Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Truth About Chernobyl. Grigori Medvedev. Basic Books, $22.95. I will never forget my visit to Three Mile Island. Almost a decade after the accident, the cleanup...
...At almost exactly the same time, Darwin began to read the theories of Lamarck and to speculate uponthe “mutability of species,” as the idea of evolution was then known...
...The son, Francis, “reluctantly agreed to the deletions out of respect for [his] mother’s wishes...
...Nearly everyone who researches or even writes about AIDS has been attacked by one interest group or another...
...As a result, Darwin grieved insufficiently for his mother, and paid for this suppression with years of psychosomatic illness...
...I wanted to like his book and to see in it an end, at last, to the ceaseless arguments over who did what and when in the discovery of the AIDS virus...
...Ehrenhalt attributes any number of recent crises to the professionalization of politics, sometimes carrying his argument a bit too far...
...When it comes to nuclear power, 1 consider myself normal...
...Ehrenhalt lays out his argument through a series of tightly written, chapter-length case studies, beginning at the small-town level and working his way up to Congress and the White House...
...The men responsible for the accident are not mere incompetents...
...All this is not so much implausible as uninteresting...
...In another revealing entry, Darwin recorded the need “to avoid stating how far I believe in Materialism...
...For the most part, it consisted of three men, sucking on respirators and swaddled in protective bunny suits, standing directly on top of the open reactor core...
...And it was when his son prepared to publish the autobiography in the Life and Letters that Emma Darwin revealed the true measure of her conventionality...
...Forer knew that any investigation would pit the word of the officer against that of a convicted prostitute-a hopeless match...
...Characters are introduced and quickly sketched...
...Surprisingly enough, however, Bowlby relegates to an appendix the possibility that this may have caused Darwin’s illness...
...One problem is that Gallo has no gift for writing...
...He argues that Darwin’s malady was psychological in origin...
...Compare that to last fall, when Congress was kept in session until little more than a week before election day...
...Nonetheless, there is something odd about Bowlby’s posthumous work...
...What are the lessons of Chemobyl...
...In the section on the elderly, Forer describes poignantly how we force the old to behave in court as if they are in their prime...
...Having worked on cancer viruses that bear some similarities to HIV, he was ideally situated for the task...
...Bowlby has his own theory to offer, a theory hit upon when the biographer learned that Darwin’s mother had died when he was eight years old...
...I wish I could say that Gallo has finally put all the controversy to rest, closing a particularly unpleasant chapter in his life...
...Dispelling this frightful image from his mind, but already feeling the embrace of hot nuclear tentacles on his face, hands, brain, and inner organs, Sitnikov carefully surveyed what was left of the central hall...
...Would that there were more like her...
...Where’s the Beef...
...Here, Forer is firm and clear: Toleration of difference, and the development of special standards to reflect that difference, is essential public policy...
...In every instance, Ehrenhalt argues, change resulted from politicians shedding their status as part-timers and embracing politics as a profession...
...the noteworthy attacks of the illness can be traced to moments of stress or incidents reminding Darwin of his late mother...
...One of the hidden messages of this book is that we must fill the seats of justice with wise, creative people...
...As for the problem of evil, and the difficulty of squaring it with an omnipotent God: “It revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded...
...In each instance, Ehrenhalt shows how a powerful (usually businessdominated) elite that once called the political shots lost its influence as politicians became more independent and assertive...
...With the help of nothing more than pairs of fancy pliers attached to the ends of very long poles, they were chipping away at the melted fuel rods and damaged control assembly, piece by radioactive piece...
...we do not understand their forgetfulness...
...Since the advent of “People’s Court,” “Divorce Court,” and the like, television has provided Americans with a somewhat satisfying image of justice in local trial courts: common-sensical and usually fair...
...In Greenville, South Carolina, a county government that was formerly the rural fiefdom of a state senator was taken over by fundamentalist Christians bent on restricting sinful development...
...In cases like these, justiceand judges-must be creative...
...He’s also sufficiently rigorous in reporting about the way these feudal arrangements worked that the discerning reader isn‘t likely to wish them back...
...The stories of children and the elderly are equally compelling...
...Instead, he became enmeshed in molecular biology, a science that comes close in its standards and dispassion to physics or chemistry...
...they are also shrewder about using the press, especially TV, to sell their agendas to voters (though Ehrenhalt wisely avoids this subject, which has been discussed to death by others...
...City and state governments once run by moonlighting lawyers, farmers, and merchants became year-round enterprises, requiring an officeholder’s full attention...
...We did everything right...
...He began to look for viruses that can cause cancer in humans, focusing on a particular class of viruses that insert copies of themselves among a cell’s genes-just like the AIDS virus does...
...Among the deleted passages was the following gem from Darwin: “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true: for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished...
...Convicted of a drug crime, she was sentenced to a job instead of a jail so that she could continue to provide support for her two small children...
...A nuclear physicist by training who spent his career generating power in the Soviet Union, Medvedev assisted in the construction of Chernobyl in the early seventies...
...It was a dangerous, dirty, inelegant job...
...Plant officials assure Moscow that the reactor is intact and the radiation levels are normal...
...The massive lid of the central hall had been blasted off, and the pathetic remains of the battered concrete walls, their mangled reinforcing bars protruding wildly, looked like some monstrous flycatching plant, waiting for the chance to drag a living creature into its infernal belly...
...Jerome Groopman of New England Deaconess Hospital still cringes when he recalls AIDS activists who passed out Kool-Aid at one of his lectures several years ago, comparing his recommendation that people with AIDS take the drug AZT to Jim Jones’s cyanide solution...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Truth About Chernobyl...
...There remains the problem of remedy...
...Back in the old days, when politicians were distracted by legal briefs or time profession of politics attracts ambitious people prepared to give the business of government their full attention...
...The theory associated with his name continues to draw headlines...
...They thought of the core as a toilet bowl...
...In Connecticut, the power of state party bosses like Republican J. Henry Roraback and Democrat John Bailey, who at one time exerted absolute control over state legislators, gave way to a statehouse full of independent agents collectively wreaking fiscal chaos...
...One day, Carol showed up in Forer’s chambers claiming that her probation officer was seeking sexual favors in return for the good reports she already deserved...
...And for more than a year, he was pursued by a Chicago Tribune reporter, John Crewdson, who deluged Gallo with reams of requests for data, letters, expense accounts, and lab notes and who called almost every scientist in Gallo’s field asking for information that would make Gallo look nefarious...
...And what a whopping dose of radiation they receive...
...To serve the apparent will of the people, the federal government slashed taxes, boosted defense spending, and funnelled cash (legally and otherwise) to the Nicaraguan contras...
...Hart, he argues, was encouraged to stray so far from any identifiable constituency that the public ended up wondering who this man really was and developed an unwholesome curiosity about his sex life...
...His prose is sprinkled with scientific jargon that is certain to confuse the general reader...
...Himmelfarb dryly notes that Darwin “preferred a morality independent of religion and untainted by the moral defects of Christianity...
...If the Number Two Reactor at Three Mile Island can be thought of as a commode, the Unit Four Reactor at Chemobyl will forever in my mind be “the nuclear volcano” described in Grigori Medvedev’s horrifying, bitter, and passionate hook about the colossal disaster that occurred on April 26, 1986, on the banks of the Pripyat River in the Soviet Ukraine...
...But so did Dr...
...He was far more sympathetic with religion when his books were considered wicked by the religious world than when (as was the case for some years before he died) the dignitaries of the Church were eager to pay him the highest honor...
...Bowlby does not even address the strong possibility that conflict within Darwin’s own soul may have been the root of the problem...
...Bowlby, or his editors, may have realized this, because most of the book is straightforward biography, informative and clearly written (if wholly conventional in its unqualified admiration of Darwin and his ideas...
...But Bowlby seems to want to keep the lid on all this almost as much as Emma Darwin herself did...
...Timothy Noah Unequal Protection: Women, Children, and the Elderly in Court...
...Gallo was so viciously ridiculed, he writes, that the hurt still festers...
...Almost a decade after the accident, the cleanup dragged on...
...Although it never revealed a smoking gun, the article prompted an as-yet-unfinished investigation of Gallo by the National Institutes of Health...
...Darwin was raised by his older sisters, who did all they could to suppress his memory of her...
...I once got several hundred nasty Christmas cards from members of the activist group ACTUP, with messages like “the blood of people with AIDS is on your hands...
...Forer shows how the legal system pushes them to testify, at no small personal expense, then often discounts their testimony and returns them to abusive homes...
...Darwin’s cousin, Julia Wedgwood, remarked on the curious fact that his antagonism to religion increased “while all the apparent reasons for it were vanishing quantities...
...The nuclear fire, Medvedev warns, burns...
...As to the allegedly “scant evidence that [Emma] was troubled” by her husband’s beliefs, here is what Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her book, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, published in 1959: “It was only in his autobiography that Darwin gave free expression to his religious opinions...
...Ehrenhalt occasionally comes close to suggesting that we should return to the old days of smoke-filled rooms, but deep down he seems to understand that their time is gone...
...He also blames bureaucratic incompetence and a culture of secrecy and lies...
...Left without the most fundamental sense of identity, MitcheWDavid became even more withdrawn as legal proceedings over his future ensued...
...The psychosomatic origin of much illness, and no doubt Darwin’s, is well worth discussing...
...But most of all, Medvedev believes that we forgot to respect the atom...
...And so it goes...
...That is Medvedev’s style...
...But Ehrenhalt is surely right that the newly professionalized and independent breed of politician has made it difficult to steer the government in any one direction for very long...
...At the same time, I think the book will baffle and bore those who are not members of the AIDS cognoscenti...
...screamed the directors of the plant, after sending worker after worker inside the unit to report on the situation...
...Hadn’t voters chosen the unmistakably conservative Ronald Reagan because they thought the federal government was too liberal...
...The legal system did nothing for the boy whose divorced parents called him by two different first names and used him as a pawn in their struggle against each other...
...But after 16 years as a trial court judge in Philadelphia, Forer sees institutional justice in a slightly more cynical light...
...But even in this company, Gallo has suffered more than his share...
...In one notebook Darwin wrote: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of the deity...
...Even in these cases, which present a number of truly unfair and upsetting outcomes, Judge Forer’s hand, barely visible because of her modesty, has plainly improved the lives of the litigants before her...
...And because one of Gallo’s viruses is almost identical to a virus isolated by Montagnier, Gallo has been accused of stealing or misappropriating the virus From the French...
...He writes of the fishermen at the outflow gates of the plant...
...He also has larded his book with irrelevancies, like a brief history of the National Institutes of Health and a section on the 13 questions he is most often asked about AIDS...
...How big the fish are...
...It was those small acids that, after the explosion and the release of radioactive substances, served as efficient coagulators, transporting radioactive particles and fission fragments...
...Gallo was attracted to medicine when he was a child, after his sister died of leukemia...
...Gallo’s troubles, the title of his book might indicate that it is going to be a swashbuckling story of discovery on the front lines of science...
...Those who want a primer on viruses will find Gallo’s book rough going...
...Charles having succeeded in maintaining a modicum of discretion in his lifetime, she objected to having the floodgates of scandal opened after his death, and solemnly warned her son that unless he deleted some of the franker passages, her life would be made unendurably miserable...
...Carol was a prostitute and drug courier...
...But precisely because Darwin is so strongly associated with those wellknown theories and controversies, we do expect a discussion of any psychosomatic illness he suffered to be related to evolution, or to the issue of religion and science more generally...
...Robert Gallo...
...Or, perhaps, between his marriage and his work...
...Gallo’s problems began in 1972, when he thought he had made a momentous discovery...
...On learning this, many people reasonably ask: Was Darwin’s illness brought on by a conflict between religion and science...
...Medvedev concludes that the type of reactor used at Chernobyl contained design flaws that led to the explosion...
...Ambition was, according to Alan Ehrenhalt, a respected former political reporter for Congressional Quarterly who is now executive editor of Governing magazine...
...Norton, $22.95...
...Ehrenhalt’s thesis is that the quirky path of recent political history, from Vietnam to Watergate to Operation Desert Storm, is best understood not by trying to figure out elusive electoral mood swings but by scrutinizing the unsubtle egos of American politicians...
...Ehrenhalt also blames the new professionalization for the implosion of Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign...
...And this is a damnable doctrine...
...Sure enough, he discerned a similar etiology in Darwin’s case...
...But Gallo is the field’s true Job...
...Of course, he died in great agony in the Number Six clinic in Moscow...
...But I found his book slow going, full of details that will not change the minds of those who want to believe he is guilty of stealing the AIDS virus or who dislike his fasttalking, aggressive ways...
...he writes...
...He got up at a scientific conference to present his discovery of a virus that can cause human cancer...
...Lois Schlffer Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery...
...The country lacks political direction, he argues, not because voters are ambivalent but because politicians with various politcotton crops, they were more likely to defer to others...
...When I interviewed the workers later, they referred to their task as cleaning “the pot...
...Tom Bethell...
...Authors and scholars have long speculated on the great man’s “shivering, dying sensations, ringing in the ears” (to use Darwin’s words), his heart palpitations, blurred vision, and hysterical crying fits...
...If voters were not determining the course of our democracy, what was...
...Unfortunately, Bowlby manages to suppress almost all of this, paraphrasing Darwin’s views on religion this way: “The Old Testament gave a manifestly false history of the world, and [Darwin] was shocked by the image of God as a revengeful tyrant...
...It settles scores...
...Eventually, however, the full extent of the disaster is revealed, but only after men like Sitnikov have received fatal doses of radiation and the people of the towns beside Chernobyl have seen themselves, their gardens, their streets coated in nuclear fallout...
...Many AIDS researchers have similar stories to tell...
...William Booth The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office...
...Now that the ideological fervor of the Reagan years has given way to the gentlemanly pragmatism of the Bush era, political analysts are turning their attention from large questions about the purpose of government to smaller ones about its mechanics...
...As Himmelfarb suggests, the truth is that Darwin was actively antagonistic to religion, which in turn plainly dismayed his wife...
...She would, for example, have us develop laws that recognize that women are different-they are often the primary guardian of children, for instance-and that to achieve fair treatment we must give them special treatment...
...Darwin’s illness, Bowlby concludes, was the result of repressed emotions generated by his mother’s death...
...They are worse than fools...
...Ehrenhalt reminds us that, as recently as the fifties, Congress ran from January to July, allowing members “to practice law or sell insurance or do whatever they had done before they were elected...
...Medvedev is in a unique position to tell the story of Chernobyl...
...Luc Montagnier of Paris’s Pasteur Institute...
...Equally disturbing are the stories of sexually abused kids...
...Then Medvedev delivers the obituary...
...The struggle, and conflict, between religion and science is as much an issue now as it was when Darwin was suffering from persistent gastric pains...
...In Congress and the White House, politicians once bound together by loyalty to national political parties went their separate ways, bequeathing to the nation an out-of-control federal deficit...
...they were cleaning up a very large, very hot mess...
...A well-regarded scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr...
...The common thread in these cases is that they involve “the others”: women, children, and the elderly...
...What can be done to regain the rudder...
...These passages remained unpublished until 1958, when Nora Barlow, Darwin’s granddaughter, published his autobiography in unexpurgated form...
...Bowlby, who died in 1990, was also the author of Personality and Mental Illness, Attachment and Loss, and The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds...
...He also has been accused of seeking a patent on the antibody test for HIV for his personal gain...
...Bowlby’s 500-page biography is not the first book to probe Charles Darwin’s mysterious illness, which endured for 30 years or more...
...They are “half-crazed’’ bureaucrats who crack under pressure, who refuse to believe that the reactor core has exploded, despite a plant full of radioactive rubble...
...This new breed grew up in a culture less inclined to respect authority...
...In the early eighties, Gallo was one of the few scientists who turned their labs over to a search for the new, destructive virus...
...After the accident, he was sent back to investigate, interviewing many of the operators, turbine engineers, electricians, and firefighters before they died of radiation poisoning...
...thus led inexorably to “Where’s the Salami?’ Well, maybe yes, maybe no...
...Darwin’s notebooks reveal that at the very time his illness appeared, he was, as Bowlby writes, “keenly aware that the religious and political implications of his theories could prove dangerous-especially if his philosophical position turned out to be materialist, as he strongly suspected it would...
...Of course, Sitnikov is not believed...
...And, eventually, he discovered the virus...
...It is going to be an apologia...
...This may well have churned up Darwin’s stomach and given him many restless days and nights...
...Who except the most diligent will struggle through sentences like, “As noted, to make viral proteins requires a viral RNA in the form (messenger RNA) and location (cytoplasm) where it can be ‘read’ or ‘translated.’ ” Even when Gallo writes about incidents that have deeply hurt or enraged him, his prose is almost devoid of passion...
...Anatoly Andreyevich Sitnikov, deputy chief operational engineer, is one of those ordered in to inspect...
...AIDS research is a subject exploding with politics and passion...
...So in one of the few happy endings in the book, Forer ordered Carol to report to the officer by mail, and she completed her three-year probation successfully...
...Times Books, $23.00...
...That’s where the oddness lies...
...The reactor had clearly blown up...
...Even now, I have difficulty thinking back to that day,” he writes, when the joke was “human tumor virus or human rumor virus...
...To the naive reader-if such a person exists-who has never heard of Dr...
...To Medvedev they are “pathetic creatures hidden beneath layers of arrogance and official confidence...
...If, on the other hand, Darwin’s repressed grief really is the true cause of his illness, and that’s all there is to it, it is a comparatively insignificant point and scarcely worth bringing up...
...Ellen Cooper, asked to be reassigned this year so that she would no longer have to deal with AIDS drugs-she felt beaten down by the unrelenting pressure from activists, drug companies, and the government...
...He worked for and knew many of the men who sat at the control panels during the ill-fated test that led to the explosion at Chernobyl...
...But those who are curious about the controversy that envelopes Gallo may want to read his book to learn his side of the story...
...But as an adult, he found himself uninterested in, and actually put off by, seeing and treating patients...
...Especially when I think about nuclear power stations dotted across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...While Gallo does not bare his soul in this book, he has said privately to me and many others that he was devastated by Crewdson’s zealous investigation...
...Crewdson eventually published a 50,000-word article that accused Gallo of stealing the AIDS virus...
...As it happened, Bowlby discovered this datum when he was working on the psychological ill-effects that sometimes flow from childhood bereavement...
...He contends that the phenomenon is a reason Jim Wright was driven from office, since no countervailing sense of party unity existed to rally unbeholden congressional Democrats behind their speaker...
...Bowlby then misleadingly summarizes Darwin’s sentiments by saying, “Yet he was unwilling to move too far from tradition...
...Ten years ago, the two seemed one and the same...
...The destruction he saw surpassed his imagination...
...Reformers often suggest that American government could reestablish party loyalty if it were restructured along more parliamentary lines, a change I would certainly support tutional surgery, governmental torpor can be shed only through an appeal to the idealism, or at least common sense, of the group whose influence on the political process Ehrenhalt chooses not to discuss: the voters...
...In this book, she reflects on those of her cases in which the law, correctly applied, effected a grave miscarriage of justice...
...Gina Kolata Charles Darwin: A New Life...
...Those who want to read a juicy tale, full of righteous anger, by a scientist who feels himself persecuted will surely be disappointed...
...But Medvedev tells such a tale of bureaucratic incompetence and willful ignorance, a story of such needless death and widespread contamination, it makes me pause...
...I have such fond memories of the Pripyat River...
...But today, the full-but which is unlikely to occur any time soon...
...I wish Gallo success and I fervently hope, for his sake and for the sake of AIDS research, that he will finally be left alone to do his work...
...Forer argues that the system fails, sometimes miserably, when it cannot tolerate those who differ from that premise...
...Darwin’s malady began when he was 30 years old, shortly after he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a devoutly religious woman...
...He duly notes the “conflict between what were seen in Darwin’s day to be the adverse religious consequences of evolution theory and Emma’s religious beliefs,” only to dismiss it in a paragraph...
...Perhaps that’s why, reading Gallo’s book, 1 kept thinking of Coleridge’s lengthy “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which an old sailor collars a young man and forces him to sit still for his bitter, cautionary tale...
...Short of such major constiical beliefs are tugging it in a hundred different directions at once...
...Or between his own upbringing (he was expected to enter the church at one point) and the implications of the theory of evolution...
...A decade later, just as Gallo regained his standing in the scientific community by finding incontrovertible evidence of that human tumor virus, he became ensnarled in the politics of AIDS...
...Their cowardice or heroism during the accident is described...
...How happy the fishermen, who enjoy the vodka and the warm Ukrainian night...
...That’s one reason I wish I could wholeheartedly recommend his book...
...What, then, was its cause...
...Medvedev’s book is a Soviet book...
...If you stop rowing and scoop up some of the brownish water in your hand, your palm immediately tends to contract on account of the fatty marsh acids in the water...
...Medvedev tells his story in a rambling countdown to disaster, beginning with a recollection of the countryside around pre-radiated Chernobyl -a setting of primeval quiet and cleanliness...
...America’s common law-the fabric of court-made rules and practices that has evolved in this country from English roots-is premised on “the reasonable man in the prime of life...
...But even before the presidency passed from Ronald Reagan to George Bush, these causes lost their momentum, and the notion of a popular mandate to do any of these things became less compelling...
...Alan Ehrenhalt...
...In Concord, California, a sleepy city government that previously rubberstamped decisions made by an unelected city manager suddenly turned activist in the eighties with the election of a city council dedicated to instituting “comparable worth” pay...
...Darwin is a historically important figure, and his life is copiously documented...
...Lois G. Forer...
...The redeeming feature of the book is that, ultimately, it has very little to do with the author’s pet theories about bereavement...
...You could watch them via remote video camera...
...But to those who have followed Gallo’s blighted career, it is clear what Virus Hunting is going to be...
...John Bowlby...
...Norton, $24.95...
...Actually, I’m inclined to believe the decisive factor was a more aggressive press, which is less inclined than it used to be to ignore ethical lapses in politicians, in part because reporters, too, have less reverence for authority than they once did...
...More humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals...
...By that, I mean that I am not hysterical, one way or the other...
...To his dismay, other scientists at the meeting gleefully informed him that rather than discovering a new human virus, Gallo had isolated animal viruses that had contaminated his cells as they grew in the laboratory...
...My concern with the case she makes is that special treatment can, and historically has, meant second-class treatment...
...I began to lose track of the people who died in great agony in the Number Six clinic in Moscow...
Vol. 23 • May 1991 • No. 5
