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Confessions From a Beginning Public Defender

Over the last fifteen years, I have volunteered at several public defender offices. I started my legal career as a public defender, and going back to that work after decades made me remember how hard that job is. It certainly was difficult for me at the beginning of my career.

          Because of plea bargaining and dismissals, many defenders and prosecutors try few cases. The overwhelming majority of cases end without a trial, and new attorneys might go a year or more without doing a trial. I, however, tried a lot of cases shortly after being sworn in as an attorney.

          After getting a graduate law degree, I joined the Legal Aid Society, then New York City’s public defender. I was a favorite of the chief attorney of the organization because he and I were both graduates of the University of Chicago Law School. He advanced me quickly, and I was in a major trial position three months after I started, having already done a few misdemeanor trials.

          Federal money had come into New York City for special drug courts, and I and five others were assigned as public defenders in these newly-opened courts. Cases were transferred there from all around the city. Because of the backlogs in the other courts, many of these cases were old, no acceptable plea bargains had been negotiated, and a mountain of cases was awaiting trial. The new courts were designed to try such cases. As a result, for about a year and a half, I started a new trial about every two weeks.

          The pressure was intense. I never was not thinking about my cases. I carried a notebook—at movies, parties, dinners, the subway, wherever—to jot down notes about the cases because I could not shut them out of my mind. I put the notebook by the bed because almost every night I would wake up thinking about my clients.

          Mostly I lost the trials. I knew that this was normal. Defendants are convicted 75% of the time or more, and the conviction rate for the kinds of drug cases I was trying was even higher. A legendary attorney who mentored me said that it would be a miracle if a defender won half the cases. Even though I knew these facts, I had not yet mastered the essential requirement for a public defender: coping with losing. I consider myself sane and balanced, but this was the one time in my life that I felt close to a nervous breakdown. Of course, it may not have been my fault that a person was convicted—the evidence against him was simply too strong—but even so, each time I questioned whether I was competent to do the work.

          Especially hard was a loss when the defendant had been free on bail. When convicted, he was immediately handcuffed and shoved into a cell behind the courtroom. I dreaded seeing that person at that moment, but I felt that I had to. The bars that separated us always gave me a chill. They haunted me. This feeling always comes back to me when I see the final scene of the movie “The Maltese Falcon.” Although I have enjoyed this film many times, I often turn away at that closing shot, which gives me the creeps. Mary Astor is being led away by the police, and she is hoping that Humphrey Bogart will save her. In a great monolog, he makes it clear that he won’t. The cops take her to an old-fashioned elevator with a gate, and the gate is closed with her on one side and Bogart on the other. The gate’s shadow falls like bars across her face. The horror of what awaits her has now sunk in. She panics. The scene brings back the memory of the queasiness I felt when I went to see Abraham S. in the cells after he was convicted. His was the real-life face of Mary Astor’s character. Worse yet, it was not clear to me that he was guilty. Sleep was only a velleity that night.

          I did win a few trials, but these did not prove to me that I had the right disposition to be a public defender. After a not-guilty verdict I did not feel elation or gratification. I did not even feel satisfaction about my trial attorney skills. I was only relieved that I had not lost. The win did not make me feel good; it only staved off the depression of a loss. After one acquittal, I talked with the friendly presiding judge, and I explained these feelings to him. He responded that with such emotions, I should not be a public defender. I knew that he was right, but I had no idea what to do to survive in the work.

          After trying cases at what seemed like a non-stop pace for a couple years, I left the trial bureau and went into a test case unit of the Legal Aid Society. Doing legal research and drafting memoranda and briefs without having to pick a jury gave me time to reflect on my experiences, something I could not do when I was involved with trial after trial. I thought hard about what I had done well and what I had not done well. I thought that I was being objective when I concluded that I had performed much better than I had given myself credit for. Yes, I was a good trial attorney, and my clients, even the ones who had been convicted, were lucky to have had me.

          Six months into the test case unit, I went back to try a big drug case involving a defendant arrested by an elite, but corrupt, unit of the police. Conviction meant an automatic life sentence, but now I had the confidence that I knew what I was doing. The client, however, was scared and tried to get me replaced, but his mother—a sweet, sweet woman, who, in spite of everything, loved her son–said that she had a vision from God that I was Mikey’s savior. So, he began to cooperate with me. I did do a terrific job, and to his surprise he was acquitted of the most serious charges. He went to jail, but did not get a life sentence.

          From that time on, I felt I was able to assess my trial performances more dispassionately. Even when there was a conviction, I could examine without prejudice whether I had done a good job. I looked back on a trial not to flagellate myself, but to see if there was something to learn for the future. I learned that I and only I had to try each case. In other words, I could not let other people tell me how to try it because I was the one who had to live with the result. I learned that sometimes risks had to be taken and the safe path was not always the better one. The safe path, the one that others can’t criticize, often leads to a conviction because that is the usual result in a criminal case. Risks would leave me open to criticism, but I owed my client my best effort, risky or not. If I thought that the risks increased the likelihood of an acquittal, even though an acquittal was still unlikely and even though I would be criticized if a conviction resulted, the risk was worth it. I learned to have confidence in my judgment, or at least I learned that I knew the case better than any observer and my judgment about my own case was better than anyone else’s. I eventually went back to regularly trying cases and trusted that I really knew how to do it. I would like to think—do think—that I served my clients well. I still felt bad after a loss, but now I found satisfaction in winning.

          But there was another side to being a public defender. Mikey’s big drug case, while giving me new-found confidence, also led me to an ethical breach…not a particularly serious one, but… Defender ethics prohibited me from taking anything from the client or his friends or family. But after the case, Mikey’s mother kept insisting that she had to do something for me. She settled on a Saturday lunch that she would prepare. I said no again and again, but she persisted. She could not understand the reason for the refusal, and I could see that I was hurting her feelings by continually declining her invitation. I decided to bend my ethics and relented. She then insisted that I bring the spouse. I’m glad we went.

          She lived in a cramped apartment somewhere in what was then the shadow of Shea Stadium, the home of the Mets. We quickly learned, however, that after coming from Cuba (well before Castro), she had lived in the Bronx and was a Yankees fan. Her accent was thick, and she kept talking about her love of the New York “Jankees.” I tried not to smile every time she said it. There were religious artifacts around her living/dining room, but then I noticed pictures of a handsome man in the kind of fancy dress that I associated with Cuban performers. When I asked about the person in the picture, she lit up. That was her husband who had died but still lived in her memory. I did not know how to react when I found out that he was a Cuban band leader who primarily led orchestras playing on cruise ships plying the waters to Havana. I did not ask her what she thought of “I Love Lucy,” but here was a woman who had been married to a real-life Ricky Ricardo. She was fascinating talking about that life.

          She had us sit at a small Formica table, and she brought the spouse and me food. After we ate it, she brought more food. After a few minutes, she brought even more, and after that was sampled, another dish, and another. She had prepared a banquet for ten!  I hoped each time she served us it was the last time, but I also felt that I would look ungrateful if I did not continue to eat. She had worked on this meal not just for hours, but for days. The spouse and I kept urging her to sit and eat with us, but she refused. She was only there to serve us.

          If we talked about her son (who was serving a nine-year sentence), it was only for a moment. She tried to give me money, but I was insistent on giving it back to her. I didn’t see her again after I waddled down the steps, but for years, until she died, I got a Christmas card from her sent by her son. I don’t think that she could read or write English.

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Silva’s Prescience

I told Lisa the Librarian that I was looking for a “read,” maybe a noir mystery. She said that she preferred spy stories and recommended Daniel Silva, a name I recognized from bestseller lists but whom I had never read. Lisa suggested The English Girl, published in 2013, the first Silva she had read. Early on I was not only hooked by the book but also struck by the author’s seeming prescience.

Shamron, a high-level Israeli security agent, is trying to recruit Gabriel, Israeli art restorer, assassin, and spy, for a mission. Shamron states that the American president “says that he will not allow the Iranians to build nuclear weapons. But that declaration is meaningless if the Iranians have the capability to build them in a short period of time.”

Gabriel indicates that this would apply to Japan, but Shamron rejoins, “The Japanese are not ruled by apocalyptic Shia mullahs. If the American president isn’t careful, his two most important foreign policy achievements will be a nuclear Iran and the restoration of the Islamic caliphate.”

Silva’s prescience, however, was limited. He did not foresee that in 2015, two years after the book’s publication, Iran would agree with the United States, England, France, China, Russia, and Germany to limit its uranium enrichment to levels far below that needed for nuclear weapons. That agreement had a major limitation: It expired in 2030, but presumably as that deadline came, there would have been further negotiations to extend the accord. On the other hand, the agreement had two major positives: Iran agreed to ship its more highly enriched uranium out of the country, and, because the agreement also allowed for the international inspection of Iranian facilities, atomic energy inspectors were granted widespread access. All the countries and the inspectors indicated that the agreement was working. Silva had not foreseen that Iran would cede its capability of quickly making a nuclear weapon.

Of course, Silva could not also see that the accord would be an agreement interruptus, when Trump, with his Obama Derangement Syndrome, withdrew from the accord. Trump asserted, without proof and ignoring what the other countries and the inspectors had concluded, that Iran was not living up to the deal.

Not surprisingly, after the U.S. withdrawal, what could easily have been foreseen happened; Iran starting enriching uranium to higher levels than it had before. It was now closer to building nuclear weapons that could be put on missiles than it had in 2013 when The English Girl came out and much higher than before Trump broke the agreement. Silva did not foresee that an American president, Trump, would actually enable Iran to be closer to a bomb than ever before.

Silva’s prescience was limited in another way. Shamron opines that Israel is “foolish to leave our security in [American] hands. [Israeli] generals aren’t sure they can destroy enough of the program to make a military strike effective. And [Israeli intelligence] is telling the prime minister that a unilateral war with the Persians would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.”

Silva did not foresee that with Trump as president, Israel could easily get America to undertake military actions that Israel wanted done.

Now we are involved in a deadly “excursion” against Iran. Unfortunately, we have seen this movie before. According to Louis Menand in The New Yorker of April 20, 2026, an Assistant Secretary of Defense in March 1965 stated what he saw as U.S. goals in Vietnam: “The principal aim was ‘to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.’ He assigned this a weight of seventy per cent. Second, at twenty per cent, was to keep Southeast Asia out of Chinese hands. And the third, at ten per cent, was to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.” Compare and contrast with Trump’s present goals in Iran, assuming you know what they are.

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REMOVAL OF THE PRESIDENT: A PRIMER

There has been a lot of talk recently about how to divest ourselves of the current president. There’s not a chance, and here’s why.

The United States has two constitutional methods for removing a president.  The first is the impeachment process. Three separate constitutional provisions are involved. The first gives the House of Representatives the power to impeach.

Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 states: “The House of Representatives shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”

Impeachment means an accusation or charging decision akin to an indictment. It is not a conviction. This means the House takes on the role of prosecutor and decides whether to bring charges.

In modern times, impeachment proceedings begin in the House Judiciary Committee, which investigates and holds hearings on the charges. The committee may produce an impeachment resolution that usually contains articles of impeachment based on specific charges. The House then votes on the resolution. Impeachment requires a simple majority in the House.

The Constitution gives the Senate the power to try an impeachment’s accusation. Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 states: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.”

House members act as prosecutors for the trial. Attorneys for the accused can present a defense and question witnesses. The accused may testify. If the president has been impeached, the Chief Justice of the United States presides over the trial. In other cases, the vice president or the president pro tempore of the Senate is the presiding officer.

At the end of the trial, the Senate debates in closed session, with every senator limited to 15 minutes of time. Each article of impeachment is voted on separately and conviction requires a two-thirds majority. If all 100 Senators are present, sixty-seven are required to convict.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution defines who can be impeached and for what. It states: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

An impeached official can be convicted for the reasonably well-defined offenses of treason and bribery and the broad category of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” That phrase does not have a fixed definition. Perhaps most famously House Minority Leader Congressman Gerald Ford said in April 1970, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” At that time, Ford was seeking to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a staunch liberal he accused of financial impropriety.

Impeachment is not limited to the president but applies to everyone in the executive branch and the judiciary. To date, the Senate has conducted formal impeachment proceedings nineteen times, resulting in seven acquittals, eight convictions, three dismissals, and one resignation with no further action. The eight convictions were of judges. Although three presidents have been impeached (Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump twice), the Senate has not convicted a president although Johnson survived by only one vote. (This post-Civil War drama produced one of the chapters in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.)

The consequences of an impeachment conviction are removal from office and a disqualification from holding future federal offices. Article 3, Clause 7: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

A second process for removal of a president comes from Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. It reads:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”

The impeachment process is aimed at the conduct of a president, for the commission of bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is designed for situations where the president is incapacitated or dangerously unable to function but refuses to step aside. For example, before this provision became part of the Constitution, it is widely believed that Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke and was no longer able to act as president. In essence, his second wife performed as the chief executive, which we tend to forget when we say that no woman has been president.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment removal process is triggered if the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet (or another body Congress creates) declare the president unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. The Vice President becomes Acting President. The president can contest this determination. If the Vice President and a Cabinet majority again determine that the president is unfit, the matter goes to Congress, which can remove the president only with a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate.

Something to be stressed here: The triggering process requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet and may eventually require agreement of two-thirds of both the House and Senate. This is, indeed, a high bar.

Not surprisingly, Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment has never been invoked.

But there is another wrinkle, and that is in the term limits of the Twenty-Second Amendment. It states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

It is the second clause of that provision that would be important in the highly unlikely event Trump would be removed. If JD Vance were to serve as president for more than two years of Trump’s unexpired term, he could only be elected to the presidency one time. If, however, he serves less than two years of the unexpired term, he could be elected to the presidency twice. The presidential term starts on January 20. In other words, again in the highly unlikely event Trump was removed before January 20, 2027, Vance would serve as president for more than two years of ‘Trump’s term and could be elected to that office only once. If, however, Trump wasbe removed after January 20, Vance could be elected twice and in theory could be president for ten years.

So. How likely are either of these events going to succeed in “ridding us of this meddlesome” president? Not very. Even if the House impeached, it is fantasy to think that two-thirds of the Senate would convict Trump. With the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, neither JD Vance nor a majority of the Cabinet are going to certify that Trump is so disabled that he can’t perform as President. And two-thirds of both the House and Senate are never going to vote for that. I, for one, hope that Congress would address more substantive issues such as comprehensive reforms of our immigration framework or our healthcare system. Wasting its time on impeachment proceedings that go nowhere is foolish.

That does not mean that I am not concerned about the performance and mental abilities of our president as is indicated by a tee shirt I have worn frequently in the last decade. It reads: “Trump: His Mother Did Not Have Him Tested.” My spouse gave it to me. The culturally literate, of course, will immediately recognize it as a reference to Sheldon Leonard on “The Big Bang Theory.” You can look it up.

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Offensive Language?

The college students called me out (attacked me?). They were in my seminar “Race, Poverty, and American Criminal Justice.” They said that my language was offensive (racist?). They referred to my use of “Blacks” as a noun, although they did not put it in that grammatical fashion. It was wrong to say something like “Blacks are incarcerated at a higher rate than whites” (Whites?). Instead, I should be saying “Black people” or “Black males” are imprisoned at a higher rate. Black as a noun was bad; Black as an adjective was acceptable.

I had not been aware that mine was offensive language. I was surprised because I know that words matter, as my family can attest. The spouse was born with one leg shorter than the other. As a kid, she was labeled “crippled,” a term she detested because it made her seem helpless and deformed, neither of which is true. In those bygone days, however, it was an acceptable word. (She reluctantly accepts “handicapped.”) Words and their impacts, however, change. Today, “crippled” would be avoided. (In the mid-nineteenth century, The Hospital of the New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled was founded. It is now New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery. The NAACP would have a different name if formed today.)

“Queer” was pejorative when I was a young man.  “He is a queer” did not indicate a normal difference in sexuality, but, at best, an unexplainable oddity. It more often connoted that something was amiss or wrong or perhaps even dangerous. My trans son, however, now embraces the term as do others who have formed a welcoming community. Their use of “queer” proclaims that they do not hide who they are, that they are proud of themselves.

For these personal and other reasons, I thought I was attuned to offensive words and terms and their changing meanings. I was surprised, then, when the students contended otherwise. I wondered if the students were correct, and with minimal delving, I found they had support. The 2025 edition of the AP Stylebook, perhaps the most popular arbiter of usage, backed them up and told me not to use “Blacks” as a noun as I had. Instead I was to use it as an adjective as in, for example, Black men, or the Black community. This confused me. I had taught the same course in 2019. The enrollment was larger, and the students were outspoken and well-spoken, yet no one had called me out as the present students had. I saw that the author of the book I had assigned for the following week, published in 2012, had used the language that had been labeled offensive. I was confused.

I then did more research and found a bit of uncertainty. The Chicago Manual of Style, used extensively in academic publishing, did not mandate the AP usage but favored it. I researched further and learned that this now mandated or recommended usage started to emerge in the 2010s. It did not become the “official” standard until 2020 when, for the first time, the AP Style Book adopted it.

This recent emergence helped explain why I had not known it and my 2019 class had not insisted on it. It had not yet become a standard. My present class of twenty-year-olds are the first generation to grow up with it, but, of course, in the hubris of youth, they did not know that. But I will try to abide by their wishes. I do not wish to needlessly offend. Too often when people are offended by language, reasonable discourse disappears.

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Walter Reed and the Microbes (Post by the Spouse)

I recently finished re-reading Microbe Hunters, a book published in 1926 to great acclaim. It’s a chatty and fascinating history of the men (and some of their assisting wives) who were at the forefront of discovering the germs that cause anthrax, malaria, syphilis, and other scourges. For reasons that are not clear to me, I was required to read this book in 1958, when I was in the 6th grade.

Before I get to telling you about Walter Reed (one of its fascinating stories), you might wonder why anybody would choose to re-read a book about science from 1926? So here’s how that happened:

I belong to a book club (doesn’t everybody?). In this book club we recently read Stephanie Dray’s Becoming Madame Secretary, a fictional “autobiography” of Francis Perkins, a remarkable woman who became the first woman to hold a cabinet post. She was FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the prime mover behind Social Security. Anyway, in her 20’s, she was courted by Sinclair Lewis who was several years younger than she. How many of us remember that Sinclair Lewis was the first American author to win a Nobel Prize? Well, that’s all the book club needed. We simply had to read something by Sinclair Lewis and chose Arrowsmith, published in 1925.

Arrowsmith follows the career of Martin Arrowsmith, a Midwesterner who goes to medical school at the fictional University of Winnemac. While there he meets one professor Gottlieb. Skeptical of the commercialism of the medical profession, Gottlieb is driven instead by his dedication to pure research in the service of Science. Arrowsmith becomes an acolyte and subsequently spends a great deal of his career frustrated by the practice of medicine and longing to follow in Gottlieb’s footsteps. Later in his career, he gets that opportunity and discovers a potential cure for a deadly tropical disease. He is sent to the tropics where an outbreak of this scourge has occurred. Upon arrival, he is confronted with a scientific dilemma: He can either treat everyone who has the disease with his “cure,” or he can scientifically test his phage by treating one group of victims and leaving a second group untreated. If more people in the treatment group survive than in the untreated group, then and only then will he really know if his treatment is successful. No spoilers here; I won’t tell you what he decides.

What is particularly interesting about the novel is that Lewis had an essential collaborator, Paul de Kruif, a somewhat cantankerous microbiologist (he was thrown out of Rockefeller Institute after writing highly unflattering things about his colleagues). Arrowsmith’s early years mirror those of de Kruif, and Lewis would not have been able to accurately describe laboratories and experiments without de Kruif’s help. As a result, de Kruif enjoyed 25% of the royalties from the book.

When I subsequently learned that de Kruif was the author of Microbe Hunters, well, nothing would do except that I had to re-read it. And so I did. So, after learning about Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur and Koch and a few others that, to me at least, were unknown, we came to Walter Reed. So from Frances Perkins to Walter Reed, we come to the intersection of Arrowsmith and Reed.

Major Walter Reed was sent to Cuba in 1900 as the head of a four-man commission with orders to eradicate yellow fever which was, at the time, killing almost a third of U.S. troops stationed there. Reed was a doctor, but not much of a microbe hunter (yet), and he was flying blind; he and everyone else knew almost nothing about the disease.

First order of business, then, was to identify the microbe. He and his three colleagues set about to examine the blood and organs of those who died of the disease and managed to find…nothing.* At his wits’ end, Reed consulted Dr. Carlos Finlay (aka “Theorizing Old Fool”) who had proclaimed, without much (or any) evidence, that yellow fever, like malaria, was caused by a mosquito. Since they had nothing else to go on, they decided to examine his theory.

There was one catch: it was not possible to give yellow fever to any animal…except the human animal. So Reed was faced with the prospect of taking mosquitoes who had bitten sick humans and allowing those mosquitoes to bite perfectly healthy humans to see if they got sick. Having no permission from the military to perform this experiment, he nevertheless asked for volunteers. Two of his colleagues, one with a wife and five children (!), volunteered.

And so, the experiment proceeded. Both volunteers allowed mosquitoes swollen with the blood from severe cases of yellow fever to bite them. Two days later they were sick with yellow fever. To Reed’s relief, his colleagues recovered, and, importantly, he had a suggestion that mosquitoes carry yellow fever. But what if his two colleagues had caught the disease accidentally from another source before they had been bitten? Reed needed better proof. For that he needed more volunteers…paid volunteers. Soldiers volunteered (with a $300 incentive), but so did others — recently arriving Spanish immigrants who volunteered not because of their eagerness to serve humanity but simply because they needed the money.

Those to be bitten were quarantined for weeks so that there would be no chance of accidentally acquiring the disease through other means. At the end of their sequestration, they were bitten by mosquitoes who had feasted on fatal cases. All seven of them got sick. Happily, all seven survived. Reed now had very good evidence that mosquitoes transmitted the disease.

Yes, but everybody said that the disease was transmitted by the infected bedding of sick people. What about that? And so they did a truly nasty experiment. They built a house: “no draft could blow through that little house. Then it was furnished with a nice stove, to keep the temperature well above ninety…it was an uninhabitable little house…but now…sweating soldiers carried several tightly nailed suspicious-looking boxes, that came from the yellow fever wards…to make this house altogether cursed.” The boxes contained pillows, blankets, and sheets, even pajamas, from the beds of men dead of yellow fever. Three men lived in that horrid house for 20 nights! And then another three men spent 20 nights. And then another group of three. But no one got yellow fever.

Yes, but what if all of those nine men where immune to yellow fever? And so they allowed two of the men to be bitten by yellow-fever-carrying mosquitoes. Both got sick but survived to receive their $300 reward.

One last experiment: A horridly filthy house without mosquitoes did not yield yellow fever. But what about a perfectly sterile house with mosquitoes? And so it was done. Another little house, pristinely clean with disinfected everything was prepared. But…yellow fever-carrying mosquitoes were released into it along with a volunteer. Yes, he got sick.

Reed had his proof: it was mosquitoes, not dirty linen that was the vector by which the disease was spread.

I find this story stunning. The audacity, curiosity, bravery, cleverness, patience, and, yes, nobility of the participants is, to me, extraordinary. In today’s world, it was comforting to know that such valor exists…even in the past.

*It is not surprising in hindsight that they couldn’t find the microbe. Yellow fever, we know now, is caused by a virus, too small to see in the microscopes of the day.

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Easter Reflections

In God: A Biography Jack Miles reads the Hebrew Bible as a literary text and examines the character of God. In spite of the religious piety that God is immutable, Miles shows how God developed over the course of the narrative, especially as a result of His interactions with humanity.  God the Creator at the beginning of Genesis changed as He interacted with Adam and Eve. The God who eventually talked to Job is different still. And so on.

At least for me, however, the Jesus of the New Testament does not really develop or evolve over the course of the scriptures.  Instead, different writers of the Gospels have related, but different, conceptions of Jesus.  Matthew’s Jesus is not precisely the same as John’s.  Paul’s various versions of Jesus are not consistent (I know: scholars say that the same person did not write all the Pauline stuff), and Paul’s depictions differ from those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Each writer has either tended to find different characteristics in Jesus, or the writers have created a Jesus to fit their own agendas.

The possible variations of Jesus’s character were not fixed in biblical times and they have continued to evolve in America as discussed in Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. The American Jesus has supported both slavery and desegregation; capitalism and socialism; bombing Iran and pacifism. He has been a go-getter who would be comfortable at a Rotarian meeting. The muscular Christianity of Theodore Roosevelt had its Jesus, who perhaps had six-pack abs. But Jesus has also sweetly taken His place at love-ins. He espouses Reverend Ike’s or the Osteenian gospel of prosperity but also a Rauschenbuschian social gospel.

But in all these incarnations, He was somehow always an American Jesus. He had to be. We Americans and our beloved land are blessed; we live in an America that is exceptional, and surely that must mean that Jesus has a special affinity for America. Jesus could be right there with us on the Fourth of July enjoying a hot dog (not necessarily kosher) and apple pie. If He had wanted to, he would have played a great shortstop. Many American Christians have absorbed without reflection that Jesus looks out especially for America. Americans, it seems, are lucky in another way: We don’t really have to seek to be like Jesus because our Jesus is like us.

He is like us also in his physical manifestation, as indicated by our pictures of Him. He seems to be of above average height, but not so tall as to be disconcerting. His skin, while not a sickly pale, is a version of white. He is not blond, but his hair is not too dark—a pleasant brown, often with highlights. His face looks like one who has immigrated to the U.S. of A. from some Northern European locale. His eyes might even be blue. Except for his clothing and that his hair might be a bit long, he would not be out of place in many American living rooms or corporate offices. (It is not surprising that different cultures have created different portraits of Jesus. The Ethiopian or Russian Christian has a Jesus who looks different from the American one, but one that seems to be more than a little Ethiopian or Russian. A Renaissance Jesus tends to look, how shall we say, “renaissancey,” and even a Korean or Chinese Jesus tends to reflect a Chinese or Korean culture.)

The historical Jesus, of course, was a Jew from the Middle East—a Semite.  Recently forensic anthropologists have tried to figure out what Jesus really looked like. If you look at these depictions, you see something much different from the American Jesus. The odds are overwhelming that Jesus was not very tall, had dark eyes, almost black hair, and a swarthy skin. He was much more likely to have short hair rather than flowing, shoulder-length locks. And, of course, he likely had what might be described as a Jewish nose. The looks of the real Jesus were unlikely to be of the kind that would fit easily into a Kiwanis meeting, or more to the point, most Sunday services in America. He didn’t look so much like our imagined portraits; He looked like a our image of a Mideast terrorist.

So my thought experiment: Imagine that every existing picture of Jesus in America was replaced with a more historically correct one. We hang up pictures that look like, shall we say, Yasser Arafat’s nephew.  How would this change American Christianity?  Might this even change American’s views of the world or America’s foreign policy? Would our faith in Christianity be changed? How?

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Snippets

I have read that David Thoreau, hero of live-simply-and-off-the-grid, periodically went home so his mother could do his laundry. Is that true?

The young man was wearing what appeared to be a tiny flask on a chain around his neck. I asked, “Does it contain a magic potion?” “No,” he replied, “some ashes from my dead dog.”

Class notes from my college alumni magazine reported on an alum who had retired after four decades in the medical sales field. He said that he was now doing what he always wanted to, play Santa Claus. Besides telling us about his Santa company, he also proudly reported that he had been inducted into the International Santa Claus Hall of Fame. Who knew?

Who first said “boots on the ground”? I hope that I will soon know the last to use the cliché. Boots don’t kill. Boots don’t get killed. Boots don’t lose a leg, an arm, an eye. Boots don’t get PTSD. Boots don’t leave loved ones behind. People do. Let’s talk about people in combat, not footwear.

What does it take to get into heaven? If it is not doing harm to others, I may stand a chance. If it is how much good is done to others, I am not so sure. If it is the amount of sycophantic praying to an Almighty, I won’t make it.

The local library asked me: “Please tell us about a favorite book, that provided inspiration, guidance, laughter.” I responded:

I have no favorite book. At different times, different books have been meaningful or touching or captivating. What was important at eight or thirteen would not be now. At one point, I read Huckleberry Finn every year. I no longer do. At one point, I read a Charles Dickens book every summer. I no longer do. When I first read Moby Dick, I just saw it as boring. Several decades later, I thought that it was marvelous. I thought Bleak House was wonderful when I first read it. When I picked it up again thirty years later, I could not finish it. However, I have read The Great Gatsby three or four times and each time I was awed by it. Nonfiction has also been important. Especially influential to me and many others is John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. There are many books that have added to my life. I hope that there are more to come.

Amanda Chapman writes in the Acknowledgements to Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library, “Someone once said that any author who claims they don’t write in their bathrobe is a damn liar.” I decided long ago that you don’t need to know what I wear and don’t wear when I write for the blog.

Often when I hear a group singing “Sweet Caroline,” I realize that it is an overwhelmingly white group some of whom are at least slightly inebriated and who feel that they are meaningfully bonding into some sort of community through their singing. And given the chance, they will soon be singing about a long-lost shaker of salt.

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First Sentences

“Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History.” Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli.

“Arrive finally at about three. The place has the feel of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune, but is not welcoming.” Charlotte Ward, Stone Yard Devotional.

“The images endure. In his twelve years as the greatest mayor of the world’s greatest city, he smashed slot machines with a sledgehammer, donned a fireman’s raincoat at the first whiff of smoke, and, most famously, narrated Dick Tracy’s exploits on the radio when a newspaper strike deprived youngsters of their comic strips.” Richard Goldstein: Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II.

“It is nowhere you choose to be, and yet you are here.” Karen Russell, The Antidote.

“Hortense could never forget the first dress she bought in New York City.” Julie Satow, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion.

“Mrs. Blossom had never been upgraded before in her life.” Laura Lippman, Murder Takes a Vacation.

“The first time I heard Forbes Smiley’s voice was at six o’clock on a summer Friday as I was drinking a martini at a Boston bar.” Michael Blanding, The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps.

“Why am I in this car?” Daniel Kehlmann (translated from the German by Ross Benjamin), The Director.

“In 1918, a fever gripped Boston.” Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War.

“Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, of the Queensland police, was walking along a bush track on his way to Windee Station.” Arthur W. Upfield, The Sands of Windee.

“I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn.” Tara Westover, Educated.

“My first word was ‘mother,’ spoken out loud and with texture.” Tayari Jones, Kin.

“This is a very weird way to begin an investigation, David Clurman thought as he listened to the anonymous caller on the other end of the line.” Michael Riedel, Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway.

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Forty-Seven Years?

A mantra now says that Iran has been at war with the United States for forty-seven years.

The forty-seven-year figure apparently refers to the hostage-taking at the American embassy in Iran in November 1979. This lasted for 444 days. The hostages were released on the first day of Reagan’s presidency, January 20, 1980. If Reagan had been negotiating with the Iranian regime to assure that the hostages were not released before he became president, as many believe, if he was not committing treason, he was at least committing crimes. He, however, maintained that it was a mere coincidence that the hostages went home the day that he became president.

Iraq assumed Iran was weak enough after the 1979 abdication of the Shah that they invaded their neighbor. America provided logistical and intelligence support to Iraq and sold it materials that had both civil and military uses. Both Iraq and Iran suffered huge losses. Estimates indicate that over 250,000 Iranians were killed.

However, while we were supporting Iraq, we also were aiding Iran. Hezbollah in the early 1980s took and held American hostages in Lebanon. Tim Weiner writes in The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century (2025) that the hostage-taking “led President Reagan to try to ransom the American captives by selling weapons to Hezbollah’s military and financial sponsor, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, igniting the biggest White House scandal since Watergate.”

This was soon followed by further arms sales to Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. Congress had prohibited continued funding for the Contras who were trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. The Reagan administration wished to get around this restriction and sold arms to Iran planning to use the proceeds to aid the Contras. Several dozen Reagan officials, but not Reagan, were indicted. Eleven convictions followed. Some were reversed on appeal. The rest were pardoned by George H.W. Bush, with the special counsel saying Bush was protecting himself.

No one, however, was charged with treason. However, if, as the mantra has it, Iran has been at war with us for forty-seven years, Iran was our enemy when the sales happened. If so, the arms deliveries were a textbook example of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Now you can believe that Reagan knew nothing about selling arms to Iran and consider him incredibly incompetent as a president. Or you can take the more obvious path and believe that Reagan knew what his administration was doing in one of its more important foreign policy initiatives. In that case, the current mantra is labelling Reagan a traitor. Incompetent or traitor? Which is it?

Whichever you choose, Trump’s statement that no president except him has addressed Iran is wrong. Reagan did. As these and later information show, there were several times when we were allies with Iran. However, Trump is not known for his grasp of history, even relatively recent history.

Weiner reports that Iranians hated al Qaeda and the Taliban. As a result, Iran aided the CIA-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the CIA had helped Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims during 1990s. Under the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend, America and Iran were partners in the war on terror.” The cooperation lasted until George W. Bush included Iran in the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea.

In fact, we directly aided Iran and worked with them. We also inadvertently advanced their national interests. Two decades ago, funded by a conservative organization, I and others went to Israel to study terrorism and anti-terrorism from an Israeli perspective. We met several people who were recently retired Israeli intelligence operatives. They were mystified by our 2003 invasion of Iraq. One said that the state sponsor of terrorism in the region was not Iraq but Iran, who would only be strengthened by our actions. He, of course, was right. Once again Weiner: “Ultimately, Iran and its Quds Force (created in 1979 to export the Iranian revolution across the nations of Islam and beyond) would prove to be the only winner of Bush’s war.”

And Trump’s contention that no president in forty-seven years has done anything about Iran slides over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The United States and other Western countries have placed various sanctions on Iran since 1979. In July 2015, Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. This was the agreement that resulted in the JCPOA. The agreement was between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany. It went into effect on January 20, 2016. The agreement did not rely on Iranian good faith; provisions included inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to make sure that Iran was not producing material that could be used in nuclear weapons. If any of the 5+1 countries found Iran not in compliance, sanctions were to be automatically reimposed. In April and July 2017, with Trump now ensconced in the White House, the U.S. and the other Western countries certified that Iran was in compliance. However, in October 2017 Trump said that America would no longer certify because Iran was violating the spirit of the agreement. However, the other five countries, Russia, China, France, England, and Germany said Iran was complying. In 2018, IAEA inspectors spent 3,000 calendar days in Iran and concluded Iran was in compliance with the JCPOA. Even so, in May 2018, without giving evidence of noncompliance, Trump withdrew from the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran, causing great economic harm to that country.

This history of the JCPOA indicates why a negotiated settlement to our present war on Iran will be difficult if not impossible. What believable guarantees can the United States give that it will live up to any promises it makes? According to five countries and international inspectors, Iran was complying and America still pulled out of the agreement. Tim Weiner states a clear fact: “Iran has not tested a nuclear weapon after five decades of research and development.” However, on the unsupported whims of the president, the agreement’s spirit was declared broken and sanctions reimposed. Of course, Iran has to be concerned that any new agreement would end the same way.

However, this brief history, Iranians know, is misleading. The hostilities between the two countries did not start in 1979. They started a quarter century earlier, and not surprisingly, were triggered by oil. Oil was discovered in Iran in the early twentieth century. Shortly after this discovery, according to Stephen Kinzer in The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, Britain bribed the Iranian monarch to cede control of the resources to foreign countries.

Primarily Britain controlled Iran’s oil when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi became Shah of Iran in 1941. Iran was then a constitutional monarchy, but a decade later the Shah tried to disrupt democratic elections. This caused protests and led to the rise of Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh had grown up seeing foreign companies and countries loot Iran, including its oil. Mossadegh wanted Iran to have full control of its resources. After he was chosen Prime Minister in 1951, parliament, under his leadership, unanimously voted to nationalize the oil industry. Winston Churchill was outraged, but he believed that he needed the United States for a coup. America was opposed to Mossadegh for the oil nationalization. Furthermore, because Mossadegh did not believe in global capitalism, he constituted a threat to the West. Under the leadership of Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, Teddy’s grandson, the CIA, on its second attempt, overthrew Mossadegh in 1953. What had been a constitutional monarchy was now fully under the control of the Shah.

In many ways, Pahlavi helped make Iran a better place. In the1960s, he modernized the government, instituted profit sharing, had effective literacy programs, and invested in infrastructure. The country had sustained economic growth. GDP per capita nearly tripled between 1950 and 1970. But there was also increasing unrest from Islamic militants. The Shah responded with oppressive measures, which led to more unrest. He left Iran for exile in January 1979. The Iranian monarchy was abolished, which led to the installation of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeni, and the subsequent taking of U.S. hostages.

From the Iranian perspective, the United States started war with their country in 1953. They have a point.

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Iran and Oppressed Women

The news last week reported that Country Joe McDonald died. He, along with his group the Fish, sang a song of my youth. The refrain from the Fixin’ to Die Rag:

And it’s 1, 2, 3,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We’re all going to die.

Antiwar anthems recede. However, America’s hunger for conflict only temporarily diminishes, for we are country almost constantly at war. We can ask, as Country Joe might, “What are we fighting for this time?”

We have been given many answers. We need to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons, even though they have none, and even if they want them, they would not have them anytime soon.

We need to stop them from having ballistic missiles that could be fired to our homeland, even though they have no such missiles, and even if they want them, they would not have them anytime soon.

Perhaps we are in this war simply because Israel wants us to, although that has been denied, as could be expected, by our version of a supreme leader. He is, he maintains, no lapdog of Bibi.

Or maybe we are in this war because Trump was in a bad mood because his MacDonald potatoes were not fried in RFK-approved beef tallow.

Perhaps we are in this war because Trump wants attention diverted from Jeffrey Epstein.

Or perhaps it was because Hegseth needed a testosterone boost after he had completed his sets of pushups for the day.

And there were some brief comments, which have receded, that we were at war to increase the freedom of Iranians.

Some have bought into that last rationale. Women in particular are so poorly treated in Iran that it is appropriate, nay, downright noble, to bomb the country and then bomb it some more, people say.

Women, and others, have faced oppressive Iranian conditions. Made in 2007, Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous film of her graphic novel of the same title, Persepolis, takes on a new life. It illustrates how devastating it can be to live in a theocracy.

Nevertheless, Iran is not the only country that mistreats women. Should we bomb all of them? This got me poking around, and I quickly found that there are lists of which countries are the best and worst for women. A couple of these rankings are highly regarded. One of them is produced by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (https://giwps.georgetown.edu/the-index/). It ranks 178 countries. On their world map, you can easily see that many of the low-ranked countries are clustered in the Mideast and Africa.

 According to the list, Denmark is the best place for women followed by other Northern European nations. Afghanistan is the worst. A few other rankings caught my eye. Iran is 128th. In other words, there are many countries worse than Iran, according to this Institute. The United States is #31. Israel, our ally in this latest war, is ranked #84, worse than Saudi Arabia that comes in at #63. India is #131. Iraq is #158.

As I indicated, this list, while respected, is not the only one. This may come as a shock, but women are mistreated in many ways. Analysts do not always agree on how to rank different kinds of mistreatment, so there is a subjective component to each list. How should educational opportunities for girls be weighed against trafficking of girls; equality of women’s salaries against rates of intimate partner violence; clothing restrictions against genital mutilations; and so on. The various rankings have similarities but are not precisely the same.

There is another list of interest that ranks the ten worst counties (10 of the worst countries for women’s rights | Concern Worldwide). In honor of March 17, it comes from Concern Worldwide, the largest Irish humanitarian group. It bears striking similarities to other listings: Afghanistan is in the bottom ten, as is Iraq. This is noteworthy. They are both countries that the United States has bombed…the technical term… the bejesus out of. That ordinance has not produced better conditions for women. That is not surprising. When we destroy a country’s infrastructure, kill its citizens, ravage its economy, and create refugees and homelessness, it is unlikely to lead to better lives for women…or anyone, for that matter. Chaos rarely leads to hope-filled progress. It more often leads to oppression. Indeed, it was barely news here that two weeks ago Yanar Mohammed, an Iraqi women’s rights activists, was killed outside her Baghdad home.

But surely our actions will lessen the oppression of women in Iran. Our bombs that fell on a school killing perhaps 150 girls means that there will be 150 fewer women to be oppressed in the glorious Iranian future that our bombs are sure to create.