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To Vaccinate or Not To Vaccinate. Lessons from Lackland

Flu has recently swept through the Lackland Air Base. About 160 troops training there have been sick. This outbreak comes only two months after Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, ended the longstanding requirement that American troops have flu vaccinations. He stated that it was an “absurd, overreaching” mandate that had served to “weaken our warfighting capabilities.” The flu vaccine is now voluntary in the military. Hegseth again: “Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions.”

Perhaps peer pressure tells trainees that it is unwarriorlike to get vaccinated. (The notion that “real” warriors don’t get vaccinations does not seem to be undercut by Trump’s having had flu and Covid shots.) Perhaps the trainees think diarrhea, vomiting, and fevers are manly. Whatever the reason, only 40% of trainees had the flu shot. Well, that was true before an exception to the voluntary vaccine policy was imposed at Lackland. Flu vaccinations are now required.

Hegseth did not explain how mandatory flu shots weakened our warfighting capabilities, but I assume that is because about 8,700 armed forces personnel quit or were discharged when they refused to get vaccinated when it was mandated. (Now they can be reinstated, but only thirteen have sought reinstatement.) That loss, however, only harms fighting prowess if those who quit could not be replaced with vaccinated warriors, and nothing indicates they weren’t. Instead, Trump boasts that our recruitments have never been better. Sorry, Mr. Hegseth, but vaccinated warriors lead to military strength. It is hard to fight effectively with diarrhea, vomiting, and fevers. Removing the vaccination requirement does the opposite of strengthening our military forces.

Hegseth gave medical autonomy as a reason for rescinding the vaccine mandate, but, of course, autonomy has limits. For example, the decision whether to have an abortion is one of medical autonomy, but that autonomy is lacking in much of this country. Moreover, vaccinations are not simply questions of personal medical autonomy. Flu vaccines reduce the likelihood of getting sick, but they do not totally prevent the illness. If I get the flu, others in contact with me are more likely to get the flu, too. My decision whether to get vaccinated affects the people around me, and that would seem to be especially so when I sleep in barracks and eat communally. Those others require consideration.

I own a quarter acre in Pennsylvania. Often in the autumn when it has been dry, the county bans open burning. The government is telling me what I can’t do on my property, which seemingly infringes my rights. (The Constitution has explicit provisions protecting property. It does not have any provisions for medical autonomy.) The ban protects me from myself, just as a vaccine mandate does. I am less likely to burn my property if I don’t openly burn in the dry spell. But the burn ban also protects my neighbors as well. Other properties are also less likely to be destroyed if I don’t openly burn. With an open burn ban, more than my property rights should, and are, considered. With a vaccination requirement, more than an individual’s medical autonomy should be weighed.

Hegseth also said that the military should have “freedom to express their religious convictions.” These stem from the scripture that says, “The Lord said, ‘Verily, do not permit your holy body to be jabbed so as to prevent liquid bowels, upchucking, and chills and sweats. The path to the Lord is an uncomfortable one that should not be lessened.’” Oh, wait. There is no such passage.

Even so, religious objections to vaccinations have existed for hundreds of years. Puritan Minister Cotton Mather learned about smallpox vaccinations from his West African slave Onesimus and employed the technique in the 1720s when Boston suffered a smallpox outbreak. Objections to the inoculations were strong. Although Cotton Mather was hardly lax on the religiosity front, the method was said to be ungodly because it was not mentioned in the Bible. Furthermore, it affronted God’s right to determine who was to die and how and when they should meet their Maker. But experience showed that the vaccinations prevented deaths from smallpox, which, surprise, surprise, both the godly and the ungodly wanted. The practice spread in colonial America, and in 1775 George Washington required the vaccination of the Continental Army. It soon gained general acceptance in the larger cities and towns of the United States.

The practice, however, did have dangers, but those were lessened when Dr. Edward Jenner learned a safer way to vaccinate. Mandatory vaccinations ensued. Boston was the first American city to require school children to be vaccinated against smallpox, and other states and cities adopted the policy and added similar requirements as other vaccines were developed. Over a century after Jenner’s discovery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in response to an outbreak and pursuant to a state law, required adults to get smallpox vaccinations.

Henning Jacobson said that forcing him to be vaccinated violated the liberty guaranteed by the Constitution and that no one should be subjected to the law if they objected to vaccination no matter what their reason. The issue made its way to the United States Supreme Court. In 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts held that individual liberty could be restrained by reasonable laws for the safety of the general public and that “real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own liberty, whether in respect of his person or property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.” The mandatory vaccination requirement for adults was upheld.

 In 1922 the Supreme Court extended its Jacobson ruling. Zucht v. King upheld the San Antonio, Texas, school district’s rule that excluded children from both public and private schools if they did not have a smallpox vaccination. Since then lower courts have found many different vaccination requirements to be constitutional.

Since the development of the smallpox vaccine, other vaccines have prevented much human misery, but in spite of what the Supreme Court held more than a century ago, many claim they have a constitutional right to refuse a mandated vaccination. Today the assertions often conflate a personal belief with a religious one. Many people seem to feel that their strong belief must be ordained by their God. Since the Covid pandemic, we have seen an increasing number of claims that mandatory vaccinations violate people’s religious convictions when the belief really seems to come from anti-government feeling or their own misinformed views of vaccine’s dangers.

Whether the anti-vax belief is truly religious and should be an accepted form of relief from mandated vaccinations is a topic for another day. Today, though, we can focus on the simple lesson from the outbreak at Lackland: Ending the vaccine mandate undercut the readiness of our armed forces. Sick soldiers are not the best warriors. Hegseth has harmed, not strengthened, our military.

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The PHG

It was not the promised unconditional surrender. Instead, we placed some (minor) conditions on our capitulation. Once again, we should realize that no matter how strong our military, we are limited in what we can accomplish through such might. Richard Nixon found that out.

Nixon, like the current president, promised to easily end wars. Nixon’s presidential campaign said that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Apparently that meant that two years later he would have the United States secretly invade Cambodia. When this became public knowledge, a huge backlash emerged. Perhaps surprising to the modern observer, outrage came from both sides of the congressional aisle. Congress then still performed some of its checks-and-balance function, and the invasion became a catalyst for the War Powers Resolution, which has been ignored by our present legislature.

Nixon addressed the nation on April 30, 1970, to justify the new or broader war and said that the United States would become a “pitiful, helpless giant” if it failed to use its military might abroad in furtherance of freedom: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

Nixon missed the point. If we were a PHG, it was not because we refrained from the use of our power. We had a half million troops in Vietnam, and we had bombed the bejesus out of that country and were now going for Cambodia. We had bombed Laos even more and even longer, but these actions had not, and did not, produce the desired results. If we were a pitiful, helpless giant, it was because our widespread use of military force could not defeat our foes. When his physical strength does not cow his target, the bully becomes helpless. We were helpless in Nixon’s time not because of military restraint but because we knew nothing but military force and did not understand its limits.

That lesson has not carried over to today. Our military might has been overwhelming in Iran, but reliance on such force without an understanding of our target has again made us seem like a pitiful, helpless giant. More bombs are not always the answer.

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The Golf Teacher

I don’t know how the father learned to play golf. I knew that when he was young, he played baseball, basketball, and ran track, but these, I expect, came naturally out of schoolyard play. He surely did not learn golf from his father or mother; his parents showed no interest in any sport. There certainly was no money in their family for golf lessons or new sets of clubs. This was a working-class family where the father’s father sweated for his pay on a factory floor. I never heard the father talk about being a caddie, an activity through which many blue-collar kids learned to play golf. Still, even though I can’t really imagine how he learned it, my father knew golf.

And he was quite good at it. Not great, but, by my standards, very good. Often when he left to play, he would say, “I’m going to break 80 today.” I don’t know how often he did, but it was not regularly. Still, his scores were usually in the low 80s. He didn’t keep a handicap, but my guess is it would have been a ten or twelve.

He could not afford the local country club even if he had been accepted there. He did not even play at the local public course that attracted some of the “best” people in town. Instead, he drove a half-hour to a tiny village to go to Quit-Qui-Oc, which, when he started playing there, had only nine holes.

 Although he knew some people at the golf course, he did not have golfing buddies. Instead, golf was a family affair. He had taught the mother to play, and she could hit a good ball. I think she enjoyed the game, but it was also her way of getting sun. On the holes far from the clubhouse where she assumed no one could see her, she often stripped off her blouse and played in a halter top.

At an early age the brother and I would go to the course, too. At the beginning, I did not play but walked along, for walk we did. There were no motorized golf carts in those days, and when they started to be employed, the father voiced nothing but disdain for them. Golf meant walking.

There were no caddies, but the parents did not carry their clubs. Instead, they pulled little wheeled carts designed to hold a golf bag. (Until recently, I often played golf alone, and I walked pulling the same kind of cart my parents used. I still can feel the father’s influence. It is not really golf if you ride. A few years back at a golfing event, the pro announced that “real golf” was going to be played. I said to myself, “Oh, we are going to walk.” This seemed unlikely because we were sitting in motorized carts at the time. Instead, the pro meant that the players could not move the balls in the fairway to get a better lie. My first drive came to rest in a fairway divot. But I digress.)

I usually walked in the rough as the parents went from tee to green. I was looking for lost golf balls, and I felt a little excitement every time I found one. More than a half century later, I still get a little thrill in finding a ball in the rough that I can keep. The son and I used to do that, and he felt something similar. Maybe that’s why Easter egg hunts are such fun.

Soon, however, the father started to teach the brother and me to play the game. This was done in our backyard, which was quite large for our modest home, but it really did not have to be very large for our lessons. He gave us golf-ball sized whiffle balls to practice with. These objects with more holes than plastic did not travel far no matter how well struck. I don’t know how sophisticated the lessons might have become if I had stuck with the game, but at this point there were two goals: Keeping the head down so that I would not top (or even miss) the ball and swinging inside out so the ball went to the right. (I still struggle with both those things.) The father assured us that a real golf ball starting to the right after an inside-out swing would curve back to the left, and every golfer preferred a hook or a draw to a ball that sliced to the right.

After the father’s teaching had given me a modicum of backyard golfing proficiency, the brother and I often joined the parents on the golf course—a family foursome. I did not have a full set of clubs, but, even so, I got some pleasure in playing, mostly in seeing how far I could hit a drive. Soon, however, I got to the stage where I was as good as I was going to get from merely playing. If I wanted to eliminate some of the frustrations from golf, I was going to have to practice, and not just drives. I was going to have to work on all those components of the game that require “touch”– pitching and chipping and putting. I tried this practicing bit for a while, but I hated it. I was willing to practice other games. I could shag flyballs countless times a day, day after day; I could spend hours skating around a rink. I could practice those activities, but golf? No.

Golf was just not active enough. I wanted to be running and jumping and sweating. I loved coming home at the end of a day, stripping off clothes, and finding my ankles caked in that special red dirt of the baseball infield. I liked hitting a baseball hard and then running to first or beyond. Hitting a golf ball solidly and then walking up to it was not the same.

And perhaps there was something more. I played golf only with the parents and the brother. Nothing wrong with that, but I was not a very social kid. My interactions with others my age outside of school were on playing fields, courts, or rinks. I wasn’t aware of missing that when playing golf, but perhaps I did. So, in my teens, I stopped golfing.

I understand why I stopped, but sometimes I regret it. I regretted it when I returned to golf forty years later. Starting the game again when I was fifty-five assured that I would not be very good at it. (At least that is the explanation I give myself for my lack of skill.) But I still remember much of what the father said about the game and what he tried to teach me. A half-century later, what he tried to impart is still correct.

 I absorbed some, but not all, of his golf clothing style. He never owned, nor would he have worn, any of those ridiculous pants and belts many men wore playing golf. I follow him in this, but he never wore shorts on the golf course or anywhere else, even when he lived in Florida. I am fairly confident that in his circles he was not an outlier in eschewing shorts. I don’t remember seeing any of his working-class contemporaries in shorts. I am not sure when men of his age higher on the economic scale wore them. I don’t remember seeing adult male knees as a Midwestern kid, but I do remember being a bit surprised at seeing bare calves on grown men when I arrived at my eastern college. I, on the other hand, wear shorts playing golf, generally limiting myself to boring solid colors. (I wear shorts on many other occasions as well. On a recent trip to Machu Picchu, I was the only man on the van in shorts. One of my new friends said that he had been to an outing where Tim Allen talked. Allen had said that no man over forty should wear shorts. The new friend said this as if he were imparting some useful lesson to me. I replied that Tim Allen makes lots of money saying many silly things. But I digress.)

I also regret having given up the game because I, without thinking about it, was giving up the activity that I might have continued doing with the father. I have now learned that sometimes you can learn a lot about someone when you play golf together. Perhaps if I had played golf with him when I was an adult, I would have learned more about him, and he would have learned more about me. At least, maybe, I would have learned how he had learned to play the game.

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Snippets

Some religions prohibit saying the sacred Name of God. What if it turned out to be Chip or Baxter? Or Henrietta?

He “never acknowledge[ed] that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.” Charles Frazier, Varina.

Irony is dead, or at least it is in certain conservative circles. Some conservatives find the troubled past of Graham Platner disturbing. But they don’t have a similar concern with Ken Paxton’s history. Or that Trump has been adjudicated a sexual abuser. And is a convicted felon. Of course, there are many examples that irony is dead in certain conservative circles. We could make a list.

Many friends and the spouse recommended it. It was in the house. I finally read the first chapter. It was good. I only have 101 more chapters to go in Lonesome Dove.

On a friend’s recommendation I watched Ford v Ferrari. It was good. I recognized many of the race car driver names from that era, but the one that most resonated was Phil Hill. In my memory, he won a sports car race on the roads around Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, that I saw when I was kid. My parents took me to it. I was mostly bored. I saw a tiny fraction of the course with unidentifiable cars whipping past. There was no way to tell who was first or last. But Phil Hill won the race, so I must have seen him. However, after watching the movie, I wondered if my memory was correct. I googled and found that Phil Hill did, indeed, win the race at Elkhart Lake when I was seven. My memory might be correct. I told the spouse about this, applauding myself for having such a memory. She, the neuroscientist, told me that the real issue is short-term memory.

Sports are funny. In the New York Knicks’ incredible comeback win in the fourth game of the finals, their star missed an open shot to go ahead with two seconds left. That won’t be remembered because of the teammate’s game-winning tip-in.

World Cup announcers talk about getting the ball into the back of the net, but isn’t the point to get the ball into the back of the goal which is the front of the net?

When I want to feel special, I tell myself that I am one of the few people who knows that Tarzan lived in Wisconsin.

She was in an Off-Broadway musical. I said that I might go to it if I could find discount tickets. Even though I had just met her, she got offended and said that since she had paid full price for her music degree, I should pay full price to hear her. I never heard her sing.

“If one attitude can be said to characterize America’s regard for immigration over the past two hundred years, it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one’s parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now.” Bill Bryson, Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States.

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Whither Biomedical Science? (Guest Post by the Spouse)

Starting out as a small federally-funded Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887, the National Institutes of Health (the NIH) has become the largest and, arguably, the most prestigious biomedical institution in the world. It has fueled virtually all of the advancements in the treatment of heart disease, cancer, stroke, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, other infectious diseases, and much more. It can be considered the jewel in the crown of scientific excellence. It funds a cadre of in-house scientists as well as academic scientists across the United States and around the world. Explain to me, then, why the Trump administration is trying to hobble it…no, destroy it.

Beginning in February 2025 the administration terminated 2,300 ongoing research grants, amounting to cuts of almost $4 billion. Most of the cuts were at medical schools and hospitals, but they reached into other institutions — mostly universities — as well. More than 60% of these terminations were aimed at research and development, but an alarming 38% targeted research training and career development. Most of these were Post-doctoral Individual National Service Awards. Is this a problem? Yes. Emphatically, yes.

Training to become a scientist is time-consuming and expensive. It usually begins (in the U.S. at least) at the 4-year undergraduate level. Graduate training (course work and hands-on laboratory experience) can consume another 4-6 years. A written thesis and its defense are required for completion of the doctorate. Attainment of the PhD, however, is only the beginning of the ending point. It’s followed by another 2-4 years of post-doctoral training. When one finally takes her place as an assistant professor with a research lab of her own, she needs microscopes, centrifuges, PCR machines, supplies (glassware, chemicals, paper towels, for heaven’s sake), computers, animals, and a helping hand to get things underway. NIH often provides a good deal of the funding for this extensive training. Moreover, those recipients of NIH training grants at the graduate and post-doctoral level provide established laboratories with essential intelligent labor. Experiments that would not get done without trainees get done with them. Explain to me, then, why the Trump administration is cutting the very training that leads to the health of a scientific future.

One answer is a sad one. Over the years it had become clear that the scientific work force was almost exclusively white and male. Surely there were women and minorities out there who could be recruited to this important enterprise, and it just might be in the national interest to find them. So the NIH (and other scientific agencies) began to actively recruit from these populations, and sometimes, even to insist on the inclusion of them.

Then came Executive Order 14281, issued in April 2025 just months after Trump took office. It was the opening salvo of the Trump administration’s assault on Civil Rights legislation. This EO direct all agencies (not just scientific ones) to “deprioritize” enforcement of statutes and regulations imposing “disparate impact liability.” In everyday language this meant that agencies could not take into account the fact that certain groups had been discriminated against, and that they should not give priority to these so-called “underrepresented minorities.”

This injunction was elaborated more specifically for scientific grant funding in EO14332 later that year. “Discretionary awards” it states, “must…demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” One has to assume that some of those policy priorities were enumerated in EO14281. So, in short, no priority is to be given to minority groups.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is given the task of implementing Executive Orders, and it has recently promulgated its new rules that will apply to scientific grants funding. It includes the language of EO14332, but goes further: A “federal award is not to be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate ‘diversity, equity or inclusion’ (DEI)….This includes racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination used by the recipient”[Emphasis added]. Technically, awards are granted to institutions, not to individuals. This means that even if a scientific study has nothing to do with DEI, funding can be withheld if the formal recipient of the grant (e.g., a university) engages in something that is determined to be in violation of the administration’s DEI policies. This appears to be designed to punish institutions that are in presumed non-compliance at the expense of what might be relevant and meritorious science.

Moreover, and more insidiously, the OMB regulations would give final approval authority not to a scientific advisory council, but rather to a political appointee whose job it will be to ensure that grant applications are consistent with administrative priorities, do not espouse “anti-American” (undefined) ideas, and are in the “national interest” (undefined). This can and will lead to decisions based on political considerations (undefined), not scientific merit. It is ironic that the EO14281 is entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.”

Another provision of EO14332, the order underpinning these new OMB rules, is that funded grants must not “compromise public safety.” This, too, is ironic. Because some of the current administration policies are demonstrably anti-intellectual and anti-scientific (anti-vaccine rhetoric that has undermined public confidence in vaccines that have been in use for decades, quashing anti-mRNA research, decimating the Centers for Disease Control, removing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, canceling studies examining effects of global warming, etc., etc., etc.), the administration itself poses threats to national safety thereby violating its own prohibition. Political appointees of this administration cannot be considered qualified to determine what is a threat to national safety.

There are other egregious aspects to the new OMB regulations (they log in at 238 pages of single-spaced type). Many of them handicap researchers sometimes to maintain accountability (not necessarily a bad thing), but often to punish them and their institutions for perceived grievances — grievances defined by political appointees, not scientists. The most troubling rules allow an authoritarian overreach that can have a chilling effect on creative and necessary scientific endeavor. These proposed regulations taken together do not advance the scientific enterprise. American scientific know-how and ingenuity used to be the envy of the world. The Trump administration is rapidly darkening that sparkling reputation.

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Snippets

The Knicks are in the NBA finals. The New York team has not won that basketball championship in over fifty years, and it has been that long since the spouse has been a team sports fan. (She does have her tennis favorites, not always based on their good looks.) She watched eagerly and got pleasure when the Knicks won championships those many decades ago, but she learned the next year what diehard sports fans already knew: almost always your team ends the season without a championship. In short, they lose. Sports fans, somehow, overcome the almost perennial disappointment; the spouse could not. She buried her fandom never to resurrect it. She has not been watching the Knicks this time around.

I don’t understand. Players inspect three or four tennis balls before choosing one for a first serve. But after hitting a first-serve let, many of them don’t inspect three or four balls for their second first serve but just use the first one bounced to them by the ball person.

“A continual dripping on a rainy day and a contentious woman are alike; to restrain her is to restrain the wind or to grasp oil in his right hand.” Proverbs.

As I was waiting for a prescription to be filled, a twenty-something woman made some purchases and asked Rose behind the counter, “Do you sell toilet brushes?” Rose said that the store did not. The young woman continued, “Do you know where I might buy one around here?” Rose shook her head. I then suggested a hardware store a few blocks away. The woman thanked me and said, “My parents are coming tomorrow…. They have high standards.”

The Christian radio station gave a few brief Bible readings, although where the sacred words left off and commentary began was not always clear. It also presented short inspirational stories and exhortations. Mostly, however, it played music, and mostly that music fell into the rock category. I remembered back when rock started. (Alas, I am old enough to remember when “Rocket 88,” Bill Haley, and Elvis Aron were all new.) I recalled how ministers smashed 45s saying that rock was music of the devil. This made me think about how powerful He is. In only the short span of my lifetime, He had transformed a genre that would send me into eternal damnation into music that was now for the devout. Hallelujah!

“There are grounds for suspecting, in other words, that there exists a secret constitution, whose first article runs: The security of power is based on the insecurity of the citizens.” Leonardo Sciascia, Death and the Knight (translated from the Italian by Joseph Farrell).

When I was a kid, I would come find in a park or outside an old house a hand pump. Of course, I had to try it. The first couple strokes always seemed hard, but with minimal persistence they became easier. As I pumped, I would wonder if the pump still worked. Was there really water down there? Sometimes the effort produced nothing, but at other times a little water would spurt out. That sight produced a quickened, more forceful stroke. Then larger spurts, and finally, a stream without interruption. These efforts always produced a smile and a sense of accomplishment, a satisfaction that a younger generation will never have.

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Confessions of a Sometime Public Defender—The Question

          “How can you defend someone who’s guilty?” This is The Question I have been asked many times. Sometimes my answers have been platitudinous: To function properly our legal system requires defense of all, guilty or innocent. Sometimes my answer has been facetious: A defender prefers representing the guilty. If the client is innocent and acquitted, it is merely the system working. If the client is guilty but found not guilty, it must mean that the defender is a damn fine attorney.

Sometimes I gave a third answer that is slightly less facetious: The defender wants to represent the guilty because there is a lot less pressure. It feels much worse to have an innocent client go to jail than a guilty one.

No matter what my answer has been about defending the guilty, the looks on the questioners’ faces never indicate that they are satisfied with the response. The Question, however, is one asked only by those outside the public defenders. We did not discuss it among ourselves, and I only occasionally reflected on The Question.

          There is no one answer to The Question because there are many different components to the public defender’s job. Defenders spend the overwhelming amount of their effort in the plea-bargaining process, not trials. The goal is to get a more favorable plea or sentence than would occur without the defender’s efforts. The defender knows that the client is almost always going to be punished. The issue is how and how much. I was like most defenders who knew that the criminal justice system is awful in many ways. Our sentencing laws are often ludicrous; prisons are terrible places; prosecutors are arrogant; judges are often dim. It is (usually) easy in the plea process to try to help even the bad people in such a bad system.

          I did not romanticize those charged with crimes. I met many people who I thought should be punished. Even so, when I saw the system operate, I saw its many, many flaws, and it was seldom a moral challenge to try to help those caught up in it.

This was fueled by my anti-authoritarian nature. I believe in a strong government, but we must have checks on the government’s power. We must try to ensure that when the government exercises power, it is doing so properly. Danger lurks if we don’t. The government’s ability to fine, imprison, and even execute is among its most awesome powers. When, as happens so often in our criminal justice system, the government seeks to impose its will on the outcast and the poor, we need to have someone pushing back. Defenders act in the deeply conservative traditions of our country by trying to check governmental power. I could defend not just because I was defending an individual but because I was fighting the government. And that also meant defending the guilty.

          The person asking The Question about defending the guilty, however, is not asking about plea bargaining. They are really asking, “How can you defend someone whom at trial you know to be guilty?” How can you work for the acquittal of someone who has committed a crime and very well may commit more crimes?

The questions seem to imply that this must be a common situation, but obtaining a not-guilty verdict for one a guilty person seldom occurred. Few who admitted their guilt to me went to trial. Mostly those who said they were guilty wanted to get the best plea bargain possible.

Clients going to trial almost always maintained their innocence. I did not simply accept what they said. Often the defendants who told me they did not commit the charged crime related stories that struck me as bullshit. If I had to make the decision, those guys were guilty. But they said they were not, and it was not my job to pass judgment on them. And every so often that farfetched, remarkable story had truth in it. They were entitled to have someone fight for them because even if all the indications were to the contrary, they might not be guilty. My duty was to present the best possible case for them and let the jury decide.

          I could know I was defending the guilty, not merely assume it, only if the clients told me they were guilty. That only happened a few times, and I felt no moral qualms even in those situations. For example, Mary was a hooker on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue–not the high-rent avenue then for anyone, and certainly not for a prostitute. She would do just about anything for a bit of food and some drugs. An undercover cop approached her and asked if she knew where he could make a big drug buy. She didn’t, but she asked what was in it for her if she could find out. He said $50. This was the equivalent of five or ten tricks for her.

She located where to get the drugs, and when the undercover returned, she took him to a seller in Harlem. She left after pocketing five tens. The cop made the buy, and Mary was arrested for aiding the sale. She told me this. She was guilty. She was not offered a plea bargain. We went to trial.

If convicted, the sentencing law required that she get a life sentence with at least a fifteen to twenty-five year minimum. That meant that she would have to serve whatever minimum a sentencing judge imposed before she would be eligible for parole, and, of course, she could be imprisoned until she died. I did not think such punishment just. Yes, she did something illegal, but a person like her, who was barely surviving, could hardly turn down $50, and for that $50, offered to her by the police, she would get a life sentence. She was convicted and got a life sentence as was required. I felt that it was an injustice. If, by some miracle, I had gotten an acquittal, I would have rejoiced.

          I did think about the consequences of one acquittal, however. I represented a man, Ron, on the illegal possession of a gun. He told me a story that had some plausibility but was not likely to be true. The trial went surprisingly well. From the evidence, I began to believe that he might be innocent, and to my surprise, he was acquitted.

A few months later he called me. Ron was in jail again. He was charged with rape. I wondered what I had done. Had my acquittal gotten a woman raped? He wanted me to represent him, but his case had not been assigned to me, and I said no. Later the attorney who represented him on that new charge told me that it was as phony a rape case as any he had ever seen. Ron was acquitted of the rape charge, too. He was apparently innocent.

This sequence of events bothered me. Most often after an acquittal, I had no further contact with the defendant. Ron’s situation made me wonder if I had the moral luxury of feeling good about an acquittal simply because I usually didn’t know whether the person I had helped free went on to do bad things. Would I have more doubts about what I did if I always found out what happened after a client was acquitted?

On the other hand, Ron made me think that for one of the few times I had abandoned my defender ethic. I had brushed him off instead of defending him again because I didn’t want to confront the possibility that he had committed a rape for which I perhaps should have felt a responsibility.

          Almost always, however, I could do the work and do it without moral qualms. I learned that the trial system works better than many believe. Attorneys want to believe that their skills and tactics make a difference. Once in a while the attorney does have a huge effect, but generally the attorney, at best, can only be a little bit better than the evidence presented at trial. My experience and my scholarly work convince me that almost always the verdict follows the evidence. If there is strong evidence that a person is guilty, a guilty verdict almost always follows.

          But the real reason I could do the work is that even though I respect police work, I also fear the power the police have. The same for prosecutors and judges. That fear allowed me to be a defender. The poor and the outcast need someone to stand up for them against a powerful government and its representatives…no matter what.

Posted on by rjonakait

Support Your Friendly Library

There weren’t books in my house growing up. There was reading material, however. Two newspapers were delivered daily, and a third came once a week. There were magazines. I think the parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest. I read some of its articles, but mostly I went to the anecdotes and jokes. There were many other magazines that came from friends of my mother’s who passed when they were through with them—Life, Look, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal. And I exaggerate when I say no books were in the house. There was an encyclopedia and a few textbooks that seemed as if they had from my father’s high school days, but there were not the kind of books a second grader who discovered he liked reading wanted.

            I soon found the public library. It may have been a mile from the house, but in those days, a mile was nothing. A two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the youth books upstairs. I fell in love with two series: Freddy the Pig books and what I thought of as orange biographies. I don’t remember much about the Freddy tales, but the biographies were so labeled in my mind because they all had orange covers. Of appropriate length for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn much about history. I believe that these books have stayed with me, forming much of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras.

            Perhaps because I was shy, I read constantly, even while walking to and from school. It was not long before I felt I had exhausted the offerings of the children’s section of the local public library.  Luck befell me in the person of Miss Dahlberg, my sixth-grade teacher. She recognized my dilemma and went with me to the public library. I don’t remember at what age one qualified to take books out of the adult section, but it certainly was not the sixth grade. Miss Dahlberg talked with library directors, and then some higher-up  library directors. She knew how to hold her ground. (None of us kids would have been surprised. We all knew she had been a WAC during WWII and had even parachuted out of a plane!) What had been rigid rules for the library were no match for her, and I walked out with a library card that granted me adult privileges.  (Actually, inked on it was “Adult Priviledges.” Miss Dahlberg knew how to be gracious in victory. She noted the misspelling and told me that it would not matter, and we left the library.)

            This golden card allowed me to enter a new stage in my reading. There was no one to tell me what were good books or what books they had enjoyed. I certainly did not then read book reviews. Instead, I would walk the stacks, read jacket copy, read a few paragraphs or pages and then used gut intuition to take out books. Thus, the reading at this stage was random. Only years later did I gain direction and would perhaps read one Hemingway or Fitzgerald after the other.  Well, there was one direction that came before that. I was soon at the age where there was an interest in male-female relationships, and I would spend many hours skimming books back in the shelves looking for some sort of sex scene, but I seldom checked such books out.

            I remember little of what I read from these directionless days except, perhaps, for The Mouse that Roared, and its sequels, by Leonard Wibberley. The Cold War satire was a delight, a precursor in my mind to Dr. Strangelove, but like that movie, it also hit my emerging views that the powerful– whether the military, political, corporate, or social–were to be distrusted. If I had then talked about books with others, I would have insisted that all read it.

            The other book I remember from that period was different in that I did not stumble across it—From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I am not sure how I became aware of the book; even if I had read about books, I would have been too young when the book was published, or even when the movie of it came out, for it to have registered with me. But somehow a half dozen years or so after its publication, I decided I wanted to read it, and I went looking for it on the shelves of the Mead Public Library. I did not find it, and then I learned that in that staid period the book was too explosive or controversial to be allowed on the shelves. A potential reader had to ask for it at the front desk. I did, and this caused consternation. No one apparently wanted to be the one responsible for corrupting this youth by giving him this book, but I insisted that the library had granted me “adult priviledges.” After much discussion behind closed doors, the book was produced, and I was allowed to check it out. Perhaps the library staff did not want to take on Miss Dahlberg again.

            This was the first adult book that mesmerized me. The beach scene famous from the movie was not the real draw. The sprawling narrative was captivating, but it was the character of Robert E. Lee Prewitt that totally grabbed me—a Hamlet, a Tony Zale, a Miles Davis, a Kierkegaardian zen figure, a lover, a friend, an anti-authoritarian, a patriot. Of course I was not alone in these reactions, but I did feel that the character talked especially to me.

            Life moved on, and I went off to college. Now a library was different. It was a research institution, not a place for browsing to find material to fill up my idle hours. I said good-bye to the kind of library that had helped form me. Now I did what had once been a radical act for me; I bought books and rather than checking them out of libraries.

            That pattern remained for decades. It only altered when I started spending summers in the Poconos and finally became a regular patron of the Barrett Friendly Library. It is smaller than my hometown one, but it has a similar feel. Of course, libraries have changed since my youth. Many still go to that library for books, but now many also come to use the computers, but even this latter group really come to the library for the reasons I did. I didn’t have books at home, and they do not have books and computers at their home.  Recently I read about a county out West that had slashed its already low taxes more and as a result was closing its public library. I felt a despair for the place and a grief for all the kids there who did not have access to books and computers.

Owning computers, I am one who goes to the library for the books, and the library has brought back some of my old browsing ways. I don’t wander the general fiction and nonfiction shelves as I would have in olden days. Instead, I browse the bookcases of “new releases,” an often generous ascription in this small library because a volume can remain “new” for over a year. At the beginning of summer, I concentrate on the nonfiction and biography sections. While on occasion I spot a title that I have heard about from elsewhere, most of the books are previously unknown to me. I just look for topics that I might find interesting, and since the collections are diverse, this has led to varied subjects. One year from the library I read about class and poverty in America, a North Korean pilot who defected, the CIA, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the connection between corporate America and a form of Christianity, surfing, modern China, and a Jesuit traveling in the Holy Land.

 I feel like this library has returned me full circle to reading habits I had when still in Wisconsin public schools, but more important, it has reminded me of how important the library was in my formation and how important it must still be for the many who are raised in homes without the resources that too many of us just take for granted. A long time ago I had vowed that if I ever published a book, I would make a donation to my childhood library, and both events eventually happened. Now the wife and I have given money to the Friendly Library, and of course, I urge you to support a local library—volunteer or donate money, or both.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

People surprise me. We were discussing streaming shows when the dessert server came. I asked the Guatemalan-born man if he had any Netflix recommendations. He replied that he did not watch television, but after a beat he added that he did listen to audiobooks. With only the slightest urging, he recommended Andre Agassi’s memoir. He was eager to tell us that for much of the tennis player’s career, his iconic long locks were fake. Andre was losing his hair but had a shampoo sponsor and extensions seemed necessary. Then the server recommended the audiobook about Nike’s Phil Knight and suggested that after listening to  it, we should watch the Michael Jordan movie about the shoes. When I sat down at the suburban Italian restaurant for a birthday celebration, I could not have predicted I would have a conversation about audiobooks with a server born in Guatemala. That server went on to describe dishes he liked from his native country, but he was also insistent that if (he said “when”) we visited his homeland that we visit a McDonald’s. When I said that I saw no point in getting a fast-food hamburger there, he said we had to experience the service in Guatemala. He maintained it was always wonderful, even at a Mickey D’s where someone opened the door for the customers and asked whether they would like to order there or at the table. He did not mention the quality of the food.

People amaze me. I took the crime novel Reykjavik off the library shelf. I had not read an Icelandic noir novel for a while. The book was co-written by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrín Jacobsdóttir. The jacket copy tells me that Ragnar has sold over three million copies of his books, is an investment banker, teaches copyright law, and has translated fourteen Agatha Christie books starting when he was seventeen. Katrín is the prime minister of Iceland (or at least she was when the book was published in 2022), has a master’s degree in Icelandic literature having written her thesis on Icelandic mystery writer Arnaldur Indrióason, and worked for media and publishing. She served as a minister in the government before becoming prime minister in 2017. She has a husband and three sons. (Ragnar is married with two daughters.) And I have trouble brushing after every meal.

The new billboard advertised a “wellness” place. When did “wellness” with its undertones of the new age, holistic stuff, and “proactivity” become a standard term? I always find the word at least slightly amusing. I would be happier if we could have more “goodness” products, places, and events.

We have indicted the aged Raúl Castro for his supposed part in shooting down planes that might have been in Cuban airspace thirty years ago. Have our authorities thought this through? We have killed two hundred citizens of foreign countries in international waters by bombing their boats. Will those nations indict Hegseth and Trump for murder?

Should I worry about my mental health? After the colonoscopy, I was told that everything was normal, and my first reaction was, “I went through all of that for nothing!”

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk.” Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2026).

“Twilight arrived early in the Crimean mountains, with dusk falling at four thirty and darkness shortly thereafter.” Giles Milton, Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World. (2021).

“At last on Monday around ten or half past, Sybil Van Antwerp carries the mug of Irish breakfast tea with milk to her desk.” Virginia Evans, The Correspondent (2025).

“If historians were asked to identify the greatest human tragedies of all time, the Holocaust would probably top the list, for reasons both powerful and plausible.” Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding (2025).

“This is the story of three girls who were born in one world and sent, by forces beyond their comprehension, to grow up in an entirely different one.” Janice P. Nimura, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back.

“‘Do you know, when I was a child, it was the lavatory to which I retired for quiet meditation.’” Amanda Chapman, Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library (2025).

“Maralyn looked out at emptiness.” Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (2025).

“It was a muggy late-summer day in 1979 when I stepped out of the Shanghai heat into the cool marble lobby of the Peace Hotel.” Jonathan Kaufman, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China (2020).

“This is what happened in Faha over the Christmas of 1962, in what became known in the parish as the time of the child.” Niall Williams, Time of the Child (2024).

“After Donald Trump won his first presidential election, I had one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had as a writer.” Michael Lewis, ed, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service (2025).

“Our story starts, appropriately enough, with a bang: the whizz of shells, the crack of gunfire.” Jeremy Dauber, American Comics: A History (2022).

“A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the sun.” Karen Russell, The Antidote (2025).

 “At some point in the afternoon of 17 July 1937, a tall, round-faced Ukrainian in his late thirties, whose bright eyes contrasted vividly with his smooth black hair, sat down in a hotel room in Paris to write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union.” Josh Ireland, The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy (2026).

“When John Foster Dulles died on May 24, 1959, a bereft nation mourned more intensely that it had since the death of Franklin Roosevelt fourteen years before.” Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War.