FIA press conference: pole winner Ralf Schumacher with Jenson Button and Giancarlo Fisichella
F1 > Japanese GP, 2005-10-08 (Suzuka): Saturday qualifying
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Japanese GP: Saturday press conference
Racing series
Date 2005-10-08

Japanese Grand Prix FIA Saturday press conference transcript with

1. Ralf Schumcaher (Toyota), 1m46.106s
2. Jenson Button (BAR), 1m46.141s
3. Giancarlo Fisichella (Renault), 1m46.276s

Q: Ralf, difficult conditions but you got pole.

Ralf Schumacher: It was a difficult lap for all of us, I think. It was very slippery out there, you it saw with Jarno. He had a bit of bad luck and a lot of the other drivers did as well. He was just on the limit of what we could do and we were lucky with the weather. Especially, it was clear, you saw that with Giancarlo already that he could have gone faster but luckily the rain came in. It was actually down to our predictions, that was perfect, so thanks to the weather guy!

Q: You like Suzuka, you have always said that in the past, and looking at the grid now it is going to be an amazing race tomorrow because you have got a good chance of winning.

Ralf Schumacher: It is incredible. I have always loved Suzuka, I have been racing here since 1995. This is the first time for a Japanese team being on pole (here) which is obviously great. The team did a great job and I think we have a good chance tomorrow as well since some of the really strong cars are further back so we could have a really strong race tomorrow.

Q: And you are driving the new T104B Toyota, presumably for preparations next year. Could you talk a bit about the improvements compared to the standard car?

Ralf Schumacher: Yeah, thanks really to the pushing in Cologne, they brought the B-car to the last test and we decided it was a better car, more consistent, better front-end: It is basically an evolution to define directions for next year and it worked out.

Q: Jenson, you were out just after Ralf, was the weather maybe a little bit worse then?

Jenson Button: Not at all, it wasn't raining when I was out so I think I was the last of the people in just greasy conditions. We were very lucky, both of us, but it was lucky more for me because I had a very difficult car to drive, a lot of understeer in the car. It's great to be second on the grid and it's Honda's home Grand Prix, so it should be a very exciting race tomorrow.

Q: You did some running in the morning. How much were you plunging into the dark in the qualifying lap, you said the handling was not good, how do you live with that problem in the lap?

Jenson Button: Well, it's the first time we ran this tyre because we ran a different tyre this morning. It was very difficult. On the out lap I knew I had some big issues, I had massive understeer, I couldn't get my front tyres to work, I don't know if it was temperature or just not enough wing in the car, but it just felt like a very, very slow lap, so to be P2 I am reasonably happy. I am sure all of us have set the car up for tomorrow in the race but for us we are very positive and think we can have a very good home race for the team.

Q: And what are your thoughts for the race in terms of your potential for winning tomorrow, bearing in mind the shape of the grid?

Jenson Button: It is never going to be easy even if the McLarens are so far back, we also have got Giancarlo here at the front with us. It is going to be an exciting race and I think we have a better car here in race trim than we have had at the last couple of races, we have solved a few of the problems we have had so we think it will be a strong race for us.

Q: Giancarlo, the rain was falling when you were out there, very difficult conditions, talk us through that.

Giancarlo Fisichella: It is true I have been lucky but unlucky because when I was out for my qualifying lap it started raining quite heavily in the last part of the circuit. I was really confident because his morning after the second free practice I was the quickest and the car balance was really good, so I was confident to do well. Considering the last part of the circuit was a bit too wet for the intermediate tyres I am really happy for today and looking forward to tomorrow.

Q: And of course, the last qualifying with similar conditions was Australia and it worked very well for you there. What are your thoughts on tomorrow?

Giancarlo Fisichella: I am obviously looking forward to it. We have the two McLarens on the back of the grid which is good for us and for the Constructors' Championship and for the race tomorrow and it is going to be an interesting race.

Q: Ralf, do you remember the last pole?

Ralf Schumacher: No, when was it? I have no clue. Last year in Canada?

Q: In a way this is Toyota's first real pole because they did admit to running light at Indianapolis. What are your feelings on that, I guess you weren't running light this time?

Ralf Schumacher: I guess so, we will find out tomorrow, won't we! No, certainly not. But at the same time we have been lucky as well. I think we had particularly difficult circumstances but we saw there was not so much between DC and us, although he was out there first, but I was certainly lucky because Giancarlo would have gone a lot faster anyway. We could see that. But it feels great, I mean, being in Japan, on a circuit I like, with Toyota, the first time here on pole and it is a great result for the team.

Q: You mentioned you got the forecast right, did you know it was going to ease up for the first little batch of rain?

Ralf Schumacher: Well, actually, usually it never works to my advantage so that is why we were laughing amongst the mechanics and I said 'okay, once Jarno is done it is fine but then it is going to start as usual!' But just the prediction was simply great, I don't know how it happened but it did happen.

Q: You got the right strategy for pole position?

Ralf Schumacher: I would almost guess that, I think we have known now since this year that we always have good strategies and I am sure it will work out tomorrow.

Q: Is there a difference between the strategy you might have used for say midfield?

Ralf Schumacher: No, no, no. After the morning and after yesterday we were fairly aggressive because we thought that even in dry conditions we might be slightly strong so we have no reason not to go and try to win the race. That could always happen with a bit of luck, the right car and the right tyres, so we are very aggressive in our strategies, so why not?

Q: Are you expecting it to be dry tomorrow?

Ralf Schumacher: That is what we expect, yeah. I think that is very common along the pit lane.

Q: Jenson, you must be pleased to be on the front row after the events of the past couple of weeks.

Jenson Button: It is fantastic and it is always nice to be on the front row, but especially at Honda's home circuit. Again, as it was for Ralf, it was a little bit lucky, because it did start raining for Giancarlo just after my run. So, yeah, it's a bit lucky but sometimes you get bad luck, sometimes you get good luck and it's nice to get some luck this time.

Q: Did you get the forecast right?

Jenson Button: Yep, pretty much. I think we are correct with our forecast for tomorrow as well. As Ralf said, I think it's going to be dry for the race.

Q: You were very quick in the second two sectors but not particularly quick in the first. What happened there?

Jenson Button: I just had very low front grip. I thought some of it was to do with the warm-up of the tyre but it wasn't because I had massive understeer throughout the whole lap and I was very surprised to be second quickest, I really was.

Q: Giancarlo, the conditions very much changed during your lap. Did you realise that you were going to have to get as much as you could out of the first sector and just hope for the rest?

Giancarlo Fisichella: Um, unfortunately it was raining when I left the pit lane and the circuit was getting wetter and wetter, but especially in the middle sector and in the last sector it was a bit too wet for the intermediate tyres. But apart from that, I did a very good lap. I was already confident because this morning I was quickest, even with the full wet tyres. It is okay. I have been lucky but unlucky, I am looking forward to tomorrow. I am confident. We have both McLarens at the back of the grid and that is good for the Constructors' Championship and for the race, so I'm confident.

Q: For the race itself, you have had the second quickest car in the dry, in theory you have a very good chance tomorrow.

Giancarlo Fisichella: We have a very good chance. We feel quite confident and we think we have a good strategy for tomorrow.

Q: Ralf, which part of the track do you feel is the most difficult to drive?

Ralf Schumacher: Well, for me it was almost every part because the car was very oversteery. I think you saw that during the lap. I went wide quite a few times, a snappy rear end, and due to the slippery conditions - it was particularly wet -- to keep the car on the road and still be able to push (was difficult) and like Jenson, I was surprised. I just didn't expect to do a 1m 46.1s.

Q: Ralf, how different is the new car to the previous version?

Ralf Schumacher: In detail, you have to ask Mike (Gascoyne) but it's clearly a step forward in the way we use the front end of the car, more grip, which works a bit in my favour. I don't know whether it was so helpful in today's conditions but in dry conditions that's really a step forward and that's really to confirm and define the direction for next year. That's why we brought it as early as possible, to learn more about it.

Q: Jenson, you often say McLaren is too good but now they are well behind you. Do you think you can beat them tomorrow?

Jenson Button: We will do everything we possibly can to do the best race we can but we have seen before when Kimi has started at the back or Juan Pablo, they have been very strong, especially in a circuit like this where aero is very important. I think we will see them coming through the field very quickly. But we will do everything we possibly can. We can't go into this race feeling defeated already. We have to stay positive and look for the win, definitely.

Q: Is this the new order we can get used to, seeing Honda and Toyota drivers at the front of the grid?

Ralf Schumacher: Let's hope you are right.

Jenson Button: We are hoping, but you never know. So much can happen during the winter. I am sure that both teams will be moving forwards very much. We are hoping we will move forward more, likewise for Ralf I am sure. I am sure in the future we will be very competitive and we will see both teams challenging for wins in the future.

Ralf Schumacher: As he (Jenson) said, basically. When both teams started, obviously Honda has been amongst us longer than Toyota. It's obvious that it needs some time. Now, after four years this year, you would expect us to be further up the grid next year. That is what we all expect and that should be the case anyway. But it's going to be a hard fight. McLaren is quite a bit down the road. Even Renault -- we always forget about Renault - so there's tough work to be done next year.

Q: When you qualify in conditions like that, but expect a dry race, are you running a full dry set-up, or pretty much that way?

Jenson Button: Yeah, you've got to. The race is 54 laps long and you have to concentrate on that. One lap in qualifying is important but nothing like the race, and especially the way the system is now, with the tyres and also the fuel load in qualifying, you have to think about the race.

Q: Giancarlo, the weight of the Constructors' title is now very much on you. How do you feel?

Giancarlo Fisichella: I feel confident, I feel right. It is very important to get to the end of the race and do the best I can. Obviously it would be nice to win the race. We have a good chance, also because the McLarens are in the back of the grid so it is going to be difficult for them to score points - maybe not to score points, it's going to be easy but maybe to get on the podium.

-fia-

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The weigh-in in New York, June 22, 1938.

October 2, 2005
'Beyond Glory': The Good Fight
By JOYCE CAROL OATES

BOXING is the most pitiless of sports, as it can be the most dazzling, theatrical and emblematic. Where race and nationalism are involved, as in the famous Joe Louis-Max Schmeling heavyweight fights of 1936 and 1938, two of the most widely publicized boxing matches in history, the emblematic aspect of the sport can assume epic proportions. When the second fight, of June 1938, pitting the 24-year-old American Negro titleholder, Louis, against the 32-year-old Schmeling, the Nazis' star athlete, was fought at Yankee Stadium, the contest was as much between the United States and Nazi Germany as between two superbly skilled athletes. There were almost 70,000 spectators and an estimated 100 million radio listeners throughout the world: "the largest audience in history for anything."

David Margolick, the author of such diverse works of nonfiction as "Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song," "At the Bar: The Passions and Peccadilloes of American Lawyers" and "Undue Influence: The Epic Battle Over the Johnson & Johnson Fortune," is clearly disadvantaged in retelling so familiar a sports tale. The Louis-Schmeling fights, with their extraordinary political/cultural significance, have been analyzed more than any boxing matches in history; the paired fights have become staples of ESPN Classic; there have been TV documentaries on Louis and Schmeling as iconic representatives of their nations in the years preceding World War II, inevitably covering the same historical ground. The most poignant and engaging of recent books to examine the role of Joe Louis in the politicized epic drama is Donald McRae's "Heroes Without a Country: America's Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens" (2003).

What Margolick has accomplished in "Beyond Glory" is to provide an exhaustively researched background to the Louis-Schmeling rivalry that includes sympathetic portraits of both Joe Louis and Max Schmeling; an examination of racism at home and anti-Semitism in Germany; a look at the predominant role of Jews in professional boxing in the United States; and, interlarded through the text, opinions by just about anyone, from boxing experts and sportswriters to celebrities and ordinary, anonymous citizens, who might have had something to say about Louis or Schmeling that found its way into print, valuable or otherwise. Less cultural criticism than Margolick's artfully focused "Strange Fruit," "Beyond Glory" is historical reportage, a heavyweight of a book that is likely to be the definitive chronicle of its subject.

"Too good to be true, and absolutely true . . . the most beautiful fighting machine that I have ever seen": so Ernest Hemingway famously wrote of Joe Louis after the 21-year-old's savage victory over the ex-heavyweight champion Max Baer in 1935. Louis's distinctive ring style, like the politely inexpressive public persona cultivated for him by his canny managers, gave the impression of robotlike precision, the more lethal for being seemingly without emotion. "Joe Louis ain't no natural killer," Louis's trainer remarked. "He's a manufactured killer." In both Louis-Schmeling fights, with their singularly different outcomes - Louis was ignominiously knocked out by Schmeling in the 12th round of the first fight; in the rematch, Louis knocked Schmeling out in a spectacular feat of boxing, in the first round - the young black heavyweight was as impressive for the devastating accuracy of his fists as for his economical footwork and the power of his combination punches. A "small" heavyweight by contemporary, post-Sonny Liston standards at 6 feet 1¾ inches, with a reach of 76 inches and, in 1936, weighing 198 pounds, Louis had disproportionately large hands and powerfully muscled wrists, forearms and legs; in his celebrated early fights, available on film, he more resembles a 21st-century middleweight than a heavyweight. You can see how, in the 1936 match with Schmeling, Louis's inexperience cost him the fight: the German boxer had scrutinized films of Louis's fights and discovered a habitual weakness in his defense, an unconscious lowering of his left glove after throwing a punch. (In more colloquial terms, the Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock, heavyweight champion from 1935 to 1937, thought Louis was "a sucker for a right hand; every time he jabbed he leaned way over and stuck his kisser out there, just begging to be socked.") By the time of the media-hyped rematch on June 22, 1938 - "Joe Louis versus Adolf Hitler Day" - Louis had been trained not to make that mistake, with devastating results for his older opponent. The victory of the American "Brown Bomber" over the German "altar to manliness" was so decisive that even the suspicious German press, after examining fight films, could not contest it.

At the time of his initial retirement in 1949, Joe Louis had a brilliant ring record of 60 wins - 51 by knockout - and one loss, through a career of 15 years that included 25 title defenses. Along with his controversial predecessor Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion (1908-15), and his yet more famous successor Muhammad Ali (1964-67; 1974-78; 1978-79), Louis ranks with the greatest heavyweight boxers in history, of a stature surpassing that of, for instance, Rocky Marciano, who defeated him in 1951 after Louis's ill-advised comeback. Like many former champions, Louis was forced to resume his career for financial reasons, with humiliating results. His accounts had been so mismanaged that though he'd reputedly earned $4.6 million by the late 1940's, Louis had virtually nothing to show for it. (In a gesture of patriotic but naïve generosity, he had donated the purses of two of his fights to the United States war effort in the early 1940's, for which the I.R.S. relentlessly hounded him for taxes and arrears amounting to nearly a half-million dollars, a colossal debt at midcentury.) As in the grimmest of fairy tales, the most honored athlete of his time, the man responsible for "the greatest show of Negro unity America had ever seen," would end his career as a professional wrestler, then a "greeter" at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where, drug-dependent and paranoid, he would die of cardiac arrest and general physical collapse in 1981, at the age of 66.

By contrast, and ironically, the ever-resourceful, chameleonlike and urbane Max Schmeling not only survived the brutal vicissitudes of the boxing ring and the trauma of his 1938 defeat but was able to maintain his reputation as a homeland hero - "German Champion in All Classes" - through a lengthy, perennially public career of self-promotion and self-mythologizing. As Margolick writes, "The man who was malleable enough to fit into Weimar Germany and the Third Reich with equal ease now became an exemplar of West Germany, of its economic miracle and its fledgling democracy." Schmeling would live to be 99; he would die a millionaire.

Where Joe Louis gives the impression of being, for all his dominance in the ring, essentially passive and susceptible to manipulation by others (see "Joe Louis: My Life," by Joe Louis with Edna and Art Rust Jr., 1978), Max Schmeling appears to have been the consummate manipulator of others. In appearance, in boxing trunks, Schmeling more resembled the Manassa Mauler, Jack Dempsey, than an emblem of fair Aryan manhood, but his ring style was the antithesis of Dempsey's unstoppered aggression: "cooler, slower, more methodical - 'Teutonic.' " As a young man Schmeling had taken pride in associating with German intellectuals like the filmmaker Josef von Sternberg, the artist George Grosz and Thomas Mann's novelist brother, Heinrich Mann: "Artists, grant me your favor - boxing is also an art!" he wrote to one of these. Shrewd enough never to have joined the Nazi Party, in part because he was depending upon American (i.e., Jewish-managed) boxing for a lucrative career, Schmeling yet benefited from the patronage of the highest-ranking Nazis and the admiration of Hitler; in the United States he emphasized the separation of politics and sports, as in Germany he readily gave the Nazi salute and acquiesced in the "Nazification" of athletics. His canniest decision was to have signed a contract as a relatively young boxer to fight in America under the auspices of Joe Jacobs, the Jewish manager with whom he would remain through the anti-Semitic ravages of the Third Reich. As Margolick notes: "He had the best of both worlds: he was making enormous amounts of money . . . and had the approbation of his people and his government. There is no evidence, in anything he said or did at the time, to suggest that he ever agonized over anything." Schmeling's greatest coup, more lucrative than any boxing purse, was being offered a Coca-Cola dealership in northern Germany that would make him wealthy in the very years when Joe Louis, whom the Atlanta-based company had never wished to approach for advertising purposes, was crushed by debt.

When American boxing was at its zenith in the first half of the 20th century, as Margolick says, "Jews were all over boxing, not just as fighters and fans but . . . promoters, trainers, managers, referees, propagandists, equipment manufacturers, suppliers, chroniclers." (Jewish boxers? The most famous were the lightweight champions Benny Leonard and Barney Ross. Marketable Jewish heavyweights were in such short supply that the non-Jewish Max Baer, a charismatic champion of 1934-35, performed in trunks adorned with the Star of David.) Through their careers Louis and Schmeling were associated with Jewish boxing entrepreneurs, both named Jacobs: Mike, Joe. Not only were the two Jacobses unrelated but the men were temperamental opposites: Mike Jacobs the dour, humorless fight promoter whom few liked, Joe Jacobs the "quintessential Broadway guy" liked even by men who didn't trust him. Where Joe Jacobs was "fanatically devoted to his fighters, whom he championed unceasingly and ingeniously," Mike Jacobs took so little interest in his boxers that he sometimes didn't trouble to watch even their championship matches: "For him, the real sport lay in staging a show, outwitting the other guy, putting fannies in seats. . . . Fight nights he could often be seen patrolling the stadium, or even hawking tickets." Yet "Uncle Mike" was the individual responsible for Joe Louis's phenomenal career, financing the young boxer at the start and grooming him for the championship by assuring that Louis would be marketed to the white public in a way to neutralize the image of the flamboyant Jack Johnson. Margolick writes:

"Louis would be the antithesis of everything Jack Johnson had been. He would always be soft-spoken, understated and polite, no matter what he accomplished. He would not preen or gloat or strut in the ring. . . . He would always conduct himself with dignity. . . . When it came to women, he would stick to his own kind. . . . He would never fraternize with white women, let alone be photographed with them. He would not drive fast cars, especially red ones. . . . The press would be saturated with stories of Louis's boyish goodness, his love for his mother, his mother's love for him, his devotion to Scripture."

Without this discreetly constructed persona, which accounts for Louis's "frozen" demeanor in public, it's probable that Joe Louis would be recalled as one of the legendary "shadow champions" like Peter Jackson and Harry Wills, black boxers whom the champions John L. Sullivan and Jack Dempsey managed to avoid.

Joe Jacobs, Schmeling's ever-zealous manager, was also concerned with honing marketable images for his fighters. He was scrappy, bright, inventive and courageous or reckless enough to take one of his fighters to Georgia, where Jacobs was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. The anti-Semitic newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler called him "a New York sidewalk boy of the most conspicuous Jewishness," but fight folks called him "Yussel the Muscle." In a time in which activist Jews were organizing boycotts of German goods and of individuals like Max Schmeling, Joe Jacobs came to the seeming defense of Nazi Germany: "Most of the trouble with the Jews over there is caused by the Jews in this country." In a comic-nightmare episode like a scene from a Woody Allen movie, after a victory of Schmeling's in Hamburg in 1935 the wily Jew from New York City found himself hauled into the ring by Schmeling as the German national anthem was being sung by 25,000 ecstatic Germans lifting their arms in the Nazi salute:

"Jacobs was momentarily at a loss. But everyone else was saluting, he thought, and he was in plain sight; what else was he to do? So up went his right arm, too, though with a cigar nestled between his fingers. . . . Schmeling's arm was stiff and resolute, while Jacobs's was more limp, as if halfheartedly hailing a cab."

Joe Jacobs would die of a heart attack at 42 in 1940, not long after his star boxer had left boxing to become a paratrooper in the Wehrmacht.

The actual time a boxer spends fighting is minuscule set beside the interminable preparation, training, "intrigue and . . . politicking" of the kind Margolick reports in detail, so in "Beyond Glory" the Louis-Schmeling fights take up a very small part of the text. Most of the chapters are impersonal historical accounts, culled from numerous sources, in which the author's voice is subordinate to his material. Amid much summarizing, press clippings of the era, many of them painfully racist, provide candor and color; occasionally there are outbursts of a kind of comic surrealism, as in this rapid collage following the dramatic outcome of the 1938 fight:

"In the stands there was bedlam. Tallulah Bankhead sprang to her feet and turned to the Schmeling fans behind her. 'I told you so, you sons of bitches!' she screamed. Whites were hugging blacks. 'The happiest people I saw at this fight were not the Negroes but the Jews,' a black writer observed. 'In the row in front of me there was a great line of Jews - and they had the best time of all their Jewish lives.' . . . 'Beat the hell out of the damn German bastard!' W. E. B. Du Bois, a lifelong Germanophile who rarely swore, shouted gleefully in Atlanta. In Hollywood, Bette Davis jumped up and down; she had won $66 in the Warner Brothers fight pool. . . . 'Everybody danced and sang,' Woody Guthrie wrote from Santa Fe. 'I watched the people laugh, walk, sing, do all sorts of dances. I heard "Hooray for Joe Louis!" "To hell with Max Schmeling" in Indian, Mexican, Spanish, all kinds of white tongues.' "

(Here is history as antic folk art, like a mural by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Beyond an ambitious distillation of facts and a blizzard of opinions, what seems missing in "Beyond Glory" is authorial perspective: what does David Margolick make of the Louis-Schmeling phenomenon? Are such crude but potent myths of the "moral" superiority of physical superiority still dominant in our culture? Did not a single commentator among so many make the obvious point that Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling in the ring because, that night, he was the better boxer, not because he was the better man, or represented the better country? Did not one commentator take note that boxing, like warfare, has nothing to do with virtue? Even in the epilogue the author's voice is curiously muted, where one might expect some of the subtly nuanced, informed and engaging commentary that gives such life to "At the Bar" (1995), a collection of Margolick's legal columns from The New York Times.

Yet "Beyond Glory" is a valuable addition to a growing library of books on sports and culture, one to set beside Gerald Early's "Culture of Bruising" (1994) and Geoffrey C. Ward's "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson" (2004) as a chronicle of an era not so bygone as we might wish.

Joyce Carol Oates, a professor of humanities at Princeton University, is the author of "On Boxing." Her new novel, "Missing Mom," is being published this month.

Giovani Rufino for The New York Times

Patrols were increased last night on New York's subway system.

October 7, 2005
New York Named in Terror Threat Against Subways
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Security in and around New York City's subways was sharply increased yesterday after city officials said they were notified by federal authorities in Washington of a terrorist threat that for the first time specifically named the city's transit system.

The measures were announced by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, along with Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and the head of the New York F.B.I. office, Mark J. Mershon, after an American military operation with the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in Iraq yesterday and Wednesday, according to law enforcement officials. The operation, the officials said, was aimed at disrupting the threat.

Some officials in Washington, in interviews last night, played down the nature of the threat. While not entirely dismissing it, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security described it as "specific yet noncredible," adding that the intelligence community had concluded that the information was of "doubtful credibility."

Several law enforcement officials said an investigation had yet to corroborate any of the details.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the operation in Iraq resulted in two people being taken into custody. They said a third was being sought.

Information about the threat, the officials said, came to light last weekend from an intelligence source who told federal authorities that the three men in Iraq had planned to meet with other operatives in New York.

One official said the group would number about a dozen. Another official said the total was closer to 20 people involved. The men planned to use strollers, briefcases and packages to hide a number of bombs that they planned to detonate on the subways.

"It was a conspiracy involving more than a dozen people aimed at delivering a number of devices into the subway," one of the officials said.

One official said the information suggested an attack could happen as early as today; another pointed to the middle of the month.

"This is a piece of information that came in as a result of operations that go on all the time, and to corroborate that information or not we had to go after certain people," one official said.

Mr. Mershon said: "F.B.I. agents and other U.S. government personnel continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this particular threat. Thus far, there is nothing that has surfaced in that investigation or those enforcement actions which has corroborated an actual threat to the city."

Mayor Bloomberg seemed to try to inform New Yorkers without alarming them. He said that while the threat was not corroborated, it was specific enough to warrant an immediate and overwhelming response.

"It was more specific as to target; it was more specific as to timing, and some of the sources had more information that would lead one to believe that it was not the kind of thing that appears in the intelligence community every day," Mr. Bloomberg said.

The mayor urged New Yorkers to continue riding the subways, as he said he would, but cautioned them to be watchful, saying several times, "If you see something, say something."

As he spoke, thousands of city police officers were swarming the transit system. An officer will be assigned to each subway station, and Commissioner Kelly said the Police Department is significantly stepping up uniformed and plainclothes patrols, increasing sweeps through subway cars and posting officers at each subway tunnel that passes beneath city waterways. The department's heavily armed "Hercules teams" and other specialized units will also focus on the transit system, he said.

Bag searches will also be significantly increased, the commissioner said, with a focus on briefcases, baby strollers, luggage and other packages and containers, and he asked subway riders to curtail their use. The searches will take place not only on the subways, but also on buses and ferries, and the Police Department has coordinated the increased scrutiny with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Amtrak.

Mr. Kelly used narcotics detectives from Brooklyn and Queens and other investigators from the department's Warrant Division to increase security in the subways. Officers mobilized at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Mershon would not discuss the events in Iraq, or where they had occurred, saying that it was classified.

Counterterrorism officials in Washington said the information received this week was highly specific, including details about the possible use of suitcase bombs and explosives hidden in strollers. That information, along with the more general concern that terrorists might stage an attack modeled on the July bombings in London, prompted immediate concern, the officials said.

On an average weekday, an estimated 4.7 million rides are taken on New York's subway system, which has 468 stations.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for Homeland Security, said the credibility of the threat was still to be determined.

He said Homeland Security "received intelligence information regarding a specific but noncredible threat to the New York City subway system."

Mr. Knocke said Homeland Security shared the information "early on with state and local authorities in New York," adding, "There are no plans to alter the national threat level or the threat level in New York City."

He would not say any more about the content of the threat or the origin of the information.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's deputy commissioner of public information, would not discuss whether the source information suggested that operatives were in New York. He would only say, "We're looking at all aspects of this case."

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, city and national law enforcement authorities have at times reacted differently to similar threat information. In part, this is because of the varying roles that different agencies play. The New York Police Department, for example, is responsible for protecting the city and its subways and therefore is more likely to act quickly. The F.B.I.'s prime antiterrorism mission, on the other hand, is thwarting plots and apprehending any suspected terrorists - a task that is almost always complicated by information becoming public. But yesterday, city and F.B.I. officials in New York stood side by side and seemed to present a similar message. Officials from Homeland Security did not take part in the briefing.

Of the information from Iraq, one official said: "Suffice it to say it was credible enough for us to be working it very hard and very diligently literally around the clock and around the world. Sometimes it looks incredibly detailed, and then it washes out into nothing, and sometimes pretty vague in nature and it turns into something real. You can't know until you go through the process, and we're going through the process."

William A. Morange, the transportation authority's security director, who is a member of a citywide counterterrorism task force, was informed several days ago about the threat, said Tom Kelly, a spokesman.

"We were kept well apprised of all the developments since earlier this week," Mr. Kelly said.

The Police Department also put into effect a broad range of measures aimed at stepping up security around the city that did not address the specific threat, but were aimed at tightening the city's security cordon. They included increased truck searches on East River crossings and banning trucks from the Brooklyn Bridge.

The department will also increase the use of radiation detectors, and detectives from the department's Intelligence Division will check parking lots and garages in Manhattan and in other areas of the city.

Reporting for this article was contributed by David Johnston, Eric Lipton and Eric Lichtblau, in Washington, and Sewell Chan and Kareem Fahim, in New York.

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To Thine Own Self Be True: What Tell-all Memoirs Tell Us About Ourselves

To Thine Own Self Be True: What Tell-all Memoirs Tell Us About Ourselves Print

In his book, Authority, sociologist Richard Sennett begins with an observation that at first glance appears obvious: “Without the ties of loyalty, authority, and fraternity,” he writes, “no society as a whole, and none of its institutions, could long function.” Sennett links loyalty to authority and fraternity for a reason – as a virtue, loyalty cannot exist in isolation. Historically, it has always been tied inextricably to institutions, to authority, and to traditions. Authority is “a bond between people who are unequal,” Sennett reminds us, and it was this bond that formed the basis for lasting loyalty: the reciprocal loyalty of landowner and tenant, lord and serf, and sovereign and knight.

Shakespeare was perhaps our greatest poet of loyalty. His plays include many paeans to this virtue. Lysander’s response to Hermia’s “good night” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a fervent, “Amen, amen, to that fair prayer say I/And then end life when I end loyalty!” (Oddly, the word “loyalty” does not appear in the King James Version of the Bible, although “fidelity,” “respect,” and, of course, “faithfulness” do.)

But loyalty need not be felt only toward other human beings; a person can exercise loyalty toward a high ideal, an institution, a country, and a faith – often all at the same time. There are, it seems, no natural limits to loyalty. But as times and mores change, and as respect for authority and hierarchy declines, what becomes of loyalty? Can it continue to exist without ties to its traditional sources of legitimacy? After all, no one used to ask (to borrow the title of a recent book about the Bush administration) the price of loyalty; they noticed only its presence or absence. In earlier ages, disloyalty to his superior could cost a man his life. Until recently, it could cost him his job. Today, however, it will almost certainly land him a book contract. It is worth asking, then, if we have developed a more sophisticated and flexible concept of loyalty to suit the times, or if we are, instead, witnessing the last vestiges of loyalty succumb to the inexorable forces of market democracy.

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The professional world offers a useful vantage point for exploring both contemporary loyalty and its absence, because it is here where the unspoken rules of loyalty have undergone their most radical transformation. Until the late twentieth century, employers could assume a certain degree of loyalty from their employees; bosses went about their work unconcerned that an underling might be gathering information for an exposé. No longer. In addition to a more general decline in respect for authority and hierarchy, a more brutally competitive market economy means that the social contract that existed between employer and employee – a contract that implied that dedicated service to a company would yield job security and eventually a pension – has unraveled. Coupled with the fraying of this contract is a change in the market for loyalty. The erosion of privacy over the last century has spawned an increasing demand by the public for exposure over reticence; disloyalty is required to meet this demand for details about the powerful. People who used to face opprobrium and social disapproval for betraying confidences now instead gain both money and that more elusive and desirable modern status, celebrity. Fewer and fewer people see the use in old-fashioned loyalty.

Today, even Uriah Heep, the fictional embodiment of hypocritical humility in David Copperfield, who feigns loyalty but is actually engaged in undermining his employer Mr. Wickfield, would have written a book. In thinly veiled fiction and revealing nonfiction, former assistants, friends, and co-workers are exposing the tawdry inner workings of their acquaintances’ minds. To name just a few in the genre: the wildly popular novel The Nanny Diaries exposed the pretensions and bad parenting of wealthy Manhattanites; The Devil Wears Prada offered a cruel and barely fictionalized portrait of Vogue editor Anna Wintour, which one reviewer labeled “bite-the-boss-fiction.” Hollywood has produced several books that reveal the seamier side of the movie industry.

The New York Times described the trend as a “flotilla of best-selling novels that rely less on the craft of literature than on the recycling of rumor and on their authors’ well-positioned perches.” It was a practice first put to good effect by Truman Capote, whose novel Answered Prayers, a fictional portrait of his socialite friends, was not well received by his intimates. Capote’s editor Joseph Fox noted that when one chapter of the book, “La Côte Basque,” was published in Esquire, “virtually every friend he had in this world ostracized him for telling thinly disguised tales out of school, and many of them never spoke to him again.” Nedda Logan, one of the women skewered in the book, infamously decreed: “That dirty little toad is never coming to my parties again.”

Moviemaker Samuel Goldwyn once remarked, “I’ll take 50 percent efficiency to get 100 percent loyalty,” but today, it is disloyalty that is efficient – and lucrative – for many people. And as society, in the old sense of a social establishment, atrophies, there are fewer social networks with the power to punish the disloyal. In fact, these books may garner their writers more party invitations, not fewer.

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The demand for loyalty between boss and employee is perhaps most potent – and most fraught – when one’s boss is the president of the United States. The White House is both a hothouse and a graveyard for professional loyalty. Here, power is tantalizingly close but access to it is often fleeting; the White House has a high turnover rate for staff. Over time, and most dramatically in the last thirty years, the unspoken rules of loyalty and the virtual ban on revelation that used to define White House employment have eroded.

One of the first insider portraits of a president and his White House came from the pen of a slave. In 1865, Paul Jennings, a slave of James Madison who acted as his “body servant,” published a book, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison. Jennings knew Madison well; he “shaved him every other day for sixteen years,” and was present at Madison’s death, after which Mrs. Madison sold him to another slaveholder (Daniel Webster later bought Jennings and manumitted him.)

Jennings was one of the first White House memoirists to employ a device now ubiquitous in the genre: the insider’s challenge to official wisdom. Mr. Jennings offered an alternative narrative of the rescue of a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington during the British invasion of the Capitol and White House in 1814. “It has often been stated in print,” Jennings wrote, “that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment.” In fact, Jennings said, it was a Frenchman named John Susé, with the help of the president’s gardener, who salvaged the portrait.

Despite his taking issue with the conventional wisdom about Dolley Madison, Jennings remained fiercely loyal to the Madisons. When the widow Mrs. Madison was left destitute toward the end of her life, Jennings said he “occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket” to help her with the “necessaries of life.” He described her as a “remarkably fine woman” and James Madison as “one of the best men that ever lived.”

Between Madison and Franklin Delano Roo-sevelt there were few insider memoirs of significance, with the exception of the spiteful analysis written by Andrew Jackson’s treasury secretary. It seems hard to believe now, but FDR was one of the first victims of a disloyal aide – betrayed by a member of his own “brain trust,” an adviser named Raymond Moley who published After Seven Years in 1939. The memoir painted a portrait of FDR as hopelessly in thrall to dangerously leftist ideas and urged voters not to reelect him in 1940. Roosevelt, not surprisingly, was unhappy; according to presidential historian Michael Besch-loss, he said Moley had “kissed a** – and told.”

But FDR also enjoyed more traditional loyalty from his aides. William D. Hassett, who kept a private diary detailing FDR’s activities during periods of “press blackout” beginning in January 1942, took care to note that his was “a private record with no thought that it should be seen by other eyes than those of the writer.” Hassett, called “the soul of discretion” by one historian, left explicit instructions that if there ever was interest in publishing the diary, this should happen only after Roosevelt’s death. Hassett’s is an affectionate portrait of the last few years of Roosevelt’s life, and from the diary one catches frequent glimpses of FDR’s excellent sense of humor and love of nonsense verse. Hassett also included wonderful descriptions of the eminences who passed through the parlor in Hyde Park, from Winston Churchill to Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, all of whom FDR called by their first names.

Yet given the still widely held notion that White House aides should never reveal private administration business to the public, even mild public criticism of a president elicited strong social disapproval in the 1940s and 50s. Former Eisenhower speechwriter Emmet John Hughes began criticizing Eisenhower in the late 1950s, offering his opinion that “as an intellectual [Eisenhower] bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from his books and ideas.” In 1963 Hughes published The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years, which faulted Eisenhower for not using his popularity to achieve more for the country. (According to Beschloss, Eisenhower was so incensed when he found out about the book that he went to Hughes’s publisher, Doubleday, and asked them to cancel the contract. They did and Hughes had to find another publisher.) Publicly, Hughes’s book was, as the Washington Post noted several decades later, “widely attacked for its then-controversial disclosure of private conversations.”

Also attacked as a betrayal of privacy was the hagiographic book by John F. Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, published in 1965. Knowing well of Hughes’s betrayal of Eisenhower, Kennedy took fewer chances and, according to Beschloss, made the household staff in the White House “sign pieces of paper saying that they would not write memoirs about anything that they saw during their employ.” Kennedy once asked, “I wonder who’s going to be our Emmet John Hughes,” For his part, Schlesinger defended his divulgences by claiming that Kennedy knew he was a writer. But the standards of professional loyalty remained in place firmly enough that after Kennedy’s assassination, Cyrus Sulzberger, speaking to the Washington Post, rebuked those former aides, like Schlesinger, “who raced across his warm grave into print.”

Although a few memoirs emerged from the administration of Lyndon Johnson, disloyal memoir writers found their perfect subject in Richard Nixon and an apt historical moment in the narcissistic 1970s. Perhaps the best known of the memoirs of the Watergate era was John Dean’s Blind Ambition, published in 1976, which laid out the case against Nixon and forever etched Dean in historical memory as the archetype of the disgruntled former employee. Dean dined out on Nixon for the rest of his life, writing books, screenplays, and even consulting on a television miniseries version of Blind Ambition starring Martin Sheen. Dean was one of the first disloyalists to make of his professional disloyalty a thriving post–White House career. Other aides, such as John Ehrlichman, whom Nixon once called the “conscience” of his administration, wrote books as well, although as one obituary noted of Ehrlichman’s 1982 offering Witness to Power, Ehrlichman “savaged others but minimized his responsibility,” a trend that would reach full flower in the 1980s.

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The avalanche of memoirs from Nixon aides made sense given the unprecedented events of Watergate. But the modern era of professional disloyalty may be said to have begun in 1979, when James Fallows, a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, published a lengthy essay in the Atlantic Monthly. Released just as Carter faced a tough reelection campaign, Fallows’s piece was clear in its intent to set aside professional loyalty in pursuit of journalistic truth; the title of the piece was “The Passionless Presidency: The Trouble with Jimmy Carter’s Administration.”

Fallows modeled the steps for future published acts of disloyalty. First, deny that what you are actually doing is a betrayal since the boss must have known it was coming. “I was not one of his confidants,” Fallows disclaims, “and my intention to return to journalism was widely known.” Second, craft the obligatory “I hate to do this” passage, which for Fallows was: “I make these observations with sadness but without rancor.” Finally, begin your betrayal with a paragraph or two of outlandish flattery of your subject. “If I had to choose one politician to sit at the Pearly Gates and pass judgment on my soul,” Fallows mused, “Jimmy Carter would be the one.” One doubts if, after reading the evisceration that follows, Carter would have let Mr. Fallows pass through those pearly gates.

Fallows described the “profound ignorance” of Carter and his aides, detailing missteps in internal staffing procedures and pay raises, Carter’s inability to engage on issues such as foreign policy and taxes, and his inefficient focus on minor details, such as scheduling staffers’ court time on the White House tennis courts. “Carter’s willful ignorance, his blissful tabula rasa, could – to me – be explained only by a combination of arrogance, complacency, and – dread thought – insecurity at the core of his mind and soul,” Fallows concluded.

Fallows was not the first disloyal former soldier in a presidential army, but he made it more acceptable for former officials to engage in presidential soul searching by proxy after only the briefest of tenures in the White House, and to race into print before the boss was even out of office. “There used to be ... an unwritten rule that you never write while the president is in office and even for some time after that,” historian Michael Beschloss told Newsweek in 2004. In 1981, as books by former Carter aides were flooding bookstores, the Washington Post asked, “Should a ‘decent interval’ be observed between government service and the writing of books? ... Can an official advise the president in genuine candor while knowing that he will soon be describing the same advice in a book? How much of such recollections is valuable historical insight and how much a printed settling of private disputes?” In other words, didn’t our notions of professional loyalty suggest a seemly bit of time between service to a president and exposure of his flaws?

Evidently not. By the 1980s, standards had permanently changed. Schlesinger, pilloried for compromising Kennedy’s privacy in the 1960s, was now viewed as merely an early adopter. Speaking to the Post in 1981 about aspiring memoir writers in the White House and whether they might stifle open debate, Schlesinger said, “I really don’t think it inhibits people ... If you feel you’re right, you want to be on the record.” Loyalty to oneself was the new standard, not old-fashioned loyalty to an individual president or to the institution of the presidency itself. As the Post remarked, “Standards have changed to the point where such revelations are now both acceptable and desirable.” After all, who wants to be the rube who makes the ignorant suggestion that is immortalized by another presidential adviser six months later in his or her memoir? Better to get one’s own account on the record as quickly as possible.

Not everyone embraced this new understanding of professional loyalty. John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration, told reporters in 1981 that his rule was that “everyone should wait at least five years before writing to eliminate any suspicion that public service was meant to be subordinate to the publication.” Galbraith himself did this, waiting a decorous six years before he published Ambassador’s Journal in 1969.

But with the gates now thrown wide open for former aides to rush into print, all in the name of outlining their own truth, it was not surprising that the political memoirs that emerged in the 1980s began to include more salacious personal details and revelations that would generate media interest – a necessity for boosting book sales in a competitive publishing environment – and that might even have an impact on a president’s chances for reelection.

The treasonous trio that emerged with memoirs from the Reagan White House conformed to these new market demands – offering dishy insider details about the president and Mrs. Reagan or settling political scores – all before Reagan had left office: secretary of state Alexander Haig in 1984, budget director David Stockman in 1986, and White House chief of staff Don Regan in 1987. These were mostly dry and policy-driven, but Don Regan’s For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington, elevated cruel gossip to a new status in White House memoirs. Regan infamously revealed that Nancy Reagan frequently consulted an astrologer who aided her in organizing the president’s schedule, a revelation the press seized upon and played out at length and to great effect. This, clearly, was Regan’s intention; even his editor said the book had a “vendetta quality.” The publishing industry and the public had spoken: In the future, White House memoirs would be marketed for their gossipy and politically harmful insights into the personal lives of presidents and their families – professional loyalty officially sacrificed on the altar of prurient rumor and innuendo.

Slightly fewer memoirs emerged from the first Bush administration, perhaps because this patrician clan places a high value on personal loyalty – and exiles those who betray them. The man for whom I worked as a speechwriter, a former cabinet member in the administration, told me that he was regularly offered opportunities to tell “his side of the story” in a book, an impulse he resisted because he felt that it simply wasn’t what loyal cabinet members – or gentlemen – did. Alas, his was the exceptional and increasingly old-fashioned view.

The books that emerged from the first Bush administration suffer from a common weakness in modern political memoir, particularly for people who served a one-term president: the “if only he’d listened to me” lament. This is usually coupled with the author’s tendency to picture himself as an idealist bewildered by everyone else’s lack of idealism. Both of these impulses were pursued to great effect by Richard Darman, who headed the first Bush’s Office of Management and Budget, and published Who’s In Control? Polar Politics and the Sensible Center in 1996, just after Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton. Not surprisingly, Darman considers himself (but few others) a member of that elect group, the “sensible center.” But he acts flabbergasted that so few see the wisdom of his suggestions, blaming ignorant ideologues for his setbacks: “It was new to me to find ideology to be the driving force for many of the Reaganauts,” Darman marveled. “Moderate was a term I had been taught to think of as a virtue ... but hard-right conservatives were trained to treat it as a vice.” His idealism is further trampled after he gives a speech at the National Press Club about deficits, in which he expresses the hope that, “by beginning to sketch a larger vision I might help show the way.” But “that was not to be.” Darman engages as well in old-fashioned score-settling, portraying Congressman Newt Gingrich, with whom he often clashed, as a megalomaniac future anti-Christ, a man “intoxicated by his own vision” of politics and clearly hoping to become “a kind of modern media-made world ruler.” Darman received no public censure for his disloyalty.

During the Clinton administration, professional disloyalty continued to be embraced by former White House officials. Although Clinton could inspire loyalty, he also had a large number of former aides and advisers who reveled in exposing his personal and professional weaknesses. Perhaps one of the most egregious offerings was George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human, published in 1999, in which the former aide spent considerable time describing the pettiest of human foibles found in the Clinton household: terrible tempers, miscommunication, personal rows. For his trouble, Stephanopoulos received little public opprobrium (although the Clintons reportedly were furious about the betrayal). Instead, Stephanopoulos hit the media jackpot: he got his own Sunday morning talk show on ABC News. As the Los Angeles Times ruefully noted in 2004, “These days, the biggest bounce usually goes to high-level administration officials who tell all early.”

Stephanopoulos’s situation also highlights another question. What does professional loyalty mean when your profession keeps switching? Peggy Noonan has moved back and forth between journalism and presidential speechwriting more than once, as has Sidney Blumenthal. Where do the loyalties of these people lie? With their readers? With voters? With their presidents? For now, conventional wisdom still treats these revolving-door careerists with a degree of suspicion, in part because they become proud partisan boosters post–White House, as Blumenthal demonstrated. A tenuous conventional wisdom in journalism, however, still holds that service in a presidential administration undermines a journalist’s ability to be wholly objective about matters related to that administration – and perhaps to the activities of future ones.

The Clinton administration was faced with another disloyalist in its midst after Stephanopoulos: adviser Dick Morris, who, like John Dean before him, made a post-administration career out of attacking both Bill and Hillary Clinton. In Because He Could, published in 2004, Morris performed an exegesis on Bill Clinton’s best-selling memoir My Life. He repeated this operation in his next book, Rewriting History, on Hillary’s memoir Living History. Morris’s fear and loathing run deep; by the second page of Because He Could we’re hearing about Clinton’s “moodiness, temper, self absorption, and lack of discipline.” Morris even suggests we view his book as akin to the Rosetta Stone: “Just as the translation of the Rosetta Stone led to an understanding of the history and culture of the ancient Egyptians, the unraveling we’ll undertake here offers a new way of looking at and comprehending the convoluted world of Bill Clinton.” White House memoirs now feature former aides recast as professional truth tellers, decoders of secrets and – as the books that emerged during George W. Bush’s first term would show – the disloyalist as selfless public servant.

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By the time George W. Bush became president in 2000, a firmly entrenched understanding of professional loyalty, born of years of experience with former White House officials, was in place: Anything goes. Thus it was not a surprise that one of the earliest insider accounts of his White House seamlessly combined the many trends of the past several decades to produce the twenty-first century disloyalist memoir par excellence: a well-written narrative of gossip, score-settling, and grand claims about serving the public interest. The book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill is self-consciously concerned with loyalty – indeed, it begins with an observation from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism – “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise” – and the author’s note includes an endorsement from Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2, affirming that Paul O’Neill is “amazingly loyal – an old-fashioned thing, really ... because he looks at you as an equal; there’s no arrogance there.”

But this is not the “old-fashioned” sense of loyalty at all. It’s the postmodern one. The book, in fact, performs a clever trick: it redefines loyalty as the fealty of Paul O’Neill not to his president, or to the Treasury Department, which he headed, or to the administration more broadly – but to O’Neill’s own ideas and vision. We are to see him as a new kind of civic hero: the outspoken maverick willing to commit his recollections to print for our edification. As one particularly revealing passage notes, “Since he signed on as secretary of the treasury, many of those around Bush expected O’Neill to be loyal, without question, to the president. The problem was that Bush hadn’t earned his loyalty.” No longer, then, can we assume that loyalty is something someone brings with him to the job – a bona fide occupational qualification for serving a president. Instead, loyalty is something the president has to earn from his aides.

The Price of Loyalty offers standard withering criticisms of the commander in chief: the president couldn’t “analyze a complex issue, parse opposing positions, and settle on a judicious path,” for example. And the book, published during Bush’s first term, had its intended effect on political discourse. Writing in Newsday, former Clinton labor secretary (and published disloyalist and fabulist) Robert Reich opined, “During the time they serve, cabinet officers and key White House aides surely owe the president their undivided loyalty” and “when they leave office, cabinet officers and White House aides are expected to remain loyal.”

But like O’Neill, Reich locates a “higher loyalty” than that owed the president: loyalty to the public. “If they know of troubling facts or circumstances of which the public should be aware – instances of gross irresponsibility or illegality at the top – they have a duty to reveal them,” Reich wrote, concluding in a succinct articulation of the new loyalty that “the central question ... isn’t really the loyalty a cabinet officer owes a president. It’s the loyalty a president and his inner circle owe to the country and to its democracy.” Not surprisingly, Reich concluded that O’Neill’s account of Bush’s weaknesses raises “serious doubt[s] about the loyalty of this administration to America.”

A similar narrative of public-servant-as-truth-teller emerged in Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. Like many memoirists before him, Clarke claims he would never have published a memoir if it hadn’t been vitally important for the public to know what he does. “From inside the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon for thirty years,” Clarke writes, “I disdained those who departed government and quickly rushed out to write about it. It seemed somehow inappropriate to expose, as Bismarck put it, ‘the making of sausage.’”

Yet as soon as Clarke left office he, too, was seized with a desire to set the record straight. “I became aware after my departure from federal service that much that I thought was well-known was actually obscure to many who wanted to know.” Later, in the preface to the book, he offers the contemporary disloyalist’s justification for telling all: “For me, loyalty to the citizens of the United States must take precedence over loyalty to any political machine.”

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When he catalogued the “absent things in American life,” expatriate Henry James mentioned “country palaces” and “castles and abbeys.” But he also remarked on the absence of “personal loyalty.” Two trends in our current era will continue to encourage and reward disloyalty. The first is the continued influence (and demands) of the market, which rewards not loyalty but exposure, revelation, and scandal. The second trend is the continued personalization and celebritization of politics. The New York Times credited “some of gossip-lit’s popularity to the fact that Americans have become increasingly fascinated with the practices of elite institutions and social structures.” That fascination feeds on personal details – Bill and Hillary’s fights, Nancy Reagan’s weakness for astrology – and it is unlikely to wane.

Given these factors, should employers do more to ensure loyalty? President George W. Bush has been criticized on several occasions for having aides who are considered too loyal – a quality that some critics feel inhibits wide-ranging debate. But excesses of loyalty are not a problem for most of the professional world. Professional relationships that used to rest on the bedrock of assumed loyalty, understanding, and shared values must now be legalized to protect against future betrayals. Celebrities, CEOs, and politicians now routinely require staff to sign nondisclosure agreements – our new loyalty oaths. In this personalized, sensationalist, legalized culture, it is perhaps naïve to hope that we might heed the advice of earlier generations – Hassett’s and Galbraith’s included – to insist on reticence and the passing of time before we trade our professional loyalties for a mess of published pottage.

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Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. She is the editor of In Character