Andrew Bacevich’s new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” is a good summary of the past 65 years’ worth of war thinking in Washington, D.C. “Prior to World War II,” he writes, “Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity.” For the past 65 years or so, Bacevich writes, these beliefs have been Washington’s “sacred trinity”:

“an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”

The people putting this expansion of Manifest Destiny into practice, Bacevich writes, have not fundamentally been presidents, as everyone believes, much less Congress, as the Constitution would have had it. “Pretending to the role of Decider, a president all too often becomes little more than the medium through which power is exercised.”

Bacevich highlights the roles of two men in establishing structures of war power, Allen Dulles at the CIA and Curtis LeMay at Strategic Air Command. They established the power, for themselves and their successors, respectively, to do anything at all in secret, and to determine nuclear weapons policies. And they established the practice of lying about Soviet military threats as a means toward escalating the already dominant U.S. military.

Bacevich describes President John Kennedy as taking some of these powers into the White House. “The methods devised by Allen Dulles and the methods perfected by Curtis LeMay worked in tandem to create an aura of secrecy, prestige, and power that now allowed presidents to assert and exercise quasi-imperial prerogatives.” And Bacevich points to LeMay’s public descent from revered wise man to dangerous buffoon as illustrative of the damage the Vietnam War did to Washington’s rules, damage that did not last long at all.

“Failure in Vietnam seemingly left the Washington rules in tatters,” writes Bacevich. “That within five years of Saigon’s fall they were well on their way to reconstitution qualifies as remarkable. That within another decade the American credo and sacred trinity had been fully restored deserves to be seen as astonishing.”

Bacevich repeats this sort of astonishment in the course of the story he tells, including when the end of the Cold War slows the U.S. war machine down even less than defeat in Vietnam did, and including when counter-insurgency theories are resurrected for General David Petraeus’ “surge”. Each time Bacevich is right to be astonished, but in each case the astonishment is lessened, I think, to the extent that one views war proponents as frauds rather than well-intentioned fools. That those in power, profiting financially and electorally from wars, immediately argue for more war is simply to be expected. That they persuade others to share their beliefs is, indeed, astonishing, albeit less so to the extent that one examines how our communications system works — something Bacevich does not do. The five year recovery post-Vietnam may have a recent parallel. By 2005, Washington’s war lies were in worse than tatters, but by 2010 it was considered impolite to mention that excuses for wars were lies.

By the time we get to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, Bacevich is writing as though presidents are Deciders. He notes that the United States could now go to war without inconveniencing most of its people, and that wars tended to give boosts to presidents’ approval ratings. This was a major change, but another came when the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became understood as permanent or at least open-ended. And the military adopted a policy of “counter-insurgency” that involved primarily non-military work. This is another astonishing revolution, as Bacevich points out, except that — as far as I can tell — the military is not actually following its new policy. Are we putting 80% into civilian efforts? Last time I looked it was more like 4%.

“Washington Rules” was written before General Stanley McChrystal ended his career but not before he did things that should have ended it. When, in Bacevich’s account, McChrystal publicly pressures President Barack Obama to escalate Afghanistan, Bacevich returns to his discussion of the 1950s: Presidents are not the real power.

As in his past books, Bacevich does a terrific job of nudging the reader away from belief in popular militaristic and patriotic myths, in the direction of some beginning grasp of reality. And he explicitly charts a wiser course, a new “trinity”:

“First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests. Second, the primary duty of the American soldier is in America. Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self-defense.”

Of course, that doesn’t resemble any just war tradition, and eight years ago the just war theorists were explaining the need to attack Iraq. The ONLY duty of the American soldier should be to defend the United States, minus any extraneous “vital interests.” But this is vast progress, and Bacevich describes himself in the introduction to his book as “a slow learner” who didn’t begin paying attention or asking questions until he was 41. He must also be a fast learner, because from that point on he’s come to understand and explain the U.S. empire as well as anyone.

But there are two areas in this book in which I think Bacevich is still resisting adequate questioning of orthodoxy. The first is in his understanding of U.S. news media. The media is never mentioned, except for a passing reference to media executives in a list of those benefitting from current policy. Repeatedly Bacevich laments the public’s backward attitudes, never considering where they come from if real, or noticing when the public is actually far ahead of what passes for “public discourse.” Does Bacevich know that a majority of Americans oppose the current wars? Even when Bacevich’s generalizations about the public may be fair, he omits any notice whatsoever of the sizable minority that opposes war mongering. Bacevich’s examples of heretics who have resisted the march to permanent war are always those with power and the prestige of having spent years going along, rather than early leaders or those with the most penetrating analysis. In Bacevich’s world a “left-leaning” publication is The New Republic.

The second place I see acceptance of the official story as getting in the way of Bacevich’s narrative is in his apparent belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Bacevich’s argument that people like Dulles held the reins of power would be stronger and look very different if he acknowledged the well-documented push-back against Kennedy’s firing of Dulles and Kennedy’s steps toward peace. According to Bacevich, “There is no evidence that any lessons drawn from his administration’s Cuban encounters had a positive effect on the way it dealt with Vietnam.” Kennedy, in Bacevich’s account, wanted war and more war in Vietnam, and everything was up to him. “At the White House, the president and his lieutenants were in charge of everything, including the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Yet, on October 11, 1963, Kennedy issued a secret order for a withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum 263. Two years earlier, as described in James Douglass’ “JFK and the Unspeakable” Kennedy successfully blocked public discussion of troop escalation by planting the false story in the media that his generals were against it. Yes, Kennedy mostly went along with the Washington Rules, but he tested their limits and apparently found them.

Back in the hills of western Virginia, I grew up worshiping Robert E. Lee. I often joke that I didn’t know the South lost the War of Northern Aggression—this is actually what one of my schoolteachers called it—until I got to college, and even then I went to the library to check after somebody broke the news to me.

In the hollows and small towns where I lived, my Scots-Irish kin and I loved Stonewall Jackson even more than Lee. He was the ass-kicking, lemon-sucking Presbyterian who practically won the war singlehandedly, until (a) his arm got shot off and (b) he died. I remember as a little boy staring, mouth agape in awe, at what was left of his long-dead horse, Little Sorrel, at the Virginia Military Institute Museum, not far from my home.

I imagined the one-armed Stonewall riding along on Sorrel, chopping the heads off those invading Yankees and making the world safe for…what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. But in my 10-year-old head, I was sure it was noble and fine and honorable. After all, we were proud Virginians, and that was even better than being an American. Even Stonewall’s last words seemed almost Shakespearean: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

I’m a direct descendant of Confederate soldiers. My great-great-grandfather suffered a terrible leg wound on day one at Gettysburg, fighting for the South. My grandmother was a proud member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and I remember her coming home after meetings wearing her little pin made out of cotton blossoms. Today I live in a building in Alexandria that was once burned by the Union, and even my middle name comes from Gone With the Wind, which was—and still is—my mom’s favorite movie.

I describe my Rebel bona fides to make what I’m about to say more dramatic: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s decision to throw a bone to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and proclaim April Confederate History Month is a terrible, terrible idea. If I can borrow the supposed last words of John Wilkes Booth, it’s “useless, useless.” McDonnell took a Louisville Slugger to a hornet’s nest that had been humming benignly in our state for eight years. To compound the problem, his first proclamation made no mention of slavery. He was forced to apologize, in no small part because of condemnation from his African-American benefactor, Sheila Johnson, of BET fame. The contrite governor found religion and called slavery “a stain on the soul of this state and nation.”

Don’t get me wrong—I’m proud of my ancestors, and if I had been a Virginian in the 1860s, I would have no doubt been fighting for the South. It’s ridiculous to say otherwise. But guess what? It’s not the 1860s, and I’d like to think we’ve all—even Southerners—evolved a little in the last 150 years or so. And guess what again? The South lost. It’s true. I looked it up, remember? And the reasons for the war weren’t “noble and fine and honorable,” like I thought they were when I was a little boy worshiping false idols and ogling a dead horse.

I’m a man now, and I don’t think the state that I love so much should be celebrating the Confederacy, whether the decree mentions slavery or not. And I don’t need the government to assign a month for me to honor my ancestors. I go to visit my Confederate great-great-grandfather Romulus Tuttle’s grave in Tinkling Springs, Va., now and then, and I stand there in silence and try to honor his memory. Any other Southerner can do the same for his kin, without a politician’s proclamation, especially one that gratuitously hurts African-American Virginians. Imagine if your governor signed a document honoring a cause whose goal was to keep your ancestors enslaved. And please don’t start up with me about how the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. Sure, it was about states’ rights—to own slaves.

While new disclosure laws on corporate political spending are not needed to see the forest, they may be required for seeing the trees. Knowing which corporations funded what won’t, on its own, end or reduce the corruption. And the big picture of corporate spending cannot easily be hidden. Already, pre-Citizens United, it dominated Washington. And the threat alone of massively increased spending is corrupting Washington further already. But those who, for various reasons, think we need to see the details, or would be helped by seeing the details, require new legislation.

“Higher Corporate Spending on Election Ads Could Be All but Invisible,” reads a headline on ProPublica:

“The Supreme Court recently freed corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won’t know it, because it’s easy for them to legally hide their political spending.”

That is, the public will know the basic corporate interests behind the propaganda, but not necessarily the original sources of the money. The example ProPublica uses to illustrate this is telling. At issue in it is not the public’s need to know who’s running the country, or any corporation’s interest in hiding its corrupting influence per se. Rather, the token expert cited in the article imagines an example in which a corporation might want to back the pro-corporate policy of one political party without offending the irrational ideologues in the other pro-corporate political party:

“For instance, a company may want to help Democratic politicians who support health care reforms that would benefit the company, but it worries about offending ‘Republican shareholders who may care more about their personal ideology than about their three shares of stock in the company,’ said Kelner, who says he represents many politically active Fortune 500 companies. ‘The same would be true on the other side of the political spectrum.’”

Spectrum may be somewhat too broad a term in this brave new world for the range of political positions held, not by people, but by those worthy of corporate largesse.

As we transition from dusk to darkness, it’s worth looking at some of the areas corporations control. One is the rapidly dying environment known as planet earth. The Atlantic reports on How Campaign Ads Could Finish Off the Climate Bill:

“Even before the Supreme Court’s ruling, which allows corporations and unions to spend money directly to help elect or defeat candidates for office, the energy industry spent ten times more on political donations than environmental interests. . . .

“As election season approaches, oil and coal companies could fund attack ads on vulnerable legislators who have supported emissions reductions or cap-and-trade. . . .

“Whether or not these companies choose this approach, the mere possibility of their doing so may convince waffling politicians not to jeopardize their seats by voting for a climate bill. Since the Supreme Court has given corporations a big stick, all they may need to do is speak softly.”

Now THAT’s invisibility!

Here’s another area I’ve recently written about: education. Already corporations are persuading senators to block student loan reform that would allow more students to afford a college education.

Of course complete fixes are possible through amending the US Constitution, and partial ones, such as disclosure, are possible through congressional legislation. But all things are more easily done better through states. States can limit corporate and union spending on elections reads the headline of Maryland state senators Brian Frosh’s and Jamie Raskin’s article in Saturday’s Washington Post:

“The 50 state legislatures (and the D.C. Council) that charter, supervise and regulate nearly every corporation in the land are still responding to the court’s dramatic recasting of the political landscape. (Washington state has passed a bill that is waiting for the governor’s signature.) In fact, the state legislatures have power to constrain runaway corporate and union political spending — if they are willing to exercise it. . . .

“A group of more than 20 concerned Maryland legislators has joined with us to propose a package of bills to limit the worst aspects of the decision. Specifically, our bills would:

“– Require that any corporate executives or union leaders seeking to make political campaign expenditures first obtain a majority vote of shareholders or union members approving the specific expenditure, which would guarantee that the move would reflect the will of shareholders or union members, not the whims of the chief executive or union leader.

“– Ban “pay to play” corruption (and its appearance) by preventing state contractors from making campaign expenditures on behalf of state political candidates and their campaigns.

“– Compel public disclosure of all corporate and union political disbursements.”

Ohio state legislators are now among those proposing to block pay-to-play as well. The Columbus Dispatch reports:

“The ban would kick in if more than 10percent of a company’s revenue comes from state contracts. The ban also would apply to companies that benefit from state grants, tax credits or low-interest loans.”

Pennsylvania is now among the states where state legislators are pursuing what is ultimately needed: a U.S. Constitutional Convention:

“Several area lawmakers are hoping to start a trend to amend the U.S. Constitution to effect campaign finance reform.”

Here’s to hoping, and to doing more than hoping.

March 06, 2010

03/05/10

- A U.S. Army Veteran Says The Iron Curtain Shows A

Fence Can Work

A Former ACU Intern Confirms Its Anti-Amnesty Fund-Raising Scam; etc.

From:

him)

Immigration (Again). But They Still Want Your Money

Morgan’s piece was incredibly

precise in its depiction of Washington D.C.’s political

fund-raising scams.

As a former intern at the

American

Conservative Union, I can confidently confirm

that Morgan is 100 percent correct about the way it

deals with those postcards/donations.

During the summer of 2007, when I

did my intern stint, I filed out donor cards and took

calls for $150 a week.

Every day, I drove to the ACU without

air conditioning and left Old

Town Alexandria in rush hour traffic so I could

support conservatism. Obviously, my paltry $150 wage

barely covered my meals and gas expenses.

This was the summer of

George W. Bush’s amnesty push and I hoped the

ACU would kick some butt.

They mass mailed senior citizens

about the looming amnesty crisis, of course. I saw the

angry responses we got.

The elderly donors were sincerely

upset about the amnesty threat—but the

ACU officials didn’t care about

America’s looming destruction one way or the other.

The ACU used the amnesty issue to

make money by cashing the checks but flinging the

postcards into the trash.

All the while of course, the

big shots collected their salaries but did nothing

about the prospect of millions of illegal aliens being

amnestied.

I greatly appreciated Morgan’s take

on this corruption and I look forward to reading more of

his columns.

[PermaLink] [Top]

[Letters Home]

A North Carolina Home Economist Says Anchor Baby’s Diet Is Not So Bad

From: 

her)

Their Own Children

The diet of beans, tortillas and

egg that Maritza Hernandez provides for her

five-year-old son that letter writer Henry Ridge

described is not all that bad.

Eggs and beans are nutritious and

have protein. With the addition of a green vegetable and

possibly some rice, it would be an adequate although not

fancy meal. Millions of Mexicans have lived for

centuries on the same

food staples.

The larger question is why the

Hernandez family hasn’t gotten

food stamps or

assistance from any of the dozens of Hispanic

outreach groups including the

Roman Catholic Church.

As we painfully know, those

organizations are more than eager to help aliens in

their time of need. In truth, however, they would be

better off at home in Mexico.

[Letters Home]

Another North Carolina Reader Says Aliens Need Lessons On How To Make The Best Use Of The Food Stamps You Pay For

From: John

him)

Most all English speaking native born

American citizens on food stamps and/or with WIC babies

at least buy most of their groceries at mainstream

regional chain grocery stores.

When using their

EBT cards and WIC

vouchers, most welfare recipients don’t make wise

nutritional and economic purchases.

I’ve seen

morbidly obese grocery buyers with overweight

children pay for $90.00 worth of eligible foodstuffs

that included fatback, country ham,

potato chips, bacon, the

most expensive brand of sugar coated cereals instead of

plain house brands, eight packs of 8 oz. convenience

packaged orange juice at over twice the per ounce price

of bulk container sizes.

Then, when they finish their food

stamp transaction,  they purchase for cash

ineligible items which include Chinet

paper plates, the most

expensive brands of household cleaning products, a case

of beer, two jugs of wine, and two cartons of

cigarettes.

But the illegal alien invasion has

compounded the insults to taxpayers I’ve

described above.

Now

illegal immigrant food stamp users patronize the

independent

bodegas that liter our landscape and cater to a

plethora of ethnic grocery buyers.

Guess what? The

bodegas also

accept food stamps and WIC vouchers. Their shelves are

loaded with non-perishable ethnic food products imported

from as close as
Mexico

to as far away as

Thailand and India.

Many of these products have exact or

close equivalents of mainstream nationally produced

foods but others fall into the category of

bush meat or substances used in ceremonial

incantations of one kind of Shaman or other.

Most are very expensive. Calculate the

cost of hauling a load of, for example, canned pickled

squid fillets from Bangkok

to
Long Beach and then run it

through the ethnic food

distribution network. Then compare that total to

the cost of the items in your pantry.

What’s wrong with supermarket house

brand long grain rice? Why does the rice have to have

the brand name

Lupita’s and sell for 50 percent more than the

Arkansas

rice I use? Is there something wrong with
Arkansas rice? So much for culinary and

grocery brand loyalty assimilation in
America!

I have

written earlier on this misappropriation of taxpayer

funds with a description of the Costa Rican welfare

foodstuffs program where participants can only buy a

limited number of items at government-run grocery

stores.

The
U.S.

needs to convert to the Costa Rican method if it plans

to continue handing out food you pay for willy-nilly.

After all, the

food stamp program is

run by the

U.S. Department of Agriculture. What part of

U.S.

is not being understood here?

Pershing’s previous

of the

here,

here and

here.

[Letters Home]

A Virginia Reader Urges

VDARE.COM Editors And Contributors To Procreate

From: Herman

King (e-mail him)

Finally, I found at

VDARE.COM columnists who see and write the

unvarnished truth about the alien invasion.

May all of you procreate and may

your offspring share with the nation the same lucid

insight you have been blessed with.

I’ll add that I recognized from the

beginning that the

Tea Party movement was being hijacked by the

neocons and pseudo-cons.

My two Democratic Senators,

Jim Webb and

Mark Warner, pose as moderates but really are

knee-jerk liberals.

[Letters Home]

Or maybe it’s Nevada, whose own governor, amid allegations that he had groped a waitress, recently said in a deposition that he had not had sex since 1995. Albany, this past month, could have been Las Vegas, with fewer scruples. The New York legislator Malcolm Smith—along with Congressman Gregory Meeks—for example, set up a fund that collected thirty thousand dollars to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina. As of last week, less than two thousand dollars had been dispensed. Meeks and Smith have said that they weren’t involved in the day-to-day operation of the fund, but the rest of the money remains unaccounted for. (Downstate, Larry Seabrook, a Bronx councilman, is alleged to have tried to expense a hundred and seventy-seven dollars for a deli lunch—a bagel and a diet soda—and is now known, even as he contests charges against him, as Bagel Larry.) Meanwhile, the Times reported that Paterson may have had a role in covering up a top aide’s possible involvement in a Halloween-night incident of domestic violence. Key members of Paterson’s administration resigned in protest of the mess surrounding the aide, David W. Johnson—who, Bernard Kerik-like, started out as Paterson’s driver and is tight enough with the Governor to have his own bedroom in the Executive Mansion. Paterson did nothing to bolster the public’s faith in his integrity, making his major public appearance of last week at the opening of a steak house.

Paterson is supposed to be leading negotiations to balance the nine-billion-dollar budget deficit that must be resolved by April 1st. It’s as huge a job as it sounds. So is finding a way to deal with the 2.6 million New Yorkers—nearly fourteen per cent of the state’s population—who do not have health insurance. The Governor is also supposed to be finalizing a big deal to bring a “racino” to Aqueduct racetrack, in Queens, but that has stalled because of accusations that he selected an inferior bid from a company in which Floyd Flake, a prominent pastor, is an investor. On top of all this, the State Commission on Public Integrity came out with a report saying that Paterson had violated ethics laws by cadging thousands of dollars’ worth of World Series tickets from the Yankees. A lot of people would have thought this a relatively minor infraction had Paterson not, according to the commission, lied about the matter under oath and then produced a backdated check, as though he were a renter and the commission (which he once sought to abolish) a grasping landlord he was trying to outwit. According to the Citizens Union of the City of New York, since 2005 ten state lawmakers have left office owing to criminal or unethical conduct. Even the fate of Charles Rangel, the twenty-term congressman from Harlem—who, after it emerged that he had accepted corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean, said that he was temporarily stepping aside as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee—was eclipsed by the shambolic proceedings of the boys upstate.

Over the objections of virtually every Democratic leader on the planet, the President included, Paterson was running for a full term, until late last month, when he wasn’t. Instead, we have as a candidate Kristin Davis, the madam who furnished Spitzer with call girls, and who announced, last week, that she was running on the Personal Freedom ticket. “I already have contribution pledges from supporters as diverse as Northern California Pot farmers, Hip Hop artists, Gay and lesbian friends and even some conservative businessmen,” her Web site says. She calls her platform P2: prostitution and pot. She would like to legalize both. If we don’t get an Empire State Cicciolina, we may end up with Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who hasn’t yet announced whether he will enter the race. He is busy right now leading an investigation of Paterson.

On the Republican side, the Long Islander Rick Lazio—who ran against Hillary Clinton in 2000, and who, in a speech, referred to Kim Jong Il as “Kim Jong the Second”—has resurfaced. He says it’s unsavory that Cuomo is leading the investigation of Paterson. It’s certainly awkward, since, whatever happens, the outcome will affect Cuomo’s fortunes. As the Albany Times-Union reported, Lazio has spent the past several years at JPMorgan Chase, helping, among other things, to “educate (congressional) members and staff,” according to firm records, about why JPMorgan opposed restrictions on credit-card and student-lending practices. Last week, Lazio called New York “the corruption capital of America.” Several months earlier, in a policy piece in the Times, he wrote, “I have a different idea for New York—a unicameral legislature like Nebraska’s.”

As Paterson struggled to stay in office, Hiram Monserrate, the former state senator who was convicted, last year, of assaulting his girlfriend, was attempting to regain his. Monserrate has likened himself to, among other martyrs, Jesus Christ. Paterson has complained, in the past, that he is a target of the media (“Even at ten o’clock at night I should have been working on the budget?”). He has denied any wrongdoing, saying, last week, that he is a “victim” of “hysteria.” Governors have the authority to issue pardons. It is troubling if Paterson doesn’t know who victims really are, and odious if he does and pretends otherwise. One would rather be a victim of hysteria than a victim of domestic violence.

Last Tuesday, the state senator Pedro Espada, Jr., who is being investigated for the misuse of funds, stood in the driveway of the Executive Mansion and issued some advice to the Governor. “Do what Pedro does,” he said. “Report to work. Don’t listen to and read everything that’s said about you. Stay compartmentalized. Stay focused on the job.” Here’s another suggestion—a plea, really—to whoever ends up running the place: Don’t do what Eliot and Joseph and Efraín and Hiram and David did. ♦

The 69-year-old Republican, who served as Vice President from 2001 to 2009 in the administration of George W. Bush, was said to be resting comfortably Monday at George Washington Hospital, Washington D.C.

“His doctors are evaluating the situation,” a statement from his office said.

Cheney has a history of cardiovascular problems. He suffered his first heart attack 32 years ago at the age of 37. Since then, he has suffered four heart attacks.

As a result of earlier scares related to his heart condition, Cheney has stated numerous times that he goes to the hospital at the first sign of discomfort as a precautionary measure.

In 2001, doctors gave Cheney an implanted cardioverter defibrillator, a device that controls an irregular heartbeat.

In 2008, doctors restored a normal rhythm to his heart with an electric shock. It was the second time in less than a year that Cheney had experienced and been treated for an atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart. He had previously had two quadruple bypass surgeries and two artery-cleaning angioplasties.

Fox News’ Mike Emanuel and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

The picture of diversity—black, white, and brown students cavorting or studying together out on the quad—is a stock shot in college catalogs. The picture on graduation day is a good deal more monochromatic. “If you look at who enters college, it now looks like America,” says Hilary Pennington, director of postsecondary programs for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has closely studied enrollment patterns in higher education. “But if you look at who walks across the stage for a diploma, it’s still largely the white, upper-income population.”

The United States once had the highest graduation rate of any nation. Now it stands 10th. For the first time in American history, there is the risk that the rising generation will be less well educated than the previous one. The graduation rate among 25- to 34-year-olds is no better than the rate for the 55- to 64-year-olds who were going to college more than 30 years ago. Studies show that more and more poor and nonwhite students aspire to graduate from -college—but their graduation rates fall far short of their dreams. The graduation rates for blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans lag far be-hind the graduation rates for whites and Asians. As the minority population grows in the United States, low college–graduation rates become a threat to national -prosperity.

The problem is pronounced at public universities. In 2007 (the last year for which Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group, has comparative statistics) the University of Wisconsin–-Madison—one of the top five or so “public Ivies”—graduated 81 percent of its white students within six years, but only 56 percent of its blacks. At less-selective state schools, the numbers get worse. During the same time frame, the University of Northern Iowa graduated 67 percent of its white students, but only 39 percent of its blacks. Community colleges have low graduation rates generally—but rock-bottom rates for minorities. A recent review of California community colleges found that while a third of the Asian students picked up their degrees, only 15 percent of African-Americans did so as well.

Private colleges and universities generally do better, partly because they offer smaller classes and more personal attention. But when it comes to a significant graduation gap, Bowdoin has company. Nearby Colby College logged an 18-point difference between white and black graduates in 2007 and 25 points in 2006. Middlebury College in Vermont, another topnotch school, had a 19-point gap in 2007 and a 22-point gap in 2006. The most selective private schools—-Harvard, Yale, and -Princeton—show almost no gap between black and white graduation rates. But that may have more to do with their ability to cherry-pick the best students. According to data gathered by Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, the most selective schools are more likely to choose blacks who have at least one immigrant parent from Africa or the Caribbean than black students who are descendants of American slaves. According to Guinier’s data, the latter perform less well academically.

“Higher education has been able to duck this issue for years, particularly the more selective schools, by saying the onus is on the individual student,” says Pennington of the Gates Foundation. “If they fail, it’s their fault.” Some critics blame affirmative action—students admitted with lower test scores and grades from shaky high schools often struggle at elite schools. But a bigger problem may be that poor high schools often send their students to colleges for which they are, in educators’ jargon, “undermatched”: they could get into more elite, richer schools, but instead go to community colleges and low-rated state schools that lack the resources to help them. Some schools out for profit cynically jack up tuitions and count on student loans and federal aid to foot the bill—knowing full well that the students won’t make it. “Colleges know that a lot of kids they take will end up in remedial classes, for which they’ll get no college credit and then they’ll flunk out,” says Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust. “The school gets to keep the money, but the kid leaves with loads of debt and no degree and no ability to get a better job. Colleges are not holding up their end.”

A college education is getting ever more expensive. Since 1982 tuitions have been rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation. University administrators insist that most of those hikes are matched by increased scholarship grants or loans, but the recession has slashed private endowments and cut into state spending on high-er education. In 2008 the net cost of attending a four-year public -university—after financial aid—equaled 28 percent of median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of median family income. More and more scholarships are based on merit, not need. Poorer students are not always the best-informed consumers. Often they wind up deeply in debt or simply unable to pay after a year or two and must drop out.

There once was a time when universities took a perverse pride in their attrition rates. Professors would begin the year by saying, “Look to the right and look to the left. One of you is not going to be here by the end of the year.” But such a Darwinian spirit is beginning to give way as at least a few colleges face up to the graduation gap. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the gap has been roughly halved over the last three years. The university has poured resources into peer counseling to help students from inner-city schools adjust to the rigor and faster pace of a university classroom—and also to help minority students overcome the stereotype that they are less qualified. Wisconsin has a “laserlike focus” on building up student skills in the first three months, according to vice provost Damon Williams.

State and federal governments could sharpen that focus everywhere by broadly publishing minority graduation rates. (For now students and counselors must find their way to the Web site of the Educational Trust, which compares data obtained from schools by the federal government.) For years private colleges such as Princeton and MIT have had success bringing minorities onto campus in the summer before freshman year to give them a head start on college-level courses. The newer trend is to start recruiting poor and nonwhite students as early as the seventh grade, using innovative tools like hip-hop competitions to identify kids with sophisticated verbal finesse. Such programs can be expensive, of course, but cheap compared with the millions already invested in scholarships and grants for kids who have little chance to graduate without special support.

With effort and money, the graduation gap can be closed. Washington and Lee is a small, selective school with a preppy feel in Lexington, Va. Its student body is less than 5 percent black and less than 2 percent Latino. While the school usually graduated about 90 percent of its whites, the graduation rate of its blacks and Latinos had dipped to 63 percent by 2007. “We went through a dramatic shift,” says Dawn Watkins, the vice president for student affairs. The school aggressively pushed mentoring of minorities by other students and “partnering” with parents at a special pre-enrollment session. The school had its first-ever black homecoming. Last spring the school graduated the same proportion of minorities as it did whites. If the United States wants to keep up in the global economic race, it will have to pay systematic attention to graduating minorities, not just enrolling them.

© 2010

Greg Manning, whose wife, Laura, was severely burned in the World Trade Center attacks, stood before the crowd and said, “Thousands are already dead because of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s choices. We do not want to see . . . hundreds of thousands dead because of the Attorney General’s choices.”

Andrew McCarthy, the former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney who led the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, also gave a speech, declaring that Holder didn’t “understand what rule of law has always been in wartime.” He said, “It’s military commissions. It’s not to wrap our enemies in our Bill of Rights.”

“Traitor!” someone shouted.

Edith Lutnick, who works for the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, told the crowd, “My brother, Gary, lost his life that day.” The 9/11 victims, she said, “were murdered by the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and we do not want him and his fellow-terrorists tried in that building. . . . We need to tell Eric Holder that we will be victims no more.”

“Lynch Holder!” an onlooker cried.

One protester, Carolyn Walton, who works for a water-filtration company in Manhattan, told me that Holder was “a Marxist mole.” She asked, “How can someone who is not an American have any right to our rights? Holder wants to help the terrorists.”

The rally was organized, in part, by Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot Charles Burlingame, who was killed on 9/11 when Al Qaeda hijackers crashed the plane he had been flying into the Pentagon. Burlingame is one of the three founders of Keep America Safe, a new political-advocacy group. Her partners in the venture, which is aimed at attacking the Obama Administration’s national-security decisions and vindicating those of the Bush Administration, are William Kristol, the conservative pundit, and Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney. The organization’s political strategist is Michael Goldfarb, a spokesman for Senator John McCain during his 2008 Presidential campaign; among its funders is Mel Sembler, a conservative donor and a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Despite the prominence of the demonstration’s organizers, the campaign against Holder’s Justice Department was largely overlooked by the national media, which considered the event a fringe affair. But the anger was growing, and it became impossible to ignore on January 19th, when Scott Brown, a Republican, captured the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat. As Eric Fehrnstrom, Brown’s political consultant, put it to me recently, the “most potent political issue” in the race was voter opposition to the Justice Department’s decision to extend customary legal protections to suspected terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspect who on Christmas Day attempted to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines passenger plane bound for Detroit. In a debate with his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, Brown declared, “We’re at war in our airports, we’re at war in our shopping malls. I have to be honest with you, folks. . . . I’m scared at some of the policies I’ve heard.”

In a television ad, Brown, who is in the Army National Guard, flashed a photograph of himself in fatigues and declared, “Some people believe our Constitution exists to grant rights to terrorists who want to harm us. I disagree.” Brown also announced his support for waterboarding suspected terrorists—a tactic that Holder, among others, has denounced as torture. As Brown’s attacks grew more pointed, Fehrnstrom said, Coakley got “bollixed up” defending Obama’s policies. He added, “The obvious follow-up is: Are you going to read Osama bin Laden the Miranda warning if you catch him?”

After the Christmas Day incident, conservative pundits lambasted the Justice Department’s handling of Abdulmutallab, who had concealed in his underwear a bomb that ignited but failed to explode. When the plane landed, Abdulmutallab was taken to a hospital for treatment; at Holder’s directive, he was arrested as a criminal suspect. (The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Pentagon signed off on Holder’s decision.) F.B.I. agents questioned Abdulmutallab for some fifty minutes, under what is known as the “public-safety exception” to the right to remain silent. He divulged time-sensitive intelligence: he had been trained in Yemen, by affiliates of Al Qaeda, and had obtained explosives from them. After he received medical treatment, a Justice Department source said, he started to “act like a jihadi and recite the Koran.” He stopped coöperating and demanded a lawyer, at which point authorities read him his rights. On “Inside Washington,” Charles Krauthammer declared that it was “almost criminal” that Holder had allowed Abdulmutallab access to an attorney. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, appeared on ABC, saying, “Why in God’s name would you stop questioning a terrorist?”

Joseph Lieberman, the Independent senator from Connecticut, released a statement declaring that Abdulmutallab was “an enemy combatant and should be detained, interrogated, and ultimately charged as such.” Then, to the dismay of Justice Department officials, the Obama Administration’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence, appeared at a Senate hearing and, under harsh questioning from Republicans, second-guessed Holder’s decision to turn Abdulmutallab over to the F.B.I. (Blair later said that his remarks had been “misconstrued.”) Soon, even Democrats were attacking Holder’s decisions. In a letter to Obama, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested that holding a trial in New York was dangerous. “New York City has been a high-priority target since at least the first World Trade Center bombing,” she wrote. “The trial of the most significant terrorist in custody would add to the threat.”

The death blow was struck by New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who had previously pledged his support to Holder. On January 27th, Bloomberg distanced himself from the Justice Department, saying that a trial in New York would be too expensive. For months, companies with downtown real-estate interests had been lobbying to stop the trial. Raymond Kelly, the commissioner of the New York Police Department, had fortified their arguments by providing upwardly spiralling estimates of the costs, which the federal government had promised to cover. In a matter of weeks, in what an Obama Administration official called a “classic City Hall jam job,” the police department’s projection of the trial costs went from a few hundred million dollars to a billion dollars.

Senator Charles Schumer, of New York, quickly released a statement echoing Bloomberg; the wisdom of moving the trial away from lower Manhattan, he said, was “obvious.” Then, on February 1st, Schumer told the Daily News that he opposed the idea of a 9/11 trial taking place anywhere in New York State. Officials in Pennsylvania and Virginia—the two other states where the 9/11 attacks occurred—began declaring their opposition to hosting the trials, too.

Bill Martel, an international-security expert at the Fletcher School, at Tufts University, told me that Holder, having been impervious to the shifting public mood, had been sucked into “a political riptide.” The Christmas Day bombing attempt, he noted, had come only a month after Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who had exchanged e-mails with radical Islamists, massacred thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas. Both incidents had revived public concern about America’s vulnerability to terrorism. Holder’s decisions, Martel warned, had “the makings of a sustained and self-inflicted political hemorrhage.” He added, “I think they’re going to have to give up on civilian trials. And Eric Holder is in for some pretty brutal days.” Indeed, on January 31st, Senator Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, declared on Fox News that Holder should “step down,” for his inability to make “a distinction” between “terrorists who are flying into Detroit, blowing up planes, and American citizens who are committing a crime.”

On January 11th, a few weeks before his plans for a trial at Foley Square fell apart, Holder flew to Boston, to preside over the installation of a new U.S. Attorney. That evening, he returned to Washington in the Justice Department’s Gulfstream jet. Holder, who had jokingly lamented that such perks wouldn’t last forever—“I’m missing it already!”—sat down, put on headphones, and blasted one of his favorite songs, Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Holder, who is fifty-nine, seemed determined not to let the tensions of Washington politics poison his mood. He was equally determined not to capitulate on the idea of holding a 9/11 trial. “I don’t apologize for what I’ve done,” he told me at one point. “History will show that the decisions we’ve made are the right ones.” Holder said that he regarded trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a courtroom as “the defining event of my time as Attorney General.” But, he added, “between now and then I suspect we’re in for some interesting times.”

Holder, despite the controversy he has inspired, has not actually pushed for radical change. Indeed, critics in left-leaning legal circles have complained that he has kept too many of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies in place. For example, Holder’s Justice Department has continued blocking lawsuits by people who were subjected to extraordinary rendition—the practice of sending suspected terrorists captured abroad to countries known for administering torture—on the ground that such litigation would expose state secrets. Even some former members of the Bush Administration see more continuity than change. Bradford Berenson, who served as a White House lawyer when the Bush Administration was forging its controversial legal approach to terrorism, told me that “from the perspective of a hawkish Bush national-security person the glass is eighty-five per cent full in terms of continuity.”

Holder told me that he was frustrated by much of the criticism over the handling of Abdulmutallab. “What we did is totally consistent with what has happened in every similar case” since 9/11, he said. “There’s a desire to ignore the facts to try to score political points. It’s a little shocking.” Without exception, he noted, every previous terrorist suspect apprehended inside the country had been handled as a civilian criminal. Even so, critics such as Krauthammer were denouncing Holder for failing to send Abdulmutallab directly to Guantánamo. As a senior national-security official in the White House put it, “It’s a fantasy! Under what alternative legal system can Special Operations Forces fly into Detroit, and take someone away without court oversight?”

According to Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, in Washington, the military can’t simply grab suspects inside the U.S. and hold them without charge or a hearing. “It violates the Constitution, which extends to everyone inside the U.S.,” she said. “You can’t be seized without probable cause. You have the right to due process, and to a trial by a jury of your peers—which a military commission is not.” Confusion on this point may derive from the Bush Administration’s controversial handling of two suspected terrorists, José Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. Both men were arrested in the U.S. by law-enforcement officials, and indicted on criminal charges. But Bush declared Padilla and Marri to be “enemy combatants,” which, he argued, meant that they could be transferred to military custody, for interrogation and detention without trial. (Neither suspect provided useful intelligence.) The cases provoked legal challenges, and in both instances appeals courts ruled that Bush had overstepped his power. The Administration, not willing to risk a Supreme Court defeat, returned the suspects to the civilian system.

For all the tough rhetoric of the Bush Administration, it prosecuted many more terror suspects as criminals than as enemy combatants. According to statistics compiled by New York University’s Center on Law and Security, since 2001 the criminal courts have convicted some hundred and fifty suspects on terrorism charges. Only three detainees—all of whom were apprehended abroad—were convicted in military commissions at Guantánamo. The makeshift military-commission system set up by Bush to handle terrorism cases has never tried a murder case, let alone one as complex, or notorious, as that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who will face the death penalty for the murder of nearly three thousand people.

The Bush Administration obtained life sentences in the criminal courts for two terror suspects arrested inside the U.S.: Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was planning a second wave of plane attacks. (Reid was read his Miranda rights four times.) When the Bush Justice Department obtained these convictions, the process was celebrated by some of the same people now criticizing Holder. Giuliani, after the Moussaoui trial, said, “I was in awe of our system. It does demonstrate that we can give people a fair trial.”

Holder told me that he was “distressed” that people “who know better” were claiming that the courts were not up to the job of trying terrorists. He added that he found it “exceedingly strange” to hear this argument from Giuliani, who had been a zealous prosecutor. “If Giuliani was still the U.S. Attorney in New York, my guess is that, by now, I would already have gotten ten phone calls from him telling me why these cases needed to be tried not only in civilian court but at Foley Square,” Holder said.

There is no evidence suggesting that military commissions would be tougher on suspected terrorists than criminal courts would. Of the three cases adjudicated at Guantánamo, one defendant received a life sentence after boycotting his own trial; another served only six months, in addition to the time he had already served at the detention camp; the third struck a plea bargain and received just nine months. The latter two defendants—Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as Osama bin Laden’s driver, and David Hicks, an Australian who attended an Al Qaeda training camp—are now at liberty in their home countries, having been released while Bush was still in office. It’s impossible to know how these same cases would have fared in the civilian system. But the case of John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, offers a comparison between the two systems, as it closely parallels the case of Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi-American who was captured in the same place (Afghanistan) and at the same time (2001). Lindh, who pleaded guilty in a criminal court, is now serving twenty years in prison. Hamdi, who was declared an enemy combatant, was held in military detention, without charge; in 2004, after a court challenge, he was freed, and is now in Saudi Arabia.

Michael Mukasey, who was Holder’s predecessor as Attorney General, has suggested that the military system is better at making terrorists talk. Last month, in the Wall Street Journal, he argued, “Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon.” But the conventional court system has proved surprisingly effective at extracting intelligence. Dozens of suspected terrorists in the criminal system have coöperated with the government, usually in exchange for leniency in sentencing. The government is currently receiving valuable information from David C. Headley, who was indicted last December, in Chicago, for his involvement in terrorism conspiracies in India and Denmark. And, last week, the Justice Department confirmed that Abdulmutallab was now coöperating with the F.B.I. A department official noted, “He has an incentive to talk in the criminal-justice system, which the other system doesn’t offer.” The key to gaining Abdulmutallab’s coöperation was the F.B.I.’s ability to enlist his family in getting him to talk. Holder asked me, “Would that father have gone to American authorities if he knew his son might be whisked away to a black site”—a secret prison set up in a foreign country—“and subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques? You are much more likely to get people coöperating with us if their belief is that we are acting in a way that is consistent with American values.”

On January 13th, Holder discussed the controversies surrounding him, in a conference room on the top floor of the Justice Department building. The walls were hung with portraits, which Holder had chosen, of his favorite Attorneys General. One was of Elliott Richardson, who resigned rather than follow President Richard Nixon’s demand that he halt the Watergate investigation.

Some of Holder’s friends, who call him Mr. Nice Guy, wonder if he is as tough as some of these predecessors. “Attorneys General should be feared,” one legal observer told me. “They have incredible power. Holder makes correct decisions on the law, but he’s not aggressive.” Holder bristles at such characterizations. His Secret Service code name is Fidelity, but he joked, “I’d like something like The Hammer.”

Though Holder has improved the morale at the Justice Department, he has had some management difficulties. He did not get along with David Ogden, his deputy. Ogden announced his decision to resign last December,** and has not been replaced. A lawyer who is close to the Administration said, “Eric’s weakness is his management skills, but his strength is his gut.”

Holder tried to address his critics with lawyerly detachment. Dick Cheney had equated Holder’s approach to handling terrorism with giving “aid and comfort to the enemy”—the legal definition of treason. Holder said of Cheney, “On some level, and I’m not sure why, he lacks confidence in the American system of justice.” He added that he had seen documents making clear that Cheney’s office was the driving force behind the Bush Administration’s most controversial counterterrorism policies, especially those sanctioning brutal interrogations. He said of Cheney, “I think he’s worried about what history’s judgment will be of the role that he played in making decisions about everything from black sites to enhanced interrogation techniques.” Holder said that he doesn’t know Elizabeth Cheney, but noted, with a laugh, “She’s clearly her father’s daughter.”

Holder shook his head at Scott Brown’s assertion that America’s “laws are meant to protect this nation, not our enemies.” Such rhetoric, he said, was “inconsistent with a little organization called the United States Supreme Court.” During the Bush years, U.S. courts consistently struck down claims that detainees at Guantánamo, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were beyond the reach of U.S. and international law. Moreover, Guantánamo detainees receive legal counsel that is paid for by the U.S. government. Holder said, “It’s distressing to me that on an issue that is truly a matter of life and death for this nation people will find a way to make that a partisan issue.”

Despite such comments, Holder is not naïve. He has spent almost his entire career in the public arena, most of it at the Justice Department. After graduating from Columbia Law School, in 1976, he became a prosecutor in the department’s public-integrity section, going after lawbreakers in both parties. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the Superior Court in Washington. Five years later, President Bill Clinton appointed him the District of Columbia’s U.S. Attorney; he was the first African-American to hold the post. In 1997, he became Deputy Attorney General, under Janet Reno. Holder was a lifeline at the Justice Department for Rahm Emanuel, then a senior White House adviser, because communications were so strained between Clinton and Reno, over such issues as her appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In 2001, Holder himself was embroiled in a scandal, for having supported Clinton’s last-minute pardon of the financier Marc Rich, who had fled the country rather than face criminal charges; his ex-wife, Denise, was a Presidential friend and fund-raiser. Holder never consulted with the prosecutors in the case, infuriating them. Afterward, many of Holder’s friends suspected that he had let his desire to ingratiate himself with Clinton override what one of them called “that gnawing uneasiness.” Holder’s actions have not been forgotten. Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor, said, “He had a background going into this that would have made him unconfirmable if he was a Republican.” Holder emerged from the scandal, a friend said, determined to appear that he was above politics. “After being accused of not standing up to that kind of pressure, he’s establishing his independence,” the friend said. “It all goes back to Marc Rich.”

As Attorney General, Holder has tried to depoliticize one of the most polarizing issues facing the Administration: how to protect the country from terrorism. David Vladeck, a former law-school classmate, who is now the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said, “His vision as Attorney General is to be seen as a lawyer, and to get away from what was a partisan-infected Justice Department. He doesn’t want to be Ed Meese or John Ashcroft. He doesn’t want the Justice Department to be seen as another political agency. He’s sent the unmistakable message to the people at D.O.J. that after years of politicization they are now going to do the right things, regardless of politics.”

Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the Center on Law and Security, said that a difficulty with recalibrating what was formerly called the “war on terror”—a term that Obama has shunned—is that any change is seen as “a slap in the face of all that Bush did.” She added, “The Justice Department was emasculated under Bush. Holder’s trying to reassert its lead role in handling the prosecution of terrorism, which Bush delegated to the Pentagon. It’s not minor. It’s about bringing the whole approach to handling terrorists back inside the rule of law. But it’s a public rebuke, suggesting that for eight years his predecessors betrayed American traditions.” This is especially true in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for Holder is explicitly overriding the Bush Administration’s judgment that the case belongs in a military commission at Guantánamo.

As a result, it is proving virtually impossible for Holder to make mid-course legal corrections without sparking political fights over the Bush legacy. Many of Obama’s political advisers see such battles as exactly the kind of “wedge” issues that alienate the independent voters they need. So far, polls show that the President has repaired the Democrats’ image problem on national-security issues; his approval rating on handling terrorism is about fifty per cent, and was unhurt by the Christmas Day fracas. The one national-security policy on which recent public-opinion polls register extreme disapproval is the decision to handle terror suspects as civilian criminals.

Holder’s unpopular positions on terrorism issues have frustrated Obama’s advisers. The lawyer close to the Administration said, “The White House doesn’t trust his judgment, and doesn’t think he’s mindful enough of all the things he should be,” such as protecting the President from political fallout. “They think he wants to protect his own image, and to make himself untouchable politically, the way Reno did, by doing the righteous thing.” On November 13th, when Holder announced his plan to try the 9/11 defendants in New York, Obama was travelling in Asia. He told reporters there, “We have to break . . . this fearful notion that somehow our justice system can’t handle these guys.” But as political tensions mount it’s unclear how far the White House will go to back Holder. Greg Craig, Obama’s first White House counsel, resigned under pressure in January, after clashing with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, over his attempts to reverse Bush Administration counterterrorism policies.

Holder told me that he has no doubt that Obama supports him. They have shared some private moments. Late last year, Holder accompanied Obama on a middle-of-the-night visit to Dover Air Force Base. An Air Force plane had just delivered eighteen bodies of soldiers and Drug Enforcement Administration officials who had been killed that week, in Afghanistan. Holder said that Obama, after seeing a hangar filled with caskets, sat alone in a nearby room. Holder added that he “was struck by the fact that this guy has the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders.”

On January 5th, Obama held a national-security meeting in the White House Situation Room to review how the Administration had failed to detect and prevent the Christmas Day plot. Afterward, Holder said, Obama asked him to walk back to the Oval Office with him. “We talk about these matters,” Holder said. “The decisions are, relatively, mine. I take responsibility for them. But these are things where he is kept in the loop, and the direction he gives obviously has to be factored into any decision I make.” Holder declined to reveal details of their recent discussion but said, “We are on the same page.” He added, “He recognizes that being Attorney General at this time is not the easiest job in the world.”

When Holder announced, last November, his decision to try Mohammed and his co-conspirators in a federal courthouse, he predicted that it would be “the trial of the century.” It had taken him months to arrive at the best way to bring Mohammed to justice. By the time he became Attorney General, the Bush Administration had moved Mohammed—whom the C.I.A. took into custody seven years ago, in Pakistan—from a black-site prison to Guantánamo. His prosecution was complicated by the fact that C.I.A. interrogators had subjected him to torture, including at least a hundred and eighty-three sessions of waterboarding.

Bush Administration officials, too, had recognized Mohammed’s abuse as an impediment to prosecution. After Mohammed arrived at Guantánamo, a team of F.B.I. and military interrogators tried to elicit from him and his co-defendants the same confessions that the C.I.A. had obtained about the 9/11 plot, but by using only legal means of interrogation. (According to the Washington Post, he was enticed with Starbucks coffee.) By 2008, the Bush Administration believed that this so-called Clean Team had compiled sufficient evidence to charge Mohammed and the others with capital murder. The cases were to be tried in military commissions, which have more lenient rules of evidence than civilian courts. But even in this forum, several outside experts warned, the Administration might have trouble using any evidence that had originally been obtained with methods that would “shock the conscience of the court.” John D. Hutson, a former judge advocate general, told the Washington Post that “there’s something in American jurisprudence called ‘fruit of the poisonous tree.’ You can clean up the tree a little, but it’s hard to do.”

In December, 2008, Mohammed and his co-defendants cast further legal uncertainty over the proceedings at Guantánamo by insisting that they preferred to plead guilty without a trial, and be put to death as “martyrs.” The defense counsel for two of the defendants protested that their clients were not competent to make such a decision. The cases stalled while psychological evaluations took place.

Amid this legal tumult, Obama assumed the Presidency. Days after taking office, he signed executive orders suspending the military commissions at Guantánamo, and calling for the closure of the detention facility within a year. He vowed to end legal abuses that had made Guantánamo infamous, such as indefinite detention without credible judicial review. He also banned torture and other cruel forms of interrogation, and foreclosed the option of detaining terror suspects in black sites. (Some of these practices had already been suspended by Bush, in the face of court orders and public disapproval.)

In January, 2009, there was bipartisan support for closing down Guantánamo, including from John McCain and from President Bush himself, who had said, “I’d like it to be over with.” General Colin Powell, Bush’s former Secretary of State, had declared, “If it was up to me, I would close Guantánamo not tomorrow but this afternoon.” Robert Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, whom Obama asked to stay on, had already considered a plan to transfer the remaining two hundred and sixty-five detainees—including Mohammed—to America. A former Pentagon official told me that the plan, which never surfaced publicly, called for the prisoners to be held in the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina. (Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The plan never left the building.”)

Holder had been an outspoken critic of Bush’s terrorism policies. In 2008, he gave a speech to the American Constitution Society, and described some of the steps Bush had taken as “excessive and unlawful.” He said, “We owe the American people a reckoning.”

Obama’s executive orders effectively put Holder in charge of the legal process of closing Guantánamo. Most of the President’s legal advisers believed that virtually all the Guantánamo detainees could be tried in criminal courts, or transferred to courts in other countries. Amy Jeffress, Holder’s national-security adviser, set up three interagency task forces to review the detainees’ cases. But the challenge proved far greater than expected. “There was no file for each detainee,” Jeffress told me. “The information was scattered all over the government. You’d look at what the Department of Defense had, and it was something, but, as a prosecutor, it wasn’t what you’d like to see as evidence. . . . It was pretty thin stuff.” The Bush Administration, she said, clearly “hadn’t planned on prosecuting anyone. Instead, it was ‘Let’s take a shortcut and put them in Guantánamo.’ ”

In a speech last May, Obama declared that the Bush Administration’s legal approach had created “a mess.” Among other problems, Obama’s Justice Department found itself under frequent attack in the courts for Bush-era policies. Detainees were winning habeas-corpus hearings, and public-interest groups were mounting challenges to the Bush Administration’s stances on state secrecy, surveillance, and torture. In addition, the Obama Administration faced litigation over access to Bush-era documents. An informed source said of the situation, “We were buried in an avalanche of shit.”

Holder set up an elaborate review process for detainees. On Wednesday afternoons, twenty senior government officials from the defense, intelligence, legal, and foreign-policy bureaucracies met for hours in a secure, undisclosed location, to weigh the case of each prisoner at Guantánamo. Sometimes they spent weeks on just one case. Ambassador Daniel Fried, who was appointed by Obama to manage the closure of Guantánamo, and who served in the Bush Administration, told me that the process was “remarkably effective,” but hovering in the background was the fear of making a lethal mistake. A member of the detainee task force said, “It’s like the parole board. Do this long enough, and you’ll have a Willie Horton.” But, Fried said, “the damage done by Guantánamo was greater than the damage done by some of the low-level people let out.” Also great, he believed, was the cost of trying suspects in military hearings that much of the world considered illegitimate. As the man in charge of persuading other countries to accept Guantánamo detainees, he noted that “Holder’s decision to try the 9/11 defendants in the courts has made my job a lot easier.”

Officials at the White House would not say the same. Last spring, a series of Justice Department moves prompted attacks from Republicans, causing concern in what’s known as the White House “front office,” where Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s top political adviser, work. Most notably, the detainee task force recommended the release of two Guantánamo detainees in America. The recommendation received unanimous support from the principals committee of the National Security Council. Among those who signed off were Holder and the Cabinet secretaries dealing with defense, intelligence, foreign affairs, and homeland security. The two detainees were Chinese Uighurs whom the courts had ordered to be set free, after the Bush Administration had conceded that they were not enemy combatants. But the government had been unable to find any country willing to take them except China, where, as dissidents, they would be jailed.

Lawyers in the Homeland Security and Justice Departments, along with the Uighurs’ attorneys, formed a plan to resettle the men in northern Virginia. But the White House front office saw the release as politically toxic, and stood in its way. In May, word of the secret plan leaked, causing Republicans in Congress to declare their opposition to bringing any detainees to the U.S. At a White House meeting, Obama suggested that he had been blindsided by the Uighur plan, and that he disapproved of it.

Within days, both the House and the Senate had voted to strip a spending bill of eighty million dollars that had been requested for the closing of Guantánamo. Last fall, Congress passed legislation barring the government from bringing any detainee from Guantánamo to America, except to stand trial. Elisa Massimino, the president of Human Rights First, told me, “Politically, these issues are poisonous. That’s what Rahm Emanuel is looking at.” But, she added, “You can’t finesse it, and you can’t spin it. The President just has to lead the American people away from fear.”

Emanuel viewed many of the legal problems that Craig and Holder were immersed in as distractions. “When Guantánamo walked in the door, Rahm walked out,” the informed source said. Holder and Emanuel had been collegial since their Clinton Administration days. Holder’s wife, Sharon Malone, an obstetrician, had delivered one of Emanuel’s children. But Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions. Holder authorized Durham to determine whether the agency’s abuse of detainees had itself violated laws. Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community. But Holder, who had studied law at Columbia with Telford Taylor, the chief American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, was profoundly upset after seeing classified documents explicitly describing C.I.A. prisoner abuse. The United Nations Convention Against Torture requires the U.S. to investigate credible torture allegations. Holder felt that, as the top law-enforcement officer in the U.S., he had to do something.

Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, “Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?”

Last spring, under pressure from the defense establishment, Obama decided to reform the military commissions rather than terminate them, to the disappointment of his liberal base. A protocol was drafted, directing the Pentagon and the Justice Department to work together in settling turf battles. The presumption, the draft said, was that detainees should be tried in civilian courts unless there were compelling reasons not to do so. Holder was put in charge of deciding which legal system was appropriate for each Guantánamo detainee.

Some legal experts regarded the process as odd, since it removed the President from taking the lead role. Philip Bobbitt, a law professor who served in the National Security Council under Clinton, said the protocol made Obama “look as if he’s not in charge.” A government official involved in the process told me, “My sense is that Obama wanted the Attorney General to make the call.”

Last July, Holder assigned eight experienced criminal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia to build the best criminal case they could against Mohammed and his co-conspirators. They had until October 1st to investigate. The prosecutors gathered fresh evidence from around the globe, rendering the military’s case comparatively weak. Neil MacBride, the U.S. Attorney who represents Virginia’s Eastern District, participated in the process, and said, “The prosecutors came together, and produced hundreds of pages of analysis that was granular, and evidence-specific.” Many countries that had refused to coöperate with military commissions at Guantánamo were much more favorably disposed to criminal trials. Among the countries that stood willing to provide evidence and witnesses for court prosecutions were Germany, France, and Great Britain.

In weighing the cases of Mohammed and his co-conspirators, Holder conferred with top Pentagon lawyers, including Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, and William Lynn, the Pentagon’s head of detainee affairs. The Pentagon’s prosecutors were initially reluctant to relinquish the cases, but in the end supported the decision. Holder then picked the Pentagon to prosecute five key suspects in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, a Navy ship attacked in Yemen by Al Qaeda in 2000. Sarah Mendelson, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, followed the deliberations closely, and told me, “You could see Holder negotiating.”

Holder, MacBride said, also conferred with his counterparts in the intelligence community about any possible jeopardy to national-security secrets “if we went forward with a full-throated prosecution of K.S.M.” Critics have raised worries that an open trial, which would require the government to reveal the names of witnesses and sources of evidence, could tip off enemies of the U.S. about sensitive security matters. A lawyer familiar with the discussion told me, “Suffice it to say, if there was serious concern about revelation of sources and methods by the intelligence community you would have heard a lot of howling.”

Last fall, Holder selected the offices led by MacBride and Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to prosecute the criminal case. Bharara, addressing the national-security concerns, said of Holder, “This is not a rogue Attorney General. These are reasoned, considered decisions made by people in America who have the greatest knowledge and concern about the revelation of these materials. And, with all due respect, they have greater knowledge than the critics.”

Holder told me that the “critical factor” in his choice of civilian prosecutors was that they could build a case independent of the Clean Team, and of the C.I.A.’s tainted confessions. His prosecutors, Holder said, had “constructed a case that uses materials and evidence that does not derive from the techniques that were controversial,” which would “maximize our chances for success.” It was a driving concern to Holder that the case not rest on torture. “It’s a statement about what this Administration is about,” he said. “It’s a statement about this Attorney General. We are not going to use the products of interrogation techniques that this President has banned.”

MacBride, like Holder, emphasizes the tactical advantages of the Administration’s approach. “There are gigantic challenges to attempting to cleanse concededly coerced statements,” he said. In fact, as Holder was making his decision the federal court in Washington was weighing another case involving the admissibility of statements made freely, after a prisoner had been tortured. prosecutions, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that the government must release another Guantánamo prisoner, Farhi Bin Mohammed, even though F.B.I. agents had elicited incriminating evidence against him from a fellow-detainee, Binyam Mohamed, without coercion. Her reason was that interrogators in Morocco had, among other abuses, cut Binyam Mohamed’s penis with a scalpel. After such mistreatment, Kessler found, it was impossible to regard later statements as free of taint.*

In Holder’s view, avoiding the Clean Team’s work was also smart in terms of winning the “hearts and minds” of the Islamic world. “Values matter in this fight,” he said. “We need to give those who might follow these mad men a good sense of what America is, and what America can be. We are militarily strong, but we are morally stronger.”

At the White House, Emanuel, who is not a lawyer, opposed Holder’s position on the 9/11 cases. He argued that the Administration needed the support of key Republicans to help close Guantánamo, and that a fight over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could alienate them. “There was a lot of drama,” the informed source said. Emanuel was particularly concerned with placating Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who was a leading proponent of military commissions, and who had helped Obama on other issues, such as the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Rahm felt very, very strongly that it was a mistake to prosecute the 9/11 people in the federal courts, and that it was picking an unnecessary fight with the military-commission people,” the informed source said. “Rahm had a good relationship with Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don’t prosecute these people in military commissions I won’t support the closing of Guantánamo. . . . Rahm said, ‘If we don’t have Graham, we can’t close Guantánamo, and it’s on Eric!’ ”

At Emanuel’s urging, Holder spoke with Graham several times. But they could not reach an agreement. Graham told me, “It was a nonstarter for me. There’s a place for the courts, but not for the mastermind of 9/11.” He said, “On balance, I think it would be better to close Guantánamo, but it would be better to keep it open than to give these guys civilian trials.” Graham, who served as a judge advocate general in the military reserves, vowed that he would do all he could as a legislator to stop the trials. “The President’s advisers have served him poorly here,” he said. “I like Eric, but at the end of the day Eric made the decision.” Last week, Graham introduced a bill in the Senate to cut off funding for criminal trials related to 9/11.

Behind Graham’s opposition was an insistence that Obama not treat military commissions as second-class justice. Given the commissions’ erratic track record, the argument strikes many legal observers as dubious. But once Obama had agreed to keep the commissions going he forfeited the option of openly criticizing them. David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, said, “They can’t say military commissions are less legitimate, because they’re still using them. But if they tried K.S.M. in a military commission they’d lose any chance of having a conviction seen as legitimate by the rest of the world.”

Once Holder had settled on taking the 9/11 cases to court, the remaining question was where. A confidential security study by the U.S. Marshals Service tipped the decision toward Manhattan. The marshals concluded that the courthouse on Foley Square was by far the safest option; it has underground tunnels through which defendants can be transported from the adjacent Metropolitan Correctional Center. In addition, Holder was mindful of a federal death-penalty statute that calls for capital-murder trials to be held in a state that is connected to the crime. The choice also may have had special significance for Holder because he was born and raised in New York City—in Queens, near LaGuardia Airport. His mother still lives in the city, and his brother William, a retired Port Authority police officer, lost several friends and colleagues on 9/11. In announcing his decision, Holder stressed that, “after eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York—to New York—to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.”

Hours before he went public, Holder spoke with several New York officials, including Bloomberg, Schumer, and Governor David Paterson, all of whom pledged their support. Bharara, the U.S. Attorney, informed Commissioner Kelly. Holder then called Obama to relay his decision. Everything seemed in place. After Holder announced the plan, Bloomberg said, “It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site, where so many New Yorkers were murdered.”

But the Obama Administration’s political preparations for a controversial trial were less thorough than those made by previous Administrations. In 1995, Justice Department officials spent months laying the groundwork for trying the bomber Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City. Detailed cost estimates were made, and there was extensive outreach to local officials, victims’ families, and security personnel. (Ultimately, a judge ordered the trial moved to Colorado.) By comparison, local officials in New York have said that they were only glancingly consulted. And, when the Foley Square protest made clear that some families of 9/11 victims were upset by the idea of a civilian trial, the White House barely reacted, and did not rally 9/11 families who favor a trial.

Now that Bloomberg, Kelly, and Schumer have withdrawn their support, the Justice Department is in retreat, and Holder is scrambling to find a venue for “the trial of the century.” Kate Martin, the Center for National Security Studies director, warns, “We can’t have a situation where political pressure forces the federal government to forgo criminal prosecution. That would mean the system is fundamentally broken.” Bill Martel, of Tufts, said, “When public fear coalesces, it generates forces that are almost uncontrollable by the political leadership.”

Late last month, at home, in Northwest Washington, Holder addressed those who have suggested that he and Obama are too weak to take on terrorism. “This macho bravado—that’s the kind of thing that leads you into wars that should not be fought, that history is not kind to,” he said. “The quest for justice, despite what your contemporaries might think, that’s toughness. The ability to subject yourself to the kind of criticism I’m getting now, for something I think is right? That’s tough.” He paused, and added, “This is something that can get a rise out of me, the notion that somehow Eric Holder and Barack Obama, this Administration, is not tough. We have the welfare of the American people in our minds all the time. We’ll fight our enemies, and we’ll do that which is necessary, and we won’t turn our backs on the values and traditions that have made this country great. That is what is tough.” ♦

*Corrections, February 5, 2010: The original text stated that Binyam Mohamed had been tortured during an interrogation related to his own case, and that he, not Farhi Bin Mohammed, was released by Judge Kessler.

**Ogden announced his decision to resign last December; he did not resign last December, as originally stated.

Kelley: Tell me what you think of Black History Month.
Gates: I love Black History Month. But for me, every day is Black History Month, and I would like one day to see the need for Black History Month disappear because the contributions of our ancestors have become a fundamental part of the American-history curriculum.

What do you think of people who call for an end to Black History Month?

It depends on who is doing the asking. Their concerns are understandable if they feel Black History Month  is ghettoizing. But these sorts of gestures are necessary to reclaim the past. Black History Month has been very effective in resurrecting the stories of our ancestors and in integrating those stories into our history. But we’re not even on the horizon of the time to end Black History Month. When as many Americans are as familiar with Harriet Tubman as they are with Paul Revere, then we can talk about ending Black History Month.

You entered Yale in 1969; those were heady times to be a black man at what was considered a white man’s school. Did you like it?
I loved Yale. We were on the great adventure of black discovery. We were discovering ourselves as future leaders in the largest numbers up to that time at a university of that caliber. Sheila Jackson Lee was there with me—so was Ben Carson, Anthony Davis, and dozens of others who became investment bankers, lawyers, and other kinds of leaders. We were in a position of privilege, and we recognized our historical responsibility. We knew how lucky we were. Yale’s class of ‘66 had six African-Americans in it. The class of ‘70 had 96. Yale’s affirmative action was about the dismantling of racist historical quotas. Yale was very explicit about the fact that we were part of the 1,000 male leaders they produced (and 250 female leaders). We had such a sense of being the talented tenth. We were going to spread the wealth to other members of our community.

But now it seems as though many African-Americans feel burdened by the obligation to spread the wealth. They want the world to forget about color and judge them as individuals. Does that distress you?

We all want to be judged as individuals, but it doesn’t really matter what you want. It comes down to how society constructs race, and that’s out of our hands. Noticing one’s color or one’s race should be a neutral act. It’s just a descriptor, but right now that’s not the case.

In your PBS specials African American Lives, African American Lives 2, and the most recent Faces of America, what were you trying to say about America and its history?
Those are my attempts to celebrate the true triumph of American democracy, which is its diversity.

Maxo was born on November 4, 1948, after three days of agonizing labor. “I felt,” my Aunt Denise used to say, “as though I spent all three days pushing him out of my eyes.” She had a long scar above her right eyebrow, where she had jabbed her nails through her skin during the most painful moments. She never gave birth again.

Maxo often complained about his parents not celebrating his birthday. “Are you kidding me?” I’d say, taking his mother’s side. “Who would want to remember such an ordeal?” All jokes aside, it pained him more than it should have, even though few children in Bel Air, the impoverished and now shattered neighborhood where we grew up, ever had a birthday with balloons and cake.

When Maxo was a teen-ager, his favorite author was Jean Genet. He read and reread “Les Nègres.” These lines from the play now haunt me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If I ever return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”

Two days after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, on January 12, 2010, I was still telling my brothers that one night, as we were watching CNN, Maxo would pop up behind Anderson Cooper and take over his job.

Maxo was a hustler. He could get whatever he wanted, whether money or kind words, simply by saying, “You know I love you. I love you. I love you.” It always worked with our family members in New York, both when he occasionally showed up to visit and when he called from Haiti to ask them to fund his various projects.

The last time I heard from him was three days before the earthquake. He left a message on my voice mail. He was trying to raise money to rebuild a small school in the mountains of Léogâne, where our family originated. The time before that, someone in the neighborhood had died and money was needed for a coffin. With a voice that blended shouting and laughter, Maxo made each request sound as though it were an investment that the giver would be making in him or herself.

When my eighty-one-year-old Uncle Joseph, a minister, left Haiti, in 2004, after a gang threatened his life, Maxo, his son, was with him. They travelled together to Miami, hoping to be granted political asylum. Instead, they were detained by the Department of Homeland Security and separated while in custody. When Maxo was finally able to see his father, it was to translate for the medical staff, who accused my uncle, as he vomited both from his mouth and from a tracheotomy hole in his neck, of faking his illness. The next day, my uncle was dead and Maxo was released from detention. It was his fifty-sixth birthday. Once the pain of his father’s death had eased, he joked, “My parents never wanted me to have a happy birthday.”

After unsuccessfully pursuing asylum, Maxo returned to Haiti. He missed his five young children, who were constantly calling to ask when he was coming home. There was also his father’s work to continue—small schools and churches to oversee all over Haiti. The return, though, was brutal. During our telephone calls, he talked about the high price of food in Port-au-Prince. “If it’s hard for me, imagine for the others,” he’d say.

His time in detention in the United States had sensitized him to prison conditions and to the lack of prisoners’ rights in Haiti. He often called asking for money to buy food, which he then took to the national penitentiary.

This generosity, along with the Haitian sense of kindness and community, is perhaps why, immediately after four stories collapsed on Maxo on January 12th, family, friends, and even strangers began to dig for him and his wife and their children. They managed to free his wife and all but one of his children, ten-year-old Nozial, from the rubble two days later. Even when there was little hope, they continued to dig for him and for those who had died along with him: some children who were being tutored after school, the tutors, a few parents who had stopped by to discuss their children’s schoolwork. We will never know for sure how many.

The day that Maxo’s remains were found, the call came with some degree of excitement. At least he would not rest permanently in the rubble. At least he would not go into a mass grave. Somehow, though, I sense that he would not have minded. Everyone is being robbed of rituals, he might have said, why not me?

By the time Maxo’s body was uncovered, cell phones were finally working again, bringing a flurry of desperate voices. One cousin had an open gash in her head that was still bleeding. Another had a broken back and had gone to three field hospitals trying to get it X-rayed. Another was sleeping outside her house and was terribly thirsty. One child had been so traumatized that she lost her voice. An in-law had no blood-pressure medicine. Most had not eaten for days. There were friends and family members whose entire towns had been destroyed, and dozens from whom we have had no word at all.

Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.

I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you,” I said. “If not for the baby—”

My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.

“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”

“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it should not be.”

“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while. ♦