline — significantly, probably," from increasing wastewater flows and moving the outfall.

Gross and other federal researchers began studying Las Vegas Bay fish in the late 1990s, testing nonnative carp and largemouth bass as well as razorback suckers. All three species exhibited lower thyroid function. Both males and females had lower sex hormone levels, and in males the quality and motility of sperm were diminished.

The fish additionally had trace amounts of chemicals — also found in the Las Vegas effluent and Las Vegas Bay water — that are derived from birth control pills, antidepressants, antibacterial soap and fragrances.

"Much of what we're detecting are things that come from sewage outfalls," Gross said.

While researchers have not definitively proved the cause of the fish hormonal problems, they "in all likelihood are tied to effluent," Orsak said.

Such compounds have been detected in wastewater worldwide, and regulators are trying to figure out what, if anything, to do about them. There are no clean water standards for them, and conventional sewage treatment removes only some of the substances, many of which are endocrine disrupters.

"It seems to me most scientists agree that it is not a human health issue from a drinking-water [standpoint]," said Shane Snyder, research and development project manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Mead water to the Las Vegas area.

"It's more of an ecologic, aquatic-life issue."

Snyder, who sits on a federal advisory committee examining the matter, said his latest research indicates ozone and reverse osmosis treatments can remove most if not all of the compounds from wastewater streams.

But "the cost of implementing these types of processes can be enormous," he said. "From the data I've seen, I certainly would not advocate vast amounts [of spending] for water treatment or removal of these compounds — in Lake Mead for certain. I believe there are more important issues that public dollars can go to."

Karafa also said that while the valley's wastewater agencies can make some adjustments to improve the treatment all three plants already employ, there are limits to how much they can do without jumping to much more expensive technology that would have its own drawbacks.

Reverse osmosis, for example, would convert a significant amount of the wastewater to an unsavory brine that would have to be disposed of and — more critically from southern Nevada's standpoint — reduce the Las Vegas Valley's take of Colorado River water.

That's because Nevada is credited for whatever treated wastewater it puts back into Mead, meaning that in practice it can draw much more from the reservoir than its legal entitlement. Reduce the wastewater returns, and Las Vegas gets less Colorado River water.

At the Clark County Water Reclamation District, which generates a little more than half the wastewater going into Mead, Deputy General Manager Doug Drury said he is slashing the phosphorous output of his plant by fine-tuning the existing treatment process. Given that, he argues that more wastewater doesn't necessarily equal a nutrient problem for Mead or the lower Colorado.

"I don't see us being stagnant in treatment of phosphorous," he said.

"I believe we'll have to lower it and lower it."

Mark Felt In Current Photo

washingtonpost.com

Watergate and the Two Lives of Mark Felt
Roles as FBI Official, 'Deep Throat' Clashed

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 20, 2005; A01

The Watergate scandal had reached a peak, and President Richard M. Nixon was furious about press leaks. His suspicions focused on the number two man at the FBI, W. Mark Felt, a 31-year bureau veteran. He ordered his aides to "confront" the presumed traitor.

Another man may have panicked. Over the previous six months, Felt had been meeting secretly with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, helping him and fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein with a series of sensational scoops about the abuse of presidential power. But the former World War II spymaster had an exquisite sense of how to play the bureaucratic game.

In a Feb. 21, 1973, FBI memo, Felt denounced the Post stories as an amalgam of "fiction and half truths," combined with some genuine information from "sources either in the FBI or the Department of Justice." To deflect attention from himself, he ordered an investigation into the latest leak.

"Expedite," he instructed.

Recently identified as the secret Watergate source known as "Deep Throat," Felt is the last and most mysterious of a colorful cast of characters who have captured the national imagination. Now 91, and in shaky health, the former FBI man joins a pantheon of Watergate figures ranging from H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and G. Gordon Liddy to John J. Sirica and Archibald Cox.

Unlike many of the heroes and villains of the Watergate saga, Felt defies easy pigeonholing. Admirers, beginning with his family, have presented him as a courageous whistle-blower. Detractors depict him as driven by overreaching personal ambition. Neither description captures the bravura, almost reckless, performance of a man leading two very different lives.

By day, Felt was the loyal, super-efficient government executive, ordering leak investigations and writing obsequious notes to acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray. By night, in 2 a.m. meetings with Woodward in an underground parking garage, he fulminated against the dirty tricks of the Nixon White House and worried about threats to the U.S. Constitution.

A review of tens of thousands of pages of declassified White House and FBI documents, and interviews with more than two dozen people who had dealings with Felt, reveal an exceptionally complicated personality. It is impossible to disentangle Felt's sense of outrage over what was happening to the country from his own desire to scramble to the top of "the FBI Pyramid," a phrase he later used as the title of a little-noticed autobiography.

As a protege and ardent supporter of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's legendary first director, Felt was determined to perpetuate Hoover's vision of the bureau as an almost autonomous institution, feared by criminals and politicians alike. In nighttime conversations with Woodward, and later in his own book, he made clear that he resented attempts by Nixon and his acolytes to turn the world's premier law enforcement agency into "an adjunct of the White House."

In some ways, Felt comes across as that archetypal Washington figure, the master manipulator more concerned with bureaucratic turf than constitutional principle. At the same time that he was blowing the whistle on Nixon for illegal break-ins, he was authorizing similar "black-bag jobs" against left-wing radicals, according to evidence presented at his 1980 conspiracy trial.

Declassified documents and White House tapes show that Nixon aides initially saw Felt as "our boy," but became suspicious after hearing through the bureaucratic grapevine that he was leaking information to Woodward and other reporters. Nixon ordered his aides to "set traps" for Felt, but held back from moving against him for fear that the FBI man would "go out and unload everything."

Felt is as "cool as a cucumber," marveled White House counsel John W. Dean III, in a Feb. 27, 1973, conversation with the president in the Oval Office. Felt was eventually forced to resign from the FBI in June 1973 on suspicion of leaking a story about illegal wiretaps to the New York Times.

A combination of patriot and turncoat, Hoover loyalist and truth teller, Felt never achieved his long-cherished dream of becoming FBI director. But for a crucial year in his life and the country's life, he was at the vortex of the greatest political scandal in modern American history.

It all began with the death of J. Edgar Hoover.

A Funeral

"I have strong ideas about this damn funeral," Nixon told his aides on the morning of May 2, 1972, on hearing of Hoover's death at the age of 77. "I want it to be big."

A lying-in-state on Capitol Hill. A presidential eulogy. A Marine band. Taps. Nixon made sure that Hoover received all the honors that America could bestow on a fallen hero. In his mind, this was not just a funeral for Hoover, it was a heaven-sent opportunity to reassert presidential authority over an agency that was "out of control."

Nixon praised Hoover in public. But in private, he referred to the FBI director as "a morally depraved son of a bitch," declassified White House tapes show.

The man chosen by Nixon for "cleaning house" at the FBI was a former World War II submarine commander named L. Patrick Gray III, a longtime political loyalist who had held a succession of positions at the Justice Department. Nixon's one concern about Gray was that he was "a little naïve."

Gray was soon reporting back about the internal power struggles that were taking place within the FBI. The upper ranks of the bureau were a hive of gossip and intrigue, in his opinion. "Those people over there are like little old ladies in tennis shoes and they've got some of the most vicious vendettas going on," Gray told Nixon in amazement.

The one senior FBI man trusted implicitly by Gray was his deputy, Felt. Smooth and debonair, with an extraordinary command of detail, Felt had been involved in counterespionage operations in World War II, and had run the FBI field office in Kansas City, a hotbed of political corruption. Hoover had plucked Felt out of the bureau's internal inspection division in 1971 and made him his heir apparent.

Declassified FBI and White House documents show that Felt praised Gray for his "magnificent" performance at a meet-and-greet session with the FBI's executive committee. He later sent Gray surveys of laudatory comments from FBI field offices such as "morale outstanding, never higher," and "99 per cent of agents highly disposed toward innovative changes made by Mr Gray."

Felt's private view of Gray was very different. In his autobiography, he makes no secret of his disappointment about not getting the top job, which, he thought, should have gone to a career FBI man. He refers to his boss as "three-day Gray," because of his "constant absence from his command post in Washington," visiting FBI offices around the country or spending long weekends at his home in Connecticut.

Like most senior FBI officials, Felt strongly opposed Gray's decision to recruit female agents to what had been an exclusively male preserve.

Gray's frequent absences meant that his deputy was effectively running the bureau when police apprehended five burglars in the Democratic Party's national campaign office at the Watergate complex at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972.

Early White House Support

"Mark Felt wants to cooperate because he's ambitious," Haldeman told Nixon four days after the Watergate break-in on what later became known as "the smoking gun tape," because it demonstrated presidential involvement in a White House cover-up.

One reason that the White House had confidence in Felt, according to Dean, was his sensitive handling of a potentially embarrassing case early in the Nixon presidency. As reported by Curt Gentry in a 1992 biography of Hoover, the FBI chief had heard of "a ring of homosexualists at the highest levels of the White House." Hoover told Nixon he was sending over Felt, one of his "most discreet executives," to investigate.

The alleged "homosexualists" included Haldeman and fellow White House aide John D. Ehrlichman. After interviewing the suspects, Felt found no evidence to support the allegations and recommended that the case be closed. The investigation provided Felt with valuable contacts at the highest levels of the administration and with first-hand insights into how the White House was organized.

Nixon and Haldeman hoped to put a lid on the Watergate investigation by suggesting a CIA link to the burglary, putting it off-limits to the FBI. Contrary to their expectations, Felt persuaded Gray not to go along with the plan.

In the meantime, Felt had begun to talk off the record about the Watergate case to Woodward. He had first met Woodward, then a U.S. Navy courier, outside the White House Situation Room in 1970. After Woodward joined The Post in 1971, Felt became a valued source.

On June 19, two days after the break-in, Felt helped steer Woodward to his first big scoop in the Watergate investigation. After Woodward telephoned him at the FBI, a nervous-sounding Felt confirmed that a former White House consultant named E. Howard Hunt was a "prime suspect" in the case.

As the Watergate scandal heated up, Felt stopped taking telephone calls from Woodward, and insisted on conspiratorial meetings. If the reporter wanted to request a meeting, he would move a flowerpot to the back of his sixth-floor balcony.

At the same time Felt was meeting with Woodward, he was having to deal with complaints from the White House that the bureau was "leaking like a sieve." He did not want to reveal any information about the investigation that would compromise himself as the likely source.

One way that Felt covered his tracks was to demand leak investigations into Post stories that appeared to rely on FBI interviews. On Sept. 11, for example, after a Woodward and Bernstein story about illegal wiretaps, he wrote a memo forcefully reminding "all agents of the need to be most circumspect in talking about this case with anyone outside the Bureau."

Felt was walking a tightrope. A single misstep would result in his own destruction.

Under Scrutiny

"We know what's leaked and we know who leaked it," Haldeman told Nixon in a soft, almost painful, whisper on the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1972, that was picked up by hidden microphones. They were sitting in Nixon's hideaway in the Executive Office Building, across the alley from the White House.

"Somebody in the FBI?" Nixon murmured back.

"Yes, sir."

"Somebody next to Gray?"

"Mark Felt."

Nixon was shocked. "Now why the hell would he do that?"

Haldeman thought about this, as the conversation whirled around in a circle.

"I think he wants to be in the top spot."

Haldeman speculated that Felt was trying to engineer a victory for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, in which case Felt would have a good chance of succeeding Gray. Nixon had a different explanation. Perhaps there was a Kennedy connection.

"Is he Catholic?"

"Jewish."

"Christ, [they] put a Jew in there," exploded Nixon, who had long suspected that a cabal of liberal Jewish bureaucrats was out to undermine his administration.

"That could explain it, too."

Contrary to Haldeman's assertion, there is no evidence Felt is Jewish.

Nixon was feeling more than usually paranoid. Nine days previously, The Post had run a blockbuster article by Woodward and Bernstein outlining "a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage" by the Nixon reelection effort. The article had been inspired, at least in part, by a four-hour conversation between Woodward and Felt in the underground parking garage on Oct. 8.

The tip about Felt had come to the White House via a roundabout route. According to comments by Haldeman and other Nixon aides captured on White House tapes, the original source was Sandy Smith of Time magazine, widely considered to be the best-informed reporter covering the FBI. A Time lawyer had passed the information to Assistant Attorney General Henry Peterson, who in turn passed it on to the White House, according to the tapes.

Smith, who has Alzheimer's disease, has consistently declined to talk about his Watergate sources.

The White House tapes do not directly name the lawyer who purportedly tipped off Peterson, but they provide some strong hints. The person who best fits the description provided by Haldeman and other White House aides is Washington attorney William G. Hundley, now a partner with the firm of Akin Gump. Hundley had been retained by Time to represent Smith. He was also Peterson's best friend and frequent golfing companion.

In an interview last week, Hundley denied tipping off Peterson about Felt. He said he was "very surprised" to learn this month that Felt was Deep Throat.

On the very day that Haldeman was voicing his suspicions about Felt to Nixon, Woodward was preparing to write an explosive story naming Haldeman as one of the controllers of a secret fund used to finance political espionage. The White House seized on errors in an Oct. 25 Post story as proof that the paper's reporting on Watergate was fatally flawed. Felt was furious. When he next met Woodward in the parking garage, he scolded him for sloppy reporting.

"When you move on somebody like Haldeman, you've got to be sure you're on solid ground," Felt complained. "What a royal screw-up."

Feeling the Heat

Felt was under huge pressure to deflect White House suspicions about FBI leaks away from himself. Fortunately for Felt, the Post reporters had been talking to other sources in the bureau, including Angelo J. Lano, the Washington field office agent directly responsible for the Watergate investigation. Woodward and Bernstein were angry with Lano for allegedly providing them with bad information on the Haldeman story. They decided to get even with him by reporting him to a superior, in violation of the confidentiality understanding.

(Woodward and Bernstein provide a detailed account of this incident in "All the President's Men," without naming the agent involved. Lano's version of the incident is contained in declassified FBI files.)

In a four-page memo to Attorney General Richard D. Kleindienst, Felt came to Lano's defense, depicting him as the victim of a "vicious fabrication." He accused Woodward and Bernstein of taking Lano's comments about Haldeman "completely out of context."

Felt was feeling the heat on other fronts as well, on matters that had nothing to do with Watergate. The FBI was busy waging war against a radical group known as the Weather Underground, which had asserted responsibility for a series of bomb attacks against federal buildings. In late 1972 and early 1973, Felt approved nine black-bag jobs at homes of Weather Underground sympathizers in the New York area.

During his trial in 1980, Felt was unable to satisfactorily explain whose authority he was acting on, beyond a general instruction from Gray to hunt down the Weather Underground, "no holds barred." Convicted on a conspiracy charge, he was fined $8,500, only to be pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Prosecutors later described how agents dressed in old clothes or disguised as telephone repairmen gained access to apartments by picking the locks or paying bribes to landlords. Once inside the apartments, they rummaged through desks and closets, photographing old address books, love letters and pages from diaries, in an ultimately fruitless search for clues to the hiding places of Weather Underground fugitives.

"It's hard for me to see Felt as a hero," said Jennifer Dohrn, sister of fugitive Bernardine Dohrn and one of the targets of the New York break-ins. "At the same time he was whistle-blowing against Nixon, he was authorizing FBI agents to break into my apartment. It was outrageous."

Putting Felt to the Test

Gray brushed aside the White House's suspicions of Felt. He could not believe that his loyal, supremely competent deputy was capable of such betrayal. As an old Navy man, he was inclined to take subordinates at their word. Felt flatly denied leaking "anything to anybody" when Gray finally confronted him with the allegations in January 1973.

Nixon's anger over FBI leaks reached a boiling point in a Feb. 16, 1973, meeting with Gray. The president told the acting FBI director that he needed to stop being "Mr. Nice Guy" and clean out "the whole damn place." The Germans had the right idea during World War II, Nixon told Gray, according to a declassified White House tape. If they went through a town, and one of their soldiers was hit by a sniper, "they'd line up the whole goddamned town and say, until you talk you're all getting shot. I really think that's what has to be done." At the very least, Felt should be made to take a lie detector test.

Gray, who is preparing his own account of his relationship with Felt, declined a request for an interview through his family. But Ed Gray said that his father ignored the president's demand: "He wasn't going to polygraph his own people. It was all about mutual trust, and a presumption of regularity."

Gray's refusal to administer a lie-detector test to Felt did not prevent Felt from ordering one for at least one subordinate suspected of leaking to the press, FBI records show. "He was a very, very tough guy," recalled Bob Gast, a supervisor in the espionage and intelligence division. "God forbid if you made any mistakes."

A complicating factor, according to Gray's former chief of staff, David Kinley, was that Gray was awaiting his Senate confirmation hearing as director of the FBI. He could not risk Felt going public with all the dirt about the FBI at such a politically sensitive time.

"By January 1973, we knew that Felt was leaking information about the internal workings of the FBI in an attempt to undermine Gray," Kinley said. "By that time, however, it was too late to do very much about it."

The confirmation hearings were a disaster. Gray acknowledged early on that he had been sharing FBI interviews of Watergate suspects with the White House. The final blow to his nomination came after he acknowledged destroying files that had come out of Hunt's safe in the Executive Office Building. He resigned on April 27.

The night before Gray's resignation, Felt telephoned Woodward at The Post to tell him what had happened. As Felt relayed the story, Ehrlichman and Dean had urged Gray to ensure the files "never see the light of day."

For a few brief hours, Felt allowed himself to think that he had a shot at the number one position. Both Kleindienst and Gray recommended that he be named acting director. But Nixon was adamantly opposed to the idea, and turned instead to William D. Ruckelshaus, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In his autobiography, Felt notes proudly that he stood at "the top of the FBI pyramid" for 2 hours 50 minutes, the length of the interregnum between the resignation of Gray and the appointment of Ruckelshaus.

Felt and Ruckelshaus soon clashed. In his autobiography, Felt makes clear that he saw himself as the guardian of Hoover's FBI, and was "jarred by the sight of Ruckelshaus lolling in an easy chair with his feet on what I still felt was J. Edgar Hoover's desk." For his part, Ruckelshaus accused Felt of leaking information about illegal wiretaps to the New York Times.

Felt indignantly denied the charge. He in turn suspected Ruckelshaus of "playing politics" and buckling to White House demands, according to his autobiography. Ruckelshaus, now a venture capital consultant in Seattle, declines to detail the evidence against Felt, but says it was "certainly strong enough to convince me."

"I told him that I was very angry with him and suggested that he sleep on it overnight, and decide what he wanted to do," Ruckelshaus recalled. Felt resigned from the FBI the next day.

A Final Mystery

Retirement was painful for Felt. An inveterate gossip, he loved being at the center of things. After he retired, he continued to call former subordinates with tips and speculation about the latest Watergate developments, FBI records show.

Felt also kept in touch with his reporter friends. According to Woodward's account in "All the President's Men," he met with Deep Throat one last time in November 1973, five months after Felt's retirement. By now, Washington was abuzz with talk of secret White House tape recordings that could either exonerate Nixon or force him out of office. Felt told Woodward that "one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures."

As the search for Deep Throat turned into a Washington parlor game in the decades after Nixon's resignation, the November 1973 scoop deflected suspicions away from Felt. Several Deep Throat sleuths excluded Felt from consideration on the grounds that he could not have been informed about the erasures on the tapes, as he was long retired.

Even Nixon was fooled, according to his British biographer, Jonathan Aitken. Reassured that Felt could not have been the master leaker, he turned his attention to other candidates, including White House staff members.

In "All the President's Men," Woodward and Bernstein leave the impression that the final meeting with Deep Throat was set up in the same manner as the meetings before Felt's retirement. "In the first week of November," they write, "Woodward moved the flower pot and traveled to the underground garage."

This version of events assumes that Felt kept Woodward's apartment under daily observation long after he left the FBI, at a time when they were living on opposite sides of the Potomac.

Woodward, who has written a book about his relationship with Felt, to be published in early July, declined to explain this curiosity except to say that everything he wrote in "All the President's Men" is "accurate."

A possible explanation is suggested by Scott Armstrong, a former Senate staffer who worked with Woodward on two books, including one about Nixon's final days as president. Armstrong says it is quite likely that Felt continued to have access to inside information months after he left the FBI. But he believes that Woodward employed a literary sleight of hand to protect the identity of his source.

Armstrong says that Woodward likely did move a flowerpot around on his balcony in early November 1973. There is no reason to doubt his assertion that he traveled to an underground parking garage around the same time. But neither event was related to his meeting with Felt.

To reach the retired FBI man, Woodward probably just picked up the phone or dropped by to see him, Armstrong said.

An ironic coda to Felt's double life as loyal FBI employee and master leaker came in November 1980, when he sat across a D.C. courtroom from Nixon.

The former president had come to testify at Felt's illegal break-in trial. Interrupted by shouts of "liar" and "war criminal" from spectators, who were swiftly bundled out of the courtroom, Nixon made clear that he believed that Felt had acted properly in approving the break-ins.

A few days later, Felt received a copy of Nixon's latest book, "The Real War." On an inside page, he found the following inscription: "To Mark Felt. With appreciation for his years of service to the nation. Richard Nixon."

Research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

Starting grid F1 > United States GP, 2005-06-19 (Indianapolis Motor Speedway): Sunday race Planet-F1.com USGP Losers + Losers 19/06/05 Normally we have a Winners and Losers column but after the US Grand Prix there were no winners, even though Tiago Monteiro thought he was. Losers and Losers Star of the Race Martin Brundle, ITV Gridwalk On his grid walk Martin Brundle said what we all subsequently thought. He tried his best to ask some direct questions to Bernie Ecclestone and all he got was evasive rubbish. Brundle then tried to interview Slavicia Ecclestone and ended with: “I think you should have something to say and give him a jolly good slapping.” And so say all of us. It seemed like nobody wanted to find a solution to the safety problem and F1 fans were the losers. Race promoter Tony George must be livid Losers Michelin Clearly coming to a race with tyres that weren’t safe after just ten laps was one of the biggest miscalculations in motor-racing history. Let’s make no bones about it, it’s thanks to Michelin we had a rubbish race. Even the tyres they flew in that had been used in Barcelona they weren’t that sure about. In mitigation, Bridgestone probably didn’t share all the tyre data they amassed during the Indy 500 and the Indy situation isn’t replicated anywhere else. What the incident has done is force the teams towards a one-tyre formula which at the end of the day, is no bad thing. It’s better to have a World Championship for cars and drivers than one for tyre manufacturers. Having made their BIG mistake and acknowledged it early, Bernie Ecclestone, the FIA and Ferrari did everything possible to make them pay for it. Race Director Charlie Whiting Ross Brawn’s drinking buddy released a letter that he got from Michelin with some smart answers as to why they couldn’t use different tyres on Sunday. But he’s changed the rules for Bridgestone prior to a race so we’ve been here before. It's surprising nobody’s questioned why Whiting changed the tyre rules at the beginning of the 2003 Brazilian GP. Back in 2003 you were only allowed to take one wet tyre to races, so you had to make your mind up before the event. Bridgestone arrived at Interlagos with their legendary intermediate tyre that was quite good in wet and mixed conditions. Michelin had a full wet that could run in more rain. When the heavens opened before the race, Whiting delayed the start because the Bridgestone runners wouldn’t have been able to make it round safely. It was clearly Bridgestone’s fault for not bringing a full wet tyre, but as the argument has gone this weekend – they knew the situation… After delaying the start the field was then sent round Interlagos behind the Safety Car until enough water was taken off the circuit. Had they released the field when it was suitable for the Michelins on full wets, then Fisichella would never have won the race in his Jordan and Kimi Raikkonen may well have got the win. Nobody complained because it was a safety issue. Fast forward two years and Whiting is not prepared to compromise in another safety situation. This interpretation of the rules when it suits them makes F1 fans deeply suspicius - it's like there was an agenda here from the FIA. Bernie Ecclestone His refusal to answer some simple questions from Martin Brundle on the grid showed you where the problem lay. Ecclestone has tried very hard to bring F1 to North America, but even before this race the fans weren’t biting. Even with ticket prices at $85. (Try buying a grandstand seat for £50 at a European race.) A crowd of 120,000 was half full before we even got the farce of a race we had. So he’s gone and shot himself in the foot by not sorting out the teams and getting everyone to agree to a solution. The idea that Bridgestone could have the front three rows of the grid in exchange for a safety chicane, (Introduced on safety grounds, nothing to do with performance) seemed pretty fair. He and his former employee Charlie Whiting should have forced it through. The FIA Max Mosley and the FIA are supposed to be the champions of safety. So does preserving the rules at all costs, even though it might compromise safety for some of the teams, sound contradictory to you? Their solution to the Michelin problem was run slower on the banking. It’s a motor race, though isn’t it. I suppose the sponsors of the EuroNCAP tests will applaud the Michelin teams for opting for safety instead of competing. The best thing they can do now is cancel the result of the race and use the FIA’s money (or Bernie’s) to compensate US race fans. Ferrari Nine teams agree on a way forward and the one team that spoils it all is…yes, Ferrari. They’re not to blame for the debacle, but they are to blame for the compromise solution not going through. And as a result they come away from the race with 18 points. Jean Todt was grinning on the grid and you know why. The team feel no shame at testing more than all the others so the other teams won't have been surprised. It’s odd, too, that for the first time we get to hear Ferrari’s pit radio. Why don’t we hear it in the other races – the Championship leaders, Renault, made theirs available in Canada, a really crucial race for them. Finally, even when there are just two cars at the front, they won’t let their cars race to the line. Rubens and Michael could have had a humdinger over the last 15 laps but it was 2002 all over again. Fall in line So how come Michael Schumacher was allowed to challenge Rubens on the last.lap of the Monaco Grand Prix? Jordan The chance to score a shedful of points proved too much for the greedy b******s in charge of the team. The new sporting director (though surely a contradiction in terms) explained that they wanted to put on show. Clearly he doesn’t appreciate that six cars running round a track, with a pre-determined result doesn’t count for entertainment in the USA. Even Ferrari fans were leaving their seats and going home. Minardi Paul Stoddart argued that the only reason that Minardi competed was that he had to race the Jordans, their only serious competition in F1. Because the yellow cars went out to race, he did too. But how did they know on the formation lap that Jordan were going to compete with Ferrari? Surely the only time they knew was when the Jordans didn’t dive down the pitlane. Michael Schumacher Presumably after this race Michael Schumacher will be resigning from his position in the Grand Prix Drivers Association. He’s supposed to be the guy in charge of F1 safety yet he’s racing for a team who weren’t prepared to support it His position now is untenable. In the race he had a barging incident with Rubens, but unlike many others, this time he didn’t intend to do it. Once he locked up his brakes into Turn 1 he could do nothing to avoid the other Ferrari. It was robust but it looked accidentally robust. ITV “F1 should be deeply ashamed by this,” said Jim Rosenthal, “I feel sick and embarrassed.” So, was he talking about the station’s refusal to show ‘live qualifying’ on Saturday night on ITV1, ITV2 or ITV3. No, he was talking about the race. If the station are big supporters of F1 they can only come up with statements like this when they show all qualifying live and stop interrupting good races with advertising breaks. AD/FH

Tim Laun
From Tim Laun's Web site, a rendering of his projected Brett Favre cyclorama.

June 19, 2005
Ball in Flight and Other Jock Art
By WARREN ST. JOHN

LAST Sunday, Tim Laun crouched down behind his Jugs Football Machine, a large blue metal tripod with two whirling white tires on top, and loaded a National Football League-size Wilson ball into the breach. With a single swift motion and sudden thwap, the ball was arcing over the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens: a perfect imitation of the trajectory of an N.F.L. punt. Four and a half seconds later, the ball thudded onto a square of freshly sodded grass painted with hash marks, like a swatch from a football field, as a group of neighborhood kids watched in perplexed wonder.

"I love seeing that perfect arc and perfect spiral," Mr. Laun said a little dreamily, as he loaded another Wilson into the machine.

Though the act of firing footballs with a Jugs machine takes place routinely on the practice fields of America as a way of training punt returners, his project is not a mundane part of preseason practice. To hear Mr. Laun, a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan from Wisconsin and an adjunct professor of art at Hunter College, tell it, it is a work of art: one with a specific title: "Hang Time." As part of an exhibition called "Sport" at the sculpture park, Mr. Laun is firing football after football into the blue sky with the Empire State Building and the East River in the background. Those willing to sign a waiver can attempt to catch the machine-generated punts. But if no one is around, Mr. Laun is content to fire his footballs to no one at all.

"It's that suspended moment in the game when no one can touch the ball," Mr. Laun said as another ball sailed skyward. "And that person waiting and looking for the ball, they look like the depictions of rapture in Renaissance paintings."

Mr. Laun, who happens to bear a striking resemblance to his hero, Brett Favre, the Packers quarterback, is a member of a little-known but growing band of artists who take their inspiration from sports: some to comment critically on the strange, at times perverse, hold sports have over the modern psyche, others to celebrate the beauty of the body in motion and still others to explore the emotional intricacies that make spectator sports fascinating to fans.

"Most of the sports images you see are about glorification: there's no irony," said Ron Baron, a sculptor whose 31-foot-tall "Excavation 1.2 SOC: A Monument for the Weekend Warrior" stands at the center of the park and resembles an archaeological site full of old discarded trophies and sports equipment. "This is not about putting sports figures on pedestals."

Some sports artists merely incorporate the imagery of sport into their work, while others create elaborate performance pieces that resemble sporting events as much as art. At the sculpture park, for example, next to a Claes Oldenburg-style 6-foot-by-5-foot version of an athletic cup protector, is a pole stacked with 35-pound weights. Its artist, Lee Walton, buys a weight every few days at a Modell's sporting goods store on the Upper East Side, walks for two hours across the Queensboro Bridge and through Queens, then slips the weight onto the pole. Mr. Walton has made 20 trips. He plans to make 48 in all before the exhibition ends, when the weights should be stacked pole-high.

The work, titled simply "Stacked," is about what Mr. Walton called the fine line between dedication and absurdity that many athletes walk in their training. "Think of like a shot-putter who spends his whole life - 15 or 20 years - practicing to throw a steel ball," Mr. Walton said. "For what? Knowing that it could all be done in one trip with a truck gives the walk more meaning."

Artists have been interested in sports at least since the discus throwers of ancient Greece, and modernist painters were fascinated by the fluid motion of bicycles in a velodrome. But today's artists are working in a world where, because of photography and television, images of athletes in action are ubiquitous to the point of cliché. On some level, said Alyson Baker, the executive director of Socrates Sculpture Park and the curator of "Sport," sports artists are trying to find ways to view sports with fresh eyes.

She said Mr. Laun's punting piece, for example, was about removing many layers - commentary, TeleStrators and instant replay - between the viewer and the game.

Ms. Baker said that when she put out a call for proposals, she expected more emphasis on extreme sports. Instead, she said, "almost all the works had a nostalgic sense to them."

Only one piece in the show - an elaborate contraption called "Terrain Park, Featuring Backside 180" by Nicholas Arbatsky, which resembles a snowboard half-pipe - is inspired by extreme sports. Mr. Arbatsky, an avid snowboarder, plans to take a truckload of snow to the sculpture park, which is at Broadway and Vernon Boulevard on the East River, on July 30 and to let snowboarders jump off his sculpture.

Many of the artists in the "Sport" exhibition are athletes and embody a kind of oxymoron: the jock artist. Mr. Walton, 31, grew up in the Bay Area in California in a family obsessed with sports. "We never went to a museum," he said. He was recruited to play college baseball at Sonoma State University.

From an early age, though, he was obsessed with drawing. One night in 1999, when he was a graduate student in art, he found his passions at war. A World Series game came on as he was doing a drawing assignment. "I had always kind of kept them separate," Mr. Walton said of sports and art. But that night, he said, he had an epiphany.

"Artists want to be different from everybody else," he added. "I found that if I was myself - like a jock kind of guy - that was different."

Mr. Walton's projects are usually participatory. He created one called "One Shot a Day," in which he played a round of golf by taking a single shot each day. The round took him five and half months to complete, and he documented the experience with video and photography, which he put on his Web site, www.LeeWalton.com.

"That project was basically an attempt to put as much pressure and weight on each shot as possible," Mr. Walton said. "In golf they say play one shot at a time. I wanted to find a way to play my shot and then to have to live with that shot for 24 hours. A bad shot would affect my whole day."

DURING the National Basketball Association season he engaged in a free-throw-shooting contest with Shaquille O'Neal of the Miami Heat, who is notoriously bad at free throws. To hone his form, Mr. Walton availed himself of a free-throw coach who once advised O'Neal, and for every shot O'Neal took in a real game, Mr. Walton took one wherever he happened to be - in local gyms or playgrounds - and then posted a video of his efforts on his Web site. Though he led O'Neal for the early part of the season, Mr. Walton went down to the N.B.A. star 350 to 342, out of 756 free throws.

The obvious rub for sports artists is figuring out a way to finance their work, much less to make a living, since their performance-oriented projects are not usually salable. Mr. Laun gets by with a job overseeing Hunter College's art studios on the West Side, and his "Hang Time" was in doubt for some time as he scrounged up the $2,000 to buy a Jugs Football Machine. "I don't have a track record of selling a lot of work," he said.

Occasionally opportunities for commissioned work come along. Mr. Laun was asked to redesign his high school mascot. (The job was worth $50.) Mr. Baron, the sculptor who created "A Monument for the Weekend Warrior," received a commission to build two 16-foot-diameter O's out of 7,000 discarded plastic trophies for Autzen Stadium at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

"The piece is made of trophies that at one point had a lot of personal value," Mr. Baron said, adding that he hopes it challenges viewers to ask themselves, "Why does this thing no longer have value?"

Perhaps the most ambitious piece by a sports artist - the equivalent of Christo's "Gates" - is a project planned by Mr. Laun, called "The Favre Era Video Cyclorama," which would be a circular installation of over 200 televisions, each showing a game from the Green Bay quarterback's career. Viewers would walk into the installation wearing wireless headsets, which could be dialed to the audio for each game.

Mr. Laun said that if he has his way, the games will be shown with commercials to replicate the experience of watching them in real time. He estimates the project might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - money he does not yet have - and says the work will be about the collective relationship between fans of the same team.

"You spend 15 years watching those games," Mr. Laun said. "How much ownership of that experience do you have as a fan?"

Ownership occasionally complicates the work of sports artists, as Mr. Laun learned when his art gallery, Parker's Box in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, included computer renderings of the Favre cyclorama in a show of his work. (The images can be seen at www.FavreEra.net, where his schedule for his punting project also appears.) Mr. Laun had hoped the show might lead to financing for his project, but instead it earned him a call from James Cook, Mr. Favre's agent, who objected to unauthorized use of his client's image.

Mr. Laun considered the phone call depressing because of what it said about the corporatization of sports, but he said his main fear was of upsetting Mr. Favre.

"My first thought was to be embarrassed for disturbing his ecosystem," Mr. Laun said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

Our Little Women Problem

By STACY SCHIFF

As it seems to be the way things are done around here, I asked my spouse's opinion. Could this working mother thing ever be mastered? "On two conditions," he said, but the rest of the sentence was drowned out by a wail from the other room, where the youngest had raced out of bed so fast that she had collided with her door.

She was also in the mood for poached eggs, which - my husband helpfully pointed out - Robert Novak was presumably not making this morning. If he was, I wonder if he too was under strict instructions to keep the yolks runny, and to position the eggs in the precise center of each slice of toast. The 5-year-old is a gourmand and a tyrant, equally exacting in her menus as she is stern in her conviction that mothers do not go to their offices on weekends.

This is especially galling as the little tyrant is named for a feminist icon, in a novel I clearly should have read more closely. Jo March represented many of our first encounters with a capable, independent-minded heroine. She stands alone in a field crowded with submissive women.

She isn't sitting around with dwarfs or sweeping floors. She is waiting neither for a fairy godmother nor a handsome prince. She makes choices - and seemingly perverse ones, too. Perhaps most significantly, she is the first girl in literature with a room of her own.

Or so I remember it.

Writing in the May l6 New Republic, Deborah Friedell offers a startling revelation. I have misread "Little Women." It is true that Jo is spunky, thirsty for adventure and grappling with her "disappointment in not being a boy." It's also true that - 15 years later - she has entirely reconciled herself to her disappointment. Having relinquished her dreams, she looks from stout husband to unruly children and pronounces herself happier than she has ever been.

She is philosophical about her early ambition: "the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now." One day she may well write a good book - as indeed she will, in a sequel - but she has no qualms. Nor does she care that she has kissed the tenure track goodbye.

How could I have got this so entirely wrong? It's like holding up Emma Bovary as an emblem of marital bliss. In part I have conflated the Jo of "Little Women" with the Jo of the sequels. And in part I've had help from Hollywood, which has filmed "Little Women" three times, and three times blessed Jo with both career and children.

Friedell feels that Alcott was not so much swayed by market pressures as she was eager to spare Jo her own fate. She lent her heroine the domestic bliss she would have preferred. (She also allows Jo the luxury of not working, something she could never afford.) So it was that from the proto-feminist, the single woman who put in 14-hour days at her desk, supported her extended family, and died of overwork, we got Rapunzel redux.

Two volumes later Jo indeed finds work she loves, and success, and money to spare. But the realization of her "wildest and most cherished dream" comes at a price. It is exhausting, and a strain on the domestic front. The feather duster brings more satisfaction than the fan mail. Alcott's message is loud and clear. Evidently it does not in fact require testosterone to deliver an opinion.

It helps, though. "First of all," resumed my husband, swabbing the counter, "two parents have to know how to make breakfast." Yes, and 75 percent of male executives have non-working wives. Seventy-four percent of female executives have working husbands. Guess who's making breakfast? "And," he continued, "the women who manage well will be the ones whose fathers listened to them."

I suspect he's reading this stuff while I'm wielding the feather duster. But the research bears him out. Mr. Alcott was a case in point. John Munder Ross, clinical professor of medical psychology at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, is among those who have argued that for the Jos in this world to manage work and love, they need fathers who teach them to think - and to think that they deserve to marry their equals. Those men are as crucial to a girl's development, Ross holds, as the frantic mother who brings in a paycheck.

It could well be the route to the Hollywood version of "Little Women." Happy Father's Day.

Maureen Dowd is on book leave.
Stacy Schiff is the author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America" and a Pulitzer Prize winner.
E-mail: schiff@nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

June 19, 2005
Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks
By FRANK RICH

TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells's time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.

That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, "The War of the Worlds." The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast's phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," The Times darkly observed that "what began as 'entertainment' might readily have ended in disaster" and warned radio officials to mind their "adult responsibilities" and think twice before again mingling "news technique with fiction so terrifying."

That's one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn't make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of "The War of the Worlds," the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.

Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on "Oprah," the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, "Batman Begins." Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.

But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles's, there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.

The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We'll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on "Desperate Housewives."

Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with "War of the Worlds," and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it's only in the past few years that Welles's ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of "real" celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized "reality" shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and Paris Hilton's mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."

Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they're being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer - in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.'s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned "Ask the President" campaign town-hall meetings - at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons - were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles's bogus "War of the Worlds" bulletins.

But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush's 60-stop Social Security "presidential roadshow," his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn't repeated the success of "Ask the President." Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise's desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."

The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.

This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.

Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.

Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.

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Photographs by, from left, Charley Gallay/London Entertainment/Splash; Steve Granitz/WireImage.com; Lester Cohen/WireImage.com; Michael Schwarz for The New York Times; and George Pimentel/ WireImage.comFrom left: Adam Brody, Marc Jacobs, Brad Pitt, E. Lynn Harris and John Varvatos.

June 19, 2005
Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell
By DAVID COLMAN

ARE you confused that the newly styled Backstreet Boys, hoping for a comeback, look an awful lot like the stars of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy"? Are you curious why Brad Pitt, to promote his new film, dyed his crew cut so blond that even his hairdresser is scratching his head?

Well, how about that guy you see in the locker room, changing out of his Prada lace-ups, Hugo Boss flat-front pants and Paul Smith dress shirt and cuff links into a muscle T-shirt and Adidas soccer shorts. Does he wear that wedding ring because he was married in New York - or in Massachusetts?

Or those two 40-something guys walking in the park in pastel oxford-cloth shirts and khakis, collars turned up and cuffs rolled, one of them pushing a stroller? Is that baby his - or theirs?

Confused? You are not alone. It is late June, when many cities across the country celebrate gay pride, and bare-chested he-men dressed in very little are out in the streets again. But look past them, and June is more confusing. As gay men grow more comfortable shrugging off gay-identified clothing and Schwarzeneggerian fitness standards, straight men are more at ease flaunting a degree of muscle tone seldom seen outside of a Men's Health cover shoot. And they are adopting looks - muscle shirts, fitted jeans, sandals and shoulder bags - that as recently as a year ago might have read as, well, gay.

The result is a new gray area that is rendering gaydar - that totally unscientific sixth sense that many people rely on to tell if a man is gay or straight - as outmoded as Windows 2000. It's not that straight men look more stereotypically gay per se, or that out-of-the-closet gay men look straight. What's happening is that many men have migrated to a middle ground where the cues traditionally used to pigeonhole sexual orientation - hair, clothing, voice, body language - are more and more ambiguous. Make jokes about it. Call it what you will: "gay vague" will do. But the poles are melting fast.

The new convergence of gay-vague style is not to be confused with metrosexuality, which steered straight men to a handful of feminine perks like pedicures, scented candles and prettily striped dress shirts. Gay vagueness affects both straight and gay men. It involves more than grooming and clothes. It notably includes an attitude of indifference to having one's sexual orientation misread; hence the breakdown of many people's formerly reliable gaydar.

"I don't have a clue anymore," said Brad Habansky, whose four-month-old men's store and salon, Guise, in the tony Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, specializes in fashionable men's wear. "Some of the straight guys who come in, I never would have thought were straight, and some of the gay men, I never would have guessed either."

Confused as he is, Mr. Habansky can at least relate. "A lot of guys think I'm gay," he said. He added that it is his gay customers who need the most convincing that he's straight.

"Have I been called gay a gazillion times?" said Robert Vonderheide, a straight man who is a sales representative for a several clothing lines in New York. "Yes. Do I give a damn? No." He added, though, that it does not happen as much lately, as he sees less difference between gay and straight men in terms of how they express masculinity outside the bedroom.

"If you don't care less, it just adds to your appeal now," said Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan. She pointed out that Seth, the sensitive, moody character played by Adam Brody on "The O.C.," who is constantly razzed by the straight jocks on the show for seeming gay, has become the surprise heartthrob among viewers.

Just as there are gay-vague television characters, there are gay-vague bands like the Bravery (which was photographed by Steven Klein for L'Uomo Vogue looking like 1970's gay hustlers). The group's single "Honest Mistake" seems to be about getting your best friend's sexuality wrong; but then again it may not be. The lyrics are kind of vague.

"The codes have broken down completely," said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "The other night I was at a dinner sitting next to someone who was talking about how he couldn't tell anymore, that he just didn't have any gaydar. And it was so funny. I couldn't tell if he was gay or straight."

WHAT has sped the change is the erosion of the time-honored fashion hierarchy. For years gay men were the ones to first adopt a style trend - flat-front pants, motorcycle jackets, crew cuts - and straight men would pick up on it more or less as gay men tired of it. Now gays and straights are embracing new styles almost simultaneously.

"The lag time between gay innovation and straight appropriation is nonexistent now," said Bruce Pask, the style director of Cargo magazine, who is gay. "They're picking up the trends as fast as we are."

Marshal Cohen, the chief analyst of the NPD Group, which researches trends in the fashion industry, noted that far more men now feel free to indulge an interest in style. In 1985 only 25 percent of all men's apparel was bought by men, he said; 75 percent was bought by women for men. By 1998 men were buying 52 percent of apparel; in 2004 that number grew to 69 percent and shows no sign of slowing.

"We have left the era when the defining line for men is one of sexual preference," he said. "Now, it's either 'I want to be stylish' or 'I don't.' " With the coming of the Internet, men, away from the scrutiny of salespeople, are free to shop in places they might not visit in person and to buy clothes that, stripped of the context of a store, lose not only gay or straight meanings but also intimations about class, age and race.

The result is a full-blown category of men's wear that draws equally from skateboard and surf culture, the preppy canon and the runways of Prada and Marc Jacobs, hot brands like James Perse, Rogan, Rogues Gallery, Trovata, Energie, Original Penguin, Le Tigre and Libertine.

Even the once gay-oriented underwear brand 2xist, now credits straight men, a spokeswoman said, with 50 percent of its roughly $40 million annual business, a statistic helped along by mentions on "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and numerous sightings of the 2xist waistband on Justin Timberlake.

"All the brands I rep are gay vague," Mr. Vonderheide said, referring to, among others, Modern Amusement, a mainstay of Urban Outfitters; Wash; and the sexy Da'mage line of denim. He does not use the word metrosexual - "that horrible term" - because he thinks it marginalizes fashionable men by implying that there is something unusual or unmanly about liking clothes. "Men are aware of fashion, and they're not afraid of it anymore, gay or straight," he said.

Ms. White of Cosmopolitan said that her teenage son and her husband, who used to shop with her, have been going out stag and bagging some interesting choices. "My husband came home with a sheared beaver coat," she said. "He said he thought it was shearling. He never would have been shopping for that, but the salesguy whipped it out, and . . . " Beaver or not, the coat stayed. "He loved it too much," she said. "It's definitely gay vague."

Overall she and her readers approve of the trend, but there is a limit. "You like the fact that's he's paying more attention," she said, "but on the other hand, the thought of him getting a pedicure makes some women a little squeamish."

Some gay men are of like mind. As they shift their athletic interest from the gym to sports or become parents and find it hard to work out as often, the classic gay gym body is becoming just one of several options. The term "Chelsea boy," denoting a bronzed, buffed, waxed gay ideal, has even acquired a pejorative tint.

"It's easier for gay men to come out of the closet as slobs, just as it's easier for straight men to be dandies," said Brendan Lemon, the editor of Out, the gay men's magazine. "One of the things that's breaking down how gay guys are seen is that people know more kinds of men who are gay, nonstereotypical ones like soldiers and athletes rather than stylists and fashion designers and decorators." The lack of any one gay sensibility has meant that Out and other gay publications have struggled to reconcile a host of identities, while gay-vague magazines like Details and Cargo, aimed squarely at savvy, fashion-conscious men, are having a heyday.

Mr. Lemon suggested that for a generation that grew up watching "The Real World" on MTV, in which the gay and lesbian characters were no more or less flamboyant in dress or persona than their straight counterparts, being gay carries neither the stigma nor the specialness it once did. That, he said, has also altered the landscape of men's style.

"If you can hang out with your straight buddies and be part of the group," he said, "why would you feel the need to look different as an assertion of identity? That show is a great example of normalization and dressing to reflect sexuality."

Mr. Pask agreed that many gay men, younger ones especially, don't want to feel, or look, that different. "They didn't need to assert their place in society, their right to be who they are," he said. "They're not fighting for visibility. We got it; they don't need it." Young men may associate the gay looks of the late 1980's and early 90's with the anger and anguish that AIDS wrought on the gay world, a time they have little connection with.

Of course there are still places that gay men will go that straight men will not. The Speedo swimsuit is still off limits to even the most vain heterosexual American men, as is knowing the words to Kylie Minogue's latest hit single.

And Alice Eisenberg, who works the door at several New York gay bars, said her supersensitive gaydar remains infallible. Last weekend she surprised onlookers when she stopped a gay-vague guy, complete with a fedora, in line at the Boys Room, an East Village bar, asking him, "You know this is a gay bar, right?"

"The jeans were right, the loafers were right, and he had a good body," she recalled. "But the shirt was completely untucked, and I think it was Old Navy."

The guy thanked her, turned and fled.

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