The Boston Globe

September 14, 2005, Wednesday THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 623 words

HEADLINE: A LOVE STORY

BYLINE: BY STEVE BAILEY

BODY:
BEVERLY Past the imposing though securely locked front gates of state Republican Party headquarters otherwise known as Affiliated Managers Group Sean Healey has made a fortune buying small- and medium-size money-management firms. Now Healey wants to buy an election for his wife.

I think it is sweet. Most of us believe we are doing OK if we manage to buy some jewelry for our wife's birthday or get a reservation at a pretty good restaurant for the anniversary. But Healey wants to buy his wife, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, the governorship. What's money for if the family can't enjoy it?

Being a Republican candidate in Massachusetts is more like belonging to a private club than a political party. It is a small, small world, and the gracious mansion on Beverly's "Gold Coast" that AMG built with the help of a state tax break is an appropriate symbol of just how small read: wired this exclusive club is.

Consider: While Sean Healey, AMG's chief executive, tries to remain carefully out of sight, he is preparing to once again spend whatever it takes on his wife's political campaign. He has the state Republican chairman, Darrell Crate, on his payroll as AMG's chief financial officer. And until last year former Massachusetts governor William Weld was on the AMG board; now he's running for the Republican nomination for governor in New York.

Healey, though a spokesman, declined to talk about politics, but his money will talk loudly on his wife's behalf. It already has. Four years ago the Healeys spent $1.8 million on her campaign. Last month as Harvard Pilgrim chief executive Charlie Baker was considering the race, Sean Healey sent a not-so-subtle message by cashing in $13 million in AMG options. Baker promptly dropped out.

AMG prospered by building a better mouse trap. In 1995, William Nutt, former president of the investment firm Boston Co., recruited Healey from Goldman, Sachs & Co. to join AMG, then a year-old start-up designed to buy investment firms. Another Boston company, United Asset Management, was then the king of the hill, but it had a fatal flaw: It bought total control of the firms, leaving the money managers it acquired with little incentive to continue growing. Nutt's model, however, left the managers he acquired with enough equity to keep them engaged. The result: UAM faltered, while AMG grew. Today AMG owns stakes in about two dozen investment companies with about $163 billion under management. It has a market value of $2.5 billion. Forbes last year valued Healey's stake at $45 million.

Sean Healey doesn't have a state trooper to drive him to work, but he doesn't need it: A few years ago AMG built its headquarters in Prides Crossing, an elite section of Beverly, just 1 1/2 miles from the Healeys' oceanfront home. The headquarters mansion sits on an 89-acre estate once owned fittingly enough by conservative New Hampshire publisher William Loeb, whose Manchester Union-Leader used to take pride in making Democrats weep. And AMG rebuilt the estate with the use of a $1 million tax credit intended for blighted areas or projects considered too costly to develop. Just wondering: Did that tax break go for the locked gates out front or the tennis court out back?

Under campaign finance rules, Sean Healey can only give $500 a year to his wife's campaign. But under those same rules, Sean's income and Kerry's income she doesn't take a salary as lieutenant governor are considered one, allowing them to spend whatever they want on the campaign. In matters like these, nothing says "I love you" like cash.  ¶ Tuesday, November 07, 2006

  Paper: Boston Globe
Title: MASSACHUSETTS\ YANKEE REPUBLICANS - R.I.P.?\ ONCE SALTONSTALLS AND LODGES SET THE GOP'S TONE; NOW LINES ARE RUNNING\ THIN'
Date: April 4, 1982

Perhaps this study should be filed under political anthropology, since it involves a genus. A genus which, as former House Speaker David Bartley quips, "should apply for protection under the endangered species act."

The Massachusetts Yankee politician was an institution when one's grandparents arrived and he's since passed from there through stereotype to caricature.
As in lanky build, angular face. The letter s' whistling through his teeth. Lives on Beacon Hill or the North Shore. Went to Harvard, more likely than not. Wasn't concerned with the money. Ran for office because he felt he should.

"The people you meet, the problems you confront, the absence of routine," says former US senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. "Those were natural baits for a person like me."

For two centuries they've lured dozens of Lodges, Saltonstalls, Herters, Coolidges and Bradfords to Congress, the governor's chair, the Legislature.

And now John Winthrop Sears, whose grandfather-to-the-nth-power was Massachusetts' first governor, has invoked that ethos in his Republican gubernatorial campaign this year.

He recalls the "clean, decent Massachusetts" of former governors Leverett Saltonstall and Christian Herter, when the streets were safe and clean, the parks lush and trim and industry prospering.

"Those were the glory days of the Republican Party in this state," agrees state Rep. Howard Cahoon Jr. (R-Chatham). "You don't hear anyone tearing them down."

The lines are running thin'

But Herter and Saltonstall have passed on. Saltonstall's son William left the state Senate four years ago and now runs the New England Medical Center and works in the investment business. Francis Sargent, the last Republican governor, is heading the Coalition for Safe Hazardous Waste Management. Frank Hatch Jr., the party's 1978 nominee, is out of politics.

Former state and US attorney general Elliot Richardson is working for a Washington law firm; friends tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to run for statewide office this fall. Lodge is out of public life and his son George, who ran against US Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1962, is on the faculty at Harvard Business School.

Fewer than 20 persons of Yankee background now hold seats in the Legislature. "The lines are running thin," Sears will concede. So what has happened to the Yankee politician and the ethos he represented?

"We're still breeding like we used to," reports Rep. Forrester (Tim) Clark Jr. (R-Hamilton). "And probably enjoying it more."

Yet most of them seem to be satisfying their urge for public service ("a genetic, Pavlovian thing," as former US senatorial candidate Josiah Spaulding calls it) elsewhere.

"Where have they gone?" muses Sears, now the breed's most prominent statewide symbol. "They're on library and hospital boards. And there's a ring of people in town government that could make this place hum. But they wouldn't

dream of running for any office that would bring them to Beacon Hill."

Why? The demands of financial disclosure laws, says Sears. The vilification attached to political life, says Hatch. The devaluation of the legislator's role, says assistant Senate minority leader David Locke (R- Wellesley). The dwindling relevance of political parties, says Spaulding. The diminished opportunity for creativity, says Sargent. And the decline of the Yankee's traditional haven, the Republican Party.

"When you put together all the considerations," muses Richardson, "if someone is wavering about whether to do it or not, it doesn't take a whole lot to tip him against it."

The GOP doesn't hold a single statewide office and hasn't had one of its own as treasurer or secretary of state since 1949 or as auditor since 1941. Only two of the state's 12-member congressional delegation - Margaret Heckler and Silvio Conte - are Republicans.

"It's a very frustrating thing," says Clark. "If you're somebody who wants to achieve and have your influence felt and have a limited time to be in public office, the Republican Party in Massachusetts right now isn't one of the places to be."

Not numerically, anyway. Where the party held 102 of 240 House seats in 1963, they now control 31 of 160. In the Senate, where they matched the Democrats roughly head for head in the Fifties, Republicans now occupy only eight seats of 40, barely enough to force a rollcall.

" God forbid we ever lose (Senate minority leader) John Parker (R- Taunton)," says Sen. Robert Hall (R-Fitchburg). "He goes in there day after day and gets his head knocked in, losing all those votes. The public doesn't realize what a public servant he is."

In the last statewide election, Republicans contested only 91 of 200 legislative seats. Though state committee chairman Andrew Natsios is recruiting candidates actively for the fall, the party had to scramble to find convention endorsees for the lower statewide offices last month and still does not have a challenger for incumbent Atty. Gen. Francis Bellotti.

"There is no Yankee wing of the Republican Party because there is no party," says Spaulding, who came within 18,000 votes (of nearly 2 million cast) of beating Bellotti in 1974, but chose not to run for any office this time.

"There's the Reagan-Bush organization and that's it. The political process has been going through a difficult period. It's not where the real world has been. The parties are doing nothing about the issues, and the Yankee is attracted by issues. He wants to make a point."

The harassment in public life

More and more, the Yankee sees that possibility dwindling around the State House. "The creativity seems to have been squelched," muses Sargent. "I guess a lot of people just don't want to stick their necks out any more."

Not only the process, but the job has been devalued, says Locke. "We've permitted the role of legislator to become nothing but that of a glorified errand boy," he feels.

Given the low level of public esteem for the Legislature as a whole and tough disclosure laws ("It's not the reason I left, but it's an inhibiting factor about going back" says Saltonstall), a number of Yankees have decided it simply isn't worth the trouble.

"Public life is a harassment," says Clark. "Once you throw your hat in the ring, you're a free target. The Yankee has to open up more of his private life than is attractive to him. He can develop a lot of satisfaction working on volunteer organizations."

So where a public-spirited Yankee might once have begun as a town meeting moderator and progressed to state representative, House Speaker and either Congress or the governor's chair, he's more likely to be drawn now to the board of a symphony, of his university or a local hospital.

"They're still willing to give their time," says Sears. "As long as there is some result, the process is reasonable and they can see something happening."

The public-service ethic dies hard. Yet the Yankee is quick to say that he's never had a hammerlock on either the ethic ("It's a wonderful feeling," says Hatch, "but you don't have to be a Sears to get the same feeling.") or the party.

"The perception that the Republican Party consists of bluebloods and Brahmins is misleading," insists Locke, "and has been for a long time."

The Republicans remind you that they ran a Jewish candidate statewide in the Twenties and got one elected (attorney general George Fingold) in the Fifties. They elected an Italian governor in 1960, a black US senator in 1966.

"If you look back to the Fifties," says Natsios, "you'll see that the party ticket was carefully balanced ethnically. The Brahmin leadership wanted to make sure that people knew the party was open."

Indeed. Even now, the remaining Yankee politicians prefer to downplay their background as irrelevant. "We happen to live in an area where ethnicity is perceived as important," says Rep. John Loring (R-Acton). "And I don't know how important it is."

Loring is half-Irish. Sargent will tell you about his Italian grandmother. Sears says that state Rep. Andrew Card (R-Holbrook), a gubernatorial rival, has more Mayflower in him than Sears does. "Alden on my father's side, Bradford on my mother's," Card admits. "But somehow we fell into the swamp along the way."

Anyway, they say, the Yankee stereotype hasn't been the real problem. It's the lingering image of the Republican Party as the exclusive preserve of the rich. Which is why some party insiders see a Sears candidacy as symbolically regressive.

"John Sears represents the past," says former state committee chairman Gordon Nelson, who's supporting John Lakian for governor. "The old guard. The Republican Party has changed tremendously. We don't want to get rid of the Yankees, but we have to get new people into the party. We are 14 percent of the electorate. Anybody who doesn't want new people is cuckoo."

The broadening is a natural one. Even the Yankees admit that. They never intended, they say, to pass the party on into a family trust. Last month the Republicans endorsed a Syrian/French-American for US senator, an Armenian- American for governor and an Italian-American for lieutenant governor.

Plenty of room for "newer stock," as they say. Don't have to be a Yankee to be a Saltonstall. "There are Irish Yankees, Jewish Yankees, black Yankees," Sears believes.

And Bartley says he has a way to lure more Yankee Yankees back into the Legislature. "Either double the salary," he's told Sears. "Or cut it to zero.

Author: John Powers Globe Staff  ¶ Tuesday, November 07, 2006

  Paper: Boston Globe
Title: THE REPUBLICANS\ SEARS - A YANKEE AND POLITICAL SCRAPPER
Date: September 16, 1982

The young volunteer, nibbling crackers at a reception for John W. Sears Tuesday night, looked startled when asked if she thought he would clinch the Republican nomination for governor.

"Win? Of course he'll win," she shrugged matter-of-factly. "He's had most of the good jobs in the state, and his family has had most of the rest. It's in his blood.
Exaggeration aside, Sears possesses ample political credentials, from both his own career and his family history of patrician Republican leadership. Those qualifications, he believes, appealed to Republican voters who gave him a nearly 2-1 margin over his primary rivals.

Directly descended from John Winthrop, the first Colonial governor of Massachusetts, Sears, who lives on Beacon Hill, has long hobnobbed with Lodges, Sargents and other heirs to Boston Brahmin political family fortunes.

During his own 18-year political career, Sears has served as a state legislator, been the first Republican elected to the Boston City Council in 30 years, headed the Metropolitan District and Boston Finance commissions under Republican Gov. Francis Sargent and run the state Republican party.

"To use a baseball analogy, you might call John a utility infielder for the Yankees - with a capital Y," observed one longtime State House aide who asked not to be named. "He's been able to step into any job the Republican leadership asked him to."

In interviews during his career, Sears - a 51-year-old Rhodes Scholar, holder of two Harvard degrees, and former investment banker - has often described himself as a "17th century man" who idealizes the strong "work ethic" and "sense of social order" that dominated that era.

And on Tuesday night, flushed with his overwhelming defeat of two primary contenders, Sears supporters were quick to applaud his promise of a "bright new day" in fiscally conservative, squeaky-clean state leadership and a rejuvenation of long-dormant Boston Republicanism.

But while Sears presents himself as a dignified public servant, above the "vicious" bloodletting and "arrogant" style of state Democratic leaders, he is no shrinking violet when it comes to speaking his mind.

As head of the Boston Finance Committee in the early 70s, he railed against Mayor Kevin H. White's "spendthrift" administration. While on the City Council from 1979 to 1981, he criticized his peers as trivia-obsessed "tagalongs" to White.

As leader of the state GOP in 1975, he accused his own party organization of being a "sophomoric, title-happy" bunch. And during the gubernatorial campaign this summer, he raised eyebrows with his flailing accusations that Gov. Edward J. King had "mob connections" and ran a corrupt administration.

(Later, he insisted his assertions were correct, but refused to provide specific allegations).

Sears' political fortunes began to rise quickly after 1967, when his neighborhood-pounding mayoral campaign brought him within 6800 primary votes of White. Today, he often points to that fight as proof of his mettle on the grittier battlefield of city politics.

"People might think someone like Sears enters office from a sense of

noblesse oblige, but the truth is, he enjoys the politicking," notes a legislative aide who observed Sears during his term in the State House.

Adds Josiah Spaulding, who preceded Sears as state GOP chairman and strongly endorsed him for governor: "He's a scholar and a Yankee, but he's a lot tougher than I am."

Others, though, have criticized Sears for displaying a lofty, impractical approach to issues, a brusque impatience with less intellectual colleagues, and a barely masked presumption that he is the naturally superior candidate for whatever office he has sought.

Robert Kavin, an aide to Democratic City Council member Christopher Iannella, says Sears sometimes "can't see the trees for the forest. In City Council debates about a police officer's disability pension, he'd go off on a whole tangent about the pension issue and ignore the immediate one."

He also criticized a "certain righteousness" in Sears' attitudes toward the political system. For instance, Sears has long lambasted the "public cancer" of patronage. But, Kavin remarks waggishly, "no cousin of his would accept a job on the public payroll anyway."

Sears' supporters, on the other hand, applaud his conceptual approach to such issues as inadequate public education, environmental hazards and fiscal waste. And they insist that, despite his patrician roots, Sears has the common touch.

"It's a shame he's been tagged with this Brahmin thing, because I've never met a more democratic man in my life," asserts Julie Schniewind, a Chestnut Hill consultant who has worked for numerous Sears campaigns.

Sears himself seems well aware of the paradoxes in his political personality, and he is known for smoothing them over with disarming humor. Once, he referred to his 6-foot-4 frame as a "stately carcass."

And recently, when asked by a reporter on the campaign trail to name his favorite poet, he quickly replied: "Homer. But please don't say that. It simply wouldn't do to let the voters know I read someone who wrote in Attic Greek."

Author: Pamela Constable Globe Staff  ¶ Tuesday, November 07, 2006

  The Boston Globe

December 11, 1996, Wednesday, City Edition

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. C1

LENGTH: 3804 words

HEADLINE: MARY ANN GLENDON;
Writing her own party line;
Recruited by the Vatican, rebuffed by Bush, the Harvard Law prof defies definition

BYLINE: By Dick Lehr, Globe Staff

BODY:
In June of last year, the Vatican turned to Harvard - an odd (and unholy) alliance if ever there was one. The telephone rang in the office of law professor Mary Ann Glendon, and it was the Vatican, asking: Would Glendon lead the Holy See's delegation to the international women's conference in Beijing?

"I'll have to ask my dean," Glendon recalls replying, smiling now at the token nod to protocol, for Harvard officials quickly granted her the chance to become the first woman to head a papal delegation. Indeed, such a calling might seem the culmination of any conservative Catholic's life, and Glendon's scholarly work surely satisfied the Church.

But things are more complicated than they seem.

Glendon, 58, may be a devout Roman Catholic, but she defies other labeling. She admires both Robert H. Bork and Thurgood Marshall. She opposes abortion, supports welfare and is an advocate of civil rights and public school desegregation. Formerly a registered Democrat, she is now an independent who believes both parties have sold out to big business. In her six books and countless articles, she's agitated all sides, drawing the ire of feminists and the complaint from conservatives that she's "mushy."

Strikingly blond and unfailingly gracious, dressed in a dark-blue suit highlighted by a silk scarf, Glendon is now welcoming a visitor into the heady halls of Harvard. In the hours of interviews that follow, and in her writings and through interviews with others, her rich life begins to unfold, revealing what can only be taken as surprises if your starting point is a line drawing of a capital-C conservative, based on her work for the Vatican, the assignment that placed her for the first time before a wider audience.

It's a string of surprises that begins as Glendon strides into an office filled with books and explains she has morning treats to go with coffee. "Would you like one of Alan Dershowitz's bagels?" she offers, and her words hang in the air. Later she even jokes about how she and her liberal colleague across the hall used to share a fax machine - until she began receiving reams of confidential material from the Vatican while he was getting a stream of confidential memos from O. J. Simpson's defense team. But no matter how ordinary she makes it, the bagel moment, involving two unlikely floor-mates, does indeed capture this oft-repeated truth: Mary Ann Glendon cannot be pigeonholed.

During the 1960 presidential election, the first in which Glendon, then 22, could vote, she eagerly cast her ballot for John F. Kennedy. For most of her life, she's been a Democrat - all of which seems incongruous for someone now tagged such a conservative.

But then a certain duality runs through this scholar's life.

Glendon was raised in the small town of Dalton in western Massachusetts. Her mother's family, the Pomeroys, fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and her grandfather Theodore Pomeroy was chairman of the town's Republican committee. Her father, Martin Glendon, was a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle and later chaired the local board of selectmen, the first Irish-Catholic Democrat to win that job.

"A big part of who I am is I'm half Irish and half Yankee," Glendon says. She considers herself a "true hybrid" who relishes both traditions. That said, she adds, "It never occurred to me to be anything but a Democrat, which meant to me the party of work, family, church and community." And her early years are marked by a deep commitment to civil rights - a backdrop that makes less surprising a portion of her scholarly writings. Glendon has always had high praise for a US Supreme Court ruling many conservatives consider a rogue act, the unanimous 1954 landmark case, Brown vs. Board of Education, mandating an end to segregated public schools.

Back when Glendon was 9 years old, her parents took her and two siblings to North Carolina, her first trip to the South. They saw firsthand the segregation of everyday life. "I didn't forget it, because both of my parents underlined the lesson. I mean, this was deeply shocking."

Later, in the summer of 1963, having finished law school and studying for a master's degree in comparative law, Glendon and her younger sister accompanied a church group to Washington, D.C. They were part of the March on Washington and listened to Martin Luther King stir the nation with his speech about his dream. The next year, Glendon used her vacation time plus a few extra weeks to leave her job as an associate in one of Chicago's high-tone law firms to travel to Jackson, Miss. It was the summer that Mississippi was burning, the summer that three civil rights workers disappeared and were later found, dead, in a swamp; Glendon joined lawyers from around the country to help local blacks assert their voting rights and defend jailed civil rights workers.

"I felt frightened many times," recalls Glendon. "There was just the fear of driving along those roads when you knew that some of the people driving those same roads had been intercepted and, as we knew then, killed."

For the young attorney, Jackson was a long way from the Berkshires, and within a couple of years she was crossing racial lines not only in her work but in her personal life. While in Mississippi, she met another young attorney, a black man, and the next year, after Glendon returned to Chicago, they were married in a civil ceremony. She resumed her work at Mayer, Brown and Platt, one of the city's oldest and largest firms, where she was only the second woman ever hired. Even though her early years might suggest a liberal activist in the making, Glendon sees these years as grounded in Catholicism and a small-town populism, the river running deeply through her life.

It's as if times changed, and Glendon didn't.

To her, the Democratic Party gradually "stopped being the party of working men and women" and, anathema to her Catholicism, "became insistent on an extreme version of the separation of church and state." Never comfortable with Republican ties to big business, she was cut loose.

But the life of the mind evolved gradually, a sharp contrast to the unexpected tumult in her personal life. In 1966, two years after Glendon's work in Mississippi and one year after marrying, much of what she was counting on collapsed around her. That May 22, her father, Martin Glendon, with whom she'd always been close, tagging along by his side during his newspaper assignments, died of cancer. He was 56 years old and had always been healthy and hardy, until his terminal condition was diagnosed that winter. Two weeks after his death, Glendon gave birth to her first daughter, Elizabeth - just as her husband decided to leave her.

"I was cleaned out, you might say," says Glendon about this "awful period." Her voice softens, her tone is solemn; she is reluctant to discuss the marital breakup, unwilling to mention by name the man who "didn't come see me in the hospital.

"I was dealing with my father's death, and I was dealing with the prospect of being a single parent of a mixed-racial child." During this time, too, she was trying to maintain the high-octane pace of a young associate at a big-time firm; she had been required to work that Memorial Day weekend just days before her daughter was born and then, with baby in hand, had to tap four weeks of vacation as a maternity leave. "I began, then, to look for ways to come back to Massachusetts," she says.

It took two years, but this decision marked her entree into the academic life. Glendon was hired in 1968 to teach at Boston College Law School. The move back also marked an intense period in which Glendon was focused almost exclusively on her academic career and her family life, first as a single parent and then in a relationship with Edward R. Lev, a labor lawyer she'd known at the Chicago firm. In Massachusetts on a business trip, Lev asked her out. They married in 1970. (The couple had a daughter, Katherine, in 1971, and adopted Sarah in 1973.)

Public issues and discourse, political activism, even Catholic Church matters - that would all come later. "I wasn't able to do anything for the Church, a little Sunday School teaching," says Glendon, a trace of playful guilt in her voice. "But really nothing during the years when my kids were little. The late 1960s and into the 1970s were just a blur! Get tenure at work. Raise three daughters. Vietnam. Watergate. All that. I was like Rip Van Winkle as far as the great events of the '70s."

If not for her devotion to teaching and family, according to many who have followed her academic career, Glendon would have broken out into the open long before her Vatican assignment last year. "She could be a much more prominent figure in American politics if she was more willing to travel to promote herself," says Roger Conner of the Washington-based American Alliance of Rights and Responsibilities. "But it's always been difficult to pry her out of Boston, because of her family and teaching, the priorities she has established for her life."

Her commitment to teaching seems to have succeeded. Today, Renee Landers is deputy counsel at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Previously, she taught law at Boston College and also took Glendon's classes while she was a law student there. Though Landers is quick to preface her remarks by saying she disagrees with many of Glendon's positions, particularly her views opposing abortion, she praises Glendon as "a very fine scholar and an excellent teacher.

"Anybody at BC would tell you it was a tremendous loss when she left, to lose both a scholar of her stature and a teacher of her ability. It's hard to have both qualities," Landers says.

More recently, Harvard law students, who submit teacher evaluations after a course is over, posted rave reviews of Glendon's class work. Teaching property law and comparative law, she won high ratings for being sensitive to students, responsive to their questions and accessible outside of class. The students, according to officials, are not a bunch to pull punches, but Glendon, wrote one student, "is the most concerned and dedicated professor I've had at HLS." Wrote another, "If all my professors were this good, I'd pay double tuition."

For her part, Glendon concurs with Conner's view about the all-consuming hustle required to break into the mainstream; but she smiles and shakes her head with a look of "Not for me." During these years, she and her husband, a partner at the Boston firm of Sullivan and Worcester, set a rule about making it home from work by 5 p.m. to relieve the baby sitter and tend to family.

"Raising kids and having not just a job, but very intensive kinds of careers, almost everything goes, except for family and the job," Glendon recalls. "You economize where you can, so we virtually had no social life." There was, she says, always a "sense of robbing Peter to pay Paul," a nagging feeling one moment that she'd shortchanged her daughters by, say, missing a school event, and then, another moment, the suspicion that she wasn't doing enough for her academic career. To illustrate, Glendon tells a story that reveals both how stretched she was but also how ambitious. By 1974, six years into her career at BC, she got a call from Harvard about spending a year there; it would be a tryout for a possible permanent appointment.

"As you can imagine, I was very excited about that, and I came over here in 1974 and I taught my little heart out." Her daughters, she adds, were all under the age of 10. Life was hectic all around. "I was herYou didn't do lunch.' " Glendon was crestfallen. Before the day was out she had another visitor. "Judge Charlie Wyzanski," she remembers. "He had a reputation for bluntness, and he came by and just stuck his head in and said, 'Well, I hear they're sending you back to the minor leagues.' " Glendon pauses here. "And I was sent back to the minor leagues, for 12 years."

In 1986 Glendon moved over to Harvard, where today she is the Learned Hand Professor of Law. Beginning in the 1980s, she began to emerge from her self-described "Rip Van Winkle" phase. Her writings increased and expanded as she moved beyond the narrowly academic and esoteric concerns of property and estate law and into the politicized battlegrounds of abortion and feminism. In hindsight, her output of the past decade constitutes a pathway to her recent assignment in Beijing for the Vatican, a body of work that caught the eye of antiabortion activists, Cardinal Bernard Law and, finally, Pope John Paul II.

In 1987, Glendon's book "Abortion and Divorce in Western Law" was published. To her surprise, she has said, she found "the US is absolutely in a class by itself" in its virtually unfettered access to abortion and the way in which "the courts have taken the problem so completely away from the legislatures." In Europe, she found "no talk of a right to an abortion."

Glendon is against abortion under any circumstance, although she also opposes criminalizing the procedure as a crude and ineffective tool to reduce abortion rates. In the book, she launched a broadside - an attack she has pursued relentlessly ever since - against Roe vs. Wade, not only for its outcome in finding a constitutional right to abortion, but for what she considers the high court's naked power grab to fulfill a political agenda. She also began talking about a "dark side" to the prochoice movement, which has become another refrain, in which she argues that "silent supporters" of abortion rights include men who don't want to take responsibility for fatherhood, people who profit financially from the "abortion industry," and, "maybe saddest of all, people who see abortion as a way to keep down the size of an underclass."

The abortion book was followed in 1991 by "Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse." In it Glendon wrote: "A tendency to frame nearly every social controversy in terms of a clash of legal rights (a woman's right to her own body vs. a fetus's right to life) impedes compromise, mutual understanding, and the discovery of a common ground." Taking aim again at Roe v. Wade, she complained that the 1973 ruling "brought to a virtual halt the process of legislative abortion reform that was already well on the way to producing in the United States, as it did all over Europe, compromise statutes that gave very substantial protections to women's interests without completely denying protection to developing life."

Conner, of the American Alliance of Rights and Responsibilities, calls it "her most important work. The book has become a manual for people trying to find a language for placing community responsibility on the same moral level, on equal moral footing, as individual rights."

In recent years, Glendon has also produced countless opinion pieces and book reviews published in The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, and in such magazines as The National Review and First Things, the latter a neoconservative periodical for which she also sits on the editorial advisory board. Increasingly, she has taken on family and feminism, what she has called "the last gasp of a certain kind of feminism of the '70s, an angry, polarizing feminism." In an article last year, she wrote about an "old feminism . . . distinguished by its sour attitude toward family life, its rigid party line on gay rights and abortion and its puzzling combination of sexual anger with sexual aggressiveness." Last month, in a speech to priests at a seminary in Weston, Glendon hailed the arrival of a new feminism, a feminism that "is looking for better ways for women and men to live and work and raise their children."

In all, her research and writings placed her at odds with the Democratic Party, where she'd previously felt at home. "I emerged the same way," Glendon says, referring to the early 1980s, when she began to have more time to research and write, "and the Democrats were now somewhere else."

It's not as if she has embraced the Republican Party. "Too attached to big business," she says. Instead, she has employed the term "homeless" to describe her political status, "appalled" by the convergence of the parties to the point where both "are attracted now to big government, like heroin to an addict, and they can't give it up."

Glendon occupies her own turf, and it's as if political and social thinkers at times do not know what to make of her. For openings on the federal bench, she's drawn interest from both parties. But she's never exactly been a neat fit. During the Carter administration, her interview went well, she recalls, but "the most probable reason I did not get a federal judgeship was my prolife view." During the Bush administration, the antiabortion view worked in her favor, but her more expansive view of construing the Constitution likely did not fit the Bush party line. "There were all these questions that, for this particular Justice Department, mine were the wrong answers," says Glendon.

Not infrequently, she finds herself a target for all sides. "What irritates people who adhere to a party line is if you aren't with them all the way, then you are in some ways more obnoxious to them than the well-known enemy over there."

Leon Graglia, for one, a conservative legal scholar at the University of Texas, trashed Glendon's last book, "A Nation Under Lawyers." In The National Review, Graglia delivered an unflattering portrayal of both the author and the book (he called Glendon's analysis "soft" and "typically mushy"). Graglia wrote: "She earns the accolade of 'moderate' by, it turns out, pandering to liberal convention and mythology and hedging her conservative-sounding arguments to the point of retraction. She defies political categorization because she typically seeks to have things both ways."

From the other side, the criticism might be less heated, but it is poed nonetheless. Ellen Zucker, a lawyer in Boston and a longtime official with the National Organization for Women, respects Glendon's concern about the social welfare of women and children, but says her writings reveal a "nasty disrespect" for the women's movement.

"I hear from her a paternalism toward women," says Zucker, and a "narrow vision of family." Glendon may claim to be just an academic, says Zucker, but "in the recent past she has stepped forward as not only an antichoice activist but a self-styled critic of the women's movement."

The consequences of being this way - of being Glendon - extend into skirmishes of everyday scholarly life.

In 1993, for example, Harvard's general counsel Margaret H. Marshall (today the newest addition to the state Supreme Judicial Court) chastised Glendon for a letter she'd written to Catholic pastors opposing federal abortion legislation.

"The use of Harvard letterhead for purely personal correspondence is not appropriate," Marshall wrote.

Glendon's mouth dropped. Responding in a letter, she called the rebuke politically motivated. She could not find another law professor, she wrote, who'd ever been admonished for using school stationery to support such liberal causes as opposing the US Supreme Court nominations of Bork or Clarence Thomas.

The cross-fire can even carry a price tag. The same year Glendon tangled over Harvard stationery, she experienced a blunt end to research funding she was relying on to carry her through an unpaid leave from teaching. The Laurel Foundation, having expressed interest in Glendon's work, authorized in 1991 a $ 250,000 grant that was paid in two installments. Relying on that and oral assurances there would be further support, Glendon began her two-year leave from Harvard in fall 1992.

But months later, a fateful article by Glendon appeared in the March 1993 National Review. In it she wrote of "a sinister side of the abortion-rights movement: its sibling relationship with the anti-immigration groups who see abortion and border controls as the major defenses against an expanding, threatening, welfare-consuming - and non-white - underclass."

Relations with the Laurel Foundation quickly soured. Glendon learned the group, controlled by Cordelia S. May of the Mellon family, mainly funded causes she had criticized. May's fortune is estimated at $ 600 million, and foundation officials wrote Glendon that her single sentence "seemed to be aimed directly at us: we are not only pro-choice and pro-immigration reform, but probably the largest funders of both efforts in the country."

Glendon tried to repair the damage; she apologized and even called her utterance a "cheap shot." By late summer, and just as the second year of her leave began, her calls were not being returned.

"It was eerie," says Glendon. "They were so interested but then it was like I died." Financially secure, she managed without further funding to finish her most recent book. "I can laugh about it now, but that is a brutal way to be."

For her part, Glendon has long become accustomed to her role as a dissenter, a Roman Catholic voice crisscrossing political and ideological boundaries. Even so, there are always moments of of discomfort, even pique (she and Graglia traded frosty letters following Graglia's panning of her book). Most recently, Glendon "felt bad" when she read portions of Bork's new book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah." In 1987, she supported Bork's failed nomination to the US Supreme Court, and now, in his angry treatise about liberalism ruining the country, "it was painful to see him criticize moderates."

Indeed, she read Bork as taking aim at her. "But I don't see why we have to be read out of the rolls if we don't hew to the party line, point by point. . . . There are a lot of people who don't fit standard American political categories."

Glendon is a leading example of these misfits, maintaining, she says, a "distinctively Roman Catholic position that tends to be concerned about working people and the poor, what some people call 'liberal' on economic issues, but tends, at the same time, to be socially conservative."

Meanwhile, Glendon remains preoccupied with her family and her work, which, beyond teaching law, includes several papal assignments, working as a member of Cardinal Law's Advisory Committee on Social Justice, and new research in international human rights, although she goes into that last project with open eyes regarding the hunt for foundation support. "The conservative foundations are not happy with the social and economic preoccupations I have," she says, "and the liberal foundations just hate my prolife views."

Smiling, she tosses up a final surprising line, to sum up her view that you take what comes and move forward, quoting not Learned Hand, Pope John Paul II or even God. Instead, "as Bob Dylan has said, 'You have to keep on, keepin' on.' "


GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. Glendon with Pope John Paul II. She represented the Vatican at the international women's conference. 2. Glendon (with husband Edward Lev on Harvard Law campus) calls her own political status "homeless." GLOBE STAFF PHOTO/TOM HERDE 3. Glendon (center) was the Vatican's choice to lead its delegation to the 1995 international women's conference in Beijing.  ¶ Monday, October 03, 2005

 

The Rev'd Benjamin J. King after Mass at the Church of the Advent, Boston


The Boston Globe
January 28, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1235 words

HEADLINE: CITY WEEKLY;
CHURCH OF THE ADVENT PLANS MASS FOR A MONARCH CHURCH SOCIETY TO HONOR MARTYRED KING FOR KEEPING THE FAITH

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
BEACON HILL - Boston history recalls him as the British royal for whom the Charles River was named, but many High Church Anglicans revere King Charles I as a sainted martyr, who lost his head for defending the faith of the Church of England.

Sentenced to death by Parliamentary forces after the English Civil Wars that pitted Royalist Cavaliers against Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Roundheads, the doomed Charles uttered these famous last words before the headsman's ax fell on Jan. 30, 1649: "I have a good cause and I have a gracious God. I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown. Remember!"

And so Charles I will be remembered, on the 352d anniversary of his death at a 6 p.m. memorial Mass on Tuesday at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill. Members of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, the Anglican devotional society sponsoring the Mass, see no incongruity in honoring a deposed English ruler in a city famed for tossing the British monarchy more than two centuries ago.

"We commemorate him not because he was an English monarch, but because he was a saint, who died in order to avoid having to acknowledge the church he believed in was false," said Society member Thatcher Gearhart, 24, a money manager from the Back Bay. His student society at Yale, the Tory Party, held Charles I as its patron.

A devout Anglo-Catholic who traces his Old Boston lineage to Cotton Mather and John Adams but describes himself as a monarchist, the bow-tied Gearhart, sipping sherry after the 11 o'clock Solemn Mass at the Advent this past Sunday, said the historic church on Brimmer Street was a fitting place to honor a churchman who died in the name of tradition.

"Beacon Hill is by nature a very traditional place," he said, "and it is not surprising to find here the most traditional expression of the Christian religion anywhere."

If a service for an English monarch in Boston seems an anomaly, so too does the Church of the Advent, for many years a singular presence in this city of Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics.

The parish was founded in 1844 as the American flagship of the Oxford Movement, which emphasized the Catholic instead of the Protestant heritage of the Anglican Communion, and took a "High Church" view of the sacraments and liturgy.

Parishioners have included the Harvard naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, memorialized in sailing gear in a statue on the nearby Commonwealth Mall, and flamboyant socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner, who did annual penance by scrubbing the walk in front of the church on her hands and knees.

Mass at the Advent, a sensory feast with its chant and incense and ornate ceremony, recalls the old Roman Catholic Latin Mass, only said in English.

The steeple bells that peal to accompany the "1812 Overture" during the annual July Fourth Pops concert on the nearby Esplanade also ring each Sunday during the elevation of the Sacrament at Mass and the praying of the Hail Mary afterward.

And it is noteworthy that in today's Catholic Boston, post-Vatican II, one of the few places a priest is to be seen in traditional black cassock and biretta is at the Anglican Church of the Advent.

The Rev. Benjamin King, a newly ordained priest from England who is serving as curate at the Advent while studying at Harvard Divinity School, will offer Tuesday's Mass for Charles I, and said he is pleased to be doing so.

"I would say it is marvellous - with two Ls," said the 26-year-old cleric, savoring a Britishism.

Mark Wuonola of Waltham, the American representative of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, will give a presentation following the Mass, which he expects to draw perhaps "a couple dozen" worshippers.

He said as many as 100 attendees were expected at the annual Mass and meeting of the Society of King Charles the Martyr yesterday at St. John's Church in Newport, R.I.

Wuonola is a 53-year-old research chemist and church historian who authored the official guide book to the Church of the Advent and who, appropriately enough, lives in a section of Waltham called Piety Corner. "The name goes back to the Puritans," he explained. He has been heralding the cause of Charles I for more than a dozen years.

By refusing to submit to Cromwell's demands to abolish the Anglican episcopacy, Charles I forfeited his life, Wuonola said, but preserved the succession of bishops that stretched unbroken to Christ's apostles and maintained the Anglican Communion as a branch of the "one holy, catholic and apostolic church."

Wuonola said he came to believe that a "gross injustice" had been done to Charles I. "What appealed to me was the wrongness of the situation, that he had been unjustly tried in a kangaroo court," he said. "I subsequently came to appreciate his service to the Anglican Church."

A cult grew up about Charles I almost immediately following his execution, with strips of cloth dipped in the royal blood credited with miraculous cures. Thirteen years after his death, after the monarchy had been restored, the Church of England proclaimed him a saint, establishing Jan. 30 as his feast day.

In 1859, for reasons owing to church and court politics, and to the waning observance of his feast, Charles I was ordered removed from the Anglican calendar of saints by Queen Victoria. A group of High Church Anglicans seeking to restore his feast to the church calendar formed the Society of King Charles the Martyr in 1894.

The cause of the "decollated" monarch has inspired some devotees to flights of impassioned - not to mention gory - hymnody. A favored hymn composed by Society founder Ermengarda Greville-Nugent begins:

"O holy King, whose severed head/ The Martyr's Crown doth ray/ With gems for every blood-drop shed,/ Saint Charles for England pray!"

Another hymn, "The Praise of Charles, Our Martyr King," recalls the monarch thus: "For holy Church his head he bowed,/ Upon the axe his life-blood flowed:/ And where that kingly seed was sown/ New harvest unto Christ has grown."

King said he has the text to a sung-verse "paean of praise to Charles the Martyr" that runs upward of 12 stanzas, but is hesitant to use it in its entirety on Tuesday. "The Mass would go on all night," he said, with a smile. "I'll try and use some of it."

Society member Gearhart planned to attend Mass for the king in Newport yesterday, and return for the rite in Boston on Tuesday.

"It's hard being a monarchist in modern-day America," he said. "The appeal of the monarchy is it gives any particular culture a face, a symbol behind which all the people can unite."

History has not been kind to Charles I the king. An unprepossessing monarch with a slight stammer, he was devoted to religion and family and was a notable patron of the arts. But he lacked the common touch, held an authoritarian belief in the divine right of kings, and has been faulted for provoking the civil war that led to his execution through his intransigence in the power struggle with Parliament.

His glory was in his exit, said Richard Mammana, a 21-year-old classics major at Columbia University who is a frequent contributor to the Society of King Charles the Martyr newsletter and Anglo-Catholic Web sites, and who will preach on Charles the Martyr on Tuesday at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan.

"He wasn't a great king," said Mammana. "But in the end, he knew who his God was. He knew there was a king greater than he."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. The deposed British King Charles I was beheaded in 1649. / PHOTO COURTESY OF CHURCH OF THE ADVENT 2. The Rev. Benjamin J. King after last Sunday's Mass at Church of the Advent. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / DOMENIC CHAVEZ
  ¶ Monday, January 31, 2005

  By Rob Doyle

The canonisation causes of holy men and women are not often successful. Thousands are begun with great excitement only to meet one too many hurdles, get bogged down in dubious miracle claims, or simply lose appeal.

So what happens to these heroic Catholics once venerated then forgotten? Perhaps they sit up in heaven, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the time when they are needed or discovered again, like the fabled King Arthur, ready to rise when his people face their greatest peril.

One such figure due a revival is Father William Doyle, a Jesuit military chaplain killed in the First World War.

The Irishman's exploits and writings were, at the beginning of the 20th century, famous the world over but at the beginning of the 21st, his cause is a dead duck, his teaching unknown to all but scholars and the elderly.

Yet his is a story that deserves to be told, shouted from the rooftops. In this age of war and rumours of war, of falling vocations and instant gratification, his voice is beginning to be heard again: a hero who points the way to holiness.

Father Doyle was born at Dalkey, Co Dublin on March, 3 1873, the youngest of seven children and son of a legal clerk. After education at, among other places, Stonyhurst College, he was ordained in 1907 and volunteered to serve as a chaplain on the outbreak of the Great War. He was appointed to the 8th Royal Irish Fusiliers, 16th (Irish) Division, in November 1915 and immediately saw action at the battle of Loos, ministering to soldiers dying from a poison gas attack with disregard for his own safety.

His bravery was mentioned in dispatches and he was put forward for a military cross, the first in a long-line of military decorations denied to him for technical or sectarian reasons. In fact when he eventually was awarded that medal, he sent it to his father, not having any use for honours.

His accounts of battle make extraordinary reading. In 1916 he recalls a miraculous survival when a bomb hit the trench he was in, killing or mortally wounding everyone but himself, and allowing him the chance to give absolution and anointment to all the victims.

In his diary from 1916, he gives a harrowing account of the fighting at Ginchy and Guillemont.

"The first part of our journey lay through a narrow trench, the floor of which consisted of deep thick mud, and the bodies of dead men trodden under foot," he wrote. "It was horrible beyond description, but there was no help for it, and on the half-rotten corpses of our own brave men we marched in silence, everyone busy with his own thoughts. Half an hour of this brought us out on the open into the middle of the battlefield of some days previous. The wounded, at least I hope so, had all been removed, but the dead lay there stiff and stark with open staring eyes, just as they had fallen. Good God, such a sight! I had tried to prepare myself for this, but all I had read or pictured gave me little idea of the reality. Some lay as if they were sleeping quietly, others had died in agony or had had the life crushed out of them by mortal fear, while the whole ground, every foot, was littered with heads or limbs, or pieces of torn human bodies. In the bottom of one hole lay a British and a German soldier, locked in a deadly embrace, neither had any weapon but they had fought on to the bitter end. Another couple seemed to have realised that the horrible struggle was none of their making, and that they were both children of the same God; they had died hand-in-hand. A third face caught my eye, a tall, strikingly handsome young German, not more, I should say, than eighteen. He lay there calm and peaceful, with a smile of happiness on his face, as if he had had a glimpse of Heaven before he died. Ah, if only his poor mother could have seen her boy it would have soothed the pain of her broken heart."

This concern for his fellow man, whether comrade or enemy, Catholic or otherwise, shines through in his time on the front. Although at Stonyhurst he gained a reputation for stirring up anti-British feeling, on the battle field his only concern was helping his fellow man.

Fr Fergus O'Donoghue, Jesuit archivist at the Jesuit headquarters in Dublin, recalls hearing an Anglican bishop telling the story of Fr William approaching a wounded soldier who told him "I'm sorry I don't belong to your Church", to which Fr William replied "but you belong to my God" before giving him aid and spiritual comfort. During a war in which Anglican chaplains were kept away from the front line, it was the Catholics who became famous for their willingness to bring the Gospel to No-Man's Land, gaining dozens of converts and winning the respect of all faiths. Even the Ulster Presbyterian newspaper recorded Fr William's death with the words that there was "never a nobler soul" on the battlefields of France.

But the time spent in No-Man's Land could not continue indefinitely. On August 17, on Frezenberg Ridge during the the third battle of Ypres, Fr Willaim was with two other officers, dodging shells to try and bring a wounded men back behind allied lines, when he was blown to pieces after a direct hit.

Owing to the nature of the death, aged 44, there is no known grave for him but is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial (Panel 144 to 145).

He was awarded the Military Cross in January, 1917 though many were outraged that he did not win the Victoria Cross for his bravery under fire. He was also recommended for the Distinguished Service Medal but "disqualified" by virtue of his Irish birth and Catholic faith. In fact General Gough tried to blame the Irish for the failure of the attack, a fact that blackens his name to this day.

Fr William's story quickly gained popularity, especially after his brother, fellow Jesuit Charles, decided to ignore his sibling's final wish and handed his spiritual diaries to biographer Alfred O'Rahilly who published his life story in 1920 and watched as it was translated and sold across the world.

Meanwhile Fr William's pamphlets on vocation and suffering became widely read, especially his ahead-of-it's-time appeals for men to come forward as priests lest a lack of vocations damage the Church.

Fr William was a great advocate of denying and delaying wants and found it abhorrent that anyone should ever try and persuade young people from the priestly or religious life. He lived the life of an ascetic and found it hard to understand why others did not want to follow that path.

In Vocations he wrote: "It is a curious fact that although many pious and learned persons do not shrink from discouraging, in every possible way, aspirants to religious life, they seemingly scruple to give any help or encouragement. They unintentionally perhaps, but most effectually, extinguish the glowing enthusiasm of a youthful heart. Some even assume a terrible responsibility by deliberately turning away souls from the way into which the Master is calling them, forgetting the warning: 'It is I who have chosen you', never reflecting on the irretrievable harm they are causing by spoiling the work of God."

So what went wrong, why did this attractive charismatic Irish hero manage to fall by the wayside?

Fr O'Donoghue puts it down to a number of factors, not lest the Irish themselves.

"It is interesting how a devotion to a certain person can just cease and nobody is quite sure why," he told The Universe. "The nature of devotion has changed and his cause did not outlive these changes.

"Beatification is traditionally reserved for a local devotion and canonisation declares a person worthy of universal devotion. In fact, early beatifications were so informal, they occurred when the pope allowed a lamp to be hung in front of a shrine.

"There was an awful lot of work done on it in the early days, especially by Fr William's brother Charles, great hopes, and many cases of witness to prayers answered, but the cause is now silent. With the exception of a handful of people, devotion to him passed with a certain generation of people.

"It also has to be said that Irish people are not very good when it comes to promoting causes or organising these things for maximum effect. There's a type of spiritual dislocation in a way, that comes from a long tradition of priests trained in Rome discouraging local devotions."

One final reason that this remarkable man deserves a new audience is the testimony he gives to the horrors of war, descriptions of frontline that stand alongside the war poets in their chilling reality.

One of his last entries read thus: "By cutting a piece out of the side of the trench, I was just able to stand in front of my tiny altar, a biscuit tin supported by two German bayonets. God's angels, no doubt, were hovering overhead, but so were the shells, hundreds of them, and I was a little afraid that when the earth shook with the crash of the guns, the chalice might be overturned. Round about me on every side was the biggest congregation I ever had: behind the altar, on either side, and in front, row after row, sometimes crowding one upon the other, but all quiet and silent, as if they were straining their ears to catch every syllable of that tremendous act of Sacrifice - but every man was dead! Some had lain there for a week and were foul and horrible to look at, with faces black and green. Others had only just fallen, and seemed rather sleeping than dead, but there they lay, for none had time to bury them, brave fellows, every one, friend and foe alike, while I held in my unworthy hands the God of Battles, their Creator and their Judge, and prayed to Him to give rest to their souls."

That so many victims of that unforgettable war went to meet their maker, absolved and marked with the last rites of the church should be reason enough to make Fr William Doyle an instant candidate for sainthood. Perhaps it is not too late for his cause to begin again.
  ¶ Tuesday, January 18, 2005

  The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)

July 10, 2004 Saturday Final Edition

SECTION: Weekend: Arts & Books; Pg. H4

HEADLINE: The Jesuits helped shape the modern world

BYLINE: PETER STOCKLAND

God's Soldiers:

Adventure, Politics, Intrigue and Power - a History

of the Jesuits

By Jonathan Wright

Doubleday, 337 pages, $39.95

A book that opens with a long-dead Jesuit having his baby toe bitten off as an act of piety might not seem like every reader's cup of tea.

How many North Americans, after all, have much interest in the history of a Roman Catholic organization known far more widely for the apocrypha its name evokes than for the facts of its existence?

OK, blockbuster novelist Dan Brown proved with The Da Vinci Code that it's possible to sell millions of books with a potboiler plot based on half-truth, suspicion and paranoia about Opus Dei, the contemporary Catholic movement sometimes considered the successor to the Jesuits.

But an actual history written by a university-certified historian? A detailed, honest-to-God account of a 470-year-old religious society based on research and original documents? By itself, the subtitle of Jonathan Wright's new book raises the daunting questions: a) will there be footnotes? and b) will we have to read them?

Yes, there are notes aplenty at the back of God's Soldiers. Yes, it's entirely possible to cruise through the text without reference to them. Wright is a historian with a doctorate from Oxford, but he's also a storyteller with a craftsman's touch of the pen. Erudition and narrative deftness coalesce to marry factual rigour with the wildest of adventure stories.

Wright rightly regards the story of the Society of Jesus as a motif for the unfolding of modern Western society during the last five centuries. The Jesuits emerged from the immediate aftermath of the theological earthquake caused by Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Much more, they became the offspring of newly fecund modernity.

The point is made early on that Ignatius Loyola hardly intended the society he founded with a few friends to become the vanguard of Catholic counterreformation. A Spanish soldier whose right leg was shattered by French cannonballs at Pamplona in 1521, Loyola and his friends chose the tactical route of shoring up Catholic devotion in individual hearts rather than engaging in the grand strategic sweep of saving Europe from Luther's unleashed hordes.

As Wright puts it: "(T)he spirituality they espoused was not envisaged as some counterblast to Protestant heresy; it was firmly rooted in the medieval devotia moderna tradition."

Yet within a dozen years, the Jesuit mission was inextricably part of what historian Paul Johnson has called the birth of the modern. Evangelization, under the Jesuit impulse, had the modern characteristic of being equal parts education, science, politics, newfound mobility and persecution - inexhaustible persecution.

At our tag end of the modern project, it is boilerplate to blame religious faith as a primary source of humanity's cruelty. It is sobering to be reminded, as Wright reminds readers so effectively, of the centuries of inhuman torment inflicted on Jesuit missionaries and, for a time, on the Society itself. Christianity makes for a convenient cultural scapegoat, but the Jesuit martyrs are testimony to the darkness that could be found in the pre-Christian as much as the post-Christian heart.

At least the Portuguese noblewoman who bit off Francis Xavier's fifth toe in the anecdote that opens the book had the decency to wait until he was a corpse lying on a slab in Goa. Other Jesuits, as Wright details, were not so lucky. By the hundreds, if not thousands, they were tortured, hacked, burned and butchered in all corners of the globe simply for daring to proclaim their faith in the face of local or tribal hostility.

Among the most compelling sections of God's Soldiers is Wright's account of the mistreatment of the Jesuits at the hands of their own European tribes during the suppression, and ultimate liquidation, of the Society in the mid-18th century. The account reads like a macabre prefiguring of the techniques of oppression used two decades later to such hideous effect in the French Revolution and two centuries later in the totalitarian exterminations conducted by Hitlerites, Stalinists and Maoists.

Of course, the Jesuits did rise again to soldier on, much as humanity itself has done in emerging from the previous century's death camps, gulags and killing fields.

Wright seems guardedly optimistic the Society will endure for some time yet.

Peter Stockland is The Gazette's editor in chief.
  ¶ Friday, November 19, 2004

  The Boston Globe

November 10, 1989, Friday, City Edition

HEADLINE: From the old school;
Groton-St. Mark's steeped in tradition, perspective

BYLINE: By John Powers, Globe Staff

DATELINE: SOUTHBOROUGH

BODY:
They met for the first time on Mr. Thayer's meadow in Lancaster on a Wednesday afternoon in 1886. The Grotties came down on the 12:29 train ("Now and then Jay would favor us with a solo on the fish-horn"); the St. Markers piled atop a horse-drawn barge at Clinton.

Tomorrow afternoon on a rectangular patch of this Tudor spread, the Lion (St. Mark's) plays the Zebra (Groton) a game of foot-ball for the 100th time.

The Grotties will be wearing the same horizontally striped jerseys they sported a century ago. The St. Markers will be garbed in their traditional blue. The haze and scent from the Friday night bonfire will still be in the air, and the gridiron will be surrounded by students, parents and Old Boys standing five deep outside a rope.

It was much the same in 1905 when Hamilton Fish was a young Lion, playing across from many of his social chums. He may have gone on to make All-American at Harvard, win a national championship and stop Jim Thorpe in his tracks. But what still galls him after eight decades are those four losses to the Zebra. "We never did beat them," says Fish, now 101 and recently remarried. "That's what upsets me."

The results of other, lesser Saturdays will fade. But Groton-St. Mark's endures across generations. "I was talking to a friend on the team about that," says St. Mark's captain David Paquette. "And he said that a lot of people will remember their football career here by whether we win or lose this game."

Groton coach Jake Congleton recalls one season when the only victory came against St. Mark's. "I couldn't convince our players that it wasn't a wonderful season," he says. "I said, 'Hey, you only won one game.' "

If Groton loses tomorrow, it will scarcely matter that they won four other games. If St. Mark's wins, nobody will remember that they were thwacked by Governor Dummer last week. It's been that way for both sides since that first Wednesday 103 years ago.

"The St. Mark's game made or broke the season," remembers former Gov. Endicott (Chub) Peabody, who captained the 1937 team and whose grandfather founded Groton. "If we won, we'd carry The rector around the circle in a big Oriental-style chair which had handles fore and aft. There'd be a bonfire and terrific cheers for each member of the team. It was glorious. But when you lost, you came home to darkness - and a long winter ahead."

Two years out of every three, it's been bonfires and backslapping for the Grotties, who've won 61 of the 99 games and tied 4. They've earned the luxury of having a postgame ritual. The St. Markers, who've won only twice since 1978, schedule their bonfire and Victory Wagon procession for Friday. Optimism has always been a prime virtue in Southborough.

For years, the St. Mark's students and faculty, led by the headmaster's wife, did a snake dance on the eve of the game, chanting, "Oh me, oh my, how we'll black old Peabo's eye," even as they conceded the heavy odds against them.

Peabo was The Rector himself, and he tormented the Lion from the first game on Mr. Thayer's makeshift gridiron, when he suited up in striped jersey and stocking cap and played alongside his boys.

Another Groton master, William Greenough Thayer, lined up alongside Peabody that day, and the pair duly intimidated the Lion's spindly volunteers. "The former was very lively, the latter very large," observed the St. Mark's school history.

Thayer, who later became headmaster at St. Mark's, scored one Groton touchdown, Peabody provided the other "by a very pretty rush," and the Zebra ruled, 10-2. The next year, St. Mark's refused to play if Groton used masters. Memories of the strapping 6-foot Rector and the lively Thayer trampling 125-pound fourth-formers were still fresh.

When play resumed in 1888, new rules applied - no more than two masters per side and none over 150 pounds. Thus was The Rector squelched. Yet Groton still won, 52-0, the worst flogging of the series, and dominated for years.

St. Mark's didn't win a game until 1894, when Hamilton Fish Benjamin scored three touchdowns and found himself immortalized in verse in the school newspaper: "Fish Benjamin of Southborough/A mighty oath he swore/That the great school of St. Mark's/Should see defeat no more."

Most seasons, the Zebra was simply larger and heavier than the Lion and played the game according to Peabody's manly taste - "very straight football, without guile." When St. Mark's ran a reverse one year, the shocked Rector deemed it immoral.

It wasn't immorality, it was desperation. For five years at the start of the century, the Lion couldn't even manage a point. The game was a religion at Groton - until relatively recently, every student had to play at least a year of football. Down at Southborough, it was more a diversion.

As early as 1887, the St. Mark's school newspaper was lamenting the number of promising athletes who preferred skating: "Now, as this is the foot-ball season, let us ask those fellows who play hockey to stop and play foot-ball instead."

Victories over the Zebra were cherished because they were comparatively rare. John Marquand's novel "The Second Happiest Day" refers to a wedding day. The happiest was a victory over the Grotties.

Any St. Marker can reel off the most memorable ones. The 15-13 decision which capped the unbeaten 1947 season. The 41-13 shocker in 1951, when Potter Palmer flung scoring passes to Paul D.G. Munger, playing his first and only game as a Lion. The 20-7 uprising which ruined Groton's unbeaten season in 1956. Bill McCardless' last-minute field goal in 1971 that ended six years of emptiness.

And the 22-14 sting two years ago, when a JV back named Marvin Lao was pressed into service and scored a touchdown. "Everyone was ecstatic," says Paquette. "Our hope came true."

The Class of 1988 had never come close to beating Groton. For most of them, it was a victory to retire on. The majority of the players who suit up tomorrow will never play in college. Most of those who do will be at Division 3 schools like Amherst and Hamilton and Williams. If they play for an Ivy school, it will most likely be 150-pound football at a Princeton or a Pennsylvania.

The Lion and the Zebra are not in the business of stocking rosters at scholarship colleges. They have produced a handful of All-Americans - Fish, Peabody and Be Bradlee at Harvard, Truxton Hare at Penn - but all but one played before the Great War.

Groton now has the smallest male enrollment (157 in grades 9-12) in the Independent School League, St. Mark's the third smallest (179). Groton has 38 players in all, St. Mark's barely more than 40. All of them will dress tomorrow, and the coaches will make a point of getting every senior into the game.

The gridiron is merely an extension of the classroom. The head coaches - Congleton at Groton, Henry Large at St. Mark's - are both history teachers who happen to coach football. Congleton has had the job since 1958 (with two years off on sabbatical), Large since 1965. They are not expected to win. They are expected to motivate, to challenge, to teach. "The only way kids learn is to dare," says Large. "To extend themselves."

These are Episcopal church schools founded in the last century (St. Mark's in 1865, Groton in 1884) and grounded in the values of the English public schools. Thus reads Groton's Original Announcement: "Every endeavor will be made to cultivate manly Christian character."

Books, chapel and vigorous exercise were the indivisible trinity at both schools, and football was played according to a gentlemanly code. Even though Groton used two masters to subdue the Lion in that first game, the St. Mark's newspaper conceded, "We were beaten fairly and squarely."

The game was to be hard but clean, with handshakes and cheers for the rivals afterward. In the athletic offices at both schools, the code is posted still: "Honor visiting teams and spectators as your own guests and treat them as such."

The Lion and the Zebra may be rivals, but they are far from enemies. Congleton and Large are old friends who don't worry much about who's ahead on what ledger. It may be the most important game on the schedule, but Groton-St. Mark's is still only that - a game.

Both schools will still hold classes tomorrow morning, and there'll be other games - football and soccer and field hockey - going on simultaneously. "I'm often asked today, 'Where are all the fans?' " says Groton headmaster Bill Polk, who captained the 1957 varsity. "And I point to all the other fields."

At both Groton and St. Mark's, all students must play a team sport. Back before the schools went coed and before soccer grew in importance, football was the only real option. There were second, third and fourth teams at both places. "The primary challenge for the fourth team," remembers Large, "was keeping their pants up."

The third and fourth teams have gone the way of the snake dance. So has the automatic Monday holiday at St. Mark's when the Lion wins. Nobody's talked about blacking old Peabo's eye for a while now.

"With schools like these, the important thing is to know the difference between a tradition and an anachronism," says St. Mark's headmaster Chris Mably. "We live in a very different society now than when the rivalry began."

The day when both schools were the exclusive preserve of Coolidges and Bundys and Choates from the Brahmin fish ponds of Boston and New York has passed.

Fish and Peabody knew most of the players on the other side of the ball because they'd gone to the same feeder schools and summered at the same resorts. "I don't know any of their players," says Paquette, "and I don't think too many other guys do, either."

Groton and St. Mark's draw from a broad spectrum of classes and races now. More than a third of the student bodies receive some kind of financial aid. Nearly half of each class is female, and black, Hispanic and Asian faces peer out from team photos.

Walk the sidelines tomorrow and you'll see the diversity. "We don't get the tweedy-preppy crowd now," says Congleton, "because we're not a tweedy-preppy school anymore."

Yet some of the tradition endures. Halfback Morgan Dix's Groton roots go back three generations. His father, grandfather and great grandfather are all in the archives.

Few of the players on either side have spent much time rummaging through the lore, but they can sense its presence. "I don't think we know the history that well," says Dix. "But the rivalry is so big."

The rivalry is all around them, from the moment they come through the portals as third-formers. "You walk through the door here," says Large, "and people start talking about Groton."

Pictures of old varsities hang on the library walls. Bound copies of the Grotonian and the Vindex go back more than a century. At Groton, the same man who coaches now also coached the headmaster. He and his assistants have been at the school for a combined 100 years.

When the tower clock creeps past 3, you can still hear Congleton's voice from 100 yards. Today the old captains and coaches and masters will return, and the Lion and the Zebra will grapple once more.

"I told the kids Monday at practice that there'll be a lot of excitement and hoopla," Large says, "but that this game is special not because it's the 100th, but because it's their game."

  ¶ Wednesday, November 17, 2004

  Sports Illustrated, Nov 5, 1990

A golden oldie, in every way: at age 101, Hamilton Fish is the last of a rare sports breed. Robert H. Boyle.

He was one of the greatest tackles ever to play college football and was a two-time All-America. He is now 101 years old and as tough and spirited as when he fought for Harvard more than 80 years ago.

He is Hamilton Fish, Harvard, class of 1910, the last surviving member of Walter Camp's alltime All-America football team and a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. As a Republican member of Congress from 1920 to 1945, Fish again became a nationally known figure, for his vehement opposition to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Fish lives in Cold Spring, N.Y., with his fourth wife, Lydia, 58, a former state corrections officer. After a lengthy correspondence, the always ready to socialize Fish met his wife-to-be in person for the first time at a library reception, and they were married three months short of Fish's 100th birthday, on Sept. 9, 1988. Fish has not lost his zest for politics either, even when it means taking on family members. In 1974, when his son, Hamilton Fish Jr., a Republican member of the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee, voted to impeach President Richard Nixon, Fish was a prominent member of Operation Freedom, which took out ads opposing any prosecution. Twelve years later, when his grandson Ham III ran for the Democratic nomination for Congress, the eldest Fish all but branded Ham III a Communist and announced that he intended to campaign against him. "My grandfather regarded me as he would any political opponent," says Ham III, 38. "I never took it personally."

Fish now wears a hearing aid and gets about with the aid of a walker to offset a bad knee ("Nothing to do with football," he says), but he also has a full-time secretary to help keep his hectic schedule of public engagements. Recently, his calendar for the coming month showed an evening panel discussion at a Connecticut community college, two parades, a reception for the Salvation Army, another speech, a trip to Southborough, Mass., to celebrate the 125th anniversary of St. Mark's, his preparatory school, lunch at the Porcellian Club in Cambridge, Mass., and a class reunion at Harvard.

Five years ago Fish attended his 75th reunion, and as a member of the class of 1910, he confidently expected to lead the parade as the oldest alumnus present. His grandnephew J. Winthrop (Winty) Aldrich was there attending his 20th Harvard reunion, and as Aldrich says, "The scene that followed was vintage Ham Fish. He came upon an infirm, sickly old man clutching a walker and a sign that said 1906. Brandishing his cane at the man with the walker, Uncle Ham shouted, `That man is an imposter! He was behind me!' " It turned out that the man was indeed a member of the class of 1906, but it also proved that trying to upstage Fish is a daunting task for anyone.

Fish had better luck this year at his 80th reunion, though there were again some tense moments. When Harvard president Derek Bok and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, Ella Fitzgerald and other recipients of honorary degrees began the academic procession, Fish, using his walker, was slow in getting to the lead. As the band started to play and the grand marshal checked his watch, Aldrich decorously transferred Ham Sr., holding his 1910 sign, to a folding chair on top of a dolly and pushed the old man to the head of the line. The band parted like the Red Sea before Moses, and, as Fish wheeled by, Fitzgerald slapped him on the shoulder and exclaimed, "Why, you sweetie pie!"

That might have been the first time Fish has ever been addressed in such a manner. Certainly his opponents on the gridiron or in Congress had other names for him. At St. Mark's, Fish played football for three years, and he is still upset that while he was there his teams never beat archrival Groton.

At Harvard, Fish played right tackle both ways, as was the rule then. In 1907, when he was a sophomore, Harvard won its first seven games, but then lost three straight, to the Carlisle Institute, Dartmouth and Yale. The defeats were blamed on Crimson coach Joshua Crane, and he was replaced for the 1908 season by Percy Haughton, perhaps the greatest coach in Crimson history.

A believer in specialized coaching, Haughton wanted Lieut. Ernest Graves, a West Point graduate then serving in the Corps of Engineers, to coach the line. According to Morris A. Bealle's The History of Football at Harvard, Haughton sent a message to President Theodore Roosevelt to ask that Graves be detached from duty in Washington to coach in Cambridge. The president subsequently wrote a note to Secretary of War William Howard Taft, a Yale man, no less, informing Taft, "I was a Harvard man before I was a politician. Please do what these gentlemen want."

Haughton and Graves built much of the Harvard offense and defense around their right tackle. In 1910, Camp referred to Fish as "a leader of men." On defense Fish was, in Camp's words, "a certain and deadly tackle," while on offense he "was as equally good."

Tackles were then eligible to receive passes, and the combination of senior quarterback John Cutler, who later married Fish's sister, Rosalind, and Fish became a vital part of the Harvard attack. "No man who has been developed since the introduction of the forward pass could equal him at receiving the ball," Camp wrote of the 6 ft. 4 in., 190-pound Fish. "And the stretch of his arms up into the air, as can be readily appreciated, is considerable. Furthermore, he had a way of so planting himself upon his feet that the men whose province was to knock over the man receiving the pass invariably found Fish immovable." Overall, Camp pronounced that Fish was "the best rounded-out of all the tackles that have played that position."

Early in the 1908 season, Harvard captain Francis Burr, an All-America guard and a senior, suffered an injury that ended his football career. Haughton named Fish, a junior, as acting captain. Fish, in turn, named his classmate, John Reed, as the cheerleader, because, he says, "I knew him very well, and I liked him." The archconservative Fish liked Reed's politics less as time went on. After graduating, Reed was reputed to have taught striking workers songs with proletarian lyrics that he had set to the tunes of Harvard fight songs, and he wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, an account of the Russian revolution. When Reed died in Moscow of typhus in 1920, an appreciative Lenin honored him by having his body buried at the Kremlin wall.

In its first five games of the 1908 season, Harvard ran up 93 points and held its opponents scoreless. Then came a 6-6 tie with the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Despite the tie, Harvard was still in contention for the Ivy League championship, which at that time was tantamount to being national champion. The Crimson beat Brown 6-2 and then faced its biggest test: undefeated, untied Carlisle with a sensational new back, Jim Thorpe.

"Pop Warner was the Carlisle coach," Fish says, "and they believed they were going to win the national championship. Before they played us, they beat Syracuse, a very strong team that year. Pop Warner had sewn the covers from old footballs onto the jerseys of his three backs and two ends so that Syracuse would have a difficult time distinguishing who really had the ball, and they beat Syracuse 12-0. Syracuse was furious. They rang me up, and I called my squad to a meeting. I said, `You are Harvard men, you're supposed to be intelligent, I want you to take the rule book and see if there is anything against putting the cover of a football on the backs and ends.' They came back in the morning, and said, `We can't find anything against it in the rules.' But we had a very fine, intelligent coach in Percy Haughton, and he outsmarted Pop Warner. The home team provided the football, and Percy Haughton had the football colored crimson, the same as our jerseys, and Pop Warner had to send his three backs and two ends back to change their jerseys. We beat Pop Warner's team, and Jim Thorpe, 17-0.

"Thorpe was the best player I ever saw," Fish continues. "He was recognized at the time as the best man, he really was. He could do anything. He had the speed, he had the strength, he had the know-how, he could go through the line, he could run the ends, he had all the tricks. When we beat them, I believe it was the first time he didn't score. I tackled him more than anyone else."

Harvard went on to defeat Dartmouth and Yale -- neither opponent scored a point -- and was declared Ivy League champion. In 1909, the Crimson looked like a good bet to repeat. There was a close call against Williams, which led 6-0 at the half because Haughton started second-stringers, but then he sent in the regulars, including Fish, who had been sidelined by ptomaine poisoning, and Harvard won 8-6.

After an 11-0 win over Brown, The Boston Globe reported, "Captain Fish was prominent in one of the most spectacular plays of the game." It occurred when Ted Frothingham, the Harvard halfback, picked up the ball on the Harvard eight-yard line and headed downfield with Adrien Regnier, Brown's captain, in pursuit, closely followed by Fish. "The two captains raced along yards behind Frothingham," The Globe reported, "and when they reached the middle of the field Fish threw himself at Regnier and knocked him down. Fish fell on the Brown leader and whenever the latter would strive to rise Fish would stiffen out his arms and legs, taking care not to hold his rival. Regnier tried half a dozen methods to free himself, but could not do so, while the 16,000 spectators laughed. Finally when Frothingham had crossed the goal line Fish rolled off Regnier and the latter somewhat sheepishly regained his feet." Fish's clever heroics were to no avail; it turned out that the referee had called the ball dead before Frothingham had broken loose.

Undefeated Harvard next played Army. At the time, the rules prohibited a player from returning to the game once he was taken out. Eugene Alexis Byrne, the Army captain, played opposite Fish and proved no match for him. "I could see that he was pretty well in at the end of the half," Fish says, "and I said to my coach, `You ought to send word to the West Point coach that the captain is all in and might get hurt.' I suggested that Byrne be taken out for a substitute, but he wanted to play. Shortly after, in the second half, we had the ball. We gave the ball to our 200-pound fullback, Dono Minot, a rugged fellow. Strangely enough, on this particular play, I was shifted over to the other side of the line, and the West Point captain came through the line fast, smashed into our fullback and fell to the ground. He couldn't move and became unconscious. We had to stop the game -- we were way ahead -- and he died the next day from a broken neck. That's when football changed the rule so that you could take a man out and put him back in again, and that's a very good rule."

Harvard followed with an 18-0 victory over Cornell and a 12-3 defeat of Dartmouth to set up a dream game -- Harvard vs. Yale. These two unbeaten teams, archrivals at that, were meeting to decide the national championship on the final day of the season. Harvard, 8-0, had outscored its opponents 103-9. Yale had gone 9-0, but the Elis were unscored upon and boasted six All-America players, including Ted Coy, the fullback and captain whom Camp would name his alltime All-America fullback. In profiling Coy, Camp wrote: "It was almost impossible to stop him in front when he had acquired full headway."

Anchored by Fish, who was playing with badly damaged ribs suffered in the Dartmouth game, Harvard held Coy and Yale to only 100 yards and two first downs, but Yale won the game and the championship 8-0 on a safety and two drop-kick field goals by Coy. "I never played a better game," Fish says. "I'd rested up, my tackling was perfect, but I couldn't attempt to catch a pass because I couldn't lift my left arm [because of his injured ribs]. We would have beaten them though if I'd been able to lift my arm."

After graduating from Harvard cum laude, Fish declined an offer to teach history and government at his alma mater and served as secretary to his congressman father, Hamilton Sr. Once back home in Garrison, N.Y., Fish formed a baseball team that played every weekend in a field next to the sprawling family estate. "I broke into politics through baseball," Fish says. "Three or four hundred people would come every Saturday or Sunday we played, and that's how I got known. I played first base, we had a lot of good players, and we won most of the time. We even played in Sing Sing state prison." Fish served in the state assembly from 1914 though 1916 as a member of the Progressive Party, led by former president Theodore Roosevelt.

Assemblyman Fish had been friendly with state senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt of Hyde Park, a fellow Hudson Valley patrician and Harvard graduate. "We became great friends," Fish says. "Franklin Roosevelt was then a fine Jeffersonian Democrat. Sometime after he became assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913, he came to me and said, `I want you to succeed me in the state senate. I'll get you the Democratic support, you have the independents, and most of the Republicans will vote for you anyway.' I said, `Thank you very much. I'd love to do it, but I can't do it because I intend to enlist for the war.' "

Fish served as a captain in a National Guard unit that would become the legendary 369th Infantry, a black regiment from Harlem. During its training in Spartanburg, S.C., the 369th was stationed next to an all-white regiment from the Deep South. Ugly words were exchanged that eventually led to the southern regiment's threatening to attack the black soldiers. The lore of the 369th has it that Captain Fish offered to settle matters once and for all by challenging three officers to a fistfight.

"The newspapers said I challenged each of them to fight, but that was an exaggeration," Fish says. "The men from the southern regiment had said they would attack us. As captain, I served notice to my men that if we were attacked, we would fight to the death. I trained all the men and armed them to attack. Late one night, someone, I don't know who, stupidly blew a bugle. My men came pouring out of their tents ready to fight and kill. I told them to stay where they were, and I went out to meet the southerners. I uncocked my pistol, went out and met several southern officers. Standing in the dark with my cocked pistol, I said, `You must stop. My troops are under orders to fight to the death. It will simply be a massacre on both sides and one of the worst things to happen to our country.' There was no trouble."

In combat in France with the 369th, Fish won the Silver Star and the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action. When the war was over, Fish served as chairman of the Committee of Three, which wrote the preamble for the newly founded American Legion.

In 1977, filmmaker William Miles used long-forgotten footage to make a movie, Men of Bronze, about the 369th. Fish and Ham III attended the premiere together at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. "We sat up in a box with other members of the cast, separated from the rest of the audience in the theater," Ham III recalls. "It was a remarkable and moving film. When the lights went on afterward, the 2,000 people in the audience, many of them liberals from the Upper West Side, turned and looked up at my grandfather and gave him a standing ovation."

After World War I, Fish and Roosevelt remained friendly, but when FDR won the presidency in 1932, the friendship soured. It did not help that Fish was congressman from Roosevelt's Hudson Valley home district. If FDR were alive, he doubtless would have his side of the story about the estrangement, but Fish says, "I put the start of the change in Roosevelt to his work in the Navy in World War I. Money began to mean nothing to him, and he had power. Lord Acton said, `Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' That's what changed the whole life of the man I was once very fond of and who wanted me to succeed him."

Fish was the ranking minority member on the House of Representatives' Rules and Foreign Affairs committees, which provided him with plenty of power of his own, and he stridently opposed the New Deal almost from the start. He also objected to Roosevelt's effort to pack the Supreme Court, fought against recognition of the Soviet Union, and after World War II began in Europe, accused Roosevelt of attempting to lead the country into the war.

Relations between the two men deteriorated to the point that the president barred Fish from the White House. "Yes, he hated me, and he had a right to," Fish says. "I didn't hate him," he adds with a chortle. "I despised him."

On Oct. 28, 1940, in a campaign speech delivered at Madison Square Garden, FDR scathingly denounced by name his three principal Republican opponents in Congress. The Rooseveltian refrain of "Martin, Barton and Fish," the last name drawn out with almost a hiss -- F-i-s-s-s-h-h-h -- became part of the national political vocabulary.

Fish was defeated for reelection to Congress in 1944, and he returned to New York. Nevertheless, his speeches on behalf of various organizations and his letters to the editor that frequently appeared in newspapers and magazines kept his name before the public. In 1960 his wife, the former Grace Chapin Rogers, whom he had married in 1920, died. In the fall of 1970, his oldest sister, Janet, died in Washington. The newspapers reported that her funeral would be held on Nov. 21 at St. Philip's Church in Garrison. "Then," says Aldrich, "the word came from Uncle Ham that the date conflicted with the Harvard-Yale game, and that he was not about to miss it. The funeral would have to be rescheduled." It was.

In 1967, Fish married for a second time. His wife was Marie Blackton, a Russian emigre who lived in a Park Avenue apartment.

After Marie died in 1974, Fish, then 86, was married for a third time, to Alice Desmond of Newburgh, N.Y., the widow of a state senator. They endowed a 20,000-volume library in Garrison, the very library in which Fish was first to meet his current wife, Lydia, after Alice and he were divorced in 1984.

Throughout the vicissitudes of life, Fish has remained an ardent football fan. At Harvard, where the band serenaded him and Lydia before last year's Yale game, he is given seat 21 in row 1, section 32, right on the 50-yard line of Harvard Stadium. Yale accords him a similar honor in years The Game is played in the Yale Bowl. And when he attends U.S. Military Academy games at West Point, in his old home district, he gets the best seat available in Michie Stadium. Ham III, who since childhood has regularly accompanied his grandfather to Harvard games, recalls times when "I had to restrain him from running down the stairs to upbraid coaches or players for not performing up to snuff."

Fish remains ever ready to deliver a speech, and he does so without notes or a microphone. Recently, he was an honored guest at a dinner of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in New York where he, author Tom Wolfe and Paul Nitze each received the association's medal for distinguished service. Fish spoke on Americanism, and he says, "By the time I had finished, Nitze was crying."

"I'm very privileged to be married to him," Lydia says. "He's living history. Life is exciting, it's interesting. It's never dull."

  ¶ Wednesday, November 17, 2004

  The Washington Post

July 16, 1986, Wednesday, Final Edition

SECTION: Style; D1

LENGTH: 4169 words

HEADLINE: Moynihan: The Myths and the Appetites;
The Family Crusader, Belying Labels, Drawing Crowds & Loving It All

BYLINE: By David Remnick, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:
Has teevee land ever seen a man so tickled as Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

As he describes the plight of the American family to Phil Donahue, the senator's knees lock and his shoe tips wag. His bushy brows hump up like two millipedes on a twig, then ascend to his thatchy forelock. When the audience applauds him, Moynihan applauds back. And as the clapping flattens into a roar, his mouth goes pursy, forming a fleshy Irish rose.

His daughter Maura -- late of Harvard and the rock group the Same -- has seen the look before. "Dad's mouth gets like that when he's happy," she says.

After the show, Moynihan lumbers toward the elevator. He is a towering sight -- 6 feet 4 inches -- and surprisingly trim. He is one of those men whose waggy midlife jowls make them seem far heavier than they are.

"Saddle up, children!" he yells tinnily, and the entourage shuffles over to meet him. There is something antique, something mythological about Moynihan. The theater he has become -- the herky-jerky Anglo-speech, the bow tie slightly askew, the tweedy caps and professorial rambles -- they all make him seem vaguely not there, a figure not of the present but of an unreal history, an American Edmund Burke taking dominion on the Hill.

The sources of Moynihan's real satisfactions these days run deep. His New York Senate seat appears safe. As an analyst of American family problems, he is being hailed as an embattled prophet redeemed. Even the publicity ball is rolling pleasantly to his feet. Donahue -- perhaps the most influential book seller in American history -- twice showed Moynihan's book, "Family and Nation," to the cameras. Twice! The senator is even more delighted than the PR woman from Harcourt Brace.

"Well!" he chirps in the elevator. "You can't say that fella didn't try to sell any books!"

The limo ushers Moynihan crosstown to further flattery. The editors of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica have arranged to bestow medals on the senator and five others for making scholarly work accessible. In the course of a very few minutes Moynihan refers to political theorist R.H. Tawney, physicist Max Planck and other academic immortals. He lobs bons mots like bonbons. And now Moynihan's mouth is blooming again. He is enjoying that uniquely intoxicating sensation: He is talking, and everyone is listening. In his odd pizzicato, he is discoursing obscurely on the universality of scientific experiments -- " . . . and so it will turn blue in Bul . . . gar . . . ee . . . ya and it'll turn blue in Pa . . . ta . . . go . . . nee . . . ya!"

"One thing about my father you should know," Maura Moynihan says. "He loves being senator."

"I couldn't believe it!" Moynihan says, in his Washington office a few days later. "In the elevators people were saying 'Hey! We were watching you on television! We saw you on Donahue!' "

The moment is optimal for Moynihan, too. When he first spoke out on the state of the black family as an undersecretary of labor in the Johnson administration 21 years ago, he cited the problem of single-parent homes as a "tangle of pathology." He caught swift hell for that. The times did not permit such an analysis -- too soon after the civil rights initiatives -- and the attacks on Moynihan were sometimes ugly and cruel. Black leader James Farmer wrote that the Moynihan Report was "the fuel for a new racism," and its data would "turn the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan into a prophet." Moynihan was deeply wounded. He abandoned plans to write a book on the black family:

"I thought, let someone else do that."

Finally, he did write his book. "Family and Nation," which was first delivered as a series of lectures last year at Harvard, shifts somewhat the emphasis of Moynihan's old argument from race to class, and it has been received with almost universal acclaim. Although it is conspicuously lacking for answers and recommendations, Moynihan has once more framed the critical questions on family and poverty. This time there is applause.

"Pat was right all along," says Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.). "He set an agenda and stayed with it." "Pat deserves all the acclaim he's getting on this," says Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.). "He was dead right."

"The subject of the family is on the agenda now," says Moynihan, who is hoping that he and his fellow Democrats can pull together a set of coherent proposals for the years ahead. He compares the need for a family policy to the need for basic social welfare programs preceding the years of the New Deal. "And that sort of thing requires preparation, thinking. You know by 1935 if you wanted a Social Security bill, there were people you could turn to who could tell you what it should be. They'd been working on it for 30 years.

"We have behavioral, social and structural problems to deal with and the first step in the legislative process is to protect the few things we do have. Even if the president does raise the subject of the family, he's wrong about what we have to do about it. With the Reagan administration there came to power an official doctrine that you have problems because you tried to do something about them. It's a national tragedy."

The overall Moynihan Myth, the one that he propagates, is one of ideological, liberal consistency. And yet he has shifted his imagery and allegiances radically over his career.

As an aide to former New York governor Averell Harriman in the '50s and to John F. Kennedy and LBJ in the '60s, he was a mainstream Democrat, part regular, part reformer, part broker, part civil rights advocate. As an adviser to Johnson he wrote a crucial speech on poverty in black America. As an adviser on domestic affairs to Richard Nixon and the spokesman for a temporary policy of "benign neglect" toward the tumult in the black urban community, he began forfeiting those liberal credentials. He lost some old friends. Upon his return to Harvard in 1971, he was accorded a dismal attic office and a good many sneers. He even lost one tenure vote before finally gaining a secure post on the faculty.

Moynihan's sympathies -- or lack of them -- stunned some of his more liberal friends. During the Vietnam era he was often more critical of the protesters than of the war -- "I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals," he said in 1969.

As President Ford's U.N. ambassador, Moynihan was a swaggering figure, hoisting the nameplate of the United States in pugnacious opposition to much of the Third World. Suddenly he was the Neoconservative of U.N. Plaza, an ally of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Public Interest editor Irving Kristol and other converts to the Temple of Toughness. During Moynihan's U.N. career, William F. Buckley's National Review proclaimed him Man of the Year.

After denying for weeks that he would run, Moynihan won his Senate seat by outflanking his Democratic rivals Bella Abzug, Ramsey Clark and Paul O'Dwyer to the right and his Republican rival, incumbent and Buckley brother James, to the left.

He came to the Senate in 1977 as a kind of New York version of Sen. Henry (Scoop) Jackson -- a liberal on social policy, a hawk on defense and foreign affairs. He brought with him some of Jackson's most militantly neoconservative former aides, among them Elliott Abrams, Chester Finn, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt. Soon there were furious denunciations of the Carter foreign policy in the office -- the weakness, the weakness! At times the office seemed like the Washington bureau of Commentary.

Almost immediately Podhoretz and others involved in neoconservative organizations such as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority began chatting up Moynihan as a presidential candidate, for in his first five years in office, Moynihan pleased most of his neoconservative allies. His Americans for Democratic Action ratings were 70, 60, 47, 72, 75 -- the numbers of their kind of moderate Democrat. "But Pat started moving in a different direction," Podhoretz says ruefully. With Reagan in office, Moynihan sounded his odd, burbling bugle of opposition. After voting in favor of Reagan's initial round of tax cuts -- "not my finest moment," he says now -- he began taking a more antagonistic approach to the administration.

Opposition has long been his strongest suit. First it was opposition to the Democratic orthodoxy of the '70s; now it's opposition to the conservative orthodoxy of the '80s.

"I've always liked that role," he says.

With liberals Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh, Frank Church, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and George McGovern all gone from the Senate, and with the political climate itself shifted to the right, Moynihan suddenly finds himself greatly valued, even by his old ideological enemies. "I feel delighted with the intellectual and political growth of Pat Moynihan," says George McGovern -- who did not win Moynihan's vote in 1972. "Pat's been moving in the right direction. After flirting with all the neos, he's returned to his natural instincts. There's been a maturing process. He grew away from his natural base -- a liberal, Irish Democrat -- and that got him in trouble, I thought. Now he's returned."

In contrast, of course, Moynihan's neoconservative allies are disappointed. The relationship with Podhoretz, which had once been so close, has deteriorated. Abrams (who is Podhoretz's son-in-law), Finn, Shulsky and Schmitt all took posts in the Reagan administration. Not only did they want to serve in the executive branch, they had all drifted rightward from their mentor Moynihan. Tim Russert, Moynihan's political guru, was one of the few who did not enter the administration; after a stint with Mario Cuomo, Russert became a vice president at NBC News.

Moynihan holds fast to what might be called the "I never changed, the world did" theory. "The Democratic Party in the early '70s went very considerably to the left," he says. "There were some of us who didn't, that's all."

Of the term neoconservative, he says, "I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. Why take the honorable word 'liberal' away from people who want it?" And of neoliberal, well, Moynihan would rather resort to visual aids.

"Come, come, I'll show you something in my bathroom."

Moynihan points the way with a forefinger as long and knobby as E.T.'s.

Hanging above the toilet are two framed magazines. There is a Nation cover with the logo, "The Conscience of a Neoconservative." The Nation, obviously, thought Moynihan had no conscience -- the cover drawing shows the senator wearing a holster with a couple of six-shooters and a bullet strap loaded with tiny missiles. The other cover is from The New Republic with a smiling Moynihan under the logo, "Pat Moynihan, Neo-Liberal."

"Well . . . there you see . . . the value of labels."

Like so much drizzle on a hot street, Moynihan's patience evaporates. As far as he is concerned, the subject can be dismissed.

And so he turns his attention to an ornate relief map of New York State that hangs on another wall in the bathroom. His finger wanders from the plains of west New York to the rivers converging in Pennsylvania.

"Well!" he says. "Would you like to see how the Indians got to Pittsburgh?"

Moynihan's mythology of self is a thing to behold. His daughter Maura grew up on it: "the myth of Dad. When we were growing up we'd recount with reverence how he shined shoes in Times Square and became the ambassador to India. We thought it was extraordinary! The American dream. He'd always say, 'This country has been good to me.' "

Moynihan's version of his public life also has a mythological quality.

When he was in the Nixon White House he pushed a liberal Family Assistance Program and tried to get Nixon to read, and emulate, Britain's progressive Tory, 19th-century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. "I gave him books about progressive conservatives," Moynihan says. "After all, half the legislation Reagan is now trying to repeal was enacted under Nixon."

But of Nixon's darker side, Moynihan says he never saw it. "I was half a world away" in India as U.S. ambassador during Watergate. Furthermore, he saw the 1972 election not as a matter of Republican versus Democrat, but of a moderate Nixon versus a far-out McGovern.

But after Scoop Jackson died in 1983, Moynihan never stepped into the breach as the national neoconservative. "When he first got to the Senate I thought he might run for president," says Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.). "But not lately. The ambition to do that isn't there."

Moynihan says the presidential talk never came from him. "It should be recorded that no conversation ever took place with me. If there had been I would have said no. I was not interested in that."

Why not?

"I'm very sorry! I think people should have to explain why they think they should be president, not why not. You have to think you'd be a good president. Anyone who thinks that has a lot of explaining to do. If you're of the view that there are people who could do the job better than you, well . . . It's not something I've ever thought of doing. I very much wanted to be a senator. Well, once I got to be one I very much wanted to be one . . . I'm not interested in being an astronaut, or in commanding a nuclear submarine, either. You don't have to explain that. A senator -- that's a useful job."

Moynihan adores the life of a senator, and many of his critics even contend that his shift to the left was a deliberate attempt to keep the favor of New York voters. To prevent a challenge from the left in the 1982 election, Russert went around to various county organizations hyping Moynihan's more liberal positions and his work for the state. In the meantime Russert discovered that the chief threat from the Republican side, former congressman Bruce Caputo, had lied about his military record. Exit Caputo. "We did a little accounting after the election," Moynihan says with glee, "and we found that we won 50 of 62 counties in 1982. I'm the only New York Democrat to do that."

New York political analysts say that Moynihan's opposition in 1988 is bound to come once more from conservative opponents such as Lewis Lehrman.

Since the death of Jackson and the electoral defeat of the late Jacob Javits in 1980, Moynihan has had few close friends in the Senate. He spends time occasionally with Bradley, Gary Hart (D-Colo.), Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and a few others, but he is something of a Senate loner, an intellectual among politicians. Another Senate loner, Hart, says, "You just don't become a buddy with Pat overnight. Patrick is clearly a prophet, and, frankly, he's not always appreciated. He's one of our few people with a sense of history. Intellectuals are not always appreciated here."

Although he seems to write a serious book nearly every year -- one year on arms control, another on the welfare state -- Moynihan's reputation in the less intellectual senatorial skills -- legislative initiative, cajolery, mixing with the constituents, the dull details of Capitol life -- is middling at best.

Staffers say Moynihan's working days follow a pattern more reminiscent of a 19th-century don than that of a state-of-the-art senator. Often, he has trouble sleeping and will write in the middle of the night. He is grouchy and impatient at work in the morning. "He's impossible most mornings," says a former aide. For two or three hours after lunch, he retreats to his "hideaway" for a nap on the couch or some writing. He follows that with a couple hours more of work at the office in the afternoon. "Moynihan just doesn't have the patience or the passion for all the detail work," says one former aide. "And he's impossible to schedule. A lot of the time he'll be all set to go to a dinner in Buffalo or something and he'll call and say 'I just don't want to go!' And that's it. Russert was always pushing him to do more politically, but he hates it. He's a certain sort of good senator, but in other ways he just doesn't care that much. He takes an almost totally global view of his job, and the hell with the rest of it."

Occasionally an article -- in, for example, The New York Times Magazine in 1979 -- will mention the persistent rumors about Moynihan and alcohol. (Russell Baker remarked on his reputation as "a convivial imbiber of spirit and grape.") Says Moynihan, "I go home and have two or three drinks with my wife and split a bottle of claret." Asked directly if drinking was for him a problem in any way, Moynihan is quiet for a while, then says slowly, "No. I hope not. Here I am, 59 years old . . . without a day's break since 1965 or 1964. A steady life -- one wife, three kids, three mortgages."

Says Russert, "I've heard that stuff and generally it's from people who are either jealous or oppose him. As a senator or a campaigner he's always been 100 percent."

If Moynihan has any political problems they are rooted in the contrast in style and substance between him and the junior senator in his state, Alfonse D'Amato, a Long Island Republican who displaced Javits. When he first came to the Senate, Moynihan could not have seemed any less "local" than his colleague Javits. But with the advent of D'Amato, Moynihan seems an almost wholly national and international figure. D'Amato rarely misses a ribbon cutting.

Moynihan is cool to D'Amato. During one late-afternoon interview, a piercing buzzer in his office summons Moynihan to the floor for a vote. On his way out of the chamber after the vote, D'Amato passes by. Moynihan exchanges greetings with a few other senators -- "Well, well, hello, hello!" -- but he and D'Amato do not even acknowledge each other.

They both walk to the Senate subway, first D'Amato, then Moynihan. They are waiting for the little Senate trains to shuttle them back to the Russell Building, but they wait at separate tracks.

No waves, no hellos.

Moynihan's public insouciance masks a great deal of personal pain and trial in his life.

The myth is that it doesn't hurt.

He is the son of Margaret Phipps, the daughter of a successful trial attorney, and John Moynihan, a peripatetic newspaperman who preferred the bottle and the track to family responsibility. John Moynihan worked as a publicity man at RKO for most of Moynihan's childhood, and the family lived in a middle-class neighborhood in Queens.

But one day, when Pat was 11, John Moynihan bolted the family. Moynihan, his mother, his sister Ellen and his brother Michael had to move to cold-water flats in Yorkville and the Upper West Side. They moved a lot to take advantage of the one month's free rent offered by some New York landlords. Pat shined shoes around Times Square.

Moynihan, who has been married to the former Elizabeth Brennan since they were aides in the Harriman administration three decades ago, seems not to have talked about his difficult childhood even with his three grown children. "He never discussed it all when we were kids -- never, never," Maura Moynihan says. "I never saw a picture of John Moynihan and I know nothing about him. Just that he was supposed to be witty and talented."

Moynihan's economic fortunes continued to fluctuate throughout his adolescence. After several years of financial struggle, his mother married again and the family moved to the suburbs. After that marriage disintegrated the Moynihans moved in with relatives sw,-2 sk,2 in Indiana. The family later moved back to New York, where Margaret Moynihan opened a bar in the Hell's Kitchen area when Moynihan was 20. Moynihan's old campaign biography says he was "raised in New York City's Hell's Kitchen District," a phrase that was later dropped.

Moynihan graduated first from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem and was voted the most popular boy in his class. Before entering City College in the fall Moynihan worked on the Hudson River docks, first as a stevedore, then as a checker. An oft-repeated anecdote from that period in his life is full of swagger:

"A friend told me about the qualifying examination for City College and mainly to prove to myself that I was as smart as I thought I was, I went up and took the test. I remember playing it very tough -- I swaggered into the test room with my longshoreman's loading hook sticking out of my back pocket. I wasn't going to be mistaken for a sissy college kid."

Moynihan's account is part truth, part mythology. Even Doug Schoen, who has since become a pollster for Moynihan, wrote in his mainly adoring biography, "Pat," that Moynihan was admitted to college on the strength of his grades in high school. "Moynihan may have confused his admission to City College with his entrance into the Navy officer's training program," Schoen wrote.

Moynihan's Navy training took place at Middlebury College in Vermont, and it was there that he began to see the way the upper half lives. He began meeting boys from Andover and Exeter. At Tufts, where he finally earned his B.A. and before shipping off for a stint in the Navy, the education had a similar class tone.

All of Moynihan's hurts, his careening from one place and economic situation to another, were suspended and eased in 1950 when he won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the London School of Economics. With money coming in from both the scholarship and the GI Bill, Moynihan loved the situation:

"I was living abroooad . . . and had plenty of monnnney and had no! thing! to! do! There were no classes, there were no exams."

Sander Vanocur, now a correspondent for ABC News in Washington, met Moynihan when they were both young and living in London:

"Pat seemed to me the richest man in the world in those days. And one of the happiest. He was so absorbed in the place. He would talk for hours about the doors in Regency architecture, knew everything about it. One day he got me to jump over a fence with him on High Street, Kensington, and sneak into the Holland House where the Whig aristocracy used to meet. He made the place come alive.

"Pat was loved by the English. He was an American -- so out front and full of life."

Moynihan came back to the United States an Anglophile. He is partial to Cockney pub songs such as "The Lambeth Walk," odd British evening slippers, English soaps, colognes, cheeses, mustards and ales. He used to stuff his handkerchief up his jacket sleeve in the British mode, but that mannerism has disappeared.

"When Dad was ambassador to India I was interested in the Hindu era, Mom was interested in the Mogul era and Dad was interested in the Raj," says Maura Moynihan.

A photo of Moynihan reviewing an honor guard of Indian Gurkha soldiers 13 years ago shows the new ambassador wearing a bowler on his pate and a carnation in his lapel. He looks as though he were meeting Mountbatten in Raj heaven.

"But I like Irish things, too," he adds quickly. On his office wall is a landscape by Jack Yeats. "It's a beauty, isn't it?"

Seven years ago in The Nation, Fred Powledge wrote a "journalist's apologia" for a favorable piece he wrote on Moynihan in a 1967 issue of Life magazine.

"I should have caught on when . . . I saw him unlimber an Abercrombie & Fitch fly-fishing outfit, complete with rod, reel, little hat and dry martini, to pursue trout in a mud puddle," Powledge wrote. "He was, I realized then, a cartoon, not the real stuff."

Moynihan, for all his theater, is nothing at all like a cartoon. The Anglophile reviewing Gurkhas, the department-store fisherman, the stammering academic pol, these are cartoons. And funny ones, too. But in an era of techno-politicians, legislators without flair or intellectual adventure, he is unique on Capitol Hill.

*Moynihan, who was abandoned by his own father, has spent much intellectual energy and political capital working on the deepening problems of single-parent families. And yet he resists discussing the past and the notion that his present work reflects a private hurt:

"Oh, oh, it's not something I talk about very much. I was not abandoned. It was not something that happened, like an automobile accident; it was stretched out, it took place over time . . . It was not a traumatic event.

"It wasn't a traditional breakup. The husband wasn't functioning very well, and just went off. It was more in the nature of a divorce. The problem now is the institutionalization of a single-parent home."

After a conference on the underclass and family earlier this month in New York, Moynihan had some time to kill before flying back to Washington. He spent it going door to door at a welfare hotel near Union Square. He was struck by the sight of 12-year-old girls holding their own babies, and the human problems represented in those images.

"The truth is, we are in a lot of trouble," says Moynihan. "And if there's one thing basic to all this it's that you cannot experiment with social policy. You can't do that with citizens. When you cite a problem, and ask the questions, you'd better hope the answers are the right ones. People's lives are at stake!"

  ¶ Wednesday, September 15, 2004