Hunting the Next Big Thing, Risk-Takers Turn to Developing Markets
By Tomoeh Murakami Tse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; F01
Forget the emerging markets of China, Brazil, India and Russia. If you're looking for that extra kick in your investment portfolio, you'll have to venture to Latvia, Bangladesh, Namibia and Ivory Coast, according to a small but growing number of mutual fund managers exploring the front line of stock investing known as frontier markets.
In the past several years, many investors who put their money into emerging markets enjoyed annual returns of more than 30 percent, attracting capital from Japanese housewives and American pensioners.
But as investments in Chinese retail companies and Indian tech firms become more mainstream, and as more analysts caution that such outsize gains are not sustainable, money managers are asking: Where next?
"A lot of hidden gems are no longer hidden," said Hugh Hunter, head of global emerging markets at WestLB Mellon Asset Management. "Clearly, frontier markets are the next tier. . . . We have no option but to go forward in this area."
So don't be surprised if you start seeing unfamiliar stocks from far-flung places on statements from your emerging markets fund manager.
Aside from the need to keep looking for new investment opportunities, Hunter and others say, economic growth and development of the capital markets have turned some frontier markets into appealing, long-term investments for those with a healthy appetite for risk. Money managers view the frontier economies much as they did the emerging markets of a decade ago. They are hopping on airplanes to visit countries where as few as a half-dozen companies are listed on the local stock exchanges.
A handful of mutual fund firms, including Franklin Templeton and Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price, already offer individual investors exposure to the frontier markets via emerging market mutual funds. This month, T. Rowe launched the Africa & Middle East Fund, with investments in Kenya and Lebanon, among other places. As markets develop, T. Rowe said, the fund could potentially invest in Algeria, Botswana, Ghana, Kuwait, Mauritius, Namibia, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.
"We've seen a number of factors come together," said Joseph Rohm, an analyst for the fund. "Africa is enjoying strong GDP growth. Inflation has halved over the last five years. . . . We've seen governments spend heavily on power, electricity, roads. For the first time ever in the continent's history, that's really happening."
The fund's largest holdings include United Bank, the largest lender in Nigeria, which recently implemented reforms in the banking sector. The bank is expanding operations outside the country, T. Rowe noted.
There is no precise definition of what constitutes a frontier market vs. an emerging market. Some investors, for example, consider Israel and Korea to be developed markets, while others do not.
In general, frontier markets are smaller -- fewer companies, fewer investors, less trading. There's also less regulation, information on companies and transparency. The markets are considered to be in the nascent stages of development and even riskier than emerging markets, which, of course, are riskier than developed markets like the United States.
Think of it this way: While a money manager invested in an emerging market might worry about bubbles created by unsophisticated domestic investors, his or her counterpart in a frontier market might be concerned about a lack of local investors.
About 540 stocks are traded across 22 frontier markets, with a total market capitalization of $165 billion, according to an April report by Acadian Asset Management. By comparison, the market cap of just one Russian oil company, Lukoil, is about $70 billion, and more than 800 companies are listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, one of two exchanges in China.
Despite its size, a frontier market can reward investors handsomely. In the past three years, the Ukrainian stock market has returned 700 percent. It has risen about 160 percent in the past year, while the market in Slovenia gained 110 percent. Botswana returned about 90 percent, and Bangladesh advanced 60 percent. But not all are winners. The Jamaican exchange is down 4 percent this year, though it gained 150 percent in 2003 and 2004 combined.
The S&P/IFC Global Frontier Markets index, which covers the stock markets of 22 countries, gained 49 percent in the year ended Aug. 31. That compares with 16 percent for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index during the same period.
But numerous potential downfalls exist in frontier markets. One big concern is the lack of "liquidity," or the ability to buy and sell stocks quickly. Hunter of WestLB Mellon said it recently took him close to a month to get out of a single position in a frontier market in Europe.
There is also the risk of wild fluctuations in foreign-exchange rates, which can unexpectedly lower the value of investments. The value of the peso in Argentina, for example, plummeted five years ago when the government was forced to devalue the currency during the largest foreign debt default in history.
Money managers have to ask themselves fundamental questions. "What are the rules that allow me to get in and out quickly?" said Alka Banerjee, vice president of global index management for Standard & Poor's. "Is there a derivatives market which allows me to hedge my exposure? These are the kinds of infrastructure that a stock market needs for it to become basically more accessible to any global investor."
One benefit investors should consider, noted Rohm of T. Rowe, is the frontier markets' low correlation to developed markets, offering diversification to individual portfolios.
Many emerging markets fell during the turmoil sparked by U.S. mortgage and credit markets this summer. Not so frontier markets. One reason is that they often deal only in equities and bonds and don't have derivatives markets. Many of the exotic securities backed by subprime mortgages, the catalyst for the credit crisis, are traded in derivatives markets. "They have no exposure to these sort of instruments," Rohm said.
On the other hand, many frontier-market economies are dependent on commodities. While raw materials and oil have high prices now, volatile commodity prices and a reliance on commodity exports have been a source of risk for developing countries. But some frontier countries are widening the base of their economies.
Debt relief from the World Bank has freed up African governments to spend their money on infrastructure, said Rohm, a native of South Africa who has traveled extensively across the continent. The emergence of the middle-class consumer has created opportunities for consumer-oriented companies.
"It's very visible," said Rohm, who recently returned from a trip to Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. Before, "you wouldn't have seen people walking around with mobile phones. There are a lot of new cars on the road. You see new roads being built. You see new factories being built . . . managements are very happy to meet with investors. They're producing regular financial statements, which allows us to do due diligence on these companies. "
Friday, October 12, 2007
The Right Fit Is Worth It
The Neighborhood You Choose Says a Lot About What 'Home' Means to You
By Mary Ellen Slayter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; R01
When Laura Updyke and her husband, Craig, began looking for a new home five years ago, one thing they knew was that they were committed to staying in the District.
The Brookland house they eventually settled on was "kind of a disaster," but the neighborhood "embodied everything we wanted," she said.
The "everything" that trumped the stress of fixing up an old house, even with their first baby on the way, was the neighborhood's close-knit feel and its social and racial diversity. "The whole concept of community is very important to us," said Updyke, now the mother of three young children. "It was very important to us that we not just move into a house."
The Updykes have put down roots in Brookland, joining a church three blocks from their house. Their oldest child attends a nearby charter school.
As they discovered, houses aren't just about debt ratios, square footage and commuting times. If they were, all those Marylanders and Virginians wouldn't be inching past each other on the American Legion Bridge every weekday morning and evening. Houses are also about home, that feeling that you belong somewhere and that a place belongs to you. Our values influence our choices as much as our pocketbooks do.
After all, someone who buys a U Street condo is looking for a lifestyle very different from someone who yearns for 10 acres of southern Prince George's woodlands.
For many people, children push these discussions about values to the forefront.
"My biggest priority in life is my family. Everything I do really revolves around them now," said Trent Hamm, who runs the Simple Dollar, a personal-finance blog. "I chose to live in a small town in the upper Midwest mostly for their benefit -- rural environment, lots of freedom to explore and learn who they are, and strong education."
But politics also plays a part. Hamm calls himself "a small-government greenie" and said that's a big reason he went small-town. "Not much government to interfere with my choices, and no one cares if I have a giant compost bin in the back yard."
There are nice places that might make him downright miserable -- South Riding in Loudoun County, for example. Friendly people, very family-oriented -- it's one of the Washington area's most popular developments among people with school-age children -- but that compost bin had better be properly maintained, given the community's strict covenants, conditions and restrictions.
Aesthetic rules were part of the appeal for Deanna McFarland, who had lived with her family in communities similar to South Riding in Arizona and Southern California. "I'm pretty picky about how the houses look, " said McFarland, now the administrative manager for South Riding Proprietary, which governs the development.
She's also picky about schools, which she said was the main draw in South Riding, along with all the sports and other activities nearby. After comparing local school districts, she said, she knew she wanted Loudoun. As her three children have gotten older and done well in those schools, with one now off to college at the University of Virginia, she says she made the right choice.
Clearly, much as Hamm loves his small town and Updyke loves her city 'hood, McFarland was drawn to South Riding for the community's values.
The homeowners association might run the place, but the kids are its top priority. You only have to look at how they spend those dues to see what they value: swimming pools, tennis courts, and plenty of festivals and parades.
Wendy Taylor, South Riding Proprietary's general manager, said that the community's priorities make it very different from her last job, at a country club development in Boca Raton, Fla., where the values could get a little "bizarre." That association spent $4 million on a new front gate. A South Riding resident would look at that number and see a lot of ice cream for the Stingrays, the local swim team.
Of course, community values aren't solely the province of people with children.
When Rebecca Henry and her partner bought a bungalow in Maryland's Riverdale Park in March, they weren't thinking about just their monthly mortgage payment. They knew they wanted an older house for the "character."
"Neither one of us feels comfortable in brand-new construction, where everything is nice and plumb and square," Henry said.
Before they bought, they had been renting in Columbia Heights, but it wasn't a good fit. "We weren't happy. The dog wasn't happy."
Henry, a lawyer, said she feels at home in her working-class neighborhood. (So does the dog, as well as the new one they've since adopted.) "It's not too ritzy. We don't feel like we have to feel competitive. People spend time taking caring of their yards and houses, but they do a lot of the work themselves."
The two never even considered living on the other side of the Potomac -- the commute would have been crazy. And there were political considerations, too. "Because we're a gay couple, well, we're feeling a little bitter about Virginia." Virginia voters last year passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
If you're house-shopping, how do find the place where you'll feel most at home?
Hamm said the first step is to figure out what matters most to you. "If you sit down and really think about your core values, features of a home become obvious." He and his wife are planning as many as five children, so they wanted a lot of bedrooms. But to balance that with their environmental concerns, they kept the other spaces and amenities in the house more modest.
You'll also want to think about what you want to be close to. Friends? Family? Church?
Your real estate agent will be able to help you with only some of these questions, as many of the most pertinent topics are off-limits because of fair housing laws. But there are ways to get the information you need about the type of community you're interested in. Don't ask where all the Jewish people live, for instance. Instead, ask for help in finding a place within a certain distance of the synagogue you want to attend. "You have to give a very specific location," said Andi Fleming, an agent with Long & Foster in the District.
Another way to glean information about is by getting online. South Riding, for example, has an incredibly detailed and informative e-mail discussion group. So does Kentlands, a planned community in Gaithersburg. Many neighborhoods in the Washington area do.
But online discussions aren't to be taken as gospel. "They often get hijacked by people with an agenda. They're useful, but you need to take everything with a grain of salt, especially the negative stuff," Updyke said.
In the end, finding the right place may be as much about serendipity as it is about research. Updyke, after all, said she discovered Brookland when she was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland and would visit Colonel Brooks' Tavern, the neighborhood bar. "I always got a really good vibe out of it."
By Mary Ellen Slayter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; R01
When Laura Updyke and her husband, Craig, began looking for a new home five years ago, one thing they knew was that they were committed to staying in the District.
The Brookland house they eventually settled on was "kind of a disaster," but the neighborhood "embodied everything we wanted," she said.
The "everything" that trumped the stress of fixing up an old house, even with their first baby on the way, was the neighborhood's close-knit feel and its social and racial diversity. "The whole concept of community is very important to us," said Updyke, now the mother of three young children. "It was very important to us that we not just move into a house."
The Updykes have put down roots in Brookland, joining a church three blocks from their house. Their oldest child attends a nearby charter school.
As they discovered, houses aren't just about debt ratios, square footage and commuting times. If they were, all those Marylanders and Virginians wouldn't be inching past each other on the American Legion Bridge every weekday morning and evening. Houses are also about home, that feeling that you belong somewhere and that a place belongs to you. Our values influence our choices as much as our pocketbooks do.
After all, someone who buys a U Street condo is looking for a lifestyle very different from someone who yearns for 10 acres of southern Prince George's woodlands.
For many people, children push these discussions about values to the forefront.
"My biggest priority in life is my family. Everything I do really revolves around them now," said Trent Hamm, who runs the Simple Dollar, a personal-finance blog. "I chose to live in a small town in the upper Midwest mostly for their benefit -- rural environment, lots of freedom to explore and learn who they are, and strong education."
But politics also plays a part. Hamm calls himself "a small-government greenie" and said that's a big reason he went small-town. "Not much government to interfere with my choices, and no one cares if I have a giant compost bin in the back yard."
There are nice places that might make him downright miserable -- South Riding in Loudoun County, for example. Friendly people, very family-oriented -- it's one of the Washington area's most popular developments among people with school-age children -- but that compost bin had better be properly maintained, given the community's strict covenants, conditions and restrictions.
Aesthetic rules were part of the appeal for Deanna McFarland, who had lived with her family in communities similar to South Riding in Arizona and Southern California. "I'm pretty picky about how the houses look, " said McFarland, now the administrative manager for South Riding Proprietary, which governs the development.
She's also picky about schools, which she said was the main draw in South Riding, along with all the sports and other activities nearby. After comparing local school districts, she said, she knew she wanted Loudoun. As her three children have gotten older and done well in those schools, with one now off to college at the University of Virginia, she says she made the right choice.
Clearly, much as Hamm loves his small town and Updyke loves her city 'hood, McFarland was drawn to South Riding for the community's values.
The homeowners association might run the place, but the kids are its top priority. You only have to look at how they spend those dues to see what they value: swimming pools, tennis courts, and plenty of festivals and parades.
Wendy Taylor, South Riding Proprietary's general manager, said that the community's priorities make it very different from her last job, at a country club development in Boca Raton, Fla., where the values could get a little "bizarre." That association spent $4 million on a new front gate. A South Riding resident would look at that number and see a lot of ice cream for the Stingrays, the local swim team.
Of course, community values aren't solely the province of people with children.
When Rebecca Henry and her partner bought a bungalow in Maryland's Riverdale Park in March, they weren't thinking about just their monthly mortgage payment. They knew they wanted an older house for the "character."
"Neither one of us feels comfortable in brand-new construction, where everything is nice and plumb and square," Henry said.
Before they bought, they had been renting in Columbia Heights, but it wasn't a good fit. "We weren't happy. The dog wasn't happy."
Henry, a lawyer, said she feels at home in her working-class neighborhood. (So does the dog, as well as the new one they've since adopted.) "It's not too ritzy. We don't feel like we have to feel competitive. People spend time taking caring of their yards and houses, but they do a lot of the work themselves."
The two never even considered living on the other side of the Potomac -- the commute would have been crazy. And there were political considerations, too. "Because we're a gay couple, well, we're feeling a little bitter about Virginia." Virginia voters last year passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
If you're house-shopping, how do find the place where you'll feel most at home?
Hamm said the first step is to figure out what matters most to you. "If you sit down and really think about your core values, features of a home become obvious." He and his wife are planning as many as five children, so they wanted a lot of bedrooms. But to balance that with their environmental concerns, they kept the other spaces and amenities in the house more modest.
You'll also want to think about what you want to be close to. Friends? Family? Church?
Your real estate agent will be able to help you with only some of these questions, as many of the most pertinent topics are off-limits because of fair housing laws. But there are ways to get the information you need about the type of community you're interested in. Don't ask where all the Jewish people live, for instance. Instead, ask for help in finding a place within a certain distance of the synagogue you want to attend. "You have to give a very specific location," said Andi Fleming, an agent with Long & Foster in the District.
Another way to glean information about is by getting online. South Riding, for example, has an incredibly detailed and informative e-mail discussion group. So does Kentlands, a planned community in Gaithersburg. Many neighborhoods in the Washington area do.
But online discussions aren't to be taken as gospel. "They often get hijacked by people with an agenda. They're useful, but you need to take everything with a grain of salt, especially the negative stuff," Updyke said.
In the end, finding the right place may be as much about serendipity as it is about research. Updyke, after all, said she discovered Brookland when she was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland and would visit Colonel Brooks' Tavern, the neighborhood bar. "I always got a really good vibe out of it."
Questions for Obama
By George F. Will
Sunday, September 30, 2007; B07
Is it audacious to hope for more clarity from Barack Obama than he has so far supplied? Herewith 17 questions for him:
You advocate leaving in Iraq "some" U.S. forces for three missions -- fighting al-Qaeda, training Iraqi security forces and protecting U.S. forces conducting those two missions. Some experts believe that even 60,000 U.S. troops would be insufficient for those functions -- even if the Iraqis were not, as they will be for the foreseeable future, dependent on U.S. logistics, transport, fire support, air support, armor and medevac capabilities.
What is your estimate of the numbers required by your policy? How, and in consultation with whom, did you arrive at your estimate? As to fighting terrorists but not insurgents -- how would soldiers and Marines tell the difference? If, while searching for terrorists, they make contact with insurgents, would your rules of engagement call for a full-force response? You say all "combat brigades" should be out of Iraq "by the end of next year." Even if al-Qaeda is still dangerous? Who, after the end of next year, will protect U.S. noncombat forces that you say "will continue to protect U.S. diplomats and facilities" and to "train and equip" Iraqi forces?
In an interview with the Associated Press in July, you argued that preventing genocide in Iraq is not a sound reason for keeping troops there: "By that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife, which we haven't done. We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done."
Do you think U.S. obligations to Iraq, and to the many Iraqis who have actively collaborated with us, are no greater than our obligations, if any, to the residents of Congo or Darfur? Would a humanitarian disaster have to threaten to be a strategic disaster for the United States before an Obama administration would intervene militarily?
In his second inaugural address, President Bush said: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." You have said: "In today's globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people."
Well. Given that the goals of liberty and security can both generate foreign policy overreaching, and given the similarity between your formulation and Bush's, should people who are dismayed by Bush's universalizing imperative be wary of yours? Does not yours require interventions in Darfur -- where you say " rolling genocide" is occurring -- and in Congo and similar situations?
You stress the importance of people taking "responsibility" for their actions. But in a Financial Times column regarding the subprime mortgage turmoil, you said that lenders, by "lowering their lending standards," were guilty of "pushing," "hoodwinking" and "driving" low-income buyers into mortgages "they could not possibly afford." The "victims," you wrote, "are the millions of borrowers who followed the rules, whose only crime was in taking out mortgages that lenders told them they could afford." You propose a fund to help these millions of borrowers, partially paid for by penalties on lenders who committed fraud or behaved "irresponsibly."
Puzzles abound. How did lenders "push" these people? Are these "victims" absolved of personal responsibility simply because they were "told" they could afford the mortgages? Could you define -- and defend punishing -- lending that is "irresponsible" but not fraudulent? The foreclosure rate for so-called "jumbo" mortgages -- those of more than $400,000 -- is approximately the same as the rate for subprime mortgages. Are borrowers who seek and receive such large mortgages also blameless "victims" of being told and driven to do something reckless?
In 1978, in a case regarding racial preferences in admissions to a California medical school, the Supreme Court ruled, in an opinion written by Justice Lewis Powell, that race can be considered a "plus" factor for minority applicants. But Powell's biographer, John Jeffries of the University of Virginia law school, writes that when the justices met in conference to deliberate about the case, and Thurgood Marshall said such preferences would be needed for another century, Powell was "speechless." In 2003, the court affirmed the constitutionality of racial preferences in
admissions to the University of Michigan law school. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority, said such preferences would be unnecessary in 25 years.
How long do you think they will be necessary? By what criteria do you measure necessity? Why are they necessary now, two generations after the civil rights laws of the 1960s?
Sunday, September 30, 2007; B07
Is it audacious to hope for more clarity from Barack Obama than he has so far supplied? Herewith 17 questions for him:
You advocate leaving in Iraq "some" U.S. forces for three missions -- fighting al-Qaeda, training Iraqi security forces and protecting U.S. forces conducting those two missions. Some experts believe that even 60,000 U.S. troops would be insufficient for those functions -- even if the Iraqis were not, as they will be for the foreseeable future, dependent on U.S. logistics, transport, fire support, air support, armor and medevac capabilities.
What is your estimate of the numbers required by your policy? How, and in consultation with whom, did you arrive at your estimate? As to fighting terrorists but not insurgents -- how would soldiers and Marines tell the difference? If, while searching for terrorists, they make contact with insurgents, would your rules of engagement call for a full-force response? You say all "combat brigades" should be out of Iraq "by the end of next year." Even if al-Qaeda is still dangerous? Who, after the end of next year, will protect U.S. noncombat forces that you say "will continue to protect U.S. diplomats and facilities" and to "train and equip" Iraqi forces?
In an interview with the Associated Press in July, you argued that preventing genocide in Iraq is not a sound reason for keeping troops there: "By that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife, which we haven't done. We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done."
Do you think U.S. obligations to Iraq, and to the many Iraqis who have actively collaborated with us, are no greater than our obligations, if any, to the residents of Congo or Darfur? Would a humanitarian disaster have to threaten to be a strategic disaster for the United States before an Obama administration would intervene militarily?
In his second inaugural address, President Bush said: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." You have said: "In today's globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people."
Well. Given that the goals of liberty and security can both generate foreign policy overreaching, and given the similarity between your formulation and Bush's, should people who are dismayed by Bush's universalizing imperative be wary of yours? Does not yours require interventions in Darfur -- where you say " rolling genocide" is occurring -- and in Congo and similar situations?
You stress the importance of people taking "responsibility" for their actions. But in a Financial Times column regarding the subprime mortgage turmoil, you said that lenders, by "lowering their lending standards," were guilty of "pushing," "hoodwinking" and "driving" low-income buyers into mortgages "they could not possibly afford." The "victims," you wrote, "are the millions of borrowers who followed the rules, whose only crime was in taking out mortgages that lenders told them they could afford." You propose a fund to help these millions of borrowers, partially paid for by penalties on lenders who committed fraud or behaved "irresponsibly."
Puzzles abound. How did lenders "push" these people? Are these "victims" absolved of personal responsibility simply because they were "told" they could afford the mortgages? Could you define -- and defend punishing -- lending that is "irresponsible" but not fraudulent? The foreclosure rate for so-called "jumbo" mortgages -- those of more than $400,000 -- is approximately the same as the rate for subprime mortgages. Are borrowers who seek and receive such large mortgages also blameless "victims" of being told and driven to do something reckless?
In 1978, in a case regarding racial preferences in admissions to a California medical school, the Supreme Court ruled, in an opinion written by Justice Lewis Powell, that race can be considered a "plus" factor for minority applicants. But Powell's biographer, John Jeffries of the University of Virginia law school, writes that when the justices met in conference to deliberate about the case, and Thurgood Marshall said such preferences would be needed for another century, Powell was "speechless." In 2003, the court affirmed the constitutionality of racial preferences in
admissions to the University of Michigan law school. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority, said such preferences would be unnecessary in 25 years.
How long do you think they will be necessary? By what criteria do you measure necessity? Why are they necessary now, two generations after the civil rights laws of the 1960s?
Conspiracy Theory
Who really drives America's policy toward the Middle East?
Reviewed by Samuel G. Freedman
Sunday, October 7, 2007; BW04
In the fifth chapter of the New Testament's Book of Romans, there appears the single verse that established the concept of original sin. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin," the passage in the King James version reads, "and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." From Adam onward, in other words, sin is hereditary, ancestral, inescapable except through the acceptance of Jesus Christ.
Original sin over the millennia has become more than a religious belief, and a contested one at that. It has entered our collective vocabulary as a powerful metaphor for ineradicable guilt, guilt based on the condition of merely existing. As such, original sin serves very well, if unintentionally, as the framework for The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the broadside by political scientists John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard.
For all its attention to American foreign policy and domestic lawmaking, The Israel Lobby operates more deeply as a theology, a belief system. The original sin, in the Mearsheimer-Walt cosmology, is the United States' support for Israel, which they view as the root cause of global instability, Islamist terrorism and American insecurity. To enter into this faith is to accept the premise that a shifting, stealthy, protoplasmic group of Zionists, most of them Jews but some evangelical Christians, have for decades manipulated the puppet strings of Congress and the White House.
The Israel lobby's "loose coalition of individuals and organizations" has not simply steered the United States into a self-destructive and staggeringly expensive bond with Israel, a "strategic liability." It has pushed America into the Iraq war, alienated us from Western European allies, ruined rapprochement with Syria and begun greasing the way for a military strike against Iran.
Like some other critics of the American-Israeli relationship -- the historian Tony Judt, former President Jimmy Carter -- Mearsheimer and Walt perceive themselves as speaking a previously unutterable truth, a truth so shattering in its clarity that powerful forces seek to muzzle it. The more voices are raised against them, the more convinced they are of their own rightness and persecution.
But, of course, there is nothing very new in what these two scholars say about the pervasive, hidden power of Jews, that convenient euphemism. Mearsheimer and Walt assure readers that the Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy, that it is perfectly acceptable for special-interest groups to advocate for their causes and that they categorically reject such anti-Semitic evergreens as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It may not be fair to hold any writer responsible for his or her audience. But it is impossible to plow through this book without feeling certain that Mearsheimer and Walt have provided required reading for Jew-haters worldwide. Their credentials in the academic establishment -- and, indeed, the imprimatur of their publisher -- supply intellectual legitimacy to a blatantly slanted, inherently biased worldview.
I would have no such problems with Mearsheimer and Walt had they openly written the prescriptive book that hides within this putatively dispassionate one. They want the United States to tilt toward the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict and to impose a geopolitical compromise on the Israelis. To achieve this, they want Washington to reduce military and economic aid to Jerusalem and possibly to invoke sanctions of the sort deployed against the former apartheid regime in South Africa. That is a policy recommendation worthy of sustained, serious debate.
Yet one learns this agenda only at the end of The Israel Lobby. For most of the preceding 300-odd pages, Mearsheimer and Walt use a measured tone and copious footnotes to evoke the sense that they are bloodlessly parsing the facts. In the 18 months since Mearsheimer and Walt published the articles that anticipated this book -- initially on a Harvard Web site and then in the London Review of Books -- their thesis has become widely known and vigorously debated. They believe that Israel's supporters in the United States, led by the potent American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), have used campaign donations and media clout to drive America into blind endorsement of everything Israel does, including its settlement of conquered Palestinian land. A great deal of international terrorism against the United States, including al-Qaeda's, has come in response to America's complicity in Israeli aggression. Finally, the United States has adopted its confrontational policies toward Syria, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq primarily to serve Israeli interests.
Such a synopsis, however, fails to convey what Mearsheimer and Walt have omitted, which is as important as what they have said. In their original-sin perspective, there has been no tangled spiral of causes and effects; only Israel's actions and policies have destabilized the Middle East. Palestinian terrorism is the response of an occupied, outgunned people; from the Munich Olympics massacre to the suicide bombing in 2002 at a seder in Netanya, the attacks that traumatized Israel's populace and many moderate-to-liberal American Jews and drove their politics to the right are barely mentioned. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vow to "wipe Israel off the map" was mistranslated, according to Mearsheimer and Walt. The Israeli offer of land for peace at Camp David was only "purportedly generous."
The logical outgrowth of such dismissiveness appears in this rather chilling section toward the book's end: "Although we believe that America should support Israel's existence, Israel's security is ultimately not of critical strategic importance to the United States. In the event that Israel was conquered . . . neither America's territorial integrity, its military power, its economic prestige, nor its core political values would be jeopardized. By contrast, if oil exports from the Persian Gulf were significantly reduced, the effects on America's well-being would be profound."
It is certainly the right of Mearsheimer and Walt to advance these arguments, and their analysis of Camp David in particular echoes that of Robert Malley, one of the American mediators there. There is no lack of Israeli culpability in the Middle East morass, most obviously for the settlement enterprise. Still, one can leave this book with only the faintest realization that the political majority in Israel had been prepared to withdraw from most of the occupied territories to conclude a peace agreement with a Palestinian state -- until the Al-Aksa intifada brought terrorism as deeply into sovereign, pre-1967 Israel as the Tel Aviv beachfront. Having withdrawn from all of Gaza in 2005, Israel received a steady barrage of rocket attacks, which undermined public support for further disengagement from portions, at least, of the West Bank. The authors do not have to concur with the Israeli reaction to those events, but they prove their intellectual dishonesty in barely even mentioning them.
Thus, while Mearsheimer and Walt endorse a two-state solution, they still lump into the nefarious Israel lobby some of the very diplomats -- Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, to name two -- who tried to negotiate precisely such a peace agreement. The authors make a point of quoting Jews and Israelis such as the historian Benny Morris and the journalist J.J. Goldberg to buttress The Israel Lobby's premise; the uninformed reader would never guess that Morris in the New Republic and Goldberg in his editorials in the Forward have delivered two of the most persuasive demolitions of the Mearsheimer-Walt theory. (Full disclosure: The book refers to one of my own op-ed columns in USA Today and misrepresents its contention that Jews were not to blame for the Iraq war.)
The latest full-length rejoinder to Mearsheimer and Walt is Abraham H. Foxman's The Deadliest Lies. As national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Foxman has often led his organization away from its core concern with various forms of discrimination and made it more of an agency for Israel advocacy. Indeed, he is one of the usual suspects whom Mearsheimer and Walt round up. So it comes as no surprise that Foxman would want to reply in kind. But The Deadliest Lies reads like a collection of talking points and historical factoids rather than a lucid essay, much less a book. It took a lot of white space to stretch this thin volume out to a respectable 256 pages.
While Foxman contributes some valuable material to the ongoing debate -- quotations from Charles Lindbergh blaming the Jews for pushing America into World War II, for example -- he sacrifices credibility in presenting AIPAC as just any old lobbying group. The answer to conspiracy theories about Jewish influence is not to pretend Jews don't have it. It's to say, as J.J. Goldberg has done in his book Jewish Power, that playing the interest-group game within the law requires no apologies. And it's to say something that Mearsheimer and Walt simply refuse to believe: All the lobbying in the world on Israel's behalf couldn't have succeeded had there not also been enough voters, the vast number of them non-Jews, who genuinely do believe in the moral and strategic foundations of the unique, and uniquely controversial, U.S.-Israeli relationship. *
Who really drives America's policy toward the Middle East?
Reviewed by Samuel G. Freedman
Sunday, October 7, 2007; BW04
In the fifth chapter of the New Testament's Book of Romans, there appears the single verse that established the concept of original sin. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin," the passage in the King James version reads, "and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." From Adam onward, in other words, sin is hereditary, ancestral, inescapable except through the acceptance of Jesus Christ.
Original sin over the millennia has become more than a religious belief, and a contested one at that. It has entered our collective vocabulary as a powerful metaphor for ineradicable guilt, guilt based on the condition of merely existing. As such, original sin serves very well, if unintentionally, as the framework for The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the broadside by political scientists John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard.
For all its attention to American foreign policy and domestic lawmaking, The Israel Lobby operates more deeply as a theology, a belief system. The original sin, in the Mearsheimer-Walt cosmology, is the United States' support for Israel, which they view as the root cause of global instability, Islamist terrorism and American insecurity. To enter into this faith is to accept the premise that a shifting, stealthy, protoplasmic group of Zionists, most of them Jews but some evangelical Christians, have for decades manipulated the puppet strings of Congress and the White House.
The Israel lobby's "loose coalition of individuals and organizations" has not simply steered the United States into a self-destructive and staggeringly expensive bond with Israel, a "strategic liability." It has pushed America into the Iraq war, alienated us from Western European allies, ruined rapprochement with Syria and begun greasing the way for a military strike against Iran.
Like some other critics of the American-Israeli relationship -- the historian Tony Judt, former President Jimmy Carter -- Mearsheimer and Walt perceive themselves as speaking a previously unutterable truth, a truth so shattering in its clarity that powerful forces seek to muzzle it. The more voices are raised against them, the more convinced they are of their own rightness and persecution.
But, of course, there is nothing very new in what these two scholars say about the pervasive, hidden power of Jews, that convenient euphemism. Mearsheimer and Walt assure readers that the Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy, that it is perfectly acceptable for special-interest groups to advocate for their causes and that they categorically reject such anti-Semitic evergreens as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It may not be fair to hold any writer responsible for his or her audience. But it is impossible to plow through this book without feeling certain that Mearsheimer and Walt have provided required reading for Jew-haters worldwide. Their credentials in the academic establishment -- and, indeed, the imprimatur of their publisher -- supply intellectual legitimacy to a blatantly slanted, inherently biased worldview.
I would have no such problems with Mearsheimer and Walt had they openly written the prescriptive book that hides within this putatively dispassionate one. They want the United States to tilt toward the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict and to impose a geopolitical compromise on the Israelis. To achieve this, they want Washington to reduce military and economic aid to Jerusalem and possibly to invoke sanctions of the sort deployed against the former apartheid regime in South Africa. That is a policy recommendation worthy of sustained, serious debate.
Yet one learns this agenda only at the end of The Israel Lobby. For most of the preceding 300-odd pages, Mearsheimer and Walt use a measured tone and copious footnotes to evoke the sense that they are bloodlessly parsing the facts. In the 18 months since Mearsheimer and Walt published the articles that anticipated this book -- initially on a Harvard Web site and then in the London Review of Books -- their thesis has become widely known and vigorously debated. They believe that Israel's supporters in the United States, led by the potent American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), have used campaign donations and media clout to drive America into blind endorsement of everything Israel does, including its settlement of conquered Palestinian land. A great deal of international terrorism against the United States, including al-Qaeda's, has come in response to America's complicity in Israeli aggression. Finally, the United States has adopted its confrontational policies toward Syria, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq primarily to serve Israeli interests.
Such a synopsis, however, fails to convey what Mearsheimer and Walt have omitted, which is as important as what they have said. In their original-sin perspective, there has been no tangled spiral of causes and effects; only Israel's actions and policies have destabilized the Middle East. Palestinian terrorism is the response of an occupied, outgunned people; from the Munich Olympics massacre to the suicide bombing in 2002 at a seder in Netanya, the attacks that traumatized Israel's populace and many moderate-to-liberal American Jews and drove their politics to the right are barely mentioned. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vow to "wipe Israel off the map" was mistranslated, according to Mearsheimer and Walt. The Israeli offer of land for peace at Camp David was only "purportedly generous."
The logical outgrowth of such dismissiveness appears in this rather chilling section toward the book's end: "Although we believe that America should support Israel's existence, Israel's security is ultimately not of critical strategic importance to the United States. In the event that Israel was conquered . . . neither America's territorial integrity, its military power, its economic prestige, nor its core political values would be jeopardized. By contrast, if oil exports from the Persian Gulf were significantly reduced, the effects on America's well-being would be profound."
It is certainly the right of Mearsheimer and Walt to advance these arguments, and their analysis of Camp David in particular echoes that of Robert Malley, one of the American mediators there. There is no lack of Israeli culpability in the Middle East morass, most obviously for the settlement enterprise. Still, one can leave this book with only the faintest realization that the political majority in Israel had been prepared to withdraw from most of the occupied territories to conclude a peace agreement with a Palestinian state -- until the Al-Aksa intifada brought terrorism as deeply into sovereign, pre-1967 Israel as the Tel Aviv beachfront. Having withdrawn from all of Gaza in 2005, Israel received a steady barrage of rocket attacks, which undermined public support for further disengagement from portions, at least, of the West Bank. The authors do not have to concur with the Israeli reaction to those events, but they prove their intellectual dishonesty in barely even mentioning them.
Thus, while Mearsheimer and Walt endorse a two-state solution, they still lump into the nefarious Israel lobby some of the very diplomats -- Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, to name two -- who tried to negotiate precisely such a peace agreement. The authors make a point of quoting Jews and Israelis such as the historian Benny Morris and the journalist J.J. Goldberg to buttress The Israel Lobby's premise; the uninformed reader would never guess that Morris in the New Republic and Goldberg in his editorials in the Forward have delivered two of the most persuasive demolitions of the Mearsheimer-Walt theory. (Full disclosure: The book refers to one of my own op-ed columns in USA Today and misrepresents its contention that Jews were not to blame for the Iraq war.)
The latest full-length rejoinder to Mearsheimer and Walt is Abraham H. Foxman's The Deadliest Lies. As national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Foxman has often led his organization away from its core concern with various forms of discrimination and made it more of an agency for Israel advocacy. Indeed, he is one of the usual suspects whom Mearsheimer and Walt round up. So it comes as no surprise that Foxman would want to reply in kind. But The Deadliest Lies reads like a collection of talking points and historical factoids rather than a lucid essay, much less a book. It took a lot of white space to stretch this thin volume out to a respectable 256 pages.
While Foxman contributes some valuable material to the ongoing debate -- quotations from Charles Lindbergh blaming the Jews for pushing America into World War II, for example -- he sacrifices credibility in presenting AIPAC as just any old lobbying group. The answer to conspiracy theories about Jewish influence is not to pretend Jews don't have it. It's to say, as J.J. Goldberg has done in his book Jewish Power, that playing the interest-group game within the law requires no apologies. And it's to say something that Mearsheimer and Walt simply refuse to believe: All the lobbying in the world on Israel's behalf couldn't have succeeded had there not also been enough voters, the vast number of them non-Jews, who genuinely do believe in the moral and strategic foundations of the unique, and uniquely controversial, U.S.-Israeli relationship. *
Who Made Hillary Queen?
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B01
Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there's nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency?
She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, both in polls and in fundraising. If the Democrats can't win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But in all seriousness: What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits?
We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the rather useful institution of constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger.
At a time when Americans seem to contemplate with equanimity up to 28 solid years of uninterrupted Bush-Clinton rule, please note that there are almost no political dynasties left in British politics, at least on the Tory side. Admittedly, Hilary Benn, the environmental secretary, is the fourth generation of his family to sit in Parliament and the third to serve in a Labor Party cabinet. But England otherwise has nothing now to match the noble houses of Kennedy, Gore and Bush.
And in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton's r¿sum¿ even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It's true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina, where Sen. Cristina Fern¿ndez de Kirchner may succeed President N¿stor Kirchner, or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines -- and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. Such things also happened (apart from the assassination) in the early days of women's entry into British politics. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Lady Astor, by birth Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Va., who inherited her husband's seat in 1919 when he inherited his peerage, but we haven't seen a case like that for many years.
In one democracy after another, women have been enfranchised, entered politics and risen to the top. The United States lags far behind in every way. A record number of women now serve in Congress, which only makes the figures -- 71 of 435 House members and 16 of 100 senators -- all the more unimpressive. Compare those statistics with Norway's, where 37 percent of lawmakers are women. In Sweden, it's 45 percent.
More to the point, women who make political careers in other democracies do it their way, which usually means the hard way. Not many people had fewer advantages in life -- by birth or marriage or anything else -- than Golda Meir, born in poverty in Russia and taken to the United States as a girl before she settled in Palestine. She was one of only two women among the 24 people who signed Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. After serving under David Ben-Gurion as foreign minister, she became prime minister in 1969 -- stepping into a man's shoes, it's true, but those of her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, who died unexpectedly in office.
Four years later, Meir showed that a woman could lead her country in war as well as peace, an example that Margaret Thatcher would follow. Thatcher made her way from a lower-middle-class home to Oxford at a time when there were few women there from any background. She then had not one but two careers, as a barrister and as an industrial chemist. (One of the gravest charges against her is that she helped invent a noxious concoction called "Mr. Whippy" squirtable ice cream.) After the traditional blooding of British politics -- fighting and losing a parliamentary election -- she entered Parliament in 1959 and served there for more than 30 years, working her way up as a Conservative backbencher, junior minister and then cabinet minister, speaking, debating, listening (yes, even Thatcher sometimes listened), pounding the streets at election time and attending dreary meetings in her constituency.
She not only had no advantages, but she was at a disadvantage in what was still very much a chaps' party -- dominated by men who had attended the same schools, served in the same regiments and belonged to the same clubs. But she ignored all that. In 1975, she was the only Tory with the guts to challenge Edward Heath for the party leadership, and in 1979 she led her party to victory in the first of three general elections.
To be sure, some women in politics have been less successful than others. France's first female prime minister was ¿dith Cresson, who lasted less than a year in office, and the first Canadian was poor Kim Campbell, who held the job for less than six months before leading her party to catastrophic electoral defeat. But Helen Clark in New Zealand and Angela Merkel in Germany have fought the political fight on equal terms, neither expecting nor receiving any favors because of their sex.
What a contrast Hillary Clinton presents! Everyone recognizes the nepotism or favoritism she has enjoyed: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. And yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn't seem to have impinged on Americans.
Seven years ago, she turned up in New York, a state with which she had a somewhat tenuous connection, expecting to be made senator by acclamation (particularly once Rudy Giuliani decided not to run against her). Until that point, she had never won or even sought any elective office, not in the House or in a state legislature. Nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband's health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.
No doubt she has been a diligent senator, even if the cutting words of the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier about "the most plodding and expedient politician in America" ring painfully true, and no doubt her main Democratic rivals have only quite modest experience themselves: Obama's stint in the Illinois state legislature before entering the U.S. Senate in 2005, John Edwards's one term in the Senate. But both men are unquestionably self-made, and no one can say that they are where they are because of any kin or spouse.
Predictably enough, Sen. Clinton's husband has tried to defend her with his quicksilver tongue, speaking recently on BBC Radio here, where he's plugging his new book, and on television back home. Dynasties mean the kings of France, Bill Clinton told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," whereas Hillary has had "a totally different career path" from his, "from a different political base" to a different "set of expertise areas."
"And I think the real question here is not whether she's establishing a dynasty," he went on. "I don't like it whenever anybody gets something they're not entitled to just because of their families. But in this case, I honestly believe . . . she's the best suited, best qualified
nonincumbent I've had a chance to vote for." (Really? Better qualified, in terms of experience, than Hubert Humphrey or Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis?) "So I just don't want to see her eliminated because she's my wife," the former president added. The gentleman doth protest too much on behalf of his lady, methinks: This is the best Clintonian evasive style. No one for a second thinks Sen. Clinton's marital status should be held against her. The question is whether she has any other serious claim to high office.
By way of what English barristers call a bad point, the former president mentioned that, after Robert F. Kennedy had served as his brother's attorney general, Congress made it illegal for a president's family member to be in the Cabinet. "I actually agree with that," Clinton said. "I think it would be a mistake for Hillary to give me a line policy-making job." So was it a mistake for him to have given her the health-care job?
All in all, "Democracy in America," not to mention equality or feminism in America, can sometimes look very odd from the outside. We've seen Jean Kennedy Smith made ambassador to Dublin (and a disastrous one) because she was famous for being a sister, then Pamela Digby Harriman made ambassador to Paris (and rather a good one) because she was famous for being a socialite.
Now Hillary Rodham Clinton has become a potential president because she is famous for being a wife (and a wronged wife at that). Europe has long since accepted the great 19th-century liberal principle of "the career open to the talents." In the 21st century, isn't it time that the republic founded on the proposition that all men are created equal -- and women, too, one hopes -- also caught up with it?
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B01
Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there's nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency?
She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, both in polls and in fundraising. If the Democrats can't win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But in all seriousness: What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits?
We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the rather useful institution of constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger.
At a time when Americans seem to contemplate with equanimity up to 28 solid years of uninterrupted Bush-Clinton rule, please note that there are almost no political dynasties left in British politics, at least on the Tory side. Admittedly, Hilary Benn, the environmental secretary, is the fourth generation of his family to sit in Parliament and the third to serve in a Labor Party cabinet. But England otherwise has nothing now to match the noble houses of Kennedy, Gore and Bush.
And in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton's r¿sum¿ even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It's true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina, where Sen. Cristina Fern¿ndez de Kirchner may succeed President N¿stor Kirchner, or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines -- and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. Such things also happened (apart from the assassination) in the early days of women's entry into British politics. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Lady Astor, by birth Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Va., who inherited her husband's seat in 1919 when he inherited his peerage, but we haven't seen a case like that for many years.
In one democracy after another, women have been enfranchised, entered politics and risen to the top. The United States lags far behind in every way. A record number of women now serve in Congress, which only makes the figures -- 71 of 435 House members and 16 of 100 senators -- all the more unimpressive. Compare those statistics with Norway's, where 37 percent of lawmakers are women. In Sweden, it's 45 percent.
More to the point, women who make political careers in other democracies do it their way, which usually means the hard way. Not many people had fewer advantages in life -- by birth or marriage or anything else -- than Golda Meir, born in poverty in Russia and taken to the United States as a girl before she settled in Palestine. She was one of only two women among the 24 people who signed Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. After serving under David Ben-Gurion as foreign minister, she became prime minister in 1969 -- stepping into a man's shoes, it's true, but those of her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, who died unexpectedly in office.
Four years later, Meir showed that a woman could lead her country in war as well as peace, an example that Margaret Thatcher would follow. Thatcher made her way from a lower-middle-class home to Oxford at a time when there were few women there from any background. She then had not one but two careers, as a barrister and as an industrial chemist. (One of the gravest charges against her is that she helped invent a noxious concoction called "Mr. Whippy" squirtable ice cream.) After the traditional blooding of British politics -- fighting and losing a parliamentary election -- she entered Parliament in 1959 and served there for more than 30 years, working her way up as a Conservative backbencher, junior minister and then cabinet minister, speaking, debating, listening (yes, even Thatcher sometimes listened), pounding the streets at election time and attending dreary meetings in her constituency.
She not only had no advantages, but she was at a disadvantage in what was still very much a chaps' party -- dominated by men who had attended the same schools, served in the same regiments and belonged to the same clubs. But she ignored all that. In 1975, she was the only Tory with the guts to challenge Edward Heath for the party leadership, and in 1979 she led her party to victory in the first of three general elections.
To be sure, some women in politics have been less successful than others. France's first female prime minister was ¿dith Cresson, who lasted less than a year in office, and the first Canadian was poor Kim Campbell, who held the job for less than six months before leading her party to catastrophic electoral defeat. But Helen Clark in New Zealand and Angela Merkel in Germany have fought the political fight on equal terms, neither expecting nor receiving any favors because of their sex.
What a contrast Hillary Clinton presents! Everyone recognizes the nepotism or favoritism she has enjoyed: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. And yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn't seem to have impinged on Americans.
Seven years ago, she turned up in New York, a state with which she had a somewhat tenuous connection, expecting to be made senator by acclamation (particularly once Rudy Giuliani decided not to run against her). Until that point, she had never won or even sought any elective office, not in the House or in a state legislature. Nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband's health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.
No doubt she has been a diligent senator, even if the cutting words of the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier about "the most plodding and expedient politician in America" ring painfully true, and no doubt her main Democratic rivals have only quite modest experience themselves: Obama's stint in the Illinois state legislature before entering the U.S. Senate in 2005, John Edwards's one term in the Senate. But both men are unquestionably self-made, and no one can say that they are where they are because of any kin or spouse.
Predictably enough, Sen. Clinton's husband has tried to defend her with his quicksilver tongue, speaking recently on BBC Radio here, where he's plugging his new book, and on television back home. Dynasties mean the kings of France, Bill Clinton told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," whereas Hillary has had "a totally different career path" from his, "from a different political base" to a different "set of expertise areas."
"And I think the real question here is not whether she's establishing a dynasty," he went on. "I don't like it whenever anybody gets something they're not entitled to just because of their families. But in this case, I honestly believe . . . she's the best suited, best qualified
nonincumbent I've had a chance to vote for." (Really? Better qualified, in terms of experience, than Hubert Humphrey or Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis?) "So I just don't want to see her eliminated because she's my wife," the former president added. The gentleman doth protest too much on behalf of his lady, methinks: This is the best Clintonian evasive style. No one for a second thinks Sen. Clinton's marital status should be held against her. The question is whether she has any other serious claim to high office.
By way of what English barristers call a bad point, the former president mentioned that, after Robert F. Kennedy had served as his brother's attorney general, Congress made it illegal for a president's family member to be in the Cabinet. "I actually agree with that," Clinton said. "I think it would be a mistake for Hillary to give me a line policy-making job." So was it a mistake for him to have given her the health-care job?
All in all, "Democracy in America," not to mention equality or feminism in America, can sometimes look very odd from the outside. We've seen Jean Kennedy Smith made ambassador to Dublin (and a disastrous one) because she was famous for being a sister, then Pamela Digby Harriman made ambassador to Paris (and rather a good one) because she was famous for being a socialite.
Now Hillary Rodham Clinton has become a potential president because she is famous for being a wife (and a wronged wife at that). Europe has long since accepted the great 19th-century liberal principle of "the career open to the talents." In the 21st century, isn't it time that the republic founded on the proposition that all men are created equal -- and women, too, one hopes -- also caught up with it?
Forget Easy Money. Try Saving a Few Bucks.
By Ray Boshara and Phillip Longman
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B03
Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender, has a curious new idea -- or, more precisely, an old one. No longer will it use wads of Chinese cash recycled through Wall Street to make subprime loans to unqualified borrowers. Instead, it will take in deposits from small savers and lend them out to people who might actually repay them -- just like that humble thrift institution president George Bailey did in "It's a Wonderful Life."
Imagine: a bank that promotes thrift! This could be the start of something big. Writing recently in the American Banker, Eugene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency, advised financial institutions to stop relying "on the easy money that comes from wholesale funding" and to concentrate instead "on harder-to-get core deposits." How quaint. Remember when banks actually tried to instill the savings habit by going into schools and helping kids set up small passbook accounts? Today, the first experience most younger Americans have with a bank comes during freshman orientation at college, when they come across a table laden with giveaways and credit-card applications.
This return to thrift comes none too soon. Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans lost their homes in one year -- and we're not even in a recession, at least not yet. But we're still on course to see 2 million foreclosures in 2007, afflicting one in 62 households. That's a 67 percent increase from 2006, according to RealtyTrac. The Federal Reserve's recent decision to cut its benchmark rate by half a point, while widely praised on Wall Street, will do little to stop the slide.
Also not since the Great Depression have Americans saved so little. Even with unemployment at historically low levels, Americans spent more than they earned in both 2005 and 2006 -- and charged the difference. Household debt, not including mortgages, now eats up nearly 15 percent of disposable income -- more than food and gasoline combined. One in seven families is dealing with a debt collector. Children today are more likely to live through their parents' bankruptcy than their parents' divorce. Americans' stunning lack of savings not only brings personal tragedy but also is causing the dollar to plummet against all major currencies, jeopardizing our economic growth and threatening the financial system worldwide.
What's going on? No doubt, some of us like to shop too much, but it's also true that the "fixed costs" of middle-class life have soared. Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School, shows that while family incomes have gone up in the past generation, the costs of health care, education, housing, child care and transportation have risen even higher.
Meanwhile, not only does the government itself borrow as though there were no tomorrow, primarily through unfunded health and pension plans, but it promotes what David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values calls "anti-thrift" institutions. Today, 41 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico run lotteries, and 11 states encourage casinos. Government has also allowed for the mainstreaming of other anti-thrift institutions -- some charging annual interest of more than 500 percent -- that once existed, if at all, only in the shadows of society. Payday lenders, rent-to-own stores, auto-title lenders, some franchise tax preparers and chain pawn shops are all now as common across the landscape of middle-class America as Applebee's.
After the terrorist attacks of 2001, President Bush told us that the patriotic thing to do was to shop. But Osama bin Laden is still out there, gas is more expensive than ever, the credit card is maxed out and our homes are depreciating. There's a better way: the old-fashioned virtue called thrift.
Historically, thrift didn't carry its current association of being cheap or stingy. Rather, it meant the wise use of resources. It meant an abhorrence of waste, whether of raw materials, time, energy or money. In short, it meant conservation.
To conserve money, working-class men and women banded together to create "thrift" institutions. Before these institutions were deregulated and taken over by the fast-buck crowd in the 1980s, they provided a staid but reliable vehicle for building a nation of "freeholding" middle-class homeowners and small-scale entrepreneurs. Most Americans understood, until the triumph of the anti-thrift institutions, that their own freedom from wage slavery -- and, indeed, the civic health and wealth of the republic -- depended on the savings habit and the widespread ownership of unencumbered small properties that it makes possible.
Today, by contrast, while many Americans understand the need to conserve energy and natural resources, they have trouble seeing what any of that has to do with credit cards and subprime mortgages. But conserving financial resources is not only still essential to individual liberty; it is also essential to moderating wasteful consumption and saving the environment.
Reviving the American thrift ethos won't be easy, and it will probably take at least a generation. But we can take some small steps now that would make saving easy, automatic and frequent. Our goal should be to generate new savers as well as new savings -- in sharp contrast to current government policy, which allocates considerably more than $100 billion a year in tax breaks to high-income earners who would save anyway.
First, we should take advantage of one of the most powerful forces in human nature: inertia. Studies in behavioral economics show that when new hires have to opt out of a 401(k) retirement plan, as opposed to having to opt in, savings rates skyrocket. Also, building on the "Opportunity NYC" initiative (which is being privately funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and several other donors), governments, civic-minded corporations and philanthropies could make automatic savings deposits to individuals who engage in socially desirable behavior. Finish high school, volunteer in your community or buy an energy-efficient appliance, and your savings account receives a deposit.
Technology, if fully exploited, can also make the cost of maintaining a bank account far lower, thereby giving financial institutions a greater incentive to serve small savers and giving freedom to the "unbanked" poor from the gouging fees that payday lenders charge to cash checks. Imagine that your debit card is also an interest-paying savings card, to which your employer, the Internal Revenue Service and other entities can make automatic deposits. Some innovative firms are already offering such a product, which combines low cost with convenience and security.
Meanwhile, regulators should encourage more community-focused banks, credit unions and thrift institutions. These can resume their historical role of promoting thrift by helping customers become savers as well as (eventually) homeowners and small-business owners.
Congress should do its part as well. The bipartisan New Savers Act, for example, makes it easier to open bank accounts, buy savings bonds, put money away for college and receive financial education. Another bipartisan measure, the Automatic IRA Act, encourages automatic payroll deposits into IRAs. Other proposals authorize tax credits for low-income savers, as well as remove savings penalties for those on public assistance.
Finally, to usher in this "new thrift" across generations, Congress should establish a lifelong savings account for all children when they are born -- a reality in Britain and elsewhere and an idea that's rapidly gaining bipartisan momentum in the United States.
If you're an American born in the 20th century, thrift probably strikes you as a musty, downscale word -- reminiscent of used clothes, aged relatives who wrapped their sofas in plastic or perhaps the grandmother who saved Green Stamps. But it's worth remembering, as did generations of Americans struggling up from poverty and privation, that thrift is still the essential virtue that makes the American dream possible.
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B03
Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender, has a curious new idea -- or, more precisely, an old one. No longer will it use wads of Chinese cash recycled through Wall Street to make subprime loans to unqualified borrowers. Instead, it will take in deposits from small savers and lend them out to people who might actually repay them -- just like that humble thrift institution president George Bailey did in "It's a Wonderful Life."
Imagine: a bank that promotes thrift! This could be the start of something big. Writing recently in the American Banker, Eugene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency, advised financial institutions to stop relying "on the easy money that comes from wholesale funding" and to concentrate instead "on harder-to-get core deposits." How quaint. Remember when banks actually tried to instill the savings habit by going into schools and helping kids set up small passbook accounts? Today, the first experience most younger Americans have with a bank comes during freshman orientation at college, when they come across a table laden with giveaways and credit-card applications.
This return to thrift comes none too soon. Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans lost their homes in one year -- and we're not even in a recession, at least not yet. But we're still on course to see 2 million foreclosures in 2007, afflicting one in 62 households. That's a 67 percent increase from 2006, according to RealtyTrac. The Federal Reserve's recent decision to cut its benchmark rate by half a point, while widely praised on Wall Street, will do little to stop the slide.
Also not since the Great Depression have Americans saved so little. Even with unemployment at historically low levels, Americans spent more than they earned in both 2005 and 2006 -- and charged the difference. Household debt, not including mortgages, now eats up nearly 15 percent of disposable income -- more than food and gasoline combined. One in seven families is dealing with a debt collector. Children today are more likely to live through their parents' bankruptcy than their parents' divorce. Americans' stunning lack of savings not only brings personal tragedy but also is causing the dollar to plummet against all major currencies, jeopardizing our economic growth and threatening the financial system worldwide.
What's going on? No doubt, some of us like to shop too much, but it's also true that the "fixed costs" of middle-class life have soared. Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School, shows that while family incomes have gone up in the past generation, the costs of health care, education, housing, child care and transportation have risen even higher.
Meanwhile, not only does the government itself borrow as though there were no tomorrow, primarily through unfunded health and pension plans, but it promotes what David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values calls "anti-thrift" institutions. Today, 41 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico run lotteries, and 11 states encourage casinos. Government has also allowed for the mainstreaming of other anti-thrift institutions -- some charging annual interest of more than 500 percent -- that once existed, if at all, only in the shadows of society. Payday lenders, rent-to-own stores, auto-title lenders, some franchise tax preparers and chain pawn shops are all now as common across the landscape of middle-class America as Applebee's.
After the terrorist attacks of 2001, President Bush told us that the patriotic thing to do was to shop. But Osama bin Laden is still out there, gas is more expensive than ever, the credit card is maxed out and our homes are depreciating. There's a better way: the old-fashioned virtue called thrift.
Historically, thrift didn't carry its current association of being cheap or stingy. Rather, it meant the wise use of resources. It meant an abhorrence of waste, whether of raw materials, time, energy or money. In short, it meant conservation.
To conserve money, working-class men and women banded together to create "thrift" institutions. Before these institutions were deregulated and taken over by the fast-buck crowd in the 1980s, they provided a staid but reliable vehicle for building a nation of "freeholding" middle-class homeowners and small-scale entrepreneurs. Most Americans understood, until the triumph of the anti-thrift institutions, that their own freedom from wage slavery -- and, indeed, the civic health and wealth of the republic -- depended on the savings habit and the widespread ownership of unencumbered small properties that it makes possible.
Today, by contrast, while many Americans understand the need to conserve energy and natural resources, they have trouble seeing what any of that has to do with credit cards and subprime mortgages. But conserving financial resources is not only still essential to individual liberty; it is also essential to moderating wasteful consumption and saving the environment.
Reviving the American thrift ethos won't be easy, and it will probably take at least a generation. But we can take some small steps now that would make saving easy, automatic and frequent. Our goal should be to generate new savers as well as new savings -- in sharp contrast to current government policy, which allocates considerably more than $100 billion a year in tax breaks to high-income earners who would save anyway.
First, we should take advantage of one of the most powerful forces in human nature: inertia. Studies in behavioral economics show that when new hires have to opt out of a 401(k) retirement plan, as opposed to having to opt in, savings rates skyrocket. Also, building on the "Opportunity NYC" initiative (which is being privately funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and several other donors), governments, civic-minded corporations and philanthropies could make automatic savings deposits to individuals who engage in socially desirable behavior. Finish high school, volunteer in your community or buy an energy-efficient appliance, and your savings account receives a deposit.
Technology, if fully exploited, can also make the cost of maintaining a bank account far lower, thereby giving financial institutions a greater incentive to serve small savers and giving freedom to the "unbanked" poor from the gouging fees that payday lenders charge to cash checks. Imagine that your debit card is also an interest-paying savings card, to which your employer, the Internal Revenue Service and other entities can make automatic deposits. Some innovative firms are already offering such a product, which combines low cost with convenience and security.
Meanwhile, regulators should encourage more community-focused banks, credit unions and thrift institutions. These can resume their historical role of promoting thrift by helping customers become savers as well as (eventually) homeowners and small-business owners.
Congress should do its part as well. The bipartisan New Savers Act, for example, makes it easier to open bank accounts, buy savings bonds, put money away for college and receive financial education. Another bipartisan measure, the Automatic IRA Act, encourages automatic payroll deposits into IRAs. Other proposals authorize tax credits for low-income savers, as well as remove savings penalties for those on public assistance.
Finally, to usher in this "new thrift" across generations, Congress should establish a lifelong savings account for all children when they are born -- a reality in Britain and elsewhere and an idea that's rapidly gaining bipartisan momentum in the United States.
If you're an American born in the 20th century, thrift probably strikes you as a musty, downscale word -- reminiscent of used clothes, aged relatives who wrapped their sofas in plastic or perhaps the grandmother who saved Green Stamps. But it's worth remembering, as did generations of Americans struggling up from poverty and privation, that thrift is still the essential virtue that makes the American dream possible.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Missteps in the Bunker
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 23, 2007; A01
Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota's Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.
The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane's wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.
That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.
The episode, serious enough to trigger a rare "Bent Spear" nuclear incident report that raced through the chain of command to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and President Bush, provoked new questions inside and outside the Pentagon about the adequacy of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguards while the military's attention and resources are devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident.
The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on the plane in Louisiana for nearly nine hours more before being discovered. In total, the warheads slipped from the Air Force's nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone's knowledge.
"I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing," retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as U.S. Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, said in an interview.
A simple error in a missile storage room led to missteps at every turn, as ground crews failed to notice the warheads, and as security teams and flight crew members failed to provide adequate oversight and check the cargo thoroughly. An elaborate nuclear safeguard system, nurtured during the Cold War and infused with rigorous accounting and command procedures, was utterly debased, the investigation's early results show.
The incident came on the heels of multiple warnings -- some of which went to the highest levels of the Bush administration, including the National Security Council -- of security problems at Air Force installations where nuclear weapons are kept. The risks are not that warheads might be accidentally detonated, but that sloppy procedures could leave room for theft or damage to a warhead, disseminating its toxic nuclear materials.
A former National Security Council staff member with detailed knowledge described the event as something that people in the White House "have been assured never could happen." What occurred on Aug. 29-30, the former official said, was "a breakdown at a number of levels involving flight crew, munitions, storage and tracking procedures -- faults that never were to line up on a single day."
Missteps in the Bunker
The air base where the incident took place is one of the most remote and, for much of the year, coldest military posts in the continental United States. Veterans of Minot typically describe their assignments by counting the winters passed in the flat, treeless region where January temperatures sometimes reach 30 below zero. In airman-speak, a three-year assignment becomes "three winters" at Minot.
The daily routine for many of Minot's crews is a cycle of scheduled maintenance for the base's 35 aging B-52H Stratofortress bombers -- mammoth, eight-engine workhorses, the newest of which left the assembly line more than 45 years ago. Workers also tend to 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles kept at the ready in silos scattered across neighboring cornfields, as well as hundreds of smaller nuclear bombs, warheads and vehicles stored in sod-covered bunkers called igloos.
"We had a continuous workload in maintaining" warheads, said Scott Vest, a former Air Force captain who spent time in Minot's bunkers in the 1990s. "We had a stockpile of more than 400 . . . and some of them were always coming due" for service.
Among the many weapons and airframes, the AGM-129 cruise missile was well known at the base as a nuclear warhead delivery system carried by B-52s. With its unique shape and design, it is easily distinguished from the older AGM-86, which can be fitted with either a nuclear or a conventional warhead.
Last fall, after 17 years in the U.S. arsenal, the Air Force's more than 400 AGM-129s were ordered into retirement by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Minot was told to begin shipping out the unarmed missiles in small groups to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, La., for storage. By Aug. 29, its crews had already sent more than 200 missiles to Barksdale and knew the drill by heart.
The Air Force's account of what happened that day and the next was provided by multiple sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government's investigation is continuing and classified.
At 9:12 a.m. local time on Aug. 29, according to the account, ground crews in two trucks entered a gated compound at Minot known as the Weapons Storage Area and drove to an igloo where the cruise missiles were stored. The 21-foot missiles were already mounted on pylons, six apiece in clusters of three, for quick mounting to the wings of a B-52.
The AGM-129 is designed to carry silver W-80-1 nuclear warheads, which have a variable yield of between 5 and 150 kilotons. (A kiloton is equal to the explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT.) The warheads were meant to have been removed from the missiles before shipment. In their place, crews were supposed to insert metal dummies of the same size and weight, but a different color, so the missiles could still be properly attached under the bomber's wings.
A munitions custodian officer is supposed to keep track of the nuclear warheads. In the case of cruise missiles, a stamp-size window on the missile's frame allows workers to peer inside to check whether the warheads within are silver. In many cases, a red ribbon or marker attached to the missile serves as an additional warning. Finally, before the missiles are moved, two-man teams are supposed to look at check sheets, bar codes and serial numbers denoting whether the missiles are armed.
Why the warheads were not noticed in this case is not publicly known. But once the missiles were certified as unarmed, a requirement for unique security precautions when nuclear warheads are moved -- such as the presence of specially armed security police, the approval of a senior base commander and a special tracking system -- evaporated.
The trucks hauled the missile pylons from the bunker into the bustle of normal air base traffic, onto Bomber Boulevard and M Street, before turning onto a tarmac apron where the missiles were loaded onto the B-52. The loading took eight hours because of unusual trouble attaching the pylon on the right side of the plane -- the one with the dummy warheads.
By 5:12 p.m., the B-52 was fully loaded. The plane then sat on the tarmac overnight without special guards, protected for 15 hours by only the base's exterior chain-link fence and roving security patrols.
Air Force rules required members of the jet's flight crew to examine all of the missiles and warheads before the plane took off. But in this instance, just one person examined only the six unarmed missiles and inexplicably skipped the armed missiles on the left, according to officials familiar with the probe.
"If they're not expecting a live warhead it may be a very casual thing -- there's no need to set up the security system and play the whole nuclear game," said Vest, the former Minot airman. "As for the air crew, they're bus drivers at this point, as far as they know."
The plane, which had flown to Minot for the mission and was not certified to carry nuclear weapons, departed the next morning for Louisiana. When the bomber landed at Barksdale at 11:23 a.m., the air crew signed out and left for lunch, according to the probe.
It would be another nine hours -- until 8:30 p.m. -- before a Barksdale ground crew turned up at the parked aircraft to begin removing the missiles. At 8:45, 15 minutes into the task, a separate missile transport crew arrived in trucks. One of these airmen noticed something unusual about the missiles. Within an hour, a skeptical supervisor had examined them and ordered them secured.
By then it was 10 p.m., more than 36 hours after the warheads left their secure bunker in Minot.
Once the errant warheads were discovered, Air Force officers in Louisiana were alarmed enough to immediately notify the National Military Command Center, a highly secure area of the Pentagon that serves as the nerve center for U.S. nuclear war planning. Such "Bent Spear" events are ranked second in seriousness only to "Broken Arrow" incidents, which involve the loss, destruction or accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon.
The Air Force decided at first to keep the mishap under wraps, in part because of policies that prohibit the confirmation of any details about the storage or movement of nuclear weapons. No public acknowledgment was made until service members leaked the story to the Military Times, which published a brief account Sept. 5.
Officials familiar with the Bent Spear report say Air Force officials apparently did not anticipate that the episode would cause public concern. One passage in the report contains these four words:
"No press interest anticipated."
'What the Hell Happened Here?'
The news, when it did leak, provoked a reaction within the defense and national security communities that bordered on disbelief: How could so many safeguards, drilled into generations of nuclear weapons officers and crews, break down at once?
Military officers, nuclear weapons analysts and lawmakers have expressed concern that it was not just a fluke, but a symptom of deeper problems in the handling of nuclear weapons now that Cold War anxieties have abated.
"It is more significant than people first realized, and the more you look at it, the stranger it is," said Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress think tank and the author of a history of nuclear weapons. "These weapons -- the equivalent of 60 Hiroshimas -- were out of authorized command and control for more than a day."
The Air Force has sought to offer assurances that its security system is working. Within days, the service relieved one Minot officer of his command and disciplined several airmen, while assigning a major general to head an investigation that has already been extended for extra weeks. At the same time, Defense Department officials have announced that a Pentagon-appointed scientific advisory board will study the mishap as part of a larger review of procedures for handling nuclear weapons.
"Clearly this incident was unacceptable on many levels," said an Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Edward Thomas. "Our response has been swift and focused -- and it has really just begun. We will spend many months at the air staff and at our commands and bases ensuring that the root causes are addressed."
While Air Force officials see the Minot event as serious, they also note that it was harmless, since the six nuclear warheads never left the military's control. Even if the bomber had crashed, or if someone had stolen the warheads, fail-safe devices would have prevented a nuclear detonation.
But independent experts warn that whenever nuclear weapons are not properly safeguarded, their fissile materials are at risk of theft and diversion. Moreover, if the plane had crashed and the warheads' casings cracked, these highly toxic materials could have been widely dispersed.
"When what were multiple layers of tight nuclear weapon control internal procedures break down, some bad guy may eventually come along and take advantage of them," said a former senior administration official who had responsibility for nuclear security.
Some Air Force veterans say the base's officers made an egregious mistake in allowing nuclear-warhead-equipped missiles and unarmed missiles to be stored in the same bunker, a practice that a spokesman last week confirmed is routine. Charles Curtis, a former deputy energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said, "We always relied on segregation of nuclear weapons from conventional ones."
Former nuclear weapons officials have noted that the weapons transfer at the heart of the incident coincides with deep cuts in deployed nuclear forces that will bring the total number of warheads to as few as 1,700 by the year 2012 -- a reduction of more than 50 percent from 2001 levels. But the downsizing has created new accounting and logistical challenges, since U.S. policy is to keep thousands more warheads in storage, some as a strategic reserve and others awaiting dismantling.
A secret 1998 history of the Air Combat Command warned of "diminished attention for even 'the minimum standards' of nuclear weapons' maintenance, support and security" once such arms became less vital, according to a declassified copy obtained by Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' nuclear information project.
The Air Force's inspector general in 2003 found that half of the "nuclear surety" inspections conducted that year resulted in failing grades -- the worst performance since inspections of weapons-handling began. Minot's 5th Bomb Wing was among the units that failed, and the Louisiana-based 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale garnered an unsatisfactory rating in 2005.
Both units passed subsequent nuclear inspections, and Minot was given high marks in a 2006 inspection. The 2003 report on the 5th Bomb Wing attributed its poor performance to the demands of supporting combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wartime stresses had "resulted in a lack of time to focus and practice nuclear operations," the report stated.
Last year, the Air Force eliminated a separate nuclear-operations directorate known informally as the N Staff, which closely tracked the maintenance and security of nuclear weapons in the United States and other NATO countries. Currently, nuclear and space operations are combined in a single directorate. Air Force officials say the change was part of a service-wide reorganization and did not reflect diminished importance of nuclear operations.
"Where nuclear weapons have receded into the background is at the senior policy level, where there are other things people have to worry about," said Linton F. Brooks, who resigned in January as director of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Brooks, who oversaw billions of dollars in U.S. spending to help Russia secure its nuclear stockpile, said the mishandling of U.S. warheads indicates that "something went seriously wrong."
A similar refrain has been voiced hundreds of times in blogs and chat rooms popular with former and current military members. On a Web site run by the Military Times, a former B-52 crew chief who did not give his name wrote: "What the hell happened here?"
A former Air Force senior master sergeant wrote separately that "mistakes were made at the lowest level of supervision and this snowballed into the one of the biggest mistakes in USAF history. I am still scratching my head wondering how this could [have] happened."
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 23, 2007; A01
Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota's Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.
The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane's wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.
That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.
The episode, serious enough to trigger a rare "Bent Spear" nuclear incident report that raced through the chain of command to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and President Bush, provoked new questions inside and outside the Pentagon about the adequacy of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguards while the military's attention and resources are devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident.
The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on the plane in Louisiana for nearly nine hours more before being discovered. In total, the warheads slipped from the Air Force's nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone's knowledge.
"I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing," retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as U.S. Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, said in an interview.
A simple error in a missile storage room led to missteps at every turn, as ground crews failed to notice the warheads, and as security teams and flight crew members failed to provide adequate oversight and check the cargo thoroughly. An elaborate nuclear safeguard system, nurtured during the Cold War and infused with rigorous accounting and command procedures, was utterly debased, the investigation's early results show.
The incident came on the heels of multiple warnings -- some of which went to the highest levels of the Bush administration, including the National Security Council -- of security problems at Air Force installations where nuclear weapons are kept. The risks are not that warheads might be accidentally detonated, but that sloppy procedures could leave room for theft or damage to a warhead, disseminating its toxic nuclear materials.
A former National Security Council staff member with detailed knowledge described the event as something that people in the White House "have been assured never could happen." What occurred on Aug. 29-30, the former official said, was "a breakdown at a number of levels involving flight crew, munitions, storage and tracking procedures -- faults that never were to line up on a single day."
Missteps in the Bunker
The air base where the incident took place is one of the most remote and, for much of the year, coldest military posts in the continental United States. Veterans of Minot typically describe their assignments by counting the winters passed in the flat, treeless region where January temperatures sometimes reach 30 below zero. In airman-speak, a three-year assignment becomes "three winters" at Minot.
The daily routine for many of Minot's crews is a cycle of scheduled maintenance for the base's 35 aging B-52H Stratofortress bombers -- mammoth, eight-engine workhorses, the newest of which left the assembly line more than 45 years ago. Workers also tend to 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles kept at the ready in silos scattered across neighboring cornfields, as well as hundreds of smaller nuclear bombs, warheads and vehicles stored in sod-covered bunkers called igloos.
"We had a continuous workload in maintaining" warheads, said Scott Vest, a former Air Force captain who spent time in Minot's bunkers in the 1990s. "We had a stockpile of more than 400 . . . and some of them were always coming due" for service.
Among the many weapons and airframes, the AGM-129 cruise missile was well known at the base as a nuclear warhead delivery system carried by B-52s. With its unique shape and design, it is easily distinguished from the older AGM-86, which can be fitted with either a nuclear or a conventional warhead.
Last fall, after 17 years in the U.S. arsenal, the Air Force's more than 400 AGM-129s were ordered into retirement by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Minot was told to begin shipping out the unarmed missiles in small groups to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, La., for storage. By Aug. 29, its crews had already sent more than 200 missiles to Barksdale and knew the drill by heart.
The Air Force's account of what happened that day and the next was provided by multiple sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government's investigation is continuing and classified.
At 9:12 a.m. local time on Aug. 29, according to the account, ground crews in two trucks entered a gated compound at Minot known as the Weapons Storage Area and drove to an igloo where the cruise missiles were stored. The 21-foot missiles were already mounted on pylons, six apiece in clusters of three, for quick mounting to the wings of a B-52.
The AGM-129 is designed to carry silver W-80-1 nuclear warheads, which have a variable yield of between 5 and 150 kilotons. (A kiloton is equal to the explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT.) The warheads were meant to have been removed from the missiles before shipment. In their place, crews were supposed to insert metal dummies of the same size and weight, but a different color, so the missiles could still be properly attached under the bomber's wings.
A munitions custodian officer is supposed to keep track of the nuclear warheads. In the case of cruise missiles, a stamp-size window on the missile's frame allows workers to peer inside to check whether the warheads within are silver. In many cases, a red ribbon or marker attached to the missile serves as an additional warning. Finally, before the missiles are moved, two-man teams are supposed to look at check sheets, bar codes and serial numbers denoting whether the missiles are armed.
Why the warheads were not noticed in this case is not publicly known. But once the missiles were certified as unarmed, a requirement for unique security precautions when nuclear warheads are moved -- such as the presence of specially armed security police, the approval of a senior base commander and a special tracking system -- evaporated.
The trucks hauled the missile pylons from the bunker into the bustle of normal air base traffic, onto Bomber Boulevard and M Street, before turning onto a tarmac apron where the missiles were loaded onto the B-52. The loading took eight hours because of unusual trouble attaching the pylon on the right side of the plane -- the one with the dummy warheads.
By 5:12 p.m., the B-52 was fully loaded. The plane then sat on the tarmac overnight without special guards, protected for 15 hours by only the base's exterior chain-link fence and roving security patrols.
Air Force rules required members of the jet's flight crew to examine all of the missiles and warheads before the plane took off. But in this instance, just one person examined only the six unarmed missiles and inexplicably skipped the armed missiles on the left, according to officials familiar with the probe.
"If they're not expecting a live warhead it may be a very casual thing -- there's no need to set up the security system and play the whole nuclear game," said Vest, the former Minot airman. "As for the air crew, they're bus drivers at this point, as far as they know."
The plane, which had flown to Minot for the mission and was not certified to carry nuclear weapons, departed the next morning for Louisiana. When the bomber landed at Barksdale at 11:23 a.m., the air crew signed out and left for lunch, according to the probe.
It would be another nine hours -- until 8:30 p.m. -- before a Barksdale ground crew turned up at the parked aircraft to begin removing the missiles. At 8:45, 15 minutes into the task, a separate missile transport crew arrived in trucks. One of these airmen noticed something unusual about the missiles. Within an hour, a skeptical supervisor had examined them and ordered them secured.
By then it was 10 p.m., more than 36 hours after the warheads left their secure bunker in Minot.
Once the errant warheads were discovered, Air Force officers in Louisiana were alarmed enough to immediately notify the National Military Command Center, a highly secure area of the Pentagon that serves as the nerve center for U.S. nuclear war planning. Such "Bent Spear" events are ranked second in seriousness only to "Broken Arrow" incidents, which involve the loss, destruction or accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon.
The Air Force decided at first to keep the mishap under wraps, in part because of policies that prohibit the confirmation of any details about the storage or movement of nuclear weapons. No public acknowledgment was made until service members leaked the story to the Military Times, which published a brief account Sept. 5.
Officials familiar with the Bent Spear report say Air Force officials apparently did not anticipate that the episode would cause public concern. One passage in the report contains these four words:
"No press interest anticipated."
'What the Hell Happened Here?'
The news, when it did leak, provoked a reaction within the defense and national security communities that bordered on disbelief: How could so many safeguards, drilled into generations of nuclear weapons officers and crews, break down at once?
Military officers, nuclear weapons analysts and lawmakers have expressed concern that it was not just a fluke, but a symptom of deeper problems in the handling of nuclear weapons now that Cold War anxieties have abated.
"It is more significant than people first realized, and the more you look at it, the stranger it is," said Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress think tank and the author of a history of nuclear weapons. "These weapons -- the equivalent of 60 Hiroshimas -- were out of authorized command and control for more than a day."
The Air Force has sought to offer assurances that its security system is working. Within days, the service relieved one Minot officer of his command and disciplined several airmen, while assigning a major general to head an investigation that has already been extended for extra weeks. At the same time, Defense Department officials have announced that a Pentagon-appointed scientific advisory board will study the mishap as part of a larger review of procedures for handling nuclear weapons.
"Clearly this incident was unacceptable on many levels," said an Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Edward Thomas. "Our response has been swift and focused -- and it has really just begun. We will spend many months at the air staff and at our commands and bases ensuring that the root causes are addressed."
While Air Force officials see the Minot event as serious, they also note that it was harmless, since the six nuclear warheads never left the military's control. Even if the bomber had crashed, or if someone had stolen the warheads, fail-safe devices would have prevented a nuclear detonation.
But independent experts warn that whenever nuclear weapons are not properly safeguarded, their fissile materials are at risk of theft and diversion. Moreover, if the plane had crashed and the warheads' casings cracked, these highly toxic materials could have been widely dispersed.
"When what were multiple layers of tight nuclear weapon control internal procedures break down, some bad guy may eventually come along and take advantage of them," said a former senior administration official who had responsibility for nuclear security.
Some Air Force veterans say the base's officers made an egregious mistake in allowing nuclear-warhead-equipped missiles and unarmed missiles to be stored in the same bunker, a practice that a spokesman last week confirmed is routine. Charles Curtis, a former deputy energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said, "We always relied on segregation of nuclear weapons from conventional ones."
Former nuclear weapons officials have noted that the weapons transfer at the heart of the incident coincides with deep cuts in deployed nuclear forces that will bring the total number of warheads to as few as 1,700 by the year 2012 -- a reduction of more than 50 percent from 2001 levels. But the downsizing has created new accounting and logistical challenges, since U.S. policy is to keep thousands more warheads in storage, some as a strategic reserve and others awaiting dismantling.
A secret 1998 history of the Air Combat Command warned of "diminished attention for even 'the minimum standards' of nuclear weapons' maintenance, support and security" once such arms became less vital, according to a declassified copy obtained by Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' nuclear information project.
The Air Force's inspector general in 2003 found that half of the "nuclear surety" inspections conducted that year resulted in failing grades -- the worst performance since inspections of weapons-handling began. Minot's 5th Bomb Wing was among the units that failed, and the Louisiana-based 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale garnered an unsatisfactory rating in 2005.
Both units passed subsequent nuclear inspections, and Minot was given high marks in a 2006 inspection. The 2003 report on the 5th Bomb Wing attributed its poor performance to the demands of supporting combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wartime stresses had "resulted in a lack of time to focus and practice nuclear operations," the report stated.
Last year, the Air Force eliminated a separate nuclear-operations directorate known informally as the N Staff, which closely tracked the maintenance and security of nuclear weapons in the United States and other NATO countries. Currently, nuclear and space operations are combined in a single directorate. Air Force officials say the change was part of a service-wide reorganization and did not reflect diminished importance of nuclear operations.
"Where nuclear weapons have receded into the background is at the senior policy level, where there are other things people have to worry about," said Linton F. Brooks, who resigned in January as director of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Brooks, who oversaw billions of dollars in U.S. spending to help Russia secure its nuclear stockpile, said the mishandling of U.S. warheads indicates that "something went seriously wrong."
A similar refrain has been voiced hundreds of times in blogs and chat rooms popular with former and current military members. On a Web site run by the Military Times, a former B-52 crew chief who did not give his name wrote: "What the hell happened here?"
A former Air Force senior master sergeant wrote separately that "mistakes were made at the lowest level of supervision and this snowballed into the one of the biggest mistakes in USAF history. I am still scratching my head wondering how this could [have] happened."
A Mother's Strength, a Candidate's Ambition
Dorothy Rodham's Experiences Shaped and Inspire Clinton
By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2007; A01
Family friends offer harmless details about Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham. She likes to read. She travels on her own. She loves the National Zoo.
Down-to-earth and sturdy, with gray hair, she does not bear an obvious physical resemblance to her daughter, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, but even if she did, few people would recognize her because she is rarely seen at public events. In an instance last summer when she was -- during a portrait unveiling at the Smithsonian Institution for her daughter and son-in-law -- Rodham, 88, sat unobtrusively in the front row, holding onto her granddaughter's arm.
When President Bush was asked once to name his favorite philosopher, he replied that it is Jesus Christ, a revealing response that would become an essential part of his biography. In a recent Democratic debate, Clinton offered a similarly telling insight. Asked for a defining moment in her life, one that put her on the path toward running for president, Clinton credited the women's movement and said her mother is her inspiration.
"More personally, I owe it to my mother, who never got a chance to go to college, who had a very difficult childhood, but who gave me a belief that I could do whatever I set my mind," Clinton said.
Still, 14 years after Hillary Clinton entered the White House with her husband and became known worldwide, the woman she identified as her most enduring influence 0remains a mystery. Clinton, who famously kept her own daughter, Chelsea, out of the public eye, is even more protective of her mother. No interviews with her or photographs -- and no interviews with Clinton on the subject.
Unlike the flamboyant Virginia Clinton Kelley, who played an outsize role in shaping Bill Clinton into a social extrovert and future president, or the sharp-tongued former first lady Barbara Bush who passed on her salty wit to her son, Rodham has stayed quietly on the sidelines in her daughter's career.
Hillary Clinton tends to describe her Midwestern childhood as straight out of "Father Knows Best." When she has discussed her mother's life, the picture has not been so rosy. "I'm still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and levelheaded woman," Clinton wrote in her autobiography, "Living History."
Born to dysfunctional, unhappy parents who divorced in 1927, Dorothy Howell was sent away from home at age 8, making an unsupervised cross-country train journey with her younger sister to live with unwelcoming grandparents. Dickensian events followed. The girl was banished to her bedroom for an entire year except for school after her grandmother caught her trick-or-treating. She moved out on her own at age 14, taking a job as a nanny.
Clinton has long resisted attempts to psychoanalyze her from afar. A 1999 biography by Gail Sheehy, "Hillary's Choice," that portrayed her as trying to impress a domineering father while learning to suffer in a bad marriage from a submissive mother, was rejected by her office as riddled with inaccuracies. But amid otherwise positive portrayals of her immediate family, Clinton has given, in speeches and in her book, a three-dimensional picture of her mother that helps to explain her own worldview.
A Democrat in her husband's conservative household and a dutiful stay-at-home mother who inculcated a love of learning in her only daughter, Rodham seems to have poured her curiosity about the world into her oldest child.
After living on her own during her high school years, Dorothy Howell heard from her mother, who asked her to return to Chicago. She jumped at the chance to reconnect, but discovered that her mother, newly remarried, wanted her to work as her housekeeper.
Clinton said she once asked her mother why she went back. Her mother, she said, told her: "I'd hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out. . . . When she didn't, I had nowhere else to go."
For that grandmother, Clinton has especially tough words, describing her as a "weak and self-indulgent woman wrapped up in television soap operas and disengaged from reality." Clinton's disdain for such behavior, coupled with what she heard from her mother about the impact of divorce and abandonment, seem to fit neatly into the narrative of discipline and marital persistence that have come to define her.
Growing Up Rodham
In 1942, Clinton's mother married Hugh Rodham, a gruff and energetic traveling salesman, and Hillary Rodham was born five years later. Accounts of the marriage have often described an iron-willed father and a mother serving as a quiet beacon of strength.
In his book released earlier this year, "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," Carl Bernstein wrote that Hugh Rodham was "harsh, provocative and abusive" -- in contrast with the firm-but-loving patriarch Clinton has described. Clinton's mother lived a "painfully demeaning" life under Hugh Rodham's rule, Bernstein wrote. "Unleashed, his rage was frightening, and the household sometimes seemed on the verge of imploding," he wrote.
By many accounts of their household, it was Dorothy Rodham who provided intellectual stimulation, reason and calm. Clinton describes her mother as a "classic homemaker" in their suburban Park Ridge neighborhood, a woman who was always cooking, washing and cleaning.
One mother-daughter anecdote has risen above the rest, becoming the central piece of lore about Rodham -- and suggesting the toughness she seemed to want to instill in her daughter, who was 4 years old at the time. Rodham retold the story during a 2004 appearance with Clinton on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." She has not granted an interview since.
"We moved into this new house, new neighborhood, and she would come in crying and screaming about the fact that she'd been set upon by a group of children, mostly her age, and this one girl who was exactly her age, Suzy, across the street," Rodham recounted. "She came in one day, and I said, 'You know, this is just about enough, Hillary. You have to face things and show them you're not afraid.' "
Rodham continued: "Anyway, I said, 'Just go out there and show them that you're not afraid, and if she does hit you again -- which she kept doing -- hit her back.' "
Clinton, in her own version, has said her mother told her, "There is no room in this house for cowards."
"She later told me she watched from behind the curtain as I squared my shoulders and marched across the street," Clinton wrote. "I returned a few minutes later, glowing with victory."
The point of the story -- that her mother taught her to fight back -- is not lost on family friends who list resilience as a trait Rodham and Clinton share. "It's that sense of self-confidence," said Betsy Ebeling, a childhood friend of Clinton's. Rodham, she said, seemed to compensate for her own neglected childhood by paying extra attention to her daughter's self-esteem.
"Dorothy had a vision far beyond her time, of encouraging her kids to be comfortable in their own skin," said Patty H. Criner, a friend of Rodham's in Little Rock. "Dorothy was a good mother and spent a lot of time with her children, and believes really strongly in quality time with her children and allowing her children to be individuals, and really helped them feel that they can be individuals and think for themselves, and gave them a lot of self-confidence."
But Rodham did not push her children any harder than other parents did theirs, several close friends said. "I think she believed that anything could be possible for her kids," Criner said.
Ebeling recalled Rodham as someone who "stayed home a lot" and encouraged her daughter to read. "I'm sure there was a whole group of kids that age that had mothers who were big PTA moms and overachieving in their social lives, as well," Ebeling said. Rodham, she said, "wasn't like that."
Traditional and Modern
Rodham has expressed mixed feelings about the pressures of public life. On "Oprah," she was asked whether she wanted her daughter to run for president.
"The day-to-day workload and all of that sort of thing, I don't know that I would wish on anyone, actually," Rodham said. "But she would do great. I have to say that."
It was hard to tell whether a woman who had such a traditional role in her own life shared the feminist outlook of her daughter.
"She certainly is a woman who didn't work outside the home, but I can't say she wasn't a woman who didn't have lots of life experiences and didn't make the most of being a mother, and, when her kids were raised, tried to embrace as many experiences as she could," said Melanne Verveer, a friend of Clinton's who served as the former first lady's chief of staff. "Did that make her a feminist? Did she really believe her kids were equal in terms of the possibilities they have? Certainly. It depends on how you define the word. But I would call her a modern woman."
Rodham has never spoken publicly about her daughter's marriage, though shortly before Bill Clinton's impeachment scandal, she vouched for the former president. "Everybody knows there is only one person in the world who can really tell the truth about a man, and that's his mother-in-law," Rodham said in a film shown at the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
At the time, Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky had already occurred, though it would be another 18 months before the affair became public and exposed the Clintons' relationship to heavy stress.
During her daughter's years as first lady, Rodham was living in Little Rock, where she and her husband had moved in 1987 to be closer to the Clintons. She stayed there after her husband died in 1993 but was a frequent visitor to the White House.
After Hillary Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, Rodham moved to Washington and played host to her daughter at her apartment while the Clinton home was being renovated. Now Rodham lives with the senator from New York at the Clinton home in Kalorama.
According to friends, Rodham spends time with her son Tony -- who lives in the Washington area and is divorced from Nicole Boxer, the daughter of Sen. Barbara Boxer -- and grandson Zachary. She keeps in close touch with granddaughter Chelsea, who lives in New York.
"She just stays close to her nest," Criner said, "and her children and grandchildren."
By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2007; A01
Family friends offer harmless details about Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham. She likes to read. She travels on her own. She loves the National Zoo.
Down-to-earth and sturdy, with gray hair, she does not bear an obvious physical resemblance to her daughter, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, but even if she did, few people would recognize her because she is rarely seen at public events. In an instance last summer when she was -- during a portrait unveiling at the Smithsonian Institution for her daughter and son-in-law -- Rodham, 88, sat unobtrusively in the front row, holding onto her granddaughter's arm.
When President Bush was asked once to name his favorite philosopher, he replied that it is Jesus Christ, a revealing response that would become an essential part of his biography. In a recent Democratic debate, Clinton offered a similarly telling insight. Asked for a defining moment in her life, one that put her on the path toward running for president, Clinton credited the women's movement and said her mother is her inspiration.
"More personally, I owe it to my mother, who never got a chance to go to college, who had a very difficult childhood, but who gave me a belief that I could do whatever I set my mind," Clinton said.
Still, 14 years after Hillary Clinton entered the White House with her husband and became known worldwide, the woman she identified as her most enduring influence 0remains a mystery. Clinton, who famously kept her own daughter, Chelsea, out of the public eye, is even more protective of her mother. No interviews with her or photographs -- and no interviews with Clinton on the subject.
Unlike the flamboyant Virginia Clinton Kelley, who played an outsize role in shaping Bill Clinton into a social extrovert and future president, or the sharp-tongued former first lady Barbara Bush who passed on her salty wit to her son, Rodham has stayed quietly on the sidelines in her daughter's career.
Hillary Clinton tends to describe her Midwestern childhood as straight out of "Father Knows Best." When she has discussed her mother's life, the picture has not been so rosy. "I'm still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and levelheaded woman," Clinton wrote in her autobiography, "Living History."
Born to dysfunctional, unhappy parents who divorced in 1927, Dorothy Howell was sent away from home at age 8, making an unsupervised cross-country train journey with her younger sister to live with unwelcoming grandparents. Dickensian events followed. The girl was banished to her bedroom for an entire year except for school after her grandmother caught her trick-or-treating. She moved out on her own at age 14, taking a job as a nanny.
Clinton has long resisted attempts to psychoanalyze her from afar. A 1999 biography by Gail Sheehy, "Hillary's Choice," that portrayed her as trying to impress a domineering father while learning to suffer in a bad marriage from a submissive mother, was rejected by her office as riddled with inaccuracies. But amid otherwise positive portrayals of her immediate family, Clinton has given, in speeches and in her book, a three-dimensional picture of her mother that helps to explain her own worldview.
A Democrat in her husband's conservative household and a dutiful stay-at-home mother who inculcated a love of learning in her only daughter, Rodham seems to have poured her curiosity about the world into her oldest child.
After living on her own during her high school years, Dorothy Howell heard from her mother, who asked her to return to Chicago. She jumped at the chance to reconnect, but discovered that her mother, newly remarried, wanted her to work as her housekeeper.
Clinton said she once asked her mother why she went back. Her mother, she said, told her: "I'd hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out. . . . When she didn't, I had nowhere else to go."
For that grandmother, Clinton has especially tough words, describing her as a "weak and self-indulgent woman wrapped up in television soap operas and disengaged from reality." Clinton's disdain for such behavior, coupled with what she heard from her mother about the impact of divorce and abandonment, seem to fit neatly into the narrative of discipline and marital persistence that have come to define her.
Growing Up Rodham
In 1942, Clinton's mother married Hugh Rodham, a gruff and energetic traveling salesman, and Hillary Rodham was born five years later. Accounts of the marriage have often described an iron-willed father and a mother serving as a quiet beacon of strength.
In his book released earlier this year, "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," Carl Bernstein wrote that Hugh Rodham was "harsh, provocative and abusive" -- in contrast with the firm-but-loving patriarch Clinton has described. Clinton's mother lived a "painfully demeaning" life under Hugh Rodham's rule, Bernstein wrote. "Unleashed, his rage was frightening, and the household sometimes seemed on the verge of imploding," he wrote.
By many accounts of their household, it was Dorothy Rodham who provided intellectual stimulation, reason and calm. Clinton describes her mother as a "classic homemaker" in their suburban Park Ridge neighborhood, a woman who was always cooking, washing and cleaning.
One mother-daughter anecdote has risen above the rest, becoming the central piece of lore about Rodham -- and suggesting the toughness she seemed to want to instill in her daughter, who was 4 years old at the time. Rodham retold the story during a 2004 appearance with Clinton on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." She has not granted an interview since.
"We moved into this new house, new neighborhood, and she would come in crying and screaming about the fact that she'd been set upon by a group of children, mostly her age, and this one girl who was exactly her age, Suzy, across the street," Rodham recounted. "She came in one day, and I said, 'You know, this is just about enough, Hillary. You have to face things and show them you're not afraid.' "
Rodham continued: "Anyway, I said, 'Just go out there and show them that you're not afraid, and if she does hit you again -- which she kept doing -- hit her back.' "
Clinton, in her own version, has said her mother told her, "There is no room in this house for cowards."
"She later told me she watched from behind the curtain as I squared my shoulders and marched across the street," Clinton wrote. "I returned a few minutes later, glowing with victory."
The point of the story -- that her mother taught her to fight back -- is not lost on family friends who list resilience as a trait Rodham and Clinton share. "It's that sense of self-confidence," said Betsy Ebeling, a childhood friend of Clinton's. Rodham, she said, seemed to compensate for her own neglected childhood by paying extra attention to her daughter's self-esteem.
"Dorothy had a vision far beyond her time, of encouraging her kids to be comfortable in their own skin," said Patty H. Criner, a friend of Rodham's in Little Rock. "Dorothy was a good mother and spent a lot of time with her children, and believes really strongly in quality time with her children and allowing her children to be individuals, and really helped them feel that they can be individuals and think for themselves, and gave them a lot of self-confidence."
But Rodham did not push her children any harder than other parents did theirs, several close friends said. "I think she believed that anything could be possible for her kids," Criner said.
Ebeling recalled Rodham as someone who "stayed home a lot" and encouraged her daughter to read. "I'm sure there was a whole group of kids that age that had mothers who were big PTA moms and overachieving in their social lives, as well," Ebeling said. Rodham, she said, "wasn't like that."
Traditional and Modern
Rodham has expressed mixed feelings about the pressures of public life. On "Oprah," she was asked whether she wanted her daughter to run for president.
"The day-to-day workload and all of that sort of thing, I don't know that I would wish on anyone, actually," Rodham said. "But she would do great. I have to say that."
It was hard to tell whether a woman who had such a traditional role in her own life shared the feminist outlook of her daughter.
"She certainly is a woman who didn't work outside the home, but I can't say she wasn't a woman who didn't have lots of life experiences and didn't make the most of being a mother, and, when her kids were raised, tried to embrace as many experiences as she could," said Melanne Verveer, a friend of Clinton's who served as the former first lady's chief of staff. "Did that make her a feminist? Did she really believe her kids were equal in terms of the possibilities they have? Certainly. It depends on how you define the word. But I would call her a modern woman."
Rodham has never spoken publicly about her daughter's marriage, though shortly before Bill Clinton's impeachment scandal, she vouched for the former president. "Everybody knows there is only one person in the world who can really tell the truth about a man, and that's his mother-in-law," Rodham said in a film shown at the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
At the time, Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky had already occurred, though it would be another 18 months before the affair became public and exposed the Clintons' relationship to heavy stress.
During her daughter's years as first lady, Rodham was living in Little Rock, where she and her husband had moved in 1987 to be closer to the Clintons. She stayed there after her husband died in 1993 but was a frequent visitor to the White House.
After Hillary Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, Rodham moved to Washington and played host to her daughter at her apartment while the Clinton home was being renovated. Now Rodham lives with the senator from New York at the Clinton home in Kalorama.
According to friends, Rodham spends time with her son Tony -- who lives in the Washington area and is divorced from Nicole Boxer, the daughter of Sen. Barbara Boxer -- and grandson Zachary. She keeps in close touch with granddaughter Chelsea, who lives in New York.
"She just stays close to her nest," Criner said, "and her children and grandchildren."
College Drinking: Less Than You Think
By Daniela Deane
Sunday, September 23, 2007; B01
Last month, we took our younger son back to college. Ben's a sophomore at the College of Charleston now, almost 20, and he just moved into an off-campus house with five buddies. (I know. Scary.)
First thing he needed was furniture. So my husband and I loaded up a U-Haul, drove to South Carolina and made Ben's room rather nice, we thought. We put an old chair of ours in the corner by the window. Good place for all that reading you have to do in college.
That night, we went our separate ways, Ben meeting up with friends from freshman year. We made an appointment for lunch the next day. When we arrived, Ben seemed out of sorts, had a headache. The cushion on the chair was backward. I turned it around. There was a big greenish-brown stain on the bottom.
"What happened to this cushion?" I asked. Ben looked down sheepishly. "I puked on it," he said quietly.
What? I was stunned into silence, which isn't an easy thing to do to me.
First because he'd been drinking until he vomited. We knew he drank, but hadn't he learned yet that drinking that much wasn't any fun? And then the stupidity of vomiting on a chair we had just brought from Washington for his new room. While we were still in Charleston. Omigod. The kid had no brain, and we were leaving him in this big, drafty old house nine hours from where we live.
Thing is (and I don't think I'm just a mom deluding myself here), Ben's a pretty normal college kid. He's a nice guy with a heart of gold, I swear. He's close to his family; he's doing fine in school. I don't want to jinx anything, but we're pretty sure he'll turn out okay in the end.
But he drinks. Regularly. Plenty, apparently. Sometimes until he throws up, I guess, although he swore that that was a rarity and that he usually aims for the toilet. When I told the chair story to my older son, who's at James Madison University in Virginia, he informed me that some girls actually like to drink until they vomit, to get rid of all those unwanted calories. There are lots of fun games at college that involve imbibing huge amounts of booze really really quickly. A $150,000 B.A. in beer pong, anyone?
Lots of college kids -- mostly underage -- drink. We all know that. But it's against the law. And that means something.
I've been thinking a lot about the law these days, ever since I started covering a crime and courts beat here at The Washington Post in March. I've seen some heart-wrenching, thought-provoking cases involving underage drinking since I started -- cases that have made me look hard at my own parenting, how my two sons view drinking and how the law views all of us.
I've been doing a lot of soul-searching -- and the cushion incident only made matters worse. Have my husband and I been too permissive, hostages to our own upbringing? Did we give these boys too much credit for knowing when enough is enough?
Soul-searching turned into researching, though, and what I found actually quieted my anxious heart. Despite the headlines, the truth is that drinking among college students has decreased. And young people's attitudes about drinking and driving have changed, too, with many of them much more reluctant to get behind the wheel after imbibing.
Of course, there's still tremendous heartache.
As soon as we got back from Charleston, I covered the case of a 19-year-old Alexandria boy -- sorry, I can't help calling him a boy because he's the same age as Ben -- who was charged with drunken-driving manslaughter in the death of his best friend in a horrible accident. The friend was in a coma for four months before he died in April. The kid on trial visited him in the hospital almost daily, according to court testimony. As I looked at the young boy-man on the stand in his ill-fitting suit, I thought the lump in my throat might never go down. Could one of my boys have been sitting there instead?
Then there was the Charlottesville mother of two boys who got 27 months in prison for having an underage-drinking party for her son's 16th birthday a few years ago. I spent the day with her and her son down in Charlottesville the weekend before she reported to prison. The son told me that he'd asked his sports-coaching stay-at-home mom to host the party -- and buy the beer and wine coolers. She agreed, under the condition that everyone spend the night. She collected keys. Nobody left or got hurt.
Her explanation for that "really stupid mistake" was that she knew they'd drink anyway, so she was trying to keep them off the roads and safe at home.
Uh-oh, know that feeling. Could that have been us?
Then, for a follow-up article, I talked to a Fairfax woman who lost her only child, a 17-year-old son, in a crash after an underage-drinking party she thinks was hosted by parents. She was a single mom. He was all she had.
I can't speak for other parents, but for my husband and me, the worry that kept us up at night during our sons' high school years was drinking, yes, but mostly drinking and driving. Drinking and staggering we thought we had little choice but to accept. After all, we're not the perfect role models. I'm Italian-born -- drinking a glass of wine with dinner is part of eating. My husband is British -- having a few drinks is part of life. We don't have drinking problems, though.
A couple of uncomfortable truths: When my husband was a lad in London, he used to order his pints at the pub in his school uniform. When I was a high-school kid in Northern Virginia and the drinking age in the District was 18, we used to hop across the Key Bridge to Georgetown to buy our beer.
But the line in the sand for us was drinking and driving. We just wouldn't abide it. "Call us anytime," we said. "We'll pick you and your buddies up, no questions asked. Just never drink and drive. And don't get in the car with anyone who has. Please." I don't think we were alone in reciting that mantra.
And guess what? There are signs that all that talking might be working.
Believe me, I don't minimize for one moment the unimaginable pain of a parent who has lost a child in an accident caused by a young drinker. I can't even comprehend a grief so deep. But the truth is, these kinds of life-destroying tragedies are happening less than they used to. I can't help finding hope in that.
Drinking and driving among teenagers "decreased spectacularly" in the two decades leading up to the late 1990s, according to a report on the Web site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The number of accidents involving legally impaired drivers younger than 21 (any blood-alcohol level is illegal for the underage) dropped by 61 percent between 1982 and 1998, going from 4,393 to 1,714. Although overall drinking and driving in the United States decreased substantially in that period, the report maintains that the decline was led by drivers under the age of 21. Most of that drop took place between 1982 and 1992.
Since 1995, the decline has slowed, and the number of young drivers involved in fatal crashes has stayed relatively static, although NHTSA reports that the percentage of alcohol-related fatalities for all age groups dropped from 60 percent in 1982 to 39 percent in 2005.
The report on young drivers, "Determine Why There Are Fewer Young Alcohol-Impaired Drivers," credits the minimum drinking age of 21 and zero-tolerance laws, but says that those changes "clearly did not cause the entire decrease," pointing out that Canada saw a similar decline over the same period, even though its drinking age didn't change and zero-tolerance alcohol laws weren't enacted until after the drop was recorded.
And that's what was really striking to me.
What changed over the reporting period, says the NHTSA, for both quantifiable and unquantifiable reasons, were young people's attitudes toward drinking and driving, although "most youths still drink." (I think we've established that.)
But there are some surprises there, too. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) reports that drinking by college students is down, with 86.2 percent saying they had consumed alcohol in 2003, compared with 93.6 percent in 1991.
But what about all that binge drinking we read about? All those college kids getting blotto at big parties every weekend, the ambulances on call outside the dorms to help students who drink themselves silly?
MADD cites a 2002 Harvard study saying that 44 percent of college students admit that they binge drink -- that is, if they're men, they've had five or more drinks in a row in a two-week period, or four or more drinks in a row if they're women. That's a Friday night party at either JMU or the College of Charleston, as far as I can tell.
But the study's numbers also mean that more than half don't binge drink.
Everyone agrees that we need to keep working to bring those drinking and accident numbers down further. But in the meantime, my husband and I take some solace from the NHTSA report, which concludes that North American "youth have separated their drinking from their driving."
Over the din of weekend kegger parties, my sons bear this out.
They tell me that yeah, lots of people play beer pong on the weekends -- with the occasional vomit showing up on someone's floor or in their closet -- but they're not drinking and driving. They're staggering home; they're busing it; they're spending the night; they have designated drivers.
Thank Mothers Against Drunk Driving, thank school programs, thank the laws, but thank all us plain old worried parents, too.
"We got it that it can ruin your life and kill somebody," said my elder boy-man last week. "We're just not that stupid, Mom."
Really? You're not? Okay, that makes me feel a little better. Now, will you promise you'll grow out of all this after college?
Sunday, September 23, 2007; B01
Last month, we took our younger son back to college. Ben's a sophomore at the College of Charleston now, almost 20, and he just moved into an off-campus house with five buddies. (I know. Scary.)
First thing he needed was furniture. So my husband and I loaded up a U-Haul, drove to South Carolina and made Ben's room rather nice, we thought. We put an old chair of ours in the corner by the window. Good place for all that reading you have to do in college.
That night, we went our separate ways, Ben meeting up with friends from freshman year. We made an appointment for lunch the next day. When we arrived, Ben seemed out of sorts, had a headache. The cushion on the chair was backward. I turned it around. There was a big greenish-brown stain on the bottom.
"What happened to this cushion?" I asked. Ben looked down sheepishly. "I puked on it," he said quietly.
What? I was stunned into silence, which isn't an easy thing to do to me.
First because he'd been drinking until he vomited. We knew he drank, but hadn't he learned yet that drinking that much wasn't any fun? And then the stupidity of vomiting on a chair we had just brought from Washington for his new room. While we were still in Charleston. Omigod. The kid had no brain, and we were leaving him in this big, drafty old house nine hours from where we live.
Thing is (and I don't think I'm just a mom deluding myself here), Ben's a pretty normal college kid. He's a nice guy with a heart of gold, I swear. He's close to his family; he's doing fine in school. I don't want to jinx anything, but we're pretty sure he'll turn out okay in the end.
But he drinks. Regularly. Plenty, apparently. Sometimes until he throws up, I guess, although he swore that that was a rarity and that he usually aims for the toilet. When I told the chair story to my older son, who's at James Madison University in Virginia, he informed me that some girls actually like to drink until they vomit, to get rid of all those unwanted calories. There are lots of fun games at college that involve imbibing huge amounts of booze really really quickly. A $150,000 B.A. in beer pong, anyone?
Lots of college kids -- mostly underage -- drink. We all know that. But it's against the law. And that means something.
I've been thinking a lot about the law these days, ever since I started covering a crime and courts beat here at The Washington Post in March. I've seen some heart-wrenching, thought-provoking cases involving underage drinking since I started -- cases that have made me look hard at my own parenting, how my two sons view drinking and how the law views all of us.
I've been doing a lot of soul-searching -- and the cushion incident only made matters worse. Have my husband and I been too permissive, hostages to our own upbringing? Did we give these boys too much credit for knowing when enough is enough?
Soul-searching turned into researching, though, and what I found actually quieted my anxious heart. Despite the headlines, the truth is that drinking among college students has decreased. And young people's attitudes about drinking and driving have changed, too, with many of them much more reluctant to get behind the wheel after imbibing.
Of course, there's still tremendous heartache.
As soon as we got back from Charleston, I covered the case of a 19-year-old Alexandria boy -- sorry, I can't help calling him a boy because he's the same age as Ben -- who was charged with drunken-driving manslaughter in the death of his best friend in a horrible accident. The friend was in a coma for four months before he died in April. The kid on trial visited him in the hospital almost daily, according to court testimony. As I looked at the young boy-man on the stand in his ill-fitting suit, I thought the lump in my throat might never go down. Could one of my boys have been sitting there instead?
Then there was the Charlottesville mother of two boys who got 27 months in prison for having an underage-drinking party for her son's 16th birthday a few years ago. I spent the day with her and her son down in Charlottesville the weekend before she reported to prison. The son told me that he'd asked his sports-coaching stay-at-home mom to host the party -- and buy the beer and wine coolers. She agreed, under the condition that everyone spend the night. She collected keys. Nobody left or got hurt.
Her explanation for that "really stupid mistake" was that she knew they'd drink anyway, so she was trying to keep them off the roads and safe at home.
Uh-oh, know that feeling. Could that have been us?
Then, for a follow-up article, I talked to a Fairfax woman who lost her only child, a 17-year-old son, in a crash after an underage-drinking party she thinks was hosted by parents. She was a single mom. He was all she had.
I can't speak for other parents, but for my husband and me, the worry that kept us up at night during our sons' high school years was drinking, yes, but mostly drinking and driving. Drinking and staggering we thought we had little choice but to accept. After all, we're not the perfect role models. I'm Italian-born -- drinking a glass of wine with dinner is part of eating. My husband is British -- having a few drinks is part of life. We don't have drinking problems, though.
A couple of uncomfortable truths: When my husband was a lad in London, he used to order his pints at the pub in his school uniform. When I was a high-school kid in Northern Virginia and the drinking age in the District was 18, we used to hop across the Key Bridge to Georgetown to buy our beer.
But the line in the sand for us was drinking and driving. We just wouldn't abide it. "Call us anytime," we said. "We'll pick you and your buddies up, no questions asked. Just never drink and drive. And don't get in the car with anyone who has. Please." I don't think we were alone in reciting that mantra.
And guess what? There are signs that all that talking might be working.
Believe me, I don't minimize for one moment the unimaginable pain of a parent who has lost a child in an accident caused by a young drinker. I can't even comprehend a grief so deep. But the truth is, these kinds of life-destroying tragedies are happening less than they used to. I can't help finding hope in that.
Drinking and driving among teenagers "decreased spectacularly" in the two decades leading up to the late 1990s, according to a report on the Web site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The number of accidents involving legally impaired drivers younger than 21 (any blood-alcohol level is illegal for the underage) dropped by 61 percent between 1982 and 1998, going from 4,393 to 1,714. Although overall drinking and driving in the United States decreased substantially in that period, the report maintains that the decline was led by drivers under the age of 21. Most of that drop took place between 1982 and 1992.
Since 1995, the decline has slowed, and the number of young drivers involved in fatal crashes has stayed relatively static, although NHTSA reports that the percentage of alcohol-related fatalities for all age groups dropped from 60 percent in 1982 to 39 percent in 2005.
The report on young drivers, "Determine Why There Are Fewer Young Alcohol-Impaired Drivers," credits the minimum drinking age of 21 and zero-tolerance laws, but says that those changes "clearly did not cause the entire decrease," pointing out that Canada saw a similar decline over the same period, even though its drinking age didn't change and zero-tolerance alcohol laws weren't enacted until after the drop was recorded.
And that's what was really striking to me.
What changed over the reporting period, says the NHTSA, for both quantifiable and unquantifiable reasons, were young people's attitudes toward drinking and driving, although "most youths still drink." (I think we've established that.)
But there are some surprises there, too. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) reports that drinking by college students is down, with 86.2 percent saying they had consumed alcohol in 2003, compared with 93.6 percent in 1991.
But what about all that binge drinking we read about? All those college kids getting blotto at big parties every weekend, the ambulances on call outside the dorms to help students who drink themselves silly?
MADD cites a 2002 Harvard study saying that 44 percent of college students admit that they binge drink -- that is, if they're men, they've had five or more drinks in a row in a two-week period, or four or more drinks in a row if they're women. That's a Friday night party at either JMU or the College of Charleston, as far as I can tell.
But the study's numbers also mean that more than half don't binge drink.
Everyone agrees that we need to keep working to bring those drinking and accident numbers down further. But in the meantime, my husband and I take some solace from the NHTSA report, which concludes that North American "youth have separated their drinking from their driving."
Over the din of weekend kegger parties, my sons bear this out.
They tell me that yeah, lots of people play beer pong on the weekends -- with the occasional vomit showing up on someone's floor or in their closet -- but they're not drinking and driving. They're staggering home; they're busing it; they're spending the night; they have designated drivers.
Thank Mothers Against Drunk Driving, thank school programs, thank the laws, but thank all us plain old worried parents, too.
"We got it that it can ruin your life and kill somebody," said my elder boy-man last week. "We're just not that stupid, Mom."
Really? You're not? Okay, that makes me feel a little better. Now, will you promise you'll grow out of all this after college?
To Africa, For Culture and Credits
U.S.-Born Students Are Going Back to Their Family Roots
By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2007; C01
As the first day of school approached this month, Brian Agugoesi, 13, packed his bags with pens and notebooks. He also included Honeycomb cereal, which is impossible to get at his school, and tablets to fend off malaria, which unfortunately is not.
The Randallstown, Md., boy was packing for his second year at Grundtvig International Secondary School in the Niger River Valley of southeast Nigeria, an institution that, according to its Web site, boasts a water borehole and "network of tarred roads" on a 10-hectare campus. Grundtvig also offers, according to Brian, packed school days and teachers who require rule-flouters -- such as Brian the time he forgot to empty the trash in his dorm room -- to cut the campus grass "until they're satisfied."
Brian's parents, Rita and Charles Agugoesi, chuckled at that story on the recent eve of Brian's flight to Lagos. It is just what they wanted when they decided, like many of their Nigerian friends, to send their U.S.-born child to school in their African homeland.
"Every individual comes from somewhere," said Rita Agugoesi, a social worker. "When you have children, you want them to know where you came from."
Immigrants' journeys to America have long been inspired by educational opportunities for children. But unlike previous generations of immigrants, who often encouraged their kids' full assimilation, today's newcomers strive and sometimes struggle to transmit traditions to children submerged in a high-speed, diverse American culture. For some Africans, many of whom came to the United States for higher education, the answer is full immersion -- in Africa. A few years abroad, immigrant parents say, teaches children about Africa and, even better, some perspective about life in America.
"There are a lot of people over there who are dreaming to come here. They would be willing to have one of their fingers chopped off to come here," said Cosmas U. Nwokeafor, whose elder son spent three years in Nigeria and whose younger son will go there in December.
On a recent night, Nwokeafor, who toiled his way from busboy to Bowie State University professor and assistant provost, stretched out his arms in his spacious, freshly built Upper Marlboro home. "This was not made in a day."
Africans are immigrating to the United States faster than ever, and they are among the best-educated of all immigrant groups. But the African immigrant population, at about 1.4 million, is relatively small and new, so there is scant research on parenting and second-generation integration. No one tracks how many children of African immigrants attend school in their ancestral lands.
Community leaders say the practice is most common among Nigerians and Ghanaians, whose countries offer the unusual combination of relative political stability and established boarding schools with strict discipline and rigorous courses in English. At $5,000 to $10,000 a year, the schools are generally more affordable than American private schools.
Nwokeafor said he and his wife, Catherine, made great efforts to teach their four children traditional Nigerian songs and folk tales about turtles and lions. They took them to Nigeria often, taught them to address adults as "sir" and "auntie," and spoke to them in Igbo, their language.
But they wondered whether it was enough. The children told stories about American friends talking back to teachers and telling their parents to "shut up."
"I don't even know if I could spell my name the next day if I did that," Chinedu, 14, the younger son, said softly on a recent night.
Once, Nwokeafor noticed that a photo album -- filled with snapshots of the family posing by the Mercedes-Benz and the grand white house they keep in the village of Umubasi in southern Nigeria -- was missing from its spot. Chinedu confessed that he had taken it to school to prove to teasing classmates that Africans did not "live in trees, like monkeys."
"Whatever we try to put into them is being challenged by the dominant culture," Nwokeafor said. "At times, I feel so sorry for them because they are in a battle. They don't know whether to believe their parents or the dominant culture."
Uchenna Nwokeafor, 20, no longer has doubts. He spent seventh through ninth grade sharing a dorm room with 12 other students at a school in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The crack-of-dawn treks to fetch bath water from a tap a mile away, 5 a.m. prayers, 7 a.m. classes and weekends cutting grass with a machete, he said, taught him that "you have to work for your own."
Now a lanky social-work major at Bowie State who wears hip black-rimmed glasses, Uchenna remembers fondly the basketball tournament he played in with his Nigerian classmates, who called him "Americana." He banters fluently in Igbo with his father and listens to Nigerian pop music in his car. He said he feels "like the true African American."
"Culture-wise, it changed my life," Uchenna Nwokeafor said. "Those three years, it showed me another place called home."
That sort of review has made Chinedu enthusiastic about his upcoming year in Nigeria. A stellar student who dreams of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he hopes Nigeria will help him focus.
"Here, I'm with all my friends," he said. "I have too many distractions."
Cosmas Nwokeafor said that he is too "overprotective" to send his two daughters to Nigeria and that other parents he knows feel the same. In most cases, immigrants say, children are sent abroad for a few years in their early teens and then complete high school and prepare for the SAT in the United States.
Not every alumnus has glowing memories. Riverdale area resident Faraday Okoro, 20, said attending grades nine and 10 in a Nigerian school hurt his grades. Students there, he said, were incredibly competitive, and that made him work hard. But although 75 was a top grade there, it still translated to a C on his U.S. transcript.
His mother, Adaku Okoro, decided for that reason against sending Faraday's brother and two sisters, to their relief. (Faraday's sister Maryland, 15, wrote a letter to her parents, making a case for not having to go. "But I would suggest that I could visit," she concluded.)
Nevertheless, Faraday and his mother agree that the sojourn taught him valuable lessons. He learned that getting malaria felt "just like being really sick," grew to love soccer and, his mother said, became less obsessed with buying the latest Nike shoes. An aspiring filmmaker, the Prince George's Community College student said his time in Nigeria sparked his love of cinema.
"They don't have consistent power, and once they turn it on, and the television came on, and you have a movie, it seemed, like, unreal," he recalled. "I learned more about Nigeria -- and maybe you can stretch and say the world in general. . . . I can set a movie in a foreign place and really go into detail into how a character from a foreign land will act."
The Agugoesis said they hope to retire in Nigeria and wanted their three sons to feel comfortable there. They started talking to Brian about going to school there when he was in fifth grade. He was game.
Rita Agugoesi said she almost changed her mind when she took Brian to Nigeria last fall. Then she saw her exceedingly shy son mingling with other students. Brian did not complain the whole year, except about the snakes that sometimes slither across the school grounds.
"It's the same," Brian, deep-voiced and tall, said nonchalantly when asked to compare Nigerian schools with schools in suburban Baltimore.
For now, the Agugoesis say they are pleased that Brian came back for his summer vacation more mature and relaxed than a year ago, with a voracious appetite for books and Nigerian "Nollywood" films.
"Sometimes you feel so alone, doing it all by yourself, raising them, trying to pass on the culture," Rita Agugoesi said, sitting in the living room, near Brian's suitcases, which bulged with Pringles, peanut butter
By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2007; C01
As the first day of school approached this month, Brian Agugoesi, 13, packed his bags with pens and notebooks. He also included Honeycomb cereal, which is impossible to get at his school, and tablets to fend off malaria, which unfortunately is not.
The Randallstown, Md., boy was packing for his second year at Grundtvig International Secondary School in the Niger River Valley of southeast Nigeria, an institution that, according to its Web site, boasts a water borehole and "network of tarred roads" on a 10-hectare campus. Grundtvig also offers, according to Brian, packed school days and teachers who require rule-flouters -- such as Brian the time he forgot to empty the trash in his dorm room -- to cut the campus grass "until they're satisfied."
Brian's parents, Rita and Charles Agugoesi, chuckled at that story on the recent eve of Brian's flight to Lagos. It is just what they wanted when they decided, like many of their Nigerian friends, to send their U.S.-born child to school in their African homeland.
"Every individual comes from somewhere," said Rita Agugoesi, a social worker. "When you have children, you want them to know where you came from."
Immigrants' journeys to America have long been inspired by educational opportunities for children. But unlike previous generations of immigrants, who often encouraged their kids' full assimilation, today's newcomers strive and sometimes struggle to transmit traditions to children submerged in a high-speed, diverse American culture. For some Africans, many of whom came to the United States for higher education, the answer is full immersion -- in Africa. A few years abroad, immigrant parents say, teaches children about Africa and, even better, some perspective about life in America.
"There are a lot of people over there who are dreaming to come here. They would be willing to have one of their fingers chopped off to come here," said Cosmas U. Nwokeafor, whose elder son spent three years in Nigeria and whose younger son will go there in December.
On a recent night, Nwokeafor, who toiled his way from busboy to Bowie State University professor and assistant provost, stretched out his arms in his spacious, freshly built Upper Marlboro home. "This was not made in a day."
Africans are immigrating to the United States faster than ever, and they are among the best-educated of all immigrant groups. But the African immigrant population, at about 1.4 million, is relatively small and new, so there is scant research on parenting and second-generation integration. No one tracks how many children of African immigrants attend school in their ancestral lands.
Community leaders say the practice is most common among Nigerians and Ghanaians, whose countries offer the unusual combination of relative political stability and established boarding schools with strict discipline and rigorous courses in English. At $5,000 to $10,000 a year, the schools are generally more affordable than American private schools.
Nwokeafor said he and his wife, Catherine, made great efforts to teach their four children traditional Nigerian songs and folk tales about turtles and lions. They took them to Nigeria often, taught them to address adults as "sir" and "auntie," and spoke to them in Igbo, their language.
But they wondered whether it was enough. The children told stories about American friends talking back to teachers and telling their parents to "shut up."
"I don't even know if I could spell my name the next day if I did that," Chinedu, 14, the younger son, said softly on a recent night.
Once, Nwokeafor noticed that a photo album -- filled with snapshots of the family posing by the Mercedes-Benz and the grand white house they keep in the village of Umubasi in southern Nigeria -- was missing from its spot. Chinedu confessed that he had taken it to school to prove to teasing classmates that Africans did not "live in trees, like monkeys."
"Whatever we try to put into them is being challenged by the dominant culture," Nwokeafor said. "At times, I feel so sorry for them because they are in a battle. They don't know whether to believe their parents or the dominant culture."
Uchenna Nwokeafor, 20, no longer has doubts. He spent seventh through ninth grade sharing a dorm room with 12 other students at a school in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The crack-of-dawn treks to fetch bath water from a tap a mile away, 5 a.m. prayers, 7 a.m. classes and weekends cutting grass with a machete, he said, taught him that "you have to work for your own."
Now a lanky social-work major at Bowie State who wears hip black-rimmed glasses, Uchenna remembers fondly the basketball tournament he played in with his Nigerian classmates, who called him "Americana." He banters fluently in Igbo with his father and listens to Nigerian pop music in his car. He said he feels "like the true African American."
"Culture-wise, it changed my life," Uchenna Nwokeafor said. "Those three years, it showed me another place called home."
That sort of review has made Chinedu enthusiastic about his upcoming year in Nigeria. A stellar student who dreams of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he hopes Nigeria will help him focus.
"Here, I'm with all my friends," he said. "I have too many distractions."
Cosmas Nwokeafor said that he is too "overprotective" to send his two daughters to Nigeria and that other parents he knows feel the same. In most cases, immigrants say, children are sent abroad for a few years in their early teens and then complete high school and prepare for the SAT in the United States.
Not every alumnus has glowing memories. Riverdale area resident Faraday Okoro, 20, said attending grades nine and 10 in a Nigerian school hurt his grades. Students there, he said, were incredibly competitive, and that made him work hard. But although 75 was a top grade there, it still translated to a C on his U.S. transcript.
His mother, Adaku Okoro, decided for that reason against sending Faraday's brother and two sisters, to their relief. (Faraday's sister Maryland, 15, wrote a letter to her parents, making a case for not having to go. "But I would suggest that I could visit," she concluded.)
Nevertheless, Faraday and his mother agree that the sojourn taught him valuable lessons. He learned that getting malaria felt "just like being really sick," grew to love soccer and, his mother said, became less obsessed with buying the latest Nike shoes. An aspiring filmmaker, the Prince George's Community College student said his time in Nigeria sparked his love of cinema.
"They don't have consistent power, and once they turn it on, and the television came on, and you have a movie, it seemed, like, unreal," he recalled. "I learned more about Nigeria -- and maybe you can stretch and say the world in general. . . . I can set a movie in a foreign place and really go into detail into how a character from a foreign land will act."
The Agugoesis said they hope to retire in Nigeria and wanted their three sons to feel comfortable there. They started talking to Brian about going to school there when he was in fifth grade. He was game.
Rita Agugoesi said she almost changed her mind when she took Brian to Nigeria last fall. Then she saw her exceedingly shy son mingling with other students. Brian did not complain the whole year, except about the snakes that sometimes slither across the school grounds.
"It's the same," Brian, deep-voiced and tall, said nonchalantly when asked to compare Nigerian schools with schools in suburban Baltimore.
For now, the Agugoesis say they are pleased that Brian came back for his summer vacation more mature and relaxed than a year ago, with a voracious appetite for books and Nigerian "Nollywood" films.
"Sometimes you feel so alone, doing it all by yourself, raising them, trying to pass on the culture," Rita Agugoesi said, sitting in the living room, near Brian's suitcases, which bulged with Pringles, peanut butter
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