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+{"text":"\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012 by Jeffrey Toobin\n\nAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.\n\nwww.doubleday.com\n\nDOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.\n\nA portion of this work was previously published in slightly different form in _The New Yorker_.\n\n_Jacket design by John Fulbrook III_  \n _Jacket photographs: President Obama \u00a9 Kwaku Alston\/Corbis Outline;_  \n _Justice Roberts \u00a9 Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images;_  \n _columns \u00a9 Jurgen Vogt\/Getty Images_\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  \nToobin, Jeffrey.  \nThe oath : the Obama White House and the Supreme Court \/ Jeffrey Toobin.  \np. cm.  \nIncludes bibliographical references.  \n1. United States. Supreme Court\u2014History\u201421st century. 2. United States\u2014Politics and government\u20142009\u2013 3. Constitutional history\u2014United States. 4. Political questions and judicial power\u2014United States\u2014History\u201421st century. 5. Obama, Barack. 6. Roberts, John G., 1955\u2013 I. Title.  \nKF8742.T66 2012  \n347.73\u203226090512\u2014dc23 2012029205\n\neISBN: 978-0-385-53630-1\n\nv3.1\nTo McIntosh, of course\n\n# CONTENTS\n\n#\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\nPrologue: The Oaths\n\nPART ONE\n\n1. The Politician's Path\n\n2. \"On Behalf of the Strong in Opposition to the Weak\"\n\n3. The Era of Good Feelings\n\n4. The Legacy of Appendix E\n\n5. The Ballad of Lilly Ledbetter\n\n6. The War Against Precedent\n\nPART TWO\n\n7. The Hunter\n\n8. Lawyers, Guns, and Money\n\n9. The Unrequited Bipartisanship of Barack Obama\n\n10. Wise Latina\n\nPART THREE\n\n11. Money Talks\n\n12. Samuel Alito's Question\n\n13. The Rookie\n\n14. The Ninety-Page Swan Song of John Paul Stevens\n\n15. \"With All Due Deference to Separation of Powers\"\n\nPART FOUR\n\n16. The Retired Justices Dissent\n\n17. Softball Politics\n\n18. The Tea Party and the Justice's Wife\n\n19. The Thomas Court\n\n20. \"Democracy Is Not a Game\"\n\nPART FIVE\n\n21. \"You Should Do It\"\n\n22. Broccoli\n\n23. The \"Effective\" Argument\n\nEpilogue: The Roberts Court\n\n_Illustrations_\n\n_Other Books by This Author_\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\n_Notes_\n\n_Bibliography_\n\n_Photo Credits_\n\n_About the Author_\n\n# **PROLOGUE**\n\n#    \n**THE OATHS**\n\nSo let me ask you this,\" Greg Craig said, \"does anyone there think he's _not_ the president?\"\n\nIt was about 10:30 on the morning of January 21, 2009. Craig was settling into his first day of work as counsel to the president when he received an unexpected phone call.\n\nDavid Barron was on the line. He, too, had just reported for duty, as the second-in-command in the Office of Legal Counsel, which served as the in-house legal team for the attorney general\u2013designate, Eric Holder.\n\nIn the excitement and chaos of the previous day\u2014when Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States\u2014neither Craig nor Barron had paid much attention to the peculiar way Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had administered the oath of office. Early the next morning, Barron had read several newspaper articles about the botched oath and decided to look into the issue. He was concerned enough about what he found to place the call to Craig.\n\nSo was Obama really the president?\n\nBarron's answer was, well, complicated.\n\nThe Constitution for the most part speaks in majestic generalities and employs the first person\u2014\"I\" and \"my\"\u2014in only a single provision. Article II, Section 1, states: \"Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: 'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' \"\n\nArticle I of the Constitution, which defines the powers of Congress, is more than twice as long as Article II, about the presidency. This difference reflected the framers' belief that the legislative branch of government would be the most powerful. (Article III, which creates the judicial branch, is just 376 words, half again as short as Article II.) Still, the inclusion of a formal oath in the constitutional text reflected the importance of the presidency\u2014and, more to the point, the president. It is the only oath spelled out in the Constitution. In contrast, the vice presidential oath was established by act of Congress, and the current version has been in use only since 1884.\n\nThe model for the framers was England's Coronation Oath, which had been promulgated in 1689, but the differences between the two oaths were as significant as the similarities. The King had to swear before a bishop or archbishop in the Church of England; there was no such requirement in the United States, and George Washington began the tradition of judicial administration of the oath in 1789. New York chancellor Robert Livingston conducted the first inauguration. (At that point, of course, Washington had not had the chance to nominate anyone to the Supreme Court, and it was four years later that a justice, William Cushing, swore in Washington for his second term.) The ecumenical nature of the presidential oath is reflected also in the option of \"swear (or affirm).\" Some Christian sects, notably the Quakers, did not believe in the use of the word \"swearing,\" so the Constitution made sure they were not excluded. (Only Franklin Pierce, in 1853, chose to affirm his presidential oath.)\n\nMany of the traditions associated with the inauguration began with Washington, as the first president knew they would. \"As the first of everything in _our situation_ will serve to establish a precedent, it is devoutly wished on my part that these precedents may be fixed on true principles,\" Washington wrote to James Madison shortly after his inauguration. On the occasion, which took place April 30, 1789, on the steps of Federal Hall, in lower Manhattan, Washington took the oath from a judge, not a cleric; he wore civilian garb, not a military uniform; he placed his hand on a Bible as he recited the words; he gave a brief, inspirational speech immediately after the ceremony; he made sure that any citizen who so desired could attend and view the swearing in. Washington Irving, who was six years old in 1789 but apparently a spectator at the inauguration, recounted in the 1850s that the new president had concluded the oath by saying, \"So help me God.\" No contemporary account mentioned Washington's use of that phrase, and it remains unclear whether he did. In any event, all modern presidents have chosen to follow the oath with those words.\n\nLike many other aspects of American government, the administration of the presidential oath evolved in a haphazard manner. In 1797, Oliver Ellsworth became the first chief justice to administer the oath (to John Adams), and thus the tradition began of the nation's highest legal officer performing the honors. But sometimes he didn't. (John Tyler and Millard Fillmore were sworn in by lower court judges.) Assassinations led to improvisations. Following the murder of James A. Garfield, in 1881, Chester A. Arthur was sworn in by a judge of the New York Supreme Court; following William McKinley's death, in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath from a federal district court judge. Most famously, Sarah T. Hughes, a federal district judge in Texas, administered the oath to Lyndon B. Johnson, on Air Force One, on November 22, 1963. Sentiment sometimes played a part, too. Calvin Coolidge took the oath from a lowly notary public\u2014John C. Coolidge, his father. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt recited the full oath without interruption by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.\n\nNotwithstanding the constitutional text, the precise words of the oath varied over time. When Chief Justice William Howard Taft swore in Herbert Hoover in 1929, he said, \"preserve, maintain, and defend\" the Constitution. The error was largely ignored at the time, but a thirteen-year-old girl who had been listening on the radio wrote to the chief justice about it. Taft responded, and disclosed still another, earlier mistake. \"When I was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Fuller, he made a similar slip,\" Taft wrote to the girl, Helen Terwilliger, \"but in those days when there was no radio, it was observed only in the Senate chamber where I took the oath.... You are mistaken in your report of what I did say. What I said was 'preserve, maintain and protect.'... You may attribute the variation to the defect of an old man's memory.\" In 1945, Harlan Fiske Stone began the oath with \"I, Harry Shipp Truman...\" Truman, who had a middle initial but no middle name, responded, \"I, Harry S Truman...\" Twenty years later, Lyndon Johnson forgot to raise his right hand until halfway through the oath, and Chief Justice Earl Warren said \"office of the Presidency,\" not \"President.\"\n\nOn the morning of January 21, 2009, David Barron had only a brief chance to dip into this peculiar corner of American history. What mattered more to him than these historical curiosities was the law, which was... not entirely clear. A professor on leave from Harvard Law School (one of many in the new administration), Barron recognized quickly that there was no single authoritative source to instruct him about the legal significance of the oath. For starters, it wasn't even apparent whether the oath mattered at all. Under the Twentieth Amendment, George W. Bush's term ended at noon on January 20. The electoral college had met and certified Obama as the winner of the election. Thus, Obama may have become president the previous day at noon, even if he never took the oath. But the Constitution also said that \" _before_ he enter on the execution of his office, he _shall_ \" take the oath. The Constitution, of course, abounds in such ambiguities.\n\nSo, like any other good lawyer, Barron looked for precedents. There was no Supreme Court ruling on the subject, but the Office of Legal Counsel issues formal opinions on a variety of matters, and Barron found one from 1985, regarding presidential succession. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1967, lays out what happens when a president dies or becomes incapacitated. The OLC opinion noted that, although the Constitution, \"which sets forth the Presidential oath, is not entirely clear on the effect of taking the oath, the weight of history and authority suggests that taking the oath is not a necessary step prior to the assumption of the office of President and is not an independent source of Presidential power. It is, nonetheless, an obligation imposed on the President by the Constitution, and should be one of the first acts performed by the new President.\" So taking the oath was recommended but not mandatory\u2014probably.\n\nFor Barron and his colleagues at OLC, this was not just an abstract legal problem. There was a political dimension as well. Obama had made commitment to the rule of law a centerpiece of his campaign. How would it look if he skirted the rules on the oath? Perhaps more importantly, what would Obama's political adversaries do? Article II also states that \"no Person except a natural born Citizen\" is eligible to be president, and a persistent group of critics claimed that Obama was not, in fact, born in Hawaii in 1961. Was it wise to tempt another potential constitutional challenge to his qualification to serve as president?\n\nBarron, too, saw the issue of the oath in the context of larger developments in constitutional law. Starting in the 1960s, liberals on the Supreme Court and elsewhere developed a theory built around the idea of \"unenumerated rights.\" Even if a right was not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, the Court could draw on the implications of the explicit provisions of the Constitution, prior decisions, and the broader evolution of American society, to expand the liberties of Americans. Most famously (or notoriously) during this period, the Court recognized a constitutional right to privacy, which became the basis for protecting a woman's right to choose abortion.\n\nIn recent years, though, the doctrine of unenumerated rights had come under ferocious attack by conservatives. On the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had led the charge for what became known as \"textualism,\" which said that if the Constitution did not explicitly create a right, it did not exist. A close cousin to textualism was originalism, which asserted that the words of the Constitution must be interpreted as they were understood by the men who wrote and ratified it. Under either textualism or originalism, there was no such thing as a right to privacy and, of course, no constitutional right to abortion.\n\nAs Barron knew, textualism was ascendant, and that might have implications for the presidential oath. There might be judges out there who took a literal\u2014a textual\u2014approach to the oath of office. If Obama had not said the precise words mandated by Article II, perhaps\u2014just perhaps\u2014he was not actually the president. And on that ground, any formal action Obama took might be challenged in court. At a minimum, some federal district judge might be tempted to hold a hearing on the issue. Such a legal proceeding would be a distraction, to say the least. That, certainly, was not how Obama wanted to spend his first days in office.\n\nAll in all, Barron told Craig, it might be a good idea for Roberts and Obama to redo the oath and get it right.\n\nGreg Craig listened in amazement as Barron spelled out his concerns. It was at that point that Craig realized that he was missing a key fact. At the moment Obama took the oath the previous day, Craig had been standing by the doorway to the Capitol, awaiting the new president, who would sign a ceremonial proclamation before heading inside to the luncheon. Craig had been sufficiently distracted that he barely heard the oath or Obama's inaugural address.\n\nSo almost twenty-four hours later, Craig had to ask himself: What exactly _did_ Obama and Roberts say?\n\n_It's that time again!_\n\nIn September 2008, well before Election Day, Cami Morrison sent that message to Vanessa Yarnall. Morrison was usually a staffer for the Senate sergeant at arms, but she had been detailed to the newly reconstituted Joint Congressional Inaugural Committee. Yarnall was the assistant to Jeffrey Minear, the counselor to the chief justice and his chief aide for all nonjudicial matters. Morrison and Yarnall had worked together on the presidential inauguration of 2005, and they were now starting to plan the events of January 20, 2009.\n\nYarnall knew that the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had taken a methodical approach to the oath, and she started reassembling the paperwork he had last used. Rehnquist had sworn in five presidents, and he took an extra step to make sure that he and the president would be on the same page. Shortly before the inauguration, Rehnquist sent the White House counsel a card illustrating how he would divide up the words. In 2001, the card read:\n\nPRESIDENT'S OATH\n\nI, GEORGE WALKER BUSH, DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR\/\/\n\nTHAT I WILL FAITHFULLY EXECUTE THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES\/\/\n\nAND WILL TO THE BEST OF MY ABILITY\/\/\n\nPRESERVE, PROTECT AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.\/\/\n\nSO HELP ME GOD.\n\nOn December 10, 2008, Yarnall sent Morrison a PDF of Rehnquist's oath card. She removed Bush's name and left a space for Obama's name. In her e-mail, Yarnall asked how Roberts should address the new president: With his middle name? Just middle initial? Just first and last? Yarnall and her boss, Minear, assumed that Morrison would forward the card to representatives of the president-elect. They were wrong. Morrison either never noticed the PDF, lost it, ignored it, or forgot about it. In any case, the oath card never reached anyone on Barack Obama's staff.\n\nOn December 15, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Congressional Inaugural Committee, formally invited Roberts to administer the oath of office to Obama. The chief justice quickly accepted, and Feinstein's letter prompted him to sit down with Minear and discuss the ceremony for the first time. They went over Rehnquist's oath card with care. They added a comma after the word \"ability.\" They discussed whether \"So help you God\" was a question or a statement. And since Yarnall's questions to Morrison had gone unanswered, they wondered what name Obama wanted to use. On December 17, Minear e-mailed Greg Craig to introduce himself and ask about Obama's name and \"So help me God.\" Craig wrote back that the president-elect was on vacation, so it might take a few days for an answer.\n\nOn December 30, Michael Newdow filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington seeking to prevent Roberts from referring to \"God\" following the oath of office. In 2002, Newdow became famous when he won a ruling in the Ninth Circuit court of appeals that the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools should not include the phrase \"under God.\" (The Supreme Court later overturned that decision on procedural grounds.) The Justice Department lawyers handling Newdow's latest case asked Minear to file an affidavit about how the chief justice would be administering the oath. But Minear had still not heard back from Craig. This time, Minear reached Craig by phone. Craig said that Obama wanted to include his middle name in the oath and that Roberts should say \"So help you God\" as a question. On January 8, 2009, Minear included Craig's responses in an affidavit in the Newdow lawsuit, which was quickly dismissed by a local federal judge.\n\nCraig's answers allowed Minear to put Roberts's presidential oath card into final form. It now read:\n\nPRESIDENT'S OATH\n\nI, BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR\/\/\n\nTHAT I WILL FAITHFULLY EXECUTE THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,\/\/\n\nAND WILL TO THE BEST OF MY ABILITY,\/\/\n\nPRESERVE, PROTECT AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.\/\/\n\nSO HELP YOU GOD?\n\nVanessa Yarnall e-mailed the revised version to Cami Morrison, who again did not pass it along to the president-elect's team. Indeed, in the days leading up to the inauguration, neither Obama himself, Craig, nor anyone else associated with them knew that the card existed.\n\nAt this point, with the text in final form, John Roberts set about memorizing the oath.\n\nThere never was a student like John Roberts at the La Lumiere School in LaPorte, Indiana, a quiet town near Lake Michigan, on the outer edges of the gravitational pull of Chicago. It was a Catholic school, but it was independent of any order or diocese; the founders, all laymen, built the institution around an ideal of academic excellence.\n\nRoberts was not just the valedictorian of the class of 1973. He served as captain of the football team, a varsity wrestler, member of both the student council and the drama club. (He played Peppermint Patty in _You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown_ ; the school was all boys in Roberts's day.) He continued taking Latin, as a tutorial, after the school dropped the language as a requirement. La Lumiere had a traditional curriculum, but there was one slight novelty. Every year, the students were expected to participate in what was known as a declamation contest, where they would write and memorize their own speeches. In this Roberts excelled, too.\n\nOver time, Roberts became famous for his superb memory. As a lawyer, both in the solicitor general's office and in private practice, he was known as perhaps the finest Supreme Court advocate of his generation. But it was not just his arguments that dazzled. Roberts's personality inspired confidence, especially because when he stepped to the podium to argue before the justices, Roberts brought nothing with him\u2014no pad, no notes. He carried the facts and the law of each case in his head.\n\nRoberts relied on his memory\u2014and, as always, hard work\u2014in preparing to administer the oath. He rehearsed many times. He recited the words so often at his home in suburban Maryland that he irritated his wife. \"At this point the dog thinks it's the president,\" Jane Roberts told her husband.\n\nOn the late afternoon of January 13, 2009, Roberts went to the west front of the Capitol for a walk-through of the inauguration. A handful of congressional staffers showed him his assigned seat and told him when and where he would stand. Toward the end of the meeting, one of the aides offered a card to Roberts with the text of the oath. Did he want to rehearse?\n\n\"That's OK,\" Roberts said, declining the text, \"I know the oath.\"\n\nA week later, on the morning of the inauguration, the justices gathered at the Supreme Court for a small reception, before heading across First Street as a group to the Capitol. The chief justice is a largely invisible figure to most Americans, except for this single appearance every four years. Roberts seemed uncharacteristically subdued as he waited.\n\nA throng of more than a million people filled the National Mall all the way to the Washington Monument. At the stroke of noon, Dianne Feinstein introduced Roberts and asked the audience to stand. (Feinstein called Roberts by his correct title, chief justice of the United States; four years earlier, Trent Lott, in the same role, managed two breaches of protocol in less than a minute. He incorrectly called Rehnquist the chief justice of the Supreme Court and then summoned him to the podium as \"Justice Rehnquist.\" Rehnquist was a stickler for being called \"Chief Justice.\")\n\n\"That's for you,\" Obama whispered to his wife, Michelle, as she reached for the \"Lincoln Bible,\" which had last been used when the sixteenth president placed his hand upon it in 1861.\n\n\"Are you prepared to take the oath, Senator?\" Roberts said.\n\n\"I am,\" said Obama.\n\nRoberts raised his right hand at a crisp right angle. Unlike Rehnquist, Roberts did not carry a copy of the oath in his left hand. The chief justice began, \"I, Barack Hussein Obama, do so\u2014\"\n\nObama jumped in and began to recite, \"I, Barack...\"\n\nRoberts and Obama clearly had different ideas about whether \"do solemnly swear\" would be included. Roberts's oath card included \"do solemnly swear\" in the first line\u2014but Obama had never seen this text.\n\nRecognizing that he had interrupted Roberts, Obama paused to let Roberts continue. Obama then recited correctly, \"I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear.\"\n\nBut Roberts\u2014most uncharacteristically\u2014became flustered when he thought that Obama had jumped the gun and interrupted him, and he said next, \"That I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully.\" \"To\" the United States? \"Faithfully\" after United States? Obama gave a half smile. He could tell it was wrong.\n\n\"That I will execute...\" Obama said, but then he saw that Roberts was again trying to speak, endeavoring to salvage the situation on the fly.\n\n\"The off\u2014\" Roberts stumbled again. \"Faithfully the office of President of the United States.\" This time he had left out \"execute.\"\n\nObama was confused. He said, \"the office of President of the United States faithfully\"\u2014incorrectly putting \"faithfully\" at the end of the sentence. The two men finally put that troublesome phrase behind them.\n\n\"And will to the best of my ability,\" Roberts said.\n\n\"And will to the best of my ability,\" Obama repeated.\n\n\"Preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,\" Roberts said quickly, trying to finish without further problems.\n\nObama repeated.\n\n\"So help you God?\"\n\n\"So help me God.\"\n\n\"Congratulations, Mr. President,\" Roberts said, extending his hand. \"All the best wishes.\"\n\nNow what? Craig wondered.\n\nLater on January 21\u2014in a few minutes, in fact\u2014Obama was to sign a series of executive orders and presidential memorandums relating to government ethics. He was going to freeze the salaries of White House staffers making more than $100,000 a year and establish new rules to limit lobbying by former government officials. But it was the events planned for January 22 that really worried Craig. Obama was scheduled to sign a lengthy executive order to begin the process of closing the detention facility at Guant\u00e1namo Bay. As a private lawyer, staffer to Senator Edward Kennedy, and Clinton-era State Department official, Craig had a long commitment to the cause of international human rights. Obama's passion for the subject drew Craig to support the young senator over Hillary Clinton in the primaries, even though Craig had known her for decades and served in her husband's administration. Many times during the campaign, Obama had pledged to close Guant\u00e1namo. The last thing Craig wanted to do was undermine Obama's authority to take this action.\n\nCraig's deputy, Daniel Meltzer, another professor at Harvard Law School, had not yet arrived in Washington, so Craig called him in Cambridge for his advice. Given the political tensions surrounding everything in Washington, especially Guant\u00e1namo, it was possible that someone might demand a hearing on whether Obama was president and thus had the right to close Guant\u00e1namo. In the end, the new administration would probably win such a hearing, but legal proceedings had ways of taking on lives of their own. How would they \"prove\" Obama was president? Would they have to call witnesses? How long would this take? Would there be appeals? What would happen in the meantime?\n\nMeltzer agreed that the safer course was to redo the oath. But that raised other questions. How? When? Where? Perhaps most importantly, by whom? They thought about asking a federal district judge to do it quickly and privately. Craig had been a law partner of Ellen Segal Huvelle, now a judge in Washington, and wondered if he should ask her to come to the White House. On further reflection, though, he and Meltzer decided that the better course was to be open about the whole process\u2014and to ask the chief justice to do it again. (David Barron, at the Justice Department, had largely withdrawn from the discussion. Later he would reflect, with dark humor, that he had probably managed to annoy _both_ the president and the chief justice on his very first day of work.)\n\nCraig went downstairs in the West Wing to talk to David Axelrod, the president's top political adviser. Axelrod deferred to Craig's legal judgment about the necessity of the redo and agreed that the process should be open and include the chief justice, if possible. Still, they both wanted to downplay the event's significance. So Axelrod came up with a phrase to explain what they were doing: \"out of an abundance of caution.\" Around lunchtime, Craig and Axelrod went up to the residence, where Obama was receiving visitors, to brief him and get his approval for the plan.\n\nAt 1:18 p.m., Obama entered Room 450, an auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House complex. When Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden walked into the room, the crowd of about thirty new appointees rose to their feet, which is customary when the president enters a room. At this point, though, Obama was startled by the gesture. \"Please be seated,\" he said with a slightly embarrassed smile. \"I'm still getting used to that whole thing. Please be seated.\"\n\nObama was supposed to sign the orders on government ethics, but he went to the lectern and introduced Biden: \"Joe, do you want to administer the oath?\"\n\nBiden was surprised and puzzled by the request. \"Am I doing this again?\" he asked. He was then informed that he would be giving the oath to the senior staff. \"For the senior staff, all right,\" Biden said. Never one to leave a silence unfilled, he then added, \"My memory is not as good as Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts.\"\n\nThere was no mistaking Biden's reference. The assembled staffers muttered a collective \"woooo,\" followed by outright laughter. Biden smiled, and asked for the card with the oath.\n\nBarack Obama had by this point constructed a public image of imperturbability, earning the well-deserved nickname of No Drama Obama. But Biden had irritated Obama. The president scowled, shook his head in clear disapproval, and then reached out toward Biden, almost pushing him away from the microphone. Obama knew\u2014as Biden did not know\u2014that the oath had been botched so badly that his staff was just then asking the chief justice to conduct a do-over. Obama wouldn't want anyone making fun of Roberts at this moment. Moreover, Obama had better manners than Biden. It was not the kind of joke the new president would ever make. (Biden later called Roberts to apologize.)\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nGreg Craig had made the awkward phone call to Minear, the aide to Chief Justice Roberts, who didn't hide his surprise. You want to do _what_? You want to do it _when_? Craig made clear that they would like the chief justice to come by the White House as soon as possible. Minear said he would have to check but quickly called back to say the chief justice would be pleased to stop by the White House on his way home from work.\n\nSoon, in other words. Craig then called Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, to tell him that Roberts would be arriving shortly to readminister the oath.\n\n_What the fuck did you just say?_ Gibbs replied.\n\nCraig repeated his news.\n\nGibbs was flabbergasted. When reporters had asked about the stumbles in the oath, he had directed his staff to check it out with the counsel's office. That particular game of telephone resulted in word getting back to Gibbs that the White House regarded the gaffes as no big deal. For the last twenty-four hours, Gibbs had been repeating that guidance to anyone who asked.\n\nNow\u2014Craig told him\u2014they were about to redo the presidential oath for apparently the first time in American history. The press secretary was furious with Craig. Did you think that might be newsworthy? When did you think you might get around to telling me this?\n\nGibbs raced to the office of Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and told him they needed to decide how to tell the press what was happening, and where. And they had to do it immediately.\n\nGibbs, Craig, Axelrod, and Emanuel made the decisions. The idea was not to keep the redo a secret, but not to call too much attention to it either. They agreed to conduct the ceremony in the Map Room, which is officially part of the White House residence, rather than in a working area, like the Oval Office. Presidents had long used the Map Room as a kind of hybrid, for occasions that they didn't want to recognize as presidential business but that weren't personal either. A decade earlier, for that reason, Bill Clinton gave his grand jury testimony to the Kenneth Starr investigation in the Map Room. Later, Obama would meet the Dalai Lama there, because an Oval Office meeting would have offended the Chinese government.\n\nPrecisely at 7:00, Craig met the chief justice's limousine. Roberts and Minear left the car, with Minear holding Roberts's robe. Craig offered profuse thanks, and Roberts in turn was equally gracious. \"I always believe in belt and suspenders,\" Roberts said. \"This is absolutely the right thing to do.\"\n\nGibbs had decided against television coverage of the event and instead invited only a print pool as witnesses. The pool consisted of representatives of the Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg and a rotating newspaper reporter, who happened on this day to be Wes Allison of the _St. Petersburg Times_. Gibbs lent the event an air of mystery. He told the quartet of reporters to follow him from his office in the West Wing along the colonnade to the White House residence, but he wouldn't say why until they arrived in the Map Room.\n\nThere Gibbs paused and pulled out the statement that Craig and Axelrod had prepared. It said that the White House believed that the oath had been administered \"effectively\" the previous day, but \"out of an abundance of caution,\" Roberts would be doing it again. Stunned, the reporters said nothing until Obama and Craig walked over to greet them. Smiling broadly, the president said, \"Hey guys, we decided, you know, that it was so much fun that we'd do it again.\" Obama started quizzing the members of the pool about the inaugural balls. \"How late did you stay up?\" he asked. \"Tell the truth.\" One reporter asked Obama if he had a good time. \"I had a wonderful time with my wife,\" he said. \"But she had to do it in high heels. That's something I could not imagine.\"\n\nWes Allison had had the presence of mind to turn on his Panasonic RR-US361 digital recorder, and his audio file remains the only full record of the proceedings.\n\nRoberts put on his robe, and Gibbs and Pete Souza, the White House photographer (the only photographer present), steered Obama and the chief justice to a position in front of the fireplace. The Obamas had not had a chance to put their stamp on the residence, so the portrait above the mantel was more a placeholder than an object of any special significance to the first family. The subject was Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the Capitol.\n\nStill trying to keep the tone light, Obama said, \"I don't have my Bible, but that's all right.\"\n\nObama then hesitated. Craig had brought along a copy of the oath, and he felt sure that this time Roberts would read it. Obama waited for the chief justice to pull out his own copy or take the one from Craig.\n\nRoberts had thought about bringing the text with him. It would have been the cautious thing to do. But the chief justice was a proud man. He never publicly blamed anyone but himself for botching the initial ceremony. But he didn't want to admit defeat and read the oath.\n\nObama sensed this and said, \"We're going to do it very slowly.\" Several onlookers glanced at one another with raised eyebrows. The new president was a polite man, but his remark to the chief justice had an... edge.\n\nThe second administration of the oath was completed without incident.\n\nAt that moment, standing before the fireplace, Barack Obama and John Roberts had a great deal in common. At the ages of forty-seven and fifty-three, respectively, they were probably the most accomplished members of their shared generation, and both were at the height of their powers. Even their adversaries would concede that each man possessed a powerful intellect and considerable charm. Some of the same influences and experiences shaped both the forty-fourth president and the seventeenth chief justice. Both were products of Chicago and its environs, and both were graduates of Harvard Law School. Both even served on the _Harvard Law Review_ , the student-run scholarly magazine. (Obama was president his year; Roberts was managing editor, effectively second-in-command, during his.) Both were married, neither had had a previous marriage, and each man had two young children.\n\nBut the differences between Obama and Roberts were ultimately far more significant than the similarities. Roberts came from a stable, traditional, and prosperous home, where his father was an executive at a steel mill and his mother a homemaker. Obama's father, a Kenyan, abandoned his family when his son was a toddler and then saw the boy only one more time, when Obama was ten; Obama's mother, a lifelong free spirit and intellectual searcher who grew up in Kansas, gave birth to Obama in Hawaii, spent a few years with him in Indonesia, and then left him with her parents in a Honolulu high-rise. After going to college first in Los Angeles and then graduating from Columbia, in New York, Obama made his way to Chicago to become a community organizer.\n\nChicago left entirely different marks on the two men. Obama lived in the inner city, among the poor, desperate, and Democratic; Roberts grew up among Republican burghers who lived in large and sturdy homes well insulated from the winds off the lake. Even their Harvard experiences were different; the institution changed between the time Roberts, law school class of 1979, and Obama, class of 1991, studied there. The large gap between their times in law school was due to Obama's years as an inner-city activist; it is inconceivable to imagine Roberts spending any time in that field. His years in the private sector were spent representing corporations at the powerful law firm then known as Hogan & Hartson.\n\nBut the greatest, and certainly the most important, difference between the two concerned the work of the Supreme Court. Both men gave considerable thought to the Constitution, and they reached different conclusions about its current trajectory:\n\n\u2022 One believed in change; the other in stability.\n\n\u2022 One looked forward; the other harkened back.\n\n\u2022 One was, in a real sense, a visionary; the other was, when it came to the law, a conservative.\n\nAnd in this crucial realm, the roles of the two men were the opposite of what was widely believed. It was John Roberts who was determined to use his position as chief justice as an apostle of change. He was the one who wanted to usher in a new understanding of the Constitution, with dramatic implications for both the law and the larger society. And it was Barack Obama who was determined to hold on to an older version of the meaning of the Constitution. Obama was the fellow who was, in the words of a famous conservative, standing athwart history yelling \"Stop!\"\n\nIn the previous dozen years, the United States endured a terrorist attack, economic calamity, and several wars. But the Supreme Court's rulings may leave as important a legacy. The future of politics, business, public safety, individual freedoms\u2014all hang in the balance before the justices. How will our elections be conducted? What is the place of race in American society? How much power may the federal government exercise? On those questions and many more, the Supreme Court will have greater sway than either the executive or the legislative branches of government.\n\nOver those years, the Court has been transformed by the same development that reconfigured American politics\u2014the evolution of the Republican Party. For two generations, since the liberal heyday of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court was largely controlled by the moderate wing of the Republican Party. During this period, first Lewis Powell and then Sandra Day O'Connor self-consciously tethered the Court close to the center of the political spectrum. Those justices, and indeed that part of the Republican Party, are now gone. A court now dominated by Roberts, Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. reflects the contemporary Republican Party.\n\nEven in this heady company, Roberts towers above his colleagues, conservative and liberal alike, in savvy, intelligence, and understanding of the place of the Supreme Court in American life. This was especially evident in the stunning conclusion to the Court's 2011\u201312 term, when the chief justice joined with the Court's four liberals to uphold the Affordable Care Act, the signal legislative achievement of Barack Obama's presidency. Roberts's vote, at least in the short term, was a shattering disappointment to conservatives, including his four dissenting colleagues. In spite of that vote, Roberts still believes in change\u2014but not always, and not all at once. Roberts understands that sometimes power must be tended as well as expended. The decision in _National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius_ may reward Roberts, and the conservative cause, over time. As a man in robust middle age, with life tenure, Roberts has the luxury of playing a long game, and he is.\n\nThe conservative ascendency at the Court owes much to Republican victories in presidential elections and to well-funded sponsors but also to the power of ideas. The great conservative project of the previous generation has been originalism\u2014interpreting the Constitution supposedly as its framers understood it. The conservative bugaboo in this process has been the \"living Constitution\"\u2014the idea, supposedly liberal in origin, that the meaning of the Constitution changes with the times. But in pressing originalism with such intensity and such success, conservatives have proven, perhaps unintentionally, that the Constitution does indeed live\u2014that it responds to and changes with the politics of the day.\n\nObama and Roberts embody the larger conflict. They are both honorable and intelligent, but they see the Constitution in different ways. The only certainty in the battle between them is the high stakes riding on the outcome.\n\n#  \n# **1**\n\n#    \n**THE POLITICIAN'S PATH**\n\nOn February 14, 2008, a man named Steven Kazmierczak opened fire on the campus of Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, Illinois. He killed five people, and injured twenty-one, before committing suicide. The following day, Barack Obama, the junior senator from the state and a candidate for president, was asked about the shooting at a news conference. In light of this tragedy, what did Obama think about the need for gun control, especially as it related to the Second Amendment?\n\nThe Second Amendment states: \"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.\" There was and remains unanimous agreement that the text of the amendment is ungrammatical. For more than a century, there was also agreement on what the Second Amendment meant. According to this understanding, the Second Amendment related only to the rights of citizen militias and imposed no barrier to gun control; in other words, the amendment did not give private individuals a right to bear arms.\n\nObama had a different view.\n\n\"I believe that the Second Amendment means something. I do think it speaks to an individual right,\" Obama said at his news conference following the massacre. \"There's been a long-standing argument among constitutional scholars about whether the Second Amendment referred simply to militias or whether it spoke to an individual right to possess arms. I think the latter is the better argument,\" he went on. \"There is an individual right to bear arms, but it is subject to common-sense regulation just like most of our rights are subject to common-sense regulation. And so I think there's a lot of room before you start bumping up against a constitutional barrier.\"\n\nEven a few years earlier, Obama's comments would have seemed bizarre. Since a Supreme Court case called _United States v. Miller_ , in 1939, hundreds of courts had rejected the individual rights view of the Second Amendment. But then the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party, and their allies invested their time, money, and energy in creating a new understanding of the Second Amendment. Indeed, at the time of Obama's news conference about the massacre, the Supreme Court was preparing to decide _District of Columbia v. Heller_ , a product of this long effort to create a new interpretation of the Second Amendment. The work of conservatives to change the accepted meaning of the framers' words was so successful that the recruits to the cause came to include the Chicago liberal who was a leading contender to be the Democratic nominee for president.\n\nThis, it turns out, was no surprise. Obama was an unusually well-credentialed lawyer. His life as a public figure began in 1990, when he was twenty-eight and won election as president of the _Harvard Law Review_ , the first African American to hold that position. Obama practiced law for a dozen years and taught at the University of Chicago Law School for nearly as long. But by the time he ran for president, Obama was above all a politician, and a cautious one. Obama admired the heroes of the civil rights movement, including the lawyers, but he did not model his career on theirs. Obama did not believe the courts were the principal vehicle for social and political change. Elections, rather than lawsuits, were his battlefield of choice, and by 2008 he knew that the way to win the presidency was, in part, to embrace the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment.\n\nNear the end of his memoir, _Dreams from My Father_ , which he published when he was thirty-three, Obama reflected on his education at Harvard Law School. His tone was ambivalent. \"The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power\u2014and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.\" Then, in a gesture that was common in the book, and in Obama's character, he gave the other side of the story: \"But that is not all the law is,\" he continued. \"The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.\"\n\nObama's conversation with himself continued: \"How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don't always satisfy me\u2014for every _Brown v. Board of Education_ I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.\" As before, though, Obama followed that despairing remark with a hopeful one: \"And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.\"\n\nObama arrived at Harvard after spending three years as a community organizer in Chicago. There he had led a small group in a series of fights, usually with the city government, for better housing, for asbestos abatement, and for jobs on the South Side. Like many such endeavors to organize the poor, Obama's work was difficult and not especially successful; friends and colleagues found Obama more analytical than confrontational. In time, as his frustrations mounted, Obama began thinking about going to law school. Partly, Obama simply wanted to find a way to make a decent living, but the profession also seemed well suited to his particular kind of intelligence and ambitions. He was admitted to Harvard and began his studies in the fall of 1988.\n\nObama had just turned twenty-seven, which turned out to be a fact of some significance. Most of his fellow students were considerably younger, and Obama's maturity, both chronological and temperamental, set him apart. He approached law school, as he did much else, with a certain detachment, as both participant and observer. Law school, and Harvard in particular, would leave its mark on Obama, but his core remained unchanged.\n\nThere was much truth in the conventional view of a Harvard Law School degree as a passport to Wall Street law firms, but the school also produced eminent role models for an aspiring reformer like Obama. Louis Brandeis, class of 1877, practically invented Supreme Court litigation as a vehicle for social change and, in an article in the _Harvard Law Review_ , first identified a \"right to privacy.\" Felix Frankfurter, class of 1906, provided much of the intellectual energy behind the New Deal, as well as many prot\u00e9g\u00e9s to Franklin Roosevelt, before following Brandeis on to the Supreme Court. Archibald Cox, class of 1937, joined the faculty and went on to serve as President Kennedy's solicitor general and then Watergate special prosecutor. In subsequent decades, untold numbers of Harvard Law graduates moved to Washington, and around the country, to make their marks on the policies of the day.\n\nAnd there was a time, too, when ideas, as well as people, also made the trip from the Ivy League to Washington. In the Warren Court years\u2014the years of _Brown_ \u2014leading law schools provided much of the intellectual firepower behind the Court's most liberal decisions. In _Goldberg v. Kelly_ , in 1970, the Court held for the first time that the government must give an individual a hearing before cutting off his welfare benefits. To do otherwise, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. said, would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, by depriving the individual of \"property\" without due process of law. But were welfare benefits \"property\"? In the key passage in the opinion, Brennan wrote, \"It may be realistic today to regard welfare entitlements as more like 'property' than a 'gratuity.' Much of the existing wealth in this country takes the form of rights that do not fall within traditional common-law concepts of property.\" In support of this novel notion, Brennan cited the work of Charles A. Reich, a professor at Yale Law School, and his articles in the _Yale Law Journal_. At around the same time, Frank I. Michelman, a professor at Harvard (who was still teaching when Obama was a student), suggested that the Fourteenth Amendment might require a right to economic equality, not just freedom from discrimination. The Supreme Court never went that far, but the idea was, at least for a while, plausible. To write for a law review in those days could be seen as an act of genuine political importance. Harvard's influence, though, went in cycles, and there was a down period as the country and the Supreme Court began to turn to the right in the 1970s\u2014a period that coincided with the tenure of John G. Roberts '79 on campus. Richard Nixon famously referred to Harvard as the \"Kremlin on the Charles,\" so faculty members were generally less welcomed in his administration. Conservative Supreme Court justices needed no direction from liberal academics. On the whole, in these days, the Harvard law faculty still tilted left, but the school returned its focus to its mission as a professional school. As managing editor of the _Harvard Law Review_ , Roberts was known by his colleagues as a political conservative\u2014a modest novelty among his fellow editors\u2014but mostly as a skilled and demanding taskmaster.\n\nLiberals may still have held sway in Cambridge, but conservatives were gaining in the rest of the world, and following his graduation, magna cum laude, Roberts began his Republican ascent. He clerked first in New York for Henry J. Friendly, a legendary judge of moderate Republican views on the Second Circuit, and then in 1980 for William Rehnquist, who was still an associate justice. From there, Roberts went to the Justice Department and Reagan White House. Clearly, then, the Kremlin in Cambridge could launch a brilliant conservative career as well as a liberal one.\n\nBack at the law school, in the eighties, the politics took a peculiar turn. The faculty, and to a lesser extent the student body, became bitterly divided over a movement known as Critical Legal Studies. CLS was a hybrid of traditional Marxism and contemporary literary theory; its adherents purported to expose the contradictions and class biases inherent in all aspects of law. As far back as the 1920s, \"legal realism\"\u2014which provided the intellectual basis for much of the New Deal\u2014exposed the political nature of most legal rules. But the Crits, as they were known, practiced a kind of legal realism on steroids, taking an almost nihilistic pleasure in showing the meaninglessness of law. They portrayed law as first and foremost an instrument of oppression of the disenfranchised, and they did so in a manner that was both passionate and obscure, with articles full of citations to the work of \"poststructuralists\" like Jacques Derrida. Crits and conservatives on the faculty battled over tenure appointments, and the fights sometimes spilled into the classrooms, and even into courtrooms. The Kremlin on the Charles became known as Beirut on the Charles.\n\nRoberts experienced a pre-CLS Harvard. Obama arrived just after its heyday. So it was notable that, while still in his first year, Obama sought out Laurence Tribe and went to work for him as a research assistant. The choice was a revealing one on the young student's part. Tribe was a liberal but no Crit\u2014a description that also fit his prize student. Tribe had managed to avoid the Crits-versus-conservatives warfare on the faculty, largely because he was a leading modern exemplar of the Cambridge-to-Washington axis. After writing the best single-volume treatise on the Constitution, Tribe became an accomplished Supreme Court advocate and adviser to Democratic politicians. In 1987, Tribe gave damning testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee against Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. The stand made Tribe a Republican target and doomed his own chance of winning a nomination to the Court. Still, Tribe was more than an academic; he was a player on the larger stage, the real world.\n\nObama excelled in the classroom\u2014he too would graduate magna cum laude\u2014and he succeeded in the writing competition to join the staff of the _Harvard Law Review_. Students on law reviews edit articles that are submitted by law professors around the country; about forty out of five hundred students in a class make law review at Harvard. Every February, the staff of the law review holds an election to select the president, or editor in chief, of the magazine for the following year. Obama won with broad support. Conservative students, who were a growing presence at Harvard, turned out to be the key to Obama's victory. The Federalist Society\u2014the national conservative legal organization\u2014had been founded at Yale in 1982, but Harvard soon opened a chapter, and its members asserted themselves as a vocal minority on the staff of the _Review_. The conservatives recognized that Obama was not one of their own, but they felt he would give them a fair shake, especially about which articles to publish. In winning the confidence of conservatives, Obama's maturity proved a tremendous asset. In that tumultuous time on campus, Obama always seemed slightly removed from the battle lines, in his customary posture of both observer and participant. He had an innate grasp of the politician's gift for persuading others that you agree with them without ever making an explicit commitment. Obama's earnest style earned him some mockery from his friends. One of them told David Remnick that a group would go to the movies and tease Obama by imitating his solicitude: \"Do you want salt on your popcorn? Do you even _want_ popcorn?\"\n\nSuddenly, then, with his election as president of the _Review_ , Barack Obama was a celebrity of sorts. The _New York Times_ did a story about him. Turner Broadcasting asked Obama to record a \"Black History Minute,\" and the young man, struggling with the teleprompter, gave a brief tribute to Charles Hamilton Houston, one of Thurgood Marshall's legal mentors. _Vanity Fair_ , which does not generally track the leadership of scholarly publications, devoted a full page to Obama's election. \" _The_ _New York Times_ ran a 'First Black' headline, which probably won't be the last time that label is affixed to Barack Obama,\" Elise O'Shaughnessy wrote, before concluding that Obama \"responds warily to the assumption that he himself will run for office. 'If I go into politics it should grow out of work I've done on the local level, not because I'm some media creation.' Though, as media creations go, he'd be a pretty good one.\" In addition, around this time, Jane Dystel, a literary agent in New York, approached Obama with the idea of his writing a book. Obama agreed, and signed a contract with a division of Simon & Schuster. (At that point, people embraced Obama without knowing much about him. One publisher thought he was raised in the Chicago ghetto; _Vanity Fair_ said he grew up in Singapore, not Indonesia. No one seemed to know that his real home was Honolulu.)\n\nIt was all a rather extraordinary amount of attention to a mere law student, but during his debut as a public figure, Obama demonstrated precocious political skills. \"The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,\" he told Fox Butterfield, of the _Times_. \"But it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks.\" Likewise, Obama was always careful to show respect for his forebearers in the civil rights movement, whose sacrifices, he said, made his own success possible. He told the _Boston Globe_ , \"To some extent, I'm a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made.\"\n\nBut for all that Obama showed respect for Marshall, Houston, and their peers, he also made clear in his own way what he expected of the contemporary legal system: not much. Those pioneers had used the courts to break down the legal barriers that oppressed African Americans. But by the time Obama was at Harvard, that work was mostly done. The task of legal progressives of Obama's vintage was to try to hang on to the gains that had been made in the courts\u2014and that wasn't easy, or of particular interest to him. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School into the world of the Rehnquist Court, where the social change on the agenda was (almost always) in the conservative direction. If the right was ascendant, the left was distracted\u2014with the baroque inventions of Critical Legal Studies. For someone like Obama, who had spent years working on the real-world problems of poor people in Chicago, theories untethered to reality had no appeal.\n\nLater, when Obama was a senator, he explained the nature of his disillusionment with the use of the courts for social change. It wasn't just that things looked bleak at the Rehnquist Court. \"I wondered if, in our reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but also our values, progressives had lost too much faith in democracy,\" he wrote in _The Audacity of Hope_. Yes, he pointed out that he believed in the right to privacy and celebrated the legacy of _Brown_ in civil rights, but it wasn't up to lawyers to preserve those rights. \"There was one way to ensure that judges on the bench reflected our values, and that was to win at the polls.\" Unlike his honored forebearers, Obama would devote his life to elections, not lawsuits.\n\nAlmost as soon as the president and the other new executives were elected to their positions on the masthead of the _Review_ , most of them turned their attention to obtaining judicial clerkships. Many sought opportunities with judges on the circuit courts of appeals who were known as \"feeders\" to Supreme Court clerkships. After Obama won the presidency, Abner Mikva, a former congressman from Chicago, who then served as a judge on the D.C. Circuit, sought him out as a clerk. Mikva was a feeder, and virtually all presidents of the _Harvard Law Review_ went on to clerk on the Supreme Court. But Obama turned Mikva down. It was further proof that his interests lay outside the legal system.\n\nObama's election as president of the _Review_ drew particular attention in his adopted hometown of Chicago, and an article in the _Sun-Times_ piqued the interest of a local lawyer named Judson Miner. Miner belonged to the small cadre of left-leaning Chicago lawyers who had devoted their careers to fighting the Daley machine as well as race discrimination in its many permutations in the city. At the time, Miner, who is white, had returned to his small law firm after a stint as the top lawyer on the staff of Harold Washington, who was the city's first black mayor before his sudden death in 1987. On a whim, Miner called the _Review_ , to try to speak with Obama. The receptionist corrected Miner's pronunciation of the name and told him, \"You're 643rd on the list.\" But Obama called Miner back that day. (Miner's daughter garbled the message. \"Some guy with a funny name called,\" she told him.)\n\nObama had lived in the Chicago political world long enough to know of Miner, even if he did not yet know him personally. Obama told Miner he was coming to town shortly and he would be delighted to take up Miner's invitation to meet. Obama was returning on a recruiting trip paid for by Sidley & Austin, one of the pillars of the legal establishment in the city. (Obama had worked there the previous summer and hadn't cared for the big-firm environment. Still, the summer was not a total loss, because he met an associate at the firm named Michelle Robinson, and in time they started a romance.) At this point, Obama was looking for a job after graduation, and he wanted to talk to Miner about joining his firm, then known as Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Miner's firm did the kind of civil rights and political work that interested Obama, and it offered a sufficiently flexible and informal structure that might allow him to do other things as well. Obama approached the subject in his usual methodical fashion\u2014there were about six or seven lunches with Miner, with each man interviewing the other, in a way\u2014but Obama finally agreed to sign on following his graduation. He was one of about a dozen lawyers.\n\nObama was never a conventional associate. Almost immediately, he took a leave from the firm work to run Project Vote, a voter registration drive designed to build turnout for the 1992 elections. A little while later, Obama took time off to finish the book that became _Dreams from My Father_. (It was long overdue to the publisher.) Miner brought Obama along in some civil rights cases, like a suit against Illinois to compel the state to comply with the motor voter law. There were also routine commercial disputes and a few criminal matters. Soon enough, Obama had another claim on his time. At the law review, Obama had edited an article by Michael McConnell, a conservative professor at the University of Chicago Law School. (George W. Bush later appointed McConnell to the Tenth Circuit.) McConnell was so impressed with Obama's work on the piece, which concerned freedom of religion, that he suggested that the head of the appointments committee at the law school should take a look at Obama.\n\nObama told Douglas Baird, the chair of the committee, that he wasn't interested in a tenure-track job. But the University of Chicago was so eager to have Obama on campus that the law school offered him an office and a fellowship to work on his book. Two years later, in 1993, Obama started teaching law students. Because he was effectively an adjunct professor, he was given the title of lecturer, and he continued teaching a class every semester for about a decade. Obama was an elusive presence on the Hyde Park campus; he tended to teach his classes and leave. He was not expected to do scholarly work\u2014writing law review articles and the like\u2014and he didn't attend faculty meetings. The University of Chicago long enjoyed a reputation for conservatism, especially in economics, and that was somewhat true at the law school as well. Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook were two celebrated conservatives who were appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan and kept their ties to the law school. During Obama's time, there was a substantial core of liberals on the faculty too, notably Diane Wood and Elena Kagan. Obama's relations with all factions were the same: friendly but distant.\n\nTo the extent Obama had an academic specialty, it was voting rights\u2014not surprising, given his interest in politics and his experience in the voter registration field. In the midnineties, Obama heard that a group of professors including Richard Pildes, then of the University of Michigan Law School, were preparing a casebook on what they called the law of democracy. Obama sought out Pildes, obtained a draft of the book, and used it to teach his class. The two men struck up a friendship based on their shared interest in what was then a fairly obscure field. (After _Bush v. Gore_ in 2000, the law of elections drew more public and scholarly attention.)\n\nThe hot subject in voting rights at the Supreme Court, and in the academy, was racial gerrymandering. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and its subsequent reauthorizations, forced states to draw their district lines so that African Americans would be positioned to win certain seats, both in Congress and in state legislatures. Most traditional civil rights groups, and black politicians, made a sacred cause of the creation of these so-called majority-minority districts. To them, this was the core purpose of the Voting Rights Act: to get more blacks elected to public office.\n\nObama was skeptical. After the census of 1990, Republicans, especially in the South, recognized that they could make the Voting Rights Act work for them, too. So GOP strategists joined with some black Democrats in creating overwhelmingly minority districts. As a result, black politicians won seats in several states where they had not won races since Reconstruction. At the same time these new districts drained Democratic votes from other districts\u2014making them ripe targets for Republicans. A few black politicians gained sinecures, but the Democratic Party suffered. Indeed, the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 came about in part because of losses by moderate Democrats in the South whose districts had been denuded of African American voters.\n\nTo Obama, the civil rights groups had it wrong on voting rights. Of course, Obama had no objections to blacks winning elections, but such victories alone were just symbols. He thought the point of politics was actually to accomplish something\u2014to vindicate democratic (and Democratic) values by passing laws. If black politicians just hoarded Democratic voters to stay in office, they'd never get anything done once they were there. Without coalition building, Obama told Pildes, the progressive cause was doomed.\n\nFive years after graduating from law school, in 1996, Obama began his political career by winning a seat in the state senate. Like most other Illinois legislators, Obama worked part-time for the state, and he kept up his association with Miner's firm and still taught a class every semester at the law school. At least initially, the Springfield post proved to be a disappointment to Obama. As a junior Democrat in a body run by Republicans, he had almost no power. He quickly started looking for an exit strategy. In 1999, Obama decided to challenge Bobby Rush, an incumbent congressman, in a Democratic primary. The Chicago district was exactly the kind of racial gerrymander that Obama abhorred\u2014and Rush was the kind of candidate who tended to do well in that kind of district. A former Black Panther, Rush had authenticity in abundance but little in the way of accomplishments. Still, the Democratic establishment (including President Bill Clinton) backed the incumbent, and Obama was humiliated in the 2000 primary, losing 61 percent to 30 percent.\n\nThe defeat took Obama to a personal and professional crossroads. He thought seriously (with encouragement from his wife) about dropping out of politics altogether. A job as president of a local foundation beckoned. Instead, Obama decided to dedicate himself, for the first time, to his work as a legislator. Court-ordered social change still held little allure for him, as he made clear in a 2001 interview on local Chicago public radio. Many liberals tried for years to persuade the Supreme Court to step beyond desegregation orders and direct that public schools be funded equally. Obama explained why he believed that approach had failed, citing the 1973 case of _San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez_. In _Rodriguez_ , the Court found, by a 5\u20134 vote, that unequal funding of school districts in the same state did not amount to a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As Obama described the decision, the Court \"basically slaps those kinds of claims down and says, 'You know what\u2014we as a court have no power to examine issues of redistribution and wealth inequalities with respect to schools. That's not a race issue, that's a wealth issue, and something we can't get into.' \" The Court said that it was up to legislatures, not courts, to make judgments about redistribution of wealth\u2014which was fine with Obama. \"Maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor,\" he went on, but \"the institution just isn't structured that way.\"\n\nThis was an Obama credo of sorts. To him, the courts were (or should be) static in their protection of basic rights, but he was not going to push judges and justices to create new ones. In this way, Obama differed from both liberal heroes like Thurgood Marshall and conservative icons like Antonin Scalia; they believed that the courts could deliver social change. Obama did not, and this diffidence about the role of the courts shaped his professional life and, later, his presidency.\n\nAfter Obama's defeat in the 2000 congressional race, his fortunes turned around. Just as he started paying more attention to the job in Springfield, the Democrats took control of the state senate in 2002, so he had the chance to accomplish something. He sponsored or cosponsored twenty-six successful bills in a row, including tax cuts for the lower middle class, health care for poor children, a ban on the diet supplement ephedra, and a careful compromise on racial profiling by the police. (The bill required police to record and report the race of every motorist who was stopped.) Obama decided to run for an open U.S. Senate seat in 2004. His good fortune multiplied. The candidacy of his leading opponent in the Democratic primary imploded in a sex scandal\u2014and, incredibly, the candidacy of the Republican initially nominated to face him _also_ ended in a sex scandal. He wound up facing only nominal opposition in the general election. Even though Obama was still just a state senator, he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004\u2014and it was a smash. His memoir was reissued and became a best seller.\n\nBy the time Obama arrived in Washington in 2005, he was a national figure\u2014but on his own terms. He was, of course, the only African American senator at that moment, but he went out of his way to define himself in other ways. He joined the Committee on Foreign Relations, not the Judiciary Committee, which is the principal guardian of the civil rights laws and a seat the only black senator might have been expected to take. Obama dabbled in legislating, but basically used his Senate office to prepare to run for president. He wrote a campaign-style manifesto, _The Audacity of Hope_ , and turned a book tour into a testing-the-waters campaign. (The title of the book came from a sermon by his preacher in Chicago, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.)\n\nAs Obama began playing to a statewide and then a national audience, he made some adjustments in his stands on the issues, notably gun control. When he was running for the state senate in Chicago, he took the conventional view of inner-city politicians that gun ownership should be sharply limited. In his first race for state senate he even said in a questionnaire that he supported \"restrictions on the sale and possession of handguns.\" (Obama later said a staffer filled out the form.) Still, in the state legislature, Obama continued to vote in general support of restrictions on gun use and ownership.\n\nBut when he ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, a state with a thriving hunting culture, Obama began subtly turning away from his previous position. Like many Democrats nationwide in the post-Clinton era, Obama recognized that to push gun control was to court electoral disaster; the laws would never pass and the candidates who supported them would never win. Still, Obama had not at this point migrated entirely to the individual rights views of the Second Amendment. When Alan Keyes, the hapless Republican who wound up running against Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, challenged Obama in a debate on his beliefs about the Second Amendment, Obama steered the conversation in a different direction. Obama said nothing about the Constitution but only that he believed in \"common sense gun safety\" measures like a ban on assault weapons.\n\nBut conservatives had succeeded on gun control and the Second Amendment in the new millennium the way liberals had won on school desegregation and equal protection in the 1960s. Through the use of politics, the courts, and the broader culture, each side in turn had changed the understanding of the Constitution. In both cases, the political victories were so overwhelming that opposition became futile. By the 1970s, no serious politician advocated segregated schools; by 2008, no serious presidential candidate\u2014at least one who hoped to win\u2014advocated the traditional conception of the Second Amendment.\n\nSo, after Obama launched his presidential campaign in 2007, he began speaking out in support of an individual right under the Second Amendment. The mode of Obama's expression, which he repeated throughout the campaign, revealed the nature of the conservative ideological victory on this issue. As Obama put it in a debate with Hillary Clinton before the Pennsylvania primary, \"As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right, in the same way that we have a right to private property but local governments can establish zoning ordinances that determine how you can use it.\" It was, characteristically for Obama, a cautious position, but still an unmistakable endorsement of the individual rights theory. The future president picked his fights\u2014and chose to avoid this one over the Constitution. It wouldn't be the last time, either.\n\n# **2**\n\n#    \n**\"ON BEHALF OF THE STRONG IN OPPOSITION TO THE WEAK\"**\n\nOn gun control, Obama played to his instinct for compromise and conciliation. Politics often lends itself to these sorts of solutions. But sometimes a senator, like a justice, simply has to make a decision. On one of these occasions, during his brief career in the United States Senate, Obama had a real struggle: the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice of the United States.\n\nObama and Roberts had met only once, in the fall of 2005. Roberts had already called on most of the senators when he finally made it to Suite 713 in the Hart Building, the remote lodging to which junior senators like Obama were assigned. Roberts was exceptionally good at these courtesy calls: knowledgeable but not arrogant, open but noncommittal. As far as Obama was concerned, the judge had a lot going for him. Obama valued credentials, and Roberts had the best of their shared generation, not least a Harvard Law degree. For his part, Roberts had the same instincts about Obama. Judicial candidates making the rounds of senators quickly suss out the gasbags from the players, and there was no doubt in Roberts's mind of the future president's intelligence.\n\nIn the end, Obama's vote on Roberts had little to do with the nominee's qualifications, or even Obama's feelings about him. The senator consulted some of his law professor friends, like Laurence Tribe, at Harvard, and they told him that Roberts was about as good as anyone could expect from the Bush administration. The judge was conservative, Tribe said, but perhaps he'd keep an open mind. But the advice that mattered most to Obama came from his own chief of staff, Pete Rouse, a Washington veteran. Rouse told Obama, in effect: _Cut theshit. You can't run for the Democratic nomination for president and also vote to confirm George Bush's nominee for chief justice. The Democrats who vote in primaries care too much about these issues\u2014like abortion rights\u2014for you to vote for a justice who might overturn_ Roe v. Wade. Obama couldn't disagree.\n\nSo Obama voted no, one of only twenty-two negative votes. (Obama's future rival Hillary Clinton voted the same way.) Still, Obama's statement on the Senate floor reflected his ambivalence on the nomination. \"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind Judge Roberts is qualified to sit on the highest court in the land,\" Obama said. \"Moreover, he seems to have the comportment and the temperament that makes for a good judge. He is humble, he is personally decent, and he appears to be respectful of different points of view. It is absolutely clear to me that Judge Roberts truly loves the law.\" Exaggerating slightly, Obama said 95 percent of cases at the Supreme Court were easy; \"a Scalia and a Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time.\" (About a third of cases are unanimous each year.)\n\nObama went on: \"What matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 percent of cases that are truly difficult. In those cases, adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy.... In those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.\n\n\"I talked to Judge Roberts about this. Judge Roberts confessed that, unlike maybe professional politicians, it is not easy for him to talk about his values and his deeper feelings. That is not how he is trained. He did say he doesn't like bullies and has always viewed the law as a way of evening out the playing field between the strong and the weak.\"\n\nBut that wasn't enough for Obama. \"The problem I had is that when I examined Judge Roberts's record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak. In his work in the White House and the Solicitor General's Office, he seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process. In these same positions, he seemed dismissive of the concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.\"\n\nQuickly, though, right after Obama voted no, he engaged in a characteristic gesture. The very next day, Obama posted a statement on DailyKos, the website that served as the unofficial home of the Democratic Party's Netroots, defending his colleagues who voted yes. The point Obama made was a familiar one for those who had followed his thinking about the courts. \"There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate,\" Obama wrote. \"And I don't believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.\" As usual with Obama, it was about elections, not lawsuits.\n\nFour months later, when Alito came up for a vote, that was an easier call for Obama, and for most other Democrats. Alito had little of Roberts's charm, and his record on the bench offered no promise of moderation. Like Roberts, Alito had been a young recruit to the Justice Department during the Reagan administration, first in the office of the solicitor general and then in the office of legal counsel. He was appointed United States attorney in his native New Jersey in 1987 and then three years later, at the age of forty, won appointment to the Third Circuit. There he never varied from the conservative line and made a particular name for himself as an opponent of abortion rights. Shortly after Alito joined the Third Circuit, he voted to uphold a Pennsylvania law that required wives to inform their husbands before they obtained an abortion. It was this provision in particular that offended O'Connor and prompted her vote to overturn the law in the famous _Planned Parenthood v. Casey_ decision of 1992, the ruling that preserved the core of _Roe v. Wade_. For this reason, Alito was an especially fitting replacement for O'Connor\u2014because he reflected how much the Republican Party had changed since her appointment. From the moment Bush named Alito, it was clear what kind of justice he would be. For this reason, Obama voted no, but Alito was confirmed by 58 to 42.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nObama's intelligence was tempered by a grace and serenity, but he was matched in these qualities by the new chief justice. From his earliest days, Roberts was an enormously successful student who excelled without calling a great deal of attention to himself. He had taken enough advanced placement tests at La Lumiere to skip his freshman year at Harvard, and it took him only three years to graduate summa cum laude. Three years later, in 1979, he earned his degree from Harvard Law. But Roberts's professional career was about ideology as much as brilliance and charm. At every step, Roberts's work mirrored, and hastened, the conservative movement in the law.\n\nRoberts's two judicial clerkships traced the trajectory of the Republican Party at large. Henry Friendly was appointed to the Second Circuit by Dwight Eisenhower, in 1959. Friendly and his circle of lawyers were based in New York, and many received their start in law, and politics, when they worked for Thomas E. Dewey, the crusading local prosecutor and governor who nearly won the presidency in 1948. They were close to Wall Street and big business\u2014Friendly had been general counsel to Pan American World Airways\u2014and they took a progressive attitude toward the racial struggles that were convulsing the country. On the Supreme Court, this group was represented by John Marshall Harlan II, a frequent dissenter during the liberal heyday of the Warren Court. Friendly believed in respect for precedent, gradual change, and almost scientific expertise in the law. Friendly was as far from a Scalia-style conservative as he was different from a Brennan-style liberal. The politics of Friendly's law clerks ran the ideological gamut.\n\nOn the other hand, Rehnquist stood on the rightward fringe of the Court in 1980, when Roberts joined him. Rehnquist came of age politically as a westerner, an Arizonan, and he had little in common with the gradualism of northeastern Republicans like Friendly. Rehnquist was skeptical of government efforts to promote civil rights and downright hostile to the Court's effort to broaden individual rights. (In his second year on the Court, Rehnquist was one of only two dissenters in _Roe v. Wade_. Byron White, who was appointed by John F. Kennedy, was the other.) Rehnquist's ideology never changed, and it left a deep impression on Roberts.\n\nYears later, Roberts gave a speech about Rehnquist that illustrated as much about Roberts as about his mentor. \"When Justice Rehnquist came onto the Court, I think it's fair to say that the practice of constitutional law\u2014how constitutional law was made\u2014was more fluid and wide-ranging than it is today, more in the realm of political science,\" Roberts said. \"Now, over Justice Rehnquist's time on the Court, the method of analysis and argument shifted to the more solid grounds of legal arguments\u2014what are the texts of the statutes involved, what precedents control. Rehnquist, a student both of political science and the law, was significantly responsible for that seismic shift.\"\n\nAt the time Rehnquist joined the Court, its liberals had reigned for two decades. Through the Warren and even the Burger years the justices expanded civil rights protections for minorities, established new barriers between church and state, encouraged civil litigation to challenge business and government practices, and, of course, recognized a constitutional right to abortion for women. This \"fluid and wide-ranging\" jurisprudence, in Roberts's contemptuous phrase, had become the new status quo at the Supreme Court. In Roberts's telling, Rehnquist had been responsible for a \"seismic shift\" away from these liberal excesses, but that wasn't precisely accurate. Most of the Warren Court precedents were still on the books; there had been no seismic shift\u2014yet. It was Roberts's mission to lead the counterrevolution that his mentor had begun.\n\nIn the middle of Roberts's clerkship, Ronald Reagan was elected president. \"I was trying to decide what to do next,\" Roberts later recalled in a speech at the Reagan Library. \"Then he spoke these words and, like so many of the president's words, I felt he was speaking directly to me. He said, 'I do not believe in a fate that will befall us no matter what we do; I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.' And that is what Ronald Reagan was and is and remains today to me: a call to action.\" Roberts put off more lucrative options and joined the new administration, first as an assistant to William French Smith, the attorney general, and then in the White House counsel's office. In his speech, Roberts recalled his first day of work at the White House. \"Could I hold for the President? Well, yes, I could. This was an example of the President's famous charm, with all he had to do, calling a new staffer on his first day to wish him well. I did, I think, what most people do when they get a call from the President at their desk: I stood up. A few minutes went by, but of course that's understandable, he's the President, he's probably finishing up a call with Brezhnev or something. A few more minutes went by... I sat down. I figured that I'd stand up when the President came on the line... A few more minutes went by. Then I heard the muffled laughter outside my door... I put the phone down and went to the little anteroom. In there, of course, were my new colleagues in the White House Counsel's office, who had placed the phony call from the President. They had a betting pool how long I would stay on hold... Whoever had the 15- to 20-minute slot won that money.\"\n\nRoberts was not a policy maker, of course, but his memos from that era reveal a self-assured and loyal member of the Reagan team. He referred in one memo to Smith to an article that mentioned the \"so-called 'right to privacy,' arguing as we have that such an amorphous right is not to be found in the Constitution.\" For someone who was only twenty-seven when he joined the White House staff, Roberts wrote with unusual confidence. When a Democratic congressman proposed a conference on power sharing among the different branches of government and a report on the subject, Roberts dismissed the idea this way: \"There already has, of course, been a 'Conference on Power Sharing.' It took place in Philadelphia's Constitution Hall in 1787, and someone should tell [Congressman] Levitas about it and the 'report' it issued.\" In the eighties, the Supreme Court was deciding as many as 150 cases a year, and the justices were laboring under the weight of the caseload. Warren Burger advocated a proposal to add a kind of super-appeals court above the circuit courts, to relieve the justices of some of their burdens. Roberts was not impressed with the idea, writing to his boss, the White House counsel: \"While some of the tales of woe emanating from the Court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.\"\n\nRoberts spent the last few years of the Reagan presidency beginning his career at Hogan & Hartson, but he returned to government at the start of the first Bush administration, when Kenneth Starr recruited him to be his deputy at the solicitor general's office. Starr had a genteel style as the government's principal advocate before the Supreme Court\u2014he was nicknamed the Solicitous General\u2014but the office took a series of strongly conservative stands on the merits. Again, Roberts was following administration policy, but he had no problem signing briefs that called for overruling _Roe v. Wade_ and limiting traditional civil rights remedies. As was customary, Starr himself argued the most high-profile cases for the government in this period, but Roberts also became a regular presence before the justices. His earnest midwestern manner\u2014matched, of course, by his keen intellect, sharp wit, and great memory\u2014made him an immediate favorite of the justices. Roberts made such a powerful impression in the S.G.'s office that Bush nominated him for the D.C. Circuit in 1992, when he was only thirty-seven years old. The Democratic blockade of Roberts's nomination was a tribute of sorts as well. Both sides knew even then that he might well be destined for the Supreme Court. Roberts never received an up-or-down vote in the Senate, so he returned to private practice in 1993.\n\nFor much of the Court's history, cases were often argued by the lawyers who originally represented the clients in the lower courts. Lawyers in the solicitor general's office were almost the only Supreme Court specialists. But Roberts came of age at a time when Supreme Court advocacy became its own niche in the legal profession. Starting in the 1990s, a Supreme Court bar began to expand, and Roberts was the leading figure in his generation. In all, Roberts had thirty-nine arguments at the Court, and he won about twenty-five of them. (The number is not precise because some cases had mixed or inconclusive results.)\n\nThe professional background of a justice invariably shapes his or her approach to the job. Temperamentally, Rehnquist never left the Nixon Justice Department, where he was the assistant attorney general charged with building a tough-on-crime agenda; O'Connor, the former Arizona state senator, never stopped being a politician; Scalia and Stephen Breyer remained forever the law professors they once were. John Roberts was a litigator whose primary responsibility was to figure out ways to win. For Roberts, the law, ultimately, was all about winning.\n\nThe modern Republican Party put judicial issues near the top of its agenda. The priorities included the recognition of Second Amendment gun rights, the end of constitutional protection for the right to choose abortions, and the lowering of barriers between church and state. Democrats paid less attention to these issues, or the courts generally\u2014as Obama himself demonstrated in his campaign.\n\nObama declared his candidacy for president on February 10, 2007, on the steps of the Old State Capitol, in Springfield, Illinois. The themes of his speech\u2014hope, change, and an end to the war in Iraq\u2014were central to his effort over the next twenty-one months. Through the many long days leading up to his victory in the Iowa caucuses, the four months of head-to-head combat with Hillary Clinton, and the general election campaign against John McCain, Obama limited his discussion of the Constitution to generalities. (\"I believe in the Constitution, I've taught the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution,\" he often said in his stump speeches.) Obama and Clinton differed on very little, including legal issues. Against McCain, Obama's message of change, which resonated even more strongly after the economic collapse, clearly seemed to be working. Obama's very existence, as the first African American to approach the presidency, said more about equality than any invocation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Still, it is at least worthy of note that Obama, who was, as he often mentioned, a law professor, managed to campaign for nearly two years without saying much of anything about the Supreme Court or the laws that it interpreted.\n\nMcCain took a different approach, at least once. Throughout his long political career, the Arizona senator had never shown a particular interest in legal issues; his signature causes were national security and campaign finance. But McCain felt obligated to express his fealty to the contemporary Republican vision about the Constitution. In a speech at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on May 6, 2008, he said, \"The framers of our Constitution had a knack for coming right to the point, and it shows in the 35-word oath that ends with a pledge to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution itself.\"\n\nMcCain had already clinched the Republican nomination, so he was in general election mode. He avoided direct mention of incendiary topics like abortion, and he spoke in a code familiar to those who follow constitutional law, leaving them in no doubt where he stood. He addressed what he called \"the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power. For decades now, some federal judges have taken it upon themselves to pronounce and rule on matters that were never intended to be heard in courts or decided by judges.\" This, of course, was a view functionally identical to President Bush's often-expressed contempt for judges who \"legislate from the bench.\" McCain then cited what he saw as an example of such abuse. \"Sometimes the expressed will of the voters is disregarded by federal judges, as in a 2005 case concerning an aggravated murder in the state of Missouri,\" he said. \"As you might recall, the case inspired a Supreme Court opinion that left posterity with a lengthy discourse on international law, the constitutions of other nations, the meaning of life, and 'evolving standards of decency.' These meditations were in the tradition of 'penumbras,' 'emanations,' and other airy constructs the Court has employed over the years as poor substitutes for clear and rigorous constitutional reasoning.\"\n\nMcCain did not reveal the subject matter of this supposed judicial outrage. The case was _Roper v. Simmons_ , in which a seventeen-year-old boy was sentenced to death for murdering a woman after breaking into her home. Kennedy's 2005 opinion overturned the sentence and held that the Constitution forbade the death penalty for juvenile offenders. McCain's reference to the Court's \"discourse\" on the law of \"other nations\" referred to the justices' observation of the \"stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty.\" Likewise, Kennedy noted that the only other countries to execute juvenile offenders since 1990 were China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.\n\nNor were McCain's references to \"penumbras\" and \"emanations\" accidental. Those words came from Justice William O. Douglas's 1965 opinion for the Court in _Griswold v. Connecticut_ , in which the justices recognized for the first time a constitutional right to privacy and ruled that a state could not deny married couples access to birth control. The \"meaning of life\" was a specific reference, too. It came from the Court's 1992 opinion in _Casey_ , which reaffirmed the central holding of _Roe v. Wade_ and forbade the states from banning abortion. In short, this one passage in McCain's speech amounted to a kind of dog whistle\u2014a signal (to those who could hear it) that he would appoint justices who would eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teenagers.\n\nRather than challenge McCain or present an alternative vision for the courts, Obama chose to discuss only the subjects that had been working for him. When it came to the Constitution, it was clear that Obama's agenda was the opposite of change. In an interview with the _Detroit Free Press_ , just one month before Election Day, he displayed characteristic caution. In the course of a single short answer, it was possible to watch Obama's mind in action. He was asked which justices would serve as models for his own Supreme Court appointments. \"There were a lot of justices on the Warren Court who were heroes of mine, Warren himself, Brennan, [Thurgood] Marshall,\" Obama said, but then he appeared to realize that he might be endorsing an unduly liberal agenda, so he added: \"But that doesn't necessarily mean that I think their judicial philosophy is appropriate for today.\"\n\nObama went on: \"Generally, the court is institutionally conservative. And what I mean by that is, it's not that often that the court gets out way ahead of public opinion. The Warren Court was one of those moments when, because of the particular challenge of segregation, they needed to break out of conventional wisdom because the political process didn't give an avenue for minorities and African Americans to exercise their political power to solve their problems. So the court had to step in and break that logjam.\"\n\nBut times were different now, Obama said. \"I'm not sure that you need that. In fact, I would be troubled if you had that same kind of activism in circumstances today. So when I think about the kinds of judges who are needed today, it goes back to the point I was making about common sense and pragmatism as opposed to ideology. I think that Justice Souter, who was a Republican appointee, Justice Breyer, a Democratic appointee, are very sensible judges.\" To some, this answer looked like political caution. Embracing Souter and Breyer, instead of Brennan and Marshall, was unlikely to cause offense or cost him votes. It is true that the answer was very, very careful\u2014but it did accurately reflect Obama's temperament as well as his views about the Supreme Court. After Obama became president, some of his supporters urged him to nominate the kind of judges he \"really\" wanted\u2014outspoken liberals. But that supposition misread the man. He \"really\" wanted judges like Souter and Breyer.\n\nIn that final month before Election Day, Obama had a clear lead in the polls and a final obstacle to overcome, the last of the three debates with McCain. Each campaign season, it was a tradition of sorts for the moderator to ask one question about abortion and Supreme Court appointments; on October 15, 2008, it fell to Bob Schieffer to raise the issue with the candidates.\n\nMcCain answered first, saying he would never impose a \"litmus test\" for his prospective appointments, but also making clear that he thought _Roe v. Wade_ was \"a bad decision.\"\n\nObama responded, \"It is true that this is going to be, I think, one of the most consequential decisions of the next president. It is very likely that one of us will be making at least one and probably more than one appointments and Roe versus Wade probably hangs in the balance.\n\n\"Now I would not provide a litmus test, but I am somebody who believes that Roe versus Wade was rightly decided. I think that abortion is a very difficult issue, and it is a moral issue and one that I think good people on both sides can disagree on. But what ultimately I believe is that women in consultation with their families, their doctors, their religious advisers, are in the best position to make this decision. And I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn't be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote. So this is going to be an important issue. I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.\"\n\nOn November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president, with 365 electoral votes. He received 69 million popular votes to McCain's 59 million, representing a margin of 53 percent to 46 percent. At the time of the election, the American economy was nearing free fall. The collapse of the bubble in housing prices had led to huge losses in financial firms that had sold securities based on mortgages. To prevent those firms from going out of business, Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which Bush had signed on October 3, authorizing $700 billion in bailouts. The major banks survived, but business activity nearly ground to a halt. About 700,000 Americans per month were losing their jobs. Working from transition headquarters in a Chicago high-rise, Obama and his staffers spent most of their time figuring out how to address the crisis.\n\nStill, the work of judicial selection, including for the Supreme Court, now moved from abstraction to reality. In August, after Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination, a lawyer in New York received a confidential assignment from the transition team, which was just then being formed. Preeta Bansal, who was then a partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps and formerly solicitor general of New York State, was asked to prepare a series of memorandums about how a President Obama might approach the federal judiciary. She projected the number of likely vacancies, examined the ethnic and professional backgrounds of current federal judges, and compiled the first list of possible nominees for the new president to consider. There were other issues, too. Should Obama announce his first nominations as a group, as Bush did, or one at a time? (Obama chose one at a time.) Should the new administration cooperate with the American Bar Association, which had traditionally rated nominees but which had been pushed out of the process by recent Republican administrations? (Obama's team decided to reestablish the connection, but only after securing a pledge from the ABA that the group would act quickly.)\n\nAs Obama himself now recognized, there was no longer time for abstract discussions\u2014or even intentional evasions\u2014on the subject of the Supreme Court. About a week after the election, while the group was still working in Chicago, Obama summoned Gregory Craig, the future White House counsel, and David Axelrod, his top political aide, to discuss judicial nominations for the first time.\n\n\"It looks like we might have a Supreme Court appointment soon, so we need to be ready,\" Obama told them. \"I have a list.\"\n\n# **3**\n\n#    \n**THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS**\n\nThe transition at the Supreme Court from William Rehnquist to John Roberts was not as dramatic as the one at the White House from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. In the stillness of the Court's marble halls, though, any change seemed dramatic. Everyone on the Court was fond of quoting a remark by Byron White, who had served for more than thirty years: \"When you change one justice, you change the whole Court.\" As of early 2006, after no changes in membership for more than a decade, there were suddenly two new justices, including a new chief, in the space of four months.\n\nTo compound the sense of disorientation for the justices, the Supreme Court building was in the midst of a major renovation project. The building had opened in 1935, and there had never been a full update of its major systems. Rehnquist had begun studies for the project in the late nineties, and then, after September 11, 2001, the plans had to be reconfigured to accommodate the new emphasis on security. Ground was broken in 2003, and by the following year the justices were taking turns being thrown out of their offices, and into temporary quarters, for several months at a time.\n\nWhen Roberts and Alito joined the Court, the remaining justices were all middle-aged or older. The youngest was Thomas, at fifty-seven, and Souter was next, at sixty-six. Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer were all in or soon to be in their seventies. Stevens was the oldest, at eighty-five. Like most other people in their cohort, the justices did not take easily to change\u2014in colleagues or in lodgings. Under Rehnquist, they all won some cases and lost some, but they knew where they stood, with the chief and with each other. There are few more isolating jobs than justice of the Supreme Court. The telephones rarely ring in their chambers. Year after year, the justices have no one to talk to about the most important aspects of their work except one another and their law clerks. The stakes for any change were high.\n\nRoberts understood this and asserted his authority with some finesse. During his confirmation hearing, Roberts said he hoped the Court could speak more often with a single voice\u2014in unanimous opinions. In his first year, the whole Court pulled together in helping Roberts achieve this goal. During the Rehnquist years, the justices had reached unanimous rulings in about a third of all cases. During Roberts's first year, that percentage ticked up to about 45 percent.\n\nRoberts provided a snapshot of his personality early in his first term, on October 31, 2005. _Central Virginia Community College v. Katz_ concerned a fairly obscure issue in bankruptcy law. Toward the end of the argument, as Ginsburg was asking a question, what sounded like an explosion went off in the courtroom. The police officers reached for their sidearms.\n\n\"A lightbulb exploded,\" O'Connor said. \"A lightbulb exploded.\"\n\nAs everyone resumed their focus, Roberts quipped, \"It's a trick they play on new chief justices all the time.\" No one laughed harder than O'Connor.\n\nThere was really only one important case on the docket during Roberts's first full year\u2014and the chief could not participate in it. It was the appeal of _Hamdan v. Rumsfeld_ , the case that helped seal Roberts's nomination to the Court. (At the very moment that Bush was weighing whom to appoint, Roberts joined the decision in the D.C. Circuit in Bush's favor.) Because Roberts had already ruled on the case, he recused himself from playing a part in the Supreme Court's deliberations. Eight justices would render the next verdict on the Bush administration's treatment of the detainees at Guant\u00e1namo Bay.\n\nThe case illustrated how the politics of the country affected the justices\u2014both in the cases before them and in the conclusions they reached. _Hamdan_ itself had begun in the unlikeliest of ways. After 9\/11, and the Bush administration's decision to open the facility at Guant\u00e1namo, the legal concerns of the detainees there were hardly a mainstream issue. The Pentagon assigned a handful of military lawyers to represent the prisoners, but these unlucky counselors had few resources and little support. Then in May 2003, Air Force Lt. Col. Will Gunn, the chief defense counsel for the tribunals, received an unsolicited e-mail from Neal Katyal, a thirty-three-year-old professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a former Breyer clerk. \"I hope this e-mail reaches you, as I've tried to find your contact info from a variety of different sources,\" Katyal wrote. \"I'm writing, in the event that you do lead the defense team at the military tribunals, to offer my help.\" Lacking any better offers, Gunn invited Katyal to work with Charlie Swift and Philip Sundel, the navy JAGs who would be handling the first cases.\n\nIt was a deeply unfashionable undertaking. Only a year and a half had passed since the terrorist attacks. The war in Iraq had just begun, and it enjoyed tremendous public support. Only the Center for Constitutional Rights, a stalwart of the left, had raised loud and consistent objections to the Bush administration's legal basis for the war on terror. The big law firms and major law schools were mostly silent. Even so, the first legal challenges to the detention policies began working their way through the courts. The administration had argued that the facility at Guant\u00e1namo, which was on Cuban soil, should be treated like a foreign battlefield; accordingly, the courts shouldn't be ordering American troops to help with the defense in such dangerous conditions.\n\nThe Guant\u00e1namo cases, known as _Hamdi_ and _Padilla_ , came before the Court for oral argument on April 28, 2004, and Ginsburg pressed the Bush lawyers about the logical extension of their arguments. If the Guant\u00e1namo detainees were outside the reach of the American legal system, she asked, were there any legal limits on how they could be treated? Could they be tortured? \"Suppose the executive says, 'Mild torture, we think, will help get this information.' It's not a soldier who does something against the Code of Military Justice, but it's an executive command. Some systems do that to get information.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Paul Clement, the deputy solicitor general replied, \"our executive doesn't.\"\n\nThat very night, CBS News's _60 Minutes II_ broadcast the first photographs of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The photographs, which showed extensive abuse by American soldiers, created a national scandal. By that point, too, a year after the invasion, the war had settled into a bloody stalemate. In all, the political tide was turning against the war, and in June 2004 the justices issued their first rulings against the Bush policies. Stevens, in his opinion for the Court, made short work of the argument that Guant\u00e1namo was like a battlefield. The American military \"exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control\" over the base, he wrote; Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, sent these dangerous prisoners to such a remote location precisely because it was so secure from outside interference. O'Connor, a reliable vector for public opinion, was even more contemptuous of the Bush administration's position: \"We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.\"\n\nBy the time Katyal argued the _Hamdan_ case before the eight sitting justices on March 28, 2006, the Iraq War had deteriorated further and the political climate surrounding the issue of Guant\u00e1namo had been transformed. In _Hamdi_ , the Court had rejected the notion that the detainees were not entitled to any due process at all. In response to that initial defeat at the Court, the Bush administration had set up a system of military commissions that gave the detainees the right to a kind of truncated trial. The _Hamdan_ case was a challenge to the adequacy of these hearings.\n\nThe case served also as a useful introduction to the Roberts Supreme Court. Scalia, Thomas, and Alito were sure votes to uphold the president's policy and Roberts's ruling in the D.C. Circuit. Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, on the other hand, would definitely vote to strike down the new rules. In this case\u2014and so many that followed\u2014the verdict would be rendered by Anthony Kennedy.\n\nKennedy was weeks away from turning seventy years old. He was Ronald Reagan's third choice to fill the seat vacated by Lewis Powell in 1987. (Bork had been voted down by the Senate, 58 to 42, and Douglas Ginsburg, a judge on the D.C. Circuit, had withdrawn following news reports that he had smoked marijuana as a young law professor at Harvard.) Since his appointment, Kennedy's hair had receded and whitened, but in all other respects he had thrived on the Court. Age had not withered his sinewy six-foot frame. When Kennedy began to speak, he often hesitated, almost stuttered, in what appeared to be an attempt to show humility, but he invariably found the right cruising speed, especially in front of an audience. He spoke (as he wrote) in grand and vague phrases\u2014about \"the poetry of the law,\" \"the defense of liberty,\" and \"dignity,\" his favorite word. To anyone who asked, Kennedy insisted that he did not enjoy his role as the crucial vote on the Court. Few believed him.\n\nAll the justices (except Souter and, in recent years, Stevens) traveled the world. It was one of the perks of a job that paid considerably less than their law clerks made as soon as they entered private practice. (The chief justice makes $223,500, the associate justices $213,900.) They all received multiple invitations to attend conferences or do some light teaching all over the world. Thomas enjoyed the New York University villa in Italy. Scalia and Ginsburg traded reviews of opera festivals in Europe. Breyer visited his wife's family in England and friends in France. (He speaks fluent French.) Roberts himself was teaching in London when Bush nominated him for the Court.\n\nFew justices reveled in the international scene as much as Kennedy. There was some irony in this distinction because Kennedy appeared to be, at the time of his appointment, the most provincial of men. He grew up in Sacramento and still lived in the house where he was raised. He had gone to Stanford, then to Harvard Law School, but soon returned to his hometown to take over his father's firm and teach part-time at the local law school, McGeorge.\n\nIn fact, during all those years, Kennedy nursed a considerable wanderlust. When he was still a teenager, his uncle, an oil driller, hired him to work on rigs in Louisiana and Canada. While he was in college, he studied for several months at the London School of Economics. (Later, he would recall with affection how much the range of student views differed from those at home. \"You had to sit in the room according to your place on the ideological spectrum, and, to give you an idea of what it was like, the Communists\u2014the Communists!\u2014were in the middle!\") His father's law practice focused heavily on lobbying California state government, especially for the liquor industry. But when young Tony joined the family firm he took it in a more cosmopolitan direction; for instance, he helped create the legal basis for American companies to open factories, known as maquiladoras, in Mexico. In the small world of Sacramento, Tony Kennedy was also a presence in Republican politics and an ally of Edwin Meese, who became a top aide to Governor Ronald Reagan.\n\nKennedy's scholarly bent, and Republican connections, led Gerald Ford to appoint him to the Ninth Circuit in 1975. (Kennedy was only thirty-nine.) He kept his chambers in Sacramento and could have contented himself, as many circuit judges do, with a life of reading briefs and writing opinions. He wouldn't have had to travel farther than the Ninth Circuit's headquarters in San Francisco. But Kennedy took an assignment from Chief Justice Warren Burger to supervise the territorial courts in the South Pacific, which meant that the young judge had to travel to Guam, Palau, Saipan, American Samoa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Despite his heavy schedule, Kennedy kept teaching at McGeorge, which had set up a summer program in Salzburg, Austria. Starting in 1990, Kennedy would spend about a month there every summer.\n\nThese years were a crucial time in the history of international judiciary. The fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe set off a flurry of constitution writing and the appointment of judges to enforce the laws. American Supreme Court justices were coveted participants in the process, and no one relished the opportunities more than Kennedy. (O'Connor did a lot of work in this area, too.) Salzburg in particular became a critical crossroads in this process, with much of the action taking place at the Schloss Leopoldskron, a former palace that was used as a set in several scenes of _The Sound of Music_. The schloss was the headquarters of the Salzburg Seminar, a venerable international exchange program.\n\nKennedy spent his summers in the company of judges from around the world, who came to tap his expertise and enthusiasm. But the influence went two ways. Kennedy was and remained a conservative on most subjects, but the issues on which he moved left invariably coincided with the views of the foreign judges he met. In Europe and most of the civilized world, for example, the death penalty is viewed with revulsion. (Even to be considered for membership in the European Union, a country must abolish the death penalty.) Gay rights and even same-sex marriage have made progress faster in Europe than in the United States. By the time he reached the Supreme Court, Kennedy was well to the left of his near contemporary Scalia on the death penalty and gay rights.\n\nForeign judges also embraced international institutions and international law with far greater enthusiasm than their American counterparts. As McCain noted in his Wake Forest speech, Kennedy earned the enmity of American conservatives by citing the laws of other nations in his opinion in _Roper v. Simmons_ , which struck down the death penalty for juveniles. By 2005, the international judicial elites viewed George W. Bush with special disdain, abhorring the Texas swagger that produced, among other things, the Iraq War. As Kennedy knew better than most, judges around the world held a special reverence for the Geneva Conventions, which attempt to regulate the treatment of prisoners in wartime. And the Geneva Conventions were at the heart of _Hamdan v. Rumsfeld_.\n\nIn Hamdan's case before the Supreme Court, a key issue was whether the American government was required to treat the detainees in accord with the Geneva Conventions. Paul Clement, who had been promoted to solicitor general, said in the oral argument, \"I don't think he's protected by the Geneva Conventions, but that's largely because he chose not to comply with the basic laws of war.\" In public and private, the Bush administration had described the detainees not as soldiers but as terrorists.\n\nSouter pressed Clement on the conventions. \"Well, do you agree that it applies as part of the law of war?\" he asked.\n\n\"Well, I don't think, consistent with the position of the executive, that the Geneva Convention applies in this particular conflict,\" Clement answered.\n\n\"But that, I guess, is the problem that I'm having,\" Souter replied.\n\nMaking his first argument before the justices in _Hamdan_ , Neal Katyal insisted the government had to prove that its procedures complied with the Geneva Conventions. He clearly impressed Kennedy, who played his words back to Clement, saying, \"He says there is a structural invalidity to the military commission.... And the historic office of habeas\"\u2014a legal action asking to free a wrongfully imprisoned individual\u2014\"is to test whether or not you are being tried by a lawful tribunal. And he says, under the Geneva Convention, as you know, that it isn't.\"\n\n\"Well, and we disagree with those claims,\" Clement replied.\n\nA 4\u20134 vote would have affirmed Roberts's judgment on the D.C. Circuit, but Kennedy voted with the liberals, and the military commissions were struck down. Stevens wrote the opinion for the Court and, with characteristic directness, stated that the United States must comply with the Geneva Conventions and, accordingly, the law \"requires that Hamdan be tried by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.\" Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion that was, in his fashion, more expansive: \"Respect for laws derived from the customary operation of the Executive and Legislative Branches gives some assurance of stability in time of crisis. The Constitution is best preserved by reliance on standards tested over time and insulated from the pressures of the moment.\" Either way, the point was the same\u2014another clear rebuke to the Bush administration's methods of conducting war on terror.\n\nWith the exception of _Hamdan_ , Roberts's first year was generally a quiet one. As a rule, most of the eighty or so cases a year heard by the Supreme Court attract little attention from the general public. They involve the interpretation of federal statutes, the criminal sentencing practices of the federal courts, or disagreements between circuit courts on any number of issues. There are always several tax cases, a few bankruptcy matters, and a case or two involving the unique legal status of Native Americans. Among law clerks (and occasionally among justices), these low-profile controversies are known, uncharitably, as \"dogs.\"\n\nSometimes, though, there are cases that are so powerfully obscure, so utterly insignificant while at the same time so maddeningly complex, that the justices (and certainly their clerks) stare at the briefs and wonder\u2014what were we thinking? Why? _Why?_ Holding the briefs at some distance, like a mysterious discovery from the back of the refrigerator, the denizens of One First Street, steeling themselves against boredom and fatigue, begin reading.\n\nOne such dog\u2014a veritable Great Dane\u2014hit the Court's docket toward the end of Roberts's first year. Each petitioner for certiorari to the Court includes a section called Questions Presented, which the lawyers use to define the issues in a way that will entice the justices to accept the case for review. In this one, the questions were:\n\n1. What is the scope of the probate exception to federal jurisdiction?\n\n2. Did Congress intend the probate exception to apply where a federal court is not asked to probate a will, administer an estate, or otherwise assume control of property in the custody of a state probate court?\n\nThe _what_ exception? The stupefying dullness of these questions, and of the case as a whole, was apparent to all, and the matter of _Marshall v. Marshall_ would have passed into obscurity but for one thing. The legal name of the plaintiff may have been Vickie Lynn Marshall, but she was better known by her stage name\u2014Anna Nicole Smith.\n\nIt later became a kind of sport among the law clerks to speculate whether any of their bosses had heard of Anna Nicole before the briefs in the case first crossed their desks. The consensus (for all nine) was no. Her renown, such as it was, appeared so far on the cheesy end of the celebrity spectrum that it was indeed possible that her name did not ring a bell. Breyer cheerfully acknowledged to his clerks that he had never heard of her, but he also enjoyed a good laugh more than most of his colleagues, so he started referring to her, and her case, as \"the stripper.\"\n\nThis was not precisely accurate. Her name at birth was Vickie Lynn Hogan, and she was the second child born to her sixteen-year-old mother. At the age of nineteen, with a child of her own, she became an exotic dancer (not a stripper, exactly) in one of Houston's lesser clubs. To add to her appeal, according to a biographer, she had several rounds of plastic surgery \"to create her infamous 42DD bra size, the product finally of two implants on each side and a total of three pints of fluid.\" She also began using the name Anna Nicole Smith.\n\nOne day a man in a wheelchair named J. Howard Marshall II stopped in to watch her at a place called Gigi's. Many years earlier, Marshall had been a professor at Yale Law School, where he had cowritten scholarly articles with his faculty colleague William O. Douglas. Marshall left academia for the oil business and became an early investor in the company later known as Koch Industries (which would later have its own place in Supreme Court history). At the time he was wheeled into Gigi's, Marshall was worth as much as $1.6 billion.\n\nThe first time they met, Marshall and Anna Nicole spent the night together, and they married two years later, on June 27, 1994. Marshall was eighty-nine, and Anna Nicole twenty-six. He died thirteen months later, on August 4, 1995. In the meantime, Anna Nicole had become famous as a model and an actress of sorts as well as the subject of an early reality television series.\n\nMarshall did not mention Anna Nicole in his will, and he left virtually his entire fortune to his son E. Pierce Marshall. (Another son, J. Howard Marshall III, was also excluded from the will.) A protracted legal struggle over the estate ensued in courts all over the United States. Notwithstanding the omission in the will, one court awarded Anna Nicole $474 million, which another knocked down to $88 million, which still another reduced to zero. Five years after Marshall's death, a federal court in California and a state court in Texas both asserted jurisdiction over the will, and it was this dispute that eventually wound up before the justices. When they heard arguments in this arcane matter of federal jurisdiction, the courtroom was nearly as crowded as it had been for _Bush v. Gore_.\n\nResponding to the buzz in the audience, the two justices most inclined to show off, Scalia and Breyer, dominated the argument with questions. Breyer may not have heard of Anna Nicole at the start of the case, but he had clearly studied the material about her. \"The fact that three pages of the living trust, according to the judge, were created after the event of that trust and slipped in without his knowledge,\" he said to Pierce's lawyer, \"I mean, it's quite a story.\"\n\nAnna Nicole herself wore a subdued black suit for the occasion, and, according to her spokesman, she wept during the argument because she was overwhelmed by loving memories of her late husband. As it happened, the Court ruled unanimously in Anna Nicole's favor and returned the case to federal court in California. Roberts assigned the case to Ginsburg, the Court's leading expert on federal procedure.\n\nThe postscript to _Marshall v. Marshall_ was melancholy, even tragic. About a month after the Court's decision, Pierce Marshall died suddenly, at the age of sixty-seven. Three months later, Anna Nicole's twenty-year-old son died of a drug overdose. Five months after that, Anna Nicole herself died of an accidental drug overdose in a hotel room in Hollywood, Florida. Anna Nicole's estate continued the litigation against Pierce's estate (over the proceeds of J. Howard II's estate). In an extremely rare development, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case a second time, in 2010, to consider an issue relating to bankruptcy law. The case was by then known as _Stern v. Marshall_ , as the lead plaintiff was Howard Stern, Anna Nicole's paramour. (He was not the radio shock jock, though they were often confused.) Without Anna Nicole's presence, the second oral argument drew little notice. The Court ruled 5\u20134 against her estate, but the litigation continues in 2012.\n\nMore than his colleagues, Roberts brought a literary flair to opinion writing. Inevitably, then, given the circumstances, Roberts began his opinion for the Court in the second Anna Nicole case with a quotation from _Bleak House_ , by Charles Dickens. \"This 'suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that... no two... lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause: innumerable young people have married into it'; and, sadly, the original parties 'have died out of it.' \"\n\n# **4**\n\n#    \n**THE LEGACY OF APPENDIX E**\n\nAs the Court convened on the first Monday in October 2006, the beginning of the second full year of the Roberts Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had more on her mind than the new lineup of cases. Someone in her family had cancer. Again. The disease haunted her life.\n\nRuth Bader was born in 1933. Her father was a furrier and her mother cared for Ruth and Marilyn, her older sister, in their Brooklyn home. Few people were buying furs at the height of the Depression, so the family struggled. When Ruth was a toddler, Marilyn was stricken with meningitis and died. Ruth was raised as an adored only child, escorted by her mother to cello lessons and the local public library, which was located above a Chinese restaurant. When Ruth was thirteen, her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Throughout Ruth's high school years\u2014when she was a cheerleader, editor of the school paper at James Madison High School, and the designated \"rabbi\" at her summer camp\u2014Celia Bader endured the agonies of cancer treatment in the 1940s. She died the day before Ruth's graduation. After the funeral, the Bader house filled with mourners, but only the men were allowed to participate in the minyan, the quorum for the official prayers. The teenaged Ruth took note.\n\nRuth went to Cornell, where on a blind date she met Martin Ginsburg, who was a year older and also from Brooklyn, though he was raised in more prosperous circumstances, on Long Island. Ethnicity notwithstanding, they were almost comically mismatched. Ruth was shy, bookish, and reserved; Marty was ebullient, outgoing, and amusing. Each one remained that way for a remarkable half-century-plus of marriage. Their personalities could scarcely have differed more, but as a partnership based on love and respect, their union served as a happy model for all who knew them.\n\nThey married just after she graduated, in 1954. Ruth followed Marty to Oklahoma, where he was completing his service in the army. This corner of the military had entered a postwar lull, and Marty found a good deal of time on his hands. He took the opportunity to read Escoffier and turned into an accomplished chef, which his wife, emphatically, was not. Their daughter Jane was born in 1955, and the family moved to Cambridge, where Marty was a year ahead of Ruth at Harvard Law School. She was one of nine women in a class of more than five hundred. (Ruth again noted the rules limiting female freedom, often without rhyme or reason. For example, at Cornell, women were required to live in the dorms; at Harvard, they were forbidden from living in the dorms.)\n\nWhile they were law students, Marty was stricken with testicular cancer, then as now a devastating disease. Through two surgeries and extensive treatments, Ruth cared for Marty, took class notes for him (as well as herself), typed his papers, made law review, and tended to their young daughter. It is said that these years made Justice Ginsburg somewhat intolerant of her law clerks' complaints of overwork. Marty survived, of course, and the couple had a son a few years later.\n\nThe Ginsburgs moved to New York, where Marty practiced tax law at a big firm and Ruth spent her final year of law school at Columbia. She then began a career in teaching law, first at Rutgers, in New Jersey. In her early years as a professor, she specialized in federal civil procedure, a subject she continued to find fascinating throughout her long career. (Rehnquist shared this unusual fondness, and it contributed to the warm relationship between the two.) In the fall of 1970, though, Ruth was thinking about doing some work for the budding women's movement. One evening, as the couple was working in their adjoining home offices, Marty handed Ruth a few pages from a recent tax court decision. \"Read this,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't read tax cases,\" she told him.\n\n\"Read this one,\" he said.\n\nIn the five minutes it took to read the brief opinion, Ruth Ginsburg realized that a new chapter in her career was about to begin.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nCharles E. Moritz lived in Denver and worked as a book editor. In 1958, Moritz, who never married, brought his elderly mother to live with him, hiring a part-time caregiver a few years later. Under the tax law at that time, a single woman who paid for the care of a dependent could take a deduction; a single man who made the same expenditure could not. Representing himself before the tax court, Moritz wrote in a one-page brief, \"If I were a dutiful daughter instead of a dutiful son, I would have received that deduction. That makes no sense.\" (Both Ginsburgs later described Moritz's homemade brief as one of the finest they'd ever seen.)\n\nAfter reading the case, Ruth said to Marty, \"Let's take it.\" The husband and wife represented Moritz pro bono and won their appeal in the Tenth Circuit, in Denver. The Court found that Moritz was entitled to receive the same deduction as a woman would have received. (It came to about $600.) As it happened, though, by the time the case was decided, Congress had prospectively changed the law to eliminate that particular sex-based differential; the legal issue now appeared to be moot. But Erwin Griswold, the solicitor general under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (and the former dean of Harvard Law School), thought the Moritz decision was so significant, and so wrong, that he asked the Supreme Court to reverse the Tenth Circuit decision. Griswold told the Court that it was important to preserve the principle of treating men and women differently under the law. Take the case, the solicitor general urged, because the Tenth Circuit's decision \"casts a cloud of unconstitutionality upon the many federal statutes listed in Appendix E.\"\n\nWhat was Appendix E? Griswold had prevailed upon the Department of Defense to use one of its first computers to scour federal laws and regulations to find all rules \"containing differentiations based upon sex-related criteria.\" There were hundreds of them, and it would not have been possible for a mere law professor, in those days before simple computer databases, to track them down. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, but Appendix E gave Ginsburg a road map for the next decade of her life\u2014she wanted to undo as many of that long list of laws as possible. She later said Appendix E was a \"treasure trove.\" Moritz turned out to be the only case where Marty joined Ruth on a brief. He went back to tax law, and she became a founding director of the Women's Rights Project for the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as the first tenured woman professor at Columbia Law School.\n\nWhen Ginsburg first contemplated bringing women's rights cases to the Supreme Court, her prospects did not look promising. The Court had a long history of sanctioning discrimination against women. In 1873, the Court ruled that states had the right to bar women from the practice of law. As one justice explained, \"The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.\" In 1961, the Court unanimously upheld a Florida law that made jury duty mandatory for men but voluntary for women. Despite some changes in recent years, Justice John Marshall Harlan II observed, \"woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.\" The question for Ginsburg was how to change this mind-set\u2014in a Court made up of men.\n\nBut the Moritz case had given her a useful insight about how to persuade judges to strike down laws that differentiated between the sexes. She brought cases on behalf of _male_ plaintiffs, not just women. Ginsburg's larger goal, of course, was to see that men and women were treated equally under the law, but she recognized that male judges might well have an easier time ruling for their fellow men than for women. Many of the laws that ostensibly favored women were based on outmoded stereotypes about how families and society were organized. She looked for cases that displayed such archaic biases.\n\nIn the first case Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court, Sharron Frontiero, a lieutenant in the air force, applied for housing and medical benefits for her husband, whom she claimed as a dependent. Under the law, male officers could automatically claim their wives as dependents, but women had to prove that their husbands were dependent on them. In 1973, the Supreme Court in _Frontiero v. Richardson_ ruled 8\u20131 in Ginsburg's favor. As Brennan wrote in the lead opinion, \"There can be no doubt that our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an attitude of 'romantic paternalism' which, in practical effect, put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.\"\n\nTwo years later, in _Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld_ , Ginsburg successfully argued in the Supreme Court against a provision in the Social Security Act that denied to widowed fathers benefits afforded to widowed mothers. \"Obviously, the notion that men are more likely than women to be the primary supporters of their spouses and children is not entirely without empirical support,\" Brennan wrote again for a unanimous result. \"But such a gender-based generalization cannot suffice to justify the denigration of the efforts of women who do work and whose earnings contribute significantly to their families' support.\"\n\nUltimately, Ginsburg won five of the six cases she argued before the Supreme Court and became known as the Thurgood Marshall of the feminist movement. In light of Ginsburg's eminence, it was no surprise that Jimmy Carter named her to the D.C. Circuit in 1980, and Clinton nominated her for the Supreme Court in 1993.\n\nThere were other, less happy parallels between the careers of Marshall and Ginsburg. Marshall became famous in the 1950s when he led the legal effort to end segregation; his greatest success came in 1954, when he won the epic case of _Brown v. Board of Education_ , which ended the doctrine of \"separate but equal\" in public education. President Johnson named Marshall to the Court in 1967, just before Richard Nixon's four appointments ended the era of liberal hegemony. Consequently, Marshall spent most of his twenty-four years as a justice trying to hang on to the gains of the Warren Court years. It was neither easy nor enjoyable. He was not always successful, and his persistent health problems compounded his unease on the bench. That he was replaced by Clarence Thomas\u2014whose politics Marshall abhorred\u2014capped the disappointments of his tenure.\n\nGinsburg joined the Court after Rehnquist became chief justice. Though Rehnquist never succeeded in achieving his greatest judicial goals\u2014overturning _Roe v. Wade_ and ending race-conscious affirmative action\u2014he won a great many more cases than he lost, and Ginsburg, like Marshall, often found herself in dissent. She did have occasional triumphs, none sweeter than the VMI case. The Virginia Military Institute, which was funded by taxpayers, admitted only men as cadets. In a 7\u20131 decision in 1996, the Court struck down the single-sex policy at VMI as a violation of the equal protection clause. Ginsburg's opinion gave her the rare pleasure of surveying the history of sex discrimination law at the Court and citing several cases that she herself had argued. \" 'Inherent differences' between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity,\" she wrote. \"But such classifications may not be used, as they once were, to create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women.\" (Rehnquist, knowing how much the issue meant to Ginsburg, assigned the opinion to her. Scalia dissented. Thomas recused himself from the case because his son was a cadet at VMI.)\n\nTriumphs like the VMI case were few. Ginsburg, like Marshall, suffered serious health problems. Over the years, many had been fooled by Ginsburg's fragile appearance. She barely topped five feet and weighed less than a hundred pounds, but she was as tough, in her way, as an NFL linebacker. (In this area and others, Marty was a diligent steward of his wife's good name. He once surprised a reporter with the question, \"How many push-ups can you do?\" When the reporter stumbled for a response, Marty Ginsburg said, \"My wife can do twenty-five\u2014and you wrote that she was 'frail.' \")\n\nIn 1999, Justice Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer. Over the next several months, she went through radiation and chemotherapy but never missed a day on the bench. During this period she received enormous support from O'Connor, who had been treated for breast cancer in 1988. The shy Ginsburg and charismatic O'Connor appeared to have little in common, including their judicial philosophies, but the first and second women on the Court shared a warm friendship. In 2005, O'Connor's departure from the Court hit Ginsburg hard, especially since Alito ended up as her replacement. As Ginsburg often said, it had never occurred to her that she would ever be the only woman on the Court.\n\nWhen Ginsburg took her seat in October 2006, she was already melancholy. There was worse news. Marty had cancer again. And for the first time in the Roberts era, the most incendiary topic of all had returned to its docket\u2014abortion.\n\nThe Court's 1973 decision in _Roe v. Wade_ was rooted in a ruling that came eight years earlier. The result in _Griswold v. Connecticut_ was not especially controversial, but the reasoning behind it was and remains a flashpoint of constitutional debate. ( _Griswold_ the case should not be confused with Erwin Griswold, the onetime solicitor general and dean of Harvard Law School.)\n\nEven in the midsixties, Connecticut rarely enforced its legal ban on the sale or use of birth control, which stated, \"Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than fifty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year.\" Still, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of the state, seeking to create a test case, arranged to be arrested for violating this law by giving birth control advice to married couples. In 1965, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction by a vote of 7\u20132. The justices produced six different opinions, but Justice William O. Douglas spoke for the majority.\n\n\"This law operates directly on an intimate relation of husband and wife and their physician's role in one aspect of that relation,\" Douglas wrote. There was clearly something wrong with the Connecticut law, but what? In his characteristically terse style, Douglas appeared to be searching for a rationale. The law was not a violation of due process of law or freedom of speech, he said, though clearly the values underlying those provisions were implicated. He also believed the case was not really about freedom of association either, though that too was involved. Rather, Douglas concluded, it wasn't a single provision of the Constitution that was violated by this law. Instead, he wrote, in one of the most famous (and infamous) passages in Supreme Court history: \"Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy.\" The Connecticut law interfered with this zone of privacy and thus had to be struck down. (McCain mocked this passage in his campaign speech about the courts.)\n\n_Roe_ relied on Douglas's _Griswold_ opinion to establish a woman's right to choose abortion. In _Roe_ , Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the Court, \"The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as [1891], the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.\" This right of privacy, Blackmun went on, \"is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.\"\n\nIn Blackmun's opinion, though, the abortion decision was as much about the physician as about the woman. \"The attending physician, in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the State, that, in his medical judgment, the patient's pregnancy should be terminated,\" he wrote. \"The abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician.\" (Blackmun had once been general counsel to the Mayo Clinic, and he maintained a reverence for doctors throughout his tenure on the Court.)\n\nLiberals have long regarded the right to privacy, and Blackmun's opinion, as a touchstone of American liberty\u2014a vindication of what Justice Louis Brandeis called \"the right to be let alone\u2014the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.\" Conservatives have always reviled _Roe_ as the ultimate power grab by a liberal judiciary. As Robert Bork summed up the conservative critique of Roe, the right to privacy \"does not come out of the Constitution but is forced into it.... This is not legal reasoning but fiat.\"\n\nGinsburg favored abortion rights, but she departed from the liberal orthodoxy in her distaste for the privacy rationale undergirding _Roe v. Wade_. She believed abortion rights were about equality, not privacy. Ginsburg regarded the denial of abortion rights to women as just another form of the broader denial of equal rights. As she said in 1984, the right to abortion places in the balance \"a woman's autonomous charge of her full life's course\u2014her ability to stand in relation to man, society, and the state as an independent, self-sustaining, equal citizen.\" Ginsburg also resented Blackmun's patronizing emphasis on the rights of doctors, rather than of women. As she put it in an interview later, \"It's the woman in consultation with her doctor. So the view you get is the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him.\"\n\nAgainst this backdrop Ginsburg\u2014and the Court\u2014weighed the abortion case of 2006.\n\nThe specific issue was not a new one. Indeed, the Court had considered a nearly identical case just a few years earlier.\n\nIn the modern post _-Roe_ era, the anti-abortion movement focused its efforts on limiting what it called \"partial birth\" abortion. The medical details were complex, but the movement had seized on a procedure, which usually took place late in a pregnancy, that many ordinary people regarded as gruesome. These kinds of abortions were rare and often undertaken because the woman's health or life was in danger. But there was no denying the shock value of the details.\n\nStill, in the 2000 case of _Stenberg v. Carhart_ , the Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska \"partial birth\" abortion law by a vote of 5\u20134. As ever, O'Connor provided the swing vote, concluding that the law was unconstitutional because it failed to include an exception allowing the procedure to be used to protect the health of the mother. Breyer wrote the opinion for the Court in 2000, the highest-profile majority opinion of his career.\n\nBut when George W. Bush took office the next year, along with a Republican Congress, one of his first priorities was to sign the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which was almost identical to the Nebraska law that the Court had just struck down. It was immediately challenged in Court in a case called _Gonzales v. Carhart_. (The 2000 and 2006 cases had the same plaintiff, LeRoy H. Carhart, who was one of the few doctors willing to admit publicly that he performed the partial-birth procedures. George Tiller, another doctor who performed such abortions, was murdered by an anti-abortion terrorist in 2009.)\n\nThere was, of course, one critical change in the Court between 2000 and 2006: Alito had replaced O'Connor. In this case, as in many others, the switch made all the difference and the Court now voted 5\u20134 to uphold the federal law. (Alito said nothing during the oral argument, but it wasn't hard to guess how he would vote; his wife and family doctor, who were in the audience, scowled and shook their heads as the lawyer for Planned Parenthood argued her case.) Roberts assigned the opinion in _Gonzales v. Carhart_ to Kennedy.\n\nKennedy had a complex history in abortion cases. Reagan nominated Kennedy in 1987, following the Senate's rejection of Robert Bork. There had been no doubt that Bork would have joined the anti _-Roe_ forces, but Kennedy's history and his confirmation testimony were opaque about abortion. In 1992, Kennedy joined with O'Connor and Souter in the _Casey_ decision to preserve what they called the \"essential holding\" of _Roe v. Wade_. (Their unsigned collaborative opinion was joined by Blackmun and Stevens to give them a majority.) In subsequent years, though, Kennedy had been moving to the anti-abortion side of the Court, voting to uphold various restrictions on the practice. In 2000, Kennedy dissented vigorously in the first _Carhart_ case. Now, six years later, Roberts gave Kennedy the chance to turn that dissent into a majority opinion, which was released in April 2007.\n\nKennedy made the most of the opportunity. He discussed the abortion procedures in great and gory detail. (\"Rotating the fetus as it is being pulled decreases the odds of dismemberment.... The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby's brains out.\") He said almost nothing about the kind of medical conditions that would prompt a woman to subject herself to such procedures. Overall, Kennedy's rhetoric was straight out of the anti-abortion movement. He referred to the fetus as a \"baby\" and a \"child.\" The obstetricians and gynecologists who performed the procedures were \"abortion doctors.\" The state \"has respect for human life at all stages in the pregnancy\" and a \"legitimate and substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life.\" Kennedy's opinion was a vivid demonstration of the significance of Alito's appointment\u2014and of the dedication of the conservatives on the Court to change. The addition of one new justice posed a clear threat to _Roe_ , _Casey_ , and abortion rights generally.\n\nGinsburg had little patience for Kennedy in the best of circumstances. The Californian's airy and vague rhetoric about dignity and the like offended the practical New Yorker. (Ginsburg agreed with Kennedy on the merits of cases more often than she did with Rehnquist, but she had a temperamental affinity for the late chief's plainspoken, forthright opinions.) There was one passage in Kennedy's _Carhart_ opinion that offended Ginsburg as much as anything she had seen during her tenure on the Court. Kennedy wrote:\n\nRespect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child. The Act recognizes this reality as well. Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision. While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.\n\nGinsburg had devoted her life to fighting this kind of patronizing reasoning. Appendix E consisted almost entirely of rules written by men who thought they knew what was best for women. Kennedy's opinion belonged to that lamentable tradition.\n\nGinsburg prided herself on her professional tone; no Scalia-style hysterics for her. Her model and partner in this decorous approach was David Souter, who also resisted the use of invective in even the most controversial cases. But in _Carhart_ , Ginsburg did not, or could not, restrain herself. In her dissent, she wrote that Kennedy's opinion rested on \"ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution\u2014ideas that have long since been discredited.\"\n\nGinsburg also took the opportunity in her _Carhart_ dissent to clear up some of her lingering dissatisfactions with _Roe_ itself. Her long-standing preference was for equality rather than privacy as the governing rationale. Challenges to abortion laws, she wrote, \"do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.\" Harry Blackmun notwithstanding, abortion rights belonged to women, not their doctors. Later cases, she noted, \"described more precisely than did _Roe_ v. _Wade_ the impact of abortion restrictions on women's liberty. _Roe_ 's focus was in considerable measure on 'vindicat[ing] the right of the physician to administer medical treatment according to his professional judgment.' \" Finally, she took on Kennedy's claim that, in her words, \"having an abortion is any more dangerous to a woman's long-term mental health than delivering and parenting a child that she did not intend to have.\" Kennedy's assertion was based on junk science, she said, proving her point with a four-hundred-word footnote summarizing the actual scholarly research about women who had had abortions. Ginsburg was appalled by the Court's decision\u2014and she wanted everyone to know it.\n\nIn their first decade or so, Supreme Court justices usually announced their rulings in the manner of their British forebearers, with each justice presenting his view of each case. In this area as in so many others of the Court's history, Chief Justice John Marshall, who presided from 1801 to 1835, created a new and enduring tradition. Under Marshall, the Court began to render opinions that represented the collective judgment of the Court. In his day, Marshall wrote most of the opinions himself, but there were occasions when one or more of his colleagues disagreed with him. These disputes, rare though they were, gave rise to the tradition of dissenting opinions.\n\nOutsiders (and sometimes the justices themselves) often asked about dissents: why bother? There was no higher court to persuade. What was the point of writing down the losing side of an argument? The most famous answer to this question came from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who wrote, \"A dissent in a Court of last resort is an appeal... to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed.\" Dissenting opinions also offered reasons to the public, who, in a democracy, were the ultimate judges of the political branches of government. Many justices cared deeply about how their work was perceived beyond the walls of the Supreme Court building, and dissenting opinions shaped perceptions of the winners and the losers almost as much as the words of the majority.\n\nIt was true, too, that some of the most famous dissenting opinions were ultimately vindicated, either by the course of events or by future justices. Dissenting in the infamous Dred Scott case of 1857, Benjamin Curtis anticipated the Civil War; the first Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in _Plessy v. Ferguson_ in 1896, presaged the ruling in _Brown v. Board of Education_ fifty-eight years later; Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes protested the Court's restrictions on free speech in the repressive period after World War I. Later the Court explicitly embraced their understanding of the First Amendment. These were exceptions. Most dissents remained just that.\n\nBut the justices kept writing them, and sometimes did more to call attention to the minority view. When the justices finally moved from their cramped quarters in the Capitol to their commodious new building across First Street, in 1935, their new courtroom looked more like a theater. Some justices began playing to the audiences and, on major occasions, read their dissenting opinions out loud. Intentionally or not, justices sometimes also ad-libbed additions to their formal opinions. When, for instance, James McReynolds announced his dissent from the Court's approval of FDR's decision to take the government off the gold standard in 1935, he reportedly uttered a line not found in his written opinion: \"The Constitution, as we have known it, is gone.\"\n\nJustices recognized that reading a dissent from the bench represented their most visible and intense form of protest, and they exercised the privilege sparingly. There were rarely more than a half-dozen dissents read aloud over the course of a year; in some years, like 1984, there were none. William Brennan and William Rehnquist, through their long careers on the bench, each read dissents from the bench exactly once. (Brennan read his dissent in the _Bakke_ affirmative action case of 1978, and Rehnquist read in the _Casey_ abortion case of 1992.)\n\nStill, Ginsburg had no doubt she wanted to register a vocal protest against Kennedy's opinion in _Gonzales v. Carhart_. Decades after she'd moved away, Ginsburg's voice still carried hints of Brooklyn as she began: \"Four members of this Court, Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer and I strongly dissent from today's opinion.\"\n\nGinsburg made clear that she thought the decision in _Carhart_ came about only because of the changing composition of the Court. \"Although today's opinion does not go so far as to discard _Roe_ or _Casey_ , the Court, differently composed than it was when we last considered a restrictive abortion regulation, is hardly faithful to Casey's invocation of the rule of law and the principles of stare decisis\"\u2014the rule of precedent. The message was plain. Abortion rights were under siege. \"In candor,\" Ginsburg said, \"the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Court's defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power.\"\n\nA few weeks later, Ginsburg would be reading another dissent from the bench.\n\n# **5**\n\n#    \n**THE BALLAD OF LILLY LEDBETTER**\n\nJohn Roberts, no less than Ginsburg, was shaped by the cases he argued before the Court. _Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation_ , which Roberts argued during his tenure as George H. W. Bush's deputy solicitor general, seems to have had special resonance for him. An environmental group had challenged the Reagan administration's effort to assign as much as 180 million acres of federal land for mining. Roberts did not defend the Interior Department's designation of the land on the merits but rather asserted that the plaintiffs had no right to bring the case in the first place. The issue involved the doctrine known as standing\u2014one of many subjects before the Supreme Court that appear to be just procedural in nature but are in fact freighted with political significance.\n\nIn his argument before the Court on April 16, 1990, Roberts said that the mere allegation that a member of the National Wildlife Federation used land \"in the vicinity\" of the affected acres did not give the group the right to bring the case. \"That sort of interest was insufficient to confer standing, because it was in no way distinct from the interest any citizen could claim, coming in the courthouse and saying, 'I'm interested in this subject,' \" Roberts told the justices. By a vote of 5\u20134, the Justices agreed and threw out the case.\n\nRoberts's argument in _Lujan_ represented a template for how to defend environmental, civil rights, and other \"public interest\"\u2013type lawsuits. The goal, to the extent possible, was to avoid a judgment on the merits but rather to employ a variety of procedural doctrines to persuade courts to dismiss these cases. There are any number of procedural doctrines that can be used for this purpose. Other examples include ripeness (is it too early for a court to decide the case?), mootness (is it too late for a court to decide?), venue (is this court the right one?), and the \"political question\" doctrine (is the subject matter appropriate for a court to decide at all?). Everyone agrees that these doctrines are necessary, at some level; the courts cannot be allowed to weigh in on controversies simply because judges feel like deciding the merits. But the ideological divisions on these issues are clear. Liberals want flexible rules that allow courts to reach a lot of decisions on the merits, and conservatives want strict rules to prevent cases from being heard.\n\nRoberts came of age as a lawyer when controversies about procedural doctrines were hot topics. The liberal activism of the Warren Court was based, to a great extent, on flexible rules of procedure. Warren and his colleagues wanted to push the law into new fields and to create new rights. The justices began to allow plaintiffs to bring new kinds of cases. While Roberts was at Harvard, a professor there, Abram Chayes, wrote a famous law review article celebrating this trend. \"In our received tradition,\" Chayes wrote, \"the lawsuit is a vehicle for settling disputes between private parties about private rights.\" But that was changing, Chayes said, and for the better. Contemporary lawsuits, especially class actions, amounted to \"public law litigation,\" which required courts to consider the needs and views of a wide variety of people, who may or may not be actual parties to the case. \"School desegregation, employment discrimination, and prisoners' or inmates' rights cases come readily to mind as avatars of this new form of litigation,\" Chayes wrote. (The Boston school busing crisis was ongoing.) In these cases, Chayes wrote, \"the party structure is sprawling and amorphous, subject to change over the course of the litigation. The traditional adversary relationship is suffused and intermixed with negotiating and mediating processes at every point.\" He went on, \"Most important, the trial judge has increasingly become the creator and manager of complex forms of ongoing relief, which have widespread effects on persons not before the court.\"\n\nLike many other conservatives of his generation, Roberts built his career fighting the ideas extolled in Chayes's piece. In the vision of Roberts, Alito, and others, courts should play a narrower role than the one Chayes envisioned. They should interpret rules strictly, construe laws narrowly, and decide only what they must. Indeed, in the one famous line from Roberts's brief tenure on the D.C. Circuit, he had described \"the cardinal principle of judicial restraint\u2014if it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more.\" George W. Bush put the same point another way, in describing the kind of judges he wanted to appoint to the Supreme Court. \"Every judge I appoint,\" Bush said, \"will be a person who clearly understands the role of a judge is to interpret the law, not to legislate from the bench.\" Procedural doctrines were the principal tool to keep plaintiffs from persuading judges to legislate.\n\nThe political lineup in these procedural disputes, and in civil litigation generally, was clear. \"Trial lawyers,\" as they are known, are actually plaintiffs' lawyers, who tend to represent individuals and skew overwhelmingly Democratic. The \"defense bar\" represents corporations, often insurance companies, and are usually Republicans.\n\nWhen Roberts was a private lawyer at the firm then known as Hogan & Hartson, he was part of the defense bar. The cases he argued before the Supreme Court were typically for corporations against individuals, and they often involved the procedural doctrines. For example, shortly before Roberts became a judge, he successfully argued in the Supreme Court that a woman who suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome could not win a recovery from her employer, Toyota, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. A strict reading of the statute\u2014always the preference of defendants in civil rights cases\u2014meant the plaintiff had no right to make her case. Likewise, Roberts won a Supreme Court ruling that the family of a woman who died in a fire could not use the Alabama wrongful-death statute to sue the city of Tarrant, Alabama. The family of Alberta Jefferson, an African American woman, sued the city, claiming that the fire department failed to save her because of \"the selective denial of fire protection to disfavored minorities.\"\n\nIn one of his early decisions as chief justice, Roberts had a chance to put his expertise in standing doctrine to work\u2014to characteristic ends. In _DaimlerChrysler v. Cuno_ , a group of taxpayers in Toledo, Ohio, went to court to challenge local tax breaks that were given to the carmaker to expand its operations in the city; the Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing and dismissed the case. In a broadly worded opinion that relied in part on the _Lujan_ case (offering Roberts the same kind of satisfaction that Ginsburg received from citing the cases she had litigated), Roberts suggested that most state and local government activities were off limits to challenges from taxpayers. \"Affording state taxpayers standing to press such challenges simply because their tax burden gives them an interest in the state treasury,\" Roberts wrote, \"would interpose the federal courts as virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and soundness of state fiscal administration, contrary to the more modest role Article III envisions for federal courts.\" As usual under Roberts, the citizen plaintiffs were out of luck.\n\nThe justices built their judicial philosophies on the foundation of their prior lives. From differing perspectives, Ginsburg and Thomas had long experience with (and strong feelings about) civil rights; Roberts had neither. Breyer had given years of thought to the role of the administrative state; Roberts had not. Scalia endorsed an overarching theory of the Constitution; Roberts did not. Kennedy viewed the Supreme Court in the context of an international community of judges; Roberts saw no such thing. But the chief justice had spent decades thinking about how to throw plaintiffs in civil cases out of court\u2014the faster, the better. Civil procedure, so dreary even to most lawyers, was for Roberts the surest route to victory for his political side. One of Roberts's fellow conservatives on the D.C. Circuit used to offer his law clerks a small cash bonus if they could find a procedural issue in any case that would allow the court to dismiss the action. Roberts provided no such cash incentives, but he shared the impulse.\n\nThe real-world implications of these procedural roadblocks were clear. With so many barriers at every stage of the process, plaintiffs' lawyers hesitated before filing new cases, or did not bring them at all. The costs and risks were too high. (Legislative efforts at tort reform, like limits on punitive damages, compounded the difficulties for plaintiffs.) If claims could never get to trial because of procedural barriers, there would be fewer cases brought in the first place. This was especially true in civil rights cases\u2014in \"public law\" cases, in Chayes's phrase\u2014because these ambitious undertakings had the greatest procedural vulnerabilities. The defense bar understood these economic realities and, with a sympathetic judiciary, pushed to capitalize on its advantages. As a lawyer and judge, Roberts was more skilled at this kind of work than anyone.\n\nAll of which helps explain the fate of Lilly Ledbetter.\n\nThe Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was founded around the turn of the last century, in Akron, Ohio, which soon became known as Tire City. The firm vaulted to prosperity during World War I and the postwar boom, and in time its leaders began looking for new locations to open their vast tire-making factories. In 1929, Goodyear established a base in Gadsden, Alabama. By 1954, it was the largest tire-making facility in the United States. In the seventies, Goodyear prospered, even in the face of the energy crisis, by making steel-belted radial tires, which offered greater stability and traction than traditional models. Still, it was a polluting, competitive business, increasingly susceptible to lower-priced imports from abroad. For employees, even more than for the company, manufacturing tires was a tough, dirty way to make a living.\n\nIn 1979, a forty-year-old woman named Lilly Ledbetter went to work at the Gadsden plant. She already had fifteen years of experience at other factories, and Goodyear hired her as a production supervisor. In 1985, she scored the second highest of forty-five applicants to become an area manager. But Goodyear in Gadsden was never an easy place for a woman to work. One male boss pressured her for sex. When she refused, Ledbetter said, he lowered his evaluations of her work. When she confronted him about the poor evaluations, he told her that it was \"a lot easier to downgrade you. You're just a little female and these big old guys, I mean, they're going to beat up on me and push me around and cuss me.\" According to Ledbetter, that boss \"continued to ask me out, go out with him. And I finally told him no. And then from that standpoint, my evaluations, the audits got worse.\" Nevertheless, Ledbetter, who was one of the very few female area managers at the plant, did receive a top performance award in 1996. She planned to retire the next year.\n\nShortly before Ledbetter was planning to leave the company, someone anonymously slipped a note inside her mailbox at Goodyear. The message informed her that she was making $3,727 per month while men who were doing the same job were paid between $4,286 and $5,236 per month. The same kind of differences had persisted for years. Ledbetter hired a lawyer, and as she was required to do under the Title VII antidiscrimination law, she took her complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (In her last months at the company, after she had filed her formal protest with the government, she was transferred to a new job that required her to carry tires around the plant. Ledbetter was just short of sixty years old at the time. She asserted that the transfer was retribution.)\n\nLedbetter put her case before a federal jury in Alabama, which awarded her $3.3 million. The judge reduced the award to $300,000, but Goodyear still appealed the case to the Eleventh Circuit, which overturned the judgment altogether. The company's claim was straightforward. Goodyear asserted that an employee alleging disparate pay must file an EEOC charge within 180 days of the pay decision giving rise to the disparity. Under that theory, Ledbetter could try to prove only that her 1997 pay adjustment (the last one she had received) was discriminatory. She had no recourse for the earlier years because she had missed the 180-day deadline.\n\nIn other words, according to Goodyear, virtually all of Ledbetter's claims were barred by the statute of limitations. Like ripeness, mootness, and all the other procedural doctrines, statutes of limitations were another roadblock to successful civil rights claims in federal court. The argument was like the ones Roberts made in private practice. Even if Ledbetter had suffered discrimination (which Goodyear did not concede), she was barred from bringing her case because she had waited too long to charge the company.\n\nThe Ledbetter case reflected the practical impediments to plaintiffs in civil rights cases. She initiated the case in 1998, and the Supreme Court decided it nine years later. As with most plaintiffs, her lawyers worked for a contingency fee, which meant they earned nothing on the case for nearly a decade (or, as it turned out, ever). Not many lawyers are willing to take such risks. Indeed, Ledbetter's case only reached the Supreme Court because after her loss in the Eleventh Circuit, her original lawyers brought the case to the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. There, the teachers and students agreed to represent Ledbetter for free.\n\n\"Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court,\" Kevin Russell, the lawyer with the Stanford clinic began his argument on November 27, 2006. \"A jury found that at the time petitioner filed for a charge of discrimination with the EEOC, respondent was paying her less for each week's work than it paid similarly situated male employees and that it did so because of her sex.\" The question for the Court was whether all of the paychecks that reflected the discrimination were violations of Title VII, or just the last one.\n\nGinsburg, the only woman on the Court at the time, ranked around the middle of the Court in terms of how often she asked questions: behind Scalia, Roberts, and Breyer, but ahead of Alito and, of course, Thomas. (Thomas asked his last question in oral argument during the previous term, on February 22, 2006; he has not asked one since.) The diminutive Ginsburg never looked smaller than she did on the bench; her head came nowhere close to the top of her leather chair. But in this case, like almost no other, Ginsburg dominated the argument. Her questions\u2014they were more like speeches\u2014left no doubt about where she stood. Shortly after Russell began, Ginsburg said, \"Mr. Russell, I thought that your argument was that 'yes, you know that you haven't got the promotion, you know you haven't got the transfer,' but the spread in the pay is an incremental thing. You may think the first year you didn't get a raise, 'well, so be it.' But you have, you have no reason to think that there is going to be this inequality.\" Quite so, said Russell.\n\nRoberts took the lead in defending Goodyear, relying on the venerable argumentative tactic of the slippery slope. Under the plaintiff's theory, Roberts charged, companies could be liable for acts that were committed many years ago. \"I suppose all they'd have to do is allege that sometime over the past. I mean, it doesn't have to be 15 years,\" he said. \"It could be 40 years, right... that there was a discriminatory act, in one of the semi-annual pay reviews I was denied this, a raise that I should have gotten.\"\n\nWrong, replied Ginsburg, who was two seats to Roberts's left. If the case were based on a single disputed small raise many years ago, there would be no point to bringing a case. \"If she's going to bring a case [alleging] I got a 2 percent raise, he got a 3 percent raise, her chances are very slim,\" she said. But Kennedy\u2014the key vote\u2014weighed in on Goodyear's side, by raising the possibility that a company may have been sold between the time of the alleged discrimination and the commencement of the lawsuit.\n\nIn this case, Goodyear had an important advantage. The Bush administration, through the solicitor general, entered the proceedings and urged the justices to rule for Goodyear. Irving Gornstein, the assistant to the SG, told the justices, \"Employees who allow the 180-day period to pass may not years later and even at the end of their careers challenge their current paychecks on the grounds that they are the result of a number of discrete individually discriminatory pay decisions that occurred long ago.\" The Court agreed, by the customary 5\u20134 split (the same as in _Gonzales v. Carhart_ , the abortion case that was pending at the time). Roberts assigned the opinion to Alito.\n\nAlito had been a judge on the Third Circuit for fifteen years when Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court. That meant that he had served as an appeals court judge for longer than any of the other justices; at the time of his promotion, Alito had already written hundreds of opinions. So it was not surprising that Alito brought an established style that reflected his long experience. Circuit court opinions tend to be drier, less rhetorical than Supreme Court opinions, and this approach suited Alito's careful, even phlegmatic temperament. In rejecting Ledbetter's claim on statute of limitations grounds, Alito hewed closely to the facts and his view of the precedents. \"She argues simply that Goodyear's conduct during the charging period gave present effect to discriminatory conduct outside of that period,\" he wrote. \"But current effects alone cannot breathe life into prior, uncharged discrimination.... Ledbetter should have filed an EEOC charge within 180 days after each allegedly discriminatory pay decision was made and communicated to her. She did not do so.\"\n\nAlito was short on sympathy for Ledbetter but long on the risks cases like hers posed for corporate defendants. \"Statutes of limitations serve a policy of repose,\" he wrote. \"They represent a pervasive legislative judgment that it is unjust to fail to put the adversary on notice to defend within a specified period of time and that the right to be free of stale claims in time comes to prevail over the right to prosecute them.\" (A graceful stylist like Roberts would never have written such a clunky sentence.) The EEOC filing deadline, Alito went on, \"protects employers from the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions that are long past.\"\n\nAs the senior associate justice in the minority, Stevens was responsible for choosing which justice should write the primary dissent. For workload purposes, Stevens (and Roberts) liked to spread these assignments around, and Ginsburg already had the major dissent in _Gonazales v. Carhart_ on her plate. But since Ginsburg felt strongly about this case too, Stevens gave it to her as well.\n\nSex discrimination cases, like civil rights cases generally, had changed since Ginsburg was a litigator in the seventies. The Court in recent years had focused on affirmative action programs, testing whether racial or gender preferences violated the rights of the majority. But _Ledbetter_ was not a case about special privileges. It was a case, simply, about equality, very much like the kind that Ginsburg herself had brought to the Court three decades earlier. Alito's bloodless opinion, with its tender regard for the Goodyears of the world and none at all for the Ledbetters, inspired Ginsburg to unleash a powerful and thorough dissent. (At 6,200 words, it was nearly as long as Alito's opinion for the Court.)\n\nAs someone who had actually litigated sex discrimination cases, Ginsburg had some idea of how they unfolded in the real world. \"The Court's insistence on immediate contest overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination,\" she wrote. \"Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter's case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time. Comparative pay information, moreover, is often hidden from the employee's view. Employers may keep under wraps the pay differentials maintained among supervisors, no less the reasons for those differentials. Small initial discrepancies may not be seen as meat for a federal case, particularly when the employee, trying to succeed in a nontraditional environment, is averse to making waves.\"\n\nThis was obvious, of course, since it's clear that employers that discriminate rarely make public announcements to that effect. Ginsburg also made short work of the slippery slope argument, noting she was only proposing to allow suits by plaintiffs who did not know they had been discriminated against until much later. For those plaintiffs who knew about pay differentials and simply waited to sue, Ginsburg noted, \"No sensible judge would tolerate such inexcusable neglect.\"\n\nGinsburg's words were endorsed only by the three other losing justices in the case. And _Ledbetter_ (both the case and the person) was still fairly obscure; the news media rarely pays attention to cases about procedural doctrines like statutes of limitations. But Ginsburg had a plan to turn Lilly Ledbetter, and her own dissenting opinion, into something more than just another quickly forgotten loss for the liberal quartet.\n\nIn this Ginsburg had an edge. Notwithstanding the arcane details of federal procedure at issue in the case, Ginsburg knew that Ledbetter's predicament was easy to understand. Ledbetter had been a clear victim of discrimination and, perversely, the longer Goodyear violated her rights to equal pay, the weaker her case became. People outside the Court, and especially across First Street, at the Capitol, would respond to her story.\n\nGinsburg's idea for her dissent was also rooted in an important difference between the _Carhart_ and _Ledbetter_ cases. _Carhart_ was a decision based on the Constitution. The only people who could change or overrule it were the justices themselves. Accordingly, as Chief Justice Hughes put it, Ginsburg's only recourse in her dissenting opinion in _Carhart_ was to appeal \"to the intelligence of a future day.\" _Ledbetter_ was different. It was not based on any constitutional provision. Rather, the issue in _Ledbetter_ was the interpretation of an act of Congress\u2014specifically, the statute of limitations provision of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Only the Court could interpret the Constitution\u2014but Congress can always change a law.\n\nOn May 29, 2007, Ginsburg waited, sunken in her big chair, as Alito read his summary of the majority opinion. In her fourteen years on the Court at that point, Ginsburg had gone as long as four years between reading dissents from the bench. Now, only about a month after _Carhart_ , she was reading another. That alone would have generated a good deal of attention.\n\nIn dissents from the bench, the tradition was for the justice to give, in essence, a shortened version of the published opinion. But that was not what Ginsburg did. Rather, she described the Ledbetter case in plain English, not the legalese of her dissent. \"In our view, the court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,\" she said. \"Today's decision counsels, sue early on when it is uncertain whether discrimination accounts for the pay disparity you are beginning to experience. Indeed, initially you may not know that men are receiving more for substantially similar work. Of course, you are likely to lose a less-than-fully baked case.\"\n\nBut Ginsburg was just warming up. (Overall, she spoke twice as long as Alito.) She then gave a detailed summary of Ledbetter's long career at Goodyear and the acknowledged differences in her pay and that of comparably situated men; she went on to explain how those differences expanded and multiplied over the years. \"As the court reads Title VII, each and every pay decision Ledbetter did not properly challenge, wiped the slate clean,\" Ginsburg said. \"Never mind the cumulative effect of a series of decisions that together, set her pay well below that of every male Area Manager.\" All through these years, Ginsburg pointed out, Ledbetter had no idea that she was making less than her male peers.\n\nAt last Ginsburg came to the climax\u2014and the point\u2014of her long speech. \"This is not the first time this court has ordered a cramped interpretation of Title VII, incompatible with the statute's broad remedial purpose,\" she said. Ginsburg was referring to a series of cases in the late 1980s when the Court made winning discrimination cases much harder. \"In 1991,\" Ginsburg went on, \"Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that effectively overruled several of this court's similarly restrictive decisions including one on which the court relies today.\" In other words, in the 1991 act Congress repaired the damage the Court did in a series of wrongheaded decisions.\n\n\"Today, the ball again lies in Congress' court,\" Ginsburg concluded. \"As in 1991, the legislature has cause to note and to correct this court's parsimonious reading of Title VII.\"\n\nRarely in the history of the Court had a justice, speaking from the bench no less, called so directly on another branch of government to nullify a decision by her colleagues. And rarely had a justice's words in dissent created so powerful and immediate an impact. Ginsburg's words were intended to, and did, draw the notice of the Democratic legislators who had just won control of both houses of Congress. In addition, the Democratic candidates for president\u2014among them, at that point, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden\u2014quickly took up Ginsburg's challenge. Thanks to Ginsburg, a legislative overruling of _Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co_. became a central plank of the Democratic Party.\n\nVery suddenly, in her seventieth year, Lilly Ledbetter was a famous woman.\n\n# **6**\n\n#    \n**THE WAR AGAINST PRECEDENT**\n\nWith her dissent in _Ledbetter_ , Ginsburg executed a nimble feat of jujitsu, turning a setback into a possible long-term victory. But in that second year of the Roberts Court, there was no mistaking the full picture of what was happening. The era of good feelings among the justices lasted precisely twelve months. Unanimous opinions in year two plummeted from 45 percent to 25 percent. More importantly, in contested cases the conservatives were winning, almost all the time. A full third of the cases were decided by a margin of 5\u20134, the highest percentage in more than a decade. The liberal quartet of Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer was able to assemble a majority in only a quarter of them.\n\nThe conservative victories ranged over the Court's docket, but some of the most important came in areas that especially mattered to the chief justice. In a famous decision from 1968, Chief Justice Warren held that taxpayers had the right to sue the government to block expenditures that might violate the First Amendment's prohibition on establishment of a state religion\u2014that is, to maintain the barrier between church and state. Warren's theory in _Flast v. Cohen_ was that if taxpayers did not have standing to bring these suits, there would be no effective way for the courts to examine possible constitutional violations. Conservatives like Roberts had targeted the _Flast_ case for decades, part of their larger effort to rein in standing doctrine. In _Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation_ , the five conservatives chipped away at the _Flast_ precedent, holding that taxpayers lacked standing to challenge any action by the executive branch on church-state grounds.\n\nIn a case with the evocative title of _National Association of Home Buildersv. Defenders of Wildlife_, the Court shut the courthouse door to plaintiffs in a different way. The majority held that an environmental group could not stop the Environmental Protection Agency from returning jurisdiction over water pollution permits to states.\n\nIn death penalty cases, where Kennedy often joined the liberals, he voted with the other side to uphold two planned executions. One case involved jury selection in death penalty cases, and the other weighed whether the defendant was entitled to a hearing on the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel.\n\nEven one vaguely comic case from Alaska turned into a political standoff. On January 24, 2002, the Olympic Torch Relay passed through Juneau on its way to the Winter Games in Salt Lake City. The principal of a local high school allowed students and staff to skip class and watch from the sidewalk as the runners passed by. Joseph Frederick, an eighteen-year-old senior, stood across the street from the school with a group of friends, with a fourteen-foot banner that said, BONG HiTS 4 JESUS. The principal told the group to take it down, and all except Frederick agreed. The principal forcibly took the sign from Frederick and later suspended him for ten days.\n\nThe issue in the case was whether the First Amendment protected Frederick's display. At the time, Deborah Morse, the principal, said she removed the sign because she thought it encouraged drug use. In fact, it remains unclear to this day what, if anything, the sign meant. Frederick always denied that he was talking about drugs; indeed, he maintained that the whole thing was a joke and \"that the words were just nonsense meant to attract television cameras.\" Still, in _Morse v. Frederick_ , the Court agreed to weigh the limits of students' First Amendment rights.\n\nThe subject had a rich history. In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, the Court ruled that three students in Iowa could not be sent home from their local schools for wearing black armbands to protest the war. In _Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District_ , the most famous opinion Abe Fortas wrote during his brief tenure on the Court, he said, \"It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.\" In the years since, though, conservative justices had cut back on the freedoms granted to students, which they did in _Morse v. Frederick_ as well.\n\nThe dueling opinions, by Roberts for the majority and Stevens for the dissenters, took issue over the less-than-momentous question of what Frederick's slogan meant. \"The message on Frederick's banner is cryptic,\" Roberts wrote. \"It is no doubt offensive to some, perhaps amusing to others. To still others, it probably means nothing at all.\" Roberts and the four others were willing to trust the principal's conclusion that the banner encouraged drug use. On the other hand, Stevens took Frederick at his word: the banner was gibberish and he only wanted to get on television. The question was whether, in a matter involving freedom of speech, the principal or the student should receive the benefit of the doubt. Roberts won by backing the school authorities. (Thomas wrote a separate concurring opinion, arguing that _Tinker_ should be overturned because students should have no free speech rights _at all_ under the First Amendment.)\n\n_Morse v. Frederick_ could be dismissed as a silly aberration, but the overall tenor that year was unmistakable, and deadly serious. There was no doubt which one of the liberals was most traumatized by the Court's sharp turn to the right. It was Stephen Breyer.\n\nBreyer was always very clear about his happiest professional memory. He had grown up in San Francisco, gone to Stanford and Harvard Law School, clerked for Justice Arthur Goldberg, and then returned to Harvard in the late sixties to teach. Less than a decade later, though, Breyer surprised his colleagues in Cambridge by returning to Washington. It was common for Harvard law professors to work in the executive branch\u2014much later, Obama would practically deplete the faculty\u2014but Breyer went to work in Congress. He became chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was then chaired by Edward M. Kennedy.\n\nAlmost every morning, Breyer had breakfast with the top lawyer for Strom Thurmond, who was then the senior Republican on the committee. Together, cordially, the two staffers mapped out plans for the committee. Of course Kennedy and Thurmond were ideological adversaries, but they directed their representatives to find areas of common ground. Indeed, it turned out to be a remarkably successful legislative partnership, producing landmark laws that deregulated the trucking, airline, and natural gas industries. Breyer loved that time in his life.\n\nHis tenure on the Judiciary Committee staff also yielded a very tangible benefit. In 1980, when Breyer was just forty-two, President Jimmy Carter nominated him to the First Circuit. Breyer was so popular among the senators on the committee, the Republicans as well as the Democrats, that he was confirmed _after_ Carter had lost the presidential election to Ronald Reagan. Later, when the political environment on judicial nominations turned poisonous, this kind of bipartisanship on a circuit court nomination became inconceivable. But this period\u2014this golden age, as Breyer recalled it\u2014became the model that he hoped to replicate on the Supreme Court.\n\nBreyer never lost respect for the legislators he came to know during his days on Capitol Hill. He believed in the Congress, and in government generally. To him, compromise was a virtue, not a vice. The point was to give everyone a say and reach a result that... _worked_. Breyer loved that word (and its cognates) and used it incessantly. \"Our constitutional history,\" Breyer wrote in his book _Active Liberty_ , published in 2005, \"has been a quest for workable government, workable democratic government, workable democratic government protective of individual personal liberty.\" Five years later, Breyer wrote another book, which he called _Making Our Democracy Work_.\n\nAfter Clinton appointed Breyer to the Court in 1994, Breyer dissented in most of the major cases up to and including _Bush v. Gore_ , in 2000. But then Breyer had had his own brief period as a force in the majority, thanks largely to O'Connor. During George W. Bush's first term as president, as O'Connor grew more and more alienated from the Republican in the White House, Breyer and O'Connor became a formidable team. They also shared a genuine fondness for each other, for they had similar practical, problem-solving temperaments. They traveled the world, giving speeches and advice to judges and legislators. (After the 9\/11 attacks, they were stranded in India together.)\n\nThe highpoint of Breyer's influence can be marked with precision. At the end of the term in June 2005, the Court decided two cases about public displays of the Ten Commandments, both by votes of 5\u20134. The Court rejected a decision by local authorities to post the Commandments in Kentucky courthouses but at the same time allowed the Commandments to remain in a public park, near the state capitol, in Austin, Texas. Four justices thought both displays should remain; four others thought both should be taken down.\n\nOnly Breyer was in the majority in both cases. He endured some mockery for his seemingly inconsistent positions, but his reasoning made sense. The Kentucky Commandments, which everyone in the courthouse could see, were clearly intended as a provocation, and the display had been controversial from the moment it was posted. In Texas, on the other hand, the monument with the Commandments drew no notice at all for forty years. (The plaintiff in the case was a homeless man who sometimes lived in the park.) Breyer thought the difference in public reactions to the displays was critical. The Texas display \"has stood apparently uncontested for nearly two generations. That experience helps us understand that as a practical matter of _degree_ this display is unlikely to prove divisive,\" Breyer wrote. But he added, referring to the Kentucky display, that \"in a Nation of so many different religious and comparable nonreligious fundamental beliefs, a more contemporary state effort to focus attention upon a religious text is certainly likely to prove divisive in a way that this long-standing, pre-existing monument has not.\" It was, to use Breyer's favorite word, a workable compromise.\n\nIn any case, Breyer's moment was brief. The decisions in the Kentucky and Texas cases were announced on June 27, 2005. Four days later, O'Connor announced her departure from the Court.\n\nWhen Breyer was appointed, he was often described, with good reason, as a technocrat. He taught antitrust and administrative law at Harvard, and he was more deeply steeped in those arcane specialties than in the constitutional law at the center of the Court's work. Once Breyer settled into his new position, however, he tried to come to terms with the Constitution and the place of the Court in the broader history of the country.\n\nIt is easy, if unwise, to romanticize the history of the Supreme Court. During John Marshall's tenure as chief justice, from 1801 to 1835, the Court built a noble template for American democracy. Marshall himself, more than any framer of the Constitution or even any president, defined the terms of separation of powers, the breadth of federal power, the relationship between the national government and the states, and the place of the Supreme Court in the government of the young nation. Thanks to Marshall, the Court made a glorious debut.\n\nFor the next twelve decades, however, the Supreme Court was for the most part a malign force in American life. The landmarks of this era, which still constitutes more than half the history of the Court, were nearly all negative. In 1857, to the eternal shame of the institution, the Court held in _Dred Scott v. Sanford_ that African Americans were property and that they could never possess the rights that belonged to human beings. This decision hastened the Civil War and was technically overruled by the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Court then proceeded to give those amendments such cramped and narrow meanings that the justices allowed African Americans to endure perpetual discrimination, and much violence, for a great many more years. In _Plessy v. Ferguson_ , from 1896, the Court gave its formal imprimatur to American apartheid by approving Louisiana's system of separate railcars for blacks and whites. In 1905, the Court decided _Lochner v. New York_ , rejecting a state law that limited the number of hours bakers could work. This dismal decision set off several more decades when the Court dedicated itself to obstructing legislative initiatives that might protect the nation's less powerful citizens.\n\nEarl Warren's tenure as chief justice ushered the United States into the modern era of race relations and, in some deeper sense, saved the Supreme Court as an institution. Warren recognized that a court that had the legend EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW carved into its fa\u00e7ade could no longer tolerate state-sponsored segregation. In just his second year as chief justice, on May 17, 1954, Warren steered his colleagues to a unanimous decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_. Warren himself wrote the opinion in simple, direct prose. \"We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place,\" he wrote, formally overruling _Plessy v. Ferguson_.\n\nThe case, and the Warren Court's decisions on race, became Breyer's special interest. On the fiftieth anniversary of _Brown_ , Breyer volunteered to be the Court's emissary to the official celebration, in Topeka, Kansas, where the case began. \"As a member of the Supreme Court, I am here today to represent that Court, not nine individual Justices, but the institution itself\u2014an institution as old as the Republic, charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution of the United States,\" Breyer told the crowd, including President Bush. \"May 17, 1954, was a great day\u2014many would say the greatest day\u2014in the history of that institution,\" he continued. \"Before May 17, 1954, the Court read the Constitution's words 'equal protection of the laws,' as if they protected only the members of the majority race. After May 17, 1954, it read those words as the post\u2013Civil War Framers meant them, as offering the same protection to citizens of every race.\" (Not everyone on the Court was so moved by the anniversary; William Rehnquist also gave a speech on May 17, 2004, and he didn't even mention _Brown_.)\n\n_Brown_ also had a special resonance for Breyer because of his own experiences in the public schools. Breyer grew up in San Francisco in what he regarded as a unique and glorious moment in the city's history. The post\u2013World War II boom there created an equality of opportunity that was rare, if not unprecedented, in American history. Steve and his younger brother, Chuck, graduated from Lowell High School, the jewel of the San Francisco system, a selective academy that served generations of strivers. Breyer's father spent decades as a lawyer for the San Francisco school board, helping to manage the influx of immigrants from around the world. (Breyer still wears the wristwatch that his father received upon his retirement. The inscription reads, \"Irving G. Breyer, Legal Advisor, San Francisco Unified School District, 1933\u20131973, from his friends.\") Lowell led to good things for Chuck, too. In 1997, Clinton appointed Charles Breyer to the federal district court in San Francisco.\n\nNo Breyer speech (and he gave many) was complete without the story of _Cooper v. Aaron_ , the famous case that directed the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, to cease obstructing the rule of law and integrate forthwith. (The opinion remains the only one in the Court's history to which all nine justices affixed their names as coauthors.) Describing the aftermath of _Cooper v. Aaron_ , Breyer said that Warren's words in _Brown_ \"forced the Nation to ask themselves whether it believed in a rule of law\u2014a rule of law that the Nation's history had sometimes denied, a rule of law that President Dwight D. Eisenhower enforced in 1957 when he sent federal paratroopers to Arkansas to take those black schoolchildren by the hand and walk them safely through that white schoolhouse door. We now accept that rule of law as part of our heritage, thanks to _Brown_ and to its aftermath. But too often we take that rule of law for granted.\"\n\nThat was the final question for the Court in Roberts's second year: Was _Brown_ now taken for granted?\n\nSeattle and Louisville, on opposite ends of the country, different in spirit, history, and orientation, confronted a similar problem. In both cities, kids generally went to public schools near where they lived, and neighborhoods tended to be highly segregated by race. The school boards in both cities wanted to nudge enrollment in a more integrated direction. In Seattle, where citywide enrollment was about 41 percent white and 59 percent nonwhite, students were allowed to choose their high schools. For the more popular schools, the city had a tiebreaker formula. The first tiebreaker was whether a sibling already attended the school. The second was race; if the school's racial makeup was more than ten percentage points different from that of the city as a whole, race would determine whether a particular student was admitted. Kentucky's Jefferson County, which included Louisville, had a roughly similar plan. Proximity of the student's home to the school was the first tiebreaker; race was the second. Very few students, probably less than five hundred in each city, were affected by the second part of the formula.\n\nSo if the two cases only affected a handful of students, why did they matter so much? There was the simple historical resonance of public school integration at the Court. More importantly, the Seattle and Louisville lawsuits represented the first time the Roberts Court addressed the legacy of _Brown_. Was _Brown_ essentially a libertarian decision, which simply forbade all recognition of race by the government? Or did _Brown_ mandate, or allow, government to take steps to foster integration? When can the government consider your race in assigning you to a school\u2014or hiring you for a job, or assigning you to a congressional district? Can government consider race at all?\n\nIn the most important opinion of her career, O'Connor had answered a version of these questions in 2003. In _Grutter v. Bollinger_ , she spoke for a narrow majority of the Court in approving the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School. Under that policy, the law school considered race as one of many factors, including grades and test scores, in deciding whom to admit. O'Connor approved the practice for the same reason that her mentor, Lewis Powell, approved of affirmative action in graduate school admissions in the _Bakke_ case of 1978. O'Connor ruled in _Grutter_ that \"student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admissions.\" But her decision came with a warning and, even more unusual in a Supreme Court decision, a time limit. \"It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education,\" O'Connor wrote, referring to _Bakke_. \"Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.\" In the Seattle and Louisville cases, just four years after _Grutter_ , the question was whether O'Connor's words remained the law.\n\nIn the lead case, which was known as _Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1_ , Roberts took the opportunity to display what had been, at that point, something of a secret weapon in his arsenal. The quality of writing in Supreme Court opinions generally ranges from serviceable to opaque, and the justices' attempts at eloquence often fall flat. For his part, Breyer wrote in a kind of prose PowerPoint, with paragraphs that began _First, Second, Third_. Souter's style was so gnarled that the justice himself made fun of it. Receiving an eloquent draft from a law clerk, Souter would say, \"Time for me to put some lead in...\" In his earlier years, Stevens tended toward a midwestern directness\u2014he did all his own drafting for a long time\u2014but eventually he too migrated toward the mean. Scalia put a gift for invective on display in dissents but wrote with less verve, and interest, for the Court. Kennedy had a weakness for bloviation.\n\nChief Justice Roberts, it soon became evident, was a brilliant writer\u2014clear, epigrammatic, eloquent without being verbose. The peroration of his decision in _Parents Involved_ made his case with characteristic force. \"For schools that never segregated on the basis of race, such as Seattle, or that have removed the vestiges of past segregation, such as Jefferson County, the way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis is to stop assigning students on a racial basis,\" he wrote. \"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.\"\n\n_The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race_. Who could disagree with that?\n\nThe four dissenters did not just disagree\u2014they were enraged. Stevens assigned the main dissenting opinion to Breyer, but he could not resist adding a short, incredulous dissent of his own, not least because the legacy of _Brown_ was at stake. \"There is a cruel irony in The Chief Justice's reliance on our decision in _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_ ,\" Stevens wrote. \"The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: 'Before _Brown_ , schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.' This sentence reminds me of Anatole France's observation: 'The majestic equality of the law, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.' The Chief Justice fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways, The Chief Justice rewrites the history of one of this Court's most important decisions.\"\n\nStevens had turned eighty-seven shortly before the Court's decision in _Parents Involved_. Stevens knew that, at his age, his time as a force on the Court was shrinking fast. More than in his earlier days, Stevens did not mince words. The conservative torrent of Roberts's second year moved him to something close to outrage.\n\n\"The Court has changed significantly,\" Stevens wrote in his _Parents Involved_ dissent. It was once \"more faithful to _Brown_ and more respectful of our precedent than it is today. It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today's decision.\"\n\nThe last day of a term always arrived laden with drama. Almost invariably, it was when the Court's most important and controversial decisions of the year were announced or when the justices revealed their plans to retire. As a rule, it was also a time when the justices were both tired and sick of one another. Everyone needed a haircut and a vacation.\n\nPlainly, on June 28, 2007, Breyer was distraught. This kind of career\u2014writing dissent after dissent\u2014was not how he envisioned his life as a justice. Breyer clerked for the liberal Arthur Goldberg in 1964\u201365, near the liberal apogee of the Warren Court. Breyer was not na\u00efve. He didn't think everyone would agree with him all the time. But Breyer did at least think the atmosphere at the Court might resemble the collegiality he found at the Judiciary Committee thirty years earlier. In the heyday of the O'Connor-Breyer Court, he read less than one dissent a year from the bench. But on this final day of the 2006\u201307 term alone, he read two protests in 5\u20134 cases.\n\nThe first, called _Leegin Creative Leather Products_ , involved antitrust law. Since a 1911 case called _Dr. Miles_ , the Court had held that a manufacturer who required retailers to sell a product for a minimum price was always guilty of an antitrust violation. With the urging of the Bush administration, Kennedy's opinion for the Court overruled that ninety-six-year-old precedent and said that such violations should now be determined on a case-by-case basis. (The political divisions in antitrust cases are clear. Democrats favor strict enforcement, while Republicans defer to the market.)\n\nAs the second-most-junior justice, Breyer had the seat to the chief justice's extreme right, which happened to be only about a dozen feet from the benches reserved for journalists. As he read his first dissent of the day\u2014a short one\u2014Breyer turned toward the reporters to make sure they were paying attention. He knew that antitrust cases rarely attracted much public notice, but he used the case to highlight a broader issue about the Roberts Court.\n\n\"I just want to emphasize one point here, and it is stare decisis,\" Breyer said. \"The legal rule that forbids vertical price fixing\u2014it comes from the case called _Dr. Miles_ \u2014is nearly 100 years old. It's well known to those in the law and in business. This court and lower courts have followed it consistently for decades.\" Breyer used the term \"stare decisis\"\u2014the rule of precedent\u2014three more times in his brief statement. His message was clear: the Roberts Court was on the warpath against the Court's own history.\n\nThen, finally, came the last case of the year, _Parents Involved_. Roberts began by giving his summary of the case, and it was plain that one more precedent was now endangered\u2014O'Connor's opinion in _Grutter_. O'Connor had written broadly about the value of diversity in education, but Roberts said that the Court now viewed _Grutter_ as relating only to \"diversity in higher education.\" Since _Parents Involved_ concerned only high schools, Roberts said, the reasoning in _Grutter_ was irrelevant. This was what the Supreme Court did when it was preparing to jettison a precedent: first limit it, then overrule it.\n\nBreyer followed, reading from a dissent that he noted was more than twice as long as any he had written. School boards, like the one to which his father had devoted his life, had done their best in Seattle and Louisville. \"They began with racially segregated schools,\" Breyer said. \"They sought remedies. They tried forced busing. They feared or experienced white flight. They faced concerns about de facto re-segregation, and they ended up with plans that end forced busing, that rely heavily upon student choice. In both cities all the students choose. The majority, indeed almost all of them, received their first-choice school.\" And to Breyer, there was nothing wrong, indeed everything right, with what the school boards had done.\n\nTo Breyer, the efforts of these cities honored _Brown_ rather than defied it. \" _Brown_ held out a promise, it was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of former slaves,\" he said. \"It was the promise of true racial equality, not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life of the Nation's citizens and schools. It was about the nature of democracy that must work for all Americans.\" Democracy that _worked_ \u2014this was always Breyer's goal.\n\nBut Breyer's dissent was not just about _Parents Involved_ , or _Brown_ , or even civil rights. It was about what had happened to the Court in this one short year\u2014on abortion, and women's rights, and civil procedure, and freedom of speech, and antitrust, and the death penalty, and on and on. Breyer departed from the text of his dissenting opinion to offer an introduction to the real Roberts Court.\n\n\"It is not often in the law,\" he said, \"that so few have so quickly changed so much.\"\n\n#  \n# **7**\n\n#    \n**THE HUNTER**\n\nAs the Roberts era began, Antonin Scalia's spirits were low. Notwithstanding his halfhearted denials, he had hoped to be named chief justice. His old friend Dick Cheney, with whom he served in the Ford administration, raised the possibility of the promotion for Scalia, but the idea never went anywhere with President Bush. Much as Scalia was a hero to conservatives, he was also nearly seventy years old. The opportunity to control the Court for a generation was far more important to Bush, and even to most fellow believers, than rewarding Scalia for a job well done.\n\nIn truth, Scalia had mixed feelings about being on the Court at all. He often said that he would have left the Court years earlier if he could have found another place where people would pay as much attention to his ideas. But there was no such place. In routine cases, Scalia barely went through the motions. For these, his clerks learned to operate with minimal guidance from their boss. Scalia's belligerence at oral arguments, particularly in minor cases, was a way for him to keep paying attention\u2014and getting attention. Scalia craved the spotlight. When O'Connor left the Court, Scalia often took over her custom of asking the first question during oral arguments. When another justice made a joke, Scalia invariably tried to top it.\n\nOn the cases that mattered most to him, though, Scalia hated to lose, and for most of his career on the Court, he lost more of these than he won. In 1992, Scalia thought he was within reach of overturning the hated _Roe v. Wade_. But then O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter betrayed him in _Casey_. Scalia's dissent was splenetic. (\"The Imperial Judiciary lives,\" he sneered.) Scalia was even more apoplectic in 2003, when the Court ruled in _Lawrence v. Texas_ that gay people could no longer be prosecuted for having consensual sex. (\"Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct,\" he wrote.) Scalia's gift for invective made his dissents far more memorable than his majority opinions, but still, he grew weary of writing them.\n\nIt was no coincidence that cases involving the culture war moved Scalia the most. He regularly spoke to Catholic groups, and over the last decade he often gave them the same speech in slightly different forms. It was a sarcastic look at how he thought true believers were viewed by secular elites. \"We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world,\" he would say. \"Surely those who adhere to all or most of these traditional Christian beliefs are to be regarded as simple-minded. Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society.\" His remarks would often close, \"If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.\" Biblical literalism was never far from constitutional literalism, or, as Scalia called it, textualism.\n\nThere was some irony in Scalia's sense of victimhood, because his own career had been one of perpetual ascent. He was born in Trenton and raised in Elmhurst, Queens, where his father commuted to a job as a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College. (He translated works of Italian literature.) His mother taught elementary school. Nino, their only child, excelled academically. He made law review at Harvard. While a law student, he met his future wife, Maureen, who was a Radcliffe undergraduate. They have nine children. One is a priest.\n\nAfter a brief stop at a Cleveland law firm, Scalia became a professor at the nation's top law schools. (He taught at Chicago, Stanford, Georgetown, and Virginia.) Like Breyer, Scalia was principally interested in administrative law, but Scalia generally took stronger antiregulatory positions than Breyer did. His views drew the attention of the conservatives ascendant in Washington, and he served in the Justice Department under President Ford. Reagan put him on the D.C. Circuit in 1982, when he was just forty-six, and on the Supreme Court four years later. Scalia's Italian roots and Catholicism, far from being disabilities, were the deciding factors in his getting the nomination over Robert Bork.\n\nScalia had, in some ways, the best of both worlds, even if he didn't see it that way. He was by far the favorite justice of the cultural warriors\u2014the religious groups, the Federalist Society\u2014and he reflected and encouraged their sneers at \"the sophisticated world\" and the \"law-profession culture.\" At the same time, he earned the admiration of that world, too. Even if his former colleagues in the legal academy didn't share Scalia's judicial philosophy, they recognized his achievement in placing a fully formed ideology at the center of American constitutional law. The magnitude of Scalia's accomplishment should not be understated. In the modern era of the Court, only Scalia, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and perhaps William Brennan introduced their own judicial philosophies into the life and work of the Court.\n\nThis was apparent in 2006, after Scalia saw the chief's chair slip away from him forever. Over two days in November, Harvard Law School held a celebration of Scalia's twentieth anniversary on the Supreme Court. The event was the brainchild of the dean of Scalia's alma mater, Elena Kagan. Kagan was a veteran of the Clinton administration, a failed nominee to the D.C. Circuit herself. Everyone in Cambridge knew she didn't share Scalia's politics or his judicial philosophy, but that made it all the sweeter for Scalia when Kagan and her colleagues paid such fulsome tribute to him. \"His views on textualism and originalism, his views on the role of judges in our society, on the practice of judging, have really transformed the terms of legal debate in this country,\" Kagan said in her speech. \"He is the justice who has had the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about law.\"\n\nGiven his background, Scalia's embrace of such culture war touchstones as opposition to abortion and gay rights was unsurprising. He also had a long history with guns, which was not exactly what one might expect of a native New Yorker.\n\nAs a teenager, Scalia commuted from Queens to Manhattan to attend Xavier High School, an all-male Jesuit institution on Sixteenth Street. Even for its time\u2014Scalia was class of 1953\u2014Xavier was an unusual place because every student was required to participate in junior ROTC. After school, young Antonin participated in drills at an armory, and he took his rifle, a .22 carbine, with him on the subway\u2014a novelty, to be sure, and not then a violation of law. For many years, the exigencies of adult life took Scalia far away from the world of guns, but eventually he returned.\n\nIn 1991, Scalia replaced Byron White as the justice responsible for the Fifth Circuit, which includes several southern states. Scalia started making regular trips to the region, and friends down there began inviting him along on hunting expeditions. Scalia fell hard for the sport, especially the pursuit of birds like turkeys. Briefly, though, Scalia became the most famous duck hunter in the country. In January 2004, he invited Dick Cheney to join him on a duck-hunting trip in Louisiana. As it happened, a legal challenge to the secrecy of the vice president's energy task force was pending before the justices, and Scalia faced robust criticism for socializing with a litigant. In a characteristically combative riposte, Scalia filed a twenty-one-page memorandum justifying his trip. \"The Vice President and I were never in the same blind, and never discussed the case,\" he wrote. \"Washington officials know the rules, and know that discussing with judges pending cases\u2014their own or anyone else's\u2014is forbidden.\" In any event, more than his colleagues, Scalia had a personal interest in the constitutional status of firearms\u2014a subject the Court had not addressed in many years.\n\nIn its first two hundred years, the Supreme Court discussed the Second Amendment in any depth on only one occasion. The case arose on April 18, 1938, when state troopers arrested a small-time hood named Jack Miller and an accomplice in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. Miller was a suspect in the killing of a court reporter (of all people) in a bar fight, and he had turned state's evidence after a string of bank robberies. At the time of his arrest, there were two unregistered sawed-off shotguns in the car, and Miller was charged with violating the National Firearms Act, which had been passed in 1934 in response to the St. Valentine's Day massacre and other notorious crimes of the era. A federal district judge in Arkansas threw the case out on the ground that the law violated Miller's rights under the Second Amendment.\n\nIn 1939, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the district judge and held that the firearms act complied with the Second Amendment. To achieve that result, Justice James McReynolds had to excavate a part of American history that was obscure even then. In the days before the American Revolution, there was no standing army in the colonies. Instead, when there was need for collective military action\u2014usually against Indians\u2014the colonists formed militias. The militias relied on the guns and gunpowder of private citizens, which were sometimes stockpiled together for later use. During the period immediately before and during the Revolution, the British took to seizing the guns of the colonists, who were understandably outraged.\n\nWhen it came time to write a Constitution, the framers took care to preserve the independence of these local militias from interference by the central government. There are several references to militias in the Constitution, though the Second Amendment is today by far the best known. Article I states that Congress has the power:\n\nTo provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; [and]\n\nTo provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States.\n\nArticle II says the president is commander in chief of the army, navy and \"Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.\" In other words, when the Constitution was being framed, the militias were a vibrant and significant part of American life. They survived into the nineteenth century, and then, in the Militia Act of 1903, their functions were formally subsumed into other agencies, like the National Guard and other law enforcement and military entities.\n\nIt was against this background that the Supreme Court weighed the challenge to the early form of gun control in the _Miller_ case. McReynolds's opinion for the Court was almost entirely originalist in its reasoning. The opinion quoted the provisions of Article I dealing with the militia powers, and then stated, \"With obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces, the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.\" Indeed, if the Second Amendment were intended by its framers to give individuals a right to keep and bear arms, the initial militia clause would be both unnecessary and meaningless.\n\nMcReynolds went on to say that the framers believed militias would protect the rights of the people from an oppressive central government. \"The sentiment of the time strongly disfavored standing armies; the common view was that adequate defense of country and laws could be secured through the Militia\u2014civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion.\" He quoted William Blackstone and Adam Smith on the importance of militias and reviewed the state laws concerning them. \"Most if not all of the States have adopted provisions touching the right to keep and bear arms,\" he wrote. \"But none of them seems to afford any material support for the challenged ruling of the court below.\" For these reasons, justices concluded that the Second Amendment existed to preserve the rights of militias\u2014not individuals\u2014to possess arms.\n\nAfter the unanimous and largely uncontroversial decision in _United States v. Miller_ , the issue of the Second Amendment more or less disappeared from the national agenda for decades. During and after World War II, the United States entered a period of prosperity and safety. There was little call for gun control, and thus no reason to challenge the constitutional basis for it. That began to change in the 1960s, when assassinations and crime generally built political momentum for restrictions on gun ownership. Following the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, the last major piece of legislation of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. The bill's restrictions were modest\u2014prohibiting the sale of most firearms through the mail, limiting certain high-risk people from buying guns. There was widespread support for the law, even from the National Rifle Association. In this period, part of what it meant to be tough on crime\u2014a traditional Republican goal\u2014was to endorse gun control. President Gerald Ford, a typical member of his party for his era, proposed gun control legislation. But Ronald Reagan, Ford's opponent for the Republican nomination in 1976, was staking out a different position.\n\nReagan worked opposition to gun control into a broader libertarian message. To him, gun control was just another big-government program that did more harm than good. Gun control punished law-abiding citizens while leaving firearms in the hands of criminals. What was more, Reagan hinted, gun control was prohibited by the Second Amendment. \"The Second Amendment gives the individual citizen a means of protection against the despotism of the state. The rights of the individual are preeminent,\" Reagan wrote in _Guns & Ammo_ magazine in 1975. \"The Second Amendment is clear, or ought to be. It appears to leave little if any leeway for the gun control advocate.\" Reagan lost in 1976, but times were changing. The 1972 Republican platform had supported gun control, but the 1976 platform opposed it.\n\nThe political and legal branches of the conservative movement joined forces in support of a new reading of the Second Amendment. On May 21, 1977, a hard-line faction of the National Rifle Association staged a coup d'\u00e9tat at the annual meeting of the group, in Cincinnati. Out went the traditional emphasis on gun safety and in came a new focus on political action, especially in fighting gun control. The NRA financed a group called Academics for the Second Amendment, which advocated for the individual rights view in conferences and seminars. Still, this position remained well outside the legal mainstream, if not downright eccentric. The rule of the _Miller_ case remained the unchallenged law of the land. Not even a lower federal court had embraced the view that the Constitution limited the ability of the government to regulate gun ownership. A few years after Warren Burger stepped down as chief justice, he said in an interview on PBS that the Second Amendment \"has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud\u2014I repeat the word 'fraud'\u2014on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.\"\n\nNevertheless, gun rights joined \"family values\" and the anti-abortion fight as key planks of the conservative agenda that in 1980 propelled Reagan into the presidency and the Republicans into the Senate majority. When Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, he commissioned a report entitled \"The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.\" In the preface he wrote, \"What the Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear\u2014and long lost\u2014proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.\" The chief author of the report was a Hatch staffer named Stephen Markman, who later joined the Reagan Justice Department. There, one of Markman's junior colleagues was Samuel Alito.\n\nCrime spiked again in the early nineties, and the Clinton administration, in its early days, responded by passing what became known as the Brady bill, named after James Brady, Ronald Reagan's press secretary, who was wounded in the 1981 attempted assassination of the president. This complex piece of legislation included an interim provision that directed state and local officials to conduct background checks for prospective handgun purchasers. That portion of the bill was challenged, and in 1997, by a 5\u20134 vote, the Supreme Court found the temporary part of the law unconstitutional. Scalia's opinion for the Court in _Printz v. United States_ concluded that the law amounted to an impermissible federal intrusion on states' rights.\n\nThomas joined Scalia's opinion for the majority but wrote a concurring opinion that examined the case in a different way. Thomas devoted his argument to the Second Amendment, which the Court had not addressed since the _Miller_ case in 1939. He suggested that the Brady bill might be unconstitutional as a violation of the Second Amendment. \"Marshaling an impressive array of historical evidence, a growing body of scholarly commentary indicates that the 'right to keep and bear arms' is, as the Amendment's text suggests, a personal right,\" Thomas wrote. Concluding with a flourish and referring to Joseph Story, a renowned figure from the early days of the Court, Thomas declared, \"Perhaps, at some future date, this Court will have the opportunity to determine whether Justice Story was correct when he wrote that the right to bear arms 'has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.' \"\n\nThomas's opinion marked the near culmination of a remarkable political and legal undertaking\u2014an example of the \"living Constitution\" in action, even if that was not how the protagonists described it. A small group of activists took a fringe and discredited constitutional interpretation, injected their considerable passion, intelligence, and financial resources, and nearly brought their ideas to success.\n\nThe actual culmination of their work would take a little longer.\n\n# **8**\n\n#    \n**LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY**\n\nThe Supreme Court can sometimes have the last word, but it never has the first. The executive and legislative branches of government can initiate action on any issue of their choosing. But the justices must wait for a case to come to them. Some or all of the justices may be itching to rule on a subject, but they have no chance to do so until an appropriate appeal arrives at their door. When it came to guns, that was what made Bob Levy so important.\n\nRobert A. Levy was born in 1941 and grew up in modest circumstances in Washington, where his parents ran a hardware store. He went to college at American University, earned a PhD in business there as well, and went on to live the American dream. He founded a financial information and software firm, CDA Investment Technologies, and sold it for many millions of dollars in 1986. At that point, Levy thought carefully about what he would do with the second half of his life\u2014and decided to start law school at the age of forty-nine. He chose to study at George Mason University, because it had a reputation for welcoming libertarian scholars and students. After graduating, Levy became a law clerk first for Royce Lamberth, of the federal district court in Washington, and then for Douglas Ginsburg, on the D.C. Circuit. (Levy may be the only law clerk in history who was older than the judges he clerked for. The security guards at the federal courthouse, noting Levy's judicial bearing and formidable bald head, would often greet him by saying, \"Good morning, Your Honor.\" In chambers, Lamberth would put him in his place by reminding him to fill the water jugs in the jury box.)\n\nWhen Levy completed his clerkships, he brought the same entrepreneurial spirit to law that he had to business. He had a special interest in the Second Amendment, which was the subject of a great deal of scholarly attention at the time, even though he himself never owned a gun. The NRA-funded Academics for the Second Amendment had been churning out copy, and even several liberal academics, including Laurence Tribe, Akhil Reed Amar, and Sanford Levinson, had looked with some sympathy on the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment. And Justice Thomas's concurring opinion in the _Printz_ case had put the issue squarely on the Supreme Court's agenda.\n\nThere was also the matter of _United States v. Emerson_. The Brady bill made it a crime for individuals who were subject to domestic-violence protective orders to possess firearms. In 1999, a local court filed a protective order against Timothy Emerson, a doctor in Tom Green County, Texas, who was involved in a messy divorce. Later, a federal grand jury charged Emerson with violating the Brady bill, because he purchased a pistol while subject to the protective order. Emerson challenged the constitutionality of the law, on the ground that it violated the Second Amendment. A federal district court, relying heavily on Thomas's opinion in _Printz_ , concluded that the Second Amendment did confer an individual right to bear arms and threw out the indictment. In 2001, the Fifth Circuit reinstated Emerson's indictment but again cited Thomas's opinion in calling for a new understanding of the Second Amendment.\n\nThe political momentum for a revived Second Amendment was building, too. By this point, John Ashcroft had become George W. Bush's first attorney general. A longtime member and favorite of the NRA, Ashcroft gave a full official endorsement of the theory that the Second Amendment granted individuals a right to keep and bear arms. In a letter read at the NRA annual convention in 2001, Ashcroft announced that the federal government would now advocate the individual rights theory in all litigation. But _Emerson_ was actually a poor vehicle for testing the limits of the Second Amendment, because the constitutional issue was so closely bound up with the matter of domestic violence. Not surprisingly, the justices declined to hear the _Emerson_ case.\n\nLevy had clerked for Lamberth with a young lawyer named Clark Neily III, who then went to work for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm. (Levy was on the board.) Neily and a colleague, Steve Simpson, came to Levy with the idea of putting together a test case that would raise the Second Amendment issue for the Supreme Court. The scholarly articles, the Thomas opinion in _Printz_ , the friendly Justice Department, the _Emerson_ case\u2014all suggested that the time was right. The problem was, the Institute for Justice didn't do this kind of work. Neily and Simpson asked Levy to finance the case himself, and he agreed. Levy also hired Alan Gura, an aggressive young lawyer from Virginia, who happened to have an interest in the subject but no experience at all with constitutional litigation or the Supreme Court.\n\nThe National Rifle Association was not amused by the attempt of Levy, Neily, Simpson (and later Gura) to horn in on what it considered its turf. Levy had a day job at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington, where he later became chairman of the board. One day he was visited there by Nelson Lund, one of his professors at George Mason, whose chair had been endowed by the NRA, and Charles Cooper, a former Reagan-era Justice Department official with close ties to the conservative movement. Their mission was to talk Levy out of funding the case. The pair told him that the issue was a loser. The law-and-order conservatives then on the Court, including Rehnquist and O'Connor, would never buy a wholesale revision of the Second Amendment. A bad ruling could set back the cause for years. Better to leave the issue to the NRA and its experienced team of litigators.\n\nConflicts over litigation strategy are common, even among ideological allies. Issues of timing, risk of adverse decisions, control of a case, and simple ego often lead to bitter feuds. The models for such ideologically driven legal crusades remain the work of Thurgood Marshall for civil rights in the forties and fifties and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for women in the seventies. Levy felt his work was in this tradition. Sometimes, though, it's almost as important to know when _not_ to bring a case as when to press forward. Advocates have at times gone to extraordinary lengths to keep cases away from the justices. In 1997, after a white schoolteacher was laid off to save the job of a black colleague, a coalition of civil rights groups raised $300,000 to settle the case two months before it was slated to appear on the Supreme Court docket.\n\nEspecially on issues with high public profiles, the motives of the participants can be decidedly mixed. There were even conservatives who believed that at some level the NRA didn't _want_ a favorable decision from the Supreme Court on gun rights; they thought NRA fund-raising depended on maintaining a sense of perpetual risk. Levy thought the NRA was just protecting its turf, but his own fortune gave him the luxury of a single-minded focus: winning in the Supreme Court. Lund and Cooper denied that the NRA's motives were anything less than pure, but Levy decided to stay the course with his case.\n\nTheir best option, Levy's team realized, was under their noses in Washington. The District of Columbia had the strictest gun laws in the nation, banning possession of handguns even in private homes for self-defense. Over the years, gun cases had foundered in part because they had unsympathetic plaintiffs. In 1939, Miller was a bank robber; many years later, Emerson was accused of threatening domestic violence. Those were not favorable settings in which to raise Second Amendment claims. Gura and the others wanted to avoid such problems from the start. They decided to pick their plaintiffs almost as if they were casting a movie.\n\nAfter months of research, the Levy team came up with six people who could, as a group, appeal to almost any judge. There were three men and three women, four whites and two blacks, five straight and one gay. The lead plaintiff, Shelly Parker, was an extremely charismatic African American woman. In February 2002, Parker had moved to the periphery of Capitol Hill and found her neighborhood overrun by drug dealers. She started a one-woman security patrol, walking the streets in an orange cap and reporting what she saw to the police. In response, drug dealers broke her car windows and drove into her back fence. She wanted a gun to protect herself and her home. Levy's team entitled the case _Parker v. District of Columbia_.\n\nDespite all the careful planning, the case ran into a problem the team had not fully anticipated. For all that they were fighting to advance a conservative goal\u2014gun rights\u2014their case was still a kind of public interest litigation. Like civil rights plaintiffs, these six people were initiating a lawsuit in order to challenge a government action. Thanks to the conservatives on the Supreme Court, the legal rules on standing in such cases had been tightened a great deal in recent years. Applying those new rules, the D.C. Circuit held that the plaintiffs could not simply walk into the courtroom and demand a ruling on the gun control law. The circuit court said the plaintiffs had to have actually made an application for a gun license and been rejected in order to have standing to bring the case. This rule presented a catch-22. Under the D.C. law, you had to own a handgun first to apply for a permit\u2014but it was illegal to buy a gun in Washington. Federal law, moreover, made it illegal to buy a gun in a state where you did not reside. So you needed a gun to apply for a license, but you couldn't buy the gun in the first place.\n\nFive of the six plaintiffs (including Shelly Parker) had not applied for gun licenses, so the D.C. Circuit threw out their cases. But the litigation survived. The sixth plaintiff, Dick Heller, was a specially assigned District of Columbia police officer who helped protect the Federal Judicial Center. He was issued a gun to use at work, and he wanted to keep a private handgun at his home as well. Alone among the plaintiffs, Heller already had a gun, and he had actually sought a gun permit from the D.C. government and been denied. For that reason, the court found that only Heller had standing to bring the constitutional challenge to the law.\n\nBut one plaintiff was enough. The D.C. Circuit adopted for the first time the individual rights theory. The court held that Heller had the right to \"keep and bear arms\" under the Second Amendment and struck down the local law. The lawyers for the District of Columbia asked the Supreme Court to review the decision, and the justices agreed to hear it. In the manner of such things, the case had taken years. Finally, on March 18, 2008, as the highlight of John Roberts's third year as chief justice, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case now known as _District of Columbia v. Heller_.\n\nThe government of the District of Columbia hired Walter E. Dellinger III, the former acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and a veteran of Supreme Court litigation, to defend the gun law in front of the justices. Dellinger started with what he thought was his strongest material\u2014the words of the framers themselves in 1787. In these debates, \"every person who used the phrase 'bear arms' used it to refer to the use of arms in connection with militia service, and when Madison introduced the amendment in the first Congress, he exactly equated the phrase 'bearing arms' with, quote, 'rendering military service,' \" Dellinger said. \"And even if the language of keeping and bearing arms were ambiguous, the amendment's first clause confirms that the right is militia-related.\"\n\nIf the second clause of the amendment granted an individual right to bear arms, Dellinger was saying, then the first clause, the militia clause, would have no meaning at all\u2014and the framers must have included the language for a reason. But Dellinger immediately ran into a problem with Anthony Kennedy, who would probably hold the swing vote.\n\nKennedy said he thought Dellinger was right that the militia clause could not be \"extraneous.\" But that didn't solve the problem. In Kennedy's view, the two clauses were entirely separate and both valid. \"In effect the amendment says we reaffirm the right to have a militia, we've established it, but in addition, there is a right to bear arms,\" Kennedy said. Later in the argument, Kennedy made his point even more clearly: \"And in my view [the second clause] supplemented [the first clause] by saying there's a general right to bear arms quite without reference to the militia either way.\"\n\nThe debate continued in this vein as Dellinger, Gura, and Paul Clement, the solicitor general, argued the case. Clement expressed the Bush administration's view that the Second Amendment protected an individual right and that the D.C. law was unconstitutional. The conversation rarely strayed from the eighteenth century. What did \"bear\" and \"arms\" mean to the framers? What did Blackstone, the English law scholar revered by the framers, think about the issue? The questions and answers reached an almost comic level of obscurity: \"Do you think the Second Amendment is more restrictive or more expansive of the right than the English Bill of Rights in 1689?\"... \"If we're going back to the English Bill of Rights, it was always understood to be subject to the control and limitation and restriction of Parliament.\"... \"That view was taken by William Raleigh in his 1828 treatise. Raleigh was, of course, a ratifier of the Second Amendment.\"... \"General Gage's inventory of weapons seized from the Americans in Boston included some 1,800 or so firearms and then 634 pistols.\"\n\nAt one point, David Souter had the temerity to return the conversation to twenty-first-century Washington, D.C., the ostensible focus of the case before the justices. \"Can we also look to current conditions like current crime statistics?\" he asked Gura.\n\n\"To some extent, Your Honor,\" Gura answered, \"but we have certainly\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, can they consider the extent of the murder rate in Washington, D.C., using handguns?\" Souter went on.\n\nGura conceded the rate was high.\n\nThen Scalia jumped in, almost jovially: \"All the more reason to allow a homeowner to have a handgun!\"\n\nScalia had good reason for cheer, because even before the _Heller_ case was decided, the argument alone represented a singular triumph for him. Before Scalia joined the Court, the lawyers in a case like _Heller_ would have argued, in a general way, about how to apply the values reflected in the Second Amendment to the modern world. The justices would have sought to define a contemporary meaning of the Constitution. In contrast, Scalia often said that he believed in a \"dead\" Constitution\u2014that its meaning was set for all time at the moment of its creation. The argument in _Heller_ showed how much Scalia's originalist view had come to dominate the Court. When Scalia was appointed to the Court, twenty years earlier, there was simply no way that an argument would have dwelled at such length, and in such detail, on the text of the amendment or the intentions of the framers. Scalia had brought originalism to the Court, and he had come to define the terms of the debates, if not always to win them.\n\nThe split in _Heller_ was the familiar 5\u20134\u2014with Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer in their customary losing position\u2014but this time the surprise came from the chief justice. Instead of giving the opinion to Kennedy to keep him on board, Roberts asked Scalia to write for the majority. In his two decades as a justice, Scalia had few important majority opinions to his name. At first, his views were too eccentric for Rehnquist to trust him to keep a majority together. But the Court, and the country, had moved Scalia's way, and now he reaped the reward.\n\nScalia turned _Heller_ into a textualist and originalist tour de force. Literally word by word, Scalia deconstructed the meaning of the Second Amendment, using the sources available to the framers of the Constitution. (He cited Blackstone eight times.) He went back to the Glorious Revolution of seventeenth-century England, to uncover the roots of the constitutional right. \"And, of course, what the Stuarts had tried to do to their political enemies, George III had tried to do to the colonists,\" Scalia wrote. \"In the tumultuous decades of the 1760's and 1770's, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. A New York article of April 1769 said that '[i]t is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence.' \" In light of this history, which Scalia laid out in exhaustive detail, he concluded \"the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.\"\n\nScalia's greatest tribute came not from his allies but from his adversaries, particularly Stevens. Of course, Stevens disagreed with Scalia about the meaning of the Second Amendment. \"The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia,\" Stevens wrote. \"It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States.\" But to make his argument, Stevens relied on the same kind of evidence, and the same style of argument, as Scalia did for the majority. \"Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature's authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms,\" Stevens wrote.\n\nStevens, too, was talking like an originalist. The true measure of Scalia's success in _Heller_ was that he had changed the terms of the debate. In the twentieth century, it was inconceivable that two justices would spend thousands of words excavating from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources the purported intentions of the framers. The Supreme Court did not operate that way in those days. Scalia changed that. It was left to Breyer to write the kind of dissent that the justices used to produce. He said the protections of the Second Amendment, even if Scalia was right about its origins, should not be absolute. Rather than look exclusively at the framers' debates in 1787 in Philadelphia, Breyer examined the records of the City Council of the District of Columbia in 1976, when it passed the gun control law. The council concluded, \"on the basis of extensive public hearings and lengthy research, that the easy availability of firearms in the United States has been a major factor contributing to the drastic increase in gun-related violence and crime over the past 40 years.\" According to Breyer, it was not the place of the Supreme Court to \"second-guess the Council in respect to the numbers of gun crimes, injuries, and deaths, or the role of handguns.\"\n\nThe ruling in _Heller_ was announced on June 26, 2008, the last day of the term. As usual on the last day, the justices were tired and their nerves worn. Scalia's voice was hoarse as he began, but he still could not resist going for a laugh. \"Our opinion is very lengthy, examining in detail the text and history of the Second Amendment,\" he told the hushed courtroom. \"This summary that I'm giving will state little more than the conclusions. If you want to check their validity against the dissent's contrary claims, you'll have to read some 154 pages of opinions.\"\n\nSoon enough, though, people did read all the pages. And some of the problems with the originalist view came into focus.\n\nThere was, for starters, the simple problem of historical accuracy. To the extent a historical debate can be settled, Stevens had the better argument about what the framers intended in the Second Amendment. Jack Rakove, a leading early-American historian at Stanford, joined by several other prominent academics, filed a brief in the _Heller_ case that examined in depth the original meaning of the Second Amendment. It concluded, \"Once explored, this context establishes that the private keeping of firearms was manifestly not the right that the Framers of the Bill of Rights guaranteed in 1789.\" (Rakove later observed that while Scalia devoted a great deal of his opinion to statements made decades _before_ the ratification of the Constitution, it was Stevens who hewed more closely to the actual debates of the framers.)\n\nAt a minimum, the conflict between Scalia and Stevens underlined the difficulty of determining any single meaning of the intentions of the framers, more than two centuries after the fact. By eighteenth-century standards, the men who gathered were a diverse group. They had different ideas about what their work meant, as did the state legislators who ratified their work. On many provisions, they compromised; on others, they left their words intentionally vague. Often, there is no single \"original intent\" or \"original meaning.\" Moreover, for all that the framers quarreled over the wording of the Constitution, they never indicated that they understood their _intentions_ should bind future generations. All that mattered, they thought, was the Constitution itself.\n\nEven Scalia's originalist approach could not settle all the issues in _Heller_. The Court concluded that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to keep and bear arms, but that still raised the question: which arms? A true originalist would identify which arms the framers believed were protected and then find their twenty-first-century analogue. But here Scalia ran into a problem. In the eighteenth century, militias required civilians to obtain military weapons. In the Uniform Militia Act of 1792, Congress compelled militia members to purchase muskets, bayonets, and other weapons that were needed in military combat. The true originalist would, presumably, assert that the Constitution protected an individual right to possess military weapons. But Scalia limited his ruling for the Court in _Heller_ to handguns. He said D.C. could not ban handguns because \"handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.\" Scalia translated a right to military weapons in the eighteenth century to a right to handguns in the twenty-first. He never explained his rationale, but the reason was obvious. It would be intolerable to allow individuals to purchase tanks, bazookas, Stinger missiles, and other modern weapons of war. So, with little explanation, Scalia wrote those kinds of weapons out of the Second Amendment. He affirmed \"the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons\" and noted further that \"nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.\"\n\nWith those limitations, what was left of _Heller_? It forbade the federal government from banning the possession of handguns in the home. It was not clear that it did much else. It was clear, on the other hand, that for all its rhetoric and historical citations, Scalia's decision had little to do with the original meaning of the Second Amendment. It was an improvisation designed to reach a policy goal, which was, not coincidentally, one of the top priorities of the modern Republican Party.\n\n_Heller_ was, in the end, very similar to the decisions most hated by conservatives. In _Roe v. Wade_ , Blackmun found a right to privacy that (in his view) protected a woman's right to abortion up to the time a fetus was viable. In _Grutter_ , O'Connor said that (in her view) affirmative action in university admissions could continue for another twenty-five years. In _Heller_ , Scalia discovered a Second Amendment that (in his view) said yes to handguns and no to machine guns. His view was strikingly similar to the one Barack Obama advocated on the campaign trail. Both Scalia and Obama endorsed a Second Amendment that protected individual rights to own handguns but with limitations on more dangerous weapons. The difference was that only Scalia pretended the framers had dictated the result.\n\n_Heller_ represented the culmination of a political, legal, and public relations offensive that was many years in the making. Scholars, lawyers, politicians, and activists created a new understanding of the Second Amendment that eventually commanded five votes on the Supreme Court. Notwithstanding his denials, Scalia had demonstrated precisely how the Constitution is not dead at all\u2014but a vibrant, living thing. In other words, there was less to the originalism revolution than met the eye. Originalism was no more principled or honorable than any other way of interpreting the Constitution. It was, as _Heller_ demonstrated, just another way for justices to achieve their political goals.\n\n# **9**\n\n#    \n**THE UNREQUITED BIPARTISANSHIP OF BARACK OBAMA**\n\nOn December 5, 2008, Roberts sent Obama an invitation. With characteristic care, the chief justice researched how he should address Obama and came up with: \"Dear Mr. President-elect.\" The letter began:\n\nThrough the years, our respective predecessors have occasionally arranged a pre-inaugural meeting between the President-elect and Members of the Supreme Court, so that colleagues in public service might become better acquainted.\n\nThe Associate Justices and I would be pleased to see that sporadic practice become a congenial tradition. We cordially invite you and Vice President-elect Biden to visit us at the Supreme Court.\n\nIf your schedule permits such a visit, you will receive a warm welcome from the Members of the Court as you prepare to undertake your important responsibilities on behalf of the American people.\n\nRonald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush had met with the justices shortly before they took office in 1981, and Bill Clinton followed suit in late 1992. (The punctilious William Rehnquist long remembered that Clinton was forty-five minutes late for his visit; Clinton had such a good time that he also stayed a half hour late.) Roberts's gesture was especially gracious, because both Obama and Biden had voted against his confirmation three years earlier.\n\nAt 3:45 p.m., on January 14, 2009, eight justices greeted the president- and vice president-elect in the West Conference Room of the Court. (Alito did not attend, even though he had been at oral arguments that morning.) Biden was the only person who knew everyone present. He had served on the Judiciary Committee since 1977 and had voted on the confirmation of all nine current justices. After a few initial pleasantries, Roberts made a pitch that he had coordinated with his colleagues. Judicial salaries had been stagnant for about a decade; lower-court judges were leaving the bench to pay for college tuitions. As a Washington veteran, Roberts knew that a personal appeal on this kind of issue would certainly have an impact and might make a difference. Greg Craig, an old Washington hand himself, and the White House counsel designate, had warned Obama that Roberts might bring up the topic. Obama said he supported a raise for federal judges, but he knew it would be a tough sell to Congress, especially in hard economic times. (The raise never happened.)\n\nRoberts offered to show the pair his chambers, where the Court takes its votes in secret. They filed from the West Conference Room\u2014which is one of the Court's public spaces, often used for receptions\u2014through the Great Hall, with its busts of chief justices, into the private realm of the justices. Like most of his recent predecessors, Roberts keeps a small office directly behind the bench in the courtroom. It's next door to the conference room, which is still dominated by the massive desk where Charles Evans Hughes once presided.\n\nThe inner sanctum impressed Obama and Biden, as it does most everyone. The project to renovate the Court building, begun by Rehnquist, had nearly been completed. Warren Burger, in his day, had installed rows of fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling of the conference room, but Kennedy (the chair of the Court's building committee) had found historically accurate chandeliers as replacements. Double-paned windows (highly resistant to most kinds of ammunition) gave the room a soft glow and distinct hush. After inspecting the Hughes desk, Obama lingered by the simple rectangular wooden table, with its nine chairs, that is the tangible symbol of the work of the Court. Like the President's Oval Office, the Supreme Court's conference table represents the power of the institution\u2014and its mystique may be even greater because it is seen, especially in person, by so few.\n\n\"Is this where they decided _Brown_?\" Obama asked.\n\nIndeed it was, Roberts told him.\n\nToward the end of the meeting, Kennedy mentioned that there was a basketball court on the top floor of the Court building. \"We hear you're a basketball player,\" Kennedy told Obama. \"We'd like you to come play on the highest court in the land.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Obama said. \"I hear that Justice Ginsburg has been working on her jump shot.\"\n\nSix days later, Roberts performed the oath ceremony with Obama at the Capitol, and seven days later they had their repeat performance in the Map Room, at the White House. On January 26, Roberts presided over the installation of the new leader of the Smithsonian Institution. \"Those of you who have read it will see from the program that the Smithsonian some time ago adopted the passing of a key in lieu of the administration of an oath,\" Roberts said. \"I don't know who was responsible for that decision. But I like him.\"\n\nThe work of the new administration began. On the morning of January 29, a raucous, almost giddy crowd filled the East Room, the location for the most formal and important occasions at the White House. Just after ten, the disembodied voice of an announcer silenced the audience. \"Ladies and gentlemen,\" it said, \"the President of the United States, accompanied by Mrs. Lilly Ledbetter.\"\n\nSide by side, along the red carpet, Obama and Ledbetter walked slowly to the podium, while the audience stood, whooped, and hollered. \"This is a wonderful day,\" Obama began. More applause. \"First of all, it is fitting that the very first bill that I sign\u2014the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act\"\u2014more applause, even louder\u2014\"that it is upholding one of this nation's founding principles: that we are all created equal, and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness.\"\n\nThe bill to overrule Alito's 2007 opinion in the Ledbetter case had been pending throughout the final year of the Bush administration, but Republicans had blocked it. In early January 2009, the new Congress finally passed the bill. The margins were 61\u201336 in the Senate and 247\u2013171 in the House.\n\n\"Lilly Ledbetter did not set out to be a trailblazer or a household name,\" Obama told the crowd in the East Room. \"She was just a good hard worker who did her job\u2014and she did it well\u2014for nearly two decades before discovering that for years, she was paid less than her male colleagues for doing the very same work. Over the course of her career, she lost more than $200,000 in salary, and even more in pension and Social Security benefits\u2014losses that she still feels today.\n\n\"Now, Lilly could have accepted her lot and moved on. She could have decided that it wasn't worth the hassle and the harassment that would inevitably come with speaking up for what she deserved. But instead, she decided that there was a principle at stake, something worth fighting for. So she set out on a journey that would take more than ten years, take her all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and lead to this day and this bill which will help others get the justice that she was denied.\"\n\nBehind the new President, Joe Biden wiped tears from his eyes. Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not attend the proceedings, but she followed the fate of the Ledbetter bill with considerable interest, and greater pride.\n\nObama took office facing a wider range of challenges than any other president since Franklin Roosevelt. There were two wars and an economic collapse; there were restless Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress eager to put their stamp on a variety of issues, including health care, immigration, and climate change. Considering these burdens, it would not have been surprising if the new administration treated the issue of judicial nominations as a less than pressing priority.\n\nThat is precisely what happened. Indeed, a variety of other factors combined to give the issue even less attention than it might otherwise have received. Greg Craig had not sought the job of White House counsel. During the Clinton administration, he had watched that office become bogged down in fending off investigations by hostile Republicans, and at the age of sixty-three he had no longing for such enervating duties. He'd rather have worked in the State Department. But Craig didn't believe in turning down requests from presidents, so he took the job. Obama also asked Craig to find a place on his staff for Cassandra Butts, one of the president's law school classmates, who had also worked on the campaign. Craig agreed, and she became the deputy general counsel in charge of judicial nominations.\n\nThe problems began almost immediately. Through his years with Senator Edward Kennedy and later in the Clinton State Department, Craig had developed a special interest in international human rights. He made a personal mission of fulfilling Obama's oft-repeated campaign promise to close the detention facility at Guant\u00e1namo Bay. Craig's fixation with Guant\u00e1namo brought him into conflict with Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff. Emanuel believed the president's top priority (as well as his own) was to push Obama's legislative agenda through Congress, starting with the economic stimulus bill and then health care reform. Emanuel regarded Guant\u00e1namo as a distraction that could only alienate members of Congress, where Obama's margins were tiny. In those first months, there were fifty-nine Democrats in the Senate, and Republicans were filibustering on virtually everything, meaning the president needed sixty votes to pass bills. Obama had to claw for every vote he could get, and Emanuel\u2014who was famously profane and opinionated\u2014thought Craig was making the president's job harder. Craig believed he was simply doing the work the president hired him to do. In short order, Emanuel and Craig loathed each other.\n\nButts did not have an easy time either. Craig had assembled a staff that was heavy on the qualifications that were valued at his law firm, Williams & Connolly. That meant an abundance of young, self-confident Supreme Court law clerks. Butts had gone to Harvard but she had spent much of her career on Capitol Hill, working longest for Congressman Richard Gephardt. In the recondite status hierarchies of the legal profession, Butts occupied a somewhat lower plane than the A students favored by Craig. There were tensions between Butts's and Craig's other underlings, who traded whispered complaints about arrogance and incompetence. Susan Davies, who worked under Butts on judicial nominations, had clerked for both Kennedy and Breyer and then served on Patrick Leahy's staff on the Judiciary Committee. Davies and Butts embodied the internal culture clash.\n\nButts, and thus Obama, also had difficulties with the Senate. By long-standing tradition, senators of the president's party controlled district court nominations in their states. It had been almost a decade since Democratic senators had had a chance to pick judges. Many were slow to put machinery in place to do so, and the senators also bristled at the Obama demand that they submit three names (instead of just one name) for every vacancy. The process stalled. Weeks, then months, passed.\n\nGeorge W. Bush had made a splashy show of his first set of judicial nominations. On May 9, 2001, Bush assembled his first eleven selections in a ceremony in the East Room. The group included two nominees to the D.C. Circuit, John Roberts and Miguel Estrada. (Democrats stalled Roberts's nomination for two years before confirming him; Estrada was filibustered by Democrats and ultimately defeated.) Those two, as well as nominees like Terrence Boyle (a former aide to Senator Jesse Helms) and Jeffrey Sutton (a former Scalia clerk) indicated that Bush would work hard to put a conservative cast on the federal judiciary. The public nature of the occasion served as a clear demonstration of the centrality of judicial appointments in a Republican administration. It showed the voters and the Senate that Bush cared about his judges.\n\nObama took a different approach. He knew that Bush's high-profile announcement of his first nominees was intended, and taken, as a provocation to his political adversaries. Obama preferred to try to lower the political temperature. He thought it would be better to start with a single, uncontroversial choice that would burnish his postpartisan credentials. In this way, he could show his good faith to Senate Republicans and expect similar fair dealing in return. So Obama wanted a first nominee who was sure to have Republican support.\n\nAs it turned out, there was a perfect candidate lined up. On March 17, 2009, President Obama nominated David Hamilton, the chief federal district court judge in Indianapolis, to the Seventh Circuit court of appeals. Hamilton had been vetted with care. After fifteen years of service on the trial bench, he had won the highest rating from the American Bar Association; Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana and a leading Republican, was supportive; and Hamilton's status as a nephew of Lee Hamilton, a well-respected former local congressman, gave him deep connections. The hope was that Hamilton's appointment would begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself. What could go wrong?\n\nAlmost everything. Not for the last time, Obama misread the political environment in the Senate. As they put it in the White House, \"Hamilton blew up.\" Conservatives seized on a 2005 case in which Hamilton ruled to strike down the daily invocation at the Indiana legislature because its repeated references to Jesus Christ violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Hamilton had also ruled to invalidate a part of Indiana's abortion law that required women to make two visits to a doctor before undergoing the procedure. By the time Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, scheduled a vote on Hamilton, in June, the best he could muster was a straight party-line vote, 12\u20137, in favor of the nomination. (Months of delay followed. The nomination did not reach the Senate floor until November 19, and Hamilton was confirmed by a vote of 59\u201339.) Obama had chosen the Hamilton nomination to send a message, but he wound up receiving one instead. Republicans _cared_ about the courts.\n\nAnd as everyone knew, a Supreme Court vacancy was imminent.\n\nNo justice on the Court spent more time on the job, or enjoyed it less, than David Souter. Six days a week, sometimes seven, Souter would drive his battered car into the basement parking lot and trudge up to his chambers on the first floor. On weekends, he would occasionally forswear his three-piece suit. Souter lived in a modest apartment in an unlovely neighborhood. He didn't go to parties or even out to dinner. His world was mostly circumscribed by the jogging paths near his home and the corridors of the Supreme Court building. (In 2002, Souter did happen to attend a party to celebrate Strom Thurmond's one hundredth birthday. Afterwards, he told his law clerks, \"If I am still on the Court at eighty-five, I want one of you to shoot me.\") Even people who didn't know much about the Court knew that David Souter hated Washington.\n\nThere was truth in this, but it was far from the whole story. In some ways, Souter didn't mind having his unhappiness on the Court portrayed as a simple eccentricity, like his predilection for lunching on a cup of yogurt and an apple (including the core). _This is a guy who doesn't know how to use a computer or a cell phone\u2014and, crazily enough, he doesn't like Washington either!_ That kind of explanation obscured the more painful truth. Ironically, Souter liked Washington somewhat more in his later years on the Court, in part because he had his first serious girlfriend in years. It was true that Souter wanted to return to New Hampshire, but the reasons were harsher, and uglier, than a simple longing for the White Mountains. He abhorred the views of Roberts and Alito. Souter didn't like what the Republican Party\u2014his party\u2014was doing to the Court, or to the country.\n\nSouter identified with a tradition in American politics and law that had almost vanished from public life: the moderate Republican. As Souter was moving up the ranks in New Hampshire, from attorney general to the state supreme court, his mentor was Warren Rudman. New England used to abound in moderates like Rudman\u2014and Lowell Weicker in Connecticut, Robert Stafford and Jim Jeffords in Vermont, and John Chafee in Rhode Island. On the Supreme Court, moderate Republicans had played crucial roles for decades: John Marshall Harlan II in the fifties, Potter Stewart in the sixties, Lewis Powell in the seventies, and Sandra Day O'Connor in the eighties, nineties, and beyond. As a group, they prized stability and venerated precedent. So did Souter, who liked to quote something that Rehnquist (hardly a moderate himself) used to say: \"The law of the United States is like an ocean liner. You can't turn it on a dime.\" Scalia and Thomas, joined now by Roberts and Alito, thought otherwise and were trying to make that sharp turn in case after case. Moderate Republican ideas, like moderate Republicans, were disappearing from the Court as they were disappearing from the country.\n\nFor Souter, all his worries, all his distaste for the modern Court, had come together in a single case: _Bush v. Gore_. In the years since the decision, in 2000, there was a kind of informal agreement among the justices not to talk about it. They were used to disagreeing with one another, of course; that was the nature of the work. But the wounds of _Bush v. Gore_ were so deep, the anger so profound on both sides, that it was thought best to avoid the subject altogether. Momentous Supreme Court cases tend to move quickly into the slipstream of the Court's history. In the first ten years after _Brown v. Board of Education_ , the justices cited the case more than twenty-five times. In the ten years after _Roe v. Wade_ , there were more than sixty-five references to that landmark ruling. By the time Obama became president, it had been nearly a decade since the Court, by a vote of 5\u20134, terminated the election of 2000 and delivered the presidency to George W. Bush. Over that time, the justices provided a verdict of sorts on _Bush v. Gore_ by the number of times they cited it: zero.\n\n_Bush v. Gore_ broke David Souter's heart. _The day the music died_ , he called it. It was so political, so _transparently_ political, that it scarred Souter's belief in the Supreme Court as an institution. Scalia, in his public appearances, would often be asked a hostile question about _Bush v. Gore_ , and he always said the same thing: \"Oh, get over it!\" Souter never did. After the election of 2004, Souter almost quit the Court in disgust. After all, he thought, George W. Bush told the people what he wanted to do with the Supreme Court, and he won the election, so perhaps he should just let Bush have his chance. Souter thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes's mordant observation about the role of a judge in a democracy: \"I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them.\" A close friend in New Hampshire talked Souter out of quitting, but he was certainly ready to go by the time Obama won the election. Souter would not even turn seventy years old until later in 2009\u2014still middle-aged for a Supreme Court justice\u2014but he had had enough. Roberts and Alito were obviously intelligent and honorable men, Souter thought, but he didn't recognize their approach to the law. He thought it was time to let someone else try to figure it out.\n\nThrough former Souter clerks on his staff, Greg Craig learned that Souter planned to leave at the end of the 2008\u201309 term. Souter asked his clerks to find out from Craig what the best time for his announcement might be. Craig sent back word that late in the spring would be better than earlier; that way, Obama could build up some momentum with other judicial nominations before moving on to the Supreme Court. In any event, the formal announcement leaked out rather awkwardly. On the evening of April 30, Nina Totenberg of NPR and Pete Williams of NBC announced that Souter would be retiring at the end of the term. The following day, other news outlets confirmed the story, but there was still no official word from Souter or the Supreme Court. Craig decided simply to call Souter and ask him what was going on. Souter confirmed that he was retiring and would write his formal letter of resignation the next day.\n\nSupreme Court resignation letters are an art form. The justices know that the letter will be widely distributed, so they make an effort to craft a meaningful valedictory. \"It has been a great privilege, indeed, to have served as a member of the Court for 24 terms,\" O'Connor wrote in 2005. \"I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the Court and its role under our constitutional structure.\" (This sentence reflected what O'Connor intended: her pride that the Supreme Court had reined in George W. Bush's excesses in the war on terror.)\n\nIn contrast to O'Connor but in keeping with his singular style, David Souter wrote his letter with all the poetry of a phone bill:\n\nDear Mr. President,\n\nWhen the Supreme Court rises for the summer recess this year, I intend to retire from regular active service as a Justice, under the provisions of 28 US.C. \u00a7 371(b)(1), having attained the age and met the service requirements of subsection (c) of that section. I mean to continue to render substantial judicial service as an Associate Justice.\n\nYours respectfully,  \nDavid Souter\n\nSouter's letter meant that he had served long enough as a federal judge to retire at full pay. (Years earlier, Souter had made a series of canny investments in New England bank stocks that multiplied in value and left him, with Ginsburg, as the wealthiest justice, with a net worth between $6 million and $27 million. But Souter remained at heart a frugal New Englander, and if he was entitled to retirement pay, he was going to take it.) Souter's letter meant further that he wanted to continue sitting as a circuit court judge, as was his right, following his resignation as a justice.\n\nMore importantly, the letter meant that a Democratic president would have a chance to name a justice to the Supreme Court for the first time in fifteen years.\n\nDuring those fifteen years, conservative ideas about the judiciary and the Constitution\u2014especially originalism\u2014enjoyed a great deal of prominence. To many in the liberal camp, the nomination of a new justice, and the confirmation hearings to follow, offered an excellent opportunity to put forth an alternative, progressive legal vision. To them, the point was not simply to confirm a Democrat but also to win the war over the interpretation of the Constitution.\n\nNeither Obama nor the people around him wanted any part of such an undertaking. In the first place, that wasn't the president's style. He wasn't looking to start fights that he didn't need to have. Moreover, Obama himself had basically middle-of-the-road ideas about the Constitution, and he wanted a nominee with similar views. Finally, given the crowded legislative calendar, Obama and his team wanted a no-drama confirmation. His nominee should be confirmed with as little disruption as possible.\n\nBut who should it be? Back in Chicago, the week after the election, Obama had given his own list of four names to Craig and Axelrod: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Diane Wood, and Cass Sunstein. A young staffer on the transition, Danielle Gray, now a member of Craig's staff, had drawn up the first memos about the candidates. Now, about six months later, the list had changed slightly.\n\nCass Sunstein had been a colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was perhaps the most accomplished, and certainly the most prolific, legal scholar of their generation. Sunstein moved to Harvard Law School and worked on Obama's campaign, where he met and later married Samantha Power, a human rights scholar and activist who had also become an adviser to Obama. Sunstein's interests were a lot like Breyer's\u2014administrative law, government efficiency in all its forms. As a result, Obama had appointed him to a little-known but powerful job running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. Republicans knew Sunstein was a possible Supreme Court nominee, so they put him through an arduous confirmation process; he still had not been confirmed by the full Senate for his OMB job when Souter stepped down. Sunstein's eclectic views had the ability to offend both the left and the right, and he liked being where he was. Sunstein was removed from consideration.\n\nJanet Napolitano was added. Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama had mused about the need for nonjudges on the Supreme Court. In this regard, the transformation on the Court had been enormous. Only one of the justices who decided _Brown_ in 1954 had ever been a full-time judge. (Sherman Minton was a former senator who had served on the Seventh Circuit; Hugo Black had been a part-time judge on a police court in Alabama.) When Alito replaced O'Connor, for the first time in history all nine justices were former federal appeals court judges. The change owed much to the differences in the confirmation process over fifty years. When FDR appointed figures like Felix Frankfurter (law professor and activist who had spoken out in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti), William O. Douglas (head of the SEC), and Robert Jackson (attorney general), the Senate did little more than act as a rubber stamp. That was true, too, when Eisenhower nominated Earl Warren, then governor of California, to be chief justice. But as senators started to apply greater scrutiny, especially after Robert Bork's defeat in 1987, presidents started opting for safe nominees whose prior records were largely devoid of political expression. That meant judges, not politicians.\n\nNapolitano had an extraordinary r\u00e9sum\u00e9\u2014governor of Arizona, attorney general of the state, United States attorney as well. (Obama's vetters took some sinister joy in noting, too, that one of Napolitano's clients during her brief career in private practice had been Anita Hill. The possibilities for lively lunchtime conversations at the Court were duly noted.) But the prospect of scouring a lifetime of public appearances by a politician was daunting. Plus, Napolitano was off to a strong start as secretary of homeland security\u2014a job that, if it could not win reelection for Obama, might lose it for him. Napolitano stayed on the list but, through no fault of her own, remained a problematic and unlikely choice.\n\nKagan was only an outside shot for the Souter seat as well. She, too, had been a professor at Chicago, where she became acquainted with Obama, and had gone on to service in the Clinton White House and then a successful tenure as dean of Harvard Law School. But it had been only a month since she was confirmed as solicitor general, and she had not yet argued a case for the government in the Supreme Court. Indeed, Kagan had never argued a case in any court throughout her entire career. She might be a strong candidate someday\u2014but for now she came off the list.\n\nThe field\u2014the real field\u2014quickly came down to two: Diane Wood and Sonia Sotomayor.\n\n# **10**\n\n#    \n**WISE LATINA**\n\nSonia Sotomayor could have been genetically engineered to be a Democratic nominee to the United States Supreme Court. She had impeccable credentials: Princeton, then Yale Law School. She had ideal experience: big-city prosecutor, six years as a federal district judge (nominated by George H. W. Bush), and then a decade on the federal appeals court. She had, above all, a great story: raised amid poverty in the Bronx, with juvenile diabetes no less, she would make history as the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. In light of all this, it looked like political malpractice for Obama _not_ to nominate her.\n\nThere was only one problem. Barack Obama really liked Diane Wood.\n\nWhen Wood was shuttling her three young children to music lessons in the late nineties, she already had a very busy life. She was a judge on the Seventh Circuit, a Clinton nominee confirmed in 1995, and she taught part-time at the University of Chicago Law School. Still, she sprang a question on her kids' violin teacher: \"Do you know anyone who could teach me the oboe?\" Wood spent the next decade in intensive study of that difficult woodwind. Today she sits in with local orchestras.\n\nThere was nothing conventional about Diane Wood. Even in the rarefied realm of law professors and federal judges, she had a rich, full, complicated life. She was born in New Jersey but came of age as a teenager in Texas, and she went to the University of Texas for college and law school. (This alone was an advantage on a Supreme Court dominated by Harvard and Yale graduates. Wood was also a Protestant; at that point, Stevens was the only Protestant remaining on the Court.) In Wood's day, there were only a handful of women at the law school in Austin, but Wood flourished. She clerked on the Fifth Circuit for Irving Goldberg\u2014a legendary Texas liberal\u2014and then for Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court. She speaks French, Russian, and German.\n\nAfter clerking, Wood went to work in Jimmy Carter's State Department, where she specialized in international trade and antitrust law. She taught at Georgetown and then Chicago, until Clinton summoned her back to Washington to work in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. He put her on the Seventh Circuit in 1995. Along the way, Woods married three times\u2014\"my many husbands,\" she referred to them ruefully. After a brief marriage during law school, she was with her second husband for twenty years. Dennis Hutchinson was a fellow professor at Chicago and one of Obama's few good friends on the faculty. In 2006, Wood wed Robert Sufit, a professor of neurology at Northwestern.\n\nOn the Seventh Circuit, Wood achieved a rare accomplishment. She was both an unapologetic liberal and a valued, even beloved, colleague to the outspoken conservatives on the Court, Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook. In her opinions and copious scholarly work, she mounted a vigorous defense of the living Constitution. In an era when originalism was ascendant and many liberals (especially those with ambitions of serving on the Supreme Court) found it convenient to stay away from the debate, Wood took on the subject with enthusiasm. As she stated in the James Madison Lecture at New York University in 2004, the language of the Constitution \"may legitimately be interpreted broadly, in a manner informed by evolving notions of a decent society.\" She went on:\n\nFirst and most important is the idea that we should take seriously the fact that the text of the Constitution tends to reflect broad principles, not specific prescriptions. Neither James Madison, for whom this lecture is named, nor any of the other Framers of the Constitution, were oblivious, careless, or otherwise unaware of the words they chose for the document and its Bill of Rights. The papers they left behind leave no doubt that they hoped to be writing for the ages. There is no more reason to think that they expected the world to remain static than there is to think that any of us holds a crystal ball. The only way to create a foundational document that could stand the test of time was to build in enough flexibility that later generations would be able to adapt it to their own needs and uses.\n\nThis was a direct challenge to the originalist notion that Madison's words should be interpreted only as he and his peers understood them. Wood applied this mode of analysis consistently\u2014including on the question of abortion.\n\nIt was Wood's misfortune to have several abortion cases before her during her years on the Seventh Circuit. She voted to strike down so-called partial-birth abortion laws in Illinois and Wisconsin and rejected an informed consent law in Indiana. In all of these cases, her colleagues voted to uphold the laws. Worse yet for her chances was the case of _National Organization for Women v. Scheidler_ , in 2001.\n\nThe facts underlying that decision were chilling. During the 1980s, anti-abortion groups affiliated with the Pro-Life Action Network engaged in repeated acts of violence against women's health clinics around the country. NOW used the federal racketeering law known as RICO to sue the group for damages and for an injunction to stop further attacks, and a jury found that the Pro-Life Action Network orchestrated 121 crimes involving acts or threats of violence. As NOW summarized some of the evidence, protesters at a clinic in Los Angeles beat a postoperative ovarian surgery patient over the head with their anti-abortion sign, knocking her unconscious and opening the sutures in her abdomen. In Atlanta, they seized a clinic administrator by the throat, choking and bruising her. They trashed a clinic in Pensacola and assaulted a staff member. The trial revealed a nationwide wave of terror. Wood's opinion upheld the jury verdict, the damage award, and the injunction against the group.\n\nThe Supreme Court reversed Wood's holding by a vote of 8\u20131. (Only Stevens dissented.) The reason was narrow. Indeed, the _Scheidler_ case demonstrated how cases involving terrible injustices can turn into bloodless disputes about legal technicalities in the Supreme Court. The justices held that the protesters did not \"obtain\" any of the clinics' equipment, so that meant their activity did not fit the definition of extortion under the racketeering law. The case went back to Wood and the Seventh Circuit, which again ruled for NOW, and for a second time in the same case, the justices overturned Wood's ruling, this time unanimously. (Alito did not participate.) It was true that these cases, as they arrived at the Supreme Court, concerned fairly arcane matters of federal statutory interpretation, not abortion law per se. But it was also true that Supreme Court confirmation fights did not concern such subtleties. In crude terms, the Supreme Court had twice reversed Wood's rulings on abortion\u2014and even Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not support her position.\n\nTo which Greg Craig said, \"Good for Wood! This is why we need someone like her on the Supreme Court.\" Wood was both a fighter and a thinker, and she could be the voice of their side against Scalia. As a veteran appellate judge, Wood would hit the ground running.\n\nFor neither the first nor the last time during his tenure at the White House, Craig was out of step with his colleagues. More importantly, Craig misread his boss. Obama wanted someone who could put together winning coalitions at the Court\u2014more than he wanted someone who could write a good dissent. Obama liked and admired Wood, but the benefits of appointing her were, from a political perspective, unclear. Not so for Wood's leading competitor. The closer Obama looked at Sonia Sotomayor, the better\u2014in every respect\u2014she seemed.\n\nIn the brusque shorthand of political life, White House officials later described Sotomayor's story as \"an American story.\" It was an extraordinary one.\n\nCelina B\u00e1ez and Juan Sotomayor were both born in Puerto Rico and came to the United States as part of the great migration that transformed New York during and after World War II. Celina worked as a telephone operator at a hospital, Juan as a tool-and-die maker in a factory. Their daughter, Sonia, was born in 1954, and they moved into an unfinished Bronxdale housing project in the South Bronx with the poetic name of Building 28. (Her brother, Juan, was born three years later.) Their lives were hard and soon got even harder. When Sonia was eight, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The following year, Juan Sotomayor Sr. died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-two.\n\nCelina was a striver, committed to bettering herself and making sure that her children could do the same. After her husband's death, she started speaking English at home; as a consequence, Sonia speaks Spanish fluently but her younger brother barely speaks it at all. Celina obtained a GED and then trained to become a practical nurse. The job paid better, and it taught Celina to manage her daughter's illness. She placed Sonia and Juan in highly regarded Catholic schools. The reasons were educational, not religious. In an oft-told tale, Celina invested in an expensive set of encyclopedias\u2014supposedly the only one in the building\u2014for her two children. The neighborhood was deteriorating, and Celina moved her family to Co-op City, the sprawling development near the Westchester border. While keeping her job at the hospital, caring for her own kids, and serving as a kind of unofficial doctor for her neighbors, Celina commenced studies to be a registered nurse. (The exodus of middle-class families like the Sotomayors in the seventies helped turn the South Bronx into a national symbol of urban decay.)\n\nSonia won a scholarship to Princeton, where she experienced immediate culture shock. After a rocky freshman year, she settled in and became successful, socially and academically. She wrote a thesis about Puerto Rico's independence movement, graduated summa cum laude, and won acceptance to Yale Law School. (Her younger brother became a physician.) For all her achievements, Sotomayor held no illusions about one of the reasons for her success. As she said in a speech after she became a judge, \"I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. My test scores were not comparable to that of my colleagues at Princeton or Yale, but not so far off the mark that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.\" In any case, she thrived at Yale, too.\n\nToward the end of law school, Sotomayor happened to show up at a career-day presentation by Robert Morgenthau, the legendary Manhattan district attorney. After sizing her up, Morgenthau arranged for a job interview the next day, and she was quickly hired. Sotomayor worked her way up in the office and capped her career there with a victory in the tabloid-ready Tarzan Murderer case. Richard Maddicks was a familiar New York type in the seventies and eighties\u2014the desperate junkie who preyed on his neighbors to support his habit. What distinguished Maddicks was his ability to jump from building to building while making his rounds, a circuit that produced seven shootings and four murders. In 1983, thanks to Sotomayor and a fellow prosecutor, Maddicks was convicted and received a life sentence.\n\nSotomayor tired of the never-ending misery in the criminal justice system and left the office after only five years to join a small private firm. (After graduating from Princeton, she had married her college boyfriend, whom she had known since high school; he was in graduate school in molecular biology for much of the marriage, and their commuting relationship didn't last. They divorced after seven years. She was later engaged, but did not marry again.) Like many other young lawyers, Sotomayor was guided both by altruism and by ambition. In 1980, she joined the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund\u2014a leading civil rights organization. While in private practice, Sotomayor was named to the State of New York Mortgage Agency board; the next year, thanks to Morgenthau, she gained a seat on the New York City Campaign Finance Board. In 1986, she toured Israel with a group of Latino activists. When George H. W. Bush was president, the New York senators divided the judicial appointments so that Al D'Amato received three appointments for every one for Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In 1992, Moynihan heard about Sotomayor and put up her name; at the age of thirty-eight, she was confirmed unanimously for a federal judgeship in lower Manhattan.\n\nAs with the Tarzan Murderer, a celebrated case brought Sotomayor wide public notice on the district court. A labor dispute had destroyed the 1994 major league baseball season, including the World Series, and the 1995 season was in jeopardy when the battle between the players and the owners wound up in her courtroom. On March 30, 1995, the union demanded that the owners continue free-agent negotiations and salary arbitrations while the two sides negotiated an agreement. Sotomayor told the lawyers that she didn't know the history of their case, but \"I hope none of you assumed... that my lack of knowledge of any of the intimate details of your dispute meant I was not a baseball fan. You can't grow up in the South Bronx without knowing about baseball.\" She issued an injunction reinstituting free agency, the players went back to work, and the 232-day dispute soon ended. It was a classic Sotomayor moment\u2014decisive and unequivocal. It was the kind of behavior that generally wins praise for male judges, if not always for their female counterparts. Certainly, it did not hurt that Sotomayor became famous as the judge who saved baseball.\n\nBill Clinton nominated her to the Second Circuit two years later, and she soon became known\u2014even to Barack Obama, whom she had never met\u2014as the Democrats' leading Supreme Court justice-in-waiting.\n\nBut that was only part of the story, especially for Obama. Although Sotomayor flourished on the Second Circuit, she kept her ties to the Bronx. She remained a frequent visitor to her grammar school and high school; she was godmother of five children, including the son of her dentist; she gave talks to Hispanic student groups all over the country. As a public figure, Sotomayor had a stump speech of sorts. The one she gave in 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley, was typical. These kinds of inspirational talks often consist of banalities, but not Sotomayor's. Her talk was serious and substantive\u2014with a quietly radical message.\n\nSotomayor began with the customary paean to her roots, in her case as a \"Nuyorican.\" \"For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the _muchos platos de arroz, gandules y pernil_ \u2014rice, beans, and pork\u2014that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events,\" she said. \"My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, _morcilla_ \u2014pig intestines\u2014 _patitas de cerdo con garbanzos_ \u2014pigs' feet with beans\u2014and _la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito_ \u2014pigs' tongue and ears.\"\n\nSoon enough, Sotomayor took aim at one of the hardest questions surrounding affirmative action. _Why_ does it matter if there are more women, or minorities, on the bench? She quoted a former colleague on the Manhattan federal trial court, Miriam Cedarbaum, who \"sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote.\" Sotomayor went on, \"Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law.\"\n\nBut that wasn't Sotomayor's opinion. She embraced the view that women and minorities brought something different to the bench. \"Our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions,\" she said. \"The aspiration to impartiality is just that\u2014it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.\" She continued, \"Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.\" But in the crucial passage in the speech, Sotomayor said she _disagreed_ with O'Connor's view. \"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.\" According to Sotomayor, gender and ethnicity among judges made a substantive difference in results. \"Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see,\" she said. \"My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.\"\n\nSotomayor, Wood, Kagan, and Napolitano had all submitted enormous volumes of material, including all their public remarks, to the White House as part of the vetting process. For Sotomayor, the \"wise Latina\" speeches, as they became known, immediately jumped out as problems. But how big?\n\nObama wanted the new justice confirmed in time for the first Monday in October 2009, which meant that he could not tarry in making his choice. The Senate went into recess in August, so the hearings had to take place by the end of July. Souter had quit on May 1; Obama needed to nominate someone by the end of the month. All four candidates came to the White House for interviews with the president; Kagan and Napolitano received the clear message, from Obama and others, not to get their hopes up. It wasn't their time.\n\nWood or Sotomayor? An abortion problem or an affirmative action problem? By that measure, Wood had the advantage. In rough terms, the public was about 60 percent pro-choice; on affirmative action, support was closer to 30. (There are wide variations depending on how the poll questions are asked.) As Obama knew better than most people, the acceptable discourse about race and identity was fairly narrow. It was fine to say, as Sotomayor did, that it was important for women and minorities to have role models. It was acceptable, too, to say that diversity was a strength in any institution. But O'Connor, with her understanding of public opinion, knew the limits of the idea. It was not acceptable to say that men and women judges (or blacks and minority judges) actually reached different, or better, opinions in cases because of their backgrounds. But that was what Sotomayor had said in her speeches\u2014repeatedly.\n\nSotomayor had another problem on that score. As it happened, the Supreme Court had just heard an appeal from the Second Circuit on an affirmative action case where Sotomayor had been on the panel. In 2003, a group of New Haven firefighters took a standardized test for promotions. Whites passed the test at double the rate of blacks, and the local Civil Service Board, worried about being sued by the failed black applicants, invalidated the test. Instead, nineteen white firefighters and one Hispanic who passed the original test sued for their promotions. In a brief order, Sotomayor and two other judges on the Second Circuit ruled against the white firefighters and upheld the decision to throw out the test. White House soundings on Capitol Hill produced almost no support, even from liberals, for Sotomayor's position. \"Diversity\" was one thing, but blacks and whites should have to play by the same rules or, in this case, take the same test.\n\nObama sought advice from Biden, Craig, Butts, Susan Davies, and Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain, who had worked on Ginsburg's and Breyer's nominations in the Clinton White House and was Biden's top aide in the Senate during the Clarence Thomas hearings. No staffer had more experience with Supreme Court nominations than Klain. There were sixty Democratic votes in the Senate. Either Wood or Sotomayor was likely to be confirmed. Obama simply had to make his choice.\n\nThe decision revealed a great deal about Obama. In his interview with Sotomayor, the president took particular note of how she had stayed in touch with her former neighborhoods in the Bronx. He sensed an authenticity in her, and no one had to remind the president of the political appeal of appointing the first Hispanic to the Supreme Court. If he had a chance to make history in this way, with an impeccably qualified nominee, Obama was going to do it.\n\nThere was something more, too. In a way, Obama thought that Sotomayor's \"problems\" were also advantages. It was impolitic to say that race and ethnicity mattered, but the first black president, far more than most, knew how much they did. Obama was often described by others as \"postracial,\" but he didn't see himself that way. After all, as a young man Obama had written an entire book about coming to terms with his racial identity. Around the same time as he was making his choice for the Supreme Court, Obama made an uncharacteristically indiscreet revelation. He was asked about an incident where Henry Louis Gates Jr., a renowned Harvard professor and friend of Obama's, was arrested on the front steps of his home in Cambridge. Gates was returning from a long overseas trip and found the front door to his home jammed. He struggled to open it, and a neighbor called the police, thinking a burglary was in progress. The police came and exchanged words with Gates, and he was arrested.\n\nA few days later, a reporter asked Obama for his opinion. \"Now, I've\u2014I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,\" Obama said. \"But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact.\" Obama quickly came to regret his remarks, which were indeed ill-informed about the specifics of the incident. (By way of apology, in the summer, he held a \"beer summit\" at the White House with Gates and James Crowley, the Cambridge police sergeant who made the arrest.) Still, the Gates incident was revealing. Obama had never been arrested, but he knew what it was like to be a black man facing the police. So, in a different way, did Sonia Sotomayor. That was more than fine with the president.\n\nHeading into Memorial Day weekend, Sotomayor had been told she was the likely nominee but that she would hear the official word from the president probably on Monday. (White House officials had consulted several doctors and were assured that Sotomayor's diabetes would not prevent her from living a normal life span.) On the afternoon of the holiday, Obama called Klain and asked him to run the negatives on Sotomayor one more time. Klain rehearsed the expected attacks: intemperate, too liberal, too pro\u2013affirmative action. Obama was unpersuaded by the case against her and told Klain he would make the formal offer that night.\n\nIn the meantime, Sotomayor\u2014nervous and unable to tell anyone what was going on\u2014went to her chambers on Memorial Day, if only to fill the time. Relatives called for updates, and there were none. Finally, she decided to return to her apartment in Greenwich Village and pack for the trip to Washington\u2014just in case. At 8:10 p.m., Obama called her cell phone. When he made the offer official, Sotomayor began to cry.\n\n\"I want you to make me two promises,\" Obama said. \"First, you have to remain the person you are. And second, to stay connected to your community.\" Happy to oblige, the nominee told the president.\n\nObama and his staff had been so caught up in the details of the selection process that they weren't prepared for what happened the next day, when he announced Sotomayor's nomination in the East Room. There were people, lots of them, weeping with joy. Many of them did not even know Sotomayor personally. Supreme Court nominations are cultural markers in the United States\u2014Louis Brandeis in 1916, Thurgood Marshall in 1967, Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981. The dates are not coincidental, for they mark coming-of-age moments for Jewish Americans, African Americans, and women. May 26, 2009 was such a date for Hispanic Americans. In a White House hallway afterwards, Obama told Ron Klain, his designated naysayer, \"I feel great about this now.\"\n\nAs recently as the nineties, Supreme Court nominees could be eased into the confirmation process, first with a round of courtesy calls on a few senators and then with several weeks to prepare for their hearings. Harriet Miers put an end to that. Miers had been George W. Bush's private attorney and then his White House counsel before he nominated her to replace Sandra Day O'Connor in 2005. (Bush initially named Roberts to take O'Connor's place, but then Rehnquist's death opened the chief justice position for Roberts.) Right after Miers's nomination, her handlers at the White House scheduled a few informal meetings with senators, who took the opportunity to test her knowledge on a variety of issues. Miers performed disastrously, and she was soon forced to withdraw as a nominee.\n\nSo there was nothing casual about Sotomayor's preparations for her first meetings. (She eventually met with ninety-two senators, a substantial increase from prior practice.) Sotomayor had been a judge for the past seventeen years, and she was more used to asking questions than answering them. Plus, her docket in New York had not included some subjects that were closest to the hearts of the senators\u2014like national security, gun rights, and the death penalty. She needed to study up, and fast.\n\nLike Cassandra Butts, who was still nominally the deputy counsel in charge of judicial nominations, Sotomayor had gone to a prestigious law school, but she had not operated in the universe of Supreme Court law clerks. The nominee felt an edge of condescension from what she called \"the bright young things\" on Greg Craig's staff. Matters were not helped on June 8 when Sotomayor tripped at LaGuardia Airport and broke her ankle. She was determined to keep to her schedule of meetings on crutches\u2014and to avoid using painkillers\u2014but it wasn't easy. Eventually Sotomayor agreed to take some Aleve, but she remained in pain for weeks. (In keeping with recent tradition, her future colleagues on the Supreme Court greeted her nomination with a frosty silence. No one called. Only Ginsburg, who as the justice responsible for the Second Circuit had known Sotomayor for years, wrote her a congratulatory note.)\n\nAs her hearings approached, Sotomayor's ambitions narrowed. This was not about explaining the Constitution or even winning arguments but only about getting confirmed. It did not help that after her nomination, but before her hearing, the Supreme Court voted 5\u20134 to overturn her decision in the New Haven firefighter case.\n\nAs Sotomayor had often said, her own career was a monument to the success of affirmative action. She had a Hispanic and female take on the Constitution. But at her hearings, she steered away from that controversial territory. Instead, Sotomayor's opening statement was a monument to banality. \"In the past month, many senators have asked me about my judicial philosophy,\" she said. \"It is simple: fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make the law\u2014it is to apply the law.\" Of course, all justices believe they are displaying fidelity to the law; the question is how they interpret the law. Like other nominees since Robert Bork, Sotomayor ducked questions about substantive issues\u2014abortion and gun control especially\u2014but her nonresponsiveness exceeded the norm. The Democrats had sixty votes; Sotomayor tried to run out the clock without making a mistake.\n\nOn the \"wise Latina\" issue, Sotomayor caved. When questioned closely on the matter by Jeff Sessions, the senior Republican on the committee, she first dodged the central contention of her speeches: \"My record shows that at no point or time have I ever permitted my personal views or sympathies to influence an outcome of a case. In every case where I have identified a sympathy, I have articulated it and explained to the litigant why the law requires a different result.\"\n\n\"Well, Judge...,\" Sessions interrupted.\n\n\"I do not permit my sympathies, personal views, or prejudices to influence the outcome of my cases,\" she said, ignoring the interruption.\n\nIn the end, Sotomayor just walked away from her previous position. \"I was using a rhetorical flourish that fell flat. I knew that Justice O'Connor couldn't have meant that if judges reached different conclusions\u2014legal conclusions\u2014that one of them wasn't wise. That couldn't have been her meaning, because reasonable judges disagree on legal conclusions in some cases. So I was trying to play on her words. My play was\u2014fell flat.\n\n\"It was bad, because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that's clearly not what I do as a judge,\" she went on. \"It's clearly not what I intended in the context of my broader speech, which was attempting to inspire young Hispanic, Latino students and lawyers to believe that their life experiences added value to the process.\"\n\nFrom the perspective of the White House, Sotomayor's hearing was a clear success. Above all, she did nothing to jeopardize her chances of being confirmed. In a way, it was an Obama-like performance\u2014progressive by implication, biographical rather than ideological. Sotomayor was a highly qualified nominee whose views appeared to mirror the careful inclinations of the president who appointed her. That's what Obama wanted in a Supreme Court justice, and that's what he received. On July 28, the Judiciary Committee voted 13\u20136 in her favor. (Only Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, crossed party lines to vote for her.) On August 6, the full Senate confirmed Sotomayor by a vote of 68\u201331. (Nine Republicans voted for her.)\n\nRoberts and Alito had been sworn in at the White House\u2014over the objections of John Paul Stevens, a fierce defender of the prerogatives of the judicial branch of government. Stevens thought such ceremonies should take place at the Supreme Court, because new justices should make clear that they now owed no allegiance to the president who appointed them. In a subtle but unmistakable sign of her inclinations in the battles to come, Sotomayor agreed with Stevens. On August 8, at the Supreme Court, she officially became the 111th justice in American history.\n\nIt was especially important for Sotomayor to take her place right away, because the Court was hearing a case before the traditional start of the year, on the first Monday in October. It was September 9, 2009, when Sotomayor ascended the bench for the first time and heard the chief justice call her first case. It also turned out to be the first case argued by the new solicitor general, Elena Kagan.\n\n\"We'll hear argument today in Case 08-205,\" Roberts said, \" _Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission_.\"\n\n#  \n# **11**\n\n#    \n**MONEY TALKS**\n\nThe story of _Citizens United_ includes several of the great themes of Supreme Court history, among them corporate power, freedom of speech, and the intersection of law and politics. The tale involves legislation and court cases of enormous complexity, but the struggle at its heart has been a fairly simple one. For more than a century, the partisans in these battles have sometimes seen fit to obscure or deny the ideological fissures, but the sides have remained more or less the same: progressives (or liberals) vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Republicans, regulators vs. libertarians. One side has favored government rules to limit the influence of the wealthy in political campaigns; the other has supported a freer market allowing individuals and corporations to contribute as they see fit. The battles sometimes had unexpected consequences, but the motivations on either side never changed.\n\nThe saga began with one of the enduring mysteries in the history of the Supreme Court. In 1886, the Court heard a rather obscure and uncontroversial tax case called _Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad_. The lawsuit concerned whether a railroad should have to pay taxes on fences adjacent to its tracks. What made the case famous was a remark by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, just prior to the oral argument. Waite told the lawyers, \"The court does not want to hear argument on the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.\"\n\nThe argument proceeded, and the Court unanimously decided the case in favor of the railroad. The fences were not taxable. The justices never addressed the issue of whether corporations, for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, were persons. Still, just before the opinion was issued, J. C. Bancroft Davis, the clerk of the Supreme Court, wrote to Chief Justice Waite to ask him about his remark before the oral argument. Waite confirmed what he said, and Davis quoted the remark verbatim in his \"headnote,\" or summary of the case. From the earliest days of the Supreme Court, these headnotes had been prepared by the staff of the Court, not the justices, and they have never been part of the official opinions of the Court. They have no formal legal significance; they are merely to assist readers of the Court's opinions. Still, the _Santa Clara_ headnote became the wellspring for a crucial idea in the history of American law: under the Fourteenth Amendment, corporations had the same rights as people. In an opinion from 1978, then\u2013Justice Rehnquist said of the _Santa Clara_ case, \"This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a 'person' entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.\"\n\nAll these years later, questions about the _Santa Clara_ case abound. Why didn't Waite want to hear argument on this question? Why didn't the justices address the point in an opinion? Why did they leave this momentous issue to be settled by the clerk of the Court? The writer Jack Beatty, who examined the questions in detail, could not settle the matter with certainty: \"Davis may have gotten it right, may have misunderstood what Waite said or meant, or may have understood yet gone ahead to make constitutional law on his own.\"\n\nThe historical context for the Court's decision was clear. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Court remained what it had been before the war\u2014a very conservative institution. During Reconstruction, Congress and the states passed three new amendments to the Constitution\u2014the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth\u2014to give the newly freed slaves the full rights of citizenship. Almost immediately, the Supreme Court did much to undermine these new provisions, ultimately permitting the continued oppression of African Americans. At the same time, the justices became eager accomplices in the excesses of the Gilded Age. In a series of cases, including _Santa Clara_ , the Court prevented any governmental restraints on the great new concentrations of wealth and power in commercial and corporate interests. Black people and poor people had few friends among the justices.\n\nThis time at the Court came just before the _Lochner_ era, which was named after the most famous case of its day. In an early attempt to protect workers from exploitation, New York passed a law prohibiting bakery employees from working more than sixty hours a week. In the 1905 case known as _Lochner v. New York_ , the Court declared the state law unconstitutional on the ground that it interfered with the \"right of contract\" of both the employer and the employee. \"The general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution,\" Justice Rufus Peckham wrote for the 5\u20134 majority. In short, the New York law was an \"unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.\" In simple terms, the majority in _Lochner_ turned the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, into a mechanism to advance the interest of business owners.\n\nThe implications of _Lochner_ were breathtaking. The Court basically asserted that all attempts to regulate the private marketplace, or to protect workers, were unconstitutional. In the words of the legal historian Morton J. Horwitz, _Lochner_ \"expressed, above all, the post\u2013Civil War triumph of laissez-faire principles in political economy and of the view that 'the government is best which governs least.' \" The concept of \"judicial activism,\" if not that precise term, dates to this period at the end of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. During this time, the democratically elected branches of government passed a variety of laws to protect workers and other individuals. But the Court imposed itself as a superlegislature, rejecting many of these laws as violating the right to contract and due process of law. The _Lochner_ era at the Supreme Court reflected conservative judicial activism; later, in the Warren Court era, there would be liberal judicial activism when the justices began overturning laws that violated the rights of minorities and women.\n\nThe conservative extremism of the _Lochner_ era at the Supreme Court, and its broader political implications, eventually generated a backlash. Around the turn of the century, disparate reform movements began gaining traction. Antitrust legislation, food safety rules, child labor laws, women's suffrage, a tax on income\u2014all came together under the broad rubric of Progressivism. Theodore Roosevelt, who became president in 1901, made the movement his own.\n\nRoosevelt won a landslide election in 1904, helped in part by vast campaign contributions by corporations. Roosevelt drew heavily from railroad and insurance interests and, in the last days before the election, made a personal appeal for funds to a group of wealthy businessmen, including Henry Clay Frick, the steel baron. Years later, Frick recalled of Roosevelt, \"He got down on his knees to us. We bought the son-of-a-bitch and then he did not stay bought.\" Almost as soon as TR won the election, he turned his attention to passing the first campaign finance reform act in American history\u2014trying to outlaw the very techniques he had just used to hang on to the presidency. Roosevelt put the effort to ban corporate money in politics near the top of his agenda. In his annual message to Congress on December 5, 1905, he recommended that \"all contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.\"\n\nRoosevelt's efforts came to fruition in 1907 with the passage of the Tillman Act, named for the eccentric rogue \"Pitchfork\" Ben Tillman, the South Carolina senator who sponsored the law. To be sure, the act was a modest first step. The law barred corporations from contributing to campaigns and established criminal penalties for violations, but there was no enforcement mechanism. (The Federal Election Commission would not be created for decades.) Loopholes proliferated. For example, individuals could still give as much as they wanted to political campaigns and be reimbursed for the contributions by their employers. Nevertheless, the Tillman Act was a nod toward what Congress described as its goal: elections \"free from the power of money.\"\n\nThat never happened. In subsequent decades, the power of money in politics only grew. After World War II, candidates campaigned principally by buying advertisements on television, and that strategy created an ever-increasing need for cash. Richard Nixon's obsession with campaign fund-raising was one of the principal motivations that led to the Watergate scandals.\n\nWatergate prompted the second great wave of campaign finance reform. The major legislative enactment of this era was the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, which created much of the regulatory structure that endures today. This law enacted unprecedented limits on campaign contributions and spending, created the Federal Election Commission to enforce the act, established an optional system of public financing for presidential elections, and required extensive disclosure of campaign contributions and expenditures.\n\nAnd Watergate, and its legislative fallout, brought the Supreme Court into the thick of the issue.\n\nShortly after the new law went into effect, a group of politicians, including James L. Buckley, then a senator from New York, and Eugene McCarthy, the former senator and presidential candidate, challenged the new rules as unconstitutional. To this point in the Court's history, few decisions dealt with the constitutionality of campaign finance regulation. The Tillman Act was never directly tested in the Supreme Court, and no one questioned the right of the federal government to restrict corporate political spending. But the 1974 reforms were challenged in court, and the resulting decision, known as _Buckley v. Valeo_ , issued in 1976, has gone down in history as one of the Supreme Court's most complicated, contradictory, incomprehensible (and longest) opinions.\n\nNo one really knows who wrote it. It is signed per curiam\u2014\"by the Court\"\u2014a label the justices usually use for brief and minor opinions. In _Buckley v. Valeo_ , however, the Court used it to signal a team effort of sorts. William Brennan is generally regarded to have written much of _Buckley_ , but Brennan's biographers note that sections were also composed by Warren Burger, Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist. Not surprisingly, in light of the multiple authors, the opinion is a product of several compromises. To add to the confusion, five justices also wrote opinions concurring in part and dissenting in part from the majority. (A quarter century later, _Bush v. Gore_ was another per curiam opinion by the Court that reflected poorly on the institution.)\n\nIt is possible, however, to extract some meaning from the dog's breakfast that is _Buckley v. Valeo_. At the heart of the decision is a distinction between expenditures and contributions. The Court said that, under the First Amendment, Congress could not restrict campaign expenditures. Spending money was like speech itself because \"every means of communicating ideas in today's mass society requires the expenditure of money.\" That included printing handbills, renting halls, and buying ads on television. It is a result of _Buckley_ that wealthy candidates can spend as much as they want of their own money on their campaigns; it would be unconstitutional to limit their expenditures.\n\nOn the other hand, according to _Buckley_ , limits on contributions were constitutionally permissible. The Court said that a campaign contribution served only as \"a general expression of support for the candidate and his views, but does not communicate the underlying basis for the support.\" In the Court's view, limiting contributions did not really inhibit much political expression by the person giving the money. This was why the Court concluded that it was permissible for the law to limit how much an individual could contribute to any particular campaign.\n\nIn the 1974 law, Congress had tried to set up a tightly controlled system for financing campaigns: the government would monitor and regulate both the inflows and outflows of money. It is not clear that it would have worked as intended, but at least the proposal made a sort of holistic sense. Congress could essentially select a number for the overall price of a congressional (or presidential) campaign and then force candidates to live within that parameter. _Buckley_ ended that system before it even started and imposed a different one of the justices' own creation. In the justices' system, contributions could be limited, but expenditures could not. The legislators who designed the law certainly did not think this distinction made sense. Both contributions and expenditures involve political expression, and campaigns clearly need both of them to function. At the same time, a system that sought to limit the power of money in campaigns would have to control both contributions and expenditures in order to make any real difference. (That is what Congress tried to do.) Instead, the Supreme Court's improvised hybrid drew a distinction where none may have existed, and for two generations that distinction has been the central feature of the constitutional rules of campaign finance. The bottom line was that money is speech.\n\n_Buckley v. Valeo_ created an entirely new area of law. With the vague and imperfect guidance from the Court, the federal government and the states had to construct their systems for regulating campaigns. Concurrently, candidates, their supporters, and their opponents began to act according to their understanding of the law. _Buckley_ dealt only with candidates and elections, but it left unsettled the rules for \"issue advocacy\"\u2014television commercials that were supposedly designed to change public opinion rather than the outcome of a single election. \"Issue advocacy\" was much less regulated than campaign spending, but the line between the two was less than clear, and easily exploited.\n\nThe law treated the financing of campaigns and \"issue advocacy\" very differently. Under _Buckley_ , candidates had to rely only on tightly regulated campaign contributions to pay for ads. But advocacy groups could receive and spend unlimited funds, and issue advocacy advertisements could look a lot like political campaign commercials. Advocacy groups could run commercials saying \"Call Joe Congressman and tell him he's wrong,\" and that would not count as a contribution to his opponent. Similarly, groups could avoid federal regulation by preparing \"voter guides\" that pointed out the contrasts between candidates in clearly partisan ways.\n\nLike any other major change in the law, the post _-Buckley_ world of campaign regulation prompted a group of lawyers to develop specialties in the new field. The most revealing career was that of James Bopp Jr. Over three decades, Bopp became one of the most important anti-abortion lawyers in America and one of the most vocal opponents of campaign finance laws. Bopp's twin goals reflected a true symbiosis.\n\nBopp was raised in Terre Haute, Indiana, and in 1970 graduated from Indiana University, where he headed the chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, the student group that propelled many Republican careers. He returned to the state to practice law after graduating from the University of Florida law school in 1973, the year of _Roe v. Wade_. Bopp decided to join the fledgling anti-abortion movement and was hired as general counsel to the Indiana chapter of the National Right to Life Committee. Two years later, Bopp became general counsel to the full National Right to Life Committee\u2014and a key Republican partisan in the elections of 1980.\n\nBopp persuaded his colleagues to start a political action committee to give financial support to anti-abortion candidates, and the Right to Life group put out a series of \"voter guides\" before Election Day. These guides were credited with helping to create the landslide that put Ronald Reagan in the White House and twelve new Republicans in the Senate. The right-to-life voter guides were barely concealed works of advocacy, and the FEC later tried to ban them. Bopp won a First Amendment challenge to the prohibition, and began working actively to challenge campaign finance restrictions as well as abortion rights. Bopp's dual career was launched.\n\nBopp ultimately filed or defended 140 lawsuits around the country, challenging various kinds of campaign finance regulations as violations of the First Amendment. He argued two cases before the Supreme Court, winning one of them, before his friends at Wisconsin Right to Life asked him for help in another case in 2004. It was, in certain ways, similar to the work he had been doing for decades, with one very important exception.\n\nIn 1989, during his first term in the Senate, John McCain was one of the \"Keating Five\" who participated in unsavory dealings with Charles Keating Jr., a corrupt Arizona financier. McCain was never charged with any wrongdoing, but the humiliation of the experience led him to become a leader in the fight for campaign finance reform. More than a decade of work produced the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), which was sometimes pronounced \"bic-ruh\" but more often called the McCain-Feingold law. The law passed mostly because of Democratic support. President Bush signed it with great reluctance, early in the morning to avoid a public ceremony, and immediately announced his reservations about its constitutionality. So for the most part, the customary ideological split on campaign finance reform prevailed with McCain-Feingold. Indeed, by the time McCain ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2008, he had all but repudiated the law that bore his name.\n\nOne of the primary targets of the McCain-Feingold law was the increasingly meaningless distinction between candidate advertisements and \"issue\" advertisements. For many years, corporations and labor unions had spent millions on ads that denounced individual candidates but technically avoided the specific language that turned a commercial into a \"campaign\" ad. McCain-Feingold sought to address this problem by prohibiting corporate and labor union funding of any broadcast ads mentioning a candidate within thirty days of a primary or caucus or within sixty days of a general election.\n\nThe new law prompted Wisconsin Right to Life to come to Bopp with a problem. The state had two Democratic senators, Russell Feingold and Herb Kohl, who both supported abortion rights. In the run-up to the election of 2004, when Feingold was on the ballot, Right to Life wanted to run radio ads like the following:\n\nPASTOR: And who gives this woman to be married to this man?\n\nBRIDE'S FATHER: Well, as father of the bride, I certainly could. But instead, I'd like to share a few tips on how to properly install drywall. Now you put the drywall up...\n\nVOICE-OVER: Sometimes it's just not fair to delay an important decision.  \nBut in Washington it's happening. A group of senators is using the filibuster delay tactic to block federal judicial nominees from a simple \"yes\" or \"no\" vote. So qualified candidates don't get a chance to serve.  \nIt's politics at work, causing gridlock and backing up some of our courts to a state of emergency.  \nContact Senators Feingold and Kohl and tell them to oppose the filibuster.  \nPaid for by Wisconsin Right to Life, which is responsible for the content of this advertising and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.\n\nThe advertisement was designed to criticize Feingold, but it did not specifically discourage a vote for him. In that way, it looked like an \"issue\" ad, but because it ran before an election, it was prohibited by the McCain-Feingold law. The political priorities of the right-to-life movement were also revealing. The Wisconsin group, which was dedicated to fighting abortion rights, was putting its money behind pushing President Bush's judicial nominations, which suggests how important federal judges were to the conservative movement. (When President Obama's judicial nominations were obstructed by Republican senators, there was no comparable energy expended on their behalf by Democrats.)\n\nBopp believed the McCain-Feingold ban on issue advertisements violated the First Amendment, but he had a problem. In 2003, in one of the last major opinions of the Rehnquist Court, the justices had upheld the great majority of McCain-Feingold against a constitutional challenge led by Mitch McConnell, a leading Republican in the Senate and a dedicated foe of all campaign finance reform. (The case was known as _McConnell v. Federal Election Commission_.) How could Bopp challenge a law that had already been upheld?\n\nBut the lawyer was fearless. Bopp knew that the 2003 Supreme Court case was a challenge to McCain-Feingold \"on its face\"\u2014that is, a claim that the law was going to be unconstitutional in all circumstances. A new case would challenge the law \"as applied\" against Wisconsin Right to Life. He would claim that this specific application of the law violated the group's First Amendment rights. Bopp didn't wait around for the FEC (a notoriously slow-moving agency) to challenge his clients. Rather, he decided to bring a preemptive lawsuit challenging the ban on issue advertisements before elections.\n\nBopp knew that he had an important advantage over the failed 2003 challenge to the McCain-Feingold law. In that case, O'Connor had voted to uphold most of the law as part of a 5\u20134 majority. But she was now gone, having been replaced by Alito, so Bopp could count on the more friendly faces of the Roberts Court.\n\nThe Wisconsin Right to Life case was heard on April 25, 2007, the last day of arguments during Roberts's tumultuous second year as chief justice. It was the year of great conservative ascendancy\u2014of Lilly Ledbetter's loss, of the approval of the late-term abortion ban, and of _Parents Involved_ , the cases involving the integration of the Louisville and Seattle schools. By the time _Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life_ was argued, all these other cases had already been decided (if not yet announced), so the liberals knew that they would lose. No one was more frustrated than Stephen Breyer.\n\nA pattern had emerged over Breyer's years at the Court. He would arrive each fall, after a summer of travel and relaxation, full of the optimism that had been a trademark for the first half century of his adult life. But each year, as the defeats piled up and the Court turned away from him, he would grow more and more discouraged. On this final day of arguments in the fateful 2006\u201307 term, Breyer was spitting fire\u2014at Jim Bopp.\n\nWhat frustrated Breyer in the Wisconsin case was that he thought he had already won this particular battle in 2003, when the Court upheld McCain-Feingold in the _McConnell_ case. Breyer had recently published _Active Liberty_ , a book intended for a popular audience, which celebrated at length the importance of campaign finance reform. Now that achievement, like so many of Breyer's victories on the Court, looked as if it could slip away.\n\nBreyer taunted Bopp\u2014which amounted to baiting his conservative colleagues. \"If we agree with you in this case, good-bye McCain-Feingold,\" Breyer said. \"Maybe we should do it up front. That's what you advocate. Very well. Would you address that? Why should this Court only a year or two after it upholds McCain-Feingold, accept a position that either in fact or in theory overturns that case?\"\n\nBopp tried to defuse the issue, but Breyer wasn't having it.\n\n\"That's what McCain-Feingold was about,\" Breyer went on. \"They said in today's world these are the kinds of ads people run just to defeat people. And then they said, moreover, most of the campaign money goes on them. And then they said, moreover, if you let corporations and labor unions contribute to these, well, then they can contribute to the campaign.\n\n\"If you're prepared to say the Constitution requires us to let corporations and unions buy these kinds of ads, well, how could it be constitutional to have a statute that forbids them to contribute directly to the candidate, something that's been in existence only since, I guess, 1904?\" (Breyer was referring to the Tillman Act of 1907.)\n\nBreyer could see where the Court was going. If his colleagues were prepared to rule that the modest regulations of McCain-Feingold were unconstitutional, then the whole edifice of campaign finance reform would crumble. Laws that were in place since the beginning of the twentieth century were going to fall, too.\n\nBopp could afford to parry Breyer's questions, because he knew he had the votes. At one point, Bopp said that the ads in Wisconsin were not just to support or oppose candidates in elections but also to change the positions of existing officeholders.\n\n\"People should have the opportunity to engage in grassroots lobbying,\" Bopp said.\n\n\"Is that called democracy?\" Kennedy asked him.\n\n\"We are hopeful, Your Honor,\" Bopp replied. One might argue that television and radio advertisements were hardly \"grassroots lobbying,\" and one could say elections dominated by those commercials were not necessarily \"called democracy.\" But those arguments were clearly failing before the Roberts Court.\n\nIn candid moments, justices often remark that outsiders ought to pay more attention to the time of year that any given opinion has been handed down. The Court begins hearing arguments on the first Monday in October, and decisions rendered in November and December are often unanimous or at least the product of good-natured bargaining on all sides. As the year progresses, however, nerves grow frayed and impatience becomes the norm. The issues are harder. There is less negotiating, and there are more separate opinions, which take longer to write. By the last day of the term, especially one as fraught as 2006\u201307, the justices can barely stand the sight of one another. That tone was reflected in the decision in _Wisconsin Right to Life_.\n\nThe opinions in the case are a patchwork mess, a typical late-term failure to agree on much of anything. But on the core issue, the split remained the same. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito found the restriction on Wisconsin Right to Life unconstitutional; Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer would have upheld the ban on the commercials. Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, who had dissented in the McCain-Feingold case in 2003, wrote separate opinions rearguing their position that McCain-Feingold should be struck down. Alito more or less said the same thing.\n\nThat left Chief Justice Roberts to speak for the Court. He was still trying to prove that he was cautious and respectful of precedent, as he had claimed to be during his confirmation hearing. But now he was part of a majority that was gutting a four-year-old opinion and decades more of settled law. Roberts completed this mission with typical finesse, declaring, \"The First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it.\" Unlike the others in the majority, Roberts did not explicitly call for overturning McCain-Feingold, but he plainly indicated where the Court was heading. As for the _McConnell_ case, the 2003 decision upholding the law, Roberts wrote, \"We have no occasion to revisit that determination today.\"\n\nToday. _Today_. The sentence was a model of near-total transparency. To those who know the language of the Court, the chief justice was all but announcing that five justices were preparing to declare the McCain-Feingold law unconstitutional. Not today\u2014but, clearly, soon.\n\nSouter wrote the pained dissent for the liberal quartet in _Wisconsin Right to Life_ and announced at the outset that the Court's 2003 decision upholding McCain-Feingold was \"effectively, and unjustifiably, overruled today.\" But that wasn't true, at least not \"today.\" For the coup de gr\u00e2ce to be applied to the campaign finance laws of the past century, it would take a charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.\n\n# **12**\n\n#    \n**SAMUEL ALITO'S QUESTION**\n\nThe most famous television commercial of the 1988 presidential race was not produced by either George H. W. Bush or Michael Dukakis. An independent committee called Americans for Bush ran a commercial featuring Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had received a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison and then committed several grisly crimes. The stark images of the African American perpetrator, as shown in the commercial, caused a sensation. The Bush campaign always claimed it had nothing to do with the ad.\n\nFloyd Brown was happy to take the credit. A burly native of Washington State, Brown had worked around the fringes of the conservative movement for years. (Like Bopp, Brown got his start in politics through the Young Americans for Freedom, in Brown's case at the University of Washington.) Brown had mastered the art of setting up a nonprofit, raising money, making a splash, and moving on. When the election was over, Americans for Bush had obviously outlived its usefulness. So Brown embraced the notoriety that came with authorship of the Willie Horton ad, and founded a new organization. He called it Citizens United.\n\nAt first, Brown worked from the Horton template. He would create highly partisan television commercials and then engage in direct-mail fund-raising to pay to broadcast them. In 1991, for example, Citizens United produced a commercial in support of the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. (The ads consisted mostly of attacks on the characters of senators who sat on the Judiciary Committee.) With the election of Bill Clinton as president, Citizens United took off in a new direction.\n\nBrown acquired a sidekick\u2014a recent dropout from the University of Maryland named David Bossie. Crew-cut and intense, Bossie had a passion for conservative politics and, like Brown, an entrepreneurial bent. (A dedicated volunteer fireman, Bossie lived above his local firehouse in Maryland.) In 1992, Brown named Bossie his \"chief researcher\" and the pair narrowed their focus to the personal and financial affairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The duo produced a book tied to the 1992 campaign, _Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton_.\n\nOver the next several years, Bossie became, in effect, the agent for various Arkansas figures who claimed they knew of wrongdoing by the Clintons. David Hale, a municipal court judge in Little Rock, was under FBI investigation in Arkansas for misusing federal small business loans. Friends of Hale put him in touch with Bossie. Hale asserted that Clinton was involved in a web of corruption in the state. Bossie, in turn, introduced Hale to various Washington journalists who printed or broadcast his accusations. (Hale's claims were never verified.) Later, Bossie served as a similar intermediary for stories that raised questions about the White House aide Vince Foster's suicide.\n\nTwice during the Clinton years, Bossie left Citizens United to work for Republicans in Congress\u2014first on the Senate investigation of the Clintons' Whitewater land deal and then for Congressman Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican who was obsessed with Clinton's alleged misdeeds. (In an effort to show that Foster might have been killed, Burton conducted a demonstration in his backyard where he shot what he referred to as a \"head-like object,\" which was either a watermelon or a pumpkin.) During Bossie's tenure with Burton, he became friendly with Clarence Thomas's wife, Virginia Thomas, who at the time was on the staff of Richard Armey, the Republican leader in the House. Ginni Thomas thought Bossie was a bit extreme in his views. Burton fired Bossie after it was revealed that he had doctored certain transcripts to eliminate exculpatory information about Hillary Clinton. Bossie then went back to work at Citizens United.\n\nThe careers of Bossie and Brown had been sources of particular interest to Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who joined the White House staff in 1997. It was Blumenthal who prepared Hillary Clinton for her appearance on the _Today_ show, on January 27, 1998, her first interview after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Schooled by Blumenthal in the ways of Brown, Bossie, and others like them, Mrs. Clinton told Matt Lauer, \"This is\u2014the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.\"\n\nWith the inauguration of George W. Bush, the public profile of Citizens United receded. Bossie, who had become president of the group, thought that it needed a niche to distinguish it from the other conservative organizations in Washington. Bossie's moment of insight came in 2004, when he saw advertisements for Michael Moore's movie _Fahrenheit 9\/11_. Bossie saw that the documentary was doing a kind of double duty. _Fahrenheit 9\/11_ and the television commercials promoting it were political salvos against the reelection of President Bush as well as a potential source of profit. ( _Fahrenheit 9\/11_ earned more than $200 million at the box office.) A nonprofit organization, Citizens United had a total budget of about $12 million a year, and the vast majority of those funds came from donations from individuals. A small portion of contributions\u2014about 1 percent\u2014came from for-profit companies. (This turned out to be important.)\n\nBossie determined to remake Citizens United into a movie studio, to produce conservative documentaries. The first, _Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die_ , was a direct response to Moore and not especially successful. But Bossie kept making films, and some found an audience. All had conservative themes, and many were narrated by Newt and Callista Gingrich. They included: _Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman_ , starring Michele Bachmann; _The Gift of Life_ , against abortion rights (\"My mom was raped, and I was almost aborted. My life was spared for a purpose.\"); and _Rediscovering God in America_ (\"There is no attack on American culture more destructive, and more historically dishonest, than the relentless effort to drive God out of America's public square.\").\n\nIn the period leading up to the 2008 election, the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton was an irresistible subject for Bossie, given his long history opposing her and her husband. In many respects, _Hillary:The Movie_ was typical of the Citizens United oeuvre. It included news footage, spooky music, and a series of interviews with fierce and articulate partisans. (\"She's driven by the power, she's driven to get the power, that is the driving force in her life,\" said Bay Buchanan, the activist and sister of Patrick, the onetime presidential candidate. \"She's deceitful, she'll make up any story, lie about anything, as long as it serves her purposes of the moment, and the American people are going to catch on to it,\" added Dick Morris. \" 'Liar' is a good one,\" said Ann Coulter.) Bossie wanted _Hillary: The Movie_ to come out in late 2007, to tie it to the presidential election in the way that Moore pegged _Fahrenheit 9\/11_ to the previous race. Citizens United offered a cable company $1.2 million to make _Hillary_ available for free to viewers on a technology known as Video On Demand.\n\nOver the years, Bossie had become familiar with federal election law, and he was concerned that his movie would run afoul of the same law that was at issue in the _Wisconsin Right to Life_ case, especially since he planned to run commercials in states holding presidential primaries. The movie and commercials would have multiple purposes: to advance the conservative cause, to hurt Hillary Clinton's chances for victory, and to make the production a financial success. The question, then, was how the Federal Election Commission would classify _Hillary_ and the advertisements for it. Under the FEC rules, if _Hillary_ was deemed a work of journalism or entertainment, like _Fahrenheit 9\/11_ , then Bossie could show it any time he wanted; the FEC had a clear exception for those kinds of works. But if the FEC regarded _Hillary_ and its commercials as an \"electioneering communication,\" that is, \"speech expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate,\" then it could not be broadcast within thirty days of a primary or sixty days of a general election.\n\nBossie hired Jim Bopp, who, as ever, favored an aggressive tack. He went straight to the FEC to get a ruling. As expected, the FEC ruled that the documentary amounted to an \"electioneering communication\" and thus could not be broadcast in the period before a primary. Bopp appealed to the federal district court in Washington. A three-judge panel agreed with the FEC, holding that _Hillary: The Movie_ is \"susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her.\"\n\nBossie was determined to take the next step: an appeal to the Supreme Court. But first he had a tough decision to make. Whom should he hire as his lawyer?\n\nBossie may have arrived in Washington as a flamethrowing outsider, but over the previous decade he had become part of the conservative establishment. He knew that Bopp had just won the _Wisconsin Right to Life_ case before the justices, but he also recognized that his own financial life, and potentially his place in history, was on the line in the _Citizens United_ case. Did he want to leave his fate in the hands of a lawyer from Terre Haute?\n\nBossie checked with some of his mentors in Republican law and politics. He called Michael Chertoff, who had led the Senate Whitewater investigation (and then gone on to be secretary of homeland security); Alice Fisher, a former Bush Justice Department official; Victoria Toensing and Joseph DiGenova, the famous team of married former prosecutors. All their advice was the same.\n\nHire Ted Olson.\n\nOlson was already a legendary figure in conservative legal circles. Bossie first met him in the nineties, when Ted and his wife, Barbara, were outspoken fellow critics of Bill Clinton. As a private lawyer at the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Olson had argued and won _Bush v. Gore_ and was rewarded by President Bush with appointment as his first solicitor general. (Barbara Olson was killed on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.) Olson had argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, and he had a great deal of credibility with the justices. He knew how to win. So Bopp was out, and Olson was in.\n\nOlson quickly shifted tactics in the case. As Bossie saw it, Bopp was a cause lawyer whose top priority was to change the law of campaign finance. While Olson supported the conservative movement, he was primarily a litigator devoted to winning one case at a time. In that spirit, Olson tried to narrow the issues in _Citizens United_ , so that the Court would not have to take any dramatic steps in order to rule his way. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, _Hillary: The Movie_ had already played in a handful of theaters, so the only legal issue related to Video On Demand. Indeed, the issue was now so small as to be almost obscure. The McCain-Feingold law prohibited corporate spending on \"electioneering\" in the period right before presidential primaries. The legal question in the case was whether the law allowed the broadcast of this documentary on Video On Demand during the proscribed period because Citizens United received a small amount of money from corporations.\n\nOlson opened his oral argument on March 24, 2009, with a flourish: \"Participation in the political process is the First Amendment's most fundamental guarantee. Yet that freedom is being smothered by one of the most complicated, expensive, and incomprehensible regulatory regimes ever invented by the administrative state. In the case that you consider today, it is a felony for a small, nonprofit corporation to offer interested viewers a 90-minute political documentary about a candidate for the nation's highest office.\"\n\nAfter that bit of rhetoric, Olson made a point of limiting his demands. For Citizens United to win its case, according to Olson, the Court did not have to declare anything unconstitutional. The justices simply had to rule that the McCain-Feingold law (BCRA) did not apply to documentaries or nonprofits. \"A 90-minute documentary was not the sort of thing that the\u2014the BCRA\u2014that the Congress was intended to prohibit,\" he said. At one point, Scalia seemed almost disappointed by the modesty of Olson's claim.\n\n\"So you're making a statutory argument now?\" Scalia said.\n\n\"I'm making a\u2014\" Olson started.\n\n\"You're saying this\u2014this isn't covered by it,\" Scalia continued.\n\nThat's right, Olson responded. All he was asking for was a ruling that the law did not prohibit the broadcast by a nonprofit corporation. The ninety-minute documentary could run on Video On Demand. If the justices had resolved the case as Olson had suggested, _Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission_ might well have been forgotten\u2014a narrow ruling on a remote corner of campaign finance law.\n\nBut then the lawyer for the government stood up to defend the FEC's decision, and a single question changed the case and perhaps American history.\n\nWhenever the federal government is involved in a case before the Supreme Court, the solicitor general handles the representation. In an age when the reputations of many government agencies have suffered, the office of the solicitor general has remained a symbol of excellence: small, elite, and deeply respected by its most important audience, the justices.\n\nSince the position was created in 1870, some of the most distinguished lawyers in the country's history have served as solicitor general. William Howard Taft, before he became president and then chief justice, was an early SG, and Franklin Roosevelt put two of his solicitors general, Stanley Reed and Robert H. Jackson, on the Supreme Court. In the sixties and seventies, the office was consecutively occupied by Archibald Cox, Thurgood Marshall, Erwin Griswold, and Robert Bork. Kenneth Starr stepped down from a judgeship on the D.C. Circuit to be George H. W. Bush's SG.\n\nFor all that the solicitor general serves as the public face of the office, and as an important senior political appointee, the career employees act as its principal representatives to the Court. Only about two of the twenty-two lawyers in the office are political appointees, so most move seamlessly from one administration to the next.\n\nTradition holds the staff to a different standard than the hired guns who generally appear before the Supreme Court. The solicitor general's lawyers press their position before the Court, but in a way that hews strictly to existing precedent. They don't hide unfavorable facts from the justices. This is why, in many cases, even when the federal government is not a party, the Court issues what's known as a CVSG\u2014a call for the views of the solicitor general. The lawyers in the SG's office are not neutral, exactly, but they are more highly respected than other advocates. They dress differently, too, wearing a morning coat, vest, and striped pants when they appear in the Supreme Court.\n\nMalcolm Stewart, the lawyer in the solicitor general's office who argued the _Citizens United_ case, reflected the best of the office. A graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School, he had clerked for Harry Blackmun in the 1989 term. He joined the solicitor general's office in 1993, and his career soared through three presidencies and more than forty oral arguments. He twice won a John Marshall Award, among the highest honors in the department. Shortly before the _Citizens United_ argument, Stewart had been named a deputy solicitor general, the highest rank for a career lawyer.\n\nThe justices say that oral arguments rarely make a difference in the outcome of cases. But that may not have been true in _Citizens United_ \u2014because Stewart's appearance was an epic disaster.\n\nThe morning the case began, the justices were in their typical positions. Scalia was on the edge of his seat, ready to pounce. Ginsburg was barely visible above the bench. Breyer was twitchy, his expressions changing with whether or not he agreed with the lawyer's answer. As ever, Thomas was silent and withdrawn.\n\nSamuel Alito appeared miserable, as usual. Alito liked the job well enough, but he was uncomfortable with its public aspects. He liked reading cases and making decisions. He disliked pomp and bureaucracy. (Alito didn't even like hiring law clerks. For years, he chose clerks who had worked for him on the Third Circuit, so he didn't have to interview new ones.) After Thomas, Alito tended to ask the fewest questions. But no one asked better ones. It was easy to tell which way Alito was leaning, because his questions were so hard to answer for the lawyer he was targeting. Alito had radar for weak points in a presentation, and in this case he saw a big hole in Malcolm Stewart's.\n\nAlito recognized how broadly McCain-Feingold was written, and he wanted to push Stewart down its slippery slope. This was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? \"Do you think the Constitution required Congress to draw the line where it did, limiting this to broadcast and cable and so forth?\" Alito asked. Could the law limit a corporation from \"providing the same thing in a book? Would the Constitution permit the restriction of all of those as well?\"\n\nYes, said Stewart. \"Those could have been applied to additional media as well.\"\n\nThe justices leaned forward. It was one thing for the government to regulate television commercials. That had been done for years. But a _book_? Could the government regulate the content of a _book_?\n\n\"That's pretty incredible,\" Alito responded. \"You think that if a book was published, a campaign biography that was the functional equivalent of express advocacy, that could be banned?\"\n\n\"I'm not saying it could be banned,\" Stewart replied, trying to recover. \"I'm saying that Congress could prohibit the use of corporate treasury funds and could require a corporation to publish it using its PAC.\" But clearly Stewart was saying that Citizens United, or any company or nonprofit like it, could not publish a book about a presidential campaign.\n\nKennedy interrupted. He was the swing justice in many areas of the law, but in campaign finance cases, Kennedy joined the conservatives. Sensing vulnerability on the subject of books, he joined Alito's assault.\n\n\"Well, suppose it were an advocacy organization that had a book,\" Kennedy said. \"Your position is that under the Constitution, the advertising for this book or the sale for the book itself could be prohibited within the sixty- and thirty-day periods?\"\n\nYes, said Stewart.\n\nBut neither Alito nor Kennedy had Roberts's instinct for the jugular. The chief justice wanted to make Stewart's position look as ridiculous as possible. Roberts knew just how to do it. He continued on the subject of the government's censorship of books, leading Stewart into a trap.\n\n\"If it has one name, one use of the candidate's name, it would be covered, correct?\" Roberts asked.\n\n\"That's correct,\" Stewart said.\n\n\"It's a 500-page book, and at the end it says, and so vote for X, the government could ban that?\" Roberts asked.\n\n\"Well, if it says vote for X, it would be express advocacy and it would be covered by the preexisting Federal Election Campaign Act provision,\" Stewart continued, doubling down on his painfully awkward position.\n\nThrough artful questioning, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts had turned a modestly important case about campaign finance reform into a battle over government censorship. The trio made Stewart\u2014and thus the government\u2014take an absurd position, that the government might have the right to criminalize the publication of a 500-page book because of one line at the end. Still, the justices' questions raised important issues. Did the McCain-Feingold law in fact permit such an outlandish outcome? Could Congress pass any law to ban a book? And was Stewart right to acknowledge that it did?\n\nStewart was wrong. Congress could not ban a book. McCain-Feingold was based on the pervasive influence of television advertising on electoral politics, the idea that commercials are somehow unavoidable in contemporary American life. The influence of books operates in a completely different way. Individuals have to make an affirmative choice to acquire and read a book. Congress would have no reason, and no justification, to ban a book under the First Amendment.\n\nAs for Stewart's performance, his defenders pointed to the unique role of the solicitor general. A private lawyer could have danced around the implications of the law and avoided making any concession, but Stewart had a special obligation to be straight with the justices, even if the answers hurt his cause. Stewart's critics\u2014and there were many\u2014said that he had no obligation to try to answer an absurdly far-fetched hypothetical involving the censorship of books. By doing so, according to this view, Stewart wasn't being honest\u2014he was being foolish. He should have asserted that the federal government had neither the obligation nor the right to stop the publication of a book. Like most arguments about the quality of advocacy, this one had no clear resolution. Evidently, though, the damage to the government's case had been profound.\n\nHere again, the vagaries of the Supreme Court calendar played a part in the resolution of the case. Like _Wisconsin Right to Life_ , _Citizens United_ was argued near the end of the term, on March 24, 2009. There was not a lot of time for the justices to reach a consensus before June. At their initial conference, the vote was the same as in _Wisconsin Right to Life_ , with Kennedy joining the four conservatives.\n\nA private drama followed that in some ways defined the still new chief justice to his colleagues. Roberts assigned the opinion to himself. Even though the oral argument had been dramatic, Ted Olson had presented _Citizens United_ to the Court in a narrow way. According to the Questions Presented in the briefs, the only real issue in the case was whether the McCain-Feingold law applied to a documentary, presented on Video On Demand, by a nonprofit corporation. The liberals lost that argument: the vote at the conference was that the law did not apply to Citizens United, which was free to advertise and run its documentary as it saw fit. The liberals expected that Roberts's opinion would say as much, and no more.\n\nAt first, Roberts did write an opinion roughly along those lines, and Kennedy wrote a concurrence that said the Court should have gone much farther. Kennedy's opinion said the Court should declare McCain-Feingold's restrictions unconstitutional, overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision from 1990, and gut the Tillman Act prohibitions on corporate giving to campaigns. But after the Roberts and Kennedy drafts circulated, the conservatives began rallying to Kennedy's more expansive resolution of the case. Roberts proposed to withdraw his own opinion and let Kennedy write for the majority. Kennedy then turned his concurrence into an opinion for the Court.\n\nThe new majority opinion\u2014which transformed _Citizens United_ into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law\u2014shocked the liberals. Stevens assigned the main dissent to Souter, who was in the last weeks of his tenure on the Court. (He was actually working on the opinion when he announced his departure.) The Kennedy opinion reflected everything Souter had come to loathe about the Roberts Court\u2014its disrespect for precedent, its grasping conservatism, its aggressive pursuit of political objectives. Worse yet, Roberts's approach to _Citizens United_ contradicted a position he had taken earlier in the term. At the argument of a death penalty case known as _Cone v. Bell_ , Roberts had berated at length the defendant's lawyer, Thomas Goldstein, for his temerity in raising an issue that had not been addressed in the briefs. Now Roberts\u2014the chief justice\u2014was doing precisely the same thing to upset decades of settled expectations.\n\nSouter wrote a dissent that aired some of the Court's dirty laundry. By definition, dissents challenge the legal conclusions of the majority, but Souter accused Kennedy and Roberts of violating the Court's own procedures to engineer the result Roberts coveted. The dissent, had it been published, would have been an extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court by Souter.\n\nRoberts didn't mind spirited disagreement on the merits of any case, but he worried that Souter's attack might damage the Court's credibility, or his own. So the chief came up with a stroke of strategic genius. He would agree to withdraw the majority opinion and put _Citizens United_ down for reargument in the fall. For the second argument, the Court would write Questions Presented that left no doubt about the stakes of the case. The proposal put the liberals in a box. They could no longer complain about being sandbagged, because the new Questions Presented would be unmistakably clear. But\u2014as Roberts knew\u2014the conservatives would go into the second argument already having five votes for the result they wanted. With no other choice (and no real hope of ever winning the case), the liberals agreed to the reargument.\n\nRearguments were very rare. There had been none of this kind since Warren Burger's days as chief justice. So, on June 29, 2009, the last day of the term, the Court surprised the litigants\u2014and the political world\u2014by issuing the following brief order: \"This case is restored to the calendar for reargument.\" The parties were directed to file new briefs on a single issue:\n\nFor the proper disposition of this case, should the Court overrule either or both _Austin_ v. _Michigan Chamber of Commerce_ , 494 U.S. 652 (1990), and the part of _McConnell_ v _. Federal Election Comm'n_ , 540 U.S. 93 (2003), which addresses the facial validity of Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, 2 U.S.C. \u00a7441b?\n\nTranslated into English, the Court's order told the parties that the justices were considering overruling two major decisions in modern campaign finance law. Specifically, the Court was weighing whether to overturn its recent endorsement of McCain-Feingold. As every sophisticated observer of the Court knew, the Court did not ask whether cases should be overruled unless a majority of the justices already _wanted_ those cases overruled. And Roberts and his allies were so impatient to overturn these precedents that they were not even going to wait for the first Monday in October. The second argument in _Citizens United_ was set for September 9, 2009.\n\n# **13**\n\n#    \n**THE ROOKIE**\n\nOn the morning of September 9, 2009, a car pulled into the Justice Department courtyard to take the government's team to the Supreme Court for the reargument of _Citizens United_. Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, took the front seat and three of her deputies piled into the back. She had been confirmed by the Senate a few days before the first _Citizens United_ argument, and the reargument would mark her debut before the justices. Kagan, at the age of forty-nine, had never so much as argued a single case in any courtroom. _Citizens United_ would be the first time.\n\n\"C'mon guys,\" she said to those in the back. \"It's my first day. Psych me up!\"\n\nThe deputies looked at one another, and after a lengthy pause Malcolm Stewart whispered, \"Go get 'em.\"\n\n\"Ugh,\" Kagan said. \"You guys _suck_!\"\u2014and the laughter broke the tension in the car.\n\nAt precisely ten, the chief justice called Ted Olson to the lectern. Like everyone else associated with the case, he could tell from the new Questions Presented that the Court was leaning his way\u2014heading for a ruling that was far broader than the one he originally sought. Olson argued cautiously, as if protecting a lead.\n\nThe liberal quartet of justices, recognizing that their position was probably hopeless, did their best to raise the alarm with the public if not with their colleagues. Ruth Ginsburg, surprisingly astute at judging popular opinion, brought up one potential source of future controversy.\n\n\"Mr. Olson,\" Ginsburg said, \"are you taking the position that there is no difference in the First Amendment rights of an individual? A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights. So is there any distinction that Congress could draw between corporations and natural human beings for purposes of campaign finance?\"\n\n\"What the Court has said in the First Amendment context, over and over again,\" Olson replied, \"is that corporations are persons entitled to protection under the First Amendment.\" He might well have added that the principle of corporations as people went back to the strange case of _Santa Clara County_ in 1886.\n\n\"Would that include today's megacorporations, where many of the investors may be foreign individuals or entities?\" Ginsburg went on.\n\nOlson was ready: \"The Court in the past has made no distinction based upon the nature of the entity that might own a share of a corporation.\"\n\nKagan's first decision was apparent even before she began speaking. Like many other members of the SG's office (especially women), Kagan thought the woman's version of the morning coat looked ridiculous. Through intermediaries, she had asked the justices if they would mind if she appeared in a normal business suit. None objected, and that was what she wore.\n\n\"Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court,\" Kagan began, \"I have three very quick points to make about the government's position. The first is that this issue has a long history. For over a hundred years Congress has made a judgment that corporations must be subject to special rules when they participate in elections, and this Court has never questioned that judgment.\n\n\"Number two\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait, wait, wait, wait,\" said Scalia.\n\nAnd so it went. Kagan knew she had probably launched herself on a suicide mission. Her best hope was to limit the damage, perhaps by persuading the Court to strike down this particular application of McCain-Feingold rather than invalidate the entire law. Or, as Kagan put it to Roberts, \"Mr. Chief Justice, as to whether the government has a preference as to the way in which it loses, if it has to lose, the answer is yes.\"\n\nStevens tried to help Kagan along these lines, suggesting that the Court could resolve the case with a narrow ruling. For example, the justices could create an exception in the McCain-Feingold law for nonprofits like Citizens United or for \"ads that are financed exclusively by individuals even though they are sponsored by a corporation.\" Grasping the Stevens lifeline, Kagan said, \"Yes, that's exactly right.\"\n\n\"Nobody has explained why that wouldn't be a proper solution, not nearly as drastic,\" Stevens went on. \"Why is that not the wisest narrow solution of the problem before us?\"\n\nGinsburg did Kagan the favor of allowing her to undo some of the damage from Stewart's argument in March. \"May I ask you one question that was highlighted in the prior argument, and that was if Congress could say no TV and radio ads, could it also say no newspaper ads, no campaign biographies?\" Ginsburg said. \"Last time the answer was, yes, Congress could, but it didn't. Is that still the government's answer?\"\n\n\"The government's answer has changed, Justice Ginsburg,\" Kagan replied, and the well-informed audience in the courtroom laughed. \"We took the Court's own reaction to some of those other hypotheticals very seriously. We went back, we considered the matter carefully, and the government's view is that although 441b does cover full-length books, that there would be a quite good as-applied challenge to any attempt to apply 441b in that context.\" Better late than never, perhaps, but the concession probably mattered little at this point. Especially for a first argument, Kagan was poised, self-confident, even relaxed\u2014and doomed.\n\nKagan's new subordinates in the solicitor general's office were not surprised by her self-confidence. In theory, the solicitor general himself (Kagan was the first woman to hold the job) personally reviews every brief that goes out in his name. In reality, most solicitors general picked a few high-profile issues that interested them and basically passed off the others to the career lawyers. The SG staff quickly learned that Kagan had other plans.\n\nOn her first day as SG, almost as a courtesy, Kagan was presented with a final draft of the government brief in a numbingly tedious case called _Cuomo v. Clearing House Association_. (It concerned state versus federal rules regarding certain banking regulations.) The case was the type that most solicitors general gave only a cursory review. Kagan disappeared into her office with the draft and emerged hours later with a copy that seemed to have more scribbled corrections in red than typescript. Her staff knew that Kagan had not practiced law in two decades. She had never written a Supreme Court brief in her life. Furthermore, the lawyers regarded themselves, with good reason, as an elite within an elite. As Kagan's handiwork was passed around the office, the nearly universal reaction was, \"What the _fuck_?\"\n\nCertainly there were no complaints about Kagan's work ethic. She was in the office seven days a week. One of her briefs went through fifty-four drafts. To prepare for her _Citizens United_ argument, she read every case cited in every brief\u2014which came to about three thousand pages of material. Kagan subjected herself to the same rigorous moot court ordeal that every member of the staff endured before a Supreme Court argument. To prepare for a thirty-minute argument before the justices, the advocate submitted first to an hour-long grilling from three line assistants, a deputy solicitor general, and the junior lawyer who worked most closely on the case. In addition, the SG invited to the moot courts any government lawyers who had a special familiarity with the issues in the case. Some moots had a dozen lawyers in the audience; some had forty. After the hour of rehearsal, there was then another hour spent analyzing the advocate's answers. And the lawyers in the SG's office went through this entire process twice before any argument. So did Kagan.\n\nAfter what turned out to be a fairly brief period, Kagan's staff came to terms with the solicitor general's hyperactive red pen. The lawyers saw that Kagan was blunt, funny, occasionally obnoxious, and usually right. What they did not know was that Elena Kagan was working from a very specific model.\n\nElena Kagan grew up on West End Avenue, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at a time when its canyon of apartment buildings were occupied by more civil servants and social workers than, as was later the case, corporate lawyers and investment bankers. Like the Kagan family, the neighborhood was comfortable, not chic; Jewish, but not devout. When Kagan became a public figure, it was widely suggested that she had modeled herself after her father, who was described as a crusading public interest lawyer, rather than her mother, a schoolteacher. In fact, the reverse was true.\n\nRobert Kagan had a real estate law practice based largely around the ongoing conversions of apartment buildings (like the Kagans' own) from rentals to cooperatives. It was true that he did some work for neighborhood groups, but Bob Kagan, a gentle and modest man, was no crusader. Gloria Kagan was another story altogether.\n\nDecades after Gloria taught her last class at Hunter College Elementary School, there are dozens if not hundreds of her former students who still dream about her. Some, clearly, have nightmares. Then as now, Hunter was one of New York's handful of selective public schools, and it has attracted generations of multiethnic strivers. Gloria taught language arts and social studies to fifth and sixth graders. She tapped into her students' preadolescent ambition, demanding excellence and rigor. Some students wilted, but many thrived and ascribed life-changing powers to their diminutive teacher. Of course, Gloria came of age at a time when the professional options open to a woman pretty much began and ended with teaching school (and nursing). As many who knew both of them observed, Gloria Kagan _was_ Elena Kagan, three decades too early.\n\nElena made the most of the opportunities that were denied her mother. Even at Hunter, where Kagan braved her mother's legend, she clearly wanted a life beyond the classroom. In her high school yearbook photo, Kagan posed in a judicial robe, with a gavel, and included a quotation from Justice Felix Frankfurter: \"Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of arts.\" She went to Princeton, where she ran the editorial page of the college newspaper, and graduated summa cum laude in 1981. (Kagan was the third consecutive Princeton undergraduate appointed to the Supreme Court, following Alito '72 and Sotomayor '76. A Manhattanite, Kagan also became the representative of a fourth New York City borough on the Court, with Sotomayor hailing from the Bronx, Ginsburg from Brooklyn, and Scalia from Queens. Currently, no justice comes from Staten Island, the fifth borough.) After a fellowship at Oxford, Kagan joined the class of 1986 at Harvard Law School.*\n\nIn certain respects, Kagan's career at law school resembled that of Obama, who arrived at Harvard five years later. Both plainly intended to put their educations to work in public life. Indeed, their law school experiences made it just as easy to predict a judicial career for Kagan as it was to foresee a political one for Obama. Because of an unaccountably poor grade in torts during her first year\u2014the first and only B-minus of her life\u2014Kagan did not make the law review based on grades. She earned a place through the writing competition. Also like the future president, Kagan avoided the faculty battles over Critical Legal Studies. Like Obama, Kagan was no radical, but rather a committed and serious Democrat. And like him, she sought out and went to work for Professor Laurence Tribe, the putative justice of the Democratic Supreme Court in exile (or in waiting.) Tribe chose only the best students to work for him, and only those who shared Tribe's politics\u2014and his ambition\u2014selected him as a mentor.\n\nHere, though, the parallels to Obama end. Kagan had neither the temperament nor the inclination for introspection that led Obama to write _Dreams from My Father_. Kagan didn't need a whole book to outline her goals, and while she would never have been so vulgar as to voice the hope, as Alito did in his college yearbook, to \"warm a seat on the Supreme Court,\" her basic ambition was the same.\n\nAfter law school, Kagan's life more closely paralleled that of another future colleague\u2014John Roberts. In every generation of lawyers, a few are widely assumed to be headed for great things, possibly even the Supreme Court. That was certainly true for Kagan and Roberts, who graduated from Harvard Law seven years before she did. The art of building a judicial career today requires talents of some subtlety, because the rules changed in recent years. In the pre\u2013Robert Bork era, especially during the early part of the twentieth century, Supreme Court appointments went to major public figures\u2014like Louis Brandeis, the Progressive intellectual; Felix Frankfurter, the impassioned defender of Sacco and Vanzetti; or Hugo Black and Earl Warren, politicians with national reputations. In that bygone time, a lifetime of controversy and accomplishment was all but mandatory for a potential justice. But the Bork hearings made an outspoken public career\u2014a long paper trail, as it came to be known\u2014more of a liability than an asset. Recently, judicial ambition has called for excellence, intelligence, and caution, all of which Roberts and Kagan had in abundance.\n\nToday, there are just two career tracks for potential judges, one for Republicans and the other for Democrats. It is important to be identified enough with one party to have patrons, but not so closely that you have enemies. The challenge was to _be_ partisan without _seeming_ partisan. By clerking for Henry Friendly on the Second Circuit and then Rehnquist on the Supreme Court, Roberts committed to the Republican track. Kagan went the other way. She clerked for Abner Mikva\u2014the same D.C. Circuit judge who later implored Obama to work for him\u2014and then for Thurgood Marshall, who, in the 1987\u201388 term, was near the unhappy end of his judicial career. In the period that followed, Kagan's career seemed a rather obvious marking of time until a Democratic administration came along. First, she spent a couple of years as an associate at Williams & Connolly. (Her duties sometimes included libel checks on the _National Enquirer_ as well as its wackier cousin, the _Weekly World News_.) Next, she joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School. Kagan dutifully did some scholarly writing, mostly about the First Amendment, but her heart was never in the academic world. Later, in confirmation testimony, Kagan referred to herself (accurately, if immodestly) as \"a famously excellent teacher,\" but not long after she secured tenure, in 1995, she left for a job in the counsel's office in the Clinton White House.\n\nThe job was the pivotal point in Kagan's career, just as the Reagan White House changed Roberts's life. Every office, even the West Wing, has its stars, and both future justices stood out from their peers, even in such lofty environs. Clinton used to say that anytime Kagan walked into the Oval Office, the average IQ in the room doubled. She spent two years as an associate White House counsel and two more as deputy domestic policy adviser. (Roberts also spent four years in the White House.)\n\nAs with most other presidential advisers, it was difficult to identify with precision how Kagan's own views affected the policies of the administration. This was true of Roberts, too. Certainly Kagan played an important role in negotiating the complex resolution of lawsuits and legislation involving the cigarette industry. (Not coincidentally, it was during Kagan's White House years that she finally defeated her own twenty-year cigarette habit.) Perhaps most importantly, the White House gave Kagan the chance to impress a generation of senior Democrats, many of whom would go on to important roles in the Obama administration. Her colleagues knew her politics\u2014but those insights would be forever off-limits to Republicans. In the fog of government policy making, Kagan became known in the Clinton years mostly as a no-bullshit closer. Like most other staffers, she was probably more liberal than the president she served. A decade earlier, Roberts earned a similar reputation and was certainly more conservative than Reagan. These insights about the true views of Kagan and Roberts created no paper trail, but that didn't make them any less true.\n\nThe parallel between Roberts and Kagan became especially clear at the end of her tenure in the White House. In 1992, George H. W. Bush had nominated Roberts, who was then just thirty-seven, to the D.C. Circuit, the traditional stepping-stone to the Supreme Court. In June 1999, Clinton nominated Kagan, who was thirty-nine, to the D.C. Circuit. Both nominations suggest how highly the two were regarded by their respective presidents and parties, even at such young ages. But both nominations met similar ignominious fates. In 1992, the Democrats in control of the Senate stalled Roberts's nomination into oblivion. As for Kagan, even though the change of administrations was more than a year and a half away at the time she was chosen, the Republicans who held the majority used the same tactics to kill her nomination; Kagan never even received a vote in the Judiciary Committee.\n\nFor both Roberts and Kagan, the failed nominations appeared to be crushing disappointments. For both, as it turned out, it was the best thing that ever happened to them.\n\nThe nomination of Kagan to the D.C. Circuit, even though she failed to be confirmed, marked her as a potential Supreme Court justice. It was a tremendous honor and vote of confidence. With the Clinton administration winding down, though, Kagan faced a more immediate problem. She needed a job.\n\nKagan had exceeded the customary amount of time on leave to preserve her tenure at the University of Chicago Law School, but she had assumed that the job was still hers if she wanted it. She was wrong. Chicago fancies itself the most self-consciously intellectual of major law schools, and Kagan's modest record as a scholar counted against her. She was out. (Decades earlier, Scalia struggled to receive tenure at Chicago for similar reasons; the local mandarins thought, correctly, that he preferred Washington to academia.) So Kagan scrambled and found a visiting professor position at Harvard, essentially an audition for tenure. She produced a major law review article on administrative law, her teaching was as famously excellent as ever, and she won tenure after her second year.\n\nThe key moment in Kagan's early years on the Harvard faculty occurred when she had an opportunity to put her true skills to good use. Harvard had purchased hundreds of acres on the Boston side of the Charles River, and the new president, Lawrence Summers, was considering moving the law school there from its longtime home in Cambridge. The faculty regarded this possibility with horror. Robert Clark, the dean of the law school, named Kagan the head of a task force to study the possibility of the move\u2014in reality, to kill it. Kagan summoned all of her bureaucratic finesse and delivered a report to Summers that all but buried the idea. Summers turned the land over to scientific projects instead, and Kagan became a hero to her colleagues on the faculty. Then Clark stepped down.\n\nSummers, himself a former Clinton White House aide and then treasury secretary, had been a friend and colleague of Kagan's in Washington. Though Kagan was only forty-three in 2003 and had almost no administrative experience, Summers decided to take a chance on her as the first female dean of Harvard Law School.\n\nWhat happened next was one of those rare intersections of the right person at the right time in the right place. The dour Robert Clark had presided over the law school through all its enervating internal wars. Kagan, young and ebullient, swept in and cleared the air. The booming economy, at least for lawyers, helped solve many of her problems. Liberals and conservatives had battled for years for places on the faculty but Kagan had the money to reach the perfect solution\u2014she could hire both! She gave the students free coffee, and an ice rink to use in the winter, and they loved her. Kagan's own politics were, as ever, artful. She preserved the longtime boycott against military recruiters\u2014employers that discriminated against gay people were not allowed to conduct official interviews on campus\u2014but she arranged an enthusiastic welcome for the soldiers and veterans who were students. (She invented an annual Veterans Day dinner for active military students, veterans, and their spouses.) It was the kind of behavior that would look good at a confirmation hearing, and, eventually, it did.\n\nTo be sure, some of Kagan's behavior was calculated\u2014a studied attempt to present a bipartisan image. But her enthusiasm for debate, for the give-and-take of intellectual life on campus, was real. At a Federalist Society banquet at Harvard, she welcomed the group with the words \"I love the Federalist Society\"\u2014and won a raucous standing ovation. Then she added, with winning candor, \"But, you know, you are not my people.\" Her elaborate celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Antonin Scalia '60 on the Supreme Court bench was doubtless sincere\u2014as well as very savvy. Her tenure as dean was such a success that when Summers was forced out as president in 2006, Kagan was an obvious candidate to succeed him as president of the university.\n\nHere, though, Kagan's politicking proved too clever for her own good. Summers's fall as president was precipitated by his comments about the underrepresentation of women in science that were widely denounced for ignorance and sexism. At that moment, Kagan was Summers's most high-profile female hire. As such, she could have been an important defender of his. But Kagan, perhaps sensing Summers's impending doom, was notably restrained in offering support for her embattled boss.\n\nThis came back to haunt her. Robert Rubin, the former treasury secretary, was also a leading member of Harvard's governing board, and he had pushed for Summers, his successor at Treasury, to be named president of the university. In Rubin's view, Kagan had shown great disloyalty and ingratitude to Summers when she left him twisting in the wind during the women-in-sciences flap. Accordingly, Rubin made it his personal mission to prevent Kagan from becoming president of Harvard, and indeed the job went instead to Drew Gilpin Faust.\n\nWith her progress blocked at Harvard, Kagan looked for other options. She made it clear that she was backing Obama for president in 2008 and that she hoped to join him in Washington. During the transition period after the election, Greg Craig, the White House counsel designate, made a recruiting trip to Cambridge and asked Kagan what she had in mind for herself. She knew that the job of attorney general had been promised to Eric Holder, so she told Craig she wanted to be deputy AG, the person who traditionally runs the day-to-day operations of the Department of Justice. Following the disastrous tenure of Alberto Gonzales, DOJ was demoralized\u2014just like Harvard Law School when Kagan became dean. She knew how to bring people together in a large and complex organization.\n\nSorry, said Craig. Holder had promised the deputy job to someone else.\n\nWhat about solicitor general? he asked her.\n\n\"I'm not an appellate lawyer,\" Kagan said, which was, if anything, an understatement. She had only ever been a \"real\" lawyer as a junior associate at Williams & Connolly. But Kagan had never run anything before she was a dean\u2014and never worked at the White House before she went there either. SG was the most intellectually demanding job in the Justice Department, but Gloria Kagan's daughter never lacked for moxie. \"If I'm asked to do it, I'll do it,\" she told Craig. In short order, she was.\n\nAnd so, in 2009, a decade after Kagan failed to become a judge on the D.C. Circuit, she was given the job that was sometimes known as the tenth justice. If she had been confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, as she had hoped to be, she might well have had a long paper trail of controversial decisions that could have disqualified her from being considered for the Supreme Court. Instead, she had a sterling\u2014and largely apolitical\u2014record as the savior of Harvard Law School.\n\nAs for John Roberts, his failure to win confirmation in 1992 allowed him to spend a decade as a widely respected, highly paid, and largely apolitical appellate lawyer at Hogan & Hartson. To complete the symmetry between the two lives, in 2001 George W. Bush (like his father) nominated Roberts to the D.C. Circuit, and this time, after another long delay, Roberts was confirmed. The seat Roberts occupied was the very one that Clinton had tried, and failed, to fill with Kagan.\n\nAfter the second argument of _Citizens United_ , the votes were the same as after the first one. Kagan's advocacy had failed to break up the majority. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito voted to overturn the judgment of the FEC, with Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor (in place of Souter) on the other side. Because of the revised, and much broader, Questions Presented, Roberts was now well within his rights to lead the charge to bury decades of campaign finance law.\n\nAt the time of the first argument, in March 2009, it was not clear that _Citizens United_ was going to be a blockbuster, so the case received a modest amount of attention. But everyone understood the stakes of the reargument. There was the inherent drama of Kagan's debut as solicitor general and Sotomayor's first case on the bench. (From the start, the new justice proved an able and vigorous questioner.) More importantly, the political implications of _Citizens United_ were immense. The conservative movement had been fighting for decades to dismantle campaign finance rules. Figures as varied as Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator and personification of the GOP political establishment, and David Bossie, the bad-boy investigator, had the same passion for the issue. It was true that their side had some support from traditional liberal groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union (which takes an absolutist view on free speech issues) and some labor unions (which wanted to keep spending money in elections). Still, the ACLU was eccentric, and unions were losing power.\n\nAt its heart, _Citizens United_ was a case about Republicans versus Democrats. Since the Progressive era, Republicans had been the party of moneyed interests in the United States. For more than a century, Republicans had fought virtually every limitation on corporate or individual participation in elections. Democrats supported these restrictions. It was a defining difference between the parties. So, as the chief justice chose how broadly to change the law in this area, the real question for him was how much he wanted to help the Republican Party. Roberts's choice was: a lot.\n\n* Kagan and I were classmates and friends at law school.\n\n# **14**\n\n#    \n**THE NINETY-PAGE SWAN SONG OF JOHN PAUL STEVENS**\n\nRoberts assigned the opinion in _Citizens United_ to Anthony Kennedy. It was another brilliant strategic move by the chief. Alito's replacement of O'Connor in 2006 had locked the Court into a consistent 4\u20134 conservative-liberal split and left Kennedy the most powerful justice in decades. On controversial issues\u2014including abortion, affirmative action, civil rights, the death penalty, federal power, among others\u2014Kennedy controlled the outcome of cases. For the previous fifteen years or so, O'Connor had most often held the swing vote, though she never controlled as many cases as Kennedy did.\n\nThere was a striking difference in the way that O'Connor and Kennedy handled their roles as the swing vote. O'Connor was a gradualist, a compromiser, a politician who liked to make each side feel like it won something. When O'Connor was in the middle in a case, she would, in effect, give one side 51 percent and the other 49. In _Casey_ , she saved abortion rights; in _Grutter_ , she preserved racial preferences in admissions for the University of Michigan Law School; in _Hamdi_ , she repudiated the Bush administration's lawless approach to the detainees held at Guant\u00e1namo Bay. In each of these cases, as the author of or contributor to the opinions, O'Connor split the difference. Yes to restrictions on abortion but no to outright bans; yes to affirmative action but no to quotas; yes to the right of detainees to go to court but no to the full constitutional rights of American citizens. In describing her judicial philosophy, O'Connor liked to point to the sculpted turtles that formed the base of the lampposts outside the Supreme Court. \"We're like those turtles,\" she liked to say. \"We're slow and steady. We don't move too fast in any direction.\"\n\nAnthony Kennedy was no turtle. Unlike O'Connor, he tended to swing wildly in one way or the other. When he was with the liberals, he could be very liberal. His opinion in _Lawrence v. Texas_ , the 2003 decision striking down laws against consensual sodomy, contains a lyrical celebration of the rights of gay people. Similarly, in _Boumediene v. Bush_ , the 2008 case about the rights of accused terrorists, he excoriated the Bush administration and the Congress. \"To hold that the political branches may switch the constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say 'what the law is,' \" he wrote, quoting Chief Justice John Marshall's famous words from 1803 in _Marbury v. Madison_. No one relished saying \"what the law is\" more than Kennedy.\n\nBut in his conservative mode, Kennedy could be shockingly dismissive of women's autonomy, as in _Gonzales v. Carhart_ , the 2007 late-term abortion law case. He also wrote the most notorious sentence in the majority opinion in _Bush v. Gore_ , acknowledging that the Court acted for the sole benefit of George W. Bush: \"Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.\" Kennedy was not a moderate but an extremist\u2014of varied enthusiasms.\n\nAll of the justices knew that Kennedy's views were most extreme when it came to the First Amendment. (Independently, several different justices would say Kennedy had \"a thing\" about the First Amendment.) In the Roberts Court, there was a broad consensus about protecting freedom of speech. Many areas of the law that had once been controversial, such as the suppression of dangerous or unpopular views, were resolved with little disagreement. Even in a legal system that protects free speech, though, the government had long been able to regulate speech in all kinds of ways. Copyright infringement was subject to civil and criminal remedies; extortion and other verbal crimes were routinely punished. Campaign contributions, if they were considered \"speech\" at all, had been regulated for more than a century.\n\nBut Kennedy had an almost Pavlovian receptivity to arguments that the government had unduly restricted freedom of speech\u2014especially in the area of campaign finance. Throughout his long tenure, Kennedy had dissented, often in strident terms, when his colleagues upheld regulations in that area. And as the possessor of probably the biggest ego on the Court (always a hotly contested designation among the justices), Kennedy loved writing high-profile opinions.\n\nRoberts knew just what he would get when he assigned _Citizens United_ to Kennedy. After all, Kennedy had written an opinion for the Court after the case was argued the first time. During his confirmation hearing, Roberts made much of his judicial modesty, his respect for precedent, saying that he was just an umpire on the playing field of the law. If the chief had written _Citizens United_ , he would have been criticized for hypocrisy. But by giving the opinion to Kennedy, Roberts sidestepped the attacks and still achieved the far-reaching result he wanted.\n\nKennedy did not disappoint him. \"Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people,\" he wrote for the Court in his familiar rolling cadence. \"The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.\" These rhetorical flights were a long way from the gritty business of raising and spending campaign money.\n\nKennedy often saw First Amendment issues in terms of abstractions. At its core, _Citizens United_ concerned a law that set aside a brief period of time (shortly before elections) when corporations could not fund political commercials. To Kennedy, this was nothing more than censorship: \"By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker's voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.\"\n\n_Citizens United_ was a simple case for Kennedy. \"The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations,\" he wrote. This had been true since 1886, and speech, especially political speech, could never be impeded. \"The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,\" Kennedy continued. \"The Government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy. And the electorate has been deprived of information, knowledge and opinion vital to its function. By suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit, the Government prevents their voices and viewpoints from reaching the public and advising voters on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests.\n\n\"If the First Amendment has any force,\" Kennedy concluded, \"it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.\"\n\nMcCain-Feingold and several Supreme Court precedents had to be overruled. The Constitution required that all corporations, for-profit and nonprofit alike, be allowed to spend as much as they wanted, any time they wanted, in support of the candidates of their choosing.\n\nTo John Paul Stevens, however, _Citizens United_ was much more complicated, with immense implications for American politics.\n\nStevens would turn ninety shortly after the _Citizens United_ decision came down. Better than most justices, he knew the potential cost of staying too long on the bench.\n\nFranklin Roosevelt named William O. Douglas to the Court in 1939, and he served with cantankerous brilliance well into a fourth decade. In 1974, however, Douglas had a stroke, and he became physically and mentally disabled. Douglas refused to retire, and his colleagues had to wage an awkward campaign to persuade him to bow to the inevitable. When Douglas did finally leave the Court the following year, Gerald Ford appointed Stevens to take his place. Stevens wanted to avoid a similarly unseemly end to his own career and deputized his closest friend among the justices, David Souter, to let him know when it was time to go. It seemed like a reasonable plan. After all, Souter was nearly two decades younger than the man known to all at the Court as JPS.\n\nBut then Stevens outlasted Souter. JPS was a remarkable physical specimen. He still played tennis on many mornings. (A frequent golfer, too, he practiced putting on the carpet in his chambers.) For more than twenty years, Stevens and his wife had spent a good deal of time at their condominium in Fort Lauderdale, but he remained deeply engaged in the work of the Court. During the eighties, Stevens was nicknamed the FedEx justice, because he did so much work from Florida; later, he used e-mail. By the new millennium, Stevens's age, and his genial bearing, had earned widespread affection. Stevens had a midwesterner's inveterate politeness, which manifested itself during oral arguments. He would begin speaking by saying, \"May I ask you a question?\" or \"May I ask you this?\" Frequent advocates found this tic amusing and endearing, a little like his inevitable bow tie.\n\nIn light of all this, it was possible, by the time of _Citizens United_ , to think of Stevens as a kind of docile old uncle. After all, he was thirteen years older than Ginsburg, his closest contemporary, and he belonged to an entirely different generation than the rest of the Court. (Sotomayor was almost _two_ generations younger than Stevens.) But Stevens was no harmless codger. He was, rather, a ferocious competitor who hated to lose. Life made him a tough combatant.\n\nIn the early part of the twentieth century, the Stevenses were prominent citizens of Chicago. The justice's grandfather James Stevens had gone into the insurance business, and, with the profits, he and his sons Ernest and Raymond bought land on South Michigan Avenue, where they built what was then the biggest hotel in the world, with three thousand rooms. The Stevens Hotel opened in 1927 and featured a range of luxurious services, including a bowling alley and a pitch-and-putt golf course on the roof. There was a big, stylized \"S\" over the main entrance.\n\nThe Depression hit the family hard. As chronicled in _John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life_ , a biography by Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman, questions arose as to whether the Stevens family had embezzled funds from the insurance company to prop up the hotel. In January 1933, the _Chicago Herald-Examiner_ reported, \"The Stevens children were sent to bed so they could not see their father arrested.\" After Ernest Stevens was released on bail, according to the biography, four men brandishing a submachine gun, two shotguns, and a revolver ransacked the Stevens home in search of cash. Ernest and his wife, Elizabeth, and two of their children, William, age fifteen, and John, age twelve, as well as the family cook and two maids, were herded upstairs and held in a bedroom after one of the boys was forced to open a safe in the first-floor library. It remains unclear whether the intruders were police officers or gangsters (or both), but they found no secret stash of cash.\n\nLater in 1933, the patriarch, James, had a debilitating stroke. A few days afterward, John's uncle Raymond committed suicide rather than endure the disgrace of a criminal prosecution. Ernest Stevens thus had to go to trial alone, and in the toxic environment of the Depression he was swiftly convicted. He faced ten years in state prison. Deliverance came in 1934, when his appeal reached the Illinois Supreme Court and the justices unanimously reversed his conviction. \"In this whole record there is not a scintilla of evidence of any concealment or fraud attempted,\" the decision said. Still, the family never recovered its former wealth, and it lost control of the hotel. (It is now known as the Chicago Hilton and Towers; the \"S\" is still there.)\n\nJohn Stevens rallied from the trauma of his teenage years and excelled at the Lab School of the University of Chicago. (Sasha and Malia Obama would later be students there, and the Obamas lived about a mile away from where Stevens grew up, on the city's South Side.) In 1937, he enrolled at the university, where he was the editor of the newspaper, a stalwart of the tennis team, the head class marshal, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Toward the end of his undergraduate career, the dean of students, Leon P. Smith, rather mysteriously suggested that he take a correspondence course. Stevens did. He later learned that Smith was an undercover naval officer who had been asked to see if he could get students interested in cryptography. At the end of November of 1941, the navy sent Stevens a letter saying that he had completed enough of the course that he was eligible to apply for a commission. Stevens enlisted the day before Pearl Harbor and spent most of the war at that navy base in Hawaii, analyzing intercepted Japanese radio transmissions.\n\nAfter being discharged in 1945, Stevens raced through Northwestern Law School in two years, graduating as valedictorian. (He also acquired a new name. A professor told him that every lawyer should have something unique about them. Stevens thought his name, John Stevens, was particularly boring, and decided always to use his middle name, at least professionally.) John Paul Stevens earned a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, an FDR appointee whom Stevens always revered. When Stevens's colleagues wanted to needle him, they would cite one of Rutledge's opinions against him. (Kennedy referred to Rutledge three times in his _Citizens United_ opinion.)\n\nAfter his clerkship, Stevens returned to Chicago and took a job at one of the city's first religiously integrated law firms. In time, he became a renowned antitrust litigator. He and his wife, Betty, had four children, two of them adopted, and he took up flying a private plane as a hobby, which also enabled him to visit clients around the Midwest. Stevens probably would have lived out his life in prosperous obscurity if one of Chicago's periodic corruption scandals hadn't intervened. A local character, a wheelchair-bound frequent litigant named Sherman Skolnick, alleged that two justices on the Illinois Supreme Court had taken bribes in a political corruption case. The court formed an investigatory committee, which appointed Stevens as its counsel. In a series of dramatic hearings in 1969, Stevens established that the two judges had indeed taken bribes. Both resigned, and Stevens became a public figure. The next year, Senator Charles Percy, an Illinois Republican, put Stevens up for a judgeship on the Seventh Circuit. Richard Nixon agreed, and, in 1970, Stevens began his judicial career.\n\nIn 1974, Gerald Ford, seeking to demonstrate a renewed commitment to ethics at the Justice Department, named Edward H. Levi, the dean of the University of Chicago Law School, as attorney general. When, the following year, Douglas left the Supreme Court, Levi pushed for Stevens, his fellow Chicagoan, whose anticorruption credentials looked especially desirable in that post-Watergate moment. Ford nominated Stevens, who was then fifty-five, on November 28, 1975, and the Senate unanimously confirmed him just nineteen days later. (Soon after moving to Washington, Stevens divorced and remarried. His second wife, Maryan Mulholland Simon, an old friend from Chicago, was a dietitian, whose ministrations Stevens credited for his longevity.)\n\nLike Souter and his mentors, Percy and Levi, Stevens was a moderate Republican. In his early years on the Court, he settled into the ideological center, which was bounded, on the left, by William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall and, on the right, by Rehnquist, then an associate justice, and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Stevens's voting record was roughly in line with those of fellow Republican appointees like Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell, Harry Blackmun, and O'Connor. But as they were replaced by more contemporary Republicans, Stevens often found himself described as a liberal. In some areas, he did move to the left, especially on the death penalty and racial issues. But his evolution into the leader of the liberal wing was mostly the result of the rest of the Court moving so far to the right.\n\nStevens became the senior associate justice after Blackmun stepped down in 1994, and over the next decade Stevens remained confident that he could pull together majorities for his side. Toward the end of the Rehnquist Court, Stevens had a string of good years, as O'Connor became a frequent ally, especially on issues relating to Guant\u00e1namo. Kennedy, too, joined Stevens's side on gay rights and death penalty cases. More often than his liberal colleagues, Stevens would vote to hear controversial cases. Ginsburg and Breyer, fearing disaster if the Court took these cases, tended to vote not to take them in the first place.\n\nBut John Roberts and Samuel Alito sapped John Paul Stevens's optimism. In under five years, the pair of Bush appointees, joined by Scalia, Thomas, and usually Kennedy, had overturned or undermined many of the Court's precedents. Unlike his new conservative colleagues, Stevens, like Souter, was a classic common-law judge who thought that the law should develop slowly over time, with each case building logically on its predecessors. The course of _Citizens United_ captured everything that offended Stevens most about the Roberts Court.\n\nIn some ways, Stevens's greatest objections were procedural. Like Ginsburg (and almost no one else), Stevens had a deep fascination for the mysteries of federal procedure. He was happy to wade into the subject on his own for hours. (Stevens was the only justice who generally wrote his own first drafts of opinions.) So it was especially galling that the Court converted _Citizens United_ from a narrow dispute about a single provision in McCain-Feingold into an assault on a century of federal laws and precedents. To Stevens, it was the purest kind of judicial activism.\n\nOr, as he put it in his dissenting opinion, \"five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.\" The case could and should have been resolved by simply ruling on whether McCain-Feingold applied to _Hillary: The Movie_ , or at least to nonprofit corporations like Citizens United. And here Stevens aimed a dart not at Kennedy but at the chief justice: \"The parties have advanced numerous ways to resolve the case that would facilitate electioneering by nonprofit advocacy corporations such as Citizens United, without toppling statutes and precedents.\" Which is to say, the majority has transgressed yet another \"cardinal\" principle of the judicial process: \"If it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more.\" Stevens was quoting Roberts's oft-cited line from his tenure on the D.C. Circuit\u2014and throwing it back in his face. In essence, Stevens was saying that Roberts was acting not like a mere umpire but like an imperious commissioner of baseball.\n\nStevens was just warming up. His dissent was ninety pages, the longest of his career. He questioned every premise of Kennedy's opinion, starting with its contempt for stare decisis, the rule of precedent. He went on to refute Kennedy's repeated invocations of \"censorship\" and the \"banning\" of free speech. The case was merely about corporate-funded commercials shortly before elections. Corporations could run as many commercials whenever they liked during other periods, and employees of the corporations (by forming a political action committee) could run ads at any time.\n\nStevens was especially offended by Kennedy's blithe assertion that corporations and human beings had identical rights under the First Amendment. \"The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare,\" Stevens wrote. \"Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.\" Congress and the courts had drawn distinctions between corporations and people for decades, Stevens wrote, noting that, \"at the federal level, the express distinction between corporate and individual political spending on elections stretches back to 1907, when Congress passed the Tillman Act.\"\n\nStevens was almost amused at Kennedy's fear that the government might regulate speech based on \"the speaker's identity.\" As he wrote, \"We have held that speech can be regulated differentially on account of the speaker's identity, when identity is understood in categorical or institutional terms. The Government routinely places special restrictions on the speech rights of students, prisoners, members of the Armed Forces, foreigners, and its own employees.\" Stevens, a former navy man, could not resist a generational allusion: he said Kennedy's opinion \"would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by 'Tokyo Rose' during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.\" (Stevens's law clerks, having never heard of Tokyo Rose, who made propaganda broadcasts for the Japanese, implored him to remove the dated reference, but he insisted on keeping it.)\n\nStevens's conclusion was despairing. \"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt,\" he wrote. \"It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.\" It was an impressive dissent, but that was all it was. Anthony Kennedy, on the other hand, was reshaping American politics.\n\nAt the stroke of ten, on the morning of Thursday, January 21, 2010, the nine justices emerged from behind the red curtain and the chief justice introduced the sole order of business for the day. \"In case 08-205, Citizens United versus the FEC, Justice Kennedy has the opinion of the Court,\" Roberts said.\n\nKennedy took about ten minutes to announce the Court's judgment. Kennedy had been a law teacher even longer than he'd been a judge, and he relished these moments to define, in layman's terms, what the justices had decided. Only a handful of people ever had the chance to see these performances\u2014the Supreme Court seats about five hundred people\u2014and the words in the opinions, not the words from the bench, represented the judgment of the Court. Nevertheless, Kennedy took these occasions seriously, as a chance to put in his own words what he sometimes called \"the poetry of the law.\" At the climax of his brief summary, Kennedy said: \"The Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear. It uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.\"\n\nIn a case of this magnitude, there was never any doubt that Stevens would read his dissent from the bench. He didn't read all ninety pages, but he still prepared a twenty-minute stem-winder. For once, though, the news was not what Stevens said but how he said it. He stumbled frequently, skipped words, and at times was hard to understand (as when he said, \"As the corp, court has long resembled...\"). For the first time in public, Stevens looked his age. He charged that the way the majority had handled the case was even worse than the legal outcome. \"There were principled, narrower paths that a Court that was serious about judicial restraint could have taken,\" he said. \"The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.\" After thirty-five years on the Supreme Court, it was clear that John Paul Stevens was about to walk away from a place he no longer recognized.\n\n# **15**\n\n#    \n**\"WITH ALL DUE DEFERENCE TO SEPARATION OF POWERS\"**\n\nAt the White House, the tensions between Greg Craig, the president's counsel, and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, festered throughout 2009. Likewise, the concerns about Cassandra Butts, Craig's deputy and ostensibly the person assigned to screen potential judges, grew more widespread. By fall, both were on their way out. In November, Butts left the White House for a job at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a Bush-era foreign aid agency. To facilitate a graceful exit for Craig, Obama offered to nominate him to the D.C. Circuit. (Nearly a year into the administration, the president had still not filled a vacancy on the second most important court in the country, a fact that itself illustrated the dysfunction in the counsel's office.) But Craig turned down the judgeship and returned to private law practice at the end of the year.\n\nIn December, a few weeks before _Citizens United_ came down, Robert Bauer took over as the new White House counsel. Just as Craig had devoted much of his life to human rights, Bauer had his own cause: campaign finance. Bauer had been in private practice for thirty years, but at his law firm he helped virtually every major Democratic politician navigate the complex rules about how campaigns should be run and paid for. In a way, Bob Bauer was the Jim Bopp of the Democratic Party. In the nineties, Bauer was a top outside adviser to Richard Gephardt, the Democratic leader in the House, as well as Tom Daschle, the party's leader in the Senate. When Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, Bauer became his personal attorney.\n\nBearded, genial, and professorial, Bauer didn't look like what he was: a fierce Democratic partisan. Given his background, he was also uniquely well positioned to understand the implications of _Citizens United_. The initial news reports portrayed the Court's decision almost as an act of bipartisanship. These reports tended to stress that the decision freed both labor unions and corporations to make unlimited expenditures on behalf of candidates. Because unions generally supported Democrats and corporations backed Republicans, the decision was described as an equal opportunity act of deregulation.\n\nBauer knew this was nonsense. Unions had been shrinking for a half century. _Citizens United_ gave them permission to spend millions of dollars they didn't have. On the other hand, corporations controlled most of the wealth in the country. Corporations, especially private corporations, skewed overwhelmingly Republican. Moreover, in crude terms, Republicans had more money than Democrats; anything that deregulated the political process was thus likely to help the GOP. It was clear to Bauer that _Citizens United_ was a gift to the Republican Party.\n\n_Citizens United_ was also, Bauer knew, an invitation to chaos. From long experience, Bauer understood that candidates and political parties were subject to real scrutiny from the media and their constituents. People running for office worried about defending the sources of their campaign money and how they spent it. In contrast, _Citizens United_ empowered interests that were largely immune from public attention. The decision authorized independent expenditures by companies and committees that were generally unknown. _Citizens United_ did uphold disclosure requirements; it was constitutional to force campaigns and committees to reveal the sources of their funds. But that detail scarcely mattered in the real world. These disclosures tended to take place long after the fact, and donors had ways of camouflaging their identities in any case. Because of _Citizens United_ , unlimited amounts of money would be funneled into shadowy organizations to spend on commercials right before elections. The damage would be done before anyone knew who funded or produced the ads.\n\nSo what to do? The dilemma in the Obama White House bore some similarity to those Franklin D. Roosevelt faced in 1935. (And the resemblance would become greater in short order.) During Roosevelt's first term, a conservative Supreme Court declared unconstitutional several signature initiatives of the New Deal, including the National Industrial Recovery Act. The decisions represented the final spasm of the _Lochner_ era, the long period when the Court regarded economic regulations as violations of the right to contract, or to due process of law. At first, Roosevelt responded to these decisions by launching his ill-fated court-packing plan in 1937. That idea\u2014to add to the number of justices on the Court\u2014died an unmourned death, but FDR achieved the same result by other means. During his long presidency, he named eight justices to the Court, and his appointees buried _Lochner_ and allowed a vigorous federal role in the national economy. In 2010, those options were not available to Obama. There was not even a single vacancy at the Court.\n\nAnd the clock was ticking for the administration to respond. _Citizens United_ came out on the morning of Thursday, January 21, 2010. Six days later, Obama was to give the State of the Union address. What should he say?\n\nIn every administration, the production of the State of the Union address is an elaborate operation. Cabinet officials press for mentions of their initiatives. Congressional leaders lobby for their priorities. Political advisers test ideas in polls. The process takes many weeks. In rough terms, the White House plans its year around the speech. By the time _Citizens United_ was read and digested, the White House had a matter of hours to respond.\n\nDavid Axelrod, the president's top political adviser, was enraged by the opinion. A former journalist in Chicago, Axelrod came into politics as a reformer, and he had a deep understanding of the procedural issues underlying how campaigns operated. Specifically, Axelrod had intimate familiarity with the business of television commercials\u2014how time was purchased and how the ads affected campaigns. Better than anyone at the White House, even Bauer, Axelrod understood the implications of _Citizens United_. Of course, given his responsibilities, Axelrod thought it was politically advantageous for Obama to get in front on the issue. More importantly, Axelrod wanted to raise the alarm. He knew where the Court's decision would lead.\n\nThat still left the question of what Obama should say in his speech about _Citizens United_. A Supreme Court decision interpreting the Constitution can be overturned only by a new decision or by a constitutional amendment. A call for a constitutional amendment would be seen as extreme, not to mention futile. Still, there was a chance to make a difference in the margins of the decision. Since the Court's call for reargument in the spring of 2009, the president's Democratic allies in Congress had been making plans for a response. A handful of Democrats, including Senator Charles Schumer of New York and Congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, came up with what they called the DISCLOSE (Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections) Act. Because Kennedy's opinion had upheld McCain-Feingold's requirement that contributors be identified, the proposed new law would strengthen that requirement. It was not much\u2014there was not much that could be done\u2014but it was enough for the president to endorse in his speech.\n\nThe wording proved difficult. Election reform issues are notoriously difficult to explain, and voters tend to tune them out. The issue grew so complicated that Emanuel convened a meeting in his office to settle what Obama would say. Axelrod, Bauer, Ron Klain, and a few others pored over the _Citizens United_ decision\u2014parsed it, sentence by sentence\u2014to make sure they were on solid ground. Like Ruth Ginsburg, Emanuel recognized the political appeal of arguing that foreign corporations could start buying their way into American elections.\n\n\"How sure are we on this foreign corporations thing?\" Emanuel asked the group.\n\nSure enough, he was told.\n\nThe justices' attendance at the State of the Union had been spotty at best in recent years. In the sixteen years before 2010, six was the largest number of justices to attend the event. From 2006 to 2008, just four attended. Two came in 2002. Rehnquist missed one year because his painting class met that evening; other times he just chose not to come. Breyer was the only justice to attend in 2001 and from 2003 to 2005. Breyer made it a point to attend every year. He thought that the justices' appearance was an important symbol that the Supreme Court was a part of the government and had respect for the coordinate branches. But even Breyer didn't make it in 2000. (He had the flu.) Not one justice did.\n\nIt was easy to see why they skipped the event. For decades, the State of the Union had been a highly political occasion, where the president laid out his accomplishments and agenda. The legislators in the president's party frequently jumped to their feet and cheered; those from the opposing party mostly sat in silence. The justices had to calibrate when it was appropriate to applaud. Generic patriotic appeals, yes; the president's priorities, no. A tribute to the troops, yes; a plea to cut taxes, no. All in all, it was easier to stay home.\n\nDuring the discussion in Emanuel's office, as well as the president's own prep sessions, the propriety of challenging the Supreme Court had never come up. The group was so focused on pushing Obama's agenda that the issue of the justices' presence seems not to have occurred to anyone. The administration's anger about _Citizens United_ was such that (even though no one said this specifically) the Obama team simply regarded the Supreme Court majority as another group of Republicans, deserving no greater deference than GOP senators or congressmen.\n\nBut once Obama reached the relevant portion of his speech, he was very much aware of the justices assembled in front of him. \"It's time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress. And it's time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office,\" Obama said. Then, looking up at the justices, the president ad-libbed a revealing phrase: \"With all due deference to separation of powers.\" Obama suddenly realized that he was attacking the Supreme Court and decided to soften the sentiment. Specifically, he said, \"With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests\u2014including foreign corporations\u2014to spend without limit in our elections.\" The Democrats rose in a standing ovation. \"I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities.\" More partisan applause. \"They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.\"\n\nHad the matter been left there, that portion of the speech might have drawn little notice. But, as was customary, the network television pool had received an advance copy of the State of the Union, so the producer knew that the reference to the Supreme Court was coming. He ordered cameras trained on the justices before Obama's reference to them. Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer were in the front row, with Alito behind Roberts and Sotomayor behind Kennedy. As it happened, Alito was wedged into an especially partisan corner. To his right was the Obama cabinet; behind him were the Democratic leaders of the Senate: Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and Schumer. All three vaulted to their feet as Obama denounced _Citizens United_.\n\nAlito had spent most of his life in New Jersey, in nearly total obscurity. (Before joining the Supreme Court, he had lived in Washington only during part of the Reagan administration.) Circuit judges are not celebrities. Alito was not used to being photographed. He detested the attention he received during his confirmation hearings. It did not even occur to him that he would be on camera. So he did not censor his reactions. When Obama said \"foreign corporations\" could spend without limit, Alito shook his head and mouthed, \"Not true.\" And he went on shaking his head as Obama made his second reference to foreign influence. Alito's colleagues sat stone-faced. Behind him, Schumer was nodding his head as vigorously as Alito was shaking his.\n\nAfterwards, both Obama and Alito received some criticism for their behavior. The president and the justice were said to have disrespected each other, but in fact Obama understated the consequences of _Citizens United_.\n\nAlito's actions were also revealing. It was not a coincidence that Alito was the most irritated of the justices. After all, he was the only one who had snubbed Obama and Biden at their preinaugural visit to the Court. Alito was also the author of the _Ledbetter_ decision, which Obama took such relish in overturning. The clash was a moment of great authenticity. Obama and Alito were both men of intelligence and integrity; they were also dedicated political adversaries. The Democratic president and the Republican justice were deeply divided on _Citizens United_ and a host of other issues. The brief back-and-forth was a glimpse of the truth.\n\nThe drama almost obscured the question of which one of them was right. Did _Citizens United_ pave the way for foreign corporations to spend without limit in American elections? (In the aftermath of the speech, Obama demanded a memo from Bauer to satisfy himself on the issue.) Kennedy's opinion explicitly refrained from ruling on the limits on foreign corporations. \"We need not reach the question whether the Government has a compelling interest in preventing foreign individuals or associations from influencing our Nation's political process,\" he wrote. So Alito had a point: the Court did not specifically rule that foreign corporations could spend money in American elections.\n\nBut Obama and his speechwriters had chosen their words with care. The president said only that _Citizens United_ was a decision \"that I believe will open the floodgates\" to the influx of foreign money. There was good reason for this belief. In response to Ginsburg's questions during the oral argument, Olson had said the Constitution required the government to treat American or foreign corporations the same way; the lawyer thought both should be allowed to spend money on political campaigns. Furthermore, _Citizens United_ said American corporate money presented no special risk of corrupting the political system; there was ample reason to believe that the Court would reach the same conclusion about foreign contributions. Consequently, Obama was well within his rights to state that the rights granted in _Citizens United_ would be extended to foreigners. Both Alito and Obama drew reasonable, though conflicting, conclusions from the text of _Citizens United_.\n\nIn any case, the electric moment at the State of the Union defined in the public mind what had otherwise been an abstraction: the Obama White House and the Roberts Supreme Court were at odds. If there was any doubt in the aftermath of Obama's speech, the conservative justices began publicly denouncing the State of the Union as an unbearably partisan occasion. In a Federalist Society event, Scalia said it had been a \"juvenile spectacle.\" In a talk at a Florida law school, Thomas said, \"I don't go because it has become so partisan and it's very uncomfortable for a judge to sit there.\" He added that \"there's a lot that you don't hear on TV\u2014the catcalls, the whooping and hollering and under-the-breath comments.\" In an appearance in New York, Alito said it was awkward \"to sit there like the proverbial potted plant.\"\n\nThe issue presented a special challenge for the chief justice, who at once wanted to defend the integrity of his decisions but also sought to preserve the picture (misleading though it was) of an apolitical Supreme Court. Roberts's frustrations came out in a question-and-answer session with students at the University of Alabama School of Law several weeks after Obama's speech. Asked about the president's criticism, Roberts said, \"I have no problems with that. On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances, and the decorum. The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the Court\u2014according to the requirements of protocol\u2014has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.\" He went on, \"To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I'm not sure why we're there.\" Roberts's complaint was understandable, though he and the other conservative justices had no grievances when George W. Bush gave his State of the Union addresses.\n\nAsked about the chief justice's remarks, Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman, voiced none of the traditional deference to the Court. \"What is troubling is that this decision opened the floodgates for corporations and special interests to pour money into elections\u2014drowning out the voices of average Americans,\" Gibbs said. The conflict between the White House and the Court was now out in the open.\n\nFor his part, Alito spent the next State of the Union in Hawaii.\n\nOn March 21, 2010, two months after the State of the Union, the House of Representatives passed Obama's health care reform law, bringing to fruition decades of work by Democratic presidents and legislators. It marked the signal accomplishment of the president's term. Obama's popularity, however, was already tumbling. The economic recovery was faltering. Unemployment was rising. And at the Supreme Court, the justices were waiting for John Paul Stevens to announce he was leaving.\n\nLike Souter, Stevens was a Republican who became alienated from his party. As old as Stevens was, he might well have hung on if McCain had won the previous election. As much as Souter wanted to leave, he too might have remained on the Court in the same circumstances. Stevens had a special fondness for Obama because of their shared Chicago roots. Stevens's decision, long expected, came on April 9, almost exactly eleven months after Souter's. Stevens's letter reflected his plainspoken manner. \"My dear Mr. President,\" Stevens wrote. \"Having concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court's next Term, I shall retire from regular active service as an Associate Justice... effective the next day after the Court rises for the summer recess this year.\"\n\nIn Stevens's final spring, the conservative decisions continued. Two years earlier, in _Heller_ , the Court had overturned a District of Columbia gun ordinance on the ground that the Second Amendment gives individuals a right to keep and bear arms. Because that law was limited to D.C. (which is not a state), _Heller_ addressed only the right of the federal government to pass gun control laws. In _McDonald v. Chicago_ , the question was whether the new interpretation of the Second Amendment applied to states as well as to the federal government.\n\nThe case dealt with a constitutional concept known as \"incorporation.\" By their express terms, most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights apply only to the federal government. For example, the text of the First Amendment states: \"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.\" The amendment says nothing about the states. But during the twentieth century, the Court decided that most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights applied against the states as well. This process, which was associated with Hugo Black during his long career on the Court, was known as \"incorporation.\" How did the Court decide which rights should be incorporated? Over a series of cases, the justices determined whether the right was \"fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty,\" or \"deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition.\" The issue in _McDonald_ was whether the right of an individual to bear arms, under the Second Amendment, met this test.\n\nAlito's opinion, for the five conservatives, said yes. The Second Amendment right was so fundamental and deeply rooted that it should apply against the states as well as the federal government. \"Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day, and in _Heller_ , we held that individual self-defense is 'the _central component_ ' of the Second Amendment right,\" Alito wrote. In a dissent that was alternately weary and anguished, Stevens pointed out that it was only two years earlier\u20142008\u2014that the Court for the first time recognized any individual rights under the Second Amendment. \"States have a long and unbroken history of regulating firearms. The idea that States may place substantial restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms short of complete disarmament is, in fact, far more entrenched than the notion that the Federal Constitution protects any such right,\" Stevens wrote. After just two years, how could the right be \"fundamental\"? To Stevens, the Second Amendment did not carry the same weight as freedom of speech and religion. He wrote, \"It does not appear to be the case that the ability to own a handgun, or any particular type of firearm, is critical to leading a life of autonomy, dignity, or political equality.\"\n\nThe spring of 2010 was a tense and uncertain time at the Court. The reality of Stevens's impending departure was sinking in. He would be leaving after thirty-five years, just short of William O. Douglas's record tenure. Because Stevens had spent so much time in Florida, he was a remote figure, even to some of his colleagues. Nevertheless, he had gone out of his way to welcome Sotomayor in her first year and had struck up a friendship with Alito as well. Stevens had a polite and respectful relationship with Roberts, which was inevitably colored by their disagreements in almost every major case. Decades of legal duels had poisoned the relationship between Stevens and Scalia. Still, no sitting justice had known a Court without JPS. It was difficult, and a little painful, to imagine one.\n\nA worse problem for the Supreme Court family was Marty Ginsburg's illness. He was universally beloved. As a law professor and high-powered lawyer himself, he could speak to the justices as a relative equal; as a gregarious and self-deprecating spouse, he could welcome their wives (and O'Connor's husband) as a peer as well. He was a terrific cook whose talents nearly everyone in the Court building enjoyed at one time or another. His cancer, once seemingly in remission, had returned. He died on Sunday, June 27, 2010, at the Ginsburgs' home at the Watergate. It was one day before the final day of the Court's term.\n\nMost of the time, the real operations of the Supreme Court take place behind the scenes. Sometimes, though, the public has a window into the very soul of the institution. Monday, June 28, was such a day. The judicial, the political, the personal, and the ceremonial\u2014all were on display.\n\nEven on Monday morning, no one knew for sure how the day would unfold. As news of Marty's death spread, it was unclear whether Justice Ginsburg would appear in Court the following day. Most of her colleagues assumed not, especially since Jewish tradition calls for immediate burial of the dead. But since Ruth, as a girl, saw women excluded from the minyan for her father, she never paid a great deal of attention to the formal rituals of her religion. The funeral would be Tuesday, at Arlington Cemetery, with full military honors. (Several mourners saw an amused Marty Ginsburg wink in the selection of the location. He tended to discuss his tenure at Fort Sill chiefly as the time he learned to cook.) On Monday, Ruth went to work.\n\nThe audience in the courtroom almost gasped when she appeared from behind the curtain at the stroke of ten. Her hair was pulled back with a black ribbon, her eyes downcast. Roberts said, \"It is my very sad duty to announce that Martin David Ginsburg, husband of our colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died yesterday, June 27, 2010, at home in Washington, D.C.\" The chief went on to give a brief summary of Marty's life, including his \"sharp wit and engaging charm.\" Roberts was extremely good at this sort of speech, much better than Rehnquist, who tended to mumble and rush through ceremonial occasions. As Roberts spoke, Scalia wept. The Ginsburg and Scalia families had celebrated every New Year's Eve together since the two judges were on the D.C. Circuit together. To the amazement of their friends, the families had never let politics come between them.\n\nBut this was a working session of the Court\u2014the most important one of the year. Alito read the first opinion, _McDonald v. Chicago_ , the victory for gun rights. Breyer, as was his custom, grimaced and rolled his eyes as his colleague spoke, and then read his dissent from the bench. Ginsburg had the next opinion, a case that held that a Christian student organization at a public law school could not bar gay students from attending their meetings. Her voice was unaffected by her ordeal.\n\nRoberts went last, in a case where the Court, 5\u20134, struck down a minor provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which was passed in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal. The decision involved only a small piece of economic regulation, but Roberts's characteristically eloquent opinion gave a clear sense of which way he wanted the Court to move in the future:\n\nOne can have a government that functions without being ruled by functionaries, and a government that benefits from expertise without being ruled by experts. Our Constitution was adopted to enable the people to govern themselves, through their elected leaders. The growth of the Executive Branch, which now wields vast power and touches almost every aspect of daily life, heightens the concern that it may slip from the Executive's control, and thus from that of the people. This concern is largely absent from the dissent's paean to the administrative state.\n\nOf course, it was Breyer\u2014bureaucracy's best friend on the Court\u2014who wrote the dissent. And he read it from the bench, too, scolding Roberts that \"judicial opinions are not tickets for one ride in one day on one train. They have principle in all this.\" It was an echo of the dissenting opinions in _Bush v. Gore_.\n\nAll that was left for the Court was to say good-bye to John Paul Stevens. Roberts read a letter, signed by all the current justices, as well as Souter and O'Connor, saluting his long tenure and his commitment to justice. \"Justice Stevens, we will allow you time for rebuttal,\" Roberts said with a smile.\n\nStevens said that when he joined the Court in 1975 he would have addressed the other justices as \"Dear Brethren.\" Instead Stevens said, \"Dear Colleagues, Collegiality and independence characterize our common endeavor. I thank you for your kind words. Far more importantly, Maryan and I thank each of you and each of your spouses\u2014present and departed\u2014for your warm and enduring friendship. It has been an honor and a privilege to share custodial responsibility for a great institution with the eight of you and with ten of your predecessors.\" With midwestern reserve, Stevens's voice never broke. Roberts then adjourned the Court until the first Monday in October.\n\nA dinner had been arranged for that night, where the current and retired justices would pay tribute to Stevens on his final day on the bench. Both the chief justice and Stevens offered to cancel the event in deference to Marty Ginsburg's death, but Justice Ginsburg insisted that the event proceed, even though she herself chose not to go. Maryan Stevens was not well enough to attend, and it was, on the whole, a depressing occasion. The justices were tired, sad, grumpy, and frustrated.\n\nNo one, though, was as downcast as Sandra Day O'Connor.\n\n#  \n# **16**\n\n#    \n**THE RETIRED JUSTICES DISSENT**\n\nShe was still the most famous justice. She had been retired for five years, but she was stopped for autographs every day. Always\u2014 _always_ \u2014parents introduced their daughters to Sandra Day O'Connor. Some people wept. There were nine justices on the Supreme Court, but people recognized O'Connor more than any of them\u2014which was not surprising, since she was the most influential woman in American history. And in keeping with her remarkable life, O'Connor figured out a new way to be a retired Supreme Court justice, too.\n\nIn recent decades, Supreme Court justices had all done the same thing in retirement: they died, usually sooner rather than later. But O'Connor was only seventy-five in 2005\u2014not especially old for a justice\u2014and in good health. She loved the job. She reveled in her role as the swing justice. But she decided to quit anyway.\n\nIt was because of her husband, John O'Connor. John had been a successful lawyer in Phoenix, but his career never really took off after Sandra was appointed to the Court and the couple moved to Washington in 1981. If John ever felt resentment for being an especially well-known trailing spouse, he never made it apparent. He was an enthusiastic, almost giddy, backer of his wife's career. (So was Marty Ginsburg for Ruth.) For many years, however, John had been displaying symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as Alzheimer's disease. The signs were barely visible outside the O'Connor family at first, but his decline accelerated in the new millennium. In 2003, Sandra started bringing him to Court on most days; he sat on the sofa in her outer office while she worked. Then, in 2004, John started wandering away, which is a common and dangerous problem for Alzheimer's patients. The situation was becoming unmanageable.\n\nSo in the spring of 2005, O'Connor went to see Rehnquist, who was trying to recover from thyroid cancer. She explained that she was considering leaving the Court to take care of John. O'Connor knew that neither she nor Rehnquist wanted to leave the Court with two vacancies. Who should leave first? Was Rehnquist thinking of retiring?\n\nIt was an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary friendship. They had known each other for more than five decades. Law school classmates at Stanford, they both decided to settle in the nascent metropolis of Phoenix. There, they went to the same pool parties with their young families. Somehow, improbably, they both wound up on the Supreme Court, Rehnquist in 1972, O'Connor nine years later. Her insistent moderation cost him several of his most precious goals\u2014like overturning _Roe v. Wade_ and ending affirmative action. But the affection between them never dimmed.\n\nO'Connor was expecting Rehnquist to say that he would step down; though she didn't know the details, O'Connor could tell that he was desperately ill. But the chief told his old friend that he was going to try to hang on. He did not plan to retire and hoped soon to return to work.\n\nThat left O'Connor with an excruciating dilemma. No one had loved her role as much as O'Connor had, and she was more than capable of continuing to do the job. She didn't want to leave. But she thought John needed her, and that trumped her other misgivings. Over the years, many male members of the Court had nursed their wives through illnesses, but few if any considered leaving the Court to provide the care. In a way, this decision made O'Connor one more kind of pioneer.\n\nOn July 1, 2005, O'Connor announced her decision to resign, to be effective upon the confirmation of her successor. None of her colleagues except Rehnquist knew it was coming. Without exception, they were stunned.\n\nWhat followed was, to use a favorite O'Connor expression, \"a mess.\" George W. Bush nominated Roberts to replace her. Then, over Labor Day weekend, Rehnquist succumbed to cancer, and Bush named Roberts to be chief justice. After Roberts was confirmed, Bush nominated Harriet Miers to replace O'Connor. Miers was grievously underqualified, and her selection turned into a tragicomedy that took several weeks to open and close. Months after O'Connor announced her resignation, there was still no replacement. It was not until November that Bush sent Alito's name to the Senate.\n\nO'Connor's frustrations mounted. The delays were maddening. O'Connor was a planner, a doer, a control freak of sorts. She was the kind of person who took it upon herself to choreograph her law clerks' lives as well as her own life. Three mornings a week, her female clerks were expected to join her for aerobics on the basketball court on the top floor of the building. (Male clerks were often instructed to lose weight by other means.) O'Connor arranged for special access to exhibits at the National Gallery, and attendance for clerks was not optional. In her Arizona days, O'Connor had proudly worn the nickname the Yenta of Paradise Valley, and later she was not shy about encouraging her clerks to experience the joys of married life. Now, finally, she wanted nothing more than to leave the Court and take care of her own husband, and circumstances kept conspiring to prevent her from doing so.\n\nAnd now it was up to George W. Bush to reshape _her_ Court. O'Connor had voted with the majority in _Bush v. Gore_ , but she came to regard the presidency that she and her colleagues had delivered to the country as a disaster. On one of her final days on the Court, O'Connor was explaining her decision to leave to David Souter, as the two of them stood outside her chambers. \"What makes this harder,\" O'Connor told Souter, \"is that it's my party that's destroying the country.\"\n\nO'Connor's bill of particulars against Bush was extensive. \"He's destroying the military with adventures that we aren't prepared for,\" she said, for the war in Iraq was going poorly. \"We've got colossal deficit spending, and the only way he got reelected was by getting states to vote on same-sex marriage.\n\n\"I thought Republicans stood for a strong military, a balanced budget\u2014and Barry Goldwater never gave a damn who you slept with,\" O'Connor went on. \"Bush repudiated all of that.\" Her Republican Party\u2014and Souter's\u2014was gone. Her alienation had deepened during the Terri Schiavo case. There, Republicans in Congress had rushed through a bill to force a federal judge to reexamine the case of a critically ill woman in Florida. This perverse turn on \"pro-life\" politics had a particularly ugly resonance for O'Connor, who was herself making decisions for the care of her husband.\n\nAt long last, on January 31, 2006, the Senate confirmed Alito and Sandra O'Connor could step down to be with John.\n\nO'Connor's departure was bittersweet in the extreme. During the months between her announced departure from the Court and her actual retirement, John slipped completely into the grip of Alzheimer's. He no longer recognized his wife of nearly fifty-four years. O'Connor and their three sons made the painful decision to move John to a long-term-care facility in Phoenix.\n\nO'Connor handled even that experience in a groundbreaking way. In November 2007, Veronica Sanchez, a television news reporter in Phoenix, called a local nursing home to do a report on \"mistaken attachments\" among patients with Alzheimer's disease. With this syndrome, patients can forget their relationships with their spouses and other family members and \"fall in love\" with the people they see every day, usually other patients. At the last minute, Sanchez's story fell apart, and she was directed to another facility, the Huger Mercy Living Center, where she was told two families had agreed to tell their story on camera. Sandra Day O'Connor's family was one of them.\n\nSanchez wound up interviewing the O'Connors' son Scott, who lives in Phoenix, and he allowed John to be shown on camera with the woman who was the object of his affection. The story caused a worldwide sensation. A few months later, O'Connor herself testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging. She said Alzheimer's was \"a subject that is very dear to my heart and to the hearts of the millions of American families who love and provide care to relatives who have Alzheimer's disease. As you know, I became one of these caregivers in 1990, when my husband, John, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Living with this disease has been sad and difficult for my entire family.\" (The date of John's diagnosis had never before been made public.) O'Connor asked the senators for additional funding for research on the disease and its effects on the families of its victims. John O'Connor died on November 11, 2009.\n\nThis kind of work was, of course, admirable and courageous, as well as politically uncontroversial. But O'Connor also had other ideas for how to spend an unquiet retirement.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nIn part, O'Connor did the traditional work of retired justices. She continued to sit occasionally as a judge on the various circuit courts of appeals. (When she did, the benches for spectators were always filled.) She also took up the cause of civics education in schools. Horrified that two-thirds of American adults could not name all three branches of government (and a third could not name even one), O'Connor started traveling around the country advocating that public schools restore civics to a more prominent place in their curriculums. She founded and became the public face of a nonprofit organization, iCivics, that produced lesson plans and Web games to promote civics education. During her tenure on the Court, O'Connor traveled more and gave more speeches than any of her colleagues, and her schedule barely slackened during her retirement.\n\nO'Connor had another cause, too, which she called judicial independence. At one level, the issue seemed almost bland, like literacy or nutrition, the kind of concern that a First Lady might embrace. O'Connor had been the nation's best-known judge, so it might seem natural that she would go on to speak out on behalf of fellow members of her profession. In fact, judicial independence, especially O'Connor's version of it, was an intensely partisan subject\u2014and the former justice had very much chosen sides.\n\nThe history of judicial selection has tracked larger themes in American history. The Constitution invested the president with the power to nominate all federal judges, with the \"advice and consent\" of the Senate. That system has never changed. However, in state courts, where the great majority of civil and criminal lawsuits are resolved, the systems had evolved a great deal over time. In the Jacksonian era, before the Civil War, most states moved to electing judges, which was perceived as a form of bringing democracy to the courts. By the Progressive era, this system was under criticism, because elections were largely under the control of political parties, which were often corrupt. Progressives created \"merit selection\" systems, which usually involved the appointment of judges by governors or even independent panels; these systems sometimes included retention elections, where voters had the right to evict judges every few years. The \"Missouri plan,\" adopted in 1940, gave the power to nominate judges to an independent commission, and allowed the governor to select from the commission's list. Many states adopted a version of this plan. Thirty-nine states have judicial elections for at least some judgeships.\n\nThe politics of judicial elections changed in the 1980s. Business interests began lining up behind Republican candidates who promised to limit tort awards; plaintiffs' trial lawyers, with fewer resources, began subsidizing Democrats. Elections, especially for state supreme courts, started to cost millions of dollars. Overall, Republicans thrived, especially in the South. (Karl Rove first became famous because his campaigns turned the Texas Supreme Court from all Democratic to all Republican.) Later, social conservatives joined business conservatives in pushing for Republican judges\u2014and for moving states from systems of appointed judges to those of elected judges.\n\nIn short, by the time O'Connor took up the cause of judicial independence, the partisan battle lines were clearly drawn on the issue. Republicans supported judicial elections; Democrats wanted appointive systems. O'Connor joined the Democratic side, loudly and passionately. Earlier in her tenure, she was more ambivalent about these issues, but her embrace of judicial independence paralleled her move to the left on a variety of other matters. O'Connor's passion for the issue reflected her own experience as an elected official\u2014real-world experience that was keenly missed at the Court. She knew what it was like to raise money for elections, and she knew how money could corrupt the judicial process. It was not an abstraction to her. She understood how political decisions were made, and she could communicate the earthy reality in a characteristically direct way. Urging the members of a state bar association to lobby for more funding for the courts, she told them, \"Make sure to drop in some sob stories. If things get really bad, buy some beer and Mexican food, and have them all over.\" (O'Connor herself, who enjoyed a scotch, was fond of quoting her husband: \"You don't have to have a drink to have a good time, but why take the chance?\")\n\nO'Connor stepped into one of the hottest political fights in the nation in 2010. The previous year, the Iowa Supreme Court had ruled unanimously that the Iowa constitution required that same-sex couples be allowed to marry. Three of those justices happened to be facing retention elections in 2010, and a conservative Republican activist organized a campaign to defeat them. Alone among national public figures, O'Connor traveled to Iowa to defend the three judges. \"Justice Souter and I both look at the Court as the one safe place where a person can have a fair and impartial hearing to resolve a legal issue, and we have to keep that,\" O'Connor said. \"We have to address the pressures being applied to that one safe place... to have it where judges are not subject to outright retaliation.\" Despite O'Connor's efforts, all three of the Iowa justices were voted out of office. (In Iowa, O'Connor described her mission as supporting judicial independence, not same-sex marriage per se. Her views on gay rights had evolved enormously, too. In 1986, O'Connor had voted with the majority in _Bowers v. Hardwick_ , which upheld a Georgia prosecution of a gay man for having consensual sex. In 2003, in _Lawrence v. Texas_ , O'Connor was part of the majority that overturned _Bowers_. By 2010, there was little doubt that O'Connor favored full equality, including marriage rights, for gay people.)\n\nIn Nevada, also in 2010, O'Connor's venture into electoral politics turned into an embarrassment. Shortly before the election, she went to Las Vegas to support a ballot initiative that would have moved the state to a primarily appointive system for judges. Through a series of snafus, supporters of the initiative used O'Connor's voice on robocalls that went out to about 50,000 voters\u2014in the middle of the night. (One woman called the local newspaper to complain that, since she had a son in intensive care, she thought the call meant that he had died.) Through the Supreme Court public affairs office, O'Connor put out a statement that she had not authorized the use of her voice in this way. In any event, O'Connor's side in the initiative lost.\n\nThe change in O'Connor's circumstances was striking. She had gone from being one of the most powerful people in the country to an itinerant speechmaker who was not nearly as sure in her footing as a political player as she had been as a judge. O'Connor placed herself in an awkward position by taking such an outspoken role in elective campaigns. She had retired from the Supreme Court but remained a federal judge. Conservatives complained that she had violated ethical norms. She hadn't\u2014the rules were vague\u2014but the questions were unpleasant. She weathered them and went right back out on the road. O'Connor could have done what most retired justices do\u2014pick up an honorary degree here or there, teach a class every once in a while. But O'Connor saw what was happening to her country\u2014and her Court\u2014and she couldn't let go.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nO'Connor had an unusual conversational tic. She divided the world into things (and people) that were \"attractive\" and \"unattractive.\" The distinction had little to do with appearance, but more with O'Connor's general sense of how things would be perceived in the world. O'Connor kept up her politician's radar for public sentiment. When the Court abruptly changed course and overruled its prior decisions, that was unattractive. Colin Powell was attractive. John Ashcroft was unattractive.\n\nJohn Roberts was the very definition of attractive. When he became chief justice, O'Connor already knew him as a skilled and accomplished oral advocate before the Court. She was dazzled, like so many others, by his graceful and learned testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. O'Connor overlapped with Roberts for only about four months on the Court\u2014from October 2005 to January 2006\u2014but it was long enough for her to be enchanted with his debut. She told the story of his graceful handling of the exploding lightbulb all the time and went so far as to write a gushy tribute to the new chief justice in _Time_. \"The stars must have been aligned that January morning in 1955 when John G. Roberts Jr. was born in Buffalo, N.Y., because almost everything thereafter led him straight to the Supreme Court of the U.S.,\" the story began. The new chief justice had made the transition to the Court \"seamlessly and effectively,\" she wrote, concluding, \"I'm certain he will serve a long tenure in the role and be an effective leader not only for the Supreme Court but for all the federal courts in the nation.\"\n\nThen O'Connor started seeing the decisions. It wasn't one, or two, or even three of them. Abortion, civil rights, women's rights\u2014it was as if the Roberts Court had made a special project of targeting O'Connor's legacy in particular. Hers had been the crucial vote in _Casey_ in 1992 to save the core of _Roe v. Wade_ \u2014and then _Gonzales v. Carhart_ jeopardized it. O'Connor had preserved affirmative action in _Grutter_ in 2003\u2014and Roberts belittled it in _Parents Involved_ , the Seattle school integration case. O'Connor had projected onto Roberts her idea of what a chief justice, and what a Republican, should be. But if she had chosen to look more closely, it was always clear that Roberts reflected his own era of the Republican Party, not O'Connor's.\n\nIn private, O'Connor had a disparaging word for what she saw in Roberts\u2014 _an agenda_. Rehnquist was different, she said. He had taken each case one at a time; he had not tried to force his vision of the Constitution on the Court. This was actually revisionist history on O'Connor's part. Rehnquist was just about as conservative as Roberts was, but Rehnquist didn't have the votes to enact his agenda. Roberts, in most cases, did. (In slightly different ways, O'Connor, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and even Stevens all created a kind of posthumous cult of William Rehnquist. _He was moderate! He played fair! He respected precedent! Rehnquist was great! Those were the good old days!_ These reimaginings of him had more to do with these justices' distaste for Roberts than with a realistic assessment of Rehnquist.)\n\nMostly O'Connor kept her views about the Roberts Court private. Given her wide circle of friends, frequent travels, and outgoing nature, her opinions were hardly a secret. But _Citizens United_ prompted her to shed her public reserve. The main reason the retired O'Connor had come to favor an appointive judiciary over an elected one was to limit the power of money in campaigns. And here the Court was casting aside decades of limits on campaign finance. \"This rise in judicial campaigning makes last week's decision in _Citizens United_ a problem, an increasing problem, for maintaining an independent judiciary,\" O'Connor said at a conference at Georgetown University Law Center just a few days after the decision. \"No state can possibly benefit from having that much money injected into a political campaign.\" Like _Carhart II_ , the partial-birth abortion case, _Citizens United_ illustrated the importance of the Alito-for-O'Connor shift on the Court. If she had remained, that 5\u20134 decision would have gone the other way.\n\nBut as she knew better than anyone, O'Connor had left the Court, and she had to live with the consequences of her decision. Her health was still good, but midway through her ninth decade, she was more prickly and less patient than she used to be. There were two questions that she especially disdained, and she was asked them all the time. The first was about _Bush v. Gore_. Did she think she voted the right way? \"It wasn't the end of the world,\" she said, in a typical response, at a conference in Aspen. \"They had recounts of the votes in four counties by the press, and it did not change the outcome at all. So forget it. It's over!\" Her defensiveness invited speculation about the state of her conscience on the subject.\n\nThe other question was whether she regretted stepping down from the Court. To know O'Connor was to recognize that she did not traffic in regrets. The rancher's daughter had no truck with whining about what might have been. Asked about what the Roberts Court had done to her legacy, she said at one point, \"What would you feel? I'd be a little bit disappointed. If you think you've been helpful, and then it's dismantled, you think, 'Oh, dear.' But life goes on. It's not always positive.\"\n\nDavid Souter's life, on the other hand, was pretty close to always positive\u2014or at least close to what he always wanted.\n\nJust a few months before George H. W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1990, Souter was confirmed as a judge on the First Circuit. (He had been a justice on the New Hampshire Supreme Court for several years.) If Souter had stayed on the First Circuit, he would have had chambers in Concord, gone down to Boston about once a month for arguments, and lived in his old family home in Weare. It was the life he wanted. Now, twenty years later, Souter finally had it.\n\nBy the time Souter returned to New Hampshire full-time, the old family farm house was literally disintegrating under the weight of all his books. So he bought a newer one closer to Concord and started the laborious process of moving his possessions. Efficiency was never a Souter strong suit, so he spent months shuttling between the two houses, not living entirely in one place or the other. As a retired justice, Souter was eligible to sit on the First Circuit, but that court was short-handed and Souter soon had a substantial caseload. The Supreme Court, however, only gave him a secretary based in Washington, not Concord, so his chambers on Pleasant Street were strewn with disorderly piles of papers and books. Souter didn't mind. He went running through the hills every morning. He retired at sixty-nine, and a year or two in New Hampshire made him look five years younger. (He did miss his friends in Philadelphia, where he had been the Third Circuit justice for many years. He thought about visiting, but Philadelphia (!) just seemed too far to go.)\n\nSouter put the Supreme Court behind him\u2014almost. In May 2010, he agreed to give the commencement address at Harvard and get a few things off his chest. Souter had watched with impatience as Roberts, in his confirmation hearing, had compared himself to an umpire, limited only to the mechanical process of calling balls and strikes. Likewise, Souter had spent a generation confronting the resolute certainties of Scalia and Thomas that they could find the answer to any legal question in the plain text or the original meaning of the Constitution. Souter did not believe there was any such certainty. (He didn't share his predecessor William Brennan's liberal certainties either.) Rather, Souter built his jurisprudence around embracing the complexities and contradictions built into the Constitution.\n\n\"The explicit terms of the Constitution, in other words, can create a conflict of approved values, and the explicit terms of the Constitution do not resolve that conflict when it arises,\" he told the crowd at Harvard, citing the Pentagon Papers case, where the values of a free press conflicted with the need for national security. \"A choice may have to be made, not because language is vague but because the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways.\" To Souter, originalism and textualism were based on false promises. \"If we cannot share every intellectual assumption that formed the minds of those who framed the charter, we can still address the constitutional uncertainties the way they must have envisioned, by relying on reason, by respecting all the words the Framers wrote, by facing facts, and by seeking to understand their meaning for living people.\" _Their meaning for living people_ , not the intent of the framers\u2014those, in Souter's genteel way, were fighting words. In temperament and style of living, Souter was probably closer to the eighteenth century than any other justice, but he recognized the folly of trying to re-create the world of the framers and then render decisions as they would have done. In all the important ways, Souter was a modern man.\n\nThe Harvard speech was very much an aberration. Souter was out of the game, and happily so. When he was on the Court, Souter had longed to take the time to read (reread, actually) Proust and Dickens, and that was what he was finally getting around to doing.\n\nOne thing gnawed at him. Before he left Washington, he had meant to take something of the Court with him. He wanted a souvenir, a keepsake, that might remind him of his days as a justice, but he never found the right thing.\n\nThen, some time after he returned to New Hampshire, Souter had an idea. When he was a boy, he had collected stamps, and the postmaster in Weare used to save copies of the new issues for him. He remembered that when he was about eleven years old, there was a three-cent stamp with a picture of the Supreme Court building. Souter burrowed into his files and found the stamp, and he noticed that it featured the windows where he had had his chambers for many years. Souter put the stamp in a frame. That was good enough for him.\n\n# **17**\n\n#    \n**SOFTBALL POLITICS**\n\nStevens's announcement of his departure, in April 2010, was no surprise. Neither was Obama's reaction to filling a second vacancy on the Court. The president thought the nomination and confirmation of Sotomayor had been a great success. So he decided to start with the same list of candidates and make his choice in the same way he had selected his first justice.\n\nFrom the perspective of the White House, however, the world now looked very different. Sotomayor was nominated during Obama's honeymoon, which was long over by the time Stevens retired. There had been no significant recovery from the devastating recession, and the blame for this failure was starting to attach to Obama. In January, Scott Brown had won a dramatic upset victory in the race for the late Senator Edward Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts. That election took the Democratic majority in the Senate below the filibuster threshold of sixty. That same month, the _Citizens United_ decision had reminded the White House just how much harm the Supreme Court could do to them. In light of his political weakness, Obama wanted to place the right justice on the Supreme Court while also looking to avoid a big fight in the Senate.\n\nThe three losing finalists for the Souter seat had been Kagan, Diane Wood, and Janet Napolitano. As before, though, Napolitano was doomed by her success as secretary of homeland security. Obama liked the job she was doing there, and nominating a politician, with a history of public positions on controversial issues, was problematic in the best of circumstances. Since she was out, Obama wanted to consider more options.\n\nMerrick Garland joined the finalists. Bill Clinton had put Garland on the D.C. Circuit in 1997, and he had been a moderate liberal on that Court for more than a decade. He was viewed as an easy bet for confirmation, if not an especially politically advantageous choice. With the uncertainty surrounding the coming midterm elections, Obama was looking at a substantially reduced Democratic majority in the Senate during the second half of his term. It was wise to keep Garland in reserve in case he needed Republican support for confirmation. \"I need a play I can run in 2011 or 2012,\" Obama said to an adviser.\n\nGarland had graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and after his name leaked as a possible nominee, Obama received some criticism for educational snobbery. With Stevens leaving, the Supreme Court would consist of five products of Harvard Law School and three of Yale. (Ginsburg's law degree came from Columbia, though she spent her first two years at Harvard.) Was that a healthy thing? Were there only two law schools in the whole country? Obama wanted some diversity.\n\nHe added Sidney Thomas to the list. Thomas had an impeccably non\u2013Ivy League pedigree. He was a graduate of Montana State University and the University of Montana Law School whom Clinton nominated to the Ninth Circuit in 1995. A prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Max Baucus, the state's senior senator, he was also among the most liberal judges on the most liberal appeals court in the country. (Some in the White House did relish the idea of a liberal \"Justice Thomas\" on the Supreme Court.) The White House made a point of leaking the fact that Thomas had been brought in for an interview with Obama, but he was never a realistic candidate.\n\nAgain, the real choice came down to Diane Wood and one other candidate, this time Elena Kagan.\n\nKagan went into the contest with what might be called the John Roberts advantage. Through his work in the Reagan White House, Roberts knew many of the most important Republican lawyers in the country. It was true that Roberts hadn't written much when he was appointed to the Supreme Court, but that didn't matter a lot, because these people _knew_ him. They had been in that gilded foxhole together. Roberts didn't have to prove his conservative or intellectual bona fides. He was an insider.\n\nSo was Kagan. In the Clinton White House, she had worked closely with Rahm Emanuel, who was currently the White House chief of staff. Kagan and Cynthia Hogan, Biden's chief counsel, had been associates together at Williams & Connolly, and then Hogan had hired Kagan to assist Biden in the Ginsburg confirmation hearings in 1993. (That meant Biden knew Kagan as well.) Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff, was a law school peer of Kagan's and one of her closest friends. Danielle Gray, the young lawyer who wrote the first vetting memos on Supreme Court candidates, had been her student at Harvard. As for Wood, the brother of Susan Davies, the deputy White House counsel, had once been a law clerk for her, but that could scarcely compare to Kagan's lineup of friends and advocates.\n\nWood did have one important supporter: Barack Obama. He liked her. He appreciated her cerebral nature and even temperament. He was impressed that Wood had worked so successfully with conservatives on the Seventh Circuit. After all, this Supreme Court was full of Republicans and likely to remain that way for years; any Obama nominee would have to build coalitions to win cases. Obama started asking his advisers: How many five-to-fours could Wood swing to her side each year? How many could Kagan? Garland? No one could say for sure, of course, but the question illustrated what mattered to Obama. _Citizens United_ had demonstrated with great clarity the implications of losing these close decisions. Obama didn't want someone who could write eloquent dissents. He wanted someone who could _win_.\n\nSo: Wood or Kagan? Neither one of them offered the kind of compelling biographical story that Sotomayor did. Both Wood and Kagan grew up middle-class and became law professors. Nothing very striking there. The prospect of three women on the Supreme Court for the first time was appealing, but that didn't help him choose between the two finalists. In fact, Obama was amused at his advisers' increasingly desperate attempts to draw distinctions between them. (In response to one argument for Wood, Obama said, \"Your pitch is that she is a regular person, and she plays _chamber music_?\")\n\nAs the discussion continued, Obama's native caution came to the fore. Choosing Wood meant a fight over abortion in the Senate. She had also made critical remarks in speeches about the Bush administration's war on terror, and these comments would be used to portray her as weak. With fifty-nine Democrats in the Senate, Wood would probably win, but was the struggle really necessary? Could Obama get the justice he wanted without the heartburn? When Wood came for her second interview, Obama told her, \"You realize that there is a political dimension to this decision.\" Correctly, Wood recognized that was not a promising sign.\n\nKagan's backers also played the age card. Kagan was born in 1960; she had just turned fifty. Wood was born in 1950; she was about to turn sixty. (Her supporters pointed out that Wood's _mother_ was still in excellent shape.) A younger nominee probably meant a longer tenure\u2014and a greater legacy for Obama on the Supreme Court. In the end, though, Margaret Witt might have tipped the balance.\n\nMargaret Witt enlisted in the air force in 1987 and enjoyed a sterling record as a flight nurse, first on active duty and later in the reserves. Like many gay people in the military, she avoided questions about her personal life. But in 2004, the estranged husband of a woman Witt was seeing reported her to the air force. After an investigation, Witt was discharged in 2007 under the policy known as \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell.\" From her home in Washington State, Witt, who was by then a major, launched one of the many legal challenges to the policy.\n\nObama ran for president on the promise that he would repeal \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell.\" The policy was enshrined in a law, so Obama could not change it without congressional approval. Preoccupied with other matters, Obama did not press legislators on the issue during his first year in office. So lawsuits like Witt's proliferated. Witt lost in the district court, but then she won a major victory in the Ninth Circuit. The question became whether the government should appeal the Ninth Circuit's ruling to the Supreme Court.\n\nAs solicitor general, Kagan had to determine the government's position on Witt's appeal. Like most others in the Obama administration, Kagan opposed \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell.\" She thought Congress should repeal the law, but there was little question in her mind that it was constitutional. And Kagan thought the Ninth Circuit's decision was clearly wrong. She believed the government should ask the justices to overturn the decision.\n\nAt the Justice Department and the White House, many people\u2014most, in fact\u2014disagreed with Kagan. The president was already facing charges from his supporters in the gay community that he had betrayed his promises. \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell\" was manifestly unjust. If the Ninth Circuit made it a little harder to discharge gay service members, then so much the better. Pushing his appeal would be a needless insult to some of the president's biggest fans\u2014and a disgrace to honorable members of the armed forces like Margaret Witt. With the administration split, there's only one thing to do. The president has to decide.\n\nSo, during her first year as solicitor general, Kagan made the case to Obama that he should approve an appeal of the Ninth Circuit's decision. Her friends warned her of the risks of taking an unpopular opinion to the White House. Everyone knew she was a candidate for the Supreme Court, and it wouldn't pay to alienate the president on a touchy issue like this one. But Kagan thought the dispute was about the rule of law. There are right ways to change the law and wrong ways. What the Ninth Circuit did was the wrong way.\n\nObama rejected Kagan's advice. The government let the Ninth Circuit decision stand. But Kagan had impressed the president. Obama had a strange affinity for people who disagreed with him. It was often said that, in staffing his administration, Obama treated supporters of Hillary Clinton better than his own backers. Kagan's polite but resolute defense of a losing cause resonated with the president. In addition, she presented no political problems on abortion or national security. She was probably an easy confirmation. She was young. (As for Margaret Witt, after her victory in the Ninth Circuit, she won her trial in the district court. The government ultimately settled with her, giving her full retirement benefits. Congress repealed \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell\" in December 2010.)\n\nOn Monday, May 10, 2010, Obama introduced Kagan as his nominee. The moment had little of the drama of Sotomayor's, but the rollout was smooth and free of controversy. The president called Kagan \"one of the nation's foremost legal minds,\" which was hyperbolic, given her modest record of scholarship. Obama also praised her \"openness to a broad array of viewpoints\" and her \"fair-mindedness.\" These would be important themes for her confirmation strategy, based largely (and accurately) on her role in taming the ideological conflict at Harvard Law School. (Sotomayor broke the traditional silence of current justices toward nominees and called Kagan to congratulate her.)\n\nKagan's nomination became the subject of a peculiar media phenomenon. The day after she was announced, the _Wall Street Journal_ ran a large front-page photograph of her playing softball when she was a teacher at the University of Chicago Law School, in the early nineties. Two days later, on May 13, the _New York Post_ , which, like the _Journal_ , was owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, ran the same photograph, with a full-page headline that read, \"Does This Photo Suggest That High Court Nominee Elena Kagan Is a Lesbian?\"\n\nThe issue had a close historical analogy. In 1990, when David Souter was nominated to the Supreme Court, he was, like Kagan, fifty years old and never married. For a brief time, the issue of his sexual orientation came up in the press. (This was when the myth arose that Souter always lived with his mother. That was not true, but the insinuation of such an arrangement was the point.) Johnny Carson, who was still on the air, made a few mild jokes about Souter. \"He's lived in the same house his whole life,\" Carson said. \"And he's never gotten married\u2014which explains why he's lived in the same house his entire life!\" The issue, such as it was, of Souter's private life was soon dropped. Given the relatively small number of news and entertainment outlets in 1990, and their relative timidity about exploring such issues, the story faded away.\n\nThe big difference in 2010 was the Internet. Once the softball picture was widely circulated, the story took on a life of its own. It wasn't just critics of Obama who were speculating about her sexuality. Andrew Sullivan, a prominent blogger of eclectic views, and himself a gay man, made Kagan's sexuality a major focus. \"If Kagan is straight, why have so many people simply assumed she's gay?\" Sullivan wrote in an early post. \"The kind of 'I'm-out-but-not-really-out' straddle cannot work any more in national public discourse.\" Later he wrote, \"We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay... and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively.\" Other bloggers responded to Sullivan, who continued to pursue the story, which wound on for thousands of words. On _The Colbert Report_ (another institution that did not exist in 1990), Stephen Colbert did a segment mocking the _Journal_ and the _Post_ for creating and then reporting the rumor about Kagan's sex life\u2014but the overall effect was to keep the issue in circulation.\n\nKagan's advisers in the White House struggled with how, and whether, to respond. Was being gay an \"accusation\" that had to be denied? Would a denial suggest that being gay was somehow sinister or wrong? Did addressing the rumor dignify it and extend the story? How does one \"prove\" that someone is gay or straight anyway? Was it better to say nothing at all? For her part, Kagan just seethed.\n\nIn short order, the administration reached a consensus: Kagan should be seen by the public as what she was\u2014a heterosexual. The truth mattered. Ron Klain, Kagan's friend from law school, hit on the disclosure strategy that the White House ultimately adopted. During her second and third years of law school, Kagan was roommates with Sarah Walzer and Walzer's boyfriend (now husband), John Barrett. They had e-mailed Klain and volunteered to be \"witnesses\" for Kagan's heterosexuality. Klain asked Walzer to give a single interview on the subject of Kagan's personal life. It would be with _Politico_ , an online publication that was widely read in political circles but with limited circulation outside the Beltway. Walzer agreed, and she spoke to _Politico_ 's Ben Smith.\n\nThe resulting story, which ran under the headline \"Elena Kagan's Friends: She's Not Gay,\" was excruciating but effective. \"I've known her for most of her adult life and I know she's straight,\" Walzer told Smith. \"She dated men when we were in law school, we talked about men\u2014who in our class was cute, who she would like to date, all of those things. She definitely dated when she was in D.C. after law school, when she was in Chicago\u2014and she just didn't find the right person.\" Walzer had founded a pioneering social service agency on Long Island, but her role in the story was that of giggly best friend. Walzer recalled \"discussion about who she might be interested in\u2014the usual girl talk stuff\u2014talk about how to get his attention.\" This was \"less along the lines of how to wear your hair,\" Walzer said. \"It's an ongoing challenge for very smart women\u2014there are not very many men who would choose women who are smarter than they are.\" The story accomplished its purpose. The issue faded.\n\nKagan had a very different experience from Sotomayor preparing for her confirmation testimony. Sotomayor had bristled at the \"bright young things\" in the White House counsel's office who insisted she become fluent in the full range of constitutional law. Her prep sessions were tense and laborious (and she was in constant pain from her broken ankle). Kagan, on the other hand, was completely familiar with the world of Supreme Court law clerks. Discussing cases was as natural as breathing for her.\n\nAs with Sotomayor, the White House team recognized that Kagan's \"courtesy calls\" on senators were serious auditions. Duly prepared, she was ready to answer (or duck) questions about abortion, affirmative action, _Citizens United_ , and a whole range of other issues. But they rarely came up. Instead, over and over, the senators asked her about her position on guns. Sotomayor had much the same experience. It is difficult for people outside the day-to-day operations of the political system to understand the pervasive obsession with gun rights in the contemporary Republican Party, and among many Democrats as well. More to the point, it was especially hard for Kagan and Sotomayor to fathom, since both had spent their entire lives in urban enclaves, where the only gun owners tended to be cops and criminals.\n\nIn making the rounds, Kagan also suffered from a postconfirmation backlash among Republicans against Sotomayor. In 2009, Sotomayor had promised senators that she would have an open mind in the _McDonald_ case, which was then pending. There, the Court ultimately ruled 5\u20134 that states, like the federal government, had to respect an individual's right to bear arms. Republicans were so used to winning on gun issues\u2014national Democrats had basically thrown in the towel on gun control\u2014that they were offended that Sotomayor had the temerity to vote with her liberal colleagues. Consequently, many senators found Kagan's promise of an open mind unpersuasive. In the course of the meetings, Kagan confessed that she had never gone hunting, which in turn won her several invitations to join various senators on their expeditions. Kagan demurred, but she did promise, if she was confirmed, to ask Justice Scalia if she could tag along with him.\n\nThe most important news for Kagan's prospective vote in the Senate came shortly after her nomination. The National Rifle Association announced its opposition to her and, more importantly, indicated that her confirmation would be a \"scored\" vote for the senators. A perfect NRA voting record was extremely important to many senators, and now it was clear that a vote for Kagan would ruin any such rating. Kagan had real hopes of picking off a substantial number of Republican votes. When she worked at the White House, she had good relationships with John McCain and Orrin Hatch. Making the rounds on Capitol Hill after her nomination, Kagan had especially friendly meetings with Richard Lugar and Lindsey Graham. The decision by the NRA to score the vote essentially killed Kagan's chances of winning over more than a handful of Republicans. In particular, Hatch, of Utah, and Lugar, of Indiana, were looking at possible primary challengers who were going to argue that they were insufficiently conservative. There was no point in their taking a risk on this vote, especially since Kagan was likely to be confirmed anyway. (Lugar lost his primary in 2012; Hatch survived his race later that year.)\n\nThe Kagan and Sotomayor nominations showed how politicized the confirmation process had become. After all, there was no doubt that Kagan was intelligent and ethical enough to be a Supreme Court justice. Perhaps, on those grounds alone, she should have won overwhelming confirmation in the Senate. As recently as 1993, Ginsburg had received ninety-six votes, and her background, which included extensive work on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, was far more politically controversial than Kagan's. The same point could be made about the opposition to Alito, who won by only 58\u201342, despite formal qualifications that were as good as or better than Kagan's. By 2010, it was clear that the days of confirmation with ninety-plus votes for anyone were over.\n\nIn a way, the politicization of the process was healthy, or at least revealing. The Supreme Court is not an honor society for smart people. It's the final arbiter on scores of the most controversial political issues in the United States, including gun control. The NRA was under no obligation to indulge the persistent myth that qualities like intelligence or integrity mattered most for a Supreme Court justice. Ginsburg had intelligence and integrity; so did Scalia. What mattered far more was their ideology, which compelled them to see the Constitution in very different ways. Based on the available record, it was a reasonable conclusion that Kagan would be hostile to the NRA's interests. Opposing her confirmation was the rational thing for the NRA to do.\n\nStill, as Kagan headed into her hearings, her prospects looked bright. There was no hint of opposition from any of the fifty-nine Democrats in the Senate and no talk of filibuster from the Republicans. The arithmetic looked stacked in her favor. As with other recent Supreme Court nominees, Kagan's job in testifying was to stay out of trouble.\n\nThere was some irony in Kagan's embrace of the say-little approach that had become the norm for prospective justices in the post-Bork era. In 1995, when Kagan was still a junior professor, she wrote a 10,000-word article for the _University of Chicago Law Review_ cogently laying out the absurdities of contemporary confirmation hearings. They were \"a vapid and hollow charade,\" she wrote. \"When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public.\" For current nominees, Kagan wrote, \"the safest and surest route to the prize lay in alternating platitudinous statement and judicious silence.\"\n\nThat, of course, was the route that Kagan took. Confronted with her article at the hearing, Kagan hedged. \"I do think that much of what I wrote in 1995 was right, but that in some measure I got a bit of the balance off. I skewed it too much toward saying that answering is appropriate even when it would, you know, provide some kind of hints,\" she said. \"And I think that that was wrong. I think that, in particular, it wouldn't be appropriate for me to talk about what I think about past cases\u2014you know, to grade cases\u2014because those cases themselves might again come before the court.\" In one respect, Kagan's 1995 article did anticipate the kind of justice she would become\u2014because the bracing, colloquial writing style quickly showed up in her opinions.\n\nThe Kagan hearings were significant more for what the senators said than for what the nominee did. It was clear that originalism had become official Republican policy\u2014an enormous achievement for Antonin Scalia, who essentially introduced the idea to the wider world only about two decades earlier. As Senator John Cornyn, of Texas, framed the issue, constitutional law amounted to a contest between \"traditionalists\" who feel bound \"to a written Constitution and written laws and precedent\" and judges who believe in \"empathy, as the president has talked about it, or a living Constitution, which has no fixed meaning.\" Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, said that any view of the Constitution except \"original intent is going to give a lot of people in this country heartburn, because what it says is our intellectual capabilities are better than what our original founding documents were, and so we're so much smarter as we've matured that they couldn't have been right. And that's dangerous territory for confidence in the Court.\"\n\nLike Obama himself, Kagan did little to fight back against these notions, but there was a cost to their silence. Left unrefuted, originalism began to look like the status quo. There was no one to say that an eighteenth-century document that embraced slavery, that ignored women, and that limited the right to vote was an imperfect guide in resolving contemporary problems. No one made the argument that it was impossible to determine precisely what the framers meant in every provision (or that they often disagreed with one another about what the words meant). No one said the Constitution's values might be as important as its specific words, or that the framers never wanted or expected later generations to honor their precise understanding of their words, or that the Supreme Court's own interpretations of those words over time had value, too. Instead, the field was left to the Cornyns and Coburns. For Kagan, it was safer to glide frictionlessly to confirmation. There was only one moment that anyone would remember from Kagan's hearing. In an awkward introduction to a question about the terrorism arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on December 25, 2009, on a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit, Lindsey Graham asked Kagan where she was on that Christmas Day. Kagan didn't understand the question at first, but then after Graham clarified it, she started laughing. \"You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,\" Kagan said. The answer brought down the house and may rank as the most famous utterance by a Supreme Court justice since 1964, when Potter Stewart gave this definition of hard-core pornography: \"I know it when I see it.\"\n\nOn August 5, 2010, Kagan was confirmed by a vote of 63\u201337.\n\n# **18**\n\n#    \n**THE TEA PARTY AND THE JUSTICE'S WIFE**\n\nThe confirmation of Elena Kagan was just about the last piece of good news Barack Obama received in 2010. The legislative horse trading that was necessary to pass health care reform offended many voters. The oil spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico took many long weeks to control. Above all, the economy failed to improve. Most of the political energy in the country during the period belonged to the Tea Party.\n\nIn certain respects, the Tea Party merely reflected the contemporary Republican Party; it was antitaxation, antiregulation, and anti-abortion. But the Tea Party was distinctive in other ways. Initially, it was largely a grassroots movement prompted to action by a spontaneous cry from CNBC's Rick Santelli. On February 19, 2009, from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli denounced Obama's mortgage assistance plan as \"promoting bad behavior\" and rewarding \"the losers.\" He called for a Chicago Tea Party in July. From this spark, legions of conservatives began speaking out at town hall meetings held by members of Congress in their home districts. The protesters raised various issues at the meetings, but their most frequent target was Obama's health care reform plan.\n\nThe Tea Party remained a decentralized movement, without a single leader or platform, but it is possible to generalize about some of its distinctive qualities. Its partisans often spoke out against \"elites,\" like the highly educated president and the similarly credentialed experts in his administration. Members of this movement thought they could understand the issues facing the country as well as anyone else. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson observed in their broad study, \"Tea Party skepticism about experts is part and parcel of their direct approach to democracy, their belief in citizen activism.\" In particular, these activists thought they could interpret the Constitution better than the law professor president.\n\nThe Tea Party cared deeply about the Constitution. They passed out copies at rallies. They referred often to the Tenth Amendment (which refers to states' rights) and the commerce clause (which limits the scope of federal legislation) and cited Supreme Court decisions, often with derision. More than any other conservative movement of the last several decades, the Tea Party embraced a party line about the Constitution. Above all, Tea Party members were originalists, dedicated to restoring the modern government of the United States to the views, as they understood them, of the eighteenth-century framers. In this respect, the Tea Party reflected the broad triumph of originalism, which was also seen in the questions at Kagan's confirmation hearing. Originalism had not yet fully triumphed at the Supreme Court, but it had become the quasi-official legal theory of the Republican Party.\n\nMany of the key figures in the Tea Party movement were fascinated, even obsessed, by the text of the Constitution and its origins in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Glenn Beck, the radio and television personality who was initially the personification of the movement, talked incessantly about the Constitution and wrote a book called _The Original Argument: The Federalists' Case for the Constitution_ , _Adapted for the 21st Century_. As Beck wrote:\n\nWhat the Federalist Papers offer to us today is a guide to understanding the Founders' core constitutional principles, the theories behind their words, the whys, where, and how of the foundation of America:\n\n\u2022 Why smaller government makes better government\n\n\u2022 Where federal power ends and state power begins\n\n\u2022 How government should be organized and operated to maximize efficiency and minimize the risk of another monarchy.\n\nMark R. Levin, a radio talk show host and lawyer and another Tea Party favorite, wrote a series of best sellers devoted to supposed liberal perfidies about the Constitution. His first, published in 2005, was called _Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America_ and featured such chapters as \"Al Qaeda Gets a Lawyer,\" \"Socialism from the Bench,\" and \"Liberals Stack the Bench.\" As soon as Obama was elected, Levin wrote _Liberty and Tyranny_ , his most successful book, which included a paean to the _Lochner_ era on the Supreme Court, when the justices repeatedly struck down social welfare legislation. To Levin and the Tea Party, small government was not just a policy preference but a constitutional command. Modern justices, and Obama himself, \"are an arrogant lot who reject the nation's founding principles,\" Levin wrote. \"They teach that the Constitution should not be interpreted as the Framers intended.... No literate person can comprehend the Fourteenth Amendment to mean what the [liberals] in academia claim it to mean.\" In the political arena, Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman embraced by the Tea Party, often described herself as a \"constitutional conservative\"\u2014as if the views of the movement were mandated by the Constitution itself.\n\nIn fact, the Tea Party version of originalism went well beyond anything most of the current justices believed. Tea Party partisans insisted, like the conservative justices of the 1930s, that the Constitution forbade the regulation of the national economy. They rejected decades of cases that called for at least some separation of church and state. They believed that power should be concentrated in the states, rather than the federal government, in defiance of Supreme Court precedents that went back a century. In short, the constitutional interpretations of the Tea Party conflicted with those of every Supreme Court justice who had served on the Court since World War II\u2014except for one: Clarence Thomas.\n\nOn September 12, 2009, tens of thousands of opponents of Obama's agenda, especially his proposed health care reform, gathered in protest at the west front of the Capitol. FreedomWorks, the conservative organization led by Dick Armey, the former Republican leader of the House, helped organize the rally, and Armey was by that point an orchestrator, if not an actual leader, of the Tea Party movement. \"Give me liberty or give me death,\" Armey told the crowd. \"Well, Barack Obama is trying to make good on that.\"\n\nThe September 12 rally, and the Tea Party movement, had a transformative effect on the life of Virginia Lamp Thomas. Ginni Lamp grew up in Omaha, in a wealthy family prominent in Republican politics. She went to Creighton, in her hometown, for college and law school and moved to Washington to work for a Republican congressman, Hal Daub. In 1985, she moved to the United States Chamber of Commerce, where she fought regulations on businesses. At a conference on affirmative action sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, Lamp met Clarence Thomas, who was then chairman of the EEOC in the Reagan administration. They married in May 1987.\n\nDuring the Clinton administration, Ginni Thomas went to work for Armey, who was then the House majority leader under Speaker Newt Gingrich. Ginni was already a well-known figure in the conservative world. She was not a theoretician or a writer but an organizer, a connector of people with jobs and ideas. The work matched her temperament, which was outgoing and jovial. In 1998, she went to work at the Heritage Foundation, one of the leading conservative think tanks in Washington. Between George W. Bush's election in 2000 and his inauguration, Ginni was assigned the job of matching conservatives with political jobs in the new administration. She served as the think tank's liaison with the Bush White House.\n\nShortly before Obama won the presidency, Ginni Thomas took a position in Washington with Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts institution in rural Michigan. The school had no formal religious affiliation, but it had been described by the _National Review_ as \"a citadel of American conservatism.\" Thomas ran a speaker series for the college in Washington, called the Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship. After she was named to the post, she stated that Hillsdale students \"always study our Western heritage, American history, and the Constitution. Maybe some of what they learn at Hillsdale will rub off.\" Thomas brought in conservative speakers on such subjects as \"The Meaning and Intent of the Second Amendment\" and \"The Constitutional Roots of the Free Enterprise System.\" For her first three decades in Washington, Ginni Thomas was a behind-the-scenes player, her name known mostly by other conservatives in the capital.\n\nBut after the Tea Party's rally on September 12, 2009, Ginni Thomas took on, for her, an unprecedented public role as a fiery and outspoken leader in the conservative cause. She told Fox News that she decided to move to the front lines \"because of the march on Washington on September 12th, and seeing and being inspired by the real people who came and spent their own money to get to Washington.\" She started Liberty Central, a nonprofit at the forefront of conservative advocacy. According to tax records, it was funded by two donations: one of $500,000, the other of $50,000. Under then-current law, she was not obligated to disclose the identities of her contributors, and she never did so. Liberty Central had a website, but mostly the organization appeared to exist to support Ginni Thomas's travels.\n\nThomas spent much of 2010 on a coast-to-coast campaign against the Obama administration. As she said in an introductory video on her website, \"If you believe in limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, national security, and personal responsibility, and have felt these principles are under attack from Washington, then you've come to the right place.\" In a later interview, she said, \"I've never seen, in my thirty years in Washington, an agenda that's so far left. It's a radical, leftist agenda that grabs a lot of power to Washington so that Washington elites can pick the winners and losers.\"\n\nAll who know Clarence and Ginni Thomas remark on the depth of their love for each other. They travel the country together, often in the large motor coach that the justice calls \"the bus.\" He is a devoted football fan, and sometimes they go to see Dallas Cowboys games or those of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. (Justice Thomas adopted the team of his wife's home state.) On other occasions, they just set out and drive, usually stopping in Walmart parking lots, which allow such large vehicles to stay overnight.\n\nThe couple also share political views. In his own speeches, Justice Thomas expresses himself in terms similar to those of his wife. Answering questions at a law school in Florida, he said, \"The government has to be limited, so you have separations of powers, and some of the other enumerated powers that prevent the government from becoming our ruler. I don't know if that's happened already.\" Ginni Thomas's contempt for \"elites,\" which she shared with the Tea Party at large, also mirrored a theme in Justice Thomas's writings. Dissenting from O'Connor's opinion in _Grutter_ , upholding the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan Law School, Thomas wrote, \"All the Law School cares about is its own image among know-it-all elites.\" In a concurring opinion in _Parents Involved_ , the 2007 case that invalidated school integration plans in Seattle and Louisville, he added, \"If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.\" In his autobiography, he described the ordeal of his confirmation hearings as a time when \"America's elites were arrogantly wreaking havoc on everything my grandparents had worked for and all I'd accomplished in forty-three years of struggle.\" More than any other justice, perhaps more than any other public figure, Clarence Thomas helped inspire the Tea Party movement.\n\nFor the Thomases and the Tea Party movement, there was one issue that defined their political views in the Obama era: opposition to the president's health care reform plan.\n\nHealth care reform was a major issue in the presidential election of 2008. Until Lehman Brothers failed, the candidates talked about health care more than any other issue. It was one of the few areas of substantive disagreement between Hillary Clinton and Obama, and it came up often in the many debates between the two. Clinton supported an individual mandate\u2014a requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance, with government subsidies for those who could not afford it on their own. Obama opposed the mandate, pointing out in a television advertisement before the Pennsylvania primary: \"What's she not telling you about her health care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it. And you pay a penalty if you don't.\"\n\nOnce Obama locked up the nomination, however, his view changed. As the Princeton scholar Paul Starr reported in his account of the health care battle, Obama recognized that the insurance industry would not cooperate in the reform process unless there was a mandate. Obama understood that the government could not force insurers to accept individuals with preexisting conditions unless the risk pool included virtually every American; he needed an individual mandate to make the numbers work. As Obama told Neera Tanden, the longtime Clinton adviser who became Obama's campaign policy director for the general election, \"I kind of think Hillary was right.\"\n\nSo when Obama and senior Democrats unveiled their health care reform ideas, shortly after the election, they all included an individual mandate. It was the heart of the plan, and as during the primaries, the proposal was intensely controversial. Conservatives stated that the plan amounted to a \"government takeover\" of health care. The issue dominated American politics well into the summer of 2009.\n\nBut the most significant aspect of the debate was something that was never said. Although the individual mandate had been a matter of major public controversy for two years, _no one suggested that the proposal was unconstitutional_. Not a single public figure raised the issue. No one wrote an op-ed piece; no one in Congress gave a speech on the subject. Of course, the Obama plan was opposed with great passion. Thousands of people, including some of the best political and legal minds in the country, devoted their professional lives to defeating the Obama plan. Yet not one of them came up with the argument that the plan was unconstitutional.\n\nThat silence is significant. If there had been a plausible argument that Obama's plan (or Clinton's plan) for an individual mandate was unconstitutional, it stands to reason that _someone_ would have mentioned it during those many months. No one did. The reason was obvious. The federal government had a long and intimate regulatory connection to the health care industry. Medicare and Medicaid were central parts of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and there had been no doubt of their constitutionality for decades. Obamacare, as some called it, was simply an extension of this well-established federal role.\n\nFurthermore, the individual mandate had been a central part of health care proposals for many years, often from conservative sources. The idea first came to wide public attention in 1989, when it was proposed in a plan sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation. For many years, Newt Gingrich himself supported the individual mandate. In 1993, he said on _Meet the Press_ , \"I am for people, individuals\u2014exactly like automobile insurance\u2014individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance.\" He repeated his support for the idea as recently as 2005. Gingrich never suggested the idea\u2014his idea\u2014was unconstitutional. In 2006, Governor Mitt Romney used the individual mandate as the centerpiece of his health care reform plan for Massachusetts\u2014also without controversy about its constitutionality.\n\nFinally, though, as the debate about Obama's plan reached its crescendo, someone came up with the constitutional argument. Peter Urbanowicz had been deputy general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services under George W. Bush, and during the summer of 2009, he was a health care consultant in Washington. Following the debate in the press, he realized there was an angle that he thought had been neglected. Working with Dennis G. Smith, a former colleague at HHS who now worked for the Heritage Foundation, he decided to write up his thoughts for the Federalist Society website. The two authors posted \"Constitutional Implications of an 'Individual Mandate' in Health Care Reform\" on July 10, 2009, asserting that \"this individual mandate, if passed, would be an unprecedented federal directive that might call into question the constitutionality of such an action under Congress's taxation or interstate commerce 'regulatory' authority.\"\n\nThe Federalist Society article was written in three thousand carefully chosen, lawyerly words, but the effect on the health care debate was electric. David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, who had worked in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, wrote an op-ed piece in _The Washington Post_ translating the Urbanowicz-Smith article into more colloquial language. Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown, soon became the public face of the argument that Obama's proposal was unconstitutional. Republican members of Congress added this objection to their bill of particulars against the individual mandate.\n\nBut no one made the case against Obama's plan with greater passion than Virginia Thomas.\n\nIn February 2010, Virginia Thomas said: \"We all know we're at a big fight in our historical times and I wanted to join a lot of you on the front line. I've been with think tanks, and I've been behind the scenes, but I do want to partner with the Tea Party movement and the people we can find there who have all the right instincts.\" In March, Obama signed the health care law. In April, Ginni Thomas stated: \"Let me tell you, there's a war going on, and Washington wants to make it look real complicated, real technical. It's not so complicated, it's not so technical.... You know what it comes down to? Are we gonna be self-governed by a Constitution that starts with 'we the people,' or are we gonna be ruled by elitists who want to govern our cradle-to-grave lives?\" On Fox News, in May, Ginni added: \"The audacity of power grabbing that I'm seeing right now in cap-and-trade, health care, the stimulus plan, it's corrupt. It's a big power grab. It's picking winners and losers from Washington; it's abhorrent to our founding principles.\" At the Steamboat Institute in Colorado, in August, she said: \"We need a constitutional audit to help set up a system where Congress can reconsider different functions, and programs, and agencies.... I think we need a big spending reduction and no new taxes.... I think we need to repeal Obamacare.\" In Florida, noting her support for Republicans running for office in the midterm elections, she claimed, \"We support the more constitutionally inclined candidate.\"\n\nOn occasion, especially in television interviews, Ginni was asked about her husband's view of her activities. At a Dallas appearance, she said, \"My husband and I do really different things, by the way, but there was a tornado over our wedding when we got married. God knew that we were both troublemakers coming together. I do policy, he does law, and I don't understand that world and I'm glad God didn't tell me to do that, because I don't know how to do that.\" Justice Thomas, too, often drew the same law-versus-policy distinction when he was questioned about his wife's work. Actually, both Thomases overstated Ginni's ignorance about legal matters. After all, she was a lawyer, and she, too, invariably invoked the Constitution as the authority for smaller government.\n\nAs the midterm campaign of 2010 built toward its climax, Ginni Thomas's activities became so prominent that she drew some journalistic scrutiny. On Saturday, October 9, the _New York Times_ ran a front-page story headlined \"Activism of Thomas's Wife Could Raise Judicial Issues,\" which was a straightforward account of Ginni's political campaign.\n\nAt 7:31 that morning, Ginni decided to make a phone call.\n\n# **19**\n\n#    \n**THE THOMAS COURT**\n\nThe Clarence Thomas\u2013Anita Hill hearings remain one of the great set pieces of recent American history. Even two decades later, the facts are familiar. Anita Hill, also a graduate of Yale Law School, worked on Thomas's staff at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. According to her testimony, Thomas made a series of crude advances to her, which included references to pornographic movies starring Long Dong Silver and utterances like \"Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?\" Thomas denied her allegations categorically and denounced the hearings as a \"high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.\" On October 15, 1991, Thomas was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 52\u201348.\n\nNeither the Judiciary Committee nor any other government office has seen fit to reexamine the controversy, although a good deal of evidence has since emerged about the protagonists and their testimony. Near the end of the hearings, several other women who had worked for Thomas were prepared to corroborate Hill's testimony that Thomas had a history of making female subordinates uncomfortable with personal and sexual talk. The group included Angela Wright, Rose Jourdain, and Sukari Hardnett; other associates of Thomas's, among them Kaye Savage and Fred Cooke, would have sworn to the nominee's long-standing interest in pornography, again corroborating Hill's account. But Joseph Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, decided not to call these witnesses. In 2011, Lillian McEwen, a Washington lawyer who had a long-term romantic relationship with Thomas before he met Ginni, published a memoir, _D.C. Unmasked & Undressed_. She, too, remarked on the justice's \"strong interest in pornography.\" She also said that Thomas had designated certain colleagues as prospective sexual partners. In short, virtually all the evidence that has emerged since the hearings corroborated Hill's testimony.\n\nOver the last twenty years, Clarence and Ginni Thomas built their lives away from such troubling reminders. They conducted their social and political lives in protected spaces. Ginni made many speeches, but only in front of supportive conservative crowds. Justice Thomas spoke at law schools and Federalist Society events, where he generally received a warm welcome. In Washington, the couple was a pillar of the conservative movement, socially as well as professionally. They threw parties at their home for like-minded friends and acquaintances. The Thomases hosted at their home, and the justice officiated at, the third wedding of Rush Limbaugh. (Thomas attended, but did not preside at, Wedding No. 4.) Other friends included the radio talk show host Mark Levin. Thomas was also close to Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman and supporter of conservative causes who funded a museum in Thomas's hometown of Pin Point, Georgia. According to _Politico_ , it was Crow who made the $500,000 contribution to Liberty Central, Ginni's Tea Party organization. Justice Thomas apparently spoke to a Federalist Society event that was part of the conference of conservative funders sponsored by Charles and David Koch, who are leading benefactors of the Tea Party movement. In addition, the justice was also a regular at Bohemian Grove, the annual all-male conclave in Northern California. In his social life, Thomas clearly differed from his frequent ally Scalia, who was well known for his friendship with Ginsburg, his ideological opposite and a fellow opera buff. (\"I'm not really a Washington-type person,\" Thomas said at a law school appearance. \"I don't sort of like hanging out at the opera and that sort of thing.\") Even in the current highly polarized political environment, many members of Congress shared friendships across the aisle. But the Thomases chose to live in a bubble where everyone believed Thomas had told the truth in 1991. In fact, Ginni may have thought everyone else did, too.\n\nAll of which may explain her telephone call on October 9, 2010. At 7:31 a.m., she left a voice mail for Anita Hill, at her office at Brandeis University, where Hill teaches. \"Anita Hill, it's Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.\" She went on: \"So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. O.K., have a good day.\"\n\nHill reported the call to the Brandeis police, and its contents soon leaked to the press. News of the bizarre voice mail revived interest in the Thomas-Hill matter, which had been dormant for years; much of the publicity noted the abundant evidence that Hill, not the future justice, told the truth at the hearing. Many in the media mocked Ginni's phone call. In an interview with the Daily Caller, a conservative website for which she later became a \"special correspondent,\" she insisted her voice mail was \"a private matter\" that was \"probably a mistake on my part.\"\n\nThe controversy, especially the ridicule of his wife, took a toll on Justice Thomas, as he made clear in an emotional appearance at a Federalist Society event at the University of Virginia School of Law, in February 2011. \"This is about our country, and one of the things I want to do is I want to go to my grave knowing that I gave everything I have to trying to get it right. And all I ask of you all, especially those of you who are still in school, is you give it your best,\" Thomas said. \"I watch my bride who, in doing the same things, when she started her organization, she gives it 24\/7 every day, in defense of liberty. You know, and maybe that's why we're equally young and we love being with each other because we love the same things; we believe in the same things. So, with my wife and the people around me what I see unreinforced is that we are focused on defending liberty. So, I admire her and I love her for that because it keeps me going.\" In conclusion, he said, \"My bride is with me, Virginia Thomas, and some of you may know her. But the reason that I specifically bring it up: there is a price to pay today for standing in defense of your Constitution.\"\n\nFor those whose picture of Thomas remains frozen at the time of his confirmation hearings more than two decades ago, the justice today is a startling sight. His jet-black hair is almost completely white. He has gained a great deal of weight. (An injury long ago ended his days on the basketball court.) His gait is weary, and he looks older than his sixty-five years.\n\nTo the broad general public, Thomas was largely known only for two things. The first, of course, was the drama of his showdown regarding Hill. The second was his silence on the bench. Thomas last asked a question during oral argument in February 2006. No justice in the modern history of the Court has gone as long as a single year without asking a question; Thomas is well into his seventh consecutive year. In his public appearances, Thomas has often been asked about his silence; sometimes he has brought it up himself. Over time he has refined his answer, usually saying that he thinks the other justices ask too many questions and that the lawyers should be given a chance to speak for a time without interruption. At an appearance at a Hillsdale College dinner in Washington, in 2007, he said, \"My colleagues should shut up!\" At a law school talk in 2010, Thomas was asked what might change his mind about a case. \"If my colleagues would let me talk,\" he said with a small laugh, then added, \"assuming that improbability.\"\n\nThomas had a point. During his tenure on the Court, the other justices became notably more aggressive, and lawyers sometimes had trouble getting a word in edgewise. Even the chief justice, at an appearance in West Virginia in 2011, expressed the view that he and his colleagues might be talking and interrupting too much. \"I am probably one of the prime offenders,\" Roberts said. Obviously, though, Thomas's reaction to this problem was extreme. He would certainly be allowed to ask questions if he tried.\n\nWhat made his silence even more peculiar was his behavior in the courtroom, especially in recent years. The justices all sit in high-backed leather swivel chairs, and Thomas set his so that he can recline so far that he appears almost to be lying down. He stares at the ceiling. He rubs his face. He does not appear to be listening. He closes his eyes and looks as if he has fallen asleep. The overall effect is rude, if not contemptuous.\n\nThe conventional view of Thomas is that he is silent because he has nothing to say. Many believe that he is just a cipher for his fellow originalist, Scalia. Others think Thomas is not up to the job.\n\nThis stereotype is wrong in every particular.\n\nIn 1993, during the early days of the Clinton administration, Congress passed the gun control law known as the Brady bill. The complex piece of legislation included an interim provision that directed state and local officials to conduct background checks for prospective handgun purchasers. That portion of the bill was challenged, and in 1997, by a vote of 5\u20134, the Court found that part of the law unconstitutional. Scalia's opinion for the Court in _Printz v. United States_ concluded that the law amounted to an impermissible federal intrusion on states' rights.\n\nThomas joined Scalia's opinion for the majority but wrote a concurring opinion that examined the case in a different way. Thomas devoted his opinion to the Second Amendment, which had not been addressed by the Supreme Court since the _Miller_ case in 1939; the parties in _Printz_ had not raised a Second Amendment claim at any stage of the proceedings. But Thomas used the case to undertake an extensive discussion of the Second Amendment and to suggest that the Brady bill might well be unconstitutional because the \"right to keep and bear arms\" is \"a personal right.\"\n\nIn his _Printz_ opinion, Thomas caught\u2014and propelled\u2014the intellectual wave that was building for a new understanding of the Second Amendment. His prominent endorsement of the individual rights theory spurred other judges, as well as academics and politicians, to take that view more seriously. The judges who embraced it in the _Emerson_ case in the Fifth Circuit cited Thomas's opinion. Robert Levy and his colleagues who created the _Heller_ case were also inspired, in part, by Thomas. In time, even Barack Obama followed Thomas's lead on this issue. It took eleven years for the full Court to embrace Thomas's interpretation of the Second Amendment. In 2008, Scalia wrote the opinion for the Court in _Heller_ \u2014which struck down the D.C. gun control law and adopted the new view of the Second Amendment\u2014but it was Thomas who first put the issue on the Court's agenda.\n\nHe has played this role\u2014as conservative intellectual pathbreaker\u2014in many areas of the law. His hostility to campaign finance regulation, and his First Amendment absolutism, anticipated _Citizens United_. Like his intellectual heirs in the Tea Party, Thomas had a special hostility for government attempts to level the playing field in the political arena. For this justice, the Constitution mandated laissez-faire government. He first laid out his views on free speech in _McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission_ , a case early in his tenure. In 1988, Margaret McIntyre distributed unsigned leaflets at public meetings in a small town in Ohio. According to Ohio election laws, she was required to put her name on any material she distributed, and McIntyre was ultimately fined a hundred dollars for breaking this rule. In a 1995 opinion by Stevens for a seven-justice majority, the Court overturned the fine as a violation of McIntyre's right to free speech. For the Court, Stevens weighed the interest of the state in protecting the integrity of campaigns versus the individual's right to express herself and concluded that the state's restrictions went too far.\n\nThomas wrote a concurring opinion that laid out a template that he and to some extent the Court have followed ever since. The opinion was an originalist tour de force, with extensive discussion of anonymous speech as conceived by the framers of the Constitution. \"In light of the Framers' universal practice of publishing anonymous articles and pamphlets,\" Thomas wrote, it was clear \"that the Framers shared the belief that such activity was firmly part of the freedom of the press. It is only an innovation of modern times that has permitted the regulation of anonymous speech.\"\n\nThomas believed that the First Amendment prohibited regulation of campaign advertising, contributions, or expenditures. He put his position clearly in a dissent to a decision, in 2000, that upheld a Missouri law that limited individual contributions to local campaigns to a total of $1,075. \"In my view, the Constitution leaves it entirely up to citizens and candidates to determine who shall speak, the means they will use, and the amount of speech sufficient to inform and persuade,\" he wrote.\n\nBy 2010, in _Citizens United_ , the opinion was Kennedy's, but the victory was Thomas's. Kennedy adopted several Thomas tropes\u2014that corporations and people have the same rights to free speech under the First Amendment and that limitations on expenditures amounted to limitations on speech. Remarkably, Thomas wanted more. Kennedy's opinion upheld the rule that directed corporations and others to disclose how much they had contributed to political campaigns; Thomas said such rules amounted to an unlawful intrusion on the First Amendment. Returning to a theme first expressed in _McIntyre_ fifteen years earlier, Thomas said, in a separate opinion in _Citizens United_ , that the First Amendment protected anonymity as much as speech itself. Ever alert to contemporary conservative political developments as much as to eighteenth-century history, Thomas asserted that harassment of contributors to Proposition 8 in California, which banned same-sex marriage in 2008, demonstrated the dangers of mandatory disclosures. \"These instances of retaliation sufficiently demonstrate why this Court should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements,\" he wrote. On this issue, Thomas had not persuaded a majority of his colleagues\u2014yet.\n\nHe was not a conventionally influential justice. Unlike, say, Kennedy or O'Connor (or Roberts or Stevens), Thomas wrote few important opinions for the Court. Rehnquist and later Roberts recognized that Thomas's views were so extreme that they could not assign controversial opinions to him and expect a majority of his colleagues to agree. Rather, Thomas's influence was that he introduced new ideas to his colleagues. Through sheer doggedness and, of course, the arrival of like-minded justices, especially Roberts and Alito, Thomas saw his views (if not his exact words) pass into law.\n\nHe relished outraging his ideological adversaries. His views on the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment remained so eccentric that they found little favor even on this more conservative Court. In 2008, in _Baze v. Rees_ , a badly splintered Court upheld lethal injection as a method of execution. In the lead opinion for the Court, Roberts said that the evidence in the case showed that lethal injection was not \"cruelly inhumane\" and thus not a violation of the Eighth Amendment.\n\nThomas concurred, in an opinion that read like a treatment for a slasher movie. As always, he began by asserting that the relevant constitutional provision must be \"understood in light of the historical practices that led the Framers to include it in the Bill of Rights.\" To that end, Thomas surveyed eighteenth-century executions that were, apparently, cruel and unusual even in those days. There was burning at the stake, \" 'gibbeting,' or hanging the condemned in an iron cage so that his body would decompose in public view, and 'public dissection.' \" Thomas went on, \"But none of these was the worst fate a criminal could meet. That was reserved for the most dangerous and reprobate offenders\u2014traitors.\" Their punishments involved \"embowelling alive, beheading, and quartering.\" One death sentence in England called for the condemned to be \"drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, where you shall be hanged by the necks, not till you are dead; that you be severally taken down, while yet alive, and your bowels be taken out and burnt before your faces\u2014that your heads be then cut off, and your bodies cut in four quarters.\"\n\nThe point of this grotesque catalogue was to assert that the Eighth Amendment prohibited methods of execution that were also forms of torture\u2014nothing more. Such a standard meant that Thomas ignored decades of precedent. Over the years, the Court had vetoed the imposition of \"hard and painful labor,\" rejected disproportionate sentences for minor crimes, abolished the death penalty for rape, and outlawed life sentences for juveniles convicted of crimes other than murder. Under Thomas's narrow reading of the Eighth Amendment, all these cases would be wrong; under his understanding of stare decisis, all would be overturned.\n\nIt is Thomas's approach to stare decisis\u2014the rule of precedent\u2014that most distinguished Thomas from his colleagues, even Scalia. \"You have to remember that we are the court of last resort,\" he told the students at the recent speech in Florida. \"I always ask people, 'What would you do with _Plessy v. Ferguson_ , which was sixty years old?' \" That case, from 1896, affirmed the racial doctrine of separate but equal, until it was effectively overruled by _Brown v. Board of Education_ in 1954. \"If it's wrong, the ultimate precedent is the Constitution. And it's not what we say it is, it's what it actually says, and I think we have to be humble enough to say we were wrong,\" Thomas said.\n\nAll justices would like to see some precedents overturned, and certainly, in the modern era, all agree that the Court was right to overturn _Plessy_ in _Brown_. Thomas differed with his colleagues in the sheer number of cases he wanted to overturn. He paid far less deference to prior rulings than anyone else on the Court. As he said, \"If it's wrong, it's wrong, and we are obligated to revisit it.\"\n\nThis is a different approach from the traditional conservative position, which stressed the importance of stare decisis\u2014of relying on precedent. As Roberts put it during his confirmation hearings, \"Adherence to precedent promotes evenhandedness, promotes fairness, promotes stability and predictability. And those are very important values in a legal system.\" (Whether Roberts, as chief justice, actually honored that sentiment was another question.) Thomas, though, made little pretense of relying on the words of his colleagues and his predecessors when their interpretations conflicted with his own understanding of the Constitution's text.\n\nFrom the moment he arrived on the Court, he was a committed originalist; he believed the Constitution should be interpreted as the words were understood by the men who wrote it. \"When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution's original meaning,\" Thomas wrote in an opinion from 2005. Scalia was the figure most often associated with this school of thought, but he referred to himself as a \"fainthearted originalist.\" Scalia meant that other factors besides his own understanding of the intent of the framers, especially the long-established precedents of the Court, influenced his resolution of constitutional disputes. \"If a constitutional line of authority is wrong, Thomas would say let's get it right,\" Scalia told a reporter in 2004. \"I wouldn't do that. He does not believe in stare decisis, period.\" In other words, there is nothing fainthearted about Thomas's convictions about the meaning of the Constitution. His understanding of the framers' intent trumps everything.\n\nThomas's approach to the Eighth Amendment underlined some of the problems with his approach to the Constitution, and with originalism. Only two justices, Thomas and Scalia, built their jurisprudence around originalism (one of them faintheartedly), so its full adoption would require the trashing of dozens, if not hundreds, of Court precedents. Further, notwithstanding Thomas's enduring certainties, it was difficult to know what the framers would have thought of any given situation in the modern world. (Alito, a conservative but not a full-fledged originalist, captured this problem nicely in the oral argument about a California law on violent video games. Following up on a series of questions by Scalia, Alito said to the lawyer, \"I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?\") It was true, too, that the framers often disagreed profoundly with one another, making a single intent behind any constitutional text even more difficult to discern. The twenty-seven amendments (each with its own framers) created another overlay of opinion. For all of Thomas's conviction, originalism was just another kind of interpretation, revealing as much about Thomas as about the framers' intentions.\n\nGinni Thomas's outspoken criticism of Obama, and especially his health care plan, prompted a new round of questions about Justice Thomas's ethics. Based on Ginni's activities, seventy-four members of Congress called on Thomas to recuse himself from any legal challenges to the health care law. To make matters worse, he was compelled to amend several years of the financial disclosure forms that Supreme Court justices must file each year. The document requires the justices to disclose the source of all income earned by their spouses. Thomas failed to list Ginni's work for Hillsdale College and at the Heritage Foundation.\n\nThe Supreme Court operates in a peculiar ethical netherworld. The federal statute governing judicial conflicts of interest covers only lower-court judges. On the question of recusal, the law is clear that such a decision is entirely up to Thomas; the Supreme Court basically operates on an honor system. The tradition among the justices has been to avoid recusal if at all possible. Recusals at the Supreme Court raise the distasteful possibility of 4\u20134 ties, because, unlike in the lower courts, there is no mechanism for bringing in substitute judges.\n\nThomas was clearly within his rights to ignore calls for his recusal in the health care case. Ginni Thomas had been a political activist for decades, even before she met Clarence Thomas. This was her job; she was not obliged to quit because her husband became a judge. The Thomas family had no obvious or direct financial stake in the outcome of the health care case. The attempt to drive Thomas off the case was politically motivated. Democrats perceived Thomas as hostile to the health care law and thus tried to get rid of his vote. (To Thomas's good fortune, the leader of the effort was Representative Anthony Weiner, who was soon forced to resign because of a sex scandal.) As for Thomas's failure to list Ginni's employment on the disclosure forms, the error seemed sloppy rather than sinister. Her work was widely known, and, in any event, the law did not establish a punishment for mistaken filings.\n\nIf Ginni's activities did not disqualify her husband from the case, they were still extremely significant\u2014and highly complementary to Justice Thomas's agenda on the bench. In their own ways, Ginni and Clarence Thomas helped build the intellectual infrastructure opposing President Obama's agenda. Ginni did her best to derail the health care plan when it came up for a vote in Congress. Justice Thomas had his chance when the law came before the Supreme Court. Even more than gun control and campaign regulation, the health care case reflected the issues at the core of Thomas's judicial career.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nEarly in the New Deal, the Supreme Court struck down several of President Roosevelt's signature initiatives as violating the commerce clause of the Constitution. If the law did not directly affect commerce \"among the several states,\" in the words of Article I, the Court said that Congress had no right to pass it. FDR responded to these setbacks with his infamous court-packing plan, but a change of heart by Justice Owen J. Roberts in 1937, followed by Roosevelt's own appointments to the Court, transformed the understanding of that provision. In a series of cases, the justices gave Congress essentially unlimited power to regulate the national economy. In 1942, the Court said in _Wickard v. Filburn_ that the federal government could regulate the amount of wheat grown on a farm, even if none of the wheat was sold across state lines, or even if no wheat was sold at all. The opinion stated that since the production of wheat, taken in aggregate, did affect interstate commerce, the regulation was permissible. After that, the issue of the commerce clause more or less vanished from the Supreme Court's docket for decades\u2014until Thomas and the Tea Party brought it back to life.\n\nTea Party partisans embraced the ideas of the pre\u2013New Deal Court and rejected _Wickard_ and the decades of decisions that followed. As the journalist Kate Zernike wrote in her book _Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America_ , \"In the originalist view, and the Tea Party view, the perversion of the Constitution took off during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.\"\n\nOn this issue, as ever, Thomas led where the conservative movement soon followed. In 1995, the Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, finally struck down a law as violating the commerce clause. In _United States v. Lopez_ , the Court rejected legislation that made it a crime to possess a gun near a school. Rehnquist's opinion said, in essence, that mere possession of a gun in or near a school was so totally unconnected to the national economy that Congress had no right to prohibit it.\n\nThomas agreed\u2014and then some. In a concurring opinion, he said, \"I write separately to observe that our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause. In a future case, we ought to temper our Commerce Clause jurisprudence.\" Even Rehnquist had acknowledged the long line of cases that said the commerce clause was satisfied if the activity in question \"substantially affects\" interstate commerce. In his characteristically lengthy and detailed opinion, Thomas also said that the early New Deal Court\u2014which was nicknamed the Nine Old Men\u2014was right, and all the justices over the following six decades were wrong. \"From the time of the ratification of the Constitution to the mid 1930's, it was widely understood that the Constitution granted Congress only limited powers, notwithstanding the Commerce Clause,\" he wrote. If a majority of the justices agreed with Thomas, Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act, to say nothing of Medicare and Medicaid, might all be unconstitutional.\n\nOn March 23, 2010, President Obama signed his health care law, which was formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA. That same day, Kenneth Cuccinelli, the attorney general of Virginia, filed the first of many legal challenges to the law. Federal judges around the nation began passing judgment on the constitutionality of \"Obamacare.\" One of the first, and certainly the harshest, verdicts came from Judge Roger Vinson, of the federal district court in Pensacola. He struck down the law in its entirety, relying several times on Thomas's concurring opinion in _Lopez_. Vinson said that the Obama administration's position would allow the federal government to \"penetrate the recesses of domestic life, and control, in all respects, the private conduct of individuals.\" These words, of course, would have fit just as well in a speech by Ginni Thomas as in an opinion by her husband.\n\n# **20**\n\n#    \n**\"DEMOCRACY IS NOT A GAME\"**\n\nOn November 2, 2010, Republicans routed Democrats in the midterm elections. The GOP won control of the House of Representatives, with a gain of sixty-three seats, and cut the Democrats' margin in the Senate to fifty-three to forty-seven. The results amounted to a repudiation of Obama's agenda.\n\nThe following morning, the justices heard an archetypical case of the Roberts era. It provided a chance for the Court to lower the barrier between church and state, and to use a procedural device to do so. A state law in Arizona gave tax credits to individuals who paid tuition at parochial schools. A group of local taxpayers challenged the law, asserting that the credits amounted to government financial support of religion, in violation of the First Amendment. The specific issue in _Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn_ was whether the taxpayers had standing even to challenge the law. This was another challenge to a conservative b\u00eate noire: Chief Justice Warren's famous 1968 opinion in _Flast v. Cohen_ , which held that taxpayers had the right to challenge actions that they believed amounted to government support of religion, in violation of the First Amendment.\n\n_Arizona Christian_ was the right's latest chance to cut back on _Flast_. In the oral argument, Anthony Kennedy sounded like a Tea Party protester: \"I must say, I have some difficulty that any money that the government doesn't take from me is still the government's money.\" The result in the case was predictable\u2014a 5\u20134 ruling that the taxpayers lacked standing to bring the suit. There were still only four liberals, but now two of them were new to the Court\u2014and that, inevitably, changed the interpersonal dynamics for all nine justices.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nExcept when deciding cases, the Supreme Court operated somewhat like a university faculty. As dean, the chief justice established committees to allow the other justices to participate in the administrative business of the Court. The most coveted of these assignments was the building committee, because the justices took understandable pride in the beauty and durability of Cass Gilbert's marble masterpiece. On that committee, O'Connor and Souter fought for years to keep garish fire exit signs out of the corridors. Kennedy also dueled with the architect of the Capitol over the egregious congressional visitor center, which wrecked the vista between the Court and the Capitol. Thomas, a computer buff, enjoyed his tenure on the technology committee.\n\nThere was no doubt about the least desirable assignment. One justice always had to serve on the cafeteria committee, which dealt with the windowless and forlorn diner-style restaurant located in the Court's basement. By tradition, this assignment went to the junior justice. Because Breyer spent eleven years with the least seniority, he put in the most time on cafeteria matters. In his characteristically earnest way, Breyer spearheaded the introduction of wrap sandwiches, which he remembered fondly from the courthouse cafeteria in Boston. He mediated conflicts in matters of social class; Supreme Court police officers wanted meatloaf and mashed potatoes, while the law clerks demanded tofu. To address the persistent deficits generated by the enterprise, Breyer tried, with mixed success, to arrange for tour groups to be deposited within tempting distance of the cafeteria.\n\nKagan, now the newest justice, took another approach. Just as she brought a food-and-fun philosophy to Harvard Law School, she tried a similar experiment at the Supreme Court: she engineered the acquisition of a frozen yogurt machine in the cafeteria. It was perhaps testimony to the dour nature of life at the Supreme Court that such a modest enhancement was so celebrated. Even Roberts took to saluting Kagan's frosty coup in his speeches.\n\nKagan, who sometimes referred to herself as the Frozen Yogurt Justice, made her presence felt in more jurisprudentially significant ways as well, in large part thanks to her relationship with Ginsburg. It was perhaps predetermined that Ginsburg would adopt Kagan as a prot\u00e9g\u00e9e. Both were secular Jews from New York City who spent much of their lives as law professors. Ginsburg's daughter, Jane, who was five years older than Kagan, was also a law professor at Columbia. And Kagan, unlike Jane, was ebullient and outgoing, like Marty Ginsburg, whose death roughly coincided with Kagan's arrival. Ruth Ginsburg made Kagan her frequent date for the opera. For her part, Kagan kept her word to the senators and volunteered to go shooting with Scalia. To her surprise, she liked the guns (as well as Scalia), returned for more, and quickly graduated from clay pigeons to actual birds. The opera soon paled in comparison.\n\nNow that Ginsburg had replaced Stevens as the senior justice on the liberal side, she had the responsibility for assigning the main dissenting opinions when the Court split in its predictable fashion. She gave _Arizona Christian_ to Kagan, and here the Court saw for the first time what kind of justice Kagan would be in the way that mattered most\u2014her writing. Kagan's voice was straightforward and colloquial, almost chatty. In her dissent, she assailed the supposed distinction the Court drew between a state giving tax credits (permissible) and direct subsidies (impermissible) to religious schools. \"Suppose a State desires to reward Jews\u2014by, say, $500 per year\u2014for their religious devotion,\" Kagan wrote. \"Should the nature of taxpayers' concern vary if the State allows Jews to claim the aid on their tax returns, in lieu of receiving an annual stipend? Or assume a State wishes to subsidize the ownership of crucifixes. It could purchase the religious symbols in bulk and distribute them to all takers. Or it could mail a reimbursement check to any individual who buys her own and submits a receipt for the purchase. Or it could authorize that person to claim a tax credit equal to the price she paid. Now, really\u2014do taxpayers have less reason to complain if the State selects the last of these three options? The Court today says they do, but that is wrong.\" Later, she wrote: \"I count 14 separate cases (involving 20 appellate and district courts) that adjudicated taxpayer challenges to tax expenditures alleged to violate the Establishment Clause. I suspect I have missed a few.\"\n\nIt was entertaining reading, but as a dissenting opinion that was all it was. In the Court's current configuration, Kagan could look forward to writing a lot more of them.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nAlito, on the other hand, quickly established himself as an influential player in the conservative majority. On the big issues\u2014civil rights, _Citizens United_ , gun control\u2014Alito was a reliable vote for the Roberts team, although there were differences, too, in his approach. Scalia and Thomas had a libertarian streak, especially in First Amendment cases, but Alito hewed to the more authoritarian tradition on the American right. In this way, Alito resembled Rehnquist more than Roberts.\n\nWhile Scalia and Thomas seemed obsessed with the eighteenth-century world of the framers and Roberts channeled the corporate priorities of the Republican establishment, Alito had a different focus: the 1960s counterculture. When he came to Washington in 2006, Alito had a nearly invisible public profile, but he reinvented himself there as a culture warrior. Alito made speeches before groups like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a student leadership organization dedicated to \"teaching future leaders the timeless principles that make America free and prosperous\u2014the core ideas behind the free market, the American Founding, and Western civilization that are rarely taught in the classroom.\" Likewise, Alito spoke at a fund-raiser for the _American Spectator_ magazine, a right-wing outlet best known for its attacks on Anita Hill and investigations of Bill Clinton's sex life.\n\nIn his speech, Alito joked that the _Spectator_ was the \"very center of the vast right-wing conspiracy,\" but that was actually a pretty apt description. Alito divided the country into two worlds\u2014that of the conservatives' hero Ronald Reagan and that of liberals and their law schools. (The justice also repeatedly mocked Vice President Biden for an act of plagiarism he had committed many years earlier.) Alito juxtaposed the first \"be-in\" in San Francisco with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as governor. \"On October 26, 1967, John McCain's plane was shot down over North Vietnam,\" Alito said. \"On November 30, Eugene McCarthy announced that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, promising to restore hope and bring about change,\" he continued\u2014to much knowing laughter at the allusion to Barack Obama's 2008 slogan. (Like the other justices, Alito was not bound by formal ethical rules. But if he had still been a lower-court judge, his speech to raise money for the _Spectator_ would have been inappropriate. In any case, Alito's behavior was more dubious than anything Thomas did, even though Thomas received a great deal more attention and criticism.)\n\nAlito's aversion to anything-goes libertarianism was especially evident in his approach to cases involving free speech. Over the years, debates about vulgar or unpopular speech provided the grist for some of the Court's most famous and controversial decisions. But under Roberts, the Court reached a consensus that the government had little or no power to regulate in this area. Two cases proved the point. In 2010, the justices struck down a federal law that prohibited the sale of \"crush videos\"\u2014which show small animals, often woodland creatures, being killed with a woman's bare foot or stiletto heel. The Court said Congress could ban the torture itself, but a limit on _depictions_ of such behavior amounted to a violation of free speech. In a similar vein, the Court in 2011 overturned a multimillion-dollar judgment against members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, a fringe religious group with fanatically antigay views, for protesting at the funeral of a marine killed in Iraq. Because the protest took place on public land, well out of sight or hearing of funeral attendees, the Court said the damage award violated free speech rights.\n\nBoth decisions were 8\u20131, with only Alito in dissent. In the \"crush\" case, Alito, who owns a springer spaniel named Zeus, lingered over the horrific details of the videos. For example: \"A kitten, secured to the ground, watches and shrieks in pain as a woman thrusts her high-heeled shoe into its body, slams her heel into the kitten's eye socket and mouth loudly fracturing its skull, and stomps repeatedly on the animal's head.\" Alito concluded that \"the harm caused by the underlying criminal acts greatly outweighs any trifling value that the depictions might be thought to possess.\"\n\nAlito was, if anything, even more outraged by his colleagues' decision in the case involving the funeral, _Snyder v. Phelps_. (The antics of the Westboro Baptist Church were familiar to viewers of cable news. Notwithstanding their name, the defendants were not \"Baptist,\" or even a \"church,\" but rather a single family led by a charismatic lunatic named Fred Phelps. His daughter Margie, a lawyer, argued the family's case in the Supreme Court and did a creditable job.) \"Petitioner Albert Snyder is not a public figure,\" Alito wrote in his dissent. \"He is simply a parent whose son, Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, was killed in Iraq. Mr. Snyder wanted what is surely the right of any parent who experiences such an incalculable loss: to bury his son in peace. But respondents, members of the Westboro Baptist Church, deprived him of that elementary right. They first issued a press release and thus turned Matthew's funeral into a tumultuous media event [and then] launched a malevolent verbal attack on Matthew and his family at a time of acute emotional vulnerability.\" He went on, \"In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims like petitioner.\"\n\nRoberts, for the majority, had the last word in the case, and he made his point eloquently, as usual: \"Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and\u2014as it did here\u2014inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course\u2014to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.\" (The chief justice used his family back in Indiana as a kind of reality check. Roberts's brother-in-law made a point of telling him that he agreed with Alito.)\n\nThe decision in _Snyder v. Phelps_ , which came down on March 2, 2011, showed Roberts at his best. The oral argument in _Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett_ , which took place later that month, featured the chief justice at his worst.\n\nThe case represented the Court's first return to the subject of campaign finance since _Citizens United_ the previous year. The public had yet to see the full implications of the decision. Most of the campaign finance reports from the 2010 election had not yet been filed or digested. What became clear in the course of the oral argument on March 28, 2011, was that the conservative justices knew what they had achieved in _Citizens United_ \u2014and they wanted to push their position forward.\n\nThe case concerned the constitutionality of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Act, which had been passed by the voters in 1998, to address the state's appalling history of political corruption. This fairly modest reform established a system of optional public funding of campaigns for certain state offices. A candidate who chose to accept public funding would receive extra money from the state if his or her privately funded opponent exceeded a certain set spending limit. The basic idea was simple: to keep elections competitive if a privately funded candidate was vastly outspending a publicly funded one. The question in the case was whether the First Amendment permitted the government subsidies.\n\nKagan dominated the questioning of William Maurer, the lawyer who was challenging the law. Her point was straightforward\u2014that no one's right to free speech was being violated by this law. \"There's no restriction at all here; it's more speech all the way around?\" she said.\n\n\"I would disagree with that, respectfully, Your Honor,\" Maurer answered. \"There is a restriction here. Every time an independent expenditure group or a privately financed candidate speaks above a certain amount, the government creates real penalties for them to have engaged in unfettered political expression.\"\n\n\"Well, doesn't the government actually just give a selective subsidy?\" Kagan continued. \"It's not a penalty, it's just saying, in order to run an effective public financing system, when you speak, we're going to give a subsidy over a certain amount. So the trigger does not trigger a penalty; it triggers a subsidy.\"\n\nRoberts said nothing during Maurer's argument, but when Bradley Phillips, the lawyer for Arizona, rose to defend the law, the chief justice tore into him. He raised several hypotheticals (mostly far-fetched) about multicandidate races and how the law might penalize the privately funded candidates. He then zeroed in on a distinction that had been drawn in _Citizens United_ and other cases\u2014one that reflected just what a mess the Court's campaign finance decisions had created.\n\nSince the days of Theodore Roosevelt, the idea behind keeping corporations out of politics was to level the playing field. Without these limits, corporations would have too much political power. In a 1990 case called _Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce_ , the Court made the sensible observation that limits on campaign contributions by corporations served to curb the \"corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas.\" But _Austin_ was one of the cases overturned by _Citizens United_ , and Kennedy's opinion went on to say that Congress _never_ could try to level the playing field with regard to campaign finance; that was now a forbidden rationale. Rather, the only permissible purpose for campaign laws was to fight corruption, which the Court defined in a very narrow way. Congress could outlaw only quid pro quo bribery, nothing more.\n\nAgainst this confusing, and largely senseless, background, Roberts sprung a trap at the oral argument.\n\n\"Counsel, do you agree that under our precedents, leveling the playing field for candidates is not a legitimate State purpose?\" Roberts asked William Jay, the lawyer in the solicitor general's office who was defending the Arizona law for the Obama administration.\n\n\"We do, Mr. Chief Justice,\" Jay said. \"That, of course, is not what's at work here.\"\n\nThen Roberts pounced. \"Well, I checked the Citizens Clean Elections Commission website this morning,\" he said, \"and it says that this act was passed to, quote, 'level the playing field' when it comes to running for office. Why isn't that clear evidence that it's unconstitutional?\"\n\nIt was a nimble piece of lawyering by the chief justice\u2014a touch\u00e9 moment. But to a layperson, it was an absurdity. The state of Arizona was caught trying to level the playing field\u2014in other words, to do what most people would think was the right thing.\n\nJay did his best to recover. \"Well, Mr. Chief Justice, whatever the Citizens Clean Elections Commission says on its website, I think isn't dispositive of what the voters of Arizona had in mind when they passed this initiative,\" he said. \"The Court has recognized since _Buckley v. Valeo_ that public financing serves a valid anticorruption purpose, and it does so because it eliminates the influence of private contributions on the candidates who take public financing.\" Jay was attempting to speak the chief's language, albeit in a clearly losing cause.\n\nIt was a moment that showed just how much the Court missed Sandra Day O'Connor. It was not just that she was an Arizonan who understood why her state had tried, in this small way, to clean up its politics. But O'Connor had actually run for political office (as no one on the Roberts Court had). She understood the danger of giving individuals and companies unlimited freedom to spend. But Roberts was on a mission\u2014to deregulate American politics. And the chief had the votes.\n\nNo one knew this better than Stephen Breyer. He was seventy-two years old at this moment, not old for a Supreme Court justice, but not young, either. The days of his great collaboration with O'Connor were six years in the past. He had built his professional life around the idea that government could be a force for good in America. In particular, he had written a book, _Active Liberty_ , that said limits on campaign contributions were the best way to preserve democratic values. And now he saw that the Court was dismantling those limits, sooner rather than later. Breyer gave in to his frustration.\n\n\"And what about\u2014it's a general question. Answer this if you wish. Don't if you don't want to, and the same goes for your opponent,\" Breyer stammered, near the end of the argument in the Arizona case. \"But as I hear this argument, what's going through my mind is we are deeply into the details of a very complex bill. McCain-Feingold is hundreds of pages, and we cannot possibly test each provision which is related to the others on such a test of whether it equalizes or incentivizes or some other thing, because the answer is normally we don't know.\" Breyer could see that Roberts and the others were subjecting all campaign finance laws to such exacting scrutiny that none of them could ever survive.\n\nBreyer went on. \"And it is better to say it's all illegal than to subject these things to death by a thousand cuts, because we don't know what will happen when we start tinkering with one provision rather than another. That thought went through my mind as I've heard this discussion. Comment or not upon it as you wish.\"\n\nNervous laughter filled the courtroom. The justices often made speeches in the form of questions, but this was a speech in the form of a speech. No one knew what to say. As the day's events showed, Kagan was still in there fighting, but Breyer had thrown in the towel. _Just give up on all campaign finance limits. Return American politics to the law of the jungle_.\n\nBy the customary vote of 5\u20134, the Court declared the Arizona law a violation of the First Amendment. The opinions appeared to be a window to the next quarter century at the Supreme Court: Roberts for the majority, Kagan (again assigned by Ginsburg) in the lead dissent. Like _Citizens United_ , _Arizona Free Enterprise_ showed the conservative agenda for change. Roberts was a modern Republican, not an old-fashioned one (like Harlan, Stewart, Powell, or O'Connor) who believed in judicial restraint. Instead, Roberts was engaging in a consummate act of judicial activism, overruling the will of Arizona's voters to serve a newly invented legal theory. And, most obviously, the chief justice was doing the bidding of the contemporary Republican Party, which hated campaign finance reform, while Kagan was speaking for the Democrats, who embraced it.\n\n\" 'Leveling the playing field' can sound like a good thing,\" the chief justice wrote for the majority. \"But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game. It is a critically important form of speech. The First Amendment embodies our choice as a Nation that, when it comes to such speech, the guiding principle is freedom\u2014the 'unfettered interchange of ideas'\u2014not whatever the State may view as fair.\"\n\nLike the president who appointed her, Kagan sought to limit the power of the Court and to defer to the democratically elected branches of government. This case, like so many others, revealed how the parties had switched places at the Supreme Court since the 1960s. Then, it had been the Democrats who were the activists, striking down laws that were not to their liking. Now it was the Republicans. \"This case arose because Arizonans wanted their government to work on behalf of all the State's people,\" Kagan wrote in her dissent. \"On the heels of a political scandal involving the near-routine purchase of legislators' votes, Arizonans passed a law designed to sever political candidates' dependence on large contributors. The system discriminated against no ideas and prevented no speech. Indeed, by increasing electoral competition and enabling a wide range of candidates to express their views, the system furthered First Amendment values. Less corruption, more speech. Robust campaigns leading to the election of representatives not beholden to the few, but accountable to the many. The people of Arizona might have expected a decent respect for those objectives. Today, they do not get it.... Truly, democracy is not a game.\"\n\n#  \n# **21**\n\n#    \n**\"YOU SHOULD DO IT\"**\n\nBarack Obama bet his presidency on health care reform. He sacrificed every other legislative priority\u2014including climate change, energy, and immigration\u2014to drag the Affordable Care Act across the finish line. The president's political adversaries, knowing the stakes, threw everything they had into defeating him. The outcome in Congress was in doubt until the final votes were cast in the House and Senate.\n\nBy the time the ACA passed, it was clear that conservatives were going to challenge the bill in court. For two decades, the constitutionality of the individual mandate had never been questioned. But in just a few months, its illegality under the commerce clause became an article of faith within the Republican Party. Opponents of the law lined up to be first to challenge it in federal court. The legal fight over health care reform became a defining symbol of the role reversal that had taken place between liberals and conservatives over the past several decades. Liberals, once the apostles of judicial activism, embraced judicial restraint and deference to the democratically elected branches of government; conservatives, who had railed for so long against judges who, in George W. Bush's famous phrase, \"legislate from the bench,\" set out to persuade judges to do just that. Even before the first lawsuit was filed against the ACA, everyone knew the Supreme Court would have the last word. When the case did come before the justices, nothing\u2014no legal argument, no political maneuver, no public appeal\u2014had as much to do with the ultimate fate of the legislation as a single four-word e-mail.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nEven before Congress voted on the final form of the legislation, lawyers in the Obama administration began organizing a defense. In the typical way of bureaucracies, a group of deputies organized an initial meeting, which senior officials would then decide if they wanted to attend. On January 8, 2010, at 10:54 a.m., an aide to Thomas Perrelli, the associate attorney general, e-mailed Neal Katyal, the deputy solicitor general, about scheduling a meeting for \"a group to get thinking about how to defend against inevitable challenges to the health care proposals that are pending.\"\n\nThree minutes later, Katyal e-mailed back this enthusiastic reply: \"Absolutely right on. Let's crush them. I'll speak with Elena and designate someone.\"\n\nAt the same time, Katyal forwarded the original invitation to Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, asking if she wanted to be included in the group. \"I am happy to do this if you are ok with it,\" Katyal wrote to her.\n\nKatyal was doing his job, asking his boss if she wanted to attend a strategy session on a major legal issue facing the Justice Department. It was, at one level, a routine communication about who should attend a meeting, and Kagan responded with four unelaborated words. At 11:01 a.m., she wrote Katyal: \"You should do it.\" The exchange was like thousands that take place in offices every day. (As it turned out, the January meeting never took place. Once Scott Brown, a Republican, won a special election later that month for the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly held by Edward M. Kennedy, it looked like there would be no health care bill at all\u2014so there was no need to figure out how to defend it.)\n\nBut the bill came back to life, and in March Obama and the Democrats finally won passage. The denouement came when the House approved a revised measure on Sunday, March 21, by a vote of 219\u2013212. That same day, Perrelli e-mailed invitations to Katyal and others to convene, at long last, the health care litigation planning group. At 6:19 that evening, Katyal forwarded the invitation to Kagan and wrote, \"I think you should go, no? I will, but feel like this is litigation of singular importance.\" A minute later, Kagan e-mailed Katyal back, asking him for his phone number.\n\nWhen Kagan and Katyal spoke that evening, she said she had decided to stay away from the health care litigation\u2014which was why, two months earlier, she had written to him, \"You should do it.\" Kagan didn't want to be involved or even informed about work on this issue. Little more was said between them, but the reason for Kagan's decision was clear. She had been a finalist for the Souter seat the previous year. Stevens was dropping hints that he was going to leave in a matter of weeks. Kagan had a very real chance of being nominated for the Court, and the health care case was likely to come before the justices, sooner rather than later. She wanted to preserve her opportunity to take part. If she became a justice, Kagan did not want to have to recuse herself, so she was not going to participate at all in planning the health care litigation.\n\nLater, when the challenge to the health care law did wind up in the Supreme Court, some liberals argued that Thomas should recuse himself from the case because of his wife's political activities. In short order, conservatives began asserting in response that Kagan should recuse herself because she must have participated in planning the defense of the law when she was solicitor general. It was a plausible argument. After all, Katyal himself had noted that the case was of \"singular importance,\" and the solicitor general served, in effect, as the chief legal strategist for the Justice Department. As his e-mails showed, Katyal believed that Kagan should help to defend the law.\n\nIn light of all that followed, then, Kagan's e-mail\u2014\"You should do it\"\u2014ranks among the most consequential of such messages in American history. It was contemporaneous proof that the future justice had not participated in planning the defense of the law. Katyal's recollections of their exchanges backed her up. If Kagan had gone to even a single meeting where the legal defense of the health care law was discussed\u2014even if she just sat there and didn't say a word\u2014she would have been required to recuse herself from participating in the case as a Supreme Court justice. (Justices are not bound by the same formal ethics rules as other federal judges, but attendance at such a meeting would have created a very clear case for recusal.) As would later become clear, the loss of Kagan's vote would have meant the loss of the case for her side. Without her, at least the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act would have been invalidated. The e-mail trail kept Kagan in the case.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nThat still left the question of how the Justice Department should defend the law. Even in the initial stages, the issue split the Obama lawyers into two camps. The internal differences were largely generational.\n\nThe principal constitutional justification for the health care legislation was the commerce clause of Article I, which authorizes Congress to \"regulate Commerce... among the several States.\" After 1937, when the Court adopted Franklin Roosevelt's conception of the Constitution, the justices gave nearly unlimited scope to Congress's power under the commerce clause. In the famous case of _Wickard v. Filburn_ , from 1942, the Court upheld congressional power to regulate how much wheat a farmer could grow\u2014even if he didn't sell the wheat at all but rather used it to feed his own livestock. \"If we were to be brutally frank,\" Justice Robert H. Jackson, the author of _Wickard_ , wrote in a letter to a friend shortly after the decision, \"I suspect what we would say is that in any case where Congress thinks there is an effect on interstate commerce, the Court will accept that judgment.\"\n\nThat clause became almost a blank check for Congress. By the days of the Warren Court in the 1960s, the justices routinely ignored the commerce clause as a meaningful limit on the power of Congress. As the Court held in 1964, upholding the Civil Rights Act, the test was simply whether the activity sought to be regulated is \"commerce which concerns more States than one and has a real and substantial relation to the national interest.\" For decades, every act of Congress passed that test.\n\nThis wasn't just an abstract legal issue. The commerce clause was freighted with political significance. Among liberals, a broadly defined commerce clause was the indispensable constitutional provision for activist government. This sentiment was especially strong at the Justice Department, including among those lawyers who took initial charge of defending the health care law. They had grown up with the commerce clause as a settled issue, and they regarded any threat to its interpretation as a challenge to their entire worldview.\n\nNeal Katyal didn't see it exactly the same way.\n\nAs the health care litigation began, Katyal had just turned forty years old, which may have been the most important thing about him with reference to the case. The son of immigrant parents from India, raised in Chicago, mother a physician, father an engineer, Katyal was the legal world's version of a prodigy. A champion debater at Dartmouth, he went on to a standout career at Yale Law School, which brought him a clerkship with Stephen Breyer. He served in the Clinton administration and then became a tenured professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He was blessed, occasionally cursed, with abundant self-confidence. And his legal career took place entirely during the new era of conservative hegemony at the Supreme Court.\n\nKatyal himself was a Democrat, and a proud member of the Obama administration, who was determined to help protect the president's legacy. But he wanted to do so in a way that reflected the courts as they were\u2014full of conservatives\u2014not as he wished they would be. And that brought him into conflict with his colleagues at the Justice Department.\n\nAs much as liberals embraced a broad conception of the commerce clause, conservatives disdained it\u2014and they had won a couple of important recent victories. In 1995, Rehnquist cobbled together a five-justice majority to strike down a federal law on commerce clause grounds for the first time in decades. In _United States v. Lopez_ , the Court said Congress could not make it a federal crime to possess a firearm near a school. Five years later, in _United States v. Morrison_ , the same five justices said that victims of gender-based violence could not file federal lawsuits against their attackers. In both cases, the majority said that the conduct Congress sought to regulate was too remote from actual interstate commerce to be constitutional. Both _Lopez_ and _Morrison_ were, in their way, originalist decisions\u2014that is, the conservative majority was guided by what it said was the intent of the framers in crafting the commerce clause.\n\nTo defend the health care law, Katyal endorsed several heresies against the liberal orthodoxy. He embraced the holdings in _Lopez_ and _Morrison_ , even though many in the Justice Department still regarded them as nefarious departures from a true reading of the commerce clause. Even more controversially, Katyal was a kind of originalist himself. He thought conservatives had no right to sole claim on the framers of the Constitution as their political forebears. He thought liberals could claim the mantle of the framers, too\u2014and he wanted to do so in the health care case.\n\nEven for lawyers, these abstractions can mean very little, but for Katyal they translated into clear challenges in the defense of the ACA. Specifically, Katyal came to believe that the administration would win its case only if it could answer two simple questions: Are there any limits on what Congress can do under the commerce clause? And if the health care law is constitutional, does that also mean that Congress could mandate that every American eat broccoli as well?\n\nSome two dozen lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act were filed in 2010. A few were clearly frivolous, but several were well financed and artfully argued. On the day Obama signed the bill, Bill McCollum, the attorney general of Florida, brought a case in federal court on behalf of his state and eventually twenty-five other states. Choosing his forum with care, McCollum filed the lawsuit in Pensacola, which had some of the most conservative judges in the country. There, Roger Vinson, a 1983 Reagan appointee, declared the entire law unconstitutional. According to the government's theory, Vinson wrote, \"Congress could require that people buy and consume broccoli at regular intervals, not only because the required purchases will positively impact interstate commerce, but also because people who eat healthier tend to be healthier and are thus more productive and put less of a strain on the health care system.\" Around the country, several other judges upheld the law, some judges invalidated parts of it, and the appeals to the circuit courts began. (Almost without exception, district judges appointed by Democratic presidents upheld the law and those appointed by Republicans struck it down.)\n\nWhen Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court, in May 2010, Katyal became acting solicitor general, and he took responsibility for arguing all of the appeals of the health care cases in the circuit courts. Drafting the briefs was a contentious process within the Justice Department. Traditional liberals wanted to concede little on limits of the commerce clause; Katyal felt they needed to acknowledge the changed world that included _Lopez_ and _Morrison_. On June 1, 2011, Katyal defended the law in the Sixth Circuit, based in Cincinnati. The exchanges were typical of the questions he received in every court.\n\n\"I hear your arguments about the power of Congress under the commerce clause and I'm having difficulty seeing how there is any limit to the power as you're defining it,\" said Judge James L. Graham, a district judge sitting by designation on the appeals court. \"And I'm starting with the premise that just about everything that human beings do, about every human function I can think of, has some economic consequences.\" It was the key question: What was the limit of the commerce clause?\n\nTo Katyal, the answer was embedded in both _Lopez_ and _Morrison_. Those cases related to noneconomic activities at the core of state functions: neither one regulated any actual economic activity. As Katyal told the judge, \"What _Lopez_ and _Morrison_ say, is you've got to be economic in nature, and that it can't be the aggregation of a whole bunch of uneconomic activities. Zero plus zero plus zero is always going to equal zero. Here's what _we're_ saying: we're saying in this [health care] market, what Congress is regulating is not the failure to buy something but the failure to secure financing for something that everyone is going to buy.\" Every American was going to buy health care at one time or another; the law simply regulated those transactions, before and after they took place.\n\nKatyal also took on the \"broccoli question.\" Opponents of the law said if the Congress was allowed to force people to buy insurance, legislators could make people buy General Motors cars, or cell phones, or broccoli\u2014anything at all.\n\nHealth care was different, Katyal replied. \"Congress made a specific finding, that people without insurance are causing everyone's premiums to rise to the tune of $1,000 per family, you and me, because hospitals have to take these people,\" he said. \"And that makes this market different than many of the examples that we were talking about. The real question is, Can Congress regulate, in a market in which it knows that everyone is participating, that is, the health care market?\"\n\n\"That's a generality,\" Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a conservative former Scalia clerk, said, \"that's true of food, transportation, shelter markets.\"\n\n\"That's one aspect, but what sets up the cost shifting is not just that everyone needs it but that providers can't opt out of it,\" Katyal said. \"So the food and transportation markets\u2014I can't show up at the broccoli store without money and say, 'Give me broccoli.' \" It was a compelling\u2014and winning\u2014argument. Sutton, the pedigreed conservative, wrote the opinion upholding the law.\n\nStill, the political splits in the judiciary ultimately showed through in their various decisions on the health care law. Like the Sixth Circuit, the D.C. Circuit upheld the law, and the Fourth Circuit dismissed the case on procedural grounds. But once a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, it was inevitable that the Supreme Court would hear the case. (The justices almost always grant certiorari in cases where a circuit court has declared a federal law unconstitutional.)\n\nAs acting solicitor general, Katyal had made one last important decision about how to handle the health care case. The issue was timing. The government can almost always contrive ways to delay appeals, and there were ways to keep the case away from the Supreme Court, at least until after the 2012 election. But Katyal canvassed his peers at the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies and found that they were spending tens of millions of dollars a month preparing to implement the ACA. It was simply irresponsible to let the legal uncertainty around the law linger. The agencies needed a definitive answer about whether the law was valid or not. So Katyal, after consulting the White House, decided to press ahead. On November 14, 2011, the justices agreed to review the Eleventh Circuit decision, consolidated all of the remaining appeals, and put the case down for argument in the spring.\n\nBut Katyal wouldn't be there to argue it.\n\nKagan was nominated to the Supreme Court in May 2010 and confirmed in August. During those months and several more that followed, Obama did not nominate a successor. Katyal wanted the job, but it eventually became clear that he wasn't going to get it.\n\nKatyal was still best known for his lonely and ultimately successful crusade on behalf of Salim Hamdan, the Guant\u00e1namo detainee, in the Supreme Court. Just as the solicitor general post became available, Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, attacked Katyal for being part of what she called the \"Al Qaeda Seven,\" Justice Department lawyers who had, during the Bush years, done pro bono work challenging legal aspects of the war on terror. Of course, the profession has a long and distinguished history of encouraging the representation of unpopular clients\u2014and several Republican lawyers, like Ted Olson, rebuked Cheney for impugning the lawyers who upheld this tradition\u2014but Cheney's attacks made Katyal controversial.\n\nIn any event, Obama had a safer choice for solicitor general. Don Verrilli came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well. After compiling a distinguished academic record at Yale College and Columbia Law School, he clerked for two liberal legends, J. Skelly Wright, on the D.C. Circuit, and William Brennan, on the Supreme Court. Verrilli then went to work at the law firm of Jenner & Block, always meaning to do public service some day. Unlike most other corporate lawyers, Verrilli maintained a serious commitment to pro bono work throughout his career\u2014he even argued five death penalty cases before the Supreme Court\u2014but he found himself well into middle age without ever having done what he came to Washington to do. When Obama was elected, he vowed that he would go to work at the Justice Department even if it meant sweeping the hallways.\n\nThat turned out to be unnecessary. Verrilli worked first as associate deputy attorney general and then moved to the White House to work as a deputy to his friend Bob Bauer, the White House counsel. Verrilli had argued a dozen cases in the Supreme Court. His background in corporate law made him easy to confirm in the Senate. Unlike Katyal, Verrilli was without enemies. Finally, after dithering about his choice for solicitor general for eight full months, Obama nominated Verrilli on January 26, 2011. He was confirmed five months later. Obama had his lawyer for the health care case.\n\n# **22**\n\n#    \n**BROCCOLI**\n\nFor all the grandeur of the Supreme Court's fa\u00e7ade, the courtroom itself has a kind of intimacy. The lawyer's lectern is less than ten feet in front of the chief justice; the press seats begin about the same distance from Sotomayor, the justice to Roberts's extreme right; the justices' guests sit about as close to Kagan, who is on the opposite side. When the courtroom is completely full (which it rarely is), there are only about five hundred people inside and their collective presence gives the room an unmistakable barometric instability. The place buzzes. The justices notice.\n\nIn major cases, the justices are like themselves, only more so. The tension, the adrenaline, the stakes\u2014all serve to exaggerate the quirks of their personalities. Court convened on Monday, March 26, 2012, for the first of three days of arguments in the health care case\u2014the most important any of the justices had heard. Health insurance for thirty million people, to say nothing of the political future of the President of the United States, was riding on the outcome. Five justices remained from the Court that decided _Bush v. Gore_ , but by the time that case was argued, on Monday, December 11, 2000, the Court had already voted to issue a stay to stop the recounts in Florida. The result of the argument that followed was largely a foregone conclusion. Not so in health care. According to Court protocol, the justices do not discuss cases with one another before they are argued. So no one\u2014including the justices\u2014knew how this one was going to come out.\n\nFirst, though, there was an overture. Roberts had divided the argument by subject, and the first one was the most obscure. When the initial cases against the ACA were filed, the government argued that the suits were barred by a little-known 1867 law called the Anti-Injunction Act. In short, the law bars lawsuits challenging the legality of taxes before the taxes are actually due. In those first cases, the government asserted that the fee that individuals had to pay for failing to comply with the individual mandate\u2014that is, for refusing to buy health insurance\u2014was a tax. The lawsuits, the government contended, could therefore not proceed until the taxes were actually imposed, in 2015. But Katyal, when he was controlling the case as acting solicitor general, switched the government's position. He said for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, the law was not a tax but rather a penalty, and thus the Court could now hear the challenge to its constitutionality. Verrilli, the new solicitor general, stuck with that position, which in turn created a new complication.\n\nAt the Court on Monday, Verrilli was claiming that the ACA was not a tax but a penalty. But on Tuesday, when the Court would weigh the constitutionality of the individual mandate itself, Verrilli would argue that the law _was_ a tax. Like Katyal, Verrilli had devoted most of his energy (and most of the space in his briefs) to the claim that the ACA was a legal exercise of Congress's power under the commerce clause. But he also asserted that the law was separately justified under a different provision of Article I: \"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes.\"\n\nTypically, it was Alito, the most skillful questioner, who exposed the apparent contradiction in the government's position. \"Today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax,\" Alito told Verrilli on Monday. \"Tomorrow you are going to be back and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax. Has the Court ever held that something that is a tax for purposes of the taxing power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act?\"\n\nNot exactly, Verrilli said, but he still had a response. \"Tomorrow the question is whether Congress has the authority under the taxing power to enact it and the form of words doesn't have a dispositive effect on that analysis,\" he said. \"Today we are construing statutory text where the precise choice of words does have a dispositive effect on the analysis.\"\n\nNot for the last time in the case, the dispute seemed like a matter of semantics. A tax or a penalty? A tax for one purpose but not for another? A tax at an early stage of the litigation but not at a later one? Each argument made a kind of sense (at least to a lawyer), but there was something dispiriting about the fact that the fate of such an important piece of legislation turned on such ephemeral concepts. In a brief exchange on Monday, little noticed at the time, Roberts tried to pierce some of the artificiality.\n\n\"The whole point of the suit is to prevent the collection of penalties,\" he told Gregory Katsas, one of the lawyers challenging the law.\n\n\"Of taxes, Mr. Chief Justice,\" Katsas said.\n\n\"Well, prevent the collection of taxes. But the idea that the mandate is something separate from whether you want to call it a penalty or tax just doesn't seem to make much sense. It's a command. A mandate is a command. Now, if there is nothing behind the command, it's sort of, well, what happens if you don't follow the mandate? And if the answer is nothing, it seems very artificial to separate the punishment from the crime,\" Roberts said, adding a little later, \"Why would you have a requirement that is completely toothless? You know, buy insurance or else. Or else what? Or else nothing?\" The chief justice was suggesting that a tax and a penalty were effectively the same thing.\n\nStill, in the course of the argument on Monday, the justices seemed more or less aligned, appearing to believe that the Anti-Injunction Act did not prevent them from reaching the merits of the case. They would decide whether the ACA was constitutional\u2014and the key argument would take place the following morning.\n\n\"Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court,\" Verrilli began, \"the Affordable Care Act addresses a fundamental and enduring problem in our health care system and our economy. Insurance has become the predominant means of paying for health care in this country.\" He paused and said again, \"Insurance has become the predominant means of paying for health care in this country. For most Americans, for more than 80 percent of Americans, the insurance system does provide effective access. Excuse me.\" Verrilli paused to take a drink of water, which went down the wrong pipe. Briefly, he lost his train of thought. And just then the assault began.*\n\nScalia: \"Why aren't those problems that the federal government can address directly?\"\n\nKennedy: \"Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?\"\n\nScalia: \"If I'm in any market at all, my failure to purchase something in that market subjects me to regulation?\"\n\nVerrilli reeled. Several times, he tried to make the point that the health care market was unique, because, as he said, \"virtually everybody is either in that market or will be in that market, and the distinguishing feature of that is that people cannot generally control when they enter that market or what they need when they enter that market.\"\n\nRoberts: \"Well, the same, it seems to me, would be true, say, for the market in emergency services: police, fire, ambulance, roadside assistance, whatever. You don't know when you're going to need it; you're not sure that you will. But the same is true for health care. You don't know if you're going to need a heart transplant or if you ever will. So, there's a market there. To some extent, we all participate in it.\n\n\"So,\" Roberts went on, \"can the government require you to buy a cell phone because that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services? You can just dial 911 no matter where you are?\"\n\nThe argument was less than ten minutes old and Verrilli had already been hit with a torrent of hostility from the Court's conservatives. In the weeks leading up to the argument, the conventional wisdom had been that the Court would probably uphold the ACA as a valid exercise of Congress's power under the commerce clause. After all, such respected conservatives as Sutton, on the Sixth Circuit, and Laurence Silberman, on the D.C. Circuit, had just done so. But it was quickly obvious how wrong that consensus had been. The onslaught even shocked the four liberal justices, who were themselves frozen in silence.\n\nAlito joined in next. \"Do you think there is a market for burial services?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, Justice Alito, I think there is,\" Verrilli answered.\n\n\"All right,\" Alito went on. \"Suppose that you and I walked around downtown Washington at lunch hour and we found a couple of healthy young people and we stopped them and we said: 'You know what you're doing? You are financing your burial services right now because eventually you're going to die, and somebody is going to have to pay for it, and if you don't have burial insurance and you haven't saved money for it, you're going to shift the cost to somebody else.' Isn't that a very artificial way of talking about what somebody is doing?\"\n\n\"No\u2014\" Verrilli began, but Alito cut him off. \"And if that's true, why isn't it equally artificial to say that somebody who is doing absolutely nothing about health care is financing health care services?\"\n\nAs usual in Supreme Court, the answers mattered less than the questions. In a flash, the four speaking conservatives had signaled one another that they were united in the commerce clause argument against the individual mandate. (Thomas observed his customary silence, but his long-established position on the clause made him a sure vote to overturn the law.)\n\nKennedy then asked an extraordinary question, one that reflected his judge-centered, almost messianic, approach to the law. \"Could you help me with this,\" he said to Verrilli. \"Assume for the moment that [the individual mandate] is unprecedented, this is a step beyond what our cases have allowed, the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce. If that is so, do you not have a heavy burden of justification?\"\n\nKennedy had seventy-five years of constitutional law precisely backwards. During that time, the justices had repeatedly acknowledged that laws passed by Congress were presumed to be constitutional, especially in the economic sphere. It was supposed to be a rare thing indeed for unelected judges to overturn the will of the democratically elected branches of government. But here Kennedy was saying that the legislature had a \"heavy burden\" of proving that its health care law was constitutional. According to decades of settled law, it was the Court, including Kennedy, that had the heavy burden of justification for interfering in the political process. But Kennedy did not think that way. More than any other justice, he had the confidence, or arrogance, to trump the other branches of government. Sometimes, as when he struck down laws that discriminated against gay people, Kennedy's thirst for power pleased the left; more often, as with _Citizens United_ , Kennedy pleased the right. \"Judicial modesty,\" in Roberts's famous phrase, was never for Anthony Kennedy.\n\nAs usual, though, it was Scalia who called the most attention to himself during the argument. Two weeks earlier, he had turned seventy-six, and as with many other people, age had coarsened his rough edges. His belligerence had taken on a nastier edge, and his frame of reference became ever more political, less judicial. Even more than Kennedy, Scalia had a palpable contempt for Congress; he didn't even pretend that the Court owed some deference to the people's representatives. At one point, Scalia said, \"If we struck down nothing in this legislation but the\u2014what's it called, the 'Cornhusker Kickback'\u2014OK, we find that to violate the constitutional proscription of venality, OK?\" Scalia said, and the audience laughed. Scalia went on: \"When we strike that down, it's clear that Congress would not have passed it without that. It was the means of getting the last necessary vote in the Senate. And you are telling us that the whole statute would fall because the Cornhusker Kickback is bad.\"\n\nThe level of distortion in this riff by Scalia was extraordinary. In late 2009, congressional leaders did sweeten the bill with several provisions designed to appeal to Nebraska's Ben Nelson; these became known as the Cornhusker Kickback. But after the changes generated bad publicity, congressional leaders removed it completely from the bill. There was no Cornhusker Kickback in the final version of the legislation, so the premise of Scalia's question was false. There is also no such thing as a \"constitutional proscription of venality\"; that was just another cheap shot at Congress. Scalia was merely reciting conservative talking points, instead of sticking to the facts of the case.\n\nScalia raised another issue that had a rich history in the right-wing popular culture. \"Everybody has to buy food sooner or later,\" he said, \"so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.\" In op-ed pieces, blog posts, Internet videos, even Judge Vinson's opinion in Florida, the broccoli example was cited as the reductio ad absurdum of the Obama proposal. (Katyal had answered a broccoli question in his argument in the Sixth Circuit.) Given its provenance in the conservative political world, it was not surprising that Scalia was the justice who raised broccoli in front of his colleagues.\n\nVerrilli stumbled in response: \"No, that's quite different. That's quite different. The food market, while it shares that trait that everybody's in it, it is not a market in which your participation is often unpredictable and often involuntary. It is not a market in which you often don't know before you go in what you need, and it is not a market in which, if you go in and seek to obtain a product or service, you will get it even if you can't pay for it.\" (Verrilli failed to note, as Katyal had observed, that Congress had made a specific finding that everyone's health care premiums rose because of the cost of treating uninsured people; there was no finding, nor could there be one, that food costs rose because some people refused to eat broccoli.)\n\nAt this point, finally, the liberals on the Court broke their stunned silence and came to the defense of Verrilli and the health care law. Ginsburg was plainly irritated at Verrilli's halting performance and tried to take over the defense of the law. At seventy-nine, she had limited patience, inside and outside the courtroom. (Ginsburg was known for exiling law clerks who disappointed her, even while she still nominally employed them.) If Verrilli couldn't make his case, she would make it for him.\n\n\"Mr. Verrilli, I thought that your main point is that, unlike food or any other market, when you made the choice not to buy insurance, even though you have every intent in the world to self-insure, to save for it, when disaster strikes, you may not have the money,\" Ginsburg said. \"And the tangible result of it is, we were told there was one brief that Maryland hospital care bills seven percent more because of these uncompensated costs, that families pay a thousand dollars more than they would if there were no uncompensated costs. I thought what was unique about this is it's not my choice whether I want to buy a product to keep me healthy, but the cost that I am forcing on other people if I don't buy the product.\" Verrilli humbly assented.\n\nKennedy then brought the issue back to the critical question in the case: \"Well, then your question is whether or not there are any limits on the commerce clause. Can you identify for us some limits on the commerce clause?\"\n\nIt was here that the differences between Katyal's and Verrilli's arguments were most stark. Katyal had grown up in a world dominated by conservatives, and he tailored his appeal to them. He acknowledged that there were real limits on the power of Congress under the commerce clause. He told the appeals courts that Congress could not regulate quintessential state functions that were local and noneconomic in nature. A criminal law forbidding guns near schools, like the law in _Lopez_ , was outside Congress's power under the commerce clause. Under the commerce clause, Katyal said, Congress could address national economic problems, like health insurance, but not local problems, like guns near schools.\n\nBut Verrilli had little to offer the justices as a meaningful limit on the commerce clause. As Kennedy told him, \"If Congress says that the interstate commerce is affected, isn't, according to your view, that the end of the analysis?\" Verrilli said no, but the real answer seemed to be yes. He was presenting a New Deal\u2013era version of the commerce clause like the one Robert Jackson had described to a friend in 1942: \"In any case where Congress thinks there is an effect on interstate commerce, the Court will accept that judgment.\" But not, clearly, the Roberts Court in 2012.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nScalia was partisan, Kennedy imperious, Alito incisive, Ginsburg demanding (and frustrated). When Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush, rose to challenge the law, Stephen Breyer took him on.\n\nBreyer was not a linear thinker (like Ginsburg, for instance), and he sometimes found himself caught up in his own curlicues of erudition. But no one knew this area of the law better than Breyer. He tried, in his professorial way, to show what a radical step the Court was considering. Chief Justice John Marshall upheld the creation of a national bank in the famous 1819 case of _McCulloch v. Maryland_ ; in _Wickard_ , the Court said the commerce clause allowed the regulation of wheat growing for private consumption; in _Gonzales v. Raich_ , the Court, in 2005, said the commerce clause allowed the prohibition on the use of homegrown marijuana.\n\n\"I think if we look back into history, we see sometimes Congress can create commerce out of nothing,\" Breyer said. \"That's the national bank, which was created out of nothing to create other commerce out of nothing. I look back into history, and I see it seems pretty clear that if there are substantial effects on interstate commerce, Congress can act.\n\n\"And I look at the person who's growing marijuana in her house, or I look at the farmer who is growing wheat for home consumption. This seems to have more substantial effects. Is this commerce? Well, it seems to me more commerce than marijuana. I mean, is it, in fact, a regulation? Well, why not? If creating a bank is, why isn't this?\"\n\nBreyer was rambling, as was his wont, but he was making a serious point. The conservatives were pushing the idea that the government could never force anyone to take affirmative steps, or to create anything. But Breyer was pointing out that the Court had upheld many regulations and laws that had far less effect on interstate commerce than the ACA.\n\n\"And then you say, ah, but one thing here out of all those things is different, and that is you're making somebody do something,\" Breyer went on. \"I say, hey, can't Congress make people drive faster than 45 miles an hour on a road? Didn't they make that man growing his own wheat go into the market and buy other wheat for his cows? Didn't they make Mrs. Raich, if she married somebody who had marijuana in her basement, wouldn't she have to go and get rid of it? Affirmative action? I mean, where does this distinction come from? It sounds like sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't.\" Breyer had dedicated his life to the idea that was at the core of the ACA: that government could help solve problems for people. The idea that the Constitution prohibited such attempts was anathema to him.\n\nSuppose \"a disease is sweeping the United States, and 40 million people are susceptible, of whom 10 million will die; can't the Federal Government say all 40 million get inoculation?\" he went on, before finally getting to his point. \"So here, we have a group of 40 million, and 57 percent of those people visit emergency care or other care, which we are paying for. And 22 percent of those pay more than $100,000 for that. And Congress says they are in the midst of this big thing. We just want to rationalize this system they are already in.\n\n\"So, there, you got the whole argument, and I would like you to tell me\u2014\"\n\nAnd here, in light of the length of Breyer's question, Scalia could not avoid a wisecrack at his colleague's expense. \"Answer those questions in inverse order,\" Scalia said.\n\n\"Well, no, it's one question,\" Breyer said, miffed at the interruption. \"It's looking back at that history. The thing I can see is that you say to some people, go buy. Why does that make a difference in terms of the commerce clause?\"\n\nSotomayor tried to help. Unlike Breyer's, Sotomayor's concerns tended toward the earthbound and practical. Sometimes, during oral arguments, she would go on tangents involving detailed questions about the facts of cases that would leave her colleagues stupefied, sinking into their chairs. This time, though, she had a simple line of inquiry. States require individuals to buy automobile insurance. \"Do you think that if some states decided not to impose an insurance requirement,\" Sotomayor asked Clement, \"that the federal government would be without power to legislate and require every individual to buy car insurance?\"\n\nThe heart of the argument against the individual mandate was that it was an extreme departure from previous actions of the federal government. But states routinely required effectively the same thing that the federal government was asking here\u2014for individuals to buy insurance. Was that so outrageous? Clement hedged in his reply, and in any event, the issue drew no traction from the Court's conservatives. Nothing did. They were locked in. Except, it turned out, for one of them.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nBy Wednesday, the justices were punchy. They dedicated one hour of oral argument to most cases. For certain important cases, they gave somewhat more. The second _Citizens United_ argument took an hour and a half. But the six hours over three days for health care was the most they had devoted to any case in forty-five years. (Oddly, the Court had allotted eight hours in 1967 to an obscure and long-forgotten case about natural gas rates in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.)\n\nThe Wednesday morning argument concerned the issue of severability. If the Court found the individual mandate unconstitutional, how much of the law would be invalidated\u2014all of it or just part? The liberals could tell that the previous day's contest had gone badly for their side, so they argued, with some desperation, that the Court should invalidate only part of the law at most. As Ginsburg put it, \"Mr. Clement, there are so many things in this Act that are unquestionably okay. I think you would concede that reauthorizing what is the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act, changes to the Black Lung benefits, why make Congress redo those?... So why should we say, it's a choice between a wrecking operation, which is what you are requesting, or a salvage job. And the more conservative approach would be salvage rather than throwing out everything.\"\n\nBreyer made an almost poignant pitch for his favorite kind of solution: a \"workable\" compromise. Since parts of the law were clearly controversial and parts were not, could not the lawyers make those distinctions themselves?\n\nBreyer said to Edwin Kneedler, the deputy solicitor general, who was representing the government in this part of the case: \"Do you think that it's possible for you and Mr. Clement, on exploring this, to get together and agree on\"\u2014the audience started laughing\u2014\"I mean, on a list of things that are, in both your opinions, peripheral. Then you would focus on those areas where one of you thinks it's peripheral and one of you thinks it's not peripheral. And at that point, it might turn out to be far fewer than we are currently imagining...\" Kneedler politely demurred, as if the suggestion came from a harmless eccentric.\n\nOnce more, Kennedy displayed a breathtaking sense of his own power. Kneedler asserted, with good reason, that the principle of judicial restraint would suggest that the Court should strike down as little of the law as possible. In other words, the Court should eliminate the unconstitutional parts of the law (if any) and leave the rest. Kennedy objected to this notion.\n\n\"When you say 'judicial restraint,' you are echoing the earlier premise that it increases the judicial power if the judiciary strikes down other provisions of the Act,\" Kennedy said. \"I suggest to you it might be quite the opposite. We would be exercising the judicial power if one provision was stricken and the others remained to impose a risk on insurance companies that Congress had never intended. By reason of this Court, we would have a new regime that Congress did not provide for, did not consider. That, it seems to me, can be argued at least to be a more extreme exercise of judicial power than to strike the whole.\"\n\n\"I\u2014I think not, Justice,\" Kneedler stammered, incredulous. Only Anthony Kennedy could assert that eliminating more rather than less of plainly constitutional statutes represented \"judicial restraint.\" (It is notable too that Kennedy expressed particular concern for the effect of the law on insurance companies, not the millions of individuals who would receive insurance coverage.)\n\nScalia, by the end of the day, only wanted to get laughs. When Kneedler made the reasonable suggestion that the Court would have to separate the constitutional parts of the law from the unconstitutional, Scalia shot back, \"Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?\" In other words, making them read so much would be \"cruel and unusual punishment.\" Scalia went on, \"And do you really expect the Court to do that? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?\" More laughter. \"Is this not totally unrealistic? That we're going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?\"\n\nAt one point, Scalia grew so raucous that the chief justice had to shut down his comedy routine, saying, \"That's enough frivolity for a while.\"\n\nAs the six long hours came to a close, with a discussion of whether the expansion of Medicaid imposed unconstitutional duties on the states, the differences between Roberts and Scalia appeared to be more than just stylistic. Scalia had taken every opportunity to announce his hostility to the law\u2014and his belief that the whole law, not just the individual mandate, had to be invalidated. Kennedy and Alito were nearly as contemptuous of Congress's, and President Obama's, work. To be sure, Roberts did not sound like his four liberal colleagues\u2014who were clearly boosters of the law\u2014nor did the chief justice publicly commit himself to the law's demise.\n\nAt 2:24 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28, Roberts said, \"The case is submitted.\"\n\n* Immediately after the argument, no one was more critical of Verrilli's performance, or more wrong about its impact on the justices, than I was.\n\n# **23**\n\n#    \n**THE \"EFFECTIVE\" ARGUMENT**\n\nOn Friday, March 30, Roberts gathered his eight colleagues around the table in his conference room to vote on the health care case.\n\nThe Supreme Court was actually considering consolidated appeals from several health care decisions by the circuit courts. The lead case was known as _National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius_ , which was the Eleventh Circuit decision striking down the individual mandate. In accord with the Court's custom, the chief justice introduced the case, defined the issues, and opened the discussion. According to the same informal rules, no justice spoke twice before everyone had a chance to speak once. Then, in order of seniority, Roberts called on each justice to vote.\n\nScalia: affirm.  \nKennedy: affirm.  \nThomas: affirm.  \nGinsburg: reverse.  \nBreyer: reverse.  \nAlito: affirm.  \nSotomayor: reverse.  \nKagan: reverse.  \nFour to four.\n\nChief Justice Roberts would decide the outcome of the case.\n\nIn the conference room, Roberts sometimes looked wistfully at Charles Evans Hughes's massive desk, which anchored one wall. Hughes would occasionally preside from the desk, while his colleagues sat like supplicants at the conference table. Roberts had no comparable sway. He couldn't even control the conference table itself, much less the decisions made there, without dissent. When Roberts had the temerity, as part of the Court renovation project, to rotate the conference table by ninety degrees, Stevens launched an extended attack on the decorating decision in his memoir, _Five Chiefs_. \"Some might consider the change trivial,\" Stevens wrote, but he then devoted several pages to disparaging the alteration. Stevens said the new location of the table left insufficient room for the justices' carts containing their research material; it was too far from the telephone; there was less space for coffee and baked goods; it made it harder for the justices to autograph group photographs at the same time; the acoustics were worse.\n\nRoberts's vote in the health care case would trump even _Citizens United_ as a symbol of his tenure. _Citizens United_ defined the public image of the Roberts Court in the way that _Bush v. Gore_ , another decision steeped in partisan politics, symbolized the Rehnquist Court. In terms of public perception, the health care case represented the third installment of this legal trilogy\u2014the next occasion when the Court would wade into the political thicket. Unlike _Bush v. Gore_ and _Citizens United_ , the newer case did not deal directly with the business of elections but instead represented something almost as inflammatory: the Republican-dominated Court's verdict on the central achievement of a Democratic president.\n\nRoberts told his colleagues that, as he had indicated at oral argument, he thought Congress had exceeded its powers under the commerce clause in creating the individual mandate. This position was in accord with Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito. It was less clear to his colleagues how the chief felt about the other questions in the case. Most importantly, what did the commerce clause ruling mean for the future of the health care law as a whole? Would just the individual mandate be struck down? Or the whole law? And what of the law's imposition on the states to expand Medicaid coverage? Was that permissible? Discussions at conference are conducted at a fairly general level. The details are worked out in the opinions. Roberts assigned himself _National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius_. His colleagues would see a draft in about a month, which was normal for a major case.\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nRoberts and the other justices couldn't simply devote themselves to resolving the health care case. They had to keep up with the rest of their calendar, too. On April 25, the last day of oral arguments for the term, the justices heard a challenge to Arizona's immigration law, which included several measures to limit illegal immigration and punish undocumented people who were already in the state. The measure, known as SB 1070, had received a great deal of criticism for its possible effect on the lives of Hispanics in the state, but the Obama administration challenged the law on narrower grounds\u2014that the state infringed on responsibilities that belonged exclusively to the federal government.\n\nAfter the Arizona case was argued, Roberts joined Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor in a compromise verdict. (Kagan did not participate.) The justices found that three provisions of the law, including one that banned undocumented immigrants from seeking work, were preempted by federal law. But the five justices also upheld the most controversial part of SB 1070\u2014the so-called \"show me your papers\" provision, which expanded the ability of state law enforcement officers to inquire about individuals' immigration status.\n\nScalia disagreed\u2014vehemently. His passions had shifted in recent years from the scholarly to the political. Increasingly, his preoccupations, with topics like illegal immigration, mirrored those of Fox News. (Barack Obama himself was another Scalia fixation.) All justices have a political ideology as well as a legal philosophy\u2014that's a big reason presidents choose them in the first place\u2014but Scalia was letting the two merge in an ever more public way. Implicitly, if not explicitly, Scalia expected his colleagues, including the chief justice, to share his obsessions.\n\nAt the same time, Scalia was making it clear that he thought Roberts's opinion in the health care case should strike down the entire law, not just the individual mandate. Based on the oral argument, this result was obviously a possibility, but the implications of such a resolution weighed on Roberts. The law had dozens of provisions, many of them uncontroversial, many also critical to continued operations of both the federal government and all fifty states. (Pursuant to the law, for example, many millions of federal dollars had already been transferred to the states to pay for the existing Medicaid system; that whole system would have been thrown into chaos if the law had been completely struck down.)\n\nRoberts was a conservative and a lifelong partisan Republican. The chief justice had no particular affection for Obama. Roberts had dual goals for his tenure as chief justice\u2014to push his own ideological agenda but also to preserve the Court's place as a respected final arbiter of the nation's disputes. Scalia's vision of the justices as gladiators against the president unnerved Roberts. A complete nullification of the health care law on the eve of a presidential election would put the Court at the center of the campaign, especially if the majority in the case consisted only of the five Republican appointees. Democrats, and perhaps Obama himself, would crusade against the Court, eroding its moral if not its legal authority. As chief justice, Roberts felt obligated to protect the institutional interests of the Court, not just his own philosophical agenda.\n\nGradually, then with more urgency, Roberts began looking for a way out.\n\nDon Verrilli had given it to him. Verrilli always liked the taxing power argument. No one doubted that Congress had the constitutional power to levy taxes, even if any individual decision to do so could be politically fraught. When the first cases against the health care law had been filed, in 2010, lawyers in the White House had been squeamish about using the taxing power argument. Obama had promised that the ACA would not represent a tax increase and, more generally, politicians never want to be associated with taxes. But as judges began to take the commerce clause challenge more seriously, the politicos deferred to the lawyers and allowed them to use the taxing power argument.\n\nVerrilli was determined to raise the issue during oral argument. Toward the end of his defense of the individual mandate, Verrilli tried to pivot to the subject off a question from Roberts, saying, \"Mr. Chief Justice, let me answer that, and then if I may, I'd like to move to the tax power argument.\"\n\nScalia cut him off with another wisecrack, which drew laughter. Roberts, Scalia, and Alito jumped in with questions, until finally Sotomayor came to Verrilli's rescue, saying, \"General, could you turn to the tax clause?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Verrilli said.\n\nSoon enough, though, Scalia spoke up and tried to embarrass Obama. \"The president said it wasn't a tax, didn't he?\" Scalia asked Verrilli. \"Is it a tax or not a tax? The president didn't think it was.\"\n\nVerrilli was ready for this: \"The president said it wasn't a tax _increase_ because it ought to be understood as an incentive to get people to have insurance. I don't think it's fair to infer from that anything about whether that is an exercise of the tax power or not.\"\n\nThen came an exchange that passed quickly but turned out to be of considerable significance. \"Why didn't Congress call it a tax, then?\" Roberts asked.\n\n\"Well\u2014\" Verrilli began.\n\n\"You're telling me they thought of it as a tax, they defended it on the tax power. Why didn't they say it was a tax?\"\n\nVerrilli answered: \"They might have thought, Your Honor, that calling it a penalty as they did would make it more _effective_ in accomplishing its objectives. But it is in the Internal Revenue Code, it is collected by the IRS on April 15th. I don't think this is a situation in which you can say\u2014\"\n\nThe word \"effective\" amused the chief justice. \"Well, that's the reason,\" Roberts said with a big smile. \"They thought it might be more 'effective' if they called it a penalty.\" Verrilli meant \"effective\" in the sense that the fee would compel people to buy insurance. But Roberts, a Washington veteran, knew the real reason Obama and the Democrats in Congress didn't use the word \"tax\"\u2014because it was more politically \"effective\" to avoid it.\n\nIn any event, the tax argument stayed with the chief justice.\n\nIn April and May, it started to become apparent to the other justices that Roberts was going \"wobbly\" in his determination to overturn the law. Votes are never final until the decisions are announced in open court. Votes at conference are by definition tentative. It is well within the bounds of acceptable behavior for justices to change their minds once opinions begin circulating. Still, that rarely happens. But now, it appeared it was happening with Roberts\u2014in the most important case of his tenure as chief justice.\n\nWhat happened next was unprecedented in recent Supreme Court history. For pending cases, the Court had a nearly perfect record for avoiding leaks. But conservatives on the Court\u2014especially law clerks\u2014were so outraged that Roberts might betray them that they started to talk.\n\nThe chatter became so pervasive that, in short order, prominent conservatives decided to challenge Roberts to stick to his guns in the health care case. On May 22, an editorial in the _Wall Street Journal_ , referring to recent remarks by Senator Patrick Leahy, said, \"You can tell the Supreme Court is getting closer to its historic ObamaCare ruling because the left is making one last attempt to intimidate the Justices. The latest effort includes taunting Chief Justice John Roberts that if the Court overturns any of the law, he'll forever be defined as a partisan 'activist.' \" That same day, Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist in the _Washington Post_ , wrote, \"Novelist John Grisham could hardly spin a more provocative fiction: The president and his surrogates mount an aggressive campaign to intimidate the chief justice of the United States, implying ruin and ridicule should he fail to vote in a pivotal case according to the ruling political party's wishes. If only it were fiction.\"\n\nGeorge Will, the dean of conservative columnists, had heard from a law student who had heard from a law clerk that Roberts was vacillating in the case. On May 25, Will wrote that various progressives were \"waging an embarrassingly obvious campaign, hoping [Roberts] will buckle beneath the pressure of their disapproval and declare Obamacare constitutional.\" Will concluded, \"Such clumsy attempts to bend the chief justice are apt to reveal his spine of steel.\"\n\nThe following week, the rumors broke into the open, if a panel discussion at a Princeton reunion counts as the open. There, on June 2, Ramesh Ponnuru '95, a senior editor at _National Review_ , said:\n\nMy own sort of educated guess, based on people I talk to at the Supreme Court, is that\u2014Well, as I'm sure people know, there's an initial vote the same week, on the Friday of the oral arguments. And my understanding is that there was a 5\u20134 vote to strike down the mandate and maybe _some_ related provisions but not the entire act. Since then, interestingly, there seem to have been some second thoughts. Not on the part of Justice Kennedy, but on the part of Chief Justice Roberts, who seems to be going a little bit wobbly. So right now, I would say, [the outcome of the case] is a little bit up in the air.\n\nBarton Gellman, a writer for _Time_ who was present, tweeted about Ponnuru's remarks. (Ryan Lizza, the Washington correspondent of _The New Yorker_ , retweeted Gellman's tweet, as did others.) It may have been just gossip, but it turned out to be remarkably accurate gossip. The story was getting out.\n\nThe four conservatives had overplayed their hand with the chief justice. By demanding that Roberts kill off the entire health care law, they prompted him to look for some kind of middle ground. The liberals, in contrast, welcomed any overture from the chief justice. Like the four conservatives, Roberts regarded the expansion of Medicaid as a violation of states' rights. Even though both Breyer and Kagan had vociferously defended the Medicaid expansion during oral argument, they agreed to join Roberts in striking that portion down\u2014giving the chief valuable political cover on the issue. Roberts now had seven votes on the Medicaid issue.\n\nIn early June, Roberts circulated an opinion that declared that Congress had violated the commerce clause by imposing the individual mandate but that upheld the mandate as an exercise of the taxing power. The chief justice worked hard to try to bring Kennedy to his side. He turned one of Kennedy's questions in oral argument into part of his opinion, practically verbatim. Kennedy had told Verrilli: \"Here the government is saying that the federal government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act... and that changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.\" Roberts wrote: \"Accepting the government's theory would give Congress the same license to regulate what we do not do, fundamentally changing the relation between the citizen and the federal government.\" Neither man budged.\n\nOne clue about the resolution of the health care case appeared in plain view\u2014and still everyone missed it. On June 15, Ginsburg spoke to the national convention of the American Constitution Society, the liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society. For the most part, she limited herself to an anodyne review of the cases decided by the Court so far, but she also warned that there were sharp disagreements ahead. In sum, Ginsburg said, the year \"has been more than usually _taxing_.\"\n\n\u2014\u2014\n\nScalia was enraged at the chief. On Monday, June 25, when the Arizona immigration case was announced, Scalia's dissenting opinion marked his transition from conservative intellectual to right-wing crank. Speaking from the bench, he ranged over contemporary controversies, whether or not they had any relevance to the Arizona case. He noted, for example, that Obama had recently used an executive order to accomplish some of the goals of the DREAM Act and exempt certain young people from deportation. (This decision came well after the Arizona case was argued and was legally irrelevant to the issue at hand.) \"The president said at a news conference that the new program is 'the right thing to do' in light of Congress's failure to pass the administration's proposed revision of the Immigration Act,\" Scalia said. \"Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.\" Scalia did not explain how declining to deport these individuals boggled his mind.\n\n\"The issue is a stark one,\" he went on. \"Are the sovereign states at the mercy of the federal executive's refusal to enforce the nation's immigration laws? A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the states conceivably have entered into the union if the Constitution itself contained the Court's holding?\" If this had been the original view of the framers of the Constitution, \"the delegates to the Grand Convention would have rushed to the exits from Independence Hall.\" In other words, according to Scalia, if Arizona had known what was coming from his colleagues in 2012, the state never would have joined the Union. No other state would have either. The Arizona ruling, in Scalia's telling, would have destroyed the country even before it was born.\n\nScalia was indeed unhappy with the immigration decision, but the splenetic excess of his Arizona opinion owed far more to his failure (as yet unknown to the public) in the health care case.\n\nThe last few weeks of a Supreme Court term are always tense and confusing. Only the most controversial cases remain. Drafts of opinions fly between chambers. Memos comment on the opinions, and some propose alternatives, which in turn lead to more correspondence. The goal among the justices is always the same: to receive memos from colleagues that say, in the peculiar diction of the Court, \"Please join me.\" That's how justices sign on to one another's opinions.\n\nThe manic intensity of June 2012 surpassed any year in recent memory. The outcome in _National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius_ remained in doubt long after cases were usually settled. Roberts wrote a draft opinion. Ginsburg wrote a draft dissent. As Roberts hedged, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito adopted some of the chief's arguments as their own\u2014in part as a possible dissent, in part as a lure to Roberts to make a new majority. (Dissenting opinions are invariably written by a single justice; other justices may then sign on. It's rare, if not unprecedented, for four justices to affix their names as coauthors to a dissent.) With all the changes, the cross-references among the various opinions became confused. The Scalia & Co. opinion referred to the Ginsburg opinion as \"the dissent,\" when Ginsburg wound up _not_ dissenting, except on the matter of the Medicaid provision. At one point, of course, it did look like the Ginsburg opinion would be \"the dissent.\" Likewise, the Scalia & Co. opinion for the most part does not even address Roberts's opinion for the Court, which is unusual in a dissent.\n\nStill, by the last week in June, the ragged passage had reached an end. By a vote of 5\u20134, the Court would uphold the heart of the Affordable Care Act. All that was left was to tell the world.\n\nAt ten o'clock on Thursday, June 28, the justices appeared as they always do. The three red curtains parted, pulled open by unseen hands, and the nine materialized simultaneously in groups of three: Roberts, Scalia, and Kennedy in the center; Sotomayor, Breyer, and Thomas on one side; Ginsburg, Alito, and Kagan on the other. On this day, they looked as they had never appeared before: haggard, exhausted, spent. Sotomayor was bent with fatigue; Alito needed a haircut; Kagan seemed thin and drawn. (This was partly intentional; she had lost thirty pounds in a year.) Scalia appeared as he had seven years earlier, when he stood by William Rehnquist's casket: bereft, heartbroken, and angry, too.\n\nEven those tortured visages could not prepare anyone for the sound of John Roberts's voice. The brisk midwestern confidence was gone, replaced by a mournful near whisper. This was an unpleasant duty for him. It took a few minutes to find out why. He began with the commerce clause, and his conclusions were those telegraphed by the oral argument. The individual mandate, Roberts wrote, \"does not regulate existing commercial activity. It instead compels individuals to _become_ active in commerce by purchasing a product, on the ground that their failure to do so affects interstate commerce. Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely _because_ they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. Every day individuals do not do an infinite number of things.\" He went on, \"To an economist, perhaps, there is no difference between activity and inactivity; both have measurable economic effects on commerce. But the distinction between doing something and doing nothing would not have been lost on the Framers, who were 'practical statesmen,' not metaphysical philosophers.\" The mandate, and the law, appeared at that moment as good as dead.\n\n\"That is not the end of the matter,\" the chief justice went on. \"Because the Commerce Clause does not support the individual mandate, it is necessary to turn to the Government's second argument: that the mandate may be upheld as within Congress's enumerated power to 'lay and collect Taxes.' \" Slowly, as members of the audience looked at one another in astonishment, it became clear that Roberts was endorsing the view that the mandate was a tax. \"The Affordable Care Act's requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,\" he wrote. \"Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.\"\n\nThere was no grand peroration at the conclusion of Roberts's remarks\u2014more like an apology. \"But the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act,\" Roberts said. \"Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people.\"\n\nAs the senior justice in the minority, Scalia had the right to read the dissenting opinion from the bench. But he was either too tired, too angry, or too overwrought to take on that duty, and he passed it off to Kennedy. \"In our view,\" he said simply, \"the act before us is invalid in its entirety.\"\n\nGinsburg went last. The statement she read in court marked a notable contrast to the words in her printed opinion. She had written at a time when it looked like the Court might strike down the individual mandate, or even the full statute. The opinion is caustic, almost bitter. But by the time the Court's decision was announced, Ginsburg realized, of course, that she had won. Her criticism of Roberts was, accordingly, mild.\n\nMore than any other justice, Ginsburg seemed obsessed with what she called \"the broccoli horrible,\" and she made sure to take on that argument. \"Although an individual might buy a car or a crown of broccoli one day, there is no certainty she will ever do so,\" Ginsburg wrote. \"And if she eventually wants a car or has a craving for broccoli, she will be obliged to pay at the counter before receiving the vehicle or nourishment. She will get no free ride or food, at the expense of another consumer forced to pay an inflated price.\" (The word \"broccoli\" appeared twelve times in the course of all the opinions.)\n\nGinsburg's statement in court included an observation that appeared nowhere in her written opinion but served as a fitting epitaph to this epic case. \"In the end,\" she said, \"the Affordable Care Act survives largely unscathed.\"\n\n# **EPILOGUE**\n\n#    \n**THE ROBERTS COURT**\n\nOn the day after the health care opinion was announced, Roberts went to a judicial conference in Pennsylvania. There he was asked about his plans for the summer. He said he was leaving shortly to teach a class for two weeks in Malta. \"Malta, as you know, is an impregnable island fortress,\" Roberts said. \"It seemed like a good idea.\"\n\nConservatives turned on Roberts swiftly, and with a vengeance. A _Wall Street Journal_ editorial written on the day of the decision described the chief justice's opinion as \"grim,\" \"shot through with confusion,\" \"without real restraint,\" \"a tragedy,\" and \"damaging to the Court's institutional integrity.\" Ramesh Ponnuru, the _National Review_ senior editor (and uniquely well-informed Princetonian), wrote that Roberts \"acted less like a judge than like a politician, and a slippery one.\" Mitt Romney, who had earlier promised to make appointments to the Supreme Court in the mold of Roberts, changed his tune. \"Well, I certainly wouldn't nominate someone who I knew was going to come out with a decision I violently disagreed with\u2014or vehemently, rather, disagreed with,\" Romney told an interviewer. \"And [Roberts] reached a conclusion, I think, that was not accurate and not an appropriate conclusion.\"\n\nThe outrage was understandable. A late and unexpected change of vote by a Republican appointee to the Supreme Court had again cost the conservative movement a cherished goal. The closest parallel was the _Casey_ decision, in 1992, when O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter (all Republican appointees) joined with Stevens and Harry Blackmun (also Republican appointees) to save the core of _Roe v. Wade_ and thus to preserve abortion rights. In a way, Roberts's betrayal was more agonizing. Unlike the members of the _Casey_ trio, Roberts had never before sided with the liberals in a major contested case. And in the health care case, Roberts even embraced the conservatives' main argument, about the commerce clause. Victory was within reach!\n\nBut then, at the last moment, Roberts reached out for a subsidiary argument, about the taxing power\u2014which had been only lightly briefed by the parties\u2014to change the result in the case. And the chief justice's description of the individual mandate as a tax rather than a penalty might charitably be described as plausible at best. (To this point in the litigation, no other judge had upheld the ACA on that ground.) And in the same opinion, of course, while Roberts said the ACA _was_ a tax for constitutional purposes, he also said that the law was _not_ a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. Some cynicism from conservatives, to say nothing of frustration, seemed reasonable.\n\nIn fact, for Roberts personally and the conservative cause generally, his vote and opinion in the health care case were acts of strategic genius. One cannot know for sure how future courts will interpret the decision in _National Federation of Independent Business_ , but Roberts at a minimum laid down a marker on the scope of the commerce clause. As Ginsburg noted in her opinion, Roberts's \"rigid reading of the Commerce Clause makes scant sense and is stunningly retrogressive,\" possibly even auguring a return to the pre-1937 days when the Court invalidated economic regulations with regularity. Roberts's opinion is potentially a significant long-term gain for the conservative movement.\n\nIn the short term, Roberts took the Supreme Court off the Democratic agenda for at least the foreseeable future. With the exception of Obama's complaint about _Citizens United_ at the State of the Union in 2010, the president showed little interest in using opposition to the Court as a political weapon; the ruling in the health care case guaranteed that Obama would keep his distance for the duration of the 2012 campaign. In addition, Roberts bought enormous political space for himself for future rulings. In the Court's 2012\u201313 term, the justices will take nearly as many combustible issues as they did in the previous year. They will render a verdict on affirmative action in college admissions in a case from the University of Texas, raising the possibility that they will overturn O'Connor's signature achievement in the _Grutter_ case of 2003. They will examine the future, if any, of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965\u2014which has long required mostly southern states to obtain Justice Department permission before making any changes in their electoral rules. Roberts is long on record as being deeply skeptical of any consideration of race by the government. The Court will probably also decide the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act, in the first major test of gay rights in the Roberts Court. Controversies related to _Citizens United_ will also likely return in different forms. In these and other cases, Roberts can advance the conservative movement\u2014and, after health care, he runs little risk of embroiling the Court in partisan politics.\n\nDid Roberts, by his late switch in the health care case, poison his relations with his conservative allies on the Court? That is very unlikely. On the very night of the Court's decision, June 28, Thomas attended a dinner in Washington for local alumni of Yale Law School. (In December 2011, Thomas finally ended his long estrangement from his alma mater with a cheerful visit to New Haven.) In a question-and-answer session with attendees, Thomas paid a lengthy tribute to the way Roberts handled the health care case. Given the complexity and competing pressures, Thomas said, \"he handled it just right.\" Several days later, Kennedy spoke to a gathering at the Aspen Institute, where he made a pointed defense of a justice's right to change his mind while a case was pending. He noted he had often done it himself. Scalia was furious, but what did Roberts have to fear from his senior colleague? After all, at this late date Scalia was not going to start moving to the left to punish the chief. Anyway, even by Supreme Court standards, Scalia was old\u2014and Roberts was still young. Leaks before and after the decision were more likely the work of petulant law clerks rather than of their bosses. The justices knew where the power resided on the Supreme Court, and they understood that it seldom paid to hold grudges against colleagues.\n\nConservatives and liberals, on the Court and off, recognized the health care decision for what it was: an act of leadership by the chief justice. It's John Roberts's Court now.\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" President Obama said in the East Room of the White House. \"Earlier today the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the name of the health care reform we passed two years ago. In doing so, they've reaffirmed a fundamental principle: that here in America, in the wealthiest nation on earth, no illness or accident should lead to any family's financial ruin.\" He said nothing more about the decision, preferring instead to tout the benefits of the reform plan itself.\n\nThe Obama administration illustrated a fundamental difference between contemporary Republicans and Democrats. Starting with Ronald Reagan and proceeding through both sets of Bush years, Republicans demonstrated a profound commitment to their vision of the Constitution. There was a Republican judicial agenda for change: expand executive power, end racial preferences intended to assist African Americans, speed up executions, prohibit all forms of gun control, welcome religion into the public sphere, deregulate political campaigns, and, above all, reverse _Roe v. Wade_ and allow states to ban abortion. There was a Republican judicial philosophy: originalism. Republican presidents talked publicly about this agenda. They made judicial appointments, including to the lower courts, a major priority. Republican legislators fought for their party's judicial nominees\u2014and obstructed and harassed Democratic nominees to the courts, even uncontroversial ones.\n\nBarack Obama was not only an outstanding law student and a practicing lawyer but also, as he often pointed out during his first campaign for president, a professor of constitutional law. In the White House, he enjoyed reminding his subordinates of his mastery of legal issues. (On greeting a delegation from his counsel's office, the president sometimes joked, \"Oh, the lawyers! This is the _easy_ part of my day.\") But Obama rarely discussed the Constitution outside the Oval Office.\n\nObama made two sterling appointments to the Supreme Court, and he was justly proud of these accomplishments. But his interest in judicial nominations appeared almost to have begun with Sonia Sotomayor and ended with Elena Kagan. Obama's lassitude regarding the lower courts was astonishing. In the summer of 2012, when the Senate more or less shut down confirmations until the election, there were 77 vacancies on the federal bench out of a total of about 874 judges. At that point, Obama had failed even to submit nominations for 43 of the judgeships, and Republicans will prevent many of Obama's 34 nominees from coming up for votes. During Obama's presidency, Republicans engaged in an unprecedented level of obstruction toward Obama's judicial nominees; they filibustered and threatened filibusters against more judges than Democrats did in the Bush years. But Republicans could hardly be blamed for blocking judges that Obama failed to nominate in the first place. And since Obama almost never discussed the issue in public, Republicans faced no political consequences for delaying or obstructing confirmations. In the early days of Obama's administration, it was plausible to blame this failure on staffers like Greg Craig or Cassandra Butts; by the end of his term, the only reason could be that the president himself chose not to invest his own time or effort in the issue.\n\nFor Obama, and Democrats generally, this failure to engage on legal issues extended to more than just judgeships. To the extent there is a contemporary liberal agenda, it consists roughly of a pallid embrace of the status quo: preserve _Roe_ and affirmative action. (Support for the rights of gay people may turn out to be an exception to this pervasive timidity. Obama did direct his administration to argue that the Defense of Marriage Act violated the equal protection clause, and announced his support for same-sex marriage.) Both Bill Clinton and Obama also displayed a major commitment to diversity in filling judgeships, and their nominees included dramatically more women and minorities than those of Republican presidents. But it was a lot harder to say what these Democratic judges stood for.\n\nEven after the health care case, it is easy to say what John Roberts stands for. He remains a skilled and powerful advocate for the full Republican agenda; he is still the candidate (in robes) of change. Roberts did refrain from embracing the unprecedented extremism of his conservative colleagues in the health care case; on that occasion, the chief justice acted like a true conservative and deferred, as judges have for seventy-five years, to the elected branches of government on issues relating to managing the economy. But it was folly to pretend that Roberts had discovered his inner moderate. He had not changed, except that he was more powerful than ever. The only thing that is certain about January 20, 2013, is that John Roberts will be there to administer the oath of office.\n\nThere was some irony in the conservative embrace of originalism, in the insistence by Scalia and others that the Constitution is \"dead\" and unchanging. With their success, driven by people, ideas, and money, conservatives proved just how much the Constitution can change, and it did. Obama and his party were the ones who acted like the Constitution remained inert; they hoped the Constitution and the values underlying it would somehow take care of themselves. That has never happened, and it never will. Invariably, inevitably, the Constitution lives.\n\n(photo credit i1)\n\nAt the stroke of noon, on January 20, 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to President Barack Obama at the U.S. Capitol. Stumbles and mistakes in the oath prompted an unprecedented \"redo\" of the oath the following day at the White House. (photo credit i2)\n\nChief Justice John Roberts readministers the oath of office to President Barack Obama in the Map Room at the White House on January 21, 2009. The portrait is of Benjamin Latrobe, architect of the Capitol. (photo credit i3)\n\nChief Justice Roberts prepared this card in advance of the inauguration to guide how the oath would be administered. (Roberts added a comma after \"ability.\") Aides to Roberts sent this card to the congressional inaugural committee, but it never reached anyone on Obama's staff.\n\nOn January 14, 2009, the president-elect and vice president-elect visited the Supreme Court by invitation of the chief justice. Eight justices greeted them, and Samuel Alito chose not to attend. From left: Barack Obama, John Roberts, John Paul Stevens, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, Joseph Biden. (photo credit i4)\n\nObama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in the East Room of the White House on January 29, 2009, with a smiling Ledbetter herself (center, with blond hair and pin) looking on. This was the first piece of legislation Obama signed as president, and it overturned Justice Alito's opinion in _Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co_. (photo credit i5)\n\nAntonin Scalia, shown here (right), with Stephen Breyer at a congressional hearing in 2011, has been a dominant conservative voice on the Court for decades. (photo credit i6)\n\nDick Heller, a District of Columbia police officer who challenged the D.C. law preventing individuals from keeping private handguns, signs autographs after the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment gives Americans a right to keep guns in their homes. (photo credit i7)\n\nAfter her confirmation, Sonia Sotomayor hugs her mother, Celina Sotomayor, during a reception in the East Room of the White House on August 12, 2009. (photo credit i8)\n\nThe current 4-4 conservative-liberal split on the court has made Anthony Kennedy (shown here) the most powerful justice in decades. His swing vote has controlled the outcome of many cases, including _Citizens United_. (photo credit i9)\n\nThe Obama administration's anger over the Supreme Court decision in _Citizens United_ prompted Obama to rebuke the justices during his State of the Union address on January 27, 2010. (photo credit i10)\n\nJustice Alito mouthed \"not true\" and shook his head as Obama described the consequences of the _Citizens United_ decision during his 2010 State of the Union address. Justices (top row, from left) Alito, Sotomayor, (bottom row, from left) Roberts and Kennedy. (photo credit i11)\n\nAfter Elena Kagan's Supreme Court nomination was announced in 2010, _The Wall Street Journal_ ran this photograph of Kagan playing softball while she was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The _New York Post_ reran the photo with a headline suggesting she was a lesbian. (photo credit i12)\n\nObama's second Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, shown here with Obama and Chief Justice Roberts, takes her place as the 112th justice of the Supreme Court in 2010. (photo credit i13)\n\nFrom left to right, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan. This is the first time in history that three women have served on the Supreme Court at the same time. (photo credit i14)\n\nPresident Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton share a victory hug after the House of Representatives voted to pass health care reform in March 2010. (photo credit i15)\n\nVirginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, speaks out against Obama's health care reform law at a Tea Party rally outside the U.S. Capitol in 2010. Her activities raised concerns about the propriety of a justice's spouse being a leader in a political movement. (photo credit i16)\n\nClarence and Virginia Thomas at a Federalist Society meeting in Washington in 2007. (photo credit i17)\n\nSolicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. on the Supreme Court steps during a brief recess from oral arguments on health care reform in 2012. The justices gave Verrilli a tough time but ultimately vindicated him by ruling in his favor. (photo credit i18)\n\nThe current members of the Supreme Court: (back row, from left) Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, (front row, from left) Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (photo credit i19)\nALSO BY JEFFREY TOOBIN\n\n_Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case\u2014United States v. Oliver North_\n\n_The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson_\n\n_A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President_\n\n_Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election_\n\n_The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court_\n\n# **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**\n\n#\n\nMy thanks to my friends at Doubleday, starting with my editor, Bill Thomas. Phyllis Grann also lavished attention on this book and improved it a great deal. Thank you as well to Coralie Hunter, Todd Doughty, Roslyn Schloss, and Bette Alexander. For our sixth book together, my agent, Esther Newberg, has steered me the right way. My thanks as well to John Q. Barrett, of the St. John's University School of Law, and Samuel Issacharoff, of the New York University School of Law, for their helpful comments on the manuscript. For fact-checking and research assistance, I am grateful to Lila Byock, Alex Bernstein, and Avi Zenilman. Thank you as well to Silvia Berinstein. Ellen and Adam Toobin were away at college when I wrote this book, but their inspiration to me is ever present.\n\nI remain privileged to work at _The New Yorker_ , where David Remnick has been a generous boss and a loyal friend. I am fortunate to work with Dorothy Wickenden, John Bennet, and Amy Davidson.\n\nAmy McIntosh is my wife and true love. She's a good editor, too.\n\n# **NOTES**\n\n#\n\nThis book is based principally on my interviews with the justices and more than forty of their law clerks. The interviews were on a not-for-attribution basis\u2014that is, I could use the information provided but without quoting directly or identifying the source.\n\nIn addition to the works cited in the text and below, I have benefited from the day-to-day coverage of the Supreme Court press corps, especially that of Adam Liptak, Lyle Denniston, Dahlia Lithwick, Tony Mauro, David Savage, Nina Totenberg, Pete Williams, and my CNN colleague Bill Mears. My thanks also to the Public Information Office of the Court, its excellent website, www.\u200bsupreme\u200bcourt.\u200bgov, and Kathy Arberg, Patricia McCabe Estrada, and Scott Markley.\n\nThe Court's opinions are widely available online. I generally relied on Cornell University's www.\u200blaw.\u200bcornell.\u200bedu\/\u200bsupct\/. For transcripts and recordings of the Court's oral arguments, www.\u200boyez.\u200borg, created by Professor Jerry Goldman of the Chicago-Kent College of Law, is indispensable. I am also a regular reader of www.\u200bscotus\u200bblog.\u200bcom, the blog of record about the Court, and http:\/\/\u200bhow\u200bappealing.\u200blaw.\u200bcom.\n\n## PROLOGUE: THE OATHS\n\n **only a single provision:** I am grateful to Professor Akhil Reed Amar, of Yale Law School, for introducing me to the history of the oath. In particular, I relied on his book _America's Constitution_ , pp. 177\u201378.\n\n **whether he did:** For an evocative account of Washington's inauguration, see Ron Chernow, _Washington: A Life_ , ch. 46.\n\n **wrote to the chief justice about it:** _Time_ , March 25, 1929, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200btime.\u200bcom\/\u200btime\/\u200bmagazine\/\u200barticle\/\u200b0\u200b,9171\u200b\u200b,846311\u200b,00\u200b.html\u200b#\u200bixzz1WAMUAeom.\n\n **standing athwart history yelling \"Stop!\":** William F. Buckley Jr., \"Publisher's Statement,\" _National Review_ , Nov. 19, 1955, p. 5.\n\n## CHAPTER 1: THE POLITICIAN'S PATH\n\n **friends and colleagues found Obama more analytical than confrontational:** David Remnick, _The Bridge_ , pp. 163\u201367.\n\n **\"Do you even** **_want_** **popcorn?\":** Remnick, _The Bridge_ , p. 189.\n\n **\"for a lot of the changes that have been made\":** Remnick, _The Bridge_ , pp. 207\u201308.\n\n **compromise on racial profiling by the police:** Remnick, _The Bridge_ , pp. 350\u201351.\n\n## CHAPTER 2: \"ON BEHALF OF THE STRONG IN OPPOSITION TO THE WEAK\"\n\n **a justice who might overturn** Roe v. Wade: David Remnick, _The Bridge_ , p. 434.\n\n **\"Whoever had the 15- to 20-minute slot won that money\":** Roger Parloff, \"On History's Stage: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.,\" _Fortune_ , Jan. 3, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bmanagement.\u200bfortune.\u200bcnn.\u200bcom\/\u200b2011\/\u200b01\/\u200b03\/\u200bon-\u200bhistorys-\u200bstage-\u200bchief-\u200bjustice-\u200bjohn-\u200broberts-\u200bjr\/.\n\n **Roberts was the leading figure in his generation:** See http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bscotusblog.\u200bcom\/\u200b2006\/\u200b03\/\u200bthe-\u200bexpansion-\u200bof-\u200bthe-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt-\u200bbar\/.\n\n## CHAPTER 3: THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS\n\n **\"in the event that you do lead the defense team at the military tribunals, to offer my help\":** Jonathan Mahler, _The Challenge_ , ch. 4.\n\n **\"two implants on each side and a total of three pints of fluid\":** Dan P. Lee, \"Paw Paw & Lady Love,\" _New York_ , June 5, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bnymag.\u200bcom\/\u200bnews\/\u200bfeatures\/\u200banna-\u200bnicole-\u200bsmith-\u200b2011\u20136\/.\n\n## CHAPTER 4: THE LEGACY OF APPENDIX E\n\n **the quorum for the official prayers:** Abigail Pogrebin, _Stars of David_ , p. 19.\n\n **\"That makes no sense\":** Speech by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Tenth Circuit Conference, Aug. 27, 2010, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bc-\u200bspanvideo.\u200borg\/\u200bprogram\/\u200b295217-\u200b1.\n\n **\"the right most valued by civilized men\":** _Olmstead v. United States_ , 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).\n\n **\"not legal reasoning but fiat\":** Robert Bork, _The Tempting of America_ , p. 114.\n\n **\"her ability to stand in relation to man, society, and the state as an independent, self-sustaining, equal citizen\":** Ruth Ginsburg, \"Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade,\" 63 _North Carolina Law Review_ 375 (1985).\n\n **\"the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him\":** http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnytimes.\u200bcom\/\u200b2009\/\u200b07\/\u200b12\/\u200bmagazine\/\u200b12ginsburg-\u200bt.\u200bhtml?\u200b_r=\u200b2&\u200bpagewanted=\u200ball.\n\n **\"dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed\":** Charles Evans Hughes, _The Supreme Court of the United States_ (1936), p. 68, quoted in Ruth Bader Ginsburg, \"The Role of Dissenting Opinions,\" 95 _Minnesota Law Review_ 1 (2010), http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bminne\u200bsotal\u200bawre\u200bview.\u200borg\/\u200bwp-\u200bcontent\/\u200buploads\/\u200b2011\/\u200b07\/\u200bGinsburg_\u200bMLR.\u200bpdf.\n\n **\"The Constitution, as we have known it, is gone\":** John Q. Barrett, \"Commending Opinion Announcements by Supreme Court Justices,\" http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bstjohns.\u200bedu\/\u200bmedia\/\u200b3\/\u200b55c14\u200bb0772\u200b794f14\u200b8fec4\u200b8e3c14\u200b851a7.\u200bpdf. See also James F. Simon, _FDR and Chief Justice Hughes_ , p. 256.\n\n **each read dissents from the bench exactly once:** I am grateful to William Blake, of the University of Texas, for sharing his research with me. See William D. Blake and Hans J. Hacker, \"The Brooding Spirit of the Law: Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench,\" _Justice System Journal_ 31(1): 1\u201325 (2010).\n\n## CHAPTER 5: THE BALLAD OF LILLY LEDBETTER\n\n **\"public law litigation\":** Abram Chayes, \"The Role of the Judge in Public Law Litigation,\" 89 _Harvard Law Review_ 1281 (1976).\n\n## CHAPTER 6: THE WAR AGAINST PRECEDENT\n\n **was able to assemble a majority in only a quarter of them:** These statistics are drawn from the annual compilations by scotus\u200bblog.\u200bcom.\n\n## CHAPTER 7: THE HUNTER\n\n **took his rifle, a .22 carbine, with him on the subway:** Joan Biskupic, _American Original_ , pp. 21\u201322.\n\n **after a string of bank robberies:** The Miller story is laid out in entertaining detail in Brian L. Frye, \"The Peculiar Story of _United States v. Miller_ ,\" _NYU Journal of Law & Liberty_ 3(1): 48\u201382 (2008).\n\n **the colonists formed militias:** Adam Winkler, _Gunfight_ , pp. 103\u201304.\n\n **the 1976 platform opposed it:** Reva B. Siegel, \"Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller,\" 122 _Harvard Law Review_ 191 (2008).\n\n **advocated for the individual rights view in conferences and seminars:** Winkler, _Gunfight_ , pp. 67, 97.\n\n **\"for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms\":** Quoted in Siegel, \"Dead or Alive.\"\n\n **later joined the Reagan Justice Department:** Ibid.\n\n## CHAPTER 8: LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY\n\n **Reagan-era Justice Department official with close ties to the conservative movement:** Adam Winkler, _Gunfight_ , p. 57.\n\n **drug dealers broke her car windows and drove into her back fence:** Brian Doherty, _Gun Control on Trial_ , p. 29.\n\n **Stevens who hewed more closely to the actual debates of the framers:** Post by Jack Rakove, http:\/\/\u200bbalkin.\u200bblogspot.\u200bcom\/\u200b2008\/\u200b06\/\u200bthoughts-\u200bon-\u200bheller-\u200bfrom-\u200breal-\u200bhistorian.\u200bhtml.\n\n **as did the state legislators who ratified their work:** The most often cited critique of originalism remains Paul Brest, \"The Misconceived Quest for Original Understanding,\" 60 _Boston University Law Review_ 204 (1980).\n\n **they never indicated that they understood their** **_intentions_** **should bind future generations:** H. Jefferson Powell, \"The Original Understanding of Original Intent,\" 98 _Harvard Law Review_ 885, 903 (1984).\n\n **and then find their twenty-first-century analogue:** Winkler, _Gunfight_ , pp. 283\u201386. See also Nelson Lund, \"The Second Amendment, Heller, and Originalist Jurisprudence,\" 56 _UCLA Law Review_ 1343 (2009).\n\n## CHAPTER 9: THE UNREQUITED BIPARTISANSHIP OF BARACK OBAMA\n\n **had voted against his confirmation three years earlier:** Tony Mauro, The Blog of _Legal Times_ , Jan. 14, 2009. http:\/\/\u200blegaltimes.\u200btypepad.\u200bcom\/\u200bblt\/\u200b2009\/\u200b01\/\u200ba-\u200bchat-\u200baround-\u200bthe-\u200bfireplace-\u200bfor-\u200bobama-\u200bbiden-\u200band-\u200bthe-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt.\u200bhtml.\n\n## CHAPTER 10: WISE LATINA\n\n **\"adapt it to their own needs and uses\":** Diane P. Wood, \"Our 18th Century Constitution in the 21st Century World,\" http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bscotusblog.\u200bcom\/\u200bwp-\u200bcontent\/\u200buploads\/\u200b2009\/\u200b05\/\u200b80_\u200bnyulr_\u200b1079_\u200b5-\u200b13-\u200b09_\u200b1224.\u200brtf.\n\n **was the case of** **_National Organization for Women v. Scheidler_** , **in 2001:** For a clear discussion of that case, see Emily Bazelon's discussion in _Slate_ , http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bslate.\u200bcom\/\u200barticles\/\u200bnews_\u200band_\u200bpolitics\/\u200bjurisprudence\/\u200b2010\/\u200b04\/\u200bdefining_\u200bradical_\u200bdown.\u200bhtml.\n\n **suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-two:** Antonia Felix, _Sonia Sotomayor: The True American Dream_ , pp. 12\u201314.\n\n **\"mark that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions\":** Quoted in Felix, _Sonia Sotomayor_ , p. 39.\n\n **she toured Israel with a group of Latino activists:** Lauren Collins, \"Number Nine,\" _New Yorker_ , Jan. 11, 2010, p. 48.\n\n **including the son of her dentist:** Collins, \"Number Nine,\" p. 48.\n\n## CHAPTER 11: MONEY TALKS\n\n **\"make constitutional law on his own\":** Jack Beatty, _Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America_ , _1865\u20131900_ , p. 176. Beatty points out that Davis's credibility was suspect because Karl Marx (!) complained that Davis had misquoted him in a report. On _Santa Clara_ , see also Morton J. Horwitz, _The Transformation of American Law_ , _1870\u20131960_ , pp. 66\u201371.\n\n **\" 'the government is best which governs least' \":** Horwitz, _The Transformation of American Law_ , p. 33.\n\n **\"then he did not stay bought\":** Frick made the comment to the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, who recounted it in his book _Fighting Years_ , p. 181.\n\n **required extensive disclosure of campaign contributions and expenditures:** Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela S. Karlan, and Richard H. Pildes, _The Law of Democracy_ , p. 334.\n\n **Warren Burger, Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist:** Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel, _Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion_ , p. 442.\n\n **Congress had tried to set up a tightly controlled system for financing campaigns:** Frank J. Sorauf, _Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities_ , pp. 238\u201339.\n\n## CHAPTER 12: SAMUEL ALITO'S QUESTION\n\n **named Bossie his \"chief researcher\" and the pair narrowed their focus to the personal and financial affairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton:** Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, _The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton_ , pp. 72\u201375.\n\n **various Washington journalists who printed or broadcast his accusations:** Sidney Blumenthal, _The Clinton Wars_ , pp. 76\u201377.\n\n **he had doctored certain transcripts to eliminate exculpatory information about Hillary Clinton:** Howard Kurtz, \"Some Reporters Heard Unedited Tapes,\" _Washington Post_ , May 11, 1998. See also Blumenthal, _The Clinton Wars_ , pp. 443\u201344.\n\n **\"conspiring against my husband since the day he announced forpresident\":** Jeffrey Toobin, _A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President_ , pp. 254\u201356.\n\n## CHAPTER 13: THE ROOKIE\n\n **social studies to fifth and sixth graders:** For the reflection of one former Gloria Kagan student, see Blake Eskin, \"The Ghost of Mrs. Kagan,\" http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnewyorker.\u200bcom\/\u200bonline\/\u200bblogs\/\u200bnewsdesk\/\u200b2010\/\u200b05\/\u200bthe-\u200bghost-\u200bof-\u200bmrs-\u200bkagan.\u200bhtml.\n\n## CHAPTER 14: THE NINETY-PAGE SWAN SONG OF JOHN PAUL STEVENS\n\n **embezzled funds from the insurance company to prop up the hotel:** Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman, _John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life_ , p. 31.\n\n **one of the boys was forced to open a safe in the first-floor library:** Barnhart and Schlickman, _John Paul Stevens_ , pp. 32\u201333.\n\n## CHAPTER 15: \"WITH ALL DUE DEFERENCE TO SEPARATION OF POWERS\"\n\n **spotty at best in recent years:** Pete Williams of NBC News compiled the statistics: http:\/\/\u200bfirstread.\u200bmsnbc.\u200bmsn.\u200bcom\/\u200b_news\/\u200b2011\/\u200b01\/\u200b25\/\u200b5914956-\u200bwill-\u200bchief-\u200bjustice-\u200broberts-\u200bbe-\u200bin-\u200battendance-\u200bafter-\u200ball. See also Adam Liptak, \"For Justices, State of the Union Can Be a Trial,\" _New York Times_ , Jan. 23, 2012, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnytimes.\u200bcom\/\u200b2012\/\u200b01\/\u200b24\/\u200bus\/\u200bstate-\u200bof-\u200bthe-\u200bunion-\u200bcan-\u200bbe-\u200ba-\u200btrial-\u200bfor-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt-\u200bjustices.\u200bhtml.\n\n **\"juvenile spectacle\":** Adam Liptak, \"Six Justices to Attend State of the Union,\" Jan. 25, 2011, _New York Times_ , http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnytimes.\u200bcom\/\u200b2011\/\u200b01\/\u200b26\/\u200bus\/\u200bpolitics\/\u200b26justices.\u200bhtml?\u200b_r=3.\n\n## CHAPTER 16: THE RETIRED JUSTICES DISSENT\n\n **\"and have them all over\":** http:\/\/\u200bwww\u200b.abajournal\u200b.com\u200b\/news\u200b\/article\u200b\/oconnor\u200b_lawyers\u200b_judges\u200b_need\u200b_to\u200b_wake\u200b_up\u200b_to\u200b_judicial\u200b_funding\u200b_threat\u200b_prep\u200b_for\u200b_\u200b\/.\n\n **call meant that he had died:** http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200blvrj.\u200bcom\/\u200bnews\/\u200brobocall-\u200bmishap-\u200bshows-\u200bnevadans-\u200bdont-\u200bwant-\u200bany-\u200bquestions-\u200bat-\u200b1-\u200ba-m\u2014\u200b105\u200b738278.\u200bhtml?\u200bref=\u200b278.\n\n **\"So forget it. It's over!\":** Jeffrey Rosen, \"Why I Miss Sandra Day O'Connor,\" July 1, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200btnr.\u200bcom\/\u200barticle\/\u200bpolitics\/\u200b91146\/\u200bsandra-\u200bday-\u200bo-\u200bconnor-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt-\u200balito.\n\n **\"It's not always positive\":** Joan Biskupic, \"O'Connor Says Rulings Being 'Dismantled,' \" Jan. 5, 2010, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200busatoday.\u200bcom\/\u200bnews\/\u200bwashington\/\u200bjudicial\/\u200b2009-\u200b10-\u200b05-\u200bsandra-\u200bday-\u200boconnor_N.\u200bhtm.\n\n## CHAPTER 17: SOFTBALL POLITICS\n\n **laying out the absurdities of contemporary confirmation hearings:** Elena Kagan, \"Confirmation Messes, Old and New,\" 62 _University of Chicago Law Review_ 919 (1995), http:\/\/\u200blawreview.\u200buchicago.\u200bedu\/\u200barchive\/\u200bFront%\u200b20Page\/\u200bKagan\/\u200bConfirmation\u200bMesses\u200bOld\u200bAnd\u200bNew.\u200bpdf.\n\n **\"I know it when I see it\":** _Jacobellis v. Ohio_ , 378 U.S. 164, 197 (1964) (Stewart, J., concurring).\n\n## CHAPTER 18: THE TEA PARTY AND THE JUSTICE'S WIFE\n\n **\"their belief in citizen activism\":** Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, _The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism_ , p. 53.\n\n **\"minimize the risk of another monarchy\":** Glenn Beck, _The Original Argument_ , p. xxv.\n\n **\"in academia claim it to mean\":** Mark R. Levin, _Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto_ , pp. 57, 60.\n\n **family prominent in Republican politics:** Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, _Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas_ , pp. 144\u201345.\n\n **\"And you pay a penalty if you don't\":** Quoted in Paul Starr, _Remedy and Reaction_ , p. 87.\n\n **unless there was a mandate:** Starr, _Remedy and Reaction_ , pp. 87\u201388.\n\n **the conservative Heritage Foundation:** The plan was created by Stuart Butler and Edmund Haislmaier. See http:\/\/\u200bonline\u200b.wsj\u200b.com\u200b\/article\u200b\/SB10001424052970204618704576641190920152366\u200b.html.\n\n **repeated his support for the idea as recently as 2005:** Josh Hicks, \"Newt Gingrich's Changing Stance on Health-Care Mandates,\" Dec. 12, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bwashingtonpost.\u200bcom\/\u200bblogs\/\u200bfact-\u200bchecker\/\u200bpost\/\u200bnewt-\u200bgingrichs-\u200bchanging-\u200bstance-\u200bon-\u200bhealth-\u200bcare-\u200bmandates-\u200bfact-\u200bchecker-\u200bbiography\/\u200b2011\/\u200b12\/\u200b09\/\u200bgIQAVl0lkO_\u200bblog.\u200bhtml.\n\n **\"Constitutional Implications of an 'Individual Mandate' in Health Care Reform\":** See http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bfed-\u200bsoc.\u200borg\/\u200bpublications\/\u200bdetail\/\u200bconstitutional-\u200bimplications-\u200bof-\u200ban-\u200bindividual-\u200bmandate-\u200bin-\u200bhealth-\u200bcare-\u200breform.\n\n **translating the Urbanowicz-Smith article into more colloquial language:** David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, \"Constitutionality of Health Insurance Mandate Questioned,\" _Washington Post_ , Aug. 22, 2009, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bwashingtonpost.\u200bcom\/\u200bwp-\u200bdyn\/\u200bcontent\/\u200barticle\/\u200b2009\/\u200b08\/\u200b21\/\u200bAR200908\u200b2103033.\u200bhtml.\n\n## CHAPTER 19: THE THOMAS COURT\n\n **Crow who made the $500,000 contribution to Liberty Central:** Kenneth P. Vogel, Marin Cogan, and John Bresnahan, \"Justice Thomas's Wife Virginia Thomas Now a Lobbyist,\" _Politico_ , Feb. 4, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bpolitico.\u200bcom\/\u200bnews\/\u200bstories\/\u200b0211\/\u200b48812.\u200bhtml; Mike McIntire, \"Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics,\" _New York Times_ , June 18, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnytimes.\u200bcom\/\u200b2011\/\u200b06\/\u200b19\/\u200bus\/\u200bpolitics\/\u200b19thomas.\u200bhtml?\u200bpagewanted=\u200ball.\n\n **who are leading benefactors of the Tea Party movement:** Eric Lichtblau, \"Common Cause Asks Court about Thomas Speech,\" _New York Times_ , Feb. 14, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnytimes.\u200bcom\/\u200b2011\/\u200b02\/\u200b15\/\u200bus\/\u200bpolitics\/\u200b15thomas.\u200bhtml. The circumstances of the appearances by Thomas and Scalia at the Koch brothers' event are not clear. In his financial disclosure statement, Thomas listed reimbursement for a Federalist Society event at the time and place of the Koch event.\n\n **\"price to pay today for standing in defense of your Constitution\":** The audiotape of this speech was first disclosed by _Politico_. Kenneth P. Vogel, \"Defiant Clarence Thomas Fires Back,\" _Politico_ , Feb. 27, 2011, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bpolitico.\u200bcom\/\u200bnews\/\u200bstories\/\u200b0211\/\u200b50277.\u200bhtml.\n\n **\"He does not believe in stare decisis, period\":** Ken Foskett, _Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas_ , pp. 281\u201382.\n\n **\"the perversion of the Constitution took off during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt\":** Kate Zernike, _Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America_ , p. 70.\n\n## CHAPTER 20: \"DEMOCRACY IS NOT A GAME\"\n\n **his speech to raise money for the** **_Spectator_** **would have been inappropriate:** On Alito's speeches for the _Spectator_ , see Lee Fang, \"Exclusive: Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito Dismisses His Profligate Right-Wing Fundraising as 'Not Important,' \" Nov. 10, 2010, http:\/\/\u200bthink\u200bprogress.\u200borg\/\u200bpolitics\/\u200b2010\/\u200b11\/\u200b10\/\u200b129395\/\u200bsam-\u200balito-\u200brepublican-\u200bfundraiser\/. See also http:\/\/\u200blawprofessors.\u200btypepad.\u200bcom\/\u200bconlaw\/\u200b2010\/\u200b11\/\u200balito-\u200band-\u200bethics.\u200bhtml.\n\n## CHAPTER 21: \"YOU SHOULD DO IT\"\n\n **\"the Court will accept that judgment\":** John Q. Barrett, \" _Wickard v. Filburn_ (1942),\" http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bstjohns.\u200bedu\/\u200bmedia\/\u200b3\/\u200b638cd9\u200b94e84\u200b84fd3\u200bbdb84\u200b1f31b\u200b11952f.\u200bpdf?d=\u200b201.\n\n **sweeping the hallways:** Nina Totenberg, profile of Donald Verrilli, NPR, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnpr.\u200borg\/\u200b2012\/\u200b03\/\u200b22\/\u200b148947199\/\u200bthe-\u200bman-\u200bbehind-\u200bthe-\u200bdefense-\u200bof-\u200bobamas-\u200bhealth-\u200blaw.\n\n## CHAPTER 22: BROCCOLI\n\n **\"you can make people buy broccoli\":** For a history of the broccoli example in the health care case, see James B. Stewart, \"How Broccoli Landed on Supreme Court Menu,\" _New York Times_ , June 14, 2012, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bnytimes.\u200bcom\/\u200b2012\/\u200b06\/\u200b14\/\u200bbusiness\/\u200bhow-\u200bbroccoli-\u200bbecame-\u200ba-\u200bsymbol-\u200bin-\u200bthe-\u200bhealth-\u200bcare-\u200bdebate.\u200bhtml?\u200bpage\u200bwanted=\u200ball.\n\n## CHAPTER 23: THE \"EFFECTIVE\" ARGUMENT\n\n **\"Some might consider the change trivial\":** Stevens, _Five Chiefs_ , p. 212.\n\n **he thought Congress had exceeded its powers under the commerce clause in creating the individual mandate:** In addition to my own reporting, I relied on the following sources in my account of the Court's deliberations: Jan Crawford, \"Roberts Switched Views to Uphold Health Care Law,\" July 1, 2012, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bcbsnews.\u200bcom\/\u200b8301-\u200b3460_\u200b162\u2013\u200b57464549\/\u200broberts-\u200bswitched-\u200bviews-\u200bto-\u200buphold-\u200bhealth-\u200bcare-\u200blaw\/\u200b?tag=\u200bcontent\u200bMain;\u200bcontent\u200bBody; Paul Campos, \"Roberts Wrote Both Obamacare Opinions,\" _Salon_ , July 3, 2012, http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bsalon.\u200bcom\/\u200b2012\/\u200b07\/\u200b03\/\u200broberts_\u200bwrote_\u200bboth_\u200bobamacare_\u200bopinions\/. See also http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bvolokh.\u200bcom\/\u200b2012\/\u200b07\/\u200b03\/\u200bso-\u200bnow-\u200bwe-\u200bhave-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt-\u200bleaks-\u200bdisagreeing-\u200bwith-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt-\u200bleaks\/; http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bvolokh.\u200bcom\/\u200b2012\/\u200b07\/\u200b03\/\u200bmore-\u200bon-\u200bthe-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt-\u200bleak\/.\n\n **\"a little bit up in the air\":** Quoted at http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bvolokh.\u200bcom\/\u200b2012\/\u200b07\/\u200b03\/\u200bmore-\u200bon-\u200bthe-\u200bsupreme-\u200bcourt-\u200bleak\/.\n\n **\"changing the relation between the citizen and the federal government\":** Jan Crawford first made this connection. See http:\/\/\u200bwww.\u200bcbsnews.\u200bcom\/\u200b8301-\u200b3460_\u200b162-\u200b57464549\/\u200broberts-\u200bswitched-\u200bviews-\u200bto-\u200buphold-\u200bhealth-\u200bcare-\u200blaw\/\u200b?tag=\u200bcontent\u200bMain;\u200bcontent\u200bBody.\n\n# **BIBLIOGRAPHY**\n\n#\n\nAbraham, Henry J. _Justices, Presidents, and Senators_. Rev. ed. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.\n\nAmar, Akhil Reed. _America's Constitution: A Biography_. New York: Random House, 2005.\n\nAtkinson, David N. _Leaving the Bench: Supreme Court Justices at the End_. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.\n\nBarnhart, Bill, and Gene Schlickman. _John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life_. Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010.\n\nBeatty, Jack. _Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865\u20131900_. New York: Vintage, 2008.\n\nBeck, Glenn. _The Original Argument: The Federalists' Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the 21st Century_. New York: Threshold Editions, 2011.\n\nBiskupic, Joan. _American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia_. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.\n\n_\u2014\u2014\u2014_. _Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice_. New York: Ecco Books, 2005.\n\nBlumenthal, Sidney. _The Clinton Wars_. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.\n\nBork, Robert. _The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of Law_. New York: Free Press, 1990.\n\nBrady, Diane. _Fraternity_. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012.\n\nBreyer, Stephen. _Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution_. New York: Knopf, 2005.\n\n_\u2014\u2014\u2014_. _Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View_. New York: Knopf, 2010.\n\nCalabresi, Steven G., ed. _Originalism: A Quarter-Century of Debate_. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2007.\n\nChernow, Ron. _Washington: A Life_. New York: Penguin, 2010.\n\nConason, Joe, and Gene Lyons. _The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton_. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.\n\nDoherty, Brian. _Gun Control on Trial_. Washington: Cato Institute, 2009.\n\nFeldman, Noah. _Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices_. New York: Twelve, 2010.\n\nFelix, Antonia. _Sonia Sotomayor: The True American Dream_. New York: Berkley, 2010.\n\nFoskett, Ken. _Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas_. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.\n\nGreenburg, Jan Crawford. _Supreme Conflict_. New York: Penguin, 2007.\n\nHorwitz, Morton J. _The Transformation of American Law, 1870\u20131960_. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.\n\nIssacharoff, Samuel, Pamela S. Karlan, and Richard H. Pildes. _The Law of Democracy_. 3rd ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2007.\n\nKlarman, Michael J. _From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.\n\nKramer, Larry D. _The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.\n\nLevin, Mark R. _Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto_. New York: Threshold Editions, 2009.\n\nMahler, Jonathan. _The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution\u2014and Won_. New York: Picador, 2009.\n\nManaster, Kenneth A. _Illinois Justice: The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.\n\nMargulies, Joseph. _Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.\n\nMaroon, Suzy, and Fred J. Maroon. _The Supreme Court of the United States_. New York: Thomasson-Grant & Lickle, 1996.\n\nMayer, Jane, and Jill Abramson. _Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas_. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.\n\nObama, Barack. _The Audacity of Hope_. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.\n\nO'Brien, David M. _Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics_. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2003.\n\nPeppers, Todd C. _Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk_. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.\n\nPogrebin, Abigail. _Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk about Being Jewish_. New York: Broadway, 2005.\n\nPosner, Richard A. _Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.\n\nRehnquist, William H. _The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is_. New York: Morrow, 1987.\n\nRemnick, David. _The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama_. New York: Knopf, 2010.\n\nRosen, Jeffrey. _The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.\n\n_\u2014\u2014\u2014_. _The Supreme Court_. New York: Times Books, 2007.\n\nSavage, David G. _Turning Right: The Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court_. New York: Wiley, 1993.\n\nScalia, Antonin. _A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law_. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.\n\nSchwartz, Bernard. _A History of the Supreme Court_. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.\n\nShesol, Jeff. _Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court_. New York: Norton, 2010.\n\nSimon, James F. _The Center Holds: The Power Struggle inside the Rehnquist Court_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.\n\n_\u2014\u2014\u2014. FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.\n\nSkocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. _The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.\n\nSlaughter, Anne-Marie. _A New World Order_. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.\n\nSorauf, Frank J. _Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities_. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.\n\nStarr, Kenneth W. _First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life_. New York: Warner Books, 2002.\n\nStarr, Paul. _Remedy and Reaction_. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011.\n\nStern, Seth, and Stephen Wermiel. _Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion_. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.\n\nStevens, John Paul. _Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir_. New York: Little, Brown, 2011.\n\nStohr, Greg. _A Black and White Case: How Affirmative Action Survived Its Greatest Legal Challenge_. Princeton, N.J.: Bloomberg Press, 2004.\n\nStone, Geoffrey R. _Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime_. New York: Norton, 2004.\n\nSunstein, Cass R. _One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court_. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.\n\n_\u2014\u2014\u2014_. _Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America_. New York: Basic Books, 2005.\n\nTeles, Steven M. _The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement_. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.\n\nThomas, Clarence. _My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir_. New York: Harper, 2007.\n\nToobin, Jeffrey. _A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President_. New York: Touchstone, 1999.\n\nTribe, Laurence H. _God Save This Honorable Court: How the Choice of Supreme Court Justices Shapes Our History_. New York: Random House, 1985.\n\nTushnet, Mark. _A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law_. New York: Norton, 2005.\n\nVillard, Oswald Garrison. _Fighting Years_. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939.\n\nWard, Artemus, and David L. Weiden. _Sorcerers' Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the United States Supreme Court_. New York: New York University Press, 2006.\n\nWinkler, Adam. _Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America_. New York: Norton, 2011.\n\nWoodward, Bob, and Scott Armstrong. _The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.\n\nYarbrough, Tinsley E. _David Hackett Souter: Traditional Republican on the Rehnquist Court_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.\n\nZernike, Kate. _Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America_. New York: Times Books, 2010.\n\n# **PHOTO CREDITS**\n\n#\n\nGrateful acknowledgment is given to the following for permission to reprint the photos in this book:\n\ni1 Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, U.S. Air Force\n\ni2 Win McNamee\/Getty Images\n\ni3 Pete Souza\/The White House\/Getty Images\n\ni4 Photo by Pete Souza\n\ni5 Ron Edmonds\/AP\n\ni6 Jewel Samad\/AFP\/Getty Images\n\ni7 Jose Luis Magana\/AP\n\ni8 Official Whitehouse Photo by Pete Souza\n\ni9 Evan Vucci\/AP\n\ni10 Official White House Photo by Pete Souza\n\ni11 Alex Wong\/Getty Images\n\ni12 Courtesy of the University of Chicago Law School\n\ni13 Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States\n\ni14 Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States\n\ni15 Official White House Photo by Pete Souza\n\ni16 Jeff Malet Photography\/Newscom\n\ni17 Charles Dharapak\/AP\n\ni18 Melissa Golden\/Redux\n\ni19 Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images\n\n# **ABOUT THE AUTHOR**\n\n#\n\nJeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at _The New Yorker_ and the senior legal analyst at CNN. His last book, _The Nine_ : _Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court_ , was a _New York Times_ bestseller and winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for excellence in nonfiction. He is also the author of the bestsellers _Too Close to Call_ , _A Vast Conspiracy_ , and _The Run of His Life_. He lives with his family in New York.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n* * *\n\nLachesis Publishing   \nwww.lachesispublishing.com\n\nCopyright \u00a92007 by David Lee Summers\n\n* * *\n\nNOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.\n\n* * *\n\n**CONTENTS**\n\nHeirs of the New Earth\n\nBOOKS IN THE OLD STAR SAGA\n\nDEDICATION\n\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nHEIRS OF THE NEW EARTH\n\nPROLOGUE:\n\nPart I: Silence of the Old Earth\n\nCRAFTSMAN\n\nDOOMSDAY\n\nPOLITICIANS\n\nREVELATION\n\nSAILORS\n\nPart II: Tribulation\n\nASCENSION\n\nMISSION TO EARTH\n\nMASTER AND COMMANDER\n\nBEYOND SYMBIOSIS\n\nLEGACY\n\nPart III: Battle for the New Earth\n\nPASSION\n\nRESURRECTION\n\nFUGITIVES\n\nARMAGEDDON\n\nPart IV: The New Clusters\n\nSUPPLICATION\n\nTHE NEW GALAXY\n\nAbout the Author:\n\n* * * *\n\nHeirs of the New Earth\n\nDavid Lee Summers\n\n* * * *\n\n* * * *\n\nHadrosaur Productions\n\nLas Cruces, NM\n\nAnd\n\nLBF Books\n\nImprint of Lachesis Publishing\n\n**Heirs of the New Earth**\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nCopyright by David Lee Summers\n\nNo part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States by Hadrosaur Productions and LBF Books.\n\nFIRST EDITION\n\nARTWORK BY LAURA GIVENS\n\nEDITED BY WILLIAM GROTHER\n\nISBN 1-885093-49-7\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**BOOKS IN THE OLD STAR SAGA**\n\nThe Pirates of Sufiro\n\nChildren of the Old Stars\n\nHeirs of the new Earth\n\nAlso by David Lee Summers\n\nVampires of the Scarlet Order\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**DEDICATION**\n\nTo Kenneth and Shirley Summers\n\n\u2014Dad and Mom\u2014\n\nfor teaching me to care about the world and its people,\n\nfor teaching me to dream,\n\nfor being there,\n\nfor everything.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS**\n\nThe \"Old Star Saga\" was launched almost twenty years ago as an exercise for a writer's group in Socorro, New Mexico. It started as a humble short story\u2014less than 2000 words\u2014entitled, \"The Privateer's License.\" The story ultimately grew into \"A Quiet Burning in the Darkness\"\u2014the first chapter of _The Pirates of Sufiro,_ which saw publication as an audio book in 1994 and a mass market paperback in 1997. It seems appropriate that the final book of the series should appear on the tenth anniversary of _Pirates'_ first paperback publication.\n\nTwenty years is a long time and there are a lot of people that deserve thanks for help here and there. However, there are two people who have been there for the whole ride and they deserve thanks above all for their help and support over all these years: Kumie Wise and William Grother. I couldn't have done it without you guys.\n\nI started _Heirs of the New Earth_ soon after the first publication of _Pirates'_ sequel, _Children of the Old Stars._ In the second novel, Commander John Mark Ellis was booted out of the military when he failed to save a spaceship from an alien intelligence called the Cluster. The story told how Ellis came to terms with what happened to him. However, in the process of telling _that_ story, the Cluster took control of the Earth. This novel tells the story of what happens next.\n\nOver the course of the writing, there were a lot of false starts. More than with any other novel, I wrote myself into corners that seemed insoluble. However, each time that happened, someone would come along and ask about the sequel to _Children of the Old Stars_. The list of people who have asked would be a long one\u2014and it amazes me to think about it. I want to say thanks to each and every one of them. That said, there are two people who stand out in my mind and have given the most encouragement and been asking for this book almost since _Children_ first appeared: Bret Badgett and Gary Every. You guys are the greatest.\n\nMany thanks go to Jacqueline Druga-Johnston, editor-in-chief of LBF Books. Not only has she believed in this series since she first discovered it in 2004 but she has provided insight and structure to the series and made it better than it would have been otherwise.\n\nFinally, a very special thanks goes to Laura Givens, who has illustrated all three novels of the trilogy. Not only has she given these books a uniform and dynamic appearance, but she's breathed new life into the locations and characters that have been populating my consciousness for the last twenty years. Scenes in this book are directly influenced by Laura's vision of this universe and I'm proud that she's been part of the team that's made this book possible.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**HEIRS OF THE NEW EARTH**\n\n* * * *\n\nDAVID LEE SUMMERS\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**PROLOGUE:**\n\nTHE CLUSTER\n\nIt has been something like thirty million years since I last felt anything. I have no arms to lift, nor legs to run. I have no mouth to take in nourishment; no tongue to savor it. I have no skin or hair to feel the sweet breath of a cool breeze. While I have the urge to replicate, I have no vagina to accept the loving gift of genetic material from another of my kind; no uterus to grow another of my kind even if I did. I am intelligence without appendage, but not without body.\n\nWhat body I have floats through the void. It evolved somewhere near the beginning of time and took the primordial form of a cluster of spheres\u2014mirroring the cluster of stars whose plasma and gravity conspired to give me life. I was like an island universe, all to myself, drifting from star to star. The electro-magnetic energies that course their way through my body of encased plasma began to take on order and began to sense the wider universe. I began to understand that no woman is an island and I explored, consciously. I found purpose in trying to understand the orbits of stars around the center of the cluster, understanding the cluster of stars' place in the universe, and trying to determine whether or not I was the only sentient thing.\n\nI discovered that with sufficient energy, I could replicate myself. Because of the way our memory works, we each see ourselves as the original of our kind. We all remember our beginning as though we had experienced it. None of us knows who is the original. Likewise none is really certain whether the original actually exists. Because the memory lives within us all, we do not feel that it is important who was the original.\n\nI discovered planets\u2014rocky and gaseous bodies that orbited stars. On some of these planets, I found entities that moved about and replicated much as my sisters and I had. However, some of these entities did not replicate by duplication, rather they came together in various combinations and shared components of themselves to make new, different versions. With time, there was an evolution from one type of creature to another.\n\nWe observed a difference between evolving creatures and ourselves. Instead of simply recording the universe, they reacted to it in ways we had not considered. While their lives were much shorter than ours, there was a quality to them that augmented their purpose. On one particular carbon dioxide and nitrogen shrouded planet, we observed living beings for hundreds of thousands of years. They walked upright and hair covered their bodies. Their teeth were large compared to many evolving creatures we observed, but the creatures were not carnivores, rather it was because they consumed the water and methane ice that covered their world. They retained these characteristics even after they began to make tools that made their fur coats and their teeth unnecessary. When they became aware of us, we communed with them.\n\nWe found that as part of the communion, the beings learned more about the universe than they had ever known before. It was as though they could travel to all of the star systems we had been to. Likewise, while communing, we could feel their emotions. We shared the delight of the creatures' expanded knowledge. We had the ability to see ways in which the creatures could order their existence and improve it.\n\nWhen we broke communion with the creatures, we found that they were diminished\u2014they had better tools, better lives, but not the experience to improve upon what we had given them. In the same way, we had memory of emotion, but were not able to experience new emotion without the creatures.\n\nThus, a symbiosis was formed with these sensual creatures that lasted for thousands of years. The creatures learned to build vessels with which to explore the universe on their own. We gained imagination that enabled us to interpret all we had observed in new and unique ways. While communing with these beings we felt as though we had appendages. We knew what it was like to feel cool wind, share intimate relations, give birth and hold a beautiful child\u2014like us, but different\u2014in our arms. For the first time in our existence, we could express ourselves. We knew what it was to leave a legacy.\n\nThirty million years ago, the cluster of stars in which I make my home passed through a larger conglomeration of stars shaped like a whirlpool. Our appendages broke their communion with us in the alien galaxy. Without them, we Clusters wandered lost and alone, with only our memories of emotion and sensuality.\n\nThough there are others of my kind, we are so alike that communion with one another is pointless. Without the appendages, some of my kind lost their sense of purpose and simply threw themselves into the hearts of stars. I do not know whether we can be killed that way or not, as we were formed from the hearts of stars. However, our outer shell would likely vaporize and the plasma that makes up our cores would merge with the star. I do not know whether that is the same as what the appendages call death or not.\n\nOur cluster of stars recently returned to the galaxy where our appendages left us. However, a galaxy is a daunting and huge place\u2014much larger than our star cluster. We pondered the odds of finding our appendages again. While the odds were low, the benefits of having our appendages back spurred us on to look for them.\n\nAs my sisters and I searched, we encountered many star vessels like the ones our appendages had built. Examining the vessels, we found no evidence of the appendages but we continued our exploration anyway. As I passed through one sector of the galaxy, I felt an emotional disturbance in the void. Terrible violence overwhelmed me. Only beings as sensual as the appendages could have caused emotions so great. I went to investigate, but the appendages were not there. Instead, there were strange beings that combined intelligence like mine with an ability to order their own lives using appendages. Their intelligence was governed by their sensuality. I wondered whether the appendages evolved, though I was skeptical. Communing briefly with two of the appendages, I found that these beings called the planet they were on Sufiro and they had just concluded a conflict among themselves. It was a strange concept as my appendages never fought among themselves. These new beings proved quite interesting. They bore watching. They called themselves humans.\n\nIn short order, I discovered that these humans were well traveled. One I had met at the world called Sufiro was aboard a spaceship at a strange new place where two stars orbited one another. One star spewed its gaseous plasma toward the other. There was almost a loving violence as these two stars went around each other, magnetically and gravitationally locked. It reminded me of the humans themselves.\n\nI brought the human, who called himself John Mark Ellis, to my bosom. His sensuality breathed new life into me. These humans were proving more interesting than the appendages of old. The human's emotion caused me to think imaginatively. Perhaps it was just my own fading memory. Even so, I decided to give up my quest for the old appendages. Upon communing with this John Mark Ellis, I discovered that I wanted new appendages.\n\nThe gravity tide was strong and carried me away from the whirlpool galaxy. However, tides ebb and flow. I knew I would be back to learn more about these humans.\n\nUpon my return home, I meditated. Ellis and others of his kind demonstrated much variation\u2014like my three sisters and I experienced after our contact with the original appendages. As I knew they would, the gravitational tides allowed me to return to the whirlpool galaxy and somehow I found that John Mark Ellis and another human named Clyde McClintlock, who I had also communed with, had sought me out. They followed me back to my home in the globular cluster. The one called McClintlock had the audacity to attempt to initiate communion. We found that this McClintlock thought we were the creators of the universe. Upon correcting him, his fragile mind was destroyed. We sensed that a non-human named G'Liat, who was aboard the spaceship, put an end to McClintlock's suffering.\n\nWe liked the audacity of the human McClintock and were further surprised and delighted when the human Ellis initiated communion and entered our minds. Most of my appendages were female and it felt good to have this man inside me. He was primitive and brutal, but smart. He was better than the appendages of old. When Ellis and his ship returned to the whirlpool galaxy, we were once again diminished.\n\nWe have decided to adopt these humans. They will become one with us. We will benefit from them and they will benefit from us. Together we will build a legacy.\n\nThe humans would call it a \"win-win\" proposition.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**Part I: Silence of the Old Earth**\n\n _Thus with violence shall that great city of Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee._\n\n _Revelation 18: 21-22_\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**CRAFTSMAN**\n\nTwo flies buzzed and spiraled in the semi-darkness and thick, torrid atmosphere of a one-room apartment in Southern Arizona. A mountain of dirty plates clogged the sink while uneaten remnants of food littered a small table. Unwashed socks and underwear were draped carelessly over the room's two chairs and an alcove, containing a rust-stained toilet, reeked of those odors generated in the deep, dark recesses of the human body. The flies were in paradise.\n\nAttracted to the salty sweat of the room's lone human inhabitant, the two flies lit and cavorted about on his nose only to be sent flying away as his hand swept by. The man was lying on a small cot that creaked each time he swung his arm. A clock nearby counted its way inexorably toward the time its alarm would sound. Undaunted, the flies returned time and time again. If flies had emotions, they might have thought the challenge of taking moisture from the man's nose was fun.\n\n\"Goddamn flies,\" grumbled the man as he swatted at the insects again. This time he sat up on his small cot and blinked at the zebra-stripe pattern on the floor made by sunlight streaming through partially closed blinds on the window. The man, Timothy Gibbs, reached out and grabbed the alarm clock and stared at the numbers for several seconds while his brain worked to interpret the numbers his eyes saw: five minutes before seven o'clock. Five minutes before the alarm was to go off. \"Goddamn it,\" grumbled Gibbs, as he returned the clock to the nightstand. He rubbed his rough hand across a stubble-covered chin, annoyed because he wanted to go back to sleep but there wasn't enough time before the alarm would sound.\n\nGibbs padded over to the kitchen counter. The computer unit recognized its owner and activated a finger-greased touch pad. Bleary-eyed, he examined the choices from the small inventory of frozen meals-in-one. With a sigh, he chose the omelet and coffee and stood, listening as out-dated motors carried the meal from the freezer to the internal cooking unit. For a moment, he thought he smelled acrid, electrical smoke. With a frown, he thought perhaps he should open the unit and take a look, but decided against it as he realized the smell was actually some left-over plastic still clinging to the pre-fabricated meal.\n\nWith a stretch and a yawn, Gibbs padded to the toilet alcove and swatted at the swirling flies that buzzed about his hair while he relieved himself. Stepping out of the alcove, he looked over at a hologram of his mother, sitting on the nightstand. He hadn't seen his mother since she lost her job at the paper cup factory nearly 20 years before. Unable to pay her weekly taxes and with Gibbs barely able to pay his own taxes, much less help her, she was taken away to a government housing complex. The government didn't bother to tell Gibbs where she was. Without a source of income, his mother couldn't afford a teleholo call to her son. Timothy Gibbs had no way of knowing whether his mother was alive or dead.\n\nA chime sounded alerting Gibbs that his breakfast was done. He padded over, opened the unit's door and retrieved the plate of steaming food. He sipped rancid coffee while mindlessly picking a piece of blackened plastic out of the eggs. He wondered about his father\u2014a man he never knew. Poking at the over-cooked omelet, Gibbs wondered if he, himself, was anyone's father. Like most men in the thirtieth century, including his own father, he periodically left sperm at the local Depository. Women who liked his genetic make-up and wanted children could go to the Depository for impregnation. The upside for Gibbs was that he didn't have to risk the diseases and emotional upheaval that came from a sexual relationship. The downside was that he didn't know whether he was the father of a hundred children or none at all.\n\nNot bothering to do anything with the plate and coffee cup after breakfast, Gibbs stripped out of sweaty underclothes and stepped into the sanitizer. Even with ice mining in the asteroid belt, water was a precious commodity in Southern Arizona. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the hypersonic waves tingling against his skin, removing dirt and sweat, leaving a kind of slime in the bottom of the sanitizer that the flies would enjoy. Stepping out, and wiping his feet on the mat, Gibbs dressed in his work uniform and went out the door pausing long enough to hear the door lock automatically behind him.\n\nNot able to afford his own hover-car, Timothy Gibbs walked the mile and a half to his job at Tanque Verde Teleholo. He was a repair technician, earning a small stipend and a commission on each of the expensive communication units he refurbished. In the thirtieth century, teleholos were considered virtually essential. With them, people communicated with one another, entertainment holograms were transmitted, games were played and finances were transacted. There was almost nothing in the way of entertainment or communication that couldn't be done with a teleholo.\n\nPoor as he was, there were many less fortunate than Timothy Gibbs. On his way to work, he stepped over an old man, sleeping on the sidewalk. Even the old man\u2014too poor to afford a place to sleep with a roof over his head\u2014clutched a portable teleholo to his chest.\n\nStepping through the door of Tanque Verde Teleholo, Gibbs forced himself to smile and wave at one of the sales associates, Louise Sinclair. Sinclair gestured wildly for Gibbs to come see what was playing on one of the teleholos.\n\n\"More news about the Cluster?\" asked Gibbs with a weary sigh. Hovering above the teleholo dais was a familiar image\u2014a large conglomeration of iridescent spheres. The Confederation of Homeworlds, of which Earth was a part, was fighting a one-sided war with the Cluster. Whenever the Cluster appeared, the ship it encountered was destroyed. No one knew of a single Cluster ship lost to a Homeworlds' ship. \"When are they going to stop bugging us with that?\" he grumbled. \"It's all so far away from Earth anyway.\"\n\n\"This is different,\" she said, tersely. \"A mapping ship followed the Cluster home. They finally have some idea what it is.\" Louise Sinclair had been following the Cluster story since day one and insisted on conveying everything she learned to her co-workers.\n\n\"Whatever,\" said Gibbs. He reached out as if to turn off the teleholo unit, but she batted his hand away.\n\n\"Aren't you the least bit interested in the Cluster?\" She cocked her head, examining the technician. \"They've been destroying ships left and right. They even threatened a colony for God's sake.\"\n\nGibbs shook his head. \"Sufiro's on the other side of the galaxy. I can't waste my time worrying about things in space. I've got enough problems right here on Earth.\" He shrugged mock apology then made his way to the employee lounge.\n\nSinclair followed on his heels. \"I can't believe what I'm hearing,\" she said, incredulous. \"In the thousand years humans have been in space, the Cluster is the first intelligent life we've ever discovered that's actually bent on destroying humans. How can you ignore that?\"\n\n\"It's not just humans,\" he said as he poured coffee into a paper cup. \"We're not in this alone. The Titans will figure out something. They always have before.\"\n\n\"They haven't yet,\" she retorted. \"The only thing the Cluster hasn't destroyed is that colony\u2014Sufiro. They survived their encounter with the Cluster.\"\n\n\"Okay, so, now someone's figured out where the Cluster's from, is that it?\" he asked, resigned to the fact that she wasn't going to leave him alone until after she'd given him her daily update.\n\n\"They think it's from outside our galaxy. It's from a globular cluster.\" She beamed proudly.\n\n\"Seems a bit redundant, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"What's redundant?\"\n\n\"That the Cluster's from a cluster.\" Gibbs smirked, impressed by his own clever remark. \"What is a globular cluster, anyway?\"\n\n\"They're like balls of stars that orbit the Milky Way Galaxy,\" she explained, thinking back to the images that had been displayed on the news. \"Kind of like little mini-galaxies, except the stars are older.\"\n\nGibbs nodded, then sipped his coffee. He held the cup out at arm's length and realized it had been manufactured at the factory where his mother had worked. He sighed and took another sip, then poured out the remaining coffee and crushed the cup. He looked up into Louise Sinclair's soft brown eyes. Briefly, he imagined himself asking her out to dinner, but quickly threw the notion aside, knowing he didn't have the money for such an extravagance. \"So tell me,\" he began, his tone softening, \"who made this discovery?\"\n\nHe was pleased to see her smile. \"It was a mapping ship called the _Nicholas Sanson._ They interviewed the ship's senior officers: a woman named Smart and the captain\u2014a man named Ellis. They followed the Cluster to its home.\" Sinclair wrung her hands and turned away. Gibbs swallowed, realizing he had been staring at her. \"I guess the _Sanson_ barely got back to the galaxy in one piece. It was quite a space opera,\" she finished quietly.\n\n\"Hey Gibbs,\" called a voice from the door of the break room. Looking up, Gibbs saw his supervisor, Jerry Lawrence, a tall man with a rumpled uniform shirt. \"We've got thirteen teleholos lined up in the back. We need to get them out by five,\" he said, looking at his watch.\n\n\"Sorry, Mr. Lawrence, I'll be right there,\" he said. Lawrence turned on his heel and left. Gibbs looked up at Sinclair and smiled sheepishly. \"I guess I need to get to work.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" she said, quietly. \"Sorry I kept you. I didn't mean to get you into trouble.\"\n\nHe resisted the urge to reach out and touch her shoulder. \"No problem,\" he said.\n\n\"I need to get back on the floor. Customers, you know.\" With that, she led the way out of the break room. She resumed her narrative, though it seemed that the enthusiasm had gone from her voice. \"It turns out the cook aboard the _Sanson_ was that McClintlock guy who had that wacky Cluster religion up in the New England Sector.\"\n\nThey stopped at the workshop door. He tried to think of something witty or charming to say. Instead, looking up, he saw two people browsing the displays. \"I think you've got some customers.\" He shuffled his feet. \"I need to get to work.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said, turning away.\n\nPursing his lips, Gibbs entered the workshop, feeling a little relieved that he would be spending the day with computer chips and electronic components that only spoke when he hit the on switch and if he didn't like what they said, he could always change the channel.\n\n* * * *\n\nAs the star cruiser _Nicholas Sanson_ limped toward the colony world of Alpha Coma Bereneces, the captain, John Mark Ellis, went to his quarters to wash up after the news interview. Sensors tracking the mapping vessel had seen it wink out of existence, then come back a few days later. People were amazed to learn that the _Sanson_ had, in fact, followed one of the enigmatic Cluster ships to its home in a distant globular cluster. Not only had the crew of the _Nicholas Sanson_ learned where the Cluster had come from, they had accomplished the first interstellar jump outside the Milky Way galaxy.\n\nWashed, Ellis put on clean clothes and sat down at the table in his quarters. Activating the computer interface, he dictated a short message to his mother, Suki Firebrandt Ellis. He told her what he thought he knew about the Cluster and its connection to the leaders of the Confederation of Homeworlds\u2014the Titans\u2014and asked if she had learned anything. A few months before, Ellis had asked his mother to research any connections between the Cluster and the Titans. Now, Ellis strongly suspected that the Cluster and Titans were symbiotic life forms. However, the Titans had broken the symbiosis and were in hiding. Ellis finished the message with a word about his romantic feelings for the ship's corporate officer, Kirsten Smart.\n\nThe letter home done, Ellis rapped his fingers on the tabletop and looked out the window over his bunk. Finally, with some resolve, he decided to visit the ship's prisoner, a warrior from the planet Rd'dyggia. The warrior, G'Liat, was nearly eight feet tall with a hairless head and orange skin. A cluster of prehensile, purple appendages wriggled in front of the warrior's mouth, like a grotesque, living mustache.\n\nThe captain found the warrior sitting alone in his cabin. African drums played and pungent incense burned, filling the room with potent vapors. The captain sat down opposite the warrior, remembering their first meeting in the lush swamps of Rd'dyggia. Shortly before, the Cluster had seemingly spoken to Ellis in a vision. Ellis had sought G'Liat out to help interpret that vision. \"How are you doing?\" asked Ellis, at last.\n\n\"I am caged,\" said the warrior. \"I want out.\"\n\n\"There's no guard on the door,\" admitted the captain. \"I haven't decided if I'm going to press charges.\"\n\n\"My sense of honor prevents me from leaving,\" said G'Liat, simply.\n\n\"Why did you kill McClintlock?\" asked Ellis. Clyde McClintlock, a one-time colonel and an evangelist, had been posing as the ship's cook. As it had with Ellis, the Cluster had spoken to McClintlock in emotional symbolism. At the time, Ellis had interpreted the communication as evidence that the Cluster was a powerful life form. Clyde McClintlock had interpreted the visions as a message from God incarnate. \"You could have subdued him. It would have been very simple for you.\"\n\n\"We are all specist, Captain. Have you ever longed to hunt whales as your ancestors did? Be honest.\" G'Liat leaned forward.\n\nEllis swallowed hard. \"I've thought about it.\"\n\n\"When you sort out your feelings on this matter, you will be a better warrior,\" explained G'Liat. \"Once you've done that, you are welcome to return to Rd'dyggia. I will teach you more.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I want to learn what you have to teach,\" said Ellis, looking at the floor.\n\n\"This is not the Captain Ellis speaking who sought me out.\" G'Liat leaned back revealing a deep cut left by McClintlock when they had struggled.\n\n\"No,\" said Ellis, simply. \"The universe seems to have changed for me.\"\n\n\"That is as it should be. The offer still stands,\" said G'Liat. The warrior stood and looked out the window over his bunk. \"I saw you with the Clusters. Did you succeed in talking to them?\"\n\nEllis remained silent for several minutes. \"I succeeded in hearing what they had to say.\"\n\nG'Liat turned, his hands folded. \"Nine tenths of communication is listening. May I look into your mind? I would like to see what they had to say.\" The warrior referred to electronic technology that the Rd'dyggians had developed that allowed direct brain-to-brain communication between beings.\n\nEllis shook his head slowly. \"No, not this time. My thoughts are my own. They always have been. I realize now that's why you couldn't see the second Cluster vision. It's personal and I didn't want you to see.\"\n\n\"Indeed, your ability to block me is strong, perhaps unique.\" G'Liat looked toward the floor. \"You hadn't known me long at that time. You certainly had no reason to trust me. Does our friendship mean nothing? I helped you learn the origin of the Cluster. Can't you let me see what you learned?\"\n\nEllis looked into the warrior's large, black eyes. After a moment, the captain held his hand open toward the chair opposite. \"Sit, and I'll tell you the tale.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nAfter a long day of work, Timothy Gibbs trudged home. As he pondered what he would have for dinner, he looked to the sky. The sight made him pause. Usually, there was so much pollution that city lights just reflected back and the night sky was a deep rusty orange. On this night, Gibbs actually saw a few of the brighter stars overhead. He traced out the Big Dipper then the Summer Triangle, made up of the stars Vega, Altair, and Deneb. Four lights, brighter than those stars leisurely moved across the sky. His forehead creased. They weren't blinking like aircraft and they seemed too bright for Confederation spacecraft, which were the raw black of their Erdonium hulls. However, the four lights looked like a group of Confederation spacecraft moving in a diamond formation.\n\nGibbs shrugged, then shook his head, remembering that being outside on the streets wasn't entirely safe. Continuing on, he stepped into his apartment building and frowned at the new graffiti that had appeared on the walls; the local gang felt it necessary to mark their territory. Timothy Gibbs sighed relief after he used his palm imprint reader to enter the apartment and the door was safely locked behind him.\n\nGibbs removed his uniform shirt, then turned on the teleholo with the volume down low providing a simple background noise. The hologram showed a picture of four of the Clusters. A red light flashed under the three-dimensional image. It was some kind of a news alert. Gibbs was too hungry to pay much attention; newsflashes were a routine occurrence during the war against the Cluster. As Gibbs had mentioned to Sinclair, the events all happened so far away, it hardly mattered to him.\n\nAfter selecting a meal of roast beef and potatoes, he stepped over to the dresser and frowned at the lack of underwear. While dinner cooked, he made his weekly round of the apartment and picked up the dirty clothes and tossed them into the washer-dryer unit. The dinner-ready chime sounded. Gibbs retrieved his meal from the preparation unit and shoved plates aside on the table, upsetting the flies, and sat down, habitually reaching for a bottle of Dairtox\u2014a drug necessary for human life on most parts of Earth, as it kept the pollutants in the atmosphere from building up to toxic levels in the lungs.\n\nThe teleholo flickered and the image blurred as Gibbs began to eat. He slumped, a forkful of beef smothered in gravy halfway to his mouth. He would probably have to take his own unit into the shop the next day so he could fix it. The picture of the Clusters morphed into an indistinct shape and a single syllable began repeating from the speakers: \"da ... da ... da...\"\n\nAnnoyed, Gibbs put his fork on the plate, stepped over to the table, and slammed his fist down next to the teleholo. The image solidified into that of a young man with strangely haunting eyes. Gibbs appraised the image wondering if he was getting an incoming call. That seemed to be it\u2014the interrupt function on the teleholo was broken. It should have chimed and thrown the image into one section of the view. Instead, it was trying to play over the broadcast, causing interference. Irritated by the confirmation that the teleholo was on the fritz, Gibbs fingered the volume stud. He assumed it must be a sales call. It would be quickest to answer and be done with it. \"Hello, this is Tim Gibbs.\"\n\n\"Dad?\" said the figure on the teleholo.\n\nGibbs fell into the chair facing the teleholo. \"Uh, I think you have the wrong number.\"\n\n\"Are you Timothy Allen Gibbs?\" asked the figure as Gibbs reached out to disconnect the call.\n\nGibbs blinked a few times. He looked at the young man's eyes again, then looked over to the hologram of his mother\u2014they were identical. No wonder the eyes were haunting.\n\n\"Are you Timothy Gibbs?\" asked the young man again.\n\n\"I am,\" Gibbs responded, cautiously. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I'm Jeremy Williams,\" said the young man. \"I'm pretty sure I'm your son.\"\n\n\"Pretty sure?\" Gibbs leaned forward, examining the young man. \"How did you find out? How could you find out?\" Fatherhood anonymity laws prevented Gibbs from reporting his name at the Depository. The only information they had came from the DNA he'd left behind. Sure, someone could use that to trace his identity, but it would be a difficult chore. The same laws prevented paternal surnames from being passed from generation to generation. Except in rare cases, most people took their surnames from their mothers in the thirtieth century.\n\n\"I didn't find out,\" said Williams, his brow creased. \"I was just thinking about my father and suddenly the name Timothy Gibbs came to my mind. Without thinking about it, I found myself dialing your teleholo. I live in the Los Angeles sector.\" Williams looked down, as though seeing the number he'd input for the first time. \"You're in Southern Arizona, aren't you? I don't know anyone in Southern Arizona.\"\n\n\"I don't know if you're my son,\" said Gibbs, shaking his head. \"How could I know?\"\n\nWilliams held out his arms, imploring. \"You must be. I feel it. I've never felt anything so strongly in my life! Don't you feel it?\"\n\nGibbs rapidly shook his head. This was too much at the moment. He wanted very desperately to believe\u2014to know the child he was never allowed to know. If Williams was his child, were there more? \"I don't know...\" Gibbs hugged himself, guarding against the holographic arms reaching toward him even though the hologram was just empty air\u2014an illusion.\n\nWilliams' arms dropped to his side and he looked toward the ground. The young man gathered resolve, then looked up again. He typed something into his console on the other end. \"I'm a computer programmer in the L.A. Sector. I'm transmitting my number. You can call me anytime.\" He paused. \"Do you want me to give you a location where you can check my DNA? You could find out if I really am your son?\"\n\nGibbs shook his head, more slowly. \"No, that won't be necessary. Give me some time. I'll try to call in a few days, once I've sorted out my feelings.\"\n\nWilliams nodded, accepting the verdict\u2014saddened, but understanding. \"I know you're my dad,\" he said. \"I don't know how, but I know. My emotions have never been so strong about anything before.\" With that, Williams terminated the call.\n\nThe image of the Clusters reappeared over the dais. With the volume up, Gibbs was able to hear what the announcer was saying. \"Four Cluster ships entered Earth space today. There has been no evidence of personnel from the ships trying to land. Based on evidence of the Cluster's appearance at the planet Sufiro, we believe they are just here to observe. There is no cause for panic or alarm. We will keep you updated. In the meantime, we advise the citizens of the Earth to go about their daily business.\"\n\nTimothy Gibbs continued watching the teleholo, hugging himself. First, a son he never knew called out of the blue. Now the distant, mysterious Cluster had appeared around Earth. Military ships had gone to a state of emergency. As he watched the images of the Clusters on the teleholo, Timothy Gibbs\u2014a man who had never really loved; never really been loved; a man who didn't feel strongly about much of anything aside from his own survival\u2014began to feel regret for the lost opportunities in his life. A tear eased its way down Gibbs' cheek followed by another. His emotions turned from regret to anger as he brusquely rubbed the tears from his face.\n\n\"What do I have to feel bad about?\" growled Gibbs to the empty room. \"I'm no different than most people on this miserable planet. Just a guy trying to make ends meet.\" With that, he stood and returned to his dinner that was growing cold.\n\nAfter finishing dinner, Gibbs gathered the old plates from the table and placed them in the recycler. Mindlessly, he puttered around the apartment, cleaning. Were one to ask him what he was doing or why, he wouldn't have been able to answer. He simply felt compelled to put his life in some order.\n\nA while later, Gibbs dropped onto his cot, exhausted. The teleholo continued to play news updates about the Cluster. In the meantime, he dreamed he was married to Louise Sinclair. Their grown son, Jeremy Williams\u2014no Jeremy Sinclair-Gibbs\u2014was home for a visit. They sat down to a dinner that looked more like it was from the 20th century than the 30th. A turkey steamed in the middle of table, surrounded by bowls full of potatoes, green beans and cranberry sauce. Gibbs' subconscious had pulled the image of the meal from stories of the first Thanksgiving when colonists had come from England to the United States. Certainly, Gibbs had never experienced food set out as he saw in the dream.\n\nSomeone banged at the door. Gibbs excused himself from the table and answered. His jaw dropped open when he saw his mother. She pointed an accusatory finger at her son. Charlotte Gibbs' skin began to dry and decay on her skeleton. Her jaw, no longer attached by muscle, fell open in a silent scream.\n\n\"Mom,\" called Gibbs. \"You're still alive?\"\n\nA voice croaked from the recesses of the open mouth. \"No. I died ten years ago.\" The mummified vision of Timothy Gibbs' mother moved past her son and turned. \"I've come to ask why you never tried to contact me. Why didn't you try to find me? Didn't you love your mother?\"\n\nGibbs gasped for air. \"Of course I loved you, Mom. The government took you to a retirement home. They didn't tell me where.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you ask?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't have done any good. You owed too many taxes. I couldn't help. I wanted to, but there was nothing I could do.\" Gibbs hugged himself, trying to keep his emotions at bay, trying to keep from being overwhelmed.\n\n\"You could have fought the government,\" said Gibbs' mother. As she spoke, Charlotte Gibbs desiccated further, becoming little more than a skeleton.\n\n\"No one can fight the government. I would have been destroyed!\" Gibbs chewed on his finger.\n\n\"Your body might have been destroyed, but you would have proven that you had a soul. You would have proven your worth as a human being. You would have proven you cared about something besides yourself.\"\n\nTimothy Gibbs woke in a cold sweat, clutching his sheet to himself. He stood and rushed over to the table with the hologram of his mother, picked it up and hurled it to the floor, smashing its micro-circuitry. The image of his mother was gone forever. \"Leave me alone!\" he shouted to the smashed holographic display. \"I'm only a guy doing his best to make it in this world! Leave me alone!\"\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**DOOMSDAY**\n\nThe next morning, _Nicholas Sanson_ arrived at Alpha Coma Bereneces. Repairs to the _Sanson_ proceeded immediately under the supervision of Chief Engineer Mahuk. The space-suited repair crews swarmed about the ship like gnats around a light post. Many of the people on the repair crew shook their heads at what they perceived to be an amateurish job of rerouting the conduits. Many commented that it was a miracle that the ship had not simply vaporized upon leaping into the fourth dimension of space-time as it returned from the globular cluster. It would take nearly two weeks for the crews to return _Sanson_ to her former grandeur.\n\nThe _Nicholas Sanson_ was an elegant and beautiful ship. Most star ships in the 30th century were simple and functional black cylinders with engines glowing blue at the stern. Those ships were like arrows in the night, designed to shoot through the fourth dimension as quickly and efficiently as possible. The _Sanson_ , on the other hand, was designed to map the fourth dimension, feeling its way along, charting the subtleties of gravity's ever-changing pathways, ultimately allowing all other ships to thrust their way through the void. Like the other ships, she was built of black Erdonium: the only material known that could withstand the ravages of the fourth dimension. She was also generally cylindrical, but she bulged in places Navy ships did not and attached to her hull were eight fan-like sensor arrays that swept back toward the vessel's stern\u2014almost like sails. They pivoted subtly, sensing the gravitational interactions of many stars. Each of those arrays controlled a seemingly petite engine. The glow from each engine surrounded the ship like a halo.\n\nCaptain John Mark Ellis, weary from his encounter with the Cluster, trudged through the decks of the _Sanson._ He found his way to the command deck and entered Kirsten Smart's office at the rear. With some work, he persuaded Kirsten Smart not to press charges against G'Liat. \"Under one condition,\" said Smart. \"Tell him to go to Rd'dyggia immediately. I never want to see his face again.\"\n\nEllis proposed the terms to G'Liat. \"I will go to Rd'dyggia soon, then,\" said G'Liat. \"The planet is in grave danger if what you told me of your vision is correct.\" The warrior paused for a moment, thoughtful. \"But what will you do if our paths cross again?\"\n\nEllis bit his lower lip and considered his answer. \"I think that depends on what the Cluster does,\" he said. With that, he turned and left the cabin.\n\nG'Liat activated the computer interface and pulled up a list of companies that chartered spacecraft. Admittedly, he could simply take a commercial flight back to Rd'dyggia, but he wanted solitude and quiet so he could decide his next move. He limited his search to those companies with Rd'dyggian names. The warrior was growing tired of the charade of acting like a human. He wanted to be among his own kind for a time.\n\nHe called the first company on his list and was pleased when a Rd'dyggian answered. \"Money I have,\" said G'Liat bluntly in his native language. \"Ships you have. I will return to Rd'dyggia. I require retrieval from a human ship in orbit, the _Nicholas Sanson_.\"\n\nThe Rd'dyggian on the other end bowed. \"Understood, my Lord G'Liat. A ship will be dispatched immediately. Be ready.\" The Rd'dyggian terminated the call.\n\nG'Liat stood, knocked the burning end from the incense, packed his few belongings in a small, metal traveling case, and then sat down to await the arrival of the transport from Alpha Coma. The warrior continued his reflections on John Mark Ellis and his tale of the Cluster's communications. Though G'Liat wanted to see the Cluster eliminated, he began to wonder if the Cluster could be used\u2014at least temporarily\u2014to eliminate other barriers to Rd'dyggian dominance of the galaxy. If so, perhaps elimination of the Cluster could be delayed.\n\n* * * *\n\nOn Earth, Timothy Gibbs awoke in his apartment with red-rimmed eyes. Not bothering with breakfast, he swept up the remains of the holographic display unit he had smashed the night before and put them in the garbage incinerator. He dressed quickly, grabbed his own malfunctioning teleholo unit, and then went into work.\n\nHe stifled a squawk when he saw Louise Sinclair. Her normally impeccable store uniform was rumpled, as though she had slept in it. Her eyes were bloodshot and she wore no makeup. She smiled bravely at him. \"I see you didn't get much sleep either.\"\n\n\"Bad dreams,\" he said as he moved past her to the employee's lounge. She followed and found him staring at the wall, pouring coffee until it was over-flowing the cup. Gently she helped him put the coffee pot back on the warmer.\n\nGibbs looked into Sinclair's eyes and sighed. \"If I asked, would you go out to dinner with me?\"\n\nSinclair staggered back, away from him. Conflicted emotions played across her face. Finally, she straightened her jacket and forced a certain resolve. \"Mr. Gibbs, you realize that I could report you for making such a suggestion at work.\"\n\nTimothy Gibbs looked down at his feet. \"I know,\" he whispered. He picked up the over-full coffee cup and took a sip. Some of the coffee spilled onto his uniform. Louise Sinclair made as if to reach for a towel\u2014as if to help and try to clean it up. Instead, years of training kicked in and overrode human instinct. She stormed out of the break room, an indignant look of shock forced onto her features.\n\nTimothy Gibbs dropped into a chair and sipped his coffee. Twenty minutes later it dawned on him that Jerry Lawrence hadn't come by to shuffle him off to the repair shop. He crumpled the paper cup and threw it into the trash, picked up his teleholo dais, then trudged out of the break room. He saw Louise Sinclair staring out of the big window to the street beyond. He couldn't quite tell from where he stood, but it looked as though tears glistened on her cheeks. Taking a deep breath, he pushed open the door of the workshop and stepped inside.\n\nJerry Lawrence sat, staring mutely at the control chip of a teleholo. He held a test probe listlessly in his hand.\n\nGibbs cleared his throat, but his supervisor didn't respond. \"Mr. Lawrence?\" he said, tentatively.\n\nAt last, Lawrence looked up. \"Sorry, Gibbs ... I guess I was lost in thought. What do you need?\"\n\n\"I was wondering what you wanted me to start on,\" said Gibbs.\n\nLawrence set the test probe down and looked up into Gibbs' eyes. \"It almost seems pointless, doesn't it? I'll be surprised if we have a single customer come in today, even to pick up things that are promised.\"\n\nGibbs stepped over to the workbench and sat his malfunctioning teleholo unit down. \"Sir, do you have any kids?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Lawrence with a wan smile. \"Although, now that you mention it, I had a dream about a daughter last night.\"\n\nGibbs snorted. \"I had a ... a dream, too ... at least I guess it was dream. It was about my son. Then I had a dream about my mother.\"\n\nLawrence nodded slowly. \"My daughter was a prostitute in Central Texas. She looked at me with drug-clouded eyes and accused me of being a bad father; of leaving her to an abusive mother instead of raising her myself.\" Lawrence looked down at his hands. \"I didn't even know I had a daughter. I have no idea who her mother is.\" He took a deep breath then let it out slowly. Finally, he looked up at Gibbs. \"I hope your dream was better than mine.\"\n\nGibbs stood and moved over to the storage shelf and stared at it. After a moment, he grabbed a teleholo dais at random. He took it back to his workbench. \"I think I need to work, whether or not we have any customers today,\" he said. \"It'll help take my mind off bad dreams.\"\n\nLawrence nodded. \"You're right.\" He looked at the teleholo dais Gibbs had taken from the shelf. \"That one's got a particularly tricky problem. I was going to assign it to you. Judging from the symptoms, I'd say the central processor is malfunctioning. However, I've tried replacing the processor and the problem doesn't go away.\"\n\n\"Sounds like fun,\" said Gibbs, his smile genuine. He set the teleholo dais on the workbench, glad for anything that would take his mind off of his dreams. He retrieved his tools and turned on the diagnostic computer then let his mind escape into the puzzle.\n\n* * * *\n\nAt the end of the workday Timothy Gibbs found himself dreading the return home. He feared another dream about his mother or something worse. With unaccustomed sadness, he downloaded his end-of-the-week pay and stepped out into the showroom, just remembering to retrieve his own teleholo dais that he'd stayed late to repair; though, he hadn't actually been able to find anything wrong with the unit. He saw Louise Sinclair getting ready to step outside. Their eyes met briefly, but she flushed red and quickly averted her eyes, then ducked outside. His brow creased when he realized that she normally turned right to go home. Instead, she turned left. Gibbs shook his head to clear it of pointless speculation, and then strode across the showroom and out the door himself.\n\nAs he walked toward his apartment, his mind began filling with dark thoughts. He wondered if he had abandoned his son and his mother. He wondered how many children he had, in fact, abandoned. Gritting his teeth, he tried to clear his mind of the pointless thoughts, telling himself that he hadn't abandoned anyone; he simply lived life the way most people in the thirtieth century lived life. However, that caused his mind to take an even darker turn. He found himself questioning the very point of human existence. _If humans are so horrible to one another,_ he thought, _do we even deserve to live?_\n\nGibbs gasped at that thought, shaking his head, and remembered his success with the problematic teleholo earlier in the day\u2014the one with the broken central processor. He'd managed to solve the problem and even received accolades from Jerry Lawrence. For a moment, Gibbs felt pride in his accomplishment. Then he looked across the street and saw two teenage boys playing a game on a portable teleholo; both sets of eyes glazed over. Holographic guns blazed, sending up all-too-realistic looking sprays of blood. Gibbs gripped his own teleholo dais more tightly and walked on, feeling that he was in part responsible for the orgy of fantasy killing.\n\nA few minutes later, he realized that he had passed his apartment complex and was standing in front of a weapons' shop. He licked his lips and thought about turning around but, instead, found himself entering the shop. The clerk behind the counter didn't look much better than Gibbs felt.\n\nNumbly, Gibbs found himself staring at the array of heplers, laz-rifles, and stunners on display. \"I'm going hunting,\" he lied.\n\nThe clerk nodded, somberly. \"Seems a lot of people are going hunting this weekend,\" he said. \"I don't have much left that's good for taking down animals.\" The clerk brought out some street heplers\u2014the types the gangs around the city used. Pointing to a Hepler 220-K, he continued. \"I'm taking one of those hunting this weekend, myself. You have to be careful, though. You can take the head off just about anything.\"\n\n\"I'll take it,\" said Gibbs. He entered the payment codes onto a touch pad then took the weapon and continued down the street to a liquor store. Making his purchase there, he finally turned around and returned to his apartment.\n\nThere were no signs that the gangs had been back. It was unusual. Usually, the gangs started putting up their graffiti on Thursday, and then lined the halls menacingly on Friday night. Going out on Saturday was taking one's life in one's hands. Gibbs thanked the powers-that-be for small favors.\n\nEntering the apartment, Gibbs took the hepler from its case and set it on the table. Then he opened a bottle of whiskey and took a drink. Wiping his lips, his eyes settled on the gun. He blinked several times and backed away from the table. \"I need to get a grip on myself,\" he said aloud. \"It's not like the world's coming to an end.\"\n\nWith a deliberate force of will, Gibbs retrieved his teleholo dais and sat it in the dust-free circle on its accustomed table then turned it on. A Cluster hovered over the dais. Without turning up the volume, he stared at the image, spellbound. He remembered what Louise Sinclair had told him about the Cluster. She'd mentioned something about the colony, Sufiro. Something about the planet was significant. Looking back at the hologram of the Cluster, he remembered a childhood friend named Ed Swan who wanted more than anything to be a police officer. Somehow, Gibbs knew that Swan had moved to Sufiro. Shutting his eyes, he tried to think how he could possibly know that. The last time he'd seen Swan was in high school. Still, he reached out and took the teleholo controls, shut off the news, and entered a directory search. Within five minutes, he found a listing for an Edmund Ray Swan, Deputy Sheriff of New Granada, a continent on the planet Sufiro.\n\nWithout questioning his actions further, Gibbs commanded the unit to connect to Edmund Ray Swan.\n\nA handsome, clean-shaven face with a square jaw and strangely mismatched eyes appeared over Gibbs' teleholo unit. \"Ed Swan,\" said the man in a booming baritone. \"May I help you?\"\n\n\"It is you,\" said Gibbs, breathlessly. \"You probably don't remember me. My name is Tim Gibbs. We went to school together in Southern Arizona.\"\n\nSwan's steel-gray eye dilated while his brown eye narrowed. Gibbs realized that his old friend had a computer eye implant. \"It's been a long time,\" said Swan after a moment. \"Did you ever build that ... what was it? That computer memory circuit you used to talk about in high school?\"\n\n\"What? That plasma memory cell idea I did a report on way back then?\" Gibbs smiled in spite of himself. \"I went to college and found out it was impossible. You'd need to build it in almost absolute vacuum and it would need a very large supply of highly charged particles like you'd find around a neutron star or better yet a black hole. I don't know anyone who's interested in building a computer around a black hole.\"\n\n\"Lost dreams, eh?\" said Swan.\n\n\"So, what about you?\" asked Gibbs. \"Did you ever get that law enforcement degree?\"\n\n\"I did and after twenty years, I'm glad to say I'm finally living in a place where I hardly have to use it. Sufiro's a quiet place; almost a paradise\u2014at least now.\" Swan looked down at the floor, then back up at Gibbs. \"So, what can I do for you, Tim?\"\n\n\"I'm...\" Gibbs struggled to find the words. \"I'm not quite sure. I've just been feeling kind of down lately. You've heard there are four of those Clusters orbiting Earth right now, haven't you?\"\n\n\"What?\" Swan's mouth fell open. \"There are four of them?\"\n\n\"Four,\" repeated Gibbs. \"I don't know why, but I can't seem to stay focused. My mind just keeps drifting ... thinking hopeless thoughts. I'd go see a psychologist if I could afford one.\"\n\n\"One Cluster orbited Sufiro just a couple of months ago.\" Swan chewed on his lower lip. \"It made everyone...\" The holographic image of Swan's head began to break up. Gibbs slammed his fist down on the table next to the teleholo dais, but the image didn't clear. Instead, static filled the display.\n\n\"Ed, can you hear me?\" Gibbs waited a moment and didn't hear a reply. \"Ed?\" Swearing, Gibbs tried connecting to Swan again.\n\nRed letters appeared above the dais: \"No EQ Carrier.\"\n\nGibbs shook his head, realizing the problem wasn't in the unit. He turned back to the news where a floating head said, \"We have just lost contact with planets outside the Solar System. Authorities are trying to resume contact. Be calm and...\" Gibbs turned off the unit.\n\n\"Damn,\" he said quietly. He stepped back to the table and retrieved the bottle of whiskey and took a shot, then another. He stripped naked and sat down on the cot. After his fourth shot, his head swam. He began to think about his mother's words from the dream. He wondered if she really was dead, or if there was something he could do. Gibbs took another sip of whiskey, realizing he was too much a coward to act, even if there was something he could do to find her. Four more drinks and thoughts of his mother faded, replaced by a fantasy about Louise Sinclair. He imagined touching her smooth skin and wondered what her breasts felt like. Was there a way he could have a relationship with a real woman? It did happen. However, it seemed that it was increasingly difficult. There were women's groups that had even begun to argue that men were not necessary for reproduction. DNA could be engineered; there was no reason that it had to come from men at all. Two more drinks and Gibbs had driven the coldness of this image away. His thoughts turned toward Jeremy Williams. Was Williams really his son? He so desperately wished that were true. Two more drinks and Gibbs' thoughts went dark again. He imagined that he had the DNA tested\u2014and the test turned out negative. Instead of wanting to be close, Jeremy Williams turned from Gibbs much as Sinclair had that afternoon.\n\nTimothy Gibbs stood and paced the apartment. After several turns, he reached for the bottle again. Only this time, it wasn't the bottle he raised to his mouth. It was the hepler. He leaned his head back, as though to take a drink.\n\nThe hepler flew from his hands just as he was about to squeeze the trigger. \"Oh my God,\" he said following the motion of the gun with his eyes. It clattered harmlessly into the corner. Looking forward, he thought he saw a nude woman with black hair, but he couldn't quite focus on any part of her except for her penetrating green eyes.\n\n\"Do not give up hope, Timothy Gibbs,\" said the woman. \"You have a legacy.\"\n\nThe room swirled in front of his eyes and he dropped to his knees then fell over sideways.\n\n* * * *\n\nThe next morning, Timothy Gibbs awoke with a hangover and stared at the hepler lying in the corner of the room. He wondered if the woman he had seen had been real or some kind of alcohol-induced hallucination. Putting on clean clothes, he stepped outside into a strangely quiet morning.\n\nA rank odor like an outhouse assailed his nostrils. He looked down at his feet and saw a man with half his head gone; the dead fist clenched a hepler similar to the one he had purchased the day before. The man's bowels had released upon death. Bile rose in Gibbs' mouth and he struggled not to vomit. He looked up and stepped purposefully around the corner where he saw a hover crashed into the base of the building. The driver was a pulpy mess. Gibbs wasn't able to control his stomach any more. He fell to his knees and vomited onto the sidewalk. His abdominal muscles kept contracting and releasing well after his stomach was empty and he had to struggle to stop the dry heaves.\n\nWhen he did stop, he stood up and forced himself to look up and down the eerily silent street. Bodies were strewn everywhere, as though there had been a plague, except it looked as though absolutely everyone had taken their own life.\n\nIn a daze, he walked the familiar path to work. Once there, he was surprised to find the doors locked. He sat down in front of the doors and put his face in his hands. He didn't know how long he sat there like that before Jerry Lawrence stepped up and knelt down in front of him. \"How are you doing?\"\n\n\"What the hell happened?\" asked Gibbs, looking up with tear-stained cheeks.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Jerry's voice was hollow, haunted. \"They're saying the Cluster did this.\"\n\n\"How?\" Gibbs snorted, then wiped his nose on his uniform sleeve, not caring that he left a trail of mucous.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Lawrence took a long, deep breath. \"When no one showed up to work this morning, I went looking for some of the people. I found Louise Sinclair drowned in her bathtub. When the cops arrived they said she overdosed on Dracan Love Crystals.\"\n\n\"What is this, the end of the world?\" asked Gibbs. \"Is this doomsday?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Tim,\" said Jerry. He stood and held out his hand. \"All I know is that I'm still alive and I'm not going down without a fight.\"\n\nTimothy Gibbs reached out and took Jerry's hand.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**POLITICIANS**\n\nA small, egg-shaped craft accelerated from Alpha Coma Bereneces toward the jump point for the planet Rd'dyggia. G'Liat reclined against the rounded back wall of the control cabin and stared at the holographic projection of space that hovered over the central console. Unlike most human vessels, Rd'dyggian ships were not equipped with graviton generators or any other means of providing simulated gravity. To the pragmatic Rd'dyggians such devices were a wasteful extravagance. Of course, Rd'dyggian skeletons did not deteriorate in null gravity as human skeletons did. Even so, G'Liat took advantage of the ship's acceleration to leave his own chair at the control console and recline without restraint, breathing in the comforting aromas of sulfur and ammonia. Though Rd'dyggians could survive in the same atmosphere as humans, it was not pleasant. To G'Liat, the air aboard the _Nicholas Sanson_ had been dry and foul, like a tomb deep underneath a desert where no life could flourish.\n\nA young Rd'dyggian named Rizonex remained strapped in at the central control console. Like G'Liat, he was orange-skinned and hairless with a purple mustache-like growth over his mouth and large, black eyes. He was shorter than G'Liat\u2014only about seven feet tall. His six-fingered hands rested on the console; his mind controlled the ship directly. Slowly, deliberately, Rizonex lifted his hands from the control console, and then turned to look at G'Liat. \"My Lord, we are intercepting a broadcast from Alpha Coma Bereneces. You may find it of interest.\"\n\nG'Liat pushed himself off the back wall and grabbed the edge of the control console. With virtually feline grace, the eight-foot tall warrior contorted then settled into the empty chair and belted himself in. \"Of what nature is this broadcast?\" he asked.\n\n\"What the humans call a news broadcast. They have lost contact with Gaea, their mother world,\" reported Rizonex.\n\n\"Display the broadcast,\" ordered G'Liat.\n\nRizonex placed his hands back on the console. The image of a human woman with long blonde hair appeared on the control console. \"As of this morning, we have been unable to contact our sister stations on Earth or Titan for over twelve hours. Senator Herbert Firebrandt's office has confirmed the loss of all communications and says the government is taking steps to reestablish contact.\" The woman faded from view, replaced by an image of the Cluster. \"However, the government has declined to comment about whether the Clusters reportedly in Earth orbit are the source of the communications blackout.\"\n\nG'Liat placed his own hands on the control console and searched the network archives for more information. He learned about the four Clusters that had appeared in Earth orbit and the fact that the Gaean Navy had sent ships to monitor the Clusters. However, the ships dared not fire on the Clusters for fear that they would attack the Earth.\n\nG'Liat let his mind reach out and touch that of Rizonex. \"Alter course,\" commanded the warrior. \"We go to Gaea.\"\n\n\"The ship's owners protest,\" replied the pilot through the interface. \"The charter was from Alpha Coma Bereneces to Rd'dyggia. No course change is stipulated in the contract.\"\n\n\"Contracts do not apply to me,\" said G'Liat. \"The owners know that. We will change course in spite of their protest. My operatives are instructed to compensate the owners in the event this ship is lost as a result of my actions.\"\n\nG'Liat felt the pilot's compliance, but was disgusted by the trace of fear. The warrior pulled his mind back from the pilot and continued monitoring human broadcasts. Though he longed to return to his own world, G'Liat realized he must determine what the Clusters wanted at Earth. As he searched the broadcast, a distant part of his mind sensed his orders being carried out. The ship changed course for the nearest jump point to Earth.\n\n* * * *\n\nJenna Walker, President of the Gaean Alliance\u2014Earth and all of its colonies\u2014rode into Arlington Planetary Cemetery in a black limo-hover. Her aides, who normally vied for her attention, were unusually silent. Many members of the governmental staff had taken their own lives during the previous twenty-four hours. Everyone in the President's inner circle knew someone who had died. President Walker looked from one set of eyes to another. \"Is there any way that all of these deaths planet-wide can be attributed to the Cluster?\"\n\nThere were shrugs from several of the black-suited figures. Others stared silently at the floor. One aide looked as if he was nodding off. The President and her aides had been awake all night, trying to decide what to do about the Cluster and the epidemic of death happening around the planet. Before the Clusters arrived at the Earth, every ship that had approached one had been destroyed. The Gaean Military's Chiefs of Staff were wary about attacking the Cluster\u2014especially since no one could prove that the Cluster was responsible for the deaths. There were some who posed the idea that the Clusters might even be able to help solve the mystery of the deaths. If so, the question was how to approach the Clusters without being destroyed.\n\nWalker looked to the Surgeon General, normally a high-energy woman, whose red-rimmed eyes betrayed the fact that she had been reading reports all night. The President decided it was time to reassess the information she had. \"So, the deaths are not a disease? There's no doubt whatsoever that the cause of death is clinical depression?\"\n\nDr. Cooper nodded. \"Nothing seems to contradict that.\"\n\n\"Doctor, I'm tired of you pussyfooting around this issue. Are all of the deaths clinical depression or aren't they?\" shouted Walker, slamming her petite fist on the side of the car.\n\nDr. Cooper glared at the President, baring her teeth. Anger seeped to the surface of a normally easy-going exterior because of exhaustion. \"Every single one of the billions dead would have to be examined for me to know that absolutely definitively, Madame President. Unless you really are the idiot the press makes you out to be, you know that's impossible!\"\n\nPresident Walker sat back stunned. The aide who had been dozing off was suddenly awake. The President's mouth twitched into a humble smile. \"We're all tired, Dr. Cooper. I'm just trying to find answers.\" She paused and took a deep breath. \"Is there any way the depression could be caused by the Cluster?\"\n\nDr. Cooper rubbed the bridge of her nose. \"I'm sorry I snapped, Madame President. I really am.\" The President waved the apology aside. Looking out the window she saw that the limo was nearing the podium where she would make a speech remembering the so-called Doomsday Dead. \"I really wish the official report from the _Sanson_ had made it to us. The press reports seem to indicate that the Cluster gives off some kind of emotional energy, but without the official report, I don't know exactly how it works.\"\n\n\"And,\" said the President, as the limo came to a stop, \"I presume you don't give much credence to press reports\u2014especially those that say I'm an idiot.\"\n\n\"There's a difference between editorializing and factual reporting,\" said Dr. Cooper wryly.\n\n\"Are you so sure?\" asked the President as she stepped out of the limo.\n\nThe group of aides began to file out behind the President. As they did, the Planetary Minister, Gordon \"Dick\" Richards, leaned over to the Surgeon General. \"I'd be careful which press reports I relay to the President. She would be a bad enemy to have.\"\n\n\"She watches late night teleholo just like we all do,\" said the Surgeon General, wearily. \"I'm not out to offend her. I just want to clarify that I don't have all of the answers.\"\n\n\"None of us do,\" said the Planetary Minister. \"Just don't let her know that.\"\n\nPresident Jenna Walker stood waiting just ahead of the podium while an aide checked to make sure her hair was presentable for the cameras and another aide checked her suit. Once they were done, the President stepped up to the podium where she put on her best solemn expression. \"I grieve for all of the people of the Earth. We have all lost loved ones in the last twenty-four hours. Rest assured that I will work day and night to find out why this has happened. Some say the deaths are due to the fact that four of the Clusters have appeared in orbit around the Earth. Let us not allow rumor to force us into hasty action. My staff and I are working to determine whether the Clusters are responsible in any way. If so, we will demand retribution. If not, we will determine the cause of these deaths.\"\n\nThe President paused briefly as the next lines of her speech were relayed over her brain implant. \"Let us take a minute to remember our loved ones who have passed before us. Today is the time to celebrate their lives and what they mean to us. Let's have a moment of silence.\" During the silence, President Walker tried to think if she knew any of the dead personally. There was a janitor at the Capitol that had died with no explanation and one of the Secret Service agents who guarded her had taken his own life. They were acquaintances, really, not friends. As leader of the Earth and its colonies she wondered if she really had any friends. She shot an almost indiscernible glance at Surgeon General Cooper\u2014the only member of her cabinet who spoke openly and without fear. Was she a friend or an enemy? Certainly, Dr. Cooper was more a friend than those members of her cabinet that remained silent to avoid aggravating her.\n\nThe clock in the President's brain implant told her that the moment of silence had extended long enough to be proper. If she waited any longer, people would get nervous. The President continued her speech.\n\n* * * *\n\nA man with long, white hair tied back into a ponytail stood on a ladder mounted to the side of a hover tractor and leaned over the power unit. He swore mildly as he removed the burned out transfer coupling and set it next to the open compartment. He leapt to the ground and surveyed the field around him, shaking his head in dismay. The man's name was Ellison Firebrandt and at one time he had been captain of the privateer vessel _Legacy_. Now, at 84-years-old, Firebrandt was a farmer on the colony world of Sufiro\u2014a colony he founded with his lover, Suki, and his first mate, Carter Roberts. Suki died when the colony was still new, but Roberts lived on. Even though arthritis confined him to a hover chair, Roberts' mind was still sharp.\n\nRoberts guided his chair over the field and stopped next to his one-time captain. \"Transfer coupling?\" he asked.\n\n\"Couldn't happen at a worse time,\" growled Firebrandt. \"We need to get the harvest in before the first snowfall. I don't think we can get a replacement from Earth before two weeks.\"\n\n\"Let me have a look at it,\" suggested Roberts. \"Maybe I can repair it.\"\n\n\"You've already repaired the damned thing about five times,\" said Firebrandt.\n\n\"If I can make it six, we'll save the harvest,\" said Roberts. Firebrandt started to reach up to retrieve the coupling, but Roberts stopped him. \"You'll hurt your back if you do that. Let me.\" With that, he lifted the hover chair to the top of the tractor, reached out and grabbed the transfer coupling then placed it into a compartment in the hover chair. Just as Roberts drifted back toward the ground, an alarm sounded on the hover chair's console. \"We've got a call up at the house,\" he explained.\n\n\"Who from?\" asked Firebrandt, looking up at the homestead he had built from the wreck of his star vessel, the _Legacy._\n\n\"I don't have an ID, but the call is originating on Alpha Coma Bereneces.\"\n\nFirebrandt shot a glance at his long-time friend. Sufiro had been founded when Firebrandt's mother\u2014an admiral from Alpha Coma Bereneces\u2014attacked the _Legacy_ and exiled Firebrandt to a world where he could survive but would be unable to commit acts of piracy. \"Signal for them to hold. I'll answer as soon as I get up to the house.\"\n\nRoberts did as he was instructed while Firebrandt strode ahead, reflecting about his life on Sufiro. His daughter had been born and his lover had died on the planet. Colonists seeking to escape an overcrowded Earth settled. Some of them discovered the galaxy's most precious metal, Erdonium, and that discovery ultimately sparked a war that nearly destroyed the planet. Peace ultimately prevailed, though, and Firebrandt hoped that peace would remain for a time.\n\nReaching the house, he quickly made his way through the adobe section that he built with his own hands and through an airlock into the old pirate ship. The ship's teleholographic booth still served as the primary teleholo to the outside universe. The one-time pirate captain activated the control unit and the forward wall extended into an expansive office. Sitting behind a desk, working at a computer, was a tall man with angular features, steel-gray eyes and red hair with white streaks. He looked up, apparently seeing that Firebrandt had answered.\n\n\"You must be Ellison,\" said the man, standing.\n\n\"I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage,\" said Firebrandt. He evaluated the room surrounding the stranger. His eyes fell on a portrait hanging on the wall. It was his own mother, Admiral Barbara Firebrandt. \"I see you admire my mother.\"\n\nThe man looked back at the wall, then turned with a smile as he stepped toward Firebrandt. \"Our mother,\" he corrected. \"I'm Senator Herbert Firebrandt of Alpha Coma. I'm your half-brother.\"\n\nThe pirate captain's jaw fell open. \"I had no idea...\"\n\n\"Neither did I ... not until four hours ago.\"\n\n\"What happened four hours ago?\" asked the captain, his eyes narrowed.\n\n\"I responded to an alarm at mother's tomb. I discovered your daughter and grandson,\" explained the senator. \"Apparently they were there to pay their respects.\"\n\n\"I'd heard that John Mark's ship, the _Sanson_ had gone to Alpha Coma for repairs after they'd made that jump to Cluster's home, but what the devil was Fire doing there?\"\n\n\"I gather she was sent here by the Titans,\" said the senator. He reached out and grabbed a chair and sat down facing his half-brother.\n\n\"Perhaps you'd better explain,\" said Ellison, putting his hands on his knees.\n\nHerbert nodded. \"Your daughter and a companion\u2014a man named Manuel Raton\u2014went to Titan to investigate whether or not there was a connection between the Titans and the Cluster. Apparently there is. Fire and Manuel discovered that the Cluster and the Titans used to be symbiotic organisms. The Cluster called itself 'the intelligence' and the Titans were 'the appendages.' The Titans caught Fire and Manuel and imprisoned them until after Captain Ellis followed the Cluster to its home system.\"\n\nThe captain nodded. \"The bit about John Mark and the _Sanson_ was on the news. Thank God he survived.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" agreed the Senator, who had already grown fond of his niece and grandnephew. \"Apparently the Titans transported Fire and Manuel here to Alpha Coma.\"\n\n\"So, are they available?\" asked the captain. \"Could I talk to them?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\" The senator took a deep breath then let it out slowly. \"I don't know if news has reached you out there on Sufiro or not, but we've lost all contact with Earth and Titan. Apparently four Clusters were seen in Earth orbit shortly before the blackout.\"\n\nEllison Firebrandt looked down at his feet as the news settled in. \"I gather the Cluster has gone to reclaim their former symbionts, the Titans.\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" said the senator, slowly. \"Or, John Mark thinks it could be worse than that. He thinks the Clusters may have identified an even better symbiotic partner\u2014humans.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" said the captain, slowly. He looked back up into Herbert Firebrandt's steel gray eyes. \"So, where is John Mark? Where is Fire?\"\n\n\"I made John Mark a captain in the Alpha Coma Navy. He will be taking the _Nicholas Sanson_ to Earth to find out what has happened and report back to us. Fire and Manuel volunteered to go with him.\"\n\nEllison Firebrandt looked down at his coveralls and noticed some dirt. Almost mindlessly, he swiped at it. Finally he looked up. \"I wish I could help them.\"\n\n\"As do I,\" said the senator. He put on his most reassuring smile. \"More than anything else, I suspect they need our prayers.\"\n\n\"They have them,\" said the captain, firmly.\n\nHerbert Firebrandt stood from the chair. \"It was good to meet you at last,\" he said. \"If we survive this crisis. I'd like to come to Sufiro and meet you in person.\"\n\nEllison Firebrandt stood and smiled. \"I'd like that very much.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nEarth's government had offices around the planet and at least one office building on each colony world. Officially the seat of power was in the city of Geneva. However, most Senators did not actually live or work there. Instead, they worked from the regional capitals that were closest to their homes\u2014using teleholos to project images of themselves to important meetings in Geneva. The President maintained an office in each of the regional capitals so that she would have a base of operations when she traveled.\n\nAfter the speech at Arlington Planetary Cemetery, President Walker and her aides went to the Capitol Building in the District of Columbia. The President had been there meeting with American Continental Senators when Doomsday struck. From the Capitol, the President went to the old White House Complex and virtually dropped into her chair and rubbed her eyes while the aides made a show of consulting personal teleholo units. The President looked around the room, and then shook her head. Rolling her chair up to the desk and straightening herself up, she cleared her throat.\n\n\"You're all exhausted and I need some time to think things through. Go grab some shut-eye and let's meet back here, in say, four hours.\" Most in the group nodded groggy relief and stood to leave the room. \"Dick,\" she called to the Planetary Minister. \"Would you mind keeping an eye on things for the next couple of hours? I'll take the watch in about two.\"\n\nDick Richards, looking the most alert, except for maybe Dr. Eva Cooper, nodded while folding up his teleholo unit. \"I'll talk to you in two hours.\"\n\nSurgeon General Eva Cooper lingered behind as everyone else departed the room. \"Madame President, I respectfully submit that you need more than two hours' sleep,\" she said once she was alone with the President.\n\n\"Now you're respectful,\" said the President with a touch of irony. She motioned to a chair across the desk. \"Have a seat. Care for a glass of wine?\"\n\n\"Wine?\" asked Dr. Cooper, her eyebrows furrowed. \"You really need sleep, and I can't advise alcohol right now.\"\n\nThe President stood and made her way to a cabinet at one side of the office. In spite of the Surgeon General's objections, she retrieved two glasses and a decanter of wine. \"What I need is someone to talk to ... for just a bit.\" The President set down the glasses.\n\n\"I'm a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist. I'm not even your personal physician.\"\n\nThe President sighed. \"I'm not looking for a medical or psychological opinion, I'm looking for someone I can confide in ... as a friend.\" Jenna Walker filled both glasses with a deep red Merlot and sat in the chair next to Eva Cooper.\n\n\"Surely you have friends you can confide in,\" said Cooper, warily.\n\n\"Political allies and trusted advisors, yes. Friends...\" Jenna Walker looked down sadly, letting the word trail off. She couldn't think of anyone she could really call a friend. Certainly, a long time ago, she had friends. However, once she entered politics, she carefully limited her confidences. She took a sip of wine and began to brood. \"Have you ever been married?\"\n\nCooper sat back, caught off guard by the question. She picked up her glass of wine, in spite of her earlier objection, but didn't take a drink. \"Yes, but I'm divorced now.\"\n\n\"What was it like to have someone that close? That intimate?\" asked Walker. She sat forward, elbows on her knees, peering into the glass of wine.\n\n\"It was wonderful at first. He was very handsome and we could talk about anything.\" Cooper sipped her wine. \"Then something changed. It seemed that his ego grew, or something. He cared less for me than for himself. We grew apart.\" Dr. Cooper inclined her head, examining the President, then took a deeper drink. \"Haven't you been close to anyone? Been intimate?\"\n\nThe President sighed and continued to look into the glass of wine. \"Not really. Like most people these days, I'm afraid. I'm afraid of disease and dishonesty. I'm afraid of being hurt.\" Jenna Walker sat up and took a sip of wine. \"The thing is, it never really bothered me that I was afraid. I'm not even sure I knew I was afraid. There have been enough studies done about the harmfulness of human relationships that it was easy to delude myself. Now I'm tired of the fear.\"\n\nEva Cooper pursed her lips. Uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was moving, she decided to take a more academic approach. \"I think much of it started in the 20th Century with the AIDS epidemic. People were afraid to be intimate with each other because of disease. Also, there's always been a certain kind of man who thinks being masculine means being an asshole. Feminists of the time began demanding that laws be passed to protect themselves from the assholes.\"\n\nJenna Walker snorted. \"I know my history. I wonder how things would have been different if women had just stood up for themselves rather than asking the countries of the day to protect them. History created a set of circumstances where it was easy for me to delude myself into believing that I didn't need intimacy with anyone.\" Walker sipped her wine again and then placed the glass on the desk. \"For some reason, that's changed in the last 24 hours.\"\n\n\"You're scared,\" said Dr. Cooper, leaning forward, studying the President. \"Between the Cluster and the Doomsday Dead, who wouldn't be?\"\n\n\"It's more than that,\" said Walker. \"It's as though some deep-seated part of my psyche has been triggered, running me through a gamut of emotions. It's like when I was a young teen, before I started taking meds to deaden PMS.\"\n\nEva Cooper took another sip of wine, then looked at her watch. \"Sleep will help. As I said before, you're exhausted.\"\n\nPresident Walker retrieved her glass of wine from the desk, and was silent for some time. As she sipped the wine she stole glances of the doctor over the rim of the glass. Like herself, the doctor was a middle-aged woman. Eva Walker's nose was a little beakish and her lips were a little thin, but her wide, curious eyes entranced the President. Likewise, the doctor's body was trim\u2014kept in good shape. \"Are you scared, Eva?\"\n\n\"Terrified,\" admitted the Doctor, allowing her barriers to drop somewhat.\n\nThe President of the Gaean Alliance took another drink of wine. A woman who had ordered people to their death, who routinely made decisions that affected the entire galaxy, worked up courage to ask a simple question. \"There's a sleeping chamber next door. Would you mind coming with me? I need someone to hold me and help me ward off the fear.\"\n\nDoctor Cooper let out a breath she didn't know she was holding. \"I'm not a lesbian, Madame President.\"\n\n\"I'm looking for the comfort of another human being\u2014for closeness more than sex. Would you deny your President that? Or, do you think she's too much of an idiot for that?\"\n\nEva Cooper shook her head. \"I think you are a brilliant, beautiful woman and it's a tragedy that no one has told you that.\"\n\nThe President stood and held her hand out to the Surgeon General. Eva Cooper took the hand, and noted with almost clinical professionalism that the President's nails were cut short and practical. Jenna Walker led the way through a back, unguarded door of the Oval Office and turned into a room with a comfortable-looking, but simple double bed. Each of the women removed their jackets and shoes.\n\nJenna Walker looked longingly at Eva Cooper, she reached out to her. The Surgeon General trembled and backed away. Jenna looked down, sadly. Compassion overcoming fear, Eva went to the President and folded her into her arms. They sat down on the bed and Jenna laid her head against Eva's soft breasts. Jenna's breathing came heavily: from exhaustion, from fear, from lust. The two lay down, side-by-side and Eva allowed Jenna's hands to roam, to pull her blouse from her slacks, and move up against the naked skin of her back. Rigid at first, Eva began to relax and stroke Jenna's shoulders. Jenna's sleepy eyes looked into Eva's. Drawn by some force\u2014perhaps the simple desire to be as close as possible to another human being, Jenna kissed the doctor. Eva's eyes went wide, but she was soon calmed by the President's firm hand, never leaving her back, just exploring human skin. Eva, drawn by the strength of Jenna's gaze returned the kiss, passionately, deeply. Jenna felt the hungry probing of Eva's tongue, then responded, her own tongue circling Eva's then pushing into the doctor's mouth. Jenna felt an almost unknown heat rise in her groin and her abdomen. They broke the kiss, panting for air.\n\nFor the first time in her life, Jenna Walker really understood the closeness human beings could feel for one another. A part of her longed for Eva's touch to go lower, to help release the building fire in her body, but she was so tired and it was just so nice to be held, to feel close to another human. Her explorations of Eva's body slowed, her eyelids fluttered, simply unable to stay open any longer. Her breathing deepened, not from passion now\u2014simply from exhaustion. Jenna Walker, President of the Gaean Alliance, fell asleep and dreamed...\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**REVELATION**\n\nFalling asleep in the comfort of Eva Cooper's arms, Jenna Walker dreamed she was in the most peaceful place of all\u2014her mother's uterus. She floated, happily taking nourishment from her mother. As President, her mind seemed to work all the time, even while she slept. Now, her mind floated free, without a care in the world. Too soon, though, Jenna found her head wedged in a tight place, being pushed, shoved, moved through by any means possible. Ahead, she could sense a dreadful light. Somehow, she knew it was the light of knowledge. When it swept over her, she would never be the same again. She didn't want to go any further, but the pushing and the shoving continued against her best efforts. Her home in the uterus had grown too small. Hours of pain and terror seemed to pass before she finally broke free of the vice-like grip of bone and found herself moving through strangely translucent, crystalline yet fleshy folds and gushed out into the terrifying light in a burst of clear moisture and dew that was somehow blood, but infinitely older\u2014as though the color had been washed away.\n\nLike Athena, Jenna Walker found herself born fully formed. However, while Athena had sprung from the head of the male god, Zeus, Jenna Walker came from the uterus and vagina of a god-like female. Whereas Athena was born armed with spear, helm and mail, Jenna was armed only with those things that had prompted Eva Cooper to call her beautiful: deep brown eyes, an easy smile, long, muscled legs, well-proportioned hips and breasts. Jenna Walker took a moment to admire her body as more than just so much anatomy put together, but as a deliciously sensuous whole.\n\nThe light of knowledge washed over Jenna and she became aware that she was in the presence of the mind of one of the Clusters that orbited the Earth, but she was confused and wanted more information. The woman who had given birth to Jenna reached down and gathered her into her arms, bringing Jenna to her breast. Jenna brushed the woman's long, black hair from a nipple that seemed rigid and unyielding, more like a sculpture of Venus than the tender fleshiness of a human. Instinct told Jenna to latch onto the breast in spite of its cold rigidity and, indeed, she did. As she suckled, it seemed that the woman that held her became warmer, more tender, more human. At the same time, Jenna's mind filled with images of an Earth she'd never dreamed of before.\n\nJenna had always known the Earth as a planet overrun by people. However, the governments of Earth had been able to keep the people fed by utilizing resources from outside. Ice was mined from the asteroid belt and brought to Earth to provide fresh water. There were farms and mines on Mars that supplied the people of the Earth. Maintaining all of these outside resources was a delicate dance of politics, money and technology. Jenna had been part of the dance ever since she had been elected a Senator, then named a Minister and ultimately elected President of the Alliance. She knew that many felt the tax structure of Earth was too steep. It made housing a challenge for many people. During her presidential campaign, she'd vowed to meet the challenge, though it was beginning to look insurmountable.\n\nThen came the Clusters.\n\nThen came Doomsday.\n\nJenna was all too aware that both occurrences could spell disaster for her moderately successful presidency. Neither occurrence was her fault, but that's not the way people saw it. As Jenna drank in the sweet milk of the Cluster she saw Doomsday in a new light that was both frightening and compelling. Less people on the Earth meant less people to feed. Less people on the Earth meant less people to house. Jenna looked into the green eyes of Mother-Cluster and somehow conveyed her sadness for all the lives lost.\n\nMother-Cluster smiled, \"It is sweet of you to care for those who died.\" Her voice was surprisingly gentle, not booming or resounding as one might expect from a godlike entity. \"They were invited to be born again. However, the images my sisters and I presented were too intense for them and they simply did not understand. Birth is a dangerous process\u2014rebirth even more so. Some are stillborn; others miscarry. Those who survive are the strongest. Grieve for those who died, for they will not know the wonders you and the rest of the survivors are about to experience.\"\n\nLooking into Mother-Cluster's eyes, Jenna caught the briefest glimpse of billions of years of experience. The Cluster could take humanity into the future. In that flash, Jenna saw how much more productively machines could be used on Mars and in the asteroids. She saw ways that the Earth could be cleaned up and made beautiful without giving up the comforts she had grown to love. Humans with little vision or drive had been swept asunder. She would work with the remaining humans to rebuild the planet; humans, with a drive to serve their fellow man, had imagination, and wanted to explore.\n\n\"Yes, my little one,\" said Mother-Cluster, \"Grieve for those who have died. But also celebrate with those who live. You are the heirs of a new Earth that you will build. You will be remembered forever.\"\n\nJenna released Mother-Cluster's breast\u2014now softer, almost human\u2014and swallowed the milk. A tear ran down her cheek and she woke up to find herself in the arms of Eva Cooper. Jenna gently extracted herself from Eva's arms and kissed the doctor on the forehead. The President of Gaean Alliance tucked in her blouse, threw on her jacket and slipped into her shoes. With a deep breath of resolve she knew she had work to do.\n\n* * * *\n\nArriving aboard the _Nicholas Sanson_ , John Mark Ellis, Kirsten Smart, Suki Ellis and Manuel Raton immediately went to the ship's command deck. Navigator Laura Peters turned at the sound of the lift door opening, with a look of faint relief. The ship's first mate, Simon Yermakov\u2014a man whose round face and puffy cheeks gave him the appearance of a squirrel\u2014turned in his chair. \"Top of the morning, Skipper,\" he said. \"We've been trying to reach you all night.\"\n\n\"We've heard the news,\" said Ellis, tersely. \"It seems that the Cluster ships have turned up at Earth.\"\n\n\"So much for this week's pay,\" said Yermakov, wryly.\n\n\"We might just be able to save your check, Simon,\" said Kirsten with a twinkle in her eye. \"I have volunteered _Sanson_ for a special reconnaissance mission.\"\n\n\"Recon mission?\" asked Laura\u2014who served in the Confederation Reserves, in addition to being the _Sanson's_ navigator.\n\n\"We're a mapping vessel,\" chirped in Simon. \"What's going on here?\"\n\nEllis motioned for Yermakov and Peters to come toward the back of the command deck where, he introduced his mother and Manuel. \"Has G'Liat left the ship, yet?\"\n\nSimon Yermakov nodded ascent. \"He left yesterday. A Rd'dyggian charter vessel picked him up.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Ellis, nodding. \"I'd like you to get someone to fix up his quarters for my mother and Mr. Raton.\"\n\nSimon inclined his head, examining the two new arrivals. Manuel Raton was a man of medium height with salt-and-pepper hair, a long, drooping mustache, and sleepy-looking eyes that hid keen skills of observation. Somehow he seemed as though he would be more at home with hepler pistols in each hand than at the side of the captain's mother. Fire Ellis was tall and rail thin, except for an expansive bosom that made her look top-heavy. She stood, hands on hips, her eyes admiring the command deck of the _Nicholas Sanson._ Her almost battle-ready stance made Simon re-evaluate his first impression\u2014Manuel Raton _was_ at home with this woman.\n\n\"Will do, Skipper,\" said Simon, acknowledging Ellis' request. \"Now what's this about recon work? The _Sanson_ won't even be ready to leave orbit for another two weeks.\"\n\nEllis looked from Simon to Laura. \"Where's Natalie?\" asked Ellis, realizing that the ship's communicator was not on the Command Deck.\n\nLaura Peters let out a slow breath. \"In the infirmary. When Earth went silent, it was too much for her. She collapsed.\"\n\n\"The Emergency Med Tech gave her some Proxom to calm her nerves,\" explained Simon.\n\nKirsten frowned. \"Proxom interferes with the communication's implant. Are you sure that's wise?\"\n\nSimon Yermakov shrugged. \"It seemed better than having her hysterical. The Med Tech suggested it for a dose or two, then we'd see if we can bring her off.\"\n\nEllis nodded approval. \"Good. We'll need her back to duty as soon as she's able. In the meantime, I want to talk to you two,\" he nodded to Peters and Yermakov in turn. \"I have been appointed a Captain in the Alpha Coma Space Fleet with the mission of finding out just what exactly has happened on Earth. Kirsten has volunteered the _Sanson_ to serve as my command.\" Ellis chewed his lower lip for a moment and Simon made a motion as though he were about to interrupt, but seemed to change his mind. Ellis continued, \"I want to make it absolutely clear that no one aboard the _Sanson_ is obligated to come on this mission. You are civilians and this is a military mission. However, the _Sanson_ has a good crew that works well together. I do not want to break this crew up if I don't have to. If you two stick with me, I'm sure most of the crew will come along. All of us want to find out what's happened to our friends and family back on Earth. I need you. Are you with me?\"\n\n\"You can count on me, sir,\" piped Laura Peters.\n\nSimon Yermakov looked down at his feet. Briefly, he looked back up into Laura's beaming face, then saw Kirsten's supportive smile, then looked nervously at the imposing figures of Fire and Manuel. He looked back at his feet and shook his head. Lower lip trembling, Simon stepped over to the command deck's holographic viewer and looked off into the image of space.\n\nCaptain Ellis lifted his hand, indicating that the rest of the people should stay where they were. He alone went up to Simon and put his hand on the first mate's shoulder. \"Simon, is there anything I can say to persuade you?\"\n\nSimon took a deep, shuddering breath. \"Skipper, I have a talent for geography. When I was a kid, I could name the capital of every one of the major planets and tell you just where it was located before most kids could tell you the ABC's. I'm a good mathematician and a decent physicist. All of those talents brought me to the galactic cartography division of the TransGalactic Corporation. I like maps and equations better than people\u2014that's why I shipped out. What do I owe the people of the Earth?\"\n\n\"What about your parents? Siblings?\" asked Ellis, softly.\n\n\"I never knew my father,\" said Yermakov. \"But, what else is new? My mom left Earth after I went to work for TransGalactic. She lives on New Earth. My sister followed her.\"\n\n\"The Cluster is a threat to humans everywhere,\" explained Ellis, calmly.\n\nSimon slammed his palm against the wall then took a few deep breaths and nodded. \"I'm a good map maker. I should have been captain of this ship. Not you.\"\n\nEllis inhaled deeply and looked up at the ceiling. Simon Yermakov had been up for promotion to the captaincy of _Sanson_ when he, G'Liat and McClintlock had started looking for a ship that could take them in search of the Cluster. G'Liat had pulled strings with the TransGalactic Corporation and landed them jobs on the _Sanson._ Kirsten Smart had confessed to Ellis that she had not wanted Yermakov as captain. The same thing that placed Yermakov on a ship to begin with\u2014the fact that he didn't enjoy working with people\u2014was the same thing that kept him from the captaincy. Kirsten considered it a blessing when Ellis had been named the new captain. Ellis blinked and looked at Yermakov's back. \"What would you do if you were captain of the _Sanson_?\"\n\nYermakov's back stiffened. \"My first order of business would be the repair of the ship,\" he said simply.\n\n\"What would happen after the ship was repaired? What would you do?\" Ellis stepped up to Yermakov and whispered in his ear. \"TransGalactic isn't responding. There are no instructions.\"\n\n\"You know damned well what I'd do,\" growled Yermakov. \"I'd consult Kirsten. She's the corporate officer. It would be her decision.\"\n\n\"And you know damned well what she wants to do,\" Ellis growled back. \"She's back there, ready to take this ship into Hell to find out what's happened.\"\n\nYermakov turned suddenly and looked Ellis in the eye. \"Only because of you, Captain, sir,\" he spat. \"She loves you.\"\n\nEllis put his hands behind his back. \"This is the critical question, Mr. Yermakov. Has that love really changed her? Would her decision to go back to Earth\u2014resources permitting\u2014be any different? Or, are you just using my presence as an excuse?\"\n\nYermakov looked down at his feet. \"Damn you,\" he said, simply.\n\nEllis risked putting his hand on Yermakov's shoulder. \"Will you come with us to Earth? You're more than a good mapmaker. You know this ship better than me\u2014better even than Kirsten.\"\n\n\"Mahuk knows the ship. He has family on Earth\u2014he'll go with you.\"\n\n\"But, Mahuk isn't the first officer. You are.\" Ellis squeezed Simon's shoulder. \"I need you. Kirsten needs you. Mahuk needs you.\"\n\n\"I have to think about it, Skipper,\" said Yermakov simply. \"If you're sincere that we're not obligated to follow, you'll at least allow me time to decide whether or not I'm going to Earth, won't you?\"\n\nEllis nodded. \"Will you, at least, agree to stay on for the next day or so and oversee the repairs to the ship?\"\n\nYermakov looked into Ellis' eyes again. This time, the gaze softened. \"I'll do that much for you, sir. I have to think about the rest.\"\n\nThe captain stepped into the hologram of space and looked around at the floating images of stars. \"The government of Alpha Coma Bereneces has put all of their resources at our disposal. Given that, how long do you think it'll be before the ship can be ready to proceed toward Earth?\"\n\n\"I'd have to consult Mr. Mahuk,\" said Yermakov. \"But I'm guessing it'll only take three to four days with unlimited manpower and no wait time for parts.\"\n\n\"Then meet with Mr. Mahuk and speed up your repairs, Mr. Yermakov,\" trumpeted Ellis. More quietly, \"You have two days to make up your mind.\" The captain stepped back to the rear of the command deck where Suki and Manuel waited. Natalie had returned to her post at navigation and Kirsten had stepped into her office. \"Shall I show you to your quarters?\" asked Ellis.\n\n\"Please do,\" said Fire, nodding to her son.\n\n\"Then find us some food,\" said Manuel. \"I'm starving.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nEva Cooper awoke several hours later. Her head swam as she tried to remember what had happened before she fell asleep. The memories came back to her in a rush. She bit her lower lip, feeling both liberated and frightened. Thighs sticky and hair mussed, she sat up, realizing that she would have to exit through the Oval Office. Looking at her watch, she gasped at the time. Anyone could be there. Peeking into the hall, she saw that there was a restroom across the way. She did her best with the sink and washcloth to make herself look presentable. Returning to the bedchamber, she finished dressing, then went to the door that led to the President's office. Eva eased the door open and looked in to see the President meeting with the holographic images of numerous Senators from around the planet. Their discussion had an eerie, almost philosophic tone. They were talking about diseases that the doctor knew to be incurable. However, as she listened, she realized that the President and the Senators were talking about cures\u2014and the cures sounded completely plausible and obvious. It was as though there wasn't such a thing as an incurable disease.\n\nJenna Walker looked up, smiled and waved very briefly, then returned her attention to the meeting.\n\nEva Cooper stepped into the room, moved through, but lingered near the main door. As she did, she caught snippets of conversation about humanity moving into the future and cleaning up the Earth. No one seemed worried about the Doomsday Dead except for the logistics of dealing with the bodies. It was as though they suddenly knew the answers to Doomsday and were no longer concerned. Neither were they concerned about the Clusters and the fact that Earth was out of touch with the remainder of the Galaxy. Eva swallowed hard, knowing she had some research to do. She looked at her watch and saw that it was time for her dose of Proxom. With the emotion-stabilizing drug in her system, she'd be better able to deal with whatever she learned.\n\n* * * *\n\nSwearing mildly, Samuel \"Old Man\" Coffin dug though his sea chest, in search of a tobacco pouch. While it was true that Coffin was addicted to nicotine, he smoked his pipe less from addiction than from a sense of history. His home was the island of Nantucket and legend said that Nantucket was created when God dumped out his gray pipe ash in the Atlantic Ocean. In the late 25th century, many people in old Nantucket families took up smoking as a way to set themselves apart from off islanders and to retain a sense of island history. The drug Dairtox, introduced to reduce toxins in the lungs from air-borne pollutants, made smoking a relatively safe pastime. After several minutes of searching, Coffin still could not find the tobacco. He sat down on the floor in front of the chest and stroked his snow-white beard\u2014eyes searching a room that was at once familiar, yet not his own.\n\nOld Man Coffin sat in a guest room of the Ellis house\u2014one of the last homes on Nantucket that was still owned by one of the old families. While Suki and John Mark Ellis were searching for the Cluster, Coffin stayed at their home\u2014a sentinel guarding the old house against off-islanders, tax collectors and vandals. Coffin stood, joints complaining, and hobbled out of the guest room. He pondered the Clusters. Watching the teleholo the night before, he'd learned that four had appeared in orbit above the Earth. After watching a short time, he shut off the teleholo and went to bed, spending a restless night huddled under the covers, wishing the Ellises were back from their sojourn in space. In the morning, Coffin awoke. Not used to owning a teleholo, he hadn't bothered to turn it on. Instead, he sought the comfort of his familiar pipe. Though he'd found the pipe, he couldn't find the tobacco.\n\nCoffin descended the creaking, wooden staircase and searched the living room to see if John Mark Ellis or his late father had left any tobacco behind. He saw a familiar rack of pipes on the fireplace mantle\u2014but ignored them. More promising was a wooden box\u2014the lid carved with the image of a sailing ship\u2014next to an old couch. Coffin opened the box and discovered that it was a small humidor containing a few cigars, but no pipe tobacco. For a few moments, Coffin was tempted to take a cigar, but decided that he really wanted the comfort of his old pipe. Sighing, he realized that he had no choice but to ride out to his shack in the nearby village of Madaket.\n\nCoffin pulled himself upstairs and found a backpack and shoes. As he prepared for the short trip, he grew light-hearted. It had been too long since he had been out to his own home. While it was only a shack, it contained the last vestiges of his life: his own books as well as books left behind by his ancestors, memorabilia from old whaling days and from the days when the Coffins turned their attention to studying, rather than killing, whales. Coffin realized he'd been inside too much. He needed fresh air.\n\nSamuel Coffin made his way back down the stairs and locked the front door of the Ellis house. Stepping into the backyard, he retrieved a bicycle from the shed and began peddling toward his home, five miles away. For his age, he was in good shape and refused to buy a hover car. While his joints groaned and complained, riding the bicycle kept them from seizing up entirely. \"The day I have to buy one of those hovers is the day they'll bury me in the island's sand,\" he'd said once. Hovers were loved by off-islanders who sped around the island looking for souvenirs or admiring the island's \"quaint\" charm. \"The island's charm can't be seen at 200 kilometers per hour,\" complained Coffin another time. \"You have to drink it in slowly.\"\n\nOn his way through the village of Nantucket, Old Man Coffin rode past a red brick building with white columns\u2014truly an impressive example of Greek revival architecture. It was the Coffin school, named for one of the old man's ancestors. Indeed, one of the island's original English settlers was Tristram Coffin and, by the middle of the nineteenth century it was claimed that most of the island's young people were descendants of Tristram Coffin. Now, in the late 30th century, Samuel Coffin was the last living descendant who bore Tristram's surname. As he rode through the village of Nantucket, Coffin did notice that the streets were strangely quiet. Again, he remembered the reports of the Clusters orbiting the Earth. \"People must be inside, noses stuck in the holos,\" said Coffin to himself, blissfully unaware of the Doomsday Dead.\n\nSamuel Coffin sped past the school and out of town, then followed a plastic roadway most of the way to the village of Madaket. As with Nantucket, both the road and the village were unusually quiet. Twisting and turning his bike through the streets of the tiny village, Coffin was relieved to see a few old friends\u2014like him, descendants of the old families. He waved at them as he sped by on his bike. He grumbled the word \"off-islanders\" at a few of the people whose families had moved to the island recently\u2014within the last century or two.\n\nMost of the village behind him, Coffin found himself riding along a trail of decayed asphalt out into the moors. Finally, even the ancient asphalt disappeared and Coffin dismounted and pushed his bicycle over the sandy road rather than try to peddle. At last, he arrived at a small, dilapidated shack sitting alone in the sand save for some scrubby green plants. He leaned the bike against a gray, wooden wall and licked his lips.\n\nOld Man Coffin sighed as he stood in front of his shack and stared at a carving of a whale's spout that hung outside the door. The shack's electrical power generator had failed since his last visit, and the force field that protected the sign had also failed. Without protection, the sign would rot away in the island's wet weather.\n\nEntering the shack to look for a step-stool, he recalled words from Herman Melville's novel, _Moby-Dick_ : \"Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of out-hanging light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath\u2014'The Spouter Inn:\u2014Peter Coffin.'\"\n\nWhat most people didn't realize was that Peter Coffin of New Bedford really existed. Like Samuel, he was a descendent of Tristram Coffin. Melville likely stayed at Coffin's inn, and then wrote about it in the novel, _Moby-Dick._ Finding a stool, Coffin carefully pulled the sign of the famous Spouter-Inn off of its hooks and lovingly brought it inside.\n\nGaunt, white-haired and back-bent, the moniker \"Old Man\" fit Samuel Coffin very well. However, the fact of the matter was that he'd earned the nickname when he was in his thirties. The young Samuel Coffin, a marine biologist, bought a large ocean-going boat and took the young people of Nantucket\u2014including John Mark Ellis, at one time\u2014out on cruises to instruct them in ocean science and the history of Nantucket and the whaling industry. Coffin frequently told students how ship captains had been known as \"the old man.\" The students, who dearly loved their captain and teacher, teased him by calling him the old man of Nantucket. Soon, this was shortened to simply referring to Samuel as Old Man Coffin. Samuel Coffin's career as an ocean-going teacher was a natural choice given his love of family history. His ancestor, Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin purchased the first training ship in the old United States\u2014the _Clio_ \u2014that took Nantucket students to far-off lands in the mid-nineteenth century.\n\nOld Man Coffin made his way through the shack, pausing to look at a nineteenth century sextant. A few steps further on, he picked up a copy of the \"Nautical Handbook\" from the twentieth. Shaking his head, Coffin knew that he should take some of these things to Ellis' house and thought about packing them into his backpack. Sadly, he realized that he didn't really have the room.\n\nAt last, he found the object of his quest\u2014a pouch of Navy Flake pipe tobacco. Coffin crumbled some of the tobacco into the pipe he'd brought with him and smoked while he continued to contemplate his collection of antiques. Old Man Coffin's eyes fell on a polished round of whale baleen. On the bone was a black etching of a sperm whale. Coffin sucked in warm, soothing smoke\u2014drinking it in like mother's milk\u2014as he contemplated the scrimshaw. It was unethical to own a piece of a murdered whale. However, the scrimshaw had been in Coffin's family for centuries. Either way, he realized he should not leave it in the shack where anyone could get it. It would be safer in Ellis' home.\n\nCoffin packed his pouch of tobacco, the scrimshaw and a few other odds and ends into his backpack. He stepped out of the shack and locked the door. A futile gesture, he knew, looking at the ancient, rotted wood. Still, he didn't feel he could leave his shack open to just anyone. The tourists would never come out this far\u2014Coffin's shack was too far from the plastic roadway.\n\nCoffin looked out toward the sea and smoked his pipe a little while longer. Black-accented gray clouds met white-accented gray ocean at the horizon. The old man longed to be on a ship, sailing the waves. The ocean was the true domain of the Nantucketer. The pipe smoldered to a finish. Almost ceremonially, Coffin dumped the pipe, adding his ash to God's own. He climbed on the bike and rode back to Nantucket Village.\n\nNight was falling as Coffin brought his bike to the storage shed behind the Ellis house. He stowed the bicycle, went inside and turned on the teleholo while he ordered a simple meal of quohog chowder and ale from the food preparation unit. As he noisily slurped the chowder, he watched a rerun of Gaean President Jenna Walker's speech at Arlington Planetary Cemetery. Turning up the volume, he heard about the deaths around the Earth. Coffin picked up the glass of ale and swallowed a large gulp. \"Where's John Mark when we need him?\" asked Coffin, taking a deep breath.\n\nA newscaster interrupted President Walker's rerun speech\u2014a literal talking head that floated over the dais of the teleholo\u2014that stated the President was about to make a live announcement. Coffin grinned sourly at the notion of the President interrupting the President.\n\n\"People of Gaea\u2014Mother Earth,\" began the President as her miniature image faded into view: a doll standing on the teleholo dais in front of the Gaean flag, \"for all of human history, we have been a people in crisis. We have fought wars with one another to determine which group would have the right to rape Gaea\u2014our own mother. Many times, we have raped her to get at the milk of her breast: the fuel to run factories, the land to raise crops and animals. Other times, we have raped her for pleasure: energy to run our teleholos and games. We humans are like depraved sex addicts, who have stopped seeing the Earth as mother...\"\n\nSamuel Coffin shook his head as he listened to the speech. Hadn't the President just been talking about all of the dead around the Earth? Didn't she imply suspicion of the Cluster as the cause of all of the deaths? What was all of this talk about \"rape of the Earth?\" What did it have to do with the crisis at hand?\n\nThe President went on to say that she had been in contact with the Cluster and explained that each of the Clusters was a life form in itself. \"Again, I come before you to mourn the Doomsday Dead. However, I also come before you to tell you that I know definitively that the Cluster did not kill them. The Cluster is ancient and vastly experienced. The Cluster is even older than Mother Gaea. Like Gaea, the Cluster has much to offer the people of the Earth. Earth has tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods that can kill. Still, Earth produces the bounty that allows humans to survive. In much the same way, the Cluster produces a flood of emotional energy. While that flood can be devastating, the experience of the Cluster can be profound.\"\n\nHorrified, Coffin turned off the teleholo. Unable to finish his chowder and beer, he let the dishes sit and went upstairs to his room where he undressed and pushed back the covers of his bed, then opened his backpack and retrieved the scrimshaw.\n\nSitting down on the bed, Coffin held the scrimshaw and looked at the image of the whale. He thought about the deaths happening around the globe and the glib words of the President. In Coffin's mind, the Cluster was killing people just as his ancestors once hunted whales. Almost reverently, he placed the scrimshaw on the nightstand next to the bed, lay down and fell into a deep sleep.\n\nHe awoke the next morning to a swaying followed by a lurch. He found himself bathed in filtered twilight, but not the twilight of his room in the Ellis house. His nose was invaded by the smell of wet wood mingled with humanity. There was a pungent undertone. \"Whale oil?\" he half whispered. Wood creaked loudly and he lurched again. He looked at his hands. They looked like the hands of a man thirty years his junior.\n\nCoffin climbed out of bed and looked around in the dim half-light. There were shutters over the bed. He threw the shutters open and was greeted by the sight of open ocean. He had to grab onto a beam in the wall to keep from stumbling during another lurch. He looked around the room. He was in the after cabin of an old wooden sailing vessel. Charts were laid out on a table. A black coat and pants hung over a chair. Almost involuntarily, he scratched himself and felt the surprising roughness of wool. There was a pounding at the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" said Coffin, softly, almost reverently. The pounding came again. \"Come in,\" he growled loudly.\n\nA young boy, barely into his teens opened the creaky wooden door. \"The mate's compliments, sir,\" said the boy. \"He would like to know what course to make.\"\n\nCoffin rubbed the scraggly hairs of his thin, white beard. He stepped over to the charts. There were not only antique charts of the oceans of the Earth, but star charts as well. The universe had opened up to Coffin. He could see anything he wanted to see; go anywhere he wanted to go. \"My God,\" muttered Coffin. \"What has happened? Have I gone crazy?\"\n\nHe was reassured by a soft feminine voice, almost in his head, but not quite, as though it echoed from outside. The sense was strong enough for him to know that he was not imagining this. \"This galaxy is new to us. Take us to any place, any time.\"\n\n\"Sir?\" asked the boy standing in the doorway.\n\n\"Damn it, boy! The mate can wait while I get my bearings. Get me some coffee and let me review these charts!\" The boy ran from the room, practically slamming the door in his haste to leave. Coffin took a deep breath and smiled. Not only the oceans of the Earth, but the entire galaxy, were his to explore. \"Where do we begin?\" he whispered.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**SAILORS**\n\n\"Man, it stinks in here,\" complained Manuel Raton as he entered the quarters that used to be occupied by the Rd'dyggian warrior, G'Liat.\n\nEllis shrugged. \"G'Liat liked to burn incense. I think it reminded him of Rd'dyggia.\"\n\n\"Rd'dyggia has a high concentration of ammonia in the soil, doesn't it?\" asked Fire, wrinkling her nose.\n\nRaton nodded sagely. \"That explains why it smells like cat piss in here.\"\n\nEllis moved across to a chair and fell into it. He held up his hands apologetically. \"The air scrubbers will have the room smelling fresh within a few hours.\" The captain retrieved a cigar from his jacket. \"Of course, I could cover up the smell.\"\n\nRaton waved his hands hurriedly in the air. \"No, that's fine. We like it just the way it is.\"\n\nFire sat down at the white table, next to her son. \"Mark, I hope you don't mind that Manuel and I invited ourselves along on this mission.\"\n\nMark Ellis grinned ruefully at his mother. \"Mind? If Simon's reaction is any indication of what I'm going to face from the rest of the crew, it may be you, Manuel, Kirsten, Laura and I flying the ship back to Earth.\"\n\n\"You're right to give the crew a choice, Mark,\" said Fire, putting her hand on her son's. \"You can't force them to go. But, you underestimate them. Most of them will go because they're human and they want to help.\"\n\nMark Ellis nodded, somberly. He looked up at Manuel Raton. \"Do you want me to order up some breakfast? You said you were hungry.\" There was a bitter edge to Ellis' voice.\n\nManuel moved over to the window and looked out at the stars and the planet orbiting below. \"The lingering incense has caused me to lose some of my appetite,\" he said matter-of-factly. Looking around at Ellis, Manuel grinned slightly. \"Maybe we'll have some breakfast in a little bit.\"\n\nFire squeezed her son's hand. Ellis looked down, refusing to meet her gaze. \"Is there something wrong?\" asked Fire.\n\nEllis shook his head. \"I would like to talk to you.\" He looked up at Manuel. \"Privately.\"\n\nManuel looked around and shrugged. \"I think I'm feeling a little hungry after all,\" he said patting his stomach. \"No need to bother ordering anything, I'll go see if I can find the galley.\" With that, Manuel stepped out of the cabin.\n\nBefore the door closed, Ellis noticed that Manuel was facing the wrong direction. \"Galley's the other way,\" called the captain.\n\nThey saw Manuel turn on his heel just as the door slid closed.\n\n\"What is it, Mark?\" asked Fire.\n\nMark Ellis looked into his mother's eyes and sighed. \"I like Manuel Raton. We fought side-by-side on Sufiro. But, are you...\"\n\n\"...sleeping with him?\" Fire finished when Mark was unable to complete the thought. It was her turn to stand and move to the window. \"Yes, I am.\"\n\n\"Doesn't it seem a little soon after dad...\" Again, Ellis let his thoughts trail off. He thought about his father who had been killed by the Cluster just about a year before.\n\nFire let out a long breath as she continued to look out the window. \"I loved your father a great deal. However, in the almost 30 years I was married to him, I maybe saw him in the flesh for five of those years. He had been in space well over two years before the Cluster killed him. I was a widow long before he died.\" She turned and saw that Mark Ellis' head was down again. \"I don't say that to upset you.\" She paused and sat down at the table. \"Manuel and I were close a long time ago. He's helped me heal wounds that would have taken a long time if I'd been alone.\"\n\n\"It just may take some time for me to adjust to this element of our relationship.\" Ellis looked down at his feet.\n\nFire leaned across the table and lifted Mark's chin so she could look into his brown eyes. \"Relationships are always in flux, kiddo. I meant it when I said I loved your father. You weren't the only one hurt by his loss. But just because he died doesn't mean I can't go on living.\"\n\nEllis nodded, but didn't say anything.\n\n\"How are you and Kirsten getting along?\" asked Fire, softly.\n\n\"Pretty well. But our relationship is still pretty new\u2014still changing.\"\n\n\"It always will,\" said Fire, a twinkle in her eye. \"That's what makes life exciting.\"\n\nEllis looked back to the cabin door. \"Do you suppose Manuel found the galley?\"\n\n\"We'd better go see. Besides I'm hungry, too.\" Suki Ellis grinned at her son. He stood up from the table, took his mother by the hand and led her to the galley.\n\n* * * *\n\nEdmund Swan stood at the door of Ellison Firebrandt's homestead on Sufiro. He remembered the first time he had come to the homestead, less than a year before. At the time, the one-time pirate had summoned him, asking him to lead an army to defend the continent of New Granada from invaders from Sufiro's other major continent, Tejo. At the time, Swan had been afraid, intimidated by the man who had tamed a planet. Now, like many on Sufiro, Swan regarded Firebrandt more as a grandfather figure than leader of a world.\n\nThe door slid open and Roberts greeted Swan. In his eighties, with a completely bald head, Roberts reminded Swan of a pirate flag's skull and even the warm smile managed to send shivers up the deputy sheriff's spine. \"Hello, old friend,\" said Swan. \"Is the captain in?\"\n\n\"He is, we're just finishing breakfast.\" Roberts maneuvered the hover chair back away from the door, then led the way through the house and up a staircase to the second floor. He drifted through double doors into a glassed-in room that gave a view of Firebrandt's farm and the great river beyond\u2014the Nuevo Rio Grande. Between the farm and river stood a small village called Succor. On the river, a great wooden water wheel turned slowly. Manuel Raton once told Swan that Firebrandt and Roberts had built the wheel by hand during their first year on the planet. It turned an old auxiliary electrical generator from the _Legacy_. The generator supplied power to the village and the homestead.\n\nFirebrandt turned his head as Roberts and Swan entered the room. He sat at a delicate-looking glass table holding a porcelain cup in strong, callused hands. \"Ah, Edmund!\" he exclaimed. \"How good to see you.\" He set the cup down on the table. \"May I offer you a cup of coffee?\"\n\n\"That would be nice, thanks,\" said Swan. Roberts indicated a chair and Swan sat down. Firebrandt passed a cup of coffee.\n\n\"So, have you heard about what's happened at Earth?\" asked Roberts gliding around to one end of the table. He grabbed the carafe and warmed up his coffee.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Swan, slowly. \"I suppose that's why I'm here. I was in the middle of a holo call with an old friend from Earth when communications died. He was someone I hadn't spoken to in years. For some reason he felt compelled to call me. I'm very worried.\"\n\n\"You're not the only one,\" said Firebrandt. \"I just learned that John Mark and Fire will be on their way to Earth soon. They want to find out what's happened.\"\n\nSwan took a sip of coffee and then set the cup down on the saucer. \"Exactly, and so do I.\" The deputy sheriff of New Granada stood, stepped around the table and looked out the window, arms behind his back.\n\n\"Tell me about this friend that called,\" said Firebrandt.\n\n\"I haven't talked to him since we were teenagers.\" Swan sighed. \"Back then, he was a computer genius. He had this notion that he could build a vast data storage device using a black hole.\"\n\nRoberts shot a glance at Firebrandt then looked up at Swan. \"What has your friend been doing in the years since?\"\n\n\"I have no idea.\" Swan shrugged.\n\nFirebrandt stroked his long white mustache for a moment then stood and stepped next to Swan. \"The reason Roberts asks is that John Mark thinks that the Clusters may want to form a symbiotic link with humans.\"\n\n\"Humans might not find your friend's dream very practical,\" said Roberts, picking up his coffee cup. \"But the Cluster...\"\n\nFirebrandt put his hand on Swan's shoulder. \"I begin to think you should go to Earth and see what has become of your friend.\"\n\nSwan nodded. \"That's what I want to do, but with Manuel gone...\"\n\n\"There are other deputy sheriffs here in New Granada,\" said Firebrandt. \"I think we can spare you.\" He gave Swan's shoulder a squeeze. \"Besides, you might be able to help John Mark and Fire.\"\n\nThe doorbell chimed. Roberts activated his hover chair, lifted off the ground and went through the breakfast room's double doors. Swan snorted and moved back to the table, sitting down. \"I suspect that John Mark Ellis and your daughter can take care of themselves.\"\n\nThe one-time pirate captain inclined his head and grinned. \"They can also get into a lot of trouble. I suspect they'll need all the help they can get.\"\n\nThe deputy sheriff sat down and took a sip of his coffee. \"That leaves only one problem. How do I get to Earth? I don't have a lot of money and I suspect that most transports aren't in a hurry to go to Earth and find out if the Cluster will destroy them.\"\n\nRoberts drifted back into the breakfast room. A seven-foot tall, orange being wearing an eye patch and flowing robes followed behind. \"Arepno managed to find us parts for our transfer coupling,\" said Roberts, with a pleased grin. \"I should have it up and running by this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Hallelujah!\" said Firebrandt. \"The harvest may not go to waste after all.\" He inclined his head toward the Rd'dyggian pirate captain. \"Thank you, my friend. Once again you have saved us.\"\n\nArepno turned his black eye on Swan. \"Brother Swan,\" he said with the aid of a translator box. \"It is agreeable to see you again.\"\n\n\"And you,\" said Swan. The two had fought side-by-side defending New Granada.\n\nFirebrandt stepped forward. \"Arepno, if you would care to earn more gold, I'd be happy to pay you to transport Edmund here to Earth so he can find out what's happened to a friend of his.\"\n\n\"It would mean facing the Cluster again,\" said Arepno, moving around the table. The purple mustache-like appendages in front his mouth wriggled in agitation. He sat down and remained silent for several moments. \"Learning exactly what the Cluster is doing could be valuable information,\" mused the pirate, at last. \"Sounds exhilarating.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you have your ride,\" said Firebrandt, forcing a brave smile. \"I'll pay your fare. All I ask is that you check on John Mark and Fire.\"\n\n\"I will, sir,\" said Swan. The deputy sheriff stood and shook Firebrandt's hand. Turning, he left with the Rd'dyggian warrior.\n\nEllison Firebrandt picked up his coffee cup and looked out the window, not out toward the river and the fields, but back toward the sleek, black hull of the old privateer vessel that he and Roberts had used as the foundation of their homestead. \"How many years have we been here?\" mused the captain.\n\nRoberts moved the hover chair next to Firebrandt and looked out at the ship. Few people had noticed that over the years broken gun ports had been replaced with new weapons, and that the doorways that led from the ship to the adobe part of the house were now equipped with space-worthy airlocks. \"We've been on Sufiro over fifty years, sir,\" said Roberts with a gleam in his eye.\n\n\"That's a lot of time,\" said Firebrandt. \"Time enough to repair almost all of the damage done to a ship that crash landed. Isn't it?\"\n\n\"Almost?\" Roberts lifted an eyebrow. \"I'd say the man who couldn't make a vessel spaceworthy in fifty years should be shoved out the nearest airlock rather than serve on your crew, sir.\"\n\nFirebrandt took another sip of his coffee, then smiled. \"I think it may be time to get some fuel and a minimal crew assembled.\" He examined the recently cleaned thrusters that surrounded the EQ generator at the ship's stern.\n\n\"You know, launching the ship will likely destroy the homestead,\" said Roberts.\n\nFirebrandt nodded. \"If we don't launch the ship, the homestead may be destroyed anyway.\"\n\n\"We'll miss the harvest,\" said Roberts, wryly.\n\nFirebrandt looked at his friend and winked. \"I don't think you'll miss it at all.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nEva Cooper sat in her office in the old White House Building in the Columbia District. Holographic charts floated above the desk, showing depictions of the President's brain-wave patterns. Having an implant, the President's brain activity was routinely monitored. It was done for health reasons as well as planetary security. Cooper had sample scans from the past three years along with a scan that had been taken within the past 24 hours.\n\nA sharp rapping sounded at the door. \"Come in,\" said Cooper, absentmindedly.\n\nDick Richards strode into the office and sighed when he saw the three-dimensional charts hovering over Cooper's desk. \"You're supposed to have me here if you call up the President's brain scans,\" complained the Planetary Minister.\n\nCooper looked up at Richards. \"How did you know I was looking at the President's brain scans?\"\n\n\"The White House protocol sensors alerted me.\" Richards sat down in one of the plush chairs in front of Cooper's desk. \"No one person is supposed to access that information\u2014it's a breach of security.\"\n\nCooper shook her head. \"I'm not planning a coup\u2014I just wanted to see if everything was okay.\"\n\n\"In what sense?\" asked Richards; his eyebrows came together. His fingers danced on the chair's wooden armrest.\n\n\"Before I answer that ... How exactly did the Cluster contact the President? I've looked over the White House communication's logs. The Cluster's communication is not logged.\"\n\n\"I won't ask how you got access to those logs,\" said Richards, coolly. \"Why do you want to know about the Cluster's methods of communication?\"\n\nEva stood and moved around the desk, blocking Richards' view of the three-dimensional brain-scan charts. \"I'm concerned about planetary security and concerned that the President may be compromised.\"\n\n\"In that event,\" said Richards, holding out his hands, \"You definitely should have contacted me before pulling up the brain scan records.\"\n\nCooper shook her head. \"I can't be sure you haven't been compromised as well.\"\n\nRichards leaned forward. \"Now that's beginning to sound a little paranoid.\"\n\n\"Just how did the Cluster communicate with the President? Why is the President implementing all of these new directives, suddenly? Why is she no longer concerned about the Doomsday Dead? Doesn't any of this bother you?\"\n\nDick Richards sat back in his chair, as though the barrage of questions had physically assaulted him. \"No,\" said Richards simply. \"It doesn't bother us, because most of us have spoken to the Cluster at this point. More than anything, I'm surprised it hasn't spoken to you.\"\n\nEva Cooper's mouth dropped open. \"You've communicated with it?\"\n\nRichards nodded.\n\n\"What's going on?\" asked Cooper, her voice nearly a whisper.\n\n\"The Cluster finds humans fascinating. It wants to help us,\" said Richards evenly. \"The Earth has been dirty and overpopulated for centuries. The Cluster has shown us how to fix that.\"\n\nCooper folded her arms across her stomach. \"Well, the Cluster seems to have solved the overpopulation part of the problem. Over a third the population of the Earth dead on Doomsday ... People continue to die of depression ... At the rate things are going, we may lose half the population of the planet\u2014maybe more.\" She stepped away from the President's brain scan, allowing Richards to see. She chewed her lower lip, thinking that maybe she was paranoid. Dick Richards was an old and trusted friend. The man sitting in front of her looked just as he always had. His sharp blue eyes were the same as they'd always been\u2014commanding, questioning, and compassionate. Dick Richards was not the enemy. At worst, he was a friend in trouble.\n\n\"You're right,\" said Cooper with a sigh. \"I have been looking at the President's brain activity. Brain waves are like a fingerprint in that they're unique to each individual. Unlike a finger print they do evolve.\" Cooper pointed to three charts and indicated dips and valleys in each of the graphs that were similar. \"Here we see three different scans of the President over the last three years. You'll see that several features are the same in spite of the progression.\" Cooper highlighted the fourth scan. \"Notice that this one is completely different. It's as though the President has become a completely different person overnight\"\n\n\"You said yourself that brain scans evolve and change.\" Richards shrugged.\n\n\"Not this completely,\" said Cooper sharply. \"Is the Cluster doing this? If the Cluster is doing this to everyone, it would explain a lot of what is happening.\"\n\nRichards stood and paced the room. \"I understand your concern and it's certainly valid. However, I think you should give it time\u2014see what happens. The Earth is evolving and improving. I think you're going to like the new Earth.\" Richards stopped pacing and looked Eva in the eye. \"The only thing that bothers me is, why don't you know this already? Why hasn't the Cluster communicated with you?\"\n\nEva sat down in her chair and turned off the displays. \"That is a very good question,\" she said slowly. \"Why hasn't the Cluster talked to me?\"\n\n* * * *\n\nSamuel Coffin decided that the first order of business was to test the capabilities of his new ship. While the entire galaxy was now open to him, there was one place he knew no human, Rd'dyggian, or even Titan-built ship could go. However, if he really could go anywhere he wanted, this ship would take him to that forbidden ocean: the center of the galaxy, where the mass of stars was so great, where gravity was so intense that he would find a super-massive black hole. Humans had observed the galactic center from afar using radio and x-ray telescopes, but no one had ever viewed it with the naked eye, even in the 30th century. Coffin summoned the cabin boy. \"My compliments to the mate. Set course for the galactic bulge.\"\n\n\"Aye aye, sir,\" said the boy, running off.\n\nCoffin finished sipping his coffee, then made his way to the deck. The second and third mates were shouting orders and myriad people scuttled up the rigging. Others scattered about the deck, securing hatches and a crew was hoisting the anchor. The first mate paced the deck, observing and shouting an occasional admonition. Coffin took a good look at the first mate and blinked several times. The robust, vigorous man marching about the afterdeck shouting orders should not have been able to do so. \"Elisha Folger?\" asked Coffin, unusually timid.\n\n\"Samuel Coffin!\" called the mate. \"You old sea dog, I should have known you'd be behind this!\"\n\nCoffin climbed up the ladder and shook hands vigorously with his old friend. \"How are you here? Last I knew, you were in the hospital on Nantucket, hooked up to machines.\" Coffin remembered the image of his friend, over 120 years old, a frail ghost of the man he once was\u2014a living brain trapped in a worn-out, dead body. As he had no living family, Folger had no one who could order the life-support shut down.\n\n\"I don't know how I'm here,\" said Folger, perplexed. \"All I know is that I've been given freedom again. I'm back in my old body.\" Folger lifted his arms in the air, feeling the breeze. \"Have we died and gone to heaven?\" he asked more quietly.\n\n\"If I died, I died in my sleep,\" said Coffin. \"But somehow I know we're very much alive, my friend. Somehow I know this ship can take us places no human has ever been. We'll get to see things with our eyes that no one has ever seen.\"\n\n\"That's why you ordered us to the heart of the galaxy, eh?\" asked Folger with a wink.\n\n\"Do you think I'm crazy?\" asked Coffin.\n\n\"You're asking a man who has been living in a dream world for the past decade? For all I know, I'm still in that damned hospital bed and this is all some kind of hallucination.\" Folger's eyes swept the deck, making sure that preparations to depart were continuing.\n\n\"I hate to say this, but I'm not sure you aren't in that bed\u2014but I don't think you're hallucinating. Somehow this is real\u2014a reality that's somehow physical and not physical. Don't ask me how I know, or even how it works.\" Coffin turned around and surveyed the deck himself. He was on a whaling ship, like the type that used to sail out of Nantucket. He noted that there were three masts, with square sails on the fore and main masts, and fore-and-aft-rigged sails on the mizzenmast. Five whaleboats were secured to the ship. Judging as best he could, he guessed the ship was something around 125-feet long: a whale bark with a crew of 30-40, then. With a deep breath, Coffin looked at the first mate. \"So, how do we know we'll get where we want to go?\"\n\nFolger smiled and looked over his shoulder, indicating a woman talking to a man at the helm. \"You see that\u2014our navigator is Kumiko Meiji. Remember? She came to Nantucket just to sail with you on the _Clio II_.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Coffin, nodding approvingly. \"I haven't seen her since she was a teenager. She was one of the few kids I'd let steer the old ship. She wanted to be a cartographer, didn't she? I seem to recall that she went off to work for TransGalactic Corporation.\" Coffin looked at Folger. \"Are all of us Islanders, or associated with the Island?\"\n\nFolger shook his head. \"I don't think so. It's just the three of us, as far as I can tell.\"\n\n\"Strange, though. How do you suppose we all ended up commanding this ship?\"\n\nFolger shrugged. \"You of all people questioning why Nantucketers are the most qualified sailors. I'm surprised at you, Samuel.\"\n\nSamuel Coffin straightened with mock indignation. \"I'll remind you to address me as Captain Coffin.\"\n\n\"Aye aye, sir,\" boomed Folger. The two men laughed. Looking around, Folger nodded satisfaction. The anchor was up and the ship was moving, seemingly carried by the wind. Folger and Coffin stepped to the deck railing and watched as the wind lifted the ship up and out of the water. They were moving skyward. \"So,\" said Folger. \"What do we name the ship? _Clio III?\"_\n\nCoffin's eyebrows came together, thoughtfully. \"No, I think _Pequod_ would be more appropriate,\" he said, watching water flow from the sides of the ship. He could see Nantucket in the distance, growing smaller. The ship passed through a misty veil of clouds and the island disappeared from view.\n\n\"You aren't thinking of seeking revenge, are you?\" asked Folger.\n\n\"No, but I think our souls may be at stake on this voyage, Mr. Folger. Somehow, I think we may be just as doomed as the men of Ahab's ship.\" The sky began to grow dark as the atmosphere around the ship thinned. There was still plenty of air to breathe on the ship's deck as stars appeared. Below the ship, Coffin could see the curve of the Earth, and the oceans and continents. As they continued, he began to make out cloud-shrouded continents and blue oceans. The Earth was a ball receding in the distance. Looking ahead, Coffin saw the bulge of the galaxy, bright and sparkling on the edges, obscured by black clouds of dust in the center. He nodded satisfaction. \"Steady as she goes, Mr. Folger.\"\n\n\"Steady as she goes,\" echoed the mate.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**Part II: Tribulation**\n\n _\"And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, and cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, 'What city is like unto this great city?'\"_\n\n _Revelation 18: 17-18_\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**ASCENSION**\n\nAfter breakfast and a nap, John Mark Ellis rode the lift to the command deck of the TransGalactic Mapping Vessel _Sanson._ Once there, he stepped out and surveyed the deck. The shipyard was supervising most of the repair activities. With little damage to the command deck itself, things were unusually quiet there.\n\nThe command deck was the nerve center of the _Nicholas Sanson_. At the front was a sophisticated holographic tank capable of showing different views of space in three dimensions. It served as a chart room for the mapping vessel as well as a means by which one could see space around the vessel. In front of the holographic tank were two unmanned consoles that met in a V-shape. One console was the navigation station, which oversaw both ship navigation and the recording of pathways through fourth dimensional space. The other was communications, which oversaw communications within the ship and with other ships as well as the dissemination of information to the galactic networks. Each was capable of presenting a holographic control panel that could be customized to suit the user's needs. Some users preferred black pads with colorful buttons. More eccentric users might choose levers and knobs set in a simulated wooden panel. Behind the control stations were the command chairs\u2014captain's to the left; mate's to the right. Each of the command chairs had a holographic station similar to those at the front of the bridge, only somewhat smaller. The holographic controls allowed for different jobs to be performed at different locations. On _Sanson,_ the first mate generally acted as helmsman\u2014steering the ship\u2014while the captain oversaw all ship functions, including engine performance during flight. Behind the command chairs were the offices of the corporate officer and the captain.\n\nAn image of the _Sanson_ itself filled much of the holographic tank. When Ellis had approached the _Sanson_ earlier in the day aboard the launch, it had appeared that the repair crew was a large swarm. Now, it seemed that there were so many people working on the ship that Ellis feared they might get in each other's way. Below the hologram of the _Sanson,_ Ellis could discern a pair of booted feet.\n\n\"Mr. Yermakov?\" asked Ellis, tentatively.\n\nYermakov looked around from behind the image of the ship. His features were set in a grim scowl, but there was a certain gleam in his eye that had been missing during Ellis' earlier conversation with the mate. \"Yes, Skipper,\" called Yermakov.\n\n\"How go the repairs?\" Ellis stepped toward the holographic tank, inspecting the image of the ship.\n\n\"Very well,\" said Yermakov, coming out from behind the image. \"The burned out Erdon-Quinn Engine is mostly repaired. New conduits are being installed.\" Yermakov shook his head. \"I've never seen this many people come together to get a ship in operational condition. I'd never guessed it could be done this quickly.\"\n\nEllis nodded slowly. \"They're all concerned about what's going on back at Earth. All humans came from there, after all. They want to do their part for the mother world.\"\n\nSimon Yermakov's eyes rolled skyward. \"Don't push your luck, Captain. I've already decided to go back to Earth with you. But, if you start in on speeches about why I should do my part for king and country, forget it.\"\n\nEllis inclined his head. \"Do you mind me asking why you're going?\"\n\nSimon looked at the holographic representation of the ship, then back to Ellis. \"Some of it is the number of people helping us to get going. Some of it is a conversation I had with Mahuk while you were in your quarters. Most of it is probably selfishness. I don't want the Cluster to take over my mind. If I'm not willing to do the work to make sure that doesn't happen, I can't ask anyone else to do it for me.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" said Ellis, simply. \"How long before we'll be ready to depart for Earth?\"\n\nYermakov looked at numbers scrawled in the air of the holographic tank. \"I'd say we'll be ready to leave orbit in about 36 hours.\"\n\n\"I need to make an announcement to the crew\u2014letting them know what we are about to do and asking them to decide whether they want to come along or not,\" said Ellis.\n\n\"I think that's another reason I decided to go. Ms. Smart could have easily stated that it was part of our job to go. I appreciate the fact that you asked, sir.\" Yermakov stepped over to the communications station and activated the interface. \"You're on ship-wide speakers,\" said the mate.\n\nEllis put his hands behind his back and made the announcement to the crew. He detailed what little was known about the Cluster appearing at Earth. \"I am acting in official capacity as a captain in the Alpha Coma Fleet. Ms. Smart has volunteered her services and the services of the _Nicholas Sanson_. First Mate Simon Yermakov, Chief Engineer Mahuk, and Navigator Laura Peters have all volunteered their service as well. I am asking all of you to serve with us, to determine what has happened at the Earth. If anyone is staying behind at Alpha Coma, I need to know in twelve hours so that I may determine which positions need to be filled.\" Ellis paused, thinking if anything else needed to be said. \"I won't pretend that this will be an easy or safe voyage. You are not a military crew and, as such, you are not required to sacrifice yourselves for Earth. I ask you to come along because you all know this ship better than anyone I can find on Alpha Coma in short notice. Many of you have family and friends back on Earth. All of us are humans and, as such, the Cluster poses a threat to us all. Our job will be to find out what can be done to stop the Cluster at Earth and get back here to Alpha Coma so I can help formulate a strategy to stop the Cluster. I sincerely hope you will help us in this mission.\" Ellis reached out and turned off the inter-ship speakers. The captain let out a long breath.\n\nYermakov put his hand on Ellis' shoulder. \"Let's hope that none of us does have to be sacrificed.\"\n\n\"Amen to that, Simon.\" With that, Ellis turned and went to his office to review the status of the repairs for himself.\n\n* * * *\n\nOver the course of two days, Captain Samuel Coffin and his crew aboard the whaling bark _Pequod_ made their way to the center of the galaxy. To them, it appeared that a wind billowed their sails, pushing them through the arms of the Milky Way galaxy. They sailed through a black fog, like a cloud of coal dust and came out in a day-lit world of billions of stars\u2014the galactic bulge. The ship proceeded through stars closer together than any they had experienced before. Elisha Folger stood at the deck railing with Coffin and the navigator, Kumiko Meiji.\n\n\"I've heard the phrase, it looks like you can reach out and touch the stars,\" said Folger to the other two. \"However, this looks like I could reach out, touch one star and put my hand on another.\"\n\n\"You know,\" said Meiji, \"we should be pulled apart by the gravitational interaction of these stars. There's no way any vessel could make it through.\"\n\nCoffin looked down his nose at the petite mathematician. \"That's the part that bothers you? Not the fact that we're standing on the deck of a ship over a thousand years old with an atmosphere and no obvious force field, flying through vacuum? Not the fact that we've crossed vast distances of space without making an EQ jump?\"\n\nMeiji looked up at Coffin and sighed. \"I don't know about you, but it's pretty clear to me that we are experiencing an illusion of some kind. I just don't know whether the illusion is technological, like holograms or hallucinogenic in nature. Either way, it's extremely realistic.\"\n\nFolger put his hands behind his back. \"Okay, so why worry about whether or not a ship could really be here? Why couldn't we just be experiencing a kind of theater of the mind? Especially if this is just a hallucination.\"\n\n\"Because it's too realistic,\" said the mathematician. \"I've spent years of my life going over charts of the galaxy: images taken by TransGalactic ships traveling throughout the galaxy. I've walked through chart tanks made up of photos. I've never seen the center of the galaxy, but I can say with some authority, this is what the center of the galaxy would look like.\" Meiji paused and admired the starscape. \"Somewhere, somehow, a ship is traveling through the center of the galaxy, taking these images. Somehow, that ship is not being torn apart in the gravitational tide here in the galactic center.\"\n\nCoffin looked out over the railing. The stars were getting closer together. He pulled a pipe from his coat, packed and lit it. \"Are we aboard that ship?\"\n\n\"Maybe, or maybe the ship is taking these images and feeding them back to us on Earth,\" said Meiji simply.\n\nFolger rubbed his chin. \"Still, what about the jumps? There's no way a ship could cross the distances we've crossed without making EQ jumps.\"\n\n\"True,\" said Meiji, pondering the question. \"Still, it's theoretically possible that the ship making those jumps could image the normal space it's passing through. We haven't managed it, but it's possible. It could be presented to us as though we were traveling through normal space.\"\n\nCoffin snorted, blowing smoke through his nose. \"Not even the Titans have managed that trick.\"\n\nAs the three watched, the stars around the ship began to thin again, as though a vast wind had swept the stars away. The ship listed to one side, seemingly caught by a powerful current that was going to carry it into the stellar clearing. \"Straighten your helm!\" called Folger over his shoulder. In the center of the stellar clearing was blackness\u2014blacker somehow than space itself. The blackness was roughly spherical, surrounded by a whirlpool of glowing matter. The blackness seemed wrapped in a crystal ball, light from stars behind it was warped and twisted. Folger, Meiji and Coffin all gasped at the sight.\n\n\"The galactic core,\" said Meiji in a hoarse whisper. \"We've made it.\"\n\n\"You're saying that's for real?\" asked Coffin.\n\n\"Take a good look gentlemen, that's as real as you're ever going to see the black hole at the center of the galaxy.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nLater that day, John Mark Ellis sat at his desk, reviewing the _Sanson's_ manifest, making sure that the ship had sufficient provisions for the return journey to Earth. Kirsten Smart sat, across from him, reviewing a list of potential crewmembers, in the event that anyone decided to leave the ship. The list had been provided by Herbert Firebrandt and was made up of members of the Alpha Coma military who had some experience with mapping vessels.\n\nBoth looked up at a rapping on the door. \"Come in,\" called Ellis.\n\nNatalie Papadraxis entered the office wearing a brightly colored flower-print sundress. She held her hands in front of her and her eyes were wide. \"I came to say that I'm sorry I passed out while I was on duty.\"\n\nKirsten Smart stood up and took Natalie's hands and led her to the chair next to the one she had been seated in. \"Natalie, how are you doing? We've been worried about you.\"\n\n\"It was a shock to lose contact with the Earth so suddenly. I still don't feel myself,\" said Natalie, her voice faraway, almost dreamy.\n\nEllis smiled, sheepishly. \"I know what it's like to have a shock like that and pass out on the bridge. That happened to me when I was in command of the _Barbara Firebrandt_. It's how I was booted out of the Gaean Navy. No one understood.\" Captain Ellis stood and moved around to the front of the desk and sat down on the edge, looking into Natalie's eyes. \"Natalie, I understand what it's like to have the Cluster hurt you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" said Natalie, voice soft. She looked from Ellis to Kirsten and back to the captain. \"Sir, I heard your address to the crew. I know the twelve hours are almost up, but I wanted to let you know that I would like to stay with the ship.\"\n\nEllis looked at his watch, and then rubbed his eyes. He hadn't realized how long he'd been working.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" asked Kirsten. \"You've had quite a shock. No one would hold it against you if you stayed behind.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Natalie, simply. \"But, I want to find out what's happened. I want to help if I can. Will you let me?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Ellis. \"You're a valuable member of this crew.\"\n\nNatalie smiled. \"That means a lot to me. Thank you.\" Natalie tapped her head, indicating her communication's implant. \"I've been getting messages from around the ship. The entire crew wants to stay on as well. A lot of them are scared, but they can't let the ship go home without them.\"\n\nKirsten smiled reassuringly. \"We're all scared, Natalie.\"\n\nEllis nodded. \"The Cluster is intelligent and it likes humans. I don't think we can overestimate the danger.\"\n\nNatalie sighed. \"I can't help but wonder, though, why it cut off communication with the home system. If it wants to help humans, why won't it let us talk to those people it's helped.\"\n\nEllis swallowed hard. \"That's why we need to go.\" The captain stood and moved to the wall. \"Have you been in touch with the ship yard? How are repairs progressing?\"\n\n\"They say we're on schedule. We should be able to leave orbit in just a little over 24 hours,\" reported Natalie.\n\nEllis nodded, satisfied. He looked to Kirsten. \"That should be enough time to get the provisions on board. If you'll approve the list\u2014I'd say it's time for us all to go and get a good night's sleep, so we can be ready to leave tomorrow night.\"\n\nKirsten gave a thumbs-up. \"Sounds like a plan to me.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nEdmund Swan felt like a nine-year-old child strapped into a seat that was too big for him. He faced a round command console. Hovering over the command console was a holographic projection that looked like a transparent honeycomb. Each cell of the honeycomb-like display held its own three-dimensional projection. Some cells showed space as it appeared around the ship. Others showed exterior and interior views of the ship itself. Still others flashed Rd'dyggian words so quickly that Swan felt he wouldn't have been able to read them even if they were Terro-Generic. Three Rd'dyggians sat at other chairs around the console, their massive six-fingered hands simply rested on smooth plates on the console's surface.\n\nOn human ships, there was constant noise as humans shuffled to and fro and various machines performed their tasks. For over twelve hours, the only sound Swan heard was the gentle breathing of the Rd'dyggian warriors. On human ships, care is taken to add design elements and artwork that catch the eye. The command center of the Rd'dyggian ship was like sitting inside an absolutely smooth metal egg. The floorplan was roughly trapezoidal, but there were no sharp corners. The walls flowed into the ceiling, floor, and each other. Swan had fallen asleep and awoke a few hours later to an unchanged tableau.\n\nFinally, Arepno lifted his hands from the console and looked at Swan. \"We are nearing Saturn and executing a scan of the system.\" He touched a thumb to his control plate and one of the honeycomb cells expanded. He saw the great, golden planet Saturn surrounded by its glistening rings. As Arepno held his thumb on the control plate, the view zoomed in and showed the rust-red moon, Titan. \"It appears that there are no Clusters out here by Titan.\"\n\nAs Swan watched, the view started showing different wavelengths. On the red end of the spectrum, it became apparent that the moon\u2014the capital of the known galaxy\u2014was surrounded by a halo of glowing dots, each one representing a space vessel. \"You would think the Clusters would be interested in reuniting with the Titans if what Firebrandt told us was accurate,\" mused Swan.\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Arepno. \"However, this does lend credence to Ellis' hypothesis that the Clusters are no longer interested in the Titans.\" The Rd'dyggian pirate captain turned back toward the console, lifted his thumb from the control plate and pointed to the display. \"What also seems interesting is that ship activity appears normal. I see no evidence that ships have been damaged or are being interfered with. A ship from Zahar has just arrived and it would appear that the Titans have launched a probe.\"\n\n\"Meaning the Cluster is not afraid of what ships will do,\" said Swan. \"So, why would the Cluster block communication, but not ship transport?\"\n\n\"That is a very good question, Brother Swan,\" said Arepno, his mustache wriggling. He placed his thumb on the control plate again and this time the view changed to one of the Earth. \"I am only registering two Clusters in orbit at this time. Apparently two are elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Or they're hiding,\" mused the deputy sheriff.\n\n\"It would be impossible for them to hide from Rd'dyggian sensors,\" said Arepno. Swan thought he detected a hint of indignation from the large warrior. \"We will be landing on Earth in about thirty of your minutes presuming we are not challenged by the Clusters.\"\n\nSwan swallowed hard, wishing desperately for something to drink. Suddenly he had an urge to get up and find the restroom. However, he didn't know anything about how or even if Rd'dyggians ever needed to relieve themselves. With a deep breath, he sat back and did his best to enjoy the ride. Arepno placed both his hands on the control console and fell back into silence. The honeycomb cell that showed Earth shrank and morphed back into its place in the larger structure.\n\nThe deputy sheriff did his best to follow the ship's progress on the displays. In two, the Earth seemed to remain the same size. In three others, the Earth grew closer until light seemed to fill the displays. Once that happened the displays flashed briefly, replaced by the strange, flashing Rd'dyggian alphabet. Judging from the displays, Swan guessed that they were entering the atmosphere. However, he didn't feel the telltale rocking and bumping that usually accompanied a ship during re-entry. As a result, he was startled a few moments later when Arepno lifted his hands from the control console and looked at Swan. \"We have landed,\" he said simply.\n\nThis time, placing one of his fingers on the console, a hole appeared in one wall and a tunnel congealed and extruded itself toward the ground. Swan unbuckled the harness, stretched and stood. \"I presume this means we weren't challenged by the Cluster.\"\n\n\"Indeed we were not,\" said Arepno. \"Most odd.\"\n\nThe deputy sheriff started toward the tunnel but looked around when he realized that Arepno was not following. \"Aren't you coming along ... to get information about the Cluster and its activities.\"\n\n\"We are accumulating information,\" said Arepno in a monotone.\n\n\"Where are we?\" asked Swan.\n\n\"Southern Arizona spaceport,\" explained Arepno. \"Do you require transport to your friend's domicile?\"\n\nSwan pursed his lips and thought about it for a few minutes. \"No,\" he said shaking his head. \"I'll just catch a cab.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said Arepno. With that, the warrior turned and faced his console again, putting his hands on the control plate.\n\nWith a shrug, Swan stepped into the tunnel extending toward the ground. At the end of the tunnel, he found his luggage waiting. He grabbed it and stepped out onto the tarmac of the Southern Arizona spaceport. The first thing he noticed was how blue the sky was. Growing up in Tucson sector, the sky was almost always hazy. The second thing he noticed was how quiet it was. Typically ships blasted off and landed at regular intervals. Looking around, it appeared that the Rd'dyggian ship was one of only about ten ships at the port.\n\nEdmund Swan shook his head and made his way to the main terminal so he could go through customs, find a directory and a cab that would take him to Timothy Gibbs' residence.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**MISSION TO EARTH**\n\nThe next afternoon, John Mark Ellis sat on the command deck of the _Nicholas Sanson_ watching as the work crews began departing the surface of the ship. Shuttles and launches that had brought provisions left for the planet below. Natalie Papadraxis sat at her station, coordinating with the shipyard crews, making sure none of the pods, shuttles or space suited workers collided. Ellis and Yermakov each consulted their displays and talked with each other in hushed tones. There were sufficient provisions aboard the ship for a three-year voyage. Captain and first mate alike hoped the voyage would take days rather than years\u2014however, neither was certain what they would find when they got to Earth. Along with the engineering crew, Ellis and Yermakov ran simulations, checking the tuning of the four engines. At her station, Laura Peters plotted a course to Earth that would let them come into the solar system as discreetly as possible.\n\nKirsten Smart stepped onto the command deck from her office and placed her hand on Ellis' shoulder. \"Looks to me like we're almost ready to go. I never would have dreamed that we would be heading back out this quickly.\"\n\n\"The fact of the matter is we aren't ready to go back on a mapping expedition. We can jump from here to Earth like any other EQ-ship, but the engines are not fully calibrated for charting jumps. That's what was going to take the time,\" said Ellis, bluntly.\n\nAs Ellis spoke, the lift doors at the back of the command deck opened and Fire, along with Manuel stepped out. \"Do you mind if we watch as we leave orbit?\" asked Fire. \"It's not the greatest of views down in our quarters.\"\n\nEllis looked to Kirsten, whose features remained neutral. \"I have no problem,\" said Ellis, with a smile. \"But don't get too used to special privileges, Mom.\"\n\n\"Incoming transmission from the planet,\" announced Natalie. \"Senator Herbert Firebrandt.\"\n\n\"Put him on holo,\" ordered Ellis.\n\nThe forward portion of the command deck metamorphosed into Herbert Firebrandt's planet-side office. He stood next to his desk. It was evening; the setting sun could be seen through the Senator's windows. \"I'm given to understand that the _Sanson_ is preparing to depart for Earth. I wanted to check that you had everything you need and to wish you a successful voyage.\"\n\nEllis stood and stepped into the hologram. To Firebrandt, it would have looked as though the captain had materialized in his office. \"Thank you, sir. The ship is provisioned and repairs are complete. TransGalactic will certainly request some calibration and simulation time in the ship yard upon our return.\" Ellis' statement was calculated less to request time than to convey to the bridge crew his certainty that the ship would be back soon.\n\nFirebrandt nodded approvingly and understood the impression that the captain wanted to convey. \"Very good. Likewise, I hope we'll have some time to talk on your return. I'd like to learn more about my distant relatives.\" Firebrandt's image stepped close to Ellis. \"Godspeed Captain Ellis.\" The Senator looked out to the command deck. \"Godspeed to all of you and good luck.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Senator,\" said Ellis, stepping out of the simulated office before it turned into a view of the planet below. A miniature image of the _Sanson_ hung over the planet. A yellow line extended from its bow to a distant point in space\u2014the jump point Laura Peters had calculated to Earth.\n\n\"Orbital control reports we are clear to depart,\" reported Natalie. \"All service vessels are clear.\"\n\n\"Take us home,\" ordered Ellis.\n\nLaura Peters pushed several simulated buttons and then gave a signal to Simon Yermakov. Yermakov wiped sweat from his brow, then pushed a lever forward on his console. \"Thrusters responding normally,\" he reported. \"Proceeding to jump point at one-quarter speed, Skipper.\"\n\nEllis clasped his hands behind his back and stepped toward the rear of the command deck to stand with Kirsten, Manuel, and Fire. \"Natalie, would you please give us the bow camera?\"\n\n\"My pleasure,\" said Natalie and the view changed to an image of the planet rolling away below the ship. The stars ahead seemed fixed as though one were standing on the planet looking up at an unusually clear night sky. Manuel caught his breath, having never seen this view of a ship departing orbit. Fire took his hand and squeezed it.\n\nEllis grinned, then moved in front of them, sat down in the command chair, and prepared the EQ engines for the imminent jump. \"Please overlay the course projection on the standard view,\" asked Ellis.\n\nAgain, Natalie complied and a broad, dotted yellow line shot out in the holographic display to a flashing point in space. While the distant stars appeared to remain fixed, it was clear that they were moving along the yellow line.\n\n\"Follow the yellow brick road,\" quipped Fire.\n\n\"Lions and Tigers and Clusters, oh my,\" replied Kirsten with a slight giggle.\n\nEllis and Manuel each shot a glance at the women. Kirsten only shrugged while Fire smiled and shook her head.\n\n\"Approaching jump point, sir,\" reported Laura as Simon began slowing the ship. Laura Peters double checked her jump trajectory and nodded to the captain. \"We're ready to jump on your command.\"\n\nSimon sounded the jump warning and Ellis looked at Manuel, Fire, and Kirsten. \"Time to get to your positions. Next stop, Earth,\" said Ellis. Kirsten passed his chair and gave his shoulder a slight squeeze, then departed into her office. Fire and Manuel each nodded to the captain and entered the lift.\n\nAfter a few moments, Natalie looked around. \"All decks report ready for jump to Earth. The lift tubes are all clear.\"\n\nEllis looked at Yermakov, who was sweating profusely but otherwise appeared calm, then looked to the front of the command deck. \"Okay, let's get moving. Ms. Peters\u2014Jump!\"\n\nWith that, Laura Peters entered a command and the _Nicholas Sanson_ jumped out of three-dimensional reality, en route to Earth.\n\n* * * *\n\nEdmund Swan breezed through customs and had no problem finding a public teleholo where he called Timothy Gibbs. His friend appeared, looking more relaxed than the last time Swan had seen him. \"How are you doing?\" asked Swan.\n\nGibbs smiled. \"Surprisingly well ... though things have been happening ... things that are hard to explain.\"\n\n\"Tim, I'm on Earth,\" explained Swan. \"I'd like to come by and see you.\"\n\n\"What a pleasant surprise,\" said Gibbs. He gave directions to his apartment.\n\nSwan turned off the teleholo with an uneasy sense that something was not quite right. As he stepped out of the teleholo booth, he looked around at the pristine, clean spaceport. When he had left Earth, the port was grungy and dirty. People packed the place from wall to wall. As a cop in Southern Arizona, he was all too aware that many of those people had actually lived in the spaceport. In the aftermath of Doomsday, Swan had expected to see an Earth that was even worse than the one he left. Instead, he was surprised to find one that was clean and pleasant. It gave him the creeps.\n\nStepping out of the spaceport, Swan easily found a hovercab and gave the driver directions to Gibbs' apartment. Looking out of the window, Swan saw the city he had grown up in. As he looked around, he saw that much of the route they traveled was, indeed, clean and pristine as the spaceport had been. However, he used his computer eye to take snapshots up side streets and back alleys. Most were as dirty as he remembered, though in one he saw a crew of people literally scrubbing the brickwork of a building. Ahead of the cab, Swan caught sight of a plume of smoke. As they passed, he took a snapshot with his eye. As his brain processed the image, his stomach almost emptied in the back of the cab.\n\nBodies were stacked up like cordwood, in the middle of a dirty street. A group of police officers were gathered around with flame-throwers, igniting the pyre. The image was slightly blurred from movement, but he thought he could make out his former boss, Sheriff Wilmot, in charge of the gathered group. Swan closed his eyes, trying to shut out the image. Finally, he remembered the command to wipe the image from his eye.\n\nThe hover cab settled to the ground in front of Timothy Gibbs' apartment building. Swan entered a credit code and stepped out. He noticed that the cleanup of the apartment complex had begun, though it wasn't complete. Several sections of wall had been scrubbed clean, but others still showed graffiti and gang tags that Swan recognized. Once cleaned up, the apartment complex would be a wonderful place to live, but it was apparent that it had been a haven of gang activity. That made very little sense to Edmund Swan, who remembered Timothy Gibbs as having the makings of a brilliant computer tech\u2014someone who should be able to afford a higher-class apartment. However, Swan knew all too well that on a crowded Earth, competition for even the best jobs was extraordinarily fierce and even the best and the brightest were lucky to be employed at all.\n\nSwan found Gibbs' apartment and rang the buzzer. He was surprised when Gibbs simply opened the door without checking his identity on the video interface.\n\n\"Come in,\" said Gibbs.\n\nSwan stepped into the apartment. Like much of the city, it looked as though the apartment was going through something of a renovation. Clean dishes sat stacked on a chipped but scrubbed linoleum counter. The couch that Gibbs led Swan to was torn and tattered but the air smelled of disinfectant.\n\n\"Can I get you some coffee?\" asked Gibbs.\n\nSwan nodded. \"I was worried after our teleholo call was cut off the other day.\"\n\nGibbs poured the coffee and nodded. \"I know. That was a rough day and the next day was even worse.\" He stepped back toward the couch and handed Swan the cup. \"Things have been moving so fast since then, though.\"\n\n\"Things?\" Swan's brow furrowed.\n\n\"It's hard to explain.\" Timothy Gibbs dropped into a chair opposite his friend. \"After college I couldn't find a single job in computers. I'm sure it never helped that I wasn't ever very good with people. Still, I was good with computers. I finally found a job maintaining the computer interfaces in starliners. Unfortunately, that company folded, as did about three others I worked for. Most recently I was working for a little teleholo store.\"\n\nSwan shook his head. \"That's a waste of resources, my friend. You should have been working on the most cutting-edge technology.\" He pointed to his computer eye.\n\nGibbs nodded slowly. \"That's what's strange. I am now. I finally found someone that appreciates my talent and it's paradise.\"\n\n\"Who?\" asked Swan, leaning forward, placing his coffee cup on the table in front of him.\n\n\"The Cluster. They want me to build a legacy.\" Gibbs sat back in the chair, heaved a deep sigh and closed his eyes. \"Sorry to leave you, my friend, but it's time to get back to work. Make yourself at home. I'll be back before long.\" With that Gibbs' features went slack.\n\nSwan jumped off the couch and checked his friend's pulse. Relieved that it was still there, he examined his friend with his computer eye. He was alive and healthy. Everything seemed to indicate that he was simply asleep\u2014everything except his brainwave patterns. Swan was used to looking at brainwave patterns during interrogations. However, he had never seen any so active as those in this apparently sleeping man.\n\n* * * *\n\nThe _Nicholas Sanson_ jumped into Earth's solar system near Mars. Laura Peters eased the ship around the red planet and took it on a leisurely arc toward the Earth itself. Now that they were in the solar system, Natalie Papadraxis was able to pick up transmissions from Earth.\n\n\"Any indication that the Cluster has seen us enter the solar system?\" asked Ellis, sitting on the edge of his chair.\n\n\"If they've noticed us, they're not saying or doing anything about it,\" said Natalie.\n\n\"Do you want me to perform a pre-orbital scan?\" Laura Peters looked over her shoulder at Ellis. \"It could alert the Clusters to our presence.\"\n\nEllis nodded. \"I suspect they know we're here already.\" His words were measured. \"Most likely, they either want us to come to Earth or they don't care.\"\n\nLaura nodded and began the scan. Natalie chewed on her nails as she monitored news reports on her brain implant. Simon Yermakov wiped more sweat from his brow then stood and walked over to Natalie's station. \"How does it sound?\" he asked.\n\nNatalie turned and seemed to look through Simon. \"It sounds normal ... and frightening.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" said Laura, breaking in. \"I'm detecting three of the Clusters in orbit around the Earth.\"\n\n\"There're at least four of them.\" Simon looked at Ellis. \"We don't know how many in all. But at least one of them isn't here.\"\n\nEllis nodded slowly, digesting the information. Kirsten Smart stepped from her office, looking a little pale\u2014suffering the after effects of the jump to Earth orbit. The captain stood and smiled bravely at her, then turned his attention back to Natalie. \"Can you show us a couple of the news broadcasts?\"\n\nNatalie nodded and the holographic view changed to a newscaster sitting behind a desk somewhere on Earth. The newscaster reported that the number of \"Doomsday Dead\" was leveling off. A set of graphs popped onto the display, as though they were orbiting the newscaster's head.\n\n\"Natalie, please pause those statistics,\" said Kirsten. The newscaster continued to speak, while the graphs remained still. Without Natalie's action, the graphs would have vanished after a brief appearance on the screen. Kirsten walked up and examined the information. Her hand flew to her mouth. \"Over 60 percent of the Earth's population is dead,\" she gasped.\n\n\"But the Cluster doesn't want humans dead,\" said Ellis after a moment, breaking the nearly palpable silence that filled the command deck. He stepped forward and examined the statistical charts himself.\n\nThe newscaster went on to talk about the President's recent successes. Jenna Walker had found housing for all the people of the Earth. New approaches to medical care, education and farming were announced along with new sources of fuel. The President, along with a surprisingly supportive Senate anticipated a nearly instant reduction in taxes.\n\nFire and Manuel stepped onto the command deck as Smart and Ellis walked around the oblivious image of the newscaster who was reading a report about the improvement of air quality in Southern California and Arizona. \"This is bizarre,\" said Kirsten, her eyebrows knitted. \"It's like the Earth has been hit with an epidemic of depression.\"\n\nFire walked up and stood next to Laura Peters' console. \"This report sounds like Earth is becoming a nice place to live, though,\" she said, putting her hands on her hips.\n\nKirsten motioned for Fire to look at the same set of statistics she was examining. Fire whistled as she looked at the astonishing death rate.\n\n\"We already know that the Cluster can tap into emotions,\" said Ellis, grimly. \"It sounds like they're tapping some pretty dark ones.\"\n\nManuel shrugged. \"But that would be more trouble than the Cluster needs to go to. Why make people kill themselves when it has so much firepower at its disposal? It could just decimate the surface of the planet if it wanted to.\"\n\n\"That's very true.\" Ellis felt around his shirt until he found a cigar. With it, he pointed to the newscaster. \"But then, listen to the newscast. Not everyone has been hit with depression. It sounds like the politicians have broken through layers of dogma.\" He shook his head. \"Taxes haven't been reduced in nearly five centuries\u2014not meaningfully at any rate.\"\n\nThe newscaster reported that gang violence had virtually ceased in metropolitan areas around the globe. If it weren't for the death statistics sitting in front of his nose, Ellis would be tempted to believe that the Cluster's appearance was beneficial for humanity. He placed the cigar in his mouth, but did not light it.\n\n\"Entering orbit in ten minutes,\" reported Laura Peters. \"The Clusters still haven't responded to our presence.\"\n\n\"Proceed with orbital entry,\" ordered Ellis, removing the cigar. \"It's pretty clear that the Cluster isn't shooting at anyone. I don't think we have anything to fear at the moment.\"\n\nManuel licked his lips. \"Okay, we're at Earth. Now what do we do?\"\n\n\"Our mission is reconnaissance,\" said Simon. \"We have these newscasts recorded. Can't we just take this information back to Alpha Coma?\"\n\nMark shook his head. \"I'm afraid not. All we have is circumstantial evidence that the Cluster is behind the deaths.\"\n\n\"Pretty good circumstantial evidence, if you ask me,\" said Simon sharply.\n\nFire shook her head at the first mate. \"We know that the Cluster can manipulate emotions and it's here. That's opportunity. However, we don't have a motive. As far as we know, the Cluster wants to form a symbiosis with humanity.\"\n\n\"We need to go to the planet,\" said Mark stepping back toward the command chair. \"We need to find out what's happening, first hand.\"\n\n\"Where do we go?\" asked Manuel.\n\nKirsten inclined her head. \"We don't want to attract attention. We're a mapping ship home from a voyage. The first thing I'd do is check in.\"\n\nThe captain nodded. \"Mr. Yermakov, would you please prepare the launch for a flight to TransGalactic Headquarters in Japan.\" He placed the unlit cigar back in his shirt pocket.\n\n\"Aye, sir,\" said Yermakov, looking glum.\n\n* * * *\n\nSurgeon General Eva Cooper strolled around the lawn of the White House in the Columbia District. She needed some fresh air after reading reports of people being found around the world in almost a comatose state. The people were among the best and brightest minds. They weren't dead like the Doomsday Dead, just absent from their bodies, somehow. Looking up through the force field that surrounded the compound, she saw that the sky was bluer than she'd noticed before. The President was taking credit for the improvement in air quality. The Surgeon General snorted. While she knew that the President's initiatives were going to improve air pollution, she also realized that the nearly instant improvements were simply due to less people on the planet.\n\nEva Cooper gasped when she saw Jenna Walker stepping lightly across the grass. The President smiled and waved. Seeing the President in a light, summer dress that revealed tantalizing hints of skin around the upper breasts and thighs caused an embarrassing heat to rise in the doctor. Blushing, Cooper waved back.\n\nThe President came alongside Cooper and linked arms with her. \"I love walking out here,\" said the President. \"Planetary Security doesn't feel that they have to watch me like a hawk when I'm under the force field.\" The two strolled over the grass, arm-in-arm in ardent silence.\n\nEva Cooper felt a surprising desire to lean her head against Jenna's shoulder and allow herself to be carried away in the moment. Fear kept her looking straight ahead. Partially, the fear was of the President herself and the power she represented and the fact that somehow Jenna had been in communication with the Cluster. However, there was a deeper layer to the fear. She was simply afraid that she might actually love Jenna Walker.\n\nJenna stopped in front of a flowerbed, knelt down and smelled a red rose. \"I've missed you, Eva,\" said Jenna in hushed tones.\n\n\"I've missed you, too.\" Eva heard herself saying the words, but doubted her feelings. \"I've been worried about you.\" The second sentence held more certainty and conviction.\n\n\"Why?\" asked Jenna\u2014a smile like sunshine lit up her face. \"I have never felt better in my life.\" Jenna's smile faded as she looked into Eva's downcast features. \"I'm sorry I haven't been around more. After our morning together\u2014after Arlington\u2014I've wanted to get back together, to talk more, maybe to explore our feelings more.\"\n\n\"Jenna,\"\u2014the President's smile brightened again when Eva used her first name\u2014\"my feelings are confused; but more about you and the Cluster than you and me.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Jenna, looking from Eva to the rose. \"Dick tells me that the Cluster hasn't spoken to you.\"\n\nEva nodded, not certain whether Jenna saw or not. \"What does it mean? What is the Cluster?\"\n\nJenna walked along the path a little further, then paused, but did not turn to face Eva. \"The Cluster is, maybe, the most ancient form of life there is. She's older than the Titans and she is beautiful. From her perspective, all of the problems of Earth look like child's play to solve.\"\n\n\"How does she talk to you, Jenna?\" asked Eva, taking a few cautious steps toward the President.\n\n\"I'm not exactly sure. It's like she talks to the very essence of my being; my emotional core, as it were.\" Jenna's voice held a dream-like quality. She knelt by another rose bush. \"I remember words, but I don't know if they were words.\"\n\n\"The dead, Jenna,\" said Eva softly. \"What of the Doomsday Dead? You said in your speech the other day that the Cluster was responsible, but you absolved it.\" Eva's voice remained soft, but developed a razor edge. \"How do you absolve something for killing over half the people of the planet?\"\n\nJenna stood, her back tense. \"To grow the most beautiful garden, you have to cull the weeds. The Earth became overridden with weeds.\"\n\n\"If I can't speak to the Cluster, does that make me one of the weeds?\" asked Eva, horrified.\n\nJenna turned slowly, her head inclined. She reached out and wiped a tear from Eva's cheek. \"No, you're a beautiful flower.\"\n\nEva looked into Jenna's eyes and wanted to fall into them. She wanted to be held by Jenna and ... the thought hung for several moments, pregnant and unspoken. \"I'm the beautiful flower and you're the gardener,\" she burst out at last, then spun on her heel and ran as fast as she could back to the White House. She could hear Jenna Walker calling her name behind her.\n\nEva didn't stop running until she came to her office. She threw open the door, slammed it behind her and locked it. Throwing herself into her chair she put her face in her hands and cried for several minutes\u2014irrational, blind fear and a sense of betrayal overrode every other emotion. She wanted to believe Jenna\u2014wanted to believe the Cluster had come to Earth for good. But, human lives compared to weeds? She could never believe that in this circumstance, the President would view herself as some kind of master gardener over all of the lives of the planet.\n\nA series of beeps sounded, bringing Eva to the reality of her surroundings. She wiped her eyes and reached for a tissue and blew her nose. Activating her teleholo, Eva realized that the beeps were a notice. The TransGalactic Mapping Vessel _Nicholas Sanson_ had just entered orbit around the Earth. Her computer had been scanning for it. The ship that had first encountered the Cluster had come home.\n\nEva looked up the location of TransGalactic's home office. She nodded approvingly and chartered a transport for Japan. Arrangements made, the Surgeon General, stood, straightened her coat, and left the White House Complex, determined to get some answers.\n\n* * * *\n\nThe launch from the _Nicholas Sanson_ made its way toward the islands of Japan. Aboard were John Mark Ellis, Kirsten Smart, Suki Ellis and Manuel Raton. Ellis called for permission to land at Tokyo Spaceport\u2014mentioning the fact that they had business with TransGalactic Corporation. \"You're cleared for Shikoku if you'd like,\" came the voice from city control.\n\n\"No way!\" exclaimed Kirsten. \"I've never been cleared directly for Shikoku. It's always too crowded.\"\n\n\"If we're cleared, let's go for it. I don't wanna walk too far,\" grumbled Raton.\n\nEllis nodded and acknowledged city control saying they were rerouting to the Shikoku landing strip. As they came down, automated controls directed the launch, keeping it clear of traffic. However, Ellis felt there was too little movement. The launch wasn't dodging or swerving as it normally would when coming down into a congested part of a city.\n\n\"What's happened to all the traffic?\" asked Kirsten, sensing Mark's concern.\n\nFire and Manuel looked at each other, then looked out the windows. \"Looks like a lot of hover cars to me,\" said Manuel, seeing more hovers than he was used to seeing.\n\n\"You're from a rural planet,\" said Ellis. \"This might be a lot of traffic for a place like Tejo City back on Sufiro\u2014but it's nothing for Japan.\"\n\nThe launch settled itself smoothly on the landing platform. Mark, Kirsten, Fire, and Manuel stepped out and were surprised to find a cab waiting at the landing port that could take them directly to TransGalactic. As they flew over the city, they were struck by how few pedestrians made their way along the streets.\n\n\"It's a great day, isn't it?\" asked the cab driver, trying to make conversation.\n\n\"It is a nice day,\" said Fire. \"But, we've been off planet and just heard about all the people committing suicide.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said the Cabbie. \"They're just a bunch of losers. I think the planet's better off without 'em.\"\n\nMark, Fire, Manuel and Kirsten looked from one to the other, not believing the cab driver's response. They were grateful when he set the cab down in front of the TransGalactic building.\n\nThere was no receptionist on duty in the lobby of the TransGalactic building. \"This place gives me the creeps,\" said Fire. \"Too quiet.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't be this quiet,\" affirmed Kirsten, leading the way back to an elevator tube. They rode in silence to a floor near the top of the building. Mark remembered his last visit to the building with Clyde McClintlock and G'Liat. This was where they'd come to meet the company's Senior Mathematician\u2014a formidable woman named Kumiko Meiji.\n\nKirsten led the party into Meiji's cavernous office. The room was littered with waist-high pedestals. Over each pedestal floated stars and grid lines. The holographic projections were the aids used by every human-built star vessel in the galaxy to navigate. Near the center of the room, a well-dressed woman sat in a lotus position on the floor. Her eyes stared out in wonder. \"Ms. Meiji,\" exclaimed Mark.\n\n\"Kumiko,\" called Kirsten. She knelt down on the floor and checked her friend's pulse.\n\n\"What's going on?\" asked Manuel. \"Is she in some kind of trance?\"\n\nThe four were startled by the sound of the office door opening. A woman entered that none of them knew. She had a beak-like nose and wide, curious eyes. Stepping past the four, the woman knelt down next to Kumiko Meiji and looked at her eyes and then listened to her breathing. The woman shook her head and stood up, looking at the four. \"Are you from the _Sanson_?\" she asked.\n\nBrow knitted, Mark nodded and offered his hand. \"Yes, ma'am. I'm Captain John Mark Ellis.\"\n\nThe woman breathed a sigh of relief. \"I'm Dr. Eva Cooper,\" she said accepting Mark's hand. \"I was hoping I'd find you here.\"\n\n\"The Surgeon General of the Gaean Alliance?\" asked Kirsten, disbelieving.\n\n\"The same,\" she said with a pleasant smile.\n\n\"What's wrong with her?\" asked Manuel, indicating Ms. Meiji sitting on the floor.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Eva, shaking her head. \"It seems that thousands of people around the world have ended up just like her. It started after the Doomsday Deaths, but there are a lot fewer people like this, so they weren't noticed at first. They don't seem in any danger, but they're not responding. It's like their minds are elsewhere.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" asked Fire, hands on her hips. \"People are dying. People are comatose. For the most part, it doesn't even seem like the people care. What's going on?\"\n\n\"I was hoping you would give me some of the answers,\" said Eva, thoughtfully.\n\n\"I think,\" said Mark, folding his arms, \"it's time to sit down and compare notes.\"\n\n\"Not here,\" said Eva, shaking her head. \"The President and her staff can trace my travel. We need to find someplace private.\"\n\nKirsten wanted to ask what was wrong with the President knowing where they were. Fire and Mark looked at each other. \"Home,\" they said simultaneously.\n\n\"We'll go to Nantucket,\" announced Mark. \"My home is there. If we go in the launch, it'll throw them off if they come looking.\"\n\n\"Lead the way,\" said Eva, indicating the door. Mark nodded and led the way out of the building, looking forward to going home.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**MASTER AND COMMANDER**\n\n\"I've never experienced anything like Doomsday,\" explained Eva Cooper once the _Nicholas Sanson's_ launch lifted from the Shikoku Spaceport in Japan. \"It just seems like everyone I knew had grown hopeless\u2014had no more reason to live.\"\n\n\"What about you?\" asked Fire Ellis, who sat next to the Surgeon General. \"How did you feel?\"\n\n\"Helpless,\" said Cooper with a shrug. \"Most people in the President's cabinet have known one another for years. Like most Surgeons General over the last few centuries, I'm not an insider. Even so, I've been working closely with Dick Richards, President Walker and a number of their aides for the last two years. There have been tough times and crises but I was always amazed how spirited President Walker was and how Richards maintained such an outward sense of calm.\" She took a deep breath. \"However, on Doomsday, both Richards and Walker just seemed sad. So did just about everyone else on the cabinet.\"\n\nKirsten Smart, sitting next to Captain Ellis at the front of the craft turned in her seat and faced Dr. Cooper. \"I take it you weren't sad ... at least not in the same way.\"\n\nCooper's brow furrowed. \"Now that you mention it, no,\" she said. \"I was down, but only because my friends and colleagues were down.\"\n\n\"So,\" said Raton from the back of the launch. \"What made you different?\"\n\n\"I wish I knew,\" said Cooper. \"The thing is, I also seem to be the only one of the President's cabinet that's not spoken to the Cluster.\"\n\nJohn Mark Ellis looked over his shoulder. \"People have been speaking to the Cluster?\" He remembered his own experiences. First, at the planet Sufiro right after the great war, he'd been convinced that the Cluster had attempted to communicate with him. Since then, he'd talked to the Cluster twice. The first time was while he was in command of the Destroyer _Barbara Firebrandt_ and he tried to rescue the freighter _Martha's Vineyard._ The second time was while the _Sanson_ had been in the home system of the Clusters.\n\n\"I can't quite explain it,\" said Cooper. \"They tell me they've been speaking to the Cluster, but I've heard and seen nothing except for those people that drop into a kind of absent state, like your friend Ms. Meiji that we saw back in Japan.\"\n\nEllis nodded and looked forward. \"The Cluster seems to be able to tap directly into people's emotions. The one time I 'spoke' to the Cluster, I passed out on the command deck of my own ship.\"\n\nSmart looked out the window and noticed that the launch had entered near-Earth orbit and was dropping around the planet so quickly that trees, ground and water blurred together. \"It sounds like the Cluster can talk to anyone at any time.\" She looked worriedly over at Ellis. \"What's to prevent the Cluster from contacting you right now?\"\n\nEllis chewed his lower lip. \"Nothing, I suppose,\" he answered at last.\n\nKirsten nodded slowly and faced forward. She touched several buttons, activating the launch's backup controls. \"I don't know that I'm any more immune to the Cluster than you are,\" she said. \"But, the Cluster does seem particularly fond of you. I figure we'd better be ready, just in case.\"\n\n\"Good thinking,\" called Manuel from the back of the launch.\n\nFire looked at Eva. \"So, what happened after Doomsday? It almost seems like everyone is in denial about the event.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" said Eva. \"The President has been frightening since Doomsday. She talks about it like it was the best thing that ever happened to the planet. She called the people that died the 'weeds' and she referred to herself as a 'gardener' tending those of us that were left.\"\n\n\"I suspect the Cluster is the real gardener,\" mused Mark. He checked the controls and pushed the launch's joystick forward. \"Slowing for final descent.\"\n\n\"Shall I call for clearance at Boston?\" asked Kirsten.\n\n\"Might as well try for Nantucket itself.\" The captain shrugged. \"Given our experience at Japan.\"\n\nKirsten nodded and made the call. The launch was cleared to land at the tiny Nantucket spaceport. Mark guided the launch downward, through a bank of clouds. The island of Nantucket was spread out below them. Even from their height, the captain could make out familiar sites: the old mill that sat alone on a hillside, the rounded steeple of the Unitarian Church that stood above the other buildings of the village of Nantucket, the green rolling terrain that covered the island like a carpet. He took a deep breath and reached out, taking Kirsten's hand. He was home at last.\n\n\"I'm glad to be here,\" said Kirsten. \"I just wish the circumstances could be better.\n\nMark nodded, then guided the shuttle toward the small spaceport\u2014mostly used by cargo shuttles and the private spacecraft of the very wealthy\u2014and landed at the bay directed. Once down, they undid their harnesses and stepped from the craft. Manuel frowned as he emerged from the launch. \"Back in the land of fog and rain,\" he grumbled.\n\nFire took his hand and squeezed it. She looked into his eyes and smiled reassuringly. \"We'll get back to Sufiro before long, I promise.\"\n\nMark shot a glance back at his mother, then turned forward. \"Let's see if we can find a ride at the terminal.\" He led the way toward a squat, gray-shingled building that looked far too quaint to be a spaceport terminal. As they walked across the tarmac of the strangely deserted spaceport, Ellis' eyes fell on one craft in particular. It was silver and shaped like an egg\u2014a Rd'dyggian star vessel. His brow furrowed, but he continued toward the terminal. He opened a white, wooden door mounted on hinges and stepped inside.\n\n\"John Mark Ellis!\" exclaimed the man behind the counter as the group entered. He was short, but wiry with thin, white hair. \"Why you're a sight for sore eyes.\" Then he examined the entire group and his eyes fell on Fire. \"And Dr. Ellis, too. We've missed you here on the island.\"\n\nMark reached out and shook the man's hand. \"I can't tell you how much I've missed the island, Charlie.\" The captain turned and introduced the group to Charlie Rogers, who'd run the Nantucket spaceport for as long as he remembered. \"Charlie, is there anyway we can get a car to get into the village? We're in kind of a hurry.\"\n\n\"No problem,\" said Charlie. \"I can take you into town myself.\"\n\n\"What about other ships landing?\" asked Kirsten, aghast.\n\n\"No need to worry about that, young lady. You're the only one that's landed in the last two days,\" he said. \"Even if a lot of traffic suddenly shows up, I'll only be gone a few minutes.\" He stepped from behind the counter and led the way through the glass doors to the only hover car parked in the lot outside. The small group clambered in and Charlie closed the doors. Getting in the driver's door, he started the car and slowly left the parking lot.\n\n\"I saw that some Rd'dyggians are here at the island,\" said Mark as Charlie mindlessly thumbed the network receiver, trying to find music.\n\n\"Ayup. I'm sure you'll find out about him soon enough.\" Charlie's brow crinkled as the speakers remained silent.\n\n\"Him?\" asked Mark. \"You mean there's only one?\"\n\n\"Ayup,\" said Charlie. He shook his head and gave up finding any music.\n\nThe hover car wound its way through the narrow streets of Nantucket. Kirsten found herself fascinated by the ancient buildings, covered in gray shingles as they had been since the 17th century. Many of the streets were plascrete, but they crossed a street paved with worn cobblestones. At last, Charlie set the hover car down in front of a gray house with white shutters that looked much like its neighbors. Atop the house was a whitewashed widow's walk\u2014a platform where women used to look out at the sea and wait for their sailor husbands to return. Fire looked up at it and frowned. She remembered being up there the night her husband, Jerome Ellis, had died.\n\n\"Thanks much, Charlie,\" said Mark as one after the other, the group extracted themselves from the hover car.\n\n\"You're welcome,\" said the ancient spaceport attendant. \"Let me know if you need anything.\" With that he closed the doors, lifted the hover car and disappeared down the street.\n\nCaptain Ellis led the way up the path to the front door. He reached out to take the knob when the door opened, seemingly of its own accord. Ellis looked up and found himself face-to-chest with an eight-foot tall Rd'dyggian warrior. \"I knew you would return,\" said G'Liat.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" asked Kirsten, hands on her hips.\n\n\"I thought you were on your way back to Rd'dyggia,\" said Mark, pushing his way past the warrior that more than filled his doorway.\n\n\"I presume you know this man,\" said Manuel, head tilted to the side.\n\n\"Damn right I know him,\" spat Kirsten. \"He killed Clyde McClintlock in cold blood.\"\n\n\"Is that a reason to despise him, or to go up and shake his hand?\" asked Manuel, the corner of his mustache twitched as his mouth threatened to break into a grin.\n\nBoth Kirsten and Fire shot Manuel a withering look. He put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground. G'Liat, stooped over because the ceilings were only eight feet tall, turned and followed Mark. The captain stood in front of an antique chronometer, turned it and wound it, then reset his wrist chronometer to match. \"Why are you here?\" asked Mark, looking up.\n\n\"I am here to study the Cluster,\" said G'Liat in a practiced terro-generic accent with no trace of the natural Rd'dyggian singsong.\n\n\"That tells us why you're on Earth,\" interjected Kirsten who had followed the warrior inside. She dropped herself onto the couch. \"That doesn't tell us what you're doing in this house.\"\n\n\"I knew you would return here.\" G'Liat's glistening black eyes never left the captain. \"I have been on Earth for several days now. There are reports of people all over the planet that have fallen under the influence of the Cluster. I even suspect the President of your Gaean Alliance is under the Cluster's influence.\"\n\n\"What do you know about the President?\" Eva Cooper pushed a few strands of blond hair behind her shoulder.\n\n\"All I know is what I see on the news, Dr. Cooper,\" G'Liat turned away from Ellis and moved toward the staircase. Cooper couldn't help but notice that even hunched-over the ungainly warrior was frighteningly graceful. \"Not only have there been rather odd announcements from the President in light of the circumstances, there have been reports that the Surgeon General of the Gaean Alliance has gone missing.\"\n\n\"You still haven't answered Kirsten's question,\" said Fire, pointedly stepping in front of G'Liat and meeting his fierce, glass-like gaze with her own deep brown eyes. \"Why have you invaded my home?\"\n\n\"Your son has demonstrated that he is particularly ... 'in tune' with the Cluster. He is also able to control his contacts with the Cluster well. I hope to find answers to the Cluster's motives,\" explained G'Liat.\n\n\"I have to admit,\" said Eva with a shrug, \"that's why I'm here. I want to know what's going on as well.\"\n\n\"The difference, Dr. Cooper, is that your motive is to help humans,\" said Kirsten. She turned and narrowed her eyes, evaluating the giant warrior carefully. \"I'm not quite sure what his motive is, but it's not to help humans.\"\n\nG'Liat turned on his heel, causing Kirsten to gasp in spite of her forced calm. \"You are absolutely correct,\" he said. \"I am not here to serve humans. I am here to serve Rd'dyggians. However, if humans are destroyed, what's to stop the Cluster from moving on to my planet. It's in my interest to see that humans are not destroyed.\"\n\nFire gritted her teeth and took a step toward the warrior. \"I accept your motives, but that still doesn't give you the right to sleep under our roof.\"\n\n\"I have not been sleeping here,\" said G'Liat. \"I have been sleeping on my chartered ship. Perhaps you saw it at the spaceport?\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Ellis putting his hands up. \"I'm tired of the games. What were you doing here when we arrived?\"\n\n\"Monitoring.\" G'Liat stepped past Ellis toward the stairs and gestured for him to follow. \"You may find this of interest. Perhaps even concern.\"\n\nEllis followed G'Liat up the stairs. Fire and Dr. Cooper followed close behind. G'Liat opened the door to the guest bedroom. \"Coffin,\" said Ellis and Fire simultaneously. There, lying on the bed was Samuel Coffin. Several days' stubble grew on his chin. His wispy, silver hair, though wind-blown was not matted. He'd not been tossing and turning in the bed.\n\nCooper stepped past the others and checked the old man's pulse and put her ear to his chest. \"He's like the others,\" she announced.\n\n\"Just like Ms. Meiji,\" breathed Ellis.\n\n\"His mind is not here,\" said G'Liat. The Rd'dyggian warrior pointed to a table where a device made of a lustrous, translucent substance like mother-of-pearl lay. Ellis recognized it as a Rd'dyggian brain interface unit. G'Liat could use the device to see the thoughts of others.\n\nEllis ground his teeth, at once incensed that the device was used on his friend without consent, but also confused by the exact meaning of the warrior's words. \"What do you mean his mind is not here?\"\n\n\"His brain lives, but there is no activity,\" explained G'Liat.\n\nCooper shook her head. \"That's not consistent with the other cases I've studied. Brain wave activity doesn't discontinue while a person is in the Cluster trance.\"\n\nG'Liat inclined his head in a studied imitation of human behavior. \"Yes, but I imagine that the President and members of her cabinet speak to Clusters that are in orbit. Two Clusters were gone when I arrived. One has returned.\"\n\n\"And you didn't examine Ms. Meiji's brainwaves,\" Ellis pointed out. Cooper chewed her lower lip and nodded agreement.\n\nFire stepped to the bed and sat on it, next to Samuel Coffin. She picked up his hand and patted it, an instinct to comfort, even though his brain was apparently elsewhere. \"What you are suggesting is almost inconceivable,\" said Fire. \"The mind can't simply be transplanted. Not even Rd'dyggians can do brain transplants.\"\n\nG'Liat's purple mustache wriggled in surprisingly undisguised Rd'dyggian annoyance. \"But, Rd'dyggians have done experiments where we have successfully mapped brain waves, put them in a memory cell and let them control a computer independent of any other outward input.\" He turned and looked at Ellis. \"The Cluster is much more ancient than the Rd'dyggians. Its abilities surely outstrip ours.\"\n\nEllis sighed. \"I hate to admit it, but you might be able to help us.\"\n\n\"John Mark,\" gasped Fire.\n\nEllis waved his mother's interruption aside. \"But, I think it's time you return to your ship.\" He took a step forward and lowered his voice. \"I warn you, though. Please do not return to this house without an invitation from me.\"\n\n\"Now that you are home,\" said G'Liat. \"I would not dream of it.\" With that, the warrior turned and left the room.\n\n* * * *\n\nOnce G'Liat had left, the atmosphere in the Ellis home relaxed considerably and everyone settled into the routine of sorting out rooms and luggage. Fire and Manuel took the master bedroom, though Mark found himself stifling some consternation that Manuel would be sleeping in his father's bed. Manuel quietly excused himself to do some shopping for dinner. While he was gone, Kirsten gently reminded Mark that Manuel had been sleeping in that bed already. By the time Manuel returned with a bag full of groceries, Mark was resigned though not particularly happy.\n\nMark and Kirsten took his old room. The double bed he'd grown up with was barely big enough for the two of them, but it was adequate. They left Coffin \"sleeping\" peacefully in the guest bedroom, figuring that was the best place for him. Dr. Cooper contented herself with sleeping on the couch in the living room.\n\nWhile Manuel and Fire busied themselves preparing dinner for the full house, Mark contacted Simon aboard the _Sanson_ to let him know where they were and what they had seen. \"Skipper, I don't like staying here any longer than I have to,\" said Simon. \"I think you've found out enough for a good report.\"\n\nMark nodded. \"The problem is, I still don't know how or why the Cluster killed off over sixty percent of the population of the planet. I also don't know what's happening with the people who are in a trance-like state. All I have are guesses.\"\n\nSimon rubbed his eyes. \"I just don't want to find out by becoming a victim, sir.\"\n\nThe formal \"sir\" startled the captain. He looked at Simon again and noticed the worry lines around his first officer's mouth. \"We won't be much longer, I promise,\" said Mark.\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" said Simon, quietly. \" _Sanson_ signing out.\"\n\nGlumly, Mark turned off the teleholo, but his spirits lifted with the smells coming from the kitchen. Manuel had whipped up some seafood enchiladas and a simple jicama salad and served it with a Chilean white wine. Fire lifted the glass and took an appreciative sip. \"I spent my first years on Earth in Chile.\" She looked at Manuel. \"Maybe if the Cluster ever leaves, we should visit.\"\n\nMark rolled his eyes. Kirsten put her hand on his forearm and looked at Manuel. \"I didn't know you were such a good cook.\"\n\n\"My mother and father taught me,\" said Manuel, eyes glistening with moisture as he thought back to his parents, killed on Sufiro. \"The chilies here aren't very good, but the seafood, I have to admit, is excellent.\"\n\nEveryone fell upon their food with delight. Out of the corner of his eye, Mark saw Eva take a pill with some of her wine. He wasn't certain, but he thought the pill looked like the emotion stabilizing drug, Proxom.\n\nOnce the meal was finished, Eva and Kirsten picked up the plates and stacked them in the cleansing unit. Mark stretched and yawned. \"I think that wine's making me sleepy,\" he said.\n\nFire looked at her wrist chrono. \"It's been a long day. We should turn in soon.\"\n\nKirsten tapped Mark on the shoulder and the two went upstairs, arm-in-arm. They looked in on Coffin, and then went to their own bed. Once under the covers, Mark took Kirsten in his arms. He felt her trembling slightly. \"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'm scared,\" she said, softly. \"Things are very wrong. I'm afraid if we stay too long we'll get caught up in it.\"\n\nMark nodded. \"I know,\" he said. \"But, I feel like we need to find out a little more before we can advise the Senator about a plan of action.\"\n\nKirsten took a deep breath and let it out slowly. \"I agree,\" she said. \"It doesn't scare me any less.\"\n\nMark kissed Kirsten and then turned out the light. He rolled over and fell asleep with her snuggled up against his back.\n\n* * * *\n\nDuring the night, Mark rolled and found his face up against canvas. Blinking, and sitting up suddenly, he rolled out of a hammock, into the body next to his then down onto the wooden deck of a ship. Grunting, he rubbed his back and sat up, then looked around in the semi-darkness until his eyes adjusted. Dark as it was in the hold, wan light seeped through from above, as though it was actually day outside. He saw that he was in the hold of an old wooden ship, filled wall-to-wall with the snoring forms of people in hammocks. Brow creased, he carefully stood and felt his way along the wall, stumbling once or twice as the ship rolled until he saw a ladder that led to the deck above.\n\nAscending the ladder, Mark Ellis found himself on the deck of a whale bark. He looked up at a sky impossibly bright with stars, and then stepped over to the rail and looked to starboard. \"My God,\" he whispered as he saw the black, light-warping maw that the ship orbited.\n\n\"Young Ellis?\" came a raspy voice from the ship's stern.\n\nMark looked around and up to the command deck. There in a white shirt and black trousers, looking much younger than he'd ever seen him was Samuel Coffin. \"So, this is where you've gotten to, old friend,\" said Mark, moving to the ladder at the deck's stern.\n\n\"I should have known you'd show up here eventually,\" said Coffin, eyes twinkling.\n\n\"Where are we?\" asked Ellis as he joined Coffin on the command deck. \"I presume that's a black hole, but it's the biggest I've ever seen.\" He waved his hand around at the sky. \"The density of stars is incredible. Are we...\"\n\n\"We're at the center of the galaxy,\" affirmed Coffin.\n\nEllis stepped gingerly to the starboard rail. Matter swirled around the great sphere of blackness\u2014an accretion disk of material that was gradually falling into the black hole's event horizon. \"Are we really here or is this some kind of illusion?\"\n\n\"Old Folger and I think we're really here somehow. Also, Kumiko Meiji.\" He indicated the ship around them and the flapping canvas above. \"All of this is clearly illusion for our benefit, but somehow we are aboard a ship that's really at the center of the galaxy.\"\n\nEllis looked at Coffin wide-eyed. \"Did you say Kumiko Meiji?\"\n\n\"Ahh,\" said Coffin. \"I didn't think you would remember her. She was on Nantucket while you were still quite young.\"\n\n\"She's my boss at TransGalactic,\" explained Ellis. \"Presuming it's the same Kumiko Meiji.\" He shoved his hands in his pockets and discovered that he was dressed much the same as Coffin, in blue woolen trousers with a linen shirt. \"So, why are we at the center of the galaxy?\"\n\n\"Because I ordered us here,\" said Coffin. He joined Ellis at the rail. \"It's quite a sight, but I'm thinking of moving on tomorrow. I think we've taken all of the measurements we can get.\" He paused and looked around. \"Besides, this seems to be a rather popular destination.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Another ship was here only a couple of days ago,\" explained Coffin. \"We think it was actually another Cluster ship. It was fitted out so that it looked much different\u2014more like a rocket ship of some kind than a sea vessel. Our midshipman told me that the crew consisted of more computer types than this crew.\"\n\n\"I presume this crew consists mostly of researchers and teachers such as yourself.\"\n\nCoffin nodded. Ellis took a deep breath looked around. He noticed a young woman at the ship's wheel and a man in the bow. Looking up at the main mast, he saw a man keeping lookout, as though for distant whales. Then Ellis noticed a series of little flags along one of the lines. \"Who are you signaling?\" he asked.\n\nCoffin shrugged. \"I may be the captain of this ship, but I don't know all of her mysteries yet. The flags just seem to change from time to time without my command.\"\n\nEllis frowned and felt the wind as it blew past the ship. As the wind shifted, he felt a wave of contentment roll over him. A few moments later, the breeze shifted slightly again and something like ire washed over him.\n\n\"The illusion is frighteningly real,\" said Coffin gently. \"Right down to the wind.\"\n\n\"Right down the wind,\" echoed Ellis, his brows knitted. He looked up and he saw that the signal flags had changed. \"This Cluster is signaling one of the others,\" he said more confidently. He looked into Coffin's eyes. \"When the other ship was here, what were they doing?\"\n\n\"It seemed like they were taking detailed measurements of the masses and radii of stars around here,\" said Coffin.\n\nEllis looked around at all of the stars and shivered. Then he turned with the wind and tried to see where it was blowing. Slightly to the port of stern, he thought one of the stars didn't look quite right. \"Do you have a telescope?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Coffin. He retrieved one from his belt and handed it to Ellis, who opened it and looked at the bothersome star. Somehow, it was not a star, but a lighted corridor. It reminded him of the paths that ships used to jump from star to star; the paths that ships like the _Nicholas Sanson_ mapped. He collapsed the little telescope.\n\n\"We're communicating with someone else,\" he said with a confident nod. \"EQ communications use the same nodal points that starships use to jump from system to system.\" He pointed to the place he'd examined with the telescope. \"There's a jump point right over there.\"\n\n\"Who are we communicating with?\" asked Coffin, his shaggy brow furrowed.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Ellis, \"but I'd very much like to find out.\" His eyes fell on the whaleboat secured to the stern of the bark. \"May I borrow one of your boats?\"\n\n\"We're not exactly using them out here,\" said Coffin, lightly. Even so, his shaggy brows came together and a worried frown formed on his features. \"But, how can you make an interstellar jump in a whaleboat?\"\n\n\"How can we be orbiting the black hole at the center of the galaxy in a whale bark?\" Ellis met Coffin's gaze. \"There must be some open channel between us here at the center of the galaxy and the Clusters of Earth. Otherwise, I could not have arrived here. Last I knew I was on Earth. You've been out here a few days. Somehow, my mind was passed from Earth to here. I can sense it on the wind.\"\n\nCoffin nodded. \"You may have the boat, but be very careful, my friend.\"\n\n\"Trust me, I will.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nKirsten Smart awoke as rays of early morning sunlight streamed in through the windows of the bedroom. She smiled a little mischievously and snuggled up against Mark's back. He was breathing shallowly as though he was awake, or near the surface, but he didn't respond to her at all. \"Come on, sleepyhead, up and at 'em,\" she said playfully rolling him onto his back.\n\nHis open eyes stared upward at the ceiling and she caught her breath for a moment as she reminded herself that he was breathing. She checked his pulse and confirmed that it was there. With a worried frown, she got out from under the covers, found a terrycloth bathrobe and went across the hall. She knocked lightly on Fire and Manuel's door.\n\nA bleary-eyed Manuel Raton, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts opened the door and blinked a few times. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"It's Mark,\" gasped Kirsten. \"I think he's gone ... he's gone wherever it is that people are going ... where Mr. Coffin and Ms. Meiji went.\"\n\nFire stepped up behind Manuel. Kirsten's eyes went wide when she realized that Fire wasn't wearing anything at all. Ignoring her reaction, Fire stepped past Manuel and Kirsten and went into the room. She checked her son's pulse and breathing, then gently reached up and closed his eyes.\n\nKirsten watched from the doorway, self-consciously holding her robe closed. \"What do we do?\" she asked.\n\nLooking up, Fire sighed. \"First thing is probably get Dr. Cooper up here and have her give him a more proper examination\u2014make sure he really is in the same state as Coffin. From there we have two choices, we can wait until he and Coffin return or we can bring G'Liat here and see if he can tell us anything with his machine.\" Noticing that Kirsten was staring, Fire looked down at herself and shrugged. \"Sorry,\" she mumbled half-heartedly as she made her way back to her own room and half closed the door behind her. She started rifling through the dresser.\n\n\"I don't want to involve G'Liat,\" protested Kirsten to the closed door. \"He's a murderer\u2014he doesn't even see humans as ... well ... humans. It's more like we're animals in his eyes.\"\n\nManuel, now wearing jeans, stepped through the door, pulled a T-shirt on and shrugged. \"I've been a cop a long time; humans can be animals.\" Fire started to say something but he held up his hand. \"Seriously, I think we need to take advantage of any resources we have at hand, no matter how distasteful.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid you may be right,\" said Fire, as she pulled on a pair of pants. \"Thing is, one of my dad's best friends was a Rd'dyggian pirate. Arepno was a little odd, but he was a good soul.\"\n\n\"That's the problem,\" protested Kirsten. \"I don't think this G'Liat is a good soul at all.\"\n\nFire pulled on a tank top and nodded. \"I appreciate your concern. Mark is my son, after all and I don't trust this G'Liat very much either.\" She pursed her lips. \"Let's get Dr. Cooper up here, then we can talk about this more after breakfast. Agreed?\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Kirsten. \"While you're getting the doctor, I'll get dressed.\"\n\nOnce Kirsten was dressed, Cooper came upstairs and examined Mark. As expected, she reported that he was in the same state as Coffin. Meanwhile, Manuel went downstairs to start breakfast. When the women smelled the rancid, sulfuric smell of burning eggs, they ran downstairs to find Manuel slumped over the kitchen table. Kirsten turned off the fire and dumped the eggs in the sink while Cooper checked Manuel.\n\n\"Is he...?\" asked Fire, with a worried frown.\n\n\"Alive, and in the same state as Ellis and Coffin as best as I can tell,\" said Cooper.\n\nFire looked at Kirsten, who nodded. \"I hate to say it, but I think it's time we got G'Liat,\" she said.\n\n* * * *\n\nJohn Mark Ellis rowed away from the _Pequod_ in the whaleboat. He felt the oars push against water, though he certainly saw none. Coffin had given him provisions: food, blankets, and a first aid kit. He didn't know if any of that would be of any use. As the light that indicated a gravitational node grew closer, Ellis felt the boat pulled along, as though grabbed by a current. He came to the node surprisingly quickly. Looking back, the _Pequod_ was lost among the stars. He had no sense of scale, but his instincts told him that he was moving somewhere near the speed of light.\n\nAs he entered the nodal point, he expected that he would experience something like a starship jumping from point to point in the galaxy. However, it wasn't like that at all. Instead, it was like entering a tunnel of light. All sensation of motion stopped. A few moments later, he found himself standing in front of a door. The boat and the provisions had vanished, though he was still dressed the same. Ellis opened the door and stepped into an electronics lab of some sort.\n\nA drafting table stood against one wall, while the room's lone occupant sat hunched over a workbench, a test probe in one hand. Cautiously, Ellis approached the man. Alerted by the creak of Ellis' shoes, the man looked up. \"Ah,\" he said. \"You must be new here.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Ellis running his hand through his hair. \"I just got here, if that's what you mean. But, I'm not sure exactly where 'here' is.\"\n\nThe man smiled. \"My friend, you've just found paradise.\" He put down the test probe and shook Ellis' hand. \"My name is Timothy Gibbs and for the first time in my life, I'm getting to build the computer I've always dreamed of.\"\n\nEllis' eyebrows' came together. \"Who are you building the computer for?\"\n\n\"For the Cluster, of course,\" he said. \"It's their legacy.\"\n\n\"Tell me more,\" said Ellis.\n\nGibbs looked at his wrist chrono. \"Let me show you around and I'll explain as I go.\" He moved toward a door at the opposite end of the room. \"I'm afraid I don't have a lot of time. I managed to leave a friend of mine back at the apartment. I'm sure he's worried. He just arrived from Sufiro when I had to leave for work.\"\n\n\"You have a friend from Sufiro?\" asked Ellis. \"I know some Sufirans. What's your friend's name?\"\n\n\"Ed Swan,\" said the man.\n\nEllis' jaw dropped for a moment before he regained his composure. \"Yes, show me around,\" he said. \"Let me know when it's time for you to go. I have a message for your friend.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nG'Liat stood over John Mark Ellis, his hands balancing the Rd'dyggian brain scan device on the captain's head. The device was designed for Rd'dyggians, whose brains were in their chest cavity. After a few moments, G'Liat looked up. \"That's odd,\" he said with a look of near-human puzzlement on his face. \"Ellis was gone, just like Samuel Coffin.\"\n\n\"Was?\" asked Kirsten.\n\n\"I'm now registering brain activity again,\" said the eight-foot tall warrior. \"He's much nearer again, like most humans. It's like his brain pattern was sent to a distant point, but now it's come back to one of the Clusters close to the Earth.\"\n\n\"How can that be?\" asked Fire.\n\n\"I don't have enough data yet,\" said the warrior. \"However, I've never seen anything like this in any of the people I've examined.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should examine Manuel,\" suggested Fire.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" agreed the warrior, retrieving the brain scanner.\n\n\"Examine Manuel for what?\" Raton leaned against the bedroom door, stroking his mustache. He stepped over to the window and pushed it open, took a deep breath of the damp, salt air and grinned. \"Man, it's a beautiful day.\" He turned and looked from Kirsten to Fire. \"Did someone get those eggs I left on the stove before they burned?\"\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**BEYOND SYMBIOSIS**\n\nFire Ellis watched Manuel Raton as he ate his breakfast of oatmeal and toast with a look of peaceful contentment on his face. Fire and Manuel had grown up together on Sufiro and she knew his moods well. She had see him raging mad when he'd seen an injustice committed, worried about friends in trouble, satisfied after solving a dispute, even joyously happy when things were going his way, but she rarely saw him completely serene.\n\n\"You know,\" said Manuel, \"the Cluster has made things so peaceful here on Earth, I wonder what it could do for other worlds, like Alpha Coma or Sufiro.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I want to find out,\" said Kirsten, wrinkling her nose. \"I don't care how nice the Earth seems, the fact is that over sixty percent of the population is gone.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" said Fire, pointing her spoon at Manuel. \"How do you know what the Earth was like before? You didn't even grow up here.\"\n\n\"But I was here before the Cluster, with you,\" said Manuel, leaning forward. \"My father and mother told me plenty of stories about living on the streets of El Paso and Juarez, not even able to afford a place to live. That's all been fixed.\"\n\n\"In the most draconian of ways,\" said Kirsten. She threw her napkin on the table and picked up her dirty dishes.\n\nG'Liat reclined on the couch and watched the interchange with some interest. He made a show of examining his fingers, then looked up. \"So, what was it like to communicate with the Cluster?\"\n\nManuel's mouth worked, but he couldn't quite get the words out. \"It's hard to describe,\" he stammered at last. \"It was like being gathered into my mother's arms and being told that everything was all right.\" His content smile dissolved into a deep frown as he remembered his own mother, murdered on Sufiro. He turned away from the warrior's gaze.\n\nEva Cooper looked from Manuel to G'Liat and back again. \"You're in law enforcement, Mr. Raton. How can you condone what the Cluster has done?\"\n\nManuel's brow wrinkled as though he was trying to think through a difficult problem. \"I don't...\" he began, but stopped. \"I don't know how to explain,\" he resumed after a few moments of silence. \"I almost wish the Cluster had come sooner, not later. I find myself wondering if my mom and dad would still be alive.\"\n\n\"Who knows, if the Cluster had come sooner, perhaps your parents would still be dead and Sam Stone of Tejo would still be alive,\" said G'Liat from the couch, referring to the man who had ordered the execution-style murder of Raton's mother and father.\n\nManuel looked at the warrior and his lip trembled as though he wanted to say something.\n\n\"How do you know about Sam Stone?\" asked Fire, her head inclined.\n\nG'Liat held his arms out to the side. \"I know many things,\" was his only reply.\n\nThe teleholo signal sounded. Fire continued to stare at G'Liat as she stood, only breaking her gaze when she went to the other room and answered the call. A few moments later, she reappeared. \"Kirsten, it's a call for you. It's Simon aboard the _Sanson.\"_\n\nKirsten nodded and followed Fire back to the teleholo. Shortly, Fire returned and sat down.\n\nEva took a last bite of her oatmeal and washed it down with some coffee, then sat back and eyed G'Liat with a sly grin. \"You're testing, aren't you? You're trying to find out if there's a way to break the brainwashing the Cluster has done.\"\n\nBefore G'Liat could answer, Kirsten appeared at the door. \"Simon's just told me that several people aboard the _Sanson_ have just ... zoned out, like Manuel and Mark. Even our pilot, Laura Peters seems to have been in contact with the Cluster.\"\n\n\"And Suki Firebrandt Ellis ... or so it would seem,\" said G'Liat, standing up from the couch. Hunched over, he made his way to her. Her eyes were open and staring, but she didn't blink when he waved his orange six-fingered hand in front of them.\n\nEva stood and moved to Fire. Kneeling beside her, she took her pulse and checked her breathing. She looked up at Manuel who continued to smile. \"She's with the Cluster now,\" he said. \"There's no need to worry.\"\n\nKirsten leaned against the great stone fireplace, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Eva stood and joined Kirsten at the fireplace. She looked up at a beautiful painting of a seascape. After a moment, her eyes fell down to a rack of pipes. She picked one up and thought about the great wars medical science had waged against smoking and obesity. Looking back at Manuel, she began to think she might be looking at an addict.\n\n\"G'Liat,\" said Eva, \"what would happen if we simply took Mark and Fire back aboard the _Sanson_ and got them out of the Cluster's range?\"\n\nFor a moment, G'Liat's mustache wriggled, then he shook his head in deliberate imitation of the human gesture. \"That strikes me as an exceedingly bad idea.\" The warrior picked up Fire's dishes and took them to the cleansing unit. \"We don't know what exactly has happened to their brain patterns. What would happen if the time came for them to return to their own minds and the body was not here to receive it?\"\n\n\"You think it could kill them?\" asked Eva returning the pipe to the rack.\n\n\"I don't have enough data for a solid hypothesis,\" said G'Liat. \"However, that is certainly one possibility.\"\n\n\"Does that mean we're trapped here until everyone is back in their own body?\" asked Kirsten as she moved from the fireplace to the couch.\n\n\"If you do not wish to desert your friends,\" affirmed G'Liat. As Kirsten opened her mouth to protest, G'Liat raised his hand. \"Knowledge is power in this case. The more you know, the more likely you can save your friends from the Cluster. The longer you wait, the more you will know.\"\n\nEva looked at Manuel. \"What I'm afraid of is all of us succumbing to the Cluster ... or worse.\"\n\nG'Liat finished clearing the table. \"That's the chance you must be prepared to take.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nIn Southern Arizona, Edmund Swan paced back and forth in Timothy Gibbs' apartment, trying to decide what to do. He'd spent two nights while his friend sat motionless and apparently comatose in an armchair. Several times, Swan thought about calling the police or an ambulance\u2014some kind of emergency help. However, every time he thought about it, he remembered the scene of police officers burning bodies. He wasn't sure whom he could trust and began to think it had been rash to come to Earth so unprepared.\n\nTim Gibbs' eyes fluttered open. \"Good, you're still here,\" he said. \"I've just met an old friend of yours named Mark Ellis.\"\n\nSwan's jaw dropped. \"You _met_ Mark Ellis. Where?\"\n\n\"At work,\" said Gibbs, as though he'd been physically outside the apartment and not simply sitting in his armchair for the better part of two days. Gibbs stood and went to the bathroom. When he came out, he ordered up huge meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, vegetables and bread from the food preparation unit.\n\n\"So, where do you work?\" asked Swan, joining his friend at the kitchen table.\n\nGibbs' brows creased and looked at his plate. \"I'm not exactly sure ... I think it's an orbital complex. Your friend, Ellis, seemed most interested,\" he said. He took another mouthful of food and washed it down with a drink of water. \"Oh, I almost forgot, Ellis had a message for you. He said that his mother, Manuel Raton, and some others were on Nantucket Island. He was sure you would want to talk to them.\"\n\nSwan smiled. \"You bet I do,\" he said. \"May I use your teleholo?\"\n\n* * * *\n\nLaura Peters stepped onto the command deck of the _Nicholas Sanson_. She moved to the pilot's station and commanded it to bring up her standard display that looked identical to a pilot's console on a Gaean Navy vessel.\n\nNatalie Papadraxis at the communication's console eyed her with concern and Simon Yermakov stood up from the command chair and stepped to her side. \"How are you feeling?\" he asked.\n\nHeat rose to Laura's cheeks and she looked down at the console, checking ship's status to avoid meeting either Simon's or Natalie's eyes. \"Embarrassed mostly,\" she muttered. \"I should have been able to fight the Cluster\u2014keep it out of my mind and keep working.\"\n\nNatalie put her hand on Laura's shoulder. \"There's no reason to be embarrassed, Laura. I've felt the Cluster's power. There isn't anything you could have done.\"\n\n\"Isn't there?\" asked Laura, harshly. She looked up at Natalie, her jaw clenched. \"Why me? Why did the Cluster single me out of the command crew?\"\n\nSimon tugged on his trouser legs and squatted down next to Laura's chair. \"That's a very good question,\" he said. He looked down at the deck and then up again. \"I'm sorry, but I have to ask\u2014what was it like?\"\n\nLaura took a deep breath. \"It was comforting ... very comforting,\" she said as she looked back to her console. \"It was far too easy to forget about the ship, to forget about my duty. It was like I was being primed for something bigger, something more important but...\"\n\n\"But, there's nothing more important to you than your duty to the ship and crew,\" said Natalie, quietly\u2014almost reverently.\n\nLaura nodded and sniffed.\n\nSimon stood. \"Don't be too hard on yourself. We'll get out of here just as soon as we can.\" He stepped around the pilot's console into the holographic projection at the front of the deck. The projection showed the Earth and the position of all orbiting ships and satellites along with three of the Clusters. He noticed that one of the Clusters was increasing speed and moving away from the Earth. He continued to watch it for a few minutes, wondering where it was going while pondering Natalie's words about why she alone among the command crew had been singled out for contact.\n\n\"Display crew roster, here,\" he said stabbing his finger in front of him. A list of names appeared in front of him. \"Remove all personnel off-ship,\" he commanded. Dutifully, the names of Mark and Suki Ellis, Raton, and Smart were removed. \"Highlight all personnel in medical during the last day for treatment of Cluster-induced trauma.\" He saw several names highlighted, including Laura Peters and Chief Engineer Mahuk. Simon paced a little ways off and looked at the Cluster that was moving away from Earth, and noticed that it was still accelerating.\n\nDistracted from the list for a moment, he commanded, \"Show course projection of Cluster departing Earth.\" He pointed at the Cluster he meant. A yellow line shot out from the Cluster. \"Show any jump points on that course projection.\" A red blinking dot appeared in front of the Cluster.\n\nLaura, intrigued by what Simon was doing in the holo tank stepped forward and joined him. \"Where's that one going?\"\n\n\"Show jump point destination.\" Simon pointed to the coordinates above the blinking jump point.\n\nLaura's eyes went wide. \"That's the center of the galaxy,\" she said. \"What do you suppose it wants there?\"\n\nHe shook his head while she looked at the list that he had generated. She looked up at Natalie. \"Are you still taking Proxom?\"\n\nNatalie looked up from her console and smiled. \"I hate to say it, but yes. I know it interferes with my implant, but it keeps me from having nightmares about the Cluster.\"\n\nLaura looked at Simon. \"Sir, I don't want to ask this ... but I've guessed for a while that you take Proxom. Do you?\"\n\nSimon sniffed and looked away for a moment, watching as the Cluster reached the jump point and vanished. He looked back to Laura and nodded without saying anything. Laura looked back at the list. \"Computer, highlight all crewmembers currently with Proxom prescriptions.\"\n\n\"Classified information,\" protested the computer.\n\n\"Override,\" called Simon in an unusually authoritative tone. \"This is a matter of ship's security. First officer's authority.\" The names of ten crewmembers, including Simon and Natalie were highlighted in green.\n\n\"None of the people who are on Proxom were affected by the Cluster,\" said Laura.\n\nSimon shook his head. \"That's not enough to go on. It's only ten members of the crew.\"\n\n\"But,\" protested Laura. \"Proxom is an emotion stabilizer. Wouldn't it make sense that people on Proxom might have some immunity to the Cluster?\"\n\nSimon inclined his head. \"A good hypothesis,\" he said as he stepped out of the holo tank and made his way toward the command chair. \"Thing is, I think we need more data to be sure.\" Just then, he stumbled slightly. Turning on his heel, he looked back at Laura. \"Did you feel that?\"\n\nShe took a couple of steps. \"I think so, but I'm not quite sure.\"\n\n\"Check it,\" he ordered and continued to the command chair.\n\nLaura sat down at her station and poured over the sensor data of the previous minutes. The _Nicholas Sanson_ was a mapping vessel with equipment highly tuned to the galaxy's gravitational currents. The ship could literally feel its way from jump point to jump point mapping the course as it went. Unlike most space vessels, the _Sanson_ actually rocked and swayed gently as competing gravitational forces from different bodies in the galaxy tugged at it.\n\n\"Sir,\" said Laura looking up. \"There was a density wave spike just moments ago.\"\n\nThe ship began to list ever so slightly. Most people who stood on _Sanson's_ deck would probably not have felt it, but Simon and Laura looked at each other. Again, Laura checked her sensors. \"We're picking up some kind of major gravitational shift, sir.\"\n\n\"Point of origin?\" asked Simon.\n\nShe looked up. \"It's from the center of the galaxy, sir.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nSamuel Coffin stood at the aft rail of the _Pequod_ looking at the point of light where John Mark Ellis had rowed the whaleboat only a few hours before. He hoped he would see his friend row back and let them know what he found. He feared that Ellis was, in fact, lost forever.\n\nKumiko Meiji joined Coffin at the aft railing and followed his gaze. \"Still no sign of Ellis?\" she asked.\n\nCoffin simply shook his head. Just then, he saw a flash of silver near the point of light. He watched it attentively for several moments. Soon, he realized it was another ship\u2014the silver spaceship he had seen before. It moved around the black hole and stopped. A blue beam shot out from the ship's bow and struck a distant star.\n\nMeiji gasped when she saw the star start to move. \"That's impossible.\"\n\nCoffin nodded without saying a word. He looked around and saw Elisha Folger. \"Mr. Folger,\" he said quietly. \"I think it's time to go.\"\n\n\"All hands!\" called Folger, but his voice cracked. He moved forward slightly and called again. \"All hands, prepare to make sail!\"\n\nThe midshipman that Coffin had seen upon waking in his cabin his first day aboard the _Pequod_ scurried up the ladder to the aft deck. \"Sir,\" he called. \"We have new orders from the admiralty.\" The boy handed a piece of paper to Coffin.\n\nCoffin took the paper and read the orders. \"That's impossible,\" he said as he handed the paper to Meiji.\n\n\"We couldn't move stars around even if we wanted to,\" she said when she'd finished reading the note. \"And I don't see any reason why we'd want to.\"\n\nThe midshipman shook his head. \"I'm afraid it's out of your hands, now,\" he said.\n\nHe pointed forward and a yellow beam shot from the _Pequod's_ bow toward a distant star.\n\n* * * *\n\nJohn Mark Ellis sat in Timothy Gibbs' drafting room staring at a set of plans. Gibbs had explained that he had designed a storage device that could hold almost limitless data. It utilized the gravitational compression of a supermassive black hole\u2014one just slightly larger than the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Data could be retrieved from the device by directing Quinnium particles through the black hole at precise frequencies.\n\nHowever, as Ellis examined the plans, he realized that the supermassive black hole would collimate vast amounts of energy, creating a radio-frequency jet. If enough stars in the center of the galaxy were pulverized, it would create a gas halo around the black hole, changing the frequency of the radio energy projected from the center of the galaxy to something quite different from similar radio jets in other galaxies. If care was taken, and the density of the halo varied, the signal could be made to pulse.\n\nEllis rubbed his chin. \"A beacon,\" he said aloud, even though there was no one else in the room. The Cluster was using humans to help design and build a memory core at the center of the galaxy and the core included a beacon to alert others to its presence.\n\nThe captain sat back and took a deep breath. He knew what the Cluster was building, but he didn't know why and a chill crept up his spine as he considered the \"others\" the Cluster might want to contact. Was this another species that the Cluster had contacted? If so, how powerful might they be?\n\nHe looked around at the room he was in. There were state-of-the-art computer terminals and teleholo units. Drafting and test equipment littered the tables. Looking up, tasteful art decorated the walls. He couldn't help thinking that much as he liked Van Gogh's \"Starry Night\" he would much prefer to see a seascape. As he watched, Ellis saw the painting change into the seascape that hung in his own house above the fireplace.\n\nEllis looked down at his body, suddenly aware that he had not eaten or relieved himself in several hours and the realization did not inspire any urges within him. As he looked down at his body, he wished he could do something about some of the extra fat he carried around. As he watched, his stomach flattened.\n\nHe smiled to himself, not so much because of his better physique, but because these two experiments demonstrated something he suspected since arriving aboard the _Pequod_ \u2014that he was not someplace in body, but someplace in mind. Somehow, the Cluster had copied his brain patterns and placed them in a place where he could think and act. It was as though a file had been copied from one computer\u2014his brain\u2014to another computer. The question was, where was the second computer?\n\nEllis looked back at the drafting table, realizing that if the Cluster could copy his memory, life, and experiences\u2014everything that was him\u2014to some new location, the Cluster might be looking for a place to copy all of its experiences. Such a place would have to be a vast storage cell.\n\nHe felt around his shirt for a cigar and was somehow not surprised when he found one. He put it in his mouth and lit it. \"If someone doesn't like the smell,\" he grumbled, \"they can wish it away.\"\n\nLooking at the table, he saw the teleholos and had a thought. Sitting down at one, he put in the code for his home on Earth. He was only slightly surprised when his mother did, in fact, answer. \"Mom,\" he called. \"It's John Mark. Can you hear me?\"\n\n\"I can hear and see you,\" she said with something of a sheepish grin. \"Where are you, Mark?\"\n\n\"I'm not entirely sure,\" he admitted. \"I think I may be 'aboard' one of the Cluster ships, but I'm not exactly sure. How's everyone at the house?\"\n\n\"I'm not exactly sure, either,\" she said. \"I've been taken someplace else, as well.\" Her brow creased. \"It's a very comforting place. It reminds me of dad's homestead on Sufiro. The Cluster has been talking\u2014at least I think it's talking.\" She shook her head. \"I feel like the Cluster has nothing but good intentions for humanity.\"\n\nEllis shook his head. \"Mom, the Cluster is up to something. It's building something big at the center of the galaxy\u2014a giant memory core. The problem is, I don't know why, yet.\"\n\nSuki Ellis gasped. \"I think it's time to go. I'm going to have to leave.\"\n\n\"Tell the others,\" called Mark. \"If you see them, tell the others about the memory core.\"\n\nSuki Ellis' face disappeared from the teleholo. Mark pounded his fist on the table and rolled the cigar to the other side of his mouth, chewing it contemplatively. He drew on the cigar then exhaled slowly, realizing he had to get back to the _Pequod_. There, perhaps he and Coffin could compare notes and develop a strategy.\n\nHe stood and went back to the door through which he'd entered the lab. As he expected to find\u2014or rather, as he willed to find\u2014the _Pequod's_ whaleboat was tied to a dock. Looking in the distance, he saw a light\u2014similar to the one he'd entered when he'd left the _Pequod._ The captain untied the rope from the dock and climbed in the boat.\n\n* * * *\n\nSuki Firebrandt Ellis blinked her eyes several times, as the scene before became the familiar one of her kitchen on Nantucket. She tensed as G'Liat's massive head suddenly appeared in front of her. \"Welcome back,\" said the Rd'dyggian warrior. He looked at her for a moment before he moved back toward the couch.\n\nShe blinked several times, then looked around and saw that Kirsten was seated with her at the table while Dr. Cooper sat in the easy chair in front of the fireplace. \"Where's Manuel?\" she asked, suddenly alarmed.\n\n\"He went to answer a teleholo call,\" answered Kirsten.\n\nA moment later, Manuel appeared at the hallway door. \"We just got a call from Edmund Swan. He's in Southern Arizona and he received a message from Mark.\"\n\n\"So did I,\" piped in Fire.\n\nG'Liat swung around and looked at her. \"You communicated with Ellis? While your mind was with the Cluster?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I guess so.\"\n\n\"Edmund's holding on the other end, he's wondering if there's something we can do to help each other,\" interjected Manuel.\n\nFire stood and stepped over to Manuel, she put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his deep brown eyes. \"How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"Just fine,\" he said, the vacant smile creeping onto his features. Then, he shook it off. \"I guess, a little confused, actually. A part of me keeps telling me not to worry about the Cluster\u2014not to worry about the death it's caused. A part of me keeps saying this is all for good.\"\n\nFire nodded. \"Yes,\" she said slowly. \"I keep having the same feeling, but who's good? Ours or the Cluster's?\"\n\n\"Ours,\" Manuel blurted out, then stopped and chewed on his lower lip. He looked into Fire's brown eyes and took several strands of her long, gray-streaked black hair in his fingers. \"I don't know. I want to say ours. I feel I ought to say ours ... but I don't know.\"\n\nThe teleholo chimed again.\n\nManuel looked over his shoulder. \"Edmund's waiting.\"\n\nFire shook her head. \"That's not the reminder signal. That's a second call coming in.\" She stepped past Manuel into the hall and went to the teleholo booth. Manuel turned on his heel and followed Fire. \"Hi Edmund,\" she said, cheerily. \"We have a second call coming in. I'm going to split the signal.\" She pushed a button and the image of Edmund Swan sitting in a small apartment moved to the side. Next to it, the room opened into the command deck of the _Nicholas Sanson._\n\nSimon Yermakov stood in front of the pilot's console with his hands behind his back. \"This is Simon, is Ms. Smart available? We have a couple of observations we need to report.\"\n\nFire looked up at Manuel who looked as though he was going to say something in protest, but left to retrieve Kirsten. \"She'll be right here,\" she said, then turned her attention to Edmund Swan. \"Ed, Manuel tells me you received a message from Mark...\"\n\nSwan nodded, he looked to his right, seeing the split screen on his own teleholo unit and looking a little uncomfortable about speaking in front of the new person he saw.\n\n\"Sorry,\" apologized Fire. \"Simon Yermakov is first officer of Mark's ship, the _Sanson._ \" She couldn't help but notice as a pained expression crossed Simon's features. She looked at Simon. \"Edmund Swan is Manuel's deputy from Sufiro.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you,\" said Edmund. Simon simply nodded in response. Edmund looked back toward Fire. \"Mark did get in touch with me through a friend.\" He adjusted the holographic pickup on his end, expanding the view. A man sat in a chair, eyes closed. \"His name is Timothy Gibbs and I think he's building something for the Cluster.\"\n\nJust then, Kirsten stepped into the teleholo room and put her hands on the back of Fire's chair. She nodded at Simon.\n\n\"John Mark thinks the Cluster is building some kind of a memory core at the center of the galaxy,\" said Fire.\n\n\"Using the black hole,\" affirmed Edmund, nodding. \"Timothy had a theory that such a device could be built. He always joked that he wanted to build it, but the problem was getting someone to give him a black hole.\"\n\n\"If someone's manipulating stars near the center of the galaxy, that would explain the readings we're getting,\" piped in Simon, stepping a little closer to the pick-up. He looked up at Kirsten. \"We've been sensing large scale gravity waves for the last twenty minutes or so.\"\n\nFire looked up at Kirsten, eyebrows lifted in an unspoken question. Kirsten put her hands behind her back. \"We're so far from the center of the galaxy that it's a little like sensing a Southeast Asian tsunami in California. The gravity shifts are so slight, we won't feel them here on the Earth, but the _Sanson_ is designed to detect shifts in the galaxy's gravitational field.\"\n\nFire inclined her head. \"That doesn't sound at all good.\"\n\nKirsten took a deep breath and let it out slowly. \"It depends, if they're only moving a few stars, the main thing that it'll do is wreak havoc with jump points around the galaxy\u2014a pain, but something mapping vessels like the _Sanson_ are equipped to handle.\"\n\n\"What if they move more than a few stars?\" asked Fire.\n\n\"I don't know,\" admitted Kirsten, quietly.\n\nEdmund Swan rubbed his chin and looked from Simon to Kirsten and Fire. \"Why does the Cluster want a giant memory core anyway?\"\n\n\"That's a very good question,\" said Kirsten. \"I suspect the person who knows is sitting there right next to you.\"\n\nSwan looked back at Timothy Gibbs and nodded. \"I think you may be right, but he's not exactly communicative right now.\"\n\n\"I think I know someone who can help,\" said Kirsten, her jaw set.\n\nFire stood and put her hand on Kirsten's shoulder. \"You're not thinking about G'Liat.\"\n\nKirsten nodded slowly. \"If Gibbs' mind is on one of the orbiting Clusters, then there's a chance that he can put us in touch with him. Otherwise, if Gibbs comes back, G'Liat can still help us get to the bottom of this\u2014help us learn how many stars the Cluster is going to move and exactly why they're doing it.\"\n\n\"Manuel and I will go with him,\" said Fire. \"We know Edmund and can help out.\"\n\nKirsten shook her head. \"No, I need to go with him. He'll need someone who can help interpret whatever we learn from Gibbs.\"\n\n\"G'Liat seems quite capable...\" began Fire.\n\n\"G'Liat knows a lot of things, but he isn't a trained physicist or cartographer.\" She looked to Swan. \"We need to know how to find you.\"\n\n\"I'll send the address,\" said Swan.\n\nFire tried to find the right words to say. \"I know you don't like G'Liat very much...\"\n\n\"We've worked together before; we can work together now. It's all right.\" The corporate officer straightened and looked back at Simon. \"Did you have anything else to report?\"\n\nSimon sniffed and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his flannel shirt. \"Nothing definitive, but we've formed a hypothesis that Proxom may interfere with the Cluster's symbiosis with human minds.\"\n\n\"That makes sense,\" said Kirsten. She looked down at Fire. \"That sounds like something that Simon should investigate further with Dr. Cooper.\"\n\nFire nodded then looked up at Simon. \"I'll have Dr. Eva Cooper give you a call shortly so you can compare notes.\"\n\n\"The Surgeon General?\" asked Simon, wide-eyed. \"Sounds like you have quite a party at that house.\"\n\nKirsten reached across to the teleholo control pad and retrieved a data disk with the coordinates to Timothy Gibbs' apartment in Southern Arizona. She looked up at Swan. \"I suspect we'll see you in a couple of hours.\"\n\n\"Looking forward to it,\" he said and switched off his call.\n\nLooking toward Simon, Kirsten smiled. \"I'll check in once we get to Arizona.\"\n\n\"Take care, Kirsten,\" said Simon. He turned and nodded to Natalie Papadraxis who terminated the call.\n\nKirsten and Fire stepped from the teleholo room and walked down the hall. Fire found herself looking at the photos that lined the wall. She saw faces of both men and women that looked more or less like her son and her late husband. Some were in military uniform. Others were dressed casually. Almost all of the photos were taken aboard ships. One photo in particular caught and held Fire's attention. It showed her father-in-law standing with Samuel Coffin. Behind them was the ridged back of a sperm whale.\n\nAt the door to the living room, Kirsten looked back to see what was keeping Fire. \"What's that?\" she asked.\n\nFire grinned. \"We're trying to figure out what motivates a creature that is all intelligence but has only a limited capacity to affect the world around it.\" She pointed to the whale in the picture. \"I have an idea about someone that can help us.\"\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**LEGACY**\n\nManuel Raton sat on a deck chair on a small boat as it careened out into the open ocean. He reached into his pocket and retrieved a handkerchief and blew his nose. The moist air combined with the dose of Proxom that Eva Cooper had given him was making his nose run. The boat was tossed from side to side by ocean swells and Manuel kept thinking that he was going to lose his lunch. The Proxom might be keeping the Cluster out of his head, but between his stomach and his nose, there was little room for other thoughts.\n\nBefore he and Fire had left Nantucket, Eva Cooper had spoken to Simon Yermakov aboard the _Sanson_ and compared observations. She agreed that it seemed likely that Proxom suppressed the Cluster's ability to reach into people's brains. She kept a moderate supply of the drug with her and was able to ration out three days' doses to the people in the house before they left on their separate errands. G'Liat didn't take any of the drug, protesting that Proxom was poisonous to Rd'dyggians.\n\nHis stomach and nose calming for a few moments, Manuel looked up and saw Fire at the boat's wheel. She wore a simple formfitting black shirt and pants. Her hair blew backwards in the wind. He wished he could appreciate the sight more. She might be a woman in her fifties, but she was still gorgeous to him. He thought if Fire stopped the boat, perhaps he would feel better and they could go below decks\u2014there was a bed down there that looked quite inviting. Seeing the set of Fire's jaw and the intensity with which she scanned the horizon, he realized that was out of the question. They were on a mission, searching for an old friend of the family: a Sperm whale named Richard.\n\nRichard had told Mark Ellis about G'Liat and suggested that the warrior might help him understand the Cluster. Now, Fire hoped that the whale might provide some insight into the Cluster itself. Manuel had a sudden thought. Standing, he made his way up to the wheel, next to Fire. \"How do we know the Cluster isn't affecting the whales the same way as humans?\"\n\nFire looked at him and sighed. \"We don't,\" she admitted. \"However, the Clusters don't seem to have had any effect on G'Liat while we've been here. I'm guessing that the Cluster is only targeting humans. Anyone else is simply off their radar.\"\n\nManuel frowned. \"I hope you're right.\" He looked down at the boat's radar and tracking equipment in front of the wheel. \"Speaking of radar, how are we supposed to find this Richard, anyway?\"\n\nFire shrugged. \"Like all Sperm whales, he follows a migratory pattern. Mark kept records.\" She reached down and activated the holographic display. \"We're heading for the approximate area where he'd be.\"\n\nManuel studied the display for a moment. \"That's about one hundred square miles of ocean! How do we find him in all that?\"\n\nFire smiled and shook her head. \"Typical man ... can't be bothered to ask directions,\" she said. When Manuel lifted an eyebrow, Fire laughed outright. \"There's bound to be other Sperm whales in the area. If we don't find Richard first, we ask them.\"\n\nThe boat hit another swell and Manuel belched loudly. \"I'd better sit back down,\" he said.\n\n\"I was thinking about making some lunch,\" said Fire. \"Care for any?\"\n\nAt the question, Manuel turned a deeper shade of green and ran for the boat's rail.\n\n* * * *\n\nEdmund Swan found himself once again alone with the silent form of Timothy Gibbs. He stepped over to the kitchen, ordered up some coffee and thought about taking a walk, but decided against it when he thought about the images of smoldering bodies piled up in back allies. Taking the coffee, he moved to an armchair opposite his friend and sat down, hoping that the Rd'dyggian named G'Liat and the woman named Kirsten Smart would arrive soon.\n\nJust as he lifted the coffee cup to his lips, the door chime sounded. Startled, he sloshed some of the coffee on to his shirt and swore while looking at his wrist chrono. It seemed inconceivable that G'Liat and Smart could have arrived so quickly.\n\nHe stood, went to the door, and opened it. Instead of a Rd'dyggian warrior and a stout woman, Swan was surprised to see a tall, thin man with a haunted expression and salt-and-pepper hair. The deputy sheriff swallowed hard when he realized the man was pointing a hepler 225 right at his stomach.\n\nVery slowly, Swan set his cup of coffee on a shelf next to the door and raised his hands. Examining the man with his computer eye, he noted the man's elevated pulse and respiration. \"Who are you?\" asked Swan warily.\n\nThe man looked around Swan at the seated form of Gibbs, then back at Swan. \"We intercepted your teleholo call to Nantucket,\" said the man. \"We think you can help us.\"\n\n\"Who exactly are you?\" asked Swan, his eyes narrowing.\n\nThe man licked his lips and looked hard at Swan as though trying to decide how far to trust him. Finally he lowered the hepler pistol. \"My name's Jerry Lawrence,\" he said at last. \"I'm with the resistance.\"\n\n\"Against the Cluster?\"\n\nLawrence shook his head. \"We shouldn't talk here. We have reason to think that they know what we're saying.\" He cast a meaningful look at Gibbs.\n\nSwan looked at his wrist chrono again. \"I've got friends coming.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Lawrence as he turned and started down the hall.\n\nSwan stood frozen on the spot for a moment, then pursed his lips and stepped through the door, following Jerry Lawrence.\n\n* * * *\n\nKirsten and G'Liat flew to Southern Arizona aboard the chartered Rd'dyggian spacecraft. Like G'Liat, the Rd'dyggian pilot called Rizonex seemed unaffected by the Cluster. Kirsten found herself wondering whether that meant Rd'dyggians were immune to the Cluster's influence or whether that meant that the Cluster simply wasn't targeting Rd'dyggians.\n\nThe Rd'dyggian craft made the journey from Nantucket to Southern Arizona in less than an hour. In spite of the speed and the sparseness of accommodations aboard the Rd'dyggian craft, she was amazed at how smooth and comfortable the journey was.\n\nThey landed at the Southern Arizona spaceport and took a cab to Timothy Gibbs' apartment complex. Kirsten had never been to Arizona before, but noted how quiet the streets were and how strikingly blue the sky was. She suspected that Arizona had been much more like the rest of the planet before the Cluster's arrival. As she stepped from the cab, she felt as though she had stepped into a blast furnace. Looking back, she noticed that G'Liat seemed similarly uncomfortable. \"You look like this heat bothers you almost as much as me,\" she said, trying to make conversation.\n\nG'Liat typed a credit code on the cabby's keypad then turned to face Kirsten. \"The heat here is bad, but that bothers me less than the lack of humidity.\"\n\nKirsten looked at him and noticed that his orange skin was growing dry and flaky. She nodded acknowledgment, then entered the apartment building followed by G'Liat. The ceilings in the modern apartment building were higher than in Ellis' ancient house, so the warrior was able to walk upright. They found Gibbs' apartment and rang the chime. They waited for an answer, but none came. Kirsten pushed the door chime again, then folded her arms and began tapping her foot. \"Do you suppose he stepped out?\" asked Kirsten.\n\n\"It seems doubtful,\" said G'Liat. He reached into a compartment within the case he was carrying and retrieved a small device. Setting it against the keypad, he thumbed a control stud and waited a moment before looking at the readout. Though awkward given the Rd'dyggian's large fingers, he keyed a sequence into the lock and the door opened.\n\nKirsten started to step forward, but the Rd'dyggian held out his arm and stepped through the door first. Kirsten followed close on the warrior's heels and looked around the apartment. Seeing the man sitting stock still in the armchair, Kirsten pointed. \"Do you suppose that's Timothy Gibbs?\"\n\nG'Liat nodded. \"Presuming we're in the correct apartment.\"\n\n\"I checked the number,\" said Kirsten. \"It's got to be the right place.\"\n\nOnce G'Liat looked around the room, he stepped over to a set of shelves next to the door. He picked up the coffee cup and held it to his nose. The purple mustache-like feelers entered the liquid and then quickly withdrew. \"The coffee's still hot,\" explained the warrior, returning the cup to the shelf. \"I would guess that Swan left recently.\"\n\nKirsten looked around nervously. \"Well, I hope he gets back soon.\"\n\nG'Liat carried his traveling case to the kitchen table, set it down and opened it. Kirsten saw the brain scan device within.\n\n\"Don't you think we should wait for Swan?\" she asked.\n\n\"We don't know where Swan has gone, or how long he will be.\" Seeing the disapproving look on Kirsten's features, G'Liat inclined his head. \"Still, it will take time to prepare the device. We should be ready.\"\n\nKirsten dropped into the armchair across from Gibbs and frowned as she stared at the man's blank features. \"Okay, go ahead and prepare the device, but you'll hold off using it until I give the word.\"\n\n\"I respectfully remind you that I am no longer a member of your crew,\" said the warrior tartly.\n\n\"So noted,\" said Kirsten, icily. \"Neither are you a citizen of this planet. I'd like to find out what happened to Swan and talk to him before we start poking around in this man's brain.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" said the warrior. He turned back toward the kitchen table. \"However, I warn you that the danger builds every second we delay.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Kirsten. \"I know.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nAs before, John Mark Ellis rowed toward the portal. Once he arrived, he was once again surrounded by a bright light and felt as though he was traveling at great speed. He concentrated on the illusion of the boat. He didn't want the small craft to vanish, especially if he ended up on the other side far away from the _Pequod._ When he emerged from the tunnel, he once again found himself near the black hole at the center of the galaxy. He looked around, attempting to get his bearings. His brow creased as he caught sight of a silver craft that looked almost alien to him until he realized that it was shaped like a primitive Earth rocket. He smiled when he realized that the ship looked like something he'd seen in a science fiction vid from the mid-twentieth century.\n\nHowever, as he watched, the smile fell away. He noticed a yellow beam of some kind emerging from the bow of the ship and shooting toward a distant star. At first he wasn't quite sure what was happening, but then he noticed that little by little the star was moving.\n\nEllis turned and saw the _Pequod._ As with the silver ship, the whaling ship projected a yellow beam toward a star. Looking closer, the captain thought he noticed activity on the whale ship's deck, like some kind of scuffle or fight. He grabbed both oars and began to row with all his strength.\n\nHowever, it rapidly became apparent that Ellis was not making any headway toward the _Pequod._ Instead, he was moving away from the whaling ship and back toward the light. \"No!\" he shouted, trying to impose his will on the events that were happening. He tried rowing again. In spite of his efforts, he shot into the light that took him back to the lab\u2014back to the Cluster orbiting the Earth.\n\n* * * *\n\nUnseen by Ellis, a small probe orbited a star, not too far from where he was furiously rowing. Not only was Ellis unable to see the probe, the probe could not see him, though for different reasons. Ellis did not see the probe because he was too busy concentrating on the task of rowing. The probe did not see him, since he was, in fact, nothing but a stream of electromagnetic energy existing outside the realm of visible light.\n\nWhat the probe did see were two silver clusters of spheres\u2014one relatively close by and another rather distant. Each cluster projected a yellow energy beam toward a star that was, in turn, very slowly moving. The probe relayed the images it was recording back to the largest moon of Saturn, Titan. On Titan, a large teddy bear-like creature watched a holographic display of the probe's signal with rapt interest. She had a silver-gray pelt and she was the matron of her people and leader of the galaxy.\n\nShe knew that by moving stars around in the center of the galaxy, that the Cluster would wreak havoc on the galaxy's gravitational tides, possibly doing untold amounts of damage.\n\nHer people had been slaves of the Cluster for billions of years, though. As a result, she knew two things. The Cluster\u2014or the Intelligence, as her people knew it\u2014loved its appendages. The Cluster would do everything in its power to keep humans and their home solar system safe. By extension, that meant that her own world would also be safe.\n\nTeklar also knew that if she warned the rest of the galaxy, the Cluster might seek either vengeance upon her people, destroying them; or even worse, the Cluster might enslave them again. Therefore, Teklar watched the display and did nothing else.\n\n* * * *\n\nJerry Lawrence led Edmund Swan to a building about a block away from Tim Gibbs' apartment complex. Inside, they climbed a flight of stairs and walked down a dark hallway. Swan adjusted his computer eye to let in more light. As he did, he noticed that the graffiti in this building had not been scrubbed clean and the wood had a faintly musty smell.\n\nAt last, they came to a stop in front of a door and Lawrence keyed a sequence into the computer touchpad.\n\nStepping inside, Swan counted four women and five men huddled around a teleholo watching the news. One of the women turned off the teleholo and stood. The others all turned care-worn expressions toward the deputy sheriff. \"You must be Edmund Swan,\" said the woman.\n\nSwan inclined his head.\n\n\"We're the Southern Arizona faction of the resistance against the Cluster,\" said the woman a little nervously, as though she was afraid that Swan would laugh at her.\n\nSwan looked around at the people gathered. \"There's only ten of you,\" he said with just a hint of despair.\n\n\"I know,\" said Lawrence in half-apology. \"There are cells in other cities...\"\n\n\"But, I'm afraid our numbers are shrinking as the Cluster contacts more people.\" The woman stepped forward and offered Swan her hand. \"My name is Maria Gonzalez.\" She then introduced the others in the room. \"I believe you already know Jerry.\"\n\nJerry smiled half-heartedly, thumbed the safety on his gun, and then tucked it in his waistband.\n\n\"What exactly do you want with me?\" asked Swan.\n\n\"You're the same Edmund Swan from Sufiro who organized the New Granadan resistance against Tejo, are you not?\" asked Gonzalez.\n\nSwan nodded slowly. \"I am,\" he said slowly. \"What does that have to do...\"\n\nGonzalez put her hand on Swan's elbow and led him to a chair. \"We are civilians, Mr. Swan. Jerry Lawrence used to repair teleholos. Carlos there\u2014\" she pointed to a man with straggly black hair \"\u2014used to be a plumber. I was a principal at one of the local elementary schools. None of us is exactly military material, but we've seen what the Cluster is doing and we don't like it. We want to stop it.\" She sat down, put her hands on her knees and looked into Swan's eyes.\n\n\"What about the police?\" asked Swan, afraid he already knew the answer.\n\n\"Those that survive,\" said the man called Carlos, \"are all controlled by the Cluster.\"\n\n\"We need someone like you,\" pleaded Jerry, \"that has military experience as well as experience with the Cluster to help organize us.\"\n\nSwan took in a deep breath then let it out slowly. \"Including people in other cities, how many of you are there in all?\"\n\n\"About a hundred and fifty that we know of,\" said Gonzalez cautiously, afraid the small number would send Swan storming from the room.\n\n\"But there are only four Clusters,\" Lawrence chimed in, hopefully.\n\n\"Do you have any armaments?\" asked Swan. \"Any ships?\"\n\nLawrence retrieved the gun from his waistband. \"Only a few hand heplers.\"\n\nSwan shook his head and closed his eyes. A moment later, he opened them and looked at each face in the room. He saw the horror of people who had lost friends and loved ones. He saw people who didn't understand how it was that their world had changed so radically. He saw people afraid they were going to be next to be absorbed by the Cluster or die in the process. \"I'll be honest\u2014I don't see what chance we have, but I'll help if I can.\"\n\nHope glimmered in several people's eyes. \"That's all we ask,\" said Maria Gonzalez, her own eyes bright with moisture.\n\n\"I need to get back to Tim Gibbs' apartment,\" explained Swan. \"I was supposed to meet someone. They might be able to help me get word out\u2014help us find a ship, maybe some more armaments.\"\n\nMaria Gonzalez nodded slowly. \"Good,\" she said. \"Go meet your friends then come back tomorrow and let us know what you learn.\"\n\nGonzalez and Swan stood and shook hands. The deputy sheriff tried to find more words, but was only able to drop his eyes to the dirty floor, turn and make his way back to Timothy Gibbs' apartment.\n\n* * * *\n\nManuel Raton looked over the boat's rail. As the day wore on, he grew more accustomed to the rocking and swaying of the boat. He'd spent most of his life living in inland towns or cities, well away from large bodies of water. The only time he'd spent a significant amount of time on the water was as a teenager when he'd traveled between the continents of New Granada and Tejo on a large ocean-going vessel on the planet Sufiro. As he thought back on that voyage, he remembered it as a happy time\u2014a time he'd bonded with another teenager, a boy named Sam Stone. Manuel's frown deepened as he thought about the greed that ultimately overtook his friend and how that greed compelled Stone to kill Manuel's parents.\n\nHe felt the boat slow and he looked toward the bow. Fire pulled back the throttle. \"Is everything all right?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said. \"We're approaching the area where Richard should be.\" She activated the boat's autopilot and stepped back toward the aft rail. \"Deep thoughts?\" she asked, seeing his frown.\n\nManuel shook his head. \"Just thinking about the last time I was out this far at sea.\"\n\n\"You look like you're feeling better,\" she said, noting that his skin color had improved.\n\nHe nodded and gently patted his stomach. \"Still a little queasy, but I'm doing a lot better than a couple of hours ago, that's for sure.\"\n\n\"Glad to hear it.\" She took him in her arms and he leaned his head against her shoulder.\n\nThey stood that way for a moment. \"Are you ever sorry we got back together?\" asked Manuel.\n\nFire shook her head. \"Not at all,\" she said. She stood back and looked into Manuel's eyes and smiled. \"I do miss Jerome Ellis, but you and I have been friends since we were both children. There are few people I trust as much as you.\"\n\nManuel took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. \"I've just been afraid...\"\n\n\"That I'm in some kind of rebound ... going with you just because I feel I need someone in my life.\" Fire shook her head and chuckled. \"I'm surprised at you. I'd think you of all people would know me better than that.\"\n\nManuel smiled, took her in his arms, and kissed her deeply. When he finally released her he caught sight of something in the distance, over her shoulder\u2014almost like the shimmering of crystal.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" she asked.\n\nHe pointed. \"Is that a whale spout?\" he asked.\n\nShe turned and nodded slowly. \"I think it might be.\" The two stepped back toward the wheel. Fire gently turned the boat toward the spout. She pointed to the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet to the side of the wheel. \"There are translator boxes in there.\"\n\nManuel knelt down and retrieved the translator units. He handed one to Fire then clipped the main speaker box of the other to his belt. He put on the headset and adjusted the microphone. As they came closer, Manuel realized that there were several whales ahead. In spite of his stomach giving a slight lurch, he moved toward the boat's bow to get a closer look.\n\nHe didn't know much about whales, but there had been a lot of pictures in the Ellis house. Almost all of them showed creatures with massive square heads and tiny\u2014almost underdeveloped\u2014lower jaws full of sharp teeth. These whales looked completely different. Their heads were rounder in front and more wrinkled on the top. Their jaws dominated their faces and when one opened its mouth, Manuel saw that it was filled not with teeth but with something that looked more like hair.\n\nFire activated the boat's hover controls and lifted it out of the water, so the sound of its engine wouldn't disturb the whales. He looked back, his brow creased. Carefully, Fire stepped forward and put her arm around Manuel's shoulder.\n\n\"Those whales don't look like the pictures at the Ellis home,\" complained Manuel.\n\n\"That's because they're humpback whales,\" said Fire. They watched as one of the whales rolled onto its side, revealing a long, paddle-like flipper. \"They're a different species than Richard.\"\n\n\"Can they help us find him?\" asked Manuel.\n\n\"I doubt it,\" said Fire. \"Humpbacks don't care for humans very much. It's best if we keep our distance.\"\n\n\"Why don't they like humans?\" asked Manuel.\n\n\"Because humans almost hunted them to extinction,\" said Fire. She looked up toward the sky. \"We didn't stop until the late twenty-first century. That's when Myra Lee first recognized that the whales were communicating with the Titans.\"\n\nManuel sighed, feeling a momentary pang of regret at being born a human. His childhood friend, Sam Stone, wasn't the only monster. He looked back to the whales. \"Can we at least listen to them, hear what they're saying?\"\n\n\"We can try,\" said Fire. \"Keep in mind that humpback whales speak in song. They don't talk to each other quite the same way we do.\"\n\nManuel put his hand to his ear and listened carefully to the receiver. He heard a reference to the land-apes that ply the water on floating islands. Fire pointed to some smaller whales in the distance. \"I think they're talking about us,\" she said.\n\n\"How ironic,\" sang one whale, \"that the land-apes are at the mercy of creatures such as us; creatures that do not build tools of their own; creatures that but swim the depths of space.\"\n\n\"They're aware of the Cluster?\" Manuel whispered to Fire.\n\n\"Whales are aware of a great many things,\" she said, then shushed him. She tuned her translator and then nodded. Tapping Manuel on the shoulder, she pointed to the setting and indicated that he should also adjust his translator box.\n\nWhen he did, he heard a different song. \"For us, the art is the song, the composition, the memory of what was and the dreams of what will be. For the land-apes, the art is the death, plunder of the world and taking more than they give back.\"\n\n\"How are the land-apes different from the spermaceti?\" came an eerie refrain. Fire inclined her head as she listened and tapped a button on her translator.\n\n\"For the spermaceti, the art is the hunt, the chase, the challenge. They hunt and are hunted. They exist in balance with the world.\"\n\nFire turned off her translator and stepped back toward the boat's wheel, then put the unit next to the computer. Manuel stepped up next to her and watched as she started a program. A moment later, a set of coordinates appeared above the holographic dais.\n\n\"What's that?\" asked Manuel.\n\n\"That's where we'll find the sperm whales,\" said Fire. \"You see, part of what makes humpbacks hard to understand is that their songs are multi-layered and contain more information than just the words. When they talked about the sperm whales, they also happened to tell us where we could find them.\"\n\n\"And Mark's friend, Richard?\"\n\nFire shook her head. \"Not exactly, but if we find a pod of sperm whales, they'll be a lot more willing to talk to us and help.\"\n\nManuel pursed his lips while looking out at the pod of humpback whales. \"I'm surprised any whale is willing to help humans after what we've done to them.\"\n\nFire nodded. Then, with the boat still in hover mode, she turned away from the humpbacks and drifted a distance away before dropping back into the water so they could continue on their way.\n\n* * * *\n\nWhen Edmund Swan returned to Timothy Gibbs' apartment he found an eight-foot tall Rd'dyggian warrior in a black turtleneck shirt glaring at a stout woman wearing a TransGalactic blazer and blue slacks, her hands on her hips.\n\nSwan cleared his throat and the two looked up at him. The woman's surprise at his entrance seemed genuine. Though the Rd'dyggian also looked surprised, Swan couldn't help but feel the surprise was nothing but an affectation.\n\nThe woman stepped forward, her hand extended. \"You must be Edmund Swan. Good to meet you at last. I'm Kirsten Smart.\" As the deputy sheriff took her hand, Kirsten looked into his mismatched eyes and her breath caught. She quickly turned her eyes to Gibbs. \"How's he been doing?\"\n\nSwan smiled nervously as he released Kirsten's hand. \"Who can tell? He's been like that most of the time since I've been here.\"\n\n\"But he does have periods of consciousness?\" asked Kirsten.\n\n\"About every ten hours he wakes for an hour then goes back under.\" Swan looked down at his wrist chrono. \"He's due to wake any minute.\"\n\nSwan looked up at the Rd'dyggian warrior and pursed his lips. All of the Rd'dyggians that Swan knew liked to wear loose-fitting garments and made large, loping movements. This one stepped up to Swan with almost delicate precision and introduced himself. Seeing the open case on Gibbs' kitchen table, Swan stepped past G'Liat and examined the device within using his computer eye. \"I've heard about these brain scan devices,\" he said. \"I don't know exactly how I feel about them.\"\n\n\"As a law enforcement official,\" said G'Liat, \"I would think you would find such a device very useful for interrogation.\"\n\nSwan gritted his teeth. \"Devices like that violate too many basic rights,\" he said, shaking his head. \"I'd only agree to its use in the gravest of emergencies.\"\n\n\"That's just what we were talking about when you walked in,\" said Kirsten. \"G'Liat would like to use the device on your friend now, but I was trying to persuade him to wait until your return.\"\n\nThe warrior stepped between the deputy sheriff and Kirsten so quickly and quietly that Swan jumped in spite of himself. \"Actually what I'd like to know is where you were. Why weren't you here?\"\n\nKirsten shot the warrior an angry look and Swan opened his mouth to answer, but a shuffling from Gibbs' armchair interrupted everyone. The computer technician blinked in surprise at the new people occupying his apartment. He smiled nervously and waved as he rushed to the bathroom and closed the door behind him. When he was finished, he stepped out and made his way over to the kitchen.\n\n\"Tim,\" said Swan, \"I'd like you to meet two friends of mine: Kirsten Smart and G'Liat.\"\n\nGibbs punched his order into the food preparation unit then turned on Swan. \"Edmund, I don't mind you being here, but I'd appreciate the courtesy of being asked before you invite people into my home.\"\n\nSwan started to say something but Kirsten held up her hand. \"We won't stay long,\" she said. \"We've heard a little about the project you're working on.\"\n\n\"We're curious,\" interjected G'Liat. \"We'd like to know more.\"\n\nGibbs brightened for a moment, then his eyes narrowed as he evaluated G'Liat. \"Rd'dyggians are warriors and pragmatic to the extreme. Why would you be interested in an advanced computer project?\"\n\nKirsten's jaw dropped. Even though she didn't have much love for G'Liat personally, she was shocked to hear such a sweepingly racist statement from the engineer. G'Liat cleared the distance from the table to Gibbs in a single step and looked down into the engineer's face.\n\n\"I will remind you, Mr. Gibbs that Rd'dyggians were in space while your kind were still killing each other with the bones of animals.\" His voice was soft, but so icy that it sent chills down Swan's spine.\n\nEdmund took two steps forward and put a hand on G'Liat's chest. \"Tim's been working awfully hard,\" he said, trying to think of the right words to pacify a potentially dangerous situation. He examined the Rd'dyggian warrior with his computer eye, but found the readings hard to interpret. He turned his attention to his friend. Dots of perspiration broke out on Gibbs' upper lip.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Gibbs slowly. \"I didn't mean to offend.\" He looked down to the floor. A moment later, a chime sounded, indicating his dinner was finished. Standing a little too quickly, he upset his chair. Hands shaking, he took his food from the unit and carried it around the eight-foot tall warrior to the table. With a certain grace, G'Liat righted Gibbs' chair and held it for him.\n\nKirsten looked up at G'Liat with a frown, and then joined Gibbs at the table. \"I'm afraid we've gotten off on the wrong foot,\" she said, gently. When Gibbs looked up, she smiled reassuringly. \"I'm a cartographer for TransGalactic.\"\n\nGibbs chuckled, shook his head and then he took a bite of food. \"You'll have your work cut out for you,\" he said.\n\n\"My ship has sensed gravitational shifts from the center of the galaxy. From what Edmund tells me, this might be related to what you're doing.\"\n\nGibbs nodded. \"The Cluster is a very ancient lifeform with knowledge that spans billions of years of existence,\" he said slowly. \"They want a place to deposit that knowledge, so others can benefit.\" He stood from the table and stepped over to his teleholo. He brought up a schematic that showed the black hole at the center of the galaxy, with intense jets of energy shooting out into the reaches of intergalactic space. A veil of gas surrounded the dense mass. \"We're building a memory core.\"\n\nKirsten and G'Liat both stepped up to the teleholo and examined the image displayed as Gibbs returned to the table and continued eating. \"So,\" said G'Liat, \"why does the Cluster need a memory core? It seems they're perfectly capable of storing the information they've gathered.\"\n\n\"They're dying,\" Gibbs responded bluntly. \"There used to be more of them than there are now. They want to make sure the information they've gathered is preserved.\"\n\nKirsten chewed her lower lip for a moment before looking up at Gibbs. \"Do you mind if I use your teleholo to call my ship?\"\n\n\"Be my guest,\" said Gibbs.\n\nAs Kirsten called the _Sanson,_ Swan sat down with Gibbs at the table. \"So that's what this is all about? The Cluster wants to save their knowledge for posterity?\" When Gibbs nodded, Swan looked up at G'Liat. \"That doesn't seem so bad, does it?\"\n\n\"It all depends,\" said the warrior as he stepped toward the table. \"Who gets to access the data?\"\n\n\"Anyone,\" said Gibbs. \"Part of the design is a beacon with coded instructions on how to retrieve the information.\"\n\nSwan noticed that Kirsten was deep in conversation with the _Sanson's_ first officer. He stood up from the table and joined her as Yermakov whistled. He was kneeling next to a woman typing on one of the ship's consoles. A holographic simulation of the black hole appeared. After a moment, there was a flash of light.\n\n\"Are these masses correct?\" asked Yermakov, wide-eyed.\n\nKirsten looked up. \"Mr. Gibbs, are the masses you used for your simulation the same ones you're using in the memory core?\"\n\nGibbs nodded and wiped his mouth on a napkin.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" asked Swan.\n\nThe doll-like figure of Yermakov stood up on the little dais. \"Bringing that much mass together is going to trigger a massive shock wave throughout the galaxy,\" he explained. \"It will strip the atmospheres from a million stars. Long before that happens the tachyon burst from this event will devastate life as we know it. Zahir, Rd'dyggia, Titan, Earth ... and all of their colonies...\" Simon looked down at his feet then back up. \"Kirsten, if they complete this project, life as we know it is over.\"\n\nKirsten, Swan, and G'Liat all looked at Gibbs.\n\nGibbs looked from one face to the other. \"The Cluster says they'll protect those of us here on Earth. They can control the gravity waves so we'll be safe in this solar system.\"\n\n\"That still leaves everyone else,\" said Kirsten. \"Humans on Alpha Coma and the other colonies, not to mention all the people in the galaxy.\" She deliberately avoided looking at G'Liat.\n\nG'Liat made a low, menacing growl while Swan dropped into a chair and put his face in his hands and thought about his friends on the far side of the galaxy on the planet Sufiro. Kirsten thanked Simon and then terminated the connection. Without another word, she stepped out of the apartment, needing to get to some fresh air.\n\n* * * *\n\nJohn Mark Ellis awoke in his room on Nantucket and found himself looking into the blue eyes of Eva Cooper. She started slightly, and self-consciously brushed blonde hair behind her back. He blinked a few times and she helped him sit up, then handed him a pill and a glass of water. Without thinking about it, Ellis took the pill and greedily drank the water.\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Ellis. He handed the glass back to Cooper. \"May I have more?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" she said, and she stepped across the hall to the bathroom where she refilled the glass. \"You must be dehydrated after two days asleep.\"\n\nEllis swallowed the second glass of water and then nodded. With that, he leapt up and stepped across to the bathroom. When he was finished, he looked up and down the hall as he padded back to the bedroom. \"Where are the others?\"\n\nCooper filled Ellis in on the events of the last two days while he rifled through the closet looking for some clothes. \"I'm glad to hear that Mom's going out to talk to Richard. I think if anyone can help, he can. The Cluster's building something at the center of the galaxy and I don't like what I saw at all.\" He looked out the door then at Eva. \"How's Coffin doing?\"\n\n\"He's been doing amazingly well for someone who's been asleep for so long. I've been giving him some sucrose solution to keep his body from dehydrating too far. I was just about to check on him when I noticed you were waking up.\" She looked at his pajama bottoms then smiled sheepishly. \"I'll go check on him and let you get dressed,\" she said.\n\nAs Ellis pulled on his pants, he tried to remember what he'd seen just before he awoke. The image of the scuffle on the deck of the _Pequod_ came to his mind. Quickly, he threw on socks and shoes, then stepped across the hall.\n\nCooper looked up from Coffin and swallowed hard. \"His life signs have dropped,\" she said. \"I don't know why\u2014maybe he's been too long without food and water, maybe it's something else.\"\n\n\"I need to get back,\" said Ellis. \"If I can get back to the Cluster, I think I can save him.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" said Eva as she stood up. \"I don't think that's going to be possible for at least 24 hours.\" She pulled out a chair and indicated that Ellis sit down. As he did, she explained what they had learned about Proxom inhibiting the Cluster.\n\n\"So that pill you gave me?\" asked Ellis.\n\n\"Was Proxom,\" she said.\n\nEllis took a deep breath, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and then tried to think. \"Something major's going on and we're going to need help.\" Ellis looked to his friend, lying on the bed. \"He's going to need help.\"\n\n\"Where are we going to get help?\" asked Cooper.\n\n\"Let's get Kirsten, G'Liat and Swan back here,\" he said. \"Then I think we need to have a talk with the people who should be helping us.\"\n\n\"Who's that?\"\n\n\"The people who used to be subject to the Cluster,\" said Ellis. \"The Titans.\"\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**Part III: Battle for the New Earth**\n\n _\"And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet and upon her head, a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.\"_\n\n _Revelation 12: 1-4_\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**PASSION**\n\nFire pulled back on the throttle suddenly and turned to avoid hitting a dark gray form that leapt out of the water in the boat's path. Manuel fell out of the deck chair and rolled into the boat's rail. \"What the hell?\" he cursed as he pushed himself to his knees and rubbed his neck.\n\nFire quickly set the boat on hover mode and turned on her translator in time to hear the clicks of the sperm whale that had just emerged in front of them say, \"The cycle continues.\"\n\n\"The cycle continues,\" said Fire, mustering some resolve. She looked out at the whale and tried to decide if he was the one known as Richard. Manuel struggled to his feet and joined Fire by the rail.\n\n\"You are the one called Suki Firebrandt Ellis,\" said the whale. Manuel inclined his head, listening to the whale's static-like vocalizations for a moment before turning on his own translator box. He heard the whale say, \"Your mate and calf introduced us several seasons ago.\"\n\n\"You're the whale called Richard?\" asked Fire.\n\n\"Your mate and calf knew me by that name,\" said the whale. \"I am content to be called that.\" The whale swam close to the boat and turned so that one eye looked up at Fire and Manuel. \"I do not know you, land ape.\"\n\nManuel looked helplessly at Fire and shrugged. \"He is called Manuel Raton,\" said Fire. \"He is a friend of ... my calf ... John Mark Ellis.\"\n\nThe whale lifted its tail out of the water and slapped it down on the surface. \"How is John Mark Ellis? Is he well?\"\n\nFire shook her head. \"I wish I could tell you for sure.\" She looked down at the deck and tried to find the right words. \"He lives, but last we saw him, his mind had left his body. We believe it was stolen by a thing called the Cluster.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Richard. He swam a short distance away from the boat. \"John Mark spoke to me of the Cluster when he last visited. It is a thing of space that understands the hunt and the death. I told John Mark that he should speak with a philosopher called G'Liat.\"\n\n\"He did,\" said Fire. \"G'Liat helped John Mark find the Cluster; helped him follow it to its home, a cluster of ancient stars. There, John Mark communicated with it. Now his body is back on Earth. G'Liat is here as well.\"\n\nThe whale swam a little further off and said, \"Whales care not for the matters of space.\"\n\n\"You can't just ignore the Cluster,\" called Manuel. \"It's over our heads, orbiting the Earth.\"\n\nRichard made a long, gentle arc and circled back to the boat. \"I do not ignore the Cluster,\" he said. \"Suki Firebrandt Ellis has already told me that the Cluster has stolen the mind of John Mark Ellis. That matters to me, but I am powerless\u2014just as I was when a giant squid carried my calf down to the depths\u2014just as I was when my mate came to the end of her time. I am not a tool builder.\"\n\n\"Neither is the Cluster,\" interjected Fire. \"What we need is understanding.\"\n\n\"What would a tool-builder offer you?\" asked Manuel.\n\nRichard exhaled and a spout of water washed over the deck, drenching both Fire and Manuel. \"John Mark Ellis and Jerome Ellis offered me friendship. Beyond that, I do not know what a tool builder could offer me. I have no need for tools, no desire to build.\"\n\nFire's eyes narrowed. \"Why not?\" she asked.\n\n\"What have tools given you?\" asked Richard. Again he swam away a short distance, circled around and came back. Manuel sensed the whale was growing restless.\n\n\"Tools give us the means to support ourselves,\" said Manuel. He rubbed his hands through his hair, trying to think. \"They give us the means to feed ourselves.\"\n\n\"My teeth and jaw do that for me,\" said Richard matter-of-factly.\n\n\"Tools have allowed us to travel far, to explore,\" suggested Fire. \"Without tools, we couldn't have built this boat to be out here with you.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" said Richard. \"But why must you be out here? What drove land apes to leave their migratory paths?\"\n\n\"Curiosity,\" said Manuel slowly. \"The desire to learn and pass knowledge from one generation to another.\"\n\nRichard slipped below the water and came up on the other side of the boat. Fire stepped over to the opposite rail. Manuel, beginning to shiver as a slight breeze picked up, joined her. \"What you describe is like the songs of the humpbacks,\" said the whale after some moments of silence.\n\n\"Except it's different,\" said Fire. \"The humpbacks make a living record of their travels. With pencil and paper we can write down our thoughts. With books and computers, we can store our thoughts for generations to come. I can read the exact thoughts of my grandmothers and great grandmothers if I choose.\"\n\nRichard exhaled again and slipped under the water, saying, \"the cycle resumes.\" Manuel looked back over the opposite rail to see if Richard reappeared, but he didn't. \"Is that it?\" he asked. Fire shrugged. Noticing Manuel's shivering, she went to the cabinet and retrieved two towels and wrapped one around his shoulders.\n\n\"Humpbacks have a living memory,\" said Manuel as he started to warm up. He looked up at the sky. Above, wispy cirrus clouds were thickening into overcast. \"Living memories are passed down through oral tradition. They change with time. Things are forgotten; things are added. What if the Cluster's memory is like the whales'?\"\n\n\"How can that be?\" asked Fire. \"From everything G'Liat and John Mark said, it seems that the Cluster is little more than a giant computer itself.\"\n\n\"But it's also alive,\" said Manuel slowly. He tugged at the end of his mustache and looked over at the boat's control panel. \"Even computers have data taken off and new data written in its place.\"\n\nFire and Manuel were startled as a voice issued from the translator box. \"The cycle continues.\" Returning to the starboard rail, they saw Richard again. \"You said that G'Liat is here on Earth?\"\n\nFire and Manuel looked at each other, then back at the whale. \"Yes,\" said Fire.\n\n\"I must speak with him. You have posed several interesting ideas, but they are difficult to understand. Whales understand not the ways of land apes nor understand the ways of space. Perhaps G'Liat can help me understand. Then, perhaps I can help more. I am concerned for John Mark Ellis. I will help, if I can.\" Before Fire or Manuel could say anything else, the whale said, \"the cycle resumes,\" and slipped back under the water.\n\n\"I think that was it,\" said Fire. She stepped back to the wheel and turned the boat around, back toward Nantucket Island.\n\n* * * *\n\nKirsten was surprised that G'Liat had not simply killed Gibbs. She had enough friends on colony worlds such as Alpha Coma and stationed aboard ships throughout the galaxy that had she a gun in hand, she would have been tempted to pull the trigger herself. However, G'Liat explained that Gibbs was more useful alive than dead. Kirsten wasn't quite certain how to interpret that, but agreed with Swan's assessment that there might be some way to persuade Gibbs to help them from the inside. Even so, Kirsten felt no desire to stay with Gibbs any longer. \"I don't know about either of you,\" she said once Gibbs fell back into his trance, \"but, I want to get back to Nantucket.\"\n\nSwan chewed his lower lip for a moment, then looked up at Kirsten. \"I want to go with you, but there's something I need to do here.\" G'Liat looked up with keen interest and Swan suddenly felt the need to get out from under the warrior's gaze.\n\n\"Let's take a walk,\" suggested Kirsten.\n\nThough he showed no outward emotion, G'Liat continued to watch as Kirsten and Swan left the apartment.\n\nAs they walked down the hall and rode in the elevator, Swan told Kirsten about the resistance.\n\n\"It sounds like a lost cause,\" said Kirsten as they stepped out of the building into the glaring Arizona sun.\n\nSwan swallowed hard. \"Probably,\" he admitted. He took a few steps down the street and looked around at the buildings, then up to the blue sky. \"I never thought I'd see blue sky in Arizona,\" he mused. He held out his arms. \"Out beyond the city there's desert\u2014a little, anyway\u2014and maybe Saguaro cactus can grow and Palo Verde trees can provide a little shade again. Maybe the scent of mesquite will perfume the air after a monsoon rain.\"\n\n\"It's a beautiful thought,\" said Kirsten with a slight smile.\n\nSwan dropped his arms to his side. \"I can't change what the Cluster has done, but Earth belongs to humans\u2014not just the ones who live here, but those humans on the colonies as well\u2014not just to mindless zombies like Tim Gibbs, but to those that will appreciate the sights and smells.\" He looked down to the ground then back up to Kirsten. \"You are doing your part to stop the Cluster. I have to do my part. My part is helping the resistance here in Arizona.\" He stepped forward and took her hands. \"The problem is, I can't do it alone. I need Manuel or Mark\u2014if he's awake again\u2014to get a message to Ellison Firebrandt on Sufiro.\" Swan reached into his shirt pocket, took out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote a note, then handed it to Kirsten.\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" said Kirsten as she folded the paper and put it in her pocket. She turned back toward the apartment building, but noticed that Swan had not joined her. \"Aren't you coming?\" she asked.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Lock up when you leave. I just want to take a walk.\"\n\nKirsten smiled a little sadly, then nodded and went back into the building. She and G'Liat traveled back to the island aboard the ship the Rd'dyggian warrior had chartered. During the short journey, Kirsten found herself staring at the pilot, Rizonex. She wondered how much he knew and what he thought of the situation with the Cluster. She looked at his hands resting on the console along with G'Liat's. Through the computer, the two Rd'dyggians could share their thoughts without vocalizing. It was likely that the pilot knew everything that G'Liat did.\n\nLanding at the island's spaceport, they were once again greeted by old Charlie Rogers, who all-too-cheerily drove the two back to the Ellis house. G'Liat went to the door while Kirsten tried to pay. \"No need for friends of John Mark to pay me. It's my pleasure to have some company,\" said Charlie.\n\nKirsten joined G'Liat at the door, unlocked it and stepped inside then smiled when she saw John Mark sitting at the table having lunch with Dr. Cooper. She stepped across the room and put her arms around him from behind. \"I'm glad to see you back,\" she whispered in his ear. She then frowned as she saw the dour look on his face.\n\nMark reached up and patted Kirsten's hand. \"It's good to see you,\" he said, gently. \"It's just that Coffin's in trouble. I think he's dying.\"\n\nDr. Cooper looked down at her plate. \"And I'm afraid I didn't help any.\" She looked back up at Kirsten. \"I gave Mark Proxom as we discussed.\"\n\nG'Liat entered and pushed the door closed. Mark Ellis nodded acknowledgement at the tall warrior. \"I'm glad to see you back,\" he said. \"The Cluster's building something big at the center of the galaxy and we need all the help we can get.\"\n\n\"We know,\" said G'Liat, somberly. He explained what they had learned from Timothy Gibbs and Kirsten reported what they had learned from the _Sanson._\n\n\"Didn't Edmund Swan come back with you?\" asked Mark, once they finished their narrative.\n\nKirsten cast a meaningful glance at G'Liat then looked back at Mark. \"He decided he needed to stay behind,\" she said simply.\n\n\"I suspect he's been asked to join a resistance movement,\" said the warrior bluntly. \"A futile gesture, though. The only way to defeat the Cluster is to pool our resources.\"\n\nMark looked at Kirsten who simply nodded acknowledgment that G'Liat had guessed correctly.\n\nMark and Kirsten sat down on the couch, next to each other. The captain took out a cigar, but after a sharp look both from Kirsten and Eva, he didn't light it. Instead, he simply held it in his teeth as they discussed what they had learned. \"What I don't understand,\" said Mark around the cigar, \"was exactly what happened to me. It was like I was in some strange dream world.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly you were,\" said G'Liat. Stooped over, he moved around the remaining chair around the coffee table and sat. \"Somehow the Cluster seems able to copy your memories, your thoughts, everything that makes you an individual and place that essence into themselves.\"\n\n\"Then how was I able to move from one location to the other?\" asked Mark, removing the cigar from his mouth. \"I gather that I was talking to Gibbs aboard a Cluster that was orbiting the Earth. However, there's another Cluster\u2014maybe two, now\u2014at the center of the galaxy.\"\n\nG'Liat inclined his head in a very human-like gesture. \"The Clusters must have some way to communicate with each other. It's probably an EQ channel like we use for starship communication.\"\n\n\"You mean my 'spirit' found a way to ride from one Cluster to another?\" asked Mark, his brow creased.\n\n\"Like a data packet being transferred from one computer to another,\" affirmed G'Liat. Kirsten had a feeling that if the giant warrior were capable of shrugging, he would have.\n\nMark stood and stepped over to the fireplace. In spite of Kirsten and Dr. Cooper's silent objections, he lit the cigar. Kirsten sighed and looked around the room. Her eyes finally settled on the stairs. \"So, what do we do about Coffin?\" she asked. \"If he's in trouble, I'm guessing that means that Ms. Meiji at Mao is in trouble, as are others. Their minds may be alive in the Cluster but what happens if their bodies die here on Earth?\"\n\n\"We need to do something,\" said G'Liat, standing. \"If the Cluster is simply copying humans' personality and memory matrix, it's possible that the data still exists in the brains of those humans here on Earth. Could injecting the humans here on Earth with Proxom cause them to revive?\"\n\nEva gasped. \"What would that mean? Would that mean that there were suddenly two copies of a person\u2014one in the person's body and one copied in the Cluster's memory?\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" said G'Liat, flatly. \"It would explain certain ... observations. A person who is under the influence of an orbiting Cluster is having data transferred back and forth\u2014a copy is being made as they work. Those on the more distant Clusters are simply too far away.\" He started to move toward the door.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" asked Kirsten.\n\n\"Back to the ship,\" he said, opening the door. \"It has been a long and tiring day and I wish to consult the shipboard computer, to see if I can learn more about the properties of Proxom and refresh my memory on brain transfer experiments.\" With that, the warrior left, closing the door behind him.\n\nMark exhaled a small cloud of smoke with a sigh. \"He is right. We need to know more, before we proceed, but I think there's an easy way to get that information.\"\n\n\"The Titans,\" said Kirsten, as though reading Mark's thoughts. \"We can be there tomorrow on the _Sanson_. Edmund Swan also wants us to get a message to your grandfather. From Titan, we could jump out of the solar system, send the message and be back within the hour. What are we waiting for?\"\n\n\"I want to go back,\" said Mark, stepping toward the kitchen table. \"I want to see if there's anything I can do to help Coffin and the others from within. It seems like I'm able to move from one Cluster to the others better than most. I might be able to do something to help.\"\n\nKirsten smiled. \"I understand. We can send Simon to Titan.\"\n\nMark took his cigar and tossed it into the fireplace. \"Let's wait for Mom and Manuel to get back and see what they've learned from Richard. She might want to go to Titan as well.\" The captain stroked his mustache thinking about his mother's last foray to Titan and how she'd managed to break into the Titans' computer system to learn about their connection to the Cluster in the first place. \"In the meantime, I think I could use some fresh air.\" He looked to Kirsten. \"Care to go for a walk?\"\n\n\"I'd love to,\" she said.\n\n* * * *\n\nAfter Mark and Kirsten left on their walk, Eva Cooper found herself alone. She went upstairs to check on Coffin. Finding his condition unchanged, she realized she could use some fresh air as well. She went out the front door and walked to the white picket fence that surrounded the Ellis family house. She looked both directions and decided to turn right\u2014back toward the spaceport.\n\nAs she walked, Eva drank in the surrounding landscape. Her ancestors were American and she found the sense of history\u2014the Americana\u2014that surrounded her both comforting and somehow discomfiting. She stopped briefly at a Revolutionary War memorial and took in the names of those from Nantucket that died to end the oppression of the British Crown. She quickly moved on, thinking how few they were compared to the number that died overnight as a result of the Cluster.\n\nHalf a mile from Ellis' house, the buildings began to thin out and Eva found herself on a slight grassy incline. She continued walking until she came to a large windmill sitting in the middle of a field. A plaque on the building identified it as the \"Old Mill\" and went on to describe that inside was a millstone where wheat was ground into flour. She looked up at the blades of the windmill and the gray sky beyond and found herself thinking about President Walker and crops that needed tending. Walking around the Old Mill, she found a door and tried it. Unfortunately, the door was locked and she couldn't see the millstone within. Even so, she found herself considering that even the best crops get ground into powder.\n\nLooking at her wrist chrono, Eva realized she should get back to the house to see if anyone had returned. On her way back, she passed a small observatory. Across from it was an extensive graveyard. Cooper pursed her lips as he looked out across the sea of tombstones and pondered the fact that most of the island's residents were, in fact, dead. Her eyes caught several dates: 1682, 1723, 1955, 2230. How much human experience was buried in this one graveyard? How much would be lost forever if the Cluster succeeded in its mission?\n\nWith a sigh, Eva continued on her way. She arrived at the house, just as the sun reached the horizon. There, she found that Mark and Kirsten had returned from their own walk. Fire and Manuel had also returned from their excursion.\n\n\"What I still haven't figured out is if Swan's here on Earth, who the hell is minding the store back on Sufiro?\" Manuel was asking Kirsten.\n\n\"Who knows?\" said Kirsten. \"Swan didn't tell me and I didn't think to ask.\"\n\nManuel rolled his eyes. \"He probably didn't bother to leave anyone in charge. We'll be lucky if we have a planet to go home to, even if we _do_ beat the Cluster.\" He dropped onto the couch and Fire sat down next to him.\n\nEva pulled up a chair and listened as the others began discussing plans. It was agreed that Fire and Manuel should go to Titan while Mark would stay on Earth and see if he could get back to the Cluster once the Proxom wore off.\n\n\"Only problem is,\" said Mark, \"I was booted out. They may not let me back.\"\n\n\"But, you do have to try,\" said his mother. \"Besides, Richard wants to talk to you and G'Liat. Even if you don't make it back to the Cluster, you can do more good there. You and Richard understand each other.\"\n\n\"Who knows what thoughts G'Liat might try to put in that whale's mind,\" said Kirsten. Mark couldn't tell whether she was joking or serious. Before he could decide, Kirsten stood up suddenly. \"I almost forgot.\" She reached into her shirt pocket, took out the scrap of paper that Swan had given her back in Tucson, and handed it to Manuel. \"Edmund asked me to have you deliver this message to Ellison Firebrandt.\"\n\nManuel unfolded the paper, read it and laughed. He handed it to Fire who read it, then punched Manuel's shoulder. \"You know Edmund's completely serious, don't you?\" asked Fire with an expression that seemed at once bemused and worried.\n\n\"Yeah, but wouldn't it be better if I went to Arizona to help him? Doesn't he trust old Manuel?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't,\" said Fire. Kirsten choked back a laugh. \"Thing is, it sounds like Edmund needs Dad to send a spaceship to do what he's thinking about,\" Fire continued.\n\n\"How the hell's Ellison going to get a spaceship? The only ship he has is the _Legacy_ and it's been grounded for 50 years,\" said Manuel, turning serious as her bemusement vanished entirely, leaving only worry. \"Wouldn't it be better if we just went to Alpha Coma and found someone to send reinforcements?\"\n\nFire folded the note and put it in her pocket. \"You know my father\u2014he'll find a way to get Swan the help he needs. There's always Arepno,\" she said, her voice growing distant. After a moment, she looked at Kirsten and smiled. \"I'll make sure Dad gets the message.\"\n\nWith that, Mark stood and went to the teleholo room. He contacted the _Sanson_ and filled Simon in on the plans. The first mate seemed relieved to be able to put some distance between himself and Earth. When finished, Mark returned to the living room and hugged his mother and shook Manuel's hand. Fire and Manuel then left for the spaceport where they boarded _Sanson's_ launch. Simon Yermakov activated the ship via remote control and brought it up to orbit. Once they were settled aboard the mapping vessel, Yermakov sat back in the command seat. \"Set course for Titan, Ms. Peters.\"\n\n\"Aye, aye, sir,\" she responded.\n\n* * * *\n\nThat night, the house seemed strangely quiet as Mark, Kirsten, and Eva ate dinner. Throughout the meal, Kirsten caught Eva stealing glances at her and Mark and she found herself wondering what was on the doctor's mind. Eva's brow was knitted as though she was deep in thought, but her eyes were moist, as though she was feeling sad about something. She poked listlessly at her food and when she wasn't stealing glances at Mark and Kirsten, she was looking off into the distance.\n\nMark, on the other hand, was eating furiously. It made sense\u2014he hadn't eaten for over a day. The captain didn't seem to notice Eva much at all, or Kirsten for that matter, as he wolfed down his food. When Kirsten had walked with Mark earlier in the day, he had been largely preoccupied with the idea of getting back to the Cluster. That night, Kirsten found herself glad that Eva had given him a dose of Proxom and she would have the captain to herself for at least one quiet night before everyone went their separate ways again.\n\n\"President Walker said that the Cluster spoke to her emotional core.\" Kirsten jumped at the sound of Eva's voice. \"Captain, what was it like for you to be with the Cluster so long?\"\n\nMark wiped his lips on his napkin and thought. \"Seductive,\" he said at last. Earlier in the day, Mark had described the experience of waking up aboard the _Pequod_ in orbit around the black hole to at the center of the galaxy. \"I was fed an extraordinarily real vision. It would have been very easy to stay there.\"\n\n\"Were you in control?\" asked Eva. \"Or, was the Cluster?\"\n\nMark frowned and thought for a moment. Finally, he shook his head. \"I was able to move around within the reality that was presented. I was able to manipulate that reality to some degree...\" He shook his head. \"The problem is, though, it was a reality that I enjoyed being in so much that I didn't really push the boundaries as much as I could, now that I think about it.\"\n\n\"It was ... seductive,\" echoed Eva. She sighed. \"Jenna Walker is being seduced and so are most of the people on this planet. Those who are alive, that is.\"\n\nKirsten thought she heard a hurt that was deeper than simply concern for the Earth's Commander-in-Chief. Half-consciously, she put an arm around Mark's shoulder as she wondered whether she might have lost him to the Cluster, completely. She looked into his eyes and noticed that they were staring through her for a few seconds before they refocused on her. After a moment he smiled at her. She withdrew her arm, finished dinner, and then cleared her plate and glass from the table.\n\nMark stood and retrieved a third helping while Eva slowly finished her first and Kirsten stepped over to the couch and turned on the teleholo. It almost surprised her to see one of her favorite comedy shows rather than another rerun of news. The show gave Kirsten a fleeting sense of normalcy before goose bumps stood up on her arms and she had to change channels. She heard Eva comment, \"It must have been something to grow up on this island.\"\n\n\"It was,\" said Mark as he finally finished his dinner and cleared his own place at the table. \"I suppose it's a little like growing up at the center of the universe.\"\n\nKirsten turned and shot him a glance.\n\n\"Those of us who grew up here\u2014had families on Nantucket for generations\u2014are islanders. All the rest of you are off-islanders.\" He smirked at that last comment.\n\n\"Does that include the Cluster?\" asked Eva whimsically.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Ellis, putting his plate in the cleaner. \"I suppose the Cluster would be the ultimate off-islander.\"\n\n\"How does the real center of the galaxy compare to Nantucket?\" asked Kirsten.\n\nMark Ellis settled down on the couch next to Kirsten. \"Not as many summertime tourists,\" he said. \"But, the swimming is nowhere near as good.\" He looked up at the teleholo and noticed that Kirsten had settled on a movie about the first humans to travel to Saturn. The ship they'd used had been a heliogyro\u2014a kind of solar sailing ship that looked a lot like a pinwheel. He shook his head, thinking that the ship on the teleholo wasn't really all that different from the wooden sailing vessel he'd stood upon that morning, orbiting the black hole at the center of the galaxy.\n\nKirsten made an exaggerated yawn and stood. \"I think it's time for bed.\" She stood and held her hand out to Mark. Caught by a dramatic moment in the movie, Mark almost begged off until he looked up. Seeing the look in Kirsten's eyes, he took her hand and followed her to the stairs. \"Good night,\" called Kirsten to Eva.\n\n\"Good night,\" called Eva, distracted. Whether she was distracted by her own thoughts or the movie on the teleholo, it was hard to tell.\n\nUp in the bedroom, Kirsten closed the door as Mark sat on the bed and pulled off his boots. Slowly she unbuttoned her blouse and then hung it over the room's chair. He reached up and took her hand and she sat on the bed next to him. They kissed and his hands roved her warm, silky-smooth back as she unbuttoned his shirt and let her hands explore the hairs on his chest, then moved over his nipples and, at last, pushed the shirt completely off his arms.\n\nStanding a moment later, he stepped to the window and closed the shutters. When he turned back to the bed, her slacks were on the floor. The captain stepped back to the bed and she unbuckled his trousers and lowered them to the floor. They lay down next to each other and he massaged her breast, watching her nipple rise to the gentle caress of his thumb.\n\nHer breath caught and she rolled onto her back. Mark kissed her while she guided him into position. Slowly, he entered her and sighed. As he began a slow rhythmic thrusting, she reached up and stroked his hair and looked into his eyes and said, \"I'm glad Nantucket's the center of your universe. I'm glad you came home.\"\n\nEllis shook his head. \"Nantucket's not the center of the universe. You are.\" And, right at that moment, he believed it.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**RESURRECTION**\n\nA loud beeping sound caused Manuel Raton to sit bolt upright in bed in a cold sweat. Strong but slender hands caressed the hairs on his chest and eased him back down onto the bed. \"What the hell time is it?\"\n\n\"I set the alarm for 10 a.m. ship's time,\" mumbled Suki Firebrandt as one of her hands drifted lower while she nuzzled Raton's neck.\n\n\"Why's it still dark outside?\" asked Raton, as he looked toward the window and blinked in confusion.\n\nGetting the reaction she sought, Fire rolled atop Raton and took him within her. \"That's because we're aboard the _Sanson_ you idiot.\" She felt him meeting her thrusts. \"Of course, it's about four in the morning Nantucket time.\"\n\n\"We should have gotten to bed sooner,\" he said, reaching up and twirling her long, silver-streaked black hair with the one finger. His hand moved down, to cup her full breast and he was pleased to hear her sigh in response.\n\n\"We got to bed in plenty of time,\" Fire breathed. \"What we should have done is gotten to sleep sooner. We should be at Titan within the hour.\" She leaned forward and kissed him, delighting in the way his bushy mustache tickled her lip. With that, the two stopped talking, escaping into the moment.\n\nA short time later, the sheets curled about their feet and Fire pressed against Manuel's side, he asked, \"So, any idea what we're actually going to say to the Titans? Are we just going to barge in there and ask why they haven't sent in the cavalry?\"\n\n\"Something like that,\" she laughed, \"but I thought I might try a little more tact. Seriously, we're going to need to go through channels. Natalie Papadraxis is supposed to have called ahead and scheduled a meeting with Valentin Lifshitz, the human ambassador to Titan.\" She kissed Manuel on the nose, then clambered out of bed and walked over to the shower unit. She turned it on, and stepped in. Grudgingly, Manuel climbed out of bed and laid his clothes out. \"Aren't you going to join me?\" asked Fire.\n\n\"I thought you'd never ask,\" said Manuel and he stepped into the shower.\n\nAs she soaped his back, Manuel thought about the Titans. Aside from the Cluster, they were the most ancient race in the galaxy. At one time, the Cluster had subjugated them the same way the Cluster was subjugating humans now. They provided creativity and a means to accomplish tasks\u2014giving the Cluster a purpose. \"What if the Titans don't have any ideas about how to defeat the Cluster?\" asked Manuel. He turned and she soaped up his chest.\n\n\"They were subject to the Cluster for millennia, surely they know something about how to defeat them,\" said Fire, her brow knitted.\n\nManuel took the soap and began lathering Fire's back. \"Yeah, but in the end, they only escaped from the Cluster, they didn't defeat them. Maybe they're still just as helpless.\"\n\nFire sighed. \"Still, they managed to escape.\" She turned and smiled as Manuel took extra time soaping up her breasts. \"In the end, all we need to do is escape. We don't really need to defeat the Cluster.\"\n\nManuel stepped under the running water and rinsed off, then stepped aside to allow Fire to rinse herself off. \"Yeah, but the Titans lived in fear for millennia after their subjugation by the Cluster\u2014fear that the Cluster would find them again. Don't we want to put an end to the Cluster once and for all?\"\n\nFire didn't answer. Instead, she turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, found a towel and dried off. She tossed another towel to Manuel then dressed in silence. They found their way to the ship's mess hall where the ship's pilot, Laura Peters, was waiting for them. \"Mr. Yermakov wanted me to let you know that we've been granted permission to enter orbit around Titan. I'll be piloting the launch down to the surface.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Fire as one of the cooks handed her a plate with a green chile quiche and some hash browns.\n\n\"So, when are we scheduled to meet with Ambassador Lip-shit?\" asked Manuel as he looked skeptically at the quiche, but after his first bite, he ate several more enthusiastic bites then gulped down his first cup of coffee.\n\n\"Lifshitz,\" corrected Fire.\n\nLaura frowned disapprovingly at Manuel. \"All she got was an automated reply telling us which landing bay to come down in.\" She stood to retrieve her own cup of coffee and refilled Manuel's cup. \"I'm guessing the Ambassador will meet us, or send word where to meet him.\"\n\n\"Doesn't that seem a little odd?\" said Manuel around a mouthful of quiche.\n\nFire inclined her head. \"Why? I'm sure the Ambassador and Admiralty are busy with this crisis. In a way, we're lucky to get a meeting at all.\"\n\nManuel looked thoughtful as he drank his second cup of coffee. \"You know,\" he said, \"maybe you should take that message from Swan to your father to the command deck\u2014just in case we run into problems or there's a delay.\"\n\nFire took the note that Kirsten had handed her from her pocket and looked at it. \"Maybe you're right,\" she said. She looked up at Laura. \"Do you think Simon would send this message if we ran into an emergency?\"\n\nLaura held out her hand and took the paper and read the message. \"I don't see why not.\" She stood and stepped over to the intercom. \"Natalie, where are you?\"\n\n\"In my quarters,\" she said. \"I'm getting ready to go up to the command deck.\"\n\n\"Can you swing by the mess hall on the way?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" she said. A few moments later, Natalie Papadraxis appeared in the door of the mess hall. Laura handed her the note. \"If anything happens to us, it's vitally important you jump out of the solar system and send that message,\" said Laura.\n\nNatalie's smile evaporated. \"What do you think is going to happen?\"\n\n\"I don't think anything is going to happen,\" said Fire reassuringly. \"But, a friend of mine trusted that I would do this. I don't want to let him down.\"\n\nNatalie's smile reappeared. \"Okay.\" She turned lightly on her heel, her full, flower-print dress swishing around her ankles and left for the command deck.\n\n\"Do you think she'll get the job done?\" asked Fire once she was sure Natalie was out of earshot.\n\n\"She's a good kid,\" said Laura. \"If it's important, it'll get done.\" The three finished breakfast in silence, then Laura led the group to the launch bay. After getting clearance to launch from Natalie, she charted a course for the human pressure dome.\n\nThough she had seen it before, Fire gasped when the launch left the hold and she saw the golden spectacle of Saturn spread out before them\u2014the planet's icy rings glimmered in the rays of the sun. Below the launch were the red-orange clouds of Titan. Occasionally, Fire caught a faint glimmer of light off the black Erdonium hull of another star vessel. She had often wondered how the capital of the galaxy could have remained hidden to humans for so long, but as she noted how difficult it was to see even undisguised spaceships in the orbit of the moon, she realized that the Titans may not have had much difficulty in hiding from humans at all, especially given how primitive the early cameras were that had been sent to Saturn.\n\nAs they dropped to the surface, it was apparent that there was less traffic than normal traveling between the surface of the moon and orbit\u2014much like Earth. Soon, the familiar site of the Titan capital city came into view: A vast conglomeration of silvery, translucent domes, similar to the silver spheres of the Cluster, filled a valley, surrounded by rugged peaks. A river of liquid methane wound its way from the mountains down toward the domes.\n\nThe launch approached one of the domes and began to slowly descend. A hatch in the top irised open and the launch settled onto a platform and was lowered into the dome. An automated message announced that the launch was secure. Fire, Manuel, and Laura undid their seat restraints and stepped out. As with the spaceports on Earth, this one was eerily quiet. No crews appeared to service the launch and there was no sign of the Ambassador or any of his staff.\n\nFire led the way from the landing bay into the main pressure dome. They looked around at the buildings under the domed ceiling. Though the human pressure dome on Titan was only an administrative complex, people usually bustled around from building to building, on errands from the consulate to the admiralty and the various support buildings. The dome was silent except for the sound of a few imported birds that sang from the trees\u2014their cries echoing loudly in the seemingly empty space.\n\n\"I don't like this,\" said Manuel, putting his hand on his hepler pistol.\n\nFire put her hand on his arm. \"Let's see if we can find out what's going on.\" She pointed to one of the taller buildings. \"I believe that's the Consulate over there.\" As they began walking, they heard a second set of footsteps.\n\nThree people were walking toward them from the direction of a large, squat building that was reminiscent of the Pentagon on Earth, except that it was smaller. The leader of the group was a gray-haired woman with piercing blue eyes. She wore the uniform of the Gaean Navy and had two golden epaulets on her shoulders, making her look more imposing than she was. The two people behind her also wore Gaean uniforms. The woman stepped up to Fire, who extended her hand. The woman made no motion to return the handshake. \"My name is Marlou Strauss,\" the woman introduced herself. \"Sorry I was delayed in meeting you.\"\n\n\"John Mark's told me about you,\" said Fire with a lopsided grin. \"I'm Dr. Suki Firebrandt and we hoped to meet with the Ambassador.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that won't be possible,\" said Strauss. Behind her, the Gaean officers drew their sidearms. \"You will come with me.\"\n\nManuel made a noise a little like a growl. \"Here we go again,\" he muttered.\n\n* * * *\n\nMark Ellis awoke early. Twilight illuminated the sky outside his bedroom window, but the sun had not yet risen over the horizon. Sitting up in bed, he looked over at Kirsten, lying on her side, snoring softly. He crept carefully out of bed, slipped on his trousers, shirt, and shoes and stepped from the room. He needed some time to clear his head and think. The Proxom would wear off in a few hours give or take, but when it did, he wasn't sure how he would get back to the Cluster. Mark peaked into Coffin's room and saw the old man looking so frail and still, that he was afraid his friend was dead. Setting his jaw, Ellis was determined to find out what was happening to his friend.\n\nHe crept slowly down the stairs and saw Eva Cooper lying on the couch, the blanket off her bare shoulder. He stepped past her, then out the front door. He walked through the front gate and turned toward town, passing several gray-shingled houses, most very similar to one another, yet each one with its differences. Even though it was early morning, the island should not have been quite so quiet. Several flowerbeds were uncharacteristically overgrown with weeds. A number of houses had shingles that had weathered to the point that they needed replacing, yet there was no one to replace them.\n\nThe captain turned down the cobbled main street and walked past history. Houses owned by ship captains gave way to shops run for tourists. Looking in the window of one shop, he saw a lightship basket covered in cobwebs and a wooden ship's wheel with a thick coating of dust. The sign in the shop's window said \"open.\" Ellis tried the door and found it unlocked. He plucked the lightship basket he'd seen through the window from its hook. It was a replica of the type of basket used by ships that helped to guide other ships into Nantucket Harbor at night. Mark blew the cobwebs from the basket then called out: \"Hello!\"\n\nNot hearing an answer, he hung the basket back on the hook and silently left the shop, goosebumps forming on his arm. He turned off main street and made his way through back streets toward Brant Point, a small sandbar that jutted out into the ocean. At the end of the sandbar was a squat lighthouse. With no one around, the captain slipped out of his shoes, and then stripped out of his trousers and shirt and hung them over a railing at the lighthouse's door. He stepped into the waves rolling onto the beach and delighted in the feeling of the wet sand between his toes. Though the icy water sent chills along his arms he continued on and waded out to where he could swim. He swam several yards out and then turned back.\n\nStanding on the beach was a willowy blond woman. Though he was Suki Firebrandt's son, Ellis found it difficult to climb out of the water in full view of the woman.\n\n\"You'll catch your death out there,\" called the woman.\n\nHearing her voice, Ellis realized that it was Eva Cooper. \"What are you doing out here?\" he called back.\n\n\"I heard you leave, so I followed you,\" she said. She inclined her head. \"You really shouldn't stay out in that cold water, you'll get hypothermia.\" When Ellis still hesitated, she said, \"I'm a doctor. It's not like there's anything I haven't seen.\"\n\nBlushing, Ellis clambered out of the water. Realizing he hadn't brought a towel, he shook the water off as best as he could and, shivering, pulled clothes onto his body that clung tenaciously to his wet skin. Cooper handed him her sweater and he gratefully pulled it on.\n\n\"What can I do for you, Doctor?\" asked Ellis with chattering teeth.\n\nShe sighed. \"I don't think I can wait any longer. I need to put Samuel Coffin on life support, but I need some basic equipment.\" The two began walking back toward Main Street. \"The problem is, I don't know where to get it.\"\n\n\"Would a hospital have what you need?\" he asked.\n\nThe doctor nodded.\n\n\"Let's get some breakfast, then I'll take you to the hospital. Between you being the Surgeon General and me and Coffin being old-time Nantucketers, I'm sure we can beg or borrow the equipment you need.\"\n\nAs they turned onto Main Street, Cooper caught sight of the shop that Ellis had entered. \"Presuming there's anyone left at the hospital.\"\n\nMark felt a slight chill and he wasn't sure whether it was from swimming in the cold water or if it was from the fact that her words rang all too true. They walked in silence back to Ellis' house.\n\nAs Mark opened the door, he smelled coffee, onions, and peppers and grinned. His smile fell away when he saw G'Liat standing at the counter. The large knife he wielded looked petite in the warrior's huge six-fingered hand. The knife flashed several times\u2014almost faster than Mark's eyes could follow and an onion lay in pieces on the cutting board.\n\nKirsten sat at the table and looked helplessly at Mark. \"He just invited himself in,\" she said. \"I didn't know what else to do.\"\n\nMark stepped over to the table and took Kirsten's hand in his own and gave it a gentle squeeze. \"It's okay,\" he said, reassuringly.\n\nThe warrior reached over and turned out a perfect omelet onto a plate and handed it to Kirsten. \"Ms. Smart has just told me about the conversation your mother had with the whale you call Richard,\" said the warrior, as he cracked three eggs into a bowl and began whipping them up with a whisk. \"I came over to check on you and Coffin. Hearing this news, I believe you should eat breakfast and we should leave as quickly as possible.\"\n\nMark held up his hands. \"Wait just a minute,\" he said. \"Dr. Cooper's just told me that she needs to get life support equipment to keep Coffin alive. I need to take her to the hospital to get the equipment. He's one of my oldest and dearest friends. I can't just let him die.\"\n\nG'Liat added ham, onions, and bell peppers to the just-cooked eggs in the pan and folded the omelet. \"You can draw Ms. Smart a map to the hospital,\" he said. \"I believe it is imperative that we go see Richard as soon as possible.\" He slid the omelet out onto a plate and handed it to Mark.\n\nMark looked at Kirsten, who poked at her own omelet. \"I hate to admit it,\" she said, tightly, \"but I think he's right. I can help Eva get the life support equipment together.\" She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. \"Mark, the whole planet's at stake. If Richard can help, you and G'Liat need to talk to him. Your mother only confirmed things we suspected, she didn't really find any answers.\"\n\n\"What happens if the Proxom wears off? I want to get back to the Cluster, but I want to be here when I try.\" He took a bite of his omelet and nodded grudging admiration at the Rd'dyggian warrior who was working on a third.\n\nEva poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. \"You've got several hours before the Proxom wears off,\" she said. \"I don't think you'll have a chance before then.\"\n\nG'Liat finished up the third omelet, gave it to Eva, then sat down and looked at Mark intently. \"We can go talk to Richard and be back in just a few hours.\"\n\nMark didn't answer. Instead, he took several bites of the breakfast that the Rd'dyggian warrior had prepared, and then he looked into Kirsten's eyes. She smiled at him encouragingly, then reached out and took his hand again. She squeezed.\n\nMark took a sip of his coffee. \"Then I suppose I should get some dry clothes on and we should get going.\"\n\n\"Do I want to know why you and Eva sneaked out of the house this morning? Or, why you came back sopping wet?\" asked Kirsten.\n\n\"Probably not,\" said Mark as he leaned over and planted a kiss on her cheek. He stood, handed Eva her sweater and made for the stairs.\n\n* * * *\n\nArepno sat in guest quarters in the Rd'dyggian dome on Titan and sorted through data that he had collected. When he and Swan had first arrived in the Terran\/Gaean system, it had appeared that ship activity was normal. He'd seen a ship jump into the system and another jump out. After depositing Swan on Earth, he returned to Titan to check in with Rd'dyggian central command. As he prepared to leave, his ship was refused permission to leave orbit.\n\nBeing a Rd'dyggian, he found it easier to obey the order than to question it, so returned to the surface of Titan where he found quarters in the Rd'dyggian dome and began reviewing his data. Still, the fact that he was refused permission to leave orbit piqued the Rd'dyggian's curiosity. He began searching the Titan computer database and discovered that the \"doomsday phenomenon\" that had struck Earth had also struck the human dome on Titan. If anything, it was worse for the humans on Titan than on Earth. Over eighty percent were dead and of those that survived nearly ninety percent were in the comatose state that many were in on Earth.\n\nThe numbers didn't strongly surprise Arepno. As with the Rd'dyggian dome, the human dome on Titan was primarily populated by diplomatic and military personnel\u2014very specialized jobs. The Cluster would have little need for some of those jobs. For others, it could have great need. Arepno also noted that the Titans had gone out of their way to suppress information of what was happening in the human dome.\n\nAfter a day on the moon, it became apparent based on reports from his ship that the population of ships around Titan was slowly increasing. Searching the computer records further, Arepno noticed that the only ships granted permission to leave Titan orbit and jump out of the solar system were Titan ships. It did not appear that the Cluster was keeping any ships from leaving the solar system, but it did appear that the Titans were doing their best to keep ships within the system.\n\nGrowing more curious about what was going on within the human dome, Arepno requested permission to visit. An automated message from the human dome refused the warrior permission. He then decided that it was time to take matters in his own hands.\n\nArepno went down into the depths of the Rd'dyggian dome and checked out a space suit and a land rover. He drove out across the frigid, reddish surface of Titan. He pulled up a holographic map of the moon. Even so, he had to keep careful count of the nearly identical silver domes that he passed so that he didn't get lost. At last he found his way to the human dome. He drove to the airlock and was not surprised when he was again denied admission. Using an emergency override code he'd found on the Titan central computer, he was able to open the outer door. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. Again, he was not surprised when neither the inner door opened nor was atmosphere pumped into the chamber.\n\nHe tapped an intercom button. \"This is Captain Arepno of Rd'dyggia,\" he said, pushing his faceplate to the microphone so that his voice would conduct, \"I was outside the dome on a routine survey when my map malfunctioned. There may have been micrometeorite damage. This is an emergency request for atmosphere so I may check my suit for damage.\"\n\nThe automated systems were programmed not to refuse that specific request. Soon atmosphere was pumped into the airlock. Arepno removed his helmet and breathed in the stale air. Then, he retrieved a small box from a pocket on his space suit. Opening it up, he held it to his mouth and exhaled. Tiny dust grains flew into the air\u2014each one containing a micro-miniature camera and transmitter. He replaced the box, then replaced his helmet and leaned onto the intercom. \"Suit checks out, please evacuate chamber and open the outer airlock door.\"\n\nThe precious atmosphere was drawn back in through the vents, along with the miniature cameras and audio sensors. They would be pulled through the human dome's recycling system them pumped throughout the dome.\n\nThe airlock's outer door opened and Arepno returned to his land rover and went back to his quarters in the Rd'dyggian dome.\n\nSince returning to his quarters he periodically monitored the information coming back from the human dome using a headset that was not plugged into the Titan network. Even so, he only checked sparingly, assuming the Titans were spying on him in the same way he was trying to spy on the humans. Though he would have liked to unleash his cameras in the Titan's city, he didn't dare for fear they would be detected instantly.\n\nFor the most part, Arepno saw little in the human dome that interested him. The common areas between buildings were largely deserted. Occasionally, some lost-looking soul would step out of one of the government buildings and go to a familiar restaurant, only to find it closed, then either proceed to their housing unit or back to the office building they'd emerged from.\n\nOne of Arepno's cameras did find its way into the Ambassador's office. He lay on the floor, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. Arepno could not tell by looking whether the Ambassador was alive or dead. However, he guessed that his mind was alive and absorbed by the Cluster\u2014as was happening periodically to politicians on Earth.\n\nArepno turned his attention to reports of ships arriving at Titan. If he had been a human, he would have smiled. Instead, his purple mustache-like growth simply wiggled a little. John Mark Ellis' ship, the _Nicholas Sanson_ had appeared in orbit. He activated cameras on his ship in orbit and watched the _Sanson's_ launch as it descended and was pulled into one of the human domes.\n\nHe then put on his headset and searched for signs of the craft's occupants. He finally located them on a camera that was hovering near the ceiling of one of the outer areas. The microphone was too far away for him to hear what was being said, but zooming in, he could see Ellison Firebrandt's daughter and Manuel Raton accompanied by a third human\u2014presumably the launch's pilot. Another group of humans stepped from the Navy headquarters. It was difficult for Arepno to tell\u2014especially since humans could be so similar to one another\u2014but he thought the leader of the second group was Marlou Strauss, one of the human admirals. Strauss and her party pulled weapons and led Suki, Manuel and the other woman away.\n\nArepno removed the headset and considered a set of actions. Ellison Firebrandt had saved the warrior's life and the lives of his crew. The warrior turned and sent a scrambled signal to his ship to be relayed to the _Nicholas Sanson._ He then stood and waved his hand over a storage locker. The force field in the top dissipated and Arepno began pulling out the tools he would need for the next phase of the operation.\n\n* * * *\n\nAboard the _Nicholas Sanson_ , Simon Yermakov paced back and forth. He was somewhat relieved to be away from Earth and the Clusters, but given what he'd learned about the Clusters' activities at the center of the galaxy itself, he'd grown very uneasy. The Clusters needed to be stopped. He just never imagined himself so necessary to the process of stopping them. He dropped into the command seat and looked at the chrono display. There was no word yet from Laura, Fire or Manuel. In and of itself, that didn't bother him. For all he knew, it could take them a day or two before they learned something from the Titans. Still, the fact that Laura didn't check in soon after the shuttle landed was not at all characteristic.\n\nNatalie Papadraxis inclined her head to the side, as though she was getting a signal. After a moment, she turned toward Simon. \"I'm getting the strangest signal,\" she said, her brow furrowed. \"I wonder if the Proxom is still interfering with my communications implant.\"\n\nSimon stood. \"Can you put it on the intercom?\"\n\nShe reached down and pushed a button on the holographic console. A series of chirpings, whistlings, long plaintive notes and growls issued from the speakers.\n\n\"If I didn't know better,\" said Simon stepping toward the communication's console, \"I'd say that was some kind of sea creature from Earth, like a whale or a dolphin.\"\n\nNatalie's eyes went wide and looked up at Simon. \"No, that's not from Earth at all. I just realized\u2014it's Rd'dyggian.\"\n\n\"Why aren't we getting a translation?\" asked Simon, kneeling down next to Natalie's console.\n\nShe touched several buttons and checked several displays. In the holographic tank at the front of the command deck, several yellow dots appeared, marking the position of ships. She pointed to one that was blinking red. \"That Rd'dyggian ship seems to be sending us this. It's on a tight-beam frequency with an embedded decryption algorithm.\" When Simon shook his head, she explained: \"They're sending a coded signal right at us. When our computers intercepted it, it included some computer code that automatically installed itself in our computer and began decoding the signal.\"\n\n\"Why is it in Rd'dyggian?\" asked Simon standing and moving toward the holographic tank. \"Why didn't they just send the message in terro-generic?\"\n\nNatalie shrugged. \"It's possible it was meant for another Rd'dyggian ship and we just happened to be in the way?\"\n\nSimon stepped into the display. \"I don't see any other ships beyond us on that line of sight.\" He shook his head. \"Can you translate the signal?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Natalie with a vacant smile. She turned to her console while Simon continued to walk around in the holographic tank, trying to see whom else the Rd'dyggians may have been trying to communicate with.\n\nA moment later, a singsong voice issued from the speaker. \"This is Captain Arepno calling the TransGalactic mapping vessel _Nicholas Sanson_. This is an emergency. Dr. Suki Firebrandt, Manuel Raton, and another of your crewmembers have just been abducted by one of the human admirals. I will attempt a rescue. You should leave orbit immediately. Jump away from this solar system. Do not request permission. Rendezvous at Alpha Coma.\"\n\nSimon licked his lips and shook his head. \"What the hell does that mean? They were abducted? By a human admiral?\"\n\nNatalie looked down at her hands for a few minutes. Finally, she looked up at Simon. \"I think Laura was afraid something like this might happen.\" She reached into the little satchel she had on her belt and took out the slip of paper that Laura Peters had given her. \"Laura said that if anything happened to them, we should send this message to Sufiro.\"\n\n\"Laura said?\" asked Simon, throwing his hands in the air. \"Just which one of us is supposed to be in command of this vessel anyway?\" He took the note from Natalie and stalked toward the command chair. After taking a deep breath, Simon finally felt calm enough to look at the note. As he did, his eyes grew wide and his shoulders slumped as though the weight of being in the center of the crisis had just descended full force upon him.\n\n\"Do you know who this is for?\"\n\n\"It's for Ellison Firebrandt, the pirate who founded Sufiro,\" said Natalie, simply.\n\nSimon nodded. \"It's a call for help from the resistance on Earth.\" He stepped forward and handed the note back to Natalie, then stepped back to the command chair. He sat there for several minutes looking down at the controls. He knew Kirsten Smart had not wanted him to command the _Sanson_ and he knew it was because he was not decisive enough. Now, he was faced with the worst possible decision. If he left, he'd be abandoning not only Suki Firebrandt and Manuel Raton, but also a member of his crew. However, if what the Rd'dyggian had said was true, they would be rescued. He wasn't sure he could trust this Captain Arepno, but the Rd'dyggian had gone to a lot of trouble to get the message to the _Sanson._ He could return to Earth and ask Ellis and Kirsten what to do, but that would mean that Kirsten was right about him and he really wasn't capable of making a decision on his own. On top of that, Simon actually felt he should go to Alpha Coma and report what they had learned.\n\nHe brought up a chart and ran a couple of quick calculations. The jump points were already changing due to the Cluster's interference at the center of the galaxy. Even so, it would be easy enough to jump out of the solar system, deliver the message to Ellison Firebrandt, then continue on to Alpha Coma. If the Rd'dyggian was right, he'd have his missing crewmember back. If the Rd'dyggian had lied, he could return with help.\n\nStanding up, Simon tucked the corners of his flannel shirt into his trousers, then stepped forward to the Pilot's console. \"Natalie, inform crew that we're leaving orbit. Do not, I repeat, do not request permission to leave orbit from Titan Central Command.\"\n\nNatalie smiled at Simon and then set about her task. In the meantime, Simon brought up his own version of the pilot's console and began searching for jump points. The one for Alpha Coma was more distant than he liked, but he charted course for it, taking note of other, nearby jump points.\n\n\"All decks report ready to depart orbit,\" said Natalie.\n\nSelf-consciously, Simon looked back at the command seat, hoping there would be someone\u2014Ellis, Ms. Smart, anyone\u2014to give the order. He swallowed hard, then pushed the lever forward that fired aft thrusters. In the holographic tank a blinking red dot representing _Sanson's_ position appeared and it began moving toward the jump point for Alpha Coma.\n\n\"The Titans have just ordered us to stand down,\" said Natalie, all dreaminess gone from her voice. \"They say they have armed missiles and will destroy us if we do not resume orbit.\"\n\n\"Tell 'em to go to hell,\" said Simon, through gritted teeth.\n\n\"Do I have to?\" asked Natalie, eyes wide. \"I don't think they'll like that much at all.\"\n\nSimon's laugh bordered on hysterical. \"Don't tell them anything, then.\" He reached over to his own intercom. \"Engineering, this is Yermakov on the command deck, I need all the power you can give me.\"\n\n\"What's going on up there?\" asked Chief Engineer Mahuk. \"Are we running away from Titan?\"\n\n\"We are,\" said Simon simply. He knew Ellis would say something like \"cut the chatter, Mister.\" Instead, Simon decided to tell the third in command exactly what was happening. \"We need to get to Alpha Coma and get help. Things are going wrong way too fast.\"\n\nMahuk must have heard the quavering in Simon's voice. \"Steady on, Simon,\" he said, calmly. \"You're the first officer and I'm right behind you, my friend. I'll give you everything I've got.\" The first officer felt a surge of strength at the confidence that Mahuk showed in him.\n\n\"Oh no,\" breathed Natalie. Simon looked behind and saw Natalie staring at the holographic tank, wide-eyed. \"They've launched the missiles. They'll overtake us before we get to the jump point for Alpha Coma.\"\n\nSimon looked up at the display and saw two new points quickly closing on them. He scanned the holographic display for new jump points. Seeing that they were passing near one, he altered course. The missiles turned in a leisurely arc and followed them.\n\n\"Simon, that jump point will take us out to the rim...\"\n\n\"Strap in, Natalie,\" he said. \"Call an emergency jump warning.\" He activated the intercom again. \"Mahuk, get ready to jump on my mark.\" He heard Natalie calling the emergency jump warning behind him. In the holographic tank, he saw the two missiles closing on them rapidly. A green light started blinking on his console. \"Mahuk,\" he cried. \"Jump!\"\n\n* * * *\n\nRoberts hovered back and forth outside the old teleholo booth within the remains of the privateer vessel, _Legacy._ Ellison Firebrandt, his hair loose about his shoulders, stepped from the booth and nodded to his old friend. \"It's as I suspected. They need our help on Earth.\"\n\nRoberts took in a deep breath and let it out slowly as he looked up and down the corridor they were in. \"Is there no one else that can help?\" When he saw the chiding look on Firebrandt's face, he held up his hand. \"I'm not trying to run from a fight, old friend. But this is an ancient ship. We only have a skeleton crew available and\u2014like it or not\u2014we're two old men who haven't seen action in over fifty years.\"\n\n\"You're right on all counts,\" said Firebrandt, retrieving a rubber band from his trousers' pocket and tying back his hair. \"The _Sanson_ is going to make for Alpha Coma. Hopefully they can find help there as well, but the jump points are changing rapidly with the Cluster moving stars in the center of the galaxy. It may take them a while to make it to Alpha Coma and it may take some time for ships to make it back to Earth once they do. Mark, Edmund, and Fire need our help, now.\" He reached down and put his hand on his friend's shoulder. \"Call in the crew. Have them assemble on the battle deck.\"\n\nRoberts floated into the teleholo booth to carry out the captain's orders while Firebrandt stepped toward his cabin. Since Edmund Swan left Sufiro, Roberts and Firebrandt had gathered a crew of fifteen. Some were old, trusted friends, but all had experience either with freighters converted from aged privateers like the _Legacy_ or with systems that were aboard the antique vessel. Over the past days, Firebrandt and Roberts had forgone the harvest and worked with their crew of fifteen, getting them ready in the event that they were called upon.\n\nWithin an hour of receiving the call from the _Sanson_ , the crew was gathered on the battle deck of the grounded _Legacy_. The deck had been restored to its one-time glory. The metal surfaces were spotless. The wooden handrails that lined the deck were polished. One of the gunners' rigs had been modified so that Roberts could operate it from his hover chair. Ellison Firebrandt himself wore the uniform he'd designed for himself many years before. It was a black jacket with black trousers. Underneath, he wore a white turtleneck shirt. On the shoulders were two gold epaulets.\n\n\"I'm sure you've suspected by now that we've received an emergency call from Earth,\" said Firebrandt. He paced slowly back and forth in front of the holographic tank at the front of the battle deck and looked each of the crewmembers in the eye in turn. \"This is much sooner than I hoped, but, given the power of the Cluster it's perhaps not sooner than we feared.\" He paused and smiled reassuringly at Anne McClintlock. \"I don't know how much we can do, but we have a ship with new weapons, a good engine, and a full load of fuel. The first officer of the mapping vessel _Sanson_ tells me that the Cluster is taking actions that could mean the end of Sufiro, Alpha Coma, and virtually every other human colony. It's essential we do everything we can to help. The man in charge of this operation is Edmund Swan\u2014a man I trust implicitly, and I'm sure many of you do, too.\" Firebrandt looked at Juan Raton\u2014Manuel's brother who had fought alongside Swan in the war against the Tejans.\n\n\"Now, this class of vessel,\" continued Firebrandt, stepping over to the rail and patting the wall, \"was never designed to land or take off from a planet. However, those of you familiar with EQ engines,\" and he looked meaningfully at the mechanics he'd hired, Mary Seaton and Junior Kimura, \"know that they work using controlled Quinnium bursts. A gravitational jump point is one way to control the burst and send a ship in a particular direction. However, this ship is equipped to send out a very small burst and jump a short distance without actually being at a jump point. We can use that ability to jump from the surface to orbit.\"\n\nJunior Kimura held up his hand. \"Won't that do considerable damage to the land around the ship?\"\n\nRoberts hovered forward, next to Firebrandt. \"It'll do less damage than a traditional rocket would. It'll almost certainly destroy the house around us, but not much more. We've cleared several acres around the house just to be safe, but I expect that we'll still be able to harvest our crops when we get back.\"\n\n\"Presuming the frost doesn't get it first,\" said Firebrandt with a wry grin. \"Any other questions?\" He looked around at the nervous, but determined faces and felt a long-forgotten swell of pride at the thought of a crew that was ready to follow him anywhere. \"Then let's get to work.\"\n\n\"All hands, to your stations,\" barked Roberts.\n\nWith less than military precision, the new crew of the _Legacy_ shuffled off to their stations. Juan Raton, Anne McClintlock, and Mary Seaton remained on the battle deck. Anne took the central network station at the starboard side of the deck while Juan took station at one of the gunners' rigs near the holographic tank. Mary sat down at the engine control terminal on the deck's port side while Firebrandt stood at the ship's wheel console in the center of the deck.\n\n\"You may bring the engines on line, when ready,\" said Firebrandt. \"Mr. Roberts, please close all airlocks and make us ready for spaceflight.\"\n\nSeaton activated several controls, then asked for a report from Junior. A series of red lights flickered on at the engine console. Roberts moved next to Anne McClintlock at the central network station. Together they began bringing other ship's systems on line, including life support, the recently installed graviton generators, and navigational systems. As ordered, Roberts closed all of the airlocks, sealing the ship off from the rest of the homestead. Firebrandt retrieved a pipe from his pocket, packed and lit it, then checked systems on the wheel console. Looking back at the engine console, he saw that most of the red lights had gone green.\n\nFirebrandt started working out the calculation for a jump from the surface of the planet to a position outside the gravitational well. Before he was finished, Seaton announced, \"Engines on line, sir. Junior's checking system integrity, but he believes we'll be ready to jump in about fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" said Firebrandt, his teeth clenched around the pipe stem. \"Roberts, check my calculations and make sure I'm not going to send us into the sun.\"\n\nMcClintlock and Raton looked at Firebrandt with wide eyes and Roberts laughed. He brought up Firebrandt's jump algorithm and checked it over carefully. \"For an old space dog who hasn't done this in fifty years, you did pretty damn good,\" said Roberts. The first mate drifted over to the captain. \"Once we get to orbit, we're going to need to do a complete check of hull integrity as well as systems,\" he said, quietly.\n\n\"I know,\" said Firebrandt. \"Are the launches ready to go in case this doesn't work?\"\n\n\"They are,\" said Roberts. \"We'll be able to get everyone safely to the planet as long as the ship doesn't explode on jump.\"\n\nFirebrandt nodded somberly and took a few puffs of his pipe. He looked down and saw the crystalline computer network below his feet blinking and pulsing information from one system to another. Once the pipe burned out, he put it back in his pocket.\n\n\"Junior says we're ready to go,\" said Mary.\n\n\"Sound the jump warning,\" said Firebrandt. He grabbed one of the handles on the side of the wheel console. Roberts hovered back to the computer console. He lowered the hover chair to the deck. Magnetic clamps grabbed onto the grating and he reached over and helped Anne McClintlock who was having trouble with her seat straps.\n\nThe captain looked around the deck, then swallowed hard. \"Broadcast a countdown from ten throughout the ship,\" said Firebrandt. He swallowed hard and his hand hovered over the button that would activate the Quinnium burst.\n\nRoberts touched a control on the hover chair. \"10 ... 9 ... 8...\" he began.\n\nFirebrandt felt sweat bead on his forehead.\n\n\"7 ... 6 ... 5...\"\n\nJuan Raton found himself grabbing the handles on either side of the gunner's rig.\n\n\"4 ... 3 ... 2...\"\n\nMary Seaton saw a light on her engine console flicker red for a moment. She reached up to tap it, but it flickered back to green.\n\n\"1,\" said Roberts. Firebrandt pressed the jump button. Reality collapsed.\n\nJumping into the fourth dimension played havoc with anybody's senses. Human beings are creatures of three dimensions and when they are transported into the dimension that runs parallel to time, the brain gets confused. For some, like Mary Seaton, it was as though the floor had just dropped out from beneath her, even though she could look down and see herself firmly strapped into her chair. For Anne McClintlock, the world went black but she could swear that she heard the smell of burning electronics. As the ship came out of jump, Juan Raton was holding the handles on either side of the gunners rig and screaming. He opened his eyes and got control of himself and took a few deep breaths. \"Sorry,\" he said, sheepishly.\n\nFirebrandt had collapsed to his knees. Roberts unclamped his hover chair and sped to his captain's side. The captain waved him off. \"I'm all right,\" he said. He looked over to Anne. \"Turn on the viewer, let's see where we are.\" Then he looked from Roberts to Mary. \"Let's begin a system and hull check.\"\n\nMary and Roberts nodded as the holographic viewer at the front of the deck came to life. The blue-green planet of Sufiro hung in the tank like a great globe surrounded by stars. Juan Raton gasped and Ellison Firebrandt felt a tear run down his cheek. \"We made it,\" he said.\n\n\"We're adrift and tumbling slightly,\" reported Anne, \"but we're outside Sufiro's gravitational well and all life support systems seem to be functioning.\" She reached over and typed in a command that Roberts had taught her. \"Thrusters fired. We've stabilized our position,\" she reported.\n\n\"Junior says we've burned out a few engine relays,\" said Mary, \"but we have spares and we should be ready to jump again within the hour.\"\n\nEllison Firebrandt looked around the battle deck and smiled broadly. \"Well done, everyone.\" He looked at Roberts who was hovering next to Juan near the deck's door. \"Do your survey of the hull then report to me in my cabin,\" he said to Roberts.\n\nRoberts and Juan turned and left the deck.\n\nFirebrandt stepped forward and looked at the image of Sufiro. He thought of Suki, his lover and mother of his daughter, whose ashes were scattered on the planet below. \"I'll be back, I promise.\"\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**FUGITIVES**\n\nSimon Yermakov appeared to be standing between the Perseus and Orion arms of the Milky Way Galaxy within the holographic tank in the bow of the _Sanson's_ command deck. Wavy blue lines indicated previously charted jump paths from one star system to another. Wavy green lines indicated how those paths would have changed assuming certain gravitational shifts at the center of the galaxy.\n\nChief Engineer Mahuk strode onto the command deck and shook his head, bewildered. \"What is all of that?\"\n\nSimon stepped through the arm of galaxy to stand next to the hologram. He pointed to a yellow sphere in the Orion arm of the galaxy that represented the Sun. \"That's where we jumped from.\" Then he pointed to a red sphere in the outer most part of the Perseus arm. \"This is where we are now.\" He pointed to the end of a blue streamer a few inches to the left. \"This is where we should have come out of jump according to the charts.\"\n\nMahuk joined Simon in the tank and saw that a green streamer came very close to connecting the yellow and red spheres. \"This must be close to the path we followed,\" said Mahuk, knowingly.\n\nSimon smiled. \"It is. I was able to use some of the mapping programs we have to model the way the jump points are moving as a result of the Cluster's interference at the center of the galaxy.\"\n\n\"Can we use this to get back to Earth?\" asked Mahuk.\n\nSimon stepped out of the holographic tank and put his hands on the pilot's console and looked down, not meeting the engineer's eyes. \"The Cluster hasn't stopped adding stars to the black hole at the center of the galaxy. The jump points will keep changing until they stop or someone stops them. This projection is good for an hour or two at most.\" He looked up at the chief engineer. \"How are the engines doing?\"\n\nMahuk held out his hands. \"The engines still lack the fine tuning for a mapping jump, but we can do a coarse jump again when you give the word.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Simon, softly. \"I think we need to get moving soon, or else we're going to be stranded here\u2014out on the rim.\" He stepped back toward the holographic display. \"However, I don't think we should head back to Earth.\"\n\n\"If not Earth, then where?\" asked Mahuk.\n\n\"We need to get back to Alpha Coma and let them know what we've learned so far.\" Simon pointed to the chart. With another jump, I might be able to refine this model. I might be able to predict what's happening to the jump points\u2014at least well enough that they can get a few ships to Earth.\"\n\n\"Do you think that will do any good?\" asked Mahuk, his brow knitted. \"No one has ever been able to attack a Cluster ship and survive.\"\n\nSimon puffed out his cheeks, making him look more like a squirrel than before. \"It's not our job to ask that question,\" he said after a moment. \"Our job's just to get the information back to Herbert Firebrandt on Alpha Coma.\"\n\nMahuk stepped forward and put his hand on Simon's shoulder. \"You're beginning to sound a lot like Captain Ellis.\" The chief engineer chuckled when Simon looked mortally wounded. \"Simon,\" he said sincerely, \"that's meant as a compliment. Keep this up and you'll end up in command of the ship.\"\n\n\"Somehow, I don't think Ellis is going anywhere,\" said Simon bitterly.\n\n\"Maybe not,\" said Mahuk, still cheerful. \"Still there are plenty of ships in TransGalactic's fleet. You're working on a promotion, my friend.\" With a cheering smile, Mahuk stepped to the rear of the command deck then turned around. \"I'll prepare the engines for jump. You get things ready up here and give the word.\" With that, he stepped into the elevator.\n\nSimon activated the intercom. \"Natalie, break's over, I need you back on the command deck.\" He turned and stepped into the holographic tank and pointed to a green ribbon that was near their position. The ribbon terminated near Alpha Coma Bereneces. \"Computer,\" he called. \"Store this course in the navigational computer.\" He then moved back to the pilot's console and charted a course to the new jump point for Alpha Coma.\n\nAs Simon pushed at the holographic lever that applied forward thrust, Natalie stepped onto the command deck and took her seat at the communications station. \"Natalie,\" he said, \"activate sensors, we're going to need to feel around for the exact position of the jump point. They're moving around a bit.\"\n\nShe nodded and did as Simon asked. She brought up a display that hovered over her console that showed the ship and readings of gravitational density. She touched her hand to her forehead. \"Simon, two Titan ships have just jumped into the area. They're ordering us to return with them to Titan.\"\n\nWithout thinking about it, Simon increased the thrust to full and chewed on his lower lip. \"Why are they trying to stop us?\" asked Simon, aloud. \"You'd think they'd want to see the Cluster stopped, too.\"\n\n\"They're scared,\" said Natalie.\n\nSimon looked around at her.\n\n\"They're afraid we won't be able to stop the Cluster and things are going to be a lot worse,\" she said dreamily. She pointed to her forehead. \"I've been listening in to the Titan frequencies. There's been chatter.\" She looked at another of her screens. \"The Titans are pursuing us.\"\n\nSimon turned back to his own console. \"We're approaching the jump point. Give me some direction.\" He backed off the forward thrust.\n\n\"Gravitational density increasing about twenty degrees to port,\" said Natalie.\n\nSimon called up a holographic representation of a steering column. As he turned the ship, she called out, \"Gravitation density now increasing fifteen degrees below us.\" He pushed the column forward dropping the ship's nose. \"I guess they've closed to firing range,\" said Natalie.\n\n\"Why's that?\" asked Simon.\n\n\"They've just launched two missiles.\"\n\n\"Keep your eyes on the gravitational density and warn the crew that jump is imminent. I want everyone strapped in and ready to go.\"\n\n\"Two degrees back to starboard,\" said Natalie, then she sounded the first jump warning. As Simon turned the ship, her display started blinking green. \"I think we're right on top of it.\" She looked over at her other display. \"The missiles are closing pretty fast.\"\n\nSimon shut down the forward thrust. \"We're getting out of here.\" He pushed the intercom button. \"Mahuk! Jump now!\"\n\nUsed to the long, protracted mapping jumps as he was, Simon gasped when the indicators already showed that the jump was complete. He gaped at the display for a moment, then looked back at Natalie. \"Did the missiles interfere with jump?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Natalie. She changed the holographic display at the front of the command deck so it showed the blue-green world of Alpha Coma ahead of them. \"We arrived right on target.\" She pushed a button and several red dots appeared around the planet.\n\n\"What are those?\" asked Simon.\n\n\"Military vessels,\" said Natalie with a shudder. \"I count thirty-two of them.\" She turned and looked at Simon. \"I hope none of them start shooting missiles at us.\"\n\n\"As long as they're not Titan ships, I think we'll be okay,\" he said, trying to sound reassuring, but afraid he heard something of a shudder in his own voice. \"Call Herbert Firebrandt and let him know we're back. I want to talk to him.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nRoberts let himself into Ellison Firebrandt's cabin. He looked around and smiled. The room was paneled in wood except for a couple of lighted alcoves that were covered over with stained glass. A brass lantern swung gently back and forth on a chain. He pondered for a moment how long it had been since he'd seen the lantern swinging, instead of standing still. Firebrandt reclined in large, overstuffed chair, snoring.\n\nThe first officer nudged his hover chair closer to the captain, as his smile melted into a worried frown. He thought about his own arthritis and looked at Firebrandt's white hair. With a look back at the door, he thought about the inexperienced crew and hoped that what they were doing was not simply the folly of two old men who'd grown bored of farming. He reached out and touched Firebrandt gently on the forearm.\n\nThe captain startled awake and sat up. \"What time is it?\" he asked as he rubbed his eyes.\n\n\"Ship's hull integrity is good, sir,\" said Roberts, deliberately not answering the captain's question. \"Junior Kimura reports that the EQ engines are ready for jump.\"\n\nFirebrandt looked at Roberts as though seeing him for the first time. Looking beyond his first officer, he saw the swinging lantern and nodded, as though his brain had finally caught up with what was happening. The captain reached over, took his pipe and tamped it full of tobacco and lit it. \"Then we're ready to jump to Earth?\" asked Firebrandt.\n\nRoberts shook his head. \"There's a problem.\" He hovered over to a chart table on the opposite side of Firebrandt's cabin. He brought up an image of the galaxy. \"I've scanned for five jump points and none of them are where they should be.\"\n\nFirebrandt stood and joined Roberts by the chart. He blinked at the image of the galaxy and tried to recall long-unused navigation skills as he sucked on the pipe. Finally he removed the pipe from his mouth and slapped his forehead. \"Of course. The Cluster is moving stars around at the center of the galaxy,\" said the captain. \"That's going to muck with all the jump points.\"\n\nRoberts nodded and he felt a burning sensation in the pit of his stomach. \"I'm afraid we may have jumped into orbit for nothing.\"\n\nFirebrandt returned the pipe to his mouth and stared at the chart. He commanded it to show the positions of Earth and Sufiro, then walked around staring at it from several angles. Finally he looked at Roberts. \"There are Clusters at the center of the galaxy and there are Clusters at Earth, right?\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Roberts slowly, not sure that he followed how this fact helped them.\n\n\"If the Clusters at the center of the galaxy are maintaining an open EQ channel to Earth, we can trace that and follow it right to Earth.\"\n\nRoberts shook his head, still not following. \"That would only do us good if we were at the center of the galaxy.\"\n\nThe captain smiled around the pipe stem. \"Precisely. The black hole at the center of the galaxy is the single largest gravitational source. We can jump to that from anywhere.\"\n\n\"You've got to be kidding,\" said Roberts, sitting back in the seat of the hover chair. \"No ship besides the Cluster has ever survived traveling to the center of the galaxy.\"\n\n\"Why?\" asked Firebrandt, stepping back toward his chair.\n\n\"You know why as well as I do, sir,\" said Roberts, turning to face the captain. \"A ship that tried to jump to the galactic core would be ripped apart within minutes\u2014not to mention the radiation surges we'd have to endure.\"\n\nThe captain turned on his heel. \"How many minutes would a ship have?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Roberts, thinking. \"Maybe fifteen minutes. Twenty at the outside.\"\n\n\"You'd have that long to find the jump point and trace it,\" said Firebrandt.\n\nRoberts looked down and sighed. \"I don't know, sir. That's asking a lot.\"\n\nFirebrandt stepped toward Roberts and knelt down beside him. \"I know, but we've got to try. We've got to get to Earth to help Edmund.\"\n\nRoberts looked up, meeting Firebrandt's gaze. \"Do we, sir? Or, is this just some attempt by an old man to regain lost glory?\" He pointed to the door. \"We have an inexperienced crew out there. There's a good chance we'll die in the center of the galaxy.\"\n\nThe captain ripped the pipe from his mouth. \"According to the message I got from Swan, if we do nothing we will be dead\u2014everyone on Sufiro will be dead. Like it or not, the people on Sufiro have always looked to me as a leader. Sitting around on Sufiro and continuing with my comfortable life while hoping that someone, somewhere is going to save my ass from the bad guys is not leadership. If there's any chance that we can help stop the Cluster, we've got to do it.\" The captain stood and replaced the pipe, then stepped over to a place where there was a nail in the wall. He pointed to the nail. Roberts remembered that was the place where the captain's privateer's license used to hang. \"We may have been privateers, but when you signed aboard my vessel you took a vow to protect the Earth. Are you breaking that vow, Mr. Roberts?\"\n\nRoberts swallowed hard. \"Sir, I thought you once said that Earth abandoned you.\"\n\nThe captain removed the pipe and looked down at his feet. A moment later, he looked back up at his first officer. \"Yes, I did say that ... but I've come to realize that I can't abandon Earth. Abandoning the Earth will mean abandoning our people on Sufiro.\" He stepped over and knelt down next to Roberts once again. \"Now, can you make this jump happen, or can't you?\"\n\n\"I can try, sir,\" said Roberts, firmly.\n\n\"How long will it take to set up?\" asked the captain.\n\n\"Meet me on the battle deck in half an hour. We'll either be ready to go then, or I'll be able to give you a revised estimate,\" said Roberts. He turned his chair and floated from the cabin to the battle deck, a worried frown etched into his features. He knew the captain was right, but that didn't ease the feeling of taking a bunch of people who were barely trained into a situation for which they weren't really prepared. However, as he hovered into the command deck, he saw Juan Raton at the gunner's rig. Juan had been kidnapped from his home and taken to work in the mines in Tejo. Juan fought with Edmund Swan to get the New Granadans out of the Erdonium mines. Roberts hovered alongside Anne McClintlock\u2014a computer specialist. Though her father was one of the founders of the New Granadan continent on Sufiro, her brother led the invasion that Edmund Swan along with Manuel and Juan Raton helped to fight off. The people currently aboard _Legacy_ had been forged in battle, just as any crew before had been.\n\nRoberts detailed the captain's plan to Anne McClintlock. She nodded grimly and said, \"It's a dangerous plan, but it just might work.\"\n\nHe let out an unconscious sigh of relief and they began their calculations. They plotted several possible jump points, then looked at possible paths out of the galactic core. \"If we jump here, I think we'll maximize our chances for finding the Cluster's EQ signal back to Earth.\" _Presuming the Cluster has a signal back to Earth,_ he thought, but didn't say.\n\n\"I agree,\" said Anne. She ran a calculation and pointed to a set of numbers that appeared on the display. \"We need to jump from these coordinates.\"\n\nRoberts took his hover chair over to the wheel console, raised himself up so he could reach the controls and entered the coordinates. Meanwhile Anne set up the scanners to search for the Cluster's EQ transmission to Earth, trace it and enter the jump parameters into the computer.\n\nHalf an hour later, Ellison Firebrandt strode onto the battle deck and looked around.\n\n\"We're en route to our best-estimated jump point,\" reported Roberts. \"We'll be ready to jump in about two minutes.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" said the captain with a smile. He looked back at Mary Seaton. \"Start preparing the jump engines.\"\n\n\"We're all set to go when you give the word,\" she said. Though her voice was calm, Firebrandt could see the sweat on her forehead.\n\n\"We're at the jump point,\" reported Roberts. He reached over, shut off the thrusters, and then drifted back over to the computer console next to Anne McClintlock. Once again, he lowered the chair to the grating and clamped it onto the deck.\n\n\"Sound the jump warning,\" called the captain.\n\n\"All decks report ready,\" reported Anne.\n\n\"Jumping,\" called Firebrandt as he pushed the button on the wheel console.\n\nIn spite of the fact that he was seated in the hover chair, Roberts felt as though the floor had fallen out from beneath him as the ship fell into the galactic core. Colors swirled and drifted like some kind of psychedelic smoke drifting around his head from the captain's pipe. He looked around and saw the captain on his knees, gripping the handles on either side of the ship's wheel for dear life. He thought he could hear the old man's determination to see the mission through right as the ship came out of jump.\n\nAnne belched loudly next to Roberts and then stood and stumbled out of her chair. Roberts quickly looked around. \"Scanners came on line; they're searching for the EQ jump point.\"\n\nAnne got herself to her feet, held her stomach and ran to the head.\n\n\"Gravitational stresses on the hull are off the scale,\" said Mary from the engineering console. \"I have no way of estimating hull integrity.\" She stood up and stepped over to the captain. \"Even if we find that jump point, we may vaporize the minute we jump,\" she said.\n\nThe captain's nod was barely perceptible. He looked over to Roberts. \"Turn on the display. While we're here, let's at least take a look.\"\n\nThe galactic core became visible in the holographic tank. Anne came out of the head, her hair hanging straggly around her face and gasped at the sight. Firebrandt stepped forward and stood next to Roberts. They both looked at light being warped around the black hole and the millions of stars that surrounded them, bathing the battle deck in light. \"This sight alone almost makes the trip worthwhile,\" mused the captain. He continued to gaze spellbound at the image. Finally, he saw a silver glint and pointed. \"There,\" he said. \"There's one of the Clusters.\" They saw it fire a yellow beam at a star and the star began to move. A loud groan from the ship's hull broke the captain's reverie. \"Make sure everyone remains at jump positions,\" he called. \"We're going to need to get out of here in a hurry.\"\n\n\"Sir, we've got a lock on the Cluster's signal,\" said Roberts. \"I'm feeding coordinates to your station now.\"\n\nAs Firebrandt started moving the ship toward the coordinates, there was a loud pop, like a gunshot. There was a second pop, followed by a scream. The captain looked up and saw Juan Raton kneeling on the deck, his hand to his arm. A third pop sounded, and the captain saw that the rivets around the battle deck were giving way.\n\nMary Seaton rushed to Juan's side and carefully pulled his hand away to look. \"It just grazed him, she said. \"But I'm sure it hurts like hell.\" She quickly reached down and untucked her blouse and tore off a corner, folded it and handed it to Raton who put pressure on the wound. She then strapped him in and returned to her station just as another groan sounded throughout the ship. The mechanic thought she heard the sound of structural supports twisting.\n\n\"We're at the jump point,\" reported Roberts. \"We better get out of here.\"\n\n\"I couldn't agree more,\" said Firebrandt and he activated the jump.\n\n* * * *\n\nEva Cooper double-checked a series of sensors attached to Samuel Coffin's all-but-lifeless body. She then activated the life support monitor that was on the nightstand next to Coffin's bed. His heartbeat seemed to be strong and steady as was respiration; kidney function was nominal. She breathed a sigh of relief as she reached down and patted his hand. \"Hang in there,\" she whispered.\n\nShe stepped from the room. Out in the hall, she discovered that a door that she assumed belonged to a closet was open. She poked her head in and was surprised to see daylight illuminating a set of stairs. She climbed the stairs and found herself on a platform of sorts on the roof of John Mark Ellis' home. Standing by one railing was Kirsten Smart, looking out toward the ocean.\n\nKirsten looked around and saw Eva. \"They call these structures widow walks,\" said Kirsten, pointing out similar platforms on other houses. \"They say the wives of sailors used to come up to these and watch for their husbands' ships to return from the sea. There is a great view of the bay,\" she said, pointing. \"I even think I see G'Liat and John Mark's boat.\"\n\nJoining Kirsten at the railing, Eva thought she could make out a boat leaving the harbor. What caught her eye more was the view she had of the island as a whole. She saw hundreds of nearly identical gray houses. Many had white-washed platforms\u2014widow walks\u2014on their roofs much like the one she was standing on, though she noticed that most were in various states of disrepair. Stepping across to the opposite side, she could make out the hospital where she and Kirsten had retrieved the life-support equipment. She shook her head, thinking about the reception they'd received. The doctor on duty in the emergency room seemed less impressed with the fact that she was the Surgeon General of the Gaean Alliance and more impressed by the fact that she was a guest in John Mark Ellis' house. Even then, he still seemed reluctant to release the life support equipment until they mentioned that they needed it for Samuel Coffin.\n\n\"Samuel Coffin _is_ Nantucket,\" the doctor had said. \"When he dies, this island will never be the same. It's possible the Earth itself will not be the same.\"\n\nKirsten joined Eva. Her own gaze was drawn to the green grass beyond the village. \"It's so quiet up here,\" she said, \"and you can see so far. You can almost believe that Nantucket is the center of the universe.\"\n\nEva smiled and thought about the doctor at the hospital and some of Ellis' passing comments. \"Well it certainly seems the Nantucketers believe it.\"\n\n\"Do you think there's any chance the Cluster can be stopped?\" asked Kirsten as she turned around and leaned back against the railing.\n\nEva looked down at her own thin hands gripping the railing. \"Why ask me? I'm just a doctor.\"\n\n\"You work for the President herself,\" said Kirsten. \"You know the movers and shakers. You know the people who can work this out. Do we have a chance?\"\n\nEva's laugh was cold and bitter. \"If we had to rely on people like Jenna Walker and Dick Richards, I'd say we're doomed.\" She shook her head, then stormed across the platform to look out over the bay once again. \"I'll tell you who's going to save us. It's people like John Mark Ellis and his friends.\" She turned around and looked into Kirsten's eyes. \"It's people like you.\" Her shoulders slumped and it seemed her blond hair wilted around her head. \"The only thing I don't know is whether there are enough people like you.\" She turned around and took in a deep breath of salt air. It seemed to revitalize her.\n\nKirsten was stunned into silence. After a few minutes, she said, \"I don't know that I can save the world.\"\n\n\"You can't,\" said Eva quietly. \"Not alone, anyway.\" She turned and stepped over to the hatch that led back inside. \"Just remember, you're not alone.\" She climbed down the stairs. Kirsten followed, closing the hatch behind.\n\nAs the two women stepped by Samuel Coffin's room, they heard a moan. Eva stopped short and Kirsten almost ran into her. The doctor quickly turned on her heel and entered the room. They found Coffin awake and blinking. \"Water,\" he said. \"I'm thirsty.\"\n\nKirsten, who was standing in the doorway, left and retrieved a glass of water from the bathroom. When she returned, Eva was helping Coffin sit up in bed. Kirsten handed him the glass and the old man drank greedily. He handed the glass back and Kirsten left to refill it. When she returned, Eva was staring worriedly at the monitors. Even Kirsten could tell something was wrong. The line that indicated heart function was not a steady rhythmic pulse. Instead, it seemed a bit ragged. She handed the glass of water to Coffin and pulled a chair alongside the bed.\n\n\"What happened?\" asked Kirsten.\n\n\"I was aboard a ship\u2014a sailing ship...\" The old man's voice trailed off.\n\n\"Yes, the _Pequod_ at the center of the galaxy,\" said Kirsten. \"John Mark was there. He told me all about it. He said he saw a fight on the deck of the ship before he was pulled back. He tried to get back to you, but he couldn't.\" She looked up at Eva, who looked a little guilty as she bent down to retrieve a bag of medical supplies.\n\nCoffin nodded. \"We were nothing but brain wave patterns stored within the Cluster,\" he said, his eyes drifting shut. \"The Cluster started moving stars around in the center of the galaxy. We tried to stop it. The Cluster didn't need us anymore...\" Once again, the old man's voice faded away.\n\nEva took a vial and attached it to hypodermic sprayer. She applied the hypo-spray to Coffin's upper arm and his eyes fluttered open; the heartbeat slowly assumed a more steady rhythm, although Kirsten thought that the peaks were not as high as they were when Coffin first woke.\n\n\"What did the Cluster need you for in the first place?\" asked Kirsten, her brows knitted. \"The Cluster can destroy starships. It can reason and observe the world around itself. Hell, it can move whole stars around. Why does an intelligence of that magnitude and ability need 'appendages' at all?\"\n\nCoffin closed his watery eyes for a moment before he looked up at Kirsten. \"The first life forms on this planet were little more than conglomerations of organic chemicals that moved pointlessly from place to place,\" he said slowly. \"The Cluster is really more akin to those chemicals than anything else I can think of.\" He was once again the old school teacher and the look in his eyes told Kirsten that he was attempting to pass on the most important lesson he would ever teach. \"On Earth, those chemicals became more complex. They developed tools to survive in the world they were born into. Those tools were appendages that allowed some to hunt others; allowed the hunted to flee. Exploration of the universe was born of appendages.\"\n\nEva shook her head. \"But intelligence was born as a way to more efficiently control appendages.\"\n\nCoffin chuckled lightly, then closed his eyes momentarily as a spasm shuddered through his body. \"Who's to say that intelligence requires appendages? What about artificial intelligence? Does it have appendages?\"\n\n\"Artificial intelligence experiments never got very far,\" said Kirsten, thinking about the AI aboard _Sanson._ \"Computers can store vast amounts of information. They can interpret meanings and take actions in response to input. They can even think and reason to a certain degree. For some reason, they've always lacked motive and imagination.\"\n\n\"They've never wanted for anything.\" Coffin was interrupted by a wracking cough. Finally it subsided. \"Computers have never needed to hunt to survive. They've never been hunted. The Cluster is the same. It's not so much that they need appendages. It's that they need creatures _of_ appendage to augment their intelligence\u2014to give them direction.\"\n\nEva put her hand to her mouth. \"We humans are obsessed with death. We're obsessed with building legacies to pass on to the next generation.\"\n\n\"The art is the death,\" said Kirsten, remembering something that John Mark had told her about the way whales view humans.\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Coffin. \"When the Cluster came to the galaxy looking for the Titans, they didn't know what they needed. They only knew they needed that something that motivates creatures of appendage. However, instead of finding the Titans, they found humans; and the human drive to build something\u2014to build a legacy to leave after death\u2014was a very powerful idea to the Cluster.\"\n\n\"Now, the Cluster has a program,\" said Kirsten. \"It doesn't need us anymore.\"\n\nCoffin coughed again and shook his head. When Eva tried to help him, he waved her off. \"It still wants humans. What it doesn't need are the original programmers. We\u2014the first ones to go to the Cluster\u2014have done what we were expected to do. The Cluster will continue to use other humans.\"\n\n\"What happens to the humans it's done with?\" asked Kirsten, her eyes growing wide.\n\n\"The same thing that happened to the humans it couldn't use to begin with.\" Coffin closed his eyes. The pulsing line on the heart monitor dropped to a flat line and a warning tone issued from the life support unit.\n\nEva quickly began chest compressions, trying to get Coffin's heart to restart. Kirsten put her face in her hands tried to control the sobs that wanted to erupt to the surface.\n\n* * * *\n\nManuel Raton, Suki Firebrandt, and Laura Peters had been led to the squat Admiralty headquarters building on Titan. On the way, Suki repeatedly tried to question Admiral Strauss about what was going on and what the Gaean Military was doing about the Cluster around Earth. The Admiral remained silent and when they reached the building, she went to an elevator while they were taken down the stairs into one of the basement levels, escorted to a room where they were made to remove their wrist chronos and empty out their pockets into pouches. Manuel had to remove his belt and all of them took off their shoes. Each of them was then escorted to a separate cell.\n\n\"Rather antique looking cells,\" said Laura glumly as she pointed to the bars that made up the door of her cell.\n\nManuel appraised the bars professionally, then very cautiously tried to stick his finger between them. The shock virtually spun the sheriff of New Granada 180 degrees. \"I wouldn't recommend trying that,\" he said to Laura. \"The bars are there just in case the power goes down for some reason.\"\n\n\"How long do you suppose they'll keep us here?\" asked the _Sanson's_ pilot.\n\nFire and Manuel looked at each other. \"I have no idea,\" said Fire at last. \"One thing is clear, the Admiralty is firmly under the influence of the Cluster.\"\n\n\"What about the Ambassador?\" asked Laura, her eyes growing wide at the prospect. \"What about the Titans?\"\n\nManuel moved over to the bunk and sat down. \"The problem is, the admirals have the power to keep signals from getting to the Ambassador. However, I don't think they have to. I think the Ambassador's under the influence of the Cluster, too.\"\n\nFire reached out and almost put her hands around the bars in a reflexive move, but thought better of it. Instead, she put her arms behind her back. \"The Titans may be powerful, but they're far from omniscient.\" She began to pace the cell. \"They likely recorded us landing, but it's hard to say whether they took any note of us at all. There's a good chance they don't know we're here or why.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\" asked Laura, who dropped onto her own bunk and looked as though she was going to break out in tears.\n\nManuel twirled the end of his mustache and looked up at the pilot. \"There's not much we can do, besides wait for dinner.\"\n\nHowever, the expected dinner never materialized. Without windows or wrist chronos, they had no way of telling how much time had passed. All three went through the phases of hunger pangs, rumbling stomachs and finally the quietude that seemed to come with fasting. Eventually, each of them drifted off to sleep, even though the lights had not been turned off in the cellblock.\n\nWhen Fire awoke some time later, the lights were still on. She heard Manuel snoring in the next cell as she looked across the way to see Laura. Her face was in her hands and she was crying. \"Hey,\" called Fire softly. \"What's the matter?\"\n\nLaura shook her head and wouldn't say anything.\n\n\"Laura, honey, they'll get us some food, soon, I'm sure. They're probably not used to having prisoners and they just forgot...\"\n\n\"It's not that,\" said Laura. \"It's just that I've tried so hard my whole life to stay out of trouble, to do the right thing. How could I wind up in a jail cell like this?\"\n\n\"Listen to me,\" said Fire firmly, but kindly, \"you didn't do anything wrong. We're being held unjustly. These people are under the control of a hostile alien.\"\n\nLaura looked up and sniffed. \"I keep trying to tell myself that,\" she said. \"The problem is that I keep thinking about their uniforms. I'm in the reserves. These are people I've sworn my life to protect...\"\n\nJust then, the lights went out. Without windows, it was pitch dark. Fire strained her ears, but she heard no shouts or calls. It was as though there were no guards in nearby rooms\u2014or perhaps there were and they simply didn't know what had happened. \"Hey!\" called Fire as loudly as she could. \"Did you know the lights went out? Can we get some food in here?\"\n\n\"Keep it down over there,\" muttered Raton from the adjoining cell. \"Hey,\" he said in a happier tone. \"They finally turned the damned lights out.\"\n\nFire had been facing the door. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled toward the door very tentatively, wary of the shock, but knowing somehow what she would find. As she felt the cold steel of the bars, she nodded satisfied when she could put her hand out into the corridor. \"The power's off,\" she announced. \"I can put my hand through the bars.\"\n\n\"Better pull it back,\" called Manuel, an edge of panic in his voice. \"If the power comes back on, that forcefield could slice off your hand.\"\n\nThere was the thud of boots tromping down the corridor. Fire looked up to see a space-suited figure stop in front of her cell and look down at her. The glare from the helmet light prevented her from seeing the face within the mask.\n\n\"Move back from the door,\" said a voice from a translator box. Fire thought it sounded like a Rd'dyggian. She scrambled back away from the door and the space-suited figure retrieved a hepler pistol from a holster at his hip and shot the lock. He wrenched the cell open, then retrieved a miniature flashlight from one of the suit pockets and tossed it toward her. He then moved on, shot Manuel's lock and then Laura's and gave them each flashlights.\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked Fire, her eyes narrowed. She held up the flashlight and illuminated the side of the figure's mask. She gasped when she caught sight of the eye patch. \"Arepno?\" she asked.\n\n\"We must hurry,\" said the Rd'dyggian. He motioned for them to follow and led them further into the cellblock to an open hatch. He motioned that they should go through.\n\nManuel went first and swore when he dropped about ten feet and landed hip deep in raw sewage. Fire landed next to him with a splash and Manuel raised his arms to try to keep from being too badly coated. Then Laura landed next to them. Above them, the space-suited Rd'dyggian used magnetic clamps on his suit to grab onto the walls. He pulled the access hatch closed behind him and bolted it in place, then slowly climbed down the wall to join them in the muck.\n\nIn the wan glow of the overhead service lights, they could make out that it was indeed Arepno that had rescued them. \"As you have by now surmised, we are in part of the septic system of the human dome.\"\n\n\"No shit!\" said Manuel.\n\n\"Actually, quite a lot of shit,\" said Fire, who giggled in spite of herself.\n\nUnfazed by the human's attempt at humor, Arepno pointed to a small circular airlock a few feet away in the wall. \"Though the station is equipped with waste reclamation and recycling facilities, there is an emergency port in case there a problem and the sewage must be removed.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Laura, mostly oblivious to the sewage around her hips. \"In case all the toilets in the dome back up at once and they've got to clean out the septic tank in a hurry.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Arepno. \"That door leads outside where I have a rover waiting. We can then go to my ship and meet your vessel at Alpha Coma.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a great plan, Arepno,\" said Fire, holding up her hands. \"The only problem is ... isn't it cold enough outside that hatch for methane to become liquid?\"\n\nArepno bent down and retrieved something from underneath the muck. As the brown slime dripped off of it, they realized it was a space suit built for humans.\n\nManuel's nose wrinkled and he shook his head. \"I don't know if freedom's worth that.\"\n\n\"I can always carry you back to your cell,\" said Arepno. \"There's still another hour on the program that I installed on the prison block computers. By the time the power comes back on, they will see you safely ensconced in your cell. You do not have to go with me.\"\n\nManuel looked up at the cell, then looked at the suit, his face a mask of disgust. \"Okay, I'll go with you, but there better be showers on that ship of yours!\"\n\n* * * *\n\nJohn Mark Ellis stood at the wheel of his boat. The holo display on the console next to the wheel showed the place where his mother and Manuel had found Richard out in the open ocean. G'Liat stood rigid in the bow, his massive six-fingered hands to his side. Mark couldn't shake the image of those massive hands around the body of Clyde McClintlock, literally squeezing the life out of him. In spite of those memories, Mark wondered what the warrior was thinking about, standing in the front of the boat, the wet salt air rushing past his hairless head. The moisture was almost certainly welcome to the Rd'dyggian warrior. His planet was a good deal more humid than Earth. Though the air was chill, it was not as cold as the warrior's own world. There was no sign that G'Liat was sweating. Mark found himself wondering whether or not Rd'dyggians even had sweat glands when the boat's teleholo signal sounded.\n\nHe activated the unit and saw a hologram of Kirsten sitting in his home on Nantucket. She looked at him through red, swollen eyes. Mark felt his throat go dry and somehow knew that Samuel Coffin had died before she told him.\n\n\"How ... How did it happen?\" he asked quietly, in response to the news.\n\nKirsten told him how Coffin had regained consciousness and what he'd said about the Cluster and the importance of evolved creatures. As she spoke, she gained composure. \"I know how close you and he were,\" she said at last. \"He struggled to stay alive long enough to give us that information. He knew you'd need it.\"\n\nMark felt his knees go weak and threaten to give way. Somehow, G'Liat was there, supporting him with a hand under the elbow. Mark wondered how long the warrior had been there, listening. He hadn't seen G'Liat move out of the bow nor had he heard him step up behind. G'Liat's hand on Mark's elbow was gentle and reassuring.\n\n\"I wish I could be there for you,\" said Kirsten after Mark was silent for a time.\n\n\"I'm glad you were able to be there for him,\" said Mark. \"We'll be back as soon as we can.\" He reached down to turn off the teleholo link, but stopped. \"I love you,\" he said.\n\nShe blinked at him and her breath caught in her throat. \"I love you, too,\" she said then terminated the connection from her end.\n\nG'Liat stepped back and Mark took the wheel again. The warrior watched him for a time, but didn't say a word. At last, he stepped forward and resumed his place in the bow. Mark slowly increased the boat's throttle, hoping to get to Richard's position as soon as possible. Suddenly Ellis felt very alone in the world. His father was dead, his teacher was dead, and his mother was on Titan. At that moment, he wanted advice and comfort from an old friend or a relative, but it seemed none were around. He would have even settled for his grandfather\u2014Ellison Firebrandt\u2014even though he spent much of his life disapproving of the old privateer.\n\nAfter an hour spent in uncomfortable silence, they finally came to the place where Fire and Manuel had found Richard. Mark bent down and retrieved a pair of translator boxes. He attached one to his belt, then stepped into the bow and offered one to G'Liat. The warrior shook his head. \"Thank you, no,\" he said. \"I speak the language of the Sperm Whale as fluently as I speak your own.\"\n\nMark nodded, simply accepting the statement for the time being. He retrieved a pair of binoculars from his belt and began scanning the horizon for whale spouts. The boat tipped suddenly and Ellis had to grab onto G'Liat's arm to keep from being dropped over the side into the water. The gray-black form of Richard rose near the boat and the spray from his spout washed over the deck, soaking both G'Liat and Mark.\n\n\"The cycle continues,\" said Richard.\n\nBefore Mark could speak, a series of clicks almost like static issued from G'Liat's mouth. The words were translated through the unit on Mark's belt. \"The cycle continues,\" said the warrior, solemnly.\n\nEllis echoed the statement, then said, \"It is good to see you, though I'm surprised to find you right where my mother and Manuel Raton said they'd found you.\"\n\n\"I have been waiting for you,\" said the whale. \"Besides, there is good hunting here.\" The whale rolled toward one side so it looked up at G'Liat. \"I am intrigued by this Cluster that the humans tell me about. Over the last week, I've felt something prickling at my consciousness. It is like the contentment of a full belly or the sense of satisfaction that comes after mating, but it is there even when my belly is not full and I have not mated for many years.\"\n\n\"That sounds like the Cluster,\" said Mark, stepping a little closer to the boat's edge and kneeling down. \"I've experienced similar sensations myself.\"\n\n\"The Cluster is a lifeform like me?\" asked the whale. \"It is a creature that hunts the dark of space, but does not build tools?\"\n\nG'Liat knelt down next to Ellis. \"It is similar to whales, yes. It is large and it hunts. It is also dissimilar to whales. It is extremely ancient life. It does not mate. It does not change unless it merges with other lifeforms.\"\n\n\"The only way any lifeform changes is by merging with others,\" mused the whale. \"Whether it is by mating and creating a life that is a combination of the two or by simply interacting and exchanging thoughts as we are now.\" The whale swam away from the boat a short distance and dove under the water, but surfaced a short time later.\n\n\"The Cluster is dying,\" said Mark. \"It wants to leave a legacy so that other life forms like itself can learn what it has learned.\"\n\nRichard swam close to the boat. \"I, too, am dying,\" he said.\n\nMark grabbed onto the low railing that surrounded the bow. \"You can't die,\" he said as his eyes grew moist.\n\n\"All creatures die,\" said the whale. \"However, I do not understand the word, 'legacy.'\"\n\n\"It is something that humans leave for their children or for generations to come,\" explained Mark. He looked over at G'Liat who simply stared off at the horizon. \"Sometimes it's a physical object such as this boat. My father left it for me. Sometimes it's a book or songs. I suppose you could say that the songs of the humpbacks are a legacy that they leave for their children.\"\n\nG'Liat said something in Rd'dyggian and then repeated it in Richard's language. Mark heard both translations: \"The Cluster must learn to build a living legacy.\" He continued in the whale's language. \"The humpbacks' legacy lives and evolves with time. Parents do pass on their songs, but the children change them. You, Richard, passed on your DNA to your children. Their mothers taught them how to hunt\u2014how to live. Your children will live long after your death.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" said the whale. \"The cycle resumes.\" With that, the whale dove below the water to resume hunting for a time and ponder what he'd learned from G'Liat and Ellis.\n\nMark stood, his thoughts divided. Part of his mind was stunned by the revelation that his old friend Richard was dying. He knew the time would come before long. After all, both Coffin and Richard were friends of his father; unless there was an accident, he would outlive them both. However, it seemed too soon. Another part of Mark's brain was processing what the Rd'dyggian warrior had just told the whale. \"What are you trying to do?\" he asked at last.\n\nG'Liat stood and looked down at Ellis with black, unblinking eyes. \"You humans are so obsessed with physical things.\" He pointed to the boat. \"Your father's legacy was this boat. Your ancestors' legacy to you was Nantucket Island and the houses that sit upon it. You speak of books before you speak of living songs.\" The warrior let out a laugh and the sound of it chilled Ellis to the bone. He'd never heard a Rd'dyggian laugh before. \"There is no reason that the Cluster must die. The Cluster can be convinced it can go on living, that it can build a living legacy rather than some object at the center of the galaxy.\n\n\"The whales are stagnant and so is the Cluster. However, the whales have evolved and can aid the Cluster. The Cluster can travel the stars and aid the whales.\"\n\nMark Ellis felt a chill run down his spine. \"That means subjecting the whales to the same servitude that humans are under now ... to the same servitude that the Titans fought to escape. I can't condone that.\"\n\n\"Symbiosis is only servitude when one of the life forms is unwilling,\" said G'Liat. \"This is out of your hands.\"\n\n\"Not if I can help it,\" said Mark.\n\nRichard rose out of the water. \"The cycle continues,\" he said.\n\n\"The cycle continues,\" repeated G'Liat solemnly.\n\n\"Tell me more of the Cluster,\" said the whale. \"The more I hear, the more it fascinates me. I believe my kind have something to offer them.\"\n\nMark knelt down again. \"Richard,\" he pleaded. \"The Cluster is dangerous, it enslaves the beings it interacts with.\"\n\n\"Young one,\" said Richard sternly. \"You do not want to see me die. Perhaps G'Liat gives me a reason to live just a little longer.\"\n\nEllis fell back into a sitting position, took a deep breath and listened to the conversation between the whale and the Rd'dyggian warrior, trying to find a flaw in G'Liat's cold logic or the whale's desire to see the stars. Sadly, Ellis couldn't find one and was forced to admit that G'Liat had perhaps found the solution they sought, though he didn't like it at all. He hoped his mother was having better luck on Titan.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**ARMAGEDDON**\n\nManuel Raton's nose was still twitching when Arepno's ship came out of jump in the Alpha Coma Bereneces system. \"Will you give it a rest,\" said Fire. \"You've been through the sanitizer three times. You don't smell like sewage any more.\"\n\nManuel rolled his eyes. \"I didn't think I did, but then I kept seeing it\u2014or was it hearing it during that jump.\" He paced the small octagonal room and shook his head. \"Was it just me or did that jump take a long time.\"\n\n\"Arepno's ship must be equipped to do mapping jumps, like the _Sanson_ does,\" said Laura Peters. When she saw the confused expression on Manuel's face, she explained further. \"The jump did take longer, because it was carefully tracing the gravitational currents.\" She wrung her hands. \"The Cluster's moving stars at the center of the galaxy. It must be playing havoc with jump points throughout the galaxy.\"\n\nThe door to the tiny cabin opened, and Arepno stepped in. Without a word, he waved his hand next to one wall and a hologram of Alpha Coma appeared. \"We are in orbit,\" he explained. \"It would appear that the _Nicholas Sanson_ has preceded us here.\"\n\n\"Why would they be here?\" asked Laura, her brow furrowed. \"I thought they'd still be at Titan waiting for us.\"\n\n\"They're here because they took my advice and fled the Titan system,\" explained the warrior. \"It is good to see that they are here. As we departed orbit without the Titans' permission, we were fired upon. I'm sure the _Sanson_ was as well.\"\n\n\"But the Titans are peaceful,\" said Laura as though a paradigm had just shifted. \"Why would they fire on our ships?\"\n\n\"For the same reason we were arrested,\" said Fire with a sigh. \"Someone\u2014or several someones, more likely\u2014is afraid of what will happen if the Cluster is confronted.\"\n\n\"But how did the Titans get missiles?\" she persisted. \"They've never shown signs of arming themselves before.\"\n\n\"They didn't use them very well,\" interjected Arepno matter-of-factly. \" _Sanson's_ presence here is testimony of that as is the ease of our escape. The missiles were a recent acquisition.\" He turned toward Fire. \"Your uncle has summoned us to the surface. In spite of several people's desire, there are plans to confront the Cluster.\"\n\n\"That's what I wanted to hear,\" sneered Manuel. \"Let's get going.\"\n\n\"Aren't you afraid you're going to smell the place up?\" asked Fire.\n\nArepno's prehensile mustache groped around as the warrior sniffed the air. After a moment, he made a gesture a little like a shrug and then said, \"We will be landing on the surface in a few minutes.\" He left, closing the door behind him\u2014however, he left the holo display on so they could watch the ship's progress toward the planet. Even though they saw flames shooting around the ship as they entered the atmosphere, the ride was smooth. The ship dropped rapidly toward one of the large continents. Soon, grid-like patterns appeared on the ground below them as farms, cities and roads appeared. They continued to descend and after a couple of minutes, they could make out low-lying buildings\u2014houses in the suburbs around a large urban area. In the distance were taller buildings. Though she had only been there once before, Fire thought she recognized the city as Shangri La, capital of Alpha Coma Bereneces.\n\nThe ship settled to the ground at a spaceport. Soon after, Arepno appeared in the doorway again and led the three through the command center of the craft to a gangway that extended, almost like a living appendage, to the tarmac outside. The four stepped down through the gangway and were met by a group of armed personnel in the uniform of Alpha Coma Bereneces. A woman with a gold star on her collar stepped forward and saluted Arepno. \"I've been ordered to escort you to Senator Firebrandt's office,\" she said.\n\n\"A little better reception than we had on Titan,\" muttered Manuel.\n\n\"So it seems,\" said Fire.\n\nLaura shushed them into silence.\n\nThey were led to a hover bus that took them through the city. The buildings were like fragile crystal palaces. Between them were vast, open areas that had fountains or sculptures. Fluffy white clouds stood out in stark contrast to a deep azure sky. \"It's no wonder they call this place Shangri La,\" mused Laura.\n\n\"Give me the Andes any day,\" said Fire, looking skeptical. \"Or, the Nuevo Rio Grande valley back on Sufiro.\" When she saw Laura's incredulous look, she smiled lopsidedly. \"Oh, this is a beautiful city, but I prefer natural beauty to something that's been sculpted.\"\n\n\"It'd be a shame to see either destroyed by the Cluster,\" growled Manuel, bringing them back to the danger at hand.\n\nAt last the hover bus arrived in front of the government complex. The soldiers escorted them out and led the way to Herbert Firebrandt's office. The leader opened the door, stepped through, and then stepped sideways, executing a salute as Arepno, Fire, Manuel and Laura entered the office.\n\nSimon Yermakov stood next to Herbert Firebrandt's desk; his head was bent down. He, the senator, and two ship captains were deep in conversation. Even so, Firebrandt looked up and acknowledged the new arrivals. As he did, Simon looked up and smiled openly. He ran around the desk and wrapped Laura in a hug. \"I thought you were lost!\" he said.\n\n\"There was no reason to think that,\" said Arepno. \"I said we'd meet you here.\"\n\nAt a loss, Laura's arms hung limply to her side until Simon released her and stepped back, a too-big smile on his face. \"It's good to see you, sir,\" she said, offering her hand.\n\nSenator Firebrandt stood up and escorted Fire, and Manuel to the center of the room and introduced them to several captains and two admirals. \"What's going on?\" asked Fire.\n\n\"We're assembling a strike force,\" explained the Senator. \"From what Mr. Yermakov tells us, the galaxy is in jeopardy. We have to stop the Cluster now. What distresses me even more is that the _Sanson_ was fired upon bringing us this information\u2014so we can't even count on the Titans to help us.\"\n\n\"I don't think you can count on Earth ships either,\" said Fire. \"We were taken prisoner by the Admiralty on Titan. I think they're all under the influence of the Cluster.\" The Senator looked at his feet in a way that reminded Fire very much of her father.\n\n\"How the hell are you going to attack the Cluster?\" asked Manuel. \"Every ship that's attacked one has been vaporized.\"\n\nSenator Firebrandt nodded somberly. \"We know. The problem before is that we never knew where to find the Cluster so we could never attack in force. So far the Cluster has never faced more than one or two ships. We have over thirty ships ready to assault the Cluster and we know right where to find it.\"\n\n\"You know it's at Earth,\" corrected Fire. \"The problem is that the jump points are changing.\"\n\n\"True,\" said the Senator. \"That's where the _Sanson_ comes in. Yermakov's crew has been working with staff here to realign the jump engines on the ship. By this evening, they should be calibrated well enough to lead the fleet back to Earth.\" He put his arms around Manuel and Fire. \"Your service has been invaluable, but if you want to stay here on Alpha Coma, I'm sure we can find quarters.\"\n\n\"You can't keep me out of this fight,\" said Manuel. \"If the _Sanson's_ going back, then so am I.\"\n\nFire nodded and brushed a strand of her long salt-and-pepper hair over her shoulder. \"I'm with Manuel,\" she said. \"After all, my son's there. If I can help, I will.\"\n\nThe Senator smiled. \"There're a few hours before the ships will be ready. Let's get out of here and find some dinner.\" He looked into Fire's eyes. \"I'd like some time to get to know my niece better before she gets herself shot at or thrown in jail again.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nWhen the privateer _Legacy_ came out of jump, Ellison Firebrandt fell to his knees and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. He held up his hand when he saw Roberts' look of concern. The captain looked back at Mary Seaton. \"Get me a vessel status. Are we still in one piece?\"\n\nMary, though she looked as though she was trying to keep her breakfast down, nodded and turned toward her station and started bringing up displays and making calls on the intercom.\n\nFirebrandt pulled himself to his feet and looked over at Juan Raton, sitting at the gunner's station. He'd let go of his arm and blood was seeping through his shirt. \"Juan, get down to the medic and get your arm tended to. We're going to need you ready to work in short order, I think.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" breathed Juan through clenched teeth. His eyes looked forward, a bit unfocused from the pain. He struggled to his feet and left to see the medic.\n\n\"Captain,\" called Roberts. \"We're right on target, near Earth orbit.\" The first officer activated the holo tank and the blue-green globe of Earth materialized. Behind and below the planet was the bright gray form of the Moon. Though a number of human colonies were on planets that outwardly looked like Earth, the combination of Earth and Moon was unmistakable.\n\nFirebrandt's breath caught and he stepped forward, toward the image. He put his hand on Roberts' shoulder and squeezed. \"I never thought to see Earth again.\" He looked down at the deck grating below his feet and the walls on either side. \"I certainly never thought to see Earth from this ship again.\" He stepped closer to the display and peered at it closely. \"Can you show me the position of the Clusters?\"\n\n\"I'm only showing one Cluster currently in orbit around the Earth,\" said Anne. She typed a command into the computer console and a red orb appeared over Australia. \"The other three must be at the center of the galaxy.\"\n\n\"Does that help or hinder us?\" asked Roberts as he unclamped the hover chair from the deck and drifted next to Firebrandt, raising himself to the captain's eye-level.\n\n\"Captain,\" called Mary Seaton from the battle deck's stern. \"I've just received reports from all crew chiefs. We suffered a minor hull breach amidships on deck three. The section is sealed off. Junior doesn't think we should attempt another jump until it's repaired. He also doesn't think we can repair the damage ourselves. We'll need time at a dock facility.\"\n\n\"But, it can be repaired,\" reflected Firebrandt. \"That's good. How about injuries?\"\n\n\"Juan Raton and two others suffered minor injuries. Doc Krishnamurty says she'll have them patched up in no time.\"\n\n\"How are we for combat readiness?\"\n\nMary took a deep breath and let it out slowly. \"As good as we were when we left Sufiro. We have weapons that'll fire and once Juan is back at his station, people that can fire them. The engine crew is ready to go.\" She pursed her lips as though wanting to say more, but the captain interrupted.\n\n\"That's about as good as can be expected,\" said the captain, knowing that she was worried about the small crew. Though he was also worried, he retrieved the pipe from his pocket and lit it, projecting an outward sense of calm. After staring at the image of Earth for a few moments, a self-satisfied grin appeared and he looked at Roberts drifting next to him. \"I think it's time to contact Edmund Swan and see if we can form a strategy.\"\n\nRoberts nodded and pressed several buttons on the hover chair; he had slaved certain ship functions, including communications to one of the control panels on the chair. A moment later, the hologram of Earth was replaced by an image of Edmund Swan standing in a dimly lit room. Four people were grouped behind him.\n\n\"You're here? At Earth?\" asked Swan, staring wide-eyed at the battle deck of the _Legacy._ \"When I sent the message with the _Sanson_ I expected you to get Arepno or someone to come and help us out.\"\n\n\"You said it yourself, the Cluster is endangering all human life in the galaxy\u2014that means Sufiro,\" said the captain around the pipe stem. \"I've never run from a fight,\" he added, almost as an afterthought.\n\n\"No, you haven't,\" said Swan with a genuine smile. \"Especially one where the safety of your people is concerned.\" The deputy sheriff turned and spoke to one of the women behind him, then turned back. \"Can you meet us at the Southern Arizona space port? We have a plan of action, but I'd rather not discuss it over the link.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" said Firebrandt. \"We'll see you shortly.\" Roberts shut off the com channel. Together, they left the battle deck and made their way to the launch bay. Firebrandt disconnected the safety and fuel lines while Roberts drifted into the launch and prepared it for the excursion to the surface. After a moment, Firebrandt stepped into the launch, closing the door behind him. Once the captain was strapped in, Roberts opened the bay door. Firebrandt took the controls and eased the launch forward, out of the bay.\n\nIf anything, Ellison Firebrandt was more affected by the sight of Earth through the launch's windows. Fifty years before, he had told Roberts and Suki that the last thing he wanted to do was face the humiliation of returning to Earth defeated and in a broken-down star cruiser. He turned the launch slightly and looked back at the _Legacy_ , once again in space and he felt a lump in his throat. He had not realized before how much it was that he actually wanted to return to Earth. Acutely aware that he and his ship might be the only thing that stood a chance of saving the planet, Ellison Firebrandt felt a certain triumph in the return\u2014at long last he had defeated the plans of his mother, who had planned to strand him on Sufiro for life. As the launch descended through the atmosphere, the captain realized that his mother still had achieved her own victory. He had not returned to Earth as a pirate, but on a mission to save all of Earth's colonies\u2014including his mother's world of Alpha Coma. He laughed lightly as he homed in on the Southern Arizona spaceport.\n\n\"Are you feeling okay, sir,\" asked Roberts, looking at the captain in concern.\n\n\"Never felt better,\" said Firebrandt as he activated the thrusters and settled the launch into a docking bay.\n\nFirebrandt unstrapped from the seat and opened the door. As he stepped down the ramp, Edmund Swan and two other people stepped through an archway that led into the bay. \"Tell us about your plan,\" said Firebrandt as he shook the deputy sheriff's hand.\n\nSwan gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. After he moment, he opened them and looked at the captain. \"I really wish I was asking this of someone else,\" he said. \"There's no way to predict how the Cluster is going to respond. The _Legacy_ may well be destroyed.\"\n\n\"If the _Legacy_ was sitting on Sufiro, and the Cluster succeeded, she would be destroyed just the same. What do we need to do?\"\n\nSwan began pacing back and forth as he outlined the plan he and the resistance had formed.\n\n* * * *\n\nOn the way back to Nantucket, G'Liat resumed his place in the bow of the boat while Ellis steered. Above them, dark clouds began to form and the water began to churn. Mark applied a little more throttle hoping to get back to port before the storm broke out in force. His own mind felt like the brewing storm. He was distressed, though perhaps not surprised, to hear Richard's statement that he was dying. Mark wasn't sure he knew how long sperm whales usually lived, but based on what his father and Coffin had told him, he knew Richard was well over seventy years old.\n\nHe looked up at the Rd'dyggian warrior in the bow and frowned. On one hand, he couldn't help but be grateful that he had given the whale a reason to hold onto life a little longer. On the other hand, G'Liat suggested that whales should willingly subjugate themselves to the Cluster. Ellis tried to argue the point to Richard\u2014tried to suggest that the whale not be so willing to give up the freedom of the oceans. However, he was rebuffed when the whale said, \"How dare you speak of the freedom of the oceans\u2014you who have the ability to travel to other worlds and the stars beyond.\"\n\nMark didn't know how to answer the whale. The only option he had left was to find an alternative way to stop the Cluster, before G'Liat found a way to present his proposal that the Cluster take whales in place of humans. Of course, thought Mark consolingly, it's possible that G'Liat could present his proposal to the Cluster and they would reject it as unfeasible. After all, they didn't really know enough about the Cluster to know for certain that the whales offered enough to attract the Cluster. After all, why did the Cluster choose humans over say, the Rd'dyggians, the Alpha Centaurans, or the Zahari?\n\nMark heard a building rumble and, at first, he thought it was thunder from the brewing storm. However, the more he listened, the more he realized it was not thunder, but some kind of craft approaching. Just then, a silver egg-shaped craft dropped through the low, dark clouds and descended toward the water. Mark pulled back on the throttle and turned, sending up a shower of spray to keep from running into it. He looked up into the boat's bow, certain he must have dumped G'Liat into the water. Instead the warrior had hooked his foot into the low railing that ran around the edge of the boat and followed the roll of the boat with the grace of a surfer riding a wave. When the boat finally stopped, Ellis looked over his shoulder. The egg-shaped craft settled with its bottom in the water; the narrow part of the egg pointed skyward.\n\nGracefully, in spite of the rolling waves and the slick deck, G'Liat made his way to the boat's stern. He looked briefly at Mark. \"Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to Richard once again. After so much time among humans, it was truly refreshing.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\" asked Mark.\n\nWithout answering, G'Liat dove over the boat's rail into the churning waves. A light drizzle started coming down from the sky. Mark ran to the stern and looked. He saw G'Liat swimming for the egg-shaped craft. \"Where are you going?\" called Mark again, even though he knew it was in vain. A door appeared in the craft's side and another Rd'dyggian appeared\u2014Rizonex. G'Liat reached the craft and Rizonex pulled him inside. The door closed and soon after, the ship lifted back into the sky with hardly a spray of water.\n\nThe rain was coming down harder. Though he was starting to get soaked through, Mark Ellis didn't bother to go inside to get rain gear. Instead, he returned to the wheel, set course for Nantucket and pushed the throttle to full.\n\n* * * *\n\nAfter meeting with Ellison Firebrandt, Edmund Swan returned to Tim Gibbs' apartment. He stepped over to the armchair opposite Gibbs and sat down. His friend sat, still and unmoving. Swan found himself thinking back to high school and remembered Gibbs as he was then\u2014not too different in the past than he was in the present. He remembered Gibbs tinkering with electronics and computer equipment and talking about his perfect computer that could only be built from a black hole. \"Did you ever dream that such a device would mean the end of humanity?\" he asked, even though he knew Gibbs couldn't hear him. \"Oh, I know what you're thinking, some humans will go on, including you. But, will you have that fundamental spark that makes you human?\"\n\nSwan sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. After a moment, he stood and looked in the refrigerator. After rummaging around for a few minutes and throwing out some cheese covered in green fuzz and an entire carton of something that almost made him throw up just by cracking the lid, he found a bottle of beer. The deputy sheriff pulled it out and examined it skeptically. After a moment, he unscrewed the top, took a swallow, and then made a face. He looked over at the limp form of Gibbs and held up the bottle as if asking for an explanation for the poor quality beer.\n\nIn spite of that, he took another swallow. Maria Gonzalez would be there soon. She was bringing a hypo-spray of Proxom. The resistance planned to inject Proxom into as many people as they could that were in the Cluster trance. At the same time, the _Legacy_ would fire at the Cluster in orbit around the Earth, in an attempt to knock out the EQ signal that connected that Cluster to the ones at the center of the galaxy. Their hope was that it would throw the Clusters into confusion. By pulling as many of the human architects of the memory core away from the Cluster as possible, they hoped they might stop the Cluster. However, as Roberts and others pointed out, that seemed unlikely. It seemed that the Cluster probably would have all the information they needed stored and at best this action would momentarily confuse the Cluster. Still, as Jerry Lawrence pointed out, any time they bought was time for more help to arrive.\n\nSwan took another swallow of beer and then prayed that more help was, indeed, on the way. His worst fear was that they pull Tim Gibbs away from the Cluster, the _Legacy_ would fire and the Cluster would retaliate, killing Ellison Firebrandt and Carter Roberts.\n\nThe door chime sounded. Swan took another drink of beer, then set the bottle down on the counter. He opened the door for Maria Gonzalez, who wore a headset that put her in contact with other resistance leaders around the planet, and carried a hypospray of Proxom. She looked over at the counter. \"Have you got another of those beers? I think I need it.\"\n\n\"I'll go look,\" said Swan.\n\n* * * *\n\nWhen Mark Ellis finally arrived at his front door, he was soaked from the storm. Out of habit, he wiped his feet on the sopping wet mat in front of the door and stepped inside. Kirsten jumped up from the kitchen table, ran to him and threw her arms around him. She backed off a moment later when she felt how cold and wet he was. \"You better get upstairs and change into something dry, before you catch your death of cold.\"\n\n\"Would you mind putting on some coffee, or tea?\" asked Mark as he sloshed toward the stairs. \"Anything hot would be good now.\"\n\nEva started a pot of coffee as Mark went upstairs. He returned a few minutes later, wearing dry clothes and he dropped onto the couch. Kirsten sat down next to him and pulled him close. \"How did the conversation with Richard go?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not well,\" said Mark. He shook his head. \"I feel like such a fool.\" He stood up and began pacing. \"G'Liat had his own agenda all along. I need to find a way back to the Cluster as soon as possible.\"\n\nKirsten stood and put her hand on Mark's arm. \"Mark, Coffin's gone,\" she reminded him. \"You can't help him anymore.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Mark, quietly looking down at the floor. Eva stepped up and handed him a cup of coffee. He drank it down in two gulps and handed the cup back to Eva. \"The problem is that G'Liat's convinced Richard that the best solution is for the whales to replace humans as symbionts for the Cluster.\"\n\nKirsten looked up at him wide-eyed. \"Would the Cluster consider that?\"\n\n\"What the devil would that mean?\" asked Eva, stepping back to the coffee pot and refilling the cup.\n\n\"I don't know\u2014to either of those questions,\" said Mark. He stepped back to the couch and sat down. On the coffee table was a wooden box. He opened the box and retrieved a cigar from within. Biting off the end, he thrust the cigar in his mouth and lit it. \"What I did figure out from talking to Richard is that the Cluster is just as afraid of death as we are. All of us agree that if we can't destroy the Cluster, what we have to do is convince it that it has a reason to go on living.\"\n\nEva sat down in the armchair next to the couch and set the coffee cup on the table in front of Mark. \"Wouldn't it be better to destroy the Cluster?\"\n\nMark nodded slowly. \"I'm inclined to think that would be best.\" He removed the cigar from his mouth and knocked some ash into an ashtray. \"The problem is that we're not sure the Cluster can be destroyed. G'Liat thinks the answer is to find a new symbiont for the Cluster. I think the answer is to convince the Cluster that it can live without symbionts.\"\n\nKirsten sat down in a chair at the kitchen table, avoiding Mark's cigar smoke. \"Where's G'Liat gone?\"\n\nMark shook his head. \"His henchman\u2014Rizonex\u2014picked him up out at sea and took him somewhere. I think it's now a race. The question is, which of us will get to the Cluster first.\"\n\n\"Well, I think I might have something that will help,\" said Eva leaning forward. \"This afternoon, we took Samuel Coffin's body to the hospital morgue. On the way, I was thinking about the fact that emotions seem to attract to Cluster. Proxom suppresses emotions, so that would seem to be why people on Proxom are not susceptible to the Cluster. Thinking along those lines, I realized that if I could suppress the action of the amygdala in the brain, it would free up emotions.\" She sat back and folded her arms.\n\n\"What's the amygdala?\" asked Mark as he returned the cigar to his mouth.\n\n\"It's linked to the limbic system,\" explained Eva. \"It helps you push fear to the back of the mind, it helps you repress sexual desire at inappropriate times. Basically, it's the part of your brain that keeps your emotions in check\u2014keeps them from overwhelming your day-to-day activities.\"\n\n\"Aren't there dangers to suppressing the amy ... the amig ... the part of the brain that suppresses emotion?\" asked Kirsten, with a somewhat frustrated look.\n\nEva nodded slowly. \"It's believed that a malfunctioning amygdala can lead to disorders such as schizophrenia, anxiety or depression...\"\n\n\"Disorders where people suffer from an overload of emotion,\" said Mark around the cigar.\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Eva, standing. \"However, I can give you a controlled dosage of drugs that will suppress the amygdala without leading to those disorders.\" She retrieved her medical bag and pulled out some small vials. \"I was able to retrieve some while we were at the hospital today.\"\n\nMark laid the cigar butt in the ashtray to allow it to burn out. \"I've got to see if I can get to the Cluster before G'Liat does. If you think this might work to get the Cluster's attention, I think we need to try.\"\n\n\"You've already shown a certain tendency to get the Cluster's attention,\" said Eva. \"Let's hope this enhances it.\"\n\nKirsten stood up. \"Mark, don't you think we should talk about this a little more?\"\n\nHe was already rolling up his sleeve. \"Unfortunately, it's a race. It's a race to get there before the Cluster finishes its project at the center of the galaxy and it's a race to see if I can talk to the Cluster before G'Liat finds a way.\"\n\nKirsten tried to think of something more to say. Instead, she stepped over, took Mark's right hand and kissed him as Eva applied the hypo-spray to his left arm.\n\n* * * *\n\nMaria Gonzalez paced back and forth in Tim Gibbs' apartment, talking to other resistance leaders around Earth. She worried that their numbers were shrinking so fast and she worried about what the Proxom injections were going to do to those people who received them. Some speculated it would revive them. Others speculated it would kill the bodies while leaving their minds trapped in the Cluster. Either way, she hoped the resulting confusion would do more good than harm.\n\nShe raised her finger to the earpiece as the signal came in and pointed to Swan. \"Get ready,\" she told him. \"All teams are in position.\" She signaled the _Legacy_ and told them to stand by.\n\nJust then, the door flew open and two Rd'dyggian warriors stepped into the room. The shorter one, in more traditional Rd'dyggian robes, leveled a weapon at Swan.\n\n\"Drop the hypo-spray,\" called the tall one, dressed more like a human\u2014wearing a black turtleneck shirt and slacks. Maria couldn't help noticing that he didn't wear a translator box. Swan looked at her, then looked at the two Rd'dyggians, evaluating them for a moment. At last, he dropped the hypo-spray, apparently deciding that there was no action he could take without getting one or both of them shot.\n\n\" _Legacy_ fire in five,\" called Maria.\n\nShe raised her hands as the tall Rd'dyggian crossed the room in five steps. He patted her down, found one hepler pistol, dropped it to the ground and stepped on it, crushing it under his weight. He examined the headset with his pitch black eyes, but let her keep it. The tall Rd'dyggian said something to the other in their native language just as he left the room.\n\n\"On the couch, both of you,\" said the remaining Rd'dyggian, gesturing with his weapon.\n\n* * * *\n\n\"Gonzalez's signaled from the ground, 'fire in five,'\" reported Anne McClintlock from the computer console, her hand to her own headset.\n\n\"Set five minute countdown,\" ordered Ellison Firebrandt. \"Roberts, do we have a targeting solution yet?\"\n\nRoberts changed the view in the hologram. The Earth was replaced by a close-up view of the Cluster in orbit. \"Since the Cluster doesn't have a radio per se, their transmission isn't a particularly tight beam. Also, we don't want to scan actively since active scans have been known to trigger attacks.\" Roberts floated into the holographic tank and changed the light frequency displayed. Most of the Cluster was a dull red, but one orb stood out in bright green. \"This orb,\" he said, pointing, \"seems to be emitting in radio frequency. I'd focus the attack there.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said Firebrandt. He stood at the wheel console and checked the readouts. They were coming within firing range quickly. Roberts drifted out of the holo tank.\n\n\"Three minutes,\" said Anne McClintlock.\n\n\"Give me a forward view\u2014real projection,\" ordered the captain. In the holo tank, the magnified view of the Cluster was replaced by a view of Earth. The Cluster could be seen in the distance, ahead and below the ship. Firebrandt adjusted his course, then looked over at the gunners' rigs. He saw Juan Raton, his shirt torn, sitting at one rig studying the display. Roberts floated forward to the modified rig and activated the guns.\n\n\"Mark the target orb on the display,\" ordered the captain.\n\nAnne typed in a command on the computer console. The orb in the display glowed green; the other orbs mostly obscured it. Firebrandt started bringing the ship around so that the target orb was directly ahead.\n\n\"One minute to firing time,\" reported Anne.\n\n\"Acquiring target,\" said Roberts.\n\n\"I'm getting it, too,\" said Juan.\n\nThe target orb was now centered in the display. Firebrandt applied a gentle thrust and brought the ship steadily, but slowly closer. Anne started a ten second countdown. Roberts and Juan reported they were both ready. When Anne reached the end of the countdown, the captain growled, \"Fire.\"\n\nAll of the guns on the _Legacy_ opened fire. The Cluster absorbed all of the energy from the hepler guns. However, the overlay of false-color that indicated the radio frequencies faded away. \"Cease fire,\" called the captain.\n\n\"I'm not reading any EQ or radio emanations from the Cluster,\" said Anne.\n\nFirebrandt brought the lateral thrusters on-line and turned the _Legacy_ to starboard, getting her away from the Cluster as fast as possible while simultaneously praying for deliverance and cursing the powers that kept his ship from jumping away from danger.\n\n* * * *\n\nImmediately after Eva Cooper gave Mark Ellis the injection, he didn't feel much of anything, other than a little annoyance at the pain in his arm. \"It'll take a few minutes to take effect,\" explained the doctor. \"Maybe you'd better sit down.\"\n\nMark nodded and Kirsten led him over to the big armchair and he sat. As he looked around the room, his eyes fell on the kitchen area and he grew annoyed at the clutter in the sink. \"Why hasn't anyone cleaned that up?\" he asked irritably.\n\n\"We haven't exactly had time,\" said Kirsten. Her eyes narrowed. \"There's been a lot going on, especially with Coffin's death this morning.\"\n\nAt the mention of Samuel Coffin, Mark's eyes grew wide. \"Why wasn't I here?\" he asked. \"He was my father's best friend and I wasn't here to say good-bye to him. What kind of friend am I?\"\n\n\"You're a very good friend,\" said Kirsten, kneeling down next to the armchair. She took Mark's hand and began patting it. \"Coffin would have wanted you to talk to Richard\u2014it was what you needed to do. Without the information you gained, the Earth had no hope.\"\n\n\"Does it have any hope, now?\" asked Mark, despondently. He waved Kirsten away from him and the corners of his mouth turned down. \"What kind of hope does the human race have if we can't even take time to say good-bye to our friends? Coffin taught me so much ... so much...\" Mark put his face in his hands and unrestrained tears began to flow.\n\nEva knelt down next to Kirsten and helped her to her feet, then saw the moisture in her brown eyes. \"It's the drug,\" whispered Eva, reassuringly. \"Mark can't control his emotions. They'll be a constant flood until it wears off and his amygdala takes control again.\" Eva led Kirsten away.\n\nFeeling otherwise helpless, Kirsten nodded and stepped into the kitchen where she began gathering plates and glasses and placing them into the cleansing unit. She then turned her attention the rest of the living room and kitchen area, looking for plates that had been neglected. As she did, she chewed her lower lip and wondered whether this was the wisest way to try to attract the Cluster.\n\nWhen Mark hadn't raised his head in five minutes, Eva knelt down and checked his pulse. She lifted his head with her finger and looked into his eyes. His breath caught as he saw her and it started coming rapidly. Afraid he was going to hyperventilate, Eva stood to get her medical kit. Mark reached out, grabbed her wrist and pulled her close. Wrapping her in a bear-like embrace, he drove his lips into hers, forcing his tongue into her mouth.\n\nKirsten turned and gasped. The plate she was carrying fell from her hands and shattered on the hardwood floor.\n\n* * * *\n\nG'Liat returned to Tim Gibbs' apartment within a matter of minutes carrying a case. Swan recognized it as the same traveling bag that the warrior had in the apartment before. He opened the bag and revealed an almost perfectly smooth machine, shimmering like mother-of-pearl. Without looking at the humans, he started making adjustments.\n\n\"What's going on here?\" asked Maria looking from one Rd'dyggian to the other. \"We're trying to stop the Cluster. If we don't there's going to be a shock wave that's going to destroy all life in the galaxy\u2014Rd'dyggians included. You should be helping us, not stopping us.\"\n\nG'Liat spun on his heel and inclined his head. \"Our aims are the same, young woman,\" said the warrior. Swan noticed that his Rd'dyggian accent was more pronounced than before. He took a step toward the couch, his hands clasped behind his back. \"However, your plan will, at most, delay the Cluster for a short time\u2014and I suspect will have rather devastating consequences. If successful, my plan will rid us of the Cluster permanently, and no one will have to be harmed.\"\n\n\"What exactly do you plan to do?\" asked Swan. He looked from one warrior to the other, trying to find an opening\u2014some way he could attack the one without being blind-sided by the other.\n\n\"You shall see soon enough,\" said G'Liat.\n\nMaria inclined her head as she started receiving reports from other resistance cells. She put her hand to her mouth and shook her head. \"What's the matter?\" asked Swan.\n\n\"They're dying,\" she said. \"All those people that have been injected with Proxom\u2014they seem to stir into consciousness for a short time and then they die. Its as though they have no will to live any longer.\"\n\nG'Liat sneered smugly. \"Then it would seem quite likely that I saved your friend's life,\" he said, gesturing to the unconscious form of Gibbs. \"Let's just his hope his mind is still alive inside the Cluster.\" The warrior turned and began to make more adjustments to the brain scan device.\n\n* * * *\n\nCaptain Ellison Firebrandt held onto the _Legacy's_ wheel console and watched a set of numbers floating in the holo tank as they slowly increased. They were putting distance between themselves and the Cluster, but not quite fast enough for his liking. \"Mary, can Junior give me any more power at all?\"\n\n\"Any more, and he says she'll blow apart,\" said the technician, \"especially with the hull rupture.\"\n\n\"Captain, we may have a problem,\" called Roberts. He changed the display at the front of the battle deck so it displayed the Cluster in ultra-violet light. Several of the orbs were glowing a bright purple at that wavelength. \"They're either getting ready to pursue or fire. I don't know which.\"\n\n\"Any suggestions,\" called the captain. \"We're running from them as fast as we can and I don't think there are any evasive maneuvers that will do us any good.\"\n\nRoberts put a plot up on the viewer. \"There's an old satellite debris field twenty-two degrees from our present course.\" An arc appeared from the plot of the _Legacy_ to the position of the debris field. \"If we get in there and shut off our engines, they may lose us.\"\n\n\"You don't sound too certain,\" said the captain as he began making the course adjustment.\n\n\"I'm not,\" said Roberts, matter-of-factly. \"But, it's the best option we've got.\"\n\nThe numbers that showed the _Legacy's_ distance from the Cluster continued to increase while a second set of numbers that showed their distance to the debris field appeared and began decreasing. \"I'm shutting down the engines,\" said Firebrandt. \"We should drift right into the debris at this point. We'll just need a slight reverse nudge to stop.\"\n\n\"Oh my God,\" said Anne McClintlock. \"They've fired.\"\n\nFirebrandt looked up in time to see a red beam emerge from the Cluster. At the same time, something slammed into the back of the ship and threw him headfirst over the wheel console. The last thing he remembered were all the lights going out and the sound of screams from throughout the battle deck.\n\n* * * *\n\nAs soon as the _Nicholas Sanson_ jumped into Earth's solar system, Simon Yermakov ordered Natalie to activate the holo viewer. All they saw was a distant view of the Earth. Laura Peters activated thrusters and accelerated to full speed. Right behind the _Sanson,_ dozens of black, cylindrical war ships jumped into normal space and activated their own thrusters. Almost unnoticed in the pack was a silver egg-shaped craft piloted by Arepno.\n\n\"Simon,\" said Natalie, looking back toward the command chair. She saw Simon Yermakov in the captain's chair with Suki Firebrandt next to him. \"I'm detecting one Cluster in orbit and ... I think there's an Earth ship running away from it.\"\n\n\"Let's see it.\" As Simon stood from the command chair, Manuel Raton emerged from the captain's office at the back of the deck.\n\n\"I'm picking this up on a satellite relay,\" explained Natalie as the view in the holo tank suddenly shifted. Instead of seeing Earth from a distance, it now appeared that they were in near-Earth orbit. They could make out a black ship silhouetted against the blue of Earth moving away from one of the Clusters.\n\nSimon stepped closer to the tank and pointed to a fuzzy patch that didn't seem well-resolved in the view. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"I think it's a satellite debris field,\" said Laura, squinting at the tank from her station.\n\nFire stood and stepped next to Simon, her head inclined. As she studied the ship, her eyes grew wide. \"That ship's called the _Legacy_ ,\" she said, reading the name from the hull. \"That's the name of my father's old privateer vessel.\"\n\nManuel moved up next to Fire, also studying the image. \"I think that _is_ your father's old privateer vessel.\" He stepped into the tank and pointed to patterns of light and shadow on the hull's surface. \"You can see where the adobe part of the homestead discolored the Erdonium hull.\"\n\n\"It can't be,\" said Fire.\n\nJust then, there was a bright flash of red and Manuel threw his arm up over his eyes and staggered backward out of the tank. The beam came from the Cluster and caught the _Legacy_ on its EQ generator and sent the ship into an end-over-end spiral.\n\n\"Oh my God!\" called Fire. She reached out toward the tumbling hologram, as though she could stop the ship by stopping its holographic image.\n\n\"I've got a fleet-wide signal,\" said Natalie. \"I'm putting it on speakers.\"\n\n\"This is Commodore MacPhearson of the _Astrolus_ ,\" came a gravely voice from the intercom. \"We have a ship in trouble near the Cluster. I want the _Bismarck_ and _Yamato_ to get in there between the Cluster and that ship right away. _Sanson,_ you're the third fastest ship, do you have medical personnel?\"\n\nSimon nodded to Natalie who responded, \"We don't have any doctors, but we have two emergency medical techs.\"\n\n\"That'll do,\" said MacPhearson. \"Get in there, get that ship stabilized and help out anyone that's injured. All other ships, prepare for attack plan delta...\"\n\nSimon made a cutting motion across his neck and Natalie turned off the speakers. He nodded to Laura who adjusted course for the spiraling _Legacy._ He stepped back to the command seat and Fire followed on his heels. As he sat, he ordered the EMTs to the launch.\n\n\"May I go over there with them?\" asked Fire.\n\nSimon rubbed his hands together and looked at his console, deliberately avoiding Fire's gaze. \"We don't know what we'll find over there.\"\n\nFire knelt down and looked up into Simon's eyes. \"I have a pretty good idea my father's over there\u2014alive or dead. Either way, I've got to go over.\"\n\n\"Well someone's alive over there,\" said Laura.\n\nGrateful to look away from Fire's eyes, Simon looked up at the holo tank. Fire turned and stood to watch as well. They saw that the _Legacy_ was firing thrusters, slowing her spin. As the ship straightened, two star cruisers blasted by the wounded ship and positioned themselves in front of the Cluster. Fire sighed relief.\n\n\"We'll be in range to send out the launch in two minutes,\" said Laura.\n\nSimon ground his teeth, then looked up at Fire. \"You and Mr. Raton get down to the launch bay and see what you can do to help.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Fire, as she sprinted toward the elevator with Manuel hurrying to catch up.\n\n\"Tell the launch crew to wait for Dr. Ellis and Mr. Raton\u2014but have them launch as soon as they're aboard and secure,\" ordered Simon.\n\nNatalie carried out the orders and on the screen, they saw the Cluster fire again. This time the beam hit one of the two ships that had positioned itself between the Cluster and the _Legacy._ They saw a burst of fog-like atmosphere that indicated that the ship's hull had been breached, but the military crew locked down the breach almost as fast as it appeared.\n\n\"The launch says that Suki and Manuel are aboard. They can go any time,\" said Natalie.\n\nLaura nodded ascent. \"We're in good position, they can go across to the _Legacy_ when they're ready.\"\n\n\"Tell them to launch,\" said Simon. He put his hand on the back of Laura's chair and continued to watch the holo tank.\n\nMore ships began to form up between the Cluster and the _Legacy._ The Cluster fired again at the ship it had first hit. The ship spun away from the others and exploded. Two ships moved in and filled the gap made by the lost ship.\n\nThe _Sanson's_ launch could be seen on the screen, making its way to _Legacy._\n\nThe Cluster fired again at two other ships. Simon stepped closer to the tank and looked carefully. He was pretty certain those ships had sustained damage also. The Cluster continued to fire as more Alliance and Colonial ships formed up. Another Earth ship exploded in a blinding flash.\n\n\"The launch reports it's docked on to _Legacy._ Someone opened the airlock for them,\" said Natalie with a faint smile.\n\nSimon nodded, not taking his eyes from the holo tank. \"Put on the fleet signals again,\" he said, almost dreamily.\n\n\"All ships in position,\" came one voice from the speakers.\n\nThe Cluster fired at another ship.\n\n\"This is the _Witch of Endor,_ we've sustained heavy casualties and may have to withdraw.\"\n\n\"Stick with us for a few more minutes.\"\n\n\"All ships report target lock.\"\n\n\"This is Commodore MacPhearson. All ships ... Fire!\"\n\nNatalie quickly dimmed the intensity of the holo tank as all of the ships in the fleet simultaneously opened fire on the Cluster. The Cluster got off another shot and the ship that had identified itself as the _Witch of Endor_ vanished in a flash. It fired again and destroyed another ship.\n\n\"Maintain firing solution,\" called MacPhearson.\n\nSimon reached back and gripped Laura's console. The pilot looked down and noticed that her own knuckles were white. She looked down at the display. \"The _Legacy_ has moved into the satellite debris field.\"\n\n\"I think we better take cover there as well,\" said Simon, his voice cracking at the end.\n\nLaura set the course and began moving the _Sanson_ closer to the _Legacy._\n\nWithin the tank there was a blinding flash of light that overwhelmed the dampers that Natalie had set up. Simon quickly looked away and found himself blinking at spots that had appeared before his eyes. When he looked back up at the tank, he noticed that it was empty. \"Where's the signal?\" he asked.\n\n\"Our sensors have been overloaded,\" reported Natalie. \"We're blind.\"\n\n\"We got it,\" came a voice from the speaker. \"The Cluster's been destroyed!\"\n\nWithin moments, the speakers were abuzz with the sounds of cheers and congratulations. In the midst of it all was the authoritative voice of Commodore MacPhearson trying to gain control of the fleet. Laura was on her feet and Simon turned and the two embraced. Natalie sat trembling at the communication's station, a lone tear running down her cheek.\n\n* * * *\n\nJust as G'Liat stepped toward Timothy Gibbs with the brain scan device, the technician's eyes flew open. He looked around the room, confused by the sight of two people sitting on his couch, held at gunpoint by a Rd'dyggian and another Rd'dyggian coming toward him, wielding a strange machine. \"I'm back,\" he said, startled.\n\nG'Liat lowered the device and studied him for a moment.\n\nSwan jumped toward Rizonex, but the warrior was too fast and simply pushed him back onto the couch with his free hand.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Gibbs, just as suddenly. \"Guess this was a short break.\" He slumped back into his chair\u2014eyes closed and jaw slack.\n\n\"What the hell just happened?\" asked Maria Gonzalez.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**Part IV: The New Clusters**\n\n _And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe._\n\n _Revelation 14:18_\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**SUPPLICATION**\n\nFire gasped when the airlock door opened and she found herself face-to-face with Junior Kimura, the best hover tractor and laser plow repairman from New Des Moines on Sufiro. She restrained the urge to ask what he was doing there when she looked beyond him and saw that the ship he stood in was, in fact, the house she had grown up in. How her father had managed to get the ship into space again was beyond her.\n\n\"Sir, are there injured?\" The voice of _Sanson's_ EMT startled Fire out of her reverie.\n\nFire quickly stepped across to the _Legacy_ and out of the way of the EMTs. \"Yes, we have quite a few\u2014Doc Krishnamurty could use the help, thanks,\" said Junior.\n\n\"You brought Parvati Krishnamurty out here?\" asked Fire, picturing the gray-haired, wiry doctor she knew growing up.\n\nJunior nodded. He pointed along the hallway. \"The doc's up in the battle deck with your father and Roberts. I haven't been able to get the lights on yet, do you have flashlights?\" When Fire held hers aloft, Junior nodded, satisfied. He looked at the two EMTs. \"Can you two come aft with me? I've got injured in engineering.\"\n\nThe two EMTs grabbed their gear from the launch and made their way aft with Junior, leaving Manuel and Fire alone. \"Come on,\" she said and turned on her flashlight.\n\nThe walk through the darkened corridor was eerie\u2014especially as the flashlight touched on a familiar door and hatch markings. In spite of her worry about her father, Fire found herself wondering what was happening outside. As they crossed from the _Sanson_ , they saw ships barreling past them to form up between them and the Cluster. She had strained her neck to get a better view through the windows to see what exactly was happening. There had been some red flashes and one of the ships spun wildly away from the battle group and out of sight.\n\nAs they approached the battle deck, they heard quiet but agitated voices. Fire stepped up her pace. Manuel hurried to keep up and nearly tripped over some debris. They reached the battle deck and saw that it was bathed in red emergency lighting. The holo tank at the front of the deck was dead. The engineering console was a mess of twisted metal and wire; a sheet covered something on the deck near the console. Roberts hovered next to the wheel console, typing in commands. Fire scanned the deck until her eyes fell on her father. He was sitting up at the console opposite engineering. Doc Krishnamurty was shining a flashlight into his eyes. Fire ran past Roberts and knelt down next to her father.\n\nHe looked up. \"Fire, what the devil are you doing here?\" His voice was weak and his eyes were watery; there was a bandage on his forehead and his arm was in a sling.\n\n\"Save your strength,\" said the doctor. She looked up at Fire. \"He has a concussion and a broken arm; damned lucky for an eighty-one year-old man who took a tumble over the wheel console and slammed into the forward wall. More lucky than Mary Seaton,\" she said quietly, casting a meaningful glance at the sheet-covered mound at the engineering station.\n\n\"Can you try it again?\" asked Roberts in a gentle voice from the wheel.\n\nFire looked up and recognized the woman sitting at the console her father was leaning against. It was Anne McClintlock. She seemed to be having a hard time getting her fingers to work on the console. Fire stood and helped Anne out of the seat. \"I think you better have the doc check you out,\" she said. She looked up at Roberts. \"What are you trying to do?\"\n\n\"Fire!\" he exclaimed, with a genuine smile. \"I'm trying to get the holo tank working, see if we can find out what's going on outside. I'm also trying to get engine control working through this station.\"\n\n\"I might be able to help with that,\" said Manuel who had been sitting in the front of the battle deck, talking to his brother.\n\n\"So can I,\" volunteered Juan, who rose unsteadily to his feet.\n\n\"I think you'd better sit there for a few minutes,\" said Manuel, patting his brother on the shoulder. He stepped over to Roberts and the two talked for a moment. Roberts pointed to the remains of the engineering console and explained what he needed. Manuel nodded, went over to the console and aimed his flashlight into the smoky mess.\n\n\"I think I have hologram control,\" said Fire. She pushed a button and the holo tank flickered to life. The fleet was unloading everything it had on the Cluster. There was a blinding flash of light and the holo tank went dead again. \"Damn,\" said Fire. That blast overloaded the sensors. It's going to take me a few minutes to get it back on line.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" asked the captain, rising to his feet. \"Did they destroy it?\"\n\nAs though in answer, a shock wave shuddered through the ship causing the captain to stumble. Anne caught her breath and Manuel swore as he shocked himself on a bare wire. Roberts floated over and took Manuel's flashlight and looked at his finger. Manuel waved him off. \"Just bit me a little,\" he said. \"Do you have any wire clippers?\"\n\nRoberts produced a pair from the hover chair and then held the flashlight while Manuel returned to work. A few minutes later, the white lights came back on and Fire felt fresh air blow from a nearby vent.\n\nThe EMTs from the _Sanson_ appeared in the doorway of the battle deck and took in the scene. The doctor stepped over to them and they conferred with one another in hushed tones\u2014heads close together. The doctor pointed to Anne and Juan and told them to get them down to the infirmary and gave them instructions. She then left the battle deck to take care of more seriously wounded elsewhere on the ship. One of the EMTs helped Anne to her feet and led her from the deck. The other talked to Juan for a moment, gave him a pill from his kit, then left with the other EMT.\n\n\"How are the sensors doing?\" Firebrandt knelt down next to his daughter.\n\n\"Just about got it,\" she said. She typed in a command on the computer and the holo tank flickered to life once again. The fleet was dispersing, moving away from their position.\n\n\"They're moving off in a hurry,\" said Firebrandt, his brow furrowed. \"What's going on?\"\n\nFire shifted to another set of sensors and they were looking over the Earth's North Pole. Sunlight glinted off of something. Fire zoomed in and they saw three Clusters. The fleet was moving off to intercept the new arrivals.\n\nFirebrandt stepped toward the tank and began counting ships. \"It looks like there are twenty-one Colonial and Alliance ships moving in.\"\n\nManuel looked up from the engineering console. \"That means over a third of the ships are out of action,\" he said, shaking his head.\n\n\"Can we help them out?\" asked Firebrandt.\n\nRoberts shook his head. \"We've managed to restore some basic thruster control, but we won't get there in time.\" He looked down at the body of Mary Seaton on the deck. \"Besides, I think we've already done our share for this cause.\"\n\nFirebrandt looked at the sheet, as though seeing it for the first time. He turned away quickly. \"Perhaps you're right,\" he said, something catching in his voice. Only his daughter saw the tear that ran down his cheek.\n\n* * * *\n\nEva Cooper had managed to extract herself from John Mark Ellis' fierce embrace. Mark found himself looking around the room in a daze as Eva breathlessly explained to Kirsten that this was an expected reaction to the suppression of the amygdala. \"Maybe you'd better take him upstairs,\" suggested Eva with a wink.\n\n\"Is that a good idea?\" asked Kirsten somewhat nervously as she knelt down and picked up broken pieces of plate, sitting them one by one on the table.\n\n\"The emotions he's expressing are largely positive,\" said the doctor. \"I think it would be best if he keeps expressing positive emotions. Try not to let him descend into depression and he should be okay.\"\n\n\"What if he does descend into depression?\"\n\n\"Come get me. It would be safe to give him one more dose of Proxom, but...\"\n\n\"It would likely end his chances of reestablishing contact with the Cluster,\" said Kirsten. Standing, she took a step toward Mark.\n\n\"This all presumes the Cluster will have me back,\" he said. Both Eva and Kirsten were startled by the sound of his voice. \"Just because I'm having a hard time controlling my emotions\u2014just because I'm horny as all get out\u2014doesn't mean I can't think. It's just that my emotions are causing me to act before I think.\"\n\nKirsten's lip curled up and she took Mark's hand and led him up the stairs. \"I'm sorry\u2014about Eva,\" he muttered once they reached the hallway at the top of the stairs. \"All I could see was a beautiful female face, it didn't seem to matter whose it was.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" said Kirsten as she led him into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. \"It's the drugs the doctor gave you.\" She removed her blazer and unbuttoned the top button of her blouse. \"I think you can make it up to me.\" She stepped over to Mark and put her arms around him.\n\nHe returned the embrace and his hands roved down and fondled her buttocks for a moment then moved up and began untucking her blouse. She pushed him onto the bed then sat on his lap and unbuttoned his shirt, letting her hands run through the hairs on his chest while he nuzzled her neck. With one hand, he undid another button on her blouse and his hand wandered over her skin. He felt her nipple respond to the gentle pressure of his thumb. His mouth moved up to her earlobe as he cupped her fleshy breast.\n\nAs he explored her body, something in the back of his mind began to register that something was not quite right. Though the weight on his lap didn't seem to change, the fleshy, warm breast turned unyielding and marble-chill. Instead of feeling a soft cloth-covered backside, he felt the same marble-like chill with his other hand. Reluctantly, he pulled back and found that he was staring not into Kirsten's soft brown eyes, but the piercing green eyes of a black-haired woman. He knew this woman\u2014had met her before. He was back aboard the Cluster and this woman was the manifestation of the Cluster's own persona.\n\n\"Why do you pull away?\" asked the green-eyed woman. \"I need you. I need your kind to help me build my legacy before I am gone forever.\" She reached down and gave Mark an intimate caress.\n\nHe let out a soft moan but shook his head. \"Why do you have to die?\" He allowed his hand to remain on the marble-like breast. As he caressed it, he felt it grow warmer\u2014whether from the heat of his own hand, his imagination, or some rising heat within the Cluster itself, he didn't know.\n\n\"We are ancient in your eyes. We have traveled as far as it is possible for us to travel. We have seen stars born. We have seen them live and die. We have seen their matter recycled into new stars. We have seen galaxies collide and move apart, becoming whole but taking on new forms.\" As she spoke, she began to age. Her hair grayed and the skin wrinkled on her face. The breast in Mark's hand grew languid and he released it. \"We have seen many types of life come and go and we fear we shall never achieve any more than we already have.\" She stood up from his lap and a walked a short distance away.\n\n\"What about other galaxies? Couldn't you travel to other parts of the universe?\" he asked.\n\n\"We cannot.\" When she turned, her hair was black again. Her features, as before, were sculpted perfection. \"The gravity waves are too weak for us to travel from our home cluster to another cluster. Even we cannot ride those waves that connect one galaxy to another. Even your people do not see a solution to that problem.\"\n\n\"Just because we don't see the solution now, doesn't mean that we won't see it in the future,\" said Mark. \"That's the beauty of evolution. We learn and we change through the generations.\"\n\nShe took another step closer and he saw sadness in her eyes. \"We cannot evolve and your people do not want to stay with us forever. Even now, they withdraw from us. There are people on Earth that are helping them leave. You are the only one that has sought to come back.\" She shook her head. \"It is better that we die now. It is better that we leave our knowledge behind for others.\"\n\n\"What if we worked together?\" Mark stood and took her hand in his. \"Why must you absorb humans into your being? Couldn't we find a way to cooperate?\"\n\nShe pulled her hand away from his. As he reached out to take it back, he noticed that it was shrinking. Both of her arms became spheres, as did her legs. In a matter of moments, she morphed into a floating, cluster of spheres. \"Cooperate? With this?\" Four of the spheres unrolled tentacle-like and became arms and legs once again. Another sphere became her head and she resumed her human appearance. \"Only with your mind inside me, can you see me in a way that you can talk to; that you can relate to. There can be no other cooperation.\"\n\n\"There's got to be another way,\" said Ellis. He pursed his lips and tried to think.\n\n\"Perhaps there is,\" said the woman. She looked over her shoulder and Ellis noticed a door he had not seen before. The door opened and Tim Gibbs stepped through.\n\n* * * *\n\nIn Southern Arizona, Edmund Swan and Maria Gonzalez watched as G'Liat balanced his brain scan device on Timothy Gibbs' head. The warrior closed his own eyes and found himself looking out at a strangely muted view of a human laboratory. He realized that he must have been seeing the view as a human would see it with their strangely light insensitive eyes. Computers lined one wall and there was a table in the center of the room with charts and graphs.\n\n\"It's changed,\" said a booming voice from all around him.\n\n\"What's changed?\" asked G'Liat.\n\nThe view through the warrior's eyes shifted from side to side and he realized that Gibbs must have shaken his head back and forth. \"The room. For a moment I was in my apartment, then I came back to the lab and it changed. It's like it was about two days ago.\"\n\n\"That's because you're in a different Cluster, now,\" said the warrior. \"This is the version of the lab that was last copied from the Cluster you were in to the Cluster you're in now.\"\n\n\"Why did it change?\" came the booming voice.\n\nG'Liat thought that was a very good question indeed and he had suspicions about the subject but he didn't voice them aloud for fear of upsetting Gibbs. Instead, he had a mission to accomplish. \"Perhaps you should talk to your supervisor,\" suggested the warrior.\n\n\"That does seem like a good idea.\"\n\nThrough Gibbs' eyes, G'Liat saw the technician stand, turn and move toward a door. He stepped through into a room of artifacts and antiquities, not unlike his house on Rd'dyggia. The sky overhead was filled with an image of Earth, though somehow he sensed that the view could be changed to reflect any place the Cluster had traveled, much like a holo tank. As Gibbs looked forward, G'Liat saw John Mark Ellis looking strangely disheveled, talking to a woman with long dark hair and striking, green eyes. The features on the woman's body were strangely indistinct; more like she was an idealized sculpture of a woman rather than a real woman without the myriad little flaws that human skin developed due to aging and damage.\n\nWith a force of will, G'Liat separated himself from Gibbs and felt his feet materialize on the floor of the room.\n\n* * * *\n\nMark Ellis was somehow not surprised when G'Liat materialized next to Tim Gibbs. \"My name is G'Liat,\" said the warrior. \"I am a representative of the planet Rd'dyggia. We object to the course of action that you have undertaken that will lead to destruction of life in this galaxy.\"\n\n\"What manner of creature are you?\" asked the woman with a tone of mild curiosity. She stepped up to G'Liat and put her hands his shoulders and morphed into a Rd'dyggian female\u2014slightly larger even than G'Liat with the same bald head and prehensile purple mustache. \"Ah, yes, you call yourselves Rd'dyggians, which means 'the chosen' in your language. We encountered you on our travels.\" She looked at the ceiling above and there was a Rd'dyggian star cruiser. A green beam shot toward the Rd'dyggian star cruiser and suddenly the view shifted again. This time space vessels filled the sky, taking positions and firing on one another. Some were egg-shaped Rd'dyggian star cruisers. Others were more like flying wedges; Ellis recognized them as Tzrn ships. They were watching a scene from the Rd'dyggian-Tzrn war of a thousand years before.\n\nThe scene shifted again and they saw a lush swamp teaming with purple vegetation and filled with mist. For a moment, Ellis thought he caught the odors of ammonia and sulfur that distinguished the surface of Rd'dyggia. Great war machines pushed through the swamp, firing at another group of machines at the other end. Rd'dyggian soldiers poured from the war machines with hand weapons and fired at one another.\n\nThe view shifted back to one of Earth. The woman morphed back into her idealized human form, but didn't take her hands from G'Liat. \"Your kind is obsessed with conquest,\" she said. \"Perhaps even more so than the humans. We deemed you inadequate to our needs since you would no doubt try to conquer us and we would have to destroy you.\" She looked into G'Liat's eyes. \"I admire your ingenuity getting here, but we cannot merge with your kind as an alternative to the humans.\"\n\n\"I respectfully submit,\" said G'Liat, \"that I have another option in mind.\"\n\n\"We do not wish another option. We are tired and the time has come for us to move on.\" She stepped toward Tim Gibbs and put her hands on his shoulders. \"We will build a legacy, much as humans do. We will leave something behind for others like us.\"\n\n\"I don't believe that is an option any more.\" G'Liat put his arms behind his back. \"Mr. Gibbs has told me that his laboratory has changed. From what I observed in his apartment and from what I know of the human resistance, I suspect that they have destroyed one of your kind already and are massing to attack again.\"\n\n\"What!\" Ellis looked up at the ceiling in time to see the view shift again. He saw several ships approaching. In the distance, he thought he saw the _Nicholas Sanson_. Leading the group was his old ship, the _Astrolus._\n\n\"They can injure us,\" admitted the woman. \"They cannot destroy us.\"\n\n\"Why be injured at all?\" asked Ellis, seeing an opportunity. \"Retreat today. Come back and negotiate.\"\n\n\"You were right to seek Earth,\" interrupted G'Liat. The woman looked at him with building interest. \"It is a planet where evolution has happened rapidly, the creatures of this world grow and change in mere millennia while many of the rest of us are much more stagnant. I submit, you simply picked the wrong species as your appendages.\" He held out his hand and the image of a sperm whale appeared. Ellis found himself grudgingly admiring how quickly G'Liat had learned to manipulate the Cluster reality.\n\n\"These creatures have the largest brains on the planet,\" he continued. \"They are as eager to see the sights you can show them as you are to have the input that comes from creatures that evolve. They are less obsessed with death and more with the hunt. You and the whales would make formidable allies.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" interjected Ellis, \"I thought you said the Rd'dyggians could not be trusted.\"\n\n\"No,\" said the woman quietly, as though she was forcing herself to be tolerant with a petulant child. \"We said that the Rd'dyggians were inadequate to our needs. Often times their motives are far more transparent than humans, making them far more trustworthy than you.\"\n\nA woman with golden eyes appeared next to the first woman. Other than her eyes, she was identical in all respects to the first woman. The green-eyed woman took the whale image from G'Liat and handed it to the golden-eyed woman. \"The Rd'dyggian has proposed an interesting alternative to the humans. Perhaps we can avoid death\u2014of our kind and theirs.\"\n\nThe golden-eyed woman vanished.\n\n\"What does all this mean for my memory core?\" asked Tim Gibbs.\n\n* * * *\n\nRichard\u2014or T'Li'Ch'D, as he was actually known in his own language\u2014had found a particularly good field of squid. He swam through them, scooping them up in his massive mouth and crushing their shells between his lower teeth and upper jaw. _The hunt is the art,_ he thought joyfully as the tasty morsels went down his throat. He looked out over the ocean and thought about all the sights he'd seen in his long life from coral reefs and the clear blue waters of the Caribbean to glaciers near Iceland. In the depths of those northern waters he'd battled a particularly ferocious giant squid. He still carried the scars of that battle with pride and it had made a tasty meal.\n\nThe ocean carried other dangers as well. There were Orcas and sharks that swam at him and tried to carry him into the depths to drown him. Richard had survived by his cunning, speed, and sheer power. He gulped down another mouthful of squid and realized that it was nearly time to return to the surface for air.\n\n\"The cycle continues,\" he said as he broke the surface of the water. Night had fallen while he had been under water. The recent storm had broken and the sky above was filled with stars. He rolled over onto his side so he could get a better look at the stars. Again he thought about all the places he'd seen, but he found himself wondering what it would be like to travel among those stars. The hunt could only be grander.\n\nAs he thought that, he felt himself being pulled out of the ocean and into the stars themselves. He looked down and saw the waters receding below him. The horizon was no longer a flat line, but an arc that fell away from him. He began to discern landmasses and then he noticed that the clouds themselves were below him. He looked out to the sides and saw the stars, clearer than he had ever seen them below.\n\nHe swam upward and then swam downward again. In a panic, he began to wonder where the surface of this wonderful new ocean was. As he wondered that, he saw the most beautiful female whale he'd ever seen. She had captivating golden eyes and she rubbed herself against him, making him feel stirrings he had not felt in many years.\n\n\"Breathe,\" she commanded him. \"I have created a medium for you that is both water and atmosphere. You can breathe.\"\n\nThough he felt water all around his body, he cautiously took a breath and discovered that air filled his lungs. He exhaled and then took another breath. He then swam around in a great vertical circle, reveling in the feeling of being able to breathe as he swam.\n\n* * * *\n\nAboard the _Sanson,_ Simon Yermakov stared slack jawed at the view in the holo tank. Just as the fleet was massing to attack the three Clusters that had materialized over the planet, one of the Clusters broke formation and made a giant loop-the-loop. \"What the devil is it doing?\" he asked.\n\nLaura Peters stood up next to Simon and stared at the image wide-eyed. \"Is it getting ready to attack?\"\n\n\"The Cluster has lost interest in humans,\" said Natalie. \"They've found someone else, someone more suitable to their needs.\"\n\nBoth Simon and Laura turned and looked at her.\n\n\"What does it mean?\" asked Laura.\n\n\"Life in the galaxy won't be destroyed in a big shock wave,\" answered Natalie.\n\nSimon let out a sigh of relief in spite of his skepticism at Natalie's words. \"Then we're safe.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Natalie, shaking her head. \"We're not safe at all.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nThe golden-eyed woman materialized next to the green-eyed woman and a broad smile appeared on her face. John Mark Ellis shuddered as a violet-eyed woman also materialized. \"I like the way these whales make me feel,\" said the golden-eyed woman. \"I feel alive. I want to explore. There is no end to the universe.\"\n\n\"What about our legacy?\" asked the violet-eyed woman.\n\n\"Our legacy will be our children,\" said the golden-eyed woman. \"We have always had the ability to reproduce. We simply have not had the desire. I want to make more of my kind. I want them to see the universe as I see it. There can be no greater legacy. It is far better than a machine.\"\n\n\"I feel your joy,\" said the green-eyed woman. She turned and looked at Timothy Gibbs with something like contempt. \"There is a joy in the machine you want to build, but it is fleeting. Once it is built, the joy will be gone and you will, once again, worry about your own death.\" The green-eyed woman looked at her two sisters. \"The humans are not grateful for what we have given them. The Titans were not grateful. The whale is grateful. I say we join with the whales. They shall be our new appendages.\"\n\nThe violet-eyed woman looked worried. \"Is that wise?\" she asked. \"Should we abandon an appendage so easily in favor of another?\"\n\nThe green-eyed woman smiled. \"There are many kinds of legacies. A legacy of life seems better than a legacy of death.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" echoed the golden-eyed woman.\n\nWithout warning, Gibbs and G'Liat vanished. For a split-second before he was gone, Ellis thought he caught a look of self-satisfaction on the warrior's face. The antiquities in the room also vanished and Ellis found himself floating in water. The green-eyed woman swam up to him and before his eyes, her legs merged together into a tail and her arms became fins. Her still-human face smiled and she said, \"Your kind must learn to seek joy.\" As her head transformed into that of a sperm whale, he realized he was blinking up at the ceiling of his bedroom in Nantucket.\n\nKirsten dropped onto the bed next to him. \"You're back!\" she cried. She scooped him up her arms and kissed him. \"When you went slack in my arms, I was afraid we'd lost you for good. I was afraid that you'd gone like Coffin.\"\n\nEllis pulled Kirsten close and hung on with all of his strength. \"I don't think humans have any more to worry about from the Cluster and, to be honest, that really scares me.\"\n\n* * * *\n\nRichard caught sight of a group of cylindrical objects gathering nearby. They reminded him of a school of squid. Like squid, they seemed somewhat menacing. Also like squid, he somehow knew they were to be hunted. He let out his stunning sound\u2014the loud gong that sperm whales make and swam toward to the ships. The sound he made was like laughter.\n\n* * * *\n\nAboard the _Legacy_ , the damage to the battle deck was mostly repaired. The lights were on and fresh air circulated. Mary Seaton's body had been carried down to the infirmary and the EMTs had returned to the _Sanson_. Fire and Manuel decided to remain aboard _Legacy_ to help out where they could.\n\nCaptain Ellison Firebrandt watched the scene unfold in the holo tank with growing confusion. As the battle group had formed to challenge the Clusters, one of the Clusters broke formation and performed a loop. Now that same Cluster broke from the rest. A golden beam issued from it, causing one of the ships to simply vaporize. As the Cluster plowed through the line of ships, two more were destroyed. After which, the Cluster simply jumped and vanished.\n\nThe human fleet tried desperately to regroup. As they did, both of the other Clusters retreated a short distance and also jumped.\n\n\"Dad,\" said Fire from the computer console. \"EQ frequencies to the outside galaxy have just cleared. I can reach Alpha Coma, Sufiro, anywhere.\"\n\nManuel and Juan stepped up to the front of the battle deck and joined Firebrandt and his daughter. \"Does this mean we won?\"\n\nRoberts looked around at the destroyed engineering console, at the missing rivets in the wall and at the bloodstained deck. \"I don't think 'won' is the right word. Somehow, I think the Cluster has found a new legacy.\"\n\nFirebrandt nodded and looked back toward Roberts and the damaged battle deck. \"And we must rebuild ours,\" said the captain. He turned to his daughter. \"Let's see if we can find someone who can help us get this ship rebuilt. I think it may be time to get back home and attend to the harvest.\"\n\n\"Aye aye, Captain,\" said Fire, winking at her father.\n\n* * * *\n\n\"I dare say your work is done, young man,\" said G'Liat to Swan as he packed the brain scan device into the case. \"I would recommend that you find transport to Sufiro.\"\n\nEdmund Swan stood up from the couch, looking warily at Rizonex who had lowered his weapon. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The Cluster has relinquished its hold on human kind,\" said the warrior. \"They have found another species more to their liking. As a result, they have abandoned their project at the center of the galaxy.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Timothy Gibbs. Tears ran down his face. \"They're gone. There will be no memory core.\"\n\nMaria Gonzalez stood up and slapped Swan on the back. \"That means we won!\"\n\nTim Gibbs fell from the chair into a broken heap, crying inconsolably. \"No,\" said Swan. He helped his friend stand, took him in his arms and gave him a hug, then helped him lie down on the couch. \"We've still got a lot of work to do.\"\n\nG'Liat closed the clasps on his case, and hefted it over his shoulder. \"As do I. If you'll excuse me,\" he said as he stepped toward Rizonex at the door.\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" said Swan. \"You still haven't told us what you did.\"\n\n\"You'll find out soon enough,\" said the warrior. \"Talk to Ellis. I'm sure it'll be a whale of a good tale.\" With the briefest of nods, the Rd'dyggian left the apartment, with Rizonex on his heels.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**THE NEW GALAXY**\n\nThree days after the Cluster left Earth, Mark Ellis and Kirsten Smart invited all of their friends and family to Nantucket for dinner. Ellison Firebrandt, Roberts, Manuel, and Fire came down from the _Legacy_ , in a space dock for repairs. Though pleased that they could land their launch at the Nantucket spaceport, it was still disheartening since it was a reminder of how much the population of Earth had been diminished. Upon arrival, Manuel and Roberts both shooed Mark and Kirsten out of the kitchen. Manuel began adding a mix of chile powders here and there while Roberts applied hands well practiced at cooking homegrown vegetables on Sufiro.\n\nEdmund Swan arrived with a bottle of Saguaro wine that Carlos the plumber from the resistance back at Southern Arizona had given him as a thank you present for his help. \"How's your friend Tim Gibbs doing?\" asked Kirsten as Edmund poured her a glass of wine.\n\n\"Improving,\" he answered. \"He's suffering a hefty dose of guilt for helping the Cluster and a hefty dose of depression that his dream of the perfect memory core will never be built. His old supervisor, Jerry Lawrence, checked him into the psychiatric ward at St. Mary's Hospital down in the Bisbee Sector. It's really quiet and peaceful down in that part of Southern Arizona. He's got a tough road ahead, but I think he'll recover.\"\n\n\"It's a good thing he had a friend like you,\" said Kirsten, lifting the glass of electric-red wine.\n\nNoticing that Mark was sitting alone on the couch with his head lowered, Fire sat down beside him and put her arm around his shoulder. \"What's the matter?\" she asked.\n\n\"I suppose I'm feeling a little like Timothy Gibbs,\" he said. \"After all, it was because of me that the Cluster came to Earth in the first place.\"\n\nEllison Firebrandt, admiring the rack of pipes on the mantle overheard and turned. \"You can't blame yourself, Mark. The Cluster was attracted to humans.\" He strode over, tugged on his pant legs and knelt down next to Mark's chair. \"Feeling guilty because the Cluster found your thoughts and emotions interesting is like saying you're feeling guilty because you're human.\" The old privateer captain smiled. \"And you know something? I think you're about the most human person I know.\"\n\nMark snorted. \"Once I brought the Cluster here, I couldn't get rid of them.\"\n\nFirebrandt looked up into his grandson's eyes. \"What counts is that you tried. No one person\u2014or ship for that matter\u2014could do it alone.\"\n\n\"G'Liat did,\" said Ellis, bitterly.\n\n\"G'Liat did not solve the problem,\" said Fire clasping her son's hand. \"He merely changed it. Who knows what the Cluster's up to now.\"\n\nKirsten sat down next to Fire and took a sip of her wine. \"I shudder any time I think about it. The Cluster is now a symbiont with a creature whose mantra is 'the hunt is the art.'\"\n\n\"Why do you suppose he did it?\" asked Mark, perking up a bit. \"Why did he introduce the whales and the Cluster? Somehow I think there was more to it than simply stopping the destruction of the galaxy.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly,\" came a singsong voice from the door. Everyone looked up to see Arepno, holding a bowl of something that looked like purple gruel. He set the bowl down on the coffee table. When everyone stared at it blankly, he explained, \"It's a Rd'dyggian specialty called ruas'ordah.\" When the group continued to stare at the big bowl with blank expressions, Arepno stepped over to the kitchen table, retrieved a tortilla chip and dipped it in, then popped it into his mouth.\n\nDubiously, Manuel picked up a tortilla chip and hesitated a moment. Then he stepped over and dipped it into the ruas'ordah, then nodded. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"It even has a little spice to it.\"\n\nFirebrandt stood and bowed to his old friend. \"Arepno, what do you think G'Liat was up to?\"\n\n\"G'Liat has connections on my world and beyond,\" said Arepno as he stuck one of his fingers into the purple gruel. \"He, like many of my people, fears one thing above all\u2014the eventual human domination of the galaxy.\" The Rd'dyggian lifted his hand to his mouth and the purple mustache-like growth began shoveling the gruel in.\n\nMark's brow furrowed. \"There's one thing I don't understand, then,\" he said. \"If you knew G'Liat was so dangerous, why did you take me to him?\"\n\n\"Because you asked me to,\" said Arepno simply.\n\nFirebrandt turned and looked at the pipes on the mantel again to hide a snicker. After a moment, he looked down at Mark. \"Do you have any tobacco for those pipes?\"\n\n\"I do indeed,\" Mark answered, brightening. Then his face fell, momentarily. \"It was some Navy Flake tobacco that Old Man Coffin gave me.\"\n\n\"That seems only fitting,\" said Firebrandt, somberly. \"We shall smoke to his memory.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Kirsten, getting to her feet somewhat unsteadily and sloshing just a bit of the Saguaro wine. \"If you're going to smoke to his memory, do it outside. The food in here smells too good.\"\n\nGrandfather and grandson each selected a pipe from the rack and took them outside just as Eva Cooper came down the stairs. She smiled at the sight of so many people in the house. Kirsten stepped up to her and took her by the elbow and introduced her to Edmund Swan, Arepno, and Roberts. A short time later, Simon Yermakov, Laura Peters and Natalie Papadraxis arrived from the _Sanson._\n\nA few moments later Ellison Firebrandt stepped back inside. \"I thought you went outside to pollute the clean island air with that pipe of yours,\" said Kirsten.\n\nFirebrandt smiled. \"Mark's doing a fine job all by himself.\" He made his way into the kitchen, grabbed two bowls, filled one with chips and scooped up some of Arepno's purple ruas'ordah into the other. \"I'm not about to let all of you hoard the food.\"\n\nBefore the captain could get back outside, Mark Ellis stepped through the door. \"It turns out we have a surprise guest tonight,\" he said before Kirsten could protest. He stepped aside and Senator Herbert Firebrandt stepped through the door.\n\nEllison Firebrandt quickly sat down the two bowls he was juggling and took a step toward his half brother.\n\nHerbert Firebrandt looked around at the crowded room open-mouthed, then looked down at his own somber, gray trousers and jacket. \"If I'd known that I was coming to a party, I would have dressed for the occasion.\" He looked up and his eyes met Ellison's. \"What you did...\" He shook his head. \"That will go down in the history books.\"\n\n\"I think our mother would have been rather astonished,\" said Ellison.\n\n\"She would have also been very, very proud,\" said Herbert. He stepped forward and clasped his brother's hand, then said very quietly, \"She really did love you very much.\" Ellison grabbed Herbert in a tight embrace.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Ellison as they parted.\n\n\"So,\" asked Mark stepping up to the half-brothers, \"what brings you to Nantucket?\"\n\n\"Actually,\" said Herbert, catching sight of Eva Cooper, \"I came to speak to the Surgeon General of the Gaean Alliance.\" He looked down at his feet in the way that reminded Fire so much of her father. \"The Earth\u2014hell, the whole galaxy\u2014is in an upheaval. People are calling for Jenna Walker's resignation after she helped the Cluster. The problem is that the Cluster affected almost everyone. There are real questions about whether she was responsible for her actions or not.\"\n\nMark looked to his mother, who looked to Manuel\u2014all three remembered their own experience with the Cluster. \"To be honest,\" said Fire, who had just poured herself a glass of Edmund Swan's Saguaro wine, \"she seems far less responsible than the Titans who sat on their furry asses all through this. What's going to happen to them?\"\n\n\"The Alpha Centaurans, Zahari, and Tzrn all calling for a change of leadership,\" explained the Senator. \"As for the humans\u2014I think the first order of business is to get our own affairs back in order and possibly even discuss the reunification of Earth and her colonies.\" He looked over at Eva. \"I'd like you to help me. Rebuilding the government of Earth is going to be a tough job.\"\n\nEva nodded. \"Yes, sir. I'll do whatever I can.\"\n\nThe Senator then turned to Mark. \"I also came to offer you something.\" He reached in his pocket and pulled out a silver star. \"I think you've earned this.\"\n\nJohn Mark Ellis took the star from the Senator and held it in his palm. It was the captain's insignia of the Alpha Coma fleet. He closed his fingers around it and felt a lump in his throat. He then looked up and saw Kirsten across the room. He pushed his way through the people gathered to stand by her side. He showed her the star and she gasped. \"It's what you've always wanted,\" she said.\n\nSimon Yermakov, who was standing behind Kirsten, looked at the star and smiled. \"Congratulations, sir,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't...\" said Mark, shaking his head. \"I don't know if I deserve this,\" he stammered at last.\n\nThe Senator stepped through the room to Mark. \"You deserve it,\" he said firmly. \"Also, we need your expertise. You know the whales better than most. We need someone who can speak to them and speak to the Clusters that have joined with whales.\"\n\nJohn Mark looked down at the star in his hand, his brow furrowed. He'd looked for Richard the day after the Cluster departed Earth. There was no sign of the bull, and other whales had gone missing as well. Unlike humans, their bodies apparently weren't left behind. What had happened was a mystery. \"I'd like to help, if I can,\" said Mark.\n\n\"At the very least, consider a reserve appointment,\" urged the Senator. \"You don't have to give me your answer tonight.\"\n\n\"That's a good thing,\" said Roberts from the kitchen, \"because dinner is ready.\"\n\n\"Unless you'd rather stand around talking all night,\" added Manuel.\n\nLaughter erupted from around the room and people began to shuffle toward the kitchen to fill their plates from the pots on the stove and the bowls on the kitchen counter.\n\n* * * *\n\nAs the dinner drew to a close, Senator Herbert Firebrandt stepped up to his brother and shook his hand. \"It was good to meet you at last,\" he said.\n\n\"Likewise,\" said Ellison Firebrandt. \"When you get some time, that invitation to come to Sufiro is still open.\"\n\n\"I may take you up on that,\" said the Senator. \"I have a feeling I'll need to rest a while once we've sorted everything out.\" After saying the rest of their good-byes, the Senator and Eva Cooper left together for Washington, D.C. to find lodgings and make plans for the coming week.\n\n\"We should get going, too,\" said Simon to Kirsten and Mark. \"I need to see how repairs to the ship are coming.\"\n\n\"Sounds good,\" said Kirsten with nod. She still had a bit of a lop-sided grin from the Saguaro wine, but she held her head as though a headache were coming on. \"I'll be up tomorrow and we'll check in with TransGalactic\u2014see if anyone's still there.\" Her grin dissolved into a frown.\n\n\"Captain,\" said Simon holding out his hand, \"can we expect you back on the ship tomorrow?\"\n\nMark Ellis took Simon's hand and shook it. \"I'm not really sure.\" He reached into his pocket and took out the silver star. \"I need to sleep on it.\" He looked at Kirsten, who was watching him intently. \"I think we need to spend some time talking.\"\n\nSimon pursed his lips. \"I don't envy you the decision,\" he said. He turned and joined Natalie and Laura who were waiting by the door.\n\nMark turned around and saw Roberts in his hover chair next to the couch, quietly dozing. On the couch was Edmund Swan, his hands folded over his chest, staring at the ceiling. Fire and Manuel stood together at the sink, washing dishes and speaking quietly to one another. Mark looked at the silver star in his palm, then looked up at Kirsten and thought about two possible futures.\n\nEllison Firebrandt cleared his throat. \"I think it's time we got back to the ship ourselves,\" he said.\n\n\"We've almost got the dishes cleaned,\" protested Fire, but her father looked meaningfully at Ellis and she picked up a dishtowel, dried her hands and passed the towel to Manuel.\n\nFirebrandt looked down at Swan, \"Care for a ride back to Sufiro.\"\n\nSwan sat up and smiled. \"If you've got room for one more passenger.\"\n\n\"Passenger?\" asked Roberts, startling awake. \"No passengers on the _Legacy_. You'll have to work for your passage.\"\n\n\"I was afraid you'd say that,\" said Swan, struggling to his feet.\n\nMark hugged his mother and shook Manuel's hand. Firebrandt took his grandson aside. \"Fifty years ago, my mother stranded me on Sufiro,\" he whispered. \"At the time, I hated her for it because I thought it meant the end of my career as a privateer captain. However, as I stand here and look over my family\u2014not just you and Fire, but Edmund, Manuel, Kirsten, Arepno and so many more\u2014I realize that she gave me a far better life than I'd ever dreamed possible.\"\n\n\"Are you saying I should stay with the _Sanson?_ That I should stay with Kirsten?\" asked Mark.\n\nFirebrandt smiled at his grandson. \"All I'm saying is make sure you think about all of your options very carefully. Dreams are tricky things, as you saw when your mind was in the Cluster. You can get caught up in them and lose track of where reality is taking you.\"\n\n\"What are you two conspiring about over there?\" called Fire. \"Our ride's here.\"\n\n\"Keep your options open, Son, and you'll do fine,\" said Ellison Firebrandt patting Mark on the shoulder. He stepped out the door and into a foggy night with Manuel, Fire, Roberts, and Swan. They all piled into a hover van driven by Charlie Rogers.\n\nThey rode to the spaceport in silence and listened to the mournful sound of the foghorn bellowing through the dark night. Ellison Firebrandt felt like a lost soul, being called home, being called to his rest.\n\nThe captain piloted the launch back up to _Legacy_ while most everyone slumbered in the back. Fire crept up into the co-pilot's chair, next to her father.\n\n\"I really thought you would stay behind, on Nantucket,\" he said to her. \"By coming back to Sufiro, you're giving up your job ... your home...\"\n\n\"It's Mark's home, now,\" she said, simply. \"The Earth has changed and I'm not sure I belong anymore. I guess I fit in more with the pirates of Sufiro than the heirs of this new Earth.\"\n\n\"The whole galaxy has changed,\" said Firebrandt. He looked out at the stars. \"I don't think anything is ever going to be the same.\"\n\nFire caught sight of the _Legacy_ and noticed the new landing rockets that Junior Kimura had installed, folded up against the body of the ship. \"Not even the _Legacy_ is the same. I gather the homestead is going to need a lot of work.\"\n\nFirebrandt nodded. \"You know, two old men like Roberts and I don't need that much house ... I don't know if I'd rebuild at all if it were just the two of us. We could get on just fine in the ship.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I'd trust you two in a ship that can take off and land,\" she said. \"You got into enough trouble as it is.\" She looked back at the men, sleeping in the back. \"Manuel and I could always move in with you ... help you with the homestead.\"\n\n\"I'd like that,\" said Firebrandt. His daughter stood, hugged her father around the shoulders and then joined the others in the back of the shuttle.\n\n* * * *\n\nThe next morning, Simon Yermakov turned around when the elevator doors opened. He frowned for a moment when he saw John Mark Ellis step through the door with Kirsten Smart, but stood up and offered him the captain's chair. Mark placed his hand on the back of the chair.\n\n\"Welcome aboard, sir,\" said the first officer as he moved toward his chair.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Mark. \"What's our status?\"\n\n\"Mr. Mahuk says the mapping engines will be fully operational within the next forty-eight hours.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Mark. He looked at Kirsten. \"That should give me time to sell the house on Nantucket.\"\n\n\"I still can't believe you're giving up that property,\" she said, taking his hand. \"In a way, though, I'm glad. You belong to the stars, not tied to that island.\"\n\nMark nodded and gave Kirsten's hand a squeeze. Natalie looked up from the communication's console. \"We're getting a signal from TransGalactic. It's Ms. Meiji.\"\n\nKirsten and Mark looked at each other. \"She's all right,\" said Kirsten with a smile. \"What are our orders?\"\n\n\"As soon as the ship is repaired, we're to start mapping the Epsilon Eridani and Gamma Eridani sectors. More orders to follow as ships are contacted and assigned,\" she said.\n\n\"I guess we'll be getting in some overtime,\" said Laura Peters.\n\n\"The Cluster certainly played havoc with the jump points,\" said Kirsten. \"I'd better start getting the mapping instrumentation on line.\"\n\n\"Lots to do,\" Mark said. He bent down and kissed Kirsten, then both turned to go into their offices. Before the door closed, Mark turned around and looked at Simon. \"Oh, Simon, you should know that I've accepted an appointment in the Alpha Coma reserves. So, one week out of every month, I'll need to be away from the ship. Kirsten has already approved the schedule. Do you think you can fill in as captain during my absences?\"\n\nSimon Yermakov smiled and nodded. \"Yes, sir, I think I can.\" He looked down at his feet, then back up at Ellis. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\"Let's get back to work, people,\" said Ellis. \"Lots to do.\" With that, he stepped into his office. Simon strode over to the command chair and put his hand on the headrest for a moment. Looking down, he self-consciously tucked in his flannel shirt and then sat in the chair.\n\n* * * *\n\nG'Liat entered the conference room in the government building under the Rd'dyggian dome on Titan. It was good to be back in moist, hot air, but he still longed to return to his home on Rd'dyggia. He reached out and touched a potted, purple plant, then closed the door and checked the seals. He then pulled out a scanner and checked the air and surfaces for cameras and microphones. When he was certain that all was secure he pushed a button on the table.\n\nA door opened and Teklar, matron of the Titans, stepped through. It appeared that she was unprotected against the hot conditions of the room, but G'Liat caught the faint shimmer that indicated that she was surrounded by a personal force field.\n\n\"I have done as you asked, M'Lady,\" said G'Liat with a stately bow.\n\n\"Very good,\" she growled. \"Your solution was excellent. You not only stopped the Cluster but you have put them in a position to keep the humans occupied for a very long time.\" She ambled over to a large couch that could accommodate her bulky frame and fell onto it. \"In fact, I think the Cluster will keep everyone busy for a long time. You have assured the Titans of continued dominance. We are most grateful.\"\n\nG'Liat sat down at the table, steepled his fingers and looked at the Matriarch over them. \"You say I've assured your dominance, yet your position in the galaxy is weaker than ever. You did nothing overt to stop the Cluster. People wonder why.\"\n\nShe opened her mouth to speak, but G'Liat held his hand up to silence her. \"I think you knew that if you did nothing, the Cluster would keep this solar system safe. If the Cluster succeeded, the humans would be slaves, all of your rivals would be eliminated and you would be the dominant creatures in the solar system. If I succeeded, the Cluster would be transformed, keeping all of the races in the galaxy occupied and the only barriers to maintaining your dominance of the galaxy would be political.\"\n\nTeklar inclined her shaggy head. \"Political problems are trivial to us,\" she said simply. She pulled herself off the couch, stepped to G'Liat and gazed down into the warrior's black eyes with her own. \"We will double our payment to you if you keep this knowledge to yourself.\"\n\nG'Liat's mustache twitched. \"We Rd'dyggians are a pragmatic people. I would be foolish to refuse such a generous offer.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" she said, then turned to leave.\n\n\"I would not underestimate these humans, though,\" said G'Liat thoughtfully. \"Given more time, Ellis would have come up with his own solution to the Cluster. Also, the human fleet would have likely destroyed another Cluster. They would have gone for reinforcements. They could have won. If they had won that way, they would have been in a position to topple your dominance of the Confederation.\" He paused and stepped next to the Titan's ear. \"They still could.\"\n\n\"Our probes indicate that two of the Clusters have already reproduced. There are now five. There will soon be more.\" She turned to face G'Liat. \"Thank you for your help, but I think the time has come for you to see to the safety of your people.\" With that, she loped through the door.\n\nG'Liat watched as it closed behind her then turned. She was right. It was time to go home.\n\n[Back to Table of Contents]\n\n**About the Author:**\n\nDavid Lee Summers is an author, editor and astronomer living somewhere between the western and final frontiers in Southern New Mexico. His novels are _The Pirates of Sufiro, Children of the Old Stars, Heirs of the New Earth,_ and _Vampires of the Scarlet Order._ His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines including _Realms of Fantasy, Aoife's Kiss, Star*Line and The Santa Clara Review._ David is also the founding editor of _Tales of the Talisman_ Magazine.\n\n#\n\n* * *\n\nVisit www.lachesispublishing.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nTable of Contents\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright Page\n\nDedication\n\nPreface\n\nIntroduction\n\nPART I - The Industrial Meal: Food from Corn\n\nChapter 1 - How Corn Took Over America\n\nChapter 2 - The Farm\n\nChapter 3 - From Farm to Factory\n\nChapter 4 - THE GRAIN ELEVATOR\n\nChapter 5 - The Feedlot\u2014Turning Corn into Meat\n\nChapter 6 - Processed Food\n\nChapter 7 - Fat from Corn\n\nChapter 8 - The Omnivore's Dilemma\n\nChapter 9 - My Fast-Food Meal\n\nPART II - The Industrial Organic Meal\n\nChapter 10 - Big Organic\n\nChapter 11 - More Big Organic\n\nPART III - The Local Sustainable Meal: Food from Grass\n\nChapter 12 - Poly face Farm\n\nChapter 13 - Grass\n\nChapter 14 - The Animals\n\nChapter 15 - The Slaughterhouse\n\nChapter 16 - The Market\n\nChapter 17 - My Grass-Fed Meal\n\nPART IV - The Do-It-Yourself Meal: Hunted, Gathered, and Gardened Food\n\nChapter 18 - The Forest\n\nChapter 19 - Eating Animals\n\nChapter 20 - Hunting\n\nChapter 21 - Gathering\n\nChapter 22 - The Perfect Meal\n\nThe Omnivore's Solution: Some Tips for Eating\n\nQ&A with Michael Pollan\n\nFURTHER RESOURCES\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nDIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS\n\nPublished by the Penguin Group\n\nPenguin Group (USA) LLC\n\n375 Hudson Street\n\nNew York, New York 10014\n\nUSA \/ Canada \/ UK \/ Ireland \/ Australia \/ New Zealand \/ India \/ South Africa \/ China\n\npenguin.com\n\nA Penguin Random House Company\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2009 by Michael Pollan\n\nPreface copyright \u00a9 2015 by Michael Pollan\n\nPenguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nChevat, Richie.\n\nThe omnivore's dilemma : the secrets behind what you eat\/by Michael Pollan;\n\nadapted by Richie Chevat.\u2014Young readers ed.\n\np. cm.\n\nISBN: 9781101148761 (HC)\n\nISBN: 9781101148761 (PB)\n\n1. Food supply\u2014Juvenile literature. 2. Food chains\n\n(Ecology)\u2014Juvenile literature. I. Pollan, Michael. Omnivore's dilemma.\n\nII. Title. III. Title: Secrets behind what you eat.\n\nHD9000.5.C506 2009\n\n338.10973\u2014dc22\n\n2009009283\n\nThe publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.\n\nVersion_5\n_For Judith and Isaac_\n**PREFACE**\n\nThis book just might change your life.\n\nI know: That sounds a little over-the-top, doesn't it? I would never make such a bold claim except that, in the years since The Omnivore's Dilemma was first published in 2006, thousands of readers have told me exactly that\u2014sometimes in letters and emails, other times in person (including complete strangers on the street): \"Your book changed my life.\" I'm always surprised to hear it, because that certainly wasn't my goal when I sat down to write the book, and changing people's lives sounds like a big responsibility. So I usually gulp and then say something like, \"In a good way, I hope.\"\n\nBut I'm always curious to find out what they mean, so I often ask them to tell me exactly how they've changed since reading the book. The answers are very different, often surprising, and usually extremely gratifying.\n\nSome people tell me that they lost weight after reading the book, and then they pull out snapshots of their larger former selves. Apparently what they learned in the book about how fast food is made convinced them to stop eating it, and the pounds began to fall off. (Even though this is definitely not a diet book.) Other people tell me that they read _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ and decided to change their career (!) and become a farmer. (Big gulp.) \"How's it working out for you?\" I ask, a little nervously, since farming is a tough way to making a living. They usually tell me that the work is incredibly hard but also incredibly satisfying, and that they wouldn't dream of doing anything else with their lives. (Phew.)\n\nMany people tell me that the book changed the way they think about eating\u2014and that now they spend a lot more time deciding what to put in their mouths. The book has made them aware of how their food choices affect the environment, or animals, or their own health, and they want to start \"voting with their forks\" (an idea I'll explain later). For young people, that can mean encouraging their parents to shop differently\u2014to buy organic or local food, for example. Parents are used to their kids making all sorts of demands about food\u2014usually for the latest sugary cereal or energy drink, and so they're pleasantly surprised when their kids start asking for organic vegetables or for eggs from small farms where the chickens live outdoors and eat a natural diet.\n\nThen there are the vegetarians and the meat eaters, whose reactions to the book could not be more different. I've heard from lots of readers who say that, after reading about the way animals are treated in factory farms, they felt they could no longer eat meat and decided to become vegetarians. (Even though the book is not an argument against eating meat.) So I figured that one of the impacts of the book was to inspire vegetarianism\u2014until I began hearing from some vegetarians, whose reactions _really_ surprised me.\n\nHere's a typical letter from a vegetarian high-schooler: \"I haven't eaten a bite of meat since I was six. But after reading your book I've decided to start eating meat again. I never knew there were farms, like Polyface in Virginia, where the animals are treated so well and get to lead such happy lives. I want to support those kinds of farms, so now I eat that kind of humanely raised meat when I can. Instead of calling myself a vegetarian, now I call myself a 'conscious carnivore.'\"\n\nThe fact that carnivores and vegetarians responded in two totally different ways to the same information tells me that the book is doing its job. That job is simply to get us to think about something that hardly ever crosses our minds: where our food comes from and how it gets to us. So I really like the idea that two people could read the same book and come to such radically different conclusions. I didn't write _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ to convince you to eat one kind of food or another. My aim was to give you the information you need to make good choices. What's a \"good choice\"? That's simple: It's one that allows you to be true to your values\u2014to what you most care about.\n\nThe fact is, our food choices are some of the most important choices we get to make in life. The way we eat has a bigger effect on our health and the health of the planet than any other activity. Four of the top ten diseases that kill Americans are the result of a bad diet. What you put on your plate changes nature more than anything else you do. If that sounds over-the-top, think about it: Farming has changed the landscape more than any other human activity. Agriculture has also determined which species of animals are thriving (cows, chickens, and pigs\u2014the ones we eat) and which are in trouble (wolves and the other predators that want to eat the ones we want to eat). And though you're probably well aware of how the fossil fuel your family uses to heat your home or power your car contributes to climate change, did you know that the farming and food industry produces even more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation put together? That's what I mean when I say that the way you eat affects the world more than anything else you do.\n\nThis might sound like a big responsibility, and it is\u2014but it's also a great opportunity, especially for people your age. Why? Because although you won't be able to vote in elections until you're eighteen, you can vote with your fork now\u2014by choosing to eat foods that reflect your values, and to avoid ones that don't. Best of all, you can vote this way not just once, but three times a day.\n\nDoes this sort of voting make a difference? Without a doubt. Consider the changes we've seen in just the last few years. When _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ was published in 2006, there were four thousand farmers' markets in America; now there are more than eight thousand. In 2006, organic food was a fifteen-billion-dollar industry; now it's a thirty-five- billion-dollar industry. The market for sustainably raised meat, milk, and eggs has exploded in the last decade. A new generation of young people are starting small sustainable farms. (One of the most popular internships for college students today is working on an organic farm.) Since Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the grounds of the White House, the number of Americans growing vegetables at home has soared, to about 35 percent of all families. And a whole range of food and farming issues that have never been on the public's radar are now being debated across the country and in Washington, D.C.\n\nOne of the most exciting developments we've seen in the last decade or so is the rise of a \"food movement\" in America\u2014a movement to change the way we produce and consume food, so that farmers, food workers, animals, the land, and the environment are all treated with greater respect. There's a lot we can all do to push the food system in this direction, but it begins with informing yourself about what's at stake, and then voting\u2014with your fork now, and then in a few years with your ballot\u2014for the kind of world you'd like to live in. This book is an invitation to think about both the problems of how we produce food today and some of the inspiring solutions people are coming up with to build a better food system for everyone and everything it touches. Welcome to the conversation.\n\n_Michael Pollan, 2015_\n**INTRODUCTION**\n\nBefore I began working on this book, I never gave much thought to where my food came from. I didn't spend much time worrying about what I should and shouldn't eat. Food came from the supermarket and as long as it tasted good, I ate it.\n\nUntil, that is, I had the chance to peer behind the curtain of the modern American food chain. This came in 1998. I was working on an article about genetically modified food\u2014food created by changing plant DNA in the laboratory. My reporting took me to the Magic Valley in Idaho, where most of the french fries you've ever eaten begin their life as Russet Burbank potatoes. There I visited a farm like no farm I'd ever seen or imagined.\n\nIt was fifteen thousand acres, divided into 135-acre crop circles. Each circle resembled the green face of a tremendous clock with a slowly rotating second hand. That sweeping second hand was the irrigation machine, a pipe more than a thousand feet long that delivered a steady rain of water, fertilizer, and pesticide to the potato plants. The whole farm was managed from a bank of computer monitors in a control room. Sitting in that room, the farmer could, at the flick of a switch, douse his crops with water or whatever chemical he thought they needed.\n\nOne of these chemicals was a pesticide called Monitor, used to control bugs. The chemical is so toxic to the nervous system that no one is allowed in the field for five days after it is sprayed. Even if the irrigation machine breaks during that time, farmers won't send a worker out to fix it because the chemical is so dangerous. They'd rather let that whole 135-acres crop of potatoes dry up and die.\n\nThat wasn't all. During the growing season, some pesticides get inside the potato plant so that they will kill any bug that takes a bite. But these pesticides mean people can't eat the potatoes while they're growing, either. After the harvest, the potatoes are stored for six months in a gigantic shed. Here the chemicals gradually fade until the potatoes are safe to eat. Only then can they be turned into french fries.\n\n_That's how we grow potatoes?_\n\nI had no idea.\n\n#  A BURGER WITH YOUR FRIES?\n\nA few years later, while working on another story, I found myself driving down Interstate 5, the big highway that runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I was on my way to visit a farmer in California's Central Valley. It was one of those gorgeous autumn days when the hills of California are gold. Out of nowhere, a really nasty smell assaulted my nostrils\u2014the stench of a gas station restroom sorely in need of attention. But I could see nothing that might explain the smell\u2014all around me were the same blue skies and golden hills.\n\nAnd then, very suddenly, the golden hills turned jet-black on both sides of the highway: black with tens of thousands of cattle crowded onto a carpet of manure that stretched as far as the eye could see. I was driving through a feedlot, with tens of thousands of animals bellying up to a concrete trough that ran along the side of the highway for what seemed like miles. Behind them rose two vast pyramids, one yellow, the other black: a pile of corn and a pile of manure. The cattle, I realized, were spending their days transforming the stuff of one pile into the stuff of the other.\n\n_This is where our meat comes from?_\n\nI had no idea.\n\nSuddenly that \"happy meal\" of hamburger and fries looked a lot less happy. Between the feedlot and the potato farm, I realized just how little I knew about the way our food is produced. The picture in my head, of small family farms with white picket fences and red barns and happy animals on green pastures, was seriously out of date.\n\n#  THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA\n\nNow I had a big problem. I went from never thinking about where my food came from to thinking about it all the time. I started worrying about what I should and shouldn't eat. Just because food was in the supermarket, did that mean it was good to eat?\n\nThe more I studied and read about food the more I realized I was suffering from a form of the omnivore's dilemma. This is a big name for a very old problem. Human beings are omnivores. That means we eat plants, meat, mushrooms\u2014just about anything. But because we are omnivores we have very little built-in instinct that tells us which foods are good for us and which aren't. That's the dilemma\u2014we can eat anything, but how do we know what to eat?\n\nThe omnivore's dilemma has been around a long time. But today we have a very modern form of this dilemma. We have a thousand choices of food in our supermarkets, but we don't really know where our food comes from. As I discovered, just finding out how our potatoes are grown might scare you off french fries for the rest of your life.\n\nIn the past, people knew about food because they grew it or hunted it themselves. They learned about food from their parents and grandparents. They cooked and ate the same foods people in their part of the world had always eaten. Modern Americans don't have strong food traditions. Instead we have dozens of different \"experts\" who give us lots of different advice about what to eat and what not to eat.\n\nIt's one thing to be crazy about food because you like to eat. But I found I was going crazy from worrying about food. So I set out to try to solve the modern omnivore's dilemma. I decided to become a food detective, to find out where our food comes from and what exactly it is we are eating. My detective work became the book you now hold in your hands.\n\n#  FOUR MEALS\n\nAs a food detective, I had to go back to the beginning, to the farms and fields where our food is grown. Then I followed it each step of the way, and watched what happened to our food on its way to our stomachs. Each step was another link in a chain\u2014a food chain.\n\nA food chain is a system for growing, making, and delivering food. In this book, I follow four different food chains. Each one has its own section. They are:\n\n**Industrial**\n\nThis is where most of our food comes from today. This chain starts in a giant field, usually in the Midwest, where a single crop is grown\u2014corn, or perhaps soybeans\u2014and ends up in a supermarket or fast-food restaurant.\n\n**Industrial Organic**\n\nThis food is grown on large industrial farms, but with only natural fertilizers, and natural bug and weed control. It is sold in the same way as industrial food.\n\n**Local Sustainable**\n\nThis is food grown on small farms that raise lots of different kinds of crops and animals. The food from the farm doesn't need to be processed, and it travels a short distance\u2014to a farmer's market, for example\u2014before it reaches your table.\n\n**Hunter-Gatherer**\n\nThis is the oldest type of food chain there is. It's hardly a chain at all, really. It is made up simply of you, hunting, growing, or finding your food.\n\nAll these food chains end the same way\u2014with a meal. And so I thought it important to end each section of the book with a meal, whether it was a fast-food hamburger eaten in a speeding car, or a meal I made myself from start to finish.\n\n#  THE PLEASURES OF EATING\n\nWhen I was ten years old, I started my own \"farm\" in a patch of our backyard. From that age until now, I have always had a vegetable garden, even if only a small one. The feeling of being connected to food is very important to me. It's an experience that I think most of us are missing today. We're so confused about food that we've forgotten what food really is\u2014the bounty of the earth and the power of the sun captured by plants and animals.\n\nThere were parts of this book that were difficult to write, because the facts were so unpleasant. Some of those facts might make you lose your appetite. But the point of this book is not to scare you or make you afraid of food. I think we enjoy food much more if we take a little time to know what it is we're putting in our mouths. Then we can really appreciate the truly wonderful gifts that plants and animals have given us. To me, that's the point of this book, to help you rediscover the pleasures of food and learn to enjoy your meals in a new way.\n\n**1**\n\n**HOW Corn Took Over America**\n\n#  A FIELD OF CORN\n\nThe average supermarket doesn't seem much like a field of corn.\n\nTake a look around one. What do you see? There's a large, air-conditioned room. There are long aisles and shelves piled high with boxes and cans. There are paper goods and diapers and magazines. But that's not all. Look again. Somewhere, behind the brightly colored packaging, underneath the labels covered with information, there is a mountain of corn.\n\nYou may not be able to see it, but it's there.\n\nI'm not talking about the corn in the produce section. That's easy to recognize. In the spring and summer, the green ears of corn sit out in plain view with all the other fruits and vegetables. You can see a stack of ears next to the eggplants, onions, apples, bananas, and potatoes. But that's not a mountain of corn, is it?\n\nKeep looking. Go through produce to the back of the supermarket and you'll find the meats. There's corn here too, but it's a little harder to see. Where is it? Here's a hint: What did the cows and pigs and chickens eat before they became cuts of meat? Mainly corn.\n\nGo a little further now. There's still a lot of corn hiding in this supermarket. How about those long aisles of soft drinks? Made from corn. That freezer case stuffed with TV dinners? Mostly corn. Those donuts and cookies and chips? They're made with a whole lot of corn.\n\nSupermarkets look like they contain a huge variety of food. The shelves are stuffed with thousands of different items. There are dozens of different soups and salad dressings, cases stuffed with frozen dinners and ice cream and meat. The range of food choices is amazing.\n\nYet if you look a little closer, you begin to discover:\n\n**It's All Corn.**\n\nWell, maybe not _all_ corn, but there's still an awful lot of it hiding here\u2014a lot more than you suspect. We think of our supermarkets as offering a huge variety of food. Yet most of that huge variety comes from one single plant. How can this be?\n\nCorn is what feeds the steer that becomes your steak.\n\nCorn feeds the chicken and the pig.\n\nCorn feeds the catfish raised in a fish farm.\n\nCorn-fed chickens laid the eggs.\n\nCorn feeds the dairy cows that produce the milk, cheese, and ice cream.\n\nSee those chicken nuggets in the freezer case? They are really corn wrapped up in more corn. The chicken was fed corn. The batter is made from corn flour. The starch that holds it together is corn starch. The oil it was fried in was corn oil.\n\nBut that's not all. Read the label on any bag of chips, candy bar, or frozen snack. How many ingredients do you recognize? _Maltodextrin? Monosodium glutamate? Ascorbic acid? What are those things?_ What about _lecithin and mono-_ , _di-_ , and _triglycerides_? They are all made from corn. The golden food coloring? Made from corn. Even the citric acid that keeps the nugget \"fresh\" is made from corn.\n\nIf you wash down your chicken nuggets with almost any soft drink, you are drinking corn with your corn. Since the 1980s almost all sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket are sweetened with something called high-fructose corn syrup.\n\nRead the label on any processed food, and corn is what you'll find. Corn is in the non-dairy creamer and the Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and the TV dinner, the canned fruit and the ketchup. It's in the candy, the cake mixes, the mayonnaise, mustard, hot dogs and bologna, the salad dressings and even in some vitamins. (Yes, it's in a Twinkie too.)\n\nThere are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the non-food items as well\u2014everything from toothpaste and cosmetics to disposable diapers, trash bags, and even batteries.\n\nCorn is in places you would never think to look. It's in the wax that coats the other vegetables in the produce section. It goes into the coating that makes the cover of a magazine shine. It's even part of the supermarket building, because the wallboard, the flooring, and many other building materials are made with corn.\n\n#  CARBON FROM CORN\n\nYou are what you eat, it's often said. If this is true, then what we are today is mostly corn. This isn't just me being dramatic\u2014it's something that scientists have been able to prove. How do they do this? By tracing the element carbon as it goes from the atmosphere into plants, then into our food, and finally, into us.\n\nYou may have heard the expression that humans are a carbon-based life form. (This always seems to come up in science fiction movies, but it's true.) Like hydrogen and oxygen, carbon is an element, one of the basic building blocks of matter. All the molecules that make up our cells\u2014carbohydrates, proteins, and fats\u2014contain the element carbon.\n\nAll of the carbon in our bodies was originally floating in the air, as part of a carbon dioxide molecule. Plants take the carbon out of carbon dioxide and use it to make food\u2014 _carbo_ hydrates. They do this through a process called photosynthesis. In photosynthesis, plants use the energy of the sun ( _photo_ means light) to _synthesize_ (make) food.\n\n_All food begins with the process of photosynthesis._\n\nAll of our food, in fact almost all life on earth, can be traced back to photosynthesis in plants. It's more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air.\n\nSo the plants take carbon and make it into food. Then we eat the plants, or we eat animals that have eaten the plants. That's how the carbon winds up in our cells. But not all carbon is the same. Corn uses slightly different types of carbon than other plants. So by looking at the type of carbon in our cells, scientists can tell how much corn we have been eating.\n\nTodd Dawson, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has done exactly that kind of research. He says that when you look at the carbon in the average American's cells, \"we look like corn chips with legs.\"\n\nAmericans don't think of themselves as corn eaters. Our bread is made from wheat flour. We don't eat a lot of corn on the cob. When we think of serious corn eaters, we often think of people in Mexico. About 40 percent of their calories come directly from corn, mostly in the form of corn tortillas. Yet Americans have _more_ corn in our diet than Mexicans. It's just that the corn we eat wears many different disguises.\n\nHow did corn take over America? It's really a tremendous success story\u2014for corn, anyway. Corn has managed to become the most widely planted crop in America\u2014more than 80 million acres of farmland are planted with corn every year. Today it covers more acres of the country than any other living species, including human beings. It has pushed other plants and animals off the American farm. It has even managed to push a lot of farmers off the farm. (I'll explain that one later.) Corn is now one of the most successful plants on earth.\n\nIt's important to remember that while humans use plants and other animals, it's not a one-way street. Plants and animals don't just sit around waiting for human beings to use them\u2014they use us, too. The ones that can adapt use our farms and cities to spread and multiply. Corn became king of the farm and the supermarket because it adapted itself easily to the needs of farmers and food makers. It had qualities that human beings prized. Those qualities allowed it to spread and grow until it worked its way into every corner of our lives\u2014and every cell in our bodies.\n\n#  THE RISE OF MAIZE\n\nWhen Columbus returned to Spain after his first voyage he described many wonderful things he had seen to Queen Isabella. One of his discoveries was a towering grass with an ear as thick as a man's arm, to which grains were \"affixed in a wondrous manner and in form and size like garden peas, white when young.\" That grass was called maize, but today we know it as corn.\n\nCorn began as a wild grass called teosinte. ( _Teosinte_ means \"mother of corn\" in the Native American language Nahuatl.) Teosinte still grows wild in some places in Central America, but if you saw it, you might not recognize it as the mother of corn. Teosinte ears are no bigger than your thumb. They are not covered in thick husks. The kernels are tiny seeds. Yet long before Columbus arrived, that wild grass had managed to evolve into maize and spread across North America.\n\nCorn spread because it could adapt to the needs of human beings. Of course, it needed human help. Humans selected bigger ears with fatter kernels and planted those seeds. By the year 700, Indians as far away as New England and Canada farmed maize. Corn had begun its march to world domination, but it still had a long way to go.\n\nAfter Columbus, the Native Americans were conquered by the Europeans. But maize, or corn, had no loyalties to the Maya and other people who had helped it spread. It was only concerned with its own survival. The Europeans presented a way for corn to spread even farther. The plant quickly adapted to the new humans and their needs.\n\nThe first thing corn did was push aside the European crops the new settlers brought with them. The European plants just couldn't compete. For example, wheat brought from Europe did not do as well as the native maize. A seed of wheat might, with luck, yield 50 new grains of wheat. A single planted corn seed could yield 150 to 300 fat kernels. Corn won that contest easily.\n\nCorn continued quickly to win over the new settlers by being very useful. It could supply them with a ready-to-eat vegetable, a storable grain, a source of fiber, an animal feed, and heating fuel. Corn could be eaten fresh off the cob or dried on the stalk, stored over the winter and ground into flour. Corn could also be mashed and fermented to make beer or whiskey.\n\n_Sources: The Natural History Museum, London, and Smith, C. Wayne (Ed.) Corn: Origin, History, Technology and Production. John Wiley & Sons._\n\nNo part of the big grass went to waste. The husks could be woven into rugs and twine. The leaves and stalks made good feed for livestock. The shelled cobs could even be stacked by the outhouse and used as a rough substitute for toilet paper!\n\nIn the competition for king of the crops, corn left the European plants in the dust. Settlers who stuck to the Old World crops often perished. The colonists who recognized corn's usefulness did well. And of course, one thing the successful farmers did was plant more corn, helping maize to build its kingdom. Corn helped the colonists and the colonists helped corn.\n\nCorn made itself useful in one other important way. It turned out that corn was an excellent way to store and trade wealth. Dried corn is easy to transport and almost indestructible. The farmer can take any surplus to market and sell or trade it. In the new colonies corn often took the place of money.\n\nCorn allowed farming settlements to become trading settlements. Corn made the slave trade possible. Traders in Africa paid for slaves with corn and then fed slaves corn when they were brought here. Corn was the perfect plant for the growing economy of the colonies. And just as important, the new colonists gave corn a way to get to the rest of the world.\n\n#  M. POLLAN, FOOD DETECTIVE\n\nOnce I realized how much of our food is made from corn, I began to look at supermarkets differently. Instead of a giant variety of food, I saw corn hiding in every aisle. Now, I have nothing against corn. There's nothing more delicious than a roasted ear of fresh sweet corn. But I didn't understand why there had to be corn in _everything_ we eat. Who decided that corn would be our main food? How did that happen? Where did all this corn come from and how did it take over our supermarket?\n\nSo I decided to find out. And like any good detective, I realized I had to start at the very beginning, which in this case meant a field of corn in Iowa. I began with that field and tried to trace the corn as it traveled across the country, first to my supermarket and then to my stomach. I watched it being turned into meat, milk, and eggs by cows and chickens. I watched as it was torn apart and rebuilt into all the different foods and products listed on all those labels.\n\nWhat I discovered was a vast industry\u2014a giant agriculture business or _agribusiness_. This industry doesn't look much like farming the way most people imagine it. It's more like a series of factories that turn raw materials into food products. It's a giant food chain, the one that supplies most of the food Americans eat today.\n\nA food chain in nature helps us understand who eats what (or whom). But the food chain that feeds most Americans is anything but natural. The _industrial_ food chain that supplies our supermarkets stretches thousands of miles and has dozens of different links. It's a chain that's powered by oil and gasoline and controlled by giant corporations. It's a chain that separates us from our food and keeps us from knowing what it really is we're eating.\n\nMost of all, it's a food chain built around one plant. Somehow, that small wild grass that started in the hills of Central America has become the star of the biggest, most expensive food chain in the history of the world. But if corn is the star of this story, is it the hero or is it the bad guy? Before I could decide, I needed to get to know it better. And so I went to see it where it lives, in the vast cornfields of the Midwest.\n**2**\n\n**The Farm**\n\n#  ONE FARMER, 140 EATERS\n\nIt was the first week of May and I was at the wheel of a clattering 1975 International Harvester tractor, driving through an Iowa cornfield. The tractor was dragging a spidery machine called an eight-row planter, which dropped corn seeds into the earth. Driving over that field was like trying to steer a boat through a sea of dark chocolate. The hard part was keeping the thing on a straight line. If you mess up, your rows will wobble, overlapping or spreading apart. Your neighbors will laugh and, worst of all, you will not be able to plant as much corn.\n\nThe tractor I was driving belonged to George Naylor, a big man with a moon face and a scraggly gray beard. He sat next to me as I drove and tried to shout instructions over the diesel roar. He had on the farmer's usual baseball cap, a yellow shirt, and overalls\u2014the stripy blue kind worn by railroad workers. The field was part of Naylor's farm, 470 acres in Greene County, Iowa. Naylor had been working the farm for more than thirty years, since he took it over from his father in the mid 1970s.\n\nThis part of Iowa has some of the richest topsoil in the world, a layer nearly two feet thick. It was laid down over ten thousand years ago by retreating glaciers. Tall-grass prairie grew here until the mid-1800s, when the sod was first broken by the settler's plow. George's grandfather moved his family to Iowa from Derbyshire, England, in the 1880s. The sight of such soil, curling behind the blade of his plow, must have made him feel happy and confident. It's gorgeous stuff, black gold as deep as you can dig, as far as you can see.\n\n#  THE FAR END OF THE FOOD CHAIN\n\nBack in 1919, when the Naylors bought this land, farming was very different and so was the Naylor farm. All sorts of crops grew here: corn, but also fruits and other vegetables, as well as oats, hay, and alfalfa to feed the pigs, cattle, chickens, and horses. (Horses were the tractors of that time.) Back then one out of every four Americans lived on a farm. The average farmer grew enough food to feed twelve other Americans.\n\nLess than a century later the picture is very different. Corn has muscled out most of the other plants and animals. The sheep, chickens, pigs, and horses are gone. So are most of the fruits and vegetables. George Naylor grows only two crops on his 470 acres\u2014corn and soybeans. Corn has even pushed most of the people off the farm. Out of 300 million Americans, only 2 million are still farmers. That means the average American farmer today grows enough food to feed 140 other people.\n\nThe 140 people who depend on George Naylor for their food are all strangers. Like me, they live at the far end of a food chain that is long and complicated. George Naylor doesn't know the people he is feeding and they don't know him.\n\nI came to the Naylor farm as an unelected representative of the 140 people he feeds. I was curious to learn whom, and what, I'd find at the far end of the food chain that keeps me alive. Of course, I had no way of knowing if it was George or some other farmer who grows the corn that feeds the steer that becomes my steak. That's the nature of the industrial food chain. But I knew that a Midwest cornfield just like George Naylor's is the place most of our food comes from.\n\n_George Naylor loads his truck with corn from his storage bin, which he'll then tow to the grain elevator in town._\n\n#  I PLANT CORN\n\nThe day I showed up at the farm was supposed to be the only dry one all week, and George was trying to get his last 160 acres of corn planted. A week or two later he'd start in on the soybeans. The soybean has become the second major crop in the industrial food chain, taking turns each year in the field with corn. It now finds its way into two-thirds of all processed foods.\n\nFor most of the afternoon I sat on a rough cushion George had made for me from crumpled seed bags. After a while he let me take the wheel. We drove back and forth across the field, a half a mile in each direction. Every pass across this field, which is almost perfectly flat, represents another acre of corn planted.\n\nThe corn seed we were planting looked like regular kernels of corn, but it was actually something called Pioneer Hi-Bred 34H31. You and I think of corn as corn, but farmers like Naylor know there are dozens of varieties, most created by large agribusiness companies. That's one of the reasons corn has succeeded so well. It's relatively easy for humans to breed new types of corn to fit our needs. But what's good for corn (and agribusiness) isn't always good for farmers. That's the case with the new types of corn seed.\n\nBack when George's grandfather started farming, farmers grew their own seed. That's the way farmers had always gotten their seed\u2014they just kept some of their crop to be planted for the next season. Then in the 1930s seed companies came up with a new kind of corn seed\u2014hybrid corn. A _hybrid_ is a plant or animal whose parents have different traits. For example, you might take a type of corn that resists disease and cross it with another type of corn that produces a lot of ears. The result is a hybrid\u2014a disease-resistant plant that produces a lot of corn. Sounds good, right?\n\nThe catch is that hybrid corn does not \"come true.\" The first crop planted from hybrid corn seed will all be identical. The plants will have all the good traits the seed company promised. But the \"children\" of that crop will be mixed. Some plants will be like their hybrid parents, but most will not. The only way to make sure your plants produce the same amount of corn\u2014that they have the same yield as the original hybrid\u2014is to buy new seed every year from a seed company.\n\nHybrid corn _quadrupled_ the yields of farmers, from about twenty bushels per acre to about eighty bushels per acre. This was the beginning of a major change in the way farmers operated and the way we get our food. In a way it was the beginning of the industrial food chain.\n\nThe secret of modern corn hybrids is that they can be planted very close together. Before hybrids, a farmer could plant eight thousand corn plants in an acre. Today, George can grow _thirty_ thousand plants in an acre. Hybrids have been bred for thicker stalks and stronger root systems, the better to stand upright in a crowd. This also makes it possible to harvest them with large machines. Basically, the plants live in a city of corn, crowded together in neat rows.\n\nNew hybrids have increased farm yields to about 180 bushels per acre. One bushel holds 56 pounds of kernels, so 180 bushels is slightly more than 10,000 pounds of food per acre. The field George and I planted that day would produce 1.8 million pounds of corn. Not bad for a day's work sitting down, I thought to myself.\n\n#  FRANKENSEEDS?\n\nWhen farmers first planted hybrid corn in the 1930s their yields doubled or tripled. But if they planted seed from that first crop, yields dropped again, since the second generation of corn was not identical to the first. The only way to get the higher yields was to buy seed from seed companies. Soon, the only way for a farmer to compete was to buy hybrid seed every year. Even if farmers face hard times, the seed companies continue to make money year after year, selling farmers something they used to grow themselves.\n\nToday the seed companies have taken things a step further. Genetically modified corn seed (or GMO, for genetically modified organism) promises even higher yields than hybrid seed. GMO corn is not bred the old-fashioned way, by crossing corn plants. It is created in a laboratory by adding genes to corn DNA. The new genes don't come from corn plants. They might come from a bacteria or some other organism. So with human help, corn can now take genes from other plants and animals. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the plant and its breeders.\n\nThese new GMO seeds could be a bonanza for the seed companies. No one can own the species called \"corn.\" It is part of the natural world, the common property of all humanity. But with GMOs, a company can own a patent on a living organism. When Monsanto, or some other corporation, invents a new type of corn, it belongs to them and they can charge farmers for the right to grow it. But many farmers like George Naylor refuse to grow GMO crops. They believe that GMOs are a reckless experiment with the natural order of things.\n\n#  CORN VS. EVERYONE\n\nWhen George Naylor's grandfather was farming, the typical Iowa farm was home to many different plant and animal species. At the top of the list were horses, because every farm needed working animals. After horses were cattle, chickens, and then corn. After corn came hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, and cherries. Many Iowa farms also grew wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. This _diversity_ , with many different types of crops, allowed the farmer to get by if prices fell for any one crop.\n\nThe arrival of high-yield corn changed all that. It changed the very landscape of Iowa, as corn drove out the other plants and animals and even many of the people.\n\n_Source: Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State University; USDA._\n\nAs yields grew and farmers grew more corn, prices dropped. Suddenly it was cheaper to feed corn to cattle, instead of raising them on hay or grass. People also found it cheaper to feed corn to chickens and hogs. A new business emerged\u2014cattle, pigs, and chickens started being stuffed full of corn in large factory-type operations called feedlots. So the animals disappeared from the farm, and with them the pastures and hay fields and fences. (The horses began to disappear when farmers started buying tractors.)\n\nIn the place of the pastures, the farmers planted more corn (and sometimes soybeans). Now the corn began to push out people too. A farm of corn and soybeans doesn't require nearly as much human labor as the old-fashioned farm full of different kinds of crops. Bigger tractors and machines, chemical weed killers, and artificial fertilizer made it easier for one farmer to handle more acres.\n\n_Source: USDA Economic Research Service._\n\n\"Growing corn is just riding tractors and spraying,\" Naylor told me. It only takes a few weeks of work over a year to raise five hundred acres of industrial corn. So the farms have gotten bigger, but fewer people live on them.\n\nWhen Naylor's grandfather arrived in America the population of Greene County was near its peak: 16,467 people. In the 2006 census data it had fallen to below 10,000. The town of Churdan in the center of the county is like a ghost town. The barbershop, a food market, and the local movie theater have all closed in recent years. The middle school has so few students left it can no longer field a baseball team. It takes four local high schools to field a single football team: the Jefferson-Scranton-Paton-Churdan Rams.\n\nJust about the only business left standing in Churdan is the grain elevator, the tall structure where corn is stored before it is shipped elsewhere. The elevator stands at the far end of town like a windowless concrete skyscraper. It still makes money because, people or no people, the corn keeps coming, more of it every year.\n**3**\n\n**From Farm to Factory**\n\n#  TURNING BOMBS INTO FERTILIZER\n\nIt may seem that I've given corn too much credit. After all, corn is just a plant. How could a plant take over our food chain and push out almost every other species? Well, it had some help\u2014from the U.S. government.\n\nAt the heart of the industrial food chain are huge businesses, _agri-_ businesses. The same businesses that create new seeds provide farmers with the tools and fertilizer they need to grow lots of corn. Agribusinesses also need cheap corn from which they make processed food and hundreds of other products. To get the corn flowing and keep it flowing, agribusiness depends on government regulations and taxpayer money.\n\nThe government started seriously helping corn back in 1947. That was when a huge weapons plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. How can a weapons plant make fertilizer? Because ammonium nitrate, the main ingredient in many explosives, happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen. And nitrogen is one of the main ingredients in fertilizer.\n\nAfter World War II, the government found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate. There was a debate about what the government should do with the leftover bomb material. One idea was to spray it on forests to help out the timber industry. But scientists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. And so the government helped launch the chemical fertilizer industry. (It also helped start the pesticide industry, since insect killers are based on poison gases developed for the war.)\n\nChemical fertilizer was needed to grow hybrid corn because it is a very hungry crop. The richest acre of Iowa soil could never feed thirty thousand hungry corn plants year after year without added fertilizer. Though hybrids were introduced in the thirties, it wasn't until farmers started using chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that corn yields really exploded.\n\n#  THERE GOES THE SUN\n\nWhen George Naylor's father spread his first load of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the ecology of his farm underwent a quiet revolution. Until then, the farm's nitrogen had been recycled in a natural loop. Legumes used the sun's energy to fix nitrogen in the soil. Other plants used the nitrogen to grow. Animals ate the plants and the farmer recycled the nitrogen by spreading the animals' manure on the soil.\n\nBut now the Naylors didn't need to produce their own nitrogen\u2014they went out and bought it. The nitrogen for the fields would no longer be made with the sun's energy but with fossil fuels. Farming was no longer an ecological loop\u2014it was more like a factory. The farmer bought raw materials (seed and fertilizer) and turned it into a finished product\u2014corn.\n\nSince there was no need for legumes to fix nitrogen, farmers could plant corn in every field, every year. Animals and their pastures could be eliminated. Farming became much simpler. Like a factory, the industrial farm produces just one product (or at most, two).\n\nAnd like most factories, the industrial farm is powered with fossil fuels. There's the natural gas in the fertilizer and the fossil fuel energy it takes to make the pesticides, the diesel used by the tractors, and the fuel needed to harvest, dry, and transport the corn. Add it all up and you find that every bushel of corn from an industrial farm requires about half a gallon of oil to grow. That's around seventy-five gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.)\n\n_Source: University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems._\n\nHere's another way to look at it. Calories, like the calories in food, are units of energy. On the industrial farm, it takes about ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. That means the industrial farm is using up more energy than it is producing. This is the opposite of what happened before chemical fertilizers. Back then, the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil fuel energy invested. In terms of energy, the modern farm is a losing proposition. It's too bad we can't simply drink the petroleum directly\u2014it would be more efficient.\n\nThe factory farm produces more food much faster than the old solar-based farm. But the system only works as long as fossil fuel energy is cheap.\n\n#  NITROGEN POLLUTION\n\nHybrid corn eats up a lot of nitrogen, but farmers still feed it far more than it can possibly eat. In fact, farmers waste most of the fertilizer they buy. Many farmers put down extra just to play it safe. \"They say you only need a hundred pounds per acre. I'm putting on closer to one hundred eighty,\" Naylor explained to me, a bit sheepishly. \"It's a form of yield insurance.\"\n\nBut what happens to the eighty pounds of man-made nitrogen that Naylor's corn plants don't take up? Some of it evaporates into the air, where it creates acid rain. Some of it turns into nitrous oxide, a gas that increases global warming.\n\nSome of the extra fertilizer seeps down to the ground-water. Because of this, the Naylors don't drink the well water on their farm. When I went to pour myself a glass of water in the kitchen, George's wife, Peggy, made sure I used a special faucet connected to a water filter system.\n\n_Nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere, is necessary for life. The process by which nitrogen moves from the air to the soil and back again is called the nitrogen cycle._\n\nAs for the rest of the extra nitrogen, the spring rains wash it off Naylor's fields, carrying it into drainage ditches. Eventually it spills into the Raccoon River. From there it flows into the Des Moines River, and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. There, in a strange twist of nature, the fertilizer winds up poisoning the ocean. The flood of extra nitrogen causes a wild growth of algae, and the algae take up all the oxygen in the water, smothering the fish. The nitrogen runoff has created a \"hypoxic,\" or dead, zone in the Gulf that is as big as the state of New Jersey\u2014and still growing.\n\n#  RICH FIELDS, POOR FARMERS\n\nThe industrial food chain makes some people very rich. Big agribusiness companies take in billions of dollars in profit. Yet one person who is not getting rich from the mountain of corn is the American farmer. George Naylor is all but going broke\u2014and he's doing better than many of his neighbors. His farm might feed 140 people, but it doesn't support the four who live on it. They have a garden and some laying hens but don't grow most of their own food. The farm doesn't produce enough income to pay their bills. The family only gets by because of the paycheck George's wife, Peggy, brings home from her job\u2014and because of a subsidy check from the U.S. government.\n\nIf the American farmer is more productive than ever before, how come so many farmers are going broke? One morning, after George had his crop planted, I sat down with him at his kitchen table and we talked about the problem. The answer is a little complicated, but it boils down to this: The price of corn is kept low by government policies. The low price means there's plenty of cheap corn for the industrial food chain. It means cheap animal feed to produce cheap meat and cheap high-fructose corn syrup for soft drinks. It means corn can stay king of the supermarket. But it also makes it hard for the average farmer to stay in business, even with government payments.\n\nIn the United States the price of corn is usually below what it costs to grow it. For example, when I visited George Naylor in 2005, it cost him about $2.50 to grow a bushel of corn. That cost includes things like fertilizer, seed, pesticide, and gas for the tractor and combine. But that year, the price the grain elevator co-op paid for a bushel of corn was only about $1.45. At that price Naylor would have lost more than a dollar on every bushel of corn.\n\nWith prices like that, how can Naylor and the other corn farmers stay in business? Because the government pays them part of the difference. In some years nearly half the income of America's corn farmers comes from government checks. It is these government checks, or _subsidies,_ that keep corn and soybean prices low. Yet the payments are never quite enough to cover expenses. That's why Peggy Naylor has to have a job off the farm. That's also why a lot of farmers go out of business or just give up and retire.\n\nI asked George Naylor why he doesn't grow something besides corn, and he laughed. \"What am I going to grow here, broccoli? Lettuce?\" The grain elevator is the only buyer in town, and the elevator only pays for corn and soybeans. The government will give payments to farmers for all the corn they can produce, but not for growing vegetables or fruit. Besides, Naylor has the equipment to plant corn and soybeans, he doesn't have the equipment to grow that lettuce or broccoli\u2014or anything else.\n\nGeorge Naylor finds himself in the same trap as all the other corn and soybean farmers in America. When prices fall, the only way they can stay in business is to find a way to grow even more corn or soy. One way is to boost yield per acre. That means using more chemical fertilizer or maybe trying new hybrid or GMO seeds. Another way is to rent more farmland, maybe from your neighbor who has given up. After all, if you already have the tractor and machinery, it doesn't cost much more to farm another 100 acres, or another 500.\n\nThis means bigger and bigger farms, worked by fewer farmers. It means more fertilizer pollution. And it means even more corn on top of the bulging mountain of corn. And that's the catch. As farmers produce more corn, the price falls even more! Then the only thing an industrial farmer like George Naylor can do is try to grow even more corn. It's a vicious circle. Prices go lower, but the mountain of corn gets higher and higher.\n\n#  THE HIGH PRICE OF CHEAP CORN\n\nOkay, so farmers like George Naylor are having a hard time. Everyone agrees that's a bad thing. But isn't this system still doing what it's supposed to do? Doesn't it produce cheap food for the American people? The problem is that government policies don't really give us cheap food. It only gives us the kinds of cheap food made from corn and soy. Your soft drink or hamburger may be cheaper, but that's because taxpayers have already paid for part of it. And that corn is only cheap if you don't count all the hidden costs, like the cost of pollution from chemical fertilizers.\n\nU.S. farm policy wasn't always like this. Before the 1970s, government policy was designed to support small farmers, not agribusiness. Instead of trying to keep corn prices low, government farm policy was aimed at keeping food prices\u2014and farmers' income\u2014stable.\n\nRemember the law of supply and demand. If there is a lot of grain on the market, sellers have to compete with each other for customers. They lower their prices to try to sell their grain. If there is a shortage of grain, people will pay more for it. Then farmers can charge more for their crops.\n\nStarting in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the government began a policy to keep prices from rising _or_ falling too much. That would protect consumers from having to pay too much for food. The policy would also protect farmers from going bankrupt if prices fell too much.\n\nThis is how it worked: In times when prices were low, the government gave farmers loans so they could store, rather than have to sell, their crops. It bought some grain to keep it off the market. It also paid some farmers _not_ to grow grain. When prices were higher, farmers sold their grain and repaid the government. If prices were too high, the government sold some of the grain from its storehouses. That put extra grain on the market and brought the price down. This system worked pretty well for almost forty years.\n\n#  AGRIBUSINESS, GOVERNMENT, AND CORN\n\nBeginning in the early 1970s this system was thrown out the window. Now farm policy was aimed at one thing: keeping corn prices as low as possible. The government told farmers it would pay them for all the corn they could grow. To be exact\u2014 instead of the government buying all the extra corn, or loaning farmers money so they could store it, it just paid farmers part of the cost of growing it. So all the corn the farmers grew was put on the market, driving the price down. Farmers planted even more, corn prices began falling, and, with a few interruptions, they have been falling ever since.\n\nWhy did government policy change to favor growing more and more corn? Did corn somehow sneak into Washington and change the laws? No, even King Corn couldn't do that. Instead, one of corn's best friends did it. Big agribusiness corporations, the same ones that need cheap corn for their mills, helped write the very laws that set farm policy.\n\nThis is a farm policy that is not designed to help farmers. Lower corn prices drive farmers out of business. Small family farms get replaced with larger industrial farms. Meanwhile agri businesses like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and food companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's make billions thanks to cheap corn and soy. This policy makes it cheaper to buy a corn-sweetened soft drink than whole vegetables, fruits, and grains. But most of all, this policy helps corn to take over our land, our food industry, and even our bodies.\n**4**\n\n**The Grain Elevator**\n\n#  FOOD ON THE GROUND\n\nOne wet spring afternoon I visited the grain elevator in Farnhamville, Iowa. That's where George Naylor hauls his corn each October. The sky was a soft gray, and it was drizzling lightly. My car rumbled across the railroad tracks.\n\nGrain elevators are tall, hollow concrete tubes, like silos. They are the tallest buildings by far in this part of Iowa. You can see them for miles. But what stood out on this gray day was a bright yellow pyramid the size of a circus tent pitched near the base of the elevator. It was an immense pile of corn\u2014left out in the rain.\n\nThe year before, farmers in the Midwest had had a bumper corn crop. It was too much for the elevators to handle, so some was just dumped on the ground. Even now, seven months later, there was still a huge pile. As I walked around it, I saw golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots. Most of this grain is headed for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it clean. Even so, it was hard not to feel that something was deeply wrong at the sight of so much food left out in the rain.\n\nThe next afternoon I met a Mexican American crop scientist named Ricardo Salvador, a professor at Iowa State University. He told me he'd had a similar reaction the first time he'd seen kernels littering Iowa roads in October. Farmers haul their corn to town in big open wagons that scatter a light rain of corn behind them. Salvador said the sight of so much corn on the ground made him feel sick. In Mexico, for thousands of years corn was honored as a source of life. Even today, he said, you do not let corn lie on the ground. To do so would be considered almost sinful.\n\nSalvador's reaction, like mine, came about because we were looking at corn the old-fashioned way, as a food. But the businesses that run the grain elevators and the industrial food chain do not look at corn as food. They look at it as a commodity, something to be bought and sold.\n\nThe corn at the grain elevator was not the same kind of corn you or I eat when we have corn on the cob. What George Naylor grows, and what was in the pile by the elevator, is a type called \"number 2 field corn.\" These kernels are hard to eat, but if you soak them in water for several hours you'll find they taste like lightly corn-flavored starch. It is not a food for human beings. It is the raw material out of which the industrial food chain makes beef or chicken or high-fructose corn syrup or maltodextrin.\n\n#  CORN THE COMMODITY\n\nBefore the railroads crossed America, corn was bought and sold in burlap sacks. More often than not the sacks bore the name of the farm where the corn had been grown. You could follow a sack from a farm in Iowa to the mill in Manhattan, where it was ground into meal, or to the dairy in Brooklyn, where it was fed to a cow. This made a big difference. Consumers knew who was growing their food. They knew exactly what it was and where it came from.\n\nWith the coming of the railroads and the grain elevator, the sacks suddenly became a problem. It is a lot easier to break the corn down into kernels and pump it, like a liquid, into the grain elevators and into the railroad cars. The sacks, and the names of the farms, had to go. Corn from hundreds of different farms was now mixed all together in a great golden river. The river of corn would flow from the farms to buyers anywhere in the world. Since the buyer couldn't know whose corn they were purchasing, the Chicago Board of Trade made up a category called number 2 field corn. Any batch of number 2 corn was guaranteed to be as good as any other number 2 field corn.\n\n#  THE RIVER OF CORN\n\nAt the height of the harvest the grain elevator in Farnhamville runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. When George Naylor delivers his truckload of corn, it is weighed and graded and his account is credited with that day's price per bushel. At that point it is no longer George Naylor's corn\u2014it becomes part of the vast river of corn flowing out of the Midwest toward your supermarket.\n\nI watched a pile of corn pour into a railroad hopper car painted with Cargill's blue and yellow logo. That car was joined to a train more than a mile long, holding 440,000 bushels of corn. Yet that number is a tiny fraction of all the corn produced in the United States. American farmers produce thirteen _billion_ bushels of corn a year. (That's up from four billion bushels in 1970.)\n\nThe supply of corn is usually far greater than the demand for corn, so new uses must be found for it all the time. People have to consume it in new ways, in new kinds of processed food. Animals that never ate corn before must be taught to eat it. We have to turn it into ethanol fuel for our cars. We have to get other nations to import it.\n\nMy plan when I came to Iowa was to somehow follow George Naylor's corn on its path to our plates and into our bodies. I should have known that tracing a single bushel of industrial corn is as impossible as tracing a bucket of water after it's been poured into a river. Making matters still more difficult, the golden river of corn is controlled by a tiny number of corporations. It has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.\n\nThese two companies guide corn's path every step of the way. They sell the pesticides and fertilizer to the farmers. They operate most of America's grain elevators. They ship most of the corn exported to other countries. They mill the corn into its different parts to be used in processed food. They feed the corn to livestock and then slaughter the corn-fattened animals. Oh, yes\u2014don't forget that they also help write many of the rules that govern this whole game.\n\nYet in spite of their size and power, Cargill and ADM are almost invisible. Neither company sells products directly to consumers, so they don't advertise. They work in secret and seldom cooperate with journalists. Both companies refused to let me follow the corn river as it passed through their elevators, pipes, freighters, feedlots, mills, and laboratories.\n\n_Grain elevators are tall, hollow silos where farmers like George Naylor unload their corn harvest each year._\n\n#  NINETY THOUSAND KERNELS\n\nLet's imagine a bushel of number 2 field corn. One bushel holds about ninety thousand kernels. Those kernels could come from dozens of different farms. Some might be George Naylor's Pioneer Hi-Bred 34H31. Some might be his neighbor's genetically modified variety, called 33P67. Some might be kernels grown with atrazine, an herbicide (weed killer) now banned in Europe but widely used in the U.S. Those might be mixed with kernels grown with another herbicide, metolachlor. In the industrial food chain it doesn't really matter. It's all number 2 corn.\n\nWhere do those ninety thousand kernels wind up? Since all number 2 corn is treated as though it is exactly the same, we don't have to follow Naylor's kernels. We just have to follow the main branches of the river of corn as it flows and divides through the industrial food chain.\n\nAs you can see, most of those kernels wind up being fed to animals. Much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle. And the place they are fed is the American factory farm.\n\nThe factory farms take the raw material, corn, and turn it into another product\u2014meat. If you count all the chickens, pigs, and fish, there are hundreds of millions of food animals raised on factory farms every year. These animals once were raised on family farms and ranches. Now they are gathered together in great eating camps, where they consume the mounting pile of surplus corn.\n\n_Source: USDA Economic Research Service._\n\nOne of the strangest parts of the industrial food chain is the way it forces some animals to eat corn. And the saddest example of this might be what it means for cows. The cow is by nature not a corn eater. Getting cows to eat a corn diet takes a heroic effort on the part of the factory farm. But the river of surplus corn is waiting and so the cows must be forced to consume it and turn it into beef you and I can buy.\n\nEnter the corn-fed American steer.\n**5**\n\n**The Feedlot\u2014Turning Corn into Meat**\n\n#  CITY OF COWS\n\nI was speeding down a ramrod-straight road in Finney County, Kansas, when the empty, dull tan prairie suddenly turned black. The gently rolling sea of grass became a grid of steel fences as far as the eye could see. (In Kansas, that is _really_ far.) I had made it to my destination\u2014Poky Feeders, a feedlot and home to thirty-seven thousand head of cattle.\n\nThe feedlot appeared suddenly, but the stench of the place had been rising for more than a mile. I soon learned why. At first I thought the cattle were standing or lying in a grayish mud. Then it dawned on me\u2014that wasn't mud at all. It was manure.\n\nAn endless series of cattle pens stretched to the horizon, each one home to a hundred or so animals. The cattle pens, filled with animals and their waste, are built around a corn mill. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, the mill noisily turns America's river of corn into cattle feed.\n\n_Most cattle today are raised in densely packet, city-like \"Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations\" like this one._\n\nI'd traveled to Poky early one January with the crazy idea of visiting a particular resident. I was looking for a young black steer with three white blazes on his face, the same one I'd met the previous fall on a ranch in South Dakota, five hundred miles due north of here. In fact, the steer belonged to me. I'd purchased him as an eight-month-old calf from the Blair Ranch for $598. I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room and board (all the corn he could eat).\n\nMy idea was to follow my steer as he traveled through the meat-making branch of the industrial food chain. And so I had followed him here.\n\n#  **CAFO** \u2014CONCENTRATED ANIMAL FEEDING OPERATION\n\nThe old-fashioned way of raising cattle, like the old-fashioned way of growing corn, was on the small family farm. Cattle were raised in pastures, eating grass and hay\u2014the food they naturally eat. But as corn took over the family farm, cows and other animals were pushed out.\n\nCattle are now raised in densely packed animal cities like Poky's. These places are called CAFOs\u2014Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Farmers gave up raising cattle because, as strange as it might seem, it costs a farmer more to grow feed corn than it costs a CAFO to buy it. (Thanks to those government subsidies.) Eating meat used to be a special occasion in most American homes. Thanks to CAFOs, meat is now so cheap that many of us eat it three times a day. Of course, the American taxpayers have already paid part of the cost by subsidizing corn.\n\nBut there are other costs involved in raising cattle this way, costs that shoppers don't see when they buy a steak at the supermarket. On the old-fashioned farm, there is really no such thing as waste. Animal manure goes back into the fields as fertilizer. But the waste from CAFOs is a huge source of very toxic pollution. Tons of animal manure are produced with no good way of disposing of it. The feedlots are also breeding grounds for new and deadly bacteria. Some of these bacteria are finding their way into our food.\n\nAnd there is another cost to raising cattle on CAFOs, one that's even harder to see. These animals have evolved to eat grass. But in a CAFO they are forced to eat corn\u2014at considerable cost to their health, to the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of us, their eaters.\n\n#  STEER NUMBER 534\n\nI first met steer number 534 on the Blair Ranch\u2014fifty-five hundred acres of rolling short-grass prairie a few miles outside Sturgis, South Dakota. In that part of the prairie, you can still make out ruts dug by stagecoaches and cattle drives of the 1800s. In November, when I visited, the ground was covered with a thick coat of yellow and gold grass. Sprinkled across the fields were moving black dots: Angus cows and calves, grazing.\n\nEd and Rich Blair run what's called a \"cow-calf \" operation. Their business is the first stage in the production of a hamburger. It is also the stage least changed by the modern industrial food chain. Beef cattle still get born on thousands of independently owned ranches like theirs.\n\nSteer number 534 spent his first six months in these pastures alongside his mother, a cow named 9534. The number means she was the thirty-fourth cow born in 1995. His mother never met his father, an Angus by the name of Gar Precision 1680. Like all beef cattle, 534 is the product of artificial insemination.\n\nBorn on March 13, 2001, in the birthing shed across the road, 534 and his mother were turned out to pasture just as soon as the eighty-pound calf could stand up. Within a few weeks the calf began adding to his diet of mother's milk. He chose from a salad bar of grasses: western wheatgrass, little bluestem, buffalo grass, green needlegrass.\n\nApart from the Saturday in April when he was branded and castrated, one could imagine 534 looking back on those six months as the good old days. No one can really know what a cow feels. But we can say with confidence that a calf grazing on grass is doing what he is supremely well suited to do. Yet, after a few months at Poky my steer will never have the opportunity to eat green grass again.\n\n#  COWS AND GRASS\u2014A PARTNERSHIP\n\nCows have evolved over millions of years to eat grass. It's not a one-sided deal. At the same time, grasses have evolved over millions of years to be eaten by cows. This partnership is one of nature's wonders.\n\nWhen a cow eats grass, it doesn't kill the plant. Grasses have evolved so that they can survive being eaten very well. (As long as the cows give them a chance to recover.) In return for being chewed on, the plants get help from the cows. The cow protects the grass habitat by eating young trees and shrubs that might compete with grasses. The animal also spreads grass seed, plants it with his hooves, and then fertilizes it with his manure.\n\nOnly certain animals, including cows, sheep, goats, and bison, can make a meal out of grass. They can do this because they have a specialized second stomach called a rumen. (That's why these animals are called _ruminants_.) The rumen is like a twenty-five-gallon fermentation tank. Here is where the cow gets some help. Inside that tank lives a type of bacteria that dines on grass. The bacteria break down the cell walls of the grass and allow the cows to get at the protein and carbohydrates within.\n\n_Cattle have four separate stomach compartments, while other farm animals such as chickens and pigs have only one._\n\nOn the plains of the American west, where steer 534 was born, bison and the prairie grasses lived together in partnership for thousands of years. (I guess we should include the bacteria in that partnership, also.) It was a natural, solar-powered loop. The plants used the sun's energy to make food. The bison (with the help of bacteria) ate the grass and in return planted it, fertilized it, and defended its territory. It was a successful ecological system.\n\nA rumen has evolved into the perfect organ for digesting grass. But it is not good at digesting corn. So then why is steer number 534 forced to eat corn insead of grass? The answer is one word: speed. Cattle raised on grass simply take longer to grow than cattle raised on corn. \"In my grandfather's time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter,\" Rich Blair explained to me. \"In the fifties, when my father was ranching, it was two or three years old. Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months.\" What gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous amounts of corn, food supplements, and drugs. Fast food indeed.\n\n#  COW CHOW\n\nIn October, two weeks before I made his acquaintance, steer number 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is the hardest time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike. Cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days. The calves are prone to getting sick. Calves are weaned for a couple of reasons. First, it frees their mothers to have more calves. Second, it gets the calves, now five or six hundred pounds, ready for life on the feedlot.\n\nThe calves are rounded up and herded into a \"backgrounding\" pen. They will spend a couple of months there before boarding the truck for Poky Feeders. Think of backgrounding as a training school for feedlot life: The animals are, for the first time in their lives, confined to a pen. They are \"bunk broken\"\u2014taught to eat from a trough. And they must gradually get used to eating what is for them a new and unnatural diet. Here is where they first eat corn.\n\nIt was in the backgrounding pen that I first met 534. Rather, it's where I picked him out. I had told the Blairs I wanted to follow one of their steers from birth to slaughterhouse. Ed Blair suggested, half jokingly, that I might as well buy one. Then I could have the whole beef-making experience. He told me how to pick out a good calf: one with a broad straight back and thick shoulders. Basically you're looking for a sturdy frame on which to hang a lot of meat.\n\n_This is Steer #534. I purchased him as a calf so I could follow him as he traveled through the meat-making part of the industrial food chain._\n\nI also wanted a calf with a face I could easily spot in a crowd, so I could easily find him again. I went out to the pen and gazed over the sea of ninety black Angus cattle. Almost at once, steer number 534 moseyed over to the fence and made eye contact with me. He had a wide, stout frame and three easy-to-spot white marks on his face. Here was my boy.\n\n#  NEW HOME, NEW DIET\n\nSteer 534 and I traveled from the ranch to the feedlot (in separate vehicles) the first week of January. It felt a lot like going from the country to the big city. A feedlot is not a very pleasant city, however. It is crowded and filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads, and choking air thick with dust.\n\nAt the center of the feedlot stands the feed mill. That is where three meals a day for thirty-seven thousand animals are designed and mixed by computer. A million pounds of feed pass through the mill each day. Every hour of every day a tractor trailer pulls up to the loading dock to deliver another fifty tons of corn. The driver opens a valve in the belly of the truck and a golden stream of grain begins to flow down a chute into the bowels of the mill.\n\nAround to the other side of the building, tanker trucks pump in thousands of gallons of liquefied fat, usually beef fat from a nearby slaughterhouse. There's also the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop made of molasses and urea. (Urea is a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas, similar to the fertilizer spread on George Naylor's fields.)\n\nIn a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins. Beside them are fifty-pound sacks of antibiotic drugs. Along with alfalfa hay and silage (stems and leaves of corn plants), all these ingredients will be automatically blended together to make the feed for the cattle. Three times a day a parade of dump trucks fills up with this feed and carries it to the cattle pens.\n\nBefore being put on this strange diet, new arrivals to the feedlot are treated to a few days of fresh long-stemmed hay. (They don't eat on the long ride and can lose up to one hundred pounds. The hay gives them a chance to get adjusted.) Over the next several weeks they'll gradually step up to a daily ration of thirty-two pounds of feed, including twenty-four pounds of corn. That would be enough corn to fill a paper grocery bag.\n\n#  CATTLE EATING CATTLE\n\nFeedlots are beef factories. Their goal is to turn corn into beef. But corn isn't the only thing the cattle are fed. You might be as shocked as I was to learn that they are also fed parts of other cattle. That's right, these herbivores, natural plant eaters, are fed meat.\n\nFor years, leftover beef scraps were ground up and put into cattle feed. After all, it was protein, and cattle need protein to grow. Then people in England began dying of a sickness called mad cow disease. Mad cow is a brain disease that is always fatal. It is spread by eating the brains of infected animals. Ground-up cattle brains were put into cattle feed and some of those cows got mad cow disease. Human beings who ate infected beef also got the disease, although there were no human cases reported in the United States.\n\nThe government banned the practice in 1997, but there are some exceptions. As I already noted, beef tallow (fat) is one of the ingredients that cows at Poky will eat. Where does the tallow come from? It comes from other cows that have been sent to the slaughterhouse. Though Poky doesn't do it, the rules also permit feedlots to feed cattle protein from other kinds of animals. Feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding, feces, and discarded bits of feed from chicken farms) are accepted cattle feeds, as are chicken, fish, and pig meal. Some public health experts worry that other diseases like mad cow could start to appear because of this practice.\n\n#  SICK FROM CORN\n\nCompared to all the other things we feed cattle these days, corn seems positively wholesome. Yet feeding corn to cattle goes against the natural order almost as much feeding them beef. During my day at Poky I spent a few hours with Dr. Mel Metzin, the staff veterinarian. Dr. Mel, as he's known at Poky, runs a team of eight cowboys. Their job is to ride the yard's dusty streets, spotting sick animals and bringing them into Poky's three \"hospitals\" for treatment. From Dr. Mel I learned more than any beef eater might want to know about the life of the factory farm steer.\n\n_Sources: Journal of Animal Science, Journal of Food Quality, andeatwild.com._\n\n_Here I'm reaching into the rumen of a fistulated cow\u2014an animal with a permanent opening in its side, used for research._\n\nBasically, almost all of the cattle in the feedlot are sick. And it's their corn-based diet that makes them ill. \"They're made to eat forage,\" Dr. Metzin explained, \"and we're making them eat grain.\" ( _Forage_ means grass.)\n\nThe most serious illness is bloat. Remember, there are bacteria in the animal's rumen and they produce a lot of gas. Usually cattle belch a lot to release the gas. But a corn diet causes a condition that keeps the gas from escaping. This is called bloat. The gases in the rumen get trapped and the rumen inflates like a balloon until it presses against its lungs. To save the animal, a vet must force a hose down the animal's throat to release the gas. Otherwise, the pressure will choke the animal to death.\n\nA corn diet also gives cattle acidosis (too much acid in the rumen). Human stomachs are naturally highly acid. A rumen, however, is naturally neutral or non-acid. Feeding corn to a steer changes the chemistry of the rumen, making it acid and causing a kind of heartburn that in some cases can kill the animal, but usually just makes him sick. Cattle with acidosis stop eating, pant and drool, paw and scratch their bellies, and eat dirt. This can so weaken the animal that it can develop a long list of other diseases like diarrhea, ulcers, liver disease, pneumonia, and feedlot polio.\n\n#  ANTIBIOTICS FOR ANIMALS\n\nCattle rarely live on feedlot diets for more than 150 days, which might be about as much as their systems can stand. Over time the acids eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the animal's bloodstream. These microbes wind up in the liver. Between 15 percent and 30 percent of feedlot cattle have damaged livers. Dr. Mel told me that in some pens the figure runs as high as 70 percent.\n\nWhat keeps a feedlot animal healthy\u2014or healthy enough\u2014are antibiotics. Most of the antibiotics sold in America today are for animal feed, not for humans. Without these drugs cattle could not survive. The only reason they need the drugs is because they are being raised on factory farms and fed corn. The problem is that in response to antibiotics, bacteria can mutate or change. They can develop into new types of bacteria that the drugs don't affect. By giving antibiotics to the millions of cattle in the U.S. we are actually breeding new superbacteria that can't be killed by antibiotics.\n\nI asked Dr. Mel what would happen if drugs were banned from cattle feed. \"We'd have a high death rate,\" he told me. \"We just couldn't feed them as hard. Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space, I wouldn't have a job.\"\n\n#  MY STEER\n\nI found my steer, number 534, in pen 63. Pen 63 is about the size of a hockey rink, with a concrete feed bunk along the road, and a fresh water trough out back. My first impression was that his home wasn't too bad. It was far enough from the feed mill to be fairly quiet and it had a view of what I thought was a pond. Then I noticed the brown scum. The body of water is what is known as a manure lagoon.\n\nI asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just use the liquid manure as fertilizer on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that it would kill the crops. (He didn't tell me that feedlot wastes also contain toxic chemicals and drugs that end up in waterways downstream.) On a farm, manure would be a source of fertility. At a CAFO like Poky it becomes a toxic waste.\n\nI climbed over the railing and joined the ninety steers, which retreated a few lumbering steps. I couldn't find number 534 at first. And then I spotted him\u2014the three white blazes on his face\u2014way off in the back. As I gingerly stepped toward him the shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted, and there stood 534 and I, staring dumbly at each other. I had worn the same orange sweater I'd worn at the ranch in South Dakota, hoping that maybe he would recognize me. There was no sign that he did. I told myself not to take it personally. After all, 534 and his pen mates were bred for their meat, not for their memories.\n\nI noticed that his eyes were a little bloodshot. That was probably from all the feedlot dust, which wasn't really dust but dried-up cow manure. Aside from that, it was hard to tell how he was getting on. I don't know enough about cattle to tell you if he was bored or miserable. On the other hand, I would not say he looked happy.\n\n#  MEAT MACHINE?\n\nMy steer had certainly grown. He'd put on a couple of hundred pounds since I'd seen him last, which of course was the whole point of the feedlot. Dr. Mel complimented me on his size and shape. \"That's a handsome-looking beef you got there,\" he said. (Aw, shucks.)\n\nThat is one way of looking at a steer like 534\u2014the feedlot way, the industrial way. To the industrial food chain, cattle are just machines for turning number 2 field corn into cuts of beef. So number 534 was doing a good job as a meat machine. Yet standing there, I realized once again that number 534, despite his name, was not a machine. Number 534 was a living, breathing organism. My health is directly related to his health (or to the health of other steers just like him). We live in the same habitat as the animals we eat. Whatever happens to them, happens to us.\n\nWhile I stood in pen 63 a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed. The black mass of cowhide moved toward the trough for lunch. The $1.60 a day I was paying for my steer's meal may seem cheap\u2014but it doesn't include all the costs of the industrial farm, not by a long shot. It doesn't include the billions the government spends to subsidize corn. It doesn't include the cost to the environment from manure, pesticide, and fertilizer pollution. It doesn't include the cost to our health from new superbacteria.\n\nI stood alongside 534 as he lowered his big head into the stream of grain. At that moment I couldn't imagine ever wanting to eat one of these animals. Hungry was the last thing I felt. Yet after enough time goes by, and the stink of that place is gone from my nostrils, I will probably eat feedlot beef again. Most people can eat feedlot meat because they just don't know where it comes from. For me, it will take a lot of forgetting.\n**6**\n\n**Processed Food**\n\n#  SPLITTING THE KERNEL\n\nDo you eat a lot of corn? Looking at it one way, each American eats only about a bushel of corn per year. But that number only includes the corn that _looks_ like corn\u2014corn on the cob, or corn out of a can, or corn chips.\n\nBut if you count _all_ the corn we eat, directly and indirectly the average American eats a _ton of corn_ every year. We don't recognize it as corn, though, because it's been turned into something else. Almost half is eaten by animals and turned into beef, chicken, fish, or pork. One-tenth of the U.S. corn crop is turned into processed food.\n\nTo make processed food, corn is first broken down into different parts. Those parts are put back together in new ways to make the sweetener in your soft drink or the starch in your hamburger roll. All of this happens in a factory called a \"wet mill.\" (The old sort of mill, which simply grinds grain into flour, or meal, is a \"dry\" mill.) To follow the industrial food chain, I had to follow the river of corn through a wet mill.\n\nThere are twenty-five major wet mills in the United States, most of them owned by two corporations, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. George Naylor's corn probably went to Cargill's mill in Iowa City. ADM runs a giant plant in Decatur, Illinois. Both of those companies refused to let me to tour their plants.\n\nLuckily, I was allowed to visit a smaller mill at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Iowa State really should be called the University of Corn. Corn is the hero of many of the sculptures and murals on campus. (The soybean, Iowa's second-largest crop, gets its share of attention too.) The school's wet mill is part of something called the Center for Crops Utilization Research. Larry Johnson, the center's director, was more than happy to show me around.\n\n#  INDUSTRIAL DIGESTION\n\nJohnson described the wet mill as kind of an industrial digestive system. The mill itself is a maze of stainless steel pipes, valves, filters, and tanks. Corn travels through the maze and is broken down through a series of steps including grinding (like the teeth) and soaking in acid (like the stomach). By the time it reaches the end, the corn is reduced to simple molecules, mostly sugars. Soybeans go through a similar process.\n\nThe first step in the \"digestion\" of corn is to split the kernel into its different parts:\n\n\u2022 The yellow skin.\n\n\u2022 The germ, the tiny dark part nearest the cob. That's the part that holds a tiny embryo of a corn plant.\n\n\u2022 The endosperm. The biggest part of the kernel, filled with carbohydrates.\n\nWhen a shipment of corn arrives at the mill, it is soaked for thirty-six hours in a slightly acid bath. This swells the kernels and loosens the skin. After the soak, the swollen kernels are ground in a mill. \"By now the germ is rubbery and it pops right off,\" Johnson explained.\n\nThe germ is then squeezed for corn oil. Corn oil can be used as a cooking or salad oil. Some of it is hydrogenated. That means hydrogen is forced into the oil molecules. This makes the oil stay solid at room temperature and so it can be used for margarine. Doctors used to think margarine was healthier for you than butter and would not cause heart disease. Now researchers think these hydrogenated trans fats in margarine are actually worse for our hearts than butter. Trans fats are also used in processed snacks, baked goods, and many other processed foods.\n\nOnce the germ has been removed for oil, the kernels are crushed. That makes a white mush of protein and starch called \"mill starch.\" The mill starch can be used in animal feed.\n\n#  STARCH INTO SUGAR\n\nWhat's left after that is a white liquid that's poured out onto a stainless steel table. It dries to a fine, superwhite powder\u2014cornstarch. Cornstarch was wet milling's first product back in the 1840s. At first the starch was mainly used for laundry\u2014to make shirts stiff. Then cooks and food companies began adding cornstarch to as many recipes as they could. The starch was cheap and had a nice white color that people thought was \"pure.\"\n\nBy 1866, the mill owners had learned how to break down cornstarch into a kind of sugar called glucose. The glucose corn syrup wasn't as sweet as sugar, but it was cheap. Ever since, corn sweeteners have been the industry's most important product.\n\nThe big breakthrough came in the 1960s. That's when Japanese chemists discovered an enzyme that could transform glucose into the much sweeter sugar molecule called fructose. High-fructose corn syrup was born. It's a blend of 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose that tastes exactly as sweet as table sugar. Today it is the most valuable food product refined from corn.\n\nHigh-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, is by far the biggest food output of the country's wet mills. But there are hundreds of other food ingredients created from the remaining cornstarch. Some is made into other sugars like maltodextrin, which can be used to make instant pudding or gravy. Some is fermented to become ethanol. Some of the fermented starch is used to make plastic. At the end there's almost nothing left. Even the dirty water from the process is used to make animal feed.\n\nThe wet mill is like a giant steel beast, with a maze of pipes and machines inside. At one end it eats millions of bushels of corn fed to it every day by the trainload. At the other end of the beast are hundreds of spigots, large and small. Out of each spigot flows a different product made from corn, called \"fractions\" by the food industry. Many of these fractions, the sugars and starches, the alcohols and acids, the emulsifiers and stabi lizers with the strange names, will be made into food. They are put together to make cereal or snack food or chicken nuggets or TV dinners or just about anything else you can imagine and ingest. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a processed food today that isn't made from corn or soybeans.\n\n_Source: Adapted from Twinkie, Deconstructed, by Steve Ettlinger andwww.hostesscakes.com_\n\n#  CEREAL SECRETS\n\nA few years ago I had the chance to visit one of the places where new foods are invented. I was given a tour of the research and development laboratory for General Mills, the sixth-largest food company in the world. The lab is called the Bell Institute and it is housed in a group of buildings on the outskirts of Minneapolis. Here nine hundred food scientists spend their days designing the future of food.\n\nMuch of their work is top secret, but nowhere more so than in the cereals area. Deep in the heart of the Bell Institute is a maze of windowless rooms called, rather grandly, the Institute of Cereal Technology. The secrecy surrounding cereals like Lucky Charms seemed silly, and I said so. But an executive explained to me that recipes can't be patented or copyrighted\u2014which means that once you introduce a new cereal, anyone can put out another one just like it. All you can hope for is to have the market to yourself for a few months to establish your brand. That's why companies keep their new cereals top secret.\n\nIn the interests of secrecy, the food scientists would not talk to me about current projects. But they would talk about past failures, like the cereal in the shape of little bowling pins and balls. \"The kids loved it,\" the product's inventor told me, \"but the mothers didn't like the idea of kids bowling their breakfast across the table.\" Which is why bowling pins never showed up in your cereal bowl.\n\nBreakfast cereal is a great example of why companies love to make processed foods. A box of cereal contains four cents worth of corn (or some other grain). Yet that box will sell for close to four dollars. Cereals generate higher profits for General Mills than any other food. In the same way, McDonald's makes much more by selling you a chicken nugget than a piece of recognizable chicken.\n\nThe farmer, on the other hand, makes more money from whole foods than processed foods. For example, for every dollar a consumer spends to buy eggs, forty cents finds its way back to the farmer. But for every dollar a consumer spends on HFCS, say in a soft drink, farmers get only four cents. Companies like ADM and Coca-Cola and General Mills capture most of the rest. That's why George Naylor told me more than once: \"There's money to be made in food, unless you're trying to grow it.\"\n\n_Source: USDA._\n\n#  CAN YOU EAT MORE, PLEASE?\n\nIt seems that food corporations have got it made. The U.S. government helps pay for their raw materials. They make more money from selling food than farmers. But they have one big problem that limits their sales: the size of the human stomach.\n\nUnlike many other products\u2014CDs, say, or books\u2014there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. Try as we might, the average person can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. The demand for food rises only as fast as the population grows. In the U.S., that's around 1 percent per year.\n\nThis leaves food companies like General Mills with two choices. They can figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same amount of food. Or they can get us to eat more food than we need. Which do they choose? Why both, of course.\n\nProcessing food allows companies to charge more for it. Consumers will only pay so much for an ear of corn. But they can be convinced to pay a lot more for the same corn if it has been turned into a funny shape, sweetened, and brightly colored. The industry calls this \"adding value.\"\n\nAdded value can be anything. It might be the convenience of a dinner you just pop in the microwave. Or it might be a feeling like \"this food product is good for me.\" Or it might be that a food is fun to eat\u2014like ridged potato chips or cereal bars. That's why food companies spend so much on advertising\u2014to convince us they really have added value to the corn and soybeans.\n\nThey also try to convince us that their corn or chickens or apples are better (and worth more) than those of another company. They don't want us to buy just any old chicken, but Tyson chicken or Perdue. They don't want us to buy any old oat cereal\u2014they want us to buy Cheerios.\n\nCompanies can also try to convince us that their food is healthier, even a sort of medicine. We're used to having vitamins and minerals added to our food. (Of course, manufacturers wouldn't need to add them if they hadn't been _removed_ during processing.) And some manufacturers are going even further than adding vitamins. One company, called Tree Top, has developed a \"low-moisture, naturally sweetened apple piece infused with a red-wine extract.\" Natural chemicals in red wine called flavonoids are thought to fight cancer. So Tree Top has added value to an apple by injecting it with flavonoids from red wine.\n\nIt seems that an old-fashioned apple just isn't enough anymore. We need an apple that fights cancer! We need orange juice with calcium that builds strong bones. We need cereal that keeps us from having a heart attack.\n\n#  FOOD THAT DOESN'T FEED\n\nThe latest invention to come from the wet mill and the lab is something called resistant starch. This new corn \"fraction\" has food makers very excited because\u2014it can't be digested! That's right, it's a food that your body can't use. Since the body can't break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track. It's the ultimate diet food\u2014food with no calories. It's food that isn't really food.\n\nYou would think this would be a bad thing. Imagine the advertisement: \"Our food doesn't feed you!\" But for food companies, it's an excellent invention. They have finally overcome the natural limit of what the human body will eat. You could eat this stuff twenty-four hours a day, like a human-size corn processing plant!\n\nMaybe this fake food is corn's final victory. It has succeeded up until now by being useful to humans. Now it is about to succeed by being of no use at all.\n\n**7**\n\n**Fat from Corn**\n\n#  CAN YOU EAT MORE, PLEASE? PART II\n\nSo food companies have been very successful at getting us to pay more for the same food. What about their other money-making scheme, to get us to buy (and eat) more food than we need? How has that worked out? Well, let's see . . .\n\nThree of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. Among kids, it's almost as bad. Seventeen percent of kids age six through nineteen are obese. This is a giant public health problem, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children, and the Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop it. Diabetes can mean blindness, amputation, and early death. Because of diabetes and all the other health problems caused by obesity, kids in the U.S. today may turn out to be the first group of Americans with life spans that are shorter than their parents'. To put it simply, Americans are getting fatter and it's killing us.\n\n_Sources: Journal of the American Medical Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention._\n\nYou hear plenty of explanations for our expanding waistline. We sit all day at desks in school or at work, then sit around all night watching television. We play video games instead of sports. Fast-food advertising encourages us to eat supersized meals. It is actually cheaper to eat high-calorie, fatty, processed foods than whole foods. All these explanations are true, but they don't tell the whole story.\n\n#  EXTRA CALORIES\n\nBehind our epidemic of obesity lies this simple fact: When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it. Since 1977, an American's average daily intake of calories has jumped by more than 10 percent. Since we aren't exercising more, the calories end up being stored away in fat cells in our bodies. Where did all those cheap calories come from? If you've read this far, you already know the answer\u2014most of them come from cheap corn.\n\nSince 1970, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day. (The average person needs about 2,000 calories a day, but that number varies greatly depending on your age, size, and amount of exercise.) Where are those extra calories going? Some are sold overseas. Some are turned into ethanol for our cars. But a lot of them are going into us.\n\nAn awful lot of those extra corn calories are being eaten as high-fructose corn syrup. Not surprisingly, HFCS is the leading source of sweetness in our diet.\n\n#  A SWEET DEAL\n\nIn 1985, the average American consumed 45 pounds of HFCS a year. In 2006, it was 58 pounds. You might think that it has replaced other sweeteners in the American diet, but that isn't so. In addition to the extra HFCS, Americans are eating more old-fashioned cane sugar too. In fact, since 1985 our consumption of all sugars\u2014cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever\u2014has climbed from 126 pounds to 139 pounds per person. That's what makes HFCS such a \"sweet deal\" for the food industry since we like sweet things, adding it to our food increases the amount we eat.\n\n_Lately the companies that make HFCS have been fighting back. Their trade group, the Corn Refiners Association, has been running ads on television and in newspaper suggesting that corn syrup has been unfairly criticized, and that it is no worse for us than sugar. They may be right about that, but the problem with HFCS is not that it is worse for us than sugar, but that it is everywhere in the food supply\u2014in products that never used to be sweetened at all._\n\nRead the food labels in your kitchen and you'll find that HFCS is everywhere. It's not just in our soft drinks and snack foods, but in the ketchup and mustard, the breads and cereals, the relishes and crackers, the hot dogs and hams.\n\nBut it is in soft drinks that we consume most of our fifty-eight pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. We can trace this back to the year 1980\u2014an important year in the history of corn. That was the year corn first became an ingredient in Coca-Cola. By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched over entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. Why? Because HFCS was a few cents cheaper than sugar and consumers couldn't taste the difference.\n\nThe soft drink makers could have just switched one sugar for another. That would not have led us to drink more. But that wasn't all they did. They began to increase the size of a bottle of soda.\n\nHFCS was so cheap that Pepsi and Coke could have cut the price of each bottle they sold. But they had a much better idea: They would supersize their sodas. Since corn sweetener was now so cheap, why not get people to pay just a few pennies more for a bigger bottle? Drop the price per ounce, but sell a lot more ounces.\n\nDid you ever see an old-fashioned Coke bottle, from around 1950? It looks tiny, because it only held eight ounces. Today the standard size of a Coke or Pepsi is twenty ounces.\n\n#  SUPERSIZE!\n\nSoda makers don't deserve credit for the invention of supersizing. That belongs to a man named David Wallerstein. In the 1950s Wallerstein worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas. Movie theaters make most of their profits from their snack counters, not from ticket sales. It was Wallerstein's job to figure out how to sell more soda and popcorn. Wallerstein tried everything he could think of but found he simply could not get customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish.\n\nWallerstein discovered that people would buy more popcorn and soda\u2014a lot more\u2014as long as it came in a single giant serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn and the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp. In 1968, Wallerstein went to work for McDonald's, but try as he might, he couldn't convince Ray Kroc, the company's founder, to try supersizing.\n\n\"If people want more fries,\" Kroc told him, \"they can buy two bags.\" Wallerstein explained that McDonald's customers wanted more but didn't want to buy a second bag. \"They don't want to look like gluttons.\"\n\nFinally Kroc gave in and approved supersized portions, and what followed was a dramatic rise in sales. People had been holding back because they didn't want to seem greedy. Now Wallerstein and McDonald's had figured out a way to make them feel okay about eating more. After all, it was still just one serving, even if it was twice the size. They had discovered the secret to expanding the (supposedly) fixed human stomach.\n\nOne might think that people would stop eating and drinking these huge portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn't work that way. Researchers have found that people (and animals) will eat up to 30 percent more if they are given larger portions. Our eating habits were formed over millions of years of evolution. Early humans, who lived by hunting and gathering, didn't always have enough food. Our bodies tell us to eat more when we have the chance, because hunger might be just around the corner. The problem is that with the mountain of cheap corn, hunger never comes (at least not for most Americans).\n\nIn the same way, our built-in instincts tell us to eat lots of sugar and fat. Humans, like most other warm-blooded creatures, have a built-in sweet tooth. The taste of sweet or fat tells our body we're eating an energy-rich food. Our instinct is to eat as much as we can, in case we can't find food tomorrow. Yet in nature we would never find a fruit with anywhere near the amount of fructose in a soda. We would never find a piece of animal flesh with as much fat as a chicken nugget.\n\nYou begin to see why processing foods is such a good way of getting people to eat more. The fast-food chains have been able to build foods that push our evolutionary buttons. Huge amounts of sweets and fats fool our instincts and we wind up eating much more than we should. Animal experiments prove this is so. Rats presented with solutions of pure sugar or tubs of pure lard will gorge themselves sick.\n\n#  CHEAP FAT\n\nSurprisingly, the health problems of eating too much hit poor people hardest. That's because if you count the calories, foods loaded with sugar and fat are the cheapest foods in the market. A recent study showed this was true. In a typical supermarket, one dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies. The same dollar could only buy 250 calories of carrots and other whole vegetables.\n\nOn the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar. But a dollar will only buy you 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate. These numbers show why people with limited money to spend on food spend it on the cheapest calories they can find. It makes even more sense when you realize that those cheap calories reward our instincts for fat and sugar.\n\nKing Corn shoved the other plants and animals off the farm. Now it is winning out in the supermarket too. It is so cheap and comes in so many different forms, the other foods just can't compete.\n\nAs we have seen, it has had a lot of help. The U.S. government (spending taxpayer dollars) helps pay farmers to grow corn and soybeans, but not to grow carrots. That means the government helped pay for your soft drink or cookies, but it won't help pay for green vegetables. One part of the government puts out food pyramids telling you to eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer sweets. Meanwhile another part of the government is making it cheaper for you to eat more sweets. The government says it wants you to eat healthy, then it makes sure that the cheapest calories in the supermarket are the unhealthiest. Talk about mixed messages!\n\nThe processed food industry has brought us corn in a thousand different forms. It's given us cheap corn sweeteners and hundreds of extra calories a day. It's managed to confuse our instincts, to get us to eat more food than we need. All of this is part of a bigger problem, and not a new problem either. It's the problem of figuring out what we should and shouldn't eat.\n\nIt boils down to this: As creatures who can eat many different things, how do we know what's good to eat and what's not? That's the omnivore's dilemma and it's growing bigger every day.\n**8**\n\n**The Omnivore's Dilemma**\n\n#  IS THAT FOOD?\n\nFor some animals, there is no dilemma at dinnertime. The koala eats eucalyptus leaves. Period. To the koala, eucalyptus leaves=food. The monarch butterfly only eats milkweed. There's no choice to make. Everything else in nature is not food.\n\nThe koala gets all the nutrients it needs from eucalyptus leaves. The monarch gets everything it needs from milkweed leaves. But, unlike koalas and monarch butterflies, omnivores not only can eat different foods, we _need_ to eat a variety of foods to stay healthy. For example, we need vitamin C, which is only found in plants. But we also need vitamin B-12, which is only found in animals. Ultimately, our omnivore's dilemma is rooted in our nature as human beings\u2014but we've made our choices much harder than they used to be.\n\nThe industrial food chain has brought the world to our supermarkets. Today we can buy just about any sort of food from anywhere in the globe, in any season. We can buy kiwis from New Zealand and grapes from Chile. We can buy fresh tomatoes in the middle of the winter, flown in from Israel or Holland or Mexico. Add that to the thousands of new processed foods\u2014about 17,000 each year\u2014and we have an incredible amount of food choices (even if most of them are made from corn). With all this variety and the constant stream of messages from the food industry and the media, how can we ever make up our minds?\n\n#  THE MODERN OMNIVORE\n\nOver thousands of years, human beings built a culture of food that helped us figure out what to eat and what to avoid. We learned what was safe to eat and what could kill us. We learned how to find and cook local foods. These rules and habits made eating a lot easier. When it was time to eat, people didn't have to think about it much. They ate what their parents and grandparents had eaten.\n\nIf you lived in Mexico you ate rice, beans, and corn tortillas. If you lived in West Africa you ate cassava, yams, beans, and millet. What you ate also depended on the season. You ate apples in the fall and leafy greens in the spring. In most places people ate small portions of meat, though not at every meal. By following simple rules like these, people solved the omnivore's dilemma.\n\nToday, the modern omnivore has almost no culture to fall back on. Standing in our giant supermarkets, we feel more lost than someone standing in a forest ten thousand years ago. We no longer know for sure which foods are good for us and which aren't. Thanks to the food industry, we don't even know what it is we're eating. Sometimes it even seems like we've forgotten _why_ we eat.\n\nModern Americans have lost the solution to the omnivore's dilemma and today the problem is bigger than it has ever been. But it's not an unsolvable problem. We need to recover the skills and knowledge people used to have.\n\n#  THE OMNIVORE'S BRAIN\n\nThe first thing we should remember is that our bodies have evolved to help us solve the omnivore's dilemma. For example, we have different teeth for different jobs. We can bite like a carnivore, or chew like an herbivore, depending on the dish. Our digestive tract is also good at digesting different types of foods.\n\nThe omnivore's dilemma is one reason our brains are so large. The koala doesn't need a lot of brainpower to figure out what to eat. As it happens, the koala's brain is _so_ small it doesn't even fill up its skull. Zoologists think the koala once ate a more varied diet than it does now. As it evolved toward eating just one food, it didn't need to think as much. Over generations, unused organs tend to shrink. In other words, as the koala's diet shrank, so did its brain.\n\nHumans, on the other hand, need a lot of brainpower to safely choose an omnivore's diet. We can't rely on instinct like the koala does. For us, choosing food is a problem that has to be solved with our brains and our senses.\n\nTo help it make food decisions, our brain developed taste preferences. We think of taste as something that helps us to enjoy food, but our sense of taste evolved to help us screen foods. Our tastebuds divide food into two groups: sweet foods that are good to eat and bitter foods that might harm us.\n\nSweetness is a sign that a food is a rich source of carbohydrate energy. We don't have to be taught to like sweet foods\u2014we are born liking them. A sweet tooth is part of our omnivore's brain. It is an instinct that evolved to help us through times of food shortage. It says: Eat as much of this sweet high-energy food as you can because you never know when you're going to find some again. This built-in sweet tooth is so strong that we will keep eating sweets even after we are no longer hungry. Our instinct doesn't realize that in modern times there are always sweet foods available to us. We don't have to go hunting and gathering to get more\u2014all we have to do is walk to the refrigerator.\n\n#  THE BITTER AND THE SWEET\n\nWe are also born with a built-in signal that tells us to stop eating certain foods. That's the taste we call bitter. Many plant toxins (poisons) are bitter. Avoiding bitter foods is a good way to avoid these toxins. Pregnant women are very sensitive to bitter tastes. This instinct probably developed to protect the developing fetus against even the mild toxins found in foods like broccoli. But this is not a good excuse to stop eating broccoli. It turns out that some of the bitterest plants contain valuable nutrients, even useful medicines. We can't only rely on our sense of taste when we choose what we eat. (Besides, many people like the taste of broccoli.)\n\nThe bark of the willow tree is extremely bitter, but early humans learned to make tea from it anyway. Why? Because willow bark contains salicylic acid, a pain reliever. (It's the active ingredient in aspirin.) Our food choices are not just dictated by instinct. We can learn to eat bitter foods if they are good for us. We sometimes even decide that we like them.\n\nOne way we have overcome the bitterness of some plants is by cooking. Acorns are very bitter. But Native Americans figured out a way to turn them into a rich food by grinding, soaking, and roasting them. The roots of the cassava, a plant in Africa, contain the poison cyanide. This keeps most animals from eating them. But once again, humans figured out a way to safely eat cassava, by pounding and then cooking it. And humans had the cassava roots all to themselves, since pigs, porcupines, and other animals wouldn't touch them.\n\nOnce it was discovered, cooking became one of the most important tools of the human omnivore. Cooking vastly increased the number of plants and animals we could eat. In fact, cooking probably was a turning point in human evolution. Anthropologists think early primates (pre-humans) learned to use fire and cook about 1.9 million years ago. That was around the same time the human brain grew larger and our teeth and jaws grew smaller.\n\n#  RATS!\n\nRats are also omnivores. But unlike us, rats can't pass lessons or food habits down to their many, many children. When it comes to the omnivore's dilemma, each rat is on its own.\n\nRats solve the omnivore's dilemma by testing new food. If a rat finds something new to eat, it will nibble a very tiny bit and wait to see what happens. Most poisons in nature are not that strong. A tiny amount will make the rat sick but not kill it. If the rat doesn't get sick, then it knows it can eat the whole thing\u2014a knowledge it retains for the rest of its life. This ability to learn is what makes poisoning rats so difficult.\n\nLuckily, we don't have to use the rat method for solving the omnivore's dilemma. And in fact, over thousands of years, people in every corner of the globe built a large body of food knowledge. Through experience, they learned what combinations of local foods made them healthy. They learned which foods to avoid. They learned how to cook and prepare those foods and passed all this knowledge on to their children. You grew up knowing what to eat and how to cook it.\n\nThe culture of food didn't just solve the omnivore's dilemma. It was also an important glue that bound people together. It was part of the identity of a tribe or a nation. People hold on to their national foods, even after they move to other countries. Visit any neighborhood where there are immigrants, and you'll see shops that sell food from the home country\u2014pastas from Italy, kielbasa sausages from Poland, curry spices from India.\n\nNational food cultures are more than just a list of foods. They are a set of manners, customs, and rules that cover everything from the correct size of a serving to the order of dishes served at a meal. Some of these rules have clear health benefits. If you live in Japan and eat raw fish (sushi), then it makes sense to eat it with spicy wasabi. Raw fish can contain bacteria, and wasabi kills bacteria. The people who developed the custom of eating sushi with wasabi didn't even know there was such a thing as bacteria. But somehow they figured out that eating wasabi kept them healthier.\n\nPeople in Central America cook corn with lime and serve it with beans. It turns out there are important health reasons for doing these things. Corn contains niacin, an important vitamin. The way to unlock the niacin in corn is to cook it with an alkali like lime. And eating corn and beans together supplies all the amino acids humans need.\n\n#  FOOD FADS\n\nWe have never had a national food culture in the United States. There's really no such thing as \"American food.\" (Fast-food hamburgers don't count.) We have few rules about what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat. We don't have any strong food traditions to guide us, so we seek food advice from \"experts.\" This may be one reason we have so many diet fads in this country.\n\nOne of the earliest of these so-called experts was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Yes, that's the same Kellogg whose name is on Kellogg's Corn Flakes and other cereals. Kellogg was a doctor who ran a \"sanitarium,\" or health clinic, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Large numbers of wealthy people traveled there and followed Kellogg's nutty ideas about diet and health. Some of his advice included all-grape diets and almost hourly enemas. (An enema is a cleansing of the bowel in which . . . Oh, never mind.) He followed the enemas with doses of yogurt, applied to the digestive tract from both ends. (Half was eaten and the other half was . . . Well, you can figure it out.)\n\n_The earliest so-called \"food expert\" was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who prescribed all-grape diets and hourly enemas before going on to launch the cereal company._\n\n_A scene from the Swedish treatment room at Kellogg's health spa, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, circa 1900._\n\nAround the same time, millions of Americans got caught up in the fad called \"Fletcherizing.\" This involved chewing each bite of food as many as one hundred times. It was named after its inventor, a man named Horace Fletcher, also known as the Great Masticator.\n\nIt's easy to make fun of the people who paid good money to follow his advice. But are we really so much smarter today? Food fads still come and go with alarming speed: A scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can change our nation's diet overnight. In 2002, one article in the _New York Times Magazine_ said that carbs make you fat. Suddenly millions of Americans gave up bread and other carbohydrates and started eating mainly meat. Fifty years from now that diet might seem as crazy as Kellogg's enemas.\n\n#  THE NO-FAD FRENCH\n\nRelying on experts or magazine articles is a very new way of solving the omnivore's dilemma. But there are still lots of countries where people solve it the old-fashioned way. They eat traditional foods, following customs that haven't changed for hundreds of years. And amazingly, in those countries where people pick their foods based on custom and taste, the people are actually healthier than we are. They have lower rates of diet-related illness such as heart disease.\n\nTake the French, for example. They eat by and large as they have for generations. They drink wine, eat cheese, cook with butter, and eat red meat. Oh yes, they also eat bread without worrying about it! Yet their rates of heart disease and obesity are lower than the health-crazy Americans'. How can that be? Maybe because _how_ we eat is just as important as _what_ we eat.\n\nFrench culture includes a set of customs or rules about how to eat. For example, the French eat small portions and don't go back for seconds. They don't snack\u2014you'll almost never see a French person eating while driving or walking down the street. They seldom eat alone. Instead they eat with family or friends, and their meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French culture of food allows the French to enjoy their food and be healthy at the same time.\n\nBecause we have no such food culture in America, almost every question about eating is up for grabs. Fats or carbs? Three square meals or little snacks all day? Raw or cooked? Organic or industrial? Vegetarian or vegan? We seem to have even forgotten what real food looks and tastes like. Instead we make \"meals\" of protein bars and shakes. Then we consume these non-foods alone in our cars. Is it any wonder Americans suffer from so many eating disorders?\n\n#  MARKETING NEW MEALS\n\nAnd so for us, the omnivore's dilemma becomes bigger and bigger. We can't rely on taste to choose among processed foods. We can't just eat foods that we enjoy. We have no stable food culture to guide us, handed down over generations. We are told instead to rely on science. Science (and the industrial food system) will tell us which foods are good for us and which are not. But the \"science\" keeps changing with every new study.\n\nThis situation suits the food industry just fine. The more anxious we are about eating, the more likely we are to listen to claims from food marketers. Food companies make more money if they can get us to change our eating habits and buy their processed foods. They spend billions to create a constant stream of these new foods and then spend billions more to get us to buy them.\n\nSome of these foods are marketed as being healthy. Others are sold under the banner of \"convenience.\" Many are not meant to be eaten at a dinner table. The protein bar or Pop-Tart is designed to be consumed in the car on the way to school or to work. Campbell's has even designed a microwavable soup that can be eaten in a car.\n\nAbout 47 percent of American families say they still eat together every night. But research shows that many of those \"family dinners\" are in fact something quite new. In many houses now, each member of the family prepares something different to eat. Mom might cook something vegetarian, while the kids take a pepperoni pizza from the freezer and zap it. They don't all gather at the table at the same time. By the time Dad sits down, with his own low-carb meal, the kids may have gotten up. Is that a family dinner? Not in my opinion.\n\nWhat difference does it make if families don't eat together? Well, let me answer that question with another question. Is eating just a task that we have to get done as fast and \"conveniently\" as possible? Is it something we do only because we have to, like taking medicine or brushing our teeth? Looking at food that way robs us of one of life's greatest pleasures. We should not only enjoy and appreciate our food, we should enjoy making it and eating it in the company of others. Food is not just fuel. It's also about family and friends and community.\n\nYet in spite of this, as part of my research I decided to have one of these alone-but-together meals. My family and I were going to share our separate processed meals, from a fast-food restaurant at the end of the industrial food chain. We were going to solve the omnivore's dilemma the way millions of Americans do every day. We were going to McDonald's.\n**9**\n\n**My Fast-Food Meal**\n\n#  FAST FOOD\n\nEvery food chain ends in a meal. When it came time to eat my industrial food chain meal, since it was impossible to follow Naylor's corn or steer 534 directly to my plate, I had a lot of choices. I could have bought a meal from KFC or Pizza Hut or Applebee's, or from hundreds of other fast-food outlets. I could have bought a bunch of prepared foods and heated them up (I don't want to say _cooked_ ) at home. In the end I decided to buy a meal at a McDonald's and eat it in a moving car. Somehow it seemed like the thing to do.\n\nMy eleven-year-old son, Isaac, was more than happy to join me at McDonald's. He doesn't get there often, so it's a treat. (For most American children today, it is no longer such a treat: One in three American kids eats fast food every single day.) Judith, my wife, wasn't quite as happy. She's careful about what she eats. To her, having a fast-food lunch meant giving up a \"real meal.\"\n\nIsaac pointed out that she could order one of McDonald's new \"premium salads\" with the Paul Newman dressing. I read in the business pages that these salads are a big hit, but even if they weren't, they'd probably stay on the menu. Marketers know that a salad or veggie burger in a fast-food chain gives kids something to say to overcome parents' objections. \"But Mom, you can get the salad . . .\"\n\nWhich is exactly what Judith did: order the Cobb salad with Caesar dressing. At $3.99, it was the most expensive item on the menu. I ordered a classic cheeseburger, large fries, and a large Coke. Large turns out to be a full thirty-two ounces (a quart of soda!). Of course, thanks to the magical economics of supersizing, it cost only thirty cents more than the sixteen-ounce \"small.\" Isaac went with Chicken McNuggets, plus a double-thick vanilla shake, and a large order of fries. He also ordered a new dessert treat consisting of freeze-dried pellets of ice cream.\n\nWe would be eating alone together. That each of us ordered something different is one of the wonders of the industrial food chain. Marketers break the family down into its various groups (parents, kids, moms, dads) and sell something slightly different to each group. That way we each have a reason to go to McDonald's. The total for the three of us came to fourteen dollars, and was packed up and ready to go in four minutes. Before I left the register I picked up a handout printed in tiny type that was called \"A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You.\"\n\n#  CHICKEN OR NUGGETS?\n\nWe could have slipped into a booth, but it was such a nice day we decided to put the top down on the convertible and eat our lunch in the car. Both the food and the car have been designed for eating on the road. These days 19 percent of American meals are eaten in a car. In fact, we could have ordered, paid for, and picked up the food without opening the car door.\n\nOur car has cup holders, front seat and rear, and, except for the salad, all the food could be eaten with one hand. Indeed, this is the genius of the chicken nugget. Now it is just as easy to eat chicken in a car as a hamburger. No doubt the food scientists at McDonald's are right now hard at work on the one-handed salad. By the way, the car was running on gas mixed with ethanol. So while we were eating corn, the car was eating corn too.\n\nI ate a lot of McDonald's as a kid. This was back when you still had to order a second little burger or sack of fries if you wanted more. The chicken nugget had not yet been invented. I loved everything about fast food. The individual portions were all wrapped up like presents and I didn't have to share with my three sisters. I loved the combination of flavors when I bit into a burger\u2014the soft, sweet roll, the crunchy pickle, the tasty moistness of the meat.\n\nFast food has a flavor all its own. That flavor has little to do with the flavors of hamburgers or french fries you might make at home. It's flavor created from chemicals in a laboratory. These \"fast food\" flavors make a lot of fast-food meals taste the same. Even Chicken McNuggets have the same fast-food taste as the hamburgers or french fries, though they're technically chicken, not potato or beef.\n\nIsaac announced that his white-meat McNuggets, a new McDonald's recipe, were tasty. When I asked Isaac if the new nuggets tasted more like chicken than the old ones, he seemed surprised by the question. \"No, they taste like what they are, which is nuggets.\" He then dropped on me a withering two-syllable \"duh.\" In his mind, at least, there is no real link between a nugget and a chicken except the name. No doubt a lot of you feel the same.\n\nIsaac passed one up to the front for Judith and me to sample. It looked and smelled pretty good, with a nice crust and a bright white inside that looked sort of like chicken breast meat. Yet all I could really taste was salt and that all-purpose fast-food flavor. Maybe there was a hint of chicken in there somewhere, but not much.\n\nLater I looked at the flyer I had grabbed to see exactly what goes into a nugget. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can come from corn. Among them are the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch; mono-, tri-, and diglycerides; dextrose; lecithin; yellow corn flour; regular cornstarch; vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil.\n\nAccording to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, items that come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed foods possible. They keep the food from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road.\n\n#  WHERE'S THE BEEF?\n\nCompared to Isaac's nuggets, my cheeseburger is a fairly simple food product. According to the McDonald's handout, the cheeseburger contains only six ingredients: a 100 percent beef patty, a bun, two American cheese slices, ketchup, mustard, pickles, onions, and \"grill seasoning,\" whatever that is. It tasted pretty good too, though what I mainly tasted were the ketchup, mustard, pickles, and onions. By itself, the gray patty had hardly any flavor.\n\nEating it, I had to remind myself that the burger came from an actual cow. (Probably an old burned-out dairy cow, which is where most fast-food beef comes from.) Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless forms allow us to forget we're eating animals. I'd been on the feedlot at Poky only a few months earlier, yet I had trouble connecting that place to my cheeseburger. I could not taste or smell the feed corn or the petroleum or the antibiotics or the hormones\u2014or the feedlot manure, even though I knew they were there.\n\nBy the time it reaches us, industrial food has been processed so much it no longer seems like something made from plants and animals. Where did my cheeseburger come from? It came from McDonald's. As far as industrial food companies are concerned, that's all we need to know. But it's just not so. My cheeseburger came from slaughterhouses and factory farms in towns like Garden City, Kansas, from ranches in Sturgis, South Dakota, from food science laboratories in Oak Brook, Illinois, from flavor companies on the New Jersey Turnpike, from processing plants owned by ADM and Cargill, from grain elevators in towns like Farnhamville, and, at the end of that long and twisted trail, from a field of corn and soybeans farmed by George Naylor in Churdan, Iowa.\n\nHow much corn did Judith, Isaac, and I consume in our McDonald's meal?\n\nAdd it up:\n\nHamburger: corn fed to a cow = 2 pounds corn   \n6 nuggets: corn fed to a chicken = \u00bd pound   \nHigh fructose corn syrup in 3 drinks = 1 pound   \nSubtotal: 3 1\/2 pounds of corn.\n\nThere's more corn in the meal, but it's harder to measure. There are corn products everywhere. For example, there's more corn sweetener in my cheeseburger. The bun and the ketchup both contain HFCS. It's in the salad dressing too, and the sauces for the nuggets, not to mention Isaac's dessert. (Of the sixty menu items listed in the McDonald's handout, forty-five contain HFCS.)\n\nThe nugget is made with corn products called binders and emulsifiers and fillers. Isaac's shake contains milk from corn-fed animals. Judith's salad contains cheese and eggs from corn-fed animals. The salad's grilled chicken breast is injected with a \"flavor solution\" that's also full of corn products. In fact, the majority of calories in the \"healthy\" salad come from corn. And the french fries? You would think those are mostly potatoes. Yet half of the 500 calories in a large order of fries come from the oil they're fried in. That means the source of those calories is not a potato farm but a field of corn or soybeans.\n\n#  CORN EATERS 'R' US\n\nSome time later I found another way to figure out just how much corn we had eaten that day. Scientists can use a machine called a spectrometer to look at the carbon in food and tell how much of it came from corn. I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, to run a McDonald's meal through his spectrometer.\n\nDawson and his colleague Stefania Mambelli prepared a graph that showed roughly how much of the carbon in the various McDonald's menu items came from corn. In order from most corny to least, this is how the laboratory measured our meal:\n\nSoda (100 percent corn)   \nMilk shake (78 percent)   \nSalad dressing (65 percent)\n\nChicken nuggets (56 percent)   \nCheeseburger (52 percent)   \nFrench fries (23 percent)\n\nWhat looks like a meal with lots of variety turns out to be mainly corn. But so what? Why should it matter that we have become a race of corn eaters such as the world has never seen? Is this a bad thing? The answer all depends on where you stand.\n\nIf where you stand is in agribusiness, processing cheap corn into forty-five different McDonald's items is a great thing. It is a way for agribusinesses to sell us more food than we need and so a way for them to make more money. We may not be expanding the number of eaters in America, but we've expanded how much food they eat, which is almost as good. Judith, Isaac, and I together consumed a total of 4,510 calories at our lunch, which is about two-thirds of what the three of us should eat in a day. We had certainly done our parts in chomping through the corn surplus. (We had also consumed a lot of petroleum, and not just because we were in a car. To grow and process those 4,510 food calories took at least ten times as many calories of fossil energy, something like 1.3 gallons of oil.)\n\nCorn-based food does offer cheap calories, if you don't count the billions the government spends to support cheap corn. For people with low incomes, this might seem like a good thing. In the long run, however, these cheap calories come with a high price tag: obesity, Type II diabetes, heart disease.\n\nFor poor people in other countries, America's industrial food chain is a complete disaster. If you eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) you consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost. It is used up to make bones or feathers or fur, or just to keep the steer or chicken alive. This is why vegetarians say we should all eat \"low on the food chain.\" Every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of ten. Processing food also burns energy. All of this means that the amount of food energy lost in the making of a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just Isaac.\n\n_Source: See page 77, also USDA Economic Research Service._\n\nAnd how does this corn-based food chain look to the corn farmer? As you've seen, the industrial food chain has been an economic disaster for the farmers who grow the food in it. Growing corn and nothing but corn has also damaged the soil of our farmlands, polluted the water, and threatened the health of all the creatures downstream. And of course it means that billions of animals are doomed to live out their lives on factory farms.\n\n_Adapted from Encyclopaedia Britannica_\n\nYet there is one winner in all of this\u2014corn itself. Of all the species that have adapted to thrive in a world dominated by humans, surely no other has done better than _Zea mays_. Imagine an Iowa farm with corn, corn, corn as far as the eye can see, ten-foot stalks in perfect thirty-inch rows to the horizon. That farm is just a small part of an eighty-million-plus-acre corn lawn rolling across the continent. If the corn could, it would laugh at us, the humans eating and drinking it as fast as they can. You have to wonder why we Americans don't worship this plant as the Aztecs did. Like they once did, we make great sacrifices to it.\n\n_Every step up the food chain, or \"trophic pyramid,\" approximately 90% of energy is lost, which is why there are fewer carnivores than there are herbivores._\n\nThese were my thoughts as we sped down the highway putting away our fast-food lunch. What is it about fast food? Not only is it served in a flash, but more often than not it's eaten that way too. We finished our meal in under ten minutes. From the packaging to the taste, fast food is designed to be eaten quickly. Real food is a pleasure to eat. You want to take your time and enjoy every bite. There's no point in taking your time with fast food. After a few bites, you forget what you're eating. It's not exactly food, but a kind of food substitute. So you eat more and eat more quickly, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied, exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.\n\n**10**\n\n**Big Organic**\n\n#  ONCE UPON A TIME\n\nI'm certainly not the only one who has learned the truth about the industrial food chain. In recent years, more and more Americans have discovered the same sad facts. A lot of them are trying to get away from the kingdom of corn and processed foods by buying organic food. And in my part of the world, there is no greater temple to all things organic, natural, and unprocessed than my local Whole Foods supermarket.\n\nI confess that I really enjoy shopping at Whole Foods. It has some of the same feeling as browsing a good bookstore. Maybe that's because at Whole Foods I spend a lot of my time reading\u2014not books, but labels. Every food item in the store seems to have a little story attached to it.\n\nTake the \"range-fed\" sirloin steak in the meat case. There's a flyer on the counter that says once upon a time the steak was part of a steer that spent its days \"living in beautiful places.\" Among the places the steer got to visit were \"high-mountain meadows,\" \"thick aspen groves,\" and \"miles of sagebrushfilled flats.\" Now, a steak like that has got to taste better than one without a story. You can bet it will cost more too.\n\nThese food stories are showing up everywhere. On a recent shopping trip I filled my shopping cart with:\n\n\u2022 Eggs \"from cage-free vegetarian hens\"\n\n\u2022 Milk from cows that live \"free from unnecessary fear and distress\"\n\n\u2022 Wild salmon caught by Native Americans in Yakutat, Alaska (population 833)\n\n\u2022 \"Heirloom\" tomatoes from Capay Valley Farm ($4.99 a pound), \"one of the early pioneers of the organic movement\"\n\nThe organic chicken I picked even had a name: Rosie. Rosie was a \"free-range chicken\" from Petaluma Poultry.\n\nAlmost all of the labels featured the word _organic_. Forty years ago there was no such category as \"organic\" food. Today it is a $20-billion business\u2014the fastest growing part of the food industry. The word _organic_ has become a kind of shorthand for food that is healthier or more natural or chemical-free. Yet as I had learned, \"organic\" has different meanings. Now I had more questions than answers. For example, can there be such a thing as an organic TV dinner? What about an organic Twinkie? Exactly how different is \"organic\" food from industrial food? I was about to find out.\n\n#  THE BIRTH OF ORGANIC FOOD\n\nOnce upon a time all food was \"organic.\" It was grown without the help of fossil fuels, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. As we have seen, that all began to change about fifty years ago, with the growth of the industrial food chain.\n\nOne of the first to notice this change was a man named J. I. Rodale. In 1940 he started a magazine called _Organic Gardening and Farming_. In his magazine, Rodale wrote about the health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals\u2014\"organically.\"\n\nBut the idea of organic food did not really catch on until 1969. That year marked the height of the counterculture of the 1960s. Civil rights and anti-war protests rocked the country. Young people were rebelling against a society they thought was violent, corrupt, and immoral. Some \"dropped out\" to join communes, groups of people living and working on farms.\n\nOne part of this counterculture was the environmental movement. It was spurred in part by a 1962 book called _Silent Spring_ by a woman named Rachel Carson. In it, she warned of the dangers of pesticides like DDT. Events in the news in 1969 also made people aware of the dangers of pollution. A giant oil spill off Santa Barbara blackened California's coastline. A river in Cleveland was so full of filth that it caught fire.\n\nSuddenly people started using the word _ecology_ and talking about cleaning up the planet. The first Earth Day was held in April 1970. And the idea of organic food began to catch on. Eating whole wheat bread and whole grains like brown rice became a symbol of the new movement. Processed food like white bread was called \"plastic food.\" The first organic food co-ops were founded. Neighbors would get together once a week and order organic vegetables from farmers. They had to agree on what to order. Often they bought whatever the local farmers had to offer.\n\nTo the young people who founded those first co-ops, the word _organic_ meant more than a method of farming. It meant living in harmony with nature instead of trying to control it. It meant being free from the control of big corporations. Growing organic food was a way to live their principles and not just talk about them.\n\nMost of those food co-ops are gone now. Many of them have been driven out of business by national \"organic\" supermarket chains like Whole Foods. Today in the average supermarket there's a selection of organic fruits and vegetables flown in from all over the world. You can buy your organics at any time of the year, no matter the season. And you don't have to get a dozen other people to agree on what to buy.\n\n#  INDUSTRIAL ORGANIC\n\nBut if you look a little closer you'll see that something has been left behind. The organic food in stores like Whole Foods is organic because it is grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Yet much of it is also industrial. Most organic vegetables in the U.S. are grown in large monoculture farms (farms growing only one crop), far from the people who eat it. Most of it is processed and sold by the same industrial food chain as the corn from George Naylor's farm. Because this food chain has elements of both, I call it \"industrial organic.\"\n\nFor example, some organic milk comes from cows on small farms. But most organic milk comes from factory farms. The cows on these \"farms\" spend their time in a fenced lot eating organic grain except for the three times a day they are hooked up to milking machines. Likewise, organic beef is often raised in \"organic feedlots.\" The cows are fed corn just like the cows at Poky, but their feed is organic.\n\nThe government rules about organic food allow companies to make organic high-fructose corn syrup\u2014words I never expected to see combined. This organic HFCS could come in useful when making \"organic\" processed foods, like organic soda or organic TV dinners. I found one such TV dinner that included thirty-one ingredients, from guar and xanthan gum to \"natural grill flavor.\" Several of the ingredients were synthetic additives that are permitted under federal organic rules.\n\n_A field of organic leafy greens being grown for Cascadian Farms._\n\n#  HIPPIE FOOD\n\nThe TV dinner was made by a company called Cascadian Farm. The story of Cascadian tells you a lot about the growth of the organic food movement and how it has changed.\n\nCascadian started as a kind of hippie commune in 1972, founded by a fellow named Gene Kahn and his friends. Like other young people at the time, Kahn had the idea of getting back to the land and changing the American food system. Today Cascadian is owned by General Mills, and Kahn is a General Mills vice president. Cascadian doesn't even grow its own food anymore. Instead the company buys produce from large (organic) industrial farms, many of them monocultures.\n\n_I bought and ate this TV dinner made by Cascadian Farms. Once a hippie commune in Washington State, Cascadian is now an industrial organic brand owned by food giant General Mills._\n\nOn the Cascadian package there's a picture of a pretty little farm\u2014the original commune. The place still exists, but it's just for show. (I guess so they can take photos of it.) One overcast morning Gene Kahn himself drove me out to see it, about seventy-five miles northeast of Seattle. We followed the twists of the Skagit River in his new forest-green Lexus. (His vanity license plates say \"Organic.\")\n\nKahn is a boyish-looking man in his fifties. He spoke without regret about the compromises he's made along the path from organic farmer to agribusiness executive. He explained that part of the idea behind Cascadian was to get folks to eat whole foods instead of processed foods. They wanted people to be able to buy their food from local farmers instead of from big corporations. But somewhere along the way, Kahn decided that it was impossible to make all of those changes. So he decided to focus on how food was grown.\n\n\"You have a choice of getting sad about all that or moving on,\" he told me. \"We tried hard to build a cooperative community and a local food system, but at the end of the day it wasn't successful. This is just lunch for most people. Just lunch.\"\n\n#  AGRIBUSINESS MOVES IN\n\nSo Kahn, like some other organic farmers, started following the model of the industrial food chain. Cascadian started \"adding value\" to some of its food, by freezing berries or making them into jam. Once they started processing food, they discovered they could make more money by buying produce from other farmers than by growing it themselves.\n\nThe demand for organic food really jumped in the year 1990, after the Alar food scare. Alar was a chemical conventional growers sprayed on apples to help them ripen. In 1990 the Environmental Protection Agency found that Alar could cause cancer. Suddenly the demand for organic apples and all sorts of organic produce shot through the roof. People who had never thought about organic food started buying it.\n\nOrganic food companies saw their business boom overnight. Some, like Cascadian, borrowed money to increase their production. Having borrowed too much, when the rush to buy organic food slowed down, Gene Kahn was forced to sell control of Cascadian to Welch's. The hippie commune was now under the control of corporate America.\n\nOther large agribusiness corporations started paying attention to organic food. It wasn't because they suddenly saw the error of their ways. They just recognized that a growing number of consumers wanted organic food, and they wanted a piece of that business. Gerber's, Heinz, Dole, ConAgra, and ADM all bought organic brands or started their own.\n\n#  GROWING BY THE RULES\n\nNow all sorts of foods with labels like \"natural\" and \"organic\" began to show up in supermarkets. Those words had become great marketing tools. But what exactly did they mean? In 1990 Congress passed a law telling the Department of Agriculture (the USDA) to decide on some rules for organic food. What followed was a great debate to determine the future of the organic industry.\n\nOn one side of the fight were the agribusiness corporations, which had just jumped onto the organic food bandwagon. They fought to define organic as loosely as possible. For example, they wanted the right to call genetically modified food (GMO) organic. They also wanted to be able to fertilize their \"organic\" fields with sewage sludge. At first the USDA went along. In 1997 it proposed a very loose set of rules that gave agribusiness everything it wanted. In response there was a huge outcry from small organic farmers and the public. A flood of protest forced the USDA back to the drawing board.\n\nOne big question was whether there could be such a thing as organic processed food. Gene Kahn sat on the board that set the new standards. He argued that the rules for organics had to allow synthetic additives and preservatives. Without synthetics, processed foods like TV dinners just can't be manufactured. Many people from the old organic movement argued that to put synthetics in a processed food and then call it organic was a fraud. They said there could be no such thing as a truly organic Twinkie or TV dinner. In the end, Kahn's side won out. That's why there are now \"organic\" processed foods, although still no organic Twinkie.\n\nThese new rules cleared the way for a huge growth in the organic food market. \"If we had lost on synthetics,\" Gene Kahn told me, \"we'd be out of business.\"\n\n#  DOWN ON THE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIC FARM\n\nI guess I missed the old Cascadian, the one on the package. Or at least, I missed the idea of it. This just didn't fit my picture of what an organic farm should look like.\n\nGet over it, Gene Kahn told me. Just because a farm is big doesn't mean it isn't organic. The important thing, he would argue, is that behind every organic TV dinner or chicken stands acres of land that will no longer be doused with chemicals. I could see his point. This is clearly a great thing for the environment and the public health. So I decided to go see some industrial organic farms for myself.\n\nKahn sent me to visit a large organic farm operation called Greenways, in California's Central Valley. That's where they grow vegetables for Cascadian Farm frozen dinners.\n\nGreenways Organic is really 2,000 acres of organic farmland tucked into a 24,000-acre conventional farm. That gave me a chance to compare the two types of farming side by side. Even up close it's almost impossible to tell them apart. The crops, the machines, the crews, and the fields look the same. The big difference is one you can't see. For every chemical that is put on the conventional fields, Greenways finds a substitute for the organic fields.\n\nIn place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways's organic acres are fed with compost from a nearby horse farm and by poultry manure. Instead of toxic pesticides, crops are sprayed with natural substances, like BT, a pesticide made from a common soil bacteria.\n\n#  ORGANIC WEEDING\n\nOrganic farming rules do not allow chemical weed killers, so Greenways has to use other methods to fight weeds. Even before the crops are planted, the fields are watered to get any weed seeds to grow. A tractor then plows the field to kill them. This is repeated several times. Later, when the crops are high, farmworkers use propane torches to burn the weeds by hand. The result of all this hard work is fields that look just as clean as if chemical weed killers had been used.\n\nNo chemicals means no toxic runoff into rivers and oceans. But it turns out that plowing the land over and over damages the soil almost as much as chemical weed killers do. It kills off the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that make the soil fertile. It releases a lot of nitrogen into the air. Because of this damage, industrial organic farmers have to add a lot of nitrogen fertilizer to their fields. Where do they get it? From compost, manures, or fish meal.\n\nMost of the organic food sold in America comes from farms like Greenways. Supermarket chains like Whole Foods or Wal-Mart are not set up to do business with dozens of small family-owned farms. It takes too much time and money to coordinate. It makes much more sense (for them) to buy from large suppliers like Cascadian. And for the same reason, it's much easier for Cascadian to buy its produce from large farms like Greenways.\n\n_Demand for certified organic produce and meat has increased dramatically since the early 1990s\u2014although organic items make up only about 3.5% of the total U.S. food supply in 2009._\n\n_Sources: USDA and the Organic Trade Association._\n\nTo meet the demands of their customers, Greenways has to farm on an industrial scale. It must plant one or two crop varieties that ripen at the same time. It must plant foods that can survive shipment across the country. It must buy fertilizer from someone else instead of getting it from animals on the farm.\n\nAgain, Gene Kahn and many other people think this is just fine. After all, because of companies like his, thousands of acres of American farmland are now chemical-free. Organic food can now be found in most supermarkets. Surely that is a very good thing.\n\n#  LET US SELL YOU LETTUCE\n\nI learned more about the industrial organic system when I visited Earthbound Farm. Earthbound grows 80 percent of the organic lettuce sold in America. You may have seen some of it in plastic boxes in your supermarket. You could argue that Earthbound represents industrial organic farming at its best.\n\n_Earthbound Farm grows 80% of the organic lettuce sold in America._\n\nThe company was started in the 1980s by Drew and Myra Goodman, two farmers who started with exactly no farming experience. They are childhood friends from New York City, who started dating when they both went to college in California. During a break before going to grad school, they started a roadside organic farm on a few rented acres, growing raspberries and baby salad greens. Every Sunday Myra would wash and bag a bunch of lettuce for their own use, a salad for each night of the week. They discovered that the whole-leaf lettuces stayed fresh right through to dinner the following Saturday. So began the pre-washed salad business in America.\n\nBefore the Goodmans, salad for most Americans meant iceberg lettuce. They introduced dozens of different salad mixes to mainstream America. Along the way, they changed the way lettuces were grown, harvested, cleaned, and packed. And today Earthbound is a company that takes in $400 million a year.\n\nI met Myra Goodman, now a tanned, talkative forty-two-year-old, over lunch at the company's roadside stand in the Carmel Valley. Unlike Cascadian Farm, Earthbound still grows its own produce. Most of its farmland is an hour northeast of Carmel, in the Salinas Valley. That fertile valley is cooled by sea breezes, making it an ideal spot for growing lettuces nine months of the year. In winter, the company picks up and moves its operation, and many of its employees, south to Yuma, Arizona.\n\nMyra explained that Earthbound Farm's growth exploded in 1993. That's when the Costco chain placed an order. \"Costco was moving two thousand cases a week to start,\" Myra said, \"and the order kept increasing.\" Other chains like Wal-Mart, Lucky, and Albertsons soon followed. The Goodmans realized their days of washing lettuce in the living room were over.\n\n\"We didn't know how to farm on that scale,\" Drew told me, \"and we needed a lot more land\u2014fast.\" So the Goodmans entered into partnerships with growers who knew how to grow, harvest, pack, and distribute large quantities of produce. As part of the deal, the growers had to agree to change to organic farming methods.\n\nIf you include all the farmland growing fruits and vegetables for Earthbound it comes to a total of 25,000 organic acres. The Goodmans estimate that this has eliminated some 270,000 pounds of pesticide and 8 million pounds of petrochemical fertilizer that would otherwise have been applied to those fields.\n\n#  THE SALAD FACTORY\n\nThe Earthbound Farm land looks like a giant patchwork of color: dark green, burgundy, pale green, blue green. Each color block is a different type of lettuce.\n\nThe lettuce is grown in raised beds. Each bed is eighty inches wide, and smooth and flat as a tabletop. Workers use a laser to make sure they are perfectly level. That's so that the custom-built harvester can snip each leaf at precisely the same point.\n\n_Earthbound Farm's lettuce-washing assembly line in San Juan Bautista, California._\n\nTo control pests, one out of every seven beds is planted with flowers. The flowers attract lacewings and a type of fly that eats the lettuce-eating bugs. Pesticides, even the ones allowed by the USDA organic rules, are seldom sprayed.\n\nThe leaves are harvested with a machine that Earthbound designed. It moves down the rows, cutting the baby greens at the same point just above the crown. Spidery arms gently rake through the bed in advance of the blade, scaring off any mice that might find their way into the salad. The leaves are blown into plastic trays and the trays are loaded by hand into refrigerator trucks. From that point they will be refrigerated until they reach your supermarket.\n\nOnce filled, the trucks deliver their cargo of leaves to a processing plant. There the leaves are sorted, mixed, washed, dried, and packaged. The whole plant is kept at thirty-six degrees. Because of the refrigeration, the employees, most of them Mexicans, are dressed in full-length down coats. The plant washes and packs 2.5 million pounds of lettuce a week. That's a truly amazing amount of lettuce.\n\nIt also represents a truly amazing amount of energy. Think of the electricity bill to refrigerate a 200,000-square-foot plant. Think of the diesel fuel needed to truck all that salad to supermarkets across the country or to manufacture the plastic containers it's packed in. A one-pound box of pre-washed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. Growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food.\n\nWhat could be more healthy than eating a salad? It's basically a bunch of leaves, eaten raw. And organic salad has to be even better, right? Still, the idea of packing lettuce in plastic boxes and shipping it five days and three thousand miles away didn't _feel_ very organic to me.\n\nLike Gene Kahn, Drew and Myra Goodman make no apologies for the way they do business. Their company has done a world of good, for its land, its workers, the growers it works with, and its customers. But is this kind of organic the best we can do? Before I could make up my mind, I had to visit one more industrial organic farm. I was on my way to meet Rosie, the organic chicken.\n**11**\n\n**More Big Organic**\n\n#  MEET ROSIE, THE FREE-RANGE CHICKEN\n\nI visited Rosie the free-range organic chicken at her farm in Petaluma. Of course, this wasn't the same Rosie as the chicken I had bought at my Whole Foods market. Rosie is the brand name for a type of chicken raised by Petaluma Poultry. Like Earthbound Farm, Petaluma Poultry is a large industrial organic company.\n\nWhen I got to Petaluma, I looked for a pretty little red barn, a cornfield, and farmhouse, like the ones on the Petaluma package. By now you'll have guessed that I couldn't find them. Petaluma turns out to be more animal factory than farm. Rosie lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies. Ah, you ask, what about the \"free-range\" words on Rosie's label? Doesn't that mean they can \"freely range\" outside? Not exactly. It's true there's a little door in each shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But here's the catch: The door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five weeks old. By that time they are so used to the shed that none of them go outside. And then all of them are slaughtered two weeks later.\n\n_Rosie chickens like this one spend their lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies._\n\nRosie and all the other chickens raised at Petaluma are the same breed: Cornish Cross broilers. The Cornish Cross is a type of chicken bred for the industrial food chain. It is the fastest-growing chicken ever, turning corn into meat faster than any other bird. They go from egg to full size in just seven weeks. In fact, the birds grow so rapidly that their poor legs cannot keep up. Often, by seven weeks, Rosie can no longer walk.\n\n_Organic or not, factory farms typically keep at least 20,000 broiler chickens in huge sheds such as this one._\n\n#  IT'S A BIRD'S LIFE\n\nThe folks at Petaluma gave me a tour of the fully automated processing plant. The machinery there can turn a chicken from a clucking, feathered bird into a shrink-wrapped pack of parts in just ten minutes. After the tour the head of marketing drove me out to the chicken houses.\n\nThe sheds look more like a military barracks than a barn. They are long, low buildings with giant fans at either end. To go inside I had to put on a white hooded suit. Since the birds receive no antibiotics and they are all genetically alike, if one gets sick, they will all get sick. An infection could kill 20,000 birds overnight.\n\nTwenty thousand is a lot of chickens. Inside the shed they formed a moving white carpet that stretched nearly the length of a football field. The air was warm and humid and smelled powerfully of ammonia from their droppings. The fumes caught in my throat.\n\nCompared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good. They get a few more square inches of living space per bird. (It was hard to see how they could be packed together much more tightly.) Because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to speed growth, they get to live a few days longer.\n\nI stepped back outside into the fresh air, grateful to escape the humidity and smell. Running along the entire length of each shed was a grassy yard maybe fifteen feet wide. USDA rules say an organic chicken should have \"access to the outdoors.\" But as I've said, the birds never go outside, even when the doors are opened. This is no accident. The last thing Petaluma wants is for these birds to go outside and catch a cold.\n\n#  MY ORGANIC INDUSTRIAL MEAL\n\nAfter visiting Cascadian, Earthbound, and Petaluma, I decided it was time to make my industrial organic food chain meal. (There isn't any organic fast-food restaurant chain to visit, at least not yet.) I planned a simple Sunday night dinner and bought the food at my local Whole Foods supermarket.\n\nI'd prepare roast chicken (Rosie) with roasted vegetables: yellow potatoes, purple kale, and red winter squash. All but one of them was grown by a company called Cal-Organic Farms. They pretty much share the organic vegetable market with Earthbound. On the side would be steamed asparagus and a spring mix salad from Earthbound Farm. Dessert would be even simpler: organic ice cream from Stonyfield Farm topped with fresh organic blackberries from Mexico.\n\nI also bought one of those Cascadian Farm organic TV dinners. I had a hunch it probably wasn't quite ready for prime time (or at least for my wife). So I ate it myself for lunch, right in its microwaveable plastic bowl. Five minutes on high and it was good to go. As I peeled back the film from the bowl, I felt a little like a flight attendant serving meals. Indeed, the meal looked and tasted very much like airline food.\n\nTo be fair, one shouldn't compare an organic TV dinner to real food but to a conventional TV dinner, and by that standard Cascadian Farm has nothing to be ashamed of. Still, the chunks of white meat chicken had only a faint chicken taste. That probably came from the \"natural chicken flavor\" mentioned on the box. The \"creamy rosemary dill sauce\" was made without cream or milk. I'm betting it got its creaminess from xanthan gum or some other additive.\n\n#  AIRLIFT ASPARAGUS\n\nThe dinner went much better, if I don't mind saying so myself. I roasted the bird in a pan surrounded by the potatoes and chunks of winter squash. After removing the chicken from the oven, I spread the crinkled leaves of kale on a cookie sheet, sprinkled them with olive oil and salt, and slid them into the hot oven to roast. After ten minutes or so, the kale was nicely crisped and the chicken was ready to carve.\n\nThe one vegetable I cooked that wasn't grown by Cal-Organic or Earthbound was the asparagus. It had been grown in Argentina. It had been picked, packed, and chilled on Monday, flown by jet to Los Angeles Tuesday, trucked north and put on sale in Berkeley by Thursday, and steamed, by me, Sunday night.\n\n_Source: USDA Economic Research Service_\n\nThat one bundle of asparagus presented its own little dilemma. How much fossil fuel was burned to keep it refrigerated and fly it to the U.S.? Should farmland in South America be used to grow expensive food for well-off North Americans? Should we even try to eat asparagus (or any vegetable) out of season?\n\nYet there are good arguments on the other side. My purchase helps the economy of Argentina. It also keeps some of that country's land free from pesticides or chemical fertilizer. This was all a lot of baggage for a few spears of asparagus to carry, I admit.\n\nSo how did it taste?\n\nMy jet-setting Argentine asparagus tasted like damp cardboard. After the first spear or two no one touched it. All the other vegetables and greens were much tastier\u2014really good, in fact. Of course, we live in California, so they didn't have far to travel to our table. Whether they would have been quite so sweet and bright after a cross-country truck ride is doubtful.\n\nI have to admit that the Earthbound greens, in their plastic bag, stayed crisp right up to the expiration date, a full eighteen days after leaving the field. This is partly due to the space-age technology used to pack them. But as the Goodmans had explained to me, organic greens just last longer. Since they're not pumped up on synthetic nitrogen, the cells of organic leaves grow more slowly. These slower-growing leaves develop thicker walls and take up less water, helping them stay fresher longer.\n\n#  IS ORGANIC BETTER FOR YOU?\n\nMy industrial organic dinner certainly wasn't cheap, considering I made it from scratch. Rosie cost $15 ($2.99 a pound), the vegetables another $12 (thanks to that six-buck bunch of asparagus), and the dessert $7 (including $3 for a six-ounce box of blackberries). That comes to $34 to feed a family of three at home. (Though we did make a second meal from the leftovers.) That's a hefty price compared to the same meal from the industrial food chain. So why buy organic anyway? Is the extra cost worth it? What exactly are you paying for?\n\nDoes organic food taste better? I think the answer is probably, but not always. A freshly picked non-organic vegetable is bound to taste better than one that's been riding in a truck for three days. On the other hand, organic Rosie was a tasty bird, with more flavor than mass-market birds fed on a diet of antibiotics and animal by-products. Those \"unnatural\" feeds make chickens with mushier and blander meat.\n\nOkay, so organic food sometimes tastes better. But is it better for you? I think the answer to this is also yes, but I can't prove it scientifically.\n\nI know the dinner I prepared contained little or no pesticides. Those chemicals have been proven to cause cancer, damage nerve cells, and disrupt your endocrine system\u2014your hormones. These poisons are routinely found in non-organic produce and meat. Yet I can't prove that the low levels of these poisons in food are enough to make you sick. The government says the levels are low enough that our systems can \"tolerate\" them.\n\nVery little research has been done to determine the effects of low levels of these poisons. One problem is that the official tolerance levels are set for adults, not children. Since children are smaller and still growing, the danger for them is greater than for adults. Given what we do know about the dangers of these chemicals, it makes sense to keep them out of a kid's diet.\n\nIt was important to me that the organic ice cream came from cows that did not receive injections of growth hormone to boost their productivity. We don't know if these hormones are affecting kids who drink non-organic milk, but again, I think it's better to avoid them. Also, organic cows, like Rosie the organic chicken, are never fed corn that contains residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. The tiniest amount of this chemical (0.1 part per billion) has been shown to change the sex of frogs. There's been no study to show what it does to children.\n\nSo it seems to me I have two choices: I can wait for that study to be done or I can decide that it's better to be safe than sorry and buy foods without atrazine. As you may recall from chapter four, although the U.S. government allows atrazine spraying, the chemical is already banned in Europe.\n\n#  IS IT HEALTH FOOD?\n\nOkay, getting rid of poisons is a no-brainer. But there's still another question about organic food. Is it healthier for you? Does it contain more nutrients\u2014vitamins, minerals, and natural substances\u2014that our bodies need to stay healthy?\n\nAs far as the USDA is concerned, all carrots are created equal, organic and non-organic. Yet there is some real evidence that this is not so. In 2003, a study by University of California, Davis, researchers studied two crops of corn, strawberries, and blackberries. The plants were identical and grown in side-by-side plots. One set of plants was grown using organic methods. The other set was grown conventionally with chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides.\n\nThe study showed that the organic fruits and vegetables contained higher levels of vitamin C. They also had a wider range of natural chemicals called polyphenols. Polyphenols are a group of chemicals made by plants that seem to play an important role in human health. Some help prevent or fight cancer; others fight infections. You may have seen one of these polyphenols advertised on your ketchup bottle\u2014one called lycopene. There are many others.\n\nWhy in the world should organically grown blackberries or corn contain more of these polyphenols? These compounds help plants to defend themselves against pests and diseases. Perhaps plants that are sprayed with man-made pesticides don't bother to produce much of their own.\n\nThe soils in industrial farms are often lifeless. Perhaps these dead soils don't supply all the raw ingredients plants need to make polyphenols. Artificial fertilizer may be enough to get plants to grow, yet still may not give a plant everything it needs to make enough lycopene or resveratrol (another one of the polyphenols).\n\nHere is what we do know. We have evolved over millions of years eating plants that today we would call \"natural\" or \"organic.\" Those plants, growing in complex, living soils, produced polyphenols to protect themselves from pests and disease. Our bodies evolved to use those same compounds to protect us from disease. Yet in the last fifty years we have built a food system that strips many of those healthy compounds out of our foods.\n\nWho knows what other healthy substances are in plants that we have yet to discover? The industrial food chain breaks all food down into a few simple elements. But what if our bodies need more than that? The evidence is starting to come in that this is the case.\n\n#  EATING OIL\n\nI hope I've made it clear that I think organic industrial food is a big improvement over the non-organic food chain. To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker's bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were wasted, no government subsidy checks were written. And yet . . .\n\nThe wages and working conditions of the farmworkers in an organic field aren't much different from those on non-organic factory farms. \"Organic\" factory farm chickens live only slightly better lives than non-organic factory chickens. In the end a CAFO is a CAFO, whether the cattle are fed organic corn or not. An organic label does not guarantee that cattle have spent any time in a real pasture, any more than \"free-range\" chickens really range freely.\n\nTo top it off, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as a non-organic meal. Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberries trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked to the moment I walk it out the doors of my supermarket. That takes a lot of energy and a lot of fossil fuel. Organic farmers generally use less fuel to grow their crops. Yet most of the fuel burned by the food industry isn't used to _grow_ food. Almost 80 percent of the fuel burned is used to process food and move it around. This is just as true for an organic bag of lettuce as a non-organic one.\n\nThe original organic food movement thought organic farming should be sustainable. That means it should be, as much as possible, a closed loop, recycling fertility and using renewable energy. The industrial organic food chain is anything but a closed, renewable loop. The food in our organic meal had floated to us on a sea of petroleum just as surely as the corn-based meal we'd had from McDonald's.\n\nWell, at least we didn't eat it in the car.\n\n#  A DIFFERENT KIND OF FOOD CHAIN\n\nBut I wasn't done searching for more responsible food. As part of my research I kept hearing about this incredible farmer in Virginia. His name was Joel Salatin and he and his family ran a 500-acre spread called Polyface Farm near the town of Swoope. So I gave him a call. I wanted to interview him and I also wanted him to ship me some of his food so I could taste it myself. Well, I got my interview, but Salatin said he couldn't ship me any chicken or steak. I figured he meant he wasn't set up for shipping, so I offered him my FedEx account number.\n\n\"No, I don't think you understand. I don't believe it's sustainable\u2014or 'organic,' if you will\u2014to FedEx meat all around the country. I'm sorry, but I can't do it.\"\n\nThis man was serious.\n\nHe explained that just because we can ship organic lettuce from California, or organic apples from Chile, doesn't mean we _should_ do it. Shipping food thousands of miles and burning up fossil fuels went against his whole philosophy as a farmer.\n\n\"I'm afraid if you want to try one of our chickens,\" he said, \"you're going to have to drive down here to Swoope to pick it up.\"\n\nIt turns out there's another food chain in America, one that looks very different from the industrial farms I had been visiting. It's based on small family farms like Salatin's, which practice true sustainable farming. These farms aren't owned by big agribusiness corporations. They don't ship their vegetables and meat across the country or across the globe. In fact, they look more like the picture I had of an organic farm when I had started out. So I decided to take Joel Salatin up on the offer he'd extended when I told him about my book. I decided to go to Virginia to see his farm firsthand. My wife called it my Paris Hilton adventure. And she was right\u2014I was about to do a lot of hard work I wasn't quite ready for. I was also about to find out how different an organic farm could be.\n\n**12**\n\n**Poly face Farm**\n\n#  GREEN ACRES\n\nEarly in the afternoon on the first day of summer, I found myself sitting in the middle of a bright green pasture. The first day of summer is the longest day of the year. This day felt like the longest day of my life. I was more tired than I thought anyone could be.\n\nI'd spent the afternoon making hay. After just a few hours in the June sun lifting and throwing fifty-pound bales, I hurt. We think of grass as soft and friendly stuff, but once it's been dried in the sun and shredded by machines, it becomes hay. And the ends of hay are like needles, sharp enough to draw blood. My forearms were dotted red with pinpricks and my lungs were filled with hay dust.\n\nJoel Salatin had gone off to the barn with his grown son, Daniel. That left me a welcome moment in the pasture to rest before we started up again. It was Monday, the first day of the week I would spend on the farm. After just half a day I knew I would never again complain about any price a farmer wanted to charge me for food. If the work was this hard, one dollar for an egg seemed reasonable. Fifty dollars for a steak was a steal.\n\n#  TIME TRAVEL?\n\nThe farm machinery had fallen silent, and I could hear the sounds of songbirds in the trees, and also the low clucking of hens. Up on the green, green hill rising to the west I could see a small herd of cattle grazing. The meadows were dotted with contented animals. Behind them was the backdrop of dark woods. A twisting brook threaded through it all. It was an almost too-perfect farm scene. The only problem was that I couldn't just lie there on the springy pasture for the rest of the afternoon.\n\nI thought about how amazing it was that the farm existed at all. This was exactly the way farms had been before industrial food and feedlots and giant wet mills. Yet I had not traveled back in time. This farm was living and thriving today just 150 miles from Washington, D.C.\n\n_My first glimpse of the Salatins' Polyface Farm._\n\n_Joel Salatin the grass farmer with his cattle at Polyface Farm._\n\nI'd come to Polyface Farm to find out if it was possible for a non-industrial food chain to survive in the twenty-first century. Was this farm just a lone holdout against industrial food? Or did it represent a new wave of local organic farms that could survive outside the industrial food chain? In short, I wanted to know if this kind of farming was the past or the future.\n\nLooking at those green pastures that afternoon, I thought the only thing missing from the scene was a happy shepherd. But then I saw a tall fellow loping toward me, wearing broad blue suspenders and a floppy straw hat. It was Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface, returning from the barn. Most farmers wear a trucker's cap marked with the logo of an agribusiness giant. Salatin's hat had no logo and it was made of grass, not plastic. This was fitting because grass, not petroleum, is the foundation of his farm's success.\n\n#  THE GRASS FARMER\n\nPolyface Farm raises chicken, beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, grapes, and berries. They do all this on 100 acres of pasture mixed in with another 450 acres of forest. But if you ask Joel Salatin what he does for a living he'll say, \"I'm a grass farmer.\"\n\nThe first time I heard this I didn't get it at all. People can't eat grass, and he doesn't sell any of his hay to other farmers. How could he be in the grass business? But of course, Salatin was right. As I was to learn during my stay, the cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits at Polyface (as well as Salatin and his family) all depend on grass in one way or another. (Grass, of course, is not a single plant. It is our name for the whole collection of plants that grow together in a pasture or meadow.)\n\nPolyface Farm is the opposite of an industrial farm like George Naylor's or Earthbound. Those industrial farms grow giant monoculture fields. Their farms run like factories. They put in the seed and fertilizer (raw materials) and out comes corn or soybeans (product). It's a pretty straight line from start to finish.\n\nNothing at Polyface works in a straight line. The animals and crops seem to move in circles like some sort of complicated dance. Each plant and animal plays its part and Joel Salatin is the choreographer. The pastures are the stage and the main action of the dance is to rotate the animals through the pastures.\n\n#  PASTURES OF PLENTY\n\nThe pasture I was resting in was a good example. It was the third week of June and the field had already been occupied several times. It had been grazed twice by beef cattle. After the cattle it had been home to several hundred laying hens. Later, the grass had been cut to make hay that would feed the farm's animals through the winter.\n\nI asked Salatin why the chickens had been let loose in the pasture instead of fed in a chicken coop. \"Because that's how it works in nature,\" he explained. \"Birds follow and clean up after herbivores.\"\n\nJoel calls the hens his \"sanitation crew.\" In the pasture, they pick tasty grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats. (Larvae are one stage in the life cycle of insects. For example, caterpillars are butterfly larvae.) Eating the grubs and larvae cuts down on bugs and parasites\u2014in this case, tiny organisms that live on or in the cow\u2014that would bother the cattle. And while the chickens are nibbling on the grasses, they add a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture with their own droppings\u2014and produce several thousand rich and tasty eggs. After a few weeks' rest, the pasture will regrow and feed the cows again.\n\nBy the end of the season Salatin's animals will have transformed his grasses into an astounding amount of food. Yet even more amazing is the fact that this pasture will be in better, not worse, shape. Its soil will be deeper, more fertile, and even springier underfoot (this thanks to the increased earthworm traffic). And the whole process is powered by the sun. No fossil fuels or added fertilizer or chemicals needed.\n\n#  GRASS AND HUMANS\u2014BFF?\n\nWhen we looked at beef ranching, we learned how grasses and herbivores formed a partnership over millions of years of evolution. In the same way, human beings and grasses also have been partners. People in prehistoric times often hunted the big herbivores that dined on grass. Those hunters would regularly set fire to the prairie to keep it free of trees and nourish the soil. In a sense, they too were \"grass farmers.\" They helped the grass, and the grass in turn fed the animals they hunted.\n\nThe bonds between humans and grass grew even stronger about 10,000 years ago. About that time people learned to plant and grow grasses like wheat, rice, and corn. These grasses were different because they produced big, rich seeds. Humans could harvest and eat those seeds. They didn't need herbivores to turn the grass into meat.\n\nGrains like wheat and corn are grasses, but they're different from the grasses in Joel Salatin's meadow. Meadow grasses can reproduce even if they are eaten (or mowed) before they can make seeds. They do this by sending out shoots or runners that become new plants. They also have deep root systems that help them to recover quickly from grazing or prairie fire. These roots survive through the winter and then start growing new leaves in the spring. Plants that do this are called perennials because they come back year after year.\n\nWheat, rice, and corn are annuals. That means they don't put down a deep root system. Instead, they survive by making seeds, which have to be planted every year. Because these seeds are edible, human beings took these annuals and helped them spread across the globe. We cut down forests and plowed up the prairies to make room for the giant seed-bearing grasses. They are the backbone of our agriculture and our food supply.\n\n#  INDUSTRIAL VS. ORGANIC\n\nSo if you think of corn as a big, annual grass, then George Naylor in Iowa is also a grass farmer. But Naylor's farm is one link in a chain that includes fossil fuels, artificial fertilizer, pesticides, heavy machinery, feedlots, antibiotics, and processing plants. The oil comes mostly from the Middle East, the corn comes from Iowa, the beef is slaughtered in Kansas, and then the meat has to be shipped by truck across the country to a Wal-Mart or McDonald's near you.\n\nYou can think of the industrial food system as a great machine. It's a machine that stretches over thousands of miles. It runs on fossil fuel and creates tons of waste and pollution.\n\nPolyface Farm stands about as far from industrial agribusiness as you can get. Almost everything the farm uses is grown on the farm. Almost all of the energy used to make the food comes from the sun. There are no pesticides, no artificial fertilizer, no pollution, and no extra waste. Everything is recycled. Just compare the two farms:\n\n#  ORGANIC VS. BEYOND ORGANIC\n\nAs I discovered in that first phone call, Polyface is so outside the industrial food chain that Salatin won't even sell his beef, chicken, or pork by mail. You can't order them on a website.\n\n\"We never called ourselves organic,\" he went on to explain. \"We call ourselves 'beyond organic.'\" He talked about the difference between one of his chickens and an organic chicken you can buy in a supermarket. The supermarket chicken is raised in \"a ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven.\" His chickens do eat non-organic grain, but they \"see a new paddock of fresh green grass every day.\" Then he asked, \"So which chicken shall we call 'organic'?\"\n**13**\n\n**Grass**\n\n#  MONDAY\n\nWe see grass all the time\u2014on lawns, by the side of the highway, on baseball fields (if they aren't artificial turf). But have you ever really _looked_ at grass?\n\nDuring my week at Polyface, I learned to look at grass from lots of different angles. For example, I learned to look at a field of grass the way a cow does. You might think a field of grass is all the same. But to a cow, a fresh pasture is like a salad bar, with lots of different things to eat.\n\nFrom the mix of green leaves and stems, a cow can easily pick out a tuft of emerald green clover next to a spray of bluish green fescue. These two plants are as different to her as vanilla ice cream is from cauliflower. The cow opens her meaty wet lips, curls her sandpaper tongue around the bunched clover like a fat rope, and rips the mouthful of tender leaves from its crown. She'll get to the fescue, but not before she's eaten all the clover ice cream she can find.\n\nA cow also knows there are things in the pasture to avoid, plants that will make her sick. We might fail to notice the handful of Carolina nightshades or thistles among the other plants. But when the cows are done grazing tomorrow, those plants will still be standing, like forlorn pieces of broccoli left on a picky eater's plate.\n\n#  THE LAW OF THE SECOND BITE\n\nJoel Salatin calls himself a grass farmer. In the end everything he raises on his farm comes from grass. How do the grasses perform this miracle? They do it by capturing the energy of the sun and using it to make leaves cows can eat. So maybe he's really a sun farmer.\n\nTo Joel, sustainable organic farming means using this free solar energy instead of fossil fuel energy. \"These grass blades are our photovoltaic panels,\" he says. He's built a complex farm system around this simple idea. To make it work, he needs to know an awful lot about grass. And the most important thing to know about grass, he told me, is when it likes to be eaten.\n\nAs I explained, grass has evolved to be in partnership with grass eaters. It survives very well if its leaves are chewed off. The secret, Joel told me, is not to let the cows take a second bite until the grass has had time to recover. That takes about fourteen days. He calls it the \"law of the second bite.\"\n\nIf this were a real law, most of the world's ranchers and dairy farmers would be outlaws, because they let their cows stay in the same pasture without stop. Without a chance to recover, clover and other cow favorites soon disappear. The root system of the entire field weakens. Instead of a lush pasture, the farmer soon has a field full of brown bald spots and plants that cows won't touch.\n\nJoel keeps his cows from getting that second bite by moving them every day. Near the end of my first day as a Polyface farmhand, when all I really wanted to do was lie down, there was still one more important chore to perform. We had to move the cows.\n\n#  A MOVING EXPERIENCE\n\nThrowing and stacking fifty-pound bales of hay all afternoon had left me bone tired, so I was mightily relieved when Joel proposed we drive his ATV to the upper pasture where the cows had spent their day. (It's a basic rule that the more weary you feel, the more kindly you look on fossil fuel.) We stopped by the toolshed for a freshly charged car battery we'd use to power the electrified fence. Then we sped up the rutted dirt road and soon bumped to a halt at the upper pasture. Eighty or so cattle were bunched together in a section of a much larger field. A portable electric fence kept them from roaming.\n\nThe cows had been in that spot for only one day. During that time they had eaten down just about everything within reach. Now it was time for them to move on, giving the grasses a chance to recover. Moving every day also keeps the cows healthier, because they can get away from their droppings, which can contain unhealthy parasites.\n\nJoel disconnected the electric fence from its battery and held down the wire with his boot to let me into the paddock. Clearly Joel's cattle knew what was about to happen. The cows that had been lying around roused themselves, and the bolder ones slowly lumbered over in our direction. One of them stepped right up to nuzzle us like a big cat. \"That's Budger,\" Joel told me. You wouldn't mistake Joel's cattle for show cattle. None of them are purebred. Instead they're a mix of Angus, Brahmin, and other breeds. Yet their coats were sleek, their tails were clean, and they had remarkably few flies on them.\n\nIt took the two of us no more than fifteen minutes to put up a new fence around an area next to the old one, drag the watering tub into it, and set up the water line. The grasses in the new paddock were thigh-high and lush, and the cattle plainly couldn't wait to get at them.\n\nThe moment arrived. Looking more like a restaurant ma\u00eetre d' than a cowboy, Joel opened the gate between the two paddocks. He removed his straw hat and swept it grandly in the direction of the fresh salad bar, and called his cows to their dinner. After a moment of hesitation, the cows began to move, first singly, then two by two, and then all eighty of them sauntered into the new pasture, brushing past us as they looked around for their favorite grasses. They lowered their great heads, and the evening air filled with the muffled sounds of smacking lips, tearing grass, and the low snuffling of contented cattle.\n\nThe last time I had stood watching a herd of cattle eat their supper I was standing up to my ankles in cow manure in Poky Feeders pen number 43. At Poky, the feed had to be harvested by machine, transported by train, processed in a mill, then trucked to the feedlots. Joel's cows were harvesting their own feed: grasses that had grown right there, powered by little more than sunlight. The food chain in this pasture could not be any shorter. And at the end of their meal there'd be nothing left to clean up, since the cattle would spread their waste exactly where it would do the most good.\n\n#  UNDER THE GRASS\n\nThe food chain at Polyface is short and simple. But there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. For example, Joel moves his cattle in the evening because he knows that's when the grass is sweetest. The leaves spend the whole day using sunlight to make food\u2014sugars. Mixed in with the sugars are important minerals the grasses have drawn up from the soil.\n\nIf you could look underground, you'd see even more. When cattle eat the leaves of a grass, the plant will kill off some of its roots, to balance itself out. Part of the root system dies and begins to decay. Then the bacteria, fungi, and earthworms will get to work breaking the old roots down into rich brown humus. (Humus is the part of soil that used to be living organic matter.) So by taking a bite of grass, a cow actually helps create new soil.\n\nBecause the cattle move on every day, they don't wipe out their favorite types of grass. As we've seen, this means that a pasture holds a dozen or more types of plants\u2014a real example of biodiversity. A mixture of tall and short plants means that more of the solar energy that falls on the pasture is turned into growth. Biodiversity also means the pasture is green almost all year long. Some grasses grow more in the spring, others have their growing season in the summer. For this reason, an acre of mixed grasses can actually produce more carbohydrate and protein in a year than an acre of field corn. And a field of mixed grasses with a deep root system is much more likely to survive dry spells and droughts.\n\nThese are just some of the incredible things that happen because Joel Salatin doesn't let his cows graze in the same spot too long. The amount of time it takes grass to recover is constantly changing too. It can vary depending on temperature, rainfall, sunlight, and the time of year. And of course, Joel has to figure in that different size cattle eat different amounts of grass.\n\nThis is another way \"grass farming\" is very different from the \"ride and spray\" farming on big industrial farms. It takes a lot of thought and planning to make sure the cows get to the right piece of pasture at the right time. It sometimes seems like grass farmers need to know personally every single blade of grass on their farms.\n\n#  MONDAY SUPPER\n\nOnce the cattle were settled in their paddock for the night, we rolled down the hill to dinner. We ditched our boots by the back door and washed up in a basin in the mudroom. Then we sat down to a meal prepared by Joel's wife, Teresa, and Rachel, the Salatins' eighteen-year-old daughter. Joel began the meal by closing his eyes and saying his own version of grace. It included a fairly detailed list of what had been done on the farm that day. The farm's two young interns, Galen and Peter, joined us at the big pine table. They focused so intently on eating that they uttered not a word. The Salatins' son, Daniel, twenty-two, is a full partner in the farm, but most nights he has dinner with his wife and baby son in their house up the hill. Joel's mother, Lucille, lives in a trailer home next to the house. It was in Lucille's guest room that I was sleeping.\n\nEverything we ate had been grown on the farm, with the exception of the cream of mushroom soup that was the sauce in the chicken and broccoli casserole. Rachel passed a big platter of delicious deviled eggs. Though it wasn't even the end of June, we tasted the first sweet corn of the season. It had been grown in the hoop house where the laying hens spend the winter. There was plenty of everything, and there were a lot of jokes about the interns' giant appetites. To drink, there was a pitcher of ice water.\n\n_The Salatin family and farm crew. From left to right: Peter, Daniel, Lucille, Galen, Teresa, and Joel._\n\nI told everyone that this was probably the most local meal I'd ever eaten. Teresa joked that if Joel and Daniel could just figure out how to make paper towels and toilet paper from the trees on the farm, she'd never have to go to the supermarket. It was true: We were eating almost completely off the grid. The farm and the family was a self-contained world, in the way I imagine all American farm life once was.\n\nAt dinner I got Joel and Teresa talking about the history of Polyface. \"I'm actually a third-generation alternative farmer,\" Joel said. His grandfather Fred Salatin had farmed a half-acre lot in Anderson, Indiana. Joel's father, William Salatin, bought the land that would become Polyface in 1961. Back then, the 550 acres were in bad shape.\n\n#  RESTORING THE LAND\n\n\"The farm had been abused by tenant farmers for 150 years,\" Joel said. The land is hilly and really too steep for row crops. Still, several generations of tenant farmers had grown corn and other grains there. As a result, most of the soil was either no longer fertile or had washed away. \"We measured gullies fourteen feet deep,\" Joel explained. \"This farm couldn't stand any more plowing. In many places there was no topsoil left whatsoever\u2014just outcroppings of granite and clay. We've been working to heal this land ever since.\"\n\nWilliam Salatin worked in town as an accountant while he figured out how to build the farm. A lot of his accounting clients were farmers too. When he saw the trouble they were having staying in business, he decided to try a different approach. Instead of building silos and growing grain, he started growing grass. He stopped buying fertilizer and started composting. He also let the steeper, north-facing hillsides return to forest.\n\nGradually the farm began to recover. Grasses colonized the gullies, the thin soils deepened, and the rock outcrops disappeared under a fresh layer of sod.\n\n\"I still miss him every day,\" Joel said. \"Dad was definitely a little odd, but in a good way. He lived out his beliefs. But you want to know when I miss him the most? When I see all the progress we've made since he left us. Oh, how proud he would be to see this place now!\"\n**14**\n\n**The Animals**\n\n#  TUESDAY\n\nIt's not often I wake up at six in the morning and find I've overslept, but it happened to me on my second morning at Polyface. By the time I hauled my six-foot self out of the five-foot bed in Lucille's guest room, everyone was already at work. In fact, morning chores were nearly done. Shockingly, chores at Polyface start as soon as the sun comes up. Even worse, they start before breakfast. Before coffee!\n\nI stepped out of the trailer into the warm early morning. Through the mist I could make out the figures of the two interns, Galen and Peter. They were moving around on the hill to the east. That's where a group of portable chicken pens sat on the grass. One of the most important morning chores was feeding and watering the chickens and moving their pens. I was supposed to be helping, so I started up the path, hoping to get there before they finished.\n\nAs I stumbled up the hill, I was struck by how very beautiful the farm looked in the hazy early light. The thick June grass was coated with dew. The bright green pastures stood out against patches of black forest. It was hard to believe this hillside had ever been the gullied wreck Joel had described at dinner. One type of farming had destroyed the land. Now another type of farming was restoring it.\n\n#  WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE PASTURE?\n\nBy the time I reached the pasture Galen and Peter had finished moving the pens. Luckily, they were either too kind or too timid to give me a hard time for oversleeping. I grabbed a pair of water buckets, filled them from the big tub in the center of the pasture, and lugged them to the nearest pen. Fifty of these pens were spread out across the damp grass. Each was ten feet by twelve feet wide and two feet high, with no floor. Inside each one were seventy broiler chickens. (Broilers are raised to be, well, broiled\u2014or grilled or fried.) The pens are floorless to allow the birds to get at the grass.\n\nJoel had explained that the pens were arranged very carefully. Each one would be moved ten feet a day. At the end of fifty-six days the pens would have covered every square foot of the meadow. Fifty-six days is the amount of time it would take the chickens to grow big enough to be slaughtered.\n\nDirectly behind each pen was a rectangular patch of closely cropped grass. That was where the pen had been the day before. The ground there looked like a really awful piece of modern art, thickly spattered with white, brown, and green chicken poop. It was amazing what a mess seventy chickens could make in just one day. But that was the idea: Give them twenty-four hours to eat the grass and fertilize it with their droppings, and then move them onto fresh ground.\n\nJoel moves the chickens every day for the same reason he moves the cows every night. The chicken manure fertilizes the grass, supplying all the nitrogen it needs. But left in one place, the chickens would eventually destroy the soil. They'd peck the grass down to its roots and poison the soil with their \"hot,\" or nitrogen-rich, manure. This is why the typical chicken yard quickly winds up bare and hard as brick.\n\nJoel says the chickens get about 20 percent of their diet from the fresh grass, worms, grasshoppers, and crickets they find. He also feeds them a mixture of corn, toasted soybeans, and kelp, which we scooped into long troughs in their pens. The chicken feed is one of the only raw materials he buys for the whole farm.\n\n#  THE INCREDIBLE EGGMOBILE\n\nAfter we had finished watering and feeding the broilers, I headed up to the next pasture, where Joel was moving the Eggmobile. The Eggmobile is one of Joel's proudest innovations. It looks like a cross between a henhouse and a covered wagon from the old west. The Eggmobile is home to four hundred laying hens. On each side of the wagon are rows of nesting boxes. The boxes open from the outside so someone can get at the eggs. Every night the hens climb the little ramp into the safety of the coop and Joel latches the door behind them. In the morning he moves them to a fresh pasture.\n\nWhen I got there, Joel was bolting the Eggmobile to the hitch of his tractor. It wasn't quite seven a.m. yet, but he seemed delighted to have someone to talk to. Talking about farming is one of his greatest pleasures.\n\n\"In nature you'll always find birds following herbivores,\" Joel had explained. In the wild, turkeys and pheasants follow bison herds. In Africa, you'll see birds like egrets perched on the nose of a rhinoceros. In each case the birds dine on the insects that would otherwise bother the herbivore. They also pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal's droppings.\n\n_The Eggmobile is home to four hundred laying hens._\n\nJoel climbed onto the tractor, threw it into gear, and slowly towed the rickety henhouse fifty yards or so. He placed it in the middle of a paddock where his cattle had been three days earlier. It seems the chickens don't like fresh manure, so he waits three or four days before bringing them in\u2014but not a day longer. \"Three days is ideal,\" he explained. \"That gives the larvae a chance to fatten up nicely, the way the hens like them, but not quite long enough to hatch into flies.\" Fly larvae may not seem appetizing to you and me, but that protein-rich diet makes the chickens' eggs unusually rich and tasty.\n\n_Every morning the broiler pens are moved to fresh pasture, following the cattle around the farm. Each pen is home to seventy chickens._\n\n#  THE SANITATION CREW\n\nOnce the Eggmobile was in position, Joel opened the trapdoor, and an eager, noisy parade of Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and New Hampshire Whites filed down the little ramp, fanning out across the pasture. The hens picked at the grasses but mainly they were all over the cowpats. They performed a crazy kind of dance with their claws to scratch apart the caked manure and expose the meaty grubs within.\n\n\"I'm convinced an Eggmobile would be worth it even if the chickens never laid a single egg,\" Joel told me. Because of the chickens, Joel doesn't have to treat his cattle with toxic chemicals to get rid of parasites. This is what Joel means when he says the animals do the real work on his farm. \"I'm just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time.\"\n\nEggs bring in more money than anything else Joel sells. To take advantage of that, most farmers would buy more chickens to lay more eggs. But Joel knows if he added a lot more chickens to the farm it would throw the system off balance. Too much chicken manure could kill the grass. Suddenly the manure would become a waste product. Plus, where would the new chickens get larvae for their protein? Joel would have to buy more cows. But how could he grow enough grass to feed them?\n\n\"It's all connected,\" he told me. \"This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well.\"\n\n#  LETTING CHICKENS BE CHICKENS\n\nMost industrial farmers don't worry about keeping things in balance. Their main concern is paying for inputs and getting the most possible outputs. If that means forcing cows to eat corn, even when it is unnatural for them, then that is what must be done.\n\nAt Polyface, the Salatins try to work with the natural instincts of their animals, not against them. When Joel lets his chickens loose in a pasture, he is using their natural instinct to clean up after herbivores. The chickens get to do, and eat, what they evolved to do and eat. Instead of treating chickens as egg-laying (or meat-growing) machines, Polyface honors their inborn \"chickenness.\" It is the same for all the animals on the farm.\n\nThe Salatins also raise rabbits. Like the hens, the rabbits spend part of their time in portable rabbit hutches in the pastures. The rest of the time, they live in cages suspended over a deep bedding of woodchips. The woodchips are home to earthworms, and of course, there are hens loose in the woodchips, eating the worms. The scratching of the hens turns the chips and the rabbits' nitrogen-rich urine into valuable compost.\n\nThe Polyface turkeys also spend time in the pastures. They are moved every three days. Joel has built them a moveable shademobile, which he calls the Gobbledy-Go. The turkeys rest under the Gobbledy-Go by day and roost on top of it at night. Joel likes to put his turkeys in the orchard, where they eat the bugs, mow the grass, and fertilize the trees and vines. Putting turkeys and grape vines together means getting two crops off of the same piece of land.\n\n_Polyface turkeys emerging from their moveable shademobile, called the Gobbledy-Go._\n\nDuring the winter, the cows and other animals come off the pastures and into the barns. But Polyface's \"beyond organic\" methods don't stop, they just move indoors. The cow barn is a simple open-sided structure where the cattle eat twenty-five pounds of hay and produce fifty pounds of manure each day. (Water makes up the difference.) Joel just leaves the manure where it falls. Every few days he covers it with a layer of woodchips or straw. This layer cake of manure, woodchips, and straw gradually rises beneath the cattle. By winter's end the bedding, and the cattle, can be as much as three feet off the ground. As the manure\/woodchip mix decays it heats up, warming the barn. Joel calls it his cattle's electric blanket.\n\n#  HAPPY PIGS\n\nThere's one more secret ingredient Joel adds to each layer of this cake: a few bucketfuls of corn. Over the winter, the corn ferments. That means fungi in the manure turn some of the corn into alcohol. (This is the same fermenting process used to make wine or beer.) Why does Joel want fermented corn in his manure pile? Because there's nothing a pig enjoys more than getting tipsy on corn, and there's nothing a pig is better equipped to do than root it out with his powerful snout and exquisite sense of smell. \"I call them my pigaerators,\" Joel told me proudly.\n\nAs soon as the cows head out to pasture in the spring, several dozen pigs come in and hunt for the corn in the manure pile. As they dig, they turn the compost over and air it out. This kills any harmful bacteria and after a few weeks the rich, cakey compost is ready to be spread on the fields.\n\n\"This is the sort of farm machinery I like,\" Joel told me one afternoon as we watched his pigs do their work. \"It never needs its oil changed, grows over time, and when you're done with it you eat it.\" Buried clear to their butts in composting cow manure, the pigaerators were a bobbing sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails. If pigs can be happy, these were the happiest pigs I'd ever seen.\n\nSalatin reached down deep where his pigs were happily rooting and brought a handful of fresh compost right up to my nose. What had been cow manure and woodchips just a few weeks before now smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime. Joel will spread the compost on his pastures. There it will feed the grasses, so the grasses might again feed the cows, the cows the chickens, and so on until the snow falls. That handful of compost was proof that when grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch.\n\nThe type of farming the Salatins do isn't easy. George Naylor works his fields maybe fifty days a year; Joel and Daniel and two interns are out there sunrise to sunset almost every day.\n\nYet Joel and Daniel plainly enjoy their work. One reason is that their type of farming takes a lot of thought and problem-solving. They like the challenge of getting all the pieces of their farm working together. They also get great satisfaction from the care they give to their land and their animals. Over and over again, I was struck by how healthy their animals were\u2014all without a single ounce of antibiotics or chemicals. Because they are not raising identical chickens or cows in giant, crowded sheds, a single illness doesn't represent a threat to them. Instead, when an animal gets sick, the Salatins try to figure out what is going wrong in their system. As Joel puts it, \"Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.\"\n\n#  TREES GROW GRASS\n\nAll of this produces some pretty impressive results. I asked Joel how much food Polyface produces in a season, and he rattled off the following figures:\n\n30,000 dozen eggs   \n10,000 broilers   \n800 stewing hens\n\n50 beef cattle (25,000 lbs of beef)   \n250 hogs (25,000 lbs of pork)   \n1,000 turkeys   \n500 rabbits\n\nIt was hard to believe they got that much food from one hundred acres of grass. Then Joel corrected me. He said that the 450 acres of forest were also an important part of the farm operation. I didn't get that at all. What in the world did the forest have to do with producing food?\n\nJoel counted off the ways. First, the forest held the farm's water supply. Many of the farm's streams and ponds would simply dry up if not for the cover of trees. Second, the trees keep the farm cooler in the summer. That reduces the stress on the animals from too much heat. The trees also act as a windbreak\u2014when the grass is sheltered from the wind it can grow higher. It doesn't stop there. More trees mean more wild birds. More birds on a farm mean fewer insects. Forests mean that coyotes and weasels have plenty of chipmunks and voles to eat, so they don't hunt chickens. And some of the trees are made into woodchips that go into the farm compost.\n\nI had thought of the farm as just the hundred acres of pasture. For Joel, it was all one biological system, the trees and the grasses and the animals, the wild and the domestic. On an industrial farm, the trees would have been thought of as a waste of valuable crop land. But at Polyface, it was understood that the trees helped the grass to grow and the forest fed the farm.\n**15**\n\n**The Slaughterhouse**\n\n#  WEDNESDAY MORNING\n\nI woke up Wednesday and wished for a moment I had overslept again. It wasn't because I was tired, although I was. It was because I knew this was the day we were going to \"process\" the broilers. To put it plainly, we were going to spend the morning killing chickens.\n\nSo far, I'd enjoyed the beauty of this organic food chain. I'd watched as the sun fed the grass, the grass fed the cattle, and the cattle fed the chickens. There was one more link in that food chain, however. That last link was when the chickens fed us. An important part of that last step took place right here on the farm, in an open-air shed out behind the Salatins' house. That's where, six times a month, several hundred chickens are killed, scalded, plucked, and gutted.\n\nI had been trying not to think about this last link, and of course that's what most of us do. We avoid thinking about, or having anything to do with, the slaughter of the animals we eat. Even most farmers have nothing to do with it.\n\nNot here. Joel insists on slaughtering chickens on the farm. He'd slaughter his cattle and hogs here too if only the government would let him. Joel has many reasons for wanting to do the killing himself. Some are economic, some ecological, some are political, and some are spiritual. \"The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview,\" he'd told me the first time we'd talked. To him that means every step of a chicken's life must be managed correctly, including its end.\n\n#  THE CHICKEN ROUNDUP\n\nSo that morning I managed to get up right on time\u20145:30 a.m., to be exact. I made my way to the broilers' pasture. We had to catch and crate three hundred chickens. While we waited for Daniel to show up with the chicken crates, I helped Peter move the pens to a new spot of grass.\n\nAfter a while Daniel drove up on the tractor, towing a wagon piled high with plastic chicken crates. We stacked four of them in front of the pens and then he and I got to work catching chickens. After lifting the top off the pen, Daniel used a big plywood paddle to crowd the birds into one corner. Then he reached in and grabbed a flapping bird by one leg and flipped it upside down. That seemed to settle the bird. Then he easily switched the dangling bird from his right hand to his left, freeing his right hand to grab another. I could see he'd done this many times. When he had five birds in one hand, I held open the door to the chicken crate and he stuffed them in. He could fill a crate with ten birds in less than a minute.\n\n\"Your turn,\" Daniel said. He nodded toward the cornered mass of chickens remaining in the pen. To me, the way he'd grabbed and flipped the birds seemed pretty rough. Their pencil-thin legs looked so fragile. Yet when I tried to be gentle with the birds as I grabbed them, they flapped around even more violently, until I was forced to let go. This clearly wasn't going to work. So finally I just reached into and blindly clutched at a leg with one hand and flipped it over. When I saw the chicken was none the worse for it, I switched it to my right hand (I'm a lefty). I went for a second and a third, until I had five chicken legs and a giant white pom-pom of feathers in my right hand. Daniel flipped open the lid on a crate and I pushed the pom-pom in.\n\n_Daniel Salatin gathering up the chickens for slaughter._\n\n#  SALATIN VS. THE USDA\n\nAfter we had crated three hundred birds we went to breakfast (scrambled Polyface eggs and Polyface bacon). While we ate, Joel talked a little about the importance of on-farm processing. To hear him describe it, what we were about to do\u2014kill a bunch of chickens in the backyard\u2014was nothing less than a political act.\n\n\"When the USDA sees what we're doing here they get weak in the knees,\" Joel said with a chuckle. \"The inspectors take one look at our processing shed, and they don't know what to do with us.\"\n\nFor example, government rules say the walls of a processing plant must be white. But Joel's shed doesn't have any walls. He believes fresh air keeps the shed cleaner than washing down walls with disinfectant.\n\nIncredibly, the USDA rules don't set a limit for the amount of bacteria allowed in our meat. In fact, the rules assume that there will be bacteria in the meat, because in a giant slaughterhouse, there's no way to avoid it. In most big plants expensive machinery is used to remove or kill the bacteria on the meat. Those machines, like a lot of things required by the USDA, are way too expensive for a small, local meat processor.\n\nMore to the point, Joel says he doesn't need this machinery because his meat is already clean. To prove it, he's had his chickens tested by an independent lab. The tests showed that Polyface hens have a much lower bacteria count than supermarket chickens. Salatin is confident he could meet any health standard the government would set.\n\n#  THE SHED\n\nBy the time we finished breakfast, a couple of cars had pulled into the driveway. There were two women who were raising their own chickens and wanted to learn how to process them. There were also a couple of neighbors Joel sometimes hires when he needs extra hands on processing day.\n\nAfter a few minutes of neighborly chitchat, we all drifted toward our stations in the processing shed. The shed resembles a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab. There are no walls, just a sheet-metal roof perched on wooden posts. Arranged in a horseshoe along the edge are stainless steel sinks and counters, a scalding tank, and a feather-plucking machine. There's also a line of metal cones to hold the birds upside down while they're being killed and bled out.\n\nI volunteered to join Daniel at the metal cones, the first station on the line. Why? Because I'd been dreading this event all week and wanted to get it over with. Nobody was insisting I personally slaughter a chicken, but I was curious to learn how it was done and to see if I could bring myself to do it. I guess I felt that if I was going to be a meat eater, then at least once in my life I should take part in the killing of my food.\n\nI stacked several chicken crates in the corner by the killing cones. Then, while Daniel sharpened his knives, I began lifting chickens from the crates. I placed each bird upside down into a cone. Each cone has an opening at the bottom for the chicken's head. Taking the squawking birds out of the crate was the hard part. As soon as they were snug in the cones, the chickens fell silent.\n\nOnce all eight cones were loaded, Daniel reached underneath and took one chicken's head between his first finger and thumb. Gently, he gave the head a quarter turn and then quickly drew his knife across the artery running alongside the bird's windpipe. A stream of blood shot from the cut and poured down into a metal gutter that funneled it into a bucket. Daniel explained that you wanted to cut only the artery, not the whole neck. That way the heart would continue to beat and pump out the blood. The bird shuddered in its cone and its yellow feet jerked around.\n\n_The Polyface processing shed where chickens are killed, scalded, plucked, and gutted._\n\nIt was hard to watch the chicken die. I told myself that its suffering, once its throat was slit, was brief. I told myself that the birds waiting their turn appeared to have no idea what was going on. Honestly, there wasn't much time to reflect. We were working on an assembly line (or, really, a disassembly line). The work soon took over and I had no time to think. Within minutes the first eight chickens had bled out. Then they had to be lifted from the cones and moved to the scalding tank. Daniel was calling for eight more, and I had to hustle so as not to fall behind.\n\n#  MY MEAT EATER'S DUTY\n\nAfter he had slaughtered several batches, Daniel offered me his knife. He showed me the steps I was to follow: First you hold the chicken's little head in a V between your thumb and forefinger. Then you turn the head to expose the artery but avoid the windpipe. Then you slice down toward at a spot just beneath the skull. Since I am left-handed, I had to learn every step from the opposite direction. Then it was my turn.\n\nI looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear. Holding its head in my right hand, I drew the knife down the left side of the chicken's neck. I worried about not cutting hard enough, but the blade was sharp and sliced easily through the white feathers covering the bird's neck. Before I could let go of the suddenly limp head, my hand was painted in a gush of warm blood. Somehow, a single droplet spattered the lens of my glasses. There would be a tiny red blot in my field of vision for the rest of the morning.\n\nDaniel gave his approval of my technique and, noticing the drop of blood on my glasses, offered one last bit of advice: \"The first rule of chicken killing is that if you ever feel anything on your lip, you don't want to lick it off.\" Daniel smiled. He's been killing chickens since he was ten years old and doesn't seem to mind it.\n\nDaniel gestured toward the next cone; I guessed I wasn't done. In the end I personally killed a dozen or so chickens before moving on to try another station. I got fairly good at it, though once or twice I sliced too deeply, nearly cutting off a whole head. After a while the rhythm of the work took over and I could kill without worrying about it. That almost bothered me more than anything else. I saw how quickly you can get used to anything, especially when the people around you think nothing of it. In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.\n\nWhen I stepped away from the killing area for a break, Joel clapped me on the back for having taken my turn at the killing cones. I told him killing chickens wasn't something I would want to do every day.\n\n\"Nobody should,\" Joel said. \"Slaughter is dehumanizing work if you have to do it every day. Processing but a few days a month means we can actually think about what we're doing,\" he continued, \"and be as careful and humane as possible.\"\n\n#  FROM BIRD TO FOOD\n\nAfter my break I moved down the line. Once the birds were bled out and dead, Daniel handed them, by their feet, to Galen. He dropped them into the scalding tank. There the birds were plunged up and down in the hot water to loosen their feathers. They came out of the scalder looking like floppy wet rags with beaks and feet. Next they went into the plucker. That's a stainless steel cylinder that resembles a top-loading washing machine with dozens of black rubber fingers projecting from the sides. As the chickens spin at high speed, they rub against the stiff fingers, which pull their feathers off. After a few minutes they emerge as naked as supermarket broilers. This is the moment the chickens passed over from looking like dead animals to looking like food.\n\n_Three hundred or so freshly slaughtered chickens floating in a steel tank of ice water._\n\nPeter pulled the birds from the plucker, yanked off the heads, and cut off the feet. Then he passed the birds to Galen for gutting. I joined him at his station, and he showed me what to do\u2014where to make the cut with your knife, how to reach your hand into the bird without tearing too much skin. You have to reach in and pull out the bird's guts while trying to keep the digestive tract in one piece. As the innards spilled out onto the stainless steel counter, he named the parts: gullet, gizzard, gallbladder (which you must be careful not to pierce), liver, heart, lungs, and intestines (have to be careful here again). Some organs were to be sold, others were dropped in the gutbucket at our feet.\n\nI didn't get very good at gutting. My clumsy hands tore large openings in the skin. I accidentally broke a gallbladder, spilling a thin yellow bile that I then had to carefully rinse off the carcass. \"After you gut a few thousand chickens,\" Galen said dryly, \"you'll either get really good at it, or you'll stop gutting chickens.\"\n\n#  GRASS FROM CHICKEN GUTS\n\nWe hadn't been at it much more than three hours when we were done. There were three hundred or so chickens floating in the big steel tank of ice water. Each of them had gone from clucking animal to oven-ready roaster in ten minutes, give or take.\n\nWe cleaned up, scrubbing the blood off the tables and hosing down the floor. Meanwhile customers began arriving to pick up their chickens. This was another reason Joel has a slaughterhouse with no walls. Polyface's customers know to come after noon on a chicken day, but there's nothing to prevent them from showing up earlier and watching their dinner being killed. They don't need USDA rules to ensure that the meat they're buying has been humanely and cleanly processed. They can see for themselves.\n\nThe customers pick their chicken out of the tank and bag it themselves. Then they put it on the scale in the shop next door to the processing shed. Teresa chatted with customers as she checked them out. Meanwhile Galen and I helped Joel compost chicken waste. This just may be the grossest job on the farm\u2014or anywhere else for that matter. Yet as Joel would say, even the way Polyface handles its chicken guts is an extension of his worldview.\n\nJoel went off on the tractor to get a load of woodchips from the big pile he keeps across the road. Meanwhile Galen and I hauled five-gallon buckets of blood and guts and feathers from the processing shed to the compost pile. The pile, only a stone's throw from the house, had a truly evil stink. It smelled like exactly what it was: rotting flesh.\n\nBeside the old pile Joel dumped a few yards of fresh wood-chips. Galen and I raked this into a broad rectangular mound about the size of a double bed. We left a slight hole in the middle and that's where we spilled the buckets of guts. It was a glistening, multicolored stew. On top of this we added piles of feathers, and finally the blood, which now was as thick as house paint. Then Joel came back with another load of chips, which he dumped onto the top of the pile. Galen climbed up onto the mass of woodchips with his rake, and I followed him with mine. The top layer of woodchips was dry, but you could feel the guts sliding around underfoot. It felt like walking on a mattress filled with Jell-O. We raked the pile level and got out of there.\n\n_Five-gallon buckets of blood, guts, and feathers, plus hundreds of chicken feet and innards waiting to be mixed with woodchips and made into compost._\n\nAt a slaughterhouse, the guts would end up being turned into \"protein meal.\" Then it would be fed to factory-farmed pigs and cattle and even other chickens. But like every other bit of \"waste\" on this farm, Joel regards chicken guts as a form of biological wealth. It contains nitrogen he can return to the land along with carbon he's harvested from the woodlot. He knows that by spring, this mass of blood and guts and feathers will become a rich, black, sweet-smelling compost ready for him to spread onto the pastures and turn back into grass. He sees the beauty in the compost pile, and who knows? Maybe to him it doesn't even smell that bad.\n**16**\n\n**The Market**\n\n#  \"GREETINGS FROM THE NON-BAR CODE PEOPLE\"\n\nIn the industrial food chain, the typical item of food travels 1,500 miles before it is eaten. Compared to that, the Polyface \"beyond organic\" food chain is incredibly short. Almost all of the three hundred chickens we'd processed Wednesday morning would be eaten within a few dozen miles of the farm.\n\nRemember, Joel doesn't ship his products. That's what brought me to Polyface in the first place\u2014Joel refused to ship me a steak. I was learning that even where and how he sold his products was an extension of his worldview.\n\nOriginally I thought Joel sold locally just to keep from burning fossil fuels. While that's certainly part of his thinking, it's only part. He sees his farm as part of a local food economy. He wants the sale of his eggs and meat to help other local businesses, like small shops and restaurants. He feels selling his eggs or chickens in a chain supermarket supports the industrial food industry, the very thing he is trying to get away from.\n\nThe Salatins believe having a direct relationship with their customers is very important. \"Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?\" he asked me. Once a year he sends out a newsletter to his regular customers. A recent one began with this greeting: \"Greetings from the non-bar code people.\" That kind of sums up the way he looks at himself, his farm, and his customers. They are dropouts from the industrial agribusiness food chain, trying to build a new one.\n\n_Sources: Joel Salatin and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture._\n\n#  SOLVING THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA\n\nI met several of those customers on Wednesday afternoon as they came to collect the fresh chickens they'd reserved. These people were paying a higher price for Polyface food, and in many cases driving more than an hour to come get it. But they were not wealthy, upper-middle-class people. They were a real cross section of types, including a schoolteacher, several retirees, a young mom with her towheaded twins, a mechanic, an opera singer, a furniture maker, a woman who worked in a metal plant.\n\nWhat brought them all together at Polyface Farm? Here are some of the comments I jotted down:\n\n\"This is the chicken I remember from my childhood. It actually tastes like chicken.\"\n\n\"I just don't trust the meat in the supermarket anymore.\"\n\n\"You're not going to find fresher chickens anywhere.\"\n\n\"All this meat comes from happy animals\u2014I know because I've seen them.\"\n\n\"I drive 150 miles one way in order to get clean meat for my family.\"\n\n\"It's very simple: I trust the Salatins more than I trust the Wal-Mart. And I like the idea of keeping my money right here in town.\"\n\nWhat I was hearing, in other words, was the same omnivore's dilemma that had spurred me to write this book. Somehow, getting meat and eggs from the Salatins helped these folks solve their dilemma, at least a little. Getting their food from Polyface lets them feel connected to their food\u2014these customers know exactly where their food comes from. Plus, they think it tastes better. And of course, they might just enjoy spending a little time on a farm, chatting on the porch with the Salatins, and taking a beautiful drive in the country to get here.\n\n#  YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR\n\nI asked Joel what he said to people who said his prices were too high.\n\n\"Whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food, all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water\u2014all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.\"\n\nHe also reminded me that his meat would be considerably cheaper than it is if not for government regulations that forced him to send his cattle and hogs away to be processed.\n\nStill, whatever the reason, organic and beyond organic food does cost more at the cash register. That is going to make it hard for some people to afford it. Yet for the great majority of Americans, the reason is not quite so simple. After all, most people would agree that food is more important than a new cell phone or cable TV or name-brand sneakers. Why is it that we pay for those things without blinking but won't pay an extra dollar for a dozen organic eggs? Nowadays many Americans are even willing to pay for water\u2014something we can get for free from any tap. So why are we unwilling to pay more for better food?\n\nJoel pointed out that people generally understand that quality costs more, except when it comes to food. \"When someone drives up to the farm in a BMW and asks me why our eggs cost more . . . well, first I try not to get mad. Instead, I take him outside and point at his car. 'Sir, you clearly understand quality and are willing to pay for it. Well, food is no different: You get what you pay for.'\"\n\nAgribusiness has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken. They tell us one egg is exactly like any other, but that's just not the case. If that's what you think, then you won't pay a dollar extra for the same old carton of eggs. But when you know that some eggs are not only tastier, but also healthier to eat, then a dollar extra for a dozen seems like a bargain. When people know about their food, they start considering quality and not just price.\n\n#  FARMERS MARKETS AND BUYING CLUBS\n\nA short food chain helps the consumer know what he or she is buying. It also helps the farmer in another important way. As we saw earlier, farmers in the industrial food chain are often on the edge of going bankrupt. One reason is they make less money than supermarkets, wholesalers, and food processors. In fact, out of every dollar spent on food in this country, ninety-two cents goes to these non-farmers. By selling directly to consumers Joel gets to keep more of that money.\n\nThat's why Joel makes more money from his chickens than his beef and pork. He processes the chickens himself, and doesn't have to pay someone else. So avoiding the industrial food chain isn't just a matter of principle. It's also good business.\n\nBesides the farm store, Joel sells Polyface meat and eggs at farmers markets in the Washington, D.C., area. The number of these farmers markets in the U.S. has almost doubled in recent years, from 1,755 in 1996 to more than 4,000 in 2008. Polyface also sells to buying clubs. These are groups of families, usually in cities or suburbs, who put together a big order once or twice a month. One person in the club collects the orders and takes delivery of the food. The size of the order makes it worth the farmer's while to deliver, in Joel's case sometimes as far as Virginia Beach or Bethesda\u2014half a day's drive.\n\n#  THURSDAY MORNING\n\nAnd then there is Joel's brother, Art, who makes deliveries to area restaurants once a week. On Thursday I woke to the sound of Art's panel truck noisily backing up to the salesroom door. The clock said 5:45 a.m. I threw on some clothes and dashed out to meet him.\n\nArt is five years older than Joel and, on first impression, a very different sort of character. He's not nearly so sunny, or talkative: He's even a little cranky sometimes. He's more grounded in the world, more businesslike. But then, maybe he has to be. After all, Art spends a lot more time dealing with city traffic and parking and chefs who can sometimes be pretty picky.\n\nEvery Thursday Art mounts a carefully planned military-style operation. His mission is to supply restaurants in Charlottesville, Virginia, with meat and eggs from Polyface. He also sells produce, dairy products, and mushrooms from a half dozen other small producers in the Shenandoah Valley. He gets the orders from customers, tells the farmers what he needs, and they arrive with their trucks at Polyface at dawn on Thursday.\n\nI spent the better part of Thursday riding shotgun in Art's panel truck. It's an old orange Dodge Caravan with a sign on the side that says: \"On Delivery From Polyface Inc. Follow me to the Best Restaurants in Town.\" Which seemed to be more or less the case. Many of Charlottesville's best chefs buy from Polyface.\n\nWe made most of our deliveries after lunch, when the kitchens were relatively quiet. I helped Art haul in plastic totes the size of laundry baskets laden with meat and produce. The chefs had high praise for the quality of Polyface products, and clearly felt good about supporting a local farm.\n\nBetween stops, Art told me that it was the eggs that got him his new customers. I saw how this worked at a newly opened restaurant called the Filling Station. Art introduced himself and presented the chef with a dozen eggs. The chef cracked one into a saucepan. Instead of spreading out, the egg stood up nice and tall in the pan. The chef called his staff over to admire the bright orange color of the yolk. Art explained that it was the grass diet that gave the eggs their color. I don't think I'd ever seen people so interested in an egg yolk\u2014they were clearly impressed.\n\n#  SEASONAL FOOD\n\nUnlike supermarket eggs, Polyface eggs are different at different times of the year. They turn paler in the winter, when the hens are not in the pasture. Art told me this was one of his biggest challenges. Many customers were not used to the idea of seasonal food.\n\nWe have forgotten that meats used to be as seasonal as fruits and vegetables. For example, lambs are born in the spring. They're not ready to be eaten for eight to ten months\u2014in the next winter. Yet supermarkets sell \"spring lamb\", which is meat shipped in from New Zealand. The natural seasons for red meat are fall and winter. The natural seasons for chicken are the spring and summer. If local food chains are going to succeed, customers will have to get used to eating that way again. Will consumers be ready to give up the \"convenience\" of any food any time? Perhaps they will, if they see what they are getting in return.\n\nChefs around the country, like the ones who buy from Polyface in Virginia, are trying to teach consumers that food actually tastes better when it is fresh, in season, and grown without chemicals. These chefs, along with the buying clubs and the farmers markets, are all part of a worldwide movement. It is a movement away from the industrial food chain and toward a more local, organic food system.\n\n#  EAT YOUR VIEW\n\nIn Europe, there's a bumper sticker that says: \"Eat Your View!\" That's what the Polyface customers are doing\u2014preserving the landscape by supporting the local farmers. They are part of an international movement to change the global food system. The movement includes farmers in Europe who try to preserve local food products and eating habits. Then there are farmers in India who have protested the sale of patented seeds by agribusiness. There are farmworkers in South America who protest the use of dangerous pesticides. And there are people in many countries who are trying to stop the spread of genetically modified food.\n\nIt's not surprising that food has become the focus of an international movement. Food is, after all, the center of our lives in many ways, even if we no longer pay very much attention to it. And it is one part of our lives we can still control. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to be part of. We can vote with our forks.\n\nConsumers in the U.S. have already made big changes in the food system. Our desire to have cleaner, healthier food has created a $20-billion market for industrial organics. Farmers like Joel Salatin, his customers, and all the people who buy from farmers markets and food clubs are trying to make another change. They are making the word _local_ just as powerful as the word _organic_.\n\nChanging to a truly local food economy won't be easy. It might not even be completely possible. But the advantages of moving in this direction are very clear. When consumers know once again how their food is produced, they are naturally going to want it produced in the cleanest, most humane and environmentally healthy ways. Eating locally is also an act of conservation. Keeping local farms in business keeps the countryside from being overrun by cities and suburbs.\n\n\"Eat Your View!\" takes work. It means not being able to buy a tomato in December. It means giving up many processed foods. And once you give up processed foods, you have to learn to cook, a skill that is disappearing from many American homes. Are we prepared to go that far?\n\n#  IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL EAT\n\nOn my last day on the farm, a soft June Friday afternoon, Joel and I sat talking at a picnic table behind the house. A steady stream of customers dropped by to pick up their chickens. I asked Joel if he believed the industrial food chain would ever be replaced by a local food system.\n\n\"We don't have to beat them,\" Joel patiently explained. \"I'm not even sure we should try.\" I guess I would sum up his view as: \"If you build it, they will come.\" He believes that more and more consumers will make the choice to buy local, \"beyond organic\" food. The rest will take care of itself.\n\nI think he has a point. We may need a great many food chains that combine organic food and slow food and local foods in different ways. There may be other food chains we haven't even thought of yet. Nature produces diversity. Polyface Farm is home to diversity. Maybe the food system should be diverse too.\n\nSitting on the porch with Joel, watching his customers buzzing about, I could see part of that new food system taking shape. It certainly seemed like a good start.\n**17**\n\n**My Grass-Fed Meal**\n\n#  A WEEK'S PAY\n\nBefore I left the farm Friday, I gathered together the makings for that evening's dinner. I had originally thought about filling a cooler with Polyface meat and bringing it home with me to California to cook there. But after all of Joel's talks about eating locally and short food chains, that didn't seem right. So I decided to cook dinner for a few old friends who lived close by in Charlottesville. We would eat the food within a short drive of the farm where it had been grown.\n\nFrom the farm's walk-in cooler I picked out two of the chickens we had slaughtered on Wednesday. I also took a dozen of the eggs I'd helped gather Thursday evening. Then I stopped by the hoop house and harvested a dozen ears of sweet corn. Joel refused to accept payment for the food, calling it my pay for the week's work.\n\nOn the way into Charlottesville, I stopped to pick up a few other items. I tried as best as I could to look for local produce. As much as possible I wanted this meal to be bar code-free. For my salad, I found some nice-looking locally grown arugula. At the wine shop I found a short shelf of Virginia wines, but here I hesitated.\n\n#  EATING LOCALLY\n\nVirginia is known for many things, but wine isn't one of them. Did buying local have to include the wine too? I hadn't had a sip of wine all week and was really looking forward to it. Then I spotted a wine for twenty-five bucks, an awful lot for a bottle from an area not generally known for its wines. I decided the wine makers must have been confident it was good, so I added the bottle to my cart.\n\nI also needed some chocolate for the dessert I had in mind. The state of Virginia produces no chocolate to speak of. Since there was no local product, I was free to go for the good Belgian stuff. I did it without guilt, since even the most extreme eat-local types say it's okay to buy goods that can't be produced locally. That meant coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate were safe. (Whew . . .)\n\nDuring the week I'd given some thought to what I should make. Working backward, I knew I wanted to make a dessert that would feature Polyface eggs. All those chefs had said the eggs were magical. So I decided to try something that calls for a bit of magic\u2014a chocolate souffl\u00e9. For a side dish, sweet corn was a no-brainer. No one had tasted corn yet this year. But what meat to serve?\n\nBecause it was only June, Polyface had no fresh beef or pork or turkey. Joel wouldn't begin slaughtering cattle and turkeys till later in the summer. He wouldn't get to the hogs until the fall. There was frozen beef and pork, but it was last season's. I wanted to make something fresh. Rabbit seemed risky. I had no idea whether my friends Mark and Liz liked it, or if their boys would want to eat bunny. So that left chicken. Which, truth to tell, left me feeling a little queasy. Was I going to be able to enjoy chicken so soon after working in the processing shed and gut-composting pile? I was about to find out.\n\n#  POLYFACE CHICKEN A LA POLLAN\n\nWhen I got to Mark and Liz's house, there were still several hours before dinner. I had decided to brine the chicken\u2014a soak in saltwater brine causes meat to absorb moisture and breaks down the proteins that can toughen it on the grill. My plan was to slow roast the chicken pieces on a wood fire, and this would keep the chicken from drying out. So I cut each of the two birds into eight pieces and put them in a bath of water, kosher salt, sugar, a bay leaf, a splash of soy sauce, a garlic clove, and a small handful of peppercorns and coriander seeds.\n\nTo be honest, there was another reason I chose the brining and grilling method. Once the chickens were cut into pieces, they wouldn't look quite so much like the birds I had helped kill and gut on the farm. Soaking them in brine would change their taste and aroma. That would help cancel out the scents I remembered from the processing shed. Cooking changes the animals we eat and gives us some distance from the reality of the slaughterhouse. In the same way, when we buy a package of hamburger at a supermarket, we rarely think of the living cow. (There are, of course, those who prefer their fish, poultry, or pork served with the heads still on.)\n\nAfter soaking them in the brine for a few hours, I removed and rinsed the chicken pieces. Then I spread them out to dry for an hour or two. Drier skin would brown and get crispy on the grill.\n\nMark and Liz had a gas barbecue, but I wanted some smoke and flavor of a wood fire. I snipped a couple of twigs off their apple tree and stripped off the leaves. Then I placed the twigs on top of the grill, where the green wood would smolder rather than burn. I turned the gas down low and, after rubbing a little olive oil on the chicken pieces, arranged them on the grill among the apple branches.\n\n#  POLYFACE EGG SOUFFL\u00c9\n\nWhile the chicken roasted slowly outside, I got to work in the kitchen preparing the souffl\u00e9. I was assisted by Willie, Mark and Liz's twelve-year-old son. Willie melted the chocolate in a saucepan and I separated the egg whites from the yolks. The yolks were a gorgeous carroty shade of orange. They were so firm that separating them from the whites was easy. After adding a pinch of salt, I began beating the egg whites. Beating whites makes them turn white and stiff. That's when you begin adding sugar and turn the beater on high. The beater forms billions of microscopic air pockets and stiffens the egg proteins. A souffl\u00e9 grows in the oven because the heat causes these air pockets to expand. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work.\n\nThe egg whites doubled in size, then doubled again. Once they formed into stiff, snowy peaks, they were ready. Willie had already blended the yolks into his melted chocolate. Now we gently folded my egg whites into the thick syrup, then poured the airy, toast-colored mixture into a souffl\u00e9 dish and put it aside.\n\nWillie and I brought the corn out on the deck to shuck. The ears were so fresh that the husks squealed as you peeled them back. I explained to Willie that the corn had grown in a deep bed of composted chicken manure. That was probably not the sort of detail you'd want to mention on a menu. (Polyface corn a la chicken crap?) But Willie agreed there was something pretty neat about it.\n\nI also told him that the variety of corn we were eating was called Golden Bantam. It dates back over a hundred years, before all corn was just \"corn.\" Today's hybrid corn is bred to keep its sweetness over long-distance transport. At the same time, that breeding has made it lose a lot of its earthy corn flavor. Our corn had been picked that morning, just a short drive away. Since it didn't have to stand up to the stress of a cross-country trip, we were able to enjoy this corn the way it was supposed to taste.\n\n#  GRASS, NOT GRAIN\n\nI had made pretty much this same meal several times before. The list of ingredients looked the same. Yet I knew this wasn't the same food at all. That was because the chickens had spent their lives outdoors on pastures rather than in a shed eating grain. When cattle, chickens, and other animals eat grass\u2014and not just corn or other grains\u2014they are actually healthier for us to eat. So is the milk or eggs that come from grass-fed animals. This is no accident. Humans evolved to eat meat from wild animals, animals that ate little or no grain. Animals raised outdoors on grass have a diet much more like that of the wild animals. It makes sense that their meat, milk, and eggs would be better for us.\n\nGreen grass has large quantities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid. These natural chemicals are important for a healthy diet. Animals that eat grass have high levels of these and other important nutrients. (It's the beta-carotene that gives the Polyface egg yolks their carroty color.)\n\nAnimals raised in pastures have less fat than grain-fed animals. Part of this is because pasture-fed animals get exercise. Not only that, but the kind of fats in pastured animals are the ones that are healthier for us to eat. For example, they have higher levels of polyunsaturated fats instead of monounsaturated fats. They also contain more omega-3s. These are essential fatty acids and they are very important for human health. Among other things, omega-3s are important for the growth of brain cells and other neurons.\n\nOmega-6 is another fatty acid essential to humans. Our bodies need both of these and they need them in the right balance. (Omega-3s are made in the leaves of plants. Omega-6s are made in the seeds.) There is a lot of evidence that a healthy diet has a pretty even balance of omega-3 and omega-6. And that's exactly the balance in the meat of wild animals. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Human beings evolved to survive and be healthy on a diet of wild meat and plants.\n\nNow go one step further. The meat of grass-fed cows also has the same healthy balance of omega-3 and omega-6. Why? Because grass-fed cows are eating the same diet as their wild ancestors.\n\nIt turns out that corn-fed cows don't have the healthy balance of omegas. Their meat has a ratio of about 14 omega-6 to 1 omega-3. Some scientists think this imbalance might help explain the high levels of heart disease in our society. In other words, it's not eating meat so much as eating _corn-fed_ meat that is bad for us.\n\nThe point is that all beef is not the same. All salmon is not the same. All eggs are not created equal. The type of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you're eating has itself eaten.\n\nOnce shoppers know this, they begin to look at food costs differently. Polyface Farm's eggs at $2.20 a dozen might be a better deal than supermarket eggs at $0.79 a dozen. Polyface grass-fed chickens produce eggs with more omega-3s, beta-carotene, and vitamin E. And they do it in a way that's better for the environment. Doesn't that sound like a bargain?\n\n#  THE MEAL\n\nOkay, so a pastured chicken might be better for you, but how different does it actually taste? It certainly smelled wonderful when I raised the lid on the barbecue to put the corn on. The chicken was browning nicely, the skin beginning to crisp and take on the toasty tones of oiled wood. The corn, on which I'd rubbed some olive oil and sprinkled salt and pepper, would take only a few minutes. All it needed was to heat up and for a scattering of kernels to brown.\n\nWhile the corn finished roasting, I removed the chicken from the grill and set it aside to rest. A few minutes later I called everyone to the table. Ordinarily I might have felt a little funny hosting a dinner in someone else's home. But Mark and Liz are such close friends, it seemed perfectly natural to be cooking for them. That's not to say I didn't feel the cook's usual worries about whether everything would come out right. Liz is a great cook too, so I was anxious to measure up.\n\nI passed the platters of chicken and corn and proposed a toast. I offered thanks first to my hosts (who were also my guests) and then to Joel Salatin and his family for growing the food before us (and for giving it to us), and then finally to the chickens, who in one way or another had provided just about everything we were about to eat. This was my non-religious version of grace, I suppose.\n\nWe dug in and, as usually happens during a good meal, there was little talking at first, just a few murmurs of satisfaction. I don't mind saying the chicken was out of this world. The skin had turned the color of mahogany and the texture of parchment. The meat itself was moist, dense, and almost shockingly flavorful. I could taste the brine and apple wood, of course. But even more important, the chicken held its own against those strong flavors. This may not sound like much of a compliment, but to me the chicken smelled and tasted exactly like chicken. Liz agreed, saying it was a more \"chick eny\" chicken. What accounted for it? I know what Joel would have said: When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens too.\n\n#  GRASS-FED MAGIC\n\nEveryone was curious to hear about the farm, especially after tasting the food that had come off it. Liz and Mark's older son, Matthew, who is fifteen, asked a lot of questions about killing chickens. (He's currently a vegetarian and would only eat the corn.) I didn't think it was wise to go into detail at the dinner table. But I did talk about my week on the farm, about the Salatins and their animals. I explained the circle of chickens and cows and pigs and grass. I managed to avoid the details of manure and grubs and composted guts.\n\nSlowly the conversation drifted off from my adventures as a farmhand. We talked about Willie's songwriting (he is, mark my words, the next Bob Dylan), Matthew's summer football camp, Mark's and Liz's writing, school, politics, the war in Iraq, and on and on. Being a Friday late in June, this was one of the longest evenings of the year, so no one felt in a rush to finish. Besides, I'd just put the souffl\u00e9 in to bake when we sat down, so dessert was still a ways off.\n\nWhile we talked and waited for the souffl\u00e9 to complete its magic rise, the smell of baking chocolate seeped out of the kitchen and filled the house. Though I had avoided talking about it, my mind went to the long chain from manure to grass to cow to grubs to chicken to eggs. The chain didn't stop there, for I had turned the eggs into something else\u2014at least I hoped I had. When at last I told Willie the time had come to open the oven and cross your fingers, I saw his smile blossom first, then the great crown of souffl\u00e9 puffing out from the cinched white waist of its dish. Triumph!\n\nThere's something amazing about any souffl\u00e9, how a half dozen eggs flavored by nothing more than sugar and chocolate can turn into something so air-like. ( _Souffl\u00e9_ , \"to blow,\" comes from the Latin word for breath. When done right, it's more like a breath of food, rather than something solid.) This particular souffl\u00e9 was good, not great. Its texture was slightly grainier than it should have been, which makes me think I may have beaten the whites a little too long. But it tasted wonderful, everyone agreed, and as I rolled the rich yet weightless confection on my tongue, I closed my eyes and suddenly there they were: Joel's hens, marching down the gangplank from out of their Eggmobile, fanning out across the early-morning pasture, there in the grass where this magical bite began.\n\n**18**\n\n**The Forest**\n\n#  SURVIVOR: FOOD\n\nThere was one more meal I wanted to make. It was the meal at the end of the shortest food chain of all. What I had in mind was a dinner made entirely from foods I had hunted, gathered, and grown myself. Now, there are some people in the world (not many anymore) who make that sort of meal three times a day. I am not one of them.\n\nThe growing part was the only part I knew I could handle. I've been a gardener most of my life, and have made countless meals from my garden. That left hunting and gathering.\n\nI had never hunted in my life. Indeed, I had never fired a gun. (Unless you count cap pistols.) I've always thought of myself as pretty clumsy. Walking around with a loaded gun never seemed like a good idea.\n\nThanks to my mother, I did have some childhood experience as a gatherer. During the summer she would take us to the beach at low tide to dig for clams. We'd walk along the sand, looking for the airholes the clams made. Then we'd dig them up, until they squirted us in self-defense. At the end of summer we would pick beach plums that she would make into a delicious jelly the color of rubies. All winter long her beach plum jelly brought back memories of summer vacation: August on toast.\n\nWhat I most remember from these early foraging (food-gathering) trips were the scary warnings from my mother. Some mushrooms and berries have poisons in them, and she made sure I knew exactly how terrible it would be to eat one of them. When she was done I thought eating wild mushrooms was as dangerous as touching a downed power line. As a result I only gathered fruits I absolutely knew, like blueberries. And I never, ever touched a wild mushroom.\n\nBut I was determined to have wild mushrooms on the menu of my do-it-yourself meal. I think that's because mushroom hunting seems to be a perfect example of the omnivore's dilemma. Is that mushroom good food or is it poison? I'd have to learn to tell the difference.\n\n#  THE FIRST FOOD CHAIN\n\nWhy go to all this trouble? It's not as though we can bring back hunting and gathering as a way of life for most people. There's just not enough wild game and fruit to feed everyone. Of course, if we _did_ go back to that way of life, some of us might really enjoy it. Ancient hunter-gatherers worked much less than modern-day humans. It took them about seventeen hours a week to hunt and gather enough food for them and their families. Compare that to the forty-hour (or more) workweek we have today. And you'll be surprised to learn that hunter-gatherers ate better, grew taller, lived longer, and were healthier than \"civilized\" people. It's only in the last century that modern society has been able to match the health of its hunter-gatherer ancestors.\n\nBut whether we'd like it or not, we are clearly not returning to those days. So why did I want to make this last meal? Because it was as close as I could get to the original food chain, the way people fed themselves for the tens of thousands of years before agriculture. It is the food chain we evolved to be part of. I thought this meal might take me back to a time when the omnivore's dilemma wasn't as complicated, when we had a more direct connection with our food. It would give me a chance to look at the omnivore's dilemma in a new (or rather old) light.\n\nIt has often struck me that even though modern Americans don't ever need to grow, hunt, or gather our own food, a lot of us still do. We garden, we hunt, we pick wild mushrooms or berries. Even if all you can do is grow a few tomatoes in your backyard (and even if those tomatoes end up costing twice as much as the ones you can buy in the supermarket), you do it anyway. Why? I think it's an effort to be connected once again to our food. We don't want to be passive consumers, sitting at the end of a food chain and eating what we are served. My meal would be an extreme experiment in being an active and conscious eater.\n\nI had been part of three different food systems\u2014industrial, industrial organic, and beyond organic. Now I was going to _be_ the food system. There would be nothing between me and my food, from start to finish.\n\n#  POLLAN THE HUNTER\n\nI have to confess that there was more behind my desire to go hunting. Hunting is one of those skills that the all-American boy is supposed to have. (At least in some parts of the country.) Even the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau said so. \"We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,\" he wrote in his famous book _Walden._ This idea had always annoyed me. Was I less of a boy (or man) because I had never been hunting?\n\nNow I was finally going to hunt. Yet deciding to hunt was one thing; doing it was another. How was I going to learn to fire a gun, let alone hunt? Did I need a license? What if I actually managed to kill something\u2014 _then_ what? How do you \"dress\" an animal you've killed? ( _Dress_ is the word used to skin and gut an animal. A pretty weird choice of words when you think about it.) And what about those killer wild mushrooms? Would I be able to learn enough to overcome my fear of eating them?\n\nWhat I badly needed, I realized, was a kind of hunter-gatherer tutor. I needed someone skilled in the arts of hunting and gathering who also knew a lot about the animals, plants, and fungi of northern California. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that. On the eve of this experiment I had just moved to northern California, far away from the New England woods and fields I knew. I was going to have to learn to hunt and gather and garden on what amounted to a different planet, full of animals and plants I didn't know. What did people hunt here, anyway, and when did they hunt it? What time of year do the mushrooms mushroom around here, and where? I had a lot to learn.\n\n#  MY FORAGING GUIDE\n\nAs luck would have it, a perfect tutor appeared in my life at exactly the right moment. Angelo Garro is a stout, burly Italian with a five-day beard, sleepy brown eyes, and a passion about getting and preparing food. Shortly after we moved to California, I started running into Angelo.\n\nWe'd be invited to a dinner party and there would be Angelo among the guests. Only unlike the other guests, Angelo always had some story to tell about the meal. Maybe he'd gotten the halibut from a fishing boat that morning. Or he'd picked the fennel along the highway on the drive over. Or he'd made the wine or the ham himself. And unlike the other guests, Angelo always wound up in the kitchen cooking the dinner or passing platters of his famous fennel cakes. Meanwhile he would explain the proper way to make pasta or salami or balsamic vinegar. (Hint: For the last one, you need at least ten or twelve years and the right kind of barrels.) The guy was a one-man traveling Food Network.\n\n_Angelo Garro with a chanterelle._\n\nAfter a few of these dinners, I began to piece together Angelo's story. He's a fifty-eight-year-old Sicilian who left home at eighteen, following a girl to Canada. Twenty years later he followed a different girl to San Francisco, where he has lived ever since. He makes his living forging wrought iron items like garden gates and fences, railings, stairs, and fireplace tools. He lives in a forge that has been a blacksmith shop since the time of the California Gold Rush in 1849. Yet his consuming passion is food. He seems driven to recapture the flavors of his childhood back in Sicily. A successful dish, he will say, is one that \"tastes like my mother.\"\n\nSeveral months after I met Angelo he appeared again, this time, strangely enough, on my car radio. He was being interviewed on public radio for a story about foraging. The reporter followed Angelo on a porcini mushroom hunt and then into a duck blind at dawn. While he waited for the sun and the ducks to rise, Angelo spoke in a whisper about his past and his passions. \"In Sicily I could tell by the smell what time of the year it was,\" he said. \"Orange season, oranges, persimmons, olives, and olive oil.\n\n\"I have the passions of foraging, passion of hunting, opera, my work,\" he told the reporter. \"I have the passion of cooking, pickling, curing salamis, sausage, making wine in the fall. This is my life. I do this with my friends. It's to my heart.\"\n\nEven before the radio segment ended I knew I had found my guide. The next time I bumped into Angelo I asked him if I could tag along on his next foraging trip. \"Sure, okay, we go hunt chanterelle in Sonoma. I call you when it's time.\" Feeling bolder, I asked about going hunting too. \"Okay, we could hunt one day, maybe some duck, maybe the pig, but first you need license and learn to shoot.\"\n\n_The pig?_ Clearly there was even more to learn than I had thought.\n\n#  HUNTING FOR DUMMIES\n\nIt took me a couple of months to sort out the rules for getting a hunter's license. They involved taking a hunter education course and taking a test. It seems they'll sell a high-powered rifle to just about anybody in California, but it's against the law to aim the thing at an animal without a fourteen-hour class and a multiple-choice exam. The next class was on a Saturday two months off.\n\nOnce I knew I would be going hunting and gathering, something strange happened. I started looking for food everywhere I went. Suddenly a walk in the woods wasn't just a walk. It was now a search for supper. Woody Allen once said as a joke that \"nature is an enormous restaurant.\" Maybe he was right.\n\nI started dividing everything I saw into two groups. Some things were probably good to eat. Others were not. Of course, in most cases I had no real idea which was which. Still, I began to notice things. I noticed the soft yellow globes of chamomile flowers on the path I hiked most afternoons. They're used to make chamomile tea. I spotted clumps of miner's lettuce off in the shade. That's a tasty green I had once grown in my Connecticut garden. And there was wild mustard, another green, growing out in the sun. There were blackberries in flower. I even saw some wild birds that were good to eat: a few quail, a pair of doves. I began looking at field guides to help me identify all the different unfamiliar species.\n\nOkay, maybe I went a little overboard. You don't really want to turn nature into a big restaurant. But looking for food did change the way I looked at nature. It made me look more closely at everything. It made me pay attention in a way I hadn't in years.\n\n#  THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, PART II\n\nHiking in the Berkeley hills one afternoon in January I followed the path into a grove of big oaks. I was looking for chanterelle mushrooms. I knew that they grew around old live oak trees. The problem was that up until now, I'd only seen a chanterelle over pasta or in the market. Would I be able to recognize a wild one?\n\nI knew I was looking for a yellowish-orange, thick trumpet shape. I carefully scanned the fallen leaves around a couple of oaks, hoping to spot one. Nothing. After a while I decided to give up. Then I noticed something bright and yellow pushing up through the carpet of leaves. It was not two feet from where I'd just stepped. I brushed away the leaves and there it was, this big, fleshy, vase-shaped mushroom that I was dead certain had to be a chanterelle.\n\nOr was it?\n\nWas I really _dead_ certain?\n\nI took the mushroom home, brushed off the soil, and put it on a plate. Then I pulled out my field guides. Inside one I found a picture and a description. Everything matched the mushroom on my plate. The color was right. So were the shape, the smell, and the markings on the underside. I felt fairly confident this was a chanterelle. But confident enough to eat it? Not quite. The field guide said there was something called a \"false chanterelle.\" It looked roughly the same as the real one. Uh-oh.\n\nMy mother's mushroom warnings rang in my ears. I couldn't trust my eyes. I couldn't quite trust the field guide. So whom could I trust? Angelo! But that meant driving my lone mushroom across the bridge to San Francisco. That seemed a little nuts. I realized if I was that worried, I'd never be able to enjoy it. So I threw it out.\n\nThat chanterelle (or was it a false chanterelle?) reminded me of the basic problem that had started me on my food chain journey\u2014the omnivore's dilemma. My first found mushroom had become a victim of this very dilemma. Not a very promising way to start. Of course, choosing between two boxes of breakfast cereal is a little different from deciding if a mushroom will poison you. But at its heart, the problem is the same\u2014we have to figure out what is safe and good to eat.\n\nBy going back to a hunter-gatherer meal, I would have to solve the problem of what to eat the old-fashioned way. There would be no industrial food chain between me and my food. I'd have to gain direct knowledge of the plants, animals, and fungi I was going to eat. I'd see them in their natural state. I would have the help of some friends, but when it came down to it, I would have to solve the omnivore's dilemma myself.\n\nAnd speaking of dilemmas, I was about to face another one. In my travels I had learned a lot about where our meat comes from. I had seen the factory farms and feedlots. I had even slaughtered some chickens at Polyface Farm. That experience had left me unsettled. I was beginning to have conflicts about eating animals. How did I feel about it? Was it right? I thought that hunting would bring me face-to-face with those conflicts. I'd either work them out or I'd have to stop eating meat.\n**19**\n\n**Eating Animals**\n\n#  THE MEAT EATER'S DILEMMA\n\nHere's a dilemma for you. I was sitting in the Palm, a famous steakhouse, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. On the table in front of me, open to the first page, was a copy of a book about animal rights called _Animal Liberation_. If that sounds like a recipe for indigestion, well, that was sort of the idea. I was a meat eater who was wrestling with the idea of eating meat. I wanted to tackle the problem head-on and so there I was, with a delicious steak and a book that said it was wrong to eat that steak.\n\nIt had been a long time since I had felt any dilemma about eating meat, but some things had changed. I had owned (and visited) my own steer. I had worked the killing cones in Joel Salatin's processing shed. Now I was getting ready to hunt and kill a wild animal. I had a lot to think about.\n\nI was especially thinking about my steer, number 534. I knew that on the next day, he was going to be sent to the slaughterhouse. I had followed his life so far, from when he was a calf on the prairie to his days in the feedlot, but his death was the one event I was not allowed to witness.\n\nThis didn't surprise me. The meat industry does not want Americans to know what happens in a slaughterhouse. Then again, most of us don't want to know. We don't want to think about the living animals that become our food. But I had resolved to think about it. Maybe it was a little late, but I wanted to see if I could defend what I had already done and what I was about to do.\n\n#  TO MEAT OR NOT TO MEAT?\n\n_Animal Liberation_ is one of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. It is by Peter Singer, a leader of the animal rights movement. The book has converted countless thousands to vegetarianism. It didn't take me long to see why: Within a few pages he had thrown me and my meat eating on the defensive.\n\nSinger's argument is simple. He does not argue that animals are as intelligent as human beings. He doesn't argue that they should be treated the same as human beings. He merely points out that animals can suffer just as we do.\n\nA cow is different from us in many ways. But Singer says that a cow is not different at all in this one very important way: It feels pain and suffers just as we do. If we think suffering is wrong, how can we allow suffering of animals to go on?\n\nSinger had planted a troubling notion, one that stuck in my mind. In the days that followed, I read other animal rights thinkers: writers like Tom Regan, James Rachels, Joy Williams, and Matthew Scully. These writers all ask: Is it all right to allow animals to suffer just because they are animals? Isn't that a kind of discrimination? I began to think they might be right. Not too long ago, racism and discrimination against women was accepted by a lot of people. Now those ideas are rejected by most Americans. Maybe some time in the future people will look back at our treatment of animals in the same way.\n\nSinger says we have a simple choice to make. We have to choose between our desire to eat meat and allowing the suffering of animals to continue. Put it that way and it seems you have no choice. You have to stop eating animals.\n\nSo that is what I did, at least temporarily. I felt that until I had worked out exactly how I felt about these issues, I had better give up eating meat. So on a September Sunday, after dining on a delicious barbecued tenderloin of pork, I became a reluctant\u2014and, I hoped, temporary\u2014vegetarian.\n\n#  THE VEGETARIAN'S DILEMMA\n\nBecoming a vegetarian wasn't as simple as you might think. Like all vegetarians, I had to decide on my rules and exceptions. For one thing, I did not become a vegan (I still ate eggs and dairy). I decided that eggs and milk can be gotten from animals without hurting or killing them\u2014or so, at least, I thought. I was also willing to eat animals without faces, such as clams and oysters. I believe these animals do not have enough of a nervous system to suffer pain. No one knows for certain if this is true, but many scientists and animal rights supporters (Peter Singer included) accept the argument.\n\nRules in place, I settled into my new vegetarian lifestyle. It was harder than I thought it would be. Cooking a good vegetarian dinner takes a lot more thought and work. (All that chopping of vegetables!) Cooking a steak or a chicken is a lot easier.\n\nI also found that being a vegetarian makes it harder to eat with other people. My friends now had to change their eating plans for me, and this made me uncomfortable. As a guest, if I forget to tell my hosts in advance that I don't eat meat, they feel bad. But if I _do_ tell them, they'll make something special for me, and _I'll_ feel bad. If we go out to a restaurant, it has to be someplace where I can get something to eat. Steakhouses are definitely out.\n\nBeing a vegetarian also meant giving up traditions I value: the Thanksgiving turkey, my mother's beef brisket at Passover, or even franks at the ballpark. Such foods connect us to our family, religion, nation, and history. Meat eating has been a part of human culture for tens of thousands of years. It's part of our biology too. Our bodies, from our teeth to our brains, evolved to help us hunt, cook, and eat meat. The desire to eat meat may be an instinct, something that is in our genes. Of course, as humans we can and sometimes should learn to rise above our instincts. I'm just saying that giving up meat is not something that comes easily, at least for me.\n\n#  ANIMAL SUFFERING\n\nBut even with all the conflicts I had about being vegetarian, none of the things that bothered me seemed more important than stopping animal suffering. The question that I needed to answer was this: Is there a way to raise farm animals and kill them for food without causing suffering?\n\nScientists agree that higher animals\u2014mammals like cows or pigs or apes\u2014feel pain pretty much as we do. But suffering is more than pain. A lot of human suffering comes from our emotions\u2014fear, shame, worry, or regret. Animals don't seem to suffer from emotions the way humans do. Animals can't feel the same fear of death as a human, because they can't imagine the future. I've watched cows walk up a ramp into a slaughterhouse. They seem to be feeling no fear or panic. They don't seem to be suffering at all.\n\nSo can animals suffer if they can't think like human beings? After wrestling with the question for some time, I decided that animal suffering is real but different from human suffering. Still, I want to make one thing very clear. Even if animals can't suffer like human beings, there is no excuse for the cruelty that goes on in our factory farms and feedlots. Believe me, the people who run those places don't waste any time thinking about animal suffering. If they did, they'd have to go out of business.\n\nSo far I've told you about how chickens and cows are raised on factory farms. It turns out that conditions are even worse for the chickens in egg farms. I haven't managed to actually get into one of these places. I tried\u2014journalists are not welcome. But you can read about what happens right in the industry trade magazines. What they tell us is horrifying.\n\nAt a factory egg farm, the laying hen spends her brief life jammed into a wire cage with six other hens. The cage is so small that a single page of a newspaper could cover the floor. Being trapped in a tiny cage with six other birds goes against every natural instinct of a chicken. As a result the hens do things no normal chicken would do. They attack and try to eat each other. They rub their breasts against the wire of the cage until they are bald and bleeding. This is the chief reason broilers don't get put in cages. To scar so much high-value breast meat would be bad business.\n\n_Laying hens crammed into cages at a factory egg farm._\n\nPain? Suffering? Madness? Whatever you want to call it, some of the hens simply can't take it. Ten percent just die in their cages. The companies that run the farms expect this death rate and figure it into the cost of production.\n\nThe fate of the survivors might be worse. When their egg production begins to drop, the hens will be \"force-molted\"\u2014starved of food, water, and light for several days in order to stimulate a final spurt of egg laying before their life's work is done.\n\n#  BLIND BUSINESS\n\nWhen you refuse to look away from the industrial food system, this is what you see. You see the cruelty required to produce eggs that can be sold for seventy-nine cents a dozen. We don't look, or we are kept from looking by agribusiness companies. Why don't _they_ see the cruelty they are causing?\n\nBig business is often blind, except to profit. Morality just doesn't enter into a spreadsheet. Customs, culture, ideas about right and wrong all fall away under the pressure to increase production and get a higher return on investment. Mercy toward animals is just one of the principles that gets thrown out the window. Mercy to human beings often follows. It is no accident that the non-union workers in these factories receive little more consideration than the animals.\n\nThe food industry won't even use the word _suffering_. Instead they talk about \"stress.\" Solutions to stress must be found, because it hurts production and therefore profits. But the solutions often involve more cruelty. If chickens are pecking at each other in cages, the industry doesn't let them out of their cages. Instead factory farms clip the beaks off their laying hens. When hogs bite each other's tails because of stress, the industry cuts off their tails. But not the whole tail. They leave a stub so the bite is more painful. That \"teaches\" the pigs to avoid being bitten.\n\nIt's painful just to write these things and I'm sure it's painful to read them. It all sounds like a nightmare. But it's real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born into the industrial food chain. In response to the horrors of the factory farm, becoming a vegetarian seems pretty reasonable.\n\n#  ANIMAL HAPPINESS\n\nYet are those our only choices? Must we either take part in the crime of factory farms or give up meat? I have seen other types of farms and other ways to treat farm animals. I'm thinking of the hens I saw at Polyface Farm, fanning out over the cow pasture on a June morning, pecking at the cowpats and the grass. Those chickens were doing everything a chicken naturally wants and needs to do. If there is such a thing as animal happiness, then those animals were happy.\n\nIt is true that farms like Polyface are but a tiny speck compared to the industrial food chain. But they do exist. And they show that there is another way to raise and slaughter animals. Of course, many people in the animal rights movement thinks even a farm like Polyface is a \"death camp.\" They think any use of animals for food is morally wrong, not just killing them for meat, but using their milk or eggs. But comparing a farm like Polyface to a concentration camp is to ignore reality\u2014the reality of domesticated animals.\n\nChickens and cows are domestic animals. They have evolved to live with human beings. A good life for a chicken or a cow means doing all those things its nature tells it to do. That means chickens need to scratch in the dirt. Cows need to eat grass. And cows and chickens need humans to help them do those things. Animals rights people say we should free domestic animals, but domestic animals cannot survive in the wild. They cannot lead a good life apart from human beings. (Pigs can sometimes survive in the wild, as we will see.)\n\nAnimal rights supporters say that raising farm animals is a form of slavery. This is based on the false idea that humans went out and forced animals to be domesticated. But the history of domestication is much more complicated. Zoologists will tell you that certain animals more or less \"chose\" domestication. Individual wild animals discovered that they could better survive by hanging around human beings, eating their crops or leftovers. A deal was made. It was never written down or spoken, but it was a deal nonetheless. Humans began providing the animals with food and protection. In exchange the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and\u2014yes\u2014their flesh. The animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves in the wild. Humans helped this along by breeding the individuals that were tamer.\n\nFrom the animals' point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have almost disappeared. (There are ten thousand wolves left in North America and fifty _million_ dogs.) For many animals, domestication has been a winning strategy. Some people speak of animal liberation, but what would liberation mean to the millions of cows and chickens on our farms? It would mean a swift and unpleasant death, starvation, or attack by predators. And eventually it would mean the end of chickens, cattle, and many of the other domesticated species that at this point depend on us for their continued existence\u2014depend, that is, on us eating them.\n\nIn nature there are always predators and prey. Have chickens, cows, and pigs traded one set of predators for another? Yes. They traded a life of being hunted in the wild for a life of being raised, bred, and eaten by humans. They have no other option now.\n\n#  A VEGAN WORLD?\n\nThere was one other problem I had with being a vegetarian. I just didn't see how we could have a world in which people ate only plants. It would pose serious problems.\n\nA vegan world could not be fed with local food chains. The globe is full of places where it is much easier to raise animals than crops. The rocky, hilly land of New England is a good example. To put New England on a vegan diet would mean most of its food would have to be imported from elsewhere.\n\nWithout animals to supply fertility (through their manure) you can't have small sustainable farms. You'd have to rely on chemical fertilizer from the industrial food chain.\n\nYou have to ask yourself which is better, tofu from an industrial food chain farm, shipped thousands of miles across the country, or an organic chicken raised on a small farm a few miles from my house? I would choose the chicken over the tofu.\n\nAs you can probably tell, after a lot of soul-searching I decided to give up my short experiment with being a vegetarian. I was glad I had done it, because it forced me to think hard about these questions. But in the end I decided that killing animals is not wrong in principle. What matters is the way we treat them when they are alive and the way we slaughter them when it's time for them to be eaten. Perhaps vegetarians and concerned meat eaters can at least agree on this: We have to work much harder to make sure that animals on farms are treated with respect. They have to be allowed to live lives that fit their natures. Then when it is time for the slaughterhouse, their deaths should be swift and painless.\n\n#  MY STEER BECOMES A STEAK\n\nThe day after my steak-and-Singer dinner at the Palm I found myself on a plane flying from Atlanta to Denver. A couple of hours into the flight the pilot came on the public address system to announce that we were passing over Liberal, Kansas. This was very weird. The pilot hadn't said one word until then. This was the first, last, and only landmark that he pointed out. Why had he chosen that town?\n\nIt wasn't just weird, it was spooky. For Liberal, Kansas, happened to be the town where my steer, possibly that very day, was being slaughtered. I'm not a superstitious person, but this gave me the creeps. I could only wonder what was going on just then, thirty thousand feet below me, on the kill floor of the National Beef Plant. Was steer number 534 about to meet his fate?\n\nI could only wonder because the company had refused to let me see. When I'd visited the plant earlier that spring I watched steers being unloaded from trailers into corrals. I watched them being led up a ramp and through a blue door. I was not allowed to see what happened inside, on what is called the kill floor. But as it turned out, I was able to ask an expert, the person who had actually designed that very ramp and the killing machinery behind the blue door.\n\n#  A CLEAN KILL\n\nTemple Grandin is an animal handling expert who has consulted for McDonald's. Her job is to make sure the killing of cows at National Beef is as quick and painless as possible. Before she began her work, there were many stories coming from the plant about cows that were still alive when they were being skinned and butchered. McDonald's hired Grandin to make sure that sort of thing never happened.\n\nHere's how Grandin described what happened to steer 534 after he passed through the blue door:\n\n\"The animal goes into the chute single file. The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he's straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a twenty-degree angle, and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground, and he's being carried along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can't look down and see he's off the ground. That would panic him.\"\n\nI had been wondering what 534 would be feeling as he neared his end. Would he have any hint\u2014a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line\u2014that this was no ordinary day? Would he, in other words, suffer? Grandin answered me before I had time to ask.\n\n\"Does the animal know it's going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them going into the squeeze chutes on the feedlot, getting their shots, and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die you'd see much more agitated behavior.\n\n_Information and diagram courtesy of Dr. Temple Grandin, Professor, Department of Animal Sciences, Colorado State University._\n\n\"Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a pneumatic-powered 'gun' that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When it's done correctly it will kill the animal on the first shot.\n\n\"After the animal is shot, while he's riding along a worker wraps one of his feet and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg, he's carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his throat. Animal rights people say they're cutting live animals, but that's because there's a lot of reflex kicking. What I look for is, is the head dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He'd better not be trying to hold it up\u2014then you've got a live one on the rail. Just in case, they have another stunner in the bleed area.\"\n\n#  DON'T LOOK AWAY\n\nTemple Grandin's account answered some of my questions but raised others. After all, she designed the system, so of course she would describe it in the best possible light. I couldn't help thinking about all those times \"you've got a live one on the rail.\" At National Beef they slaughter four hundred head of cattle every hour. McDonald's says it's okay if they have a 5 percent \"error rate.\" That could mean twenty cows an hour suffer a painful death. Is that okay? Is it moral to eat meat from a slaughterhouse like National Beef? In the end we all have to decide for ourselves.\n\nI believe the best solution is really Joel Salatin's. The killing at his farm is done out in the open, where anyone can see. After watching (and taking part) I decided I was all right with what had happened. No doubt some of us will decide we can't accept any killing of animals, no matter how it is done. But we can only decide if we know the truth\u2014if we _look_.\n\nI remember a story Joel told me about a man who showed up at the farm one morning. When Joel noticed a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) bumper sticker on the man's car, he figured he was in for an angry argument. But the man had a different reason to be there. He explained that he had been a vegetarian for sixteen years. He was thinking about eating meat again but felt the only way he could do it was if he killed the animal himself. So Joel grabbed a chicken and took the man into the processing shed.\n\n\"He slit the bird's throat and watched it die,\" Joel recalled. \"He saw that the animal did not look at him accusingly. He saw that the animal had been treated with respect while it was alive and that it could have a respectful death.\" The man realized that the animals on Salatin's farm were not being treated like unfeeling raw material, but like living creatures. I realized I'd seen this too, which explains why I was able to kill a chicken one day and eat it the next.\n\nThe brutality of the industrial food system in America is something that is pretty recent. No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as cruelly as we do. This crime of cruelty is only possible because we do not ask and we are not allowed to see what is going on in the meat industry. We need public information about what is happening every day to our farm animals. Imagine if there was a law that the walls of America's slaughterhouses had to be made of glass. If Americans could see what was happening behind those walls, they would not allow it to continue. Tail docking and beak clipping would disappear overnight. Slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end\u2014for who could stand the sight?\n\n**20**\n\n**Hunting**\n\n#  A WALK IN THE WOODS\n\nHunting is exciting. It embarrasses me to write that, but it's true. I discovered this the first time I went into a forest with a loaded rifle. Hunting makes everything sharper, more vivid. It made me pay attention like nothing else I have ever done.\n\nAs I walk out on my hunt, I notice how the breezes move the pine needles. Their shadows wave on the tree trunks and the forest floor. I notice the way the air feels. My eyes search deep into thickets, looking for the slightest hint of movement. I listen carefully to every little noise, the cracking of a branch or . . . wait: _What was that?_ Just a bird.\n\nAngelo, my hunting tutor, has taught me how to read the ground for signs of pig. Notice the freshly dug soil at the base of that oak tree? It's still wet\u2014the sun hasn't dried it out yet. This means pigs have been rooting here overnight. See that smoothly scooped-out puddle of water? That's a wallow, but notice how the water is perfectly clear. Pigs haven't disturbed it yet today. We could wait here for them.\n\nAfter hunting here for years, Angelo knows there are three groups of pigs sharing the oak forest in northern California where he took me hunting. Each group visits a slightly different set of good pig places. This grove of oaks is where they dig for acorns, roots, and grubs. In the afternoon heat they snooze in the dusty dirt beneath that tangle of manzanita trees. They cool off in those muddy wallows, leaving the marks of their hoofprints. Then they scrape the mud from their backs on that pine tree there, the one where the lower bark is rubbed smooth and tan.\n\n#  THE WILD PIG\n\nPart of me did not want to go hunting. The night before, I had nightmares. In one dream I was on a bobbing boat trying to shoot a destroyer that was firing its cannons at me. In another, the woods were crawling with Angelo's Sicilian relatives. In that dream I couldn't remember how my gun worked, if the safety was on or off.\n\nI had tried out my rifle only once before taking it to the woods, at a firing range in the Oakland hills. By the end of the morning my paper target didn't show much damage. But my left shoulder ached for a week. I wasn't ready to buy a gun of my own, so Angelo had borrowed a fairly basic pump-action rifle, a .270 Winchester. I had been worried that I wouldn't have the nerve to fire at an animal. And after my session at the range, I began to worry that if I did fire, I would miss completely.\n\nThe plan was to hunt boar in the countryside north of San Francisco. A friend of Angelo's has a thousand-acre property up there and Angelo has permission to hunt on it. We could have hunted for deer or turkey or duck, but I felt more comfortable going for wild pig. The animal is not native, and is regarded as a pest in many parts of California. That made it easier for me. Wild pigs can be pretty nasty. One of their nicknames in California is \"dog ripper.\" They destroy farmland and forest by ripping up the ground with their digging (or \"rooting,\" as it is called).\n\n_This is the paper target I used at the firing range in the Oakland hills. Each hole is one shot. Some of my shots didn't even hit to the paper target._\n\nSo I had a good excuse for hunting pigs. But I also had another reason\u2014I like pork, and since moving to California I'd often heard how tasty wild pigs are. When I asked Angelo why he hunted wild pig he didn't hesitate. He just kissed the tips of his fingers and said, \"Because it is the most delicious meat. And there is nothing that tastes so good as boar prosciutto.\" (Prosciutto is a kind of ham.) \"You'll see. You shoot a big one and we'll make some.\"\n\n#  HAM HUNTING\n\nIn a sense, that's what Angelo was really hunting, not pigs so much as prosciutto. Maybe because he's been hunting his whole life, he doesn't talk about the thrill of it all. \"For me it is all about the eating. Not the 'sport,'\" he told me. \"I am not what you call a trophy hunter. I take what I need, enough to make a nice dinner for me and my friends, maybe some salami, a prosciutto, but then: That's it, I go home.\"\n\nOn my first hunt with Angelo we were joined by Richard, the owner of the property, and Angelo's friend Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre hadn't hunted in years, though he had grown up hunting boar with his relatives in northern France. He had on one of those green felt Alpine hats with the feather and a pair of tall black riding boots. Richard had on a full orange hunter's outfit and I was wearing my brightest orange sweater. (Hunters wear bright clothing so other hunters won't mistake them for a wild pig or a deer.)\n\nWe divided into pairs, me with Angelo. Our plan was to meet back at the cars for lunch around noon. Jean-Pierre and Richard walked off into the lower forest. Angelo and I rode up to the top of a grassy ridge on his four-wheel-drive ATV. The bike made a racket, but Angelo claimed it didn't bother the pigs and would allow us to cover a lot more ground than we could on foot.\n\n_Jean-Pierre grew up hunting boar in northern France._\n\n\"You are going to kill your first pig today,\" Angelo shouted over the roar of the engine. Given the nature of hunting, not to mention me, I understood this as less a prediction than a prayer.\n\nAfter a while we parked the bike and set out on foot. Angelo told me to head for a wallow in a grassy opening at the bottom of a ravine. When I got close I was to find a tree with a good view of it and wait there, perfectly still, for twenty minutes until I heard him whistle. He would make his way toward the same spot from another direction, in the hopes of driving some pigs toward me.\n\n#  HUNTER'S EYE\n\nWhen I was alone, and could hear Angelo's footsteps no more, I fell into that state of extreme alertness I described earlier. It was as if I'd dialed up the volume on all my senses. I heard every little sound. I could see farther into the woods than I ever had before, picking out the tiniest movements. It was as if I had put on a new, strong pair of glasses for the first time. \"Hunter's eye,\" Angelo called it when I told him about it later.\n\nIt was a completely different feeling than I get from just walking through the woods on a hike. It was the difference between being a spectator at a ball game and one of the players. It was the difference between being a tourist and belonging to a place. I felt part of the forest, instead of just a visitor.\n\nWe saw no pigs that morning, and around noon, we met back at the cars as planned. Jean-Pierre had shot a small boar and Angelo hung it from a nearby branch. Then we turned to eating. Being Europeans, Angelo and Jean-Pierre take lunch very seriously, even when out in the woods. \"So I brought with me a few little things to nibble on,\" Jean-Pierre mumbled. \"Me too,\" chimed Angelo. And out of their packs came course after course of the most astonishing picnic. They laid the feast on the hood of Angelo's SUV. There was:\n\nGELLED LOBSTER AND HALIBUT   \nHOMEMADE SALAMI, PROSCIUTTO, AND MORTADELLA   \nHOMEMADE P\u0202T\u00c9 OF BOAR   \nHOME-CURED OLIVES   \nCHICKEN SALAD   \nA GENEROUS SELECTION OF CHEESES AND BREADS   \nFRESH STRAWBERRIES   \nPASTRIES\n\nAnd naturally, a bottle each of red and white wine.\n\nIt was a delicious lunch, but it took off some of my hunter's edge. After lunch Angelo stayed behind to dress the small pig and Jean-Pierre lay down in the grass for a nap. I was feeling pretty relaxed when Richard and I set off to look for another pig. Our rifles slung over our shoulders, we strolled down a shady trail and chatted as we walked. My attention floated away from the woods and the hunt.\n\n#  READY. OR NOT.\n\nUntil I happened to glance up and saw directly in front of us, not thirty yards away, four large black shapes in the shadows. There they were, four pigs milling beneath an oak tree, eating acorns off the forest floor. They gave no sign that they'd spotted us or heard our yammering.\n\nI grabbed Richard by the shoulder, put my finger to my lips, and pointed ahead. He stopped. \"It's your shot,\" he whispered. \"Go ahead. Take it.\" It's the custom when hunting that the first shot belongs to the person who spotted the animal. These pigs were mine.\n\nOne little problem. I had neglected to pump my rifle before we set out on the trail. There was no bullet in the chamber, and to cock my gun now would make a loud noise. The pigs would be on the run by the time I was ready to shoot. I explained all this in a whisper to Richard, who, unlike me, was ready. I gave him my shot.\n\nRichard got down on one knee and slowly raised his rifle to his shoulder. I braced for the explosion, preparing to pump my gun the moment it came. Richard took his time, aiming carefully. The pigs had their heads down, eating acorns. Then the woods exploded. I saw a pig stagger and fall, then struggle drunkenly to its feet. I pumped my rifle, but it was already too late: The other pigs were gone. Richard fired again at the wounded pig and it fell. By the time we ran up to it, it was already dead. I felt a rush that made me light-headed and shaky.\n\nThe pig was a sow weighing perhaps a hundred pounds. She was too heavy to carry, so we took turns dragging her by her rear legs back toward the cars. Holding the pig by the ankle, I could still feel her warmth beneath the bristly skin.\n\nWhen we got to the cars, Angelo trotted over to see the animal, excited and eager to hear our story. As we told him what had happened I could see the disappointment on his face. It had been my shot, my pig, but I hadn't taken it.\n\n\"You weren't ready,\" Angelo said in a level voice. \"In hunting you always need to be ready. So, okay, you learned something today. Next time you will be ready and you will take your shot.\" He was trying hard not to sound like the disappointed father. I couldn't help feeling like the disappointing son.\n\nI spent the rest of the afternoon hunting alone, walking the ridge, searching the shadows for signs of pig, looking and listening as hard as I could to will another animal out of the woods. When Angelo announced it was time to go home, I felt deflated.\n\n#  A SECOND TRY\n\nWell, I _had_ gone hunting. Plus, Jean-Pierre offered me some cuts from his pig, so I had some meat for my meal. But I hadn't done what I'd set out to do\u2014kill my own food. So I asked Angelo if I could go out with him again. He called me about a month later, said to meet him on a Monday morning, six o'clock sharp. We would be going back to Richard's property again and this time it would be just the two of us.\n\nWe spent the first part of the morning going to all of Angelo's pig spots. (Believe me, I made sure I had a round in my chamber.) It was hotter than last time, so Angelo felt the pigs would be keeping to the shadier parts of the property. We staked out a wallow deep in the woods, and then a clearing of ferns, but saw no signs of pig.\n\nA little after nine in the morning we were walking together down a logging road cut into a steep hillside. Then we heard it. We were stopped in our tracks by a grunt so loud and deep that it seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth. A very big pig was very close by. But where? What direction to look? We crouched down low, and I listened as hard as I've ever listened for anything before.\n\nThe next sound we heard was the sharp, clean crack of a branch coming from above us to our right. I looked up to the top of the thickly wooded hillside and that's when I saw it: a rounded black form, coming over the top of the hill. Then another shape, and another, a total of five or six, I couldn't be sure.\n\nI touched Angelo on the shoulder and pointed toward the pigs. _What should I do? Should I shoot? No, you wait,_ Angelo said. _See\u2014they're coming down the hill now._ I followed the pigs with the barrel of my gun, trying to get one of them in my sight. I didn't have a clear shot\u2014too many trees stood in the way. _Take your time,_ Angelo whispered. _They will come to us._ And so they did, right down to the road directly in front of us.\n\n#  MY PIG\n\nI have no idea how long it took the pigs to pick their way down the steep hill, whether it was minutes or just seconds. At last the first animal, a big black one, stepped out into the clearing of the dirt road, followed by another that was just as big but much lighter in color. The second pig turned, giving me a shot at its flank. _Now!_ Angelo whispered. _This is your shot!_\n\nWe were both down on one knee. I braced the rifle against my shoulder and lined up my sight. I felt calmer and clearer than I expected to as I took aim at the shoulder of the grayish pig. I held my breath, resisted a sudden urge to clamp my eyes shut, and gently squeezed.\n\nThe crystal stillness of the scene exploded. The pigs ran in panic, moving every which way at once, and then the _blam!_ of Angelo's shot directly behind made me jump. One pig was down; another seemed to stagger. I pumped my gun to fire again, but I was so excited that I pulled the trigger before I could lower my gun. The shot went wild, far over the heads of the rioting pigs. Angelo fired again and so did I. Then they were gone.\n\n#  I DID IT\u2014OR DID I?\n\nWe ran forward to the downed animal, a very large grayish sow sprawled on her side across the dirt road. A glossy bubble of blood grew directly beneath her ear. The pig thrashed briefly, attempting to lift her head, then gave it up. Death was quickly overtaking her. I was relieved she wouldn't need a second shot. We ran past her, looking for the others. Angelo said he thought he had grazed another one. I climbed down the embankment looking for it, but the hill was too steep and Angelo called me back up to the road.\n\nHe clapped me on the back. \"Your first pig! Look at the size of it. And with a perfect shot, right in the head. You did it!\"\n\n_Did_ I do it? Was that really my shot? I had my doubts. Yet Angelo insisted\u2014he had fired at a different pig, a black one. \"No, this is your pig, Michael, you killed it, there's no doubt in my mind. You got yourself a big one. That's some very nice prosciutto!\"\n\nI wasn't ready to see it as meat, though. What I saw was a dead wild animal, its head lying on the dirt in a widening circle of blood. I kneeled down and pressed the palm of my hand against the pig's belly above the nipples. Beneath the dusty, bristly skin I felt her warmth, but no heartbeat.\n\nI was overcome with a strong mix of emotions. The first was a powerful feeling of pride: I had actually done what I'd set out to do. I had successfully shot a pig. I felt a flood of relief too, that the deed was done, thank God, and didn't need to be done again.\n\nAnd then there was this wholly unexpected feeling of thankfulness. For my good fortune, I guess, and to Angelo, of course, but also to this animal, for stepping over the crest of that hill and into my sight, to become what Angelo kept calling her: _your pig._ I felt it wasn't my skill that had brought me this animal. It was a gift\u2014from whom or what, I couldn't say\u2014and thankfulness is what I felt.\n\nThere was one emotion I expected to feel but did not. I felt no sorrow or remorse. Those would come later. But at that moment, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific\u2014completely _happy._ Angelo wanted to take my picture, so he posed me behind my pig, one hand cradling the rifle across my chest, the other resting on the animal. I thought I should look serious for the picture, but I couldn't stop smiling.\n\n#  FROM ANIMAL TO MEAT\n\n_Angelo posing with my pig after hanging it from the limb of an oak to be gutted and skinned._\n\n_Angelo made a cut across the pig's belly and pulled the skin loose. The inside-out skin looked like a sweater coming off._\n\nThe happy excitement didn't last. Less than an hour later I was hugging the pig's carcass as it hung from the limb of an oak. My job was to hold it steady while Angelo reached in and pulled out the guts. We had used a block and tackle and two hooks to raise the pig by its rear ankles. A scale attached to the rig gave the weight of the animal: 190 pounds. The pig weighed exactly as much as I did.\n\nDressing the pig meant getting much closer to it than I really wanted. Angelo made a shallow cut across the pig's belly and began to gently work the hide loose. I held down a narrow flap of skin while he cut into the fat behind it, leaving as much of the creamy white layer as possible. \"This is really good fat,\" Angelo explained, \"for the salami.\" The flap of skin grew larger as we worked our way down the body and then slowly pulled it down over the pig's shoulders. The inside-out skin looked like a sweater coming off. What hunters call dressing an animal is really an undressing.\n\nAs we drew the skin down over the rib cage it exposed the bullet, or what remained of the bullet. It had passed through the animal and torn a ragged slot in the last rib, where it came to rest just beneath the hide. \"Here's a souvenir for you,\" Angelo said, pulling the bloody, mangled chunk of metal from the bone like a tooth and handing it to me.\n\nUsing a short knife, Angelo made another shallow cut the length of the animal's belly. He talked while he worked, mostly about the dishes he could make from the different parts of the pig. I could not believe Angelo was still talking about food. The pig was splayed open now. I could see all its organs: the bluish intestine and the spongy pink pair of lungs. I'd handled plenty of chicken guts on Joel's farm, but this was different and more disturbing. That was probably because the pig's internal organs looked exactly like human organs.\n\nI held the cavity open while Angelo reached in to pull out the liver (\"for a nice p\u00e2t\u00e9\"). He cut it free and dropped it into a Ziploc bag. Then he reached in and pulled, and the rest of the guts tumbled out onto the ground in a heap. There was a stench so awful it made me gag. It was a mix of pig manure and piss with an odor of death. I felt a wave of sickness begin to build in my gut. I still had my arms wrapped around the pig from behind, but I told Angelo I wanted to take a picture. What I really wanted was a breath of fresh air.\n\n#  THE JOY OF HUNTING\n\nThe disgust I felt was so strong I wondered how I could ever eat this animal now. How could I serve it to my friends? Some of the disgust I felt made sense. After all, part of the stench was from the waste in the pig's intestines. But it was more than that. When we kill an animal, especially a big mammal like a pig, it can't help reminding us of our own death. The line between their bodies and ours, between their deaths and ours, is not very sharp.\n\nI recovered from my disgust enough to help Angelo finish dressing my pig. Yet the emotions did not go away. They really hit me late that evening. Back at home, I opened my e-mail and saw that Angelo had sent me some pictures under the subject heading _Look the great hunter!_ I was eager to open them, excited to show my family my pig. (It was hanging in Angelo's walk-in cooler.)\n\n_Angelo's walk-in cooler packed full of foraged mushrooms and curing meat._\n\nThe image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater is kneeling on the ground behind a pig. From the pig's head comes a narrow river of blood, spreading out toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter's rifle is angled just so across his chest. One hand rests on the dead animal's broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with a broad, happy grin.\n\nI looked from the dead, bloody pig to the big, happy grin on the man's face\u2014my face. Then I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could.\n\n_What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling?_ What was I so damned proud of, anyway? Suddenly I felt ashamed.\n\nI had set out to do something new and difficult for me. I had messed up the first time I tried it. Now I had succeeded and it made complete sense that I would feel relief and pride. I was okay with that. But was it okay to feel joy over another creature's death?\n\nI was confronted with yet another dilemma. What exactly is the joy of hunting? I know what made me feel good when I was out in the woods. I enjoyed feeling totally alive and a part of nature. I enjoyed discovering new abilities that I didn't know I had. I enjoyed succeeding in my difficult task.\n\nHowever, I also knew what made me feel bad about hunting. No matter how I looked at it, I felt regret about killing that pig. The animal is at once different from me and yet as a living creature it is in some ways the same. Maybe this is an important part of hunting too. Hunters ought to be aware of the seriousness of what they are doing and never treat it lightly.\n\n#  THINGS AS THEY ARE\n\nI went hunting to kill a pig and turn it into meat. But I realized I was looking for more than that. When I started my journey down the food chains of our society, I wanted to look at things as they really are. I did not want to look away from the reality. The hardest thing had been looking at where our meat comes from. Now I had seen it as up close and personal as you can get. There was no industrial or organic food chain here. It was just me and my food.\n\nThere was one other picture Angelo sent me. I didn't look at it until some time later. This was the picture I took of Angelo cleaning my pig when I needed to break away. It's a simple snapshot of the pig hanging from the tree. You can see in that one frame the animal and the butcher and the oak tree against the sun-filled sky and the pig-plowed earth. In that single picture you could see an entire food chain. There is the oak tree standing in the sun. On the ground are the acorns the tree made with the sunlight. There is the pig that ate the acorns, and the man preparing the pig to be eaten.\n\nI had started out to see exactly where our food came from and now I had. The man in that photo did not create that food chain, he is just a part of it. Just as the tree took in the sunlight and the pig ate the acorns, the man is taking his nourishment from that natural cycle. In the end, whatever we think or feel, triumph or shame, that is the way it is.\n**21**\n\n**Gathering**\n\n#  THE FUNGI\n\nTo make my hunter-gatherer meal, I needed not only hunting skills, but gathering skills as well. Since my menu included mushrooms, I would need to learn yet another set of skills and join yet another club, the semi-secret society of wild mushroomers. I found that club even more difficult to join than the club of hunters. Luckily, Angelo was once again going to be my guide.\n\nAt first glance, mushroom hunting looks easy. You just go through the forest happily picking mushrooms, kind of like picking tomatoes in the garden. The only difference is you didn't have to plant, water, fertilize, and weed the mushrooms. They just grew all by themselves. Easy, right?\n\nNot so easy, as I was about to discover. For starters, I've never gotten lost in a garden. It is surprisingly easy to get lost when you're deep in the woods with your head down, looking for wild mushrooms. Also in the garden, you know where the vegetables are growing. Mushrooms hide from you.\n\nAnd of course, there's the whole poison thing. I have never once worried that a cucumber I grew from seed would kill me if I ate it. But picking and eating the wrong mushroom can get you killed. Mushrooms, you soon discover, are wild things in every way. That's why people who go looking for them call it mushroom _hunting_ \u2014not harvesting.\n\n#  THE MUSHROOM HUNTER\n\nIt was a Sunday morning in late January when I got the call from Angelo.\n\n\"The chanterelles are up,\" he announced.\n\n\"How do you know? Have you been out looking?\"\n\n\"No, not yet. But it's been three weeks since the big rains. They're up now, I'm sure of that. We should go tomorrow.\"\n\nAt the time I barely knew Angelo (we had yet to go pig hunting), so I was very grateful for the invitation. To a mushroom hunter, a good chanterelle spot is a closely guarded secret. Before Angelo agreed to take me I'd asked a bunch of other mushroom hunters to take me along. Some of them acted like I had asked to borrow their credit card. Others promised to call me back, but never did. A few used the same old joke: \"I could show you where I get my mushrooms, but then I'd have to kill you.\"\n\nEven Angelo wasn't really giving away a secret. The place he took me was on private and gated land owned by an old friend of his. No one could get to it without permission from the owner.\n\nThe chanterelle lives on the roots of oak trees, usually very old ones. There must have been hundreds of ancient oaks on the property, but Angelo seemed to know every one of them. \"That one there is a producer,\" he'd tell me, pointing across the meadow to a tree. \"But the one next to it, I never once found a mushroom there.\"\n\nI set off across the meadow to hunt beneath the tree. I looked around for a few minutes, lifting the dead leaves with my stick, but I saw nothing. Then Angelo came over and pointed to a spot no more than a yard from where I stood. I looked, I stared, but still saw nothing but a mess of tan leaves. Angelo got down on his knees and brushed the leaves away to reveal a bright squash-colored mushroom the size of his fist. He cut it at the base with a knife and handed it to me. The mushroom was heavy, and cool to the touch.\n\n_Looking for chanterelles at an undisclosed location in Sonoma County, California._\n\nHow in the world had he spotted it? The trick, he explained, was to look for signs of something pushing up the leaves. Then you had to look at the ground sideways to see if you could catch a glimpse of the gold stems of the chanterelle. Yet when Angelo pointed to another spot under the same tree, a spot where he had seen another mushroom, I was _still_ blind. Not until he had moved the leaves with his stick did the golden nugget of fungus flash at me. I became convinced that Angelo must be smelling the chanterelles before he saw them.\n\nBut that wasn't the case. I just had to learn how to look. The way the mushroom hunters put it is to _get your eyes on._ And after following Angelo around for a while, I did begin to get my eyes on, a little. Before the morning was out I'd begun to find a few chanterelles on my own. The mushrooms started to pop out of the landscape, one and then another.\n\n#  FIVE CHANTERELLES\n\nBut after a brief run of luck I promptly went blind again\u2014and failed to find another mushroom all day. I would say there were no more mushrooms left to find, except that Angelo was still finding them in spots I had just visited. I had managed to find just five, though several of them weighed close to a pound each. My five chanterelles were tremendous, beautiful things I couldn't wait to taste.\n\nThat night I washed off the dirt, patted them dry, and then sliced the chanterelles into creamy white slabs. They smelled faintly of apricots. I knew at once that this was the same mushroom I had found near my house, the one I had been afraid to taste. The orange color matched, and these had the same shallow ridges running up the stalk. I cooked them as Angelo had recommended, first in a dry frying pan to sweat out their water, and then with butter and shallots. The mushrooms were delicious, with a light flavor\u2014fruity with a hint of pepper\u2014and a firm but silky texture.\n\nAnd I wasn't the least bit concerned about waking up dead. What had happened to resolve my omnivore's dilemma? Even after reading guidebooks or looking at photographs on my own, I still wasn't sure I'd had a true chanterelle. But when Angelo handed one to me, my doubts vanished. I knew that the next time I found a chanterelle anywhere, I would recognize it and not hesitate to eat it.\n\nI spoke with other mushroom hunters who had the same experience. It seems we need to learn this information in person, from another human being. Maybe that's part of our omnivore's instinct. It's certainly an advantage we have over the omnivore rat, which cannot share its hard-won knowledge of food with other rats.\n\n#  MUSHROOMS ARE MYSTERIOUS\n\nMushrooms each have their seasons. Once the rains stopped in April the chanterelles were done for the year. The next important mushroom hunt would be for the morels, in May. I used the time in between to read about mushrooms and talk to mycolo gists. I had a lot of questions, like: What made mushrooms come up when and where they did? Why do chanterelles live on oaks and morels on pines? Why under some trees and not others?\n\nI learned that there aren't a lot of answers to even the most basic questions. Scientists know very little about the fungi, which are the third kingdom of life on earth. Part of the problem is simply that fungi are very difficult to observe. What we call a mushroom is only a small part of a fungus. Most of it is underground, consisting of a network of microscopic cells called _mycelium._ These thin, threadlike cells form a web buried in the soil. You can't dig up a mushroom to study it because the mycelium is too tiny and delicate. If you try to separate them from the soil they just fall apart.\n\nWe know the basic parts of a plant\u2014roots, stem, leaves, flowers. But we don't even know for sure if fungi have parts, aside from mushrooms. We don't know exactly why or when the fungus produces a mushroom either. It can go years or even centuries without producing one.\n\nThanks to chlorophyll, plants are able to transform sunlight, water, and minerals into carbohydrates. Fungi work sort of in reverse. They recycle organic matter with powerful enzymes that can break down organic molecules into simple molecules and minerals.\n\nA mycorrhizal fungus has cells that surround or even go into the roots of a plant. The fungus and the plant have a deal. The fungus gives the plant simple elements and minerals it has taken from the soil. In return, the plant gives the fungus a drop of the simple sugars (carbohydrates) it has made. The fungus cells reach far underground and so act as a second root system for the plant. Trees need these fungal networks to thrive. It is also possible that the fungus gives the tree protection from bacteria or other fungi.\n\nFungi are an essential part of the life cycle on earth. They are the masters of decay and recycling. Without fungi to break things down, the earth would soon be covered with a blanket of dead plants and animals.\n\nThat might be why some people just don't like mushrooms. Even the ones that don't poison us are closely linked to death and decay. Their job is to break the dead down into food for the living. That's much less appetizing than a plant that creates food from sunlight. Cemeteries are usually good places to hunt for mushrooms. (Mexicans call mushrooms _carne de los muertos_ \u2014\"flesh of the dead.\")\n\n#  FANTASTIC FUNGI\n\nAbout those poisons. Scientists aren't sure why some mushrooms produce them. The poison might be a defense against being eaten, or it might just be one of the chemicals the fungus needs to do its work that happens to be toxic to humans.\n\nAs a food, fungi (or mushrooms, which are the part we eat) don't have much nutritional value. They contain some vitamins, minerals, and some amino acids (the building blocks of protein) but few calories. So mushrooms are not a good source of energy for us. Yet they have enough energy to do some amazing things.\n\nConsider:\n\n#  MUSHROOMING IS NO PICNIC\n\nThrough Angelo's friend Jean-Pierre I met another mushroom hunter named Anthony Tassinello. Anthony said he'd be willing to take me morel hunting. He wasn't too worried about keeping the spot secret since we would be hunting \"burn morels.\" These are morels that come up in the spring following a pine forest fire. The fire had been big news and every mushroom hunter in California would be out looking for morels there. Plus, whatever spots we found would only be good for a couple of weeks.\n\nAnthony e-mailed that I should meet him in front of his house Friday morning at six o'clock sharp. He warned me to come prepared for any weather. \"We'll go rain, snow, or shine.\" He wasn't kidding. The weather up where we were going was extreme. It could snow in May or be very hot or both in the same day.\n\nHe also described the ground we would be covering. \"It is very steep and rocky with huge, burned fallen trees and ground that is thoroughly soaked. Bring a hat, the sun is stronger at this elevation, plus it keeps cedar needles and spiderwebs out of your face and can double as a mushroom sack when your basket is full.\" Anthony also advised me to bring sunscreen and bug spray (for mosquitoes), at least a gallon of water, ChapStick, and, if I owned one, a walkie-talkie.\n\nSuddenly, morel hunting didn't sound like much fun. In fact it like survival training than a walk in the woods. I crossed my fingers that Anthony was just trying to scare me, and set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. I wondered why it is all these hunting-gathering expeditions had to begin at such ungodly hours in the morning. I understood why you had to hunt pigs early in the day when they were active. But it's not as though these morels were going to disappear after lunch. Perhaps the idea is to use as much daylight as possible. Or maybe we wanted the early start to beat other mushroomers to the best spots.\n\n#  WORKING THE BURN\n\nI pulled up to Anthony's curb a little before six to find two thirtyish-looking men in rain slickers loading an SUV. They were packing enough equipment for an expedition down the Amazon. Anthony was a rail-thin six-footer with a goatee; his friend Ben Baily was a somewhat rounder and softer man with an easy laugh. I learned on the long ride that Anthony and Ben were childhood friends from Piscataway, New Jersey. After college they'd both moved to the Bay Area to become chefs. Anthony told me that we were going to be joined by someone they'd met at the burn the week before, a young guy known to them only by his mushrooming nickname: Paulie Porcini.\n\nPaulie Porcini was part of the subculture of mushroom hunters who travel up and down the West Coast. They follow the mushrooms as they appear: porcinis in the fall, chanterelles in winter, morels in the spring. \"These are people living out of vans,\" Ben explained. They make a living selling their mushrooms to brokers who set up shop in motel rooms near the forests. The brokers put up signs to let the mushroomers know where they are and they pay cash. Then they resell the mushrooms to restaurants and food stores.\n\nWe drove for several hours and gradually climbed into the mountains of the Eldorado National Forest. The forest is a twelve-hundred-square-mile swath of pine and cedar stretched between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. As we rose, the temperature dropped down into the thirties and a frozen rain began to pelt the windshield. Snow covered the ground. It was early May, but we had driven back into winter.\n\nWe were looking for the edge between the snow and bare ground. That's where the morels would be growing. At an elevation of about forty-five hundred feet we found it. We parked the SUV and looked around. Soon after, Paulie Porcini appeared. He was a bearded, quiet fellow in his twenties who carried a walking stick and had a bandanna wrapped around his head. He seemed like someone who was very comfortable in the woods.\n\nThe forest was beautiful and it was ghastly. As far as you could see, it was a graveyard of black, soaring trunks. For five days the previous October the \"power fire,\" as it was called, had roared across these mountains, consuming seventeen thousand acres of pine and cedar. The fire had been so fierce in places that it had eaten trees down to the roots. This left blackened holes where the trees had stood. Not much lived in this landscape. We heard owls and saw a few squirrels.\n\n_A burned-out pine forest in El Dorado National Forest, south of Lake Tahoe, California._\n\n#  DOWN IN THE MUD\n\nThat was basically the last time all day I lifted my gaze to take in the view. As soon as Ben announced he'd spotted his first morel, I began looking down. The ground was covered with a thick carpet of pine needles and the charred trunks of pine. A morel resembles a tanned finger wearing a dark and deeply honeycombed dunce cap. They'd be easy to spot if they weren't brown and black. As it was, they seem to disappear against the forest floor.\n\nTo help me get my eyes on, Ben began leaving in place patches of morels he'd found, so I could study them where they grew. I found that if I actually got down on the ground I could see the little hats popping up here and there. From above they were invisible. Of course, the ground was thick black mud, but that seemed to be the price you paid for burn morels.\n\nThe morning was spent wandering across the steep hillside with our heads down, my gaze locked on a point about six steps in front of me. Wandering around that way, I completely lost track of where I was. To regain my bearings I'd have to stop and look up. The air was foggy and the hills were cut with deep ravines. I often had no idea in which direction the road was or where the others had wandered. Every now and then a burst of static would come over my walkie-talkie: \"I've hit a mother lode down here by the creek\" or \"Where the hell are you guys?\"\n\nWhen I did see morels, it didn't feel like I had found them. It felt more like they had decided to show themselves. There's something mushroomers call the \"pop-out effect.\" Here's how it works: When searching for something, you fix its visual pattern in your mind. Then it seems to \"pop out\" of the background.\n\n#  FOREST VS. GARDEN\n\nYou don't need to play these tricks when looking for fruits and vegetables. They depend on animals to eat them and spread their seeds, so they have evolved to be noticed. In the garden nobody hides; nobody means you harm. Everything in the garden (or almost everything) is there because the gardener wants it there.\n\n_Morels popping up through a bed of pine needles._\n\nGathering in the forest is a very different thing. We didn't create the forest. It does not exist for us. The morels would just as soon I pass them by. Even the bright berries aren't growing there for us. We didn't work to make the forest happen. It's more like we are stealing from it. Alone in the woods, out of earshot of my fellow mushroom hunters, I found myself, idiotically, talking to the morels. Whenever a bunch of them suddenly popped out, I would cry, \"Gotcha!\" You would never feel like that with an apple tree in an orchard. _Of course_ the apples are there\u2014a farmer planted them.\n\n#  MORELS AND FIRE\n\nI'd completely lost track of time and space when my walkie-talkie blurted, \"Break for lunch\u2014meet back at the car.\" I had wandered nearly a mile from the car, mostly downhill. By the time I worked my way back up to the road, the others were standing around munching trail mix. They all had pretty impressive hauls. \"You couldn't have picked a better day,\" Ben gushed when I wandered over with my own bag full of morels. \"The mushrooms are so _on_ today, I've never seen it like this\u2014we're killing them!\"\n\nWe sat on a charred log (by now we all looked charred ourselves) and ate our lunch, talking about the mushrooms and the people who made their living as mushroom hunters. People have been gathering morels in burned forests forever; Ben mentioned that in Germany long ago people would set forest fires just so they could harvest morels.\n\nScientists think that morels are a mycorrhizal species that live on the roots of the pine trees. When the pines die in a fire, the fungi face a crisis. Suddenly there are no more roots supplying them with food. So the fungus fruits, sending up morels to release trillions of spores. It is up to the wind to spread the spores far from the blasted forest.\n\nThe morels are trying to escape the dying forest. Yet at the same time they also help it grow back. The slightly meaty odor of morels attracts flies, which lay eggs in the safety of the mushroom's hollow stalk. Larvae hatch and feed on the flesh of the morels. Birds then return to the forest to feed on the larvae. The birds drop seeds that sprout on the forest floor, beginning the process of regeneration.\n\n#  MUSHROOM TREASURE\n\nAfter lunch we wandered off on our separate ways again for a few more hours. I worked my way downhill, slip-sliding in the mud and following a stream that led to Beaver Creek. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I was following the trail of mushrooms. Along Beaver Creek that afternoon the morels were totally _on,_ as Ben would say. Almost everywhere I looked the dunce caps appeared, and I filled a bag in less than an hour. I had no idea how deep into the woods I'd wandered, and I was more than a little lost, but not to the morels, who weren't hiding from me any longer.\n\nI felt, again, the gratitude I'd felt in that other forest, the moment that wild pig first appeared to me on the top of that ridge. It can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but if you come away with something, it's almost by chance. You don't feel your hard work has been rewarded. You feel more like you're getting something for nothing. A gift.\n\nBy the end of the afternoon we'd all ended up down by Beaver Creek. Around four we made our way back to the car. We changed our soaking socks on the tailgate and filled the entire cargo area of the SUV with morels. We tried as best we could to hide them from view. No reason, really, but a big haul of mushrooms just isn't something you want to advertise. (Earlier that afternoon a couple of mushroom hunters in an old van stopped to ask if I was having any luck. For no good reason I had lied through my teeth.)\n\nWe'd found sixty pounds of morels, it turned out\u2014a personal best for Anthony and Ben. Before we climbed into the car to head home, we asked a hiker to take a picture of the four of us holding a crate loaded with morels, a huge one propped up on top of the pile. We were filthy and exhausted, but felt rich as kings.\n\n_Before we climbed into the car to head home, a passing hiker took a picture of the four of us holding a crate loaded with morels. From left: me, Paulie, Ben, and Anthony._\n**22**\n\n**The Perfect Meal**\n\n_Perfect?!_ A dangerous boast, you must be thinking. And, in truth, my do-it-yourself meal did not come out exactly as I hoped. The dessert, a cherry tart, was slightly burned. The morels were a little gritty. The salt I had gathered in San Francisco Bay was too toxic to serve. But for me it was still the perfect meal.\n\nI set the date for the dinner\u2014Saturday, June 18\u2014as soon as my animal was in the bag. Wild California pig would be the main course. That gave me a couple of weeks to plan and gather the rest of the menu. I made myself some rules for what I would include.\n\n1. Everything on the menu must have been hunted, gathered, or grown by me.\n\n2. The menu should include at least one animal, vegetable, and fungus, as well as an edible mineral (the salt).\n\n3. Everything served must be in season and fresh.\n\n4. I would spend no money on the meal, but I could use items I already had in my pantry.\n\n5. The guest list was limited to those people who helped me in my foraging and their partners. This included Angelo, Anthony, Richard, and a friend named Sue who took me chanterelle hunting. Plus, of course, my wife, Judith, and son, Isaac. Unfortunately, Jean-Pierre was in France. There would be ten of us in all.\n\n6. I would cook the meal myself.\n\n#  SALT OF THE EARTH\n\nAs with any set of rules, I soon found I needed to break one. The problem was the salt. I had learned that there are still a few salt ponds at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. On the Saturday before my dinner a very good-natured friend and I drove down to a lonely stretch of shoreline beneath the San Mateo Bridge. After an endles strek throughtrash strewn wetlands, we found the salt ponds: rectangular fields of shallow water. The water was the color of strong tea. The shores were littered with garbage. There were soda cans and bottles, car parts and tires, and hundreds of tennis balls abandoned by dogs. There was everything . . . except salt.\n\n_Salt ponds occur naturally in the San Francisco Bay, and are also man-made and controlled by levees in order to make commercial salt. Because they are so shallow, algae often grows in them in various bright colors, which you can see from above._\n\nThere had been heavy rains all spring, making the ponds deeper than usual. There were no white salt crystals on the rocks, as I'd expected. We ended up filling a couple of soda bottles with the cloudy brown brine. That night, I evaporated the liquid in a pan over a low flame. The kitchen filled with a smelly chemical steam, but after a few hours there was a layer of brown crystals in the bottom of the pan. Once it cooled I managed to scrape out a few tablespoons.\n\nThe salt I wound up with was greasy and tasted so much like chemicals that it actually made me gag. Here was a good example of how disgust can save your life. No doubt professional salt gatherers have better ways to purify their salt, but I had no clue what these might be. So I abandoned plans to cook with or serve my own salt, and counted myself lucky to have survived.\n\n#  PLANNING THE MENU\n\nPerhaps the hardest rule to obey was the one about freshness. I was trying to bring to the table wild pig, wild mushrooms, fresh local fruit, and garden-picked vegetables all at the same time. Once again I had to bend the rules since there are no good local mushrooms in the Bay Area in June. Luckily I had dried a pound of the morels that I'd gathered the previous month. I decided to use those. (At least I had gathered them myself.)\n\nFor the appetizer I turned to the garden, where there were fava beans ready to pick. I'd planted them back in November, and by May I had scores of fat glossy pods. The fava is a broad, flat, bright green shelling bean. If picked young and quickly boiled, it has a starchy sweet taste that reminds me of springtime just as much as fresh peas or asparagus. But by June many of my beans were not so young anymore, so I decided to make fava bean toasts. I'd mash the beans with roasted garlic and sage and serve them on toasted rounds of homemade sourdough bread. (The younger, sweeter beans I'd reserve for the pasta.) For a second appetizer, I asked Angelo to bring a block of the p\u00e2t\u00e9 he'd made from the liver of my pig.\n\nSo yes, okay, here was another exception to the rules: Angelo made the p\u00e2t\u00e9. I also asked him to make the pasta for the first course: morels saut\u00e9ed in butter with thyme and, for color, the tiny fava beans, over fresh egg fettuccine.\n\nWild California pig was the main course, but which cut and how to prepare it? Angelo recommended slowly braising the leg, in his opinion the most flavorful cut. (To braise it, I'd first sear it in a frying pan and then slow roast it in liquid.) I was curious to try the loin, and grilling outdoors over a fire seemed to me more in keeping with the hunter-gatherer theme. Unable to choose between the two approaches, I decided to try both. I would braise the leg in red wine (Angelo's) and homemade stock. The loin I would brine overnight, to keep the lean meat from drying out on the grill, cover it with crushed peppercorns, and then grill it fairly quickly over olive wood.\n\nI wanted to bake my own bread and decided it would be fitting to use wild yeast. That would introduce a second type of fungus to the menu. Yeast is what makes bread dough rise. The yeast eats the sugars in bread dough and, as a by-product, gives off carbon dioxide. The bubbles of gas create little pockets in the dough. That's what gives bread its light and spongy texture. Bakers buy yeast in packets to add to their dough, but there is also wild yeast in the air. I found a recipe that gave instructions for gathering wild yeast, in a process that took several days but didn't sound too difficult.\n\nAfter the main course there would be a salad. I had originally hoped to make it with foraged wild greens. Earlier in the spring I had found a lush patch of miner's lettuce and wild rapini in the Berkeley Hills, but by June the greens had begun to yellow. I decided to go instead with a simple salad of lettuces from my garden.\n\nThat left dessert, and for a while that posed a problem. My plan was to forage fruit, for a tart, from one of the many fruit trees lining the streets in Berkeley. I see no reason why foraging for food should be restricted to the countryside. In the weeks before the dinner I went on several urban scouting expeditions. In other words, I strolled around the neighborhood with a plastic bag. Since moving to Berkeley I've located a handful of excellent fruit trees\u2014plum, apple, apricot, and fig. They all had branches I could reach from public land, but none of them had quite ripened yet.\n\nIt was my sister-in-law, Dena, who saved my dessert. She reported that her neighbor's bing cherry tree was so heavy with ripe fruit that several of its branches were at that very moment bending low over her backyard. I checked to make sure it was legal to pick fruit from someone else's tree that is hanging over your yard. It is and I did. Bingo! Bing cherries for my tart.\n\nWith dessert I would serve an herbal tea, made from wild chamomile. I'd picked the chamomile flowers in the Berkeley hills earlier in the spring and dried them. Then I mixed them with mint and lemon balm from the garden. I also had a jar of honey made by a friend in town. You could say the honey was foraged too, by the bees who made it.\n\n#  CHEZ POLLAN\n\nNow I had my menu and I wrote it out on a card. Being in Berkeley, home to many fine restaurants, I felt compelled to add a few over-the-top menu flourishes:\n\nThe last item was one of Angelo's homemade wines.\n\nI started cooking Saturday's meal on Tuesday morning, when I made the stock and started the wild yeast culture for the bread. For the stock I used bones from both my pig and from a grass-fed steer. After roasting the bones in the oven for an hour, I simmered them for the rest of the day in a stockpot with the vegetables and some herbs.\n\nGathering wild yeast turns out to be no big deal. The spores of various yeasts are floating in the air just about everywhere. Collecting them is a matter of giving them a moist place to rest and something to eat. Some species of yeast taste better than others, however, and this is where geography and luck enter in. The Bay Area has a reputation for its sourdough bread, so I figured the air outside my house would be an excellent hunting ground for wild yeast. I made a thick soup of organic flour and spring water. I briefly exposed the mixture to the air on a win dowsill, then sealed it in an airtight container. By the following morning the surface of the _chef_ , as it's called, was bubbling like pancake batter on a hot griddle. That was a good sign, because it meant the yeasts were already at work and growing.\n\nWednesday morning I drove into San Francisco to pick up the meat from Angelo. By the end of the week I had all my ingredients. I'd picked a gallon of cherries, harvested my fava beans, prepared the brine for the pig loin, made the stock, and soaked the dried morels in warm water. On Friday night, when I made a to-do list and schedule for Saturday, it hit me just how much I had to do. What was really scary was how much of it I had never done before. That included baking a wild yeast bread and cooking a wild pig two different ways.\n\nI also hadn't added up how many total hours of oven time the meal would require. Braising the pig leg at 250 degrees would take half the day. I didn't see how exactly I could fit in the bread and the tart. For some reason it hadn't dawned on me earlier that I was cooking a very difficult meal for a group of very picky food experts. Now dawn on me it did.\n\n#  OVER MY HEAD\n\nTo give you an idea of exactly what I'd gotten myself into, here's the schedule I wrote out Friday evening on both sides of an index card:\n\n#  GIVING THANKS\n\nThat was my plan for Saturday in the kitchen. Of course in reality the day unfolded nothing like that neat and orderly schedule. Instead it was a blizzard of rushed work, missing ingredients, unscheduled spills and dropped pots, unscheduled trips to the store, unscheduled pangs of doubt, and second-guessing. There were moments when I sorely wished for another pair of hands, but Judith and Isaac were away all day.\n\nDid I really need to cook the pig two different ways? For dessert, why not just serve the cherries in a bowl? Or open a packet of fast-acting yeast?! Why in the world was I going to quite this much trouble?\n\nWhen I thought about it, there seemed to be several reasons. This meal was my way of thanking all the people who had helped me with my hunting and gathering adventure. The effort I put into the meal would be a way of showing how much I appreciated what they had done. A bowl of fresh bing cherries is nice, but to turn them into a pastry is surely a more thoughtful gesture. (As long as I didn't blow the crust.) It's the difference between a Hallmark e-card and a handwritten letter.\n\nThe work was also a way of honoring the food. All these plants and animals and fungi were being sacrificed to our needs and desires. I wanted to do right by them. I guess I could have made wild boar hamburgers, but that wouldn't have felt like the right thing. Maybe that is one way a cook celebrates the ingredients, by wasting as little as possible and making the most of whatever the food has to offer.\n\n#  AT THE TABLE\n\nIt remained to be seen whether my cooking would honor my ingredients or just embarrass me. In any case, by the hour set for the dinner, everything was more or less ready, except me. I raced upstairs to change and, before I had my shoes tied, heard the doorbell ring. The guests were arriving. They came bearing gifts: Angelo with his wine and p\u00e2t\u00e9, and Sue with a bouquet picked from her garden. Anthony brought a bottle of homemade _nocino,_ a jet-black Italian liquor he'd made from green walnuts\u2014yet another gift from the forest for our feast.\n\nMost of the guests were strangers to one another. All they had in common was foraging\u2014and me. But as we settled into the living room with our glasses of wine, it didn't take long for the conversation to start flowing. The fava bean toasts and boar p\u00e2t\u00e9 went over well and that led to a discussion about boar hunting.\n\nI disappeared into the kitchen to ready the pasta course. Within minutes Angelo appeared at my side, with an offer of help. I think he was a little worried I was in over my head. While we waited for the pasta water to come to a boil, I asked him to taste the morels. \"It's good, but maybe it needs a little more butter.\" I handed him a stick and he dropped the whole thing in the pan. (So _that's_ how the professionals do it!)\n\nWe dished out the pasta and I called everyone to the table for dinner. Candles were lit, wine was poured, the perfume of thyme and morels filled the room, and I raised my glass for a toast. I'd actually meant to write out something earlier, but the day had gotten away from me. So I kept it simple. I went around the table and spoke of each person's contribution to my foraging education and to this meal. I talked about Sue's generosity in sharing three of her choicest chanterelle spots. I talked about Anthony's allowing a complete\u2014and completely green\u2014stranger to accompany him hunting morels in the Sierra. I talked about hunting with Richard in Sonoma during that first failed outing. And lastly I talked about all the many things I'd learned from Angelo\u2014things about mushrooms and pigs, about nature and the arts of cooking and eating well, and so much else besides. Then, worried I was in danger of melting down into sentiment, I raised my glass again and urged everyone to start.\n\nI had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat. I guess I chickened out, afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace.\n\n#  THE PERFECT MEAL\n\nAs you might expect, the talk at the table was mainly about food. Yet this was not the usual food talk of recipes and restaurants. These foragers talked about the plants and animals and fungi they had seen and met. They told stories of an oak forest in Sonoma, a pine burn in the Sierras, and a backyard in Berkeley. The stories brought all these places and the creatures in them to our table. Every item on our plates had a story\u2014and not the kind of story printed on a milk carton about \"organic\" cows. These were stories the people at the table had lived.\n\nThe food, the places it came from, and the eaters at the table were all linked together. How different this was from the typical meal, in which we never even think about where the chicken or cherries come from. How completely different from a fast-food hamburger wolfed down without a moment's thought in a speeding car.\n\nI don't want to make too much of it; it was just a meal, after all. A very tasty meal too, I don't mind saying. The wild pig was delicious both ways, with a nutty sweetness to it that tasted nothing like store-bought pork. The sauce for the leg was almost joltingly rich and earthy, powerfully reminiscent of the forest. So were the morels and butter (or perhaps I should say butter and morels), which had a deep, smoky, almost meaty flavor. I could have done a better job cleaning the grit from the morels, and the tart was a shade overcooked. But the cherries themselves tasted like little bursts of summer on the tongue, and no one seemed to have any trouble polishing it off.\n\nIn the end, I did feel it was a perfect meal. It wasn't my cooking that made it perfect, but the connection we felt with the food, with the place we live and with each other. Wasn't that exactly the feeling of connection I had been looking for when I began my journeys along the food chains of the U.S.? This food had never worn a label or bar code or price tag, and yet I knew almost everything there was to know about it. I knew and could picture the very oaks and pines that had nourished the pigs and the mushrooms that were nourishing us. And I knew the true cost of this food, the precise amount of time and work it had taken to get it and prepare it.\n\nIf I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore's Thanksgiving. I certainly felt thankful to be eating those plants, animals, and fungi. I was thankful to have experienced them in full, as living creatures and not as items shrink-wrapped in the supermarket. And I was thankful to be in the company of friends who appreciated the miracle of it all.\n\nOf course, it was just one meal. The day after, I would go back to shopping at the supermarket or farmers market. It's just not realistic for me to find and prepare meals like this more than once in a while. Most people will never be able to do it. Does that mean we are doomed to eating at the end of a long industrial food chain and never know where our food comes from, or what its true nature is? I hope not. Eating with awareness is one of the basic joys of life, and one that everyone can experience even without hunting and gathering your food.\n\n#  ALL OUR MEALS\n\nOne of the wonders of my do-it-yourself meal was how little it had damaged the world. My pig's place in the forest would soon be taken by another pig. The morels would come up again when they needed to. The cherry tree would bear fruit again next year. The meal was fully paid for in every sense; there was no pollution or packaging left over. There were no hidden costs or waste to be disposed of.\n\nThe fast-food meal seems cheap, but as we have seen, the costs are actually enormous. The industrial food chain costs each and every one of us: in government spending, in pollution, in global warming, and in our health. You can say that my forager's meal is unrealistic, but I would answer that the fast-food meal is unrealistic also. It is not realistic to rely on a food system that poisons the planet. It is not realistic to call something a food system when it replaces food with an industrial product that does not nourish us\u2014and in fact makes us sick.\n\nImagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it _really_ cost.\n\nIf that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal. We would not need to go hunting for our connection to our food and the web of life that produces it. We would no longer need any reminding that we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and that what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.\n\nI don't want to have to forage every meal. Most people don't want to learn to garden or hunt. But we can change the way we make and get our food so that it becomes food again\u2014something that feeds our bodies _and_ our souls. Imagine it: Every meal would connect us to the joy of living and the wonder of nature. Every meal would be like saying grace.\n\nI suspect that reading this book will complicate your eating life. Writing it certainly complicated mine. And we're not alone. Sometimes I meet people who tell me that they liked my book, but they couldn't finish it. That's not what a writer ever wants to hear, so I always ask them, why not?\n\n\"Because in every chapter I learn about something I shouldn't eat anymore. I'm afraid if I get to the end, there won't be anything left to eat, and I'll starve.\"\n\nHearing this kind of thing from readers makes me appreciate that, in some ways, _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ has deepened people's dilemmas about food. Do I feel bad about that? Not really. It's always better to know more rather than less, even when that knowledge complicates your life. Luckily, there are still plenty of things out there that are good to eat\u2014and by good I mean not only delicious and healthy (good for us) but also good for the world: for the environment, for the workers who produce the food, and, in the case of meat or dairy, for the animals involved.\n\nOne of the strongest reactions to the book is from people who tell me they became vegetarians after reading it. _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ definitely created a lot of vegetarians. But what's more surprising has been to hear from former vegetarians who tell me that, after reading about Joel Salatin's farm, they started eating meat again. Why? Because they didn't realize that there were farms where the animals got to live good lives, eat the foods they were meant to eat, and then suffer only that one bad day right at the end of their lives. It was possible, they discovered, to eat meat with a clear conscience.\n\nSo I'm guessing that the number of new vegetarians inspired by the book has been balanced out by the number of new carnivores. But whichever conclusion readers come to, they are more thoughtful about their choices\u2014they act now out of knowledge rather than ignorance, and that's the most important thing. Ignorance is _not_ bliss, at least not if you're a person who cares about the health of your body and your world.\n\nSince writing the book, my family has changed the way we eat in many ways. I've lost my appetite for feedlot meat and so have they. We used to enjoy a fast-food meal now and then, and even today my sixteen-year-old son, Isaac (when you met him in the book, at the McDonald's meal, he was only eleven), likes an occasional chicken nugget. But what he's learned from me about how the animals live on feedlots, and about what's in those chicken nuggets, has made him think twice about eating fast food on a regular basis. He's completely lost his appetite for Big Macs and Whoppers, and he has stopped drinking soda except on special occasions.\n\nMy family also eats much less meat than we used to, and when we do eat it, we get it from farms or ranches or companies we know enough about to trust. We only buy grass-fed beef, which we can find in local markets (it's becoming increasingly common); and sometimes we buy it directly from a rancher. (You can find farmers selling pastured meat and milk in your area at eatwild.com.) In the case of plant-based foods, we usually buy organic or local (and ideally both\u2014I think organic fruits and vegetables taste better, and I also like the idea that my food dollars are supporting farmers who care about the land). We also try to shop at the farmers market as often as possible. The food there is picked fresh, which means it is at the peak of its taste and nutritional quality, and every dollar goes directly to the farmers.\n\nIf this all sounds like a lot more trouble than buying whatever's on sale at the supermarket, you're right. It also costs a little more. But I think it's worth it. It's amazing how knowing the story behind your food can make it taste better. (Or, if it's a bad story, worse.) But I also enjoy meeting farmers at the farmers market, and seeing how my food dollars can help build a new food chain in America, one devoted to health at every step: to the health of the land, the health of the plants and animals, the health of my family, and the health of my community.\n\nI call shopping and eating this way \"voting with your fork.\" How you and your family choose to spend your food dollars represents one of the most powerful votes you have. You can vote to support the kind of feedlot where steer number 534 spent his miserable life, or you can vote for farms like Polyface, where animals live the lives they were meant to, the land is healed in the process, and the farmers make a decent living. That kind of alternative farm was created not only by visionary farmers like Joel Salatin, but by visionary consumers\u2014like you.\n\nI've never liked to think of myself as a mere \"consumer\"\u2014the word sounds like someone who uses things up and diminishes the world, and very often that's exactly what a consumer does. But a consumer can be a creator too, by using his or her eating choices to help build a new food chain. That is a potent vote, and you get three of them every day. But perhaps best of all, when it comes to food, you don't have to wait till you're eighteen to start voting. You can start today, at your next meal.\n\nThat doesn't mean we're going to get that vote right every time or at every meal. We won't. Sometimes there are no good alternatives to vote for. Sometimes you're just going to want a Big Mac. There will be those special occasions when you crave that tall, cold cup of high-fructose corn syrup\u2014I mean, a soda. But there's a big difference between the special splurge and the everyday habit, and the problem these days is that fast food has, for many of us, become everyday food. You don't have to go cold turkey\u2014just put fast food back in its place, as special occasion food. And, when you are eating it, think about what you now know about your meal. How's it taste now?\n\nIf you cast your food vote consciously just once or twice a day, you will be doing a lot\u2014for the farmers, for the animals, for the environment, and for your own health. I know: You don't make all the food decisions in your household. But you have more influence than you realize. Ever since you were little, pestering your mom to buy the cool new cereal you saw on TV\u2014or tossing it in the shopping cart when she wasn't looking\u2014you've had a major impact on how your family's food dollars get spent. So what about using that influence in a new way\u2014say, by encouraging your parents to shop at the farmers market or to join a CSA? (\"CSA\" stands for Community Supported Agriculture. These are local farms that families \"join\" for a few hundred dollars a year. In return, they get a weekly box of fresh produce. It's often cheaper than shopping at the farmers market, and can even be cheaper than your local supermarket.) And then offer to help your parents cook a couple of nights a week\u2014or take over one whole night yourself. Cooking for your family is a great way to influence how they eat.\n\nVoting with your fork at school can be a challenge, but it's worth trying to do. How a school spends its food dollars can have a tremendous impact on the whole food system. In many schools today, students and parents are working together to improve the food service: to take away the soda machines (why should those companies be allowed to tempt you at school?); to encourage cafeterias to serve real food made from scratch (rather than just microwave chicken nuggets and Tater Tots); and even to teach classes on how to grow and cook food yourself. Physical education is already a mandatory part of your school day, after all, so why not eating education? It's just as important to your health. Is your school teaching you how to be a lifelong fast-food junkie? Or is it teaching you the importance, and the pleasure, of eating real food at real meals?\n\nIt's an exciting time to be an eater in America. You have choices today that your parents couldn't have dreamed of: organic, local, CSAs, humanely raised milk and meat. When they were your age, there was basically only one way to feed yourself: from the industrial food chain. You have the option of eating from a very different food chain\u2014you can vote with your fork for a better world, one delicious bite at a time.\nThe Omnivore's Solution: Some Tips for Eating\n\nI'll bet I know your last burning question: \"What now?\" Now that you know all that you know about the food chains we depend on, how exactly should you fill up your plate? Most of my readers have the same question, so I've developed a handful of everyday rules to guide you through the newfound challenges (and possibilities!) of mealtime. (You can find more of them in the book I wrote after _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ , called _In Defense of Food_.)\n\nMy advice comes in three parts:\n\n#  EAT REAL FOOD.\n\nThat sounds pretty simple, but you now know it's not so easy to do. There are many things _disguised_ as food in our supermarkets and fast-food restaurants; I call them \"edible food-like substances\" (EFLS for short) and suggest you avoid them. But how do you tell the difference between real food and EFLS? Here are a few rules of thumb:\n\n **A. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.** Imagine she's by your side when you're picking up something to eat. Does she have any idea what that Go-GURT portable yogurt tube is or how you're supposed to eat it? (She might think it's toothpaste.) The same goes for that Honey-Nut Cheerios, cereal bar, the one with the layer of fake milk running through the middle, or the (even weirder) cereal \"straw.\"\n\n **B. Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or with ingredients you don't recognize or can't pronounce.** As with the Twinkie, that long ingredient list means you're looking at a highly processed product\u2014an edible food-like substance likely to contain more sugar, salt, and fat than your body needs, and very few real nutrients.\n\n **C. Don't eat anything containing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).** Think about it: only corporations ever \"cook\" with the stuff. Avoid it and you will automatically avoid many of the worst kinds of EFLS, including soda.\n\n#  BUY REAL FOOD.\n\nTo make sure you're buying real food:\n\n1. **Get your food from the outside perimeter of the supermarket and try to avoid the middle aisles.** In the cafeteria, go for the salad bar or the fruit basket. These places are where you still find fresh plant and animal foods that have only been been minimally processed. In the middle aisles of the store\u2014and in the school vending machines\u2014are where most of the EFLS lurk.\n\n2. **Don't buy, or eat, anything that doesn't eventually rot.** A food engineered to live forever is usually full of chemicals. Food should be alive, and that means it should eventually die.\n\n3. **Shop at the farmers market, through a CSA, or at a farmstand whenever you can.** Get out of the supermarket, the corner deli, and the gas station, and you won't find those flashy fake foods.\n\n4. **Be your own food detective.** Pay attention to where your food comes from (were those berries picked in your state or halfway around the world?) and how it is grown (organic? Grass-fed? Humanely raised?). Read labels and ask questions. What's the story behind your food? And how do you feel about that story?\n\n#  EAT REAL MEALS.\n\nHow you prepare and eat food is often just as important as what you eat. So:\n\n1. **Cook.** The best way to take control of your meals is to cook whenever you can. As soon as you start cooking, you begin to learn about ingredients, to care about their quality, and to develop your sense of taste. You'll find over time that, when you prep are and eat real food, fast food gets boring\u2014more of the same old taste of salt, fat, and sugar in every Chips Ahoy! or microwave pizza. There are so many more interesting tastes to experiment with in the kitchen and to experience at the table.\n\n2. **Garden.** The freshest, best-tasting food you can eat is freshly picked food from the garden. Nothing is more satisfying than to cook and eat food you grew yourself.\n\n3. **Try not to eat alone.** When we eat alone we eat without thinking, and we usually eat too much: Just think about how thoughtlessly you can put away a bag of chips or cookies in front of the television or computer, or while doing your homework. Eating should be social; food is more fun when you share it.\n\n4. **Eat slowly and stop when you're full.** The food industry makes money by getting you to eat more than you need or even want to. Just because they offer a supersized 64-ounce Big Gulp and 1,250-calorie, 5-cup restaurant plate of spaghetti and meatballs doesn't mean that's the amount you should eat. Take back control of your portions (a normal-size serving of spaghetti is about a cup and a half).\n\n5. **Eat at the table.** I know, it sounds obvious. But we snack more than we dine these days;19 percent of the meals con sumed in America today are eaten in the car. The deepest joys of eating come when we slow down to savor our food and share it with people welove. The _real_ meal\u2014family and friends gathered around a table\u2014is in danger of extinction. For the sake of your family's health and happiness, and for your own, do what you can to save it. You might be surprised how much enjoyment it can bring.\nQ&A with Michael Pollan\n\n#  DID YOU EVER EAT PART OF STEER 534?\n\nMy plan was to eat a steak from my steer, but it never happened. I published an article about No. 534 before he was slaughtered, and the people at the feedlot and processing plant were so angry about it that they refused to give me my meat. They thought I had portrayed their business in an unfavorable light, which was true. This happens sometimes when you publish controversial articles.\n\nSo I did the next best thing: the night before No. 534 was scheduled to be slaughtered, I went to a steakhouse, ordered a rib eye cooked medium rare, and thought about my steer as I ate it.\n\nThe Blair Brothers did send me a check for my steer after he was processed and sold. I made a small profit of $30 on my $600 investment in No. 534.\n\n#  WHY DIDN'T YOU NAME STEER #534?\n\nI thought about it. In fact my son, Isaac, suggested I name him \"Night,\" since he was black. But I decided that was a bad idea. He wasn't a pet and I didn't want to bond with him. I also didn't want my readers to bond with him, because if they did they might be angry with me when I allow him to be slaughtered.\n\n#  WOULD YOU EVER GO HUNTING AGAIN?\n\nI haven't been hunting since my adventure with Angelo and I'm not sure I will do it again. It was a very emotional experience for me, and while I'm happy I did it, and learned a lot from hunting a boar, I don't feel like I need to do it again. Hunting is one of those experiences that it is important to do once\u2014a rite of passage. But, like my bar mitzvah, once is probably enough for me. For one thing, I'm such a klutz that if I spent enough time in the woods with a gun, sooner or later someone would probably get hurt.\n\nI have, however, gone mushroom hunting many times since writing the book, and find that I really enjoy it. It's still incredibly hard, but also incredibly rewarding when you find a nice fat porcini or chanterelle.\n\n#  WHAT WAS THE WORST PART OF KILLING A CHICKEN?\n\nThe worst part of killing a chicken is discovering how quickly you can get used to it, especially when you're on an assembly (or disassembly) lines with other people for whom the work is routine. After the fifth or sixth chicken, it felt like a job, and I lost my sensitivity to what was at stake. That scared me.\n\n#  WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE FOOD?\n\nMy favorite food is probably paella, a one-pot dish from Spain that consists of clams, lobster, chicken, and chorizo sausage cooked on a bed of saffron rice. My mother, who makes the best paella anywhere, prepares it once every summer, when the family is together at the beach, so it's a special occasion meal.\n\n#  LEAST FAVORITE FOOD?\n\nMy least favorite food would probably be organ meats, though I don't mind the occasional taste of p\u00e2t\u00e9. I believe you should really eat the whole animal if you're going to eat meat, but most of the organs still gross me out.\n\n#  HOW ABOUT WHEN YOU WERE A KID?\n\nAs a kid, I loved fast food and could eat three or four McDonald's hamburgers at a meal\u2014not Big Macs, which hadn't been invented yet, but the single-patty ones. I loved the french fries too. I loved eating it all in the car, how the beefy french-fry smell would fill the station wagon! Now the very thought of that makes me a little nauseous.\n\n#  DID YOU GARDEN WHEN YOU WERE GROWING UP?\n\nYes! I loved to garden when I was a kid. I learned how to do it from my grandfather, who had a big vegetable garden that he loved working in every spare moment. Starting around age ten, I planted a vegetable garden of my own behind our house on Long Island, though I didn't call it a garden\u2014I called it a farm. And every time I had five or six ripe strawberries, I'd put them in a paper cup and sell them to my mom.\n\n#  WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE THING THAT YOU GROW IN YOUR GARDEN NOW?\n\nThese days I have a little vegetable garden in my front yard, where the lawn used to be. The best thing growing in it? These yellow cherry tomatoes called \"Sun Gold\"\u2014they're so sweet that they hardly ever make it to the kitchen. We eat them before they get there.\n\n#  WHERE, AND HOW, DO YOU SHOP FOR FOOD?\n\nI live in Berkeley, a food-obsessed city, and that makes eating fresh organic food and grass-fed meat easier than in some other places. Also, our farmer's market operates fifty weeks of the year, because the weather is so good. (I know, we're very lucky.) I shop at the farmer's market every Thursday, and get most of my produce there; I also buy my eggs and some of my meat and fish there. But we also go to the supermarket every week. There, I try to buy organic, which is increasingly common (even Wal-Mart now sells organic), and I look for local produce too, which shows up in the summer. Some supermarkets now sell grass-fed meat, but I ask for it even when they don't, as a way to encourage them to stock it.\n\nBut I think eating vegetables and fruit is so important that I buy them even when they're not organic\u2014and even when they're not fresh. There's nothing wrong with frozen vegetables, and they're usually a bargain. Some canned vegetables are a great deal too, though they often have too much salt. The key thing? Eat plants (including grains), animals, and fungi as lightly processed as you can find them at the prices you can afford.\n\n#  HOW DID YOU LEARN TO COOK? HOW CAN I ?\n\nI'm still learning how to cook. But I started out by helping my mother in the kitchen. She's a great cook and doesn't think of cooking as a chore. I especially loved frying chicken, scrambling eggs, and baking brownies\u2014all magic transformations.\n\nLater on, I bought a few simple cookbooks and learned by trying out recipes that sound appealing\u2014this is something worth trying if your mom isn't much of a cook. Sometimes I'll try to figure out how to make something I've liked in a restaurant, which can be an interesting challenge when you don't have a recipe. But I've learned you can't go too far wrong in the kitchen, and people are more intimidated than they should be, probably because we watch cooking shows on TV that make cooking look like rocket science. As long as you start with good ingredients, don't get too fancy, and taste things along the way, it'll probably come out all right. Baking is different: You really need to follow recipes or you'll end up with stuff you don't want to eat.\n\n#  WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE RECIPE?\n\nAt the moment, it's a trick I learned from Angelo Garro for making poached eggs, which is my favorite breakfast. The challenge of poaching a perfect egg is keeping the thing together\u2014the white part tends to wander off. Here's the trick: Boil water in a shallow pan. Before you crack the egg, sink the whole egg in the boiling water for exactly ten seconds. Then crack the egg into a big kitchen spoon and gently slide it into the water. The egg will hold together, and in three minutes you'll have a perfectly poached egg that you can removed with a slotted spoon. If you want to get fancy, put a few drops of balsamic vinegar on the egg. That's the way they serve poached eggs in Sicily, and it's delicious.\nFURTHER RESOURCES\n\n#\n\nINTERNET\n\n**Active Kids Get Cooking** (www.activekidsgetcooking.org.uk) is a program which promotes healthy cooking and eating in schools throughout the UK\n\n**BBC Good Food: Get Kids Cooking!** (www.bbcgoodfood.com\/content\/knowhow\/kids-cooking\/1) wants to get kids into cooking. Recipes and tips galore!\n\n**Chefsters** (<http:\/\/chefsters.com\/>) is an online club based on the TV show, Chefsters. Members share recipes and other ideas for healthy eating.\n\n**Eat Local Challenge** (www.eatlocalchallenge.com) offers resources and encouragement for people trying to eat locally.\n\n**Eat Well** (www.eatwellguide.com) is an online source of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs. Enter your zip code to find healthful, humane, and eco-friendly products from farms, stores, and restaurants in your area.\n\n**Eat Wild** (www.eatwild.com) lists local suppliers for grass-fed meat and dairy products.\n\n**The Edible Schoolyard** (www.edibleschoolyard.org) started as a one-acre garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, and now has a small network of affiliate schools.\n\n**Food Routes** (www.foodroutes.org) is a national nonprofit dedicated to \"reintroducing Americans to their food\u2014the seeds it grows from, the farmers who produce it, and the routes that carry it from the fields to our tables.\"\n\n**Jamie Oliver: School Dinners** (www.jamieoliver.com\/school-dinners) is the chef's website devoted to his campaign for better and healthier school meals.\n\n**The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture** (www.leopold.iastate.edu) \"explores and cultivates alternatives that secure healthier people and landscapes in Iowa and the nation.\"\n\n**Local Harvest** (www.localharvest.com) helps you connect with local farmers, CSAs, and farmers' markets.\n\n**Mycolog** (www.mycolog.com) includes a variety of fascinating mushroom facts.\n\n**National Family Farm Coalition** (www.nffc.net) is an organization to help support the livelihood of food producers, and feed the world's people within their own borders.\n\n**Pesticide Action Network** (www.panna.org) promotes the elimination of dangerous pesticides and offers solutions that protect people and the environment.\n\n**Sky Vegetables** (www.skyvegetables.com) builds and maintains sustainable gardens on rooftops.\n\n**Slow Food USA** (www.slowfood.com) supports good, clean, and fair food while preserving traditional methods of preparation and farming.\n\n**Spoons Across America** (www.spoonsacrossamerica.org) is a national non-profit that promotes and organizes children's culinary education.\n\n**Sustainable Table** (www.sustainabletable.org) offers a variety of excellent resources on local, sustainable, and community-based food, including special features for teachers and educators.\n\n**The Vertical Farm Project** (www.verticalfarm.com) promotes indoor farming in urban settings.\n\n**Weston A. Price Foundation** (www.westonaprice.org) is an archive of information on the sorts of traditional whole-food diets advocated by Weston A. Price. Local chapters are good resources for finding some of the best pastured animal foods.\n\n**W.K. Kellogg Foundation** (www.wkkf.org) helps fund some great initiatives surrounding food attitudes and food policy\u2014look at \"Food and Society\" and \"Food and Fitness.\"\n\n#  VIDEO\n\n**Nourish** is a public television program, aimed at high school students and narrated by Cameron Diaz, that looks at our relationship to food from a global perspective, connecting our food choices to the environment and to our health.\n\n**Fresh** by Ana Jones is an inspiring look at the burgeoning movement to reform our food system.\n\n**Food Inc.** is an investigative documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner about industrial farming and its effect on our health.\n\n**What's on Your Plate** is a documentary by Catherine Gund that follows two girls from New York City as they explore their place in the food chain.\n\n**King Corn** is a documentary featuring two East Coast college grads who move to the Midwest to plant an acre of corn and follow it all the way to the dinner plate.\n**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**\n\nI had a lot of help in the kitchen preparing _The Omnivore's Dilemma._\n\nFirst to Gerry Marzorati, my longtime friend and editor at the _New York Times Magazine_ , who first suggested five years ago that I spend some time writing about food for the magazine. Unbeknownst to either of us, he was pointing me down the path that led to this book.\n\nI am especially grateful to the farmers and the foragers I write about here. George Naylor in Iowa, Joel Salatin in Virginia, and Angelo Garro in California were my food-chain Virgils, helping me to follow the food from earth to plate and to navigate the omnivore's dilemma. All three gave unstintingly of their time, their wisdom, and their always excellent company. Thanks, too, to the hunters and gatherers who graciously welcomed so rank an amateur on their expeditions: Anthony Tassinello, Ben Baily, Bob Carrou, Richard Hylton, Jean-Pierre Moulle, Sue Moore, and David Evans.\n\nIn educating myself on food and agriculture, I've incurred a great many debts. Among my most generous and influential teachers have been: Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Fred Kirschenmann, Alice Waters, Todd Dawson, Paul Rozin, Wes Jackson, and Wendell Berry. Thanks also, for information and insight, to Bob Scowcroft, Allan Nation, Kelly Brownell, Ricardo Salvador, Carlo Petrini, Jo Robinson, David Arora, Ignacio Chapela, Miguel Altieri, Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, Drew and Myra Goodman, Bill Niman, Gene Kahn, and Eliot Coleman.\n\nMany people supported the writing of this book in other ways. In California, Michael Schwarz generously read the manuscript and offered timely encouragement and helpful suggestions, reminding me what a good editor he was before he forsook print for television. In Berkeley, the faculty, staff, and students of the Graduate School of Journalism, and in particular Dean Orville Schell, have created a stimulating and supportive community in which to do this work. Mark Danner, an old friend and once again a colleague, has, as ever, provided a valuable sounding board. The students in my food chain class have taught me more than they probably realize about these issues over the past few years. Mesa Refuge, in Point Reyes Station, provided the perfect setting in which to write and research a key chapter. And the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has supported my research in crucial ways.\n\nI'm especially grateful to Chad Heeter, for his dogged research and fact-checking, not to mention his willingness to accompany me on a futile quest to gather salt in San Francisco Bay. Nathanael Johnson, Felicia Mello, and Elena Conis nailed down several elusive facts just when it looked like they might get away. My assistant, Jaime Gross, contributed to this project in many ways, but I'm particularly grateful for her superb research and fact-checking.\n\nIn New York, I'm grateful for the excellent work and good cheer of Liza Darnton, Kate Griggs, Sarah Hutson, and Tracy Locke at the Penguin Press, my publishing home. Thanks to Liz Farrell at ICM. At the _New York Times Magazine_ , where some of the material in this book first appeared, I've profited handsomely from the superb editing of Paul Tough and Alex Star and (before they moved on to other magazines) Adam Moss and Dan Zalewski.\n\nIn a publishing industry not known for loyalty or continuity, I've been blessed by the constancy of both my editor and agent. This is the fourth book of mine that Ann Godoff has edited, albeit at three different houses. At this point I can't imagine doing a book with anyone else, which is probably why I keep following her around Manhattan. Her moral, intellectual, emotional, and financial support is a critical ingredient in the making of this book. This is also the fourth book of mine represented by Amanda Urban, a verb that doesn't come close to capturing everything she does to keep me whole and on the proper path.\n\nSpeaking of constancy, this is also the fourth time I've relied on Mark Edmundson to read and comment on a book manuscript; as ever, his editorial and reading suggestions, as well as his literary judgment, have been invaluable. This time around, he (and his family) contributed in another way as well, by joining me for one of the meals chronicled in these pages. Thanks to Liz, Willie, and Matthew for their gameness, good appetite, and hospitality.\n\nBut the prize for gameness in the pursuit of a book chapter must go to Judith, who shared the two meals that bookend the book\u2014the McDonald's cheeseburger at one end and the wild boar at the other\u2014and so much more. A book becomes a sometimes disagreeable member of the family for a period of years, but Judith treated this one with patience, understanding, and good humor. Far more crucial to the book, though, has been her editing. Since I first began publishing, Judith has been my indispensable first reader, and there's no one whose instincts about writing I trust more.\n\nLast but no longer least is Isaac. This is the first book Isaac has been old enough and sufficiently interested in to actually help me with. His own approach to food\u2014Isaac is the pickiest eater I know\u2014 has taught me a great deal about the omnivore's dilemma. Though he declined to taste the boar, Isaac's contribution to this book\u2014coming in the form of smart suggestions, stimulating conversations at the dinner table, and, on the bad days, the best comfort a father could wish for\u2014has been more precious than he can know. Thank you.\n\nI had further help creating this young reader's edition of _The Omnivore's Dilemma_. Richie Chevat did a masterful job of adapting the book for a new generation of readers, streamlining a complex narrative without ever over-simplifying it\u2014not an easy feat. Malia Wollan, my research assistant, contributed to the project in so many ways: gathering and researching all the new visual material, reading and commenting on each draft, and working tirelessly to insure the book's accuracy. Alisha Niehaus, the book's editor, somehow managed to keep the project, with its many chefs and moving parts, right on track. I'm grateful for her skillful editing, unwavering enthusiasm, and faith in both the book and its audience. Thanks also to Shanta Nevlin, for getting the word out so skillfully, and to Jasmin Rubero, for her design, and her imagination in giving visual expression to all this information.\n**SOURCES**\n\nListed below, by chapter, are the main works referred to in the text, as well as others that supplied me with facts or influenced my thinking. Web site URLs are current as of March 2009. All cited articles by me are available at www.michaelpollan.com.\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nPollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire (New York: Random House, 2001). See the chapter on potatoes, as well as the bibliography on control.\n\n\u2014. \"Power Steer,\" New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2002.\n\nPART I\n\nCHAPTER 1: HOW CORN TOOK OVER AMERICA\n\nIn addition to the printed sources below, I learned a great deal about the natural and social history of Zea mays from my conversations with Ricardo Salvador at Iowa State (www.foodandsocietyfellows.org\/fellows.cfm?id=80342) and Ignacio Chapela at the University of California at Berkeley. Ignacio introduced me to his colleague Todd Dawson, who not only helped me understand what a C-4 plant is, but generously tested various foods and hair samples for corn content using his department's mass spectrometer.\n\nThe two indispensable books on the history of corn are:\n\nFussell, Betty. The Story of Corn (New York: Knopf, 1994). The statistics on wheat versus corn consumption are on page 215.\n\nWarman, Arturo. Corn & Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance. Trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).\n\nOther helpful works touching on the history of corn include:\n\nAnderson, Edgar. Plants, Man and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).\n\nCrosby, Alfred W. Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).\n\n\u2014. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900\u20131900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986).\n\nDiamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).\n\nEisenberg, Evan. The Ecology of Eden (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Very good on the coevolutionary relationship of grasses and humankind.\n\nIltis, Hugh H. \"From Teosinte to Maize: The Catastrophic Sexual Mutation,\" Science 222, no. 4626 (November 25, 1983).\n\nMann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Excellent on the evolutionary origins of the plant and pre-Columbian maize agriculture.\n\nNabhan, G. P. Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).\n\nRifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Plume, 1993).\n\nSargent, Frederick. Corn Plants: Their Uses and Ways of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901).\n\nSmith, C. Wayne (Ed.). Corn: Origin, History, Technology and Production (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2004, figure 1.4.5).\n\nWallace, H. A., and E. N. Bressman. Corn and Corn Growing (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949).\n\nWeatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Crown, 1988).\n\nWill, George F., and George E. Hyde. Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1917).\n\nCHAPTER 2: THE FARM, AND CHAPTER 3: FROM FARM TO FACTORY\n\nThe best accounts of the history and workings of the commodity corn complex in the United States are a series of studies by Richard Manning and C. Ford Runge commissioned by the Midwest Commodities and Conservation Initiative, a joint project of the World Wildlife Fund, the American Farmland Trust, and the Henry A. Wallace Center for Agricultural & Environmental Policy.\n\nManning, Richard. Commodities, Consensus, and Conservation: A Search for Opportunities and The Framework of a Commodities System (April 2001).\n\nRunge, C. Ford. King Corn: The History, Trade, and Environmental Consequences of Corn (Maize) Production in the United States (September 2002).\n\nIn writing about the rise of industrial agriculture I also drew on the following works:\n\nKimbrell, Andrew. The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002).\n\nManning, Richard. Against the Grain (New York: North Point Press, 2004).\n\nMorgan, Dan. Merchants of Grain (New York: Viking, 1979).\n\nRussell, Edmund. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).\n\nSchwab, Jim. Raising Less Corn and More Hell: Midwestern Farmers Speak Out (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). See the interview with George Naylor beginning on page 111.\n\nScott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist, puts industrial agriculture in the illuminating context of other modernist schemes, including architecture and Soviet collectivization.\n\nSmil, Vaclav. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2001). This indispensable book tells the story of Fritz Haber's life and work, explains the technology of synthesizing nitrogen, and explores its impact on the environment and world population.\n\n\u2014. Feeding the World (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2000).\n\nWargo, John. Our Children's Toxic Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). An important work on the regulation and biology of pesticides.\n\nFor detailed information on individual pesticides, see the Web site of the Pesticide Action Network (www.panna.org). On atrazine, the herbicide most widely applied to U.S. cornfields, see Hayes, Tyrone, et al. \"Atrazine-Induced Hermaphroditism at 0.1 PPB in American Frogs (Rana pipiens): Laboratory and Field Evidence,\" Environmental Health Perspectives 3, no. 4 (April 2003), and Hayes, Tyrone B. \"There Is No Denying This: Defusing the Confusion about Atrazine,\" BioScience 54, no. 12 (December 2004).\n\nOn the question of industrial agriculture's dependence on fossil fuel, there is a rich and somewhat daunting literature. The late Marty Bender, at the Land Institute, helped me to navigate a great many complexities, as did David Pimentel at Cornell. The figure of 0.25 gallons of oil per bushel of corn comes from unpublished research by Ricardo Salvador (see his Web site, cited earlier); David Pimentel, et al., offers a figure of 0.33 gallons in \"Environmental, Energetic, and Economic Comparisons of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems,\" BioScience 55, no. 7 (July 2005). For more on the general subject of energy use in agriculture, see chapter 10.\n\nOn the equally vexing topic of federal agriculture policy, I have had many fine tutors, foremost among them George Naylor himself, as well as the staff of the National Family Farms Coalition (www.nffc.net), of which he is president. The subsidy facts on page 47 come from the Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database (farm.ewg.org\/farm\/summary.php). Other sources for this material (which figures in chapter 3 as well) included:\n\nMichael Duffy, Iowa State (www.sust.ag.iastate.edu\/gpsa\/faculty\/duffy.html).\n\nDan McGuire, American Corngrower's Association (www.acga.org). McGuire generously shared his archive of documents on the history of U.S. agricultural policy since the 1930s.\n\nDaryll Ray, University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture (www.agpolicy.org). See especially his report \"Rethinking U.S. Agricultural Policy: Changing Course to Secure Farmer Livelihoods Worldwide\" (issued by the Institute's Agricultural Policy Analysis Center in September 2003 and available at www.agpolicy.org\/blueprint.html).\n\nMark Ritchie, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (www.iatp.org).\n\nOther sources on the history of farm policy:\n\nCritser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Critser summarizes the history of farm policy since the 1970s, linking it to the current surplus of food and the consequent epidemic of obesity.\n\nDuscha, Julius. \"Up, Up, Up: Butz Makes Hay Down on the Farm,\" New York Times Magazine, April 16, 1972.\n\nRasmussen, Wayne D., and Gladys L. Baker. Price Support and Adjustment Programs from 1933 through 1978: A Short History (Washington, D.C.: USDA Economics, Statistics and Cooperatives Service, 1978).\n\nRitchie, Mark. The Loss of Our Family Farms: Inevitable Results or Conscious Policies? A Look at the Origins of Government Policies for Agriculture (Minneapolis: League of Rural Voters, 1979). Ritchie also shared with me his archive of policy statements by the Committee for Economic Development. The CED, an influential business group from the 1950s through the 1970s, led the campaign to dismantle New Deal farm policy. See their \"Toward a Realistic Farm Program\" (1967) and \"A New U.S. Farm Policy for Changing World Food Needs\" (1974).\n\n\u2014, et al. United States Dumping on World Agricultural Markets (Minneapolis: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2003).\n\nCHAPTER 4: THE GRAIN ELEVATOR\n\nMy estimate of the portion of the U.S. corn crop that passes through the corporate hands of Cargill and ADM is based on Richard Manning's reporting in Against the Grain (New York: North Point Press, 2004, p. 128) that ADM buys 12 percent of the nation's corn crop, and on a 1999 estimate by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Counterpunch, November 20, 1999) that Cargill buys 23 percent of the corn crop.\n\nCronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).\n\nKneen, Brewster. Invisible Giant: Cargill and Its Transnational Strategies (London: Pluto Press, 2002).\n\nManning, Richard. Against the Grain (New York: North Point Press, 2004). Manning uses the metaphor of biomass to describe the surplus of commodity grain on page 137.\n\nSahag\u00fan, B. de (Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espa\u00f1a, 1558\u201369) Florentine Codex: A General History of the Things of New Spain. 12 vols. Trans. A. J. O. Anderson and C. E. Dibble (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and University of Utah, 1950\u201369).\n\nMichael Duffy and George Naylor helped me to sort out exactly what a farmer receives for a bushel of corn from the market and the government. That said, the various formulae and contingencies involved, not to mention the nomenclature, are dauntingly complex, and neither Naylor nor Duffy bears responsibility for any oversimplifications or errors in my computations. What I call the county \"target price\" is technically a \"marketing loan rate,\" but since the program is structured in such a way as to make taking out loans unattractive (unlike the old nonrecourse loan program), the wording is confusing. However, it's important to understand that this price level is not a target price in the sense that it once was, when the USDA set a floor for commodity prices that it then supported by offering farmers nonrecourse loans.\n\nCHAPTER 5: THE FEEDLOT\u2014TURNING CORN INTO MEAT\n\nThis chapter had its origins in a piece I wrote for the New York Times called \"Power Steer\" (March 31, 2002). In researching cattle and the U.S. cattle industry, I learned a great deal from Bill Niman of Niman Ranch in Oakland; Kansas feedlot operator Mike Callicrate; Colorado rancher Dale Lassiter; animal-handling expert Temple Grandin (www.grandin.com); South Dakota bison rancher and writer Dan O'Brien; Cornell microbiologist James Russell; and Rich and Ed Blair, the South Dakota ranchers profiled in this chapter. Valuable published sources include:\n\nCarlson, Laurie Winn. Cattle: An Informal Social History (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001).\n\nDurning, Alan B., and Holly B. Brough. Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment (Washington, D.C.: World Watch Institute, 1991).\n\nEngel, Cindy. Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn from Them (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).\n\nFrazier, Ian. Great Plains (New York: Picador, 1989).\n\nGrandin, Temple. Animal Handling in Meat Plants (video: Grandin Livestock Handling System, www.grandin.com, undated).\n\nHamilton, Doug. Modern Meat (a documentary for Frontline; aired on PBS, April 18, 2002).\n\nJohnson, James R., and Gary E. Larson. Grassland Plants of South Dakota and the Northern Great Plains (Brookings, SD: South Dakota State University, 1999).\n\nLapp\u00e9, Frances Moore. Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991). Still the strongest case against eating beef, though in making it Lapp\u00e9 assumes a production system based on grain.\n\nLuttwak, Edward. \"Sane Cows, or BSE Isn't the Worst of It,\" London Review of Books 23, no. 3 (February 8, 2001).\n\nManning, Richard. Grassland: The History, Biology, and Promise of the American Prairie (New York: Penguin, 1997).\n\nNierenberg, Danielle. Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 2005).\n\nO'Brien, Dan. Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch (New York: Random House, 2001). This is a rancher's account of the cattle business and a promising alternative to it. O'Brien's ranch happens to share a fence with the Blairs.\n\nOzeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats (New York: Penguin, 1999). Very funny, well-researched novel about the U.S. meat industry.\n\nRampton, Sheldon, and John Stauber. Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1997).\n\nRifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef (New York: Plume, 1993).\n\nRobinson, Jo. Why Grassfed is Best!: The Surprising Benefits of Grassfed Meats, Eggs, and Dairy Products (Vashon, WA: Vashon Island Press, 2000). The list of possible ingredients in cattle feed from page 69 comes from page 10 of this book.\n\nRussell, James B. Rumen Microbiology and Its Role in Ruminant Nutrition (Ithaca, NY: self-published, 2002).\n\nSchell, Orville. Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm (New York: Vintage, 1985).\n\nSchlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).\n\nSinclair, Upton. The Jungle (London: Penguin, 1985).\n\nSmil, Vaclav. Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2001).\n\nCHAPTER 6: PROCESSED FOOD\n\nI've written about the imperatives behind the processing of food on several occasions (the articles are listed below), and on that subject have profited enormously from my conversations with nutritionists Marion Nestle and Joan Gussow, and my readings of industry trade magazines, especially Food Technology (Institute of Food Technologists, Chicago). Larry Johnson at the Center for Crops Utilization Research at Iowa State was generous with his time and expertise, showing and telling me all I wanted to know about the wet-milling of corn and soybeans. The Corn Refiners Association (www.corn.org) is an invaluable resource on the history, technology, and products of corn refining; see especially their annual reports, a trove of interesting statistics and history. Their new campaign offering the \"facts\" about high fructose corn syrup, which I refer to in the next chapter, may also be of interest (www.sweetsurprise.com).\n\nEttlinger, Steve. Twinkie, Deconstructed (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2007).\n\nFord, Brian J. The Future of Food (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000).\n\nGoodman, Michael, and Michael Redclift. Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology, and Culture (London: Routledge, 1991).\n\nGussow, Joan Dye, ed. The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology (Palo Alto, CA: Bull Publishing, 1978). This remains an invaluable anthology (unfortunately out of print) on the entire range of food issues, and serves as a reminder that much of the discussion our culture is having about the politics and ecology of food today is a reprise of a discussion that took place in the 1970s. The quote about the relationship between a food's identity and its raw materials and the excerpt from the IFF annual report appear in an essay by Gussow titled \"Whatever Happened to Food? Or Does It Pay to Fool with Mother Nature?\" pp. 200\u20134.\n\nLevenstein, Harvey. Paradox of Plenty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).\n\n\u2014. Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).\n\nNestle, Marion. Food Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).\n\nPollan, Michael. \"Naturally,\" New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2001.\n\n\u2014. \"The Futures of Food,\" New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2003.\n\n\u2014. \"The (Agri)cultural Contradictions of Obesity,\" New York Times Magazine, October 12, 2003.\n\nSchlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).\n\nTannahill, Reay. Food in History (New York: Stein and Day, 1973).\n\nTisdale, Sally. The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food (New York: Riverhead, 2001).\n\nCHAPTER 7: FAT FROM CORN\n\nBray, George, et al. \"Consumption of High-fructose Corn Syrup in Beverages May Play a Role in Epidemic of Obesity,\" American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79 (2004), 537\u201343.\n\nBrownell, Kelly D., and Katherine Battle Horgen. Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2004).\n\nCritser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). His research into calories in servings of McDonald's fries over the years appears in Chapter 5, in the sidebar on page 97.\n\nDrewnowski, Adam, and S. E. Specter. \"Poverty and Obesity: The Role of Energy Density and Energy Costs in the American,\" American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79 (January 2004), 6\u201316. For this important article, Drewnowski and Specter studied how many and what kind of calories a dollar can buy in various parts of the supermarket.\n\nKroc, Ray. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1977).\n\nLender, Mark E., and James Kirby Martin. Drinking in America: A History (New York: The Free Press, 1982).\n\nLogsdon, Gene. Good Spirits: A New Look at Ol' Demon Alcohol (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1999).\n\nLove, John F. McDonald's: Behind the Arches (New York: Bantam, 1986). Love tells the story of David Wallerstein, pages 296\u201397.\n\nNarayan, K. M. Venkat, et al. \"Lifetime Risk for Diabetes Mellitus in the United States,\" Journal of the American Medical Association 290 (2003), 1884\u201390.\n\nNestle, Marion. Food Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).\n\nPollan, Michael. \"The (Agri)cultural Contradictions of Obesity,\" New York Times Magazine, October 12, 2003. This chapter extends and elaborates the argument I made in this article.\n\n\u2014. The Botany of Desire (New York: Random House, 2001). See the material on sweetness in the chapter on apples, as well as the bibliography on sweetness.\n\n\u2014. \"Farmer in Chief,\" New York Times Magazine, October 12, 2008.\n\nRorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). An eye-opening account of American drinking habits from the Revolution through the temperance movement.\n\nSatcher, David. \"The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity,\" (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001); available on the Web at www.surgeongeneral.gov.\n\nWinson, Anthony. \"Bringing Political Economy into the Debate on the Obesity Epidemic,\" Agriculture and Human Values 21 (2004), 299\u2013312.\n\nCHAPTER 8: THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA\n\nAllport, Susan. The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love (Lincoln, NE: Writers Club Press, 2003).\n\nBerry, Wendell. \"The Pleasures of Eating,\" in What Are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990), pp.145\u201352.\n\nFern\u00e1ndez-Armesto, Felipe. Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: The Free Press, 2002).\n\nHarris, Marvin. The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).\n\nKass, Leon. The Hungry Soul (New York: The Free Press, 1994). I found a William Ralph Inge quote in this endlessly suggestive philosophical inquiry into how the particular nature of human eating defines us.\n\nKatz, Solomon H. \"Food and Biocultural Evolution: A Model for the Investigation of Modern Nutritional Problems,\" Nutritional Anthropology, ed. Francis E. Johnston (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1987), 41\u201363.\n\nL\u00e9vi-Strauss, Claude. The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume 3. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).\n\n\u2014. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume 1. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).\n\nLevy, Ariel. \"Carb Panic,\" New York, December 12, 2002.\n\nNestle, Marion. Food Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).\n\nMooallem, Jon. \"The Last Supper: Living by One-handed Food Alone,\" Harper's (July 2005). My source for the statistic that 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the car.\n\nO'Connor, Anahad. \"The Claim: The Tongue is Mapped Into Four Areas of Taste,\" New York Times, November 11, 2008.\n\nPinker, Steven. How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Valuable on hunting and gathering; visual perception; the cognitive niche; and the evolution of disgust.\n\nPollan, Michael. \"Our National Eating Disorder,\" New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.\n\nRozin, Paul. \"The Selection of Foods by Rats, Humans, and Other Animals\" in Advances in the Study of Behavior, Volume 6, eds. J. Rosenblatt, R. A. Hide, C. Beer, and E. Shaw (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 21\u201376.\n\n\u2014. \"Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching,\" Social Research 66, no. 1 (Spring 1999). This is a special issue on food with many excellent essays.\n\n\u2014, et al. \"Attitudes to Food and the Role of Food in Life: Comparisons of Flemish Belgian, France, Japan and the United States,\" Appetite (1999).\n\n\u2014, et al. \"The Borders of the Self: Contamination Sensitivity and Potency of the Mouth, Other Apertures and Body Parts,\" Journal of Research in Personality 29 (1995), 318\u201340.\n\n\u2014, et al. \"The Cultural Evolution of Disgust,\" in Food Preferences and Taste: Continuity and Change, ed. H. M. Macbeth (Oxford: Berghahn, 1997).\n\n\u2014, et al. \"Disgust,\" in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd ed., eds. Lewis M. and J. Haviland (New York: Guilford, 1999).\n\n\u2014, et al. \"Lay American Conceptions of Nutrition: Dose Insensitivity, Categorical Thinking, Contagion, and the Monotonic Mind,\" Health Psychology 15 (1996), 438\u201347.\n\n\u2014, and A. E. Fallon. \"A Perspective on Disgust,\" Psychological Review 94, no. 1 (1987), 23\u201341.\n\n\u2014, and J. Schulkin. \"Food Selection,\" in Handbook of Behavioral Neurobiology, Food and Water Intake, Volume 10, ed. E. M. Stricker (New York: Plenum, 1990), 297\u2013328.\n\nTaubes, Gary. \"What If Fat Doesn't Make You Fat?\" New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2002.\n\nWrangham, Richard, et al. \"The Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins,\" Current Anthropology 40, no. 5 (December 1999). Wrangham argues persuasively here and elsewhere that it is cooking that made us human.\n\nCHAPTER 9: MY FAST-FOOD MEAL\n\n\"A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts,\" pamphlet published by McDonald's (2003).\n\nHorovitz, Bruce. \"Marketers Feed Kids' Craving for Dippable Food,\" USA Today, posted online April 8, 2004.\n\nSchlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).\n\nOn ethanol and air pollution see Libecap, Gary D. \"Environmental Phantasm: Political Forces Keep Dreams of Ethanol Alive,\" Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) (June 2003); http:\/\/www.perc.org\/articles\/article230  \n.php and the Web site of the Sierra Club, www.sierraclub.org.\n\nPART II\n\nCHAPTER 10: BIG ORGANIC\n\nOn the pastoral tradition, Leo Marx is invaluable. I learned a great deal about farming, grass, animals, and Joel Salatin from Salatin's books, all of which are worth reading, even if you aren't planning to raise chickens; he's a consistently entertaining writer. Stockman Grass Farmer, Allan Nation's monthly tabloid for grass farmers, is the indispensable media outlet for the movement. The USDA National Organic Program website includes their producer and labeling guidelines (www.ams.usda.gov\/nop).\n\nKlinkenborg, Verlyn. Making Hay (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 1997).\n\nMarx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).\n\nPollan, Michael. \"Sustaining Vision,\" Gourmet (September 2002).\n\nSalatin, Joel. Family Friendly Farming (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 2001).\n\n\u2014. Holy Cows & Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 2004).\n\n\u2014. Pastured Poultry Profit$: Net $25,000 in 6 Months on 20 Acres (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 1996).\n\n\u2014. Polyface Farm (video: Moonstar Films, www.moonstarfilms.com, undated).\n\n\u2014. $alad Bar Beef (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 1995).\n\n\u2014. You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and $ucceed in a Farming Enterprise (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 1998).\n\nVirgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1\u20136, Volume 1. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).\n\nWilliams, Raymond. The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).\n\nCHAPTER 11: MORE BIG ORGANIC\n\nParts of this chapter are based on an article on the industrialization of organic food I published in the New York Times Magazine (May 13, 2001). Among the sources in the organic movement who have done the most to educate me are: Joan Gussow; Fred Kirschenmann at the Leopold Center at Iowa State (www.leopold.iastate.edu); Bob Scowcroft at the Organic Farming Research Foundation; Michael Sligh and Hope Shand at ETC (www.etcgroup.org); the late Betsy Lydon; farmer and author Eliot Coleman; farmer Woody Derycks; farmers Tom and Denesse Willy; farmer Warren Weber; farmer and author Michael Ableman; Drew and Myra Goodman and Mark Merino at Earthbound Farm; George Siemens at Organic Valley; John Diener at Greenways Organic; Gene Kahn at General Mills; Miguel Altieri; Julie Guthman; Peter Rosset; Charles Benbrook; Roger Blobaum; and Maria Rodale. Several of the scientific articles comparing organic and conventional produce are included in the list of printed sources following; others are available at the Organic Center (www .organic-center.org).\n\nAltieri, Miguel. Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).\n\n\u2014. \"The Ecological Role of Biodiversity in Agroecosystems,\" Agric. Ecosyst. and Env. 74 (1999), 19\u201331.\n\nBarron, R. C. ed. The Garden and Farm Books of Thomas Jefferson (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1987). In a letter to his daughter, Jefferson suggests that the problems she's having with insects could be the result of exhausted soil; see page 156. Eliot Coleman first told me about this passage.\n\nBelasco, Warren. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry 1966\u20131988 (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Belasco persuasively traces organic food's roots to the sixties counterculture.\n\nBenbrook, Charles M. Elevating Antioxidant Levels in Food Through Organic Farming and Food Processing: An Organic Center State of Science Review (Foster, RI: Organic Center, 2005).\n\nBerry, Wendell. The Gift of Good Land (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981).\n\n\u2014. Home Economics (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987).\n\n\u2014. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977).\n\nCarbonaro, Marina, and Maria Mattera. \"Polyphenoloxidase Activity and Polyphenol Levels in Organically and Conventionally Grown Peaches,\" Food Chemistry 72 (2001), 419\u201324.\n\nChassy, A. W., et al. \"A Three-Year Comparison of the Content of Antioxidant Microconstituents and Several Quality Characteristics in Organic and Conventionally Managed Tomatoes and Bell Peppers,\" Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 54 (2006), 8244\u201352.\n\nColeman, Eliot. \"Can Organics Save the Family Farm?\" The Rake (September 2004).\n\nCurl, Cynthia L., et al. \"Organophosphorus Pesticide Exposure of Urban and Suburban Pre-school Children with Organic and Conventional Diets,\" Environmental Health Perspectives 3, no. 3 (March 2003).\n\nDavis, Donald R., et al. \"Changes in USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950 to 1999,\" Journal of the American College of Nutrition 23, no. 6 (2004), 669\u201382.\n\n\u2014. \"Trade-Offs in Agriculture and Nutrition,\" Food Technology 59, no. 3, 120.\n\nDewhurst, R. J., et al. \"Comparison of Grass and Legume Silages for Milk Production,\" Journal of Dairy Science 86, no. 8 (2003), 2598\u20132611.\n\nDiamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).\n\nFreyfogle, Eric T., ed. The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001).\n\nGuthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).\n\nHarvey, Graham. The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass (London: Jonathan Cape\/Random House, 2001). For the great humus controversy, see chapter 17, pages 300\u201319.\n\nHayes, Tyrone, et al. \"Atrazine-Induced Hermaphroditism at 0.1 PPB in American Frogs (Rana pipiens): Laboratory and Field Evidence,\" Environmental Health Perspectives 3, no. 4 (April 2003).\n\n\u2014. \"There Is No Denying This: Defusing the Confusion about Atrazine,\" BioScience 54, no. 12 (December 2004).\n\nHoward, Sir Albert. An Agricultural Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943).\n\n\u2014. The Soil and Health (New York: Schocken, 1972).\n\nLang, Tim. \"Food Safety and Public Health: Will the Crisis Ever End?\" Cardiff Law School Public Lecture Series: 4, Thames Valley University, 2001.\n\nLewis, W. J., et al. \"A Total System Approach to Sustainable Pest Management,\" The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 84 (1997).\n\nManning, Richard. Commodities, Consensus and Conservation (April 2001). In his study of commodity agriculture, Manning quotes Plato on agriculture's impact on the environment, and the importance of healthy soils (page 2):\n\nWhat now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man . . . Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.\n\nMarx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).\n\nMitchell, A. E., et al. \"Comparison of the Total Phenolic and Ascorbic Acid Content of Freeze-Dried and Air-Dried Marionberry, Strawberry, and Corn Grown Using Conventional, Organic, and Sustainable Agricultural Practices,\" Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 51 (2003),1237\u201341.\n\nPirog, Rich, and Andrew Benjamin. \"Checking the Food Odometer: Comparing Food Miles for Local Versus Conventional Produce Sales in Iowa Institutions,\" Leopold Center, July 2003. Data for sidebar on page 158 came from here.\n\nRosset, Peter M. The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture (Oakland: Food First, 1999). Rosset documents the ways in which small diversified farms are actually more efficient than large ones.\n\nSligh, Michael, and Carolyn Christman. Who Owns Organic? (Pittsboro, NC: RAFI-USA, 2003).\n\nStoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).\n\nTilman, David. \"The Greening of the Green Revolution,\" Nature, 396 (November 19, 1998).\n\nWargo, John. Our Children's Toxic Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).\n\nWirzba, Norman, ed. The Essential Agrarian Reader (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003).\n\nWolfe, M. S. \"Crop Strength Through Diversity,\" Nature 406, no. 17 (August 2000).\n\nOn the complex and contentious subject of energy use in conventional and organic agriculture, I relied on many sources, including David Pimentel, Rich Pirog at the Leopold Center, the late Marty Bender at the Land Institute, and Karen Klonsky and Peter Livingston at the University of California at Davis, as well as the indefatigable work of researchers Chad Heeter and Malia Wollan. Pimental helped us calculate the energy required to grow, pack, wash, cool, and ship across country a pound of organic lettuce, using his data and additional information graciously provided by Earthbound Farm. Pimentel's numbers are sometimes criticized as high because he includes \"embodied energy,\" i.e., the fossil fuel required to manufacture things like tractors. His numbers remain the most comprehensive, however, and whenever a specific figure is in dispute I've used the more conservative number or stated the range. On energetics in agriculture see also:\n\nCarlsson-Kanyama, Annika, and Mireille Faist. Energy Use in the Food Sector: A Data Survey. AFN-report 291 (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency: Stockholm, Sweden, 2000).\n\nHeller, Martin C., and Gregory A. Keoleian. Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System, Report No. CSS00-04. (Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, 2000). This study is the source for my figures on the portion of U.S. energy consumption devoted to the food system (one-fifth) and the portion of that amount (one-fifth) accounted for by farming (as opposed to packing, cooling, or shipping).\n\nLivingston, Peter. \"A Comparison of Economic Viability and Measured Energy Required for Conventional, Low Input, and Organic Farming Systems over a Rotational Period.\" Unpublished thesis. California State University, Chico, CA, 1995.\n\nLovins, Amory, L. Hunter Lovins, and Marty Bender. \"Agriculture and Energy,\" Encyclopedia of Energy Technology and the Environment (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).\n\nPimentel, David, ed. Handbook of Energy Utilization in Agriculture (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1980).\n\nPimentel, David, and Marcia Pimentel, eds. Food, Energy, and Society (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1996).\n\nPimentel, David, et al. \"Environmental, Energetic, and Economic Comparisons of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems,\" BioScience 55, no. 7 (July 2005), 573\u201382. The statistic on the energy savings of organic production (30 percent) comes from this study, though as Pimentel acknowledges, if the farm's fertility is not generated on the farm or nearby, this savings quickly disappears.\n\nTourte, Laura, et al. \"Sample Costs to Produce Organic Leaf Lettuce.\" University of California Cooperative Extension, 2004.\n\nPART III\n\nCHAPTER 12: POLYFACE FARM, AND CHAPTER 13: GRASS\n\nBenyus, Janine M. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Perennial, 2002). Offers a fine account of the Land Institute's project to perennialize agriculture.\n\nEisenberg, Evan. The Ecology of Eden (New York: Knopf, 1998).\n\nFarb, Peter. Living Earth (New York: Pyramid Publications, 1959).\n\nHarvey, Graham. The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass (London: Jonathan Cape\/Random House, 2001).\n\nHawken, Paul, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism (New York: Bay Books, 2000). Another good account of the Land Institute's work.\n\nJackson, Wes, et al., eds. Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984).\n\n\u2014. New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).\n\nJudy, Greg. No Risk Ranching: Custom Grazing on Leased Land (Ridgeland, MS: Green Park Press, 2003).\n\nLogsdon, Gene. All Flesh Is Grass: The Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming (Athens, OH: Swallow Press\/Ohio University, 2004).\n\nNation, Allan. Knowledge Rich Ranching (Ridgeland, MS: Green Park Press, 2002).\n\nSavory, Allan. Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999). Savory is a pioneer in using intensive grazing to restore arid grasslands, and is changing the way environmentalists regard the role of grazing in ecosystem health.\n\nThe Stockman Grass Farmer, published monthly.\n\nVoisin, Andr\u00e9. Grass Productivity (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1989).\n\nCHAPTER 14: THE ANIMALS\n\nFor further reading on the advantages of polyculture, see Permaculture magazine (www.permaculture.co.uk); Permaculture Activist (www.permacultureactivist.net); and the works of Bill Mollison. Also see:\n\nFuruno, Takao. The Power of Duck: Integrated Rice and Duck Farming (Tasmania, Australia: Tagari Publications, 2001). This is another example from another tradition of a polyculture farm. Furuno is the Joel Salatin of Japan.\n\nImhoff, Dan. Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2003).\n\nRosset, Peter. The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture (Oakland: Food First, 1999).\n\nCHAPTER 15: THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE\n\nJoel explains exactly how to kill a chicken and compost slaughter waste in chapters 15 and 16 of Pastured Poultry Profit$ (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 1996).\n\nOn slaughter practices, humane and otherwise, see Temple Grandin's Web site (www.grandin.com).\n\nCHAPTER 16: THE MARKET\n\nBerry, Wendell. Citizenship Papers (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003). See especially the essays \"The Total Economy\" (pp. 63\u201376) and \"The Whole Horse\" (pp. 113\u201326), where the Berry quotes in this chapter are found.\n\nBlank, Steven. The End of Agriculture in the American Portfolio (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1998).\n\nFallon, Sally. Nourishing Traditions (Washington, D.C.: New Trends Publishing, 2001). Fallon is the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation: www.westonaprice.org.\n\nFernald, Anya, et al. A World of Presidia: Food, Culture, and Community (Bra, Italy: Slow Food Editore, 2004).\n\nGussow, Joan Dye. This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2001).\n\nHalweil, Brian. Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004).\n\n\u2014. Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 2002).\n\nKloppenberg, J., Jr., et al. \"Coming into the Foodshed,\" Agriculture and Human Values 13, no. 3 (1996), 33\u201341. This article appears to be the first use of the term \"foodshed\": \"The concept of a 'foodshed' (a term that elicits images of food flowing into a place) has been developed to promote discussion and action about the disempowerment and destructive nature of this current system with regards to the community and the environment.\"\n\nLyson, Thomas A. Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community (Medford, MA: Tufts University Press, 2004).\n\nMcKibben, Bill. \"Small World: Why One Town Stays Unplugged,\" Harper's 307, no. 1843 (December 2003), 46\u201354.\n\nNabhan, Gary Paul. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).\n\nNorberg-Hodge, Helena, et al. Bringing the Food Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness (London: Zed Books, 2002).\n\nPetrini, Carlo, ed. Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2001). See also Petrini's speeches on the Slow Food Web site.\n\nPollan, Michael. \"Cruising on the Ark of Taste,\" Mother Jones (May 2003). An essay on the politics of Slow Food.\n\nPorter, Michael E. The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: The Free Press, 1990).\n\nRevkin, Andrew C. \"Energy, an Ingredient in Local Food and Global Food,\" The New York Times Dot Earth Blog, December 11, 2007.\n\nRosenthal, Elisabeth. \"Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World,\" New York Times, April 26, 2008.\n\nYeong, Choy Leng. \"NW Salmon Sent to China Before Reaching U.S. Tables,\" Bloomberg News, July 16, 2005.\n\nCHAPTER 17: MY GRASS-FED MEAL\n\nFor a digest of research on the health benefits of grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs, see www.eatwild.com.\n\nBrillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Trans. Anne Drayton (London: Penguin, 1994).\n\nChild, Julia. Mastering the Art of French Cooking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).\n\nMcGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Charles Scribner, 2004).\n\nRobinson, Jo. Pasture Perfect: The Far-Reaching Benefits of Choosing Meat, Eggs, and Dairy from Grass-Fed Animals (Vashon, WA: Vashon Island Press, 2004).\n\n\u2014. Why Grassfed Is Best! The Surprising Benefits of Grassfed Meat, Eggs, and Dairy Products (Vashon, WA: Vashon Island Press, 2000).\n\nFor recent research on the role of omega-3s and other fats in the diet, see the proceedings of the 2004 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids (www.issfal.org.uk). The research on the benefits of omega-3s cited in my chapter came from the following articles:\n\nde Groot, R. H. M., et al. Correlation Between Plasma (N-3) Fatty Acid Levels and Cognitive Performance in Women. Report. Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, Nutrition and Toxicology Research Institute Maastricht (Maastricht University, The Netherlands, 2004).\n\nKelley, R. L., et al. Effect of Dietary Fish Oil on Puppy Trainability. Report. The Iams Company Technical Centre (Lewisburg, OH: 2004).\n\nSmuts, C. M., et al. The Effect of Omega-3 Rich Spread on the Cognitive Function of Learners 6\u20139 Years Old from a Low Socio-Economic Community. Nutritional Intervention Research Unit, MRC. Report (Parow Valley, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2004).\n\nPART IV\n\nCHAPTER 18: THE FOREST\n\nFascinating mushroom facts can be found at www.mycolog.com\n\nAllport, Susan. The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love (Lincoln, NE: Writers Club Press, 2003).\n\nBudiansky, Stephen. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Thoreau's quote on hunting is on page 157.\n\nLeopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1986).\n\nNelson, Davia, and Nikki Silva. Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More from NPR's The Kitchen Sisters (New York: Rodale, 2005). See especially the chapter on Angelo Garro, pages 172\u201389.\n\nCHAPTER 19: EATING ANIMALS\n\nBerger, John. About Looking (New York: Vintage International, 1991).\n\nBudiansky, Stephen. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Choose Domestication (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1992). A valuable book on the evolution of domestication in animals.\n\n\u2014. If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: The Free Press, 1998).\n\nCoetzee, J. M. The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).\n\nDennett, Daniel C. Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996).\n\nEhrenfeld, David. Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millenium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).\n\nOvid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).\n\nFlannery, Tim. The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001). Flannery's account of how the Plains bison evolved under the pressure of hunting by Indians is on pages 223\u201329.\n\nRegan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).\n\n\u2014, and Peter Singer, eds. Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989).\n\nScully, Matthew. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002). An eloquent defense of animals, and an indictment of factory farming, from the right.\n\nSinger, Peter. Animal Liberation (New York: Ecco, 2002).\n\n\u2014. Practical Ethics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999).\n\n\u2014, ed. In Defense of Animals (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).\n\nThomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983).\n\nWilliams, Joy. Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (New York: Vintage, 2001).\n\nWise, Steven M. Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002).\n\nCHAPTER 20: HUNTING\n\nNelson, Richard. The Island Within (New York: Vintage, 1991). \"The Gifts of the Deer\" is one of the great accounts of hunting.\n\nOrtega y Gasset, Jos\u00e9. Meditations on Hunting. Trans. Howard B. Westcott (New York: Scribner's, 1972). A remarkable book, brilliant and more than a little mad. My own meditations on hunting owe a large debt to Ortega's.\n\nShepard, Paul. Coming Home to the Pleistocene (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998).\n\n\u2014. Nature and Madness (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998). Writing in the tradition of Ortega, Shepard offers a bracing reevaluation of Paleolithic culture and psychology.\n\n\u2014. The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998).\n\nCHAPTER 21: GATHERING\n\nMy education in the mysteries of the fungal kingdom profited from time spent in the field with Ignacio Chapela and David Arora, as well as with mushroom hunters Anthony Tassinello, Ben Baily, Sue Moore, and Angelo Garro. The following books and articles were also valuable:\n\nArora, David. Mushrooms Demystified (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1986).\n\nHudler, George W. Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).\n\nKrieger, Louis C. C. The Mushroom Handbook (New York: Dover Publications, 1967).\n\nLincoff, Gary H. National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).\n\nMcKenna, Terence. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (New York: Bantam, 1993).\n\nRommelmann, Nancy. \"The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05,\" Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 10, 2005.\n\nSchaechter, Elio. In the Company of Mushrooms: A Biologist's Tale (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).\n\nStamets, Paul. Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2000).\n\n\u2014. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005).\n\nTreisman, Ann. \"Features and Objects in Visual Processing,\" Scientific American 254, no. 11 (November 1986), 114\u201325. Treisman, a research psychologist, developed the concept of the \"pop-out effect\" in human visual processing.\n\nWeil, Andrew. The Marriage of the Sun and Moon: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Consciousness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004). See chapters 7 to 9.\n\nCHAPTER 22: THE PERFECT MEAL\n\nBrillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Trans. Anne Drayton (London: Penguin, 1994).\n\nLeader, Daniel, and Judith Blahnik. Bread Alone: Bold Fresh Loaves from Your Own Hands (New York: Morrow, 1993). See chapter 13 on gathering wild yeast for the chef and baking a levain. I also learned about baking with wild yeasts from Robbie Barnett.\n\nMcGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Charles Scribner, 2004).\n\nTHE OMNIVORE'S SOLUTION\n\nPollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).\n**Looking for more?**\n\nVisit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.\n\n**Discover your next great read!**\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n# CHIANG KAI SHEK\n_By the same author_\n\nON THE BRINK: THE TROUBLE WITH FRANCE\n\nDEALING WITH THE DRAGON: A YEAR IN THE NEW HONG KONG\n\n# CHIANG KAI SHEK\n\n# _China's generalissimo and the Nation He Lost_\n\n## JONATHAN FENBY\n\nCarroll & Graf Publishers  \nNew York\nCHIANG KAI-SHEK  \n _C HINA'S GENERALISSIMO AND THE NATION HE LOST_\n\nCarroll & Graf Publishers  \nAn Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.  \n245 West 17th Street  \nNew York, NY 10011\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2003 by Jonathan Fenby\n\nFirst Carroll & Graf edition 2004\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.\n\nISBN 13: 978-0-7867-1484-1  \neBook ISBN: 9780786739844\n\nPrinted in the United States of America  \nDistributed by Publishers Group West\n_To Sara and Alexander,  \nwith love_\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThis is the first full biography of Chiang Kai-shek for almost three decades. It would not have been possible without drawing on extensive research into the period up to 1949 by scholars in mainland China and Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Australia, France and elsewhere. I am grateful to all those whose work is referred to in the text or appears in the source notes. I also benefited from conversations with Lu Fan-Shang, Chen Yung-Fa and Yu Mii-ling of the Academia Sinica, Professor Jiang Yung-chiang, and officials at the Government Information Office and Kuomintang Party headquarters in Taipei where K. Y. Kuo was extremely helpful, both in arranging meetings and in providing his four-hour video recordings of the Young Marshal. Also in Taiwan, Jason Blatt gave ever-cheerful help; Windsor Chen indicated contacts; and Parris Chang spurred ideas on Chiang's last year on the mainland. I am indebted to the librarians at the Academia Sinica, _Taipei Times_ and the _China Post_. Since this book may not be to the taste of some in Taiwan, I would like to stress that the responsibility for what I have written is mine alone. In Hong Kong and mainland China, I am particularly grateful to Willy Lo Lap-Lam, Mark O'Neill, Jasper and Antoaneta Becker, John Gittings and Matthew Miller, to Michelle Wan in Shanghai, and for the assistance of guides on visits to key places in Chiang's life.\n\nI owe a particular debt to two people who read the manuscript in its final stages; Keith Stevens has been a constant fund of useful suggestions and provided great linguistic help while Rana Mitter was a steady source of support and assistance, in particular in coming up with significant comments that improved the manuscript in its final stage. In Cambridge, Hans van de Ven was kind enough to let me see the manuscript of his book on the Chinese Army as well as advice on various points. Frederic Wakeman's 2003 biography of the Nationalist police chief, Dai Li, provided insights into that powerful figure. In Oxford, I had illuminating conversations with Stephen Tsang at St Anthony's and with Graham Hutchings, who also provided the lead to photographs from the Nanking archive. I also benefited from the help of Frank Dikotter and Gary Tiedemann at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and of conversations with Shu Yun, Eddie U, Ann and Don Morrison, and Jean-Philippe Beja. The late Doon Campbell was good enough to provide papers from his time as Reuters correspondent in Chungking.\n\nThe library of the SOAS in London was an invaluable resource, and I would like to thank the staff for their help, in particular the Chinese librarian, Mrs Small. As well as academic works, SOAS proved to be a trove of books and diaries by contemporary visitors to China, many of which do not appear to have been used before, and for the files of the _North China Herald_ which I read from 1911. I have also drawn on reporting by correspondents in China whose work has been little used by previous writers on the period. For their descriptive scope and detail, I am in debt to Hallett Abend, Jack Belden, James Bertram, W. H. Donald, Rhodes Farmer, Peter Fleming, Henry Misselwitz, Edgar Mowrer, Robert Payne, Arthur Ransome, Harold Timperley, Seymour Topping, Teddy White, and anonymous stringers for Reuters (plus Christopher Isherwood's wonderful account of his journey to war with W. H. Auden). In Paris, the staff of the Foreign Ministry Archives helped to identify documents from the French Concession in Shanghai. In Los Angeles, Kaustuv Basu and Stella Lopez at the Annenberg School of Communications tracked down and supplied Gardner Cowles's privately printed memoir used in Chapter 22.\n\nAndrew Gordon not only initially commissioned the book, but also understood that Chiang's story deserved to be treated in full. His editing suggestions moved the narrative through some roadblocks, and sharpened the final draft. I owe my usual debt to Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson both for his belief in a new biography of Chiang, and his encouragement along the way. Martin Bryant saw the book into production with efficiency and eminent good cheer. Gillian Kemp provided sharp-eyed copy-editing. Reg Piggott turned complex campaigns into clear map lines. Edwina Barstow produced an impressive array of photographs. Andrew Armitage provided the expertly constructed index while Caroline Ransford gave the book a final tooth-combing. Sara Fenby contributed invaluable technical assistance, and Alexander Fenby helped on various travels. Hamish McRae offered insight; Jack Altman provided illuminating leads on Japan; and David Tang was generous with the loan of volumes from the China Club in Hong Kong. For hospitality during the writing and for acting as sounding boards as I worked my way through the complexities of the Chiang saga, I am indebted to Peter Graham, Ginette Vincendeau and Simon Caulkin, Sally and John Tagholm, Lisa and Andr\u00e9 Villeneuve, Ma\u0161a and Michael Unsworth, Ann and David Cripps, and Rosamund and Etienne Reuter.\n\nMy greatest debt, as always, is to my wife, Ren\u00e9e, both in the research, and with the innumerable improvements she brought as first and last reader. She also put up with my growing obsession with my subject, and the dislocations that a project like this inevitably involve in everyday life. Whatever this book is worth, it would have been much less without her.\n\n# AUTHOR'S NOTE\n\n## Transliteration\n\nTransliterating from Chinese into English is a minefield in dealing with events before 1958, when the Pinyin system of transliteration was introduced to replace the Wade-Giles system. Some names are so familiar to readers outside China in the old transliteration that it would be confusing to use their Pinyin forms from Mandarin. The subject of this book, for instance, is generally known from the Cantonese version of his name as Chiang Kai-shek (according to Wade-Giles) rather than Jiang Jieshi (Mandarin). Where I judge that the general reader would be most familiar with the Wade-Giles form, I have retained it \u2013 among these are Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan in Pinyin) and the Soong (Song) family. Most place names have been given their Pinyin form, with Wade-Giles in a footnote, but I have retained the old form where it is likely to be more familiar, as for Canton (Guangzhou), Yangtze (Yangtzi), Nanking (Nanjing), Chungking (Chongqing), and Hong Kong (Xianggang). The older or newer forms are given in footnotes at first reference.\n\n## Currency\n\nThe dollar sign in the text stands for Chinese dollars except where otherwise stated. The official conversion rate to sterling and US dollars varied during the period covered by this book \u2013 and was affected in different localities by prevailing local rates. From 1937, the real rate was far below the official level. The rates given by the _North China Herald_ in Shanghai were as follows in the middle of the years indicated:\n\n| \u00a31 | US $1  \n---|---|---  \n1926 | $9 | $2  \n1930 | $17.20 | $34o  \n1935 | $13 | $2.70  \n1937 | $16.40 | $3.40  \nDec. 1940 | $71 | $18\n\nSubsequent changes in parity and the vast disparity with real market rates are given in the text from 1941 on.\n\n# DRAMATIS PERSONAE\n\n**Bai Chongxi** Muslim general in Guangxi clique. Leading strategist. Commander in Shanghai in spring 1927, and in war with Japanese before fighting final battles against PLA in central China in 1949.\n\n**Borodin (Mikhail Markovich Grunzeberg)** Soviet adviser to Kuomintang. Instituted its Leninist structure and propagated united front. Leading figure in left-wing regime in Wuhan. Expelled from China in 1927. Died in Siberian camp.\n\n**Chen brothers: Lifu and Guofu** Chiang lieutenants and leaders of the CC Clique in the Kuomintang. Nephews of Chiang's early mentor, Chen Qimei. Extreme conservative anti-Communists. Lifu became Minister of Education, and tried to impose conformity on universities.\n\n**Chen Cheng** Nationalist general whom Chiang designated as his chosen successor. Commander of Y Force in Yunnan during the Second World War. As War Minister, tried to introduce army reforms. Briefly commander in Manchuria against Communists.\n\n**Chen Jieru (Jennie)** Chiang's second wife. Married in 1921. They lived together in Shanghai and Canton until Chiang dropped her in 1927 for Meiling Soong, sending her to America and denying that she was his wife.\n\n**Chen Jiongming (The Hakka General)** Reforming early Republican commander in Guangdong. His troops drove out Sun Yat-sen in 1922. Constantly at odds with Chiang who defeated him in the two Eastern Expeditions.\n\n**Chen Qimei** Shanghai revolutionary and mentor to Chiang. Governor of Shanghai after 1911, but then ousted. Staged unsuccessful risings with Chiang before being assassinated.\n\n**Chennault, Claire** American advocate of air power. Commanded US pilots flying for Chiang. Feuded bitterly with Stilwell over strategy and supplies. After 1945, ran civilian airline which worked for Nationalists.\n\n**Chiang Ching-kuo** Chiang's only child. Spent twelve years in Soviet Union, returning to hold provincial posts during war with Japan. In charge of currency reform in Shanghai before fall of Nationalist regime. Became President of Taiwan in 1978.\n\n**Dai** Li Much feared Nationalist political police chief. Regarded as one of the most powerful figures in the regime. Headed secret operation with Americans, using aid to further repression. Killed in plane crash.\n\n**Donald, William Henry** Australian adviser to Chiang, Sun Yat-sen and Zhang Xueliang. Helped to negotiate end of Xi'an Incident. Worked closely with Chiang's third wife, saving her life in 1937, but left China after she told him he could not criticise her family for corruption. Returned to die in Shanghai hospital after the war.\n\n**Du Yuesheng (Big-Eared Du)** Shanghai Green Gang boss. Helped stage anti-Communist purge in 1927. Ran opium monopoly and branched out into business.\n\n**Feng Yuxiang (The Christian General)** Allied with Nationalists on second stage of Northern Expedition, and then fought major war against Chiang. Alternately, uneasy ally and adversary of Nanking. Died in fire on Russian ship in 1948.\n\n**Fu Zuoyi** Former warlord general who commanded Nationalist forces against Communists in north China, but then surrendered Beijing at the beginning of 1949. Subsequendy held posts under Communists.\n\n**Galen (Blyukher, Vasilii Konstantinovich)** Soviet general who played major role in Chiang's early military successes as adviser. Left China after Wuhan regime expelled Russians in 1927. Fought subsequent campaigns against Japanese before being executed on Stalin's orders.\n\n**He Yingqin** Long-time Minister of War. Chiang associate since mid-1920s. Commander of First Army on Northern Expedition. Proposed bombing Xi'an during 1936 incident. Fervent anti-Communist.\n\n**Hu Zongnan (The Eagle of the North-West)** Commanded army which blockaded Communist nordaern area during war with Japan. Then fought last-ditch campaign in Sichuan in 1949.\n\n**Hu Hanmin** Kuomintang politician and ideologue. Forced out of Canton in 1925. Subsequendy allied with Chiang, heading Legislative Yuan in Nanking, but then went into opposition.\n\n**Hurley, Patrick** American politician sent as presidential envoy to China in 1944, he became Ambassador and tried to arrange an agreement between Chiang and Mao. Subsequendy blamed Communist sympathisers in the State Department for his failure.\n\n**Rung Hsiang-hsi (H. H.) (Kung Xiangxi in Pinyin)** Banker who became Finance Minister and Prime Minister, overseeing printing money that fuelled inflation and undermined die currency. Married to Chiang's sister-in-law, Ailing Soong.\n\n**Li Jishen** Commanded Fourth Army in Northern Expedition. Associated with southern movements against Chiang. Joined Communist regime after 1949\n\n**Li Zongren** Leader of Guangxi clique who joined the Nationalists for the Northern Expedition, but later led revolts against Chiang. Commanded forces in battle of Taierzhuang in 1938. Vice-President in 1948. Acting President after Chiang's resignation in 1949. Left for New York at end of 1949, returning to mainland China in 1966.\n\n**Liao Zhongkai** Kuomintang politician, close associate of Sun Yat-sen. Minister of Finance in Guangdong. Allied with Soviet advisers. Assassinated in suspected rightist plot in 1925.\n\n**Lin Biao** Long March veteran who led campaigns against Nationalists in Manchuria and northern China. Later named as Mao's successor but lost his confidence and died in plane crash while fleeing to USSR.\n\n**Long Yun** Long-time autonomist Governor of Yunnan at the end of the supply route from India. Served under Communist regime after 1949.\n\n**Mao Fu-mei (Mao Fumei in Pinyin)** Chiang's first wife in arranged marriage in his home village. Mother of Chiang Ching-kuo. Chiang left her to live in Shanghai and Canton. Killed in Japanese air raid.\n\n**Mao Zedong** Communist leader who worked in united front in Canton in mid-1920s before establishing base area in Jiangxi. Led Long March to Yan'an. Met Chiang in Chungking talks of 1945. Proclaimed People's Republic in October 1949.\n\n**Marshall, George** American Chief of Staff in Second World War who later became Secretary of State. Sent to China in 1945 to mediate between Nationalists and Communists. Arranged truces, but mission ended in failure after a year due to intransigence on both sides.\n\n**Soong, Ailing (Song Ailing in Pinyin)** Eldest Soong sister. Married H. H. Kung. Known for her love of money, including using her husband's ministerial position for profit.\n\n**Soong, Meiling (Song Meiling in Pinyin)** American-educated youngest Soong sister. Married Chiang in 1927. Became intermediary with Americans including successful 1943 trip to the United States.\n\n**Soong, Qingling (Song Qingling in Pinyin)** Middle Soong sister who married Sun Yat-sen. Prominent on the left of the Kuomintang. Became a vice-chairman of the Central People's Government of the People's Republic in 1949, held other posts under the Communist regime and travelled as a goodwill ambassador for Beijing.\n\n**Soong Tzu-wen (T. V.) (Song Ziwen in Pinyin)** Eldest Soong brother who became Nationalist Finance Minister before falling out with Chiang, his brother-in-law. Envoy to Washington in Second World War. Returned as Prime Minister in 1944. Banker and businessman, said at one point to be the richest man in the world.\n\n**Stilwell, Joseph (Vinegar Joe)** American general sent as Chief of Staff to Chiang in 1942. In constant disagreement with the Generalissimo whom he referred to as 'the Peanut' and a 'rattlesnake'. Proposed extensive reform of Chinese army, and pressed for offensive in Burma. Recalled by Washington in 1944.\n\n**Sun Fo** Son of Sun Yat-sen. Held series of senior positions in Nanking despite differences with Chiang.\n\n**Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan in Mandarin Pinyin)** Revolutionary and founder of the Kuomintang. Briefly first President of the Republic. Subsequently leader of Canton regime, dreaming of uniting China and proclaiming Three Principles of Nationalism, Democracy and People's Livelihood. After his death in Peking, he became the patron saint of the Nationalist regime.\n\n**Sun Zhuanfang** Eastern warlord controlling Lower Yangtze provinces. Defeated by Nationalists in 1926 and lost Shanghai the following year. Staged several unsuccessful offensives against Nanking.\n\n**Tan Yenkai** Former governor of Hunan, led Second Army on Northern Expedition and became important supporter of Chiang as head of Executive Yuan in Nanking.\n\n**Tang Enbo** Nationalist general who held senior commands in central China in war with Japan. Routed by Japanese in Henan in 1944. Commander in Shanghai at end of civil war.\n\n**Tang Shengzhi** Hunanese general allied with Nationalists in Northern Expedition. Became leading military figure in Wuhan but defeated by Nanking and fled to Japan before returning to work with Chiang.\n\n**Wang Jingwei** Kuomintang politician and potential heir to Sun Yat-sen. Forced out of Canton by Chiang in 1926. At different times ally and opponent of Chiang before heading pro-Japanese collaborationist regime in Nanking.\n\n**Wedemeyer, Albert** American general who succeeded Stilwell as Chiang's Chief of Staff in 1944 and adopted a diplomatic approach to Chiang.\n\n**Wu Peifu (The Philosopher General)** Yangtze warlord, defeated by Northern Expedition in 1926.\n\n**Xue Yue** Cantonese general known for his pursuit of die Communists on the Long March and defence of Changsha against die Japanese. Distrusted by Chiang as potential ally of southern rebels.\n\n**Yan Xishan (The Model Governor)** Shanxi ruler, allied with Nationalists in second phase of Northern Expedition. Skilful politician who changed sides to maintain his autonomy.\n\n**Yuan Shikai** Imperial general who reached accommodation with the revolutionaries after 1911. When Sun Yat-sen stepped down, he became President and briefly proclaimed himself Emperor.\n\n**Zhang Jingjiang (Zhang Renjie) (Curio Chang)** Zhejiang native and Shanghai businessman who supported Sun Yat-sen and was Chiang's early patron. On right of Kuomintang, he became Governor of Zhejiang and Director of National Reconstruction Commission.\n\n**Zhang Xueliang (The Young Marshal)** Inherited control of Manchuria from his father. Allied with Chiang, and commanded army in north China. Lost Manchuria with the Mukden Incident of 1931. Sacked by Chiang, but then returned as senior military figure. Kidnapped Chiang at Xi'an in 1936. Sentenced to house arrest which lasted for fifty-five years.\n\n**Zhang Zonchang (The Dogmeat General)** Shandong warlord who opposed Nationalists in Lower Yangtze in 1927 and later threatened Nanking before being forced to flee.\n\n**Zhang Zuolin (The Old Marshal)** Manchurian warlord involved in major civil wars in mid-1920s. Associated with the Japanese, but assassinated by them as his troops were handing over Peking to the Nationalists.\n\n**Zhou Enlai** Political officer at Whampoa and then Communist organiser in Shanghai who allied himself with Mao on Long March. Helped to reach solution to Xi'an Incident. Main Communist negotiator with Nationalists.\n\n# PROLOGUE\n\n _Thirteen Days in Xi'an_\n\nTHE MAN WHO CLAIMED to rule over more human beings than anybody else on earth was in his nightshirt when the soldiers came for him in the winter dawn. Driving up in four trucks, they killed the sentries and burst into a complex of richly decorated pavilions with curved roofs round a hot spring where an emperor had entertained his favourite concubine. Climbing the stone steps, they advanced under the moonlight through an ornate bath house into a walled square.\n\nIt was 12 December 1936, and there was snow on the ground at the Huaqing hot springs outside Xi'an in the north of China. Capital of Shaanxi province, the city stood at the eastern end of the Silk Road that had linked China to India, the Islamic world and Europe. Its Bell and Drums Towers were celebrated Ming dynasty monuments, as was its 1,897-room pagoda and its 10-mile brick city wall reaching up 50 feet from the ground. More recently, it had been the scene of a siege in which some 30,000 people had died, many starving to death. North of Xi'an lay a major Communist base which should have been the target for liquidation the day the soldiers arrived at Huaqing.\n\nLed by a twenty-five-year-old colonel with cropped hair and a face as broad as it was long, the 120-strong raiding party circled a lotus pool, shooting while it advanced towards a one-storey building set behind a broad, paved terrace. In the simple, white-painted room on the far left, the Generalissimo of China was doing his early morning exercises as he had done every day since boyhood. Hearing the noise outside, his chief bodyguard ran out onto the terrace from his room on the far right, and a gun battle erupted. Bullets pierced the glass panels in the doors. As the shooting raged, Chiang Kai-shek climbed through the back window. Not pausing to dress, he left behind his uniform, shoes and false teeth.\n\nJoined by two servants, the fifty-year-old leader of Nationalist China scaled a 10-foot wall, with a steep drop into a moat on the other side. He slipped and fell. 'I felt a bad pain and was unable to rise,' he recalled. 'About three minutes later I managed to stand up and walked with difficulty.'\n\nAt a small temple on the peak above the hot springs, guards helped him to climb further up through the snow. The attackers kept firing up the slope. 'Bullets whizzed by quite close to my body,' Chiang remembered. 'Some of my bodyguards were hit and dropped dead.' He tripped on brambles, injuring his back and knee. Eventually, he found refuge in a cave behind a large rock. Down at the hot springs, the raiders shot dead his particularly unpopular nephew. Then they set out to search the peak.\n\nIn Xi'an, officers of the local army huddled round telephones monitoring events. As dawn broke, their soldiers were busy grabbing Chiang's generals who were staying in the city. One jumped from a window, and was shot dead. Others were said to have been arrested in compromising night-time company. Some of the troops ran wild, looting and killing the manager of a bank. Flour worth $1.5 million was stolen from a train.\n\nTwice, searchers passed the cave without finding their prey. Then the Generalissimo heard soldiers talking outside, and decided to give himself up, trembling with cold and exhaustion. The commander of the attack, Colonel Sun Mingjiu, the round-faced man described as having 'the shy yet eager manner of a schoolboy', was summoned. In a formal tone, he addressed his captive by his rank. Chiang replied: 'If you are my comrades, shoot me now and finish it all.'\n\nThe ruler of a nation of 450 million people asked for a horse: his feet were bleeding and he was blue with cold. 'There is no horse here,' said Sun, kneeling in the snow. 'But I will carry you.' Chiang hesitated, and then got on the colonel's broad back. At the bottom of the hill, a car was waiting. When they reached the springs at Huaqing and saw the bodies strewn on the ground, it was decided to drive on to military headquarters where the commander-in-chief was greeted by a military band. 'Don't salute me,' he shouted at the officers waiting for him.\n\nNews of the kidnapping shot across China. In the capital of Nanking, the reaction was bellicose \u2013 worryingly so for the Generalissimo's wife, Soong Meiling, the sophisticated, American-educated daughter of one of China's leading families. Rumours flew that the rebels had murdered her husband. The War Minister, General He Yingqin, led a military group that pressed for an attack by bombers and troops stationed east of Xi'an. Meiling objected that this would put Chiang's life at risk. In stormy meetings, her arguments were met with disdain, as was her suggestion that she should fly north. 'Nobody is going to Xi'an,' He declared. 'We are attacking Xi'an. The Generalissimo is dead.' Meiling wondered if the generals really wanted to see her husband killed, so that they could take his place.\n\nIn the caves and villages of the poverty-stricken north of Shaanxi, where they had come to rest after their 6,000-mile Long March, the Communists received the news with glee. They knew that the Generalissimo had been about to launch vastly superior forces in what he called 'the last five minutes' of his battle to eradicate them. The previous day, Mao Zedong had received a cable which contained two characters that his secretary could not work out. Seeing them, his boss smiled, and said, 'There's good news on the way.' The Communist leader usually slept till noon after working all night, but he was up early on 12 December. The field telephone rang continuously. A mass rally called for Chiang to be put on trial. The Politburo demanded his execution. The leading Communist negotiator, Zhou Enlai, set off by mule to take a plane sent to fetch him by Chiang's kidnapper.\n\nAs Zhou made his way towards Xi'an, Chiang was confronting the man who had sent Colonel Sun to snatch him. Aged thirty-four, Zhang Xueliang was generally known as the Young Marshal, to distinguish him from his father, the Old Marshal of Manchuria. The younger Zhang had allied with Chiang after the Japanese had assassinated his father. Then, in 1931, Tokyo's army seized his huge territory of Manchuria, and pursued him into northern China. A drug addict with a playboy reputation, Zhang had been dismissed by the Generalissimo, after which he took a cure, made a lengthy trip to Europe and returned to assume new commands \u2013 the latest of which was to 'pacify' the Communists north of Xi'an. But, after several defeats and aware that Chiang was planning to demote him, he had come to the conclusion that the Nationalists should form a united front with the Communists to oppose the Japanese who had taken his homeland from him.\n\nAlthough Zhang could decide his life or death, Chiang hit a habitual tough note. 'From now on,' he shouted, 'despite the size of die world, where will you be able to find a place for yourself? Living, there will be no place to put your feet; dead, there will be no place to bury your bones . . . If you are a brave man, kill me; if not, confess your sins and let me go.' When the Marshal asked Chiang to fight the Japanese rather than the Communists, the Nationalist leader replied, 'Get out!' Though he had set in motion secret preparations for war with Japan in due course, his policy was set \u2013 to eliminate the Communists before confronting the invaders. It was a stance he had adopted since 1931, and he was not going to alter course now.*\n\nThe room in which the Generalissimo of China was being held was small, widi a wooden bed. The hangings were dirty. There were no sanitary facilities. A bucket stood in one corner; in another, some brooms. Chiang lay on the bed, pulled the blanket over his head, and turned his face to the wall. As the hours passed, he refused food and tea. An officer keeping watch outside the door offered him a fur-lined cloak. The captive waved it away.\n\nThe Generalissimo declined to eat breakfast which the guard and his colleagues bought for him with their own money. When a suggestion was made that he should move to a house with steam heating and a lawn, he replied that, if he were not released, he would die where he was. The pain in his loins and legs was such that he could hardly sit up. Soon after midnight, Colonel Sun walked into the room, a pistol in his hand. He told Chiang he had to move. The prisoner refused, and repeated, 'If you want to kill me, kill me now.' Sun stayed for ninety minutes before giving up. Zhang Xueliang came twice; once, according to Chiang, he stood at the door, tears in his eyes.\n\nThe Young Marshal had reached his moment of truth. Subsequently, he would be portrayed as a shining nationalist hero whose only desire was to end the civil war and get the Chinese to unite against the foreign aggressor. But he had played a double game for months, conducting secret negotiations for a mutual non-aggression pact with the Communists he was meant to be fighting, including all-night talks with Zhou Enlai in a Catholic church. While patriotism was certainly a motivation, he had other reasons to act. Apart from the threat of losing his command, the impending arrival of Chiang's elite troops to join the anti-Communist campaign and the denial of supplies threatened his regional base. He had lost Manchuria and his subsequent domain round Peking; now, he risked being marginalised by the Generalissimo in his last haven. The power play of kidnapping his commander had appeared to offer a way of preserving his position, while a united front against the Japanese would water down Chiang's authority. The American ambassador, who dismissed Zhang as irresponsible and vain, was moved to describe him as acting like 'a first-class Chicago gangster'.\n\nDubbed 'villain of the week' by the strongly pro-Chiang _Life_ magazine, the Marshal was not alone. The kidnapping idea had originated with a local general, Yang Hucheng, a former bandit who was equally worried about his position. When Yang suggested holding Chiang and forcing him into line, Zhang initially rejected the notion, but his thinking changed after Chiang warned him that he was going to send in a more gung-ho general to lead the anti-Communist campaign, and excluded him from military conferences.\n\nThe Marshal was under pressure from left-wing advisers who favoured working with the Communists. A Chinese victory against Japanese puppet troops in Inner Mongolia added to the call for action. Flag-waving students staged demonstrations through the streets of Xi'an making the same demand, and calling for the release of seven patriotic figures (the 'seven gentlemen') who had been detained in Shanghai for urging resistance to Japan. The Generalissimo demanded that Zhang's leftist advisers should be punished, and branded Xi'an a 'Red city'. Police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing two. When Zhang had put the students' case, Chiang had cursed and pounded the table.\n\nOn 11 December, the commander-in-chief had gone to see the Marshal in his compound of modernist brick buildings with tall windows. The two men then moved to a dinner hosted by the Generalissimo. One of his generals had warned Chiang of a plot against him and advised leaving by train. But the Nationalist leader decided to stay, driving through the snow-covered wheat fields east of the city to the hot springs. Zhang attended another social occasion before returning to his headquarters. He climbed the sixteen steps of the front building and went to the second-floor conference room with its white-covered sofas and armchairs, chandelier of brass and pink glass, and large wall maps. Thirteen officers were waiting. The Marshal told them he had decided to take Chiang prisoner. 'Unless absolutely necessary, no shot should be fired,' he instructed. 'The Generalissimo must be taken alive and unharmed at all costs. If he gets hurt, I will shoot you.'\n\nAfter the kidnapping, during which Colonel Sun's men had ignored the order not to fire, Zhang followed the customary practice of setting out his position in a telegram to national and regional leaders. He called for the 'reorganisation' of the government, an end to the civil war, the release of the anti-Japanese detainees in Shanghai and other political prisoners. He wanted free speech, the end of restrictions on patriotic movements, a National Salvation Conference and the implementation of the aspirations for nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood enunciated by the Father of the Republic, Sun Yat-sen.\n\nAfter that, Zhang was at a loss as to what to do next. His captive would not speak to him. His military position was not strong. Nanking troops were moving towards Xi'an. Local soldiers refused to attack the airfield, from where twenty bombers under the control of pro-Chiang commanders made a flight over the city to underline its vulnerability. In his uncertainty, the Marshal reached out to the most extraordinary Westerner in China.\n\nWilliam Henry Donald was from Australia, a former journalist who had become adviser to a succession of Chinese rulers, including Zhang Xueliang, though he spoke no Chinese. The British writer, Christopher Isherwood, described the teetotal Australian as 'a red-faced, serious man with . . . a large, sensible nose'. When Isherwood said that he and his travelling companion, the poet, W. H. Auden, were going to visit a war zone, Donald warned that they might have to eat Chinese food. 'Never touch the stuff.' he added, his face contracting with disgust. 'It ruins my stomach.'\n\n'Donald of China' was now working for the Chiangs, and was particularly close to the Generalissimo's wife who called him 'Don'. But he had also kept in touch with the Young Marshal, whose cure from drug addiction he had arranged a couple of years before. When Madame Chiang and her relatives met in Shanghai to discuss the kidnapping of her husband, the former journalist was the only non-family member invited. Solicited by both parties, he flew north, bearing letters from Meiling and a volume of Chiang's diary to show that he was more anti-Japanese than was supposed.\n\nAt the airfield, Donald was greeted by a young, Chinese-speaking Scot called Jimmy Elder who worked as the Marshal's treasurer. They drove to see Zhang at his office just inside the city wall. The Marshal explained why he had acted, and recounted the disputes of the past months. A photograph shows the bespectacled Donald leaning forward as his host sits in an armchair reading a sheet of paper. It could have been the letter from Meiling saying the kidnapping was disastrous for national unity, and urging a change of course before it was too late. While admitting there might be legitimate grievances which could be explored, she had not taken the demands in the Young Marshal's circular telegram seriously; with the cynicism of the age, she thought he was after a transfer to a richer region.\n\nDonald and Zhang met other officers, including General Yang. With Elder interpreting, the Australian rebuked them for the kidnapping, and said the Generalissimo should be released. Yang, who had had a sticky meeting with Chiang, appeared unconvinced. Donald and the Marshal then drove to see Chiang. As they walked into his room, the prisoner sat up in his bed, tears in his eyes. Donald gave him a letter from Meiling. She and Chiang were Methodists, and she wrote that she would pray for him.\n\nThings grew tense when Donald said Meiling planned to fly in. 'You cannot bring her into this den of thieves,' her husband cried. Turning to face the wall, he drew the blanket over his head. 'I think you should leave this room,' Donald said. 'It is no place for you.' Chiang lowered the blanket, his face glowering. The room was uncomfortably quiet. At last, the Generalissimo said, 'I will go with you.'\n\nDonald and Zhang went outside, and the commander-in-chief got up for the first time for sixty hours. 'When he emerged in full uniform, sentries clicked to attention, saluting as the trio walked to a motorcar,' Donald's biographer wrote on the basis of information given to him by his subject. As they rode through the city, the Generalissimo gripped the Australian's hand.\n\nReaching the house with the lawn and steam heating, the Marshal stood to attention as the Generalissimo spoke harshly to him. Donald noted that the younger man was so tired he was hardly able to stand. As Chiang brushed aside Zhang's demands, Donald could see the depth of anger behind the incident, and marvelled at Zhang's self-control. With the Marshal interpreting, the Australian told Chiang he was surrounded by a pro-Japanese clique, and should listen to the opinion of the people as expressed in Xi'an. When Donald became too blunt, the Marshal refused to continue to translate, so Jimmy Elder stepped in. The Australian suggested Zhang go home. As the door closed, according to Donald, the Generalissimo's superb front evaporated. He turned to his adviser with a look of despair, waved his arm and exclaimed: 'Finished. It is finished.'*\n\nThe Australian went to the airport to fly to the military centre of Luoyang, \u2020 200 miles to the east, from where he could communicate more easily and securely with Madame Chiang in Nanking. Snow was falling, the cloud was low, and the plane crept over the mountain, the wings almost touching the cliffs along the Yellow River. On arrival, Donald telephoned Meiling to tell her what was happening. She said the Nationalist generals were determined to attack, risking her husband's life.\n\nMilitary aircraft had started bombing east of Xi'an, and some followed Donald's plane as it flew back, forcing it to detour along a mountain crest \u2014 it landed with only a few gallons of fuel left. When the Australian told Chiang of the bombing, the Generalissimo asked eagerly: 'Do you think they will make another try?' His adviser looked at him blankly, wondering, 'My God, will I ever know this man?' The next morning, Zhang reported that Chiang was asking why planes were not attacking Xi'an.\n\nThe reason was that snow had grounded the bombers. 'God is protecting you,' Donald remarked. 'If the planes could get in, they'd finish you off in a hurry.' Chiang shrugged. 'He wants to be a martyr,' the Marshal said. But not quite yet: at the suggestion of a Nationalist officer also being held in Xi'an, the Generalissimo wrote to Nanking ordering a three-day truce. As for Zhang, Chiang recorded him as saying that, if the revolt failed, he would either kill himself or become a bandit in the hills.\n\nWhile Donald was flying to and from Luoyang, Zhou Enlai arrived in Xi'an. His mission had turned to embarrassment, calling for all the poise he had inherited from his mandarin family and all the subdety which would mark him out as the Communists' prime diplomat. Stalin had deflated the initial enthusiasm for the kidnapping, which the Kremlin decided was a Japanese plot. Berlin and Tokyo had just concluded a pact against international Communism, and Moscow wanted Chiang as an Asian ally. Mao and his colleagues were told the kidnapping was 'objectively detrimental' to the anti-Japanese cause. Though Chiang had been killing their members for ten years, they kowtowed. Zhou was told to seek a settlement.\n\nThat was what die Young Marshal now desperately wanted. His feet were growing colder by the day. After reading Chiang's diary brought by Donald, he concluded that the commander-in-chief was a better patriot than previously thought. He dropped half of his demands, and arranged for another mediator to fly in \u2013 Madame Chiang's brother, T. V. Soong, a stout and enormously rich banker who had been Chiang's Finance Minister. Soong brought a note from Meiling to Chiang saying that if her brother did not return within three days, 'I will come to live and die with you.' When her husband read this, his diary records, 'my eyes were wet'.\n\nBut he still refused to bow for his freedom. He gave Soong his will, and showed him a plan for an attack on Xi'an. Evidendy feeling a lot better, he slept till 11 a.m. on 21 December when his brother-in-law came to see him before returning to Nanking. Donald also left for the capital where he met Meiling who decided to accompany him back to Xi'an. She took with her a pistol and her husband's spare false teeth. As diey landed, she pressed the revolver into the Australian's hand, murmuring: 'Please shoot me if any soldiers touch me.' The adviser assured her she would not be molested. 'Please,' she repeated. But when she stepped from the plane, in a long black coat with a fur collar, she looked as composed as ever.\n\nZhang came to meet the plane \u2013 he and Meiling had known one another since 1925 when she was die smart, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of one of Shanghai's greatest clans and he was living in a modern apartment building in the city. Now, she found him 'very tired, very embarrassed, and somewhat ashamed'. She and Donald had agreed to adopt a placatory tone with the rebels, and she said she needed some tea before seeing her husband. Then, at 4 p.m., she walked past guards with machine guns into the house where Chiang was being held. As she entered his room, the Generalissimo exclaimed that he had known she would come, having read a biblical passage that morning saying, 'Jehovah will now do a good thing, and that is, He will make a woman protect a man.'\n\nMeiling recorded her resentment when she saw her husband 'lying there injured and helpless, a shadow of his former self, with his hands, legs and feet cut by brambles and bruised by the rocks he clambered over when scrambling about the mountain'. But she kept up a moderate tone in discussions with Zhang. She and Donald stayed in the only modern hotel in the city, with central heating, a barber's shop, a white dining room with a dance floor and rose-coloured bulbs. Walking at dusk in its garden, Meiling and Donald concluded that Zhang could not make the final decision on his own. General Yang was taking a tough line, fearing he might become the fall guy. He was insisting on the withdrawal of Nationalist troops east of Xi'an and a written pledge from Chiang to implement the main rebel demands. The Generalissimo refused to do any such thing.\n\nThe situation in the isolated city was becoming increasingly difficult as food prices soared, and coal grew scarce. Fearful local inhabitants dug airraid shelters or were forced to work on trenches outside the city. Government planes dropped thousands of copies of newspapers reporting that the rest of China was up in arms over the kidnapping. In desperation, the Marshal proposed to Meiling that the Generalissimo should be disguised and smuggled out by car. She turned this down because of its indignity, and because her husband was in no shape for such ajourney.\n\nHelp came from Zhou Enlai, who was staying in the Marshal's headquarters. Urged on by Zhang and Donald, Meiling agreed to meet the Communist envoy. In a two-hour talk, Zhou said her husband was the only man able to lead the country. On Christmas Eve, he went to meet the Generalissimo.\n\nThe two men's destinies crossed time and again. They had been colleagues a dozen years earlier at the military college where Chiang had begun his rise to power, and where Zhou was a political commissar. The Communist had narrowly escaped with his life when Chiang purged the left in 1927. By all accounts, the conversation in Xi'an was cordial \u2013 or high-level play-acting. The Generalissimo said there should be no more civil war. 'All the time we have been fighting, I have often thought of you,' he added. 'I hope we can work together again.' For his part, Zhou said the Communists wanted to back Chiang as the nation's leader against the Japanese.\n\nThe next morning, Donald left Christmas presents by the fireplace \u2013 a portable typewriter for Meiling and a steamer rug for her husband. Chiang laughed for the first time for thirteen days. An even better present was delivered by Zhang courtesy of Zhou. The Communist had had a second meeting with Meiling at which, employing language the Marshal or Mao might have used, she said they were all Chinese and should not be fighting each other. 'Internal problems should be solved by political means, and not by military force,' added the wife of the man who had used the army to get to the top. In keeping with Stalin's instructions, Zhou decided to take this at face value, and persuaded Yang to drop the demand for a written pledge from Chiang. It was agreed to settle for a verbal assurance of unity. The Generalissimo was free to go.\n\nBefore doing so, he had to have the last word. His 'admonition' to Zhang and Yang, published shortly afterwards, was Chiang's summing up of the situation as he would have liked to have seen it. He insisted that he had made no promises and that the two men must unreservedly obey the orders of the central government so as to 'turn a national calamity into a national blessing'. According to the official account, his sermon was taken down by his wife as the two soldiers stood to attention. Whether he actually delivered it at the time is doubtful; one of the Generalissimo's aides reported writing it after the event. But the admonition became Chiang's evidence that he had not given way. On the other hand, a local newspaper, presumably inspired by the Zhang-Yang camp, wrote that he had agreed to a united front with the Communists. Mao Zedong contended that Chiang was 'willing to accept those terms which are beneficial to the state and the nation and will keep his promise in spite of the absence of his signature'.\n\nAt 4 p.m., the Chiangs arrived at Xi'an airport, the Marshal riding in the front of their car beside the chauffeur. The main actors took time to pose for a group photograph. The Young Marshal, wearing a padded jacket and plus fours, put on a set smile. General Yang, the only one in uniform, stood to attention. The Chiangs were beside one another, Meiling stylish in a black top and long pale skirt, her husband in a thick black gown and trilby hat. Zhang, who had shown neither the stomach for war with Nanking nor a readiness to commit suicide or head for the hills, asked to fly out with the Chiangs, and face whatever punishment might be considered suitable. As Meiling noted, it was the first time 'any high officer responsible for mutinous conduct has shown eagerness . . . to be tried for his misdeeds'.\n\nThey went first to Luoyang. According to Donald's recollections of the flights, the Marshal appeared drawn and strained while Madame Chiang gazed out of the window with a faint smile and her husband slept. After they landed, the Generalissimo insisted the Marshal ride in his car to the military academy where they spent the night, Zhang sleeping in a room opposite his. The next day, the Chiangs flew to Nanking to be met by a crowd of tens of thousands. In recognition of his work, Chiang awarded Donald the Order of the Brilliant Jade, Grand Cordon of Blue. The Generalissimo offered his resignation for having allowed his subordinates to revolt, knowing that his gesture would be refused. Then, he went to recuperate in his home village in the eastern province of Zhejiang.\n\nThe Young Marshal flew to Nanking in a separate plane. At the airport, there was only one official to accompany him to T. V. Soong's ochre-coloured villa in the city, but secret police followed them, and Zhang was quickly put on trial. At one point during the court martial, he shouted that Chiang was the only member of the ruling group worth a damn; 'None of the rest of you would be any loss to China,' he added. 'If I am freed, I'll start a revolution!' The sentence was ten years' imprisonment, later changed to detention at Chiang's pleasure.\n\nAlthough the Generalissimo had not put his name to any agreement in Xi'an, the incident was a crucial historical moment. The national reaction demonstrated the yearning for unity in the face of Japan's aggression. There was only one man who could meet that need, a man whose unbowed conduct at Xi'an gave him a special status. When he arrived back in Nanking, Chiang wrote that he was 'conscious of living a second life'. But the swell of popular patriotic feeling made it impossible for him to press on with final suppression of the Communists. When a close aide suggested an immediate attack on the Red Army base in Yan'an, Chiang bent his head and did not reply. The Communists obtained a vital breathing space when they were weak and vulnerable. Had the Xi'an Incident not occurred, Mao might well not have survived to become Chiang's successor as ruler of China. That is why the thirteen days in December 1936 constituted a crucial moment of the twentieth century.\n\nThe man who had brought it about would spend half a century under arrest. The Young Marshal was to be kept in houses and caves all over China before being flown in 1946 to Taiwan where he was eventually released in 1991. Converted to Christianity, he married his long-time companion and they went to live in Hawaii where he died in 2001 at the age of 100 \u2013 he put his longevity down to sleeping well and not worrying. In an oral history released after his death, he said Chiang 'absolutely detested' him for having advocated fighting the Japanese rather than the Communists, and described the Generalissimo as a total egotist. 'Our friendship was like flesh and blood,' he added in a television interview. 'But our political dispute was like the relationship between two sworn enemies.' The grateful Communists hailed him as a great patriot \u2013 President Jiang Zemin called him 'a hero for eternity'.\n\nFor the Marshal's first place of detention, Chiang chose the Xuedou Mountain Hostel in a picturesque area south of the eastern port of Ningbo. Tea plantations stretched below the three-room bungalow suite. There were peach blossoms in the garden. Alongside was a Laughing Buddha temple said to be 1,500 years old. Zhang planted two trees on a terrace, and set off fireworks to calm his sorrow at what had happened. After six months, a fire in the kitchen destroyed the hostel, and the Marshal moved into quarters in the temple. 'The lonely shadow of my body lies under the sky,' he wrote in a poem. 'There is a long way to go; my hair turns white from growing old; little by little my tears become bright and the wind of spring is still blowing.' Down the hill lay the village of Xikou, where Chiang had been born fifty years earlier. Of all the places in China, the Generalissimo chose one next to his first home as the prison for his most illustrious captive.\n\n* * *\n\n*The conversation is from Chiang's diary in _China at the Crossroads_ p. 161 et seq. This was written after the event, and is self-serving. But the words and attitudes are characteristic of both men.\n\n* Since neither man spoke the other's language, this may have been more a matter of gesture than the dramatic words given by Donald's biographer, Selle (pp. 326\u20137), based on Donald's recollections.\n\n\u2020 Known at the time as Loyang.\n\n# PART I\n\nSON OF THE SALT-SELLER\n\nXikou, Zhejiang Province, October 1887\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nCanton, Guangdong Province, June 1926\n\n# CHAPTER 1\n\n _Cold Realities_\n\nIN LATE OCTOBER and early November of 1887, China suffered droughts, flooding of the Yellow River and cholera outbreaks in the cities of Nanking and Hangzhou. In Shanghai, a criminal was sentenced to stand in a cage without food or drink until he died. Along the Yangtze River, a magistrate conjured up the ghosts of dead men at a murder trial. Down south, a campaign to get rid of 'evil characters' led to 906 summary executions in Guangdong province. In the city of Canton, the god of plague was sighted \u2013 'a semi-human monster with huge feet'. In Peking, there was great concern about the illnesses of two Manchu imperial princes. A physician summoned from Zhejiang province on the eastern seaboard cured one, and called for die livers of river otters to deal with the malady affecting the other.\n\nIn the doctor's home province, a messenger carrying a lantern walked through the night to call a midwife to assist with the birth of a child in the village of Xikou.* On the upper floor of a two-storey house by the river running through the village, a boy was born at noon on 31 October. His paternal grandfather gave him the 'milk name' of Jui-yuan (Auspicious Beginning). His mother later called him Chung-cheng (Balanced Justice), and he finally gained the honorific name of Jieshi (Between Rocks) which would have a prophetic echo as he found himself sheltering in the cave outside Xi'an forty-nine years later. When he moved to Canton in the 1920s, its rendition in the local dialect produced the name by which he was to be generally known in the West, Chiang Kai-shek, though in the national language of Mandarin he is known as Jiang Jieshi.\n\nXikou was a small village with three streets lying on a crossing point of the slow-flowing Shanxi River. The Yutai Salt Store run by Chiang's family looked out at the waterway with its flat-hulled bamboo boats. Salt was a government monopoly, and the merchants who handled it enjoyed a certain standing. The house lay behind a wall topped with circular tiles, with a flagged courtyard onto which a room opened where Chiang's father and grandfather sold salt, wine, rice and sundry goods over a wooden counter. There were two other rooms on the ground level, one with a phoenix design set into the floor.\n\nAcross the river were thickly wooded hills and, beyond them, the trading harbours of the East China Sea. The big port of Ningbo was 30 miles to the north along a broad track through valleys and vegetable fields. Verdant hills with rows of tea bushes rose behind the village to the monastery where Zhang Xueliang would be held. Above it towered a ridge known as the Snow Mountain. In spring and summer, pink, purple and red blossoms dotted the slopes. From the peak, there was a commanding view of a lake and a stony path to a waterfall with a 600-foot drop. On the ridge, Chiang would later build a summer residence called Miao Terrace, writing its name in his own calligraphy to hang over the central courtyard. With its back to the mountains in the midst of pine woods and bamboo, the two-storey building was classically restrained, and reflected its owner's love of nature. The Generalissimo, who was brought up from Xikou in a sedan chair, liked to sit outside contemplating the hills. A photograph shows him dressed in a long robe, black slippers, skullcap and spectacles sitting looking into the distance from a wicker chair. The caption reads: 'Mr Chiang Kai-shek thought deeply at Miao Terrace'.\n\nThe Chiangs were the leading family in the village, being among a multitude of Chinese who claimed descent from a celebrated ancient statesman, the Duke of Zhou. They had lost much of their assets in the great Taiping rebellion which spread over China in the middle of the nineteenth century. The paternal grandfather, Yu-piao, gave the job of rebuilding the family fortunes to one of his three sons, Chiang Shu-an. Running the family shop, he was known as an honest broker in village disputes, a peace-maker who inspired confidence in his neighbours. His first wife died giving birth to their second child. He married again, but his second wife, who appeared to be barren, passed away eighteen months later. So, at the age of forty-five, he wed for the third time.\n\nHis wife was Wang Tsai-yu, the twenty-two-year-old, widowed daughter of a farmer who had retreated to a Buddhist monastery after her husband's death. An accomplished seamstress, she was sharp and ambitious. She gave birth to Chiang a year after the marriage; she had no breast milk, and a local man recalled that his grandmother fed the baby \u2013 'from then on, Chiang's family sent us a gift of money every spring festival,' he added. One of Shu-an's cousins took over as wet nurse for the baby, living in a room at the back of the salt shop.\n\nAs a child, Chiang was often in bad health. When not ill, he sought to stand out among his playmates, behaving in what he described as a haughty and lordly manner. In games of soldiers, he preferred to be the commander. A contemporary recalled that he 'liked to be at the head of the children'. Looking back, Chiang took a theatrical view of the perils of his childhood playing. 'I was frequently exposed to the risk of being drowned or burnt to death, or else severely cut or wounded,' he wrote. There were certainly times when he put himself in danger, for example by pushing chopsticks down his throat to see how far they would go, or nearly drowning in a water jar. But the habit of making himself the centre of melodramatic attention was to be a hallmark of his behaviour as a young man.\n\nHis early education was entrusted to village tutors, with whom he made slow progress in rote learning of classic texts. He showed a solitary side which would be evident throughout his life, going off on his own to bathe in mountain streams, walk in the hills and visit monasteries. He listened to roaring waterfalls and birds, and rode bamboo rafts down streams to watch the fishermen using cormorants with bands round their necks to prevent them from swallowing the catch they plucked from the water.\n\nWhen the boy was five, the paternal grandfather passed away, and his three sons squabbled over the inheritance. Two years later, Chiang's father died, and his widow was left to fend for herself as her in-laws and stepchildren took most of the family assets. Much later, Chiang's second wife would set down a very different version of his origins, claiming that an investigation showed he was really the son of a poor farmer in the central province of Henan who had abandoned his wife and son during a famine \u2013 she had found a job as a nurse and governess for a widowed salt merchant called Chiang whom she subsequently married. Unless contemporary inhabitants of Xikou and later historians were involved in a vast campaign of deception, the chronology of this tale makes no sense. In an inverse process to the family's claims to notable lineage, the story quoted by his second wife, whom he had abandoned, looks like a bid to take a leader down a peg by attributing humbler origins than those he proclaimed.*\n\nOn the other hand, the story of the mother protecting her son against adversity does have a certain echo. Every account attests to Chiang's remoteness from his father, his closeness to his mother, and her difficulties after she was widowed. Parallels would be drawn with the Confucian sage, Mencius, whose mother brought him up with great devotion despite her poverty. Chiang would invoke Wang as a leitmotif of his writings and diaries, constituting a mantra through which he could set her up as a model whose perfection was a continual reproach to himself and his unworthy compatriots. His filial attachment acted as a resource by which he could demonstrate to himself that he possessed the humility needed by a truly superior being. In the Chinese code, a man who was aiming high had to admit \u2013 in letter if not in spirit \u2013 to his own inadequacy; how better to do this than to measure himself against an iconic mother figure to whom all possible virtues could be attributed, and who was beyond reality as a construct of her son's psychological needs?\n\nAfter she was widowed, Wang left the salt store and moved into a three-room house down the street by the river. In due course, this would become Chiang's main residence in the village, greatly expanded as befitted his status with an ancestral hall, rock garden and large reception room. But, by his account, his mother struggled to make ends meet, raising her children in a spartan, authoritarian regime. No longer the wife of a prominent member of the village, she had to take in sewing and was regarded as an outsider because she came from another district. On one occasion, tax collectors demanded money she did not have readily available. So they imprisoned Chiang until she came up with die sum. That made a deep impression on him; a memoir he wrote on his fiftieth birthday recalled: 'My family, solitary and without influence, became at once the target of . . . insults and maltreatment . . . To our regret and sorrow none of our relatives and kinsmen was stirred from apathy.'\n\nFor a few years, Chiang was outdone in his mother's affections by a younger brother who was described as having extremely good looks and whom Wang loved as her favourite child. But the boy died at the age of four. After that, Chiang recalled, 'She centred all her hopes on me, hoping anxiously that I should make a name for myself.'\n\n'Her love was more than the love of an average mother: she was more of a disciplinarian than any strict teacher,' he wrote later. 'She taught me about the value of hard work as well as the elements of good social behaviour . . . From early morning to late at night every minute of her time was devoted to my well-being.' When he was eighteen, Chiang posed for a photograph with her, a handsome young man in a quilted jacket standing behind his mother who sits squarely on a wooden chair. Her eyes are deep-set. Unsmiling, she epitomises the harshness of her existence, what Chiang later called 'the shadow of cold realities'.\n\nFrom his mother, he learned to erect a protective wall between himself and his surroundings, and to tread warily while never admitting defeat. From an early age, he lived on his internal resources, and followed his own morality. Impulsive and domineering, demanding attention and regarding himself as the centre of the universe, he could become self-absorbed and introspective, withdrawing from the world. 'At play, he would regard the classroom as his stage and all his schoolmates as his toys,' a teacher recalled. 'But when he was at his desk, reading or holding his pen trying to think, then even a hundred voices around him could not distract him from his concentration. His periods of quietude and outburst sometimes occurred within a few minutes of each other: one would think he had two different personalities.'\n\nThere was little or no time for relaxed family relationships. Rather, an intensity bordering on hysteria reigned. When he left his mother on a trip, a tutor recalled, Chiang wept till his eyes became red. When he was downcast, one of his teachers remembered, 'the contagion of his grief would deeply depress the neighbours and cause his mother to retire to the adjoining room, there to shed tears herself. When the boy came home from a stay with cousins at the age of twelve, he burst into uncontrollable sobs on seeing his mother. 'From his childhood, [he] constructed a number of strong ego defence mechanisms against an experientially hostile world,' the historian Pichon Loh wrote in his study of Chiang's character in early life. 'They were to become a powerful mental wall behind which the rejected boy could withdraw in isolation, the better to preserve the stability of his personality or to re-stabilise a personality threatened with collapse.'\n\nIn 1901, a marriage was arranged between Chiang and Mao Fu-mei, a robust, illiterate village girl. He was fourteen; she was five years his senior. His heart was hardly in becoming a husband. During the wedding banquet, Chiang joined boys playing outside, and had to be dragged back to the meal. Wang saw the girl as a useful helper since her feet were only partially bound, but her affection was limited: Chinese mothers-in-law are not known for their tenderness to their daughters-in-law. After meeting Mao twenty years later, Chiang's second wife recalled her saying that the first two months of the marriage had been happy as Chiang took her on walks in the hills and raft rides down the river. But his mother then blamed the teenage bride for being a disturbing influence on her son, and leading him astray as they gallivanted in the mountains. When Kai-shek and she talked or laughed in the house, Wang would tell her to be silent.\n\n'Therefore,' Mao recalled, according to this account, 'I kept quiet and seldom spoke. More and more I avoided any direct conversation openly with him in the house. That was not easy, however, especially when he asked me questions and expected my answers. The situation went from bad to worse, and Kai-shek soon became impatient with me. I dared not say one word to defend myself, even when he scolded me, for, as you know, the villagers in their narrow-mindedness would accuse me of being an unfilial and disobedient daughter-in-law. And you know what that means in an isolated village like ours! The strain gradually caused a split between Kai-shek and me. All I could do was to weep secredy over my utter helplessness, and for a long period I suffered from melancholy.'\n\nMao found solace in devout Buddhism while Chiang left the village to attend the Phoenix Mountain School in the district seat of Fenghua, from which he was nearly expelled for leading a protest calling for better teaching. After two years, he shifted to a private school in Ningbo where he heard a teacher extolling the importance of the army. A year later, he moved again, to the Dragon Middle School in Fenghua. The classical Chinese learning by rote, with no questions asked, formed his mindset \u2013 he was always to believe that the issuing of an instruction was enough; orders were to be obeyed just as the texts of Confucius and his disciples were to be enunciated as eternal truths.\n\nOne of Chiang's teachers, Hollington Tong, later to be his obsequious information director, recalled him as a 'serious-minded student' who grabbed the newspapers when they arrived from Shanghai and studied them in the small reading room. He had also already adopted his lifelong habit of getting up early, practising exercises and meditating while others slept. 'It was his custom to stand erect on the veranda in front of his bedroom for half an hour,' Tong wrote in a hagiographical biography. 'During this time his lips were compressed, his features were set in determination, and he stood with his arms folded. It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty what thoughts filled his mind at such times, but it was fairly obvious that he was thinking of his future.'\n\nChiang had decided to pursue a military career, and to train in Japan, a country whose embrace of industrial and military modernity contrasted so sharply with the conservatism of China's imperial system. In August 1894, Japan had declared war on China over a dispute in Korea, which was under the protection of the Manchu Empire in Peking. Tokyo's victories marked the start of half a century of expansion into China, and confirmed Japan as the Prussia of Asia, with a military command that was a law to itself. In 1904\u20135, that status was confirmed when it defeated Russia in their Far Eastern war to demonstrate its power on the world stage.\n\nSeeking to learn from the Japanese system, Chiang sailed across the East China Sea in the spring of 1905. His mother sold possessions to raise the money for the trip. By then, the adolescent from Xikou had read an incendiary book, _The Revolutionary Handbook_ , which called for the killing of the Manchu Emperor, the establishment of a republic with a constitution based on that of the United States, the expulsion of all Manchus, and 'the freedom to revolt'. Before leaving China, the young man cut off his pigtail \u2013 a symbol of submission to the imperial dynasty \u2013 and sent it home. This declared him to be on the side of the revolution. His relatives were duly alarmed.\n\nIn Japan, he suffered a terrible disappointment. Chinese could gain admission to military schools there only with a recommendation from the Board of War in Peking, which he did not have. Rather than turning round and returning home immediately, Chiang spent several months in Japan picking up the language before heading back to Xikou. He took out his frustrations on his wife. Later, Mao complained that he beat her, and, on one occasion, dragged her down the stairs by her hair. He would write that he could not bear 'hearing the sound of her footsteps or seeing her shadow'. Soon he was off again, to China's greatest metropolis of Shanghai, 200 miles to the north.\n\nBefore long, his mother followed him. A fortune-teller had told her that, if Mao gave birth to a son, the offspring would become a high official. So Wang travelled to the big city with the oppressed wife in tow. Chiang made it plain he was not interested in testing the prophecy. But, after his mother threatened to commit suicide if he did not sleep with his wife, he relented. Mao became pregnant and in due course gave birth to a boy.\n\nShowing the perseverance inherited from his mother, Chiang applied for a Chinese army school as a stepping stone towards getting to Japan. He secured one of fourteen places allocated to his province. The college had Japanese instructors, some of whom did not hide their contempt for the Chinese. One produced a lump of clay during a lecture on hygiene, and said it could contain as many as 400 million microbes, 'like China with 400 million people'. Enraged, Chiang walked up to the desk, picked up the clay and threw it down so that it split into pieces. The instructor complained to the director, but the young man escaped with a reprimand.\n\nWhen an examination was held to select cadets for Japan, Chiang was not on the list because he was not studying Japanese. He appealed on the grounds that he had already learned the language in its home country, and was allowed to sit for the test, qualifying as one of forty applicants chosen.\n\nHis destination was the Shimbu Gakko military school, where courses for Chinese students were paid for by the Peking government. After graduating there, Chiang joined a field artillery regiment in northern Japan: he was 5.59 feet in height and weighed 130 pounds. A photograph shows a trim young man in uniform and boots. A short sword hangs from his belt, and he holds a flat cap in his right hand. He groomed horses, shined boots and learned how guns worked, but did not impress his instructors. One commented that he 'did not reveal innate ability'. Another called him 'a commonplace cadet'.\n\nMilitary life was tough. Even in the bitter winter, Chiang recalled, 'we never failed to get up before five o'clock every morning and to wash our faces with icy cold water which we ourselves had to bring up from the well'. Initially, he suffered from the thin diet \u2013 a bowl of rice at each meal with three slices of dried turnip and sometimes a small piece of salted fish. Bean curd, green vegetables and a tiny piece of meat were added only on Sundays. For the first three weeks, he supplemented this by buying biscuits, but then grew accustomed to the small quantities provided. Looking back, Chiang came to believe that his year as an ordinary soldier in Japan provided a foundation that stood him in good stead. It certainly gave him an appreciation of the value of discipline, hard work, political indoctrination and modern weapons, in an army largely free of external control.\n\nThough Peking banned Chinese students in Japan from such activities, Chiang formed a small political circle at the college. More important, he met a young man from his home province of Zhejiang called Chen Qimei who was in Japan as a student but whose main activity was working with the movement founded by the perennial Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen. Aged thirty, Chen was eleven years older than Chiang. The contact was to set the course of the young man's life. The two became sworn brothers, and Chen introduced Chiang to an umbrella grouping of anti-Manchu underground organisations established by Sun under the name of the Tongmenghui or United League, with Tokyo as its headquarters.\n\nSubsequent literature is peppered with accounts of a meeting between Sun and Chiang in Japan in 1908: in some, Sun predicts that the young man will become a hero of the revolution, and even takes to consulting him before making any plans. Such stories appear to have been the product of retrospective hagiography. At the time they were supposed to have met, Sun was elsewhere, and Chiang was too junior to figure in his projects \u2013 in any case, he did not become a member of the United League until 1910.\n\nIn the autumn of 1911, Chiang received a coded telegram from Chen in Shanghai telling him to return to China to join the revolution that had just broken out against the Manchus. Chiang obtained a forty-eight-hour leave permit. Before departing, he joined Japanese officers and two other Chinese at a dinner during which the cups were filled with water that was meant to symbolise the willingness of military men to die in battle. One of the other participants recalled much later that, after the two other Chinese had taken a sip, Chiang drained the cup, his face red with emotion. He then travelled to Tokyo with his two companions. There, he changed into civilian clothes, and sent his uniform and ceremonial dagger to military headquarters by registered mail to show he was not a common deserter. He took the train to Nagasaki and, on 30 October, sailed in disguise for Shanghai. 'This,' he recalled, 'was the real beginning of my revolutionary career.'\n\n* * *\n\n* Known at the time as Chikow or Hsikou.\n\n* There was an intriguing episode in the 1940s, however, when a man from Henan turned up at Chiang's headquarters claiming to be his brother, and was well treated as if he had some claim on the ruler of China. (See Introduction by Lloyd Eastman to _Chen: Chiang Kaishek's Secret Life.)_\n\n# CHAPTER 2\n\n _Sworn Brothers_\n\nTHE FALL OF THE Manchu Empire was a tale foretold. From 1850 on, the dynasty \u2013 known as the Qing \u2013 which had ruled since 1644 was challenged by armed uprisings on a huge scale, reform movements, and a growing sense that China could not remain in splendid isolation from a world which was clearly outstripping it. The Manchus and their predecessors had always seen their rule as universal, rising far above the mere government of a nation state and based on Confucian principles. No other power could be acknowledged: diough die dynasty was often flexible in practice, the principle was that there could only be vassals. But, by die second half of the nineteenth century, dieir hold on the mandate of heaven became increasingly shaky.\n\nEarth-shaking as constitutional reforms were for traditionalists, they were too late. The ceding of power to provincial gentry weakened Peking's authority. The abolition of the Confucian civil service examination deprived the Manchus of a dedicated elite. The system could not handle the emergence of a public sphere among those who wanted to run their own lives and think for themselves. The imperial treasury was under constant strain; the court riven by intrigue. Corruption was rampant. The backwardness of industry and the infrastructure mocked the pretensions of the Sons of Heaven. The Empire became the single great symbol of what was wrong with China, its unpopularity heightened by nationalist resentment at a dynasty whose founders had invaded from the north and which made its subjects wear pigtails in a sign of submission. Advocates of change united round one tenet: the Manchus must go. What was to follow was less clear.\n\nIn the second half of the nineteenth century, popular rebellions broke out across the country. Much the biggest was that of the Taipings, followers of a farmer's son from the south called Hong Xiuquan who proclaimed himself the younger offspring of the Christian God. Taking their name from the Chinese characters for 'great peace', the Taipings set out to create a Heavenly Kingdom on earth in which private ownership of property would be abolished, idols cast down, men and women made equal, and opium, prostitution, slavery and foot-binding outlawed. Swelling to half a million men, the Taipings took the old capital of Nanking which they renamed the Heavenly City. By the time it lost momentum and was put down, the fourteen-year revolt had affected sixteen of China's eighteen provinces with a death toll put at 20 million.\n\nThough defeated in 1864, the Taiping rising had important effects. Peking gave more authority to Han Chinese \u2013 the ethnic majority \u2013 particularly to a group of Confucian statesmen who offered to strengthen the regime. The battles against the rebels brought into being armies under professional commanders who came to relish their positions and whose elite troops received instruction from foreign advisers. At the turn of the century, changes in education, political administration, industry, law and the budget were proclaimed. But the reactionary Dowager Empress, Ci Xi, blocked progress with a coup which led to the arrest of the Emperor, her nephew, and his mysterious death, widely attributed to poisoning at her behest.\n\nThe accession of the three-year-old Pu Yi to the throne in 1909 further weakened the Manchus. Pressure for change mounted and the gentry increasingly took over affairs in the provinces. Imperial authority had also been shaken by defeat at the hands of the West in two opium wars, and then by Japan. The foreign military expedition to Peking to put down the Boxer rebellion in 1900 had made things even worse, leaving China saddled with indemnity payments to the powers whose property and citizens had been attacked. Sovereignty was impaired by the extraterritorial rights that gave foreigners immunity from arrest by the Chinese authorities, and by the granting of autonomous concessions to half a dozen foreign powers in coastal and river ports. The weakness of the Empire faced with these small bands of foreigners, and the ceding of treaty rights to them, compounded China's shame.\n\nIn the generation of educated Chinese pressing for modernisation through study circles, secret societies and journals, nobody was more active than Sun Yat-sen, the son of a peasant family in Guangdong province in the south. Though he had studied medicine in Hong Kong, where he was baptised by an American Congregationalist, Sun's true calling was revolution. He travelled incessandy to spread his gospel and raise funds from the overseas Chinese diaspora, evolving his anti-Manchu, nationalist creed as he did so. The dapper doctor became a hero in 1896 when he was kidnapped and held for five days in the Chinese embassy in London before a press outcry led the British government to obtain his release.*\n\nAt the head of the United League, Sun propounded three principles of Nationalism, Democracy and the People's Livelihood. The first meant uniting China, ending the privileges granted to foreigners and winning the country a proper place in the world; the second involved devolving power to the people after periods of tutelage by the doctor's party; the third could be interpreted as anything from gentle reformism to full-blown socialism. Sun was a vague thinker \u2013 his second wife would say he put together his pronouncements on the spur of the moment depending on the political context and his audience. He acted as a dictator within his movement, which was rent with factionalism. Still, he pressed on, often with only a handful of followers, plotting from havens in Japan or French-ruled Vietnam. After failed initiatives in the south-west, he engineered an abortive army mutiny in 1910 in the Guangdong capital of Canton.\u2020 The following April, he prepared another rising there, but the action began before the main body of his force arrived up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, and between seventy-two and eighty-six rebels died.\n\nIn May 1911, a new Cabinet took office in Peking under an imperial prince known for his traditional views and corruption. One of its early decisions was to nationalise railway lines planned in Sichuan province. This angered the gentry there, and led to demonstrations on which imperial troops opened fire. The Sichuan unrest was localised, calling for reform rather than revolution. But more radical opposition was gaining ground in army units whose officers saw themselves in a role similar to that of the general staff in Prussia.\n\nThe decisive spark came on 9 October 1911, when a bomb exploded accidentally at the headquarters of a military revolutionary group in the Russian concession of the Yangtze River city of Hankou. Police swooped and grabbed the group's membership list. That forced the soldiers into action. The following day, troops in the neighbouring garrison city of Wuchang mutinied, and marched to the quarters of their colonel, who agreed to take command of the rising: one story is that he only did so after his men found him hiding under his bed and threatened to shoot him if he did not join them. The date \u2013 10 October or the Double Ten \u2013 became the most sacred anniversary in the Republican calendar. Two days later, the rebels controlled Hankou and the two nearby cities of Hanyang and Wuchang, making up the tri-cities known as Wuhan. But they had no plan of what to do next, and revolutionaries elsewhere were taken by surprise, making the revolt a headless dragon.\n\nAt the time, Sun Yat-sen was in Denver, Colorado, as part of a fund-raising trip to the United States. He was told of events in China by a telegram from Huang Xing, his portly, thickset co-conspirator in the Canton revolt six months earlier who had been named as the second-ranking figure in Wuhan. One account is that Sun could not understand the cable because it was in code, and he had left his crib in Texas. Another is that he was feeling too tired to respond, and went to bed instead, only reading of the uprising in a newspaper the following morning. Then, instead of returning immediately to China, Sun travelled to London and Paris to seek declarations of neutrality from Britain and France.\n\nTo defend themselves, the Manchus called back their best general, Yuan Shikai, who had led the regime's German-trained new armies at the start of the century before being banished from the capital for being too powerful. Under his direction, imperial forces partially defeated the rebels in Wuhan. But the revolt had spread to fifteen provinces, and Yuan turned his power on the throne. Though he was allowed to go on living in the Forbidden City, Emperor Pu Yi was forced to abdicate while Yuan had himself appointed Prime Minister, and formed a cabinet containing only one Manchu.\n\nFor Chiang Kai-shek, the 1911 revolution provided the apprenticeship for his rise to power. After his tough experience in Japan, he became immersed in the very different world of Shanghai with its overlapping layers of politics, plotting and violence. The city was the biggest and most modern urban centre in the country, the home of cut-throat commerce and finance with a huge labour force fuelled by migrants from poor rural regions, a brutal metropolis on the make. China's writ did not run in the British-American International Settlement and the French Concession which Peking had ceded by treaties imposed by the imperial powers in the nineteenth century. As well as housing foreigners, the concessions, with their modernity, attracted a far more numerous Chinese population. For revolutionaries and political exiles, they were a great haven.\n\nAfter responding to Chen Qimei's call to join him in 1911, Chiang became well acquainted with the dark side of the city, which he would use in murderous fashion in due course. He could not have found a better training ground or a better teacher than the sworn brother he had met in Japan, for whom he had a sword made to celebrate their undying relationship.\n\nThe son of a businessman, Chen Qimei had been apprenticed to a pawnbroker and worked for a silk merchant before his brother, an army officer, paid for him to go to study in Japan. Though enrolled at military school there, his real interest lay in political activity, and he attended the meeting with Sun Yat-sen which formed the United League. Chen saw the constant use of violence as the way to revolution. Mild-looking with protruding ears and owlish spectacles, he had an almost adolescent air. But he led a successful assault by several hundred rebels on the city's arsenal, the seat of military power, on 3 November 1911, and then became military governor of Shanghai. Sun later commented that the rising in Shanghai had been the greatest contribution of any in 1911. Chen had a good relationship with businessmen, who welcomed the lifting of imperial restrictions on trade and finance. He also forged links with the city's secret societies and underworld, including the main criminal outfit, the Green Gang. One of his associates, Ying Guixin, employed criminals to conduct kidnapping, robbery and extortion missions.\n\nChiang Kai-shek's revolutionary blow was struck 100 miles south of Shanghai, in Hangzhou, chief city of his native province of Zhejiang. He travelled there in early November to organise a 100-strong unit, writing to his mother to ask her forgiveness for having neglected her. Her reply, as recorded by one of his admiring biographers, was that Chiang should do as his duty required. Early on 5 November, a storming party headed by two young women throwing home-made bombs moved on the governor's headquarters, and set it on fire. With reinforcements, the attackers then staged a two-pronged attack on the garrison camp by the West Lake. The demoralised defenders were quickly disarmed. Among those who took part in the attack was a 'Dare to Die' unit which, if the Shanghai precedent was anything to go by, included men from the Green Gang.\n\nThe provincial revolts which followed the October uprising raised the possibility that China might fall apart as regions went their own way. To prevent this, a conference was held in Shanghai with a representative of Yuan Shikai. On Christmas Day 1911, Sun Yat-sen landed in the city after returning from Europe via Singapore. Going to a house in the French Concession, he telephoned the leaders of the revolutionary delegation at the conference. Two of them went to see him, accompanied by the Australian who would be at Xi'an a quarter of a century later, W. H. Donald.\n\nIn a drawing room where a weak fire was burning, Sun sat to one side of the hearth. On the other side was a hunchback, dressed in a uniform with big shining buttons and medals. This was an American named Homer Lea, who had latched on to Sun as an adviser. The doctor hailed him as 'a world brilliant military talent', but his presence went down badly that afternoon: according to Donald's biography, the Chinese could not understand how the would-be leader of the revolution could have chosen such a man, and Lea was soon sidelined. On 29 December a provisional parliament met to elect the doctor as provisional president of China under a constitution which promised China's first national parliamentary election.\n\nSun formed a government with several figures who would work for or against Chiang in the decades ahead, including the southern politician and theorist, Hu Hanmin, as secretary general of the President's office. The cabinet met round a large rectangular table in a Western-style building looking out on a neat garden at the back of the former imperial governor's headquarters. But its authority was extremely limited, and the task of turning from revolutionary theory to practical administration soon became too much for the doctor. After only forty-five days, he handed over to Yuan Shikai. Responsibility for uniting the nation and establishing the Republic was thus vested in a general who said he had no time for 'abstract ideas' like democracy.\n\nReturning to Shanghai with his first victory under his belt, Chiang was put in command of a revolutionary army brigade funded by local merchants. According to a critical account written in 1930, the men were riff-raff, and their commander soon gave up trying to train them. Chiang followed the example of Chen Qimei by forging links with secret societies, and plunged into the flamboyant Shanghai nighdife. A photograph of the time shows him as a debonair figure with his hair slicked back, wearing a shirt with a high stiff collar and a three-button striped jacket. He also got to know Zhang Jingjiang,* a prominent financier whom he added to his list of sworn brothers.\n\nZhang, son of a wealthy family in Chiang's home province of Zhejiang, had been bought an imperial rank by his father. He went abroad to join the Chinese legation in Paris where he established a trading company dealing in gold, tea and silk: he also ran a bean curd factory and a lucrative antiques business which gave him his nickname of 'Curio Chang' in the transliteration of the time. During the First World War, he moved across the Atlantic. His wife stayed in America when he returned to China after the armistice, but his five daughters, all with Western names, joined him.\n\nAfter meeting Sun Yat-sen on a boat, Zhang became a devoted follower of the doctor, and contributed large sums to his cause. His home near the racecourse in the International Settlement was a gathering place for politicians and businessmen. Zhang suffered from creeping paralysis of the spine which led the French Concession police to dub him 'Quasimodo'. A photograph taken after the revolution shows Sun striding forward while Zhang lurches awkwardly to his left, wearing a light homburg hat and multicoloured embroidered coat. In later years, as his illness grew worse, he would be carried about on a litter, referring to himself as 'the Reclining Cicada'. With his dark glasses, Richard Ill-like appearance and aura of money and power, he was one of the city's distinctive figures, his influence increased by underworld and secret society contacts to whom he introduced Chiang. The young revolutionary clearly struck Zhang as a man with a future. For his part, Chiang referred to his feeling of 'fear and respect' for the businessman.\n\nDespite such useful associations, Chiang was not the most popular man in revolutionary circles. He had a nasty temper and insisted on having his own way. His fiery side was well illustrated in 1912 when he went to see a rival of Chen Qimei, who was in hospital at the time. As a quarrel developed, Chiang pulled out his pistol and shot the man dead.*\n\nAfter this episode Chiang, now twenty-five, took off for Japan, where he published a military magazine, for which he wrote articles extolling the doctrine of 'blood and iron' and the centralisation of military power. China, he argued, should be ruled by an enlightened despotism which would combine 'Washington's ideals' with 'Napoleon's methods', and democratic thought with revolutionary spirit. He considered going to Germany to further his training, but returned to Shanghai instead for fresh enterprises with Chen Qimei against the growing power of Yuan Shikai.\n\nThe city's revolutionary administration had lost its initial popularity as taxes rose and corruption grew. Yuan Shikai edged Chen out, and installed his own men. Sun Yat-sen had also proved malleable. In August 1912, he was lavishly received in Peking, and had thirteen meetings with the President after which he proclaimed his host to be 'just die right man'. On 25 September, die doctor was among those who put their names to an agreement that handed the stocky, bull-headed general a ten-year term in the name of stability and national reconciliation. The National Assembly backed one of his cronies as prime minister. 'The Chinese revolution is a very young baby,' Yuan told a diplomat. 'It must be nursed and kept from taking strong meat or potent medicines like those prescribed by foreign doctors.'\n\nSun found a new enthusiasm as Director for Construction of All Railways in China, and set out for an inspection tour in a long train with two dining cars. The preference for grand schemes over practicality which marked Sun's politics also applied to his new passion. On a large map, he drew thick lines between provincial capitals with thinner lines for branch links. If a connection was crooked, Sun would wipe it out with wet cotton and draw a straight line regardless of the terrain or natural barriers. He was keen to show his map to journalists who boarded the train, but W. H. Donald, who accompanied him, prudendy arranged for it to be temporarily mislaid.\n\nThough Sun had allowed himself to be sidelined, the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT) which was formed in August 1912 to replace earlier revolutionary groups, acquired a potent young political organiser called Song Jiaoren as it prepared for the general election promised by the constitution. Still only thirty, Song appealed to the middle class, landowners and merchants by ditching any mention of Sun's principle of the 'people's livelihood', which many equated with socialism. Equality of the sexes was also dropped. In February 1913, the results of the election gave the Kuomintang 269 of the 596 seats in the lower house of the legislature and 123 of 274 in the upper house. Its score meant that it would have no difficulty concluding alliances with smaller parties to form a majority, enabling Song to become Prime Minister at the head of a cabinet to displace Yuan Shikai's regime.\n\nTo eliminate that challenge, one of Yuan's henchmen contacted Chen Qimei's gangster former associate in Shanghai, Ying Guixin, who felt that the revolution had not treated him well enough. His relationship with Yuan's regime became so close that the Prime Minister gave him a copy of its secret code book. After receiving a telegram from the capital promising him a high award if he destroyed Song, Ying approached a young man called Wu in a teahouse and offered him a trip to Europe if he would 'lighten the labours of Yuan Shikai and smooth his path'.\n\nOn 20 March, Song Jiaoren went to the Shanghai station to board the train for Peking. As he walked along the platform, Wu, dressed in black, opened fire with a Browning revolver. Song was rushed to a hospital where the doctors were told to wait for official permission from Peking to operate. By the time this came, peritonitis had set in. Song died the following morning. A Western woman doctor said he could have been saved if she had been able to act immediately. On 21 March Ying sent two telegrams to the capital. One read: 'The urgent order was executed.' The other added: 'The insurgent leader is already annihilated; none of our army was killed or wounded.'\n\nThe Yuan administration tried to blame the killing on internal Kuomintang feuds, and then conjured up an unknown organisation called the Women's Assassination Group. But Ying was an immediate suspect, and was arrested while smoking opium in a brothel. In his house, police found the exchange of telegrams with Peking, together with the murder weapon. There was also an incriminating letter from the Prime Minister who soon stepped down on the grounds that he was suffering from toothache \u2013 he died after being fed poison the following year. The assassin, Wu, was also arrested, and also died of poisoning while awaiting trial. Ying, however, escaped and went to Peking to seek support. Soon afterwards, he was stabbed to death with two swords in a railway compartment. Responsibility for his death was not established.\n\nAfter Song's death, Sun Yat-sen joined the opposition in criticising Yuan Shikai for having raised a \u00a325 million loan from an international banking consortium without consulting Parliament. The general sent troops to surround the legislature, and sacked three provincial governors who sympathised with the nationalist cause. Seven provinces declared their independence of Peking in what became known as the Second Revolution, but were defeated without much difficulty. Yuan ordered the dissolution of the Kuomintang, meaning that Parliament could not meet for lack of a quorum. A constitutional conference in the spring of 1914 confirmed him as dictator for life. Egged on by an American adviser, F. J. Goodnow, who thought empire the right form of government for China, Yuan laid plans to elevate himself to the throne, and ordered a 40,000-piece porcelain dinner service from the former imperial pottery.\n\nAs part of the Second Revolution, Chiang Kai-shek was entrusted with an attack on the Shanghai Arsenal. On his way there, he was arrested by a sentry, but escaped. The early morning attack was a fiasco. After his outnumbered force suffered heavy losses, Chiang fled to the International Settlement, gave up his arms and went with his wealthy patron, Zhang Jingjiang, to try to raise support in Nanking. When this got nowhere, Chiang and Chen Qimei, who had a price of $50,000 on his head, sailed once more to Japan.\n\nThe next year, the young man was involved in plans for another rising which was aborted by the security forces of the Shanghai military governor, Admiral Cheng Ju-cheng, a graduate of the Greenwich Naval College in London. The authorities bribed a fellow revolutionary they had arrested to kill Chiang. But he sought shelter with his rich patron, Zhang Jingjiang. When police tracked him down there, Chiang walked out of the house with a young lady on his arm, gambling that the watchers would not expect him to be accompanied. As he stepped into the street, the police asked if he was their quarry. 'No,' he replied. 'We've just said goodbye to him in the drawing room.' Returning to Japan yet again, he rejoined Sun Yat-sen who was working on the establishment of a new movement, the China Revolutionary Party. With only 500 members, it was more of a secret society than a political party, described by one Kuomintang veteran as 'a small group of oddly-assorted people . . . without the slightest political training'. Chiang became its 102nd member.\n\nFor all his long years of struggle, the doctor's own status was questionable at this point. His insistence on unchallenged authority over colleagues alienated potential partners. Nor was Sun's prestige enhanced by his womanising. He had abandoned his wife, whom he had wed in an arranged marriage in his home village. They had had three children, but Sun had left her in Hawaii while he went on his travels. 'Even his close associates were disturbed by the way Sun consorted with prostitutes in Southeast Asia,' a historian of the clandestine revolutionary movement has written. 'That was the trouble with the old boy,' W. H. Donald noted. 'Couldn't keep him off the women.' He pursued a liaison in Japan from which a daughter was born, and invited what the Australian described as 'a large number of beautiful Chinese women' to join his railway inspection tour in 1912.\n\nAmong the party as Sun's secretary was Ailing Soong, the American-educated eldest daughter of the Shanghai tycoon, Methodist and republican supporter, Charlie Soong. According to Donald's recollection, the doctor stared at her during the train journeys without a flicker of his eyelids. He asked her father for her hand in marriage, but this was refused, if only on the grounds that the doctor was still married to his first wife and the Methodist businessman could not approve of bigamy. Ailing, who was more interested in money than in politics, soon left the doctor's employ. Her place was taken by her beautiful sister, Qingling, also a graduate from the Methodist Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia.\n\nCharlie Soong tried to keep his daughter away from Sun, locking her in their Shanghai home. But she climbed out of a window and escaped with her man. In October 1915 they married. He was fifty; she was twenty-three. Aware of the controversy, the doctor did not appear at public functions with his wife for more than two years.\n\nTo raise funds for the revolution, Sun sent Chen and Chiang on a trip to South-east Asia. Their boat called at Shanghai, and the lure of the city proved too much \u2013 they went ashore and stayed there when the ship travelled on. After the failures of the previous two years, Chiang pushed for action against the main symbol of Yuan's power in the city. On 10 November 1915, the revolutionaries struck.\n\nThat morning, the military governor drove in his black Delage limousine to the Japanese Consulate for a reception in honour of the Emperor. As the car slowed down to cross tram tracks onto the riverside Bund, a Chinese man on the pavement threw a bomb. It arched over the limousine and exploded in a cloud of smoke. The bomb thrower and another man, both wearing gowns, drew Mauser pistols. One jumped on the running board and pumped bullets inside; the other ran alongside, firing as he went. Bullets shattered the windscreen, and riddled the woodwork and upholstery. One of Admiral Cheng's medals was blown off. Two passing British police inspectors intervened, and overpowered the attackers. They carried ammunition belts containing 198 bullets. Hit sixteen times, the Admiral was dead on arrival at the hospital. The assassins said they had been 'very disappointed' at Yuan Shikai's plans to become emperor, and had resolved to kill Cheng as his representative.\n\nChen Qimei and Chiang hoped the assassination would clear the way for a naval mutiny they were planning to incite by taking over the local flagship, the 2,750-ton, British-built _Chao-ho_. With the help of a Green Gang member, they spent $200,000 on bribes to the crews of two other ships to join in. In the evening of 5 December 1915, a yellow-funnelled launch carrying two dozen young men sailed alongside the _Chao-ho_. The passengers, who looked like students, asked to be allowed to visit the warship. Once aboard, they surrounded its guns, drew pistols and demanded the keys of the magazine, managing to get access to ammunition for the smaller cannons. At pistol point, the gunners were forced to shoot eighty-five three-inch shells at the city. Though they aimed high, some buildings were hit, including a hotel where a shell passed through the kitchen as the cooks prepared dinner.\n\nSimultaneous attacks were launched on police stations, the main telephone exchange and the electricity station. Bombs were left in parcels and fruit baskets. But the revolt fizzled out, in large part because of incompetent preparations against superior forces. Fire from loyal ships hit the boiler of the _Chao-ho_ and, since none of those who had boarded it knew how to move the ship, it became a sitting target. The crews of the two other ships failed to join in. The revolutionaries on land were soon dispersed.\n\nHeading out from the French Concession, Chen and Chiang found themselves alone as more and more enemy soldiers appeared. 'Luckily,' Chiang recalled, 'it was fairly dark, and they could not distinguish who we were.' The two retraced their steps to a safe house. No sooner had they arrived than police turned up with drawn pistols. Chen's nephew, Chen Guofu, banged the doors and pushed tables and chairs around to make as much noise as possible to warn his uncle and Chiang who were upstairs. 'Very softly, Chen Qimei and I climbed over the next building and from there went into hiding in my private room on the Avenue Joffre,' Chiang recounted. Though he said their spirits never wavered, he admitted that 'the days seemed dark and bleak'.\n\nChiang joined an attempt to subvert a fortress north-west of the city, which was initially successful as local troops revolted. But the general appointed as the revolutionary commander changed sides after being bribed by Yuan Shikai. Chiang stayed on with some of his men till they were beaten by superior numbers and their chief, a former bandit, was beheaded. According to one account Chiang was left alone in the fortress at midnight when two soldiers came up and put him on the road back to Shanghai.\n\nThe revolutionaries suffered other reverses and growing financial problems. But, in May 1916, Chen Qimei thought he had hit a rich vein when a man contacted him with a scheme to raise money from ajapanese financier, with a Chinese mine serving as collateral. Though Chiang advised caution, Chen told him the contact was 'one of us'. A meeting was arranged to finalise the deal. Half a dozen men in a hired, chauffeur-driven car drove up to the house where Chen was staying. There was an initial discussion, but the visitors were assassins working for Yuan Shikai, who shot Chen dead. Chiang took the body in a car to a hideout in the French Concession where he held a rite. He then arranged a funeral at which he delivered the eulogy to say that he and Chen were so close that 'we had almost forgotten we were two separate personalities'.\n\nFearing he was next on the hit list, Chiang took shelter in a hideout in a pleasure garden, and then moved in with one of Chen's two nephews, both of whom would later play key roles in his regime. Sun then ordered him to join an expedition organised with Japanese help to try to bring revolution to the large coastal province of Shandong. It was very badly organised and poorly armed; Chiang left after two weeks as it collapsed.\n\nThis low time came at a moment when the wind was moving in favour of the forces opposing Yuan Shikai. With his old-fashioned outlook, dozen concubines and traditional manners, the general could not meet China's desire for change despite some attempts at modernisation. A bid to impose a more effective system of land taxation alienated the provincial gentry. After eighty-three days on the throne, Yuan was forced to retract his imperial claims. In the spring of 1916, he received W. H. Donald in his palace in Peking. His stumpy body was bent, his hair grey, his face white and shrunken. He slouched forward in his chair, and, after a brief conversation, shuffled out of the room. In June, a month after the murder of Chen Qimei, he died of blood poisoning, ushering in the warlord era in which competing militarists, big and small, fought endless battles across China.\n\nAs revolving cliques of generals jostled for power in north and central China, the only place left for Sun Yat-sen was his native province in the south. An army from neighbouring Guangxi province, which had moved into Guangdong, was ready to let him set up in the capital of Canton. The doctor named Chiang as his military adviser, putting him in charge of a field operations section of the revolutionary army under the overall command of the chief provincial general, Chen Jiongming. The two officers quickly fell out, Chiang complaining about a lack of discipline and the difficulty of getting his views across. His Zhejiang accent and dialect also made communication difficult with the Cantonese.\n\nSun took the title of Grand Marshal, donning a braided uniform with epaulettes and decorations. His national claims were boosted after the ruling clique in Peking sent troops to surround the parliament building there, and legislators headed south to elect him head of a government which was to mount an expedition to take power in the capital. But he had no army, and the commanders in Guangdong were more interested in regional power than in conquering China. The doctor's government was a lacklustre affair; its officials spent their time sitting around playing chess and Sun's influence stopped at the gates of the cement factory he used as his headquarters. His bluff was called when a leading southern militarist sent a message to the gentry, merchants and parliamentarians in Canton saying that the 'rather confusing title of Grand Marshal' was subject to question, and that China did not need another national government. Even the parliamentarians from Peking rejected him by now, and the Grand Marshal was forced to leave for Shanghai in the summer of 1918. Chiang followed him on another journey to the metropolis where, as it turned out, he would find a new wife.\n\n* * *\n\n* It remains unclear whether Sun was grabbed by Chinese diplomats or went to the embassy voluntarily and was then held. See Berg\u017dre: _Sun_ p. 62 et seq.\n\n\u2020 Now known as Guangzhou.\n\n* Also known as Zhang Renjie.\n\n* According to the adulatory biography by Sie, Chiang acted in 'legitimate self defence' (p. 92), but others say he took the initiative.\n\n# CHAPTER 3\n\n _Going to Extremes_\n\nIN HIS EARLY THIRTIES, Chiang Kai-shek was a restless, ambitious young man hanging on the coat-tails of revolution as he sought his way forward in life. Subject to impulsive moods and erratic behaviour, he was self-centred and suspicious. In his funeral eulogy for Chen Qimei, he had talked of those 'who have been trying to attack me, slander me and destroy me'. His diary records that he was 'often wary'. He suffered problems with his eyes and teeth, nervous pains and a typhoid attack. He thought of seeking new horizons abroad, and read widely on everything from military matters to astronomy and geography, with a backbone of classical Chinese literature that shaped his conservative views.\n\nDrawing on Chiang's own thoughts, the biographer of his early years, Pichon Loh, says these stressed the importance of serenity, attentiveness, tranquillity and constancy. He set himself high-minded precepts, but found no problem in acting in a less lofty manner. A warrant appears to have been issued for his arrest in connection with an armed robbery. A list of Green Gang members includes a 'Jiang Dezheng' which seems to be a version of Chiang's name: the entry is for a man from his birthplace who gives his profession as 'politician'.\n\nFor all his injunctions to apply Confucian respect for elders and superiors, Chiang's petulance and insistence on having his way had become a dominant feature of his character. Before he left Xikou, one of his tutors had written of his wild attitude. A village elder called him 'stubborn, jealous, tactless, bad-tempered and egotistical'. Chiang admitted to his patron, Zhang Jingjiang, a lack of 'cultivation, respectfulness and constancy', and to being stubborn, rude and offensive.\n\nWith rare exceptions such as Sun Yat-sen and Chen Qimei, he respected nobody. 'Your hatred of mediocrity is excessive,' the doctor told him. Chiang saw himself as a man who was straightforward and acted in keeping with his conscience, but his friend and Kuomintang colleague, Dai Jitao, referred to his 'unreasonable fury' and called him 'extremely self-willed to an almost incorrigible extent'. 'Whenever you are despondent and in a state of intoxication, you let your anger go unchecked,' Dai added in a letter.\n\nChiang himself said the murder of Chen Qimei drove him 'into a life of debauchery'. In 1924, he acknowledged that 'everyone says that I am given to lust', but said this was 'a thing of last resort, in a state of utter depression'. His earliest biography records that, after the first revolutionary success, he went through 'a period of rather riotous living' in which 'there was much chance for moral degeneration', and the results began to tell. Other reports described him as a 'suave and knowing lover' and talked of his uncontrollable urge for alcohol and girls as he 'sowed his wild oats [and] scattered his seed all over Shanghai'.\n\nHe took as his concubine a plump-cheeked sing-song girl called Yao, whom he described as 'a petite beauty and very charming'. They met at the pleasure gardens where he hid after Chen's death. She belonged to an elderly man who became jealous of her relationship with Chiang. At a dinner given by her patron, Yao brought shark's fin soup to the table. The old man asked if she would give up her new friendship. She said no. According to Chiang's account, her patron told her he had spent thousands of dollars on her, yet she made him lose face repeatedly by consorting with the younger man. Then he took the bowl of soup, and emptied it over her head, saying, 'Since you prefer this penniless revolutionary to me, wear this hat!' The boiling liquid disfigured her, and ruined her career of entertaining men in teahouses.\n\nWhile Chiang ran wild, Sun Yat-sen and his young wife settled into a neat, two-storey villa at number 29 Rue Moli\u017dre, in the French Concession, bought with donations from Overseas Chinese. Though always certain of his own correctness, the doctor cut an isolated figure, ill at ease with the modernity adopted by the vanguard of Chinese intellectuals. For all his advocacy of nationalism, he played no part in the biggest protest of the time, arising from the way the Allies treated China which had sent shiploads of labourers to the Western front after coming out against Germany in the later stages of the First World War. In return, the Chinese expected to regain German concessions in Shandong province on the east coast. Instead, secret Allied treaties gave them to Japan. On 4 May 1919, 5,000 students protested in Peking. Mixing nationalism, anger at the Shandong decision and denunciation of the militarist government in the capital, they drew on a rising tide of opinion that China needed to free itself from old modes of thought that were preventing it from becoming a modern nation. Though it could not stop Japan moving into Shandong, 4 May became a landmark in the rise of Chinese nationalism. Later, Sun would try to weave his own mythology round the protest, but, at the time, he dismissed 'young students who prate about the new culture and espouse cosmopolitanism . . . we have no place for them.' Like most revolutionary leaders, he did not fancy any movement he did not control.\n\nIn his Shanghai exile, Sun was in regular touch with his financial benefactor and adviser, Zhang Jingjiang. One summer afternoon in 1919, he went to see the crippled businessman at his home in the fashionable western section of Nanking Road, accompanied by Chiang and Daijitao. Walking into the drawing room, the three men found Zhang's five daughters and a girlfriend doing a Chinese lesson. Sun delivered a brief lecture about how the young could serve China, Chiang smiling approval. The teenagers then quit the room, returning occasionally with refreshments for the men before Sun and his companions left the house in the early evening.\n\nThe sixth girl, known by her 'milk name' of Ah Feng, was the daughter of a paper merchant and of a well-educated woman noted for her calligraphy. One of Ah Feng's friends, called Zhu Yimin, had married Zhang after his first wife died in America. When they came back to Shanghai after their mother's death, his daughters needed to learn Chinese, and Yimin suggested that her acquaintance, who spoke Chinese and English, should help the tutor engaged by their father. After saying goodbye to Yimin that evening, Ah Feng found Chiang standing at the front gate like a sentry. 'The man's face was flushed from the wine he had drunk, and he looked so very red,' she wrote later, describing Chiang as of average height, somewhat wiry, with shaven head, jutting jaw, prominent chin and a short, straight nose. When he spoke, he grunted, revealing unusually long teeth. His eyes were dark and penetrating, his lips sensuous, his tone lecherous as he asked her where she lived. She gave a wrong address to mislead him. He offered to walk with her. She refused. He stood in her path. She dashed past, hurrying home while he gazed after her.\n\nFour decades later, Ah Feng, who had taken the adult name of Chen Jieru and was also known as Jennie, wrote her memoirs in English with the help of a collaborator in Hong Kong. After a US firm offered to publish the book, two of Chiang's aides threatened legal action, and the offer was withdrawn. With the help of its friends in Washington, Chiang's administration in Taiwan was determined to suppress the memoirs for fear of the embarrassment it might cause. The agent handling the book in the United States was attacked and beaten up twice. His office was broken into. He was threatened with lawsuits, and investigated by the FBI. After American publication was blocked, a lawyer representing Chiang's son bought copies of the manuscript from the Hong Kong collaborator for US$170,000.\n\nWhen Jennie died in 1971, it seemed that her recollections would never see the light of day. But, eighteen years later, a leading expert on Republican China, Professor Lloyd Eastman, tracked down a copy of the manuscript in the Hoover Institution in California. In 1992, the memoirs appeared in book form in Chinese, followed by the English original the next year. They are, naturally, told from the author's viewpoint and contain incidents for which she is the only source. Although there are errors in dating and some sections are gushing and melodramatic, there is no reason to doubt their overall accuracy: indeed, the book is far from the negative portrait that might have been expected given her husband's behaviour.\n\nWhen Chiang first saw her, Ah Feng was, in her own words, 'tall and lanky, but well formed . . . Although I had a smooth complexion and sharp features, my mouth was large, with prominent teeth, and my jawbones were rather heavy . . . I wore thick, heavy bangs, which almost covered my eyebrows, and my hair hung in a long plait down my back.' A week after the meeting, she was sewing at home in Tibet Road in the International Settlement when Chiang walked by. Her mother had gone shopping, and had left the door open to give her daughter light to work by. Seeing her, Chiang said he had been searching for her, but had been misled by the wrong house number she had given. She told him she had done this because she did not want him to come to her home. Ah Feng's mother then returned, and got rid of him. The next day, Yimin told Ah Feng that Chiang was madly in love with her. He kept coming to Zhang's house when she was there, and eventually talked her into lunching with him at St George's Restaurant in the International Settlement.\n\n'Throughout lunch, he bombarded me with a stream of questions for which I had few answers,' she recalled. 'He was so excited and spoke so loudly in his Ningbo dialect that I had to tell him to lower his voice several times.' After the meal, Chiang invited her to visit his sister. Ah Feng said she had homework to do, but he brushed that aside. She insisted he walk ahead of her since she considered it improper for a young girl to be seen in the street with a strange man.\n\nAfter covering several blocks of Bubbling Well Road, he stopped at the driveway of the Burlington Hotel where he said his sister lived. Ah Feng remarked that the place was for foreigners. But Chiang led her through the lobby and up the thickly carpeted staircase. A white uniformed attendant met them on the landing, and led them down the hall to a room. 'On entering . . . I was surprised to see it was a large bedroom with a wide, foreign bed at one side and a dressing table at the other,' her memoirs went on. 'The large French window had long snowy-white lace curtains. Everything looked so white and clean.' The girl walked around the room, looked into the bathroom, and asked Chiang where his sister was.\n\nBy then, he was turning the key in the door lock. 'Don't be alarmed,' he said with a smile. 'I want to talk to you and tell you a secret. Ah Feng, I'm really lonely. You are the only person who can make me happy, but your coldness makes me unhappy.'\n\nHe took her hand and kneaded her fingers, trying to embrace her. She ran to the door. 'To stop me, he showed uncontrollable temper,' she recalled. 'He seized me with both his arms in manic frenzy. Then he threw his arms around me and forcefully kissed my cheek and then my mouth. But I fought like a tigress. I kicked and lashed out with all my strength to strike at him.'\n\nChiang let go, and Ah Feng screamed for help. At that, he opened the door. She dashed out. Reaching home, she told her mother she had a headache, and went to bed. Stubborn as always, Chiang telephoned the next morning. 'What do you want?' Ah Feng snapped. He asked to see her again to be forgiven. She hung up, amazed at his nerve.\n\nHe kept telephoning, but she would not speak to him. In a letter, he said her refusal would diminish the 'morale and spirit' of the revolution. 'I cannot rest until I receive your reply,' he added. 'I lay my heart at the hem of your skirt. Say that you will forgive me and talk to me again very soon. Let me see you today!' Ah Feng replied with an implied promise of a reward if he left her alone: 'Your letter received. Don't annoy me by telephoning or writing, and you shall, in time, be forgiven.' He was thirty-two, she, thirteen.\n\nIn the autumn of 1920, a Guangdong general with progressive views drove out the militarists who had ejected Sun from Canton. Though his reputation would suffer in later official history, Chen Jiongming, known as the 'Hakka General' after the early inhabitants of the area, was a considerable figure, regarded by the British military attach\u00e9 as one of the ablest soldiers in China. From a landowning family in eastern Guangdong, he had been provincial vice-governor after the 1911 revolution, and got opium and gambling banned; but he was driven out after the collapse of the Second Revolution in 1913. Moving to the south of neighbouring Fujian province, he built schools and roads there, and encouraged freedom of expression.\n\nAfter taking Canton and establishing his dominance of Guangdong province, Chen, a broad faced man with a straggling moustache, invited Sun Yat-sen to return. Installed in the city again, the doctor worked on his grand scheme to launch an expedition to the north to make himself president of all China. He called on Chiang to join him, but the younger man had fallen out with Chen on previous trips south, and took several months before moving. When he did, he insisted on going in a private capacity \u2013 Guangdong was not a suitable place for him to stay in for long, he declared.\n\nChen brought in a constitution which limited military spending to 30 per cent of the budget. Twenty per cent was to go to an educational reform programme headed by a noted progressive intellectual, Chen Duxiu, who championed the use of the vernacular language and would become the first leader of the Chinese Communist Party. The government paid for students to go abroad, some to an anarchist-run college in France. Soviet agents called Chen a man of 'great willpower and self control' and 'a brilliant organiser, receiving the sympathies of the masses'.\n\nFavouring the creation of a southern confederation independent of the great warlords in the rest of China, Chen had no time for Sun's schemes for a military expedition to Peking \u2013 he respected the doctor but considered him an impractical idealist. Undeterred, the doctor opened negotiations with a northern militarist for a joint attack on the capital which, given the paucity of his resources, was a pipe dream. He subsidised 225 members of the national parliament to assemble in Canton and elect him Extraordinary President of China (since there was no quorum, he could not take the full title). The assembly backed his plans for the expedition, and Sun set out with a small force for the north of Guangdong.\n\nEven more ambitiously, Chiang presented a plan for alliances with warlords in Jiangxi and Sichuan provinces, and an attack in the north-west at a cost of $30 million. It was sheer folly, so Chen refused to put up any money. Chiang flounced out once again for his home province of Zhejiang. When Sun urged him to return, Chiang said he would not make the trip before a proper expeditionary force was mobilised. After the doctor cabled to say this was being done, he relented. Back in the south, however, he dreamed of a snow-covered landscape, and woke sensing a bad omen for his mother, white being the symbolic Chinese colour for death. On 14 June she died at the age of fifty-three. Fiercely individualist to the last, she instructed that she was not to be buried in the same tomb as her husband and his first two wives. She also exhorted her son not to forget members of the family who had helped her in difficult times, leaving a list which, by omission, told him who had not been supportive. Both the sense of standing apart and the cultivation of clan loyalties would mark her son through the coming decades.\n\nChiang went to Xikou to mourn. He had a tomb built in the pine woods on a hill that is thought to resemble a laughing Buddha with the grave as its navel. On the way up the path, 6-foot-high inscribed tablets were erected, one provided by Sun Yat-sen. In front of the tomb, surrounded by trees and bushes, is a carved image of bamboo and a phoenix \u2013 the phoenix representing women, the bamboo the hills where Chiang's mother was born. The smoke from villages below was said to be like incense. Behind the tomb, the earth rises in a triangular form with a flower on top.\n\nIn mid-August, Chiang left for Shanghai, where he had a dream which made him fear for the safety of his mother's grave. Hurrying back to Xikou, he found the village had been flooded, but the grave was safe. Finally arriving in Canton in mid-September, Chiang called on Chen Jiongming, but the meeting went so badly that he returned immediately to Shanghai. Surveying his situation, he decided that 'the trouble with me in society is that I go to extremes. Therefore, I have lifelong, sworn, intimate friends, but no ordinary boon companions or social acquaintances. The same applies to my words and actions.'\n\nIn Shanghai, Chiang learned of the death of the father of the teenager he had taken to the Burlington Hotel. He visited the family house in his mourning clothes. The body was laid out in the front room. As was the custom, the widow stayed in seclusion while Ah Feng and her brother received visitors. Chiang lit candles and incense, and knelt three times on a cushion beside the bier. Unshaven and looking forlorn, he bowed to the children. They bowed back in silence.\n\nIn the following days, Chiang called frequently at Zhang Jingjiang's house to ask about Ah Feng, who was now fifteen. Her friend, Yimin, pressed his case with the girl's mother who engaged a private detective to investigate his private life. The report showed that Chiang was unemployed, and had a wife and a concubine. Ah Feng's mother said there was no question of marriage. This provoked a visit from Zhang, who proffered her assurances that Chiang was divorced from his first wife and that the concubine had signed a separation agreement. He also explained that Chiang was his very good friend, was infatuated and had asked him to act as matchmaker. 'He is most persistent and will not take no for an answer,' the businessman added.\n\nAsked by Ah Feng's mother for a candid assessment of Chiang, Zhang replied: 'He is a man with a good heart, and as a revolutionary he has absolute devotion. I feel he will make your daughter a good husband, Mrs Chen. But, to be very honest, I must say that he is extremely impulsive, opinionated, and too often hot-headed. His only fault is that he takes risks unnecessarily. He is a junior member of our group, and we like his quality of absolute loyalty. But we do not always follow his opinions or suggestions.'\n\nAs her mother grew increasingly persuaded, Ah Feng's anger at the hotel incident was moderated by Chiang's forlorn appearance at her father's bier \u2013 she did not know that he was still mourning for his mother. A meeting was arranged at Zhang's house. Sun Yat-sen was also visiting. As she stood in front of the doctor with her head bowed and her eyes on his tan-coloured shoes, Ah Feng heard him say: 'She is a very fine girl, but so young.' After telling the couple to get married if they were in love, he delivered a homily on the need to dedicate their lives to the revolution.\n\nWhen Sun left, Chiang led the girl into Zhang's library and declared his love. She found it impossible to reply. He took her by taxi to a park in the French Concession, and recounted his arranged marriage and his relationship with the concubine. If they married, he promised, she would be 'his one and only legal wife'. Then, she recalled, he intoned a short poem:\n\nOceans may evaporate,  \nMountains may crumble,  \nBut my love for you  \nWill never change.*\n\nWhen Ah Feng remained tongue-tied, Chiang took a knife from his pocket, and offered to cut off a finger to show how serious he was. She was won over. They became engaged. At a rendezvous at a cafe, he presented her with a photograph of himself in uniform, and said he had decided she should take the name Jieru, meaning 'pure and unblemished'.\u2020\n\nThe wedding was held in the Great Eastern Hotel in the Wing On department store building. The bride wore a pale pink satin dress with silver and gold embroidery, and pearl ornaments in her hair. The groom was in a long, dark blue gown with a short black satin jacket. The marriage certificate lay on a table covered with heavy red silk. Another table bore a large pewter incense urn, two candlesticks with red candles, and plates with pagoda-like piles of fruit, sugar cane, cakes and condiments. On the wall, the characters for Double Happiness were embroidered in gold on red satin.\n\nZhang Jingjiang, who officiated, rose with difficulty from his chair to make a short speech wishing them happiness and good fortune. Bride and groom pressed the seal into a vermilion ink pad and stamped the marriage certificate. After bowing to the guests, they walked to the other end of the room, knelt at the altar and drank from a silver wine cup while the matron of honour chanted wishes that they might enjoy long life and harmony and have many children. Firecrackers were let off outside to end the ceremony. 'Whenever I looked up to steal a glance at Kai-shek,' Chen's memoirs record, 'I could see that he had a preoccupied and uncomfortable look about him, appearing to be happy and proud, but a little impatient. I knew instinctively his main thought was to get the ceremony over with.'\n\nA bridal suite with modern European furniture had been reserved in the hotel. The brass double bed was hung with pink silk curtains embroidered with dragons and phoenixes, a design repeated in the cover and pillows. Four satin-covered padded quilts were folded lengthwise on one side of the bed. Red scrolls hung on the walls. The trousseau was packed in four trunks.\n\nThe bride waited in the room as Chiang stayed with guests at the wedding feast. The matron of honour advised her that she should not resist when he touched her \u2013 'in fact, you must do everything to cooperate and allow him to do what he wishes'. The matron arranged the bedclothes and laid down a small sheet, placing hand towels and lubricant near the pillows. Leaving when the groom came up, she repeated: 'Don't resist the bridegroom. Let him have his way . . . Now don't be afraid. Congratulations! May you have a hundred sons and grandsons!' Turning to Chiang, she said cheerily, 'Congratulations and good night, Mr Bridegroom.'\n\nChiang locked the door. Then, Jennie recalled, 'he took me in his arms, and I could feel my heart thudding against my breast. I stood there like a clinging vine, defenceless with eyes half-closed, and waited . . . Then he pressed himself against me passionately and held me tight. I yielded to his desire.' They spent the next day in the room. At one point, between 'gusts of passion', Chiang spoke of the ambitions he had formulated after the death of his mother \u2013 to marry Jieru, to win Sun's confidence and become his heir, and to emerge as the country's greatest military leader who would unify China and become illustrious throughout the world.\n\nFor their honeymoon, the couple went to Xikou where the bride encountered her husband's family and his first wife. They walked through the hills and floated down the river in a flat-bottomed bamboo boat. On their return to Shanghai, Jennie met Chiang's son, Ching-kuo, who was only four years younger than her. He seemed a well-behaved, quiet lad, but afraid of his father. When Jennie pleaded with her husband not to be harsh, he replied that the worst thing for a boy was to be spoiled by his parents \u2013 'he must learn discipline'.\n\nThe new bride also became aware of another member of the Chiang family, a boy whom her husband had adopted. He told her that the child, called Wei-kuo \u2013 or Wego \u2013 had been fathered during a stay in Japan by his Kuomintang associate and sworn brother, Dai Jitao. The Japanese mother had turned up with the baby one day. Dai, who was now married, did not want to acknowledge his son; so Chiang agreed to adopt him. Jennie described Wei-kuo as delicate and frail, with a long, thin face. He was obedient, intelligent and curious, and Chiang seemed to have a soft spot for him that contrasted with his harshness towards his natural son. 'Ching-kuo is teachable and Wei-kuo is lovable,' he recorded in his diary. He confided care of the child to his former concubine, Yao, and they went to live in Chiang's home village. Seventy years later, the adopted son said Chiang's first wife frequently abused them, making them inhabit a pigsty where they slept on straw.\n\nOn returning to Shanghai, Jennie made another, more alarming discovery after suffering from skin irritations. She went to see a doctor who took blood samples. Three days later, she wrote in her memoirs, he told her she had gonorrhoea.\n\nThe bride rushed in a taxi to her mother's home. Chiang arrived there half an hour later. He said the complaint was mild, and could be treated. According to Jennie, he also admitted that he had contracted the disease before their marriage, and had infected her. Given the life he had led in the city, this was hardly surprising: between 10 and 15 per cent of the population of Shanghai was estimated to have suffered from syphilis, and even more had gonorrhea.\n\nJennie's mother gave her son-in-law a tongue-lashing, while Jennie shouted, 'You are an evil man. I will divorce you!' Chiang stood with head bowed, begging forgiveness. That afternoon, the two of them went to see the doctor. He told Chiang to leave die room. Then he injected an antidote containing arsenic into Jennie's arm. A course often shots would cure her, he said. But he warned that this might make her sterile.\n\nThey went into the waiting room, where, Jennie recalled, the doctor told Chiang he should have finished his own course of treatment before getting married, and revealed that the groom suffered from epididymitis, which made him sterile. Swearing remorse, Chiang pledged as a penance never to touch alcohol. 'I was too miserable to argue,' Jennie recalled. 'What could I do? What could any young wife do under these circumstances, except to forgive? So, I forgave Kai-shek. And true to his promise, he gave up liquor and all kinds of liquid except boiled water.'\n\nThere is no reason to doubt Jennie's account, which is supported by the fact that Chiang had no children by either of his last two marriages. Many years later, his adopted son provided a more graphic version of his inability to procreate. At the end of his life, Wei-kuo gave an interview to a history professor in Taiwan. His story was that, as a youth in his home village, Chiang had sat on an iron handle of a wood-burning stove, severely burning his sexual organs. His mother treated the injury by rubbing lard on it. A little while later, Chiang went to defecate in a field. Attracted by the smell of the lard, a dog ran up and bit his testicles. Chiang was dead by the time the story appeared, but one of his bodyguards promptly dismissed it, adding that the Generalissimo had been sexually active into his sixties. Wei-kuo's story looked like an attempt by the adopted son to undermine the legitimacy of the natural son, branding Ching-kuo as the bastard of the first wife and a local businessman. Dynastic games are an old sport in China.*\n\nBy the time they boarded the liner, the _President Taft_ , for the south to join Sun Yat-sen at the beginning of 1922, Jennie appears to have forgiven Chiang. Her account of the voyage is upbeat. It was the first time she had been on a foreign ship, and everything was modern and luxurious to her. Chiang loved the expanse of the ocean, and looked forward to seeing Sun Yat-sen again. They had a first-class cabin; two servants travelled steerage. As well as his clothes, Chiang took two suitcases full of papers, maps and books, and studied the menu to try to pick up some English. Jennie read books about the revolution. In Canton, they were met by one of Sun's principal lieutenants, Liao Zhongkai, who took them to a hotel on the riverside Bund. After Liao had briefed him on the latest events, Chiang discussed with his wife whether to pay a call on the Hakka General, Chen Jiongming, telling her of their intense mutual dislike.\n\nAfter she urged him to seek a meeting, he set out for Chen's headquarters, where he was kept waiting for twenty minutes before being granted admittance. Chen explained his reasons for opposing Sun's expedition to the north, and invited the visitor to lunch with his officers. As they ate, Chiang heard one refer to the doctor by the nickname of 'the Great Cannon' \u2013 meaning 'the big talker'. Chiang asked Chen to go with him into an adjoining room where he demanded how such an insult could be tolerated. Chen suggested he show a sense of humour. Chiang stalked out.\n\nHe and Jennie went to join Sun in the north of Guangdong province. The doctor's expedition was advancing slowly on a fleet of steam launches and wooden boats, preceded by two regiments of soldiers. Chiang grew increasingly annoyed by the Nationalist leader's praise of Chen Jiongming. When he advocated dismissing the Hakka General and launching an attack on him, Sun told him to be more trusting and tolerant. 'Seeing that Dr Sun was adamant, Kai-shek turned, broke down and wept bitterly,' Jennie recorded. The next day, glum and irritable, he told her they were returning to Shanghai. On the way, Chiang shouted orders to troops in his dreams.\n\nDespite Sun's refusal to follow Chiang's advice, Chen and the general in charge of Canton, Ye Ju, were growing fed up with the doctor. The Hakka General considered him unqualified to organise a military expedition. Worse, he added, the Kuomintang chief was listening to 'that Zhejiang rogue, Chiang, who wants me dismissed from office'. An intermediary, who went to Hong Kong to order arms for the doctor, was shot dead at the station on his return, allegedly on Chen's orders. From Shanghai, Chiang wrote 'a last appeal' to Chen to help with Sun's expedition. The letter was returned unopened. On the back of the envelope was written 'Upstart-jealous-ill-tempered-stupid-egotistical mischief maker'.\n\nSun's hopes of a national role were temporarily boosted in his own mind by a war between major militarists in northern and central China in which he hoped to play a role. But the conflict ended before he could move his puny forces from Guangdong. He then received a second blow when a warlord in neighbouring Hunan province, with whom he had an understanding, deserted him. Alarmed by the hostility of General Ye in Canton, he returned to the city with fifty bodyguards, issuing a hysterical warning that he had 'eight-inch guns with poisonous shells capable of entirely finishing off sixty battalions in three hours'.\n\nYe showed what he thought of that by ordering an early-morning bombardment of Sun's residence on 16 June 1922. The doctor told his wife to dress and flee with him. Qingling urged him to go alone, and he made his way to the Whampoa Fort on an island in the Pearl River where loyal naval units awaited him. Half an hour after he had left, Ye's men opened up with rifles on Sun's bodyguards under the command of a young officer called Xue Yue who would become a leading Nationalist general. 'From eight in the morning till four that afternoon, we were literally buried in a hell of constant gunfire,' Qingling wrote. She escaped to a farm, and then made her way to join her husband on a gunboat. A fire at the house destroyed his manuscripts and notes for a book setting out his political philosophy. The next day, five of the doctor's boats steamed up the river and machine-gunned the street along the Bund. Sun sent telegrams to Chiang telling him what had happened, and adding: 'Matters critical: hope for your speedy arrival.'\n\nOn receiving the news, Chiang paced up and down, shaking with fury and screaming, 'I predicted it! I predicted it!' He told his wife to pack so that they could take the first ship south. She was in the middle of putting up the curtains at their new flat, and her mother told Chiang he should leave her daughter behind \u2013 'bringing your wife to Canton at this time is like delivering a lamb into a tiger's mouth'. But Jennie decided to go with him. Before leaving, Chiang wrote to his patron, Zhang Jingjiang, asking him to look after his family if he were killed.\n\nThe Chiangs sailed to Hong Kong and then travelled up the Pearl River to Canton where they boarded a motor launch that took them to Sun's flotilla of blue-grey gunboats. When Chiang stepped onto the flagship, the _Yung-feng_ , Sun looked at him with tears in his eyes. Chiang's diary records, on what evidence is unclear, that Chen Jiongming turned blue in the face when he heard of his arrival. With Chiang on the scene, he warned, there would be 'a great many devilish ideas'.\n\nSending his wife and Dr Sun to shelter below deck, Chiang instructed the captain to sail up the river to fire at a fort. As the boat moved forward, Sun sat at a table writing a speech. Sweat rolled off his forehead. Jennie got him a damp face towel, and stood behind him waving a palm-leaf fan. A shell hit the boat, throwing her to the floor. 'Dr Sun held on to the table, but his chair fell on top of me,' she wrote in her memoirs. 'When I rose, I felt my drawers sticking to my legs, and I knew that I had unconsciously urinated from shock.'\n\nDespite a barrage from shore guns, the little fleet reached a mooring near the British Concession on a sandbank in the Pearl River where it was less likely to be attacked. While Sun tried to negotiate, Chiang whiled away the time reading translations of Sherlock Holmes stories. The doctor's position grew steadily weaker and, by the beginning of August, even Chiang had had enough. 'Everything seems against us,' he wrote. The British provided a boat which was allowed through to Hong Kong. On board were the Chiangs and Sun \u2013 Qingling followed later. After the weeks cooped up on the gunboat, they sailed to Shanghai on the _Empress of Russia_ , the largest liner plying in the Pacific, complete with lifts, Persian carpets and a soda fountain. As they travelled, Chen took the title of commander-in-chief in Guangdong and was recognised as governor of both that province and neighbouring Jiangxi by the major warlord of central China, Wu Peifu; there were reports that Wu had sent him $5 million.\n\nThe debacle in Canton served Chiang well in establishing himself as a loyal right-hand man for Sun: the doctor contributed a preface to an account the younger man wrote of their weeks together on the Pearl River. Four decades later, Chiang spoke of the 'wordless rapport' that grew out of their time on the boat. With what veracity it is impossible to say, he also claimed that Sun had told him that, while he, himself, expected to die within the coming ten years, 'you will have at least fifty more [and] if nothing untoward happens in the future, it is not too much to expect you to carry on the struggle for fifty more years for the sake of our principles'.\n\nSun plunged into a round of meetings with potential allies in Shanghai, and worked on the reorganisation of the Kuomintang. Three of his supporters sat briefly in the Cabinet in Peking. The French consul called his house 'a veritable ministry'. The _New York Times_ described it as 'a Mecca for political leaders of all shades of opinion'. However, his attempts to enlist American support got nowhere, leading him to turn to Moscow for backing, and to form a link with the newly founded Chinese Communist Party. At the suggestion of Hendricus Sneevliet, a Dutch agent for the international Communist organisation the Comintern, members of the Chinese movement were allowed to join the Kuomintang as individuals while retaining their own party affiliation. The Communists would have preferred to go it alone, but the overbearing Sneevliet insisted, and Moscow decreed that the Kuomintang should be seen as a revolutionary party, starting a relationship that would swing from cooperation to war during the following three decades.\n\nAt the end of 1922, Moscow sent an experienced diplomat, Adolf Joffe, to China to try to gain recognition from the government in Peking. Failing to do so, Joffe met other prospective partners, including Sun. In January 1923, they issued a statement declaring the need for national unity and independence for China. At the doctor's insistence, it added that the country was not ready for Communism. The prospect of an alliance with a nation where revolutionaries had conquered power was intoxicating, but Sun knew that he needed a base if he was to build his strength. As he wrote to Chiang: 'To get that we must recapture Guangdong.'\n\nMoving between Shanghai and his home province of Zhejiang, Chiang was growing increasingly bad-tempered. His weeks on the gunboat in Canton had led him to imagine he would enter Sun's inner circle, but he was still regarded as a military operative rather than a political figure. 'For the first time in our married life he made no effort to control his temper,' his wife recalled. 'Something had to be done for his own sake to alleviate this intense hatred; otherwise he would become a mental case . . . I began to make him relax his tension and tried to humour him to the best of my ability. But at best it was terribly difficult.'\n\nJennie's friend, Yimin, came up with a solution: Chiang should join a share broking company set up by her businessman husband, Zhang Jingjiang. Unknown to his wife, Chiang had already been involved in stock exchange speculation, and the idea appealed to him. He was certainly in the right place. Shanghai had the country's most advanced market exchanges for everything from gold and silver to soap and tinfoil. Trading was often highly speculative, with companies ramping their own shares \u2013 and plenty of dubious dealing. To become a partner in the new enterprise, Chiang bought four shares at $1,000 each which he registered under a false name. As he became absorbed in trading, his anger diminished. But he made bad punts, including one on textile shares which lost $20,000. A brokerage career did not beckon, and Sun was soon calling him to Canton.\n\nRather than trying himself to dislodge Chenjiongming, the doctor had paid mercenaries from Yunnan and Jiangxi $400,000 to invade Guangdong, forcing the Hakka General back to his heartland in the east of the province. Chiang said such alliances were justified if they helped to advance the cause. On 21 February 1923, Sun returned to Canton, naming the future Generalissimo as his chief of staff. The ever-helpful Zhang Jingjiang stumped up the money to cover his trading losses, and a Green Gang boss was also said to have chipped in. But Chiang still played hard to get, going on a trip to Zhejiang, and then pleading that he had to stay in Shanghai for eye treatment. When he finally set off, he insisted on going in a personal capacity. In a letter, he remarked that he would do best if he could 'act summarily without interference from anyone'.\n\n* * *\n\n* This text is given by Chen Jieru: there is no way of knowing whether she recalled it through a Gershwin prism.\n\n\u2020 Chieh-ju in the transliteration of the time \u2013 this is the name she uses on her memoirs.\n\n* In her 1955 biography of Chiang, the American writer Emily Hahn, who lived in China in the 1930s, implies that Wei-kuo was, in fact, Chiang's son (Hahn, p. 48). But other contemporary accounts stick to the adoption account. If Chiang was his father, Wei-kuo's story of the stove and the dog makes no sense. But it must be said that Wei-kuo looked more like the Generalissimo than Ching-kuo, whose square face resembled his mother and grandmother.\n\n# CHAPTER 4\n\n _The Will of Heaven_\n\nONE EVENING AFTER GETTING TO Canton, Chiang was invited to dinner at the home of a prominent Kuomintang politician with whom his career would be entwined for twenty years. Wang Jingwei's revolutionary pedigree included an unsuccessful assassination attempt on a Manchu imperial viceroy. Handsome and a fine orator, he was now one of the diree main figures below Sun Yat-sen. Wang's wife, Wang Bijun \u2013 known as Becky \u2013 a wealthy heiress with luxuriant hair, large eyes and a strong chin, greeted the guests at the door of their villa in a new residential district of the city. They were shown into a spacious drawing room where tall French windows opened onto a large terrace. The room was decorated in yellow and black, with calligraphy scrolls on the walls.\n\nSun Yat-sen was the guest of honour, surrounded by politicians and generals. At dinner, the women sat apart from the men and, when the food arrived, followed tradition by staring at the dishes in the centre of the table without serving themselves. As the third course came, Jennie Chiang got to her feet, and dished it out, saying that, as revolutionaries, they would be hypocritical to accept the old idea that eating was ugly.\n\nAfter dinner, Sun left, looking pallid and ill. Kai-shek made a point of talking to a mercenary commander, Liu Zhenhuan, whom the doctor had dubbed 'Living Angel' after he suffered stomach and shoulder wounds during the conquest of Guangdong which had enabled the Kuomintang leader to return to the south. The accolade took no notice of the far from angelic behaviour of the mercenaries camped in and around Canton. Though they received up to $35,000 a day for food and upkeep, they stole from shops, took hostages, levied charges on railways, grabbed taxes, seized boats, indulged in outright piracy, and ran gambling, prostitution and drugs \u2013 one group advertised its narcotics in the newspapers. When his men complained about not being paid, a commander replied: 'Since you have guns, why should you be short of rations?'\n\nThe mercenary presence was just one symptom of the way in which Sun's revolutionary base in the south fell short of the vision he proclaimed for China. An American traveller, Harry Francke, who did not share the usual disdainful Western attitude to China, wrote that no province led 'a more miserable life than Canton under Sun Yat-sen and his lieutenants . . . [It] was probably the most mis-governed city in China.' To pay the soldiers, the administration called on merchants to 'lend' it cash, and slapped special duties on everything from pigs to what a newspaper described as 'so-called dancing halls conducted by Russian women'. The city's 800 opium dens paid so much duty that the managers held a protest meeting at a teahouse. Monopolies, public property and official jobs were auctioned. Boat owners had to buy special flags at $50 or be attacked by police as pirates. Provincial banknotes traded at 20 per cent of face value. In 1923, Sun tried to seize Canton's customs revenue which was sent to the central government in Peking \u2013 the foreigners who ran the collection brought in warships from the fleets their native countries kept in Chinese waters, and the doctor desisted.\n\nStill, with 800,000 inhabitants, Canton was rich and worldly by contemporary Chinese standards. Distance meant links with Peking were tenuous, making Guangdong virtually autonomous. Emigres returning from abroad brought new ideas, and funds to finance their implementation. From 1729 to 1842, Canton had been the only place in China where Western merchants were allowed to operate, and in the late imperial era had become one of the early treaty ports where foreigners were granted concessions.*\n\nThere were cigarette, brick, tanning, dyeing and knitting factories, an automated match plant, and more than twenty firms making latex and rubber footwear. New streets were laid, and buses were imported, fitted with special narrow seats to maximise the number of passengers. Three hundred cars drove on the new roads, used mainly by officials and militarists who sped about with armed bodyguards on the running boards. The waterfront Bund boasted two big department stores, one with a top-floor entertainment area offering opera, acrobatics and films. Bright illuminations shone through the night, and gramophone music played from the shops.\n\nAlongside this modernity, the old ways continued in much of the city. The bulk of its 35,000 shops were small family concerns. Working conditions were often primitive. A French visitor described houses in the old areas 'compressed so closely together that they give one the feeling of being indoors, and seem like an infinite number of corridors in an immense palace'. Though benefitting from its remittances from Overseas Chinese, the surrounding province of Guangdong suffered from all the drawbacks of the epoch \u2013 poor communications, the exactions of militarists, peasant poverty, and natural disasters. Some 85 per cent of the land was held by absentee owners who rented the fields out for half to three quarters of the proceeds of the crops. Heavy rainfall regularly burst dykes causing major flooding.\n\nCanton's left-wing credentials were boosted by growing trade union activity: in 1922, the First All-China Congress of Workers met in the city, and, with Kuomintang backing, seamen won a strike against Hong Kong-based operators of Pearl River shipping. The following year, Sun Yat-sen decided to develop his links with the Soviet Union, which had promised him two million gold roubles and arms. He sent Chiang \u2013 who now had the rank of general \u2013 to Moscow to see what help the KMT could raise there.\n\nArriving on the Trans-Siberian Express on 2 September at the head of a four-man mission, Chiang was unable to see either Lenin or Stalin, but did meet Trotsky, who said the USSR would do its best to provide aid. As well as observing how the Red Army was trained, the thirty-five-year-old general visited model villages, an electrical light bulb factory and a power generation plant. Having bought a Chinese translation of _Das Kapital_ , he found 'the first half of this work is very heavy-going, but the second half is both profound and entrancing'. He received advice from the Comintern, the Revolutionary Military Council and the army, though he resisted an attempt to co-opt him into the Communist Party.\n\nBut the Comintern delivered a nasty shock at the end of November. While it was ready to recommend military aid, the international Communist organisation opposed Sun's request for help with a campaign to northern China, describing the Kuomintang as being only at the 'organisation stage' and as not having built on the overthrow of the Manchus. Any campaign outside Guangdong would be premature, adventurous and doomed to fail, it decided. First, the KMT had to develop an army and win over the masses.\n\nChiang took the train for China the next day. In his last letter from Moscow to Jennie, he criticised the Comintern for being 'so ignorant of a friendly party' and added: 'With such a narrow outlook, how can it hope to be the centre of world revolution?' His wife's memoirs record that, when they met in Shanghai on his return, he said: 'You cannot trust a Communist.' Instead of going to Canton, he travelled home to Zhejiang province to write a report which said the Soviets were ready to send fifty military advisers, plus financial aid and mat\u00e9riel. But he warned that they lacked sincerity, and called their policy Tsarism by another name, seeking to annex northern territories and sovietise the country. 'The sole aim of the Russian party is to make the Chinese Communist Party its legitimate heir,' Chiang continued. 'In truth, they do not believe that our Kuomintang can cooperate with them permanently in achieving success.' In a separate letter to Sun's lieutenant, Liao Zhongkai, he stated baldly: 'My personal observations lead me to the conclusion that the Russian Communist Party cannot be wholly trusted. I told you that we could believe only 30 per cent of what the Russians had to say. That was really an understatement.' Facts, he wrote, should not be ignored simply because one might agree with Communist theories.\n\nSun was not in a receptive mood for such views. While Chiang had been away, he had acquired a Soviet adviser who was to play a crucial role in the development of the Kuomintang, and who had already proved his worth by saving the doctor from his most persistent adversary.\n\nMikhail Markovich Grunzeberg was an experienced Comintern agent. Born in 1884 in western Russia, in the Pale where, under Tsarist rule, Jews were placed, he had worked underground in Mexico and Britain under the name of 'George Brown'. After six months in a Glasgow prison, he had been expelled, being described by Special Branch as a 'most dangerous man'. Returning to Russia, he was chosen to take revolution to China, adopting the name of the composer, Borodin, as his pseudonym. He knew nothing of the country, and did not speak its language. But he was used to operating in difficult places with unfamiliar collaborators, and would be able to converse with Sun in English. An impressive figure, and an excellent organiser, he was adept at working in the shadows, leaving others to take the credit, and thus ensuring their 'face'.\n\nTall and thickset, with a heavy moustache and deep bass voice, Borodin often dressed in a tunic and high boots. A smitten American journalist, Milly Bennett, described him as 'a dreamer, an intellectual, an original [who] always managed to look like an actor. He walked into a room with that lumbering, awkward kind of grace, and presto, the situation was his.' His hair, noted the _New York Times_ correspondent, Hallett Abend, 'always seemed to be in need of the attention of a barber'.\n\nReaching China on the Trans-Siberian Express, Borodin went by boat to Canton, not stopping at Hong Kong in case the British arrested him there. The ship was caught in a typhoon which caused the death of 200 sheep on board. On his arrival on 6 October 1923, the Russian recorded, 'Sun Yat-sen welcomed me very warmly, made me sit with him and looked at me fixedly for several seconds.'\n\nThe relationship was a marriage of convenience, with major internal paradoxes on both sides which would eventually lead to a bloody outcome. Communism was based on the class struggle, but Sun rejected this, insisting that the whole nation could be brought together regardless of social differences. This enabled him to draw support from merchants, landlords and overseas Chinese businessmen who had no taste for a Bolshevik revolution. But, if he was to organise his party and conduct his expedition to the north, the doctor needed the help of Russia.\n\nFor Moscow, Sun was its most promising ally in the world's most populous nation. Guangdong's trade unions offered the base of a mass labour movement, and the proximity of Hong Kong meant Canton could be used to combat British imperialism. So taken was Stalin with the opportunity Sun offered that he decreed a united front in which the Chinese Communists would play second fiddle. Naturally, they resented this. But they were few in number, and to preach the solitary pursuit of true revolution was to fall in with the heresy of Stalin's bitter enemy, Trotsky. Thus, a pattern was set by which the Chinese party's policy would follow die dictates of the Kremlin, rather than its own interests.\n\nBorodin had no illusions about his new partner. The Russian called Canton a 'veritable Babel'. Sun, he noted, 'is very backward. He judges very badly in political matters. He . . . often reasons in a simple way like a man on the street. He considers himself the hero and the others the mob, while . . . he is simply an enlightened little satrap.' Sun claimed 30,000 members of the KMT, but only between a fifth and a tenth were active participants. Yet the doctor was die sole centre of die Kuomintang universe and had a unique national vision that could provide a legitimacy die warlords lacked. From the other side of the spectrum, Britain's Consul General, Bertram Giles, said of Sun: 'One day, if he lives, he will rule all China. He's a fanatic, he's inconsistent, he's unpredictable and, from my point of view, he's a nuisance, but he's got die seeds of greatness in his soul.'\n\nBorodin went to work as soon as he arrived, drawing up new statutes to organise die Kuomintang on Leninist lines. Hard-core cells were to be established in Canton and Shanghai, widi local structures elsewhere across the country. As the Russian was working on this, Sun's nemesis, die Hakka General, Chen Jiongming, advanced on Canton from the east. Borodin proposed a volunteer defence force, rousing peasants and workers to action by promises of land redistribution, a minimum wage, an eight-hour working day and a six-day week. The merchant and gentry members of die Kuomintang did not like the idea, and Sun prevaricated, saying he could not agree to 'sovietisation' diat would lose important supporters. His letter setting this out was delivered to Borodin by his close aide, Liao Zhongkai. After handing it over, Liao told the Russian he agreed with him.\n\nSun remained indecisive, asking whether arrangements could be made for him to visit Moscow. But Borodin organised a volunteer unit which marched to the front. Chen withdrew. Safe, Sun expressed his complete agreement with the Russian. When supporters in the USA asked him, 'Do you know that \"Borodin\" is a pseudonym? Do you know his real name?' China's would-be Washington replied, 'I know, Lafayette.'\n\nUnder Borodin's guidance, a KMT reorganisation congress opened on 20 January 1924. Sun's Three Principles of nationalism, democracy and die people's livelihood were adopted as the guiding ideology. The doctor delivered eight speeches, speaking of the Russian party as the only good example for the KMT. He won a big majority in favour of allowing Communists to join the Kuomintang while remaining members of their own party, but he had a reference to the leading role of workers and peasants expunged from the manifesto. Sun was elected life president of the party. With Borodin, he picked the forty-one full and alternate members of the Central Executive Committee. The Communists got ten seats; they were entrusted with the Peasant Affairs department and the Organising Department responsible for recruitment, assignments and job supervision. The Propaganda Department was headed by Chiang's associate from his Shanghai days, Dai Jitao. When Dai went off to write and think the following year, his replacement was a young man called Mao Zedong.\n\nThe reorganisation established a double power structure, in which the party duplicated the organs of government on the Soviet model. Though Borodin proclaimed the old Kuomintang dead and buried, two thirds of party officials were non-leftists. As usual with the KMT, things were a lot less clear in practice than in theory.\n\nUnder Borodin's spell Sun did not respond to Chiang's criticisms of what he had seen in Russia. The younger man fired off a letter mixing indignation with a plaintive plea for recognition. 'Apparently you feel that I have completely failed in the mission,' he wrote. 'Or perhaps you no longer have faith in me. In either case, I feel an intense slight and that my reputation has plunged to the ground!' Sun replied with a letter asking 'Brother Kai-shek' to travel south immediately.\n\nChiang's prime aim was to establish a military Academy to form an army that would give the Kuomintang military muscle, and free it from dependence on the mercenaries. The site was at the Whampoa Fort on an 8-square-mile island 10 miles down the Pearl River from Canton. The need for such a school was shown by the reports drawn up by Russian military advisers who came to Canton after Borodin. They reckoned that only Sun's personal bodyguard of 200 men was unquestioningly loyal. The mercenary generals owed no obedience to the revolution. The quality of officers was extremely poor. Many smoked opium. The rank-and-file, wrote the Russians, had 'neither clothing nor footwear; their pay was not given to them for years . . . everybody was stealing'.\n\nWhampoa was to be day to the mercenaries' night, producing a trained force at the service of the revolution. Its officer cadets would be properly paid and well looked after. It was to be highly politicised: orders by the chief of the school had to be countersigned by the head of the Political Department who reported to Sun. Officers were ideological messengers, proselytising among the soldiers. Most of the cash to get the Academy off the ground came from Moscow which also sent 8,000 rifles and 4 million rounds of ammunition. A revolutionary hero, Pavel A. Pavlov, arrived to head the military advisers, but he was drowned in an accident in the summer of 1924, and was succeeded by another Red Army legend, General Vasilii Blyukher.\n\nThe course the cadets followed combined elements from Chiang's own training, Japanese manuals, traditional Chinese strategy and lessons he had learned during his visit to Moscow. The overall curriculum followed that of the Red Army. Linguistic difficulties led Soviet advisers to concentrate on practical matters where they could teach by example \u2013 only twenty-five students attended the course to learn Russian. Stalin's doctrine of the united front ruled. When Zhou Enlai argued for a Communist army, Borodin told him to forget it.\n\nThe combination of military training and ideological instruction created a cohesive and disciplined base of a kind known only among elite warlord troops. The cadets were told to be austere, daring and brave. Chiang insisted on decent food and health facilities, and instructed cadets not to gamble or visit brothels. The principle of collective responsibility known as _lian zuo fa_ was adopted, providing for the execution of units which retreated without orders to do so. Chiang urged the young men to be ready to die for their cause, and uncompromising on principles whatever the odds. The emphasis was on performance in the front line \u2013 one favourite exercise was a 'storming party' drill in which teams of half a dozen men ran 150 yards with scaling ladders to climb walls under fire. Little attention was paid to administration, supply or logistics; this meant that, when they came to command large formations as their careers progressed, the graduates would lack expertise in handling big armies.\n\nEven before the Academy opened, the future Generalissimo was embroiled in another of his recurrent rows. The Russians thought the course should last for eighteen months, but Chiang wanted to turn out as many graduates as possible and so proposed a shorter curriculum. Adopting his customary tactic, he left Canton for Zhejiang and Shanghai. The outcome was that the course was set at six months. Chiang also obtained a free hand in spending from Liao Zhongkai, who was running the regime's finances and became the school's political director.\n\n1. Devoted son: Chiang with his mother in his home village.\n\n2. Training for life: Chiang as a military cadet in Japan.\n\n3. Man about town: Chiang in Shanghai after the 1911 revolution against the Manchu Empire.\n\n## REPUBLICAN PARTNERS\n\n4. Sun Yat-sen and his wife, Soong Qingling.\n\n5. Sun and Chiang at the opening of Whampoa military academy.\n\n## FOES\n\n6. The Mukden Tiger, Zhang Zuolin.\n\n7. The Philosopher General, Wu Peifu.\n\n## ALLIES AND RIVALS\n\n8. Li Zongren of Guangxi.\n\n9. Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal of Manchuria.\n\n10. Chiang with Feng Yuxiang, the Christian General (left) and Yan Xishan, the Model Governor (right).\n\n11. To the north: seeing Chiang off from Canton station for the Northern Expedition in 1926. Left to right: Mikhail Borodin; unidentified man; Fanny Borodin; Liao Zhongkai's widow; Jennie Chiang; General Galen; Chiang (smiling); his adopted son Wei-kuo; Dai Jitao; Zhang Jingjiang (seated).\n\n12. Heads of rebels hung from lamp-posts by warlord troops, 1927.\n\n13. Underworld boss Big Eared Du, who helped Chiang to take China's richest city, and remained a collaborator for two decades.\n\n14. Chiang's troops arrest leftists.\n\n15. Retribution: Nationalist executioners repress the Canton rising of 1927.\n\nIn a letter from his home province, Chiang told Sun that, in Canton, he had been 'as restless as if I were sitting on a mat full of nails . . . absent-minded and careless, and aimless in my actions'. Then he went into his habitual complaint about suffering from the jealousy of others, and said the Kuomintang was threatened by a 'new influence', meaning the Russians. Once again, he sought reassurance, asking the doctor: 'Do you really repose deep trust in me or do you not?' But he also showed unusual independence by writing to party leaders that they should not automatically allow Sun to dominate at the expense of their integrity. When his own domain was concerned, however, Chiang brooked no opposition. In a letter about the Whampoa regulations, he instructed party colleagues: 'Do your duty and refrain from having too many opinions'. On 21 April 1924, he returned to Canton. At the beginning of May, he was appointed Principal of the Army Officers Academy, and Chief of Staff of the Guangdong Army.\n\nThe opening ceremony at Whampoa was held on the second anniversary of the attack on Sun's residence in Canton, to drive home the point that such an occurrence would be impossible once the Kuomintang had its own army. The doctor spoke for two hours from an open-fronted bamboo structure decorated with party and national flags. His wife stood to his left, in a long black skirt and flowered top; to his right was Chiang Kai-shek, in uniform, knee-length boots and white gloves. Watching and holding a sun hat, was a portly, cigar-smoking London-born arms dealer called Morris 'Two-Gun' Cohen who acted as the doctor's aide and bodyguard.\n\nDespite suffering heart trouble, Sun was in full rhetorical form as he explained the need for the school. 'After thirteen years of revolution,' he said, 'the Republic is just an empty name and, even today, the revolution is a complete failure.' The lack of an army had meant the dominance of the warlords, but now 'our aim in opening this Academy is to create the revolutionary task anew from this day, and students of this Academy . . . will be the bones and trunks of the forthcoming Revolutionary Army.'\n\nSun and Chiang were photographed later on their own in a stone-flagged arcade. The KMT leader sat in a wicker chair. The Whampoa commander stood beside him, in dark jodhpurs and a tightly belted tunic with a sword hanging down his left leg and his right fist on his hip. Chiang's level, unsmiling gaze into the camera is that of a man who knew where he was heading. 'If I control the army, I will have the power to control the country,' his wife records him as saying. 'It is my road to leadership.'\n\nTo provide cadets for the Academy, Kuomintang officials across China were asked to nominate graduates aged between eighteen and twenty-five with middle school or higher primary school education. They had to write an essay on why they wanted to serve their country. On graduation, they ranked as Second Lieutenants and would serve a minimum of three years in the army. The KMT's national presence enabled it to recruit far from its base in Guangdong, plugging into the growing sense of nationalism. The first class numbered 645. As Chiang had planned, the intake increased sharply. By 1926, 3,000 had graduated. A few came from Mongolia, Tibet, Thailand and Korea. A Vietnamese contingent was supervised by a revolutionary called Nguyen Ai Quoc, later Ho Chi Minh.\n\nThe requirement for decent educational qualifications meant that the Academy was anything but a training ground for proletarian youth. A study by the American academic, Richard Landis, shows that three quarters of the cadets were sons of landlords, middle-income peasants or officials. The Shanghai recruiters were right-wingers, including Chen Qimei's nephew, Chen Guofu, and a Green Gang member. Like Chiang, the cadets might be anxious for a strong, united China, but that did not mean they stood on the left as the Russians and Kuomintang leftists had hoped. A strong anti-Communist group emerged in the Academy, and the military side of Whampoa grew ever more dominant, providing many of the members of the cliques that sprouted around Chiang in the coming decades. The new army became the equivalent of the families the cadets had left, demanding the same loyalty and obedience as Chinese parents. At the head of the family tree stood a figure whose character and ambition demanded fealty of the most classic kind as he strove to become 'illustrious throughout the world'.\n\nKai-shek and Jennie lived on the first floor of the main Whampoa building in a flat consisting of a living room, dining room and bedroom with teak furniture. In the evenings, he practised calligraphy; his rendition of the Academy's motto, 'Affection with Sincerity', was mounted on silk on his office wall. His reading list took in European wars, psychology and geography. Next to his quarters was a large conference room with a long table and twenty-four high-backed chairs. Chinese and Kuomintang flags hung on one wall. On another was a big map of China dotted with green, red and blue flags to mark the path of the planned northern expedition. Chiang's wife did much of his secretarial work. One job was to log letters marked 'secret', and stow them in a locked file in their flat.\n\nGiven Canton's conspiratorial nature, Chiang was justified in being on guard, but his suspicion bordered on paranoia. 'Those I once thought could be trusted turned out to be all the more untrustworthy today,' he wrote. 'In all things, one had only oneself to rely on.' According to Jennie, 'In his intense desire to be first in everything, he inclined to be pompous', and cultivated only friendships likely to be useful in furthering his aims.\n\n'My lowly self is replete with transgressions and evils,' his diary recorded. 'How can one not be pained by this? I will renew myself daily from now onward in order that I may nurture the divine elements in my nature.' He suffered from recurrent health problems, at one point being taken to hospital against his will for an operation to stop continuous nose bleeding. At times, eye trouble stopped him reading and doing his job normally. 'I was so vexed that several times I thought of taking my own life,' he wrote. 'But then I would comfort myself by saying, \"It is the will of Heaven that I should undertake the mission of the party. How is it possible that it would destroy my eyesight? All I need is to recuperate until health is restored.\"'\n\nHe noted his 'meticulous self-control', which would have surprised those on the receiving end of his rants and rages. His rigidity was unwavering; he would, he wrote, rather be 'ridiculed as archaic and doltish than be regarded as wild and ungovernable'. When his wife asked what he would do if his plans proved unworkable, he replied: 'I am willing to make slight alterations, if things are unsuitable. But I emphasise having a fixed, basic plan. Once decided upon, it must not be altered at random. There may be some small points that require change, and those can be adjusted later.'\n\nChiang adopted an equally rigid attitude towards his son. His letters, published by Ching-kuo in the 1970s, were sternly schoolmasterish, endlessly reproaching the boy for failings in his calligraphy. The nearest the general got to showing any feeling was to advise his son that if he had his teeth filled or crowned, he should make sure the dentist sterilised the instruments.\n\nChing-kuo visited Canton after finishing studies in Peking where he had become acquainted with left-wing ideas. The fifteen-year-old had been offered a scholarship in Moscow, and wanted his father's permission to accept. According to Jennie, he was so intimidated that he asked her to put the idea to Chiang. 'What's the use of him going away so far?' her husband replied. 'I can't afford his expenses.' His wife said he only finally agreed after she had pleaded.\n\nIn Moscow, the teenager was given the Russian name of Nikolai Vladimirovich Elizarov at the university of the Toilers of the East. He learned Russian, edited the Red Wall bulletin board, and studied peasant and labour groups. When his suitcase was stolen, Ching-kuo wrote to his father asking for cash to buy new clothes. Jennie says Chiang refused on the grounds that young people should learn to be more responsible with their belongings. Jennie advanced him money from her savings, pretending it came from the general. When Ching-kuo had left Canton, she felt it was 'as if I was losing a part of myself. To fill the emotional gap of not being able to have a child because of the treatment for the sexual disease Chiang had passed on, she adopted a baby girl.\n\nChiang showed himself a stickler for discipline and order with the Whampoa students, too. He would call cadets over to ask why they had a loose boodace or button. 'When the reply was unsatisfactory, he would shout for a corporal and, in a verbal blast, order the culprit to be reprimanded or even placed in the brig,' Jennie recalled. She remembered an occasion when a cadet gave a patriotic reading before an audience of 3,000 people. He had tried to memorise die speech, but forgot a line in the middle. Taking a soiled sheet of paper from his trouser pocket, the cadet unfolded it and began to read. 'Stop!' Chiang shouted. 'You should know better than to put a folded piece of paper in your trouser pocket where it would get crumpled! It should be placed in your shirt pocket! Remember that, you blockhead!'\n\nThree days after the opening of Whampoa, the French community in Canton gave a dinner for the visiting Governor of Indo-China, Martial Merlin. The meal was held in the foreign concession on Shameen, a sandbank opposite the riverside Bund. Covering 44 acres inside a wall, the enclave had broad streets and low brick and granite buildings, surrounded by lawns, flowerbeds and bougainvillaea. An American visitor described its leisurely streets as suggesting a New England village. The British occupied four fifths of the island: the French the rest. There was a single hotel, the Victoria, where the dinner for Governor Merlin was held.\n\nAs soup was served to the fifty guests, a man in white singlet and shorts threw a leather bag through an open window into the dining room. The bomb inside exploded immediately. Three of the diners were killed on the spot; two others died in hospital. The blast blew knives and forks and porcelain fragments from the plates into people's bodies. The attacker jumped into the river. Two days later, the authorities announced finding the corpse of 'an Annamite' who left a will denouncing French colonialism.\n\nThe Shameen authorities ordered all Chinese, but not other non-Westerners, to show a pass with their photographs to gain entry to the island at night \u2013 hardly the most logical reaction since the bomb thrower had been Vietnamese. The Canton government protested. Chinese workers in the enclave walked off the job, followed by watchmen who kept order for the foreigners. A picket isolated the concession from the city; foreign women and children left for Hong Kong; food was brought in on steamers from the British colony; the Victoria did a thriving business in the absence of domestic cooks and servants.\n\nThe confrontation heightened the radicalism of the Canton workers, encouraged by the Russians and the left wing of the Kuomintang. Though a compromise over Shameen was reached in October, the incident raised the reputation of the city as the heart of 'Red revolution'. To protect themselves, Chinese businessmen developed a khaki-clad militia, the Merchants' Volunteer Corps (MVC) which drilled under instructors and built fortified positions. Accounts of their numbers varied from 6,000 to double that. They bred emulators in other towns and cities: in May 1924, 100 volunteer groups from Guangdong met in Canton. To counter them, the Kuomintang set up a Labour Volunteer Corps whose members got 35 cents a day, a uniform, a dagger and a rifle.\n\nWhile many of the merchants were conservatives, opposition was not just a matter of reactionaries defending their turf. Prominent modernising figures were disillusioned with the regime, calling the Kuomintang leader _Sun Dapao_ \u2013 Sun the Windbag. The head of the MVC, a rich merchant and former comprador* for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Chen Lianbo, insisted the Volunteers were a self-defence force made necessary by the dislocation of trade and the depreciation of investments.\n\nIn mid-August 1924, a Norwegian freighter, the _Hav_ , steamed up the Pearl River with a consignment of arms ordered by the MVC: the manifest listed 4,850 rifles and as many pistols with 3.5 million rounds of ammunition. On Sun's order, the guns were seized, and taken to Chiang's stronghold at Whampoa. In protest, the merchants called a series of business strikes. The doctor left town on on a fresh bid to launch his expedition to the north, but Chiang refused to follow him, saying he was determined to defend Canton to the death.\n\nAn agreement was reached for the government to hand over half the weapons to the merchants in return for payment and a tax on houses. On 10 October, as MVC members went to the riverside to get their guns, a parade of Sun loyalists, Whampoa cadets and leftists marking the anniversary of the fall of the Manchu Empire came up the road. The Volunteers refused to let them pass. Shooting broke out. Half a dozen people were killed on the spot: the final death toll may have been three times as high. The Volunteers sent out armed patrols, and closed the gates round the business district, posting men on roofs and on the towers in which pawnshops were often set.\n\nThe Kuomintang leadership, with Borodin present, formed a Revolutionary Committee. Chiang was put in charge of military operations. His force consisted of 2,000 troops, including a detachment from Whampoa. At dawn on 15 October he launched the attack on the business district. Shells rained down, demolishing its gates. Police fired machine guns from the top of a building on the riverside Bund. Donning civilian clothes, Chiang's men slipped through the lines. The Volunteers fought from the roofs, erecting improvised bridges above the narrow streets. Setting fire to buildings, the attackers shot those who fled from them.\n\nEstimates put the death toll at anywhere from thirty to 284 for the government, fifty to 200 for the MVC, and 300 among civilians. There were follow-up murders, including one when a general invited two prominent merchants to dinner and, after discussing politics for a while, had them executed. The MVC leader, Chen Lianbo, fled to Hong Kong. Reports of the number of buildings destroyed ranged from 700 to 1,000. A journalist arriving by boat recorded: 'The air was thick with the acrid smell of smoke and smouldering wood . . . Chinese of all ages, but chiefly old men and women and little children, squatted weeping at the sight of what had once been their homes.' Still, there was high praise from the British Communist Party which sent Sun a cable expressing its 'hearty congratulations' for his 'gallant struggle against foreign Imperialism and native capitalism'.\n\nAfter returning briefly to the arsenal outside Canton during the battle, Sun Yat-sen went back to northern Guangdong, hoping to intervene in a war between the Peking regime run by the main warlord of Central China, Wu Peifu, and a coalition headed by the ruler of Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin, who had subsidised Sun in the past. That this would mean allying with a reactionary, pro-Japanese militarist did not trouble Sun \u2013 nor did the paucity of his forces or the distance to be travelled to the war zone. He saw himself as a figure who might yet rally the nation; the dream was his only way to escape from Canton, which he called a place of death.\n\nBefore setting out, the doctor visited the city for a lantern-lit parade of 20,000 people to mark his fifty-eighth birthday. He gave Chiang authority over all military units, and named him head of a new Military Department. A huge crowd on the Bund saw Sun and his wife board a gunboat to sail down the river. They called at the Canton Christian College, where a faculty member recorded that the KMT leader, wearing a long grey Chinese gown, brown Western shoes and a grey fedora, 'was in a fine mood . . . laughing and talking about his trip to Peking'. The final stop was at Whampoa. Chiang took Sun round the Academy, and the doctor reviewed the cadets. The commandant recorded him as saying, 'Even if I should die, my conscience will be at peace'. Then the Father of the Revolution sailed to Hong Kong on his way to Shanghai. He was never to return.\n\nBy the time he left Canton, Sun's presence in the warlord struggle had been rendered unnecessary after Wu Peifu's main ally abruptly changed sides, making the Manchurians and their associates masters of northern China. Still, Sun did not give up his quest. From Shanghai, he went to Japan where he blasted the Western powers as responsible for all his country's woes, proclaimed 'the doctrine of greater Asia' and suggested uniting with Russia and India against the West. Against all the evidence, he declared that the outcome of the war in the north meant die way was open for a 'great central revolution'. But one of the victors called the KMT policy of abrogating the unequal treaties with foreign powers 'startling', and noted that Sun would be at his wits' end if party members in Peking impeached him for his actions against the merchants in Canton.\n\nBack in China, the doctor suffered from abdominal trouble, and had a fainting spell. On 31 December he entered the American-funded Peking Union Medical College. An operation on 26 January 1925 confirmed terminal liver cancer. In mid-February, he was moved to the Peking home of a Kuomintang member.\n\nThere, Sun dictated his last will and a political testament calling for the masses to be roused to get other nations to recognise China as an equal, the holding of a national reconciliation convention, and the abrogation of the unequal treaties. Another document, drawn up under the supervision of Borodin, who had also gone to Peking, was addressed to Moscow. It expressed the 'fervent hope' that China and the Soviet Union would soon be able to advance as allies to 'victory in the great struggle for the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the world'.\n\nSun died on 12 March 1925. Though his memory would be hallowed by both Nationalists and Communists, his life had been, in the words of the historian C. Martin Wilbur, 'a sombre story of shattered dreams'. Its incoherence continued with a wrangle over the funeral. His second wife and son wanted a Protestant ceremony since he had died a Christian \u2013 one of his last utterances was reported to have been: 'Just as Christ was sent by God to the world, so God also sent me.' Other members of his circle thought a service of a foreign religion unsuitable for a nationalist revolutionary. So two ceremonies were held, the first in the Medical College chapel and the second in front of the old imperial palace. The Soviet ambassador ordered flags on his country's diplomatic buildings to be flown at half mast, and said he would have a glass-topped bronze coffin like Lenin's brought from Russia. Reuters reported that it was 'not new', and was a poor tin imitation with a thin bronze covering. It was not used.\n\nSun's body lay in state for three weeks before being transferred to a temporary resting place in the Temple of the Azure Clouds in die hills west of die city. Calling the Kuomintang 'the cancer of China', the Manchurian militarist with whom the doctor had wanted to form an alliance predicted that the party would fall apart. The reactionaries appeared all-powerful. But, even as Sun was dying, a military force was stirring on the southern battlefields which would elevate its commander to a status greater than the mightiest of warlords.\n\n* * *\n\n* The other four ports were Shanghai, Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou (Foochow) and Ningbo (Ningpo).\n\n* 'Comprador' was the term for Chinese acting as agents for foreign firms, often growing extremely rich.\n\n# CHAPTER 5\n\n _The Red Protector_\n\nAS SUN YAT-SEN WAS DYING far away, Chiang Kai-shek was on his first battlefield campaign at the head of his Whampoa cadets. Known as the Eastern Expedition, it also marked the first outing in the field in China for the chief Russian military adviser, Vasilii Konstantinovich Blyukher. Born into a poor peasant family of German origin in the Volga region, he had fought in the Red Army in the Urals, Crimea and Far East where he rose to become commander in chief: Chiang first met him there on his way back from his mission to Moscow. The Russian general was the first recipient of the Order of the Red Banner, which he was to be awarded four times.\n\nOf average height, with a shaven head, he was powerfully built with a boxer's arms, steady grey eyes, bushy eyebrows and a black moustache. An American journalist described the general, then thirty-five, as 'harsh and severe in character and fiercely energetic, a tough taskmaster . . . he was forever stomping about, filled with ideas for fresh works'. The general's dark-haired, nervous Russian wife, who had grown up in Manchuria, acted as his secretary and interpreter.\n\nLike the other advisers, Blyukher took a pseudonym, using the initials of his wife's first name and patronymic to form 'Galen'. In the hierarchy of the advisers, he came under Borodin, but he was to play a more central role in Chiang's rise. 'War as a whole, and each operation taken separately, are first of all mathematics and calculations,' he told colleagues. Trotsky denigrated him as a theatrical figure and political dilettante, but another adviser, A. I. Cherepanov, recalled that he 'had an immense military talent and the gift of foresight'.\n\nGalen got on well with the Chinese, sometimes donning a Nationalist uniform and showing enthusiasm for Cantonese food. Chiang recognised 'an outstanding Russian general as well as a reasonable man and a good friend. What was most unusual about him was that he had none of the traits associated with Bolsheviks.' The adviser focused on the military task at hand, and showed limited enthusiasm for ideology. 'Revolution is not so simple,' he warned.\n\nThe first test for Chiang and the Russian came when the Hakka General, Chen Jiongming, prepared a fresh attack on Canton. Galen advised seizing the initiative by launching an offensive. In February 1925, Nationalist troops moved out on the footpaths along the East River from the city. The weather was warm. The soldiers wore blue cotton tunics, short trousers, sandals woven out of twine, puttees, oilcloth caps and large round grass hats. Some carried umbrellas of rubberised tent cloth to keep off the rain. Communications and maps were primitive, leaving the officers, as an adviser remarked, feeling 'like captains of ships sailing in a fog'.\n\nThe first encounter was at a railway station controlled by several hundred enemy troops. General He Yingqin, a senior instructor at Whampoa who had attended the same Japanese military college as Chiang, was in command of the First Infantry Regiment which was thrown into the battle. Cherepanov, who was suffering from dysentery, suggested that the short, round-faced general should climb a small hill to get a better view of the fighting. As he did so, the Russian recalled, 'something happened to him: he grew blue in the face, rolled his eyes, and his legs gave way under him. Three messengers with some difficulty dragged him up the hill, where in a machine-like manner, he repeated as orders my advice concerning deployment of the regiment in battle formation. He was apparently not aware of what he was doing. Soon his natural colouring returned and he gradually came to his senses.' Cherepanov offered He some of the cocoa he himself was taking for his ailment: the general liked it so much that he asked for it to be served regularly.\n\nThe rail line was captured, and Whampoa cadets lined up with flags on the platform, their Communist commissar shouting 'Long Live Revolutionary China!' The next target was a town protected by a thick wall up to 20 feet high. One unit attempted two unsuccessful assaults without waiting for the main body of the army. Then the Russians placed two cannons on the nearby heights, ready to fire at the wall. When Chiang arrived, he proposed a partial encirclement of the town, reckoning the defenders would surrender in a couple of days. An adviser pointed out that this would enable them to get reinforcements, and pressed for a quick assault. After what the ever-critical Cherepanov called 'painful hesitation', the commander agreed, though delaying the attack until 6 a.m. the next day.*\n\nA point on the wall was identified to be attacked on foot by Whampoa graduates, executing the 'storming party' tactic they had practised at the Academy. An hour late, the guns opened fire, and the troops moved up. Incomprehensibly, they had no ladders. Wearing a felt coat, Chiang walked up and down behind the guns. 'From time to time he would raise his arms with a cry like a croaking raven and the cloak's ends would rise,' Cherepanov wrote. 'He looked at the advisers with eyes filled with hatred as if one of us and not himself were to blame that the assault group had not been provided with ladders.' General He crouched behind some bushes, 'blue in the face like a drowned man'.\n\nCherepanov remembered a climbing technique he had learned while in the fire service. One man bends with his hands against the wall, the next climbs on his back and shoulders, the first straightens up, and the second is raised in the air. He and another Russian went down to the wall to do this. As one of them stooped, a Chinese political officer and a flag-carrier ran up, and insisted on going first. The standard-bearer got onto the wall, where he was wounded. Others followed, and opened the gates. Cherepanov said 700 enemy were captured, with 1,000 rifles and six machine guns. The Nationalists lost ten killed and forty wounded.\n\nAfter a stiff battle to take the strongpoint of Mainhu, which was celebrated as a landmark in the Kuomintang's military history, Chiang's troops drove on to the port of Shantou.\u2020 their biggest target. Despite having to make their way through floods, they 'had very much a walkover. Chen's troops have suffered from paralysis,' the _North China Daily News_ wrote. In Shantou, the occupiers issued declarations pledging that there would be no looting. Meetings denounced foreign missionaries as imperialists, and pamphlets were distributed explaining Kuomintang doctrines.\n\nAfter Chiang's troops had chased their opponents across the border into Fujian province, the campaign ended with the reported capture of 12,000\u201313,000 rifles, 110 machine guns, 8 million cartridges, 1,500 shells, thirty old cannons, six modern mountain guns and three wireless sets. One third of the booty went to Whampoa. Chiang paid tribute to the political workers who accompanied the troops, and to the Russians. 'The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party are cooperating and we have the support of the whole country,' he said. Though Sun Yat-sen was dead, 'there is still Adviser Borodin to lead us,' he added. An American, Earl Swisher from the Canton Christian College, recorded hearing Chiang lead chants of 'Cooperate with the Soviet Union' and 'Long Live Kuomintang-Communist Unity'. The Communist leader, Chen Duxiu, said anybody who criticised the general was a counter-revolutionary.\n\nUsing propaganda techniques new to China, political commissars under Zhou Enlai enthused the peasants with the promise of land reform. The Whampoa troops showed tight discipline, and did not plunder the people or press them into service. Such behaviour won over farmers who acted as guides, messengers and spies. Battlefield performances were recorded and analysed for promotions and sanctions. Wounded men got extra pay. The dead were properly buried: Chiang attended a memorial service for them. 'With loyalty and courage, you officers and men have shown discipline and bravery,' he said in one speech. 'You have astonished everyone.'\n\nGalen, who had nearly been killed in one encounter, expressed himself content, praising the fighting valour of the soldiers. 'General Chiang Kai-shek succeeded in bringing to the front two regiments, well supplied, disciplined, and so thoroughly trained in the political sense that they could hold firmly enough at the front, and did not loot the population,' Galen wrote. Even the hostile _North China Daily News_ acknowledged the new army as 'a really fine body of troops, well armed and sternly disciplined and, in every way, superior to any who might be expected to oppose them'. According to his wife, Chiang had seen the future, jumping up from his chair one day, and exclaiming at the top of his voice, 'I've got it! My slogan will be: 'To unite China, first unite Guangdong.\"'\n\nWithout Sun's presiding presence, uniting even Canton, let alone Guangdong or the whole of China, was a major task. The regime displayed ever-increasing factionalism. Workers grew resentful as wages fell behind price rises and unemployment increased. There was a round of strikes. Almost a hundred new labour organisations were formed. The Communist-led Farmers' League claimed 200,000 members. Reuters reported that, in northern Guangdong, unemployed peasants were forming groups to take over land and practise the 'nationalisation of women'.\n\nThe chronic lack of funds brought public services to a halt. Teachers' pay was up to eight months in arrears. Fresh taxes were slapped on everything from graves to aerated water. In March 1925, 400 women with babies on their backs demonstrated for the repeal of a levy on suckling pigs. Such duties brought in relatively little money because most of the proceeds went to tax farmers to whom the government sold collection rights; the _Canton Republican_ newspaper said the administration would get only $5,000 a year from the suckling pig tax while the collector netted $80,000.\n\nThe murder rate rose, and some banks stopped handling cash because of the number of robberies. The mercenaries were out of control. Some burst into a wedding party, searched the guests, and tore down the decorations on the grounds that it violated the official mourning period for Sun Yat-sen. After seizing wedding gifts and other articles said to be worth more than $100,000, they fined the host $20,000.\n\nChiang and Liao Zhongkai officiated at a service for Sun at Whampoa, at which, one eyewitness recalled, 'Mr Chiang, unable to contain himself, wept bitterly and audibly, causing all in the assembly to shed tears.' Though his wife says the general saw himself as a man who could unify the party, nobody regarded him as much of a political leader. The Nationalists were split into three main groups \u2013 the mainly right-wing 'Old Comrades' from Sun's lengthy past, the 'Party Men' who had come to the fore in Canton, and the 'Crown Prince' faction round the late leader's son, Sun Fo. The second group was much the strongest, headed by the two succession contenders, Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin.\n\nAfter a classical education and a scholarship in Japan, Wang had joined revolutionary and anarchist groups, and tried to assassinate the Prince Regent in 1910. Freed from prison by the 1911 revolution, he refused to become a minister under the would-be emperor, Yuan Shikai, and travelled to Europe. Returning to work with Sun in 1917, he proved himself an impressive speaker, supple negotiator and accomplished writer. A handsome, nattily dressed, somewhat stout man who suffered from diabetes, Wang was described by a Russian woman interpreter as 'a humbler of female hearts'. A photograph of the time shows a dour Chiang Kai-shek with shaven head and strict military uniform standing beside Wang in a white suit, his hair wavy and pomaded, his face full, his eyes looking cheerfully into the camera.\n\nNow forty-one, Wang had been at Sun's bedside in his last days, taking down the leader's will. Identified with the left and on good terms with the Russians, he was Borodin's choice, becoming acting chairman of the KMT and head of its political and military councils. But he also had a record of indecisiveness. A Russian report noted: 'He is an ambitious man, capable of resolute and energetic action, when he is certain of having behind him power and support.'\n\nThe tougher Hu Hanmin, four years Wang's senior, had also gone on from a classical education to study in Japan. Slim, with receding hair and large round spectacles, he fitted the traditional profile of the scholar-administrator, and had headed the Guangdong revolutionary government after the fall of the Manchus. One of the regime's leading ideologues, his cold character, temper and indifference to the corruption of his two brothers made him unpopular. Although his revolutionary regime had taken a leftist path, Hu subsequently moved rightwards, warning against 'communisation'. He also developed a low opinion of his rival, saying on one occasion that 'Wang told the truth to no man'.\n\nChiang backed the younger man as the most likely winner, counting on him to ensure Russian supplies and support for an attack he planned on the mercenaries. When Jennie recalled Sun's admiration for Living Angel Liu, Chiang replied, according to her memoirs: 'The past is the past. Liu has outlived his usefulness. He must be eliminated along with the others . . . I am planning to take control of all the armies in Canton. This is impossible so long as the [mercenary] leaders are in my way. The only way is to use this opportunity to oust them, once and for all.'\n\nTo prepare the ground, documents said to have been found during the Eastern Expedition were circulated to show that the mercenaries had negotiated with the regime's enemies, and received 'tea money' bribes from the warlord, Wu Peifu. They reacted by grabbing taxes, and taking over the arsenal. In May 1925, as Nationalist troops from outside Canton advanced on the city, the government sacked the mercenary chiefs. They hit back by seizing telephone, telegraph and lighting services, digging in east of the city, and throwing up barricades on the Bund by the river. Following a battle plan drawn up by Galen, government troops moved up while railway workers and waterfront coolies went on strike against the mercenaries. Chiang was named Garrison Commander.\n\nFighting began in the afternoon of 6 June 1925. There was heavy shooting along the river into the following day, interrupted only by a rainstorm. Government gunboats opened up with machine guns and cannons. The regime's flagship steamed up and down, firing at hostile craft. Nearly 1,000 Whampoa troops, wearing red scarves and with a Soviet adviser, crossed the river at night. Coordination was maintained through a wireless system suggested by Galen after the Eastern Expedition.\n\nBy 12 June, the bulk of the mercenaries had surrendered or fled. That afternoon, the battle ended. The mercenary generals escaped to Hong Kong. The government took 16,600 rifles, 120 machine guns and twenty cannons. Earl Swisher from the Canton Christian College noted in his diary: 'Few dead on the Bund \u2013 beating Yunnanese [mercenaries] to death on the jetties with bamboo clubs \u2013 came home sick from the sight.'\n\nThe victory boosted the status of Chiang and his cadets who had grabbed the limelight with their river crossing. But the general was also arousing jealousy. An anonymous letter in an envelope marked 'secret' warned him that politicians were discussing ways of restraining him. Another unsigned missive said: 'Your rapid rise is being watched with enmity, especially by some members of the Cantonese Naval headquarters.'\n\nThe success against the mercenaries served as fresh testimony to Galen's abilities: a report by a visiting Soviet diplomat said the Chinese had such confidence in him 'that his every statement on questions pertaining to military operations was considered to be law'. Still, the Russian recognised the limits of what the advisers could achieve. In a speech, he held up both his hands and pointed to one little finger. That was all Moscow could do: the other nine were what the Chinese would have to do themselves. He aimed to build up an elite force rather than going for the huge numbers of poor troops which swelled the warlord armies. 'Quality, not quantity, must play the chief role,' he insisted. All China could be swept by three or four well-trained, well-armed and well-motivated divisions, he thought.\n\nOn 1 July 1925 a National Government of the Chinese Republic was proclaimed in Canton, with a clear tilt to the left under Borodin's influence. Wang Jingwei became chairman and head of the Military and Political Councils. Liao Zhongkai took the finance portfolio while remaining party representative to Whampoa and the army. Chiang sat on the eight-man Military Council which pursued the expansion of the army and the centralisation of the command structure. Hu Hanmin was sidelined as Foreign Minister: since nobody recognised Canton, there was little foreign relating to do.\n\nThe radicalisation of the Kuomintang regime increased after what came to be known, from its date, as the 30 May Incident. This grew out of a strike by Chinese workers at a Japanese-owned weaving mill in Shanghai that set off street protests in the city's International Settlement. A junior British police inspector ordered Sikh police to open fire on demonstrators, killing eleven and wounding dozens. Anti-foreign boycotts spread across China, reviving the nationalist spirit of the 4 May movement in 1919. In the Pearl River Delta, the unions waited until the mercenaries had been defeated in Canton before joining the protest. Then they launched a strike in Hong Kong for improved working conditions, equality of treatment for Chinese, the end of child labour, the reversal of rent rises, the right of Chinese to vote for members of the legislative council and an end to racial discrimination. Tens of thousands of strikers left the colony for Canton. Remembering the events of the previous year after the killing of the French governor, foreigners in the enclave of Shameen battened down the hatches. A community kitchen was opened at the Victoria Hotel as, once again, women and children were evacuated.\n\nOn 23 June a large anti-foreign demonstration moved down the tree-lined Bund, led by mounted police and a boys' brass band. Among those marching were cadets from Whampoa. Chiang's associate from the Academy, General He Yingqin, was also present. The gates on the bridges to Shameen were closed, and the foreigners set up machine-gun nests behind sandbags and barbed wire. As the rear of the procession came abreast of the bridge, firing began. The Chinese insisted that the British and French started it; the British Consul pointed the finger at the Whampoa cadets. At least fifty people died, twenty from the Academy. The bodies were laid out to be photographed in neat lines on a side street by a police station. One foreigner was killed at Shameen, a French merchant who was hit in the head; four others were injured.\n\nCrowds surged through the streets calling for action. Although there was some sniping, the authorities decided to use blockade and boycott. More workers from Hong Kong flooded into Canton: estimates of the total varied from 60,000 to double that. They got a subsidy from the Russians, and the government paid for their food and housing. Official authorisation was given for the resumption of opium boiling to provide funds for the strikers. Chinese stayed away from work at foreign companies. British products were banned. Posters went up showing Indian colonial soldiers killing Chinese women and children. A local newspaper editor advised Hallett Abend of the _New York Times_ not to wear shorts because they were associated with the British.\n\nShameen came under siege again behind concrete blockhouses, sandbags, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. Indian soldiers were sent from Hong Kong to strengthen the defence. Eight foreign warships took up positions in the river. A three-man Council of Defence, on which Chiang Kai-shek sat, was formed. Under Communist leadership, the strikers set up their headquarters in an entertainment centre in the city's East Park, with dormitories, an armoury, schools, courts and a jail. Some became unruly, smoking opium, staging robberies and running protection rackets. Pickets at the main prison forced the release of arrested colleagues. Merchants had to buy transport permits. Strikers cut off water, light and food from missionary hospitals: at one foreign institution for the insane, they turned 300 inmates out into the streets.\n\nRumours of a counter-move by the right circulated, with Liao Zhongkai as the main target. As well as the political enmity he incurred, the Finance Minister had launched a house-cleaning campaign that threatened corrupt elements in the regime, including some officers in the Canton Army. Suspicions of a plot centred on Hu Hanmin, some of whose relatives were outspoken rightists and known to be heavily engaged in graft; one of his brodiers, Hu Yisheng, ran a secret society and published a newspaper that suggested both Liao and Wang Jingwei should be eliminated. Handbills also advocated the assassination of Chiang. The plotters were said to be in league with Chen Jiongming and the British in Hong Kong. The Governor there did, indeed, ask for permission to fund an operation in Canton 'to suppress the Reds'. London told him to drop the idea.\n\nOn 20 August, Liao and his wife, the daughter of a rich Hong Kong tea trader, left home after breakfast to drive to the Kuomintang central office. Entering the courtyard outside the building, Mrs Liao stopped to talk to the Russian adviser, Cherepanov, who was passing. As they spoke, a shot rang out from attackers hidden behind the columns at the entrance. Mrs Liao thought it was a firecracker. Then she saw her husband on the ground. Calling for help, she crouched over him, trying to find the wound. More shots were fired. Chiang, Wang Jingwei, Borodin, Hu Hanmin and the head of the Canton Army, General Xu Chongzhi, hurried from a meeting in the building. 'Wang and Chiang wept bitterly,' a 1931 biography of the former recounted. 'So did Borodin. Hu and Xu, however, did not betray any emotion.' Liao was picked up, blood dripping from him. By the time he reached hospital, he was dead.\n\nA guard fatally wounded one of the attackers in the head. According to Wang's biographer, a list of names followed by annotations of sums of money was found on the corpse. The names were those of private guards of a former air force officer who was a prominent member of the right-wing secret society set up by Hu Hanmin's brother. The former officer escaped, but a gun found at his home had bullets identical to those used by the assassins. At Borodin's suggestion, a committee with full powers was established, consisting of himself, Wang Jingwei, General Xu and Chiang. Martial law was declared. A hundred arrests were made. Chiang shot one suspect dead point-blank. Two military men picked up at a banquet in a private room of a restaurant on the Bund were taken to the Eastern Parade Ground to be executed. One had recently denounced Chiang for 'sanctimoniousness, cajolery and cunning'.\n\nHu Hanmin initially evaded a search party, hiding in a derelict building before being found and taken to Whampoa. His brother fled town. Borodin and Chiang saw Hu as the 'ideological leader' of the assassination, and it was decided to send him to Moscow to see the virtues of Communism. On 22 September, the former Foreign Minister boarded a Russian ship leaving Canton. The following week, to consolidate its military force, the regime set up the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) with five main constituent units, headed by Chiang's First Corps from Whampoa.\n\nThat left General Xu, commander of the Canton Army and War Minister, as Chiang's next target. The old-school, opium-smoking officer was vulnerable on a number of counts. A Russian evaluation connected him with 'comprador circles' and right-wingers. After the assassination of Liao Zhongkai, he had refused to act against a minor warlord on the grounds that, though he knew the man was an unreliable counterrevolutionary, they were old friends. His slogan of 'Canton for the Cantonese' was a threat to Whampoa graduates from other regions. There were reports that, though he was on bad terms with Hu, he had made common cause with the politician's brother, and that his officers had joined the anti-government secret society.\n\nIn his earlier days in Canton, Chiang had numbered Xu among his friends. Now, he accused him of being in contact with the Hakka General. With the agreement of Wang Jingwei, Chiang sent troops to disarm the Canton Army and to surround its headquarters. He then told Xu that his men had to be reorganised, which required him to leave town. After Xu handed over his jade seal of office, Chiang accompanied him to a steamer. The official line was that the older man had brain trouble, and needed to recuperate in Shanghai.\n\nApproaching his thirty-eighth birthday, Chiang was now the top Nationalist military figure, and one of the ruling triumvirate alongside Wang Jingwei and Borodin. 'Canton is under the absolute control of General Chiang Kai-shek, a general in the employ of the Soviet High Command,' Reuters reported. The _North China Daily News_ wrote that he was called the Protector of Canton, and that he and the Russians 'have it all their own way due to their military superiority'. He had shown his ability to act with a decisiveness rare in Kuomintang politics. T could clearly discern a sudden change in his temperament,' his wife recalled. 'He basked in his infallibility as a budding leader. Dissatisfied with existing conditions, he issued imperious commands for new changes, even far beyond his own domain, and he became a kind of self-appointed dictator.'\n\nThe absorption of Xu's Cantonese soldiers swelled the size of the army to 30,000. This threatened Galen's doctrine of quality not quantity. The new recruits, who included opium addicts, were well below the standard set at Whampoa, but there was now no danger of them backing a rightist coup, while Chiang felt he needed all the men he could get to prepare for his ambition of launching an expedition to unify China.\n\nBefore he could press ahead with realising Sun Yat-sen's dream, he had to deal with a fresh offensive by supporters of Chen Jiongming who recaptured the port of Shantou. Chiang prepared a force of 20,000 men, plus 160 political commissars headed by Zhou Enlai. Galen had left for a lengthy visit to a populist northern warlord, Feng Yuxiang, with whom Moscow wanted to forge an alliance. In his absence, Chiang dropped the flanking movements the Russian had implemented in the previous campaign, and launched an assault on a large fortress held by pro-Chen troops which was protected by a river, an artificial lake, a canal and hills. According to Jennie Chiang's memoirs, there were four lines of defence \u2013 looped wire, boards with 3-inch nails sticking out, wooden block 'horses' covered with barbed wire, and a 15-foot high wall with electrically charged wire.\n\nAs Chiang directed operations from a ridge, the attack started with an artillery and machine-gun barrage. Foot soldiers advanced, the front rank carrying ladders. On the right flank marched a standard-bearer with a blue Kuomintang banner; another on the left waved red troop colours. Cherepanov watched a 'young, well-groomed commander' drawing his Mauser pistol from its wooden holster as he led his men forward.\n\nThe first detachment was badly hit, but others ran up to try to dismantle the barbed wire loops. 'Unit after unit followed, and finally a part of the loops collapsed,' Chiang's wife wrote, presumably on the basis of what she heard later from her husband. Then the cadets charged over the nails which pierced the thin soles of their boots. Unable to extricate themselves, they became easy targets. But others climbed on their bodies to the third barrier. A new wave heaped burning straw on the electric netting.\n\n'More and more soldiers advanced with straw,' Jennie Chiang wrote. 'Bullets and bombs showered down on them from above. With the netting finally down, many places in the city wall were blasted with dynamite.' The fighting continued into the next day as the attackers and their flag-bearers moved through a barrage of grenades, bombs, stones, quicklime and logs. Ladders were set up, and the Nationalist banner was raised on the wall. 'Grenades exploded on the battlements: rifle and machine-gun fire was heard,' Cherepanov recalled. 'The soldiers cheered, swept away with the elation of victory.'\n\nThe Revolutionary Army advanced northwards, helped by railway workers who blocked enemy trains. Chiang suddenly faced personal danger when an ex-soldier from Chen's forces tried to shoot him at a station. But he was unhurt, and led his troops to retake Shantou at the beginning of November. In a cable to Canton, he reported that the campaign had resulted in the capture of 6,000 prisoners and as many rifles. Chen Jiongming would not trouble him again, remaining in exile in Hong Kong where he died of typhus in 1933.\n\nThe success of the two Eastern Expeditions boosted the government's revenue as its new territory enlarged its tax base. The Nationalists had also enrolled a key figure to run their finances in the substantial shape of Sun Yat-sen's brother-in-law, Harvard-educated Soong Tzu-wen \u2013 T. V. Soong. A later American adviser described Soong, who wrote English better than Chinese, as having 'a fine mind; a very quick mind; a very practical mind'. Son of the Methodist Shanghai tycoon, Charlie Soong, TV. was a brother of Sun Yat-sen's widow, Qingling. He had worked for three years at the International Banking Corporation in New York, before moving to Canton to bring order to the Central Bank there. 'He already had the habit of watching any caller with an intent, almost unwinking, round-eyed gaze, and in spite of [his] courtesy his attention often seemed engaged in some remote mental speculation,' Hallett Abend of the _New York_ Times recalled. 'He was given to short silences when asked direct questions, and after these silences, during which his mind evidently worked with extreme rapidity, he would give his final opinion or decision in remarkably few words, always well chosen.'\n\nSoong built up a silver reserve to give the Canton currency a solidity rare in China at the time. Moving on to the finance ministry, he simplified the fiscal system, and brought in more effective methods of tax collection. The government's dependence on land duties was reduced, and property ownership reassessed. Gambling on the game of _fan tan_ was legalised, with an accompanying duty. Additional income came from levies on luxury goods, petrol, hotels, opium and prostitution. As a result, the tax take doubled between 1924 and 1926, and further revenue was raised by obliging households and shopkeepers to buy government certificates backed by taxes. Private savings held in banks rose six-fold. A drive was launched against smuggling and corruption. Expenditure was examined by a budget committee. All this enabled Soong to float government securities successfully, and provided Chiang with the funds to improve the pay and conditions of his troops, buy arms, hire experts and subsidise cadets coming to Whampoa. Though he fought no battles, Soong was a vital element in giving Chiang the ability to pursue his ambitions.\n\nSeveral other young men with international experience and education gravitated towards the Nationalists, and contributed expertise. C. C. Wu, who became both Mayor of Canton and Foreign Minister, was another Harvard graduate who held a British law degree. Sun Yat-sen's son, Sun Fo, had studied municipal administration at Columbia University; Chen Gongbo, head of the Workers and Peasants Departments, had earned a PhD in economics there. In cities like Shanghai, the Nationalists attracted the support of progressive journalists and teachers who encouraged bright pupils to head south. For educated Chinese anxious to help the modernisation and unification of the country, the Kuomintang offered the best hope with the great advantage of having its own army to give force to the nationalist urges the country felt.\n\nAt the start of 1926, Chiang's men notched up another success by taking the 13,000-square-mile island of Hainan off southern Guangdong, rich in crops and mineral deposits. As the troops of the local warlord fled, the Nationalists in their grey uniforms and red armbands put up posters saying that they were fighting the 'running dog' of imperialism. The left seemed dominant at the party's annual congress which opened soon afterwards. Delegates wore hammer and sickle banners. Planes flown in from Moscow crossed the skies. Two thirds of the Executive Committee came from the left of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. Borodin was presented with a silver tripod inscribed 'Co-operative Struggle'. But, though some rightist dissidents were expelled, the purge was limited. Despite having been bundled off to Moscow, Hu Hanmin was among those who got the highest vote for the Executive Committee.\n\nChiang also scored well in the voting, and was described by a Communist leader as 'a man of extraordinary achievement' and an important military bulwark. But, while keeping in with the party's biggest faction, he was also building bridges with the right, aided by his wealthy Shanghai backer, Zhang Jingjiang. Extolling party unity, the general opposed the expulsion of old-line party members. At Whampoa, renamed the Central Military and Political Academy, active anti-Communism emerged under the banner of the Society to Study Sun Yat-senism. This had originally been a broad church organisation, but then the Communists were expelled and it became firmly anchored on the right, providing many of Chiang's later supporters. The local correspondent of the _North China Daily News_ quoted a close friend of the general as saying that long acquaintance led to 'the definite conclusion that Chiang was anything but Red, and that when the time was ripe he would make evident his hatred of Bolshevism and the Bolshevists'. Without naming names, Zhou Enlai warned Borodin that some leading figures 'may not be as friendly as you think they are'.\n\nHallett Abend recalled Chiang at the time as slender and wiry, with magnificent flashing eyes. 'His ambition was immense, but he was surrounded by enemies and by danger and was unsure of his authority,' the journalist added. 'He always acted with such abrupt directness as to catch his political and military opponents unprepared. Chiang's enemies were inevitably slow and fatally tardy, whereas the Generalissimo's mobile mind worked swiftly, and he was always on guard.' A Russian adviser's report described him as conceited, stubborn, and enjoying his prestige. It said he 'easily becomes enthusiastic and then just as easily crestfallen, not knowing how to take a middle course and lacking the necessary coolness and firmness of character'. Inevitably, he was studying the career of Napoleon, and another Russian report compared him to the Jacobins of the French revolution.\n\nDespite Zhou's warning, the Russians had no doubt of his loyally, noting that 'he is so connected with us that the possibility of rupture on his part can hardly be admitted.' They cannot have been aware of an occasion on which, addressing Whampoa cadets, Chiang drew a goose and a stove on a blackboard. The goose represented Russia. If it was not cooked very soon, the general said, it would get so big that it might be able to catch the cook and do the cooking itself, putting the Chinese on the fire.\n\nIn keeping with his rising status, Chiang rented a house in the city, owned by the widow of the assassinated Liao Zhongkai. Small and modern, it had a dining room and sitting room with dark upholstered chairs and sofa, and two bedrooms, one with a low double bed covered by an embroidered bedspread. The bathroom was all white, with nickel-plated taps and fittings. 'Everything was new, clean and orderly,'Jennie recalled. The Chiangs were particularly pleased with the telephone link to Whampoa.\n\nAt the start of 1926, the general hired a confidential secretary: Chen Lifu, a nephew of the Shanghai revolutionary leader, Chen Qimei. The young man, who would remain with him through his life, had trained as a mining engineer, but decided to throw in his lot with Chiang. He quickly won his employer's confidence by his devotion to the job, his handling of correspondence and his skill at coding and decoding secret messages. Chen moved into the Chiang house, and the two men ate most meals together, starting work on urgent matters before breakfast after Chiang had done his early morning exercises and meditated for half an hour. Chen soon noticed the general's tendency towards gloom and bad temper which could boil over into uncontrolled anger. But he understood why Chiang was so volatile. A political crisis was brewing.\n\nThe commander's relationship with the left-wing Kuomintang leader, Wang Jingwei, was becoming fraught. Chiang feared that the politician was trying to undermine him. His Shanghai patron, Zhang Jingjiang, travelled to Canton in what was billed as a bid to bring the two men together, but was more likely to have consisted of encouraging Chiang to stand up to the left. The right was increasingly worried. The Kuomintang was being outpaced among political activists by the Communists. Chiang's friend Dai Jitao wrote to him that 'most of the combative youths of today are Communists while the corruption and cowardice of the KMT comrades cannot be denied.' A further drift leftwards or a pre-emptive move by the right would each destroy Chiang's attempt to find a central position for himself that would enable him to act independently and don the mantle of Sun Yat-sen without being beholden to any group.\n\nThe chief Soviet military adviser, V. V. Kuibyshev, who was standing in for Galen and who went under the pseudonym of 'Kisanka' \u2013 'Pussycat' \u2013 was also a source of concern. Not only did he back Wang Jingwei, but he also worked with another officer in Canton, and sent aid to militarists in Yunnan and Jiangxi.\n\nUnsettled, Chiang made plans to go to Russia, apparently hoping Moscow would give him more authority. He and Chen Lifu put their papers in order, packed, and got foreign currency from Hong Kong. As they drove to the pier to leave, Chen asked Chiang why he did not stay in Canton and make a stand. At that, the general told the driver to take him back home. Then he changed his mind again, and said they should head for the pier after all. 'At which point,' Chen wrote, 'I raised the question: \"If we leave, who is going to take over the post of commandant?\"' Chiang reflected, and this time said firmly: 'Go back.'\n\nHis fears deepened when Wang was named 'General Party Representative' to all Kuomintang forces, and decided to increase the power of political workers in the army. Matters got even worse when Borodin followed Galen north for secret meetings with Soviet delegates to discuss future policy in China. His absence meant there was no strong figure to act as a mediator between Chiang and Wang. On top of this, the general was concerned at a Soviet move to work with the northern warlord, Feng Yuxiang, which could result in his being relegated to the status of a junior military partner.\n\nHandbills criticising Chiang circulated in Canton. According to his official biographer, there were two assassination plots against him, one to be carried out at Whampoa. The general noted in his diary that he was suffering 'extreme pain and anxiety'. He replaced two army commanders whose loyalty he doubted, and drew up a list of Communists at Whampoa. Though the main threat came from the left, there was also a growing danger that rightist generals would mount a coup and, seeing him as part of the regime, oust Chiang as well as Wang. In the year since Sun Yat-sen's death, the Canton leadership had gone through a steady winnowing process. Logic pointed to Chiang's being the next to go, so there was every incentive to strike first.\n\nThe occasion came in mid-March in an incident which remains a subject of controversy. Canton was tense. Armed police patrolled the streets. A curfew had been declared. Rumours of rightist plots were rife. In case he needed to leave town, Chiang bought a ticket on a steamer to Shantou. During the morning of 18 March, the telephone rang at Chiang's home. He was out, and Jennie answered. The caller was Wang Jingwei's wife, Becky. Saying she was speaking on behalf of her husband, who was ill with diabetes, she made enquiries about Chiang's plans for the day, particularly about when he would be taking a boat for Whampoa and which jetty he would leave from. In the next two hours, Becky Wang telephoned five times seeking the same information. 'It was well known that the haughty Becky never did anything without a purpose,' Jennie wrote, 'so the more I thought of it, the more suspicious I became.'\n\nWhen Chiang came home, Jennie urged him to postpone his trip to the Academy. The general put in a call to Whampoa, and was told that the Kuomintang flagship was lying off the island after sailing from Canton. This was the gunboat on which he had spent seven weeks with Sun Yat-sen in 1922, now renamed as the _Zhongshan_ , the doctor's name in Mandarin. Its captain had recently been arrested for subversion by the head of the naval political department, Li Zhilong, who had taken over command of the ship. Li told the Whampoa authorities he had received an order by telephone to sail to the Academy and to load coal for a long journey. He understood the order had originated with Chiang. Knowing that he had not issued any such order, the general decided not to go to Whampoa. Li, a Communist, kept his boat off the island all night.\n\nShortly after midnight, a man knocked on the front door of Chiang's house, and told his secretary, Chen Lifu, he had urgent matters to report \u2013 for the general's ears only. Chiang was in bed, but had told his secretary to wake him for anything pressing; so he was roused. The visitor was Hu Gongmian, a Communist who knew Chiang from his home province. The two men talked for some time in whispers.\n\nLater in the morning of 19 March, according to Chiang, he received several telephone calls from somebody he did not name asking when he was going to Whampoa. He left the house for a while and, during his absence, the dean of the Academy, Deng Yanda, called at the door, appearing extremely uneasy. 'He did not ask Chiang's whereabouts,' Chen Lifu recalled, 'as though he knew in advance what was about to happen.' After Chiang returned, Captain Li telephoned to ask if he could bring the _Zhongshan_ back to Canton, saying Deng had passed on the original order as coming from Chiang. The general replied that, since he had not issued the instruction, it was not for him to tell the boat to return. Li did sail back, but kept the steam up and arms at the ready.\n\nIn the early hours of March 20, Chiang set up headquarters in the cement factory Sun Yat-sen had used as his base in 1917. Back at his home, Chen Lifu received a spate of telephone enquiries as to where his boss was. One caller was the persistent Mrs Wang. 'The third time she called, she became angry, cursed me, and slammed the telephone down,' Chen recorded.\n\nChiang brought in trusted troops to encircle the railway station and the Central Bank. A regiment regarded as unreliable was put onto barges and kept in the river for two days. The gunboat commander, Li, was arrested, and his ship seized. Soldiers surrounded the strike committee base, disarming 1,000 pickets. Communists were rounded up: at Whampoa, Zhou Enlai was among those held. The Russians, including a delegation that had just arrived to study conditions in Canton, were placed in 'protective custody'. A letter to Chiang from the Soviet adviser, Kuibyshev, was returned with a note saying the addressee was not at home.\n\nCalling on the sick Wang Jingwei, Chiang explained that his action was aimed only against the Communists. He said he had not given Wang notice of what he was doing since, if it went wrong, he wanted the politician to have a free hand to put things right. Two days later, when his patron, Zhang Jingjiang, arrived from Shanghai, Chiang dropped the fudge, insisting on 'settling the issue once and for all'. On 23 March he sent Wang a letter accusing him of siding with the Communists and rejecting the party faithful. The Central Executive Committee agreed to Chiang's suggestion that 'comrades of the left . . . should retire for a while'.\n\nDiametrically opposed interpretations have been given of the 20 March coup. Chiang depicted it as self-defence against a Communist attempt to kidnap him, and the telephone calls from Becky Wang suggest something was afoot. But the left saw it as a pre-emptive strike. What seems most likely is that the political tension had made a showdown inevitable, and that the general took advantage of a confused situation to assert himself. A report written in April for the _North China Daily News_ , based on information from 'persons who are very close to some of the high government officials', indicated that the leftists had hoped Chiang would join them to block threats from the right, taking his anti-imperialist rhetoric as a sign that he was on their side. 'General Chiang pretended to be enthusiastic, and promised that at four o'clock the following day he would lead his soldiers into Canton City to carry out this plan,' the story added. If Chiang did play along while mustering his forces, this would explain the visit from the dean of Whampoa who was believed to have been involved in the plot, and, above all, the midnight conversation between Chiang and the Communist visitor. It was a perfect moment to grab the initiative \u2013 Borodin was away, Wang was ill and the Russian advisers were busy with the visiting delegation from Moscow. Lulling adversaries by pretending to go along with them while preparing a counter-stroke would become a familiar Chiang modus operandi.\n\nHaving asserted himself so dramatically, Chiang moved swiftly to spread oil on the water \u2013 again, a technique he would frequently use to disarm opponents and give them 'face'. He blamed everything on a series of misunderstandings, offered an apology to the strikers, and removed the troops round their headquarters. Li was released, and the naval officer who had seized him and his boat was arrested instead as a convenient scapegoat. Sounding a nationalistic note, Chiang said he had been forced to move against the Chinese Communists because they had become the 'dogs' of the Russians. Cherepanov adds that the general told Liao Zhongkai's widow 'he had been offended: his budget had been reduced, arms passed to the other corps, and so on, that the Russians and Communists were against him, and he knew the plans of the Comintern'.\n\nThough he withdrew soldiers surrounding the Russian compound, Chiang pressed for the departure of Galen's replacement, General Kuibyshev, who had bypassed him. The Kuomintang's Political Council adopted a resolution that, while cooperation should continue, 'those Soviet comrades whose opinions . . . did not conform should immediately leave Canton'. On 24 March, Kuibyshev and two other advisers Chiang disliked sailed out with the visiting Soviet delegation \u2013 a dozen others regarded as uncooperative went three weeks later. The Kuomintang gave them a farewell banquet, but Chiang pleaded illness not to attend. His aim achieved, the general told a newspaper that reports of his being hostile to the Soviet Union or the Communists were the work of 'running dogs of imperialists'.\n\nNext, he turned to Wang Jingwei. Following the conventions for such occasions, each man blamed himself for what had happened. Wang said he had failed to control events. Going to the politician's sickbed, Chiang said he was willing to accept punishment for not having obtained authorisation for his actions. The next day, Wang told a meeting of the Political Council in his bedroom that his illness meant he should temporarily step down. Chiang repeated his readiness to accept sanctions, writing a resignation letter and leaving Canton for a fortress south of the city. The Finance Minister, T. V. Soong, caught up with him there and, playing to the script, begged him to return.\n\nBack in Canton on 1 April, the general set out his proposals for the party and government. Wang withdrew to a village outside the city, and then came back to hand the seals of his offices to Chiang before heading off to France. As Wang was getting ready to leave, the other revolutionary veteran, Hu Hanmin, reappeared from his 'study tour' of Russia, and was greeted by some on the right as a potential government leader. Chiang had no desire to have him in town seeking to reassert his political claims. So he isolated the politician to such an extent that he decided to leave for Hong Kong. Wang and Hu took the same boat out of Canton; they stayed in their cabins to avoid meeting each other on board.\n\nThe general next showed his muscle with the strikers. When the unions marched through the city on May Day, they found soldiers with fixed bayonets posted along the route or manning machine-gun and artillery emplacements. Still, showing the twin-track approach which was becoming his trademark, Chiang delivered fiery speeches extolling revolution and declaring solidarity with striking miners in Britain.\n\nBorodin had been caught completely by surprise by the events of March. Indeed, only a few days earlier he had assured a meeting with Soviet delegates in Peking that Chiang could be depended upon. The general certainly still needed Russian supplies: in May and June, 13,694 rifles, 11 million cartridges and nine planes were brought in along with financial aid. But, when Borodin returned to Canton, Chiang let him know that Hu had recommended his arrest; it was away of bringing home to the Comintern agent how vulnerable he was if the general decided to act.\n\nThe Russian accepted a substantial diminution of the position of the Communists proposed by Chiang. Party members were removed from official jobs or reduced in rank \u2013 to balance the scales some of Chiang's right-wing rivals suffered, too. All orders from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to go through a committee on which the Kuomintang was represented. Borodin agreed in the name of preserving the united front, for which Stalin was ready to sacrifice the interests of the Chinese Communists. In Moscow, the Comintern described the Nationalists as 'a revolutionary bloc of workers, peasants, intellectuals, and urban democracy'. A leading China expert, Gregory Voitinsky, called stories of a coup by Chiang 'an invention of the imperialists'. Once again, the Russians proved prime helpmates for a man out to use them for his own purpose.\n\nOn the morning of 15 May 1926, troops took up positions in the city and on the roofs of government buildings as Chiang told the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee of the new relationship with the Communists. Soldiers stood at the door of the meeting room. Leftists objected that what was happening was contrary to the sacred will of Sun Yat-sen; but, after a heated debate, they caved in. 'Many foreigners are inclined to place great confidence in General Chiang Kai-shek, believing that he has a level head,' the _North China Daily News wrote_. 'One cannot but arrive at the conclusion that his every move has been actuated by the desire for self-aggrandisement.' In similar vein, a Russian adviser, V. A. Stepanov, who had worked with him, wrote: 'We consider Chiang Kai-shek a peculiar person with peculiar characteristics, most prominent of these being his lust for glory and power and craving to be the hero of China . . . No one is allowed to argue with him over any matter or to act for him.'\n\n'His journeys are only known about in advance by his closest associates,' the French Consul reported. 'He moves surrounded by bodyguards standing on the running board of his car who are ready to shoot at anybody who makes a gesture they consider suspect'. The reason for such caution was made clear when Chiang went one afternoon to a meeting at party headquarters. As he walked down the corridor, accompanied by his wife and bodyguards, a young man in uniform approached with a bunch of newspapers held in front of him. His hand came out from behind the papers, holding a revolver. A bodyguard jumped for the attacker, but not before he had fired a shot which went wide. Chiang and Jennie ran down the corridor as a guard wrestled the attacker to the ground and another emptied his pistol into him: he turned out to be a relative of the exiled Cantonese General Xu. Jennie recalled that she and her husband 'were shaking like a leaf.\n\nIn the army, Chiang put loyalists into key positions. Generals were ordered that all recruitment was to be done through the Military Council. Chiang sent troops to the office of the right-wing police chief, Wu Tiecheng, to tell him he was being replaced on the spot. Wu, described by Chiang's secretary as 'unprincipled but smooth and tactful', was clapped in solitary confinement, accused of having diverted weapons and money from the police to an army unit he controlled, and of having grabbed $400,000 in tax revenue. The real reason for getting rid of Wu was that he represented a latent threat from the right who had to be eliminated: his successor was put under the Military Council. Another leading rightist, C. C. Wu, found it prudent to pay a protracted visit to his father's tomb in Shanghai.\n\nDespite the moves on the two Wus, Chiang's overall tilt was clearly against the left. Communists, including Mao Zedong, were edged out. Russian contacts with officials were restricted. In a foretaste of later attempts to bind every section of society to the regime, an umbrella Alliance of Workers, Merchants, Intellectuals and Peasants was formed. In a speech to workers, Chiang denounced the 'crimes' of the Communists, and said they would never be allowed to hold posts in government or in the Kuomintang. The Sun Yat-sen Society and its left-wing rival were both disbanded \u2013 the group which replaced them, the Association of Whampoa Schoolmates, was under Chiang's control. The Academy's magazine depicted the Communist Party as a rat, and Russia as a fat imperialist with two 'running dogs' \u2013 the CCP and a warlord.\n\nIn the east of Guangdong, Chiang's associate General He Yingqin ordered his troops to rein in peasant and worker groups which were putting pressure on the local gentry. Chiang called in rightists from Shanghai and his home province of Zhejiang. Among them was his secretary's elder brother, Chen Guofu, who went to work in the Organisation Department where his job was 'to comb out the real Communists'. Growing concerned, the Communists asked Wang Jingwei to return, but he preferred to stay in the Alpine spa of Evian where he had taken up residence.\n\nA new Foreign Minister was appointed, a British citizen called Chen Youren, or Eugene Chen, with the job of reaching an agreement with Hong Kong to end the strike. Born of Chinese parents in Trinidad, the voluble Chen did not read Chinese, and spoke it only partially. But his studies of the common law gave him an advantage as a negotiator. Hallett Abend of the _New York Times_ described him as 'small, very thin, with a disproportionately large head, and snapping black eyes, he spoke English with an ultra-British accent, and both in conversation and in his state papers was a master of stinging invective'.\n\nIn only sixteen months since Sun's death, Chiang had established himself as the military and political master of Canton, with an army springboard the doctor had never possessed. The political system was unique in China, combining a government claiming popular support and a party organised on centralised lines with its own ideology and a powerful call on Chinese nationalism. Though Borodin remained, his influence had diminished. Chiang was his own man, owing nothing to anybody else for his rise to the top. He was still seen as a revolutionary, and there was no doubting his fervent national feeling, his desire to unify the country and undo the unequal treaties imposed by the foreigners. Nor could his dedication to the memory of Sun Yat-sen and his principles be questioned. But there was nothing intrinsically progressive about any of this.\n\nChiang's idea of revolution was conservative, even reactionary. Where Sun had melded nationalism and social revolution, with the promise of democracy after a period of political tutelage, Chiang intended to pursue the first without accentuating the other two, causing an endless conundrum for the Russians who saw the national and social revolutions as intimately linked. The general was, by nature, in agreement with the Kuomintang aspiration for a classless, corporatist society in which social harmony and union would reign, or, if necessary, be imposed by force. But he did not see this as involving the destruction of the classical structure of Chinese society. On the contrary, Confucian authoritarianism permeated his thinking, with a heavy emphasis on obedience to the teacher-leader \u2013 so long as it was him.\n\nIn his rise in Canton, Chiang had shown his ability to meld force with great political skill. Now, he stengthened his control by having the Kuomintang Central Committee elect his patron, Zhang Jingjiang, as Chairman of its Standing Committee to tighten party discipline. The general became head of the Organisation Bureau, controlling appointments. Sun's Three Principles were the tablets of the faith; his political will was elevated to the status of holy writ, recited at party meetings and in schools; his photograph stared down throughout Nationalist-ruled areas. If Chiang could now lead his army to Peking, he would be able to claim to be the true successor who had realised the doctor's dream. At thirty-eight, he was ready to take on the rest of China, and the mighty warlords who ruled it.\n\n* * *\n\n* Cherepanov is highly critical of Chiang in his memoirs which appeared during the Cold War. His views may have been coloured by the politics of the time, but provide a rare anecdotal account of this campaign.\n\n\u2020 Known at the time as Swatow.\n\n# PART II\n\nSHEDDING BLOOD\n\nCanton, July 1926\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nNanking, December 1927\n\n# CHAPTER 6\n\n _Lords of Misrule_\n\nTHE MEN CHIANG KAI-SHEK FACED in the struggle for China had set their stamp on the nation in the years after the death of the would-be emperor, Yuan Shikai, in 1916. As central authority fragmented in the absence of anybody able to enforce his rule on a continuing basis, the warlord era saw anarchy on an immense scale as major militarists fought for dominance over great regions \u2013 at the height of his power, the Manchurian chieftain Zhang Zuolin governed a domain as big as Western Europe. Petty commanders, meanwhile, jockeyed for local authority; China's largest province of Sichuan was estimated to have seen 500 conflicts between fifty generals in twenty years.\n\nSome warlords started life as bandits, others as water carriers or coolies. It was a time for upward mobility through force of arms and political cunning. A few rulers showed an interest in modernisation, building roads, schools and public facilities, and making use of young men who had returned from study abroad with new ideas. But, as a whole, China was held back by the essentially primitive nature of the system at a time when it needed to join the twentieth century, thus heightening the appeal of the Kuomintang as a force that preached national unity, with a trained army to use against warlord forces exhausted by years of civil war.\n\nSuperior foreign observers mocked the warlords as comic opera generals with ostrich-plumed headgear and ornate uniforms, braided epaulettes, banks of medals and ceremonial swords hanging down to the ground: the diminutive Zhang Zuolin, with delicate hands and gold-capped teeth, posed for one photograph with his two young sons beside him in child-sized identical plumed hats, medal-bedecked tunics and swords. But, far from springing out of Gilbert and Sullivan, most warlords were mercurial exponents of brute force. In their amoral world, everything was possible and permissible in pursuit of power. All that mattered was being on top, by whatever means were required, squeezing peasants, farmers and merchants for the funds needed to maintain as large an army as possible. Public power was a function of personal control of troops, territory and money.\n\nThe 'Dogmeat General' of Shandong, Zhang Zongchang, was described as having 'the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig and the temperament of a tiger'. The contemporary writer Lin Yutang called the hard-drinking former coolie 'the most colourful, legendary, mediaeval and unashamed ruler of modern China'. The last Manchu emperor, Pu Yi, recalled him as 'a universally detested monster', his bloated face 'tinged with the livid hue induced by opium smoking'. His soldiers were known for 'opening melons' \u2013 splitting the skulls of opponents with their swords \u2013 and then hanging severed heads from telegraph poles. Zhang spoke of himself as a 'big, round-faced, long-legged overfed Shandong ruffian'; popular mythology gave him a penis as long as a pile of eighty-six silver dollars. He was said to have allocated his concubines numbers because they were so many that he could not remember their names. Among them were Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, White Russians, and two French women as well as somebody described by a visiting journalist as 'one bedraggled female who said she was an American'.\n\nOther warlords had greater depth. The amber-eyed, poetry-writing Wu Peifu, known as the Philosopher General, had passed the imperial civil service examination. Basing his power on the prosperous central Yangtze Valley region, Wu liked to identify with George Washington, whose portrait hung on his office wall. Known for his taste for alcohol, including imported brandy, he kept up his cultural claims by posing for photographs at his writing table, calligraphy brush in hand, but it was said that the quality of the texts declined noticeably when his private secretary died. His national pride was such that he refused to enter foreign concessions, even to be treated for blood poisoning from an infected tooth which eventually killed him.\n\nIn Manchuria, the illiterate, heavily moustachioed Zhang Zuolin, known as the Old Marshal, had begun as a graduate of the University of the Green Forest, that is to say, a bandit. Allying himself with the Manchu Empire, he used force and guile to establish mastery over the three provinces of the far north-east, an area as big as France and Germany combined. His domain had only 3 per cent of China's population, but 90 per cent of its heavy industry, thanks to Japanese investments. Zhang's large army with its fast-charging cavalry was a constant threat to rulers south of the Great Wall, and, in time, he would make himself the greatest warlord in the land.\n\nIn Shanxi province, west of Peking, the portly Marshal Yan Xishan became known as the 'Model Governor' as he introduced reforms and fashioned a creed which claimed to combine elements of militarism, nationalism, anarchism, democracy, capitalism, communism, individualism, imperialism, universalism and paternalism. Protected from outside interference by the mountainous borders of the province and his diplomatic skill, Yan ran his railways on a different gauge from the rest of China to prevent invasion by troops in trains and to safeguard Shanxi's coal and mineral resources. Another regional leader described him as 'a dark-skinned, moustached man of medium height who rarely laughed and maintained an attitude of great reserve . . . At first sight I knew him to be an artful man . . . Yan never showed his inner feelings.'\n\nThe Christian General, Feng Yuxiang, whom Galen and Borodin had gone to visit as a possible second ally in China, banned foot-binding, closed brothels, had the streets cleaned, and professed admiration for Gladstone, Bismarck and Theodore Roosevelt. His troops were bombarded with slogans in favour of the frugal moral life and against smoking and drinking: he sent Wu Peifu a gift of a bottle of water as a comment on the Philosopher General's alcohol consumption. As they marched, Feng's men sang songs on the need to conserve ammunition to the tune of 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing'. The son of a poor peasant, their bulky commander often dressed in simple soldier's clothes with a big bush hat. A convert to Methodism, he was reported to have carried out mass baptisms with fire hoses, though he said his territories in northern China were too poor to have such equipment.\n\nFeng's praise of frugality made him an exception in an age when conspicuous consumption and self-indulgence were prized as status symbols. Wu Peifu was reputed to own the biggest diamond on earth, and Zhang Zuolin to wear the world's biggest pearl in his black skullcap. In his capital of Mukden, the Old Marshal built himself a palace stocked with French wines, five wives and Confucian texts; the kitchens employed a staff of seventy. In Shandong, Zhang Zongchang ate off a forty-piece cut-glass Belgian dinner service. Visiting him, an American correspondent reported: 'He gave a dinner for me where sinful quantities of costly foods were served. There was French champagne and sound brandy.'\n\nThese men were, in the words of the historian Lucian Pye, 'instinctively suspicious, quick to suspect that their interests might be threatened . . . hard-headed, devoted to the short run and impervious to idealistic abstractions'. They were ruthlessly authoritarian. The Model Governor might proclaim his attachment to modernisation, but Shanxi was a police state. Wu Peifu might aspire to Washingtonian status, but his troops massacred striking railway workers, beheading their leader on a station platform. When Zhang Zuolin's soldiers raided the Russian embassy in Peking, a score of Chinese Communists sheltering inside were dragged out, tortured and strangled or shot. For all their hymns and homilies, the Christian General's men waged a campaign against Muslim rebels which cost an estimated 100,000 lives, with terrible cruelty on both sides. It was a brutal era in which human life counted for litde; a British diplomat recorded seeing the fate of prisoners after a battle in Sichuan \u2014 two were cut up in die street and their hearts and livers hung in a cookshop; two odiers were wrapped in wadding and burned alive in front of a huge crowd; the others had slits made in dieir bodies into which candles were inserted and burned before they were hacked to death.\n\nThe way in which the warlords used force as they wished was reflected by dieir subordinates and all the way down to die often undisciplined infantry. In 1921, die _North China Daily News_ reported from Shaanxi province: 'Violence and robbery stalk abroad. Farmers are afraid to venture out of doors widi even a donkey, lest both man and beast be pressed into the service of some warring faction.' In Henan province in 1924, a correspondent recounted: 'Unimportant cities are loaded with parasite soldiers well fed and well clad whose hardest piece of work is marching daily through die streets singing. Each general is a despot in his own sphere.'\n\nSoldiers and bandits were often interchangeable, with local militia acting in both roles. An officer who served with a 'rabble army' in the north recalled how, after the evening meal, his colleagues got into civilian gowns, strapped on their Mauser pistols and went out to rob and extort. As a letter to a newspaper from Sichuan put it: 'Soldiers come and bandits follow them, then the bandits withdraw and the soldiers come back \u2013 and what's more, it is die armies who maintain the scourge of banditry here. All discharged soldiers become bandits; and when the army needs one more soldier, it enlists a bandit . . . soldiers and bandits are two names for the same thing.' Or, as a President of the Republic remarked, when armies disbanded, soldiers turned into bandits; when they recruited, bandits turned into soldiers.\n\nAs well as murder and looting, kidnapping was a common scourge. Families were encouraged to pay the ransom by being sent a severed finger or ear of a victim. Those seized were known as 'tickets' \u2013 'lottery tickets' for the rich, 'pawn tickets' for the poor; if the money was not forthcoming, the bandits would 'tear up the ticket' by killing their prey. In an incident which hit the headlines in 1923, oudaws attacked the luxury Blue Express train in Shandong province and grabbed 300 passengers, among them thirty 'foreign tickets' including a member of the Rockefeller family. The central authorities were so worried by the international implications that they agreed to pay the ransom and handed $300,000 in compensation to the dean of the diplomatic corps.\n\nAlongside the plain bandits were rural secret societies with a patina of playing a Robin Hood role or of protecting farmers. The anti-warlord Red Spear Society, which was strong enough to storm cities, performed elaborate ceremonies and secret rituals, including eating from a magic amulet to confer invulnerability. A Russian adviser saw naked adherents riding bareback into batde smeared in red clay with headgear like fierce temple guardian statues. The young unmarried women of the Iron Gate Society dressed in white and carried fans which they believed would deflect bullets into baskets held in their other hand. The most celebrated outlaw, Bai Lang, the White Wolf, called for revolution and established contact with Sun Yat-sen as he roamed the north at the head of a 'Citizens' Punitive Army'. After an epic march on Xi'an, he was forced back to his mountain stronghold where he died of wounds. Government troops dug up the body, cut off the head and hung it from the wall of the provincial capital.\n\nThe villagers who made up over three quarters of China's population were usually defenceless against both the troops and the bandits. Men were pressed into service as porters, women abducted and raped. Food was stolen, carts seized, farm animals grabbed for slaughter or to carry supplies. In Shandong, ajapanese report recounted: 'Not only have arson, theft and rape occurred everywhere, as if wild beasts were on the prowl, but murder and kidnappings are performed in broad daylight . . . peasants in the same locale are pillaged two or three times by outsiders . . . [they] are without houses, without food and their plight has become extremely miserable.' For such peasants joining an army or becoming a bandit offered the only escape from impoverishment and oppression, and the opportunity to better themselves materially by looting and brigandage.\n\nThe peasants also had to cope with huge natural disasters. In 1918, a northern drought killed an estimated half-million people. Famines are thought to have cost from 4 to 6 million lives in 1920 and 1921. Up to a dozen provinces suffered serious flooding in 1923\u201325. There were earthquakes and crop pests. China's vast countryside was poor and backward. Communications were rudimentary. Most villagers never moved outside their immediate home patch, and there was no education or media to spread the idea of national government. Rivers and tracks were the main means of transport. According to one estimate, two thirds of the rural population lived at or below the subsistence level. Education was virtually non-existent. Absentee landlords owned three quarters of the fields, taking half the income or more in rent. A third of farmers were reckoned to be in debt, paying annual interest of 20 to 200 per cent.\n\nThe First World War had boosted China's urban economy as the West's industry was devoted to production for the conflict, and exports to Asia dipped. This opened the way for Chinese factories to serve the domestic market, and sell to neighbouring countries. But, though there were some sizeable enterprises in warlord territories and the militarists encouraged arms production, the development of an economic base for military operations was rarely pursued except in Manchuria, thanks to the Japanese presence in mining, steel, glass and ceramics there. In the textile industry, three cities with foreign concessions \u2013 Shanghai, Tianjin and Qingdao* \u2013 accounted for 70 per cent of national capacity.\n\nAn international conference in Washington in 1922 guaranteed China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Peking remained important for its symbolic status and as the seat of governments recognised by foreign nations where attempts were made to develop state institutions. Warlords liked either to control the capital, or to have their men there. But real power lay with their armies, and the system produced its own self-regulatory mechanism: if one general threatened to become dominant, a blocking coalition formed to halt him. The post-imperial divisions of the country were thus exacerbated, reflecting both the strength of regionalism and China's vast geographic, geological and cultural differences.\n\nIn this ever-shifting world, personal factors were of great importance. Intersecting networks of family, regional, institutional and teacher-student relationships between older and younger commanders provided multilayered links, strengthened by membership of secret societies and sworn brotherhoods. Warlords created ladders of loyalty by handing the running of provinces and counties to lieutenants. But treason was everywhere, aided by bribery, known as 'silver bullets'.\n\nAmbitious subordinates could turn on their masters \u2013 the Old Marshal's leading general secretly allied with the Christian General to stage a revolt which only ended when his officers reverted to their original loyalty and deserted him; he and his wife were shot and their bodies displayed for three days. Calculations of self-interest might lead a warlord to switch sides for fear that an ally was becoming too powerful, a subordinate too ambitious or an enemy too strong. In one major war, the Christian General abruptly changed sides to get his hands on Peking. The man he betrayed, Wu Peifu, lamented that China was 'a country without a system; anarchy and treason prevail everywhere. Betraying one's leader has become as natural as eating one's breakfast . . . Underlings think of nothing but getting rid of their leaders in order to take their place, so disorder keeps spreading without end.'\n\nDespite all the rhetoric that preceded the fighting, and occasional murders in a Chinese garden or after banquets, the early years of the warlord period were marked by a distinct desire to avoid too much serious violence. Fighting was a dangerous undertaking. Better to practise 'alignment politics' to sew up the best possible alliances and force opponents to retreat. Given the shifting tides of battle, it was also prudent to think of the future. On one occasion, Wu Peifu let two trains of defeated Manchurian troops steam home, knowing he might need a similar courtesy one day \u2013 sure enough, in their next war, Zhang Zuolin provided transport after beating him. As the saying had it, China's civil wars were very civil \u2013 so long as one was not a foot soldier dying from wounds without medical care or a peasant who had lost his food, wife, daughters and possessions to a locust army.\n\nAs the decade went on, however, fighting grew more intense, and more widespread. In 1916, there were estimated to be around half a million soldiers in China. The wars of 1922 and 1924 saw the number of men under warlord flags at treble that number. This cost money they did not have: in relatively rich Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin spent $51 million on his forces in 1925 on revenue of only $23 million. As a result, warlords employed the most immediate and repressive methods to fill their coffers. Everything became subservient to their need for money. In Sichuan, there were twenty-seven taxes on salt. Seventy levies in the port city of Xiamen* covered everything from night soil to firecrackers and prostitutes. Revenue due to the central government from salt and stamp duties was held back. Local duties on the movement of domestic goods \u2013 known as the _lijin_ \u2013 were a major source of funds. One shipment of paper was taxed eleven times along the Yangtze to a total of 160 per cent of its value. Elsewhere, a warlord slapped a 100 per cent tax on railway freight including food, at a time of famine.\n\nA survey found 673 different kinds of land taxes in the mid-1920s. In Manchuria, these rose twelve-fold between 1922 and 1928 to gobble up a third of the income from crops. Payment might be demanded for the future and the past: the American writer Pearl Buck recorded a case in which farmers had to stump up taxes due ten years later while others had to pay a levy on fields that had belonged to their ancestors. A warlord driven out of a region would collect taxes before going, and his successor would do the same on arrival. Defeated armies demanded 'travel payments' to leave peacefully. Victorious commanders exacted a 'welcome subsidy' not to let their troops off the leash.\n\nBanks were squeezed for loans. Chambers of Commerce were forced to accept warlord bonds. When Wu Peifu's eye lighted on the Chinese River Steamship Administration, he had the man in charge arrested and released him only after he agreed to hand over the company. Warlord-controlled banks set the presses rolling to provide cash; in some cases, notes were run off on duplicating machines. Hunan province printed $22 million in paper money on a reserve of under $1 million. In Shandong, notes worth $55 million were issued on a silver reserve of $1.5 million. The Christian General, Feng Yuxiang, established a bank with no capital. Zhang Zuolin called in merchants to tell them to make sure the currency remained stable despite his excessive printing of notes. To drive his point home he had five of them shot. The slide continued.\n\nMonopolies were sold off, and, in times of disaster, some generals 'borrowed' money or grain from relief bodies. On one occasion, Feng seized 27,000 sheep to feed and clothe his men. When he was military master of Peking, he sent soldiers to collect the entrance money at tourist attractions: he also opened the Honest and Clean Hotel in his northern stronghold and set up the Northwest Automobile Transportation Company as the only authorised user of motor vehicles. When Peking failed to send him money he demanded, he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funds from a train.\n\nA commander who rose to become President of China was said to have embezzled $20 million in his time as a provincial military governor. The Ministry of Communications reported in 1925 that $180 million had been taken from the railways up to the end of the previous year. Having grabbed $6 million from one line, almost half its gross annual income, Wu Peifu installed an aide as its boss, and raised mortgages on land along the track before getting a $5 million loan against the railway's property, which was used to open a bank that issued $20 million in bonds.\n\nGiven their constant need for money, how could the warlords be expected not to exploit the trade in opium which the British had introduced into the country in the previous century in the name of the freedom of commerce? The narcotic was officially outlawed, but no warlord took any notice of that. Drug monopolies were leased to the highest bidder, and revenue raised on production, distribution and use. Smoking dens and their apparatus were taxed. Farmers were ordered to plant poppies: in a southern province, those who did not grow the flowers were fined for laziness. Opium Suppression Bureaux raised yet more money through fines, or sold confiscated shipments to dealers and addicts.\n\nThe annual revenues of militarists from narcotics were put at $50 million in Yunnan, $20 million in Gansu and Fujian, anywhere between $10 and $30 million in Sichuan. Though Feng denounced drugs and forbade their use by his men, his annual income from opium taxes was reckoned at $20 million at one point. Regions which did not produce much opium but lay on transport routes imposed transit taxes: Guangxi's position on the way from the poppy fields of Yunnan to Hong Kong and world markets enabled its rulers to make almost enough to cover their military spending. Some commanders gave their troops opium in lieu of wages. Troops from Yunnan grew so rich from the traffic that common soldiers flaunted gold rings and watches, earning more in a day than ordinary people made in a month.\n\nThere were good troops in warlord ranks who took soldiering seriously. Wu Peifu's elite Third Division began daily drills at 6.30 a.m. Feng Yuxiang's men hardened themselves with gymnastics, trench-digging in frozen ground and 45-mile marches carrying 65-pound packs. The motto of his Big Sword units declared: 'When we fight, we first use bullets; when the bullets are gone, we use bayonets; when the bayonets are dull, we use the rifle barrel; when this is broken, we use our fists; when our fists are broken, we bite.' A British Brigadier General, C. D. Bruce, came away from a war of the mid-1920s with the conviction that, properly led, soldiers from the north of China were 'the finest Oriental raw material' with a physique second to none, and an iron constitution.\n\nFor all Bruce's enthusiasm, most warlord soldiers were untrained peasants, unemployed urban dwellers and drifters. A survey of one garrison reported that nearly 90 per cent were illiterate. Many came from very poor families. Only a third had served for more than two years. In 1926, the future US adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stilwell, observed a 'scarecrow' company: 20 per cent were less than 4.5 feet tall, many were under fourteen, some were barefoot. 'The wildest stretch of the imagination could not imagine this rabble in action except running away,' he wrote in his diary.\n\nStill, when units were ordered to disband, they sometimes mutinied in protest, seeing possession of a gun as their best lifeline: one demand of the bandits who held up the Blue Express was to be integrated into an army. Soldiers on the losing side would expect to be absorbed into the victor's army. This enabled the winner to increase the size of his forces, but brought in poor units of doubtful loyalty. When Wu Peifu fielded 200,000 men in one war, many had never fought under him before, and some of his subordinates owed him no allegiance.\n\nAs well as being of generally poor quality, most warlord armies were badly armed. Artillery was scarce. When modern weapons were bought from abroad, the men did not know how to use them. Feng's Russian advisers found Chinese officers had no idea how to deploy machine guns. On an inspection tour of Shandong, a British mercenary reported that hardly any of forty field guns on display were serviceable. Though the initial appearance of planes caused panic, their pilots flew too high for effective bombing, in order to escape ground fire. In 1924, there were 170 military aircraft in China: four years later, the total had risen to only 240. In one war, eight days of attacks by Manchurian aircraft killed five enemy, knocked down two trees and damaged a hotel, for the loss of two machines. Feng told his men they were as likely to be hit by bombs as by bird droppings.\n\nSo the warlords called in advisers and mercenaries. The Russians who helped the Kuomintang and the Christian General were there for ideological and political reasons, but most of the foreigners in China chased the spoils of war. Americans flew planes. Zhang Zuolin employed 400 Japanese soldiers, mainly gunners. He also had on his staff a one-armed old Etonian called Sutton, a Russian inventor who was working on aircraft with movable wings which would take off as soon as the motor started, and a German engineer who was locked up in a vermin-infested jail after being convicted of killing a boy who called him a Foreign Devil.\n\nThe largest foreign presence was of White Russians fleeing from the Soviet regime. Some fought in Manchuria wearing greatcoats and Tartar hats: according to one, they 'went through the Chinese troops like a knife through butter'. In Shandong, the Dogmeat General employed a unit led by General Konstantin Nechanev, formerly of the Russian Imperial Army. Kitted out in dark green uniforms and thigh-length yellow boots, his men were known for their ruthlessness and rapacity. In fighting in 1926, they drove three armoured trains machine-gunning civilians and stealing everything movable. When local inhabitants pulled up the rails, the Russians devastated the nearest town.\n\nRailways were a key to warlord conflicts, offering the fastest way to shift large bodies of troops. Armoured trains bristling with guns acted as artillery. In 1925, 70 per cent of locomotives between Peking and the Yangtze centre of Wuhan were reported to be used by armies. On the Shanghai-Nanking line, fighting took more than half the locomotives out of service, and traffic was blocked by 300 wagons occupied by soldiers as living quarters. In another war, half the locomotives on the Peking-Mukden line were in military use. Campaigns were fought along the tracks, with major battles for railheads and junctions. Retreating generals ordered track to be ripped up to prevent pursuit. In 1924, damage to railways was estimated at $100 million. Fighting in the centre and east of the country in the next two years cut non-military traffic by a quarter, hampering transport of food and manufactured goods, causing big build-ups of cargo, raising prices and cutting towns off from the countryside.\n\nA leading writer, Lu Xun, likened the state of China to syphilis, congenitally rotten and with 'dark and confusing elements' in its blood vessels which required total cleansing. The warlord system replaced the oppressive certainties of the imperial centuries with a world of cut-throat competition in which those who would never have risen to even the lower ranks of the civil service held sway over vast swathes of territory. Instead of standing in awe of Confucian sages, the Chinese kowtowed to men whose only claims to authority were the armies at their command. In the absence of an effective national political structure, they were the agents of power. Their era ensured that there was no imperial restoration, no turning back to a more settled age. There was economic, social and intellectual progress in places, particularly along the coast and in cities with foreign concessions. But the warlords had no system to offer, and the nation's weariness with the anarchy they embodied meant they had no well of support on which to draw. For all their braggadocio, even the greatest of the militarists lacked the power and determination to become the ruler of the country. They had broken the mould, but were unable to forge a new one. With the partial exception of the Christian General, the idea of winning hearts and minds, let alone of constructing a regime with a legitimacy beyond the force of arms, was foreign to their natures. In contrast, the Nationalists deployed Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles, backed by a trained army, an organised political party and a financial system more advanced than anything elsewhere in China. The balance of forces made the challenge launched from Canton in 1926 a highly hazardous undertaking, but a power now existed which could aspire to unify the nation and give it a structure of modernity. By the time Chiang Kai-shek established his supremacy in Canton, China was ready for the Northern Expedition.\n\n* * *\n\n* Known at the time as Tientsin and Tsingtao.\n\n* Known at the time as Amoy.\n\n# CHAPTER 7\n\n _To the North_\n\nON 1 JULY 1926, Chiang Kai-shek read out the mobilisation order for the Northern Expedition which was to be the world's biggest military campaign between the two world wars. 'To protect the welfare of the people we must overthrow all warlords and wipe out reactionary power so that we may implement the Three People's Principles and complete the National Revolution,' it declared. Recognising the general's power and the importance of giving him everything needed for success, the Kuomintang Central Committee voted to place in his hands 'the control of all organisations, civil and military, private as well as public' \u2013 except for the party itself.\n\nEight days later, Chiang swore his oath as commander-in-chief of the expedition in a ceremony at the Eastern Parade Grounds in Canton attended by tens of thousands. To underline the legacy of Sun Yat-sen, the doctor's son held up a portrait of his father. In his stentorian, high-pitched tone, Chiang said a decisive moment had been reached at which 'the country will sink if we do not shed blood'. The general was presented with a blue flag on which was written 'Down with militarism, the tool of foreign imperialism'. Mounting a white horse, his feet thrust forward in the stirrups, he saluted the troops.\n\nThree weeks later, the commander drove to Canton station where a 200-strong farewell party awaited him. Smiling broadly, he stood on the platform for photographs with a group that included Borodin, a poker-faced Galen, Jennie and his adopted son, in knee-length trousers and holding a straw hat. The general's Shanghai patron, Zhang Jingjiang, sat at the front in a bamboo chair with the look of a death's head. When his wife asked to accompany him, Chiang laughed, and recalled the episode on the gunboat with Sun Yat-sen. 'When women hear the roar of cannons, they are so scared that they urinate in their pants,' he said. Jennie recorded that as the train moved noisily away she had tears in her eyes, and that Chiang waved back until she could see him no longer.\n\nThe odds ahead of the expedition were enormous. The main militarists of central and northern China could muster up to 750,000 men between them, at least five times the size of the Nationalist forces. They enjoyed overwhelming superiority in arms. Reports by Russian advisers showed that some of the Kuomintang units had no arms; others carried matchlock rifles. Watching them move out, Hallett Abend of the _New York Times_ described them as 'unimpressive, straw-sandaled, mostly little men . . . clad in ill-fitting cotton uniforms of dirty grey or dusty yellow . . . Disorganization seemed complete, and the expedition appeared to be a hopeless folly.'\n\nThe cost was beyond anything Canton had faced \u2013 the army took up three-quarters of the budget and produced a $20 million deficit, setting a pattern for the next two decades. While the Nationalist soldiers were paid better and more regularly than warlord troops, a third of their income was in the form of promissory notes to be redeemed in territory which the Expedition was heading for. The home base was far from stable, with street fights between labour groups and high unemployment. The anti-British boycott disrupted trade, and prevented war supplies being brought in through Hong Kong.\n\nDespite such difficulties, Nationalist morale had been boosted by the success of the Eastern Expeditions, and the Whampoa graduates had proved themselves. The Russians had taught them to mount flanking offensives, and circle round the back of their opponents. Widespread discontent with the warlord struggles, exploitation and banditry provided a favourable climate for a party that promised to advance the people's livelihood. The major war in 1924 between Wu Peifu and the Manchurians had weakened both. The KMT was present across wide areas of China, giving it an unmatched geographical spread. The broad nature of the party Sun had founded enabled it to appeal to nationalists, democrats, modernisers, technocrats, progressives, seekers after social justice, educational reformers, entrepreneurs, and all who wanted China to play its proper part in the world. Communist work on rural reform provided a well of peasant support.\n\nThe National Revolutionary Army was split into eight corps whose heterogeneous nature reflected the prevailing conditions in the south, and whose commanders would play major roles in the coming two decades. Chiang's own First Army was the most proficient, with a large contingent from Whampoa and priority access to equipment that annoyed other generals. Twenty thousand strong, it contained veterans of the Eastern Expeditions, with Chiang's associate, He Yingqin, leading its crack units.\n\nThe Second Army, of 15,000 men, was headed by Tan Yankai, a former governor of the neighbouring province of Hunan who had joined Sun Yat-sen in Guangdong and became a Chiang confidant during the March coup, succeeding Wang Jingwei in the chair of the Political Council. The 10,000 men of the Third Army came from the wild and mountainous south-western province of Yunnan. The similarly-sized Fourth Army was under right-wing General Li Jishen, a graduate of the main imperial military academy. Given its commander's political orientation, this was considered a safe place to park leftists, including an independent regiment with a chief of staff called Ye Ting, who had secretly become a Communist while studying in Moscow. The largely autonomous Fifth Army, whose speciality was running protection rackets on the waterways round Canton, was left behind as a home guard, but the Sixth, under a Guangdong general, was regarded as loyal and reliable.\n\nThe presence of the Seventh Army was the result of an alliance with the rulers of Guangxi province, to the west of Guangdong. Birthplace of the Taiping rebellion, it was full of backward villages \u2013 the leader of the ruling group, Li Zongren, was frightened almost out of his wits when he first saw a steam engine on a visit to Guangdong at the age of twenty-five. Li and his fellow militarists in what came to be known as the Guangxi Clique were politically compatible with the Nationalists as they turned temples into schools, and encouraged their troops to behave well. The historian Eugene Levich has characterised Li as 'aggressive, ambitious, intelligent, nationalistic, puritanical, efficient, honest, daring and innovative'. British intelligence described another clique member, the Muslim Bai Chongxi, as 'tall, well-built with a high intellectual forehead. A thinker and planner in the realms of both politics and strategy . . . A sense of humour . . . A Moslem who drinks wine and eats pork.'\n\nThe Eighth Army came into the Nationalist fold when a general in southern Hunan who staged a revolt against Wu Peifu's provincial governor there was beaten back and looked to Canton for help. The son of an imperial mandarin, Tang Shengzhi was described by one Russian adviser as 'lively, resolute and radical in speech' and by another as a possessive, caustic character and a conceited careerist. He followed the advice of a personal Buddhist priest, taking a religious statue with him to battle. Tang forbade his men to smoke, though he was reported to have used opium. An adviser noted two fingers on his right hand 'stained as dark as smoked sausages'.\n\nThe Kuomintang and the Guangxi warlords had every interest in shoring up Tang; if he was defeated, Wu Peifu's men would be on their northern borders. So Tang's forces became the Eighth Army, and Guangxi troops, accompanied by a special corps of 100 women, moved over the provincial border to assist them. Thus, as the historian Diana Lary notes, 'The Kuomintang found itself in the anomalous position of having its great revolutionary enterprise led, at the front, by a man who only a few weeks before had been an undistinguished warlord, and staffed in the main by troops of other recently converted warlords.'\n\nChiang's initial plan had been to push north on two fronts through Hunan and Jiangxi province to the east. However, Galen persuaded him to avoid splitting his forces, and to concentrate on reaching the major Yangtze city of Wuhan, 600 miles to the north, which was a fief of Wu Peifu.\n\nThe campaign set the pattern by which Chiang would operate for the next two decades. All the major warlords would have to be confronted in due course if the Nationalists were to unite China. But the wisest course was to face them one by one, exploiting their mutual suspicions. Leaving the frontline fighting to Tang and the Guangxi generals, the commander remained behind at the town of Shaoguan in northern Guangdong to concentrate on diplomacy, political manipulation, control of finance, organisation and bribery. From the start, he was trying to negotiate with a major eastern warlord, Sun Zhuanfang, and to get senior officials in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces to change sides. By the end of July, he had induced six generals in the opposing camp to join the Nationalists, boosting the size of his forces but further undermining Galen's quest for quality over quantity. In operational matters, he counted heavily on the Russian, who wrote that Chiang's chief of staff would come to see him, get his opinion, write an order and take it to the general, who signed without alterations. 'He does not make a single decision without my approval,' the adviser added.\n\nThe alliance with Tang, the Buddhist General, ensured the Nationalists a smooth passage through southern Hunan. As they moved on the provincial capital of Changsha, Wu's men abandoned the city; 'peace-maintenance corps' formed by workers seized their weapons as they went. Two warlords from Guizhou province, to the west, rallied to the cause, their troops becoming the Ninth and Tenth Armies.\n\nIn Shaoguan, Chiang was joined by his wife. Jennie found him thin, but in high spirits. They went to their lodgings in a tall house with traditional blackwood furniture. As Chiang closed the door behind them in their room, she recorded, 'he grabbed me savagely to his breast and murmured endearments. I could see how much he had missed me by the way he caressed me so passionately.' That night, they went to their room early after dinner. Chiang spoke of the possibility that he would be killed: she said it was the first time he had talked to her of death.\n\nThe commander and Galen crossed the mountains into Hunan in the intense summer heat, lodging in local houses, and, once, in the rooms of a Presbyterian girls' school. 'Whether the Chinese nation and race can restore their freedom and independence hangs in the balance,' Chiang told his generals. Becoming so agitated that he lost his voice, he upbraided officers for gambling and visiting prostitutes, as well as for occupying civilian homes and not treating their men properly. His irritation was sharpened by an impacted tooth which was extracted by an American dentist from a hospital in Changsha run by Yale University.\n\nOn 18 August the Nationalists advanced along the rail line into northern Hunan. Wu's troops held out for two days in their trenches before withdrawing. A Nationalist feint drew them into a trap where they were surrounded and routed. An attack was then launched on a big base at Yueyang,* on the junction of a huge lake and China's greatest river, the Yangtze. According to a report in the _North China Herald_ , the assault on the fortress began with ten huge rafts crammed with soldiers sailing towards the defences, but the wind changed, and the rafts stopped. The defenders opened fire, killing hundreds of those on board. A second attack was successful; as the southerners marched in, the _Central China Post_ noted that they 'quietened the city, treating the people very well, paying for everything they got'. On 26 August Chiang ordered his forces to advance across the border into Hubei province towards the biggest urban area in central China.\n\nStrategically located where the Yangtze meets its biggest tributary, the Han, Wuhan consisted of three cities housing 800,000 people. Wuchang, on the south bank of the river, was the provincial capital, with a 7-mile city wall and historic links with the kingdom of Zhou from which Chiang claimed to descend. Across the river, Hanyang housed Wu Peifu's main arsenal. Hankou, the most heavily populated of the three, was a commercial metropolis with foreign concession areas, compared with Chicago as an industrial hub and agricultural entrepot and described by one contemporary guidebook as 'the best-groomed and best-dressed station in the Far East'.\n\nWater dominated the region. The Yangtze was a mile wide at high water. The Australian historian C. P. Fitzgerald, who worked in Wuhan in the mid-1920s, recalled the district round his office as 'a swamp crazily crossed here and there by gangplanks, or navigated by rickshaws up to their axles in mire and dirty water'. 'The mud, filth and stench are unbearable,' the _North China Daily News_ reported as the Nationalists approached. Roads and railways lines were submerged. Both sides blew up bridges for tactical advantage: Wu Peifu's executioners beheaded eight students caught trying to set off explosives under one.\n\nMoving with customary speed, the Nationalist Fourth Army spearheaded the advance, its leftist independent regiment playing a key role. Farmers guided the southerners to attack a supposedly impregnable railway bridge at Tingsiqiao, 50 miles south of Wuhan, from the rear. Wu Peifu took personal charge of the defence and executed officers who retreated without orders. The bridge changed hands three times in twenty-four hours of fighting before the Nationalists emerged as victors. Two thirds of the 10,000 defenders were captured or killed. Many drowned as they fled; some were said to have been run over as Wu's train steamed out in the retreat to Wuhan. Putting calculation above solidarity, the Guangxi and Hunanese troops did not join the battle, their generals preferring to conserve their strength for the future.\n\nWu Peifu sent a cable to Sun Zhuanfang asking for help, but die eastern militarist bided his time, waiting to step in when Wu and the Nationalists had torn one another apart. Dykes were breached to impede die attack. Wu demanded $6 million from the Wuhan Chambers of Commerce, and summoned reinforcements. But his troops were in poor condition, described by a journalist as 'shabby and dirty, showing marks of weeks in the field'. Many were ill, and had litde to eat. In contrast, the southerners were 'civil and well disciplined [widi] a profound contempt for both bullet and shell'.\n\nOn 2 September, the Nationalists reached the lake south of Wuchang. Chiang moved to the front by train as Wu Peifu joined the exodus across the Yangtze to Hankou. An American journalist, John Powell, who travelled to see him at his headquarters, found the Philosopher General drinking heavily, and depressed by the collapse of his forces. He was carrying a frayed copy of _The Military Campaigns of the Kingdom of Wu_. 'They didn't have any machine guns or airplanes then,' he remarked nostalgically.16\n\nAfter being addressed by Chiang, the Nationalists marched on Wuchang. Soldiers with grenades and pistols ran forward to try to scale the 28-foot-high stone and brick wall. What followed was reminiscent of an earlier debacle. The vanguard had no ladders. Heavy fire rained down. Two hundred attackers died. Again, a Guangxi unit failed to appear and the Hunan general's troops were slow to join the attack. Eight of Chiang's regiments launched a new assault but could not break through the formidable city walls, so both sides settled down for a siege.\n\nThere was better news the next day from Hanyang, across the Yangtze. In return for a bribe, the defending general handed over the city and its arsenal, arranging a bolt hole for himself in the foreign concession in Hankou after insisting on being allowed to take his car with him. To make sure there was no resistance, his soldiers were paid $10 for each rifle they handed over.\n\nWith Hanyang lost and Wuchang surrounded, Hankou was defenceless. The city fell without a fight when Wu Peifu withdrew to the north. As word of the good behaviour of die Nationalists spread, diey were welcomed widi food and shelter by local inhabitants. 'The Cantonese effort seems so reckless and foolhardy that it is hard to believe it could have been planned, much less carried out,' wrote a correspondent of die _North China Daily News_. 'Hankow has been blinking in bewilderment at die Cantonese for many days like a grown-up brought face to face with a fairy tale come true. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Cantonese have achieved amazing things.'\n\nDespite the successes of the 600-mile march from Canton, Wuchang still resisted. But food was scarce in the city, and cholera broke out. Corpses rotted outside the walls. 'Dead bodies were everywhere, and their stench permeated the air,' wrote Chiang's secretary, Chen Lifu. The corpses had black faces, but when my horse approached and its tail moved, the flies covering the dead scattered and the black faces disappeared.'\n\nNo sooner had Hankou been taken than Chiang launched a fresh offensive into Jiangxi province to the south-east. For once, he did not consult Galen, preferring to act on his own initiative. At first, it seemed a master stroke. Southern Jiangxi was quickly taken, helped by the defections of three commanders, while Nationalist troops advanced from the north. The provincial capital of Nanchang was conquered after hand-to-hand fighting. But then the warlord, Sun Zhuanfang, sent reinforcements by rail and river, himself travelling in on a steamer to organise a successful counter-attack on the city. His troops executed hundreds of students, teachers and Nationalists. Short 'Russian-style' hair was cause for death. Heads dripping with blood were stuck on stakes.\n\nNationalist coordination broke down. The Third Army from Yunnan declined to follow orders, and other units retreated before being told to do so. A Russian adviser reported that Chiang was 'confused, took wrong measures, and became a mere shadow of his former self. A Guangxi general took over the organisation of the retreat.\n\nThe death toll in the southern forces in Jiangxi was high: in some units, half the battalion commanders and up to 80 per cent of company and platoon officers were killed or wounded. For the first time, the expedition had lost the initiative, and the offensive had drawn Sun into the war. His troops caught three Nationalist spies and extracted from them the secret password to enter Chiang's headquarters. The warlord sent men in captured Nationalist uniforms on an assassination mission, but they were detected and most were killed.\n\nAt this point, the third Wuhan city fell after some of the defenders in Wuchang defected and helped the Nationalists to get over the wall. Highly symbolically, this came on the fifteenth anniversary of the start of the anti-Manchu revolution in Wuhan. The same day, 10 October, also saw the end of the anti-British boycott in Canton \u2013 to placate them, the government agreed to pay the strikers $100 each from a customs surcharge. There was also a brief glimmer of hope from Chiang's home province of Zhejiang where the governor declared his independence from Sun Zhuanfang. But the warlord's soldiers saw off the attack, machine-gunning hundreds of the rebels in the moonlight. The governor was caught fleeing in his car. He was shot dead, his corpse decapitated, and the head sent to Sun. Illogically, the Communist-led trade unions in Shanghai waited until after his defeat to stage a strike which soon fizzled out.\n\nFor Chiang, it was time to turn to Galen. The Russian decided to concentrate on taking Jiangxi's only rail line through the broad valley north of Nanchang to reduce the enemy's mobility and cut off the provincial capital. He made sure that the men had warm uniforms against the winter cold, that field hospitals were set up and that telegraphic communications were established. Reinforcements were brought in from Wuhan along with a few Soviet planes. There was more bribery to win over opponents. In a week of fighting, the southerners cut the railway, took a major base in the valley, and pinned the main enemy force against the waters of the vast Poyang Lake in the north of the province. Other units made their way along mountain paths round the enemy lines to capture the city of Jiujiang* on the Yangtze. With air support, armies from Hunan and Yunnan forced the surrender of Nanchang on 8 November. Forty thousand of Sun's troops were captured.\n\nWith victory achieved, leading political figures from Canton travelled north to make Wuhan their new capital. On the way, they went to confer with Chiang in a mountain resort above the Yangtze. When they left, Chiang stayed where he was in Jiangxi. His eyes were on an advance further east to Nanking and Shanghai, and he had no intention of becoming embroiled in the politics of Wuhan. As in Canton, independence and the solitary exercise of authority was his key to power. 'No one can be [his] superior; no one can be his associate,' as a saying had it. 'One can only be his subordinate.'\n\nBy the start of 1927, the Nationalist flag flew from Hainan Island off the south coast of China to the Yangtze basin. After Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guizhou and Guangxi, Chiang's associate, General He Yingqin, added a seventh province to the Nationalist realm when he beat back an attack from coastal Fujian, pursued the enemy home and occupied the provincial capital of Fuzhou.* The NRA's death toll in the whole expedition was put at 25,000 \u2013 15,000 of them injiangxi. The number of wounded, and of those who died subsequently, was far higher. Two dozen militarists had rallied to the cause, bringing the Nationalists' strength to 260,000 soldiers in thirty armies spread across half a million square miles with 170 million inhabitants. As always, finance was a problem. There were mutinies by troops who did not receive their wages. In January 1927, Chiang had to stop payment to the armies after a breach with T. V. Soong who must have been all too aware of the budgetary effect of the general's spending. Chiang warned the Finance Minister that, if he did not receive $1.5 million immediately, he would regard this as 'the final rupture in our relations'. After T.V. was granted control of the finances of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, he came up with the funds, but the pattern was set for a long conflict between the two men over expenditure.\n\nThe behaviour of the southerners was not always as exemplary as the legend has it, while Chiang's wife recorded him as dismissing the militarists who had joined the Nationalists as 'stinking opportunists' who were 'willing to ally with me or anyone else, just so they save their skins'. Even if the core Kuomintang soldiers distinguished themselves from warlord troops by paying shopkeepers and farmers, their money was often military scrip. In one incident in Nanchang, officers were shot and banks attacked by troops unhappy at the low value of their wages. Nor were their political leaders always a model of behaviour. The admittedly hostile _North China Daily News_ reported how a group of politicians visiting Chiang's headquarters smoked in bed, burned the sheets, fraternised with Russian women and indulged in 'indiscriminate spitting'.\n\nStill, this was a new model army. Its best units had fought with bravery, determination, speed and skill. It even had a female 'Dare to Die' unit led by Foo Foo-wang, 'Canton's Joan of Arc', who was photographed in jodhpurs, knee boots, a belted tunic and army cap. There was no doubting the popular support the NRA enjoyed. As one of its songs proclaimed: 'Soldiers and the people are like one family, so never take advantage of them. If we sing the song of love for the people every day, heaven, earth and man will be at peace.'\n\nThe political cadres built on this foundation. Harold Isaacs, whose _Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution_ , published in 1938, set the template for the idea that popular revolt was the vital element in the expedition's success, wrote that 'The spontaneous rising of the people gave the Kuomintang armies little more to do, often, than occupy territory that had already been secured for them.' That verdict was nurtured in decades to come by the Communists, but puts the cart before the horse in pursuit of ideology. The initial advance through Hunan was made possible because Canton had allied with General Tang, not because of a popular rising. Though local farmers were valuable as guides and for logistical support, the soldiers did not enjoy a walkover secured by workers and peasants in their battles with the troops of Wu Peifu and Sun Zhuanfang. A contemporary poster reflected reality when it showed a soldier with fixed bayonet moving ahead of a peasant, a worker, a clerk and a student. Hanyang and Wuchang were won by treachery, not mass risings. Labour agitation in Wuhan occurred after the three cities had been taken, and the Canton strikers were a drag on the campaign. As the historian Donald Jordan concluded in his authoritative account of the campaign written nearly forty years after Isaacs, the thesis of the expedition as a victory from below 'seems highly insecure'. It was the army which opened the door to revolution, rather than the other way round, even if the subsequent career of the man who led that army made such a truth unpalatable.\n\nThis is not to deny that the expedition embodied a new political awareness and militancy which gave it a unique depth and resonance. The KMT-Communist alliance drew idealistic young people like the future author Hsieh Ping-ying whose celebrated autobiography would chart the way revolutionary women broke out of the confines of traditional society. Against the background of the warlord years, it carried a message of hope for a new China and a vision of a modern nation which the political cadres could propagate when the soldiers marched on. This sowed the seeds for wider confrontation between the prophets of a new order and Chiang's more traditional vision of an authoritarian, militarily-led administration. While the general developed his links with the right of the Kuomintang in Shanghai, the party's left wing turned Wuhan into a seedbed for revolution, using its control of party organs to assert its sole legitimacy.\n\nThough, for reasons of face and politics, he left the front of the stage to members of the KMT left, Borodin played a key role in orchestrating developments. The Soviet adviser, who drove round the city in Wu Peifu's old car and occupied a flat in the former Russo-Asiatic building, saw Wuhan as the key to the success of the revolution. One of his visitors, T. V. Soong's youngest sister, Meiling, found him a commanding presence with a leonine head and slightly wavy, dark brown hair reaching down to the nape of his neck. A British cigarette dangled between the index and middle finger of his left hand while his right fist was bunched close to his tunic \u2013 Borodin let the cigarette ash grow until it almost fell and then flicked it on to an ashtray as he paced round the room. Speaking in a deep, clear, unhurried baritone of mid-Atlantic intonation without a trace of a Russian accent, he gave Meiling an impression of 'great control and personal magnetism' as he spoke of British and American history, Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, religion and communism.\n\nThe new spirit won plaudits even from the generally hostile _North China Daily News_. 'No matter how one may dislike certain phases of the present Nationalist movement, there is one outstanding fact \u2013 the people, in general, seem to have entered into a realm of freedom and safety never before enjoyed,' its correspondent wrote. 'On every hand, there is to be seen a harmony and a clubbing together which never was dreamt of under the recent. . . regime. Shopkeepers are no longer afraid and women and girls not only venture out after dark, but go unattended.' So much so that 'husbands of emancipated women' marked Women's Day by protesting that their wives did not come home at night, but acted 'like alley cats'.\n\nUnions sprouted \u2013 there was even one for Buddhist priests and nuns. Heavy taxes were levied on merchants. Mass rallies stoked the political temperature. Students demanded the power to sack teachers. The Madame Sun Yat-sen Political Thought Training School for Women was established. Holidays were proclaimed for the anniversaries of the birth of Karl Marx, the Paris Commune and the death of Lenin. The Servants' Association called for an annual holiday of three weeks, and for employers to provide medical attention for all ailments except venereal diseases.\n\nOn Women's Day, sing-song girls handed out leaflets stating: 'We, the prostitutes of Hankou, wish the public to know that despite the arrival of revolutionary forces here we are still suffering . . . owing to unsettled conditions we have only a small number of guests.' But the city's cabarets were crowded with a bizarre mixture of diplomats, merchant navy captains, foreign businessmen, lawyers, doctors, bankers and Chinese officials. 'Communists from Moscow danced side by side with the men they were seeking to force out of China,' an American journalist, Henry Misselwitz, wrote. 'Young girls, always Russians, laughed at them and danced with them all, demanding frequently, 'You buy me small bottle wine, pliss?'\"\n\nIn the countryside, associations of small farmers and peasants blossomed, attracting more than a million members each in Hunan and Hubei. The movement, organised mainly by the Communists, combined livelihood issues and politics. Granaries were opened, and fields confiscated from absentee landlords. Revolutionary courts handed down sentences on corrupt officials, landowners, bullies and 'evil gentry'. Heading the committee for peasant affairs, Mao Zedong was developing the thesis that revolution would come from the countryside, seeing big landlords as the foundation of imperialism and the warlord system.\n\nSuch activism deeply worried the Kuomintang right, which viewed mass movements as a dangerous force to be kept under control, or eliminated entirely. Its gentry and merchant members could only be alarmed at the way the party was heading \u2013 Soong Meiling compared Wuhan to the Paris Commune. Stalin, too, grew concerned at reports of radical peasant action which was much too close for comfort to the belief in continuous, agrarian revolution promulgated for China by his rival, Trotsky.\n\nThe Nationalist success was also making Western powers reconsider their attitude. Britain, previously a backer of Wu Peifu, sent its Minister in Peking to Hankou for talks, followed by a proposal to the other major powers that they should express readiness to negotiate on revision of the treaties in China and all other outstanding questions when the country had an established government. But there was trouble when the Northern Expedition spilled over into attacks on foreigners and their religious missions. In some churches, portraits of Sun Yat-sen were put up in place of crucifixes. A poster declared: 'Jesus Christ is dead. Why not worship something alive such as Nationalism?' Some of the British set up defensive strongholds in Yangtze cities into which they smuggled arms in cricket bags. In early January 1927, anti-foreign riots in the city of Jiujiang were followed by fighting in Hankou between Chinese protesters and British marines with fixed bayonets. The demonstrators rushed into the concession, and the council there handed it over temporarily to the Nationalists. Britain then opened talks that led to a permanent agreement which boosted the KMT as the first administration in China to reclaim territory from foreigners.\n\nThat success emboldened the left wing in Wuhan which established a Provisional Joint Council as its supreme body, headed by Chiang's most outspoken critic, the Justice Minister, Xu Qian, a man with a small head and wrinkled forehead who, at fifty-five, was older than most of his colleagues. A fervent nationalist and admirer of Russia, he had shunned the foreign concession quarters and kept his ministry in a small block of flats in the Chinese city. A visiting British journalist, Arthur Ransome, the future author of the children's classic _Swallows and Amazons_ , said Xu enjoyed high prestige among his younger colleagues, but appeared to be 'a brilliant man with something seriously wrong with his brain . . . unbalanced, incalculable, obstinate and dogmatic'.\n\nAs posters in Wuhan denounced him as a despot, Chiang hit back by forming a Provisional Central Political Council in Nanchang, where he kept his military headquarters; he also made sure that as many military supplies as possible went to his First Army. After Borodin had declined an invitation to visit him, the general travelled to Wuhan with Galen. The visit was a disaster. Borodin made pointed remarks about power-seeking militarists, and there was a row about where the new capital should be. The left favoured Wuhan, pending an advance on Peking. Chiang insisted on Nanchang as a temporary choice \u2013 he planned to move from there to his homeland of the Lower Yangtze to establish himself permanently in Nanking, with its link to Sun Yat-sen's presidency in 1912.\n\nFor the first time, Chiang faced a military rival in the Nationalist ranks in the shape of the Hunanese general, Tang Shengzhi, who had emerged as the leading military figure in Wuhan. 'Chiang is fatigued,' he told a Russian adviser. 'It would be better for him to take a rest.' Tang was hardly a model revolutionary, establishing contacts with the agents of the warlord Sun Zhuanfang and conferring with the Japanese. Meeting Communist representatives, he said he wanted Galen as his adviser, and asked Moscow to send him money. The adviser V. K. Tairov compared him to 'a beautiful woman who shows off her beauty . . . and gives herself to whomever gives her the most'. For all his faults, Tang provided the regime with a military chief it thought could stand up to Chiang. As the commander headed back to Nanchang, the Justice Minister prepared a party conference to bring him to book. Significantly, Galen chose to stay in Wuhan.\n\nAnother challenge emerged on the other side of the world when Wang Jingwei left France for Germany to start the journey home in answer to the call for his return by a Kuomintang congress the previous autumn. Though Chiang insisted they were the best of friends, the politician would be a serious rival. According to a report by a 'Russian spy', Chiang sent him a message hinting that he was not needed. Receiving this in Berlin, Wang showed a characteristic lack of resolve, and turned back to Paris. Then he changed his mind again, and headed for China after all.\n\nOn top of all this, Chiang also faced a new enemy in eastern China when the Dogmeat General of Shandong entered the conflict as an ally of the warlord Sun Zhuanfang in an alliance of militarists known as the Anguojun, or National Peace Army. His burly, vicious troops moved south with their White Russian mercenaries in an armoured train. Wearing padded coats against the winter cold, Zhang Zongchang's men were assigned to defend the provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui north of the Yangtze, in return for a monthly payment of $600,000 from Sun. At the end of February 1927, they took over the defence of Nanking, and Zhang travelled to join them in his private railway train with his harem, sitting on an elaborately decorated, lacquered hardwood coffin, drinking and chainsmoking.\n\nChiang decided to go on the offensive, launching an attack by the First Army into his home province of Zhejiang, south of Shanghai. But the southerners suffered heavy losses. Despite their criticism of Chiang, the left in Wuhan could not sit back and see him defeated \u2013 victory for Sun would have threatened its position further up the Yangtze. Stalin's insistence on the united front also led Borodin to agree to a request from Chiang for Galen to return to advise him.\n\nThe Russian general organised an advance against the Anguojun forces on both banks of the river. The Nationalist army in Zhejiang also moved up under die Muslim general from Guangxi, Bai Chongxi. Soldiers sloshed through flooded fields as their opponents blew up bridges and dykes. But the provincial governor defected, and the warlord troops abandoned major cities without a fight after being paid to leave quiedy by local businessmen. 'The rout of Marshal Sun's men was complete,' a reporter wrote. 'Hundreds of boats passed us.'\n\nThe advances strengthened Chiang's military position, and his confidence \u2013 he sent a telegram to Moscow asking for the recall of Borodin. But the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang asserted itself bywithdrawing the exceptional powers granted to him at the start of the expedition. He was left with a seat on a new governing board and his post of commander-in-chief, though even that was circumscribed \u2013 his activities were to be overseen by a commission which included a Communist and his enemy, the Justice Minister.\n\nTravelling to join her husband at Jiujiang, Jennie found him thin, seedy and feverish, though tender and affectionate towards her. He had lost his appetite, and likened himself to 'a horse with a spear stuck in its body, a tiger coming in front of me and a wolf behind'. The Chiangs stayed in the home of a leading local citizen with weeping willow trees and a red lacquered bridge and pagoda in the garden. Concerned about Chiang's health, Jennie insisted on his resting in bed, followed by a trip to the Lushan Mountains above the Yangtze where they were carried in sedan chairs, and strolled in the hills. On the first evening, after climbing the slopes till their feet ached, they sat on a large rock to watch the sunset. Each formulated silent prayers. 'Kai-shek looked at me so intently I thought there was something stuck on my face,'Jennie recalled. T raised my hand to wipe away whatever it was, but . . . he seized my palm in his and said \"It is extraordinary how much I love you. I just asked Buddha to protect and guard you.'\" Then they walked silently back to their bungalow.\n\nOn his return to Jiujiang, Chiang was given a telegram from Wuhan relaying the decisions taken against him. He threw it away. Then, according to his wife's memoirs, he hit his head with both fists, picked up a vase from a table and smashed it, slumped into an easy chair, bent his head, and wept. 'For an hour Kai-shek behaved like a madman,' she added. 'He banged the table, shouted to high heaven, and cursed Borodin in no uncertain terms.'*\n\nThe general fired off a telegram to Wuhan asking for a representative to come to explain what was going on. The government sent the widow of the assassinated Canton leader, Liao Zhongkai. Sitting in the Chiangs' drawing room, she explained that there had been a majority vote. After that, she handed over a handbill describing the commander as a dictator, and a letter from General Xu Chongzhi of Canton whom he had sent into exile in Shanghai in 1925. 'Obey orders and confess your mistakes,' the letter said. 'Censure yourself for bad faith and keep your promise so that the country will be at peace.' Mrs Liao warned that officers in Wuhan whom Chiang had considered loyal were denouncing him as a new warlord.\n\nJennie recorded seeing her husband's face turn an ugly white as he fumed, clenching his hands convulsively. Fearing what he might do, she slipped up to their bedroom, took his revolver from its holster hanging on a clothes stand, and hid it in one of his riding boots. When she returned, Mrs Liao was handing Chiang a letter written by Wang Jingwei, warning of Chiang's despotic ambitions, and calling on party comrades to 'rise up in arms and wipe away this rebel'. Borodin, Mrs Liao added, had issued a proclamation saying the 'dictator and military autocrat' could not be tolerated for another day.\n\nChiang got up as if in a trance, and went to the bedroom. For all his public inscrutability and preaching of the need for Confucian calm, he had never been one to take reverses well. 'An intense hate and fury poured out of him, shattering all sense of proportion,'Jennie wrote. 'He foamed and fumed, pulled the two suitcases off the chair and dumped their contents on the floor. But the revolver was not there. Mrs Liao and I stood at the door trembling while he raved: \"Where is my revolver?\"\n\n'I could see a strange gleam in his eyes. By this time, I was weeping, and Mrs Liao tried to calm him.\n\n'\"Where is my revolver?\" he repeated desperately. I could see his face was livid and his hands were shaking . . . Then he ran amok. He swept things off the table and broke the furniture.'\n\nPutting a hand on his arm to restrain him, Mrs Liao said he was behaving like a spoiled child: she reminded him that he was not in his own home, and was destroying other people's property. 'Then, like a baby, he broke down and wept bitterly,' Jennie recalled. 'All that afternoon and evening, he refused to eat or talk. All military matters came to a standstill. He was not at home to anyone. Even the servants were kept outside our room.'\n\nThe next morning, Chiang was calmer. He admitted that he would have shot himself had he been able to find his revolver. 'He lay there and closed his eyes,' Jennie wrote. 'I brushed away the tear that trickled down his cheek. He looked so worn and weak.'\n\nIf Chiang was prone to crumble at the onset of bad fortune, he had a great capacity to pull himself together and plot retaliation. Summoning loyal generals, he drew up defensive plans in case Wuhan attacked. Having restored his own morale, he addressed a rally with a fiercely anti-Communist speech, and then turned back to the war in the east. As usual, he used bribery to smooth the path for his soldiers. The Governor of Anhui declared his neutrality, reportedly in return for $600,000. Three divisional commanders led their men into the Nationalist ranks. The defections meant that the Dogmeat General would not be able to use the railway through Anhui to bring in reinforcements. In Shanghai, the naval commander joined the southern camp, and the head of the waterway police in Jiangsu province, to the north, also changed sides, giving the Nationalists control of canals and waterways there. An agent went to work on the Shanghai garrison commander who was annoyed because Sun Zhuanfang had not made him mayor.\n\nChiang was not the only one intent on taking control of Shanghai. As the Nationalist army advanced, Communist-led unions in the city called a general strike joined by 100,000 workers, demanding the formation of a government to protect the people, elimination of warlords, an increase in wages, freedom of expression, improved factory conditions and six-week maternity leave. If they had expected the NRA to hurry to take the city, they were disappointed. Chiang was not ready, and had no desire to ally with leftists associated with his opponents in Wuhan. So the strikers were left to the mercy of Sun's squads of executioners who roamed the streets hunting down suspected subversives. Some of those caught were summarily beheaded, and their heads hung in wooden cages from lamp posts. A White Russian armoured train, the _Great Wall_ , was ferried across the river, and moved up to join the defence, decorated in sky blue, primrose yellow and black \u2013 a journalist described it as 'a sinister thing of beautiful colour'.\n\nThe union uprising and the advance of the Nationalists led the foreigners to beef up their forces in the metropolis. Vietnamese troops arrived to reinforce the French Concession, and 1,500 men of the Durham Light Infantry landed in the International Setdement. The Americans brought in Marines; the Japanese strengthened their defences. By mid-February, there were twenty-three foreign warships in the river.\n\nIn mid-March, Chiang left Nanchang on the 550-mile journey to Shanghai. One crucial figure was not with him. Galen had counted on Shanghai being taken by a mixture of the military offensive and a fresh labour rising. But he had become increasingly aware that Chiang had no wish to work with the left. His hopes that the Nationalist commander would still prove himself to be a true revolutionary were being dashed by the day. So he left for Wuhan, whether entirely at his own volition or on Borodin's instructions is not clear. Three years after they had set out together on the first Eastern Expedition, the Chiang-Galen partnership was over, broken by the growing split behind the facade of the united front.\n\nDespite the Russian's absence, Chiang's troops implemented a plan typical of his tactics, trapping their opponents in a large enveloping manoeuvre along both banks of the Yangtze and up from the south. As he headed eastwards along the river, Chiang's actions fully justified Galen's decision to depart. In Jiangxi, a Communist union leader was executed. In Nanchang, the leftist Kuomintang headquarters was dissolved. In Hangzhou, troops and unionists clashed. In Jiujiang, martial law was declared and Communist-led bodies were suppressed. In the Anhui provincial capital, an attack on the left was authorised. As Chiang's secretary said, the purpose was simple: Communist influence must not spread \u2013 'we had to stop it.' This made inevitable a bloody watershed in the history of China.\n\n* * *\n\n* Known at the time as Yochow.\n\n* Known at the time as Kiukiang.\n\n* Known at the time as Foochow.\n\n* As with her other accounts of Chiang's behaviour in private, there is no way of corroborating what Chen Jieru wrote of this episode, but it accords both with events at the time and her husband's character and behaviour.\n\n# CHAPTER 8\n\n _Light, Heat, Power_\n\nSHANGHAI, WROTE THE BRITISH AUTHOR, Aldous Huxley, was life itself \u2013 'nothing more intensely living can be imagined'. The city the Nationalists were about to attack was the most vibrant and modern place in China, with its tycoons, burgeoning middle class, nationalistic students, adventurous writers, painters and film-makers, Communists, foreign concessions, refugees, and half the motor ehicles in the country. Boosted by migration, the population rose by a million each decade to 3 million by the late 1920s. On a wide tributary near the mouth of the Yangtze, Shanghai was both a great port, handling half the country's foreign commerce, and the prime industrial and financial centre. It contained half China's factories, employing 40,000 workers, and accounted for a third of all foreign investment in China. The banks in their neoclassical headquarters on the Bund along the Huangpu River in the Anglo-American International Settlement introduced Western financial practices. The shipyards were the biggest in China. The huge bulk of the electricity plant symbolised the city's power: a celebrated novel, _Ziye (Midnight)_ by Mao Dun, opened with the image of a gigantic neon sign on its roof flashing out in flaming red and phosphorescent green the words (written in English in capitals) LIGHT, HEAT, POWER.\n\nMulti-storey department stores were the acme of retailing, containing restaurants, cinemas, ping-pong tables, massage parlours, dance halls and hotels such as the one where Chiang and Jennie had been married. Media and advertising boomed, reinforcing the city's view of itself as the height of modernity. Smart young Chinese picked up Western fads in clothing and behaviour. Women marcelled their hair and wore flapper dresses. Tall buildings sported the latest Art Deco interiors. Among the progressive bourgeoisie, smaller, nuclear families replaced the extended Chinese clan.\n\nBankers came from Ningbo, traders and retailers from Guangdong, pawnbrokers from Anhui. Overseas Chinese returned home with knowledge picked up abroad. Compradors amassed fortunes as go-betweens with Westerners: to them, it was said, a foreigner's fart was fragrant. Conservative businessmen found their leader in Fu Xiaoan, president of the General Chamber of Commerce, head of a steamer line and director of iron, coal and paper companies. His main rival was another shipping tycoon and former comprador, Yu Xiaqing, a celebrated merchant and entrepreneur associated with the reformist movement and the Nationalists. Yu had been among those who had helped Chiang in his short-lived career as a market investor, and he travelled up the Yangtze in early 1927 to renew his links with the commander, while Fu offered aid to the warlord regime.\n\nAt a more modest level, the city was home to a mass of small traders, shopkeepers and agents who formed a myriad of associations organised by trade or street or their owners' place of origin. As their armies advanced, Kuomintang agents were active in persuading these groups that their best interests lay with the Nationalists. Then there were the Soongs. As a young man, the family patriarch, Charlie Soong, had gone to the United States where he became a Methodist. Returning to China as a preacher, he found this was not his vocation, and set up as a Bible publisher instead. Fluent in English, he built a big textbook business, acted as comprador, and managed Shanghai's largest flour mill. He backed Sun Yat-sen until the doctor's marriage to his middle daughter caused a chill between them. Though Charlie died in 1918 before the city reached its commercial apogee, his sons and daughters were to make the family the dominant dynasty of Republican China.\n\nShanghai was equally celebrated for its non-Chinese business magnates in their great houses and tall office blocks of the International Settlement and the French Concession. H. E. Morris, owner of the _North China Daily News_ , lived in a complex in the style of the British Home Counties covering a whole city block. Victor Sassoon, whose family originated in Iraq, ran a huge trading and property empire, but was equally famous for his parties, his pursuit of women, and his passion for the turf- 'There is only one race greater than the Jews,' he said, 'and that's the Derby.' Crippled by a First World War flying accident, he had a half-timbered hunting lodge and an apartment with a 360-degree view atop Sassoon House on the Bund, which also contained the Cathay Hotel where No\u00ebl Coward wrote _Private Lives_ in forty-eight hours while laid up with influenza.\n\nAnother Sephardic Jew, Elly Kadoorie, indulged his passion for the tango in a 400-square-foot ballroom lit by 3,600 bulbs at his white-painted Marble Hall mansion. Silas Hardoon, who started work as a warehouse watchman, lived with his Eurasian wife and ten adopted children in an estate with three houses, pavilions, artificial hills, lakes and bamboo groves, where the Dogmeat General stayed as he planned the defence of the city against the southerners. Even when super-rich, Hardoon liked to collect rents in person. His untidy office had no carpet, curtains or heating.*\n\nMiddle Eastern Jews followed the Sassoon trail, and were joined by others fleeing from Europe to the foreign settlements which required no entry visas. Germans expelled from the British Straits settlements in the First World War travelled north. Japanese ran a third of the city's cotton mills. After the Bolshevik revolution, White Russians poured in from Vladivostok; there were 8,000 in the French Concession. Some worked in commerce; others were employed as bodyguards, dance hostesses and prostitutes. The God-fearing built an Orthodox church in the French Concession.\u2020\n\nThe foreign areas in Shanghai and other great commercial cities like Wuhan and Tianjin were an affront to Chinese nationalism and sovereignty, run on colonialist lines, living reminders of the humiliation of the unequal treaties forced on China in the evening of the Empire. But they brought gaslight, electricity, and telephones, running water, cars, trams, a legal system and commercial stability for forward-looking Chinese companies. The local people who chose to live in the concessions far outnumbered the foreigners; of the half-million people in the French area, only 19,000 were non-Chinese \u2013 of those, just 1,400 were from France. Many rich Chinese preferred houses on Bubbling Well Road or the Boulevard des Deux R\u00e9publiques to the native city. For all his anti-imperialism, Sun Yat-sen had settled on the Rue Moli\u00e8re, and it was in the French Concession that the Communist Party held its inaugural meeting.\n\nWhile Shanghai's elan made it much the most potent modernising force in China, prosperity was the preserve of a select few. The city, as the saying went, consisted of a narrow layer of heaven on a thick slice of hell. For those below, public hygiene was non-existent, and disease endemic. Tens of thousands lived in sampans on the filthy river. Workers crowded into tiny rooms in alleys and tenements, or slept in packed dormitories. A tribe of beggars, hawkers and boatmen camped on the river pontoons in the middle of the city. The poorest of all slept in the street. Factories offered low wages, ten to fourteen-hour shifts, six or seven-day working weeks and tyrannical overseers. The premises were cramped and unventilated, even in the oppressive summer. Doors were shut to keep staff inside. Fires were common, with escape sometimes blocked by locked doors.\n\nMany workers were indentured labourers, illiterates who signed on with a thumbprint. Textile plants were the biggest employers. Conditions in the silk filatures were appalling as workers drew thread from cocoons over pans of boiling water into which their swollen, red hands often dipped. One visitor reported seeing a hundred or more babies lying on benches in the thick steam while their mothers worked. Another wrote: 'Tiny children stood for an eleven hour day, soaked to the skin in a steamy atmosphere, their fingers blanched to the knuckles and their bodies swaying from one tired foot to another, kept at their task by a stern overseer who did not hesitate to beat those whose attention wandered.' Strikers at a Japanese-run cotton mill protested that their employers 'look upon us as horses and cows, and treat us as pigs and dogs'.\n\nBad as factory conditions were, life was even more precarious for the 150,000 people on the margins of society \u2014 casual workers, rickshaw pullers, coolies, street sleepers and beggars. They were prey to predators on all sides. The organisation of labour gangs gave enormous power to underworld contractors who provided workers and raked off a slice of the wages. Even beggars had to hand over part of their takings to secure places on the streets.\n\nThis encouraged mutual assistance organisations and sworn brotherhoods. Growing from secret societies of boatmen, the Green Gang provided a vast underworld network, with generational grades and connections in all areas of the city's life. The combination of toiling masses, reformers and left-wing intellectuals also made Shanghai a breeding ground for unions and radicalism. The power of the street had been seen in the anti-foreign movement of 1925 which produced the General Labour Union. The Communist Party had its headquarters in the city, and Zhou Enlai had moved from Canton to organise political and union activity. If anybody in China was ready for urban Marxist revolution, it was the Shanghai proletariat. But there were also powerful 'yellow unions' run by the underworld and the Green Gang which manipulated workers, and decided whether they would be pliant or rebellious according to how much cash employers handed over. One celebrated figure, a rotund, elegantly dressed female gang member called Mu Zhiying, built up a network of silk mill forewomen to protect owners from unrest, at a price.\n\nFor the rich living lavishly and the poor seeking to forget their pain, Shanghai offered diversions of every kind. 'In the matter of mellow creature comforts, of savoury fleshpots deftly served, no Croesus of America, North or South, can ever hope to attain the comfortable heights and depths that Shanghai takes for granted,' wrote the London _Times_ correspondent. One showpiece was the Great World centre in the French Concession built by a manufacturer of elixirs and tonics who plastered its walls with advertisements for his range of 500 products. As described by the visiting film director, Josef von Sternberg:\n\nOn the first floor were gambling tables, singsong girls, magicians, pickpockets, slot machines, fireworks, birdcages, fans, stick incense, acrobats, and ginger. One flight up were the restaurants, a dozen barbers, and earwax extractors. The third floor had jugglers, herb medicines, ice cream parlours, photographers, a new bevy of girls, their high-collared gowns slit to reveal their hips . . . and, under the heading of novelty, several rows of exposed toilets, their impresarios instructing amused patrons not to squat but to assume a position more in keeping with the imported plumbing.\n\nThe fourth floor was crowded with shooting galleries, fan-tan tables, revolving wheels, massage benches, acupuncture, hot-towel counters, dried fish and intestines, and dance platforms serviced by a horde of music makers competing with each other to see who could drown out the others. The fifth floor featured girls whose dresses were slit to their armpits, a stuffed whale, story-tellers, balloons, peep shows, masks, a mirror maze, two love-letter booths with scribes who guaranteed results, rubber goods, and a temple filled with ferocious gods and joss sticks. On the top floor and the roof of that house of multiple joys a jumble of tightrope walkers slithered back and forth, and there were see-saws, Chinese checkers, mahjong, strings of fire crackers going off, lottery tickets, and marriage brokers.*\n\nThe Majestic Gardens could cater for 2,500 dancers. With lawns and a boating lake, Rio Rita's was described in Mao Dun's _Midnight_ as offering 'White Russian princesses, princes' daughters, imperial concubines and ladies-in-waiting to dance attendance on you.' As well as the 66-acre racecourse, there were three greyhound racing tracks, the largest holding 50,000 people. The French Club had Asia's best-sprung dance floor. The Canidrome Ballroom \u2013 the 'Rendezvous of Shanghai's Elite' \u2013 featured the American trumpeter, Buck Clayton, and his Harlem Gentlemen. The future Duchess of Windsor found Shanghai 'almost too good for a woman'. Tea dances were popular at top hotels though, as a historian of Shanghai, Stella Dong, notes, more whiskey than tea was served. Down the scale, dancing schools offered sex with the foxtrot, and Filipino bands ground out tunes in cheap dance halls while hostesses cracked melon seeds as they waited for men to hand over their 10-cent tickets.\n\nA survey found that almost 1 per cent of the female population was involved in selling sex. In 1920, the municipal council calculated that there were more than 70,000 prostitutes in the foreign concessions, among them 8,000 White Russians. Guide books listed the top hundred 'flowers': as a rule, the younger the better. Apart from sex, brothels were social gathering places where Chinese men smoked opium, enjoyed banquets and played mah-jong. Top courtesans received guests in brightly lit courtyard houses with silk curtains, fine furniture, opium pipes, mirrors and chandeliers. 'Number Three' prostitutes, who charged $3 for a drink and the same for sex, operated in teahouses with suggestive names and carved blackwood furnishings. At the bottom of the rung were streetwalkers known as 'wild chicks' or 'pheasants'. The Salt-Water Sisters catered for sailors, and 'nailers' offered their services against alley walls.\n\nThe greatest escape, for rich and poor, was in drugs. The legal import of opium had been integral to the Western presence from the mid-nineteenth century, bringing huge profits to the companies involved and to Chinese gangs which handled local distribution. International agreements provided for the elimination of the trade by 1917, but they were easily evaded in China where commonly used narcotics included morphine and heroin as well as opium, all of which were taken for medical and social purposes as well as to satisfy addiction.\n\nIt was simply too lucrative a business to be eradicated by any but a determined and powerful government, something China signally lacked. The search for temporary relief from the harshness and pain of their lives turned the city's army of workers into a huge market for drug barons, while upmarket users headed for more select dens. The city's position at the mouth of the Yangtze made it a transit point both for opium from inland and for narcotics from India and the Middle East. The rough-and-ready state of public order in a city estimated to have 100,000 hoodlums meant importers, dealers and opium parlours were subject to attack by gangsters. So bigger bandits offered to safeguard the trade in return for protection money. And who better placed for this than the head of the Chinese detectives in the International Settlement who also led a gang called the Big Eight Mob?\n\nSuch double roles were an extension of the comprador system. The foreigners, and the constabulary imported from their colonies, could not deal with the Chinese criminal world. So they appointed local figures who used their positions to enrich themselves by playing both sides of the street while making life as safe as possible for the expatriates. In 1923, the _North China Daily News_ reported that protection ran at $1 per ounce \u2013 the mob's annual earnings were put at $30 million. The chief of the Chinese constabulary was also a member of the syndicate: after he was fatally shot leaving a bathhouse, his estate was found to include $4 million in cash.\n\nIn 1924, a determined British police commissioner was appointed in the International Settlement. He set out to fight the Big Eight Mob, seizing large quantities of drugs. In contrast, the chief of police in the French Concession, Captain Fiori, favoured licensing narcotics to raise revenue. So the Green Gang bosses reached an agreement to open opium dens there in return for large payments. This gave a big boost to three gangsters who would play a key role in Chiang's ascension.\n\nThe first was the chief of Chinese detectives in the Concession, Huang Jinrong, known as Pockmarked Huang for the scar on his cheek from an attack of smallpox. Son of a policeman, he entered the service as a young man, but stormed out when told that his brocade robe was too grand for somebody of his low status. He went to the silk town of Suzhou,* where he met his formidable wife, a former brothel keeper known for her brains rather than her beauty who went on to run a lucrative monopoly of the Shanghai night soil business. Returning home, the squat, bullet-headed Huang rejoined the police and developed a network of connections and sworn brotherhoods. His status was enhanced when he helped to negotiate the release of the kidnap victims on the Blue Express in 1923. He owned a theatre and real estate, and acquired the Great World entertainment centre. For protection, he carried a tiny gold-plated revolver which folded in half and could be concealed in the palm of his hand. The epitome of an old-style gang boss, Huang lost ground in the 1920s to younger men who, in a similar pattern to the Mafia in the United States, exploited the huge potential of narcotics. His vulnerability was exposed when he was temporarily arrested after scuffling with a warlord's son who made disparaging remarks about a singer at his theatre. After that, he resigned from the detectives, returning later but only in an honorary position.\n\nThe second member of the triumvirate, the suave and educated Zhang Xiaolin, acted as the go-between with the militarists controlling Chinese Shanghai and the region. But it was the third figure who was to be Chiang's most important ally. The orphan son of a poor rice shop owner, Du Yuesheng was known as 'Big-Eared Du' for the obvious reason. Fired for stealing from the till of a fruit shop where he worked, he moved into petty crime and drug dealing, developing a habit that gave his eyes a dead, blurred look as if they had no pupils. He became a protector of a sworn sisterhood of prostitutes, joined the Green Gang, and attracted the attention of Huang's wife, who gave him three tables to run at a gambling house.\n\nRising steadily through the underworld, Du set up his own gang, and by 1925 was eminent enough to play host at a dinner for the Dogmeat General for whom he provided a girl with each course. Thin and with a wide mouth, he took two fifteen-year-old virgins from Suzhou as concubines while his wife retreated into an opium haze: the three women lived on separate floors of his French Concession home. Opposite was a house where Du maintained high-class courtesans for hire. He also offered loans to influential figures which did not have to be repaid; some historians have seen this as proof of his generosity, but it also put them in his debt.\n\nThough Du's wife bore no children, the concubines had six sons, who were protected by White Russian bodyguards. The boss was accompanied everywhere by four toughs. He was a complex character, cunning and ruthless but capable of great loyalty. Meeting him in the 1930s, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood described his face as seemingly hewn from stone, like the Sphinx. 'Peculiarly and inexplicably terrifying were his feet, in their silk socks and smart pointed European boots, emerging from beneath the long silken gown,' the British writers added.\n\nIn the French Concession, Du formed the Black Stuff Company to extort money from opium dens there, with a tax of 30 cents per pipe. The takeover of another drugs outfit meant the trio of gangsters controlled the trafficking of 40,000 chests a year through their Three Prosperities Company, whose name was taken as being self-referential. An agreement with the warlord, Sun Zhuanfang, helped to boost annual profits to an estimated $56 million. The enterprise was referred to simply as the 'Big Company'.\n\nBy 1927, as the historian of Shanghai's police, Frederic Wakeman, notes, very little illegal went on without the Green Gang's permission. Those who flouted it were likely to find themselves shot, kidnapped or having their tendons severed with a fruit knife. At Chinese festivals, Du invited leading drug merchants to a party, and told them what to pay for protection. Those who failed to cough up found a coffin delivered to their homes as a warning, sometimes accompanied by pall-bearers. In one murky incident, three French officials who had fallen into Du's disfavour died after a dinner he gave for them featuring mushrooms from the port of Ningbo. The gangster's hand was seen everywhere. Soon after the mushroom banquet, a ship carrying a report to Paris on the drug trade in the Concession caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean. The report was lost, and, among those killed was a celebrated journalist, Albert Londres, who had boasted that he was taking a 'dynamite' story home. Naturally, the sinking was attributed to Du. Clearly he was a man with whom anybody who wished to control Shanghai would have to do business.\n\nOn 18 March 1927, the Kuomintang troops pierced the defensive line south of Shanghai. Following negotiations with Chiang's agent, the garrison commander handed over military plans and cooperated with the attackers. Then, ignoring an offer of a post with the Nationalists, he fled. Stupidly, he went home to Shandong, where he was executed. His troops melted away. As the _North China Daily News_ noted: 'It would be a mistake to say that the Northern resistance collapsed; none was ever offered.' 'Hardly a shot was fired in actual defence,' reported the American correspondent, Henry Misselwitz. 'The Northern troops, dispirited, virtually leaderless, fled in rout, deserting the city.' One rare act of resistance was by the Russian armoured train which moved along the track at walking pace firing at the southerners before its crew finally gave up.\n\nRefugees poured into foreign concessions which were surrounded by sandbags and barbed wire. Hundreds of northern troops tried to follow, and British infantrymen opened fire, killing dozens. Misselwitz called those eventually let in 'the most desolate, dispirited body of men I ever saw in my life. Their uniforms were ragged and torn, scores were wounded and poorly bandaged . . . disintegration seemed to possess the very souls of these men.'\n\nStill, it took the southerners under the Guangxi General, Bai Chongxi, four days to enter Shanghai. During that time, the General Labour Union brought the city to a standstill with a strike, raided police stations for arms and occupied the workers' district of Chapei where fighting killed an estimated 300 people and burned 3,000 dwellings. The strike was subsequently portrayed by the Communists as the proletarian action that delivered Shanghai to the Nationalists. While it did disorganise the defenders, the army would have taken Shanghai in any case. Rather than doing Chiang and Bai a good turn, the Communist leaders wanted to take control before the soldiers arrived, and to set up a Soviet. The fiercely anti-Communist Bai ordered an end to the strike, and instructed troops to put down disturbances. The unions were unbowed, executing 'running dog' employees of foreigners and keeping up armed street patrols.\n\nAnti-foreign feeling swelled, in Shanghai and up the Yangtze. In the French Concession, a mob stormed the gates on the Boulevard des Deux Republiques. Up the river, churches and missions were sacked. In Wuhan, unionists attacked the Japanese settlement, leading to a landing of marines who killed several of them. Less bloodily, thejiujiang correspondent of the _North China Daily News wrote_ of demonstrators insulting foreigners as 'turtle eggs', and small boys throwing stones at players on the foreign club tennis court.\n\nWhile Chiang wanted to wipe away the unequal treaties with the West and Japan, he was wary of confrontation with the foreigners, particularly after they moved military reinforcements into the settlements \u2013 though, according to the _Lancet_ , the British had so little to do that their main health problem was venereal disease. Still, events in Nanking showed how explosive the situation was. As the southern Sixth Army had approached the city, the defending troops had left, looting, burning and raping as they went. The day after Shanghai was taken, the Nationalists moved into Nanking. Some northerners failed to get away and sporadic gunfights broke out, but there was no battle and the population welcomed the newcomers. Then the victors began to attack foreign houses and offices.\n\nOne group headed for the British consulate. The port doctor was caught on the lawn outside and shot dead. The consul was badly wounded. The Harbour Master rushed round when he heard firing, grappled with two soldiers and was then riddled with bullets. Troops who broke into the home of Dr J. E. Williams, the American Vice-President of the University, shot him dead. A French and an Italian Catholic priest were also killed. The Japanese consulate was ransacked. The troops burned nine foreign-occupied buildings. One raiding party stole pianos and the billiard table from the Yangtze Hotel. Another prised open what it took for chests outside a missionary's home, only to flee from the bees buzzing from their hives. Foreigners donned Chinese gowns as disguise; dressed in coolie clothes, the manager of the Bridge Hotel and his wife hid in a muddy pigsty.\n\nAt the American legation, the consul, John Davis, realised his Marine unit would not be sufficient defence. So two dozen women and children, accompanied by Marines, trekked 2 miles to a house owned by the Standard Oil Company on a hill which they hoped would be safer. But Cantonese soldiers attacked. As the Marines shot back, the women and children took shelter in an upper-storey bathroom, lying on the floor. Then foreign ships moored in the Yangtze began to shell the city, and the soldiers broke off the attack to see what was going on. In the lull, the Americans used ropes, sheets, curtains and blankets to climb from the bathroom windows, ran to the city wall and forded a moat. Crossing fields under sniper fire, they reached the river where they boarded sampans for a British navy ship from which they were transferred to a boat to Shanghai.\n\nThe Nanking Incident provoked an outcry from the foreigners, their missions in Shanghai and their governments. Chiang's supporters fingered the Communist head of the Sixth Army's political department for fomenting anti-foreigner activity to create difficulties for the general. Going ahead with the transfer of his headquarters to Nanking, the commander blamed it on 'bad characters', northerners in southern uniforms, and 'what might be called an anti-missionary movement'. Several dozen soldiers were executed. The Nationalists protested at the bombardment by foreign warships. For the foreigners, Nanking was a nightmare brought to life, with the Chinese turning on their small, privileged community. But the incident was only a sideshow to what was about to unfold in China's greatest city.\n\n* * *\n\n* The Cathay is now part of the Peace Hotel. Coward recalled 'lots of parties, and Chinese dinners and cosmopolitan junketing . . . and three English naval officers . . . with whom we visited many of the lower and gayer haunts of the city.' The Morris estate is a guest house. Kadoorie's home is a Children's Palace. Hardoon's gardens have been built over.\n\n\u2020 It is now a restaurant.\n\n* The Great World still stands, but is a shadow of its former self, with acrobatic displays by schoolchildren replacing the entertainment Sternberg witnessed.\n\n* The Great World still stands, but is a shadow of its former self, with acrobatic displays by schoolchildren replacing the entertainment Sternberg witnessed.\n\n# CHAPTER 9\n\n _The Great Purge_\n\nPOCKMARKED HUANG LIKED TO RISE at ten, take his breakfast, and then make his way to the Treasure Teahouse where, according to a historian of the city, he was 'besieged by callers, runners, supplicants, theatrical people, demi-mondaines, and finks'. In the afternoon, the Green Gang boss would play cards before meeting business associates, communing with his concubine or attending his theatre. On 26 March 1927 he varied his pattern to pay a visit to the commander of the victorious Nationalist forces.\n\nChiang had arrived in Shanghai earlier in the day on a gunboat. His position was weaker than the easy military victory suggested. He had only 3,000 troops in the city, including some former warlord soldiers whose reliability was uncertain. His allies on the Kuomintang right and in the business community could contribute no soldiers. Radical students in Shanghai demanded his removal, and workers waved banners declaring 'Overthrow Chiang Kai-shek'. His calls for calm towards foreigners at a mass rally at the West Gate were ignored by demonstrators who marched round the concessions denouncing imperialism.\n\nLabour organisations held fortified positions in major buildings. A Communist committee authorised assassinations of opponents, and laid plans to take power after warlord troops left and before the Nationalists arrived. Armed union squads attacked strike-breakers, and searched passers-by for weapons. Zhou Enlai felt bold enough to visit military headquarters with an unsuccessful request to be given the password used to get through the curfew the army had imposed. A huge demonstration was planned for 12 April in honour of Wangjingwei, who was returning from Europe to take up the leadership of the Kuomintang left. Yet the Communists were reluctant to take the final step. Chiang might have moved to the right, but he was still commander-in-chief of the Kuomintang, and Stalin was committed to the united front with both wings of the party Sun Yat-sen had founded. Reaching Shanghai, Wangjingwei told Chiang he would do what he could to stop a full-scale rising. This gave the general a breathing space to consolidate a vital alliance.\n\nHuang had already made a trip up the Yangtze at the end of the previous year to meet the general whose links with the Green Gang stretched back more than a decade. Now he was Chiang's first civilian visitor in Shanghai. The deal was quite simple: the gangsters would throw their weight and men behind Chiang and, in return, would be assured of immunity, probably accompanied by an undertaking that they would enjoy a narcotics monopoly in the city.\n\nAfter Huang had laid the groundwork, Big-Eared Du moved in, making the most of his contacts with the foreigners. He set up a militia under the name of the China Mutual Progress Association with the support of France's Consul General who called for 'the maintenance of public order and the struggle against the Soviet commune'. French police protected the Association's headquarters, and the diplomat arranged for the supply of 450 guns.\n\nDu also got the French police chief, Captain Fiori, to invite the American chairman of the International Settlement, Sterling Fessenden, to a meeting at Du's home in the Concession, where rifles and sub-machine guns were stacked in the hall. The short, plump, fifty-one-year-old American was later described by a State Department official as a 'feeble creature . . . who had gone to pieces in the Far East and was conspicuously unfit for his position'. Fiori spoke of the threat to the foreigners from the Communists, and Du said he was ready to attack the leftists provided the French would supply him with more guns and Fessenden would obtain permission for his men from the Mutual Progress Association to move with their arms through the International Settlement to the native areas. Fessenden said he would agree, if the settlement's council approved, which it did.\n\nHaving made his arrangements, Chiang travelled upriver to Nanking, leaving the Guangxi general, Bai, in military command in Shanghai. As usual, he preferred to stay away from the battlefield. On the night before the planned mass rally of the left, the Green Gang made its second contribution to his cause, with a dinner invitation by Du to the most powerful union leader in the city, Wang Shouhua.* Wang did not want to alienate the underworld, so, at 8 p.m. on 11 April, his chauffeur-driven car passed through the iron gates in front of Du's house.\n\nInside, he was met by another of the Green Gang bosses, Zhang Xiaolin, who told him he should dissolve the pickets and change sides for his own good. When Wang refused, four gangsters beat him severely. At this point, according to one account, Du appeared at the top of the stairs, a vacant look on his face, his voice disembodied from opium. 'Not here! Not in my house!' he called out as a mobster known as Fiery Old Crow throttled Wang. Thinking he was dead, the hoodlums stuffed him into a hessian sack, and drove to waste ground outside the French Concession to bury the body there. As they finished digging a grave, they heard Wang moaning; so they interred him alive.\n\nEight hours later, 2,000 armed men in blue denim overalls from Du's militia moved onto the streets of the city. Their white armbands bore the character for 'worker'. As they made their way to working class districts in the pre-dawn darkness, they passed soldiers who had been posted in the streets during the night, some in civilian dress. At daybreak, a bugle call rang out from army headquarters and a siren sounded from a gunboat \u2013 the signal for the men in blue to attack union branches and labour strongholds.\n\nThey were helped by troops who opened the way for the militia or themselves fired at left-wingers. Men were shot and beheaded in the streets. There was a report that captives were thrown alive into the furnaces of locomotives at the South Railway Station. A particularly fierce battle occurred at the employees' club in the big Commercial Press building, where pickets camped in the billiard room \u2013 among those who got away when it fell was Zhou Enlai. He was later arrested, but was allowed to escape, and fled with an $80,000 price on his head. It was said that Chiang had ordered him freed to repay the debt from an occasion when the Communist had saved him from violent leftists in Canton.\n\nThe police put the number killed on 12 April at 400, with 300 others arrested. But the death toll in the morning confrontation alone was probably double that while some of the prisoners taken to the military camp at Longhua were executed there. Green Gang men moved into the union headquarters to proclaim a new labour organisation. Sixty business groups sent a congratulatory telegram to Chiang and General Bai.\n\nThough the unions and the Communists had been expecting an attack, they had failed to set up defences against the troops and Du's men. Now they acted with extraordinary naivety, as if believing that the forces arrayed against them could be won over by words. A young leftist who went to ask Zhou Enlai how he could help was told to distribute leaflets and put up posters. Demonstrators headed by women and children marched to army headquarters. Showing how little the power of the people counted, troops opened fire with machine guns; soldiers with fixed bayonets chased after fleeing demonstrators. In all, 300 were estimated to have died there. Writing much later, Chiang recorded simply that 'On April 12, to prevent Communist uprisings, the Revolutionary Forces in cooperation with local labour unions and chambers of commerce, disarmed the Red labour pickets and kept Communist saboteurs under surveillance. Only then was the situation in Shanghai brought under control.'\n\nTerror spread across the city as Du's men and the Nationalist soldiers killed indiscriminately, and more lorryloads of prisoners were taken to Longhua. Green Gang lieutenants staged attacks on five left-wing groups, arresting more than 1,000 people. Mass meetings and parades were banned. The journalist Edgar Snow, who was working in Shanghai at the time, estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 in all perished in the purge. The author Han Suyin put the toll at 8,000, and added that 6,000 wives and daughters of workers were sold into brothels and factories. Later estimates put the number of people who died, Communist or not, at 34,000 with 40,000 hurt and 25,000 arrested. 'It was a bloodthirsty war to eliminate the enemy within,' Chiang's secretary, Chen Lifu, wrote. 'I must admit that many innocent people were killed.'\n\nThe Communists retained strongholds in the middle Yangtze basin and in Hunan, where they pushed land reform, seized property, executed 'bad gentry' and organised peasant self-defence units. But the left had been given a clear warning of the repression awaiting it from the increasingly ruthless army. Sun Yat-sen's broad church was imploding.\n\nIn Canton, real or suspected Communists were roped together, taken to the East Parade ground, and shot. As in Nanchang the previous year, women with bobbed hair were regarded as radicals who merited death. At Whampoa more than 350 cadets were executed. In Hangzhou, according to the American journalist Vincent Sheean, soldiers disembowelled a young woman for saying Chiang did not represent the Kuomintang or Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles. 'Her intestines were taken out and wrapped around her body whilst she was still alive,' he added. 'Girls and boys were beheaded for saying what they believed; men were hung up in wooden cages to die of hunger and thirst or were broken on the rack.'\n\nHunan province, where the Nationalists had scored their first military successes in 1926, was the scene of particularly savage and prolonged conflict as the right sought to eradicate the rural radicalism engendered by the Communists. A peasant rising was savagely repressed. Mao Zedong, a Hunan native, told of 'gouging out eyes and ripping out tongues, disembowelling and decapitation, slashing with knives and grinding with sand, burning with kerosene and branding with red-hot irons. In the case of the women, they pierce their breasts . . . and parade them around naked in public, or simply hack them to pieces.' The bloodshed in the province would last for a decade, taking an estimated 300,000 lives.\n\nShanghai's businessmen greeted the suppression of the left with pleasure, but soon found themselves becoming the second wave of victims of the new order. A firm believer that business should run for the benefit of his state, Chiang felt no sympathy with independent-minded capitalists. They were simply useful as a source of funds. A Financial Commission decided who was to pay what, and a former judge drove round in a large car telling companies and individuals the size of loans apportioned to them. The Green Gang and the security forces dealt with those who did not cooperate. More money was raised by kidnapping or direct extortion. 'Wealthy Chinese would be arrested in their homes or mysteriously disappeared from the streets; and those who reappeared came back as poorer men, but could in no case be induced to open their mouths to inform on their oppressors,' a contemporary author, Owen Chapman, wrote. 'Millionaires were arrested as \"communists\"!'\n\nTrying to placate the leaders of the new regime's shock troops, the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce gave a luncheon to honour the Green Gang bosses. It did no good. The three-year-old son of the Sincere department store tycoon was seized, and freed for $500,000. The ransom for the son of a cotton mill owner was set at $670,000. Assets reported to be valued at $7 million were grabbed from a flour magnate. When the conservative business leader Fu Xiaoan refused to raise a $10 million loan, he was made the target of an arrest warrant, reported to have been personally approved by Chiang. After Fu fled town, the authorities took over his shipping company, and the general appropriated one of his houses.\n\nChiang has been portrayed as being the creature of the Shanghai capitalists; events in the spring and summer of 1927 showed the reality of a relationship that would run through the following decades.\n\nFor expatriates, life went on as usual behind the protection of barbed wire, sandbags and troops. Tanks patrolled the streets of the French Concession, and six two-winged Royal Air Force planes were parked in the grounds of the racecourse. On the day the purge began, ratepayers in the International Settlement approved a motion to keep Chinese out of the municipal parks and gardens, one speaker warning that relaxing the ban would risk seeing such places 'crowded with the scum of the city'. The French extended the drugs pact with Du and provided naval protection for boats carrying narcotics. In return for more cash, Captain Fiori agreed to let the gang boss open gambling houses in the Concession. Du made a lump sum payment to the authorities in the International Settlement, headed by the compliant Fessenden, to be allowed to sell narcotics there. Part of the proceeds found their way upriver to Chiang to help fund his confrontation with the left and complete his bid to conquer China.\n\nThe Wuhan regime took five days to react to the attack in Shanghai. On 17 April, basing itself on its claim to be the legitimate expression of the Kuomintang, it expelled Chiang from the party, accusing him of 'massacre of the people'. A big rally denounced the 'counter-revolutionary chief, and $250,000 was reported to have been put on his head. Faced with the reality of the repression, Moscow began to shift position \u2013 the Comintern branded the Nationalist commander a traitor, and the newspaper _Izvestia_ ran an open letter by his son, Ching-kuo, who was studying in Russia, saying: 'Revolution is the only thing I know, and I do not know you as my father any more.' Stalin managed to recall a signed photograph which he had dispatched to Chiang before the purge, and he now compared the general to a lemon which could be thrown away after being squeezed.\n\nIn interviews with foreign correspondents, Borodin sounded an upbeat note. Wearing baggy grey flannel trousers and a white blouse, the Russian slapped his thigh with a thin riding crop as he told a reporter from the London _Daily Express_ that Chiang had been the 'victim of a nice trick' by reactionaries and anarchists, and must go. But the position of the leftist regime was becoming steadily more fraught. Its finances were poor, aggravated by inflation and currency depreciation. The taking of a major customs post by Chiang's supporters cut its revenue from duties on the opium trade. Wuhan's workers were a law to themselves, and merchant supporters of the Kuomintang became increasingly alienated from the government. Thirty foreign warships lay in the mile-wide Yangtze as a reminder of die readiness of the great powers to intervene if their interests were attacked. A cholera outbreak killed thousands. In the former British Concession, die Reuter correspondent wrote of coolies 'using the formerly beautiful Bund front and the river foreshore as a public lavatory'.\n\nIn Nanking, Chiang and his supporters formed a counter-government which was joined by Hu Hanmin, the Kuomintang ideologue who had been forced out of Canton in 1925 as a rightist. While lacking a populist base, it could claim to represent the middle class and the gentry who had always formed the core of the Kuomintang's financial support. As such, it could reach out to those in Wuhan worried about the move to the left there. At the same time, it represented a fresh step towards militarisation; as Hu later acknowledged, the use of the army to suppress the Communists meant the soldiers escaped from civilian control.\n\nMeeting Chiang at the time, the journalist Vincent Sheean, who acknowledged his sympathy for the Wuhan left, detected a cruel look in his thin face, but found him 'sensitive and alert' and took him for ten years younger than his age of forty. 'I could discern the eager, ambitious nature of Chiang Kai-shek's mind, his anxiety to be well thought of, his desire to give his personal ambitions the protective coloration of a revolutionary doctrine and vocabulary,' Sheean wrote. 'It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that with this young man, in spite of his remarkable opportunities, the phrases of the movement had not sunk beyond the top layer of consciousness. He remained shrewd, ambitious, energetic . . . with his way to make in the world, and I fully believed that he would make it.'\n\nFirst, in the late spring of 1927, Chiang had to deal with the Dogmeat General's army advancing from Shandong on Nanking, coming close enough to bombard the city. At the same time, the KMT left faced a threat from the warlord's Manchurian ally under the twenty-six-year-old Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, who crossed the Yellow River to menace Wuhan from the north. The twin offensive showed the fragility of the Nationalists, and the need for Nanking and Wuhan to cooperate against their common adversaries. Even if they joined forces, they risked being outnumbered by the northern alliance. So they sought a new partner.\n\nAfter having been beaten eighteen months earlier by the northerners, the Christian General had left his army to stage a dogged stand north of Peking while he took the train to Moscow, listening to gramophone records of Chinese opera to pass the time on the way. In the Soviet capital, he met high officials, and was instructed on revolutionary methods. For all his populism, Feng Yuxiang was never keen on anything like real Communism, but he knew how to get his hosts to provide supplies and money. Returning home, he rallied his army and, with the promise of Russian aid, saw his chance of getting his revenge. His troops, including his fast-moving cavalry, were based along the Yellow River in an area where the Nationalists had no support. By allying with them, Feng could hope to emerge as the key player in the fight against the northern warlords and to dominate the divided southerners. Always short of resources, he joined the Kuomintang and was promised money, though he complained of being short-changed.\n\nThe three-pronged offensive started at the beginning of May, with the two Nationalist armies operating far apart. In the east, Chiang drove back the Dogmeat General's forces, and advanced into the warlord's home province, getting to within 60 miles of the major port city of Qingdao.* Fearing for the concessions it had acquired in Shandong after the First World War, Japan moved in soldiers to establish a garrison of 6,000 men. Tokyo's action provoked Chinese demonstrations and boycotts, and made Chiang a nationalist hero, though, setting a pattern for the next ten years, he avoided a fight with the better armed foreigners.\n\nFour hundred miles to the west, the 70,000-man Wuhan Army under the Buddhist General Tang crossed the mountains into Henan province. In mid-May, its crack 'Ironside' troops fought a series of tough battles for railway towns, emerging victorious but suffering heavy losses. The Young Marshal decided to fall back behind the wide Yellow River, establishing a strong defensive line with powerful artillery which stopped the Nationalists. Much later, he said that this was the time when he began to recoil from the idea of Chinese fighting one another. Be that as it may, it was on the Henan campaign that he contracted a serious drug habit. 'I smoked opium out of anger and the pressure of leading an army,' he said in a television interview in 1992. 'An army doctor tried to help me by using a dose of medicine to get rid of the addiction. In the end I got rid of the opium but became addicted to the medicine.' The medicine was morphine. Zhang became so addicted that there was said to be hardly a place on his back which had not been pricked.\n\nThe Christian General took his time joining in the campaign. His men did not move until the bulk of the enemy had been engaged by the Ironsides. Then Feng's cavalry drove virtually unopposed along the Yellow River to the Manchurian rear, taking the key rail junction of Zhengzhou.* As a result of the delay, his men suffered only forty casualties compared to 14,000 for the Wuhan troops.\n\nWhile the Ironsides were fighting their way up the railway line through Henan, Chiang showed how little the alliance between the two wings of the Kuomintang meant. In mid-May, he won over a general who had been allied with the left, but who now advanced on Wuhan. At the same time, the right attacked and took Changsha, the radical capital of Hunan, to the south. With the bulk of the army away at the war and its left-wing allies in Changsha defeated, Wuhan seemed doomed. But Borodin staged a rerun of his defence of Canton for Sun Yat-sen, organising a self-defence force under the Communist head of the Independent Regiment from the Northern Expedition which repulsed the defecting army, and saved the government.\n\nStill, the situation remained precarious. Not only had Wuhan's military losses been heavy; officers were also alienated by news that their land had been expropriated by left-wing rural groups. Wang Jingwei and his colleagues decided it was time to cement relations with the Christian General. In mid-June, a delegation, including Chinese Communists, travelled to Zhengzhou. To meet them, the hulking Feng arrived on the back of an army truck, wearing a simple soldier's uniform and munching a slice of bread; only later did it emerge that he had travelled to the outskirts of the city in a private train, and then transferred to the lorry. Knowing he was in a position to dominate, Feng laid down stiff terms. To win his favour, the Wuhan delegates agreed to withdraw their army from Henan, leaving the warlord master of its 65,000 square miles. He was also promised leadership of the campaign, and control of other provinces that might be conquered to the north, along with a handsome payment.\n\nThe Wuhan delegates were heartened by the warlord's description of Chiang as a 'wolf-hearted, dog-lunged, inhuman thing'. When they returned to Wuhan, the official newspaper there declared the Zhengzhou meeting as a victory for the united front. In fact, the very reverse was the case.\n\nIn talks the Communists were not told about, Feng had demanded that the Soviet advisers should be sent home, and the Chinese Communists ejected from positions of authority. Wang and his non-Communist colleagues were ready to go along with this. The growing disaffection of non-radical Kuomintang members and mounting economic problems were causing them to lose faith in the leftward slant of the revolution. The influence of Borodin and his proteges was increasingly resented. It was time to try to find common ground with Nanking \u2013 and having Feng as an ally would greatly strengthen Wuhan's hand in dealing with Chiang. But, in a rerun of the confrontation with the general in Canton in 1926, Wang soon found himself comprehensively outmanoeuvred, and had good reason to understand why Feng had a second nickname, the Betraying General.\n\nHearing of the Zhengzhou conference, Chiang arranged a meeting of his own with the warlord two weeks later at another key rail junction, Xuzhou,* on the line of his eastern advance. To proclaim his claim to be Sun Yat-sen's true heir, he travelled in a train drawn by a locomotive with a giant photograph of the doctor on its front. Along the way, Chiang, wearing a plain khaki uniform, stopped at stations to make speeches. 'His voice was clear and carried well, his features were strong and intelligent and he looked alert and full of energy,' a Danish journalist reported. Seeing the correspondent and two other foreigners looking out of the window of a train door on which 'Death to all Imperialists' was written, Chiang smiled and bowed. At the Garden Hotel in Xuzhou, he conferred with the Guangxi generals before going to meet Feng at the station. The Nationalist officers were in full dress uniforms, and Chiang had arranged for an army band to play on the platform. As the train drew in, the Guangxi chief, Li Zongren, recalled,\n\nWe saw no general aboard, only a few uniformed waiters. Obviously knowing whom we were looking for, the waiters pointed towards the boxcars in the rear, which were usually used by the army to transport animals. Through the open door of one of the boxcars we saw a very tall, husky soldier, dressed in a shabby uniform, sitting on the train floor. As the train stopped, he stood up and walked out of the car. Chiang was the first to approach him, asking, 'Where is Commander-in-Chief Feng?'\n\n'I am Feng Yuxiang,' the peasant-like soldier replied with a smile. It was quite a shock to all of us! Then the band started playing while Feng shook hands with each of us in the greeting party.\n\nAs in his show on the lorry for the Wuhan delegation, Feng had made most of the journey in the carriage with the waiters, moving to the boxcar as it approached Xuzhou.\n\nThe unbuttoned warlord and the neat, aloof Chiang were very different characters, but they could see a common purpose. Whatever he had told the Wuhan delegation, Feng had given notice of his intentions by issuing orders for anti-Chiang posters to be removed in areas he controlled. The two men also had a personal link. Like Chiang's son, Feng's daughter was studying in Moscow, and the two teenagers began to live together. A further Moscow connection was provided by one of their classmates who returned to become an adviser in Feng's forces, a young Communist called Deng Xiaoping.\n\nIn four days of talks, the warlord and the Nationalist commander reached agreement. The Christian General was promised $2 million a month, and control of Henan. Hitching a lift back to Nanking on Chiang's train, the correspondent Henry Misselwitz watched the general dictating to secretaries, and eating a meal of ham and eggs, toast and jam and coffee with Western knives, forks and spoons. During the journey, Chiang's assistant read out a cable Feng had sent to Wuhan. The message built on the secret anti-Communist agreement at Zhengzhou. Radical elements had wormed their way into the party to try to control the Kuomintang, it declared. The only solution was for Borodin to go home immediately and for members of the Wuhan administration who wanted to leave to go abroad 'for a rest'. General Tang should send troops to cooperate with Feng. 'I make these suggestions sincerely and expect you to accept them,' the telegram concluded.\n\nHaving won over Feng, Chiang issued a warrant for the arrest of leading leftists, including Borodin \u2013 sensing the changing wind, Deng Xiaoping left the Christian General's camp for a Communist area. On the battlefield, the Nanking troops advanced 'like lemonade through a straw', as the _North China Daily News_ put it. Their commander went to Shanghai to put a fresh squeeze on the business community \u2013 rich locals were told they would be denounced as pro-Japanese unless they paid up. In July, a ceremony in the city decided to raise funds for a huge silver shield for Chiang bearing the words 'Fame has been attained after great hardship'. The gang bosses who had collaborated in the April purge were named as advisers with the honorary rank of Major General. When Nanking established an opium monopoly bureau which was meant to eradicate the drug over three years, Zhang Xiaolin of the Green Gang was put in charge in return for payments to the government.\n\nThe general also entered into negotiations for an anti-Communist front with the Old Marshal of Manchuria and the Model Governor of Shanxi, Yan Xishan. But Zhang Zuolin broke off the talks, saying he doubted the sincerity of Chiang's anti-Communism, while a new advance by the eastern warlord, Sun Zhuanfang, forced Nanking back onto the defensive.\n\nAs Chiang marshalled his troops to meet that threat, a crisis erupted in Wuhan to match the 100-degree plus temperatures. Since the Communists still did not know of Wang Jingwei's agreement with Feng to expel them \u2014 Borodin insisted that 'Marshal Feng is our friend. He is _my_ friend' \u2013 it was farce played as tragedy. The detonator was a new Comintern representative, Mahendranath Roy, a Brahmin described by Vincent Sheean as having 'a beautiful, carved-oak head'. Instead of the united front with the bourgeoisie pursued since 1923, the Indian saw rural revolution as the way ahead. Peasants should be armed, and the revolution pursued from below with its own army and rural self-government. Roy's message showed that his master in the Kremlin had changed tack to counter criticism from Trotskyites who were preaching a more revolutionary gospel and pointing to the way Chiang had acted as proof of the bankruptcy of the united front.\n\nA telegram from Moscow on 1 June 1927 said the agrarian revolution should be pursued, with an army of 20,000 Communists and 50,000 workers and peasants. Revolutionary tribunals should punish officers who supported Chiang. Communist influence in the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang should be increased. New blood should replace 'vacillating and compromising' veterans.\n\nChinese party chiefs read the cable with incredulity. One said they did not know whether to laugh or cry. The Communist leader Chen Duxiu, whose suggestions that the party should be armed and should ally with the Kuomintang left against Chiang had been repeatedly vetoed by Stalin, called it 'like taking a bath in shit'. After being tied to the united front for so long, they were suddenly being ordered to adopt policies that had previously been proscribed as Trotskyite \u2013 and at a time when they were suffering from massive repression. Even the loyal Borodin called the instructions ludicrous.\n\nRoy made things even worse by inviting Wang Jingwei to his home, and asking whether Borodin had shown him the message from the Kremlin. Evidently, he believed that the Chinese politician had been forewarned that something of the kind was coming when he paid a visit to Moscow on his way back to China from Europe in the spring. Wang said he had not seen the message. The Indian handed him the original and a Chinese translation.\n\nThe following day, Wang called the telegram unacceptable, and said it changed the terms of the agreement reached between Sun Yat-sen and the Russians. The envoy replied that it was an ultimatum. 'If the Kuomintang will not collaborate,' he told a Politburo meeting, 'we must regard it as an enemy rather than an ally.'\n\nThis was a desperate time for Borodin, who sought diversion in reading Sinclair Lewis's novel, _Elmer Gantry_. He had done his best to execute Stalin's policies to lay the basis for revolution in China through the united front. A keen chess player, he had planned his moves in advance and liked to speak of taking 'the long view' to make the most of often unpromising situations. Now, he faced the ruins of his schemes. Talking to a Swedish reporter, he spoke of having come to China to fight for an idea, 'but China itself, with its age old history, its countless millions, its great social problems, its infinite capacities, astounded and overwhelmed me.' Suffering from malaria and with a broken arm from a riding accident, he had other concerns. His American wife, Fanya, had been arrested by the northerners on a Russian steamer on the Yangtze. Accused of carrying propaganda leaflets, the formidable Mrs Borodin was taken to Peking, where the Old Marshal's men had shown their lack of scruple towards Communists by executing Chinese party members seized in a raid on the Russian embassy.\n\nAlthough Wang Jingwei had been ready to ditch the Communists in the secret talks with the Christian General, the Wuhan leadership took six weeks to decide how to react to the bombshell from Moscow. Sun Yat-sen's widow was among those who pleaded to continue the united front. Finally, on 15 July, the Political Council decided to expel the Chinese Communists and send the Russians packing. Most of the Communist leadership left Wuhan. Those who remained held a congress at which another new envoy from Moscow, Besso Lominadze, imposed Stalin's new line but insisted that the party still stay under the KMT flag. Since both wings of the Kuomintang had turned against the Communists, this added an element of unreality that even Stalin could not maintain \u2013 in September, Moscow finally ordered an end to the united front.\n\nBorodin delayed his departure until his wife was freed. According to various accounts, she owed her freedom to pressure from a visiting American senator or because Soviet diplomats bribed the judge who found, improbably, there was no suspicion of her being a Communist \u2013 and then promptly fled to Japan.\n\nOn 27 July 1927, the Russian was seen off from Wuhan station by Wang Jingwei and other senior officials after a farewell ceremony with tea and fizzy drinks. Half a dozen Russians accompanied him, together with the sons of the Foreign Minister, Eugene Chen, and an American journalist, Anna Louise Strong. Rather than risking arrest in Shanghai, they made an exhausting overland trek to reach the rail line from Mongolia to Moscow. Ill and bad-tempered, Borodin reflected that, like all bourgeois parties, the Kuomintang was 'a toilet which, however often you flush it, still stinks'. He arrived home on 6 October, four years to the day from his first encounter with Sun Yat-sen.\n\nKept in limbo after his return, Borodin accepted partial blame for events in China, and was appointed director of an English-language newspaper in Moscow. For two decades he benefited from Stalin's protection, but then fell under suspicion of being in sympathy with independent-minded foreign communists. Arrested in the purges of 1949, he died in a Siberian prison camp in 1951.\n\nFour days after Borodin left Wuhan, the Communists staged a rising in thejiangxi capital of Nanchang. Among those involved were Zhou Enlai and the future Red Army commander, Zhu De, who was the city's police chief. The plotters made their headquarters in the city's main hotel, a square concrete building where they stayed in spacious bedrooms with partitions decorated in coloured glass between the sleeping and sitting areas. There was heavy fighting, but the revolt was crushed in a week. The remnants of the rebels marched off to become the nucleus of the Red Army. Though ending in defeat, the Nanchang rising is celebrated in China today as marking the birth of Communist military power.\n\nIt was time for Galen to follow Borodin. Only a few officials saw him off from the station at Wuhan. 'He goes . . . unheralded and unsung,' Reuters reported. Still, the general felt able to travel via Shanghai where he bade farewell to the Chinese commander who owed him so much. Chiang recorded that the Russian was greatly depressed, but that he told him not to feel too badly about leaving. 'His reply was: \"I hope, too, that this is not the last time we shall see each other. So, till we meet again!\"' It was, Chiang added, 'one of the most moving partings in my life'.\n\nChina had burnished Galen's military star, and, on his return to the Soviet Union, he was put in charge of a Far Eastern Army which fought off attacks by the Manchurians. Awarded the Order of Lenin, he joined the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and was promoted to the rank of Marshal. In 1937, he was listed as a member of the tribunal that tried leading generals as Stalin turned on the army \u2013 one report said he was forced to supervise the executions. This did not protect his own forces which were subjected to a massive purge. Galen himself was spared to lead a major battle against the Japanese in the Far East, which he won. Then he was called to Moscow and, on Stalin's orders, arrested with his schoolteacher wife and their children. The police chief, Lavrenti Beria, carried out the interrogation. When the Marshal refused to cooperate, he was tortured.\n\nOver the years, Chiang asked Stalin several times to send Galen back as an adviser. There was no reply. In 1939, he instructed an envoy to Moscow to renew the request. Stalin did not recognise the name of Galen. An aide murmured to him that it was Blyukher. The request could not be met, the Soviet dictator said, because the man in question had been shot for divulging secrets to a Japanese woman spy.\n\nEvents in Wuhan and the alliance with the Christian General should have put Chiang on top of the world in the late summer of 1927. But, as so often in his career, apparent success was accompanied by deep threats. The expulsion of the Russian and the break with the Chinese Communists, whose leadership went underground under a new chief in Shanghai, removed the main bone of contention between the left and right of the Kuomintang, and thus undermined his position. The repression unleashed in April shocked many party members who now saw Chiang as the obstacle to re-unification. A new slogan was heard advocating 'Separating from the Communists and Opposing Chiang'. The Guangxi Clique opened secret talks with the Wuhan leaders. The Nanking commander's military status was also at issue after his troops were caught in a trap set by the warlord, Sun Zhuanfang. Though another general was blamed and executed, Chiang could not evade responsibility since he had been in overall charge, and had sworn to achieve victory.\n\nIn mid-August, a proposal was put to the Military Council that he should move to the lesser post of commander of the eastern army. Chiang offered to resign altogether. 'For some minutes not a word was said by anyone present,' reported the journalist George Sokolsky. Then an unimportant member of the council rose to speak of the importance of union with Wuhan. Chiang got up, left the room and took a special train out of Nanking. After consultations with associates in Shanghai, he headed to his home village. His main political allies resigned, and the Green Gang leaders stopped funding the government to mark their displeasure.\n\nIn Xikou, the general took up residence in a temple on the hill behind the village where fireflies glistened at night amid tall grass and bamboo stalks. Visiting him there, Misselwitz of the _New York Times_ was woken by bells at 5 a.m. and brought a breakfast of Californian oranges, hot milk, cakes, bread and chocolate wafers. Sitting on a broad veranda, Chiang received his visitor in a silk suit buttoned up to the neck. 'He looked cool and rather less worn and drawn than when I had last seen him,' the journalist wrote. They drank green tea, and munched nuts and sweets as Chiang told the journalist that he was too much a part of the revolution, and it too much a part of him, for him to retire completely.\n\nTen days after Chiang's departure, 30,000 of Sun Zhuanfang's troops crossed the Yangtze outside Nanking. The Guangxi leaders, who had formed a new government, drove them back in a six-day battle. The Wuhan forces tried to put up resistance to the new regime, but were beaten \u2013 their commander, Tang Shengzhi, took a boat for Japan. The Guangxi group also beat off a fresh attack by the northerners. But, for all its military successes, the Clique was isolated politically, and desperately short of funds. Chiang flexed his political muscle with a demonstration by supporters in Nanking during which security forces killed three people and wounded seventy-five. He also got in touch with Wang Jingwei, who had been excluded by the Guangxi group. On the principle of one's enemy's enemy being one's friend, Wang and Chiang met in Shanghai to plot strategy. Then things altered abruptly with a Communist uprising in Canton on 11 December, staged on Stalin's orders to prove his revolutionary credentials.\n\n'Reactionary' officers and merchants were shot out of hand. Police stations were attacked, and major buildings looted. A Soviet was established, promising workers food, clothing, housing and an eight-hour day. The counter-offensive by Cantonese troops was ferocious. The _North China Herald_ spoke of 'the city of the dead' \u2013 the initial official death toll was 5,700. Executioners in fur caps and knee boots beheaded bound suspects in the streets. Bodies of children were piled up by the roadside. The _South China Morning Post_ reported girls and women \u2013 'mostly of the bob-haired type' \u2013 being shot in the street. The educator Earl Swisher watched seven boatloads of prisoners being pushed into the river, and shot.\n\nThe Russian consulate, where the rising had been planned, was stormed; five diplomats were executed, their bodies left on the lawn. Nanking ordered the closure of all Soviet missions in its territory, and severed diplomatic relations with Moscow. As well as the violence in Canton, there were fierce clashes up the coast, with some reports speaking of the hearts of opponents being eaten and severed heads being pickled in brine. In Wuhan, Communist suspects were regularly shot in the streets, and the Soviet consulate was looted \u2013 the consul reported seeing a soldier wearing his silk top hat and others in stolen women's clothes. A Communist organisation put the number of dead in the repression during the year at a very precise 37,981.\n\nWang Jingwei had been in Canton before the rising, and this hurt him: either he knew something was about to happen or he had not realised an attempted coup was in the offing, which was almost as bad. Given the weakening of Wang's position and the shock of the Canton coup, Chiang no longer had to worry about rivalry from the left. At the same time, the fragmentation of the country meant the time had come for the return of the only man who could offer a broader hope for national unity. But, first, he had to seal an alliance with China's most influential family through a great personal betrayal.\n\n* * *\n\n* Also known as He Songling.\n\n* Known at the time as Tsingtao.\n\n* Known at the time as Chengchow.\n\n* Known at the time as Hsuchow.\n\n# CHAPTER 10\n\n _Political Union_\n\nEARLY IN 1927, when he was beset by the opposition of Wuhan, Chiang received a well-connected visitor at his headquarters on the Yangtze. Ailing Soong was the most ruthless and cunning of the three daughters of the powerful Shanghai family. The first Chinese girl in the city to ride a bicycle, on which she made a scandal-raising trip in the International Settlement, she had been sent by her Methodist father, Charles Soong, to college in the United States. After a time as Sun Yat-sen's secretary, she married a rich banker from Shanxi, Kong Xiangxi, or H. H. Kung, who claimed to be a lineal descendant of Confucius. The couple settled in a house in Shanghai's French Concession where their four children were brought up. Kung, who had also studied in America and had developed a relationship with Standard Oil, shared his wife's obsession with getting even richer. Among his other activities, he acted as financial adviser to the Model Governor of Shanxi. Though appointed Industry Minister in the Wuhan government, he was no more left-wing than his brother-in-law, the Finance Minister, T. V. Soong. Both were naturally closer to Chiang's version of conservative revolution than to Borodin or the Communists, and each would come to play an important role in the general's future.\n\nShort and plump, with carefully arranged hair, Ailing was an expert at pulling financial and political strings, preferably with the help of inside information. 'There was something about her anything but tall figure, something so authoritative, so personally powerful, so penetratingly keen that one would have been struck with her anywhere,' an American visitor recorded. 'Here was authority, conscious of itself, conscious of power. I suspected a mind that forgot nothing and forgave little.' An FBI source later described her as 'an evil and clever woman [who] sits in the background and directs the family'. The widow of the assassinated Kuomintang leader, Liao Zhongkai, warned Jennie Chiang: 'Steer clear of that woman, and don't let Kai-shek fall into her trap.'\n\nThat warning had come after a dinner Ailing gave in Canton in 1922 at the home of the absent manager of Standard Oil. The guests were the Chiangs, the Foreign Minister, Eugene Chen, Mrs Liao and Ailing's youngest sister, Meiling, who was engaged at the time to a Kuomintang member. Kai-shek was highly excited by the invitation, telling his wife: 'I want the names of Sun, Soong and Chiang to be linked tightly together.' According to some accounts, he had set himself on marrying Meiling, and had asked Sun Yat-sen to help him. The doctor discussed the matter with his wife, the middle Soong sister. Qingling was extremely hostile to the idea, and the Nationalist leader advised Chiang to bide his time. His wish to enter the charmed circle was so strong that, according to Qingling, he proposed marriage to her after Sun's death, ignoring her lifelong detestation of him. She told the American journalist Edgar Snow that she declined as 'she thought it was politics, not love'. In all this, the general was clearly ready to ditch his second wife in pursuit of a power union. He was not the only member of the Canton leadership to be attracted to Meiling who had been educated in America and spoke flawless English. According to a story told by the writer Emily Hahn, Borodin was also smitten; a servant took to the Soongs a sheet of paper stolen from the Russian's bedroom on which he had written her name over and over with the addition of 'Darling'.\n\nSince Chiang was held up by work, Jennie had arrived first for Ailing's dinner in 1922. She was wearing her best white crepe de Chine silk dress with white kid shoes, white-beaded handbag and sandalwood fan, trying to 'look fresh and smart so that Kai-shek would feel proud of me'. Ailing and Meiling wore brightly coloured Chinese gowns, their hair pulled into a bun at the back of their necks in the latest style. 'They looked as if they had stepped out of a Shanghai fashion book,'Jennie recalled in her memoirs, on which the following account is based.\n\nIt was hot and humid, so the party refreshed itself with iced drinks before Ailing deputed Eugene Chen to show Jennie round the house. As they walked back towards the drawing room, Chiang's wife heard the eldest Soong sister describe her as 'nothing more than a middle-class housewife'.\n\n'How can she ever qualify to be the wife of a budding leader?' Mrs Kung asked. 'Something must be done about it.'\n\n'That's true,' Meiling said. 'But I must say she has her good points. She makes a very good housewife for a Ningbo peasant.'\n\nMrs Liao jumped to Jennie's defence, but the talk stopped as Chiang's wife entered the room. When conversation resumed, the sisters pumped her for information about her husband. After Chiang arrived, they went to the dining table where he sat between Ailing and Meiling. The dinner began with jellied consomme, followed by pigeon breast served on toast with watercress and potato chips. Meiling said that 'pigeon eating is like eating mangoes. Both should be eaten with the fingers only, in the bathroom, without anyone looking on.' So, they must all keep their eyes on their plates until they had finished. Jennie marked the young lady down as a snob.\n\nAfter the early victories of the Northern Expedition, Meiling sent Chiang a congratulatory letter. He suggested to Jennie that they ask the two sisters to come to his base at Jiujiang. She showed no enthusiasm, so he dropped the idea for the time being. But, early in 1927, he considered it time to try to activate the Soong connection. Responding to his invitation, Ailing travelled to the river port of Jiujiang on a steamer owned by the Bank of China which she did not leave during her twenty-four-hour stay.\n\nThough her husband was a minister in the Wuhan government, she felt no loyalty to the regime up the Yangtze. According to Jennie's record of what Chiang told her immediately afterwards, Ailing warned that, unless he acted first, it would only be a matter of time before the left eliminated him. But Ailing could save him by getting her brother, T.V., to rally to his side and bring with him the Shanghai bankers and businessmen. Naturally, there was a price attach\u00e9d: Chiang would have to marry Meiling and become wedded to the Soongs \u2013 politically, economically and personally.\n\nFive years after his first attempt to pursue Meiling, the general was even more dazzled by the prospect of achieving a great ambition. While Jennie paints a generally idyllic picture of their marriage, she could not compete with the aura of the Soongs. It was also said that the general was irritated by some of her habits, notably her taste for spending their money which jarred with his frugal nature \u2013 given Meiling's resources, he could not object to what she paid out on her lifestyle. His arrogance was such that he told Jennie he was sure she would put his interests first. 'I am desperate,' his wife recorded him as saying. 'Ailing has struck a very hard bargain, but what she says is true. Her offer is the only way for me to achieve my plans to unite China. I now ask you to help me. I beg you not to say no. After all, true love is measured by the sacrifice one is willing to make.'\n\nThough he insisted his decision depended on her, Jennie felt that a deal had already been struck. Despite the eternal love she says he had kept swearing, Chiang's mind was made up. He proposed she go to the United States on a five-year 'study trip'. He would wed Meiling in what she said he described as 'only a political marriage'. After that, they would resume life together.\n\nJennie's first instinct was to tell him to go to hell. But he upped the pressure by saying that, if she did not agree, the Northern Expedition would be doomed. 'If I can carry on, then China will be saved and I myself can live. Otherwise, I will die \u2013 die as a result of failure or disappointment. You don't want that, do you?'Jennie said she would think about it.\n\nChiang wrote letters to Ailing and Meiling, and left them with Jennie for her to send as he went off on the military campaign. Naturally, his wife read them. According to her memoirs, one asked Ailing to find out her younger sister's attitude towards him, while the other requested Meiling to send a photograph 'so that I can look at you constantly'. Jennie left for Shanghai where she had to put up with a stream of visitors praising Chiang and their 'wonderful' marriage. She blamed Ailing, 'that vile woman', rather than her husband. But she told her mother that her love for him was dead.\n\nOn 1 August, two weeks before his resignation in Nanking, Chiang called on his wife in Shanghai. Alone in the house, Jennie gave him a cool reception, but he continued to spin his idea of a reunion after she had spent five years abroad. She said the past was the past, and she would be content to stay with her mother, rather than travelling. But Chiang was insistent, admitting that her departure from China was one of Ailing's conditions. Clearly, the Soongs would not feel comfortable if his legal wife was in town when Chiang married Meiling. 'I looked at him contemptuously, but felt a deep pity in my heart,'Jennie wrote. 'He looked so very pale, tense and gaunt. His colour was bad and his expression was filled with desperation.'\n\nChiang said he had tickets for Jennie and two of the daughters of his patron, Zhang Jingjiang, to travel to the United States on the liner, the _President Jackson_. After Jennie reminded him of broken promises in the past, the general stood in front of a Buddhist shrine to swear to resume marital relations within five years. 'Should I break my promise and fail to take her back, may the Great Buddha smite me and my Nanking government,' he declared. Then he handed over the tickets, saying the government would pay for Jennie's expenses while she was away.\n\nA week after Chiang was forced out of Nanking, Jennie and the two Zhang daughters, Therese and Helen, left Shanghai for California. Their departure was reported as far away as London. In Hawaii, a Kuomintang rally greeted them with banners and flowers. By the time they got to San Francisco, rumours of Chiang's impending marriage to Meiling were current in Shanghai, so journalists wondered about his relationship to the woman who had travelled on the _President Jackson_.\n\nThe general told the _New York Times_ he had divorced his first wife in 1921 and had set free his two concubines. 'I was surprised to learn that one of them went to America as my wife,' he added. Stepping up the hypocrisy, he claimed to have been 'courting Miss Soong all these many years without a thought of the political bearing of such a marriage and any suggestion in that direction is unfair to me and unjust to all the members of the Soong family.' He was, he said, 'free to marry in accordance with the most monogamous practices. Miss Soong would not consent to a marriage in any other circumstances and I should not dare to ask a lady of her character to marry me in any other circumstances.'\n\nReading the stories in American newspapers, Jennie was shattered. She went to the Chinese consulate in New York where she was told that instructions had been received to have nothing to do with her. She was so worked up that she ran up and down her room on Riverside Drive during the night, tearing her hair, raving and shouting with such force that the janitor was called. Wandering the city, she was about to throw herself into the Hudson River when an old man restrained her and walked her home. Returning to Shanghai in 1933, she lived on funds from Chiang and earnings from language teaching. She moved to Hong Kong in the early 1960s to live in a house bought by Chiang and an associate, and died in 1971 after writing her memoirs to show 'our happy marriage and how an ordinary man may, with persistence and favourable opportunities, rise to become the undisputed leader of a nation'. The book contains what she says is an English translation of the text of a certificate dated 5 December 1921, recording the wedding at the Great Eastern Hotel with her name and Chiang's clearly stated. 'It is wished that the couple will live until their hair is grey and the union will be blessed with many children,' it reads. 'This certificate is proof of this marriage.'\n\nFor a man who had become a dab hand at high-level political and military manipulation, disposing of Jennie must have seemed nothing special. She was powerless, and Chiang's word carried far more weight. For her part, Jennie readily acknowledged that she had stepped aside to assist him. 'But I did not know that in helping him, I had to pay and pay and pay again for the stigma he inflicted on me,' she concluded. 'All these bitter years I have never remarried. I live a life of embarrassment, concealment and repression . . . If I should be recognised in the street by those who know about my past, I am invariably stared at curiously and pointed out as the woman that Chiang Kai-shek discarded in order to marry Meiling Soong.'\n\nHaving jettisoned Jennie, Chiang now had to surmount the hostility of his putative mother-in-law. Charlie Soong's widow had the traditional low view of soldiers, and disapproved of her daughter's suitor for not being a Christian. He had also been married before, kept concubines and was known to have lived a wild life during his twenties. Not an ideal son-in-law for the God-fearing matriarch, who was undergoing medical treatment in Japan.\n\nChiang crossed the East China Sea at the end of September, 1927. Mrs Soong had moved to a hot springs resort near Kobe. The general checked into a hotel there, and gained an appointment. He showed her his divorce papers from his first wife, and dismissed the allegations about Jennie. He said he would read the Bible, but could not guarantee becoming a Christian. That was enough for the engagement to be announced. As Qingling Soong remarked later: 'He would have agreed to be a Holy Roller to marry Meiling. He needed her to build a dynasty.' Sun's widow asked Eugene Chen to send her sister a letter telling her not to marry a 'Bluebeard'. Meiling took no notice.\n\nThe wedding, on 1 December 1927, was according to the _Shanghai Times_ , 'the outstanding Chinese marriage ceremony of recent years', bringing together military power, politics and finance as never before. Though Chiang had not yet converted, a Christian service was held at the Soong house, after which the bride and groom went to a Chinese ceremony in the ballroom of the Majestic Hotel where the walls were hung with white roses arranged in the shape of wedding bells. A crowd of 1,300 waited inside while 1,000 people gathered outside. Detectives swarmed. As well as leading local and national figures, the British, American, French and Japanese consuls were present.\n\nThere was applause as the forty-year-old groom entered the ballroom in formal, cut-away tail coat and striped trousers, carrying kid gloves. The thirty-year-old bride followed on the arm of her brodier, TV., to the strains of Mendelssohn's 'Wedding March' played by a Russian orchestra. Attended by four bridesmaids, two flower girls and two of her elder sister's children in black velvet suits, Meiling wore a gown of silver and white georgette, with a long lace veil, orange blossom spray and wreath of orange buds. Her shoes and stockings were silver. The bouquet was of pale pink carnations and fern fronds tied with white and silver ribbons.\n\nWhile newsreel cameras spun, the couple bowed three times to a portrait of Sun Yat-sen set on the platform beside the Kuomintang flag. The altar was flanked by green and white foliage and huge shields of white flowers with the characters for long life and happiness worked in red geraniums. The marriage certificates were read out, and stamped. A singer intoned an uplifting hymn, 'O Promise Me'. Chiang and Meiling bowed to one another, and to the witnesses and guests before posing for photographs under a large bell of roses from which showers of petals fell on them when ribbons were pulled. Tea was served, and the couple went to the station to board the train for their honeymoon.\n\nChiang issued a statement that the wedding would enable the KMT cause to make greater progress 'because I can henceforth bear the tremendous responsibility of the revolution with peace of heart'. But he and his wife insisted theirs was not a political union. Meiling talked of moments in life when sentiment had to have the upper hand, and it was made known that he had learned to say 'Darling' in English, possibly at her insistence. In a letter which found its way into a newspaper, Chiang had written to Meiling: 'Thinking about the people I admire in this life, you, my lady, are the only one . . . Recalling the hundred battles fought on the front and my own type of heroism, I cannot but feel that so-called achievement is just an illusion or a dream. And yet, my lady, your talent, beauty and virtue are not things I can ever forget. The only question is: what does my lady think of this retired soldier who has been abandoned by the whole world.'\n\nEnergetic and determined, the bride had studied at Wellesley College, outside Boston. Majoring in English literature, she obtained the highest academic distinction in her senior year. The college records recalled her as 'outgoing and popular, and according to a friend, there always seemed to be some nice Chinese boy or other on the doorstep.'\n\nAfter graduating in 1917, Meiling had returned to China where she became involved in social work, notably to alleviate child labour and encourage the YWCA. She also needed to brush up her Chinese \u2013 she always seemed more at home in the language of America. Her perfect English and connections to the United States made her a most useful ambassador with Westerners whom she invariably charmed. Acting as Chiang's interpreter and letter-writer, she became steadily more influential as an adviser. A saying had it that of the three Soong sisters, one (Meiling) loved power, one (Ailing) loved money, and one (Qingling) loved China.\n\nThe couple spent their honeymoon at the mountain resort of Moganshan outside Shanghai with its Western-style houses, tennis courts, swimming pool, two churches and banks of dahlias. Chiang walked through the bamboo forest and gazed down from the peaks at the rice paddies below. Fifteen years later, Meiling informed the American publisher, Gardner Cowles, founder of _Look_ magazine, that, on their wedding night, Chiang had told her that he did not believe in sexual relations except to produce children. 'And since he already had a son by previous marriage and was not interested in having any more children, there would be no sex between them,' Cowles wrote in his memoirs. He added that he was not sure whether he believed her.\n\nReturning from the honeymoon, Chiang issued a circular telegram calling for Kuomintang unity and attacking the Guangxi-led regime in Nanking. He was pushing at an open door. A stream of telegrams called for his return. As Nanking's crisis deepened, General He sent a cable from the front urging him to come back. The Shanghai branch of the Kuomintang petitioned him to resume office. A newspaper cartoon showed Chiang mounting a horse labelled 'Nationalism' held by a woman marked as 'Kuomintang'. The caption read 'Somewhat Restive'.\n\nThe Nationalists might be coming into line, as expected. But somebody else who had helped in Chiang's ascent was ready to remind him he still needed to show proper deference. Soon after the marriage, according to a story current in Shanghai, a limousine called at the Chiang house and drove Meiling off to visit Ailing. When the general got home, he was concerned to find she had not reached her sister's house. Using his brother in law, XV., as an intermediary, Chiang contacted Big-Eared Du to ask if he could help find her. The gang boss said Meiling had been found motoring with only a maid for company through the dangerous streets of Shanghai. For her own protection, she had been taken to a safe villa, though she was showing signs of annoyance and refusing to take food or drink. Du found it deplorable that Chiang did not look after his wife, but he would be happy to arrange for her return to her home after TV. had completed the necessary 'formalities'. The gangster need say no more: the threat he could pose was crystal clear.\n\nOn 1 January 1928 Nanking invited Chiang to come back with full powers. He rode into Nanking escorted by three armoured trains. Despite two reported attempts to derail the convoy, he arrived safely. Chiang's longtime Kuomintang associate, Tan Yankai, contrasted the 'gloom and despondency' at his departure in August with the rejoicing that accompanied his return. Once again, the general had used a temporary retreat to get his way. Now he had to complete the conquest of China.\n\n# PART III\n\nTHE NANKING DECADE\n\nNanking, January 1928\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nMarco Polo Bridge, 7 July 1937\n\n# CHAPTER 11\n\n _Captain Chiang_\n\nON 4 JANUARY 1928, a new government was sworn in at Nanking, firmly tilted to the right. Wang Jingwei, who had left for hospital treatment in Europe for his diabetes, was censured. Chiang became Chairman of the Political Council, and swiftly turned back to the Northern Expedition. The target now was Peking, where the Old Marshal of Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin, held sway. Emissaries went to canvass potential defectors, and the Christian General agreed to join the offensive. The Model Governor of Shanxi, Yan Xishan, came on board after Manchurian troops attacked his province.\n\nThis meant the expedition now had as many troops as the northerners, and there was at least a semblance of a philosophical thread between the commanders: Feng Yuxiang and one of Yan's leading lieutenants belonged to the Kuomintang. Crucially, Chiang kept control of the flow of money and supplies. To raise funds, he put fresh pressure on Shanghai banks and companies, raising $15 million. 'We are throwing money and men into the fight with almost heart-breaking extravagance because we want to make this a fight to the finish,' declared T. V. Soong, who had returned as Finance Minister.\n\nTo replace Galen, Chiang turned to Germany. He first tried to engage the First World War commander Erich von Ludendorff but the Field Marshal was not interested. Instead, Ludendorff recommended Colonel Max Bauer, who had advocated launching suicidal air raids in 1918 to reduce Paris to 'a glowing ash heap'. Bauer brought in other German officers from the far right, and contrasted 'the strength, dignity, soundness and goodwill' of the Chinese with the degeneration of white races 'under the impact of materialism, eroticism and nervous strain.' Chiang spent five hours with him at their first meeting in the Astor Hotel in Shanghai.\n\nThe second stage of the Northern Expedition was formally proclaimed on 7 April 1928. The Nationalists mobilised a million men split into four armies \u2013 Feng's was the largest with 310,000 troops, Chiang had 290,000 soldiers under his command while the Guangxi Clique fielded 240,000 and the Model Governor of Shanxi 150,000. Chiang's First Army and the Christian General's cavalry mounted a two-pronged attack on Shandong province on the east coast. In the provincial capital of Jinan,* where he had just held a grand banquet to celebrate his new central heating system while 28,000 famine victims lived on a bowl of gruel a day, the Dogmeat General took the precaution of sending his mother and several concubines to safety in a northern port. On 1 May a vanguard of southerners secured a bridge across the Yellow River. The defenders fled in disarray, and the Dogmeat General headed for Peking to join his Manchurian ally. A Russian armoured train was captured; according to one report, its crew was paraded through the streets with 'stout rope pierced through their noses'.\n\nChiang arrived in Jinan the next day. He ordered soldiers to maintain discipline, and promised to abolish excessive taxation. Reuters quoted an American missionary as saying the newcomers had moved in without trouble. But the scene was set for the general's first encounter with Japan, which had acquired the former German concession in Shandong in 1919 and had 1,800 civilians and 2,300 soldiers in Jinan. Chiang was anxious to avoid a fight with the well-equipped foreigners, and did not want any delay which might let his allies grab the initiative in reaching Peking. So he decided to move his troops out of Japanese-held areas of the city. Before this could be completed, shooting began in several places. Each side blamed the other.\n\nThe Japanese marched into the office of the provincial Foreign Affairs Commissioner, alleging that shots had been directed at them from the building. After smashing up the offices and herding the staff into a room, they ordered the Commissioner to kneel and say who had fired. He refused. According to the account given by Chiang's Japanese biographer, Keiji Furaya, the soldiers then shot the sixteen staff one by one. An attacker knocked the Commissioner over with his rifle, broke his legs, cut off his tongue and killed him with a bullet in the head.\n\nThe Japanese claimed 300 of their nationals had been killed by the Chinese, and that some bodies had been found with eyes gouged out and replaced by stones \u2013 they later cut the death toll to thirteen dead and twenty-eight missing. In a telegram to Nanking, Chiang reported that a thousand Chinese had died, presumably an order of magnitude rather than a precise count. It quickly became clear Tokyo would apply maximum force.\n\nFacing a choice that was to dog him for a decade, Chiang sent a telegram to Nanking denouncing the 'malice and oppression beyond description' of the Japanese, and saying he could not 'bow to such bullying'. But he also urged 'a calm attitude' as the British and American consuls began to mediate. Chinese troops were told to quit the city, though some refused to go. Chiang himself came under attack when northern planes dropped two bombs in the courtyard of his headquarters; one landed 50 feet from his bedroom, killing two orderlies. On 6 May he left Jinan, advising Nanking to use diplomacy to solve the crisis. Anti-Japanese boycotts and demonstrations erupted in Shanghai, Canton and Wuhan. Despite his wary attitude, Chiang became a hero as the image spread of his troops standing up to the aggressor.\n\nOn 8 May, the local Japanese commander, General Fukada, delivered a twenty-four-hour ultimatum for the remaining Chinese forces to withdraw. He also demanded the punishment of officers responsible for the fighting, the banning of anti-Japanese propaganda, and the disarmament of troops who had fought the Japanese. When the deadline expired, he launched artillery and bombing attacks on the square-mile old walled city. Most victims were civilians. The next day, Fukada let Chinese troops inside the old city leave, but the Japanese ambushed them and killed many.\n\nArriving on a train with Japanese reinforcements two days later, Hallett Abend of the _New York Times_ found the streets deserted except for an occasional military patrol. Dead Chinese lay on the pavements and in the middle of the streets. 'Most of the corpses were already bloated and discoloured,' Abend wrote. 'And there were many dead horses, their legs sticking up stiffly at grotesque and pathetic angles . . . Nearly all the shops had been broken open, and showed disorder left by hasty looters.' An investigation gave the Chinese dead as 3,000; Abend put it at more than double that.\n\nNanking called on the League of Nations to stop Japan, but Tokyo continued to demand an apology, compensation and punishment of Chinese officers involved. The major powers showed no interest: their own concessions in China led them to sympathise with Japan. Chiang issued a proclamation that: 'We should never let our vengeful feelings be known; otherwise we will never be able to fight against the enemy. Let us hide our desire for revenge, and never let it be seen. Let us store it in our minds, let us work together to avenge the insult, and let us attempt to lead the Chinese nation towards the goal of freedom and independence.'\n\nWhile Chiang was involved in Jinan, the war in the north had taken a favourable turn. The Shanxi troops and Feng's soldiers moved over the plain towards Peking from the west and the south. Remembering how the Christian General had grabbed the former imperial capital after betraying his warlord ally, Wu Peifu, in 1924, Chiang did not want him to get there first. So it was agreed that the capture of the city would be left to the Model Governor, Yan Xishan. Facing the two-pronged attack, the Manchurians decided to head home.\n\nPeking's grey and white striped station, with its clock tower topped by a silver dome, was crowded with passengers going north. Before dawn on 3 June 1928, a convoy of twenty cars drove up, bringing the Old Marshal to start his journey back to his capital of Mukden* on an armoured train. As a military band played, Zhang Zuolin entered his cobalt blue private carriage \u2013 Reuters reported that he was smiling broadly. The Dogmeat General travelled with him for part of the way. At the request of foreign diplomatic missions, and with Nanking's agreement, a reliable Manchurian unit stayed behind to keep order until the Nationalists arrived.\n\nAt 5 a.m. the next day, the fifty-four-year-old Manchurian leader sat smoking a cigarette while the train entered the outskirts of Mukden. As his private carriage passed under a bridge, an explosion brought down a span of masonry. The area was controlled by the Japanese as part of their concession, but the guards were in their huts rather than watching the line.\n\nZhang was helped from the train by a Japanese adviser, bleeding heavily from his nose and from a wound in his left arm. A Ford motor car called from the Mukden Spinning and Weaving Works took twenty minutes to arrive. The Marshal was put inside, flooding the floor with his blood as he was driven to his residence. Carried inside on a stretcher, he vomited blood. A British doctor administered camphor injections. The Mukden Tiger was then taken to a Japanese hospital, where he died four hours after the blast.\n\nThe assassination was the work of officers of Tokyo's increasingly independent force in Manchuria known as the Kwantung Army from the concession where they were originally stationed. They also arranged for bombs to be thrown at Japanese property in Mukden so that they could propose moving in soldiers for protection. Despite his past cooperation, they saw the Marshal as an obstacle to their expansionist schemes, and expected the morphine-addicted younger Zhang to prove a weak reed.\n\nThings went somewhat awry when the Japanese Consul General, who was not in the plot, told Tokyo it was not necessary to take action to safeguard Japanese nationals. There was then another hiccup when Kwantung troops arrested three Chinese opium addicts, and accused them of setting off the explosion that had killed Zhang Zuolin. They were taken away to be executed, but one escaped and told the Young Marshal what had happened. Not that this made any difference. The Kwantung Army was firmly in the saddle. In Tokyo, the Prime Minister, Baron Tanaka, heard what had really taken place only a month later. When he called for those responsible to be court-martialled, the high command resisted, and Tanaka was told he had lost the confidence of the Emperor, who did not insist on serious punishment.\n\nIn Mukden, the Young Marshal came under heavy pressure from Japan to toe its line. After his father's funeral, the Japanese Minister to China told him Tokyo was determined to prevent any agreement between Manchuria and the 'internally unstable and pro-Communist government in Nanking', and would take whatever steps it felt were needed if the Nationalist flag was raised in Manchuria. According to his own account, Zhang replied: 'You forget one thing \u2013 you forget that I am Chinese.' The conversation became so blunt that the interpreter said he could not go on.\n\nAs the Old Marshal was travelling to his death, the vanguard of Nationalist troops had reached Peking. There was heavy fighting round the Summer Palace outside the capital, but no further opposition as tens of thousands of grey-coated soldiers caked with dust and grime marched in, moonlight glinting on their bayonets. In Nanking, Chiang went through the motion of submitting resignation from his military posts on the grounds that there was no further need for war. The offer was, naturally, refused. Accompanied by his wife, he set off on a victory trip, starting by travelling up the Yangtze to Wuhan where a huge banquet was held in his honour. He then went by train to Peking where a crowd of local notables waited all night at the station for him. Set on Nanking as the national capital, he showed his disdain for the imperial city by waving his hat, saying a couple of words and refusing to have his photograph taken.\n\nThe trip was important as an expression of the government's national reach achieved by the 1,500-mile expedition launched two years earlier. Chiang's first business was to pay homage at Sun Yat-sen's coffin in the Western Hills; Meiling held a parasol over him as they walked from the temple, adorned with huge flags. At larger ceremonies two days later, Chiang broke down after reading a eulogy, throwing himself on the casket and sobbing. The Christian General took him by the arm to help him leave.\n\nThere was a reminder of the kind of allies Chiang had collected when one of the Dogmeat General's subordinates who had switched sides looted Imperial tombs outside the city. In his haven in the Japanese Concession in Tianjin, the Last Emperor was roused to indignation. But Chiang took no action, and a rumour spread that pearls from a crown had been sent to Meiling who had put them on her shoes. One of the Christian General's officers created a bad scene by strutting round at Sun Yat-sen's tomb with an assertive bodyguard. But, for the most part, things went smoothly enough. The commander-in-chief and his wife moved into the best establishment in town, the Peking Hotel, and invited the Young Marshal, who was in town, round for tea. When Meiling called Zhang by a nickname, Chiang asked how she knew it. 'I met him before I met you,' she replied, recalling the time they had socialised in Shanghai in the mid-1920s.\n\nAs well as enabling Chiang to meet the northern commanders, the stay in Peking gave him a chance to build bridges with the Western legations there. Relations with foreigners had improved since the end of the leftist regime in Wuhan \u2013 Nanking had reached an agreement on tariffs with Washington, which constituted de facto recognition. On 21 July, the Chiangs played host to the diplomatic corps. Then the British ambassador gave a dinner for the general. A month later, a Sino-British agreement on the Nanking Incident was announced by which the Chinese accepted responsibility, apologised, promised compensation \u2013 and blamed the Communists.\n\nThe night after the embassy dinner, Chiang left by rail for Nanking. Armoured trains preceded and followed him. He was described as being in good spirits though looking tired and appearing thinner than when he travelled north a month earlier. From the capital, Chiang went to Shanghai for treatment of tooth abscesses which had been interrupted by the military campaign. The extraction led to a gum haemorrhage, forcing him to go to his home village to rest and recuperate. By the autumn he was back in Nanking, which was bursting with plans for a new China.\n\nThe stream of proposals that flowed from the government would often prove to be beyond the regime's powers of implementation. But this was the time, more than any other until the 1980s, when China embraced modernisation. Recognition by foreign powers gave it international status. Only Japan refused to hand back the tariff autonomy China had lost under the unequal treaties. Though the foreign concessions remained, Chiang assured students: 'If, within three years, the foreign soldiers are not withdrawn from China and the unequal treaties are not abolished, I shall be the first man to offer to put himself to death for neglect of duty.' Nanking sent diplomats to Washington, Europe and Latin America. Military cadets went to train abroad. Meiling started to teach Chiang English; according to Emily Hahn's biography, this stopped after the general tried out his new skill on the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson \u2013 instead of saying 'Good morning, Lampson,' he told the envoy, 'Kiss me, Lampson.'\n\nForeign advisers were appointed, including Henry Ford, who had not been asked in advance but accepted after it was stipulated that he would not need to visit China. An American city designer, Ernest Payne Goodrich, was engaged to re-plan Nanking and Canton. A Frenchman was taken on to help frame legislation, and a British colonial administrator, Sir Frederick Whyte, became a senior government adviser.\n\nT. V. Soong promised a proper national budget, with standardisation of taxes and currencies and the establishment of a Central Bank. A national system of weights and measures was drawn up. Salt tax revenue would be used to finance education. The abolition of tax farming and the _lijin_ duty on movement of goods was announced for five provinces directly under Nanking's control. A register of land holdings was planned. Civil service salaries were to be raised to eliminate corruption. There were campaigns against foot-binding and cigarette smoking, and the lunar calendar was replaced by the solar one.\n\nProgrammes were elaborated to stop river flooding and develop mining and agriculture. Legislation was drafted to introduce an eight-hour working day, ban child labour, and provide for notice periods and profit-sharing. As Communications Minister, Sun Yat-sen's son, Sun Fo, followed his father's example with plans to build thousands of miles of rail track, along with highways and an air service. The military academy was expanded and moved to Nanking, though it still kept a mention of Whampoa in its name. Chiang told its first class, of 1,000 graduates: 'We must create a new environment; for otherwise we may fall victims to the former unhealthy environment.'\n\nThe new capital, surrounded by the coiling dragon of the Yangtze and the crouching tiger of the Purple Mountain to the east, was to be a showplace for the new China with a network of 850 miles of modern roads. Ministry buildings merged modern concrete pillars and big glass windows with traditional curved roofs and archways. While pledging to preserve temples and old treasures, the American designer spoke of putting an elevated highway on the wall. Rich citizens had villas constructed in the surrounding hills. The city was so full of officials and office-seekers that not a hotel room was to be had.\n\nSome of the proposals were put into practice, particularly by T. V. Soong. A National Reconstruction Commission under Chiang's patron, Zhang Jingjiang, modernised power plants, improved transport and set up a network of radio stations. Industrial output, electricity generation and rail traffic grew by an average of almost 1 o per cent a year. The state played an ever-increasing role in the economy. But these increases were from a very low base and concentrated in small areas of the country. Most of China remained backward, and poor.\n\nHalf the provinces were ravaged by famine which brought up to 20 million people to the point of starvation and may have killed 6 million. There were plague outbreaks. Locusts ate crops: famished farmers caught and boiled them for food. A bitter winter claimed hundreds of thousands more lives. American charities raised $8 million for relief, but local officials stole and sold supplies. Defeated warlord troops swelled the ranks of bandits. Sick soldiers spread typhus and cholera. In the war zones, railway track had been torn up, bridges destroyed, and abandoned locomotives left to rust. Food and goods piled up at stations awaiting trains that never came. Canton was suffering a business depression. In Wuhan, 100,000 people were out of work. In Peking, renamed Peiping (Northern Peace) after Nanking became the national capital, a quarter of a million were said to be destitute.\n\nChiang's indiscriminate collecting of allies meant the regime's umbrella covered militarists who flew the Nationalist flag but went on in their old ways. Despite prohibition decrees, opium remained a major source of income for soldiers, officials, local governments and outlaws. A visitor to Anhui province told of areas where no other crop could be seen. Reuters reported at the end of 1928 that nearly all the major military groups were involved in the traffic, and that enforcement of anti-opium laws might mean war. Despite denouncing the trade, the regime took much-needed cash from the Green Gang in Shanghai, and from taxing drug shipments on the Yangtze.\n\nThe government was continually short of cash. Even if they paid lip service to Nanking, many provinces held back tax revenue \u2013 in 1929, T. V. Soong listed a dozen which hung on to money that should have been remitted to the central administration. Military spending and debt servicing consumed 80 per cent of the budget. To sell government bonds, the Finance Ministry had to pay a real interest rate of 20 per cent. At the same time, many officials proved incapable, or unready, to carry out the grand plans. Implementation was restricted by banditry and the obstruction of local militarists and gentry. The visiting British social analyst, R. H. Tawney, noted that 'nothing is being done, that no one is very hopeful that anything will be done, that there is little finance or administrative staff, that the last official concerned in the business was not wholly above suspicion in the matter of money, and that his successor cannot visit the areas which most need attention for fear of being kidnapped'.\n\nChiang was well aware of the problem. 'I have observed that many of die staff members do not seem to know what they are supposed to do while others do not know how to work at all,' he told the State Council. 'That is why our organisation becomes worse and worse.' Though civil servants worked only a six-hour day, he added, 'I have often observed that many staff members just sit at their desks and gaze into space, others read newspapers and still others sleep.'\n\nWhatever the deficiencies of the administration, this was the moment when Chiang, still only forty-one, assumed his national mantle as China's Man of Destiny, seeing himself as the Confucian superior figure ordained to rule the nation. Nanking's authority might only stretch over five provinces, but he expected the deference due to a conqueror. When he entered the inner sanctum of the State Council building at the back of three heavily guarded courtyards, everybody stood bolt upright to attention. Meeting him, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin was struck by his serious, unwavering expression \u2013 'he created an immediate impression of a person of high authority, determination and character.' The visiting British historian, Arnold Toynbee, wrote of his 'cool-headedness and restrained vitality'.\n\nThe general was caught between his desire to make China a modern nation which could hold its head up in the world, and his insistence on the supremacy of traditional precepts and modes of behaviour. His thinking was based on his reading of classical Chinese texts and the ideas of his old friend, Dai Jitao, who had helped to introduce Marxism to China but had then moved to Confucianism and bitter anti-Communism. A one-time secretary to Sun Yat-sen, Dai was an unstable figure who suffered nervous breakdowns and attempted suicide several times. The father of Chiang's adopted son, Wei-kuo, he proposed a state dictatorship representing all classes in which the Kuomintang should have free rein for its 'monopolistic, exclusive, unitary and dominative nature'. Picking up the baton, Chiang decreed that the party must exercise power for the people. Workers should not follow their selfish interests. Strikes and calls for a shorter working week would 'curb production, doom the labourers to perdition and bring the country endless harm.'\n\nWhen left-wingers set up a group called the Reorganisation Society to urge more democracy and a revival of revolutionary methods, mass movements and anti-imperialism, Chiang and his allies showed their muscle. For the Kuomintang congress of March 1929, only four of the thirty-eight party branches were allowed to elect delegates directly. When the meeting opened, it was ringed by soldiers, and the party's governing committees were packed with loyalists. To remove democracy from the agenda, the Central Executive Committee laid down that the party would exercise 'political tutelage' on behalf of the people until the end of 1935. Less publicly, a former Whampoa cadet called Dai Li, who boasted of having denounced seventy-five of his colleagues for execution in the 1927 purge, was laying the foundations for a secret police operation whose only loyalty was to the general \u2013 one of Dai's notions was said to have been the idea of injecting potential leftist turncoats with drugs to turn them into addicts who would do whatever he wanted.\n\nThe anti-Communist repression continued unabated, helping to deepen the gulf between the regime and many of China's best young writers and thinkers that pointed to the intellectual sterility which would mark the Nationalist regime. Thousands more died in the crackdown in Hunan. At Shantou, political prisoners were thrown into the sea with weights attach\u00e9d to their bodies. Yet the Communists were far from beaten; after the failure of their rising in Nanchang, Red Army units moved south to join Mao Zedong in his haven in the mountains of Jiangxi while a big base area persisted north of the Yangtze. The success of the Nationalists was not going to halt the post-imperial pattern of Chinese constantly attacking one another. As the great allegorical novel of the time, Lao She's _Cat Country_ , concluded, even if there were only two beings left alive, they would not stop fighting until they had bitten one another to death.\n\nStill, to try to lay the basis for a modern state, a new political system was put in place, starting the period of political tutelage by the Kuomintang. Chiang became Chairman of the State Council, the senior political post. Five government branches \u2013 the _Yuan_ \u2013 were established. The Executive Yuan, the equivalent of a prime minister's office, was in overall charge of ministries, economic affairs, and relations with provinces and local government. The Legislative Yuan debated and approved legislation, voting on foreign policy and budgets \u2013 the Kuomintang veteran, Hu Hanmin, took the chair and Meiling became a member. Other branches dealt with the appointment of civil servants and justice \u2013 though it was clear that the legal system would be subject to the interests of the Kuomintang. The fifth body, the Control Yuan, was to ensure ideological purity and discipline.\n\nThe Young Marshal joined the State Council. The Model Governor became Interior Minister. The Christian General, who appeared in Nanking wearing a pyjama-like white costume with infantry boots, an old straw hat and cotton shoes, was named Minister of War. True to form, he insisted on driving round in a freight truck instead of using the white Buick provided for him. Calling at ministries, he amazed sentries by presenting his card himself. Preaching frugality, he asked: 'At a time when so many millions are starving, why should we bedeck our ladies with diamonds, own numerous motor cars and houses and eat the luxuries of the earth?'\n\nChiang, Hu Hanmin, Feng Yuxiang and other leading members of the regime gathered for a group photograph, Chiang as impeccably turned out as ever, Hu with a scarf wrapped tightly round his neck and the Christian General massive in greatcoat and puttees. Below the surface unity bred by the victory in the north, the regime was still deeply divided, and tension was increased by reports of assassination plots against Chiang. Like a medieval king surrounded by powerful barons, he knew that his army could be outnumbered by a combination of any two of his allies from the Northern Expedition. A conference of the major commanders agreed to halve the overall army strength of 1.6 million men, but the general then gave a speech making clear his centralising intentions \u2013 which was enough to lead the others to put disbandment into deep freeze.\n\nFeng, Yan Xishan, the Guangxi Clique and Zhang Xueliang were all intent on preserving their own regional authority, and resisting Chiang's desire to erect national military, tax and political structures. The Guangxi Clique was the first to go into open rebellion in the spring of 1929, with a bid to grab control of Wuhan from Nanking's administration. In response, Chiang fielded 100,000 men to his opponents' 60,000. Using bribery when necessary, he sewed up agreements with other militarists that kept them from allying with the rebels. Carrying umbrellas against the spring rain and marching to the Kuomintang anthem's tune of 'Frere Jacques', his troops advanced without opposition along the Yangtze, though, on the way, he lost his chief German adviser, Max Bauer, who died of smallpox.\n\nAt Wuhan, 5,000 of the defenders were enticed to change sides, opening a gap in the line through which Nationalist troops poured. On 5 April 1929, greeted by artillery salvoes, Chiang arrived in the city by boat. Stamps were issued bearing his portrait set between laurels below an image of the sun, with the words 'To Commemorate Unification' in Chinese and English. The Guangxi leaders, Generals Li and Bai, launched a new offensive in Guangdong, dubbing their forces the 'Protect the Party, Save the Country Army'. But they were halted, and fled to Hong Kong, though they would be back.\n\nWith a fresh victory under his belt, Chiang strengthened his forces by buying warplanes from Europe and America, field guns from Japan and 60,000 rifles from Britain. Another German adviser arrived \u2013 Colonel Hermann Kriebel, who had left armistice talks with the Allies in 1919 saying, 'See you again in twenty years,' and who then took part in the Nazi beer hall putsch in Munich in 1923 before sharing a cell with Hitler in the Landsberg fortress.\n\nThe pattern of virtually continuous conflict that marked Chiang's life soon asserted itself as the Christian General moved to take over positions in Shandong which the Japanese had occupied after the Jinan Incident the previous year but were now preparing to evacuate. Having no wish to see his unreliable ally grow more powerful, Chiang asked the Japanese to delay their departure while he dispatched troops of his own to the province. The warlord reacted by asking to be relieved of his post as War Minister, clearly signifying he was contemplating a fight. Falling back on his stock of silver bullets, Chiang bribed one of Feng's divisional commanders to defect and won over two Shandong militarists. Outmanoeuvred, the Christian General pulled back. Without any fighting, Chiang had won the first round.\n\nThat provided a breathing space for a major symbolic act. In mid-May 1929, a train brought the coffin containing Sun Yat-sen's remains from Peking to Nanking, which the doctor had wished to be his last resting place in memory of his brief time there as the first president of the Republic. His portrait hung on the front of the locomotive, with national and Kuomintang flags on either side. Straw-hatted propaganda workers expounded his doctrines through loudspeakers to crowds along the way. The body, which had originally been clothed in a Western suit, had been re-embalmed and dressed in a long blue satin gown, black silk jacket, white silk stockings, gloves and black satin boots. On arrival in Nanking, it was taken by boat to Kuomintang headquarters. During the river journey, Qingling Soong sat with her eyes fixed on the coffin, while Chiang stood to attention. At the party building, he put a wreath on the bier as three days of lying in state began.\n\nThis gathering of the Sun-Soong-Chiang clan was highly charged. Qingling, who had gone into exile in Russia after the fall of the Wuhan regime, was sharing the spotlight with a man she had denounced as a traitor to the revolution. Meiling had become a prominent figure in the administration her sister abhorred. Sun Fo had dodged across the political landscape. T. V. Soong held the key to Nanking's finances after serving both Wuhan and Canton. The master of ceremonies at the funeral was H. H. Kung, a man who had also shifted allegiance and whose wife, if Jennie Chiang was to be believed, had engineered Chiang's third marriage. And then there was the general who had come from nothing to assume the doctor's inheritance.\n\nThe cort\u00e8ge left the centre of Nanking at dawn on 1 June, preceded by four armoured cars. It was a warm day, with bright sunshine. As a 101-gun salute sounded, Qingling, the Chiangs, Sun Fo, and T. V. Soong travelled in the hearse up a broad avenue named after Sun to a huge white mausoleum in the foothills of the Purple and Gold Mountains east of the city. A large portrait of the doctor was fixed to the front of the vehicle. The national flag covered the casket. In a black cotton dress, black cotton stockings and black shoes, Qingling nervously fingered a white handkerchief and dabbed away tears. 'Her face showed that only by determination and a sublime attempt to keep calm did she manage to follow her husband's remains,' a journalist wrote.\n\nThe line of soldiers, scouts, government workers, provincial representatives and students stretched for 2 miles. Crowds thronged the pavements. Most mourners wore plain white \u2013 the colour of mourning in China \u2013 though the principal officials were in black. The procession took six hours to cover the 10-mile route, moving so slowly that the _New York Times_ correspondent was able to watch it depart, return to his hotel to file a story and then catch up by car. When the hearse reached the hill, only Sun's widow, his son, Chiang and T. V. Soong climbed behind the pallbearers up the 400 broad granite steps to the mausoleum. Bands played dirges as the coffin was taken inside the classically proportioned, dimly lit building with blue tiled roof, blue, red and gold cornices, stained glass windows, wooden pillars and a mosaic of the Kuomintang flag on the ceiling. Orations were read. Planes circled overhead.\n\nAfter the ceremony, Qingling left for the house on the Rue Moliere in Shanghai which she had shared with Sun. From there, she issued a statement saying that nobody considered Nanking as representative of the Chinese people, and accusing Chiang of having betrayed her husband despite paying lip service to him each day. Such attacks were water off his back. It was time to turn his attention to the battlefield.\n\nAn anti-Nanking coalition had been formed by Feng Yuxiang the Christian General, Xan Yishan the Model Governor of Shanxi, and Wang Jingwei, Chiang's Kuomintang rival who had returned from Europe. Chiang, whose 300,000 troops were outnumbered two-to-one, won over some of the Christian General's leading lieutenants with enormous bribes that led 100,000 soldiers to change sides. He also got the support offerees in Guangdong which cut the supply lines of Guangxi units that tried to advance into Hunan. But his opponents set up a separatist government in Peiping under the name of the Enlarged Conference of the Kuomintang \u2013 it had to be extremely large because it stretched from the militantly left-wing Reorganisationists to the traditional, right-wing Western Hills group. The only common motivation was enmity towards Chiang.\n\nThe ensuing war saw some of the bloodiest battles of the time. Chiang put Nationalist deaths at 30,000 with twice that number wounded. He claimed 150,000 casualties for the northern forces. Other estimates spoke of total casualties of 250,000\u2013300,000, 100,000 of them for the Kuomintang. The cost of the war increased Nanking's military spending by 50 per cent. Rail lines formed the axes of the campaign. Towns were ravaged. Farmers abandoned their fields. The northerners press-ganged masses of peasants, many of whom never returned. In places, troops dug trenches 20 feet deep, linked by tunnels: in one area, a relief official reported bodies stripped of flesh by dogs.\n\nWith Chiang directing operations from an armoured train, his troops took Shandong in battles fought in heavy rain. At one point, the general was nearly captured. Moving into Henan province, his men occupied the strategic junction of Zhengzhou and the city of Kaifeng, where northern casualties were put at 20,000. They also experimented with poison gas, only for a change in the wind to blow it back on them. Journalists who met the commander-in-chief on the battlefield reported that he was very fit and distinctly cheerful. In August, his armies paused on the Yellow River. The crucial issue was what the Young Marshal of Manchuria would do \u2013 if he backed the rebels, Nanking looked doomed, and China would revert to the warlord era.\n\nZhang Xueliang, who had taken on the Australian former journalist W. H. Donald as an adviser, remained a dandy, a keen ballroom dancer and golf player, a gambler, a drinker, and a drug addict. But he had introduced reforms and shown his mettle in confronting his father's chief of staff, who was believed to be ready to collude with the Japanese and was alleged to have built up a private stock of 20,000 rifles, and a fortune of $200 million. The Young Marshal invited the general and an associate to dinner and a game of mah-jong. The previous night, he had flipped a silver dollar to decide what to do with his guests. Acting on the way the coin had fallen, he got up from the table during mah-jong, put a handkerchief to his mouth, and said he was indisposed. This was taken as a sign that he needed a morphine injection, so the guests were not worried. As the Marshal went through the door, his bodyguards rushed in and shot the visitors dead. Zhang kept the silver dollar in his safe as a lucky charm.\n\nWhile the fighting had raged between Nanking and the rebels in Peiping, the Marshal's attention had been on a conflict with the Russians over control of a railway in the north-east. His attempts to get the upper hand went badly wrong when Soviet troops, commanded by Galen, crossed the border and forced him to give way. That battle lost with substantial casualties, he could turn to China south of the Great Wall. According to Hallett Abend of the _New York Times_ , Zhang saw Nationalist principles as the only hope for the country, but thought Nanking had betrayed China and was 'rotten to the core'. In truth, his prime aim was to retain his autonomy, and Chiang offered him the best prospect. If Feng and Yan won, further struggles on the old warlord pattern were inevitable. But Nanking would be content with Zhang coming into the Nationalist tent, and, in return, leave him free to rule Manchuria and dominate northern China.\n\nThe rebels in Peiping came to Chiang's assistance by including Zhang Xueliang in their State Council without consulting him. His feathers seriously ruffled, the Marshal held a conference with his senior generals lasting till one in the morning which decided to back Nanking. Pinned between Chiang and the Manchurians, Yan and Feng gave up. At the age of thirty, Zhang Xueliang became deputy commander of Nationalist armies, and moved troops across the frontier into China proper as governor of the north.\n\nAfter this latest victory, Chiang turned to religious matters, going to a ceremony at the Soong family house in Shanghai to adopt his wife's creed. Rather than invoking inspiration and wisdom from the scriptures, he told the pastor that his mind had been made up during a battle near Kaifeng when he was in danger of being cut off from his troops. He had prayed to God, pledging that he would become a convert if he was delivered from the threat. A snowstorm started, preventing the enemy from advancing and giving time for Nationalist reinforcements to arrive to clinch victory. Keeping his side of the bargain, Chiang donned a simple long gown for the occasion, and, with water sprinkled on his head, was welcomed into the Methodist church. The next day, Kai-shek and Meiling sailed to Ningbo and travelled on to his home village for ten days of rest. Having outplayed Feng and Yan, he needed to prepare for a very different showdown.\n\nHis next opponent was the Kuomintang stalwart, Hu Hanmin, who wanted to make a reality of party control of government and army. Chiang counter-attacked by proposing the drawing up of a constitution which he would fashion to fit his ambitions. The politician insisted that Sun Yat-sen's teachings were enough to go by. At a dinner at his home, Chiang argued with Hu till the early hours about the advisability of a constitution. At 2 a.m., according to the official account, the politician accepted the general's 'invitation to stay the night'. The next day, in the euphemistic version put out in Nanking, Hu followed a suggestion that he should go to a nearby resort, where he was held under house arrest. Two days later, his resignation from all his posts was announced. Stories were circulated that he needed a rest after working too hard and sleeping for only three hours a night: he was said to have lost consciousness twice. When Chiang's aide, Chen Lifu, expressed doubts about arresting such an eminent figure, Chiang replied: 'It's already done. There is no way to pretend any further.'\n\nThe treatment of Hu scandalised some party elders, and sparked off the formation of an opposition group based in his home province of Guangdong. Wang Jingwei travelled south to express his backing, declaring that everybody in the party and army wanted 'the suppression of General Chiang', apart from those who had private connections with him. Sun Fo added that, while his father was alive, the general had been 'a very insignificant man'. Given their relative lack of military strength, this challenge was no bar to Chiang's ambitions. He called a congress of supporters to approve a constitution, setting out the usual guarantees of citizens' rights and duties, but also providing for a president who would appoint the heads of the five Yuan branches. In June, he was named to this position, and also became Chairman of the Executive Yuan, or Prime Minister.\n\nIn the four years since he had set out on the Northern Expedition, Chiang had got the better of half a dozen major warlords, the Wuhan regime, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin, and the Guangxi Clique. The Communists had been pushed back into isolated base areas, and the Russian advisers were gone. He had established himself as the dominant figure in a government which laid claim to lead China into a new age. He was linked by marriage to the Soong dynasty, and allied with the Young Marshal. No wonder that a reporter who interviewed the general in the summer of 1930 found him in the best of spirits. Wearing a khaki tunic and trousers, and leather slippers, with a pen clipped into his breast pocket, 'his eyes almost lazily swept across the questioner and, yet, revealed a penetration and a power of assessment,' the journalist from the _North_ _China Daily News_ wrote.\n\nOf middle height, his spare frame spoke of fitness and wariness . . . Accustomed to command, he showed no sign of uneasiness or any doubt in the capacity of his government to win through. The confidence did not suggest egotism but rather the happy reliance of a captain in his ability and co-operation of his team. Modest, unaffected and master of himself- that was the key note which lingered after he had shaken hands and, in dismissal, used the only English word in the whole of his part of the conversation: 'Goodbye'.\n\n* * *\n\n* Known at the time as Tsinan.\n\n* Now Shenyang.\n\n# CHAPTER 12\n\n _Two Chinas_\n\nTHROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Chiang Kai-shek showed an ability to work with yesterday's enemies. Opponents like the Christian General, the Model Governor, Wang Jingwei and the Guangxi Clique reappeared over the years in his camp, sometimes only to fall out again. Given the narrow base on which the central government and its army operated, such alliances were a necessary part of his realpolitik approach to power. But there was one foe with which he would not compromise, sensing that the Communists still constituted the greatest threat, offering the same breadth and depth of appeal as the Kuomintang had in its rise to power.\n\nThe city where the repression had started in 1927 remained a focal point for the crackdown. Police in the foreign areas of Shanghai handed over suspected leftists, making the concessions much less of a safe haven than in the past. In one raid, which attracted international attention, police in the International Settlement grabbed two dozen participants, including five writers, at a secret meeting in the hotel where Chiang and Jennie had been married. They were handed to the Chinese authorities, and taken to the detention camp at the Longhua barracks on the outskirts of the city. Manacled hand and foot, they were held in concrete huts for a month while a campaign was launched in the West for the release of the writers. Then they were led through a long, dark tunnel to the execution ground.\n\nThere were reports of political detainees being buried alive. Torture was used as a matter of course. The _North China Daily News wrote_ that the police had acquired an electrical machine to speed up confessions. 'The KMT were very ingenious and could pump a mixture of kerosene and faeces up your nose so that you didn't drown but swallowed a lot,' wrote the American scholar John King Fairbank, who was in China at the time. Still, conditions at Longhua appear to have been better than at some of the other detention centres. The historian Frank Dikotter contrasts the rice and cabbage soup provided in Shanghai with 'the mixture of grit, gravel and coal dust' served at a jail in neighbouring Jiangsu province. One Communist recorded that, in the prison where he was held, nine tenths of inmates died of illness or other causes within a year in 'a form of execution which differed from the firing squad only in being slightly more drawn out'.\n\nStill, underground organisations continued to function in China's biggest metropolis, using shops, property companies and clinics as fronts to generate funds. Hit squads, known as 'dog-killers', operated under a Green Gang member called Gu Shunzhang, who had been trained by the Russian secret service in Vladivostok and was said to be able to strangle victims without leaving marks. The historian Frederic Wakeman describes him as a master of disguise and deception, eloquent, articulate and with the air of a playboy. As a sideline, he did magic tricks at the roof garden theatre of the Sincere department store, dressed as a foreigner with a large false nose and small moustache.\n\nIn 1931, Gu was sent on an undercover mission which revealed how deeply the Communists had penetrated the Nanking regime. He joined an entertainment troupe that performed in cities where Chiang was preparing military action against Communist bases. His job was to infiltrate the Nationalists and discover their plans. There was also a report that he had been told to assassinate Chiang. After attracting attention by inviting left-wingers to his hotels, Gu was detained by security forces. Taken to Nanking, he was met by the security chief, Xu Enzeng, who gave him two hours to choose between Communism and the Kuomintang, between death and life. The assassin-magician decided to defect. Xu took him to see Chiang's lieutenant, Chen Lifu. They spoke the same language because of their common links with the Green Gang. Gu swore allegiance to the Nationalists.\n\nWhen he was arrested, Gu had told the police not to send a telegram announcing his detention to the secret service headquarters in Nanking. They took no notice. Gu had reckoned that, when the cable landed in Xu Enzeng's office, it would be seen by the security chiefs secretary, Qian Zhongfei, a Communist mole. Having won the trust of his boss, Qian had been put in charge of a network of organisations set up to gather information about Communists. He named party members to run them, while his agents operated a clandestine radio transmitter. The cable announcing Gu's arrest landed in Nanking after Xu Enzeng had left his office to go to a tea dance. So it was handed to Qian who sent his son-in-law to Shanghai to warn party leaders there, including Zhou Enlai. They went into hiding, Zhou later leaving the city disguised as a priest. Qian slipped away, too.\n\nWhile the revelation of Qian's activities was a nasty shock for the Nationalists, the fallout from Gu's defection was devastating for the Communists. He provided chapter and verse on the party's operations in major cities. By the Kuomintang count, thousands of cadres were arrested. Many were executed, while others changed sides. Much of the Communist urban infrastructure was destroyed, including communications links between the Shanghai leadership and rural base areas.\n\nLater in the year, one of the assassins who had worked for Gu defected, and took police and his former boss to several places in Shanghai where they found the decapitated, bound bodies of all Gu's family except for his younger son. Gu put an advertisement in Shanghai newspapers naming Zhou Enlai as the man behind the murders. He then went to live in Nanking, where he became a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, and a leading figure in hunting down Chiang's enemies. But he fell foul of the powerful Chen brothers, and was executed for supposedly having 'reverted to Communist ideas' \u2013 though rumours said this was a cover to enable him to engage in deep cover anti-Communist work.\n\nThe continuing crackdown netted some big fish, including the Communist secretary general Xiang Zhongfa, 'China's Stalin', who was picked up in the French Concession, handed over, and executed at the killing ground at Longhua. The party's first leader, Chen Duxiu, was also arrested but, after a trial at which he was defended by fifteen lawyers and which aroused liberal public opinion on his behalf, he was sentenced to thirteen years in jail rather than death. A more obscure figure, the future Madame Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, was said by her enemies to have bargained her way out of prison by agreeing to work for the Kuomintang: in later life, she assiduously destroyed evidence of her time as an actress in Shanghai in the early 1930s.\n\nOther opponents of the regime \u2013 real or imagined \u2013 were also at risk. In one murky case, a potential Nationalist rival from Chiang's province of Zhejiang was shot on a bus, the two assassins escaping with suspicious ease. But most of those who died were from the left. Among them was Deng Yanda, the one-time dean of Whampoa who had called at Chiang's house during the gunboat incident in Canton in 1926, and now headed a 'Third Party' dedicated to following Sun Yat-sen's teachings independently of both Nanking and the Communists. Though the party was numerically small, Chiang had declared that, if it did not die, 'the nation will never be at peace'. Arrested at a clandestine meeting in the International Settlement, Deng was handed over to the Chinese police and taken to Nanking to be executed for treason. His arrest came soon after he had defeated a pro-Communist faction at a party congress; rumours swirled that internal opponents betrayed him.\n\nThe blows suffered by the urban Communist apparatus and exponents of the third way increased the weight of the rural revolution, as the severing of wireless transmitters left the various arms of the party to follow their own paths in a long-term battle across the countryside of China. After facing death when captured in the rising in Hunan in 1928, Mao Zedong had escaped and made his way with a small band of comrades to a mountainous area on the border with Jiangxi where they reached an understanding with local bandits. When Nationalist forces closed in on them, Mao and his principal companion-in-arms, Zhu De, a former warlord soldier, moved through snowy peaks without paths, suffering extreme hardship \u2013 particularly Mao's female partner who was five months pregnant. They set up a new, larger Soviet in Jiangxi which was to be the future Helmsman's base for more than five years, building up enough strength to stage raids into the surrounding areas and into Hunan and Fujian.*\n\nThough later history would focus on Mao's base, the Communists had other havens. A Red Army survived and sometimes prospered on the Hunan-Hubei border under the command of a former Kuomintang general and veteran of the Nanchang rising, He Long. Another sizeable Communist force operated north of the Yangtze between Nanking and Wuhan, led by a self-confident former Politburo leader called Zhang Guotao. In Shaanxi, in northern China, radicals formed a Soviet which hung on despite having been beaten back by the Christian General.\n\nThe possession of armies differentiated the Chinese Communists from radical left-wing movements in other countries, and ensured that the long struggle with the Nationalists would be military as well as political, with no room for quarter on either side. The Red Armies were pitiless with class enemies and anybody suspected of helping their opponents. A witch hunt in Jiangxi took the lives of tens of thousands accused of being counterrevolutionaries or 'rich peasants'. Overall, the process of bringing revolution to China was marked by ruthlessness at sharp odds with the folksy face Mao and his colleagues would adopt for Western visitors.\n\nOn their side, the Nationalists devastated huge areas, and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Farmers were herded into stockades, and forests burned down to deprive the enemy of cover. Women were sent off to be sold into prostitution. Some Nationalist units kept score by collecting the heads of those they killed: finding this constituted too heavy a burden, they took the ears instead \u2013 one division was said to have 700 pounds of them. The families of Communist leaders were executed. The last news Zhu De had of his wife and son was when he read a newspaper report of Chiang's troops raiding his home in Sichuan. After the Red Army took the Hunan capital of Changsha and held it for nine days, the returning Nationalists tracked down Mao's wife who lived in the city and beheaded her: she had declared her abiding loyalty to her husband though knowing he had left her for the younger woman who accompanied him to Jiangxi.\n\nIn October 1930, Chiang launched an 'encirclement campaign' by some 44,000 men against the Jiangxi Red Army. This flopped badly as the Nationalists were sucked into traps and the Communists applied their guerrilla tactic of avoiding frontal battles while concentrating strength against exposed or weak enemy formations. At the end of December, one Nanking division was, in the words of the _North China Daily News_ , 'having a good time with the funds taken from the Communists' in a captured town when it was attacked. Caught by surprise, the division capitulated after five hours. Donning the uniforms of their captives, the Communists surprised and routed another vanguard division. The commander of the first unit was taken prisoner and tortured as he crawled round confessing his sins. His tongue was cut out, and his cheeks pierced before his head was cut off, wrapped in a red cloth, nailed to a board by the ears, and floated down the river towards the retreating forces.\n\nAfter that debacle, Chiang gave his long-time associate from Whampoa, General He Yingqin, responsibility for a second campaign with more than 100,000 troops. In mid-May 1931, as Mao watched from a Buddhist temple on a high peak, the Communists ambushed two Nationalist divisions, scoring total victory. In five battles in the following two weeks, Chiang's forces lost 30,000 men killed, wounded or captured, and 20,000 rifles. The area under Communist control tripled.\n\nIt was time for the commander-in-chief to take personal command, declaring the third Jiangxi campaign a matter of 'Victory or Death'. Accompanied by his German advisers, Chiang moved into a compound by the lake in the middle of Nanchang which became, in effect, an alternative power centre to the government and party in Nanking. He established his headquarters in a school with a large map on which Communist positions were marked in red and government units in blue. He issued a manifesto deploring the 'cowardice and indifference' shown by some troops in previous campaigns, and promising 'glittering rewards' to soldiers who served with distinction. Before leaving for the front, Chiang invited leading generals to a dinner catered by the city's YMCA.\n\nThe Communists had not expected a fresh attack until the autumn of 1931. Instead, Chiang launched a three-pronged offensive in July with around 130,000 men. Caught off-balance and with its forces dispersed, Red Army headquarters issued an emergency circular warning of an 'extremely cruel' campaign. But the Nationalist commander, who was carried about in a sedan chair, moved cautiously to avoid ambushes, and this allowed the Red Army to escape. Setting a pattern for the epic marches of the future, it swung in a 400-mile semicircular movement in the heavy summer heat, keeping away from the main routes and using rural tracks to evade surveillance. Moving into the abandoned base area, Chiang's troops suffered from peasant resistance, lack of food and dysentery from foul water. They reacted by burning villages, massacring the inhabitants and seizing crops.\n\nAfter a series of battles, two Nationalist armies pressed their 20,000-strong enemy back against a 3,000-foot mountain. Finally, Chiang seemed to have his foe trapped. But, during the night, the Communists climbed the heights behind them. It was an epic escape, and Chiang did not push the pursuit. Instead, he began to withdraw. That encouraged the Communists to stage a frontal assault which cost them 4,000 casualties. Still, they survived to pull back to their base and declare the Chinese Soviet Republic there. 'From now on,' Mao declared, 'there are two totally different states in the territory of China. One is the so-called Republic of China, which is a tool of imperialism . . . The other is the Chinese Soviet republic, the state of the broad masses of exploited and oppressed workers, peasants, soldiers and toilers.'\n\nChiang's Jiangxi campaign had been weakened by the need to send troops to block Canton autonomists who were threatening to march on Nanking. In Nanchang, the commander-in-chief was shot at as he drove through a park: after the tihree gunmen were caught, it was announced that they had been working for the Cantonese. In Shanghai, men shouting 'Down with the Soong dynasty' opened fire on T. V. Soong as he stepped off a train at the North Station \u2013 the Finance Minister escaped unhurt but his secretary, who was beside him, was hit in the bladder, arms and hip and died later in hospital. The attack was, again, officially blamed on the Canton faction, but was widely seen as the result of a dispute between the drug barons of Shanghai and Soong, who had been deputed to deal with them but had not proved sufficiently pliable. The way in which the gunmen had not hit the portly Soong, who was easily identifiable in the crowd by his white sun hat, made it look like a warning shot to the regime. When the next opium suppression campaign was announced, Chiang put it under military control so that he could make sure his ally, Big-Eared Du, was not incommoded. For his part, TV. had armed guards patrol the grounds behind the 12-foot wall of his Shanghai home.\n\nBy coincidence, the minister's mother \u2013 known as 'the mother-in-law of the country' for her daughters' marriages \u2013 died four hours after the attack on her eldest son: Meiling was with her when she expired. Qingling returned from Europe for the funeral: neither of her sisters nor TV. met her at the station. A hundred cars drove in the funeral procession. Walking mourners wore white gowns and hats. Soldiers lined the route. The three daughters sat in one car, the three sons in another \u2013 an armour-plated Buick. T.V.'s bodyguards carried drawn revolvers. Chiang was protected by twenty-five Whampoa graduates, a dozen walking on each side of his car. Even at a matriarch's funeral, these were dangerous times.\n\nNot nearly as perilous, however, as life for the hundreds of millions living in the areas of the great floods that spread in the summer of 1931. In the Yangtze provinces, dykes gave way as winds whipped up the water; buildings collapsed; crops were devastated; business stopped; prisoners drowned when their cells were inundated. In Wuhan sampans navigated the flooded streets directed by traffic police perched on platforms as bodies floated past. White slavers moved in to buy the daughters of the 350,000 refugees round the city. The stench was unbearable; people lived in trees; disease spread. To the north-east, heavy rains caused the Grand Canal to spill over: a local official said that more than 200,000 people were killed. Then the Yellow River burst its banks. By the beginning of September, 180 million people were estimated to be affected. The famed American pilot, Colonel Lindbergh, flew over the area and said he was 'deeply moved', before having tea with Kai-shek and Meiling.\n\nIn the middle of September, Chiang took a ship up the Yangtze for Jiangxi to renew the war against the Red Army. Halfway there, however, he was forced to head back to Nanking as demonstrators marched in the streets proclaiming 'Death before Surrender'. The Japanese had made a move in Manchuria. Though Chiang was intent on destroying the Communists before confronting the Japanese, this demanded his return to the capital, thus giving Mao and his colleagues a breathing space in the first episode of a triangular involvement between Chiang, the Communists and the Japanese which was to stretch over fourteen years.\n\nTension had been rising steadily in Manchuria during 1931, exacerbated by incidents involving Tokyo's Kwantung Army and by cross-border clashes between Chinese and Koreans. Having established his headquarters in Peiping and moved many of his troops across the border into northern China, the Young Marshal's eye had been off his homeland. After visiting Nanking in the late summer, Zhang Xueliang had flown to Peiping where reporters learned that his daughter might marry into the Soong clan to strengthen his links with the ruling group. On arrival, the northern commander, who cut a dashing figure with his thin moustache and swept-back hair, went to a hotel to watch the evening dancing, but was too tired to be interviewed. He then developed a high temperature, and was taken to hospital where he was diagnosed as having typhoid fever contracted from bad water in Nanking; rumours said he was really undergoing treatment for his drug addiction.\n\nOn his discharge on 18 September, the Marshal went to dinner at the British Legation, followed by a visit to a theatre. Returning to his residence, he received a message from Mukden which signalled the start of the Second World War in Asia, a full eight years before hostilities broke out in Europe, and a challenge to Chiang that would last until 1945.\n\nFor decades, Japan had seen Manchuria and northern China as the natural sphere for expansion. One leading politician, Prince Konoe, who had attended the Versailles peace conference and believed in supporting the spirit of the League of Nations, still thought Japan 'was perfecdy entitled to aggrandize [its] Chinese territory to meet the needs of its own exploding surplus population . . . It was only natural for China to sacrifice itself for the sake of Japan's social and industrial needs.'\n\nFeeling they were being treated as inferiors by the West, and suffering from American and European racism, the Japanese concluded that they had to make their own place in the world, using force to pursue the manifest destiny of the 'imperial way'. Though China had been seen as a source of their culture, and some prominent Japanese encouraged cooperation, many soldiers regarded the Chinese with contempt \u2013 there was a saying that they were akin to pigs, except that pigs had the advantage of being edible. A military specialist, Ikezaki Tadakata, thought three or four divisions and a few gunboats 'would be quite enough to handle the Chinese bandits'. Adopting Social Darwinism to justify crushing weaker powers, Japan argued that China was not a true nation, and needed to be guided to a better existence as its vassal.\n\nAdjoining Tokyo's colony of Korea, Manchuria was the natural first target with its large Japanese investments, natural resources and industry. The Young Marshal was proving less accommodating than Japan had expected, and reforms he was introducing to modernise the three northeastern provinces threatened to strengthen his position. A Kwantung Army hawk, Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, proposed 'a fabricated pretext for military action' to overthrow him. 'It is Japan's divine mission to assist the Chinese people,' added Ishiwara, who wanted to engage the Chinese in an anti-Western crusade. 'The four races of Japan, China, Korea and Manchuria will share a common prosperity through a division of responsibility: Japanese, political leadership and large industry; Chinese, labour and small industry; Koreans, rice; and Manchurians, animal husbandry.' 'It is futile to protect our interests in Manchuria and Mongolia through diplomatic channels and by peaceful means,' the leading Japanese newspaper in the region declared. 'There is only one way to do this. It is the way of armed might.' Even more sinisterly, a Japanese scientist with an imposing manner, Shiro Ishii, had gained permission to launch a programme of secret biological warfare research in Manchuria known as Unit 713 that would expose thousands of prisoners to anthrax and other deadly diseases and produce weapons which would kill an estimated one million people when used by Japan's army in China.\n\nDespite the high tide of nationalism in Tokyo, the Cabinet there was anxious to keep the Kwantung Army under control. So it sent the chief of the General Staff intelligence section, General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, with a letter warning the army against provoking an incident. After landing in the evening of 18 September, Tatekawa went to a restaurant and geisha house where he drank too much, and fell asleep without having delivered the letter. Since he was said to be in sympathy with the Kwantung officers, this may have been no oversight.\n\nWhile Tatekawa slept, an army unit placed explosives on the South Manchurian Railway track north of Mukden; it did so little damage that a train was able to pass by soon afterwards. But it was enough for the Japanese to blame the Chinese, and deliver their ultimatum in the name of self-protection. If they did not get satisfaction, the city would be taken over \u2013 to protect Japanese nationals and interests. The switchboard in Mukden passed the threat to the Young Marshal in Peiping. He had no idea how to react, and did nothing.\n\nBy dawn, the Japanese had seized his capital's airfield and radio station. The Japanese commander in Manchuria, General Honjo, warned that he was 'in duty bound to take drastic action without the slightest hesitation'. When the Consul General urged negotiations, a major drew his sword threateningly, and said there would be no interference with the army's prerogatives. Eleven hours after the ultimatum, the Mukden switchboard operator told the Marshal in Peiping: 'I can talk no more. The Japanese have entered my office.'\n\nOfficial buildings were occupied, and local troops disarmed. Reinforcements arrived from Korea. Learning of the events, the Japanese Prime Minister said: 'The units have already moved, so what can be done?' As his forces bombed defenceless towns and trains, it was noted that Emperor Hirohito regarded this as 'only natural in view of conditions at the time' \u2013 his semi-divine status made his benediction particularly important. Officials involved were decorated or promoted. The Kwantung commander became a baron.\n\nThe Mukden Incident set off a wave of protest in China. Students seized a train and drove it along the line to Nanking calling for action against the Japanese. In Shanghai, 50,000 demonstrators demanded death for anybody who traded with the enemy. There were riots in Tianjin. Nanking students invaded the Foreign Ministry, breaking windows and assaulting the minister. Six thousand young people, including 300 young women dressed as nurses, staged a rally in the capital demanding to be sent north to fight. The Communists accused the Nationalists of betraying the masses with a 'weak-kneed and vacillating policy'. The _China Times_ published a song urging: 'Kill the enemy! Kill the enemy! Hurry up and kill the enemy!'\n\nThe Young Marshal flew to Nanking to confer with Chiang: apart from the loss of territory, he had a $100 million family fortune at stake in Mukden, a third of it in gold bars. Chiang declared that an hour of unprecedented gravity had struck for the Chinese nation, and called for an end to internal dissension. He invited foreign missionaries to give him spiritual guidance; after devotional services and dinner, they told him they were asking God to move the League of Nations to settle the crisis. Following a military review in Nanking to mark the anniversary of the 1911 revolution, at which nine Junkers planes bought from Germany performed stunts, a manifesto warned that the aggression was a prelude to the complete subjection of China.\n\nStill, as over the attack on Jinan in 1928, Chiang decided Japan was too strong to be resisted. This would be seen as his first great failure to stand up for national interests against the enemy from across the sea, setting a pattern for the following years. Militarily, he could have tried to use the vastly more numerous Chinese troops to swamp the better equipped and trained Kwantung Army, counting on civilian politicians in Tokyo to rein in the expansionists. It is impossible to tell what the outcome would have been. But Chiang was also subject to constraints other than fear of Japanese military prowess \u2013 war in Manchuria would free regional barons to reestablish themselves elsewhere in China while his troops were in the northeast; the Kuomintang was divided; there was the impact of the Yangtze floods; and the Communists had not been beaten.\n\nChiang also counted on Japan eventually becoming embroiled in separate wars with a US-British alliance and with Russia. Rather than fighting on its own in 1931, he believed, Nanking should develop its defences and strengthen itself by liquidating its domestic foe. Then, when a Second World War broke out, China would emerge reinforced and with greater political independence than ever. In the short term, he also hoped for help from the West. But, though there could be no doubt about the rights and wrongs of the case, the League of Nations shied away from intervention in the first big test of its credibility. None of its leading members had the will or the means to take action. Instead, it was decided to send a mission under a British peer, Lord Lytton, to inquire into what had taken place.\n\nIn Manchuria, the Kwantung Army mined rail-tracks, took over communications companies and banks, removed the Marshal's picture from official buildings. The Japanese justified their action by accusing Zhang Xueliang of adopting an 'insincere attitude', and sent him his personal effects and furniture \u2013 but not his money \u2013 in 417 packing cases. Bombers attacked the industrial city of Jinzhou,* where the Japanese declared the very presence of Manchurian troops to be detrimental to peace and order. On 29 December 1931, pursuing a policy agreed with Chiang, Zhang ordered the soldiers there to withdraw. Though local commanders who did not espouse non-resistance staged guerrilla warfare elsewhere, Jinzhou was evacuated on the morning of 1 January \u2013 the American Minister in China reported that the station 'resembles a beehive, every possible car being pressed into service and loaded with troops, animals, baggage, to the last inch of space'.\n\nThe shock of the Mukden Incident meant Chiang needed to promote national unity. He released Hu Hanmin, and met him with Wang Jingwei and Sun Fo in Shanghai \u2013 it was the first time the four of them had sat down together for six years. They agreed to work for the reconstruction of China, and to hold a party reconciliation conference. As always, Chiang could depend on his rivals to be divided. A congress held by the southerners to pick their delegates turned into a shambles, with fighting on the floor. Wangjingwei held a selection session of his own at the Great World amusement centre in Shanghai, courtesy of its owner, Pockmarked Huang Jinrong of the Green Gang. It was time for another coup by Chiang to destabilise his opponents.\n\nOn 15 December 1931, the general went to a Kuomintang meeting in Nanking. After ninety minutes, he left, submitting his resignation in the interests of national unity and the fight against the Japanese \u2013 and to leave the way open for 'more competent men'. He attended the opening session of the reunification conference before heading for the familiar destination of his native village. The Young Marshal was flying to Nanking when he heard the news on the aircraft radio. He turned round to return to Peiping, and resigned as deputy commander-in-chief. He then flew to Shanghai in his three-motor Ford aircraft, with fourteen bodyguards and Meiling, who had been visiting the north. There was no doubt where his loyalties lay.\n\nWhile fighting this latest political battle, Chiang was confronted with a very different decision. Acting on Moscow's behalf, Qingling Soong sent him a suggestion that his son, Ching-kuo, should return from Russia in exchange for the freeing of a Polish Communist arrested in Shanghai. Ching-kuo, then twenty-one, was dedicated to the Soviet system, excelling at the Red Army academy in Leningrad though suffering from diabetes and developing a taste for vodka. It had been made plain that he could not leave voluntarily. Meiling thought the deal should be accepted, though there is no indication that her stepson wanted to return home.\n\nIn the six years they had been apart, Chiang's feelings towards his son had softened, and he indulged in a bout of self-flagellation as a father who has not lived up to his obligations. 'I miss Ching-kuo very much. I am bad because I am not taking good care of him,' he wrote in his diary. Later, he reflected: 'I do not know how to be kind to my children. I regret that.' Still, he decided that he would rather let Ching-kuo stay in the Soviet Union than exchange a Communist agent for him since 'it is not worth it to sacrifice the interests of the country for the sake of my son'. Turning the issue to himself in typical fashion, Chiang reflected that a person would be remembered for moral integrity and achievements, 'not because he has an heir'.\n\nAs this family drama played out, the situation in Nanking grew increasingly chaotic. Anti-Japanese students attacked Kuomintang headquarters, led by a girl and a boy whose faces were pitted by smallpox. Troops with bamboo clubs dispersed the demonstrators, and put them on trains out of the city. The reunification conference was a play without the main actors: Wang stayed in Shanghai, and Hu sheltered in Canton, wary of risking his safety in Nanking. The delegates split 42 per cent for Chiang, 39 per cent for Canton and 15 per cent for Wang, with others uncommitted. The plenum accepted a Cabinet headed by Sun Fo, but Chiang, Hu and Wang were elected to a nine-man Standing Committee which included three other members of the general's faction.\n\nSun Yat-sen's stout offspring was described by the British journalist, Arthur Ransome, as being 'like many sons of famous fathers, an undistinguished personality'. His government was in immediate financial trouble as Chiang's friends in Shanghai turned off the money tap. T. V. Soong left with Chiang. Provincial leaders acted ever more independently. In desperation, Sun named the absent Chiang, Hu and Wang to a committee to deal with national emergencies. 'He was practically begging the three leaders to share the responsibilities of government,' as a historian of Kuomintang factionalism noted.\n\nChiang was already negotiating with Wang, each man setting aside their enmity of the previous five years. In mid-January, they met in Hangzhou, and then called in Sun Fo to tell him that Wang was ready to become head of die government while Chiang resumed military command. The general and Meiling flew to Nanking in their new Sikorski seaplane, fitted with a couch and armchair in the cabin. Wang preferred to take the train. Arriving in the capital, the two returnees went to die Sun Yat-sen memorial. Wang, who was ill again, was carried in a sedan chair. On the way to the tomb, he wept so profusely that a halt was called.\n\nTaking tea and sandwiches with Kai-shek and Meiling, the journalist Hallett Abend found the commander had 'gained immensely in confidence and poise'. He had every reason to do so. He had now got die Kuomintang's most charismatic politician inside his tent, and isolated Hu Hanmin. T. V. Soong returned to run the regime's finances. Chiang's ideological guide, Dai Jitao, headed the Yuan that appointed officials. Other supporters ran _the_ bodies which trained civil servants. The 'CC Clique' of the Chen brothers, whom Chiang had first met during his revolutionary days in Shanghai, was a key source of political and administrative support, as well as having its own secret police apparatus. As Chen Lifu, remarked, Sun Yat-sen's insistence that the Kuomintang party should be above the military was only a formality. To buttress his position further, Chiang attended the inaugural meeting of a group of dedicated supporters, mainly Whampoa veterans, known as the Lixingshe, who would form a loyal secret society devoted to the man they called 'our saviour'. Despite all this, however, he was to know no more peace in the next eighteen years than in the previous six.\n\n* * *\n\n* Known at the time as Fukien.\n\n* Known at the time as Chinchow.\n\n# CHAPTER 13\n\n _Heart and Skin_\n\nAS CHIANG KAI-SHEK and Wang Jingwei were sealing their return to power in January 1932, an unpleasant incident took place in Shanghai. Five Buddhist monks from Japan were leaving the International Settlement when they were set upon by a group of Chinese. Two of the monks were badly injured; one subsequently died. Japan's consulate issued a graphic account of their suffering which was relayed home by correspondents. Feeling was already high, fuelled by the boycott of Japanese goods which had been intensified after the attack on Mukden the previous September. There had also been Japanese outrage when a semi-official Kuomintang newspaper ran a story about an attempt on Hirohito's life with a headline reading, 'UNFORTUNATELY BULLET MISSED: ASSASSIN ESCAPED'.\n\nAfter clashes at two towel factories in which Japanese killed two Chinese policemen, 2,000 Japanese residents marched through the streets of Shanghai, smashing up shops, attacking pedestrians, and trashing buses and trams. Wu Tiesheng, the one-time Canton police chief who had been rehabilitated as mayor of Shanghai, went to Nanking with the adviser W. H. Donald for consultations. On his return, he acceded to most of the Japanese demands for apologies and compensation. But that was not going to stop a plan hatched by the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Having staged the Mukden Incident, it wanted to expand further there, and to distract attention with a diversion in Shanghai. For this, it conspired with Japan's military attach\u00e9 in the city, Major Tanaka Ryukichi, a great intriguer who had a Manchurian princess as his mistress. Given $20,000 to foment trouble, he had engaged Chinese thugs to attack the Buddhist monks before organising the rally that ended in street violence.\n\nThe Japanese navy, which had marines on ships moored in the river at Shanghai, was anxious to show that it could be as aggressive as the army had been in Mukden. Receiving the _New York Times_ correspondent, Hallett Abend, for cocktails aboard his flagship on 28 January, its commander in Shanghai, Admiral Shiozawa, said that, despite the mayor's concessions, his marines would go ashore at eleven that night to protect 'helpless'Japanese civilians. Abend informed T. V. Soong and the US Consul General, who refused to believe him. At 11.05 p.m., firing began. In his room at the Astor House hotel, W. H. Donald telephoned the mayor, opened the window, and held the mouthpiece outside to pick up the sound of the shots.\n\nAs usual, each side blamed the other for starting the shooting, but there was no doubt which was the aggressor. The heavily populated Chapei district was the main target as Japanese marines on motorcycles mounted with machine guns roared through the streets, firing at random while Chinese snipers shot back. Westerners in evening dress took taxis to watch the fighting. Abend recalled that they 'stood around the sloppy streets, smoking cigarettes, occasionally drinking liquor from bottles and enjoying sandwiches and hot coffee procured from nearby cafes'. Their view was simple: Japan was teaching the 'cocky Chinese' a lesson they deserved.\n\nAt 7 a.m., Japanese planes circled in the grey sky over the city. As the light of day grew stronger, each plane dropped two small pointed cylinders which fell slowly in parallel lines below the roof line. 'The earth seemed to jar and shake,' Abend recalled, 'and then came a feeling of the concussion, and the blast of sound'. This was the world's first air raid on an unprotected civilian target the size of Shanghai, setting the precedent for Guernica and the Second World War. Meeting Abend on his flagship four days later, Admiral Shiozawa noted that American newspapers called him the 'Baby-Killer'; he added that he should be given credit for having used 30-pound bombs instead of 500-pounders.\n\nThe Japanese onslaught was unrelenting. Waves of aircraft bombed from 300 feet above the rooftops, the crews leaning over the sides to observe their targets. Shipboard guns blasted targets on land. White-putteed marines raked the streets with machine-gun fire. _Ronin_ gangsters brought in from Japan killed hundreds of civilians. A low-flying plane strafed a clearly marked Red Cross refugee camp.\n\nBut the Chinese stood their ground. The main defence was by the strongly anti-Japanese Cantonese Nineteenth Route Army which Sun Fo had moved from fighting the Communists in the south-east to act as his military shield on the Yangtze. Fierce combats raged round the North Station which blazed like a beacon in the wind. The Commercial Press building, home of China's biggest publisher and scene of violent clashes in the 1927 purge, was devastated. A priceless collection of ancient books was destroyed when the National Oriental Library burned. There was a stampede for the safety of the foreign settlements before they closed their gates. Up the Yangtze, Japanese ships shelled Nanking, and bombers cut the railway line between the capital and Shanghai \u2013 bus operators doubled the price of tickets for the twelve-hour trip. As fears rose of a general Japanese offensive, government leaders moved northwards to Wu Peifu's one-time stronghold of Luoyang.\n\nOn 28 January the Japanese used their privileged position in the International Settlement to send marines from there to attack nearby Chinese areas, and to land reinforcements in the concession. That drew a protest from the Mayor, but Brigadier General E. B. MacNaghten, Chairman of the Municipal Council, responded that the action was in order under the agreement between the nations represented in the Settlement, and that his organisation had no powers to intervene in any case. Other Japanese units advanced against a line of forts at Wusong* outside the city, and heavy fighting developed there. On 4 February, shells hit the Chapei district at the rate of one a minute. The next day, the _North China Daily News_ reported: 'Larger buildings, with few exceptions, last night were bare and gaunt walls, their interiors a seething mass of glowing embers reflecting against the night sky. Homes by the hundreds are a wreck and ruin.' But, while the attackers had planes and big guns, their armoured vehicles could not manoeuvre through the narrow streets, and their infantry tactics relied on frontal assault, which laid them open to ambushes.\n\nFollowing plans drawn up by German advisers, the defenders dug deep trenches behind moats and barbed wire barricades, sheltering from artillery and air barrages and dien emerging to mow down enemy troops trying to advance over the obstacles in their path. Green Gang members joined in as snipers. Local inhabitants donated millions. Financial aid flowed in from Overseas Chinese. The three Soong sisters raised money for a thousand-bed field hospital. The largest Chinese newspaper, _Shen Pao_ , acted as the mouthpiece for resistance, backed by the Shanghai Local Peace Preservation Association whose members included Big-Eared Du. Chiang's patron, Zhang Jingjiang, heard of the Japanese attack while eating a meal: thinking of a saying about the strong making meat of the weak, he became a vegetarian.\n\nAt last, Chinese troops were standing up to the Japanese, and doing well. But, according to the conventional wisdom, one man stood aside \u2013 Chiang Kai-shek, driven by his desire to avoid a clash with Japan and his fear that the Nineteenth Route Army, with its roots in the wayward southern province of Guangdong, would become a threat to him. That version of events was subsequently bolstered by the desire of the Communists to contrast Chiang's appeasement with their own patriotism, however little they actually fought. The Route Army's leaders, who had their own publicity department, massaged their fame by hosting press parties at which pate de foie gras and Martel cognac were served. The operational commander, thirty-nine-year-old Cai Tingkai, became a media star, photographed in martial poses and vowing never to give up a foot of Chinese soil.\n\nWhen the fighting started, Chiang did not have an official position in Nanking; it was only at the end of January that he joined the Military Council, as the Christian General, the Model Governor and the Young Marshal all rallied to the government in the name of national solidarity. Certainly, Chiang would have preferred to have avoided a battle at Shanghai: he and Wang Jingwei had told the Nineteenth Route Army not to give the Japanese any pretext for aggression. Once the battle began, he was keen to keep it confined, pressing for a negotiated settlement and worried that a major clash would force him to move troops from the fight with the Red Armies which remained his top priority.\n\nStill, a mixture of motives propelled him to take a far more active position than has been generally acknowledged. Pressure for military action was strong in his elite, German-trained Fifth Army. His political enemies could use inaction to undermine him. Then there was the danger that, if Chiang did not have loyal forces of his own in the city, the Peace Preservation Association, which contained a number of his opponents, might become a force to challenge his mastery of Shanghai. Patriotic feelings were running high. T. V. Soong favoured action; thousands of his well-armed treasury agents took part in the defence. In an interview with an American journalist, the Finance Minister asked: 'Can you be surprised that China would turn to Communism or Sovietism, if that were to unite the country, rather than submit to foreign military domination?'\n\nAfter a meeting between Chiang and his closest military aide, General He Yingqin, in mid-February, the United Press agency reported that 'definite plans have been made to send important Chinese reinforcements to the Shanghai area'. Chiang kept back his central government units until the Nineteenth Route Army had suffered three weeks of combat; by then, it was clear that the Japanese were not interested in a quick truce. When he did send his men in, he put them under the command of the Nineteenth Route Army. This was partly recognition of the role the southerners had played since the battle began, but there was another reason \u2013 the Cantonese were not part of Nanking's core forces, so the fight between them and the Japanese could be put outside the category of a war between two nations. Had more been made of the presence of Chiang's Fifth Army, China might have been dragged into full-scale conflict. So the minimisation of his role was, in part, the product of his own desire to avoid an all-out confrontation with Japan until he had beaten the Communists.\n\nOn 17 February the _North China Herald_ ran eyewitness accounts of new troops with cavalry units moving into Shanghai. Their Western-style helmets distinguished them as Nanking troops, different from the southerners in their bamboo hats. T. V. Soong referred to 'Chiang Kai-shek troops' who were 'cheerfully ready to die side by side with their comrades of the gallant Nineteenth Route'. A statement at the end of February by the Nineteenth Route Army paid tribute to a Fifth Army division which 'has been fighting with courage and fortitude'. A letter to the _North China Daily News_ from a hospital visitor who had seen wounded men from the division attested to their 'excessive bravery' in advancing and suffering 'rather high casualties'. An authoritative account of the battle by the historian Donald Jordan, published in 2001, contains a wealth of evidence to disprove the accepted version of the commander-in-chief standing to one side while the Route Army did all the fighting. As Chiang put it in a later interview: 'Who sent the Fifth Army, the 87th and 88th Divisions and the Revenue Guards to Shanghai to assist the Nineteenth Route Army who had no heavy artillery but only rifles and machine guns? Where did the Chinese heavy guns come from?'\n\nWhen the assault began, the US Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, had suggested joint action with Britain to prevent further Japanese expansion. But London was cool, and the League of Nations showed blinkered even-handedness, reprimanding Japan for the attack and China for the assault on the monks, as if the two were comparable \u2013 even if the second had not been a Japanese provocation. There were flurries of concern in the West when shells landed on foreign concessions or threatened ships. But, as in Manchuria, nobody would take practical steps to hold back Japan even when its army landed at the end of February and marched in to bolster the lacklustre marines.\n\nThe Chinese counter-attacked and advanced in places. Japanese tanks were useless in fighting in the fields round the city where the narrow paths were easy to defend. In fierce battles for villages, the defenders set up 4 yards of barbed wire in front of their trenches, and a Chinese brigade staged five charges within an hour, losing a quarter of its officers. A division reported having 2,700 men put out of action in a single day. Tokyo's 200 planes widened their bombing range \u2013 one raid on the air force centre of Hangzhou damaged the wings of Chiang's aircraft parked there.\n\nAs the weight of the attack forced the defenders to fall back on a new line, General Cai of the Nineteenth Route Army received a visit from a Manchu princess known as Eastern Jewel, who had inveigled Sun Fo into giving her an introduction to the dashing soldier. She passed on secret information that the Japanese were going to throw another division into the Chapei-Wusong front. Accordingly, the Route Army concentrated there, disregarding a warning from Chiang of a possible flanking movement from the sea. The Japanese justified his prediction, landing thousands of troops at dawn under air protection, and then sweeping round behind the Chinese. According to the conspiratorial Major Tanaka, the Jewel had been sent to lure Nineteenth Army troops into the wrong place. In his diary, Chiang Kai-shek referred to her stories as the reason why the defenders had not followed his advice.\n\nThe Chinese now abandoned Shanghai. Though keeping up their air raids, the attackers let them go to avoid a final stand, but arrested, abused and killed civilians at will. The _North China Daily News_ described Chapei as a 'blazing bonfire' throwing up a glare so strong that a reporter could read his newspaper by its light half a mile away. More than 200,000 people sheltered in seventy makeshift camps. The Japanese set up a puppet administration in Chapei which encouraged opium dens and brothels to move in from the French Concession. As the historian Christian Henriot records, the troops 'flung themselves into systematic destruction in the zones they were occupying. Whatever had not been razed by bombardment and fire was either mined or dismantled and loaded onto Japanese ships.'\n\nChinese forces involved in the fighting are reckoned to have totalled 63,000, though this may be an overstatement given the depleted condition of some divisions. Japan said it sent in 47,000 men; the Chinese put their numbers at 77,000. Estimates of Chinese dead ran from 4,600 to 6,080 with up to 10,000 missing, though Hallett Abend wrote of an overall toll of 35,000. The Japanese consulate put deaths on its side at a ludicrously low 385, with more than 2,000 wounded. A census report suggested half a million people fled. The city government reckoned damage of $1.5 billion. Twelve thousand dwellings were destroyed or damaged, along with 4,000 shops, 600 factories, 200 schools and five colleges. Hundreds of thousands were out of work. Farm land was chewed up. Railways were cut. The slowdown of trade badly affected tax and customs revenues.\n\nAfter a ceasefire on 3 March that enabled the government to return to Nanking from Luoyang, British and American diplomats joined peace talks, at which the Japanese pressed for demilitarisation of the Chinese city and the surrounding zone. This would have meant China withdrawing its troops while the treaty arrangements would allow Japan to retain forces in the settlement and on the river. Chiang told the British that this would be too great an insult, while Tokyo was keen to reach an agreement so that it could concentrate on Manchuria where the Kwantung Army had created the puppet state of Manchukuo* (Country of the Manchus) with the last Manchu emperor as nominal chief executive. Japan's focus on the north meant that there was surprisingly little reaction when a Korean \u00e9migr\u00e9 threw a bomb concealed in a water bottle during a ceremony in a Shanghai park to celebrate Hirohito's birthday. The head of the Japanese residents' association was killed on the spot. The military commander in Shanghai died a month later of wounds. The Minister to China lost a leg, and was sent an artificial limb by the Emperor. At other times, this would have been the spark for a fresh attack, but peace talks continued. Opposition to them came, rather, from Chinese hawks who pelted Nanking's negotiator with coins in the face to symbolise the 'sale of the nation'.\n\nIn the end, a compromise saved face on both sides \u2013 the Japanese agreed to withdraw from Chinese areas within four weeks, and, while its troops were barred from the city, Nanking was allowed to send in national police. The document had to be taken to hospitals to be signed by the chief Chinese negotiator, who was receiving attention for his facial wounds, and the Japanese Minister, who was awaiting treatment for his leg.\n\nMuch to its discontent, Chiang sent the Nineteenth Route Army back to rejoin the fight against the Communists. The Route Army's original commander, Chen Mingshu, who held senior posts in Nanking, stepped down in June, and left for Europe. He wanted a stiffer policy towards Japan, but he had other reasons for walking out. He had regional political ambitions, and, as he travelled to Paris, his deputy headed for Hong Kong with $700,000 in government money. Even more dramatically, T. V. Soong also chose this moment to resign. The Finance Minister favoured a tougher line against the Japanese, too, but, like Chen, had other motives. Though he had managed to balance the books for four months, the financial outlook was dire, exacerbated by the drop in revenue from Shanghai and Manchuria. The bond market, the main source of funds, had suffered a major collapse. But Chiang wanted to spend another $5 million on a fresh anti-Communist campaign in Jiangxi. Soong denounced the 'vicious cycle of debt' and called for economies and internal reforms. 'Have not banditry and communism thrived on political military and economic maladjustments, and will they not respond better to a systematic, if unspectacular, combination of politico-military-economic treatment?' he asked.\n\nFollowing Chiang's example, TV. was using resignation as a weapon to get his own way. He kept in touch with Wang Jingwei, and was back in office after a month with an agreement that halved the increase in army expenditure. Despite his return to government, Soong maintained close links with the financiers critical of Chiang for his military spending. He kept up good relations with his middle sister, Qingling, who could be a conduit to the left. He had identified himself as an advocate of resisting Japan. A fresh trial of strength between the two men could only be a matter of time. On top of this, there were stories of a family falling-out between the Finance Minister and his eldest sister after she objected to his love affair with a friend of hers. Given the way Ailing influenced her younger sister, this created personal friction with the Chiangs to add to the policy discords.\n\nChiang's position was buttressed when the government gave him the title of Generalissimo, to mark his primacy as its military leader which, given the weight of the army in the regime, also signified his overall supremacy. The head of the inquiry commission on Manchuria sent by the League of Nations, Lord Lytton, told a dinner in Nanking that, while the outside world might have difficulty with Chinese names, one 'is familiar all over the world \u2013 Chiang Kai-shek. All the world knows General Chiang Kai-shek as a great soldier.'\n\nThe commission produced a report that was generally favourable to the Nationalists. Though conceding some rights to Japan, it pronounced Manchuria an integral part of China, said the Mukden Incident could not be regarded as legitimate self-defence, and described Manchukuo as a Japanese creation, not an independent state. Tokyo, it found, had violated the Covenant of the League. When the report was debated at the League's headquarters in Geneva, Japan cast the only negative vote, and quit the international body. It knew that, whatever the Lytton team had decided, neither China nor the League was going to take action. AJapanese report even had Chiang remarking: 'If Japan will be satisfied with Manchuria, well, we aren't happy about it but we can pretend they aren't there.'\n\nIt was not all plain sailing for the Japanese in the north-east, however. A Manchurian commander, General Ma, who had joined the puppet administration, raided the treasury, and rode off to set up a resistance force of 3,500 men. One guerrilla attack got as far as the Manchukuo capital of Changchun. Another stole six Japanese planes from an airfield. When the Kwantung Army announced finding Ma's corpse, dressed in a general's uniform and lying beside a Mongolian pony, it turned out to have been a decoy body \u2013 Ma slipped over the Soviet border, and got back to China via Europe.\n\nManchuria's outlaws staged unremitting attacks on towns and travellers: after one raid on a train, they held 350 Japanese and Koreans for two weeks. In another kidnapping, bandits grabbed the eighteen-year-old English wife of an American oil company executive and the son of a British general at a racecourse, and kept them for seven weeks in a mud hut hidden in reeds. 'They are going to cut off our ears and I rather want to keep mine,' Muriel Pawley wrote in a message sent with the $1.2 million ransom demand. 'Am filthy and long for a bath. The chow is awful.' In a letter to her father, she begged to be got out of 'this Hell incarnate', and asked for a powder puff and lipstick. Eventually, a militia unit freed them.\n\nDespite such local difficulties, the Kwantung Army was sabre-rattling on the frontier between Manchuria and the mountainous province of Jehol beyond the Great Wall.* There was also a threat from the Dogmeat General of Shandong, who had failed in one attempt to retake his province, but now made another comeback bid \u2013 however, he was shot dead in a train station by the nephew of a general he had killed years earlier. His concubines divided up what they could grab from the estate, one getting a locksmith to open the warlord's safe and filching the jewels inside.\n\nWang Jingwei, as head of the Executive Yuan, blamed the Young Marshal for his ineffectiveness in the north which he contrasted with the 'gallant resistance' of the defence of Shanghai. 'This was admittedly an extraordinary feat and is therefore hardly one which may reasonably be expected of you,' he added in a telegram to Zhang. 'Although nearly a year has elapsed [since the Mukden Incident], there has been absolutely no achievement to your credit.' Wang then played the resignation gambit. Saying he could not meet Zhang's financial requests, he felt that he, himself, had to step down, and hoped the Marshal would do the same, which would be 'an inestimable blessing to China south of the Great Wall'. The younger man responded that organising resistance took time, but did submit his resignation. Meeting reporters in a Manchu palace in Peiping, he said he would go to study at Oxford or Cambridge, visit Italy, Turkey and Germany, and then settle in France.\n\nAfter the whole government resigned, Chiang stepped in, becoming Chairman of the Military Council for North China \u2013 the _North China Daily News_ wrote that 'General Chiang Kai-shek yesterday became the Government of China'. Wang left for diabetes treatment in Hamburg, and was succeeded by T. V. Soong as the cabinet withdrew its resignation. The Marshal, who still had the support of northern generals, continued as a member of the military council in Peiping, but his authority had been sapped. With the political crisis settled to his advantage, Chiang could turn to his main priority, for which he received the backing of an American visitor on an inspection tour of missionary work. The future Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, said it would be ridiculous to resist Japan before the Communist issue was settled. As the governor of Jiangxi put it, invoking an old Chinese saying about adversaries, the Japanese were a skin wound; the Communists were a disease of the heart.\n\nThe campaigns Chiang launched against the Red Armies in 1932 in the hope of liquidating them before having to deal with the Japanese involved a huge commitment of troops in four provinces. A major assault, accompanied by an economic blockade, was directed at the base area north of the Yangtze known as Oyuwan.* The Communists there won several victories, but the pressure forced them to move west on a long march to Sichuan, where they established a base area of 35,000 square miles with a well-supplied army of 80,000, including a 2,000-strong regiment of women. In Oyuwan, Chiang tried a strategy used in the defeat of the Taiping rebels in the nineteenth century. He ordered the establishment of civilian volunteer units in villages, their leaders trained and equipped by the government. Villages were to come to one another's aid, using roads built between them. Four army divisions per province would handle major threats.\n\nThe policy depended on villagers being ready to volunteer and work together against the Communists. But the regime lacked the political message to enthuse rural people, and came to count on the local elite to dragoon the population while soldiers implemented ruthless repression. As Chiang put it, 'in the emancipated territories, a thorough house-cleaning is being carried out'. Confirmed Communists were shot out of hand while those ready to turn over a new leaf were put to work as labourers.\n\nNext, Chiang turned south for a fourth campaign in Jiangxi, applying the village militia strategy to back up the army, and trying to bring local administration under tighter control. He stationed 140,000 troops as blocking forces on the province's eastern and southern borders, and sent 100,000 men to confront the 65,000-strong Red Army. His campaign began well when the Communists suffered heavy casualties after launching an attack out of their mountainous stronghold. Nationalist planes helped to repulse an attempted foray into Guangdong. Then the main Communist force won a string of encounters, showing exceptional mobility as it wheeled round Nationalist units.\n\nThe expansion of Chiang's forces had meant a steady deterioration in their quality. Visiting the front, the British writer Peter Fleming found soldiers stealing food and turning to banditry when defeated. Their military abilities, discipline and equipment were poor. Officers thought only of defence. As for the local people, 'press gangs, conscript labour, extra taxes, and many forms of indignity and extortion have made their lives a burden to them, and in return they have received only the most inadequate protection. If anything is calculated to make the Chinese peasant turn spontaneously to Communism . . . it is having troops permanently billeted on him.'\n\nThe government established some welfare centres to try to win over the peasants. But they had little success. A League of Nations expert who visited one in a Jiangxi district of 18,000 inhabitants reported that just sixty people were receiving medical care at the hospital, which had twenty beds. Only 10 per cent of people joined the centre's co-operative farms. Elsewhere in Jiangxi, an agricultural economist reported, the war meant that 'weeds are growing rank in the rice fields, homes lie in ruins, bleak and forlorn, village upon village is totally depopulated, here and there a family huddles together in a shack, facing the winter's cold and gradual starvation.'\n\nAt Christmas, Chiang broke off from the Jiangxi campaign and went with Meiling and the Kungs to spend the holiday at Xikou. They made part of the journey in a bus: seeing some soldiers behaving badly by the roadside, the Generalissimo stopped the vehicle and ordered their arrest. In his home village, he stayed in the family house, visited ancestral tombs and his mother's grave, and took walks in the crisp air. On 1 January, the Japanese made their next move.\n\nThe scene was a coastal border town, Shanhaiguan, the gateway from Manchuria to China proper between mountains and sea at the start of the Great Wall. Japan had the right to station a small garrison there under the Boxer Treaty. After provocative night manoeuvres, its soldiers announced the discovery of two bombs in their quarters. The town was bombed and shelled. Tanks and an armoured train joined the attack. On the third day, engulfed in smoke and flames, Shanhaiguan fell. The death toll among the defenders was put at nearly 600, with 300 Japanese killed or wounded. 'Are we going back to a state of savagery and barbarism?' the Young Marshal asked.\n\nIn Tokyo, the Foreign Minister said that the province of Jehol was part of Manchukuo which needed to be defended against the Chinese. The governor there was a former bandit and sidekick of the Old Marshal called Tang Yulin, who ordered his wives to practise horse-riding each morning and was known for his cruelty and corruption. He had a drug factory in the grounds of his palace, and sold off plundered Manchu relics in foreign treaty ports. His 20,000-man army was a ragtag force.\n\nTravelling to Peiping, T. V. Soong called the region a powder keg. He arranged for imperial treasures to be moved to Nanking to protect them from the Japanese and from officials who were selling them to antique dealers. Zhang Xueliang and W. H. Donald drove through blizzards to the Jehol capital of Chengde where the only troops they saw were those guarding the opium factory. Governor Tang listened to the visitors urging him to resist, and did nothing. The steep mountains of his province should have provided excellent defensive terrain, but the Japanese brought planes and artillery to bear, slaughtering the local troops in bare, narrow valleys which offered no shelter, and where their camels, donkeys and bullock carts were sitting ducks for air attacks. Nanking declined to provide money or supplies, and so-called volunteers sent in were badly armed and untrained.\n\nThe Japanese advance through snowstorms and biting winds was spearheaded by free-ranging columns of cavalry, trucks and armoured cars. Dogs carried communications between units. Defections weakened the Chinese further. Incendiary bombs burned down forests where their troops were hiding. The province's inhabitants believed the newcomers could be no worse than the old regime.\n\nGovernor Tang commanded lorries to take his belongings to safety, depriving the defenders of transport. When the trucks arrived at a Great Wall pass, Nationalist troops seized the freight and sent them back to Chengde. The Young Marshal ordered Tang's arrest, but he had fled on horseback with 200 bodyguards. After a heavy air attack, the city was taken by a brigade of the Kwantung Army, followed by lorries carrying Korean girls for the troops. The Japanese pursued the retreating Chinese to the Great Wall. From there, they could look down on the plain towards Peiping where martial law was declared.\n\nThe most trenchant analysis of the disaster came from T. V. Soong. He contrasted Japan's preparations, mechanisation and equipment, and the Chinese army with 'no staff work, with the generals staying hundreds of miles behind, with no transport except of the most primitive sort, which took several weeks for supplies to reach the front, no liaison between different commands, no anti-aircraft guns and trenching materials or artillery, and soldiers trained only in drill ground requirements'. He blasted Chinese generals, who 'strut about in field-grey uniforms with Sam Browne belts', for their old-fashioned mindset and their _sauve qui pent_ mentality. The greatest blame lay in 'the system which permits the existence of vast armies of ill-fed, ill-armed and ill-trained soldiery which in time of crisis degenerates into helpless mobs'.\n\nWhile this fresh disaster was unfolding in the north, Chiang had returned to the campaign in Jiangxi where there were some successes \u2013 the Nanking news agency told of one battle in a forest where the corpses bled 'black blood into the red sand' as the Red Army was forced to retreat, leaving behind shoes, belts, puttees, broken umbrellas, papers, books and red-starred caps. But the Communists ambushed two Nationalist divisions and inflicted heavy losses \u2013 one commander committed suicide. The Generalissimo decided to call an end to the campaign, and to find a culprit for the debacle in Jehol.\n\nOn 8 March 1933, he and T. V. Soong arrived by rail in the town of Baoding south of Peiping. Waiting there was the Young Marshal, aboard his personal train. Zhang was called to a cool, five-minute meeting at which his resignation was accepted. Chiang compared the situation to an unstable boat that had to be righted by dropping one of those on board. The Marshal would be replaced by the Generalissimo's associate, He Yingqin.\n\nTwo days later, Zhang addressed his troops outside Peiping. 'We came into China proper to effect national unification,' he told them. 'But the result is that we are now homeless.' He urged them to obey Chiang's orders. If they remembered their duty to the nation, the objective of returning to Manchuria could be attained, he added. Then he flew out in his Ford aircraft with two wives, four bodyguards, and W. H. Donald. A brass band played when they landed at Shanghai. Wearing a dark coat of silk and fur, the Young Marshal looked tired as he drove to T. V. Soong's house to meet officials. He invited local journalists to a press conference, but they boycotted it when guards frisked them for weapons. Somebody put up a scroll at the front door reading, 'Do you remember that you have lost Manchuria? And now, through you, Jehol is lost to China.'\n\nZhang moved to a house on the Avenue Foch, and Donald arranged for treatment by an American drug specialist who put him and his equally addicted wives to sleep with anaesthetics, and then injected their arms with fluid drawn from blisters induced on their stomachs. They were unconscious for several days. 'If he dies, so will you,' a Manchurian aide warned the doctor. But the Marshal and his wives came round. Cured of his habit, he set out with Donald on an ocean voyage to Europe. At sea, he flirted with Mussolini's daughter whose husband, Count Ciano, was returning from a diplomatic posting in China. When the Marshal went to Rome in May, she took him to meet her father. By then, he had put on so much weight that he had to buy new clothes. In Britain, he called on the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, at his official country residence at Chequers, met eminent figures at the Dorchester Hotel in London, and rented a house behind the seafront in Brighton where he held black-tie poker parties that began after dinner and continued behind drawn curtains till the following afternoon.\n\nIn the Marshal's old domain, Japan's troops ran into stiff opposition on the Great Wall from snipers and sword-wielding defenders. Returning from Europe to resume his chairmanship of the Executive Yuan, Wangjingwei recorded a speech for the Star Motion Picture Company in Shanghai urging resistance to Japan. But, after its first reverses, the Kwantung Army advanced on Peiping. At a meeting with Nationalist officials that lasted till 4.30 a.m., the Japanese demanded demilitarisation of an area of 115,800 square miles with a population of 6 million. Otherwise, the old capital would be attacked. The Chinese agreed, and a date for signing the accord was set for 31 May in the walled coastal town of Tangku.*\n\nThe Chinese delegation arrived in a long train of Wagons-Lits carriages which parked on a siding. Two Japanese destroyers were moored at battle stations in a river estuary opposite them. 'Presently from the curtained coaches there descended nearly a score of high Chinese officials,' Hallett Abend of the _New York Times wrote_. 'No automobiles or carriages had been provided. They had to walk down the narrow, dusty little Tangku streets which had no sidewalks. At the gate of the Japanese Consulate, sentries brusquely challenged the Chinese, and kept them standing in the hot sun for nearly ten minutes. When they were finally admitted, they were received by Japanese officials who had been carefully selected from ranks below those of the Chinese delegates.'\n\nThe Japanese presented a written document to be signed within an hour. The head of the Chinese team insisted this was a purely military accord without political ramifications. The Japanese cut him off, saying he either had to agree or not \u2013 that was all. He signed. Champagne was served. Then the Chinese walked back through the dust and heat to their train.\n\nThe Nationalist soldiers left Peiping quietly: an observer described them as going 'in small groups sauntering along rather dejectedly, and seemingly quite at random with rickshaws and carts loaded with every conceivable kind of household article'. Jehol, where a new governor arrived from Manchukuo with 3,000 cavalry, was incorporated into the puppet domain. Demilitarisation was a sham as far as the Japanese were concerned since the protocols imposed on China after the Boxer revolt gave them the right to station troops in the area; so they were free to build up their garrisons there. The zone Japan dominated included nearly all Hebei province north of Peiping, and the big port of Tianjin. Its officers tried to foment autonomist movements elsewhere in the north, offering $300,000 to one petty warlord who was, however, assassinated in his hotel bathroom in Tianjin. The Chinese commanders left in the region operated with virtual autonomy of Nanking, making deals with the Japanese and manoeuvring for survival.\n\nThe appeasement provoked a fresh wave of demonstrations, particularly by students in Peiping, providing another rift between educated youth and the regime. Chiang's southern opponents accused him of having given the Japanese a free hand to interfere in China's internal affairs with the Tangku Truce. Qingling Soong organised an international conference in Shanghai where eighty participants met secretly by candlelight to denounce 'the base betrayal by the Chinese ruling classes and the Kuomintang'. T. V. Soong showed his colours by targeting tariff increases against imports from Japan \u2013 Tokyo revenged itself by sabotaging his plan for a committee of foreign advisers to stimulate investment in China, persuading American and European bankers not to join for fear of losing Japanese business. In the far north, the Christian General formed an anti-Japanese army which defeated Manchukuo troops but was then cornered between the Kwantung Army and Nationalist forces moved up by Chiang, who had no desire to see Feng reassert himself. Faced with this double threat, the Christian General handed over to two subordinates \u2013 one was arrested by the Nationalists after being shot and wounded in Tianjin; he was sent to Nanking and executed. Feng himself retreated to a mountain temple, rising at 4 a.m. to write poetry and sixty sheets of Chinese characters a day. One poem spoke of the nation getting weaker by the day:\n\nIt is unbearable to think about! Unbearable to see!  \nLet men of spirit arise and act!  \nRecover our lost lands\n\nWang Jingwei compared China to a man whose life was in grave danger. Describing Japan as a mad dog, Chiang wrote in his diary that asking it to be reasonable would be like asking a tiger to give up its fur. 'So long as there is any breath of life in me, I will not cease fighting the enemy,' he pledged. The truce, he added, provided a breathing space. The international situation might improve. 'At a time of national humiliation we should \"lie in faggots and taste gall\" and should never be discouraged or relax our vigilance,' he wrote to himself. 'We must draw up a plan for national reconstruction and carry it out with dispatch and effectiveness in ten years!'\n\n* * *\n\n* Known at the time as Woosung.\n\n* Manchuguo in Pinyin.\n\n* Jehol, also known as Rehe, no longer exists as an independent province, being split between Hebei and Liaoning.\n\n* Also E-Yu-Wan. The name was an acronym of the classical names of the provinces at whose junction it lay.\n\n* Tanggu in Pinyin.\n\n# CHAPTER 14\n\n _Follow the Leader_\n\nIN CHIANG'S IDEAL WORLD, China would have been the traditional family on which the country's society was based. The 480 million children would look up unquestioningly to their father figure, following his dictates and showing endless fortitude as they eliminated the noxious influence of the wayward Communist son and repaired the damage done by the aggressive Japanese neighbour. The paterfamilias did not need to be liked, but he had to be respected as the embodiment of national salvation. Were the people's devotion to that aim as wholehearted as his mother's had been to raising her children, he said, China would gain its place among the great powers.\n\n'If his children behave well, the father feels they reflect honour upon him; if badly, they disgrace him,' Chiang noted. 'In a narrow sense, the family means simply a household. In a broader sense, however, it includes all civic and Government organs, including the Revolutionary Party, and the schools.' Army units directly under Chiang's command were regarded as 'family troops' and his close advisers, the Chen brothers, were 'adopted sons'. 'There exists not much difference in the management of the family and that of troops,' the leader said. 'I have often compared the army to a family wherein I look upon the soldiers under me as a father regards his children.'\n\nThe national family needed to be told what to do rather than having a voice in its own affairs. Its thought had to be unified, so that it would not be tempted to seek different ways of thinking and create disorder. At the start of the Nationalist revolution in Canton, Chiang's guide Dai Jitao had compared China to a sheet of blank paper that could be coloured as its rulers chose. The Generalissimo told officials to treat ordinary people as if they were three-year-olds, and spoke of initiating a control system that would mobilise millions within hours in a 'strict, huge and healthy organisation'. 'I believe that unless everyone has absolute trust in one man, we cannot reconstruct the nation and we cannot complete the revolution,' he added.\n\nLike the Emperors before him and the Communist leader Deng Xiaoping after him, Chiang stressed the need for stability and order, and opposed political diversity. Democracy was ruled out as 'absolutely impossible for the entire nation' \u2013 instead, a carefully selected national congress would meet every three years to rubber-stamp legislation. As one loyalist put it, foreign aggression and the persistence of feudalism meant that the country needed a 'Chinese-style dictatorship'.\n\nThe Lixingshe movement set up by dedicated supporters from Whampoa in 1932 to ensure authoritarian allegiance to the leader grew to number half a million members, with offshoots such as the political shock troops known as the Blue Shirts. But the notion of a continuous mass movement remained deeply suspect to the militarised bureaucracy in Nanking \u2013 a major difference between Chiang's regime and Mussolini's Italy or Hider's Germany. It presented an authoritarian view of Chinese tradition as a historic justification for dictatorship with a conservative cultural policy to buttress the supremacy of the state and its chief. Intellectuals were told to sacrifice their individual liberty for the sake of die nation. If the regime had fascist tendencies, it was 'Confucian Fascism', as the historian Frederic Wakeman has dubbed it.\n\nWhat became known as the Nanking decade was the moment to implement reform, modernisation and unity for the national family. While the years from 1927 to 1937 were marked by recurrent fighting, large areas were not affected, and the government could claim a national role not seen since the fall of the Manchus. After the upheaval of the warlord era, it was now up to Nanking to shape post-imperial China.\n\nWith strong economic growth in the major cities and the development of some agricultural areas after land purchases by commercially oriented capitalists, the era produced material progress building on the plans drawn up after die initial victory of the Northern Expedition. A national currency was launched to replace provincial notes and coins. Income tax was introduced. Joint ventures were established with German firms to build trucks and aircraft. Big new buildings went up in major cities where the infrastructure was improved. Chiang's brother-in-law, H. H. Kung, proposed harnessing the power of the Yangtze for electric power. New crop strains were investigated, and a model farm was opened outside the capital. Prison reform was proclaimed, with a programme to build model jails in which inmates would be reformed. Pharmacy colleges were set up in Shanghai and Nanking. The Academia Sinica University researched everything from astronomy to agriculture. A simplified textual language, restricted to 800 characters, was evolved as an aid to literacy.\n\nAirlines were set up as joint ventures with American and German companies. Foreign countries used part of the indemnities they had received after the Boxer Rebellion to finance infrastructure projects, so long as the equipment was bought from them. During the 1930s, 3,000 miles of railways were constructed, and the completion of the link between Wuhan and Canton meant it was possible to travel between Peiping and Guangdong by train. Hundreds of locomotives and freight wagons were imported. China's first trucks and locomotives were assembled from foreign parts, along with a plane able to fly at 100 mph. By 1936, 15,000 miles of roads had been built, bringing the national total to 68,000 miles. An impressed American mission in 1934 reported a 'vast change' coming over China.\n\nDespite the attempts of the Chen brothers to impose conformity, intellectual enquiry and cultural development sprouted among intellectuals, students and enlightened bourgeoisie. Leading writers, most of whom veered to the left, saw literature as playing a role in promoting social progress. Shanghai's film industry boomed. China engaged with the world to a degree not known before, both in its own presence abroad and in the inroads of foreign influences. Its modern-minded diplomats made their presence felt at the League of Nations and in international conferences. The country regained control over tariffs, maritime customs, and the salt monopoly, as well as steadily increasing its authority over foreign concessions. Despite all its problems, and the loss of Manchuria and Jehol, Nanking kept alive the notion of territorial integrity, leading the historian William Kirby to write of a record of 'stunning accomplishments from a position of unenviable weakness'.\n\nBut most of the progress was still confined to small urban areas on the coast and to a tiny fraction of the population.* While Nanking sought to lay the foundations of a modern state and set up the requisite institutions, its reformist members were hobbled by lack of resources, the government's limited authority over large parts of the country, the conservatism of the rural elite, entrenched traditions, and a system that concentrated real power at the apex, in particular in the person of the Generalissimo who represented the state. Modernisation was viewed largely as a matter of economics and technology, not political evolution. Excessive privilege was invested in those favoured by the regime, and the stability and administrative framework needed for change was absent. As the historian Prasenjit Duara has put it, China was 'characterised by a weak state and a strong statist ideology'.\n\nDespite announcements of civil service reforms, many of the same functionaries stayed in place, and recruits came mainly either from the ranks of old warlord officials or the relatives of well-placed Kuomintang members. T. V. Soong still had to struggle to obtain funds from provincial governments. The business levy was not applied to farmers or small local merchants. Revenue collection from bigger fish was marked by corruption. Virtually the only people to pay income tax were civil servants since they were the only ones whose earnings the state could verify. Property taxes were hobbled by lack of information about who owned what \u2013 in some provinces, half the land was not mentioned on the registers. Japanese control of the four north-eastern provinces choked off revenue from there, and smuggling reduced the take from customs duties.\n\nMuch of road and rail building was concentrated in areas where the army was fighting the Communists, rather than where it was needed for economic development. Immense regions had no rail connections \u2013 the track from the Yunnan capital of Kunming to the border with Vietnam was the only one in the whole south-west. A line to Xi'an was the sole spur westward from the main north-south connection, and there were no tracks to the south-eastern ports between Ningbo and Canton. Only a quarter of new roads had hard surfaces; a motorcyclist wrote that, after a day's rain, the highway south of Shanghai became a death trap at over 12 mph while a traveller on a bus from Hangzhou described how the vehicle 'jumped from hole to hole, and simply ploughed itself through mud and mire' in 'a tortuous quagmire not worthy to be classed with the dignity of a road'. Chiang, the Soongs and the elite took a quantum travel leap by using aircraft, but three quarters of China's transport was by unmechanised methods. On one campaign, the Generalissimo flew in two hours from Guizhou to Sichuan; others making the journey by foot or in sedan chairs took seventeen days.\n\nThe capital was, in its way, symbolic of the gulf between the thin crust of modernity and the unchanging mass below. Nanking boasted smart new government and party buildings, the broad avenue leading to the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum, tall broadcasting masts and seaplanes flying up and down the Yangtze. Behind the bold front, the city was a mass of alleys, huts and low tenements. In 1933, a visitor noticed that the big sports stadium was covered with weeds, and the swimming bath had been cracked by the sun.\n\nChiang's army contained some well-trained and well-equipped forces which gave the regime its military sheen. German advisers schooled elite units \u2013 Chiang sent his adopted son, Wei-kuo, to join the German army where he would participate in the annexation of Austria. An Italian mission arrived to train China's air force but proved less effective: most cadets at its centre in Luoyang came from prominent families and all those who were not killed in crashes were automatically given graduation certificates. Only when the Americans moved in with their training school at Hangzhou did a more effective group of pilots emerge.\n\nStill, many Nationalist units consisted of warlord troops who showed no improvement from the 1920s. Though Chiang's own circle was made up mainly of Whampoa graduates, other commanders from militarist forces were inexperienced in modern warfare. Promotions were more likely to be for political reasons than to recognise ability. With the army assuming unprecedented importance, this produced a central weakness. Generals ran most of China's provinces. The centre of power was the Military Council, and wherever Chiang happened to be. The army replaced the imperial mandarinate as the ladder for upwardly mobile young men from modest backgrounds following in the footsteps of the supreme leader. The regime was run on military lines, and its leader's concept of the state was rooted in his regimented view of life.\n\nChiang's intolerance of dissent was mirrored in the system below him. As a result, there was no development of a political structure or an innovative administrative staff that could deal with China's diversity and the scale of its problems \u2013 on the contrary, power was concentrated on one man and the cliques surrounding him. The apparatus of repression grew steadily. Anti-subversion laws were draconian, and applied indiscriminately in the absence of a proper legal system, with free use of summary executions, arbitrary detention and torture. Terror squads disposed of critics. The editor of the leading Shanghai daily, who threatened to become a rallying point for the city's bourgeoisie as chairman of the civic association, was assassinated by Nationalist agents when he stopped to stretch his legs while driving back from holiday with his family \u2013 Big-Eared Du took control of the paper. The leader of the League for the Defence of Civil Rights was shot in Shanghai as he got into his car with his fifteen-year-old son \u2013 his friend, the noted left-wing novelist Ding Ling, was more fortunate; she was kept under arrest for three years, but allowed to be with her lover and provided with sheets, food and books before being released and slipping off to join the Communists.\n\nThe factionalism which the Kuomintang had shown from its earliest days \u2013 fuelled by its leader's divide-and-rule tactics \u2013 meant there were fissures even among those who proclaimed their desire to eliminate opposition and solidify the regime. One such running battle opposed the secret police chief, Dai Li, and the Chen brothers, Lifu and Guofu, nephews of Chiang's Shanghai mentor, Chen Qimei.\n\nDai, a former Whampoa cadet and native of Chiang's province of Zhejiang, ran the innocently named Military Bureau of Statistics (Juntong), along with more clandestine outfits. His agents carried out intelligence, assassination and sabotage of political enemies and Japanese, and infiltrated the police to manipulate and control them. A Communist saying had it that, out of every 100,000 people, 3,000 were Nationalist spies. Dai used men from his home area as his communications staff because he could speak to them in an impenetrable local dialect that avoided the need for code. Already close to Chiang because of their shared provincial origin, Dai forged an even stronger bond by travelling to Xi'an to be with his boss in the kidnapping drama of 1936. Dai's critics said they could see the cruelty in his smile, his gold-capped teeth glinting. But he was also a subtle politician with qualities of personal leadership lacking in many of the other Nationalist kingpins. Above all, he was ready to do anything to defend the Generalissimo, telling his agents that a chief like Chiang required 'ears and eyes' everywhere who did not need to adhere too closely to the law.\n\nThe Chen brothers ran the Organisation Department of the Kuomintang, which supervised the party, and, from that power base, built up a following among officials. Their group, the CC Clique, became one of the regime's most significant political outfits, drawing support from rightist party factions. By 1931, the Clique accounted for 15 per cent of members of the Central Executive Committee. It trained loyalists at the Central Political Academy who went to infiltrate provincial governments as agents for Chiang. Drawing finance from government-backed banks, they branched out into publishing and propaganda, and ran their own intelligence and security arm. Referring to Dai Li's rival operation, Lifu told his group: 'Chiang needs two sets of eyes and ears.'\n\nThe Chens were also bitterly opposed to the ultra-loyalist Lixingshe movement and the Blue Shirt Society set up in 1932 on a basis of veneration for the state, extreme nationalism including anti-Japanese terror, complete dedication to Chiang, and a belief that all opponents should be eliminated. The Blue Shirts urged that 'negative elements' in society should be killed with 'extreme measures, causing the masses to become so frightened that they . . . will not again transgress the laws'. Chinese classical tradition and its heroes were melded with devotion to the national leader as the path to salvation. Dai Li headed the group's security squads which carried out assassinations and intimidation.\n\nChiang passed the Presidency of the Republic to a man who was no threat to his supremacy. Lin Sen, who had served as President of the Senate after the 1911 revolution, was the model of a Kuomintang elder with his round spectacles, goatee beard and reputation for wise counsel, except that nobody asked him for it very often. His official status made no difference to the Generalissimo's supremacy. At the head of the Executive Yuan and the Military Committee, Chiang controlled both arms of the regime. At one point, he held twenty-five different posts.\n\nHe worked immensely hard, often exhausting himself. His inability to delegate meant that he got involved in fields where he was unqualified to make decisions \u2013 he even decided which fingerprinting system the police should adopt. His long speeches, delivered in a high-pitched voice marked by his provincial accent, were schoolmasterish admonitions in which he often equated himself with the nation. His audience was expected to go away and do as it was told. When the leader took a reality check, the results could be shocking. Early in 1930, for example, he paid a surprise visit to government departments to see how far they were following instructions to work harder, and were observing the abolition of the Lunar New Year holiday under a decree adopting the Western calendar. Only at the Interior Ministry did he find anybody at their desks. 'This points to one important fact \u2013 that the Chinese people have no respect for laws,' he told the government council. 'Inertia is our most powerful enemy . . . In all the Government offices, there is no noticeable activity. Everybody is sitting about and doing nothing. Indeed, it is difficult to tell whether the offices are still functioning.'\n\n'The revolution is in danger of failing, and the entire nation has gradually lost trust in the party,' he warned at the end of 1931. By the following year, he considered that 'the Chinese revolution has failed'. Government activity, he complained, consisted almost solely of passing round documents. 'With regard to practical work, Chinese either do not know how, or \u2013 if they know \u2013 they are slow in the extreme.' Party members had not paid enough attention to individual moral training, and had 'spent too much time putting up posters, shouting slogans and issuing manifestos rather than getting down to actual work . . . We must regulate our minds and be sincere in our aims, dispel dangerous ideas, sink personal differences, and act according to the dictates of conscience.' To illustrate how officials fell short of proper standards of behaviour, he cited party members going to Kuomintang headquarters in carpet slippers.\n\nChiang should also have focused more closely on the wider problems affecting the country. Health, welfare and social services were notable by their absence. Disease was rife. Nearly half the children died before they were five. The Director of Health in Nanking blamed 50 per cent of the country's deaths on bad sanitation. There were 30,000 hospital beds, 5,000 registered doctors and 1,700 nurses for 450 million people. If Chiang had a dental clinic established in Nanking, with a Western adviser, his interest was essentially personal given his continual problem with his teeth.\n\nEducation was in almost as poor a state. The government's target of free schooling for all would have required annual expenditure of $260 million: the budget allocation never went above $42 million, and was frequently half that figure. Schools of even the most rudimentary kind were few and far between in the countryside. Modern textbooks were more expensive and less available than the traditional brush, ink and paper. As in so many areas, the Nationalists were starting from an extremely low base. The number of secondary schools was almost trebled between 1926 and 1935 but still only reached 3,000, with 500,000 students. Even in Shanghai, only 2 per cent of the population had been to high school \u2013 in Western China, the figure dropped to 0.004 per cent. A League of Nations mission put the university population at 30,000.\n\nA movement for 'plain speech' to replace classic literary Chinese did produce major changes in teaching, but its impact was mainly in urban centres. There were interesting initiatives such as a rural education movement and 'work-study units' developed by the reformer Tao Xingzhi, but these were only a drop in the bucket of need and ran into political opposition from those who preferred peasants to remain uneducated. Private schools for the middle classes in cities often taught a foreign curriculum. The real prize of education abroad further widened the divide: the Commercial Press in Shanghai paid American college graduates four times as much as those who had studied in China, and guaranteed them a custom-made desk, book shelf, crystal ink stand and rattan chair. In a country where literary accomplishment and learning had traditionally been venerated, the educational shortcomings of the Nanking decade were symptomatic of a regime in which military force was pre-eminent, and intellectuals were pressed to serve the corporatist state.\n\nThe Kuomintang elite came mainly from the cities, or felt most at home there; in this respect, Chiang was atypical with his village roots and his frequent returns to Xikou \u2013 though his wife was a symbol of the urban, foreign-educated upper class. But, in the 1930s, only fifteen cities had more than 200,000 inhabitants and the population of urban centres with over 100,000 inhabitants accounted for only 4.5 per cent of the Chinese. In 1934, an economist, Yao Xinning, put the working rural population at 360 million, compared to 1.4 million industrial workers and 2.2 million soldiers.\n\nThe village remained the fundamental social unit, far removed from the modernity of the coastal cities. It would usually consist of mud or adobe huts, sometimes strengthened with wood. Many contained only a dozen or fewer houses where the peasants lived with their animals. There was no power or sanitation. These were self-sufficient communities, illiterate, self-perpetuating, deeply traditional and inward looking, their horizons limited by lack of communications. Authority lay with the landlords or their agents; the national government was an abstraction. The regime made gestures \u2013 Chiang included agriculture in a programme of economic reforms he promulgated in 1935; new strains of rice and wheat were introduced on a small scale; there were talks about setting up a fertiliser factory. But the regime's engagement with the countryside was strictly limited, and frequently oppressive as it was conducted through the sieve of local power-holders.\n\nA co-operative movement established 15,000 local societies, half of them offering cheap credit; but they were often used as a new milch cow by those running them, usually the local gentry \u2013 in some provinces, it was said that only half the available money actually went to the farmers. Serious change would have included the establishment of a national register of property ownership, redistribution of land and rent reform, plus a reduction in interest rates. But, when a Farmers' Bank was opened, its main object was to enable Chiang to draw more revenue for his military campaigns from the opium trade by offering drug producers and merchants financial services. It had no audits. When one was suggested, Chiang flew into a rage.\n\nMost of China's 58 million farms were uneconomically small, and tilled by humans, not animals or machines. Forty per cent of land was rented, often at rates that were high compared to the cash value of what was produced. In Chiang's home province of Zhejiang, 3.3 per cent of the population owned 53 per cent of the land; in Guangdong, the same proportion of land belonged to 2 per cent of the inhabitants. The handful of experts trained abroad in modern techniques often preferred to live in towns rather than where their knowledge could have been put to practical effect. Human waste, much used as fertiliser, spread disease. By one estimate, a quarter of deaths in China were attributed to parasites carried in faeces. Chemicals could have made the night soil safe, but they were not available. Imported fertilisers were subject to duties as high as 50 per cent.\n\nResearch by the economic historian Loren Brandt suggests that agriculture grew more rapidly than the population, but average per capita annual income in the countryside was still only around $26. Fifty per cent of the revenue of farmers went to landlords. Moneylenders charged up to 6 per cent a month \u2013 in silk zones of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the rate went to 100 per cent for forty days. Only a quarter of farmers could live without going into debt; a bad harvest, flooding or drought was a disaster. With no bargaining power, they were subject to the vagaries of markets. 'Rural China,' the economist Yao Xinning concluded, 'is now bankrupt.' The British social scientist R. H. Tawney compared Chinese farmers to 'a man standing permanently up to his neck in water so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him'. In rural towns, the most prosperous commercial enterprise was often the pawnshop.\n\nSome of the Blue Shirts believed in nationalising land or limiting holdings to under 10 acres, but this was a subject of which the Kuomintang had been fighting shy throughout its existence. The party had thrown its lot in with the landlords and rural elite, which meant that, while he made speeches about the revolution, Chiang was committed to perpetuating the rural status quo. But this world was, in fact, changing. The traditional power of the local gentry and community leaders was sapped by the purchase of land by officials and army officers who often acted as absentee landlords, delegating to local agents so long as they received satisfactory rent remittances. This undermined the cohesion of village life, which was further affected by the move of younger members of the gentry to the cities and by the regime's 'anti-superstition' drives on religious cults that had provided social glue. At the same time, traditional notables in the countryside were suspicious of the centralised bureaucracy Nanking wanted to impose. The outcome was that, in many parts of China, the elite on which Chiang depended either found itself weakened or was leery of being bossed about by Nanking, further sapping the government's ability to make its authority felt.\n\nIn the cities, the advent of the Kuomintang to power had been welcomed by the merchants and chambers of commerce. But they were soon disillusioned as the new regime brought them to heel. Nanking inherited from Sun Yat-sen a belief in a centrally planned economy in which the state would promote industry while China regained its rights from foreigners. This led the government to draw up plans to develop big plants, rather than encouraging smaller-scale private enterprises. A series of national economic programmes unveiled ambitious projects designed to contribute to China's security against external threats \u2013 Japan's development was an obvious model. Merchants were classified as profiteers who were foreign to an ideal Confucian system, and were to be squeezed for taxes rather than regarded as the basis for a modern trading economy. Like everybody else, the capitalists of the big cities were to be co-opted into the family, by force if necessary. Any sign of independence was cause for suppression. As for the workers, Nationalist cadres developed what the historian Elizabeth Perry describes as 'patron-client' relations in which underworld organisers were given privileged positions in return for delivering support from the 'yellow' unions they ran. 'Racketeers replaced radicals,' she observed.\n\nAt the start of the great slump of the 1930s, the decline in the world price of silver, which constituted China's currency reserve, helped the economy by acting as an effective devaluation that boosted exports and attracted foreign investment. Fuelled by the expansion in coastal cities, annual growth reached 6 per cent. But the silver advantage disappeared after Japan and Britain left the gold standard in 1931, and America decided to purchase the metal, raising prices. Reserves flowed out; interest rates rose; deflation set in; manufacturing declined, with big lay-offs of workers. The world depression hit exports of tea, silk and tobacco. Rural income dropped \u2013 in 1934, the overall ratio of farm prices to the amounts farmers spent was half the 1926 level.\n\nThe government's revenue base was too thin to pay for military spending and high debt interest. To raise funds, T. V. Soong visited Europe and the United States in 1933. He met President Roosevelt at the White House, and returned with a loan that would give China cotton and wheat worth $50 million which the government could sell on the domestic market. When he landed in Shanghai, the Finance Minister was treated as a hero. At the beginning of September, he travelled for talks on how to use the loan held in the mountain resort of Lushan above the Yangtze. The main issue was whether it should be employed to boost the economy, or to finance more military expenditure.\n\nSoong's standing made him into a potential rival to the Generalissimo. On top of his strong links with Shanghai bankers and businessmen, his patriotic credentials had been burnished by his attempts to develop the national economy and by the introduction of tariffs that hit the Japanese. His opposition to increased military spending was well known. He had residual contacts with the non-Communist left from his time in Wuhan, and had seen the Young Marshal while in Europe. Even more than Chiang, he could draw on the Soong-Sun nexus. He also had 30,000 tax agents who might be used as a paramilitary force in a coup. But the Finance Minister also had his weaknesses, including a timidity that contrasted with Chiang's ruthlessness. Critics pointed out that the huge discounts Soong used to sell Nanking's securities meant the regime saw only half the face value. His target of a balanced budget seemed a pipe dream at a time when the deficit was $ 10 million a month. In his absence abroad, Nanking had contracted $60 million in fresh debts.\n\nAs was his habit, Chiang appeared to give ground before striking. The Lushan meeting ended with a statement saying the American loan would be used for 'productive enterprises', and T.V. got the Shanghai banks to advance another $75 million. But then the Generalissimo called for more money for a new offensive against the Red Army. On 25 October 1933, Soong resigned. According to Chiang's opponent, Hu Hanmin, he remarked that 'being minister of finance is no different from being Chiang Kai-shek's dog. From now on, I am going to be a man not a dog.' Though Nanking put out the usual explanation that he had gone for health reasons, Soong said that, on the contrary, he was in excellent shape, and was stepping down because 'I was unequal to my task' \u2013 a polite way of saying he would not meet the Generalissimo's demands.\n\nChiang attended a meeting of the Central Executive Committee at which it was decided to keep the Finance Ministry in the family by giving the job to T.V.'s brother-in-law, H. H. Kung. The new minister was experienced in Chinese banking, but the _North China Daily News_ commented that 'the new shoes are a size larger than those which he comfortably and usually fits.' To reassure the businessmen of Shanghai, Kung went there immediately in a private carriage hooked on to the night train. Though he spoke of reining in expenditure, the stocky, amiable descendant of Confucius did all he could to ensure that the Generalissimo had the funds he wanted for the army. In doing so, he determined the eventually disastrous course of financial policy while developing an economic system which merged public and private interests in a way that further undermined the regime's claims to stand for the nation, but made him and his wife among the wealthiest people in the country.\n\nKung's first moves were far from impressive. He increased taxes, which further depressed the economy, lowered duties on Japanese goods and increased those on imports from elsewhere. This exposed Chinese manufacturers to sharper competition from across the sea, and boosted the cost of primary products from other countries. To get money for Chiang, Kung offered even higher rates of return, but the financiers were becoming increasingly unwilling to invest in the government. So the regime simply took over the main finance houses, giving it control of almost three quarters of the nation's banking assets. Despite his row with Chiang, T. V. Soong became chairman of the biggest institution, the Bank of China, and a director of other leading outfits taken over by the state, alongside his brother, T. L. Soong. When the big Commercial Bank tried to resist the government, Kung enlisted Big-Eared Du to use his muscle to get it to cede. For his part, the outgoing head of the Bank of China recorded that he had been intimidated by Chiang's secret police and had been warned by the gang boss that he should not raise any opposition 'for the sake of my health'.\n\nThe Kung connection was a godsend for the minister's acquisitive wife, Ailing Soong, who would pick up tips when her husband discussed policy at home, and make a killing through her various investment vehicles, including one in which Du was a partner. Not that things always went entirely smoothly. Before the introduction of the national currency known as _fabi_ (legal tender) in Sichuan, Ailing gave the gang boss insider information which he used for a big speculative punt on the province's dollar. Unfortunately, there had been a misunderstanding, which left him with a heavy loss. Du demanded reimbursement. The Finance Minister refused. 'That evening,' a British adviser, Sir Frederick Leith-Ross recalled, 'a No. 1 style coffin was deposited on Dr Kung's doorstep by half a dozen funeral attendants.' The next day, a meeting of the Central Bank agreed to reimburse a 'patriotic citizen' who had suffered exchange losses.\n\nThe national currency was an important step forward in rationalising China's financial system. But Kung accompanied it with a circular process by which Nanking issued bonds that were deposited in government banks which then used them as security for notes. In effect, Kung was printing money to finance government spending. This fuelled inflation. To begin with, that was no bad thing since it boosted purchasing power and pulled China out of its depression \u2013 by the end of 1936, industrial output was rising. But, in the longer term, Kung's policies undermined the credibility of government finances, and created a growing gulf between the vast mass of the Chinese people and a small group of urban and party insiders, personified by the Soong clan.\n\nAs well as running the Finance Ministry and chairing the Bank of China, H.H. and TV., between them, headed an array of companies that invested a mixture of government and private money in factories, marketing and trading operations. As the historian of the Shanghai capitalists, Parks Coble, put it: 'H. H. Kung, as minister of finance, borrowed money from government banks he controlled by going through the medium of a private corporation of which he was the chairman of the board and a leading stock holder.' He gave family firms contracts for administrative jobs, as if the government did not have enough underemployed officials to do the work. A month after TV. took a majority stake in the biggest domestic cigarette company, the Finance Ministry changed the tax structure to penalise its foreign competitors. In all this, the family could count on protection from on high. When a report by the Industry Ministry into speculation on the Shanghai Cotton Exchange mentioned 'certain influential persons' who had manipulated the market, Chiang packed the minister who had ordered the investigation off to a provincial governorship. The 'influential people' included Ailing, and the report criticised Du, who was the government representative on the exchange's supervisory board. Both were regarded as being beyond criticism.\n\nThe political-business circles of the Nanking decade had a positive side in encouraging new industrial and commercial projects. But the system was fundamentally inefficient in spawning state-protected monopolies at which unqualified friends and relatives were given jobs. Personal enrichment and corruption were nothing new, but could only further deaden the promise of reform once proffered by the Kuomintang. With salaries kept low, 'for officials to benefit from their position was normal and ethical, as long as they didn't carry it to extremes', an American adviser, Arthur Young, remarked.\n\nChiang made things worse by his habit of handing out posts for political reasons or as rewards for loyalty, rather than as a recognition of ability. The Examination Yuan was meant to appoint officials, but, by 1938, only 4 per cent had achieved their jobs through it. The chopping and changing of senior posts created instability \u2013 between 1930 and 1937, Hubei had five different governors and Anhui six. Senior figures from Chiang down amassed more positions than they could possibly perform \u2013 one survey showed members of the Central Executive Committee and the Political Council with an average of five jobs apiece. Generals were paid the wages of their troops in lump sums for which they, alone, were accountable; they padded their rolls with dead or non-existent soldiers to inflate the money they claimed. Between 1931 and 1937, the Control Yuan, which was meant to fight sleaze, was presented with reports on 69,500 functionaries. Of these, 268 were found guilty, and thirteen lost their jobs. Chiang knew what was going on. 'The revolutionaries have become degenerate,' he said, pointing to the way party members thought only of power and profit. But, once again, his lament was not followed by action.\n\nThe same was true with the major cash cow of narcotics, including morphine and heroin as well as opium. Despite repeated assertions by Chinese representatives to the anti-drugs bureau of the League of Nations that drugs were being suppressed, they were simply too important a source of revenue to be eliminated. Chiang could see the harm being caused, and launched campaigns to reduce consumption. But he also used these as a political weapon, targeting troops to interrupt the traffic through the territories of rebellious provincial barons.\n\nIn 1935, the Generalissimo became head of the Central Opium Suppression Commission which proclaimed the target of phasing out drugs under a six-year programme. Addicts were to be registered and supplied while they were reformed. Anti-opium centres treated a million addicts in three years, mainly poor people and vagrants. Many of them undoubtedly went back onto drugs after being discharged, and narcotics were still widely seen as a remedy for complaints from plague to malaria. Nanking won credit for honesty; Madame Tussaud's Waxworks in London was persuaded to remove a display of an opium den after China's embassy argued, against all the evidence, that such things no longer existed. But past experience could only induce doubt about how hard eradication would be pursued, given the revenue it spawned and the juicy prospects opened up for officials and military officers. Some reached lucrative agreements with the growers to leave the poppies unscathed or imposed high penalties on the crop. A revolt erupted in northern Anhui after local authorities increased the tax three-fold and slapped fees on everything from the rope to measure fields to the paper and ink they used; 20,000 farmers took part in the uprising in which more than fifty people died.\n\nThe crowning irony was the appointment of Du as director of the Opium Suppression Bureau in Shanghai. The gang boss had suffered a setback in 1932 when a clean-up in the French Concession obliged him to move his narcotics operations to the Chinese city. But, having overcome that hiccup, his activities grew and prospered as he moved into legitimate business. He set up the Zhong Wai Bank in a fine five-storey building designed by French architects on the Avenue Edouard VII, and became chairman of the municipal council and a director of the Bank of China, the Shanghai stock exchange, the Bankers' Association and the Chamber of Commerce. The _China Yearbook_ described Du as 'a well known public welfare worker', and an English-language Who's Who called him 'one of the leading financiers, bankers and industrial leaders of China', noting his 'long and honorable record of important achievements in public and civic service'. He was deputy director of the Chinese Red Cross, attended Sunday morning prayers at H. H. Kung's house, funded eight orphanages, contributed to flood relief and supported a rural centre emblazoned with anti-opium slogans.\n\nBut there was no doubt about the roots of his power. 'One hundred thousand men in Shanghai obey his orders,' Kung remarked. 'He could create a disturbance at any moment.' Du's control of the postal union meant he could open mail at will, and he remained the drug kingpin. Meeting the Godfather in his bank office in 1936, an anti-narcotics envoy from the League of Nations, Ilona Ralf Sues, described him as 'a gaunt, shoulderless figure with long, aimlessly swinging arms, clad in a soiled, spotted blue cotton gown; flat feet shod in untidy old slippers; a long egg-shaped head, short-cropped hair, receding forehead, no chin, huge, bat-like ears, cold, cruel lips uncovering big, yellow decayed teeth, the sickly complexion of an addict . . . He came shuffling along, listlessly turning his head right and left to look whether anyone was following him . . . I have never seen such eyes before. Eyes so dark that they seemed to have no pupils, blurred and dull \u2013 dead impenetrable eyes.' When they shook hands, Du's was cold and limp, 'a huge, bony hand with two-inches long, brown, opium-stained claws'.\n\nTaking tea from a small golden pot \u2013 its lid held tight by a golden chain and its neck so narrow and curved that nothing could be inserted, as protection against poisoning \u2013 Du admitted to being the head of China's opium merchants. But he insisted he made no more than $20 million a year from drugs, and that other merchants controlled the trade, passing a slice of the revenue to the suppression bureau. When Sues mentioned two barrels of confiscated drugs which she had seen at a customs warehouse and had been told were earmarked for him, Du's eyes blazed with anger \u2013 'intelligent, passionate, cruel'. But he brought out the stock reply that all narcotics were burned. After Sues said she knew this was untrue, the gangster crashed his fist on the table, and bellowed, 'I protest. This is a lie! Everything is being destroyed except a small part, which the Government keeps for emergency stocks.'\n\nSuch was the man on whom Chiang leaned for control of China's richest city, and for whom he sent a congratulatory scroll when the gangster inaugurated his ancestral temple. Big-Eared Du and his associates, the Kung-Soong business nexus, lazy and corrupt officials, factionalism, feuding security services, an antiquated rural world, woefully inadequate education and health facilities \u2013 no wonder that the Generalissimo lamented the state of the revolution, and that those who had seen the start of the Nanking Decade as a new dawn for China grew progressively disillusioned while the regime, having laid the foundations for a modern state, lost its claim to legitimacy.\n\nChina was too big and too diverse for a government as weak as Nanking to impose its will. Sichuan province, alone, had 52.9 million people, Shandong 38 million, andjiangsu, Henan and Guangdong 100 million between them. Shanghai housed 3.4 million, Tianjin 1.3 million and Nanking a million. Apart from the Communist base areas, thirteen of the eighteen provinces were, in effect, outside the orbit of the central government at one point or other in the Nanking Decade. Some were completely lost. The Japanese controlled Manchuria and Jehol and, by the mid-1930s, were expanding out of the demilitarised zone round Peiping. In March 1934, the Last Emperor, Pu Yi, was enthroned in Manchukuo. In a blue and gold gown with dark red sleeves and a large red fur-trimmed hat with tassels and a pearl, he was given a 101-gun salute as he was driven to the ceremony in a bullet-proof Lincoln limousine followed by nine new Packards. Scrolls were read and sacred wine drunk round a brazier to inaugurate his 'Reign of Tranquillity and Virtue'. The situation in the north, Wangjingwei said, was 'critical but not hopeless'.\n\nIn Shanxi, the Model Governor returned to run his long-standing fief after temporary exile following his defeat by Chiang in 1930, encouraging industry, building railways, modernising education, and using his police to suppress any threat to his dictatorship. Sichuan was, as usual, immersed in civil wars, with almost a million men in various armies and militias. The huge Muslim territory of Xinjiang in the far north-west was out of Nanking's control as it drew close to the Soviet Union.\n\nThe Dogmeat General's old stamping ground of Shandong on the north-east coast was under the sway of General Han Fuju, who served under the Christian General but then defected to Nanking in 1930. On bad terms with Chiang, the square, bull-like Han set out to establish the province as an autonomous fief, ordering the execution of Kuomintang officials, reaching secret agreements with the Japanese and suppressing Communists.\n\nIn central China, Hunan withheld money from the central government to expand its own military forces. To its west, largely autonomous warlords ran Guizhou, where 80 per cent of the population was reckoned to use opium. In the wild far south-west, on the border with Indo-China, Yunnan was a law to itself. In neighbouring Guangxi, hostility towards anything that smacked of centralisation remained high as the Clique leaders, Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, returned from their defeat by Chiang to run the province on the 'three selfs' policy of self-government, self-sufficiency and self-defence, with a large militia, village government and co-operative economic schemes. Next door, the one-time cradle of the Nationalist Revolution, Guangdong, was ruled by General Chen Jitang, known for his avarice, deceit and superstition. He instituted a ceremony at which officers swore to oppose the Generalissimo; they were given a wooden sword to strike a leather dummy with 'Chiang Kai-shek' written across it.\n\nThe biggest challenge came in Fujian province on the south-east coast, where the Nineteenth Route Army had been sent to help the anti-Communist campaign after its feats in Shanghai. Used to glory and alienated from Chiang, its commanders became increasingly bad-tempered. Their egos inflated by publicity, including three films based on the combat with the Japanese, they resented being shunted into a backwater, and felt they had not received sufficient material rewards. Calling for stiffer resistance to Japan, the Army came under the influence of reform-minded, anti-Chiang politicians who had drawn on the legacy of Wuhan to form the 'Third Party' between the Kuomintang and the Communists.\n\nLeft-wingers, Social Democrats, Trotskyites and others, including the former Foreign Minister, Eugene Chen, flooded into the provincial capital of Fuzhou.* Measures were promulgated to better the lot of the peasants, improve communications and lift political oppression. In May 1933, the former Guangdong governor and founder of the Route Army, Chen Mingshu, who had gone to Europe after resigning from the Nanking government, returned to Hong Kong, financing the Third Party and setting up Chiang's southern political foe, Hu Hanmin, in a big house in the British colony.\n\nOn the morning of 20 November 1933, a mass rally in a public gymnasium in Fuzhou called for a 'government of the producing people, and the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek'. But the revolt failed to attract other opposition figures, and the Route Army was not as popular as it had supposed. Bereft of support, the soldiers signed an 'anti-Japanese and anti-Chiang agreement' with the Red Army which it was meant to be fighting. This afforded little practical help since Mao and his colleagues did not want to see a rival anti-regime force just over the border from their base while Moscow still saw Chiang as the best leader for China. So the Communists held back, and portrayed the rebels as counter-revolutionary reformists. Later, Mao acknowledged this to have been an important mistake.\n\nNanking's troops moved fast along improved road communications while their planes caused panic with air raids. Chiang sent in a team to bribe leading rebels to defect. The Route Army's assistant chief of staff acted as a secret agent, passing the Nationalists information over a radio transmitter hidden in his house. Rebel commanders surrendered, some won over by Meiling who flew in to negotiate. The Fujian navy changed sides. Outnumbered more than two-to-one, the revolt collapsed. Two turncoat generals were each given $50,000 to travel abroad. Some of the Route Army soldiers stayed on in Fujian; 1,500 others trekked to Hong Kong where a do-gooder gave them a dollar apiece, and helped them return to their homes across the border in Guangdong. Chen Mingshu left for Europe. Though Cai Tingkai, the commander in the battle of Shanghai, went to the United States and was greeted as a hero by Overseas Chinese, Chiang had won again.\n\nMeeting the Nationalist commander at the time, the British writer Peter Fleming found him 'a man with a presence, with that something incalculable about him to which the herd instinctively defers. He was strong and silent by nature, not by artifice . . . He may not be a great statesman or a very great soldier . . . but, at any rate, Chiang Kai-shek has something to him. He is not only not a mediocrity or a wind-bag, but he could never look like one. That, I think entitles him to a certain singularity among modern political leaders.' The visitor found the Generalissimo's eyes the most remarkable thing about him \u2013 'They were large, handsome, and very keen \u2013 almost aggressive. His glances had a thrusting and compelling quality.' As Fleming and his interpreter left, Chiang gave them 'one of those formidable glances, of the kind which prompts an involuntary self-accusation of some grave sartorial omission. We trooped down the garden path feeling very small.'\n\nNow free to turn his attention back to the anti-Communist campaign, Chiang felt the need for an ideology of his own to set against Mao's brand of Marxism. Two of Sun Yat-sen's three principles \u2013 democracy and the people's livelihood \u2013 had been put on the shelf by the evolution of the regime. That left nationalism. Chiang was ready to accept foreign military counsellors, retain a German, Walter Stennes, as his bodyguard, and see the regime guided by Western advisers. But he rejected the influence of modern foreign ideas epitomised by the 4 May movement of 1919. His nationalism remained resolutely Sino-centric, and rooted in a classical image of China. He warned that the iconoclasm and liberty preached by the 4 May reformers and by advocates of a New China risked the 'destruction of all discipline and the wanton quest for individual freedom'. At the same time, he inveighed against his compatriots as dejected, barbaric, and devoid of reason. 'Their clothes and homes were in utter disarray; they spat and urinated wherever they pleased,' he said. 'Having no principles, they smoked, gambled and whored their lives away. When they talked, they looked half-dead with a demeanour reminiscent of zombies.'\n\nThe answer lay in getting the Chinese to subject themselves to moral regeneration which would assert traditional values as defined by the Generalissimo. A sense of rigour was to be injected into the nation. Apart from its regenerative effect, the obedience which would be propagated would make it easier to guard against Communism. The idea, Chiang said, came to him as he drove through the Jiangxi capital of Nanchang, and saw a student with a cigarette in his mouth behaving badly in the street. A new creed was needed to make such people shape up. At a mass meeting in the city in March 1934, he walked down from the flower-lined platform to confront an untidily dressed press photographer who had pushed his way to the front of the crowd. This man, he told the audience, was typical of those who did not respect the need for orderliness, cleanliness, simplicity, diligence, promptness and precision. To promote such virtues, Chiang and his wife launched the New Life movement, based on the four Confucian principles of _Li_ (propriety), _Yi_ (right conduct) _Lian_ (honesty) and _Qi_ (integrity and honour).\n\nIf properly applied, Meiling explained, _Li_ would bring recognition of 'the sterling native qualities of our fellow men'; _Yi_ would induce 'the obligation not to hold wealth and enjoy it wastefully while our fellow countrymen may be on the verge of starvation or suffering from sickness or other evils'; _Lian_ would make officials recognise die rights of die people, and not try to benefit at their expense; _Qi_ would mean that 'no one would become shameless or stoop to anything mean or underhand'. Alongside its Confucian elements, the movement contained a dash of the religion to which Meiling had converted her husband. 'There's Methodism in this madness,' ran one quip; _Time_ magazine wrote that the Chiangs had decided to give China 'a big dose of the Castor oil of Puritanism'.\n\nA long list of rules was issued \u2013 one published in Nanking in 1935 contained eighty-six instructions. Simplicity, frugality and good behaviour were the watchwords. A lantern parade in Nanchang promulgated slogans such as 'Be prompt', 'Don't spit', 'Be neat', 'Kill flies and rats: they breed disease', 'Avoid wine, women and gambling'. With 'citizen detectives' to bring transgressors into line, the movement sought to touch all areas of life. The Chinese were told to replace ornate marriages and funerals with simple ceremonies. Some local authorities banned mixed bathing and decreed that men and women should not walk arm-in-arm in the street.\n\nFollowing Chiang's instruction that 'lascivious or fantastic fashions' for women must be suppressed, thejiangxi authorities ordained that women's gowns must be ankle-length; the distance between collar and cheek should be not less than an inch and a half; sleeves ought to reach at least to the elbow; slits in sides of skirts should be no higher than the knee; women must avoid tight clothes, and comb their hair backwards, not letting it fall below their necks. The Generalissimo later added curled hair to the list of prohibitions. All women working in government offices were to wear short blue jackets, black skirts, black stockings and black shoes. In Shanghai, woollen coats without buttons were banned. In Wuhan, a zealot poured nitric acid over a woman in what he considered revealing clothes.\n\nBoy Scouts and Girl Guides were encouraged as harbingers of the new morality; Kai-shek and Meiling presided at their parades, including one of 3,366 in Nanking. Superstitions were to be abolished. Censorship would protect peace and order. People were urged to buy Chinese goods, not imports. Foreign films reflecting badly on China were banned. Native productions were encouraged to 'promote good morals and demonstrate the spirit of fortitude, endurance, peace and the uprightness of the people'. Chiang's aide, Chen Lifu, told cinema directors their work should be 70 per cent educational and 30 per cent entertaining. In the Sichuan city of Chungking,* a magistrate ordered two fat pigs spotted eating sugar cane pulp in a park to be shot as an offence to public decency.\n\nTo accompany the New Life movement, Chiang declared a national economic reconstruction movement to aid industry and commerce, regulate labour and capital, promote agriculture, build roads, develop communications, adjust finance, eliminate excessive taxes and reduce tariffs. It was to work on a five-year plan and spend $270 million on industrialisation, with powers to confiscate private enterprises. Since this was Chiang's project, much of the development was to be in areas of military importance. But it soon petered out for want of funds.\n\nMany New Life rules were eminently sensible, such as those advocating healthy living, cleanliness, vaccination, and the killing of flies and mosquitoes. Compared to attempts to re-educate and dragoon the Chinese people by Chiang's Communist successor, the movement was positively benign. But, in a country with problems on the scale of those faced by China, the initiative was like the admonitions of a frustrated father wagging his finger at his unruly children. The message never reached the bulk of illiterate peasants, who were, in any case, more concerned with survival than with wearing their hats straight. Being told to eat in silence and go to bed early could only make the modern-minded urban elite regard the regime as a bunch of petty busybodies.\n\nStreets would be swept and houses painted when the Generalissimo and his wife visited a city, but, behind the Potemkin Village front, nothing really changed. Old festivals and beliefs persisted: a few miles from government headquarters in Nanking, there was a stampede to grab fragments when the head fell off a statue of a sacred tortoise. To get round limits placed on the number of dishes that should be ordered, restaurants served several at the same time on large plates, with alcohol brought to the table in teapots.\n\nThe hypocrisy was blatant. At New Life dinners, the Chiangs ate only soup and three courses instead of the usual banquet of a dozen or more dishes, but officials in Nanking and elsewhere lived as well as they could. While people were told not to smoke, Meiling puffed in private on imported cigarettes. The rule ordering 'Do not smoke opium' could hardly be reconciled with the regime's links with the likes of Big-Eared Du and provincial governors who lived off narcotics. The _North China Daily News_ observed that 'the New Life Movement would have its best chance of success if, like charity, it could begin at home'. By 1936, the adviser, W. H. Donald, decided it was time to deliver some home truths.\n\nAt a dinner with the Chiangs, he said that the regime had shown itself incapable of reform. 'You people sit in your _yamen_ [headquarters], and your horizon is your window sill,' he went on. 'You are ignorant because no one dares to correct you. You might lose face and, what's more, some one might lose his head. You've retreated into your intellectual rat holes, having exposed only a posterior of vanity. Goddamn it, sir, you've all become insufferably stupid!' The Australian denounced graft, the opium trade, the lack of measures against disease and floods, the backwardness of transport, industry and the administration. 'China should be ashamed,' he concluded. 'There is the staleness, the obeseness of wealth on one hand \u2013 the hog wallow of poverty on the other. The ricksha man and the wharf coolie are worse off than the horse and camel in many another land.'\n\nThough his lamentations in his diary showed he was aware of the truth of at least part of what Donald said, Chiang could not admit his own incapacity to put right what was wrong with the country. 'I am the Generalissimo; I do not err; I am China; and China cannot do well without me,' he declared. The truth was that Chiang, and many of those around him, were poor administrators, possessing neither the skills nor the application to put their plans into practice. Despite repeated revolts, the sanctions which would have shown that Nanking meant business were rare. The Generalissimo generally preferred to co-opt his enemies rather than punish them. He thundered on about morality, but allowed the regime to be undermined by corruption and profiteering. He spoke endlessly of the need for national unity, but used divisive tactics and allied himself with a shifting coalition of remnant warlords. All that may be regarded as par for the course at the time, but it meant that Chiang condemned himself to be the prisoner of his context instead of rising above it.\n\nChange would mean opening up society and the power structure, renouncing paternalism, running an efficient economy, shaking up the civil service, clamping down on graft, reforming agriculture and land ownership, permitting debate, accepting that the army was not the supreme arbiter of power. All of which would put the leader's own position at risk, and encourage revolt by defenders of the status quo. Cautious and conservative, Chiang was not one to take the gamble. He preferred a system which had no fresh ambition to offer the nation. His inner circle consisted of generals, a few trusted aides and those in the Soong-Kung clan who worked with him. For the mass of Chinese people, he remained a distant figure riding a white horse or haranguing a crowd from a platform.\n\nHe was expert at operating in very different boxes, reading the Bible with missionaries but dealing with Big-Eared Du, proclaiming the importance of loyalty but manipulating the cliques around him, extolling national unity but allying with warlords, assuming the Olympian calm of the superior man but flying into the wild rages that had marked him since his early days in Shanghai. He concentrated all authority on himself, keeping control of money and supplies, but never fully mastering the provincial barons. He constructed an extensive network of personal relationships, but trusted very few of those around him. He ignored inconvenient facts, and erected a make-believe world epitomised by the New Life movement. He chose, as Zhou Enlai put it, to use all the contradictions in the country to his own ends. However, he never lost sight of his prime objective \u2013 to rid China of its disease of the heart, and the man who symbolised that ailment. Given the later tide of history, it is striking how near he came to achieving his goal.\n\n* * *\n\n* Recent historical work on Republican China has emphasised advances made in the Nanking decade after earlier accounts had stressed its problems. Both schools can claim correctness, but on a different scale. Reappraising Republican China, Wakeman and Edmonds (eds) gives the latest 'revisionist' view.\n\n* Known at the time as Foochow.\n\n* Now known as Chongqing.\n\n# CHAPTER 15\n\n _The Long Chase_\n\nBETWEEN THEM, CHIANG KAI-SHEK and Mao Zedong dominated China for half a century. They were born six years apart, the Generalissimo in 1887, the Great Helmsman in 1893. Both came from country villages, from families that rose above the rural rut; the Chiangs owned the salt shop and claimed noble antecedents while Mao's father acquired 3 acres, sold grain and lent money. Each had a deep love for his mother, though Chiang's cool relationship with his father was far outdone by the hatred Mao expressed for his. Both had a Confucian childhood, studying the classic texts, whose top-down principles would remain with them through their lives. As teenagers they had been put into arranged marriages with older women, whom they soon repudiated, Mao saying he never slept with his first wife while Chiang's mother had to pressure him into having a child by his. Each abandoned a subsequent spouse, and ended married to politically ambitious much younger women. Both retained the accent of their home provinces \u2013 and both suffered from constipation.\n\nThe two men left home as teenagers, living erratic lives for several years, espousing nationalism, and then participating in the united front between the Kuomintang and the Communists in Canton in the mid-1920s. Neither was familiar with the outside world. After his time in Japan as a military cadet, Chiang did not go abroad for a quarter of a century, and then only in a setting of war; Mao's first foreign trip, to Moscow, did not come till 1949. Both had simple tastes, and little regard for money. Each saw himself as a teacher for the nation, the embodiment of what China should be, fighting his way to the top against political opponents of greater seniority, pursuing an often lonely path but convinced of his own Tightness. Each stood at the top of an organisation structured on military lines in which party, state and army came together under his command. Deeply Sino-centric, they both believed in the power of the will, and saw armed force as the way to power. Neither recoiled from a huge expenditure of human life in pursuit of his goals. Both were consummate and ruthless political power players, who knew how to recover from a temporary reverse. Each represented the 'Do or Die' approach, unready to compromise, determined to destroy opponents and rule supreme.\n\n'He was as stubborn as a mule and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature,' an American wrote of one of them. 'I had the impression that he would wait and watch for years but eventually have his way . . . I had the impression that there was a door to his being that had never been opened to anyone . . . [his spirit] dwelt within itself, isolating him.' An English writer added: 'His personality inspired loyalty, not affection. He combined a fierce temper and infinite patience; vision, and almost pedantic attention to details; an inflexible will, and extreme subtlety; public charisma, and private intrigue.' Both were descriptions of Mao. Much of what they contained applied equally to Chiang.\n\nA Soviet adviser with the Communists wrote of hearing a Japanese radio calling the Nationalist 'persistent, merciless and highly ambitious' and wondering 'isn't this characteristic of Mao Zedong?' The Communist chief, he added, would not permit criticism in a system where 'party principles are replaced by self-seeking, undisguised toadyism and self-humiliation' \u2013 which might have been said of Chiang's court. Neither leader had true friends, courting those he needed, and then dropping them \u2013 or squashing them if they became a threat. Each was profoundly, chauvinistically nationalistic, and emotionally hostile to his principal foreign ally. Power was the sole dream and ambition.\n\nStill, quite apart from the separate ideologies, their differences were equally evident, personally as well as politically. Though, like Chiang, he insisted on keeping his surroundings neat, Mao was famous for his lack of grooming and his peasant ways; Chiang, as one visitor remarked, had 'the air of fastidious distinction'. The Great Helmsman wore baggy blue peasant clothes and a Red Army cap; the Generalissimo neat suits, silk robes, uniforms hung with medals and a velvet Western trilby. Chiang was slim, erect, precise, his lips thin, his head shaven; Mao grew increasingly bear-like, his hair shaggy, his face round, his walk shuffling and rolling. Except when he flew into one of his fits of temper, Chiang exuded self-control; whatever his inner calculations, Mao behaved expansively to visitors, appearing to take them into confidence, even if this was to seduce them into his ideological embrace. Chiang delivered his speeches like military orders; Mao knew how to carry his audience with him, throwing in folksy asides, jokes, rural references before getting to the ideological core.\n\nAfter the purge of 1927, Mao was an outsider, a political rebel, a guerrilla fighter while Chiang was ensconced in the palaces of power. The Communist leader lived close to the ground with his comrades; the Nationalist chief soared above in planes with American pilots. Early on, Mao identified China's small farmers and peasants as the seedbed of revolution; the Generalissimo held back from rural reform. Mao's ideology was unrelenting, and adapted to China's situation; the nearest Chiang came to expounding a creed was in a meld of Confucian classicism and Methodism that had little relevance to the real problems facing the nation. Chiang assured his soldiers that they were part of his great family, but he was a distant figure on a platform whereas Mao could establish a real human bond. While the Communist leader headed an ever-growing nationalist guerrilla movement, Chiang's distrust of mass organisations stood in die way of creating a great popular resistance to the Japanese. In the cocoon he wove around himself, the Generalissimo could not understand the popular appeal of the Communists, seeing them simply as a rival force to be eliminated. Hearts and minds were not his concern.\n\nFrom the autumn of 1934, the revolutionary and the organiser of the biggest armed force China had seen were pitched directly against one another in a confrontation that would stretch for fifteen years. One concentrated on the basic issue of survival, refusing to give up whatever the odds. The other was at the helm of a complex military and political campaign that could never achieve its final goal. Then, and later, it was as if, for all the forces at his command, Chiang was doomed to be on the losing side of history.\n\nSuch a possibility cannot have entered his mind as he travelled at the end of 1933 to the Lushan Mountains above the Yangtze in northern Jiangxi province. The wooded peaks, rising to 5,000 feet and often wreathed in mist and cloud, had inspired Chinese poets for centuries, and were the site of a 1,400-year-old temple. At the end of the nineteenth century, a black-bearded English missionary from Dorset called Edward Selby Little identified Lushan as an ideal escape for expatriates from the summer heat and humidity of the river valley below. In a pun on its main attraction, he used the name of one peak to give his resort the name Ruling.\n\nLittle, who later became the Far Eastern manager for a British chemicals company, bought land and handed it over to a self-regulating council. He had a 12-mile track built up the steep slope through the tea plantations along which coolies carried residents and their guests in sedan chairs \u2013 small children went in baskets at the end of poles. Five hundred houses were put up, many of thick stone. A British family ran a general store and the Fairy Glen Hotel \u2013 the bluff son of a London banker opened the Journey's End Inn down the slope, where bedrooms were provided with Bibles and volumes of French pornography.\n\nIn the 1920s, wealthy and prominent Chinese began to move in. During his struggle with the leftists in Wuhan, Chiang held a meeting of his supporters at the Fairy Glen. In 1933, Meiling acquired a two-storey stone house in a garden by the stream that ran through the middle of the settlement. A missionary who lived in Ruling recalled watching Chiang, wearing a Chinese gown and felt hat, walking up the last lap of the mountain track one evening, preceded by bodyguards in grey suits with pistols at their hips. 'His forehead was broad, his brown eyes clear and steady, and his chin firm,' the watcher wrote. 'In repose, his face is austere but can light up round the eyes with a kindly smile.' Meiling, in a silver silk dress, was beside him, her face 'intelligent and beautiful', her 'animated and clear voice' cutting through the stillness as she spoke in English to Donald who walked just behind the couple. Further back came coolies carrying sedan chairs, and more bodyguards, their eyes searching the undergrowth for danger.\n\nChiang had his quarters on the first floor of the villa, with a bedchamber and a sitting room \u2013 his secretary and doctor slept down the corridor. Meiling had a separate ground-floor room, with a double bed from Britain, brown leather armchairs, a chaise longue, wooden desk and dressing table. The bathroom was fitted with imported green tub, basin, bidet and lavatory.\n\nThe Chiangs liked to sit on the large first-floor terrace, and to walk in the surrounding hills, sometimes taking a picnic with them. Meiling played an upright piano, painted landscapes, and read a collection of books in English, including a set of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and works by H. G. Wells, Strindberg, Dorothy Sayers's _Omnibus of Crime_ and Robert Graves's _I, Claudius_. The Generalissimo brought cuttings from his native province to create a small bamboo plot beside the stone house which was known as the Meilu Villa. He appreciated the _feng shui_ of the house, with slopes on either side, a mountain behind and the water from the brook in front.\n\nChiang turned Kuling into a summer capital for the Nanking government. Wang Jingwei had a house looking down at the lake below the resort. The Young Marshal owned a residence in the trees with a red cupola over the entrance. Chiang ordered a large conference hall built on the outskirts of the settlement, flanked by military buildings with curved tile roofs and special quarters for his generals.* There, at the end of 1933, he planned what was intended to be his final campaign against Mao's Red Army. Facing his commanders and staff arrayed on twenty-five rows of seats in the stone conference centre, the Generalissimo traced his military plans with a long pointer on a series of maps. Twenty thousand elite troops underwent training in the Lushan Mountains, exercising in close-contact combat and climbing the peaks in preparations for those in the Communist base.\n\nAn economic blockade had been thrown round the Soviet area, making food there scarce. To evade the embargo on salt, Communists smuggled it in hidden in bamboo \u2013 or, in one case, in a doll which a woman carried on her back as if it were a baby. Politically, splits had opened up between Mao and the party leadership in Shanghai which insisted on moving from guerrilla warfare to direct attacks on the superior Nationalist forces. Pressure increased with the construction of 700 miles of roads to enable Chiang's troops to advance more quickly. At the end of 1933, a visiting reporter saw columns of big military trucks, mules, coolies, ambulances and marching soldiers, including Salt Revenue Guards in steel helmets. In their cloth shoes or straw boots, the troops passed by with 'just a rustle, without noise'.\n\nChiang's legions were of varying quality, ranging from Whampoa veterans and elite units trained by the Germans to former warlord irregulars, but they were well supplied and their towns stocked with food. They were backed by a force of 150 planes, and a short wave radio network which relayed information from aerial reconnaissance. The provincial capital of Nanchang was turned into a fortress behind deep moats, trenches, barbed wire emplacements, walls and turreted watchtowers with overlapping fields of fire which a Polish journalist described as giving 'an impression of the defensive constructions of the Middle Ages'.\n\nGovernment planes dropped leaflets offering rewards of $100,000 for the capture of Mao and the Red Army commander, Zhu De, but less if only their heads were brought in. A force of 24,000 special agents carried out underground police work, organised propaganda and enforced the economic blockade of the Red base. A campaign was launched to get Red Army troops to defect, with $20 offered for each rifle they handed over. Leniency was promised for those who had been coerced into joining the Communists, but had not done any important jobs for them. Such people, Chiang said, included men who had 'unwittingly succumbed to the wiles of women Communists'. Reformatories were set up for those who surrendered; photographs of one showed inmates lining up to receive textbooks, attending a sewing class, making stockings and sandals, and receiving a graduation diploma. Propaganda campaigns in conquered areas featured parades, stage shows, lectures, posters, cartoons and films \u2013 the first the country people had seen. But the Generalissimo made clear his rejection of rural reform by declaring that the gentry system should be restored in areas recaptured from the Communists. In return, landlords would provide coolies and forced labour to build roads and blockhouses.\n\nAt the end of 1933, Chiang broke off from the campaign to travel to Hangzhou to meet the Young Marshal who had just returned from Europe, leaving his family in England where his sons were enrolled at a preparatory school. Described as fit and happy, Zhang Xueliang had been much impressed by the example of Mussolini and Hitler, and decried the divided state of his native land. 'Europe doesn't think much of either you or China,' he told Chiang.\n\nOver dinner with the Chiangs in a private room of a restaurant beside the scenic West Lake, Zhang and W. H. Donald kept up the attack with abrasive views of China. Though her husband did not react, Meiling was impressed, and asked Donald to join their staff. He replied that he did not work for women, but was struck when the Marshal told him she had translated everything he said, 'including the goddamns'. The next day, Zhang was appointed Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Bandit Suppression troops, the bandits in question being the Red Armies. Based in Wuhan, he also pressed a campaign of social reform at Donald's urging, including a drive against corruption which the Australian thought could only be expunged by high-level executions.\n\nChiang's mind was more focused on his fifth drive against the Jiangxi Communists in early 1934. He had a new adviser, General Hans von Seeckt, who had rebuilt Germany's armed forces after the defeat of 1918 and who suggested using lines of blockhouses to force the Communists back and withstand counter-attacks. Three thousand 'turtle shell' forts were built, linked by roads and bridges. Scorched earth tactics burned rings of open country round their positions. The terrain was difficult, with steep mountains, narrow stone paths, thick woods, and enemy machine-gun positions commanding valleys. But, with a numerical advantage of up to five-to-one, the Nationalists were finally forcing the Red Army to fight a static war. In the past, Chiang had used mainly regional troops against the Communists. Now, seventeen divisions put into the field were from his own central army, some of them trained by German advisers and with modern equipment.\n\nIn the Communist base, Mao had been elbowed aside by political opponents backed by the party leadership in Shanghai. Command was exercised by men who had returned from indoctrination in Moscow, and by an authoritarian German Communist adviser, Otto Braun. At his urging, the Red Army attacked the blockhouses, and suffered heavy casualties. 'We milled around between the enemy's main forces and his blockhouses and were reduced to complete passivity,' the admittedly partial but accurate Mao wrote.\n\nFor once, Chiang had the initiative. Contemporary press accounts reporting little except Nationalist victories reek of propaganda. Still, there was no doubt that the Communists were undergoing defeats as never before. They tried an offensive into Fujian but were beaten back. Desertions soared. Paranoia set in. Beheading squads went to batdefields to drive on the Communist troops. Thousands of 'counter-revolutionaries' were killed. Mao was put under virtual house arrest.\n\nIn June 1934, a Red Army unit left the base area under the banner of the 'Anti-Japanese Advance Detachment'. But it was overwhelmed. Its leader was caught and executed, his head being taken round in a bamboo cage. Two other break-outs in the summer had more success: one reached Shaanxi in the north, the other linked up with Communists in the wild frontier region linking Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan and Guizhou. In Jiangxi the Nationalists moved inexorably forward, taking towns and defensive lines as they forced the Red Army to retreat.\n\nWith the campaign going well, Chiang had time to turn to other issues. Diplomatic relations were re-established with Moscow. A ragged revolt by one of the Christian General's associates was put down in the far north. As the summer heat along the Yangtze climbed to over 100 degrees, there was both drought and flooding, affecting tens of millions. An official report put crop losses at $500 million. To try to stem the massive outflow of silver, die government slapped a duty on the export of the metal. The budget showed no signs of improvement, widi customs revenue falling sharply, and military spending and debt servicing taking 70 per cent of revenue.\n\nThere were several flare-ups with die Japanese in Shanghai, and the Kwantung Army issued protests at alleged Chinese infringements in the demilitarised zone round Peiping. In June, fears of a fresh incident rose after Japan's vice-consul in Nanking disappeared, but matters were resolved when he was found asleep in mountains outside the city, and he explained diat he had gone missing because of family affairs and disappointment over slow promotion. There was tacit recognition of Manchukuo when rail links with the puppet state were restored. A bomb went off on the first train from Peiping to Mukden, killing four people, but the Japanese did not take this as a pretext for action, and dieir new Minister to China had a friendly half-hour meeting widi Chiang at the end of June.\n\nAt the beginning of October 1934, the Generalissimo and Meiling travelled to Wuhan to confer with the Young Marshal about the anti-Communist drive on the Yangtze. The three of diem and Donald dien took an old imperial train to the military centre of Luoyang. On the first morning of the three-day journey, the Australian was sitting in his carriage when Meiling staggered in with an armful of letters and documents which she put on a desk. 'It's too much for me,' she said, according to his recollection for his biographer. Through his acquaintance with her fadier, the Australian had known her since she was a girl. Now, he found her 'frail and delicate, intelligent and pretty, an elf with a dynamo'. To ease her tension, he told stories of his early days in China. That afternoon, she came back to his compartment with another load of documents, and asked him to help her. Donald said this might be a problem since he was employed by Zhang.\n\n'There's nothing in China that's closed to you,' Meiling replied.\n\n'Nothing?' Donald asked. Smiling, she pushed a pile of papers towards him, and he went to work.\n\nWhen they had finished the visit to Luoyang, the Australian proposed that the four of them continue by train to Xi'an, one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation which the Generalissimo had never visited. Chiang nodded agreement when Meiling translated the suggestion.\n\nIn Xi'an, they drove into the city in bright sunshine to take tea with the local commander, General Yang Hucheng, who would suggest the kidnapping two years later. The visitors went to the hot springs to bathe. A New Life meeting was held, and Meiling spoke in 'perfect and beautiful English' with local missionaries. The Chiangs visited an orphanage where they ordered a feast for the children. Meiling announced plans for a rehabilitation home for women opium addicts. All 400 motor vehicles in the city were commandeered for use during the visit; yet a letter from a foreign resident spoke of the couple as 'unassuming, agreeable and capable', in contrast to the usual pomp of official visitors.\n\nA correspondent who interviewed the Generalissimo at the time was struck by how he had grown thinner and his closely cropped hair had become greyer \u2013 attributed to his sixteen-hour working days. Asked about rumours in Shanghai that he and Meiling were discussing divorce, Chiang said that was ridiculous, and both he and his wife laughed. He then mentioned another rumour that an office-seeker had offered him a dozen beautiful women \u2013 which he denied, too. Rather, the reporter noted, the couple 'acted like newly-weds'.\n\nDonald and Meiling hatched the idea of continuing the northern trip by air to give Chiang a taste of places no national leader had ever visited. In backward Gansu, he went to woollen mills, launched a local New Life movement and attacked opium and foot-binding. In neighbouring Ningxia, where Chiang was impressed by the huge, barren spaces, he was greeted by a military band playing 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home'. Meiling suffered from airsickness and took along an oxygen tank for the high altitudes. The party then headed for Peiping where the Chiangs and Donald all received hospital treatment for stomach ailments. A medical bulletin said the Generalissimo was suffering from nervous indigestion caused by hard work, and possibly also by the absorption of poisons from abscesses in his teeth.\n\nNext, they set off for Mongolia, and for Shanxi where they stayed in H. H. Kung's mansion in the provincial capital. On their travels, the Chiangs were provided with the finest linen, silk eiderdowns and perfumed pillows. Streets were cleaned and houses painted for their arrival. They put on weight as they ate local delicacies. Flying through the cold winter over deserted, loess 'Yellow Earth' country, the party wrapped itself in thick furs. At stops along the way, the Generalissimo delivered rousing speeches, and Meiling busied herself with good works. There was only one alarm, when a bomb was thrown at their train, but the news was hushed up and responsibility for the attack was not established.\n\nReturning to Peiping, Chiang had dental work, and was prescribed new spectacles to cope with compound myopic astigmatism. At a New Life dinner in the city, he had his first meeting with Wu Peifu \u2014 the absence of alcohol may not have charmed the wine-bibbing old warlord. Then the Chiangs and Donald headed for Nanking where the Australian moved into the Generalissimo's bungalow, and worked on papers Meiling passed him. During their travels, the Australian had paid her the highest compliment he could imagine \u2013 'You think like a man'. When Zhang Xueliang next visited the capital, he went to see them both. Like nightclub pianists, Donald and Meiling sat at either end of a table, each busy on a typewriter. Tea was served while the two Chinese discussed the Australian in their language which he did not understand. The Marshal got up, and walked over to slap Donald on the back.\n\n'It looks as if I've lost you,' Zhang said.\n\n'Yes, I damn well think you have,' the adviser replied.\n\n'I'll miss you,' the Marshal said.\n\n'Tommyrot,' Donald responded, as they grasped hands.\n\nThe change of patrons enabled the blunt and active Australian to feed his ideas to Chiang through Meiling. But it did nothing to lessen his cussedness. Though he often ate with his employers, Donald still refused to touch Chinese food. As if to stress his linguistic incapacity, he reduced 'Generalissimo' to 'G'issmo', and called Meiling 'M'issimo'.\n\nThe trip to the far north may have given Chiang only an airbrushed picture of the region, as local authorities spruced up their towns and pampered the visiting couple. But, to judge by Donald's recollections, it awakened the Generalissimo to realities he had not glimpsed before, and also brought out a less aloof side to him. The adviser sensed a change day by day \u2013 'the Generalissimo's face grew more relaxed and, if only infinitesimally, more animated'. But the trip meant he was more than 1,000 miles away while his forces in the south drove into the heart of the Soviet base area in Jiangxi to devastating effect.\n\nAs the Generalissimo arrived in Gansu province in mid-October, Mao Zedong, in grey cloth uniform and a military cap, walked to the bank of the foaming Gan River where Red Army units and support forces had been assembling in secrecy. While Chiang and his wife slept under silk eiderdowns in the north, Mao crossed the water, carrying two blankets, a cotton sheet, an oilcloth, a coat, a broken umbrella and a bundle of books, abandoning his two-year-old son whom he would never see again. Leaving behind rearguard elements to defend the Jiangxi base as best they could, the Red Army headed through a gap in the line of blockhouses, beginning the Long March which was to become one of the great exploits of the Chinese century.\n\nWith the eventual victors setting the template, accounts of the march are cast in a heroic mode, making it the furnace in which the new China was forged, with survivors recalling superhuman triumphs born from comradely selflessness. It became, in the words of the French writer and politician Alain Peyrefitte, an 'epic poem' to Communism. In reality, the Long March was a drawn-out acknowledgement of major defeat. The endurance shown was, indeed, extraordinary. The Red Army's skill at manoeuvring, misleading the enemy and covering huge distances over forbidding terrain made it an icon for guerrillas, though it also had a great secret advantage in its Russian-trained decoders who were able to read Nationalist wireless messages and change tactics accordingly. Still, for all these achievements, the Communists lost their base in Jiangxi, failed to establish themselves elsewhere along their route, and were continually harried into making new retreats. Of the original force of 80,000-100,000 men, and 2,000 women, only some 5,000 were still marching when the expedition ended a year later, and were open to annihilation. If the Long March was any kind of victory, it was a victory of sheer survival.\n\nThis is not say that the Nationalists deserve praise. Chiang had immensely superior numbers at his disposal, and an air force. But he was beset by chronic lack of coordination bred by the desire of provincial governors to avoid seeing him station troops on their territories. Their fears were well founded \u2013 as always, Chiang was operating from a cocktail of motives in which the extension of his own authority over autonomous provinces was a major ingredient. The Nationalist troops and their allies often behaved terribly, and Chiang's tactics were, by turns, too cautious or overconfident. Nanking's soldiers failed to show the same determination and discipline as their foe. Subsequent accounts of the march say little about the impact on civilians along the way, but it is clear that their suffering was considerable. The Communists killed or punished class enemies, particularly landlords who had not managed to flee; the Nationalists were ruthless with anybody they thought likely to aid their enemy, using scorched earth policies to deprive the Red Army of succour.\n\nConducted in great secrecy, the start of the march attracted little attention. The Nationalists did not appear aware of what was going on as the Red Army moved across the border from Jiangxi and along the Guangdong frontier. The provincial governor, Chen Ji tang, who wanted to keep the Nationalists out of his domain, reached a non-aggression agreement with Zhou Enlai, including exchange of information and provision of medical supplies, which ensured that the Communists moved on as speedily as possible and gave Chiang no excuse to intervene. The Red Army turned north to head for a Soviet base in neighbouring Hunan. Its baggage train stretched for 50 miles carrying everything from weapons to printing presses and an X-ray machine. As Mao said, it was more like moving a house than an army.\n\nInformed at last of what was going on, Chiang ordered fifteen divisions to encircle the Red Army in front of the Xiang River on the border between Guangxi and Hunan provinces. His own troops marched along one bank of the 300-foot wide waterway while the enemy advanced along the other; a second Nationalist army formed a blocking force. Despite their autonomist sentiments, Chiang counted on the strongly anti-Communist rulers of Guangxi to join in. But, by the time the Red Army vanguard crossed the river, the Guangxi army of Bai Chongxi had moved away to protect the city of Guilin. This let half the Communist force follow across the waterway. But the baggage train lagged behind and the Nationalists caught up: as one Communist veteran admitted, 'We were too slow and the enemy too quick.'\n\nBai Chongxi now decided to participate after all as the Red Army was split on either side of the wide river. Before dawn on 1 December, its commander, Zhu De, sent a message to the forward units stressing the decisive nature of the battle. Nationalists with fixed bayonets swarmed up hillsides to attack defensive positions, and planes swooped on bombing and strafing runs. The fighting lasted for a week. It was the biggest single setback the Communists suffered during the whole of the Long March. Some accounts reported that their strength was halved, with only 30,000 men managing to get away. Much equipment was lost as the rearguard baggage train struggled across the river.\n\nChiang was far from the battlefield, having his bad teeth treated in Peiping. But he laid another trap for the Communist survivors, ordering a large plain in their path to be cleared of people, the crops destroyed, and food removed. That was where he planned to wipe out the remainder of the Red Army with the help of aircraft and artillery. Realising the danger, the Communists changed their course. At a meeting in mid-December in the market town of Tongdao on the borders of Hunan, Guangxi and Guizhou provinces, they decided to abandon the route to north Hunan since that would mean being caught in the Nationalist killing field. Instead, they would head for the wild interior of Guizhou, a province where Nanking's writ hardly ran. As was to happen many times in the coming decade, the Communists saved themselves by avoiding their adversary.\n\nChiang flew back to Nanking for a series of meetings on the military and political situation \u2013 one decided to send parcels of Christmas food to troops in the field, though a newspaper story noted that the supplies were more in the nature of necessities than treats. He and Meiling went to spend New Year at Xikou and Hangzhou, and travelled on to their large, European-style house in Shanghai with its pebble-dash walls and red tile roof. There, they received the Kungs, T. V. Soong, Big-Eared Du and Zhang Jingjiang, and visited the grave of Meiling's mother.\n\nReaching northern Guizhou, the Communists held a conference in the confiscated home of a merchant in the town of Zunyi. The failure of their Moscow-backed leaders and the German adviser, Braun, had become evident. It was time for Mao to emerge from his semi-eclipse, gaining the upper hand as the Red Army committed itself to his guerrilla vision of warfare. The one-time warlord soldier, Zhu De, became operational commander of the march, and the supple Zhou Enlai rallied to the new strategy. Avoiding four separate armies converging on Zunyi, the Communists moved to the border with Sichuan, aiming to get to a Soviet base in that province. Among the places they temporarily occupied was the town of Maotai, home of the celebrated Chinese rice wine of the same name. One story went that, taking the white liquid for water, the soldiers used it to wash their feet; they soon realised what it was, however, and, when they left, not a drop of the 'foot water' remained.\n\nPicking up the chase, Chiang flew to Sichuan to organise defences and stiffen local forces for a counter-attack. The two great foes of twentieth-century China were now only some 150 miles apart. As the Communists moved back into Guizhou, Mao's partner, who was carried on a litter, gave birth to a baby girl who was left forever with a peasant family without having been given a name. Her father had other preoccupations, personally directing a battle in the mountains after the Red Army seriously underestimated the size and strength of forces pursuing it and had to retreat for its life. Still, it retook Zunyi, and its leaders were able to pause to consider dieir next move.\n\nEstablishing his headquarters in the Sichuan city of Chungking, situated on cliffs above the Yangtze, Chiang went into a whirl of activity. He made frequent speeches, some lasting for hours, and supervised financial reforms to try to bring order to the chaotic local finances. Visiting the city, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin was particularly struck by Meiling who wore a dark high-necked dress with short sleeves. 'A gaily colored pattern of bamboo leaves formed a sort of wreath around her neck and also adorned the sleeves. She seemed refined and at ease,' he wrote in another instance of a Westerner being bowled over by the youngest Soong sister. 'She is intelligent, clever, gifted, and stands at the peak of Chinese as well as occidental culture . . . No doubt Madame CKS is the most remarkable woman of our time . . . Long after the thunder of war has been silenced she will remain a blessed mother among her people, and her name will be mentioned with reverence and admiration.'\n\nAt the front, the main pursuer of the Red Army was a former Whampoa instructor and Northern Expedition veteran, General Xue Yue, who had headed Sun Yat-sen's bodyguard at the time of the attack on him in Canton in 1922, and had helped to put down the Communist rising there five years later. Xue had taken part in the encirclement campaigns in Jiangxi before chasing the Red Army through Hunan, Guizhou and Sichuan where he helped to reorganise the local forces. The improvement in the fighting quality of the Sichuan troops paid swift dividends when they forced the abandonment of the Soviet base in the province with which Mao had been hoping to link up.\n\nWhile the pressure built up on the Long Marchers, the Generalissimo and his wife took a break with a cruise on the Yangtze, carried to and from the river at their ports of call in sedan chairs or on the shoulders of coolies. Opium dens were closed down temporarily in towns they visited. Wearing his trilby hat, Chiang was photographed grinning broadly. In a long coat with a fur wrap, Meiling snapped the passing sights, and donned baggy trousers to scale a steep slope on all fours. On 24 March, the Chiangs flew to Guizhou to resume the campaign.\n\nThe province was poor and backward. In its capital of Guiyang, the electrical supply ran only from seven to twelve each night. Food was meagre, and officials did not turn up for work till the afternoon. Kai-shek established his headquarters in a new building by the river, and he and Meiling stayed in a house formerly occupied by a warlord. Nine-foot high partitions divided the interior into cubicles. The windows did not fit, nor did the sliding doors close. To keep out the winter wind, the couple slept in a tent of heavy blue cloth erected inside the building. When a fire was lit with the local coal, the room was filled with choking smoke that stained everything black. Chiang called local dignitaries together to denounce the use of opium and order them to wipe it out. When he stopped speaking, there was dead silence, broken only by the unsuccessful attempt of a Boy Scout band to play a tune. The Generalissimo strode off, and the audience slunk away.\n\nIn early April, the Nationalists won a battle north of the provincial capital, but suffered substantial casualties. The _North China Herald_ reported that many of the captured Communists were said to have been beheaded. The application of the blockhouse strategy enabled Chiang to report to Nanking in mid-April that the backbone of the Communists had been broken. Though rain and heavy cloud prevented widespread use of the air force, one strafing attack wounded Mao's partner in fourteen places \u2013 one piece of shrapnel in her head could not be removed, and she was in a coma near to death for weeks before recovering.\n\nThe Red Army's _zigzag_ marching thoroughly confused the Nationalists. But Chiang could see that the only escape route for his adversary lay westwards into Yunnan. So he flew to confer with the ruler of the province that had always been far from the national mainstream on the border with Burma and Indochina. Though the small, delicate, ruthless governor, Long Yun, had rallied to the Kuomintang cause in name, his revenues from opium and slave-labour tin mines made him anything but a model ally for the national revolution. Conforming to the warlord pattern, he had invited a rebellious general with whom he had reached a peace agreement to a luncheon banquet in a tent \u2013 at the end of the meal, a swordsman behind the guest chopped off his head which was then hung from a telegraph pole at the entry to the capital of Kunming.\n\nOn the flight south, Chiang sat up front in the cockpit to gaze down at the ground where the enemy lay \u2013 and at the poppy fields below. In Kunming, he and his wife were greeted with champagne toasts at the airport. They drove into the city along a road lined with cheering students in white and blue uniforms, Meiling noting the national flags flying from every house, the cleanliness of the streets and the orderly nature of the traffic. A French banker recorded a 'furtive view' of her white silk bloomers when the wind blew up her skirt at an open-air reception.\n\nGiven Mao's strategy, it was highly unlikely that he would engage in a battle for the provincial capital. Still, the inhabitants of Kunming built walls of bricks made with soil and dug trenches. Long Yun ordered troops he had sent to confront a warlord in Guizhou over a quarrel about the opium trade to return as fast as they could. The French banker moved 20 tons of gold, which was sitting in his vaults after an arms deal, to the station to be taken by train to Hanoi \u2013 he was then warned that Long's men would seize it en route, so he decided to hold on to it.\n\nDespite feints towards the city, the Red Army kept away from Kunming, which meant Chiang could return to Guizhou, where he ordered the land tax not to be collected for a year and local soldiers to stop taking tribute in grain. He gave the local warlord a choice between remaining governor or holding on to his military command. The militarist chose the second, but the Generalissimo stirred up sufficient disaffection among his subordinates to be able to replace him with his own nominee. The Chiangs pressed the merits of the New Life movement, though its effect on employment in the opium trade hardly made it popular. In a newspaper interview, the visitor called for a radical move to improve the standard of living of the people, and give them security of life and property, though he provided no indication how this was to be achieved. He and his wife made unprecedented \u2013 if highly staged \u2013 visits to the local Miao tribespeople, he in a long gown and trilby, she in dungarees and a big sun hat. Chiang faced another threat to his life when a man with a pistol was caught by the wall outside his residence.\n\nBy then, the Red Army had escaped once more as the very different strategies of the two leaders played itself out across south-west China. Chiang wanted to trap the Communists in a set-piece battle like the one on the Xiang River where he could bring overwhelming force to bear. Mao was the apostle of constant movement, counting on his men being able to outmarch the enemy. 'The ability to run away is precisely one of the characteristics of the guerrillas,' he wrote. 'Running away is the chief means of escaping the passive state and regaining the initiative.' In that, he was greatly aided by the desire of autonomy-minded rulers like Long Yun to see the back of the Red Army as quickly as possible so as not to give Chiang a reason to bring in troops to take control, as he had done in Guizhou.\n\nWith Long Yun offering minimum resistance, the Communists headed for the turbulent upper Yangtze to cross into Sichuan. Chiang ordered all the boats at the few crossing points to be secured or destroyed. That would catch the Red Army up against the river where they could be wiped out. The Nationalists' confidence was boosted by a false report from prisoners that the Communist commander Zhu De had died of wounds, and that his body was being carried along, wrapped in red silk.\n\nAgain spotting the trap laid for them, the Communist altered their line of march, heading for a different stretch of the river and moving mainly at night to avoid aerial surveillance. One battalion was reported to have covered 85 miles in twenty-hour hours. It then put on captured Nationalist uniforms, and took a ferry town without opposition. Others beat back an attack by Nationalist troops from Sichuan. One group of 18,000 men crossed the waterway in four days at the first great sweeping bend in the Yangtze where Chinese had beaten back an invasion from Tibet four centuries earlier.\n\nOn their way into the high plateau of southern Sichuan, the Communists had to deal with the Yi mountain people with whom a truce was agreed after negotiations sealed by the drinking of a cup of chicken's blood, though this did not stop the locals from robbing the passers-through when they could. Emerging from that trial, the Red Army headed for the wild Dadu River, a place of high historical significance as the scene of the slaughter of the last 40,000 troops of the Taiping revolution seventy years earlier. Surging between high cliffs, the waterway can be crossed at only a few spots by boat or over isolated bridges made of chains and ropes. Here, once more, Chiang seemed to have the Communists cornered, and be on the brink of sending the Red Army the way of the rebels of the previous century.\n\nWaiting for the showdown on the Dadu, Chiang flew again to Yunnan to bolster his position there. A big parade by school children was held in his honour, the boys dressed in blue, the girls in white. They carried lanterns in the shape of frogs, crayfish, cabbages, rabbits, guns, ships, birds and butterflies \u2013 their lights described as looking like a many-coloured 'colony of glow worms crawling sinuously upwards'. They sang the Kuomintang song, and saluted as they climbed the steps to where the Generalissimo stood. 'Gently,' he murmured as they passed.\n\nTo survey the battlefield, he made an aerial inspection in a Junkers plane, sitting in the cockpit and staring down at the mountain country with its soil of ochre, red, orange, sepia, magenta and purple. The first green of the rice plants was showing on paddy fields set on terraces in the highlands. At one point, the aircraft swooped down on a village on a sharp ridge with drops of thousands of feet on either side; the inhabitants must have wondered what wondrous metal bird was coming from the heavens. Flying over the Red Army's route, Chiang saw burned farms and stones arranged in a field to form two characters begging for quick salvation. Back in Sichuan, the Generalissimo pressed ahead with building blockhouses, and strengthening local defences. He issued decrees against opium and 'local bullies and bad gentry', lamenting that Sichuan was 'a house divided into disorder and confusion'. As he did so, the Red Army was staging its greatest escape of all, 120 miles to the west.\n\nThe Taipings had been caught on the Dadu at the ferry town of Anshunchang as they paused there to celebrate the birth of a son to their leader. Mao, Zhu De and their troops were not going to stop. A vanguard unit was sent ahead to Anshunchang, covering 50 miles of extremely rugged terrain in a day, the thick forest hiding it from aerial surveillance. A couple of miles from the town, the soldiers lay down to rest, but were ordered to stage an immediate attack. Chiang's generals had assumed that the Communists would take longer, and had not yet sent in reinforcements for a small detachment of Sichuan troops camped across the river from the Communists. All three of the local ferries had been moored on the far side. But the regimental commander was married to a local woman whose family lived on the near bank, and he had crossed the river for dinner with his relatives just as the Communists arrived. The Red Army soldiers grabbed his boat, and used it to capture the town, while others staged a diversion to draw off enemy forces in the area.\n\nIt took three days to ferry a division of soldiers over the rough river, swollen by the spring thaw. Planes began bombing, and Chiang's troops were moving up. So another crossing had to be found if the bulk of the Red Army was to escape. On the morning of 23 May a regiment which had crossed the river was ordered to march towards the town of Luding, 100 miles upstream, where there was an old chain bridge. The regimental political commissar later described the route: 'The road twisted like a sheep's gut along the side of the mountain, rising sharply vertical, as if cut by a knife straight up unto the clouds . . . To the right, dozens of yards below, were the white-capped waves of the rushing river. One mis-step and you were a goner.'\n\nFighting skirmishes with Nationalist troops along the way, the regiment reached Luding on 25 May, to find that some of the planks on the 120-yard bridge had been removed. In a feat much celebrated in Communist China, a twenty-two man advance party climbed across the chains, followed by comrades who laid planks to restore the bridge. The defenders started a fire at the town gate to block the attack but, within two hours, Luding was taken, and Nationalist troops fled as the Red Army poured over the bridge.\n\nAvoiding Sichuan's main population centres and enemy concentrations, the Communists headed across the formidable barrier of the Great Snowy Mountain range, rising to 14,000 feet. The journey was an ordeal of precipitous climbs, typhus, dysentery, air attacks and ambushes by fanatically anti-Chinese Tibetans \u2013 the queen of one tribe threatened to boil alive anybody who helped the Red Army. Those who stopped to urinate froze to death, a marcher recalled.\n\nOn 12 June 1935 the advance guard emerged from the mountains, and saw what it thought were enemy soldiers. Shots were exchanged before Mao's men realised that the others were comrades who had made their own long march from the base above the Yangtze. Hearing of the meeting of the two Communist forces, the Nationalists consoled themselves with the thought that it would be easier to attack a single army than to fight two. Chiang wrote in his diary of the way the Communists had been driven back, 'yet as long as they continue to exist, they remain a source of trouble for China'. 'I must blame myself for lack of necessary knowledge and foresight,' he added, but he told officers that their long pursuit was 'a feat of valour unparalleled in the annals of Chinese history'.\n\nDespite parades and banquets to celebrate the meeting of the two Communist armies, their leaders, Mao and former Politburo member Zhang Guotao, were uneasy bedfellows. Neither had any intention of giving way to the other. With four times as many men as Mao, and a longer pedigree in the party leadership, Zhang wanted to take the driving seat. He had been in Sichuan for some time, and had collected local support, whereas the southerners were in unfamiliar surroundings, worn out by months of exhausting marches and battles. But Mao had gained the upper hand in the Politburo, as he showed at a three-day meeting held in a Buddhist monastery lit by yak butter lamps. This appointed Zhu De as chairman of the military commission, with Zhang as his deputy. Mao also won the day for a march towards a new base area on the northern border of Sichuan instead of adopting Zhang's proposal to head for the expanses of the Far West where they would be out of Chiang's reach. To placate him, Zhang was made General Political Commissar, and joint head of the combined Red Armies with Zhu. The force was split into two columns, which moved forward 50 miles apart. Zhang headed the larger group, which contained the headquarters unit, including Zhu De.\n\nThe compromise did nothing to sink the differences between the two rivals. A Central Committee session held in Zhang's absence adopted a resolution that branded his idea of marching west 'flightist' and 'right opportunism'. For his part, Zhang tried to change the line of march, and to get Zhu De to abandon Mao. Ahead of both columns lay a huge icy swamp of black muck, water many feet deep and high grass on the border with Tibet. While Zhang's column held back, Mao's troops embarked on a week-long crossing. Men froze to death or were sucked into the swamps; foul drinking water provoked typhus and dysentery; the few local inhabitants set ambushes; soldiers hunted down rats for food; the only grain to be found was unmilled \u2013 famished men took undigested kernels from the bloody faeces of the dead, washed them and tried to eat them.\n\nChiang dispatched a strong force to pursue Mao's depleted column as it emerged from the swamp. The Communists won one battle, but then faced a formidable fortress commanding a narrow pass on their route. In another feat of daring and physical skill, twenty commandos climbed the peak behind the fort and captured it in a surprise attack. On 21 September the remnants of the Red Army that had set out from Jiangxi eleven months earlier reached Gansu in the far north of China, and Mao learned from a newspaper of a Soviet base area 600 miles away in Shaanxi province. He decided that this would be the place where he would stop running away.\n\nEscape was made all the easier because Chiang paused in his pursuit of Mao's army at this point. Given the way history was later written to focus on the Great Helmsman, this may seem strange. But the truth was that the Generalissimo was more concerned about Zhang Guotao's larger column than the remnants from Jiangxi. Zhang had given up the attempt to cross the grasslands when faced by a flooded river. Instead, he headed towards the Sichuan capital of Chengdu. After an initial defeat, Chiang's forces based round the city won two significant victories, making Zhang retreat. His numbers were, however, augmented by a link-up with two other local Communist forces, ensuring that he remained the major threat. So, rather than pursuing the fleeing Mao, Chiang sent his troops to fight Zhang's Red Army on the upper Yellow River, where they scored another victory and forced him to march to the Far West where Muslim cavalry further mauled his army.\n\nThe desolation caused by the campaign was reflected in a report by a French missionary after a journey near Chengdu. All the villages he passed through on the first day had been more or less burned down: 'the few houses that had been spared were left without doors, windows, frontage, or partitions. All faces expressed sadness and anxiety. When I inquired who the authors of this destruction were, I was told, \"On the right bank, it was the government troops who burned the houses; on the left bank, the Reds.\"' He estimated that 300,000 people had died or disappeared in three districts he visited.\n\nThe arrival of the Red troops was greeted joyfully by the common people, who had suffered so much from the government soldiery. Little by little, however, massive executions of the wealthy, and then of the proletarians suspected of being lukewarm towards the new regime, damped people's enthusiasm. The initial joy was succeeded by a general uneasiness. Finally, the population greeted the departure of the Red Army with the same feeling of relief as it had welcomed its arrival. Even though the Red Army is gone, however, the communist doctrine has left deep imprints on people's minds. It opened new horizons to the proletarian class, which is now endeavouring to preserve the newly won advantages. The farmers refused to pay their annual rent to the landowners, tenants reject the idea of paying their rent, debtors no longer acknowledge their debt.\n\nArriving in its new home in the north of Shaanxi, Mao's Red Army declared its march at an end on 22 October 1935, 369 days after setting out. A charade of unity was organised the following year when Zhang Guotao's vastly depleted army made its way to Shaanxi, and he was named one of Mao's deputies. The reality was that Zhang was no longer in a position to challenge Mao. The Long March had marked out the man who would contest the leadership of China with Chiang. As for the Generalissimo, he had failed in his primary object of destroying the Red Army, but Communist strength was far less than it had been, and its main force had been pushed into a poor, barren corner of northern China. Though Nanking's authority remained tenuous, the Generalissimo had established a presence in western provinces where the government had previously had no sway. The long campaign further buttressed the preponderance of the military in the regime, and, more than ever, made its leader the dominant figure \u2013 sure that the elimination of the Red Army could only be a matter of time.\n\n* * *\n\n* Mao would hold a key meeting in the hall to purge critics in 1959.\n\n# CHAPTER 16\n\n _End of Endurance_\n\nAS THE RED ARMY was marching towards its new base in northern Shaanxi, Chiang's other opponent was on the move again. The Kwantung Army staged threatening troop manoeuvres round Peiping, and its planes made warning flights over the city. The Japanese demanded the removal of the governor of Chahar province, west of Jehol, and the replacement of government officials in north China by 'friendly' figures. The Young Marshal's successor, General He Yingqin, reached an understanding with the Japanese commander in Tianjin, General Umeza, by which Nanking gave up control of a wide belt in the north along with the cities of Peiping and Tianjin. The secret pact, which formally outlawed the nationalistic Blue Shirts, had Chiang's approval. He was still set on playing for time with the Japanese until he finally crushed the Communists.\n\nAn autonomous administration was established under a puppet ruler over 29,000 square miles of Hebei province. The Nationalists pulled out of half of Chahar. In all, 180,000 Chinese troops withdrew from areas where they might clash with the Japanese, some going to Xi'an for an anti-Communist build-up there. Lopsided customs duties fostered trade within territories under the control of the Japanese who sought figureheads for their satellite areas. Among those mentioned was the former eastern warlord Sun Zhuanfang, who was living in Tianjin; but that came to nothing when he was shot dead while praying in a Buddhist temple by a woman to revenge his execution of her father eleven years earlier \u2013 she was pardoned after a nationwide appeal for clemency.\n\nAs well as military pressure, the Japanese attacked China's economy and the health of its people. Smugglers, including _ronin_ gangsters, moved large quantities of goods into areas under the sway of the Kwantung Army to be sold locally or taken on to central China \u2013 some got as far as Nanking. This undercut Chinese manufacturers, and deprived the government of much-needed tax revenue. Loss of customs income, put at $8 million a month in Hebei alone, jeopardised state loans based on it. Emboldened, the Japanese spread the smuggling to Fujian across the strait from the island of Taiwan, which they controlled. Chinese customs boats were made to remove their guns and stay 12 miles offshore; otherwise they would be treated as pirates and fired at on sight by Japanese ships.\n\nAt the same time, the occupiers encouraged narcotics, both to raise revenue and to sap the health of the Chinese. Three hundred drug dens and 100 shops were authorised in Peiping while Japanese navy ships moved opiates to Shanghai and the Yangtze. Visiting a town of 15,000 people in the demilitarised zone round the former capital, a British social worker, Muriel Lester, counted thirty outlets run by dealers who claimed extraterritorial status. 'When people bring their articles to the pawnshop,' she wrote, 'it is often suggested to them that they take heroin or morphine instead of money. If an injection is desired, a syringe is rented to the customer.'\n\nAt the beginning of November 1935, Chiang joined other Kuomintang leaders for a meeting of the party's Central Executive Committee. After the opening session, a group photograph was taken outside the hall. Wang Jingwei, the Young Marshal and the Model Governor were among those standing in the five rows of dignitaries, but Chiang preferred to go to talk to delegates in the auditorium. As the group broke up after the photograph, a young man stepped forward and shot Wang three times with a Spanish pistol. One bullet hit him in the left lung, another in the left cheek, the third in the left arm. Blood poured from his mouth. Chiang hurried to the scene and helped to carry him to a car. Wang's wife, looking cool and calm, covered her husband with a blanket, and he was rushed to hospital. The Young Marshal and a Kuomintang official overpowered the gunman.\n\nThe would-be assassin, Sun Fengmin, had gained entry to the building with a pass from a news agency whose other staff had left town. It was reported that Sun had been a sergeant in the Nineteenth Route Army. Under questioning, he insisted he had operated on his own. After complaining of a severe headache, he was given a stimulant, but died the next morning. Police said they found opium in his pockets. They added that Chiang had also been trailed by 'suspicious characters'.\n\nWang was operated on, and then moved to Shanghai, resigning his government positions. He went on to Paris for another operation before going to a German spa. There was sporadic speculation that Chiang might have been behind the shooting: the politician's wife asked why the Generalissimo had not been at the photographic session, and the death of the assassin in custody could have been a way of silencing him. But Wang was no threat. It seemed more likely that the assassin had acted from patriotic motives in protest at the appeasement of Japan \u2013 or, as Chen Lifu stated, because he was a follower angry at not having been promoted.\n\nChiang's pre-eminence was underlined when he received 495 of 515 votes in the election of the Central Executive and Supervisory Committees: his aides, the Chen brothers, jointly took second place. In December, the list of a new government was published. The wispy-bearded Lin Sen remained President. As head of the Executive Yuan, with the trusted H. H. Kung as his deputy, Chiang ruled supreme. Wangjingwei was named as chairman of the Kuomintang's Central Political Committee, but said he was too ill to accept, so his seat was taken by his deputy \u2013 Chiang.\n\nStill, the Generalissimo was under growing criticism for his avoidance of confrontation with the Japanese. A Shanghai-based body, the National Salvation Association, became a focal point for the desire for action against the invaders. Students staged demonstrations and hunger strikes in big cities. In Shanghai, they occupied the North Station and the Chapei police headquarters while unidentified gunmen assassinated the pro-Japanese former deputy foreign minister. Chiang received student leaders, but all he would offer was not to sign unequal treaties, as if the He-Umezu and Tangku pacts did not qualify for that description.\n\nThe death of Hu Hanmin in the summer of 1936 \u2013 from a heart attack in Canton \u2013 set off fresh patriotic demonstrations, and encouraged the southern warlords to raise yet another revolt in the name of standing up to the invaders. Given their strong anti-Japanese sentiments, the Guangxi Clique had genuine nationalist motives. That could not be said for the corrupt Guangdong ruler, Chen Jitang, who was out to increase his own power. Both had another reason to act \u2013 half a million Nationalist troops had taken up positions during the anti-Communist campaign in a huge arc stretching through Hunan, Yunnan and Guizhou north of their provinces. Chiang had also used his military presence in the south to block the opium trail to the north which provided most of the Guangxi tax revenue, forcing the generals there to seek an alternative outlet through Guangdong.\n\nThe Canton warlord sent his brother to Nanking to sound out the Generalissimo on his intentions. According to the account given subsequently by the Guangxi ruler, Li Zongren, Chiang played a typical divide-and-rule game, telling his visitor he planned to eliminate the Guangxi leaders, but would leave Guangdong alone. The warlord's brother was a great believer in the occult. On his return to Canton, he reported that, from studying his host's face, he had divined that he would not survive the year. The brothers consulted oracles which predicted defections and the clipping of wings. This, they decided, applied to the Generalissimo and meant he was doomed.\n\nOn 1 June 1936, the Guangdong-Guangxi Anti-Japanese National Salvation Army advanced into Hunan. Back from his international tour, General Cai, formerly of the Nineteenth Route Army, joined it. Chiang avoided battle, though his forces did wipe out one of their own units which had deserted. Payments he had made over the past five years to southern commanders reaped dividends. The desertions and clipping of wings predicted by the soothsayers applied to Chen, not to the Generalissimo. The Canton air force chief flew with dozens of planes to side with the Nationalists; a leading general declared his loyalty to Nanking; and the Chief of Staff went to Hong Kong pleading ill-health. Just before midnight on 17 July, Chen invited Li Zongren to his home to say he was leaving, and hand over a note for $200,000 as a 'disbandment allowance'. Then he headed for Hong Kong, where he had stashed anything from $7 million to $50 million. Like so many others, he would be back, joining Chiang in 1939 after donating $12 million to the national treasury.\n\nTo keep them quiet for the time being, Chiang named Li Zongren and his colleague, Bai Chongxi, as 'Pacification Commanders'. A defecting general was put in charge in Canton, and T. L. Soong was sent to introduce economic reforms. Once his authority had been asserted in Sun Yat-sen's one-time base, Chiang tried to get the Guangxi leaders out of their homeland by appointing Li to the National Defence Council in Nanking, and making Bai governor of Zhejiang province. They resisted that, and fresh fighting broke out, with the Guangxi leaders mobilising their formidable provincial militia.\n\nOn 11 August 1936 Chiang flew to Canton on his first visit since he set out on the Northern Expedition ten years earlier. Greeted by decorative arches over the streets, he stayed at Whampoa, accompanied by Meiling and W. H. Donald. He gave the Guangxi leaders three days to quit. Nationalist planes flew over their province dropping leaflets \u2013 and then ten bombs after being fired at. Confronted with the force of Chiang's army and an economic blockade, Li and Bai made peace; for his part, the Nationalist leader was keen not to get sucked into a war with the 100,000 Guangxi troops on their home ground. He gave his adversaries generous terms to placate them, and provide 'face'. Li was allowed to stay in his province, and Nanking undertook to pay Guangxi $2 million a month.\n\nAs Chiang tidied up loose ends in the south, Meiling and Donald flew to Nanking. The Australian and Madame Chiang had grown increasingly close. When Donald fell ill with a fever during the campaign against the Communists, Meiling had gone to his bedside. The adviser, whose Australian wife had left him twenty years earlier telling him he was married more to China than to her, was deeply attached to the youngest of the Soong sisters. He called a yacht he was building in Hong Kong the _Mei Hua_ , or 'beautiful flower', incorporating the first part of her name.\n\nIn the plane from Canton, they spoke of the new psychology they were trying to bring to China. As the Australian talked, Chiang's wife watched him with searching eyes. Taking a piece of paper from his pocket, he drew squares for a game of noughts and crosses. Meiling won two games, Donald one. The Australian turned the paper over and, as the plane headed across hills green with rice paddies, wrote a poem \u2013 he was a dab hand at doggerel. It mocked the importance of 'face' to the Chinese. He said it was for Meiling, and added, 'Not for you \u2013 but for those who should be like you.'\n\nIn late September, the Generalissimo left Canton with a farewell invocation to 'never complain of hardships or too much work'. A frontpage cartoon in the _North China Herald_ showed him on top of a pagoda, each storey of which bore the name of a province he had brought into the Nationalist fold. He was placing a dome labelled 'Guangxi' on the top; the caption read 'China's architect'. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the revolution on 10 October, Chiang declared that China was no longer disunited, and that the Communists were 'no more a real menace' as 10,000 Scouts marched past his reviewing stand bearing model tanks, planes, battleships and forts.\n\nTwo weeks later, the Generalissimo celebrated his fiftieth birthday \u2013 by the Chinese calculation which has a person one year old at birth. For the occasion, national subscriptions financed the purchase of fifty-five military planes for the regime. Among those handed over at Shanghai airfield was one paid for by Big-Eared Du, which was named for the opium suppression campaign. Chiang received 5,000 birthday telegrams. In Nanking, a fleet of planes flew over a crowd of 200,000 gathered for the occasion, drowning out a speech by President Lin Sen.\n\nThe Generalissimo was not present; he had chosen to go to Luoyang for the day. The Young Marshal joined him there to attend a celebratory lunch, with music provided by the orchestra of the Officers' Moral Endeavour Association. Chiang blew out the candles on two large cakes, and watched an hour-long parade in his honour. Wearing a long coat with a velvet collar and carrying a trilby hat, he sat for a photograph surrounded by officers, with a fur-coated Meiling by his side and the Young Marshal beside her, his gloved fists set firmly on his thighs. 'For so long as we have not recovered our lost sovereign rights and restored our territorial integrity, we will never be free as a people nor independent as a nation,' Chiang said in a speech. But his top priority remained elsewhere.\n\nTo press the campaign against the Red Army, he flew to the Shaanxi capital of Xi'an to confer with the Young Marshal, who had been moved there to fight what was intended to be the final campaign against the Communists. Meiling accompanied her husband, and they were photographed sitting on a giant carving of a fish at an imperial tomb. Zhang Xueliang's troops, who still caressed hopes of returning to Manchuria one day, had lost two battles, but had been instructed to build forts and roads to press the offensive. The Marshal inspected his territory from the air, sometimes piloting his 'Flying Palace' plane himself, dropping messages to troops to which they replied either with characters written on cloth panels or by taking formations to create the characters themselves. At one point, an air raid on the Red Army in which Zhang participated was shot at by Communist troops \u2013 in retaliation he ordered a mortar attack in which Zhou Enlai was nearly killed.\n\nOn the surface, everything seemed in order. But Zhang had made his doubts about the civil war known to his chief. His visit to Europe had led him to attribute the success of the Italian and German Fascists to their restoration of national rights. On the other hand, he added, Nanking risked losing popular support and perishing if it 'recovered territory inch by inch in a civil war, while it lost its territory to the foreign aggressors province by province'. The Communist victories over his army meant he could not disparage the enemy's fighting strength, so, he said later, 'the thought of using \"peaceful\" means to solve the Communist issue was kindled in my heart'.\n\nMessages from Mao Zedong urged a united front against the aggressors who had killed Zhang's father and taken Manchuria from him. At a meeting with a Communist emissary, Zhang agreed to take a 'passive' position in the civil war, though he refused to oppose Chiang openly or to join an attack on the government. Mao reported that a verbal accord for a ceasefire had been reached. In April 1936, Zhang travelled to a meeting close to the Communist headquarters. The Nationalist and Communist flags had been placed outside a Christian church, a classic building with two towers that could have been picked up from Spain and plunked down beneath a high rocky outcrop in northern China. Inside, the Manchurian had all-night talks with Zhou Enlai whom he would describe as 'something else'. They agreed on the need for a united government and army. The Communists set up a base in Xi'an, in a courtyard labyrinth of one-storey buildings linked by circular moon doors, with wireless transmission facilities. The entrance was through a barber's shop run by a German sympathiser.\n\nThe thirty-four-year-old Marshal did not hide his feelings about the Red Army from his senior officers. 'Who could lead an army like they did?' he asked. He told Chiang it was impossible to wipe out the Communists because of their popular support. He sent food to the forces he was meant to be fighting and claimed, fifty years on, to have saved the life of the later Communist leader, Deng Xiaoping, who had typhoid fever, by dispatching canned milk to him. In an interview late in his life, he said he even applied for Communist party membership, but was rejected by the Comintern.\n\nHis feelings were only part of the growing revulsion against the Japanese aggression and Chiang's failure to offer resistance. National enthusiasm rose when Nationalist troops in Suiyuan province in Inner Mongolia moved outside the demilitarised zone agreed with the Japanese to beat separatists backed by the Kwantung Army. In Shanghai, there were riots at Japanese-owned mills, and a Japanese clerk was shot in the back and killed in Chapei. When a group of Japanese marines came ashore, one of its members was killed as he walked in the street. In the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, a mob grabbed Japanese visitors staying at an inn, paraded them through the streets and killed two, reportedly mutilating the bodies and gouging out the eyes. In a Guangdong port, where remnants of the Nineteenth Route Army had taken shelter, the sole Japanese resident was dragged from his pharmacy and stabbed to death. The chairman of the provincial government of Hubei was assassinated by a man who said he acted because his victim was 'attached to diplomacy rather than aggression' towards Japan.\n\nZhang was not the only prominent northern figure to wonder whether it might be better to reach an accommodation with the Communists. In September 1937, Governor Yan of Shanxi announced the formation of a League for National Salvation Through Sacrifice to protect his province against both the Japanese and the centralising threat from Nanking which he could clearly see behind Chiang's new drive against the Red Army. 'There is some risk in a united front,' the Model Governor acknowledged. 'But if we don't collaborate with the Communists, what else can we do? . . . Otherwise we cannot hold off the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek.'\n\nIn fact, Chiang was preparing to fight the Japanese to a greater extent than realised by those who saw him as no more than an appeaser obsessed with the Red Army to the detriment of his nation. As early as 1932, he had set up a secret council to plan for dealing with the invaders. Now, he authorised his lieutenant, Chen Lifu, to open talks with Zhou Enlai about joining forces against the Japanese; according to Chen, the Nationalist conditions were that the Communists should observe Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles, follow Chiang's orders and abolish the Red Army, in return for which they would be allowed to maintain an autonomous government in northern Shaanxi. The secret talks broke down in mutual recrimination, but had, at least, provided the first face-to-face contact.\n\nInternationally, experience since the Mukden Incident had shown how little assistance the West was ready to offer China against Japanese expansion. The failure of the League of Nations to do anything effective in the face of Italy's attack on Abyssinia in 1935 underlined the emptiness of talk of standing up to aggression. Having given up hope of help from powers which professed to be committed to his country's territorial integrity, the Generalissimo sent an adviser to Europe to study modern military methods \u2013 on his return, he stressed the importance of air power, economic mobilisation and propaganda. With the backing of the Young Marshal, who had been bowled over by Mussolini, a consignment of planes was ordered from Italy; unfortunately they turned out to be antiquated models, and the crates of spare parts that accompanied them contained junk.\n\nMore fruitfully, Nanking hired Claire Chennault, an American enthusiast for air power who had recently retired from the US Army Air Corps after his ideas had been rejected. The Texan-born Chennault, who used his southern charm on Meiling in her capacity as a director of the national aeronautics board, was entrusted with building up the regime's aviation strength, hiring mercenary pilots, training fliers and supervising the assembling of planes from American parts. At the same time, Germany agreed to provide weapons worth $100 million in return for supplies of minerals. A contract for delivery of submarines was also signed.\n\nSouth of the Yellow River, fortifications were built along major railway lines. 'Great dugouts of cement and reinforced steel have been completed at strategic cities in this area \u2013 some as places of refuge for the civilian population, and some as storage for grain, munitions, fuel oil and gasoline,' Hallett Abend of the _New York Times_ wrote in a memo to his publisher. Chiang 'has been buying naval mines from abroad, and has secretly converted many of his ships into mine-layers', he added. At the beginning of 1937, the Chief of Staff, General He, reported on a wide range of industrial projects that would help the war effort \u2013 a further sign of the militarisation of the country. Fortifications were to be strengthened at key points, with three lines of defences between Shanghai and Nanking, pillboxes on railway lines and improved communication links. Army reform was pursued with the aim of developing an elite force of well trained officers and troops with local loyalties.\n\nThe Generalissimo was keen to keep such developments secret for two reasons. Though Nanking told Tokyo it wanted to abrogate the Tangku Truce that had given the invaders a virtually free hand in the north, Chiang did not want to give the Japanese a pretext to advance further, or to alarm regional warlords by being seen to be building up the strength of the central army. Nor was he to be shifted from his insistence on finishing off the Red Army first. If that meant getting rid of the Young Marshal for a second time because he was becoming unreliable, so be it. On a visit to the north in November, Chiang appears to have told Zhang he was going to be replaced by a more gung-ho general for the final push in Shaanxi. This meant the prospect of the Manchurian ever leading his troops home would disappear for good. That, and the realisation by local commanders that the coming of the central army would inhibit their authority and weaken their 'irregular armies', could only buttress their resistance to Chiang's crusade.\n\nHowever, everything appeared under control as the Nationalist chief got the usual New Life reception on his arrival in Xi'an at the beginning of December, 1936, to put the final touches to the sixth anti-Communist campaign. The streets were cleaned, and the dogs were chased away. Soldiers with drawn bayonets guarded his route. A large detachment of Blue Shirts arrived to weed out Communists.\n\nBut, by now, Zhang's mind was set. As he told Chiang, he did not like the idea of suppressing the Communists with whom he had reached an agreement to 'resist Japan and save the nation'. 'It wasn't that I was sympathetic with them,' he recalled fifty years later. 'But they were Chinese so why fight each other? We could talk with them. Later negotiating became my idea. It wasn't impossible to negotiate. We could talk with them. Mr Chiang became very unhappy with me in this matter.' He saw that the Generalissimo could play a double game by sending the local troops to fight the Communists, causing both to suffer heavy casualties, while the central government army conserved its strength and took control. 'I did my best to follow orders,' the Marshal insisted. 'But the soldiers were not stupid. They knew that, if they lost men or ammunition, they would not be replaced so they were unwilling to fight.'\n\nBehind such reasoning lurked the possibility of an anti-Chiang alliance in the north west linking the Young Marshal, the Model Governor, the Communists and other regional figures. Chiang's response was to insist on obedience, threatening to move Zhang's troops to far-away Fujian province if they did not fight the Red Army. The Marshal, he wrote in his diary, lacked 'the resolve of the last five minutes'. Against this background of such mixed motives, the Marshal launched the kidnapping of Chiang, and the fate of China tilted.\n\nAs the reaction to the kidnapping at Xi'an showed, for all his faults and weaknesses, the Generalissimo was the only possible embodiment of the nation. Even those who opposed his dictatorial ambitions gave him 'grudging support because they generally recognised no man in China equaled him in ability to command adherence,' wrote the American ambassador, Nelson Johnson. Xi'an, he added, 'suddenly made of Chiang Kai-shek a symbol of all that the Chinese people wanted most, namely, unity.' Still, the leader went through the motions of submitting his resignation three times, saying he was guilty of not having foreseen the December rebellion. These hollow offers, which were naturally rejected, only underlined his irreplaceability. In an Easter message, he looked back to his captivity, saying he had thought of Christ's forty days and nights in the wilderness, and remembered the injunction to forgive those who have sinned against you. So, he had let the rebels 'start life anew'.\n\nIn Xi'an, the Marshal's supporters were not ready to give up their struggle. The city was in a rebellious mood. A hundred thousand soldiers and civilians staged a rally for die recovery of Manchuria. But dieir generals preferred to open peace talks with the Nationalists, leading the young radicals to stage an uprising in which Chiang's kidnapper, Colonel Sun, played a prominent role. As they shot several senior officers, the Young Marshal's companion-in-arms, General Yang Hucheng, turned against them, and the leaders of the uprising fled after sacking the army treasury. Then a Nationalist column entered the city, and Zhang Xueliang's army began to move out for the new home dictated for them by Chiang in the far north. Yang went too, leaving China for a tour of Europe; when he returned in 1938, he was arrested and held as a prisoner for seven years.\n\nOther legacies of the incident lived on in the top levels at Nanking. Chiang developed a trusting relationship with General Chen Cheng, a veteran of the Northern Expedition and the anti-Communist campaigns who had gone to Xi'an with him, and had also been held prisoner. On his return to Nanking, the Generalissimo designated the general as his successor \u2013 he was to tell the Model Governor that he could not get along without Chen's services for even a day. Such favour could only antagonise the War Minister, General He Yingqin, who saw himself as the second ranking military figure. This set in motion a lifelong feud between the two men which Chiang did nothing to moderate since it made sure that both would vie for his support.\n\nHe's eagerness to bomb Xi'an, putting the leader's life at risk, was an obvious black mark against him. Newspaper stories, apparently inspired by Chiang supporters, spoke of a 'certain clique' in the capital, including military men, who had seen the kidnapping as a chance to dispose of the Generalissimo, and impose a dictatorship of their own. It became known that He and some of his colleagues had wanted Wangjingwei to form an administration that would be more pliant towards the Japanese. Once the Generalissimo had regained the capital, the newspapers added, the plotters had become super-supportive, seeing the degree of popularity he enjoyed. It was plain that Chiang's confidence in figures like General He had been shaken, making him even more self-sufficient and unwilling to delegate real power.\n\nNeeding rest, the Generalissimo lengthened his stay in Xikou to three months. His home village was what might be expected from the birthplace of the pioneer of the New Life movement. A visitor described it as being as clean as a new pin \u2013 'no unemployment, no beggars, no prostitutes, and no sing-song girls'. There were public lavatories, a dry-cleaning shop, two Christian missions, barbers with tilting chairs, and dentists with drills propelled by belts powered by the feet of boys. The population had reached 2,000, half of whom claimed kinship with the Generalissimo. The salt shop where Chiang had been born was empty, but in good condition. His main home had been extended. His first wife, Mao, occupied a room on a balcony with a Buddhist shrine outside. Meiling had a room at the end of the balcony, with a low wooden bed, marble-topped dressing table and mirrored wardrobe. Mao gave her successor local food specialities. Meiling reciprocated with clothes and ginseng.\n\nAs well as this home and the residence on the ridge behind the village, Chiang had another house on the riverfront, the Wenchang Pavilion, which had been renovated for him. From the big double bed with a mirrored headboard, there was a fine view out to the hills across the water. Beside it, a modern house was built for Chiang's son, who had come back under his father's wing following his return from the Soviet Union with his Russian wife. Across the road was a school where the Generalissimo was honorary headmaster. He and Meiling lectured the pupils on good behaviour in the cavernous assembly hall, and used the upstairs offices for meetings. The 700 students followed courses in agriculture; Chiang gave the director regular instructions on acquiring more land and planting trees \u2013 nothing, the Generalissimo told him, 'has more dignity than a tree'.\n\nOn arrival after the Xi'an Incident, Chiang went for a walk, and paid his last respects to a half-brother who had just died. The funeral drew the Christian General, in peasant garb, Wang Jingwei, who had returned from Europe, Big-Eared Du, and Ailing, Meiling and T. V. Soong. Some of the visitors took a trip up the hill behind the village to visit the Young Marshal, who was reported to be tanned and fit in his detention. At the monastery beside his new home, they shared with him a vegetarian meal of imitation duck, pork and ham. Chiang and Meiling were carried past in sedan chairs to their house on the peak. A visitor noted two beds there. One, for the daughter of the Soong clan, was big and soft; the other, for the self-made soldier with back trouble after his experience in Xi'an, was hard. At the back was a small room with a large porcelain bath.\n\nFrom Xikou, Chiang authorised meetings with the Communists to lay the groundwork for a united front; Zhou Enlai acted as the main point of contact. The survivors of the Long March used the breathing space that followed the kidnapping to expand their base area in the border areas of Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia provinces. After all their anti-Japanese rhetoric, cooperation with the Nationalist government against the invaders could not be rejected. A close and 'sincere' relationship with Nanking was advocated by Wang Ming, a leading party figure who had returned from Moscow, and by Mao's rival Red Army leader, Zhang Guotao. The Communists also adopted a more moderate land reform policy by which rich landlords were fined rather than being killed. As a sign of the new attitude, the Red Army gave a banquet for local military and civilian officials, north of Xi'an, to which an Italian priest and Protestant missionaries were invited.\n\nEach side was still determined to eliminate the other in the long term, but the context of 1937 meant neither could be seen to be putting its interests ahead of those of the nation. So a broad agreement was reached, with Nanking agreeing to pay money to 'reintegrated' territories and armies. The Red Army in Shaanxi, built up to number 30,000 men, became the Eighth Army of the united front, operating in the north under the burly, pug-nosed Long March commander, Zhu De. Nanking approved the creation of a second Communist force in central China, the 12,000-man New Fourth Army which included guerrillas left behind at the start of the Long March. Both armies expanded rapidly, reaching a combined strength of some 92,000 during 1937, and doubling the following year.\n\nThe Generalissimo ordered defensive positions to be established in the Shanghai-Nanking-Hangzhou triangle, and pushed the training of elite forces by the German advisers. On paper, he had 2 million troops to throw into battle, but the regime's real strength was well short of appearances. Central army commanders lacked experience in handling large units. Half the officers promoted from the ranks were reckoned to be illiterate. Provincial militarists retained control over substantial armies which they would use for their own ends. In his study of the Chinese army, Michael Gibson has calculated that seventy-nine of the 165 divisions reported to Nanking. Of the remaining eighty-six 'irregular' or warlord divisions, seventeen were of good fighting quality. Another historian of the Sino-Japanese war, Ch'i Hsi-Sheng, counts only thirty-one divisions as answering to Chiang. Many Chinese units were seriously under strength. Even elite forces lacked heavy weapons. Though Japan's strength was much less, with seventeen divisions in the country, its units were properly manned and equipped with artillery, logistical backing and air support. Chiang reckoned that it took three fully staffed Chinese divisions of 14,000 troops each to match one Japanese division.\n\nStill, the merits of taking a more aggressive approach were being pressed on Chiang by his chief German adviser, Alexander von Falkenhausen, a First World War veteran with a vulture-like head and pince-nez. 'China must resist in two ways: morally and materially,' Von Falkenhausen wrote. 'The will morally to resist requires a government that provides firm leadership.' He admitted that the Chinese army was not fit to face a modern war, but, meeting W. H. Donald, tapped him with his swagger stick and said, 'My friend, if Japan attacks, she would be defeated.'\n\nAs summer arrived, Chiang and his subordinates moved to the cool of Ruling in the Lushan Mountains where government conferences were held, with officials lodged at the Fairy Glen Hotel. In a letter to his son in June, the Generalissimo noted that the Japanese were 'again causing disturbance, a great annoyance indeed, but we will certainly be able to subdue them'. Haifa million copies of his account of the kidnapping were sold. Meiling was awarded honorary degrees by two colleges in the United States.\n\nElsewhere, the disasters which were such a feature of Chinese life continued unabated. Thirty million people were affected by famine in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Henan, where inhabitants ate mud, baked clay in leaves, hunted ants and devoured tree roots. There were outbreaks of smallpox and bubonic plague in several provinces. In Canton, soldiers shot 350 lepers out of hand at a sanatorium as health risks. A journalist reported seeing 1,500 horse loads of opium from Yunnan on their way through Guizhou. In a speech to mark the tenth anniversary of Nanking's becoming the national capital, President Lin Sen said the regime was 'far behind what we had hoped for'.\n\nThe recent appointment of a new Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, had been widely seen in the West as a sign that the militarists were losing ground in Tokyo. But Chiang received a different story from one of his visitors at Kuling, Hallett Abend. The _New York_ Traasjoumalist had just returned from a tour of Korea, Manchukuo and northern China where he saw big troop concentrations. After the American ambassador pooh-poohed his fears of a new move by Tokyo, Abend went to see Chiang. The Generalissimo, Abend recalled, showed a 'grim determination' not to yield to the Japanese. He would have liked to have had more time to prepare, particularly in developing the air force. But he was well aware that he would lose popular support if he did not resist the next provocation.\n\nThat came in the midsummer of 1937. In the afternoon of 7 July, a 100-strong company of Japanese soldiers marched by a stone bridge spanning the Yongding River 10 miles south-west of Peiping. Lined with columns topped by carvings of the heads of lions, the Lukouchiao Bridge* was known to foreigners as the Marco Polo Bridge because the Venetian traveller had visited it. South-east lay the town of Wanping, with some 2,000 inhabitants. To the north was a temple. Beside it was an open area with gravel pits where the Japanese were to carry out a night manoeuvre.\n\nOn their arrival, the Japanese found 200 Chinese soldiers digging trenches and repairing pillboxes. To avoid a clash, the Japanese shifted the site of their exercise closer to Wanping, sending off soldiers with machine guns to play the role of the enemy. When the first stage of the manoeuvre ended at 10.30 p.m., messengers were dispatched to tell the soldiers playing the adversaries to bed down till dawn. Shortly afterwards, machine-gun fire with blanks sounded from the 'enemy' position. This was followed by a dozen rifle shots from the area where the Chinese soldiers had been working. The Japanese company captain, who suspected that the machine-gunners might have taken the messengers for Chinese scouts, ordered a bugle call to summon his men to muster. When they gathered, it was found that one messenger was missing. The captain sent a dispatch rider to his superior officer to ask for instructions while telling his men to march away from the source of the rifle shots.\n\nThe Japanese regimental commander called in reinforcements, but also arranged a midnight meeting with the Chinese guarding Wanping and the bridge. According to recollections by Japanese at the scene, the captain and six men set out in the dark in an attempt to discover what had happened to the missing messenger. They ran into Chinese soldiers, and asked if their man had come that way. When the Chinese said they had seen nobody, the captain abandoned his mission for fear of being made prisoner. By then, the messenger had returned unharmed. His temporary disappearance was put down either to his getting lost in the moonless night after stopping to urinate, having been taken prisoner by the Chinese, having sneaked off to a brothel, or having fallen in a gravel pit and passed out.\n\nThe rifle shots from the Chinese were probably a reaction to the machine-gun blanks and the bugle call, rather than an offensive move. But, at the midnight meeting, the Japanese made much of the 'unlawful firing' and called for an investigation. The Chinese understood that they were demanding entry into Wanping for their troops to search the town and possibly to occupy it. When there was fresh Chinese rifle fire before dawn, the Japanese decided to advance, though only as far as the temple.\n\nUnlike earlier incidents exploited by the Japanese, the clash does not appear to have been cooked up to create a pretext for aggression on a wider scale. The local officers signed a provisional ceasefire. In Tokyo, those who wanted Japan to conserve its strength for a confrontation with the Soviet Union initially won the day against those who advocated using the episode to launch a major campaign in northern China. But then incidents multiplied round Peiping, and Emperor Hirohito gave his backing to the expansionists, ordering reinforcements of five divisions to be sent to China.\n\nOn the afternoon of 26 July, the Japanese issued an ultimatum for the remaining two Chinese divisions at Peiping to withdraw by noon the next day. In the morning, they began to attack the area round the Summer Palace and the airport outside the former capital. Travelling on the road to the airfield, the French military attache saw hundreds of corpses of Chinese soldiers killed by fire from armoured vehicles and strafing from the air.\n\nThe town of Wanping was heavily bombed before the Japanese blew their way through the gate in its crenellated walls. When the French attache, Jacques Guillermaz, got there, he found that all the shops were showing Rising Sun flags. Lines of Chinese prisoners, chained round the waist and legs, carried munitions for the victors. Others sat, bound hand and foot, awaiting their fate. An old woman prostrated herself in the dust begging somebody to look after her wounded son \u2013 a French doctor took him to hospital and saved his life.\n\nIn another walled town, Dongzhou, collaborationist Chinese militiamen changed sides after the Japanese garrison went to join the fighting. They massacred most of the Japanese and Korean civilians in the town, provoking an attack by Kwantung Army soldiers who killed everybody they could find.\n\nThe Japanese occupied Peiping and took the railway line to the port of Tianjin which was hit by waves of bombers that set off huge fires \u2013 the university was a particular target because, the Japanese explained, it harboured a nest of hostile students. North of the old capital, die Imperial Army pushed through the strategic Nankou Pass on the Great Wall, where the Nationalists had blown up locomotives in the railway tunnel to impede the offensive. The invaders used fast-moving armoured vehicles to outflank the defenders, broke through the Wall and pushed on into Inner Mongolia where they backed a separatist government led by a descendant of Genghis Khan.\n\nIn his summer retreat, Chiang referred to the Japanese in his diary by a familiar term of abuse as 'dwarf bandits', and asked whether they were 'attempting to subdue us by taking advantage of the present situation when we have not yet completed our preparations'. It was, he added, 'high time that we decide to respond to the fire'. Central army units were ordered to move north. The Generalissimo insisted that any ceasefire had to be negotiated by Nanking, not by local commanders whom he rightly suspected of being too pliant. Appearing in field uniform on the balcony of military headquarters in Ruling, his chest thrust out, his face stern, he declared that 'the limits of endurance had been reached'.\n\nIn an interview at the end of July, Chiang took responsibility for what had happened in the north, but said it marked only the start of the war. He conferred with Governor Yan Xishan of Shanxi; General Han Fuju, the largely autonomous Shandong warlord; General Bai, the Muslim member of the Guangxi Clique; and the governors of Sichuan and Yunnan. T. V. Soong was called in to advise on financing the conflict. As a sign of the new climate, a conference of 400 national leaders was held in Ruling, including representatives of non-partisan professional groups and non-Ruomintang political parties. Zhou Enlai attended to pledge support, asking, in return, for his party's activities to be legalised.\n\nYan and the Christian General, Feng Yuxiang, were each given command of a northern war zone. The Communist Eighth Army was to be deployed in Shaanxi while the Fourth Army would operate in Jiangsu, above Shanghai. Bai was allocated a central role, and his Guangxi colleague, Li Zongren, was put in charge of the biggest war area reaching in from the central east coast. Chiang kept direct control of Nationalists in the north, though his ability to influence events there was limited by the strength of the Japanese and their collaborators. But he and Meiling showed their resolve by flying to inspect troops on a northern railway line.\n\nIn a message to the Communist military commission, Mao said a moment of truth had been reached at which it was imperative to enforce 'the policy of total resistance by the whole nation'. From his side, Chiang declared: 'No territory must be lost and no sovereign rights impaired.' In Tokyo, where the Emperor pressed for a 'war-ending' battle, Hirohito's brother, Prince Takamatsu, summed up the military mood as: 'We're really going to smash China so that it will be ten years before they can stand straight again.' A message to Berlin, from von Falkenhausen reported: 'This is . . . total war.'\n\nSix years after the Mukden Incident, the long-awaited war between Japan and China had begun. It came several years too soon for Chiang whose development and defence plans were far from fruition. But a failure to fight and the abandonment of northern China would have posed a potentially fatal threat to the Generalissimo. For their part, the Japanese expected a short war which could be confined to the north and would give them mastery there. Instead, the conflict would drag on for eight years, reaching across all China and reaping a death toll so immense that it will never be known for certain. Chiang put the 'sacrifices' at 10 million. Official accounts say 3.3 million soldiers and more than 8.4 million civilians were killed, not including others who perished from disease, starvation and forced labour. Chiang's adopted son said 20 million civilians died as Japanese troops made themselves notorious for their brutality and sadistic disregard for human life.\n\nChina's great cities were occupied and large tracts of the most fertile land devastated. The war put paid to the attempt of the government to establish a centralised regime, and halted modernisation schemes. The administration became even more militarised and repressive \u2013 and grew steadily weaker. The Communists used the war to develop their bases and military force, with Mao asserting his dictatorship.\n\nThe need to fight the Japanese before finishing off the Red Army had been forced on Chiang by events beyond his control. His eventual defeat might have happened in any case, but it was greatly facilitated by events after the incident by the Marco Polo Bridge. China would suffer its greatest ordeal since the Taiping Rebellion, and its leader would face his ultimate test. As an opening gambit, he decided to start the fight-back where the enemy did not expect it, provoking a huge urban battle in the city where he had cut his revolutionary teeth two decades earlier.\n\n* * *\n\n* Now known as Lugouqiao.\n\n# PART IV\n\nBROKEN JADE\n\nShanghai, August 1937\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nChungking, October 1944\n\n# CHAPTER 17\n\n_The Most Dreadful Nightmare_\n\nON SATURDAY, 14 AUGUST 1937, as a typhoon blew through Shanghai picking up people bodily, five American-made planes from the Chinese air force flew in a tight V formation towards Japanese navy ships moored off the Bund. They had been meant to conduct a high-altitude bombing mission, but the bad weather made this impossible, so they swooped low in a shallow dive 1,500 feet above the water. This boosted their speed, but they failed to adjust their sights. Missing the Japanese ships completely, two of their bombs skimmed above the _North China Daily News_ building on the Bund, falling towards the main shopping street of Nanking Road by the Cathay and Palace hotels.\n\nAn Australian journalist from the paper, Rhodes Farmer, ran down to the street to see what had happened there. 'On the corner a decapitated Sikh policeman lay with his arms outstretched as though against oncoming traffic,' he wrote.\n\nYellow high-explosive fumes exposed a terror scene in Nanking Road. Flames from blazing cars were incinerating the bodies of their riddled occupants. In grotesque heaps where they had been huddling in doorways and annexes of the Cathay and Palace hotels were heaps of refugees whose blue coolie clothes were turning red. Heads, arms, legs lay far from mangled trunks . . . Across the tramlines was a tall European. His suit of white flannel was unspotted so cleanly had his skull been sliced off.\n\nFallen masonry and shattered glass covered the road. The clock on the front of the Cathay was stopped at 4.27. Inside, bits of flesh lay among valuables on show in the hotel's display windows. Behind the bar, two Chinese stewards served brandy. A White Russian picked up a thumb from the floor, and asked the people in the bar, 'Any of you lose this?' The official death toll was 728.\n\nThere was even worse carnage in the French Concession. Two shrapnel bombs jettisoned by another Chinese plane landed in the crowded streets outside the New World entertainment centre. A hundred cars caught fire, burning the trapped occupants to death. The pavements ran with blood. More than 1,000 people died and as many were injured. Walking home that night, Farmer passed through an alley where he saw hundreds of people apparently asleep. Then he realised that they were unburied bodies.\n\nThe bombings came at the start of a three-month batde which Chiang provoked in Shanghai to open a second front in the war with Japan. He had sent troops into the city in defiance of the demilitarisation agreement that ended the battle of 1932. The Japanese riposted with an artillery bombardment of the edge of the workers' district of Chapei, and of the university area. As refugees crowded into the International Setdement and the French Concession, Emperor Hirohito pronounced the situation in Shanghai 'critical'. It was certainly not what the Japanese wanted. Their strategy was to consolidate in the north. To prevent that and to live up to the nationalistic hopes fanned after the Xi'an Incident, the Generalissimo decided on a dramatic gesture. There could be no better place to do this than China's biggest and richest city, making the metropolis that symbolised the drive for modernity into an icon for a new readiness to fight the invaders under the gaze of foreign diplomats, businessmen and correspondents.\n\nInstead of confronting the enemy on the northern plains where it would be able to exploit its air, armoured and artillery superiority, the Generalissimo decided to suck Japan into a close quarters urban batde he hoped would arouse the nation psychologically to compensate for reversals in the north. The Shanghai-Nanking-Hangzhou triangle was the most fortified part of the country. Rail and road communications were good. The strength of the Green Gang would be used \u2013 Big-Eared Du had tipped his cap to the anti-Japanese struggle by visiting the 'seven gentlemen' imprisoned in Shanghai for patriotic activities whose trial had been abandoned when the war began. The city's businesses could be counted on to come up with funds. The Americans, British and French in their concessions might be caught up in the fighting, provoking foreign intervention. There was also the potent memory of the defence of the city in 1932, and the hope that, if they finally met resistance, the Japanese would lose heart while their home front recoiled from high casualties.\n\nChiang's policy certainly diverted the Japanese, preventing them from simply consolidating in northern China and dividing the country along the line of the Yellow River. The expansion of the war to the Yangtze and then further south meant that, so long as the Nationalists held out politically, Tokyo faced a challenge it would be unable to master, given the size of die nation and the inaccessibility of much of the interior. But Chiang's grand strategy came at an awful price. Japan was not going to allow itself to be driven into the sea at Shanghai. It controlled the lanes to the mouth of the Yangtze, so could bring in as many troops as it wished, and had no scruples about using air raids and artillery against urban areas. As for Western intervention, Washington, London and Paris had shown every desire to avoid a military clash \u2013 even if they intervened, Nanking could, at best, only expect a return to the status quo.\n\nThere was also a wider danger. Once they had become engaged in Shanghai, the Japanese were likely to press on up the river towards Nanking. If they took the capital, they could then advance further west to Wuhan. Chiang's second front also amounted to recognition that the central government was helpless in northern China. That may have been reality, but it meant he abandoned resistance there to the Communists who were able to draw on peasants, students and patriotic youth movements. The Generalissimo was acting on psychological-political grounds, rather than according to strict military calculations. As he ordered every unit to fight to the last man, what counted was to show that the enemy could no longer enjoy military walkovers whenever it chose. As a Japanese spokesman put it, 'the Chinese idea of a victory is very different from ours. When they do not retreat, they regard it as a victory.'\n\nThe main Japanese offensive began in mid-September and lasted for a month on a battle line that stretched for forty miles. There was heavy fighting in the surrounding countryside which rain turned into what one observer called 'a great wet rice field' while the urban front reached through the districts of Chapei, Hongkew and Yangtzepo. Hidden Chinese artillery fired across the river. Civilians helped construct defences and assisted medical and relief work- Du gave his bullet-proof limousine to the army. Cabarets turned into relief centres for wounded soldiers whom the sing-song girls comforted with sweet words, flowers and manicures.\n\nAt the height of the battle, the Nationalists had committed half a million men, led by some of their best generals. Tokyo staged six troop mobilisations to raise its strength to 200,000 under the command of the slight, tubercular General Matsui Iwane, a devoted Buddhist from a scholarly family. His soldiers pushed forward slowly but steadily from the coast through heavy downpours. Japanese air operations were helped when Italian advisers who had been working for the Nationalists changed sides and handed over plans of the region.\n\nThe ten-storey concrete administration building of the North Station, rebuilt after the battle of 1932, became a centre of fighting once again. Ringed by vast craters, one end of the structure was holed and blackened by shells and bombs, but a Chinese unit held out inside, emerging at night on attack missions. Many prisoners in the city's main jail were killed when they were caught in crossfire. A foreign hospital treated 14,599 outpatients during August alone. In the Hongkew district, Rhodes Farmer saw streets lined with bodies of local people shot by the Japanese. Whole blocks of buildings had been burned to smoke out snipers; shops had been looted; the freebooting _ronin_ gangsters did as they wished.\n\nSpectators lined the rooftops of the Bund to watch enemy warships firing shells from the river in the middle of the city; it was as if German cruisers had been anchored off Westminster in 1940 or Japanese naval craft in the Hudson in 1942. The foreigners went on with their lawn bowls, polo and cricket while an operatic troupe performed in the ballroom of the greyhound racing stadium; the Rotary Club heard a talk on world politics; ajapanese parliamentary delegation arrived to enquire into what was going on. At one bar, Hungarian gypsies played till dawn. At another, a broken-down Russian singer crooned 'Parlez-moi d'amour'.\n\nAlthough Japan dominated the battle in the air, Chinese pilots directed by Claire Chennault, the American officer recruited at Meiling's instigation, made regular sorties. One particular target was the cruiser moored off the Bund, the _Idzumo_ , which the planes had been aiming for in the early disastrous raid. Two unsuccessful attempts were also made to blow it up with torpedoes, but the antiquated boat remained invulnerable. In a second accident of war on Nanking Road, the Sincere department store was hit by a bomb dropped by a Chinese pilot who lightened his load while evading Japanese fighters. The blast sent shrapnel and debris flying into the Wing On shop opposite. The death toll was put at around 200, with 550 injured. Counter attendants and customers lay dead on top of one another. One heap of bodies was covered with toys. Water from burst mains washed blood down the gutters. A Boy Scout climbed to a lift caught between floors at Sincere; when he opened the door, the blood of the dead streamed out, and he handed down a pith helmet with a decapitated head still in it.*\n\nChiang orchestrated the battle from his headquarters in the silk town of Suzhou,\u2020 north-west of Shanghai. He drew up detailed written orders which often bore little relation to the fluctuating realities of the battleground, and were out of date by the time they reached the front. His insistence that units must not retreat meant many of his best troops fell in protracted battles for villages outside Shanghai. German advisers went to the front line, including von Falkenhausen who subsisted on boiled eggs and cognac, and earned a decoration from the Nanking government for his work. A visiting correspondent, Hessell Tiltman, was greatly impressed by the quality of Chinese troops, but he noted the lack of medical facilities and the heavy losses \u2013 on one dark night he sat on what he thought was a heap of sacks but discovered he was resting on a pile of bodies. The Chinese, he concluded, 'are facing incredible hardships with a courage which deserves the most flattering tribute a pen can write'. The defenders suffered from bad co-ordination and poor intelligence. In places, they were in single trenches without barbed wire.\n\nAt the height of the battle, Meiling drove from Nanking to visit refugees and emergency hospitals. W. H. Donald accompanied her. The road was pitted with shell craters and under surveillance from Japanese planes \u2013 they had just attacked a car carrying the British ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, wounding him in the spine, despite a Union Jack marking on the roof of his vehicle. Meiling, wearing blue slacks and shirt, was chatting with Donald when their car hit a pothole. After the rear tyre punctured, the vehicle went out of control, shooting off the highway and turning over. Thrown out, Donald saw Chiang's wife flying over his head. She landed in a ditch 20 feet away, unconscious, her face caked with mud.\n\nThinking she was dead, Donald picked up Meiling, and carried her to a farmhouse. There, he felt her breathing as she stirred. Parodying the Chinese custom of shouting to frighten away life-claiming devils, the Australian sang in a booming voice, 'She flies through the air with the greatest of ease, this daring young girl who fights Japanese.' When Meiling opened her eyes, as Donald recalled a decade later, he told her, 'You can never say that I didn't pick you up from the gutter.'\n\nThe youngest Soong washed her face, and put on make-up. Looking pale and weak, she said her side hurt; she held Donald's arm tighdy as the car was put back on the road and they drove to the city. She had a broken rib, but went ahead with visits to army hospitals where she was photographed tending to the wounded in a nurse's uniform.\n\nA Japanese landing at Hangzhou Bay to the south sealed the outcome as the attackers enveloped the Chinese forces with 30,000 men to their rear. Though the commanders at the front urged Chiang to order a general retreat, he held on for five days, losing many more of his best men in the process. A naval spokesman in Tokyo reported that 850 planes had dropped 2,526 bombs in two days. Huge blazes broke out, with acres of blackened ruins, charred timber and heaps of bricks.\n\nIn Songjiang on the Japanese route to Shanghai, hardly a building was not gutted by fire. Once the town had housed 100,000 people; now only five remained, sheltered in a former French Catholic mission. The dogs had grown unnaturally fat after feasting on corpses.\n\nFinally, Chiang ordered withdrawal from Shanghai on 8 November. To cover the retreat, the Chinese set fire to Chapei. Despite rain, the blaze stretched for more than 5 miles and was still burning in places two weeks later. Across the creek from the International Setdement, an elite battalion stayed behind in a warehouse to provide a last outpost of resistance, choosing its position so that the Japanese would be inhibited from using their artillery for fear of shells overshooting and hitting the foreigners. A fourteen-year-old Chinese Girl Guide swam the creek bearing a national flag which was raised over the building. The colonel in charge asked to be sent supplies of sugar, salt and biscuits for a long stand. But, once it had made its gesture, Chiang ordered the battalion to evacuate. Leaving 100 bodies behind, the soldiers crossed the bridge into the Anglo-American area. Some carried umbrellas of oiled paper; one had a canary in a cage; many walked hand-in-hand. At the back of the column were six uniformed girls who had been with the battalion through the siege. Behind them, Japanese soldiers raised their flag on the warehouse roof to the cry of 'Banzai!'\n\nEstimates of Nationalist losses in the ninety-day battle range from 180,000 to 300,000, including many of the best German-trained units. The Japanese were reckoned to have lost 70,000 men. More than 100,000 refugees crowded into camps in the foreign areas run by a white-bearded French Jesuit with a wooden arm. Another 350,000 people fled the city during or after the fighting. By any rational calculation, it had been a disaster for the Chinese. If Chiang had been able to hold the line in Shanghai, it might have been argued that the resulting upsurge in national morale would have justified the heavy casualties. But that was far from being the case as the retreat turned into a chaotic race for survival by soldiers and civilians.\n\nThe enemy repeatedly outflanked Chinese defensive lines amid the rivers, lakes and canals of the area, laying waste everything in their path, clearing men from their homes and raping the women left inside, carrying off loot, food and livestock on stolen horses, donkeys and buffaloes. 'The farming area between Shanghai and Nanking, once the most populous area on earth, was the graveyard of almost a million Chinese,' Rhodes Farmer reported. Roads were clogged with fleeing soldiers and civilians, some in carts, rickshaws and boats but most on foot, targets for repeated bombing and strafing by enemy planes. A Japanese battalion was told simply: 'All law-abiding people have retreated within the walls of towns and cities. Treat everyone found outside the walls as anti-Japanese and destroy them.'\n\nAs the Generalissimo moved back to Nanking, von Falkenhausen laid out plans to hold the Japanese at Suzhou for three months. He had reckoned without the effect of heavy air raids which, as one eyewitness wrote, sent 'tons of explosives hurtling down from the skies, exploding in a cascade of bits of human flesh, dirt, stone and mortar . . . The most dreadful nightmare could not compare with it . . . The death and destruction we witnessed defies all description.' After the raids, Japanese soldiers wearing hoods walked in through the gates of the town \u2013 it was said that the guards took them for Buddhist monks. Once inside, they drew their weapons and began to shoot, setting off fires and opening the gates to let in the main body of troops. Those who could escape fled; by the time the Japanese were finished, only 500 people were said to remain inside the walls.\n\nThe bombing of civilian centres was condemned by the League of Nations and the United States. Britain offered to mediate between the combatants. A nine-power conference on China, backed by London and Washington, convened in Brussels. But Japan stayed away and asserted its will to fight to the bitter end until China 'reconsidered its attitude'. The China Incident became a sacred struggle, a holy war to extend the Emperor's 'benevolent rule' to a backward people across the sea. The Japanese commander said the Chinese should realise his troops were their real friends, ready to sacrifice themselves to rescue them.\n\nAfter the decades in which foreign powers had fed off China while professing concern for its integrity, Chiang could only draw bitter conclusions from the lack of help. Despite foreign Fascist and Communist involvement, the simultaneous war in Spain was primarily between Spaniards. In contrast, the Chinese were facing undisguised, unprovoked aggression from another country of the kind which the United States and Europe had vowed to prevent in the post-1918 world order. As Chiang said in an interview: 'The simple truth is that Japan took action with the object of crushing China and establishing for herself a Continental Empire' . . . The West appeared to feel that 'incident-making' should be allowed as a pretext to annex parts of another country.\n\nIn line with that process, the Chinese areas of Shanghai came under a puppet administration supervised by the Japanese while the invaders worked to extend their influence in the foreign concessions. Chiang had not got the Westerners involved, and his hopes that Japan would start to suffer from war weariness were contradicted by an even more belligerent attitude in Tokyo. He had forfeited China's major city, with all its financial, tax, commercial and manufacturing resources \u2013 and drawn the enemy into the central government's base area. But, in keeping with the psychology he had adopted, the second battle of Shanghai was declared a glorious moment in Nationalist history. In a hagiography forty years later, the Generalissimo's adopted son would call the opening of the second front in central China 'the most brilliant, successful, difficult and representative of all the war directions that have been recorded in the history of war, both in China and across the world'.\n\nWhile attention was focused on Shanghai in the autumn and early winter of 1937, the Japanese had been pressing forward in the north where a puppet government was installed in Peiping in December. Widening their field of operations, they staged air raids on railway lines and major cities across much of the country. As they advanced, they displayed the brutality which was to mark their conduct during die war, killing at random, raping and looting. For fires in the bitterly cold north, they tore the frames out of houses, leaving the inhabitants without shelter. China also alleged that they used poison gas.\n\nUnits of the Communist Eighth Army under the Long March veteran Lin Biao scored the one notable Chinese victory in the north. After a marathon march, soldiers in blue-grey cotton uniforms ambushed a Japanese column moving through a narrow valley pass at Bingxingguan in the loess country of north-east Shanxi. Buoyed by previous victories, the invaders had not bothered to send out scouts. The Communists riddled them with gunfire and hurled down hand grenades, killing 3,000 men for some 400 casualties of their own. Bingxingguan went down in Communist history as a triumph for Mao's guerrilla tactics, but was hardly mentioned by the Nationalists.\n\nThe ambush was an isolated victory, and the Japanese took the Shanxi capital of Taiyuan after a siege. In Tokyo, the Imperial General Headquarters was activated to enable Hirohito to meet regularly with his military chiefs and ministers. Japan still called the conflict an 'incident' in order not to risk vital imports from the United States being halted by neutrality regulations against supplying countries at war \u2013 on one occasion, its spokesman in Peiping told a questioner, 'You know, this is a special undeclared war.' But the activation of the imperial headquarters signified that the scale of the fighting required coordination at the very highest level. Tokyo changed its terminology from the 'North China Incident' to the'China Incident'.\n\nResponding to the aggression, Meiling emerged as the regime's most effective spokesperson to the English-speaking world, in particular to America. In a radio broadcast to the United States, she said that the Chinese had laboured for years under the stigma of being labelled as cowards. Now, they would do their best. 'We will try to fight until we win or are really beaten to our broken knees, even if our good earth, with all its history, and its cares is steeped with blood and swept by fire and destroyed,' she went on. 'Japan is acting on a preconceived plan to conquer China. Curiously, no other nation seems to care. She seems to have secured their spell-bound silence, uttering the simple magical formula, 'This is not war but merely an incident.\" All treaties and structures to outlaw war and to regularise the conduct of war appear to have crumbled, and we have a reversion to the day of savages.' Was Western silence 'a sign of the triumph of civilisation', she wondered, or 'the death-knell of the supposed moral superiority of the Occident'?\n\nWith German help reduced by Berlin's increasingly projapanese policy, Chiang turned to Moscow. Stalin saw every interest in strengthening China to divert Tokyo from attacking the Soviet Far East. As always each man calculated according to what he considered to be his strategic needs, without consideration of ideology. Moscow and Nanking signed a non-aggression pact, and arms and pilots began to arrive from Russia. But this renewed relationship could do nothing to save the situation on the Yangtze as the Japanese advanced on a 24-mile front towards Nanking.\n\nThe government decided to move to the Wuhan tri-cities of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang \u2013 and then, if necessary, beyond the Yangtze Gorges to Chungking in Sichuan. A vast operation had begun during the battle of Shanghai to dismantle factories and move around 150 of them to the deep interior. That was now stepped up; 15,000 cases of art treasures from Nanking were to go, too.\n\nFor the time being, Chiang stayed in the capital where the German ambassador, Oscar Trautmann, passed on a feeler from Tokyo which may well have been an empty ploy to try to present Japan in the guise of peace-seeker. It got short shrift \u2013 the Generalissimo said talks were impossible so long as his country was being attacked. Demonstrating what was meant by their proposals of economic cooperation, Japanese companies announced a huge exploitative development scheme in coal, iron, communications and electricity in northern China.\n\nChiang now had to decide whether to stage a second major urban battle at Nanking. A strong proponent of resistance was the Hunanese general, Tang Shengzhi, the Kuomintang's early ally on the Northern Expedition in 1926 who had subsequently led a revolt and fled to Japan before returning to rally to the cause once more. The 'Buddhist General' argued that holding the Japanese at Nanking would provide a breathing space for other armies to reorganise themselves. 'Either I stay or you stay,' Chiang told him.\n\nThe Nationalists, numbering some 90,000, set up machine-gun positions on the 20-mile city wall, dug trenches, strung barbed wire across streets and barricaded the gates with concrete, sandbags and iron. A mile-wide ring of open land was cleared by fire. At the end of November, Tang gave a press conference pledging to live or die with the capital. That earned him applause from the reporters; but some noted that the general, who had just recovered from a bad illness and had a record as an opium smoker, appeared dazed, if not doped, and sweated profusely. In the evening of 7 December, W. H. Donald suggested to Chiang that he had better have his aeroplane standing by. Nodding, the Generalissimo replied, 'We leave at dawn.' Before they went, his wife wrote to the _Atlantic Monthly_ magazine in the United States asking for her subscription copy to be sent to a new address.\n\nHeading south-west at daybreak with Meiling and Donald in his Sikorski seaplane, Kai-shek could be heard reciting poetry to himself- sounding as if he were humming. As his taciturnity increased, so did his soft chanting of classical verses. The flying boat landed on the huge Poyang Lake in Jiangxi where Chiang and Galen had defeated warlord troops in the first phase of the Northern Expedition ten years earlier. The three passengers were carried up to a mountain haven to spend a week walking through the peaks when Chiang was not issuing instructions to his generals. By coincidence, on the day Chiang flew out of Nanking, the Japanese commander, General Matsui Iwane, suffered a relapse of his tuberculosis, and took to his bed. Hirohito promoted him to a non-operational post in charge of the overall campaign. The attack on the city was entrusted to die Emperor's uncle, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko.\n\nWhatever General Tang had vowed, the Chinese were in poor shape to resist. The defenders came from different units, and lacked a cohesive command. Many of the best officers had died in Shanghai. The departure of leading officials, including Chiang, sapped morale. Chinese planes had been pulled back further inland, and there was no air cover. Some defenders were boys of twelve or thirteen. And, despite his brave words, Tang was soon seeking an agreement with the Japanese to hand over the city provided his men were allowed to leave peacefully. The proposal was sent to Chiang in a radio message from an American gunboat, the _Panay_ , moored in the Yangtze. The Generalissimo rejected it. Public accommodation with the enemy did not fit his strategy.\n\nOn 10 December, Japanese planes bombed the city while artillery launched a huge wave of shelling. Civilians crowded into a Safety Zone set up by foreigners. Fierce fighting raged, often hand-to-hand. At 5 p.m., the attackers ran up their flag on major buildings. 'Our casualties are naturally heavy and we are fighting against metal with merely flesh and blood,' General Tang said in a message to Nationalist headquarters.\n\nOnce the defenders had made their stand, Chiang's attitude changed diametrically, and he sent an order to Tang to retreat across the Yangtze. His aim now was to save as many soldiers as possible. But, as was often the case, the orders the Generalissimo issued far from the battlefield were unrealistic. Tang told him that the battle situation made retreat impossible \u2013 his men were fighting in isolated pockets and could not stage a general move. The Japanese controlled the main escape route, the river. Tang himself managed to make his way out on a small launch, heading for his home province of Hunan and bearing the blame for the loss of the city. Behind him, Nanking descended into murderous chaos.*\n\nThousands died trying to cross the Yangtze, some in Japanese air attacks, others as overloaded junks sank. Huge fires and exploding ammunition dumps killed many more. Three thousand wounded soldiers lay on the concrete platform of the main station, their moaning sounding 'like the wind in a pine forest', according to an American who fed them gruel. Chinese soldiers fled from the wall on ropes made from belts and puttees. Troops took off their uniforms, and tried to blend in with the civilians.\n\nUnder orders to take no prisoners, the Japanese inspected palms to tell rough soldiers from townspeople, and shot those without smooth skin. Fine modern buildings erected during the past decade as symbols of China's modernisation were set on fire. Banks, shops, businesses and homes were looted. Half the city's million-strong population fled. Some of those who stayed hung out Rising Sun flags to appease their new masters.\n\nAmid the confusion, Japanese planes caused a diplomatic incident by sinking the _Panay_. Survivors were machine-gunned as they swam to safety. British gunboats were also targets. But both Washington and London were content with apologies from Tokyo. Chiang's hope that the Western powers would intervene proved illusory once more. In any case, the attacks on their boats were a tiny sideshow compared to what was unfolding in die city.\n\nThe Rape of Nanking was unique as an urban atrocity not only for the number of people who died but also for the way the Japanese went about their killing, the wanton individual cruelty, the reduction of the city's inhabitants to the status of subhumans who could be murdered, tortured, and raped at will in an outburst of the basest instincts let loose in six weeks of terror and death.* The death toll was put at 300,000 \u2013 some accounts set it even higher, though one source for the former figure, Harold Timperley of the _Manchester Guardian_ , used it to refer to deaths in the Yangtze Valley as a whole.\n\nOn the first day, a Japanese division killed more than 24,000 prisoners of war and fleeing soldiers. On the wharves by the river, coolies direw 20,000 bodies into the Yangtze before being killed themselves. Behind its white flags and Red Cross symbols, the foreign Safety Zone proved weak protection: indeed, by concentrating refugees there, it inadvertently provided a big target for the killers; the 'good Nazi of Nanking', the German John Rabe could only roam the streets trying to rescue individuals in his path.\n\nThere were no imperial orders, as such, for the Rape of Nanking, and General Matsui gave senior officers a scathing rebuke after he entered the city for the victory parade on 17 December. But the general left for Shanghai two days later and, though he insisted there that misconduct must be severely punished, his words had no discernible effect. Any Chinese was liable to be a target. People were roped together and machine-gunned, doused with kerosene and set on fire. Thousands were buried alive \u2013 or put in holes up to their necks and then savaged by army dogs. Others were frozen to death after being thrown into icy ponds. Japanese soldiers used Chinese for bayonet practice. Civilians were nailed to boards and run over by vehicles. Mutilation, disembowelling and eye gouging took place before executions. People were sprayed with acid, or hung up by their tongues. Medical experiments were conducted in a former hospital where Chinese, known as 'logs', were injected with germs and poisons. Women, young and old, pregnant and ill, were raped in enormous numbers, and then killed, some with sticks rammed into their vaginas. Foetuses were ripped from the bodies of expectant mothers. Other women were taken to so-called 'comfort houses' set up for the soldiers, who called the inmates 'public toilets'.\n\nJapanese newspapers recorded a competition between two lieutenants to behead 100 Chinese with their swords. When they both passed the mark, it was not clear who had got there first, so the contest was extended to 150. One of the lieutenants described the competition as 'fun', though Japanese newspapers noted that he had damaged his blade on the helmet of a Chinese he cut in half. Revelling in their savagery, Japanese soldiers took photographs of the massacres and sent them to Shanghai to be developed; Chinese staff in the photographic shops passed copies to Rhodes Farmer who forwarded them to _Look_ magazine in America in evidence of the horror.\n\nAs the Nationalist capital, Nanking was obviously an important target where the Japanese wanted to achieve maximum humiliation of their adversary. But the sustained mass bestiality can better be explained \u2014 if it can be rationally explained at all \u2013 by the tensions that had built up in the army since the Shanghai battle erupted, by the knowledge of the Japanese troops that they were heavily outnumbered by the Chinese in the city, by the callousness bred in the previous four months \u2013 and, above all, by the dehumanisation of the Chinese which had become part of the psyche of the Imperial Army. The invaders saw the people around them as lower than animals, targets for a bloodlust which many, if not all, their commanders felt could only spur their men on to fight better. In his diary, one soldier described the Chinese as 'ants crawling on the ground . . . a herd of ignorant sheep'. Another recorded that while raping a woman, his colleagues might consider her as human, but, when they killed her, 'we just thought of her as something like a pig'.\n\nIt seems certain that the Emperor in Tokyo knew at least the outline of what was going on. His uncle was in command, and Japanese newspapers reported the execution contests among officers as if they were sporting events. Hirohito still hoped that China could be defeated with one big blow, which Nanking might provide. Japan's terms for a settlement were toughened to include indefinite stationing of troops in China and reparations as well as recognition of Manchukuo and cooperation against the Communists. 'We must strengthen our resolve to fight through to the end with China,' the Foreign Minister told a meeting of the Imperial Conference. Tokyo withdrew recognition of the Nationalist government which, it said, was to be 'eradicated'.\n\nMoving to Wuhan, Chiang proclaimed that his strategy was one of trading space for time \u2013 the Japanese would be ceded territory but the Chinese would win time to strengthen their resistance. He announced that he was going to increase his focus on military affairs, handing over the chairmanship of the Executive Yuan to his brother-in-law, H. H. Kung. But there was no doubt as to his continued dominance. The organisation at the top was complex and simple \u2013 complex in the overlapping jobs held by generals and senior officials; simple in the pre-eminence of one man. 'The whole civil organisation of the Chinese Government has practically faded away, and is replaced by a military organisation which has developed out of General Chiang Kai-shek's headquarters,' Reuters reported. 'The various yuan and ministries exist in name only.' The staff at the Foreign Ministry had shrunk from 400 to fifty; the Legislative Yuan had seven officials.\n\nThe unoccupied area of the country was divided into five war zones, with Chiang as overall boss. Area commands were held by the Guangxi leader, Li Zongren, Governor Yan of Shanxi, and Whampoa veterans. The man the Generalissimo had designated as his successor, Chen Cheng, was responsible for the defence of Wuhan. The losses along the Yangtze were put at half a million troops, with considerably higher civilian casualties. Official sources acknowledged that the lack of medical facilities 'resulted in colossal proportion of deaths among the wounded'. The officer corps had been severely mauled \u2013 one general reported losing eleven of his twelve battalion commanders as well as 70 per cent of his men in the space of ten days. The loss of northern China, where a pro-Japanese, anti-Kuomintang administration had been formed, was officially blamed on old-style warlord commanders who had flirted with the enemy. But Chiang could blame nobody else for the Shanghai-Nanking campaign, so justification had to be found in the idea that suffering acted as a path to redemption.\n\nIn his memoir on his fiftieth birthday the previous year, Chiang had recalled how his family had been solitary and without influence, the target of ill-treatment \u2013 the same might be said of China in the late 1930s. He had written of the apathy of relatives and kinsmen when his family suffered injustice \u2013 again this could apply to the way no other country had stood by China after the Japanese invasion. Salvation lay in the discipline, grit and hard work epitomised by the Generalissimo's mother, backed by puritanism and the New Life movement \u2013 in December 1937, Chiang threatened execution for officials found dancing in Wuhan cabarets, and 'drastic punishment' for members of the administration discovered gambling or in the company of sing-song girls.\n\nReality and logic had little place in his reasoning. 'I can only go forward,' he declared as he told General Tang to withdraw from Nanking. 'Let us all go forward; let us never retreat.' In a broadcast after the fall of the city, the Generalissimo proclaimed: 'We must not surrender but march onwards. To capitulate is to court sure national disaster.' The situation, he added, was 'definitely favourable' because the further the Japanese moved into the interior, the greater their problems would be as they 'swallowed like a whale', taking great areas of territory they would be unable to digest. 'The time must come when Japan's military strength will be completely exhausted, thus giving us ultimate victory,' he argued. Naming Chiang and Meiling as International Man and Wife of the Year at the start of 1938, _Time_ magazine noted that China's prospects were 'for the long pull', but added that, if its leader could achieve his aims, he might emerge as Asia's Man of the Century.\n\nAnybody else would have buckled, thought W. H. Donald, who was often with the Chiangs during this period. But this was a man who had taught his son the parable of the tortoise and the hare as a lesson for life, and who would take whatever time he needed, retreating into himself and depending on nobody else. 'Days with him were like the silence of a lonely Arctic night,' the Australian recalled. 'When he did speak, there were only single-syllable questions.' On his walks with the Chiangs, Donald would discuss the war with the bilingual Meiling for an hour or so while Chiang said nothing, just reciting poetry to himself. When the Australian clapped his hands to jar the Generalissimo into life, Chiang would incline his head slightly to his wife and ask slowly what the adviser wanted. Sometimes, Donald recalled, he would ask Meiling if she knew what her husband was thinking. She would give a helpless look, and the Australian thought, 'Good God! Doesn't he even talk in his sleep?'\n\n* * *\n\n* The attack has sometimes been blamed on the Japanese but Hallett Abend watched the Chinese plane dropping two Italian-made bombs, and also recorded that they had been logged as imports to the Nationalists at the customs (Abend, _My Life_ , p. 264).\n\n\u2020 Known at the time as Soochow.\n\n* A practised survivor, he would resurface in Communist China as a member of the National People's Congress.\n\np.344\n\n* Japanese nationalists continue to deny the scale and nature of what took place, and have kept details of it from textbooks. But the evidence is overwhelming. Iris Chang's 1997 book provides a devastating chronicle of the horror, and of Japan's refusal to accept responsibility. Masahiro Yamamoto argues strongly in his account against the idea that the massacre was planned to intimidate Chinese elsewhere.\n\n# CHAPTER 18\n\n _I Am the State_\n\n'OLD WOMEN, CHILDREN, all sorts of soldiers, carts, wheelbarrows, rickshaws simply filled the steaming wet highway where the morning's heat had given place to a cold north-east wind,' the journalist Edgar Mowrer reported from central China.\n\nDainty Chinese girls in silken semi-modern dress and slippers, older women hobbling on surprisingly quickly on their bound feet with the aid of long poles on which they balanced; occasional old men; rich wives of merchants in rickshaws; peasant girls plodding stolidly; tiny children wet to the skin but impassive in the long-suffering Chinese way; whole families in heavy ox carts with solid wooden wheels, drawn by inconceivable combinations of domestic animals, their small household goods all mixed up with the equipment of soldiers trotting beside them; babies in boxes on tiny wheels or strapped to the back of tottering older children, occasional sturdy farmers lifting the handles of gigantic loaded wheel barrows, their remaining donkey or wife or children pulling in front; these were inextricably mixed with the retreating Chinese army. There were almost no motor vehicles, and the few were piled to the sky with women and goods and attempts to purchase transportation were sternly refused.\n\nThe Japanese advance turned millions of Chinese civilians into refugees as the Nationalist regime demonstrated its incapacity to offer its people even the most basic measure of security and protection. Travelling to Wuhan, the writer Han Suyin noted 'cattle trucks filled to overflowing with human salvage. Miserable, with drawn faces, in rags, dirty and thin, clutching their pathetic possessions tied in bundles. Children, old and wizened with fatigue, long past whimpering, rubbing at their trachoma-eaten eyes with their dirty hands, with the rags of their garments.' From the mountains by the Yellow River, Theodore (Teddy) White of _Time wrote_ of\n\nvillage after village completely destroyed. Houses shattered and burnt . . . Bridges torn up . . . The Japanese looted indiscriminately and efficiently. Everything of value was stripped and taken away. Telephones, wires, clocks, soap, bedding, collected for transfer to their own supply department. On their own, the soldiers went in for simpler forms of looting. Clothes and food were what they wanted, and they were not very discriminate in their tastes; women's silk garments, peasant cotton trousers, shoes, underwear were all stripped off the backs of their possessors.\n\nIn some villages White visited, the Japanese had raped every woman \u2013 those who tried to hide in fields were forced out by cavalry riding through the wheat and barley.\n\nMale villagers were stripped naked, lashed to carts and driven forward by the Imperial Army as beasts of burden. Japanese horses and mules were beaten to death in the mud; and on any road and all the hills of the valley, one can see the carcasses of their animals rotting, and the bones of their horses whitening in the sun. The Chinese peasants who were impressed to take their places were driven forward with the same pitiless fury until they collapsed, died, or were driven mad.\n\nReuters reported from a 'neat litde town' where every building had been burned down in Japanese assaults. A magistrate said the enemy had killed 600 people in the first attack; when they returned, the inhabitants fought back and chased them into the hills, using swords made from the chassis of a captured lorry. Bodies lay in a gully, the skulls and bones bleaching in the sun. The locals destroyed the road, forcing the Japanese to abandon 200 lorries. The motors were taken out and used for power. Blacksmiths turned steel from the vehicles into guns \u2013 firing a single-shot pistol, the journalist found it had a 'tremendous recoil'. Local officials said the Japanese would attack again, 'but we will . . . take them by surprise and cut their communications till they are obliged to retreat'. The villagers would be defended by themselves, not by the far-away government.\n\nAs for the Chinese army, Mowrer reported a retreat in 1938 in which\n\nthere was hardly a coat in the long defile. Steel helmets were the exception. Bayonets were anything but universal. On the other hand, umbrellas were plentiful. I saw a few machine-guns, one small thing that looked like a trench mortar, one anti-aircraft gun. In the course of two days on the road with the troops, I hardly noticed more than half a dozen batteries of field guns. During a week, not a single Chinese airplane flew over us while Jap planes were everywhere.\n\nOn the Henan-Shandong border, Rhodes Farmer watched railway wagons filled with badly injured soldiers lying on mats of plaited bamboo. 'Gangrene was everywhere: maggots writhed in the wounds,' the Australian journalist wrote. 'They suffered silendy and died silendy. A 0.5 machine-gun bullet had smashed through one kid's crotch . . . He had been hit a week ago. I offered him a pack of cigarettes. He smiled wanly and fluttered his right hand: the sign of courteous refusal.'\n\nThe Japanese seized cities and towns, main roads and railways, and launched regular, murderous expeditions to grab crops and to try to pacify the countryside where guerrillas operated. For all their armed strength, however, their forces were badly overextended, and their demands for munitions outstripped supplies. One metaphor used was of China as a net with the strings and knots representing Japanese positions around the much larger Chinese holes. The parallels with the war in Vietnam are evident, underlined by the reflections of die Red Army commander Zhu De to the journalist James Bertram. Japanese reliance on mechanised support units could be turned to the Chinese advantage, Zhu said. 'They cannot use animal transport, or human labor as our armies can. They cannot take advantage of the hill country, but must follow the easiest and most level route . . . so we always fight in the hills, not in open country.'\n\nIn a further similarity with the Americans in Indochina three decades later, the invaders were subject to repeated terrorist attacks in cities, and their isolation was accentuated by Chinese destruction of highways to create areas where they could not use their vehicles. Later, some Japanese, lamenting the way their forces had been sucked into the quagmire of China, would argue that the Imperial Army should have stopped after taking the big Yangtze cities, and focused its attention on the north, confronting the Soviet Union on its Far Eastern frontier with Manchuria. But there was no way they could have done this without leaving much of China south of the Yellow River to the Nationalists. To that extent, Chiang's space for time strategy did work, though the cost to his people, and to his own authority, was huge.\n\nThe Generalissimo linked the defence of the nation in the war of resistance to the preservation of the race; since the Japanese were out to destroy the Chinese wherever they lived, people must stick together behind him. Shellac records were made of his speeches, but which of China's multitude of villages had gramophones, and how many of them could the regime's propaganda teams reach? The search for survival under local forces was paramount. As the historian Zhijia Shen has written in a study of wartime Shandong province: 'Local people were much more influenced by pragmatic calculation than by the ideal of nationalism . . . When national and local interests clashed, they did not hesitate to compromise national interests.' Though later orthodoxy would present a picture of unified control from Yan'an, the same often applied in Communist areas which evolved their own models and sets of loyalties. Peasant nationalism took a fragmented form far from the distant figures of Chiang or Mao.\n\nBehind the lines, Chinese administration continued. A _North China Herald_ correspondent reported on places in the lower Yangtze basin where both the Chinese and the Japanese tried to collect taxes, and killed petty officials working for the other. Guerrilla-bandits kidnapped rich locals, and accused them of being traitors to the nation. Showing how little had changed since the warlord era, the victims might be tortured to make them tell where their money was hidden. 'In some districts,' the newspaper went on, 'it has been customary to roast the victims in big kettles, without water, until the flesh falls from the bone.'\n\nThe 2,000-mile frontier between Japanese and Chinese could not be effectively patrolled. Trade soon began across the lines. Smuggling proliferated. Consumer goods, fuel, medicine and even military supplies were shipped in while minerals went out for the enemy's war machine. Profit was more important than patriotism. Steamers travelling through Japanese-held ports adopted European names and sailed under captains from nations allied with Tokyo. From his base in Hong Kong, the gang boss, Du Yuesheng, used his connections to get a big load of cotton to Chungking from occupied China. In 1939, the government began to issue licences for trade with the enemy, opening the way to corruption by officers and officials responsible for them on border areas.\n\nOn the east coast, Rhodes Farmer reported, local people were getting on with life, using patience as a weapon. 'The rank and file Chinese appeared to have dourly accepted the rigors of war as just another calamity,' he wrote, comparing the Japanese effort to 'tunneling into sand without benefit of pit props'. After going through unoccupied China, the poet W. H. Auden found that 'looking for war in China is like a novel by Kafka'. Not diat anywhere was safe from Japanese attack from the sky. One air raid hit Chiang's home village in 1939. His first wife, who was in the kitchen, ran outside to see what was happening, and was crushed to death by a wall brought down by the bombing. Travelling from the military command he had taken after returning from Moscow, her son erected a stone tablet with an inscription vowing vengeance.\n\nSome unoccupied areas, particularly in the south-west, maintained life as usual. In the 150,000-square-mile province of Yunnan, roads and railways were built, the capital of Kunming prospered, and the autonomy-minded governor welcomed dissident politicians and intellectuals so long as they did not challenge his authority. Yunnan had a special importance since it lay at the entrance to China of the overland route by which supplies were brought through neighbouring Burma. Businessmen flew in to make the most of the opportunities; everything from champagne and silk stockings to guns and petrol was on sale. Fighting seemed far away.\n\nFor the walled town of Taierzhuang on the border of Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, war could not have been closer at the beginning of 1938 as the Japanese launched a two-pronged offensive on their next target, Wuhan. Taierzhuang lay in the Fifth War Zone commanded by the Guangxi general, Li Zongren. Its stone houses backed onto the Grand Canal at the end of a railway spur from the major junction of Xuzhou, where Chiang had won over the Christian General ten years earlier. If they triumphed there, the Japanese would be able to encircle Wuhan from the north and east. This made the struggle for Xuzhou the most important clash since the loss of Nanking, and Taierzhuang's position gave it an importance out of proportion to its size.\n\nChiang ordered in reinforcements, including German-trained soldiers under General Tang Enbo who had fought against the Red Army in Jiangxi. A series of counter-thrusts temporarily destabilised the Japanese advance. But they replied with air attacks. A raid on another major rail junction, Zhengzhou, blasted a row of hotels called the Abode of Heavenly Peace which housed the families of officers at the front. Casualties were put at up to 1,000. Other sorties hit the city of Kaifeng, where Edgar Mowrer saw nearly a hundred women and children killed or wounded by the East Gate \u2013 headless bodies of children lay on the ground, and 'a woman sat speechless beside the prostrate body of her dead husband, in her arms a baby missing from the waist down'.\n\nAs the enemy moved on the Xuzhou area from three sides through snowy winter conditions, Chiang flew from Wuhan to confer with Li and his fellow Guangxi general, Bai Chonqxi. When his plane came in to land, Chinese gunners opened fire, taking it for a Japanese attacker. In a rage, Chiang wanted to execute those responsible, but Bai saved the situation by complimenting the airfield commander on his excellent welcome salute, and the Generalissimo subsided \u2013 he was to face another aerial threat later in the trip when only the speed of his plane enabled it to escape from an attack by Japanese fighters.\n\nXuzhou still seemed fairly normal, with families strolling up its main hill to a pagoda among the peach trees. But air-raid shelters had been dug into the soft red earth, and walls were covered with messages put up by fleeing civilians who had lost touch with their families. Young volunteers were leading a campaign to teach resistance, civil defence and first aid. At the hospital, the matron told of a visit by a beautifully dressed Chinese woman who talked to the wounded soldiers: Meiling.\n\nGiven their two rebellions, Chiang did not trust the Guangxi leaders \u2013 a female secret agent was infiltrated into their headquarters to keep watch in case they used visits from other generals to plot a revolt. Nor did Li, described by the writer Christopher Isherwood as 'a very polite, nut-brown man, with an enormous mouth and deeply intelligent eyes', have much time for the Generalissimo, telling the Nationalist leader he did not want to receive the usual detailed instructions dictated from his far-away headquarters. In his memoirs, Li says Chiang kept to their agreement, only telephoning him twice \u2013 on non-operational matters. Each time, Li told the commander-in-chief that his accent made him hard to understand over the wire.\n\nBut the sternly anti-Japanese soldiers from Guangxi knew there could only be one leader for China at that juncture, while the Generalissimo required their military skills and leadership. So he put on a show of solidarity, spending the night in Li's headquarters in a small temple. Chiang took the general's bed, while his host slept on a door taken off its hinges. Li had a mosquito net to put over him; the visitor did not. Chiang called repeatedly to aides to drive the insects away. But 'the more they worked, the more the insects came', Li wrote. 'That night, neither of us got any sleep.'\n\nA trap was set for the Japanese who had been held at a town called Linyi. The Chinese troops there would retreat into Taierzhuang, drawing the enemy after them in the narrow streets between the fortress-like stone houses. Other Chinese units, including Tang Enbo's army, would shut off the Japanese rear. 'We [will] have them like fish in a pond,' said Li. Two lines of trenches were built below the Grand Canal. Artillery was positioned. Spies were executed \u2013 riding on a horse to the front, Isherwood saw a dog gnawing on the arm of one who had been buried in too shallow a grave. Bai took the train to Taierzhuang for a scouting trip. He cut an impressive figure, with his domed forehead, amber, darting eyes, high-bridged nose and prominent chin. Wearing a plain uniform with three-star, three-bar gold collar badges, he stopped the train to get down and walk in a wheat field talking to another general while bombs fell nearby.\n\nIn its far smaller way, Taierzhuang was to be China's Stalingrad. Following the Linyi defenders as they fell back, the Japanese fought for three days to get to the Grand Canal. Reaching Taierzhuang, several hundred soldiers got inside by digging a tunnel under its wall. They were beaten back in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The Chinese sprayed kerosene on walls and set them on fire \u2013 the town was described as a 'burning hell' where the front line followed a crazy pattern between the houses.\n\nDespite heavy losses, the defenders hung on, and Li ordered a unit to attack the Japanese flank. When the commander dallied, he was threatened with execution. On 26 March Tang Enbo cut off the attackers from the rear. Most of the supplies dropped by Japanese planes fell behind Chinese lines. Still, by early April, the attackers had taken two thirds of the town \u2013 but the Chinese still held the South Gate. At one point, the soldiers there asked to be allowed to fall back. Li refused. The defenders pledged to 'obey absolutely and . . . fight till the whole army is annihilated'. Any soldier who tried to retreat over the canal was to be executed, the Guangxi general ordered.\n\nThe Chinese had modern weapons at their disposal, including thirty planes, tanks and flame throwing vehicles. They also co-ordinated well, making their numerical superiority tell. The Japanese, on the other hand, were over-extended and over-confident. The defenders organised 'Dare to Die' corps, some armed with long swords. Taking the enemy by surprise, they regained most of the town as Chinese reinforcements moved in. Li rode up on horseback to direct operations. 'Battle cries shook the skies,' he wrote in his memoirs. 'After grimly fighting for some ten days, the enemy troops had spent their energy and were running out of munitions and gasoline. Many of their motor vehicles had been destroyed, and those that remained had no fuel. The whole army broke and fled in disorder. Faced with this sudden victory, the morale of our men soared and they rushed after the enemy like a storm sweeping fallen leaves. There was no stopping them. Enemy corpses lay all over the plain, and vehicles, arms, and horses were strewn about.'\n\nTwo thousand Japanese fought their way out, leaving 8,000 dead behind; some committed hara kiri as the battle was lost. Though no reliable figure was given, Chinese casualties were higher. Li called the battle 'the first happy occasion since the war of resistance had started'. A Chinese reporter described the ruins of the bombed-out station as standing like a warrior protecting China. In the devastated town, the owner of one of the few houses still standing complained because a chair had been destroyed.\n\nIf the immediate victory belonged to the generals and their men at the front, it had been Chiang who had made the key commitments of troops and agreed to the overall plan. For once, the Chinese had been able to put into effect a coordinated strategy executed over several weeks on a settled front. The battle, the Generalissimo said, was 'a concrete manifestation' of China's spirit. But he did not follow up the victory, and, as a result, lost Xuzhou as the enemy regrouped \u2013 a reporter flying over the area saw endless columns of Japanese tanks, cavalry and soldiers pursuing the retreating Chinese through dozens of burning towns though a bid to trap Li's army failed when the Chinese escaped under cover of dust storms. On the Yangtze, the invaders landed from boats in thick fog to capture the Anhui city of Anqing, increasing the threat to Wuhan. The only consolation was that, on the day the Chinese abandoned Xuzhou, two Chinese planes flew over the Japanese archipelago. Instead of bombs, they dropped leaflets urging the Japanese to stop their militarists seeking to conquer China. The raid, Chiang wrote, should 'disabuse the arrogant Japanese of their long-cherished illusion that dieir island country is sacred and impregnable'. But it had no effect on domestic morale or die Imperial Army.\n\nTwo weeks after Xuzhou fell, the Japanese took Kaifeng by die Yellow River in a night battle in the rain. This exposed die railway centre of Zhengzhou, and increased the danger of the Japanese moving in force down the line to Wuhan where die Hanyang arsenal was hit by an air raid that was reported to have killed 500 people. Isherwood saw bodies 'tattooed . . . with gravel and sand. Beside one corpse was a brand-new, undamaged straw hat. All die bodies looked very small, very poor, and very dead, but, as we stood beside one old woman, whose brains were soaking obscenely through a little towel, we saw die blood-caked mouth open and shut, and die hand beneath die sack-covering clench and unclench.'\n\nTo stop die enemy advance on Wuhan from the nordi, the Generalissimo summoned up liquid force. The Yellow River, known as 'China's Sorrow' for its frequent flooding, ran dirough an artificial course behind high dykes. Chiang ordered diese to be blown, unleashing millions of gallons of water in what a Japanese news agency described as 'a sea of swirling water . . . submerging roads, countryside and whole villages'. The biggest breach was 400 yards across. Dykes were also breached on die Grand Canal to increase the effect. In places, the floods were 9 feet deep and 20 miles wide. As many as 6 million people were reported to have been affected, and many thousands killed as a result of the river reverting to its natural course and sweeping over the plain to the south. This forced the Japanese to halt. When they tried to repair die breaches, they were fired on by Chinese from pillboxes. The Generalissimo had no qualms about what he had done, though his action would fuel hatred towards the regime in the affected areas and play a role in a subsequent famine.\n\nSeeing himself as the embodiment of the nation, Chiang arranged his elevation by the Kuomintang National Congress to the status of _Zongcai_ , or General Director of the party, the supreme title Sun Yat-sen had held. This was the consecration he had been aiming at since the doctor's death. 'I have struggled thirty years for the party and the nation,' he said, 'and only today have I received recognition from the entire party.'\n\nAs well as heading the Military Committee, he became Chairman of the National Kuomintang Congress and the Central Executive Committee. He got the right to ask the congress to reconsider its decisions, plus the final say in its resolutions.\n\n'General Chiang Dictator,' read the headline in the _North China Herald_. In an Easter radio broadcast, he compared Jews under the Romans to Chinese under the Manchus, describing Jesus as the self-sacrificing leader of a national, social and religious revolution. 'Let us march together towards the Cross, for the regeneration of our nation and for the realisation of everlasting peace on earth,' he added. It would have been sacrilege to have gone further, but the parallel was not hard to draw.\n\nKeeping to his policy of no surrender, he refused to receive the German ambassador who wanted to deliver another hard-line Japanese peace proposal. Instead, the envoy went to read the proposal to Meiling, H. H. Kung and W. H. Donald, saying he had been told to convey it without comment. 'I should think so,' Meiling replied, changing the subject to enquire after Herr Trautmann's son and daughter. The ambassador, according to Donald, 'bowed like an automaton, and retreated'.\n\nThe German connection was unravelling fast, though Chiang congratulated Hitler on the Anschluss with Austria.* With the Foreign Ministry now headed by the strongly pro-Japanese von Ribbentrop, Berlin recognised Manchukuo, and cancelled military exports to China. The Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, described the breaching of the Yellow River dykes as worse than the German bombing of Guernica in Spain. Trautmann and the military advisers were ordered to go home. When von Falkenhausen sought to stay, Berlin issued a veiled threat that the families of the advisers in Germany would suffer if they did not leave. On 27 June 1938, Chiang held a farewell dinner, and laid on a train to take them to Hong Kong.\n\nBy then, Soviet aid was flowing in under a US$250 million agreement paid for in Chinese raw materials. During the first year of the war, Moscow sent 900 planes, 82 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces, nearly 10,000 machine guns, 50,000 rifles and 2,000 vehicles as well as 2,000 airmen and 3,000 advisers who included the future Red Army commander, Georgy Zhukov. The north-western city of Lanzhou, which was the terminal for the supply chain, was described as 'bursting at the seams with Russians'. On the border with Manchukuo, the Soviet Army, under the command of Galen, fought a big battle with the Japanese which Chiang hoped might be a major drain on die enemy. But, despite gaining the upper hand, Galen did not advance \u2013 Stalin did not want a wider war widi Japan. So Tokyo was able to hold its position in the north while Hirohito authorised the final offensive against Wuhan, using chemical weapons as well as conventional arms.\n\nThe tri-cities had become the symbol of the united front. Chiang's authoritarianism was limited by the balancing effect of the Guangxi generals, Feng Yuxiang and other regional militarists \u2013 and the presence of the Communists under Mao's main rival, Moscow-trained Wang Ming. The regime had shown its patriotic claws by making an example of the Shandong warlord who had retreated from the Japanese with the provincial treasury loaded onto his personal train and who was in subversive contact with a Sichuan militarist. He was summoned for a meeting, and persuaded to leave his train on the way widi a false story of Japanese planes being about to attack. After he had been separated from his bodyguards by being ushered to a shelter reserved for senior officers, he was arrested and moved to Wuhan. There, he was tried by a court martial under General He Ymgqin, and shot in the back of the head while his Sichuan associate, who was in hospital in Wuhan, was taken violently ill after a visit from General He, and died soon afterwards. According to his official biographer, Chiang had nine other unreliable generals executed, and thirty dismissed.\n\nAfter their revolutionary past in 1911 and 1926\u20137, Hankou, Hanyang and Wuchang were fertile ground for a national revival. A free press flourished, as did the arts and literature transplanted from Shanghai. The secret police was restricted to tracking down Japanese collaborators, rather than going after the regime's rivals. In the words of the historian, Stephen MacKinnon, 'democracy reached a twentieth-century zenith'. Foreign documentary film directors and the photographer, Robert Capa, arrived to record the defence of the city.\n\n'Everything through the united front,' Wang Ming proclaimed. It was, he said, 'no time to engage in a power struggle'. A People's Political Council met in Hankou in July 1938 with Chiang linking the war to national redemption in his main speech. The Communists and smaller groups, such as the Young China Party and the Socialist Democratic Party, occupied fifty of the 200 seats; independents took seventy. The National Salvation Association, whose members had been imprisoned before 1937, attended, as did vocational and educational organisations. This meant that, though the biggest group, the Kuomintang was in a minority. The council's powers were limited; it could propose and criticise, but not enforce decisions. Non-KMT delegates agitated for greater authority, and made apparent the potential challenge that even this small exercise in democracy could present.\n\nChiang resisted giving any more ground. He could see how the Kuomintang's weakness increased the danger from rival political movements. In a stinging critique, he accused party members of lax living, lack of enthusiasm, lackadaisical work and the pursuit of power and pleasure. They had 'almost become a special class', he added, 'and the masses . . . are not only cool towards the party but even become antagonistic toward it'. Once again he saw what was wrong, but did not do anything about it.\n\nFor all Wang Ming's lyricism, the united front lacked roots on both sides. The Kuomintang could only take a dim view of the call for Wuhan to be defended as Madrid was being against Franco's forces \u2013 it sounded too like the mass leftist campaigns of the 1920s. Nor did the Communist delegate have backing from Yan'an, which had just been brought to world attention by visits from sympathetic foreign journalists. Mao was determined to retain his autonomy and to develop a brand of Marxism adapted to Chinese circumstances rather than becoming submerged in a Moscow-dictated common front led by his principal party rival and by his foe of the past decade.\n\nThe defence of Wuhan was entrusted to the brisk, diminutive and dapper General Chen Cheng, the Xi'an Incident loyalist who had also commanded troops at Shanghai. On paper, he had 450,000 men, while another 340,000 were drafted in from the Fifth War Zone to the east \u2013 though, as always, the number of men on the ground was less than the official count. The Chinese tactics were purely defensive. The critical Russian adviser, Cherepanov, who had returned to China, recalled strategy meetings at which a Whampoa officer unveiled maps marked with great arrows, but no troops ever moved along them. Bottlenecks were set up to try to hold up the Japanese on the Yangtze, and booms were laid to halt the enemy's ships. But the invaders resumed the advance from the north, and rode over the booms as flood waters from a tributary swelled the river.\n\nAt the end of July, 45,000 Chinese troops fled from the town of Jiujiang, in the face of a force only a quarter their size \u2013 the victors promptly indulged in murders and rapes on the pattern of Nanking. In August, government offices began to leave Wuhan for Chungking up the Yangtze, and Chiang ordered half a million people to be evacuated. Among the few people moving in the opposite direction was a woman missionary from Scotland who had walked widi a companion from the Yangtze down to the Jiangxi capital of Nanchang, where she got a ride to Wuhan on a military truck, moving through the lines in pitch dark. 'We enjoyed every minute of the trip,' said Miss F. H. E. Bartlett of Irvine in Ayrshire. 'We will do it all over again if we have to.'\n\nAir raids set off big fires in Wuhan, and hit a theatre being used as a shelter where the death toll was put at up to 1,000. The planes flew so low that their pilots could be seen from the ground in their open cockpits \u2013 in one raid, a Japanese ace died when a Chinese aircraft he had shot up from underneath fell on top of him. Four Japanese fighters attacked a clearly marked civilian plane, forcing it to land on a stretch of water. Fourteen passengers were killed by strafing as they tried to swim to safety. The Japanese said the pilot had been 'behaving suspiciously'.\n\nThe Generalissimo seemed impervious to danger. When his office came under air attack in September, he was in the courtyard, and did not take shelter. His bodyguards hurried him into a dugout, returning to their posts outside \u2013 five of them were killed. During a dinner for the Red Cross director, Bob McLure of Canada, the Chiangs took no notice of an air raid alarm, and strolled out into the garden to look up at the planes. McLure watched them use stopwatches to time how long it took for the searchlights to find the bombers. Chiang, he recalled, 'was a little annoyed because the searchlight boys had picked out the bombers about half a minute earlier the night before'.\n\nThe Chiangs lived in the army headquarters compound, behind a stone gateway flanked by stone lions and a large lawn. Taken by W. H. Donald to visit Meiling with his companion, Auden, Christopher Isherwood described the sitting room as sham walnut, like an English roadhouse. 'In the corner stood a cabinet full of cutlery and dusty champagne-glasses,' he recorded. Chiang worked in a plain, bare office, the huge desk piled high with papers. There were a few bowls of flowers, and a small porcelain clock.\n\nThe Generalissimo maintained a working day of twelve hours or more, rising before dawn, doing his exercises, praying and splashing his face with cold water whatever the temperature. According to his information chief, Hollington Tong, he took a light breakfast at 6.30 a.m. and worked through till lunch at 1. After a rest, he resumed work. He and Meiling went for a walk at 6 p.m. 'Immediately on his return home, he calls in the Mayor for reprimand if he has observed litter in the streets or inattention to their duties by police,' Tong added. Dinner was at 7.30, attended by officers and officials. Then Chiang read documents, telegrams and books, or practised calligraphy, before going to bed at 11 p.m. His specially made diary formed part of the daily routine. Apart from recording his thoughts day by day, it contained a page for personal analysis at the end of each week, followed by another page setting out his intentions for the following seven days. At the end of each month, a further page was set aside for a review of behaviour. From time to time, Chiang gave similar volumes to his generals in the hope that they would follow his example. The tone of his reflections is of high morality and self-regard, with suitably phrased lamentations about shortcomings balanced by exhortations to do better and misgivings about the sincerity of others. They seem written to be read \u2013 by the author and those who were meant to marvel at his high standards and ethical superiority.\n\nEach Monday, the Generalissimo affirmed his claim to be the successor of Sun Yat-sen by reading out the doctor's will at a morning meeting of ministers and department heads, which began with those present bowing three times to the portrait of the Kuomintang founder. He then delivered a lecture of up to two hours on whatever subject was uppermost in his mind. Speaking in his fast, falsetto Ningbo accent, he propounded new slogans, and criticised those who had fallen. 'He never praised,' recalled Rhodes Farmer, who had gone to work for the government information service. 'He scolded. He perpetually called for greater sacrifices and longer hours of work for the cause of national salvation'. His audience had to stand to attention, not wearing coats even when the temperature fell to zero. When finished, Chiang would grunt' _Wan le_ ' ('that's all'), and march out.\n\nHe employed a succession of speech writers who also ghosted his various books. His speeches made frequent use of proverbs, and, according to a detailed analysis by David Wu Chi-wei, blended traditional values and modern language, using a clear and straightforward vocabulary and sentence structure. Adapting his dress to the occasion, he wore a Chinese gown for national celebrations, a Sun Yat-sen suit for government and party gatherings, and uniform for military parades. His admonitions to frugality were reckoned to be having some effect when H. H. Kung was seen using a public rickshaw instead of his limousine. The story spread that the Generalissimo liked his officers to shave their heads, and to have craniums as smooth as eggs. He was also said to prefer his generals to be bronzed as if they had come from the battlefield. As a result, ambitious young men ran the razor over their skulls and exposed their faces to the sun.\n\nAccording to Rhodes Farmer's observations at the time, the Generalissimo acted like 'a man with a hundred pairs of hands and eyes . . . How his whip cord body generated such energy was a mystery . . . I do know however that there was the devil to pay at the Generalissimo's headquarters when an incoming plane failed to bring a consignment of a famous American tonic' Visiting him one morning at his headquarters, Farmer found twenty men sitting in the antechamber, including a tailor with two apprentices and rolls of khaki cloth on their knees. The others were military men, and they had 'the looks of schoolboys waiting for a difficult meeting with the head'.\n\nAs Farmer entered his office, the Generalissimo \u2013 in a pale mauve suit, mauve silk socks and black slippers \u2013 stood up rigidly, and grasped his visitor's hand with a steely grip. He kept his back stiff as he sat down again, his hands on his knees. Farmer felt Chiang's eyes boring into him like gimlets, but found him affable, debonair, infectiously buoyant, and brimming over with vitality. 'Wherever I go is the Government and the centre of resistance,' Chiang declared. 'I am the State.' The outcome of the war would be determined by how the leader directed the people's resistance, he added. Then 'the expression of smiling courtesy left [his] face. He looked the tough autocrat. He stood up. The interview was at an end.'\n\nHis wife was, meanwhile, playing an ever more prominent role, pushing the development of the air force, particularly the purchase of planes from America. She launched a scheme to get Chinese women to sew 2 million winter uniforms for the troops, and visited wounded soldiers in hospital. Han Suyin described her as 'a slim, youthful-looking woman, dressed in slacks and a woollen sweater. Her dark shining hair was caught in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her pale, smooth skin was untouched by make-up. Her black eyes were, I think, the most beautiful I have ever seen, and alight with keen vitality . . . all the traditions of Chinese womanhood meet in her . . . she is not only modern; that is the lesser part. She is Chinese.'\n\nForeigners were particularly impressed. The writer, Edgar Mowrer, was bowled over by her 'gift of permanent elegance. Sex appeal. Quick feminine intelligence.' Christopher Isherwood judged that she knew how to deal with any conceivable type of visitor:\n\nShe can become at will the cultivated, westernised woman with a knowledge of literature and art; the technical expert, discussing aeroplane-engines and machine-guns; the inspector of hospitals; the president of a mothers' union; or the simple, affectionate, clinging Chinese wife. She could be terrible, she could be gracious, she could be businesslike, she could be ruthless; it is said that she sometimes signs death-warrants in her own hand. She speaks excellent English, with an intonation which faintly recalls her American college-training. Strangely enough, I have never heard anybody comment on her perfume. It is the most delicious either of us has ever smelt.\n\nWhen Isherwood and Auden visited her, she appeared 'exquisitely dressed, vivacious rather than pretty, and possessed of an almost terrifying charm and poise'. But, behind her mask, she looked 'tired and far from well'. She asked Auden if poets ate cake. When he said yes, she trilled, 'I am glad to hear it. I thought perhaps they preferred only spiritual food.' Chiang joined them briefly, displaying 'the fragile impassivity of a spectre'. His wife led him onto the balcony to pose arm-in-arm for a photograph. 'Under the camera's eye,' recorded the writer, 'he stiffened visibly, like a schoolboy who is warned to hold himself upright.'\n\nAt this time of maximum peril for Wuhan, the youngest Soong sister decided to publish a collection of her English-language writings and speeches in book form. She had special paper brought in from Hong Kong, and handed Rhodes Farmer the job of executing the project. The Australian tracked down a Bible printer who had suitable printing equipment. However, the linotype operators did not know English, and he had to make endless corrections to the proofs. Meiling ordered extensive revisions which meant pulping the first print run. Eventually 10,000 copies of _Madame Chiang's Messages in War and Peace_ were produced, bound in blue silk. The books were crated up and sent to Hong Kong by train for international distribution. Meiling upbraided Farmer for the remaining printing errors.\n\nThe Chiang-Meiling partnership was unique, though Chinese women often enjoyed more influence than their public demeanour showed. Chiang liked his wife to walk behind him on ceremonial occasions, and his outlook was male-centred, as was his army world. But, like her two sisters, Meiling was extraordinarily liberated by the standards of the country and the time. The way she often appeared in public in slacks marked her out as a modernist. Even the left-wing American writer Agnes Smedley was impressed, finding her 'cultivated, tremendously clever, and possessed of charm and exquisite taste'. With coaching from W. H. Donald, she became the human face of the government, particularly for the outside world, and constantly travelled at her husband's side, pressing the New Life crusade and urging Chinese women to rally to the war effort. Still, the Americanised influence which she and her brother represented had its limits. The American correspondent Teddy White compared it to the lights winking on an electronic control panel, 'but the wires in back led nowhere, the switchboard did not connect to the operation system'. When it came to waging war and ensuring survival, Chiang was as solitary as ever while he confronted the bad news from the front in the autumn of 1938.\n\nIn the south, the Japanese took Fuzhou and Shantou, and landed unopposed on the bay beside Hong Kong. Canton fell with little resistance, leading to rumours of money changing hands. 'It looks like dirty work somewhere,' a British diplomat said, while Reuters wrote of an 'inside job'. The withdrawal may, rather, have been a decision by Chiang to pull troops back to safety in the mountains of northern Guangdong that he had crossed at the start of the Northern Expedition.\n\nThe loss of Canton meant supplies could no longer be brought in by sea in the south, so Wuhan lost its importance as the railhead from Guangdong. In any case, its time as the Nationalist capital was fast drawing to a close. The determined Cantonese general Xue Yue the great pursuer of the Red Army on the Long March, held the line in the mountains of Jiangxi province, south of the Yangtze where the Japanese were badly affected by dysentery from bad water. But, though short of ammunition, the invaders were still well equipped compared with their opponents and they advanced steadily along the river, which provided an excellent channel for their naval ships to act as floating artillery.\n\nAs the enemy took a key fortress in a deep gorge 90 miles from Wuhan, restaurants in the city closed while a patriotic play entitled _Keep Wuhan! was_ put on. Only one cinema was still open; the film studios packed up to move out. Malaria spread among the soldiers. Street barricades were erected, and big war posters covered the walls; at his headquarters, a huge mural showed the Generalissimo on horseback urging troops forward. Official reports said that the sing-song girls had given up permanent waves for more Chinese hairdos as they danced into the night with clients beside the clock course at the Wee Golf Restaurant.\n\nWhile the Japanese moved ever closer, W. H. Donald, who had been in Indo-China recovering from a bad bout of fever, returned to his large, ramshackle flat on the Bund at Wuhan. Waiting for him was a letter from the Young Marshal saying he hoped 'you people do your best to help poor China', and adding, 'I never droop. Please do not worry too much for me.' Going to the Generalissimo's house, Donald found Chiang and Meiling in the garden. 'I am not disturbed by the loss of cities,' the Generalissimo said. 'If we lose too many, we shall build some more.'\n\nThe National Day parade on 10 October 1938 included a 12-foot effigy of the Generalissimo. At that time, Han Suyin was in central Wuhan with her soldier husband. One moonlit night, she saw a car draw up in front of the Bank of China building. Out stepped a lean, uniformed figure who mounted the steps and turned for a moment, looking out over the crowd, unnoticed. 'A severely simple uniform without decorations, a face serene in the moonlight and torchlight, a face to be marked, with its characteristic long clean-cut jaw, high, unlined forehead and deep-set eyes,' she wrote.\n\nChiang Kai-shek stood on the steps. As the crowd became aware of him, there was a murmur, then silence, then a roar, spontaneous as the roar of a forest when a wind goes over it. _Wei Yuan Chang! Wei Yuan Chang! Linghsiu wan sui!_ \u2013 Generalissimo! Ten thousand years! The man they hailed stood at the salute, acknowledging their cheers, a small, grave smile playing about his lips; then bowed and passed from our sight into the building.\n\nTwo weeks later, Chiang and Meiling drove slowly along the Bund by the Yangtze in an open car, reviewing troops drawn up there. That evening, they had a meal with Hollington Tong, the deferential head of the information service. The Japanese were 20 miles away. Meiling suggested leaving. Chiang went to a desk, got out his brush and ink pad and wrote a message explaining the loss of the city. At 9.30 p.m., the Chiangs and Donald went to the airfield with a couple of bags of personal possessions. Tong was left behind to put out the statement to the press, and find his way to safety as best he could.\n\nThe Generalissimo's American pilot, Royal Leonard, flew the trio out of the city, but the navigation equipment was broken and they found that they were going the wrong way. So they instructed Leonard to return to Hankou, only to be informed that the airfield had been mined. Chiang told the pilot to head there all the same. They landed safely, changed planes and went south to Hunan.\n\nBehind them, under arc lights and the yellow glow of kerosene lamps on the docks, the city's better-off inhabitants raced in rickshaws and cars to grab a place on boats leaving up the Yangtze. 'Officers in uniforms and gentlemen in suits of European style or long Chinese gowns [were] herding their families aboard or looking to the bestowal of their hastily assembled baggage,' Han Suyin recalled.\n\nLadies, slender and elegant in their silk shan, their eyebrows pencilled delicately and their lips painted full and red. Raucous-voiced servant-women. Children, heavy with sleep. Crying babies and their imperturbable wet-nurses, with bovine calm unbuttoning their loose blouses to give suck. Carriers staggering under mountainous loads . . . a woman with tiny bound feet had stumbled and fallen into the water and was being rescued with great outcry to the entertainment of many watchers.\n\nJapanese newspapers reported a desperate last defensive move by the Chinese \u2013 5,000 orang-utans would be unleashed after having been trained to throw grenades, seize machine guns and attack company commanders whom they had been schooled to identify. The apes never put in an appearance, but the defenders left Wuhan as the attack moved in from three sides supported by twenty-six ships. Despite Meiling's programme for winter uniforms, the Chinese troops were still in their summer shorts, tunics and cotton puttees. Camouflaged straw hats the size of dustbin lids hung on their backs: when they wore them they looked like giant toadstools, but were hard to identify from the air. They moved, Rhodes Farmer recalled, 'as softly as ghosts. Even the cooks and their boy apprentices jog-trotting along with the pots, pans and rice sacks swaying from shoulder poles, had learnt the art of absolute noiselessness.'\n\nBuildings in Wuhan had been mined, and some were blown up, including the former Japanese consulate. But many property owners stayed behind to remove the explosives before the enemy arrived. Japanese troops showed discipline this time; though looting was reported, there was no repeat of Nanking. A combination of the blowing of the Yellow River dykes and the defensive fighting along the Yangtze had delayed the fall of the city for six months. Chinese casualties to date were put at up to a million. On the other side, Japanese losses in the undeclared war in China, mostiy in the Yangtze region, were reported at 62,000 killed and 6,667 wounded \u2013 12,600 of the dead perished from illness. The large ratio of dead to wounded may have stemmed from the creed that death in battle was glorious. Another reason was given by Bob McLure of the Red Cross, who recounted that, at a Japanese field hospital, he had seen only very lightly wounded men, none wearing even splints. Nearby was a burial ground. 'There wasn't a shadow of doubt that the Japanese were doing away with their badly wounded men,' he added. 'Crippled men back in Japan would have spoiled the picture of easy conquest the High Command was painting.'\n\nDespite the loss of yet another major city, Chiang maintained his poise. It was 'better to be a broken jade than a whole tile', he declared. The enemy had only 'scorched earth and dead cities' to show for the offensive. 'Already the Japanese are deep in the mire,' he added, 'and, from now on, they will tread on thornier ground . . . in revolutionary war, there is no end till the final victory is won.' It might have been Mao speaking.\n\nChiang stopped in the Hunan capital of Changsha, where he met the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kern.* A photograph shows the diplomat looking grave while the Generalissimo seems almost jaunty. Changsha had just been the target of a Japanese air raid \u2013 one bomb narrowly missed a British warship, hitting a crowded junk nearby. Sir Archibald and Meiling became godparents to a girl rescued from the water who was given the name of Water Fairy.\n\nLeaving Changsha, Chiang set up his new headquarters on the sacred mountain of Nanyue, a small settlement with 4,000 years of history, where tall trees and glens surround a great temple of golden tiles with seventy-two columns. The single street was of blocks of stone, flanked by one-storey wooden houses. A traditional poem described the mountain in azure blue with cloud below and snow blowing off the peaks. One poem, apposite to Chiang's situation, told of a bird looking down from the heights\n\nBitter at heart as it watches  \nBirds caught in nets below  \nDown to even the tiniest golden ones.\n\nNanyue provided the first encounter between old and new China induced by war. Before a road was blasted up the mountain, coolies carried furniture for the new arrivals over a 2,000-foot climb. Slung between two of their poles was a gleaming porcelain lavatory \u2013 the foreman called to install it had to be told what it was for. The recently constructed Grand Nanyue Hotel had no glass in its windows and no plumbing; its central courtyard was always muddy from water basins emptied by clients from their rooms. The General Staff established itself in a school. Dispatch carriers took messages from there up steep pilgrim paths to Chiang's residence in a temple. The Christian General arrived, bronzed and unshaven in his infantryman's uniform and black cloth shoes. A captured Japanese spy, suffering from malaria and beriberi, was exhibited in a cage; local people walked miles to see this novelty, and threw him oranges.\n\nCalling his principal commanders to a conference in Nanyue in November 1938, Chiang told them that, after sixteen months of war, the first phase was over. Instead of defending each position, they should adopt 'mobile front resistance' using guerrilla tactics to trap the adversary and hit its weak points. General Chen Cheng said the key to the future lay in 'whether we can seize the initiative and conduct mobile warfare throughout the entire country, in order to harass and disperse enemy forces, thereby leading to their attrition and total destruction'.\n\nTo strengthen the armies after their enormous losses, conscription was decreed, along with a training programme for officers and men. Chiang stressed the importance of political education and propaganda. A guerrilla training school was set up, with Communists as advisers. 'There must be no peace in the rear for the Japanese,' its manifesto proclaimed. They 'must live the lives of condemned men, with every man, woman and child their foe'. Tokyo's commander-in-chief in the south declared that the Chinese strategy 'invites only contempt and is not in keeping with a soldier's honour'. On the contrary, said the Guangxi General Bai, 'Japan's adventure in China will meet with a similar fate to that of Napoleon at Moscow'. By then, Chiang had found a new home in a mist-shrouded city where he would stay for six and a half years.\n\n* * *\n\n* China's Consul General in Vienna, He Gengshan, showed a different attitude by giving visas to an estimated 4,000 Jews to escape the Nazis, subsequendy earning the description of 'China's Schindler'.\n\n* Later Lord Inverchapel and ambassador in Washington.\n\n# CHAPTER 19\n\n _In the Clouds_\n\nCHIANG SAID THE IDEA HAD come to him when he was pursuing the Long Marchers. China's largest province of Sichuan, together with its southern neighbours of Yunnan and Guizhou, would be 'the fundamental base for the reconstruction of the nation' and the centre for protracted resistance against the Japanese. At the time, this might have seemed perverse. The country's future appeared to lie in the coastal cities, Nanking and Wuhan, but Chiang's planning implied that he expected them to fall. 'I dare say that, even if we lost fifteen provinces out of the eighteen,' he declared, 'if only we could keep our Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou we could defeat any enemy, recover the lost land, restore our country, and accomplish our revolution.'\n\nFar up the Yangtze behind the river's great gorges, ringed by protective mountains, Sichuan was known as 'the Heavenly-endowed province', covering territory slightly bigger than France. Everything except cotton grew there, and mineral resources included coal, salt, silver and copper. There were huge forests, and the hydroelectric potential of the Yangtze Gorges. Still, the province was a backward place sunk in warlordism, epitomising the inland realities of China. Secret societies were powerful. Family clans held sway. The largest landlord owned 1,500 shops and twenty-eight homes. Opium-smoking was rife; the drug accounted for almost a sixth of the province's output, seven times as much as its industrial production. Tuberculosis, dysentery, cholera and smallpox were common. Transport was rudimentary over rough terrain.\n\nFor his new base, Chiang chose not the provincial capital of Chengdu, where independent local militarists were powerful, but Chungking in the south-east of the province which he had used as a base against Mao's marchers in 1935. Perched on cliffs at the junction of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, the city suited his psychology of war perfectly. An imperial city in 340 bc, it had become a place where emperors and warlords retired to lick their wounds. The fog, cloud and mists were such that it was said 'when the sun shines, even the dogs bark in fear'. The American scholar John King Fairbank saw the city as resembling 'a junk heap of old boxes piled together . . . There is no color. Nothing grows out of the rock, the stone is all gray and slightly mossed; people, houses, pathways all blend into gray, with the gray river swirling between.'\n\nChungking was one of China's dirtiest cities. The rats were as big as cats. A maze of dingy alleyways led from the hundreds of steep, slippery steps up from the river. Beggar children and dogs burrowed into rubbish dumps on the slopes. Lepers wandered in the streets. Crowded tenements hung from the cliffs like birds' nests. Night soil was taken down to the Yangtze and poured into 'honey barges' to be stirred by naked men before being shipped off to be sold as fertiliser. Illness was endemic \u2013 a survey of 5,000 students in 1938 showed only ninety-six to be completely healthy. Hundreds of bodies were found in the streets each month.\n\nThe coming of the government confronted this provincial centre with the modern, cosmopolitan ways of the newcomers in a clash of old and new. Sewage ran in open ditches while neon signs flashed from the heights above the river. Though the 2,000-foot air strip was kept busy on a sandbank on the north shore of the Yangtze, most people in die city moved about on foot or in rickshaws and sedan chairs. The post office found itself handling 200,000 messages a month, but most of the locals remained illiterate. Young refugees from different regions lived together while local husbands and wives met for the first time at die weddings arranged by their parents. Thoroughfares were renamed the Road of the National Republic or the Street of the People's Livelihood, but rickshaw pullers still called them the slope of the Seven Stars or White Elephant Street. Processions through the streets invoked the aid of the gods while chorus girls from Shanghai danced, six cinemas opened, and _Mourning Becomes Electro_ , starred an actress who had studied drama in London. American-trained dentists advertised their services alongside soothsayers. While rich officials flew in French wine and American liquor, drinking water for most inhabitants came from the river where 500 tons of sewage flowed each day.\n\nFactories which had been dismantled and brought from the Lower Yangtze region were erected to give the city a taste of modern industry \u2013 in all, nearly 2,000 enterprises were moved up the river, dragged through the gorges on ropes hauled by coolies walking along paths cut into the sheer rock face. The Shanghai Machine Works was the first to make the journey, followed by a steel mill and the Wuhan power plant which was towed through the rapids on special pontoons. A rotary press was brought in to enable newspapers from Shanghai to resume publication. Sichuan women were trained to operate spindles in textile plants. Propaganda units were sent out into the countryside with health caravans. Universities, with nationalistic students, shifted to the interior where they were exempted from military service \u2013 perhaps as a result, their numbers doubled between 1936 and 1944.\n\nThe city's population soared from 300,000 to a million. Rhodes Farmer recalled the mix of people from all parts of the country:\n\nA Peiping scholar's fur hat marched along beside the pith helmet of a businessman from Hong Kong (just up by aeroplane), the felt hat of a Nanking civil servant, the wide bamboo sun-hat of a refugee artisan from sub-tropical Canton, or an old-fashioned . . . skull cap. An east coast banker's smart Western suit rubbed shoulders with the red surplice of a lama from Tibet, or a sheep-coated trader from Sinkiang where China borders Russia. The fashionable gown of a Chinese film star from Shanghai (now doing wartime propaganda films) swished past the blue, multi-kilted skirt of a barefoot, silver-earringed Lolo tribes girl from the mountains and the . . . eye of both expressed amazed interest.\n\nThere was a Nanking Hat Shop, a Hankou Dry-Cleaners and a Shanghai Garage and Motor Repair Works. An influx of cooks brought dishes from all over China. However, verbal communication could be tricky, as Cantonese and Mandarin speakers failed to understand one another and both were defeated by the Shanghai dialect and the local patois.\n\nThe journalist Teddy White, who arrived to take over from Rhodes Farmer at the government information service before joining _Time_ magazine, found the officials who had piled into Chungking from more advanced parts of China 'historically romantic' as they ate in communal messes, while their children were drilled in air-raid precautions and their wives hung laundry from dormitory buildings where families slept in one room heated by a charcoal brazier in the winter. Still, a shock awaited many from the developed coastal regions as they returned to China's past. The climate was terrible, hot and humid in the summer, cold and clammy in the winter. The crush of refugees meant food and supplies were scarce \u2013 driving to the province's other main city of Chengdu in 1938, an American academic, Oliver Caldwell, saw roadside ditches full of people dead or dying from starvation.\n\nGeographical isolation had made Chungking's inhabitants 'arrogant and self-sufficient', wrote a foreign doctor. 'To any authority outside its boundaries, they were openly and vociferously antagonistic' The beggars were famed for their persistence, and the rickshaw men for setting their rates at the end of the journey. Arriving in 1939, the writer Han Suyin recalled people turning to stare and mutter, 'Outsiders. Down-river people.' Taking up residence four years later, John King Fairbank recorded that 'every local person seems to have a surly temper'. As middle-class emigres used their positions to take good jobs, requisition buildings and grab perks, they came to be even more resented by the locals. While officers and officials bought, or seized, land, the old residents gouged newcomers for rent and food.\n\nIn case the newcomers made life too jolly, Chiang forbade 'harmful amusement' while encouraging 'proper amusements like sports, music and reading'. He ordered the closure of ice cream and fizzy drink parlours which did a roaring trade in the 80-degree summer heat. They were, he declared, unsuitable frivolities in wartime; bribery soon got them back in business, disguised as restaurants with ice cream and lemonade served in soup plates. The government told police to tear down crude portraits of the leader put up by admirers in the streets since they could 'give the populace a wrong impression of the likeness of the Generalissimo, impairing [his] dignity'. But Chiang could relax on occasions. At a dinner for foreign journalists, he sat rocking his head, smiling and murmuring, ' _Hao hao had_ ' ('Good, good, good', in Mandarin, but in Chiang's provincial dialect closer to 'I see, I see, I see') while his wife, in gay spirits, acted as translator. To put the guests at ease, knives and forks were used instead of chopsticks, and despite the New Life ban on smoking, Meiling gave the game away on her own habit by accepting a 6-inch Russian cigarette from the head of the Soviet Tass news agency.\n\nFor all the changes war brought to Chungking, the Nationalist base was weak from the start. Though the transfer of factories brought modern industry to the interior, it was far less than what was needed. The provinces Chiang still controlled were, for the most part, poor and backward \u2013 they produced only 5 per cent of China's cloth, mined hardly any iron ore and contained little in the way of modern transport. Many Shanghai businessmen had preferred to stay put and chance their luck with the Japanese. Showing the limits of patriotism, money which might have been sent to Chungking found its way to Hong Kong or the United States.\n\nAs well as depriving Chiang of China's manufacturing and commercial centres and putting a brake on industrial development, the Japanese also occupied big food producing areas. To make up for the shortfall, compulsory grain purchase and taxation programmes to feed the army and officials were imposed on peasants in Nationalist areas, giving rise to widespread oppression and corruption. Implementation was in the hands of the local authorities without effective control from the centre. Quotas were raised at will, and farmers cheated by rigged scales. Military storehouses bulged with food while local people lived on the brink of starvation. Officers and venal officials sold off the surplus, sometimes back to the very peasants from whom it had been taken. Not surprisingly, there were rural revolts \u2013 one, in Sichuan itself, would involve 50,000 armed men. Told of abuses, Chiang refused to credit them. When presented with the evidence, he would fly into a rage and punish those responsible, sometimes beating the culprits with his stick. Then he would fall back into his faith in the power of orders, despite all the proof to the contrary.\n\nNo sooner had the Chiangs got to Chungking than Meiling was off on flying visits to Changsha, Nanchang and the Guangdong\u2014Hunan border region during which she declared Japan to be the enemy of all women, whom it subjected to 'unbelievable oppression and slavery'. The survival of the nation depended on Chinese women not being afraid to die, she said. They must be ready to forsake vanity and luxuries, added the Soong sister who radiated the first and had lived in the lap of the second all her life. She saw in 1939 at a New Life dinner which raised $16,000 to buy necessities for troops. Patriotic songs were sung, along with a Chinese version of 'Auld Lang Syne'. There was a big torchlight parade through streets hung with national flags, and thousands of firecrackers went off at midnight.\n\n## TWO WIVES\n\n16. Chiang and Chen Jieru (Jennie) at Whampoa.\n\n17. Chiang and Meiling at their wedding in Shanghai.\n\n18 & 19. Party challengers: Wang Jingwei (above) and Hu Hanmin (right). Both claimed Sun Yat-sen's political inheritance, and both were out-manoeuvred by Chiang.\n\n20. Still friends: Chiang with the Young Marshal and their wives before the kidnapping in Xi'an.\n\n21. Chiang and Meiling after his release.\n\n22. Don and M'issimo: Australian adviser W. H. Donald and Meiling, whose life he saved in Shanghai.\n\n23. Brothers-in-law: T. V. Soong, Finance Minister and Prime Minister, meets Roosevelt (and son James) while negotiating a loan agreement.\n\n24. H. H. Kung, the banker who was also Finance Minister and Prime Minister.\n\n25 . War: Chiang announcing China's resistance to the Japanese in July 1937, from the balcony of his headquarters in Lushan.\n\n## THE NIGHTMARE UNFOLDS\n\n26. A baby in Shanghai's bombed-out station in 1937 (there were allegations that the photographer\/Newsreel Wong', posed the baby for the shot).\n\n27. Spectators gaze at the smoke and flames after Japanese air raids.\n\n28. Japanese use Chinese for live bayonet practice during the Rape of Nanking.\n\n29. Chiang harangues a rally in Wuhan before the evacuation of the city.\n\n30. Three sisters: Ailing, Meiling and Qingling Soong join forces in the new capital.\n\n31. Vast cemetery: Chungking becomes the most heavily bombed city in history.\n\nMeiling and the Generalissimo had two homes \u2013 a squat villa in his headquarters on the heights in the city, and a residence on the other side of the river, where she had marmalade made from the citrus fruits in the garden. Guards in German-style helmets and khaki uniforms with pink collar badges stood at the gates. Crossing the water one day, the academic and writer Robert Payne recalled seeing a streamlined blue motor boat sweep past taking Chiang back from his second home. Showing that he, too, could deviate from New Life injunctions, the Generalissimo reclined in the back, 'smoking a cigarette, wearing a trilby hat and a military overcoat'. On such trips, it was said, he sometimes sang duets with Meiling.\n\nT. V. Soong, who became Foreign Minister, and H. H. Kung, who deputised for Chiang at the head of the Executive Yuan as well as running the government's finances, had substantial homes in the city. Qingling arrived and was photographed with the Generalissimo though she later went to Hong Kong where her elder sister was in residence. Early in 1940, Meiling joined them for treatment for her sinus complaint which had been aggravated by die Chungking climate. On 1 April, they flew together to the Nationalist capital, Ailing taking a supply of oxygen with her for the flight. Sun Yat-sen's widow, whose house was watched by police, made no secret of her left-wing views and held regular evening salons at which, according to the American information officer, Graham Peck, she expressed her opinion of her family indirectly, popping out her eyes when the subject of her brother-in-law came up and rolling out his title 'Generrra\/mssimo'. One evening, slapping a mosquito on her leg, she said laughingly, 'No stockings you see . . . I can't get nylons from America the way my little sister the Empress does.' Her pension as the widow of the Father of the Nation had not been increased to keep pace with inflation, but T.V. provided her with a car.\n\nDai Li set up a secret police headquarters in town, and developed a training camp spread over three mountain valleys 12 miles from Chungking where dissidents were brainwashed and torture was practised. Du Yuesheng came in from Hong Kong, putting his gangland connections in occupied territories at the regime's disposal, and maintaining a healthy personal cash flow by gambling with local generals. The Christian General lived on a nearby mountain, rising at dawn and writing poetry. Zhang Guotao, former Politburo member and leader of one of the other Red Armies of the mid-1930s, moved to Chungking after losing a power struggle with Mao and defecting to the Nationalists, the highest-ranking Communist to change sides. Some of the veterans of the 4 May nationalist movement rallied to die regime, becoming awkward partners in a National Spiritual Mobilisation launched by Chiang as a rallying point in 1939. An intriguing Chinese woman, known as Iris, flitted in and out on complex secret missions, including the formation of a group of child assassins to kill collaborators in occupied territory. After ill-advisedly returning from his trip to Europe, the instigator of the Xi'an kidnapping, General Yang Hucheng, was held as a prisoner \u2013 his wife staged a hunger strike and died of what was described as 'mental illness'; Yang carried her ashes around with him in a box.*\n\nThe Communists had one office in Red Rock village overlooking the Jialing River, and another in the city in a shabby building at the fiftieth house on an alley running along the edge of a cliff. The street outside the second was deep in mud for much of the year. There were two courtyards. Kuomintang secret police occupied one, the Communists die other, with an exit through a trapdoor. The Communists printed their own newspaper and pinned maps of the Chinese and Russian fronts on the walls. The chairs and sofa in their reception room had broken springs, and were covered in coarse blue cloth.\n\nHeading the Communist team, Zhou Enlai was a popular and respected figure among diplomats and foreign journalists. Chiang told an American adviser that he regarded him as reliable while the Communist said that the Generalissimo was indispensable for the war against the Japanese. According to Teddy White, an added attraction of Zhou's headquarters was the presence of the guerrilla daughter of a minor warlord whom the _Time_ correspondent described as 'the most beautiful Chinese woman I ever encountered'. There were also Communist moles, including a seven-person ring headed by another attractive young woman that would operate for three years within the Nationalist intelligence service before being uncovered.\n\nA Living Buddha moved into Chungking after being smuggled out of Mongolia. A Canadian missionary made Chiang a new set of dentures. Among later visitors would be the Indian Congress leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who impressed his hosts by talking non-stop throughout a Japanese air raid. Stafford Cripps, the prominent British Labour politician, spent time in the city at the start of 1940, and found the Chiangs 'perfect dears, so kind and simple and natural'. Bowled over like so many Westerners by Meiling, he wrote of her as 'extraordinarily intelligent and superbly kind to everyone and full of courage and initiative often in the most difficult circumstances'. The Generalissimo offered him a job, but W. H. Donald advised the future Chancellor of the Exchequer not to accept given the 'heartbreak' other advisers had suffered.\n\nTwo successive American ambassadors were old China hands. The first, roly-poly, orange-haired Nelson T. Johnson, who had been his country's senior diplomat in China since 1929, hung a Daoist saying on his office wall, 'Through not doing, all things are done.' His successor, Clarence Gauss, a dour chain-smoker of cigars, had spent thirty years in the country and was well-informed and shrewd. But the Nationalists were unhappy with him on two counts. Having worked his way up the diplomatic tree through die consular service, he was regarded as insufficiently grand: China felt it merited a more imposing figure. Also, Gauss knew the country too well for the government's liking, and was not taken in by its window dressing. In one dispatch, he called China 'a minor asset' which could become 'a major liability'. In another, he dismissed as 'rot' the idea that Chiang was a great leader directing the war with energy.\n\nAmong other diplomats, the pipe-smoking British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, whose blonde Chilean wife enlivened the social scene, said Chungking reminded him of his native Scotland. The erudite, gouty Australian Minister held a salon in his large stucco house on a cliff edge, with a blue-carpeted drawing room filled with Chinese paintings. The charge d'affaires of the Netherlands, who had witnessed the Rape of Nanking, had a country house in the pine trees across the Yangtze where he handed out cigars from his homeland as he listened to the BBC news. After the defeat of France in 1940, General Zinovi Pechkoff, a one-armed Russian and adopted son of Maxim Gorki, came to town to represent the Free French.\n\nTexas-bred Claire Chennault, with what an American diplomat described as 'a face of cold lava', built up the Nationalist air force, and told Chiang victory could be won from the air rather than by slogging it out on the ground. His Volunteer Group of fliers set up bases across south-west China, becoming known as the Flying Tigers from the insignia of the jaws of tiger sharks painted on the noses of their advanced P-40 planes. During Japanese raids, Teddy White reported, Chennault stood in the open watching the planes 'as a football coach studies a team he expects to meet soon on the field'.\n\nThe Nationalists hired an American code breaker, Herbert Yardley, whose 'black chamber' operation had been closed down by Washington on the grounds that 'Gentlemen do not read each other's mail'. A heavy drinker and womaniser, he used the pseudonym of 'Osborne', and pretended to be a dealer in leather and hides. During air raids, he would get a drink, lie down on a couch and put pillows on his eyes and groin to protect his vital organs. John McCausland, a Cambridge graduate from Dublin, broadcast on the Nationalist radio in English. Adopting a Chinese name, he wore a gown and skullcap, but kept Western shoes, and swore not to have his hair cut until the war was won. Six feet tall, with a 4-inch wisp of hair hanging from his lower lip as a sign of scholarship, McCausland knew 15,000 Chinese characters. In 1941, he was given Chinese citizenship.\n\nAn American information officer, Graham Peck, also remembered a Bulgarian doctor, an Armenian guerrilla, an Indian novelist, a ballet dancer from Trinidad, and a Siberian Yakut who later became the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer representative in Xi'an. The foreigners set up the Chungking Club along the lines of their social establishment in the treaty ports. An American former marine produced the only ice in town safe to put in drinks. Two Germans who styled themselves as barons made a gin they called 'Mountain Dew'. When China and Germany declared war after Pearl Harbor, an internment camp was set up by the government, but the only inmate was a German Jew who had married a Chinese woman and was living in poverty in a nearby village. The camp was modern, with new plumbing, and the prisoner was given a generous food allowance. When word spread, two other poor German Jews asked to be detained. Since they had taken out Chinese nationality, they were disbarred.\n\nAt the end of 1938, one of the leading figures in the Kuomintang decided that he had had enough. Doubtful of the chances of victory and driven by his own ambition and his marginalisation by Chiang, Wang Jingwei slipped out of town, travelling by plane to the Yunnan capital of Kunming and then going on to Hanoi. There, he called for peace talks with Tokyo. The Generalissimo brushed this aside, and the one-time head of the Canton government was the target of an assassination attempt in the Vietnamese capital, apparently organised by the Nationalist secret police chief. It misfired when the killers went into the best room in the house and machine-gunned Wang's confidential secretary \u2013 his boss had chosen a simpler room. Wang said he had planned to go abroad from Hanoi, but that the killing so shocked him that he changed his mind and returned to occupied China, to set out on a path of active collaboration. He and his associates would claim that they were simply seeking peace and were thus acting in the nation's best interests as a counterweight to Chiang's war of resistance.\n\nHe could draw on Sun Yat-sen's partiality for Japan \u2013 'without Japan, there is no China; without China, there is no Japan,' the doctor had said. But Chiang made sure that he was expelled from the KMT, charged with desertion and defiance of government policy. Two of Wang's associates, whose defection to Hong Kong was arranged by Big-Eared Du with Chiang's approval, further discredited him when they leaked accounts of his earlier contacts with occupation authorities.\n\nSetting up in Nanking, Wang embarked on negotiations to unite the puppet 'reformed' government there and pro-Japanese administrations in the north, with himself as the overall collaborationist boss. This fitted in with Tokyo's desire to add a political dimension to its military superiority. The new Japanese Prime Minister, Baron Kiichiro Hirauma, made his country's ambitions plain in a statement in which he said the final goal in China 'does not lie simply in the achievement of military victories but in the establishment of a new order in East Asia on a foundation of China's rebirth and mutual co-operation amongjapan, Manchukuo and China. As long as this goal is not attained, there will be no end to the conflict.' Such warnings, however, took no account of the resolution of an opponent described by a missionary in Chungking as having 'a personality tempered to bright steel'.\n\nAfter the outbreak of war, Chiang had been given dictatorial 'emergency powers'. He was free to act as he wished in military, party and political matters, and to issue decrees as he chose. Chronically incapable of delegating or of letting any organisation escape from his grasp, he amassed jobs on a ridiculous and inefficient scale \u2013 at one point he was said to hold eighty-two posts ranging from chief of the government, the army and the party to the presidencies of the Boy Scouts, the National Glider Association and the School for Descendants of Revolutionary Martyrs. But his position was much weaker than it appeared, and he was anxious to rebuild his armies rather than fight fresh battles.\n\nIn his detailed survey of Chiang's forces the historian Michael Gibson concluded that 'by the end of 1938, the Central Army had all but ceased to exist as an effective fighting force'. Most divisions had lost at least one third of their manpower. As Chiang acknowledged, the general staff was weak and badly trained \u2013 some members could not read maps. Only a quarter of middle-rank and junior officers had received a regular education. Many regional commanders had a doubtful record of loyalty \u2013 in his account of National China at war, Ch'i Hsi-sheng calculated that 39 per cent of the top thirty-six generals had rebelled against Nanking before 1937 and only a third could be counted on totally. Regional militarists regained the autonomy which the Generalissimo had threatened in the mid-1930s. At the local level, commanders dominated administration and commerce. Senior generals were either provincial governors, or outranked the holders of those posts, drawing additional influence from their status in the Kuomintang.\n\nRedevelopment of the army was slow, equipment poor, desertion rates high. Conscription diminished the quality of troops who were badly fed and subject to disease: in Sichuan, in 1942, only a third of recruits met the official health standards. Those who could afford it escaped by bribery or by paying deserters to serve another spell under the flag in their place. Local militarists took their pick of the new men, and sometimes demanded more. To meet quotas, officials would press-gang peasants from the fields or grab passing travellers. For fear that they would desert, recruits were often marched to camps hundreds of miles away tied together with ropes round their necks, and stripped naked at night to prevent them running away. Many died on die way. Those who escaped die draft might be rounded up with their wives and children for forced labour.\n\nAn indication of the scale of deaths, desertions and evasion of the draft was given by the way in which the overall strength of China's armies remained at 4 million although the government had ordered the conscription of 1.5 million men annually from 1938. As Galen had preached a dozen years earlier, China would have been much better off with a smaller, better trained army, but the faith in sheer numbers lived on from the warlord era.\n\nThe Generalissimo did not help military cohesion by his habit of issuing far-off armies with orders that ignored batdefield realities \u2013 on one occasion, the able Cantonese commander, Xue Yue, remarked that he had taken his troops to a distant area of Jiangxi to ensure he was out of telephone contact. Explaining how he handled his generals, Chiang said: 'I have to lie awake at night, thinking what fool things they may do. Then I write and tell them not to do these things. But they are so dumb, they will do a lot of foolishness unless you anticipate them. This is the secret of handling them \u2013 you must imagine everything that they can do that would be wrong, and warn them against it. That is why I have to write so many letters.'\n\nHe bypassed the military structure to deal directly with regimental commanders and frequently changed his mind. He kept troops out of battle so that they could be used for other purposes at a later date, or stationed them to check potential domestic rivals. He was surrounded by yes-men. His generals did not dare to stand up to him, knowing, in the words of Li Zongren of Guangxi, that he put obedience above ability. 'What Chiang liked,' said the hostile Li, 'were men . . . who would obey absolutely but who had no talents of their own.' When Meiling mentioned to him that one particularly incompetent general did not seem able to exercise his command, Chiang was said to have replied: 'But where do you find a man who is so obedient?' All of which heightened his belief in his own infallibility, and his unwillingness to engage in discussion, pursuing divide-and-rule tactics that were reflected in the factions below him.\n\nOne was headed by the short, plump General He Yingqin who ran the military supply and administrative web. With his round face and circular spectacles, he looked benign \u2013 Teddy White described him as appearing 'almost schoolmasterish'. But anybody who had been Chief of Staff since 1927 and War Minister for almost as long, had to have become a master at manipulation. General He had extensive connections through the ranks of the Whampoa graduates, and he and his associates at the rambling, grey Military Council building in Chungking made fortunes for themselves from their positions. He also became one of the wealthiest landlords in his native Guizhou by annexing land, particularly from the minority populations there. China's most powerful Roman Catholic layman, the general was closely connected to the church's reactionary establishment. He advocated major campaigns to liquidate the Communists, and did all he could to block army reforms. Though Chiang did not trust him, He was too powerful to be ousted.\n\nHe's group was often at loggerheads with younger generals who were less desk-bound, had stronger regional roots and were anxious to build up their own power bases. The War Minister was particularly at odds with the more reform-minded Shanghai and Wuhan defender, Chen Cheng, who married one of Chiang's wards. Even shorter than his rival but much slimmer, Chen was the regime's main conduit to semi-autonomous forces outside the Central Army, and enjoyed good relations with commanders like the successful Cantonese Xue Yue whom Chiang regarded with suspicion. Known to be disgusted by the corruption and apathy of the regime, Chen pushed reform in his base of southern Hubei province, associated himself with the liberal Third Party and had a working relationship with Communist representatives in Chungking. This all made it inevitable that, as well as his rivalry with He, he became a _bete noire_ for the repressive CC Clique of the Chen brothers.\n\nThe general who had fought in the victory at Taierzhuang, Tang Enbo, established himself as the dominant Nationalist force in the key province of Henan, covering 65,000 square miles between northern and central China. Another ambitious Whampoa graduate and veteran of the war against the Red Army and the Japanese, Hu Zongnan, 'the Eagle of the North-West', commanded forces posted on the edge of the main Communist area in the north. Hu, who was said not to smoke, drink or chase women, was on particularly bad terms with He and dealt directly with Chiang. Lower down the ranks, fragmentation often ruled. In the central coastal area of eastern China, for instance, a dozen generals, plus politicians, secret police groups, Green Gang leaders, pirates and local dignitaries jockeyed for influence in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces \u2013 facilitating the expansion of the Communist army there.\n\nAs the glow of the united front era in Wuhan was destroyed by war, repression and censorship increased. Universities were purged. Textbooks were edited to make sure they toed the official line. The leading newspaper, _Ta Kung Pao_ , was suspended for three days until the publisher apologised for writing that 'there is a halo of sanctity and silence around the Generalissimo'. The divorce widened with intellectuals and those who thought seriously about China's future. Minority groups on the Political Council were hounded after they set up a Federation of Democratic Parties with offices in Yunnan, Guangxi and Chengdu.\n\nDespite this, Nationalist China was not a closed society like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. But Chiang showed how hollow the talk of democracy had been by reorganising the Council to drop the dissidents. In the absence of political debate, the regime's thinking became increasingly stultified. Chiang emphasised the importance of action; 'the only failure is in failing to act', he declared. The revolution needed a strong driving force based on wisdom, love and courage. Action should be based on 'true knowledge', to create 'an all-pervading moral attitude to life such as is rationally comfortable to man's true nature and [which] brings into full play the deep funds of humanity and benevolence in our own people'.\n\nHis thoughts, expressed in lengthy speeches, hardly breathed life into the Kuomintang. In 1939, its membership was a third of the pre-war level; while the total rose to 2.5 million by the end of 1944, most recruits were attracted by the perks the party offered rather than by ideology or proselytising zeal. Thirty per cent of members came from three provinces \u2013 Sichuan, Zhejiang and Guangdong. The Central Executive Committee was a rubber stamp, with formal status but little influence.\n\nInternal rivalries round Chiang remained strong, and he fostered diem on the divide-and-rule principle to get the most out of his subordinates. In particular, the Chen brothers who headed the CC Clique fought a bitter battle with the police chief, Dai Li. One of the Chen brothers, the grey-haired, ultra-energetic \u2013 and ultra-conservative \u2013 Lifu, became Education Minister and led the attempted brainwashing of students and intellectuals. His tubercular sibling, Chen Guofu, handled the flow of paper in Chiang's office, and decided who got to see the Generalissimo. An American adviser described their philosophy as 'a combination of Confucianism and European authoritarianism modelled on Italian and German fascism, with a dash of the YMCA type of Christianity'.\n\nDuring the war, their opponent Dai Li rose to become in many ways the second most powerful figure in the regime at the head of the secret police. Dubbed 'Chiang's Himmler' by critics, he was said to be the only person allowed to carry a gun in Chiang's presence. Slender and handsome, with tiny hands, Dai walked in long strides with a ramrod-straight back. He had piercing eyes, a taste for cashew nuts, and a lively distrust of the British, who once detained him for a night in Hong Kong. He always carried a small pistol presented to him by an American naval officer. His personal communications staff spoke the impenetrable dialect of his home area to communicate with one another by telephone so that anybody bugging their conversations could not understand what they were saying.\n\nUniversally feared, Dai had deepened the trust of his fellow Zhejiang native, the Generalissimo, by going to join him in Xi'an in December 1936. He had close links with secret societies and underworld gangs, including Big-Eared Du and the Shanghai mobs. After the He-Umeza secret pact outlawed the Blue Shirts, they welded into Dai's Juntong organisation and conducted terror missions for him. Overseeing a wave of terror attacks on collaborators in Shanghai, he preached 'saving the nation in devious ways' which became code for maintaining ambiguous links with collaborators. Chiang gave him control of the salt monopoly, which helped to finance his police whose numbers were put by some in the millions. His agents were posted to military and police units to check their reliability, and given responsibility for fighting hoarding, black marketeering and profiteering as the economy spun out of control.\n\nThe war had been bound to face Chiang with a major financial problem, but his response made it far worse and accentuated disenchantment with his regime. Loss of China's richest cities severely cut the tax take \u2013 in 1937\u201339, expenditure rose by a third, mainly on military spending, while revenue fell by two thirds. Washington extended loans worth a total of US$145 million, and Britain granted a \u00a3500,000 credit, but these were not enough to meet Chiang's requirements. Some funds were raised by sending the stocks of the opium monopoly for sale through Hong Kong and the Portuguese colony of Macau in an operation run by Big-Eared Du and Dai Li. Longer-term, the Generalissimo and H. H. Kung decided to pay the bills by printing money at a rate never seen before.\n\nThis caused a national disaster. The value of the currency plunged. Inflation soared. Even more money had to be found; so the presses were set to work even more \u2013 it was, in the words of a Chinese proverb, a case of 'drinking poison to kill thirst'. But the man in charge of the country's finances waved aside any criticism. 'Inflation, inflation!' Kung told a questioner. 'There is no inflation in China! If people want to pay twenty five dollars for a fountain pen, that's their business, it's not inflation. They're crazy, that's all. They shouldn't pay it.'\n\nThree quarters of wartime spending was financed by notes from the main state-controlled banks. The annual issue rose from 1.45 billion yuan in 1937 to 15 billion in the early 1940s, hitting even more stratospheric levels in the following years. By the second half of 1941, prices were doubling on an annual basis, boosted by poor harvests and scarcities of manufactured goods. In 1940\u201341, food prices in Chungking increased by 1,400 per cent.\n\nThe soaring cost of living was accompanied by an upsurge in graft that became a hallmark of the regime, particularly when the government tried to lessen the inflationary spiral by holding down the salaries of officials and soldiers. A widely read book of the time compared corruption to a banyan tree under which the Chinese sought shelter. Virtually everybody made what they could on the side, from avarice or necessity. Those with access to food or goods hoarded and profiteered. 'To get rich quickly, to have a beautiful mistress . . . to be able to give dinners at which shark's fin, already almost unobtainable, will be served as a delicacy, to ride in motor-cars and be able to say that your income can be measured in millions are the hallmarks of the most exquisite taste,' the academic Robert Payne wrote in his Chungking diary. 'There is no sign of the greatness of China here.'\n\nCorruption had long been a prime concern for W. H. Donald who had never reconciled himself to the prevalence of 'squeeze'. In the past, he had urged Chiang to execute high-profile miscreants. Now, his unhappiness crystallised round an incident he had seen before the fall of Wuhan. An ambulance bought with American donations had stopped in front of a bank where an official had a lot of money deposited. The cash was taken out of the bank, loaded into the ambulance and driven away in a centuries-old pattern of the wealthy fleeing with their possessions and leaving the ordinary people to their fate. Later that day, Donald had gone to the Chiangs' house, and led Meiling into the garden. Something must be done about the high-level sleaze, he insisted; his biography says he cited the wife of an official who is not named, but who was clearly the eldest of her sisters, Ailing Rung. Meiling turned on the Australian in a blaze of anger, and said, 'You may criticise the government or anything in China, but there are some persons even you cannot criticise.' Donald stood silent for a moment, and then walked away quickly as the blood leaped to his cheeks.\n\nIn Chungking, he continued his work, promoting Chiang's wife as a Chinese icon to the West and flying with her to Hong Kong to talk about arms procurement. But he was taking stock of his position, and of the regime he was serving. Eventually, he decided to quit at the end of three decades in China. After saying goodbye to Meiling, he flew to Hong Kong. There, he boarded his yacht called, in part, after her. On the boat was a collection of gifts she had given him over the years including a compass, a wireless and silverware. The Australian put a sheet of paper in his typewriter and, as he later told his biographer, wrote, 'Dear Madame Chiang: once I told you there were all sorts of roads out of China and that you need only say the word and I would kick up a dust so fast it would be as a locust cloud in retreat. Well, at last I am on a road, a big highway.' He pulled the paper out of the machine, and tore it up.\n\nThe following summer, Donald set sail for the Solomon Islands with the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Chinese merchant friend in Hong Kong who was to act as his secretary while he wrote his memoirs \u2013 which he did not do. Meiling would urge him to return, and, terminally ill with lung disease, he eventually flew back to China seven years later saying he wanted 'to go home to die'. He and the woman he had carried from the car crash in Shanghai never met again, but Meiling, wearing black, attended his funeral at the end of 1946, and a cross of yellow and white chrysanthemums was placed on top of the coffin as it was taken to the city's International Cemetery.\n\nOn 3 May 1939, Japanese navy planes swooped on Chungking like a whirlwind. During the winter and early spring, the cloud and fog had acted as a protective blanket. Now, the sky had cleared. It was a sultry day, and the streets were crowded as the planes started bombing. There was an eclipse of the moon that night; priests beat bronze gongs to scare off the Dog of Heaven which was trying to swallow the moon. Town criers walked the streets ringing bells warning that, along with bombs, the Japanese had dropped poisoned cigarettes. The planes returned the following day and, that night, Reuters reported:\n\nChungking presented a strange picture. One half of the city was in total darkness. There was no electric light, no telephone service, and thousands of homeless persons slept on the pavements. Lighted candles burned at the doors of houses, this telling that at least one of the inmates had been killed. Some bodies rested in coffins inside houses while others lay on the pavements, covered with mats. Meanwhile the other half of the city is full of bright lights, and life is going on there as usual.\n\nIn the bombed areas, corpses were everywhere. 'Loose limbs are scattered about amid smouldering heaps of furniture and beams,' a French missionary wrote. 'I ask myself whether such horrors are possible, or whether I am the victim of ghastly hallucinations . . . Chungking has become one vast cemetery.' The municipal hospital had room for only 250 patients. The main water tower was hit, so fire-fighting was difficult. Doors were pulled off houses to serve as stretchers. One group of Chinese sought refuge in the British consulate. The ambassador ordered the gates to be opened, and they settled on the tennis court which was then hit by a bomb that dug a 24-foot crater and killed twenty-five of them.\n\nBelow the German embassy, several hundred Chinese were trapped against the city wall. Some of their bodies were charred black by flames; others died of the heat so gradually that their clothes were not even scorched. The flesh was missing from the top joints of their fingers, ripped away as they tried to climb to safety. Children and babies lay under them. Asked why they had not helped the Chinese to escape, a German diplomat replied: 'There were too many of them. Besides they were only coolies.'\n\nThe main streets were filled with craters and wrecked buildings. Amid the raging fires, the city was a sea of fleeing people. Old women hobbled on bound feet; the blind were dragged along by relatives; children howled for their parents; mothers shrieked for their children; trucks and cars drove headlong into the mob; the crackling, rushing sound of the flames came from all sides. Going back to where her home had stood, Han Suyin found the whole district 'a wilderness of dust and debris, oven-hot'. Red Cross men and Boy Scouts were pulling out bodies, charred to bones or shrunk to half their normal size by the heat.\n\nMany of those caught in the raids could, literally, have had no idea of what had hit them. They might have seen a plane flying overhead, but they had no concept of aerial warfare. To the traditionally minded inhabitants of Chungking, it was as if mythological monsters were raining death and destruction on them from the sky. Bombs hit refugees sheltering in a park in the middle of the city. 'One small girl was sitting against a wall as if sleeping but a trickle of blood flowing down her neck revealed that she was dead,' a Reuters correspondent wrote.\n\nA Chinese mother was holding the hand of her dead boy, who was about six years of age, crying uncontrollably. Further on lay another woman, still alive but unconscious, awaiting removal while beside her lay her small girl in a pretty print frock \u2013 dead. An almost headless soldier had slumped at the foot of a cut-down tree, and beyond him two young girls, their bodies almost unmutilated, sprawled against a wall. What was once a children's playground was littered with bodies, bomb craters, and uprooted trees.\n\nOne raid caught a general at his wedding party; the couple and their guests went into a big shelter, but a bomb landed on a fuel dump nearby and they were all killed when burning oil ran into the dugout. A group of 250 well-off people sought safety in the basement of a ten-storey building being put up for the Bank of China, but were crushed to death when it was hit. Three hundred died by bombs that landed on a home for opium addicts. Chicken Street, home of the sing-song girls, was wrecked. Creeping into an abandoned mansion, Rhodes Farmer slept on silk pillows and brocade bedspreads, and breakfasted on chicken and champagne from the fridge.\n\nThere was no effective anti-aircraft defence, and, at the first alarm, the remnants of the Nationalist navy \u2013 high-funnelled torpedo boats and small gunships moored on the Yangtze \u2013 weighed anchor to head for shelter under the rock faces downstream. The death toll from the raids in early May was put at between 6,000 and 8,000. Up to a quarter of the city was gutted by fire. As buses and lorries evacuated civilians, Chiang's bulletproof limousine was pressed into service \u2013 an old woman threw herself into the dust and kowtowed before she was carried into it. In the cellar of the French religious mission, the Bishop served up noodles, cold boiled cherries and his last bottle of red wine. The British ambassador came walking up the street in old flannels swinging his stick viciously. 'On no other man's face have I seen such a mixture of hate and horror,' Rhodes Farmer recalled.\n\nBy September, there had been thirty attacks, and the network of shelters was said to be able to house 200,000 people, ranging from damp, mosquito-infested tunnels to concrete-lined private shelters with battery lighting, and fan ventilation. The bunker under the Soviet embassy was particularly well-appointed, with telephones, a bar, bedrooms, and a kitchen; the Germans preferred one-person shelters dug into the lawn of their embassy. The atmosphere mixed fear, disregard for human life and a search for pleasure, with an undercurrent of pride at not being crushed. Shops offered 'Fresh eggs direct from Tokyo' with a drawing of a plane dropping bombs. The morning after a big attack on the business district, the banks were opened as usual, though their floors were littered with glass and debris. Restaurants served 'after-the-raid meals', and queues formed outside cinemas in one street while relief teams recovered bodies in the next. When electric light was restored after an attack, Chungking, wrote Han Suyin, stood 'proudly above the rivers, like a ship majestic with all its lights ablaze, riding the ocean'.\n\nIn its vulnerability and resistance, the gaunt, grey city smelling of ashes and death reflected the man who had made his haven there. 'The enemy is cruel, inhuman and barbarous beyond belief,' Chiang wrote in his diary. 'This is the most horrible scene I have witnessed in my life.' Still, Japanese planes could not destroy the will to resist, he declared.\n\nThe initial alarms were sounded after Nationalist agents down the Yangtze had sighted the planes. At that, the Generalissimo went to a first shelter where he could go on working until the Japanese were almost overhead. Then he moved to an inner shelter where senior generals awaited him. 'Here, the Minister of War, in tightly buttoned uniform and very shiny boots, paces up and down restlessly,' Han Suyin wrote.\n\nOther generals converse in low tones or look over papers. The Generalissimo sits erect and stiff on a hard wooden chair, his arms folded, his back six inches from the back of the chair. He is resting. He is never seen to relax, to slouch or cross his legs; not a muscle moves. Overhead, bombs crash. Others in the shelter start, glance upward. They open their mouths and some stop their ears. Not Chiang Kai-shek. His face wears an expression of curbed annoyance, as though he was trying not to listen to a boring speech. Staring straight before him, he sits motionless \u2013 resting.\n\n* * *\n\n* One who did not join the exodus to Chungking was Chiang's patron from Shanghai, the businessman and Kuomintang veteran, Zhangjingjiang, who went to Europe and then to the United States where he stayed as his paralysis got worse before dying in 1950.\n\n# CHAPTER 20\n\n _Magnetic Warfare_\n\nAS CHUNGKING BECAME the most heavily bombed city on earth, the Japanese troops staged a series of advances. They finally occupied Chiang's summer capital in the mountain resort of Ruling, the defenders leaving an hour before they arrived. North-west of Wuhan, a fresh attempt to encircle twenty divisions under Li Zongren and Tang Enbo failed when the Chinese melted away into the mountains, re-appearing later to harass the enemy's communications lines. To the south, seven columns backed by planes and tanks advanced along the road and rail line on the Jiangxi capital of Nanchang, from where Chiang had organised his campaigns against the Red Army \u2013 the attackers were temporarily blocked on the far bank of the wide river beside the city, but then grabbed a flotilla of passing junks to complete the offensive after which they then advanced on a string of fortified towns, including one where the only defender left was a twelve-year-old cadet. The invaders then drove westwards into Hunan. By September 1939, they were moving on its capital of Changsha where the Chinese stocked inflammable materials to meet the attackers with fire if the defences were breached.\n\nLulled into overconfidence, the Japanese advanced without their usual heavy equipment and vehicles. Springing their trap, the Nationalists attacked on the flanks from surrounding hills. The Japanese were forced to retreat. The victory set off firecracker celebrations in Chungking. But it was accompanied by tragedy. The Hunan authorities had reacted to news that enemy cavalry was within 20 miles of the city by ordering the fire trap to be lit. Changsha burned for five days, killing many thousands. Chiang flew in to order the court martial of the garrison commander, another general and the police chief. All were shot.\n\nIn the south, the Japanese took Hainan Island, and staged a landing in Guangxi, but met resistance from General Bai, and pulled out in the autumn. The odds against which the Chinese fought were reflected in an account by Bai's colleague, Li Zongren, of a battle against a Japanese advance in central China. 'Our troops who had fought for a long time and received no adequate replacements, were worn out and lacked antitank guns,' he recalled. 'They simply could not resist the onslaught . . . they fought from their trenches and some climbed onto tanks and threw grenades inside, but where the enemy tanks passed, our ditches were leveled and the defenders either crushed to death or buried alive.' Falling back into mountains, they held out for ten days, waiting for the Whampoa veteran, General Tang Enbo, to stage an encircling movement. But Tang preferred to stay out of the battle to conserve his forces.\n\nOn the terrorist front, Shanghai was riddled with attacks on collaborators by Dai Li's men, sometimes in association with the Green Gang which received $500,000 a month from Chungking. They were estimated to have carried out more than 150 political murders in the four years after the start of the batde for the city in August 1937. The banking and shipping tycoon Fu Xiaoan, whom Chiang had had detained in 1927 and who had become mayor of Shanghai, was cut to death with a meat chopper as he slept by his cook who had been recruited by the Nationalist secret service. The chief secretary of the collaborationist police force was shot dead in the alley behind his home, and the foreign minister of the puppet administration was killed in his house in front of his family by assassins who unrolled pro-Chiang scrolls before they fled the blood-stained room. Another victim was Big-Eared Du's Green Gang associate Zhang Xiaolin, who had thrown his lot in with the Japanese. Bombs were thrown in public places and an unsuccessful plan was laid to eliminate Wang Jingwei. An attempt was made to stage a mass poisoning of the 'reformed' government and Japanese dignitaries at a banquet \u2014 they were saved by prompt medical attention. Chinese guerrillas blew up a train from Shanghai to Nanking carrying officials to the signing of a treaty between Japan and the puppet regime, killing seventy-four and injuring a hundred.\n\nThere were frequent reprisals by a collaborationist secret service which had its headquarters in a house in the Huxi 'badlands' district outside the International Settlement. Headed by two ex-Communists who had worked in Dai Li's police, it assassinated pro-Chungking Chinese, arrested citizens at will, kidnapped businessmen for large ransoms and attacked judges, banks and newspapers while running protection rackets for casinos, opium dens and brothels. One of its leaders defected to the Nationalists after surviving a murder attempt by his teenage mistress \u2013 before leaving, he poisoned his main associate in the collaborationist police, the former chauffeur of the International Settlement chairman who had agreed to let Big-Eared Du's men through to attack the Communists in April 1927.\n\nThe military success at Changsha emboldened Chiang to launch a wholesale offensive. He was also encouraged by events abroad. Washington said it would not recognise Japan's new order in East Asia and would let its trade treaty with Tokyo lapse. Chiang's hopes that a war between Japan and the Soviet Union in the far north-east would draw enemy troops from China had appeared to have some substance when fighting along the Manchurian-Mongolian railway culminated in the major battle of Nomonhan in August 1939. Zhukov's victory over the Kwantung Army's 23rd Division led the Japanese to plan a bigger offensive, but, following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Tokyo opted for a ceasefire with Moscow instead.\n\nThat left Chiang, once again, to fight on his own. Soviet aid declined, with the number of planes delivered to China dropping by 60 per cent in 1940 at a time when the Japanese increased their air force in China to 800 machines, including much-feared Zero fighters. Showing their ability to strike wherever they wished, the invaders staged a large landing on the Guangxi coast in the south and drove on to the provincial capital of Nanning. Still the Generalissimo hankered after a decisive battle to enable him to affirm his position as the national leader against regional militarists and the challenge from Wang Jingwei who accused him of being 'an aspirant dictator' lacking 'even the minimum moral and ethical qualifications of the normal human being'.\n\nOn 19 November 1939, after a series of late-night meetings, Chiang issued a mobilisation order for a Winter Offensive involving half his armies. Casting aside the gradualist strategy, he decreed frontal attacks, and spoke of retaking Nanking. But his troops were still weak after the losses on the Yangtze, and woefully equipped while the diversion of forces to oppose the attack in Guangxi cut the numbers available elsewhere. Only one in three soldiers had a rifle; the armies possessed just 2,600 artillery pieces, and 1,500 vehicles. Some commanders dragged their feet or ignored orders to advance. Still, the Chinese staged 2,300 attacks between 12 December and 20 January, managing to break briefly into Kaifeng and the Wuhan area. But, overall, the campaign was a considerable failure. By April 1940 it was all over.\n\nAs a result, the Generalissimo and those around him reverted to their belief in a long-term struggle dependent on the United States' eventually going to war and defeating Tokyo. The failure of his last big offensive also further decreased Chiang's authority over the regional power barons, including the Communists. To try to counteract this, he increasingly deployed central army troops to keep regional forces in check and assert Chungking's presence, rather than putting them where they would best fight the Japanese.\n\nEvents abroad now turned against China. France fell to the Germans, and the Vichy regime cut off the rail link to Yunnan from Hanoi as the Japanese moved into Indo-China. Standing alone against the Nazis, Britain felt obliged to yield to Japanese pressure and to close the Burma Road supply route for three months. The following year, Tokyo and Moscow signed a neutrality agreement while the German attack on the Soviet Union meant Stalin had less aid to offer. At home, Wang Jingwei's Reorganised Government took office in Nanking. It proclaimed its agreement with Tokyo's vision of a new order in Asia which included the overthrow of Chiang, but also spoke of protecting China's independence and sovereignty. Though Wang was the main collaborator, separate puppet administrations continued in the north.\n\nThe Generalissimo unveiled a new strategy: 'magnetic warfare', to draw the enemy into losing positions. He also issued a list of behavioural instructions to officials and officers: No smoking, no drinking; Sleep early, rise early; Thrifty life; Absolutely no gambling; Absolute obedience to superiors; All uniforms to be made of cotton; No office stationery to be used for private correspondence; No badges of office to be worn in places of amusement; No public banquets unless absolutely necessary.\n\nNone of this did anything to save his forces from further heavy losses, put at 200,000 men, when the Japanese launched attacks in Hubei, Henan, Anhui and Shanxi. Over Chiang's home province of Zhejiang, planes dropped fleas carrying plague germs which had been tested on Chinese prisoners at Japan's secret biological warfare unit in Manchuria. This caused an outbreak of disease in Ningbo. In another campaign in the province, the Japanese spread anthrax, plague, typhoid and cholera, but suffered over 10,000 casualties among soldiers who had not been warned of the contamination.\n\nThe invaders captured the strategic Yangtze city of Yichang,* where goods were transferred from big boats to smaller craft to make the journey up through the river gorges to Chungking. This further restricted supplies to the Nationalist capital, particularly of food. Air raids on Chungking continued unabated, setting off fresh fires, hitting the university, destroying the British legation, and covering the street with greenish-yellow sulphur dust. Meiling visited street kitchens for air-raid victims while Chiang ordered a relief grant of $1 million. In April 1940, the Soong sisters made a joint broadcast to the people of the United States. Qingling began by saying that the Chinese 'instead of becoming the helots of an all-conquering slave empire have taken up arms for their own freedom as well as for yours'. Ailing declared that China's fighting strength was greater than ever and noted how her country's women had 'escaped from their cloistered lives and are working everywhere'. Meiling called for China to be 'given the justice that is her right, the justice she has earned by almost three long years of unparalleled bloodshed and suffering'.\n\nThere were occasional displays of resistance, such as the performance of General Zhang Zizhong, a former warlord officer and veteran of the Taierzhuang battle, who became a national hero after refusing to retreat or surrender when his unit was surrounded and fighting on until he died from seven separate wounds.\u2020 Changsha was defended successfully for a second time after the Japanese were lured into an ambush. But a review of the army pointed to lack of initiative, coordination and equipment, and poor staff work, intelligence, logistics and discipline. Chiang criticised his generals for arrogance, inexperience, corruption and low interest in training their men. The Japanese estimated that Chinese combat effectiveness had fallen by up to a third since 1939.\n\nDespite his declarations of unyielding resistance, the Generalissimo took steps to open a channel to the enemy, using one of Dai Li's agents who bore a striking resemblance to his brother-in-law, T. L. Soong. The lookalike went to Hong Kong where he arranged for a reporter to introduce him as T.L. to a colonel in one of Tokyo's intelligence services who was visiting the colony. Though not sure whether the man was who he said he was, the Japanese decided to build on the contact.\n\nSecret night-time meetings were held in the British colony, attended by delegates from Chungking. Japanese surveillance showed that, however late the sessions lasted, the Chinese followed them with a long discussion of their own, after which a man went to the airport to fly to the capital. At one point, the Chinese delegates brought with them credentials signed by the Generalissimo. An agreement was reached for a meeting between Chiang, Wangjingwei and the Chief of Staff of the Japanese forces in China. Before this could take place, the negotiations collapsed on the issue of Manchukuo. Tokyo insisted on recognition, but Chiang knew he could not grant this without being branded a traitor. The Japanese command decided that China was 'not sincere in her desire for peace' and downgraded the Hong Kong operation to a simple intelligence-gathering channel.\n\nThis did not stop fresh secret contacts between Chiang and the enemy, who were not enamoured of the Reorganised Government in Nanking \u2013 one Imperial Privy Councillor contrasted Wang's 'lack of integrity' with the Generalissimo's 'heroic life'. Tokyo offered to remove troops sent to China since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident within six montfis, and to ensure that China's need for resources was met. In return, they wanted demilitarisation of the Yangtze Valley, recognition of Manchukuo, autonomy for the five northern provinces under Japanese economic control and Japanese concessions in all ports. Those conditions were unacceptable even as the basis for opening talks. In his diary, Chiang concluded that the only viable policy was to fight Japan, while remaining neutral between the Berlin-Rome Axis and the Anglo-American block until Moscow had clarified its position. His contacts with the Japanese were probing missions to see if there was any relaxation in their position. Any serious concession would fatally weaken him against domestic opponents, including the Communists. On the other hand, by letting Washington know about these contacts he sent a signal that he might change policy if he did not receive the aid he wanted.\n\nIn pursuit of that, T. V. Soong flew incognito to Washington, and negotiated a US$25 million loan after a sandwich lunch with die President at the White House. Roosevelt then announced a US$50 million currency stabilisation agreement, a loan and a credit to buy raw materials from China. This brought total US aid to Chungking to US$245 million, but raised an immediate question reflecting the fragmentation of Nationalist China. Was Chiang going to share the aid with other forces fighting the Japanese or keep it all for himself? If he did the first, he would buttress the independence of regionalists like the Guangxi Clique, not to mention the Communists. If he did the second, he would risk alienating generals whose support he needed, pushing them into revolt or non-cooperation, or to join Wangjingwei. He chose the second path, but it was a question which was to become more acute as die volume of American aid grew, and would cause a running battle with the country he counted on to win the war for him.\n\nAnother piece of good news came from Britain which agreed to a \u00a310 million loan and, even more important, reopened the highway from Burma into Yunnan on 17 October 1940. Five hundred trucks left on the first day, carrying 1,500 tons of supplies. Tunnels provided shelters against Japanese planes as the highway crossed 8,000-foot mountains; one section climbed round twenty-two hairpin loops. Lorries wended their way past trains of ponies laden with freight and carts with 1,000-pound loads pulled by three men who could average 20 miles a day. Driving up one steep stretch, Rhodes Farmer's vehicle was outpaced by coolies carrying 180-pound loads of rock salt. On the way through Guizhou, he noted heavy bombing along the road, and saw locals walking round in frock coats, Western waistcoats and fancy trousers which had been sent by mistake by the Red Cross from London.\n\nAt the end of 1940, Chiang invited Zhou Enlai to a Christmas dinner in Chungking, four years after their encounter in Xi'an. The two men discussed the longer-term relationship between their movements. Zhou said the Communists must be treated as a political party, not a warlord army. When he said the government was undemocratic, Chiang replied, 'You mean to call me undemocratic?'\n\nBy then, the united front was under severe strain. Chiang had never lost sight of his aim of eradicating his Red disease of the heart, while, from the caves of Yan'an, Mao was equally set on winning national power however long it took. The Communist Eighth Route Army was enlarging and deepening its presence in the north, and the New Fourth Army was expanding in the coastal region north of Shanghai. The hawks in Chungking were agitating for action. General He and Chen Lifu wanted a full-blooded anti-Communist campaign. The Kuomintang Secretary General objected to the fact that the Red Army 'has not actually participated in any great battles'.\n\nTo disprove that increasingly common criticism, the Communists launched a major campaign against the Japanese in central-northern China in the late summer of 1940, known as the Hundred Regiments Offensive, though many of the units were smaller formations. This abandoned Mao's doctrine of only engaging when sufficient force could be concentrated on the enemy's weak points to ensure a knockout blow \u2014 and then withdrawing. The Red Army now felt confident enough to launch frontal attacks and show it was willing to fight on a broad front. There were other motives at work as well. The Japanese were using a blockhouse strategy similar to that employed by Chiang six years earlier, and the Communists wanted to burst the cage being erected around them. They also feared that Chungking might be about to reach an agreement with the invaders to attack them. After their early moves met with success in cutting railway lines, Eighth Route Army commanders launched frontal attacks which the Japanese repulsed without difficulty. Most of the damaged railways were soon back in service, and the offensive fell well short of the achievements proclaimed by the Communists. Though it had petered out by the end of 1940, Mao sent a cable to the commander at the front pointing out that the publicity it had generated was needed as a weapon against Chiang.\n\nBut it was the 100,000-strong Communist New Fourth Army in the east which most irked the Generalissimo as it expanded its core zone north and south of the lower Yangtze. Though Maoist history would play down its role compared to troops commanded from Yan'an, the New Fourth Army was a formidable force, based on guerrillas left behind by the Long March, plus workers and intellectuals from the Lower Yangtze region, including political prisoners freed under the united front agreement.* Applying the 'united front from above' policy, it established working relationships with gentry leaders whose local power was threatened by the Nationalists. As recognition of his position as China's commander-in-chief, Chiang had been given the power to decide who should be its military leader. He had to choose a Communist, and his decision harked back to the Canton days as he gave the job to the highly regarded Ye Ting, who had fought in the vanguard of the Northern Expedition at the head of the Independent Regiment of the original Fourth Army. But Yan'an named the political boss, Xiang Ying, who had led the guerrillas in eight southern provinces since 1934.\n\nIn the autumn of 1940, the tension between the New Fourth Army and the local Nationalists round the Lower Yangtze spilled over into a major battle which the Communists won decisively. That presented a special threat to Chiang since, once the Japanese were beaten, he intended to re-establish himself there with Nanking as his capital and Shanghai as his financial centre. So he had to eject the Communists from his past and future power base, and get them to move up to the Yellow River, where there was a good chance that they would come under attack from the Japanese. There was also a question of authority \u2013 if the Generalissimo could make the New Fourth Army withdraw, that would send a message to other semi-autonomous forces; if he could not, he would be seen to be powerless. His Green Gang allies were anxious that the Communists should not interfere with the drug trade; the senior Nationalist commander in the area had a particular interest as the brother of the man running the Shanghai underworld in the absence of Big-Eared Du.\n\nThe New Fourth Army's presence on the Yangtze was not provided for in the united front agreement. So Chiang was on firm ground in insisting that it pull back from its base at Yunling, south of the river in Anhui province. Two groups did depart in the first ten days of December. That left the headquarters unit of more than 4,000 soldiers and 6,000 non-combatants. Chiang fixed a deadline of 31 December for them to start moving out. He assured Zhou Enlai that they would enjoy safe passage.\n\nThe situation on the ground made this increasingly unlikely. The Guangxi general, Bai, said force was needed. The Generalissimo told the local Nationalist commander that, if the 31 December deadline was not met, he should 'finish it off at once [and] stop being lenient'. In late December, Nationalist troops moved into position; their officers were told that a decision had been taken to 'mop up the bandits'. At midnight on 4 January 1941 the Communist headquarters units, grouped into three columns, began to move on the southerly route from their base. Snow and rain bucketed down through icy winds. The lighting the Communists carried in the night made it easy for the Nationalists to track their progress. The direction they took heightened suspicions that they were heading for their old guerrilla strongholds in Jiangxi province rather than keeping to the agreement to go north across the Yangtze.\n\nAs die columns moved through the mountains, one was fired on by a Nationalist patrol. By 9 January the Communists were under heavy pressure from their much more numerous and better equipped foes. Told what was happening, Zhou Enlai went to see the Generalissimo who dismissed the reports from the battlefield; he had agreed to a safe passage for the New Fourth Army, he recalled, so it could not have been attacked. As the tired, hungry Communists concentrated in a village called Shijing, their commander Ye Ting wrote a message to Chiang asking him to stop the attack and adding that he was ready to receive punishment. 'Though I do not fear deatfi, I do fear your radio message,' he added, 'I await your order.' Ye sent the message to the Communist base in Yan'an to be passed on. It was not forwarded to Chungking.\n\nOn 12 January the Nationalists unleashed an intense artillery and bombing attack. Two days later, Mao sent a message saying that Chiang had agreed to a ceasefire. By then, the battle was over. Estimates of Communist dead ranged from 2,000 to 10,000; Mao said at the time that 7,000 had been 'finished off. Survivors told of women being raped, and captives being marched 400 miles to a camp \u2013 'when they sickened, they were beaten; some were shot, and others were buried alive'. Ye Ting was among those taken prisoner. Held for five years, he died in a plane crash on his way to Yan'an in 1945. His fellow commander, Xiang Ying, escaped, but was killed by a companion who made off with the gold he kept in a pouch.\n\nZhou Enlai told Teddy White he was sure Chiang had not commanded the generals to attack, but had led them to believe he would not mind if they did so. Was Chiang lying? White asked. 'No,' said Zhou. 'Someone was lying to the Generalissimo but the G'issimo lies to a certain extent, too.' For his part, Chiang told a meeting of senior officers that the New Fourth Army had been guilty of disregarding orders, mutiny and sabotage. 'It was purely a matter of the assertion of military law,' he added in an implicit warning to other independent-minded generals.\n\nWhere did this leave the united front? Zhou Enlai said he considered cooperation with Chungking to be over. From Yan'an, Mao warned that 'those who play with fire ought to be very careful . . . Fire is not a very good game. Be careful about your skull.' The Communists boycotted the nearest thing China had to a united assembly, the People's Political Council. But Stalin was anxious not to dismantle the front, and Mao soon moderated his tone, speaking of some time elapsing between the start and the completion of a split with the Kuomintang. The bitter medicine contributed to his negative feelings about Moscow which continued to be Chungking's main source of arms.\n\nChiang increased the pressure on the Red Army by cutting off supplies, and blockading Yan'an. Cavalry attacked a New Fourth Army detachment in northern Henan, inflicting 4,000 casualties. Communist activities were banned in Nationalist areas. Dai Li's police stepped up arrests of real or suspected dissidents, taking in liberals and opponents of Chiang, critics of corruption and anybody who appeared to be a potential threat.\n\nThe Generalissimo had another cause for satisfaction when the Japanese were again beaten back from Changsha, forced to retreat after their sense of superiority led them to neglect flank and rear defence. Visiting the 'gray, bomb-spattered, fire-gutted, grim stone island' of Chungking, Ernest Hemingway found the Chinese officers he met 'extraordinarily frank, straight-talking, intelligent and articulate' and summed up Chiang as a military leader who was 'going dirough the motions of being a statesman'. Another eminent American visitor, Henry Luce, boss of the _Time-Life_ magazine empire, flew into the Nationalist capital, and revelled in the sense of optimism spread out for him. The son of a Presbyterian missionary in Shandong, Luce was in the process of becoming the regime's most devoted powerful foreign friend. Kai-shek and Meiling appeared to him to epitomise his dream of 'Christianising and Americanising China'. Lodged in H. H. Kung's mansion in Chungking, the publisher saw only the positive aspects which the regime laid out for him. As proof of how the Nationalists were fighting, he was taken to the Yellow River front to witness a shelling barrage. After ten days in China, he wrote that the Generalissimo was the greatest ruler Asia had seen for 250 years, and threw all his resources to sway public and political opinion behind Chungking, putting Chiang on the cover of half a dozen issues of _Time_.\n\nThe truth was that it was an awful time for Chiang. There had been rare successes such as the defence of Changsha and a battle at the town of Shanggao in Jiangxi where the Japanese were surrounded and lost nearly half their men. But the Winter Offensive had flopped, and the enemy had scored victories in Guangxi, along the Yangtze and on the plains of north Hubei. Wang's regime was posing a political threat, and the Model Governor had reached an armistice with the invaders. An oral message from Franklin Roosevelt, delivered by his emissary Lauchlin Currie, boded badly for the showdown with the Red Army which Chiang still planned after the war \u2013 the President said the Communists were 'what in our country we would call Socialists. We like their attitude towards the peasants, towards women and towards Japan.' The New Fourth Army incident had broken the united front; in one engagement north of the Yellow River, Communist troops were seen attacking Nationalists fleeing from the Japanese. Not that Mao and his colleagues were immune from assault. The Japanese launched a campaign against the main base area known as the 'Three Alls' \u2013 kill all, burn all, destroy all. By the time it ended, the base population was reduced from 40 million to an estimated 25 million, and the party was plunged into its worst period since the Long March.\n\nAbroad, Stalin added to Chiang's woes by signing a non-aggression pact with Tokyo, including recognition of Manchukuo, which removed the military pressure from Japanese troops in the north. Two months later, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Fascist aggression seemed unbeatable. Chiang became concerned at the possibility of an accord between Washington and Tokyo to head off the looming conflict between them \u2013 one condition would have been for the United States to have press-ganged China into recognising Manchukuo and the Imperial positions in the north. But then, at the start of December 1941, Tokyo finally did what Chiang had been hoping for after standing alone since 1937. By attacking Pearl Harbor, Japan finally melded China's struggle with that of the most powerful nation on earth.\n\n* * *\n\n* Known at the time as Ichang.\n\n\u2020 He was the highest-ranking Allied general to die in combat in the Second World War, and is regarded as a patriotic hero by the Communist regime. See Arthur Waldron's account of his posthumous treatment in _Modem Asian Studies_ , Vol. 30.4, Oct. 1996.\n\n* Its proper place has been established for English-language readers by Gregor Benton's magisterial study on which I have based much of the detail in this section.\n\n# CHAPTER 21\n\n _Peanut and Vinegar_\n\nHAVING SHOWN HIS JOY at the news of Pearl Harbor by playing a gramophone recording of 'Ave Maria', Chiang proposed to Washington that control of the whole Far Eastern war effort should be concentrated in Chungking. Japan should be isolated by a blockade and pummelled by air attacks while its forces were destroyed in China. He did not specify how this was to be achieved, and an American diplomat observed that the plan was 'uncluttered by considerations of supply, command or what should be done about the inconvenient war with Germany'. All the Generalissimo got from President Roosevelt was a message advocating that 'immediate steps be taken to prepare the way for common action against our common enemy', with a handwritten note at the end of the typescript: 'I am working hard on continuing our contribution to your supplies and am trying to increase it. I send you my very warm personal regards.' At the end of December, a further message from the White House scaled down Chiang's command to China, Thailand and Indo-China. Still, in one of his broadcast fireside chats to the American people, the President insisted that it was essential to help China 'in her magnificent defense and in her inevitable counter-offensive \u2013 for that is one important element in the ultimate defeat of Japan'.\n\nThe Chinese began the new phase of the war with another successful defence of the Hunan capital of Changsha, under the command of the Cantonese Xue Yue. The defenders staged eleven sorties against the 100,000 enemy; in one sector, a burial mound on which the Japanese had tried to set up an artillery piece changed hands five times. Visiting the city, the writer Robert Payne watched young, blue-helmeted Chinese soldiers walking round 'with an unexpected swagger, their bayonets gleaming . . . Farmers' lads, mostly, with faces like ripe apples.' The Japanese had burned down the Yale-in-China hospital, where Chiang had had his teeth fixed in the first stage of the Northern Expedition, throwing their dead into the flames and killing patients before they retreated. By the East Gate, where corpses lay stripped and turning green, Payne picked up a photograph of a Japanese girl sitting in front of flowering cherry trees.\n\nDespite this victory, the American military staff in Chungking had few illusions, setting a pattern by which the men on the spot took a jaundiced view of die regime's record while politicians on the other side of the world built castles in the air about China's capabilities, egged on by optimistic briefings by Chungking's diplomats and by T. V. Soong, who had gone to Washington to solicit help in 1940. A military team sent by the War Department to China in late 1941 had attributed reports of Nationalist successes to 'clever deception' while the American mission in the wartime capital warned that the condition of Chinese troops and the state of the economy were both so poor that Chiang might be undermined by those who favoured making peace. This, it added, could give 'the Japs free access to the resources of China and the manpower of China, thus fully developing the long predicted \"Yellow Peril\"\".\n\nIn contrast to such realism, Franklin Roosevelt proceeded on a mixture of romanticism, a determination to keep Chungking in the war, and a desire to treat China as the great power of Asia with which Washington would work to establish a new world order. He saw the country's east coast as a base for a counter-offensive against Japan, but did not want to commit troops, regarding Europe as the top priority. Nor would the US give Chungking control of the distribution of its military aid. For his part, Chiang's main concern was to ensure American political backing and supplies. To cement the relationship, he suggested the appointment of an American as his Chief of Staff. To Washington, that seemed a good way of getting a handle on the Chinese war effort, and pushing through a modernisation of the Nationalist forces that would make them an effective opponent for the Japanese. So the Chief of Staff, George Marshall, nominated a colleague he greatly appreciated \u2013 Lieutenant-General Joseph Stilwell, who was working at the time on a planned invasion of French North Africa.\n\nOn the eve of his fifty-ninth birthday, Stilwell knew China well from his years there with the US detachment in the concession at Tianjin and as a military attache. He read and spoke the language. He had travelled widely through the country. His experience made him an ideal candidate in Marshall's eyes, but the appointment was to spark off an epic battle which would pit 'Vinegar Joe' against Chiang for two and a half years. A foretaste of the trouble ahead came when T. V. Soong, who had become Foreign Minister, expressed concern that Stilwell saw China through the lens of the warlord years, which was rubbish since the general had been back as military attache during the Nanking Decade. Soong's real worry was that he would be hard to spoon-feed with the official view of events. For his part, Stilwell made no bones about his opinions when he met Teddy White of _Time_ as he started his mission. 'The trouble in China is simple,' he told the journalist. 'We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch.' Soon the American was referring to Chiang in his diary as 'Peanut' \u2013 later it became 'the rattlesnake'.\n\nThe idea that the tough, abrasive Yankee could work with the Generalissimo to develop a more effective Nationalist army was, at best, a sad commentary on Washington's knowledge of China and its leader. Well intentioned as the appointment was, it also reflected a naively arrogant assumption that a military approach formed in a Western democratic context could be transferred to a country with a completely different tradition and system. Historically, the Stilwell mission was a major step for both sides. Chiang had used Russian and German advisers but this was the first time a foreigner had been given the title of Chief of Staff. For the Americans, it represented a formal involvement in the internal affairs of an Asian nation that would set a pattern stretching to the present day. But, as Stilwell set out to fly to the Far East, neither party realised quite what it had embarked on.\n\nThe general and the Generalissimo were about as different as it was possible to be. Stilwell wanted to build a modern, professional army; Chiang saw military units as chess pieces to be manipulated for his benefit. The Generalissimo was a distant commander on a white horse; the American made a fetish of comradeship with infantrymen, marching with them and sharing their rations rather than the food cooked by his chef, a former employee of New York's Stork Club. In a broadcast from Chungking, evoking China's long war, Stilwell paid tribute to 'the man who has carried the burden and gone through the test of batde' [who] 'asks for little, and always stands ready to give all . . . the Chinese soldier'. It was not a tribute ever heard from Chiang.\n\nThe Nationalist leader believed in conserving forces, and put loyalty above competence; his new Chief of Staff longed for a big, decisive battle with the deployment of maximum force, and advocated sacking \u2013 or shooting \u2013 generals who did not do their jobs properly. Chiang was secretive, manipulative and insistent on receiving due deference; Stilwell was too open and direct for his own good, ultra-critical of those he regarded as hypocrites or shirkers, a man who hid his sophistication behind a mask of simplicity diat could become ostentatious \u2013 when he went to Allied headquarters in South-east Asia as the senior officer present, he refused to use the Cadillac sent to meet him and insisted on a jeep being called.\n\nThe contrast extended to their clothes and appearance. Chiang was always immaculately turned out, with silk socks and a well-brushed trilby. Stilwell liked to dress in simple field uniform, sometimes wearing shorts \u2013 when the strap on his battered scout hat broke, he replaced it with a shoelace. The Generalissimo's head was smooth, unlined, and close-shaven; Stilwell's craggy face had deep folds and a great beak of a nose topped by a soaring cockscomb of hair. Even their Chinese was different; Chiang kept the accent and dialect of his native Zhejiang while Stilwell spoke Mandarin. The one thing they did share was utter belief in their own Tightness \u2013 Chiang convinced that he, alone, held the key to China's future, and Vinegar Joe, in the words of the writer Emily Hahn, 'incapable \u2013 surely to an abnormal degree? \u2013 of appreciating that there are more points of view than one's own, and that the world is considerably larger than America'.\n\nThough subject to a cat's cradle of overlapping Allied commands in the Far East, the American's powers were unprecedented \u2013 on paper, at least. He was both to be Chiang's Chief of Staff and to command all US forces in the China-Burma-India sector (CBI). He also controlled supplies sent in under the Lend-Lease agreements by which Washington delivered aid to its allies. He would represent the United States on war committees, and act as liaison between the Generalissimo and the British. Despite such authority, there was no way he could win against the Nationalist leader who would continue his practice of dealing directly with field commanders, using his ability to play on the loyalties of generals Stilwell was meant to be in charge of. The only way for Vinegar Joe to have his way would have been for the United States to have taken over the government of China. Since it was not going to do that, Chiang just had to hang on, and to ensure that no American proteges emerged powerful enough to challenge him. Repeatedly, in the eight years after Pearl Harbor, he showed how a weak client state can run rings round a powerful ally by a combination of cunning, obstruction and single-mindedness. Again, it presaged the future, though the wrong lessons would be drawn by critics who counted Stilwell among those who 'lost' China.\n\nDespite the doubts expressed by Soong, the appointment created a warm glow in Washington, and T.V. was able to negotiate a new US$500 million loan, doubling American aid. It would be used, the Foreign Minister explained, when Chiang saw fit. The money was to be exchanged with Chinese dollars at the official rate of 1:20. By 1942, inflation had made that rate wildly unrealistic, with a single American dollar worth hundreds of Chinese dollars on the black market. So the government in Chungking, and its officials, made enormous profits on handling the US funds, and, at the same time, hugely overcharged the Americans for local supplies.\n\nAnxious though he was to ensure American backing, Chiang was hostile towards Britain, which he regarded as a power that would always put its imperial interests ahead of those of China. A Nationalist mission to Hong Kong, headed by a one-legged admiral, helped briefly to rally resistance to the Japanese, but an army unit Chiang sent to assist the defence of the colony did not arrive before its fall at the end of 1941. He also accepted a British-run programme to train guerrillas, but ordered it terminated after a year though some instructors stayed on in the south. On a visit to India, which was meant to signify Allied solidarity, the Generalissimo made clear his preference for the nationalist leaders over his colonial hosts. Gandhi warned him that the West would never accept him as an equal ally, and Meiling read a broadcast message from Chiang calling for the granting of political freedom to India \u2013 she also wrote an article for the _New York Times_ , saying the British could achieve nothing fundamental without 'a radical and drastic change in their present-day Indian policy and its application to the Indian people'. The Chiangs shared a convivial picnic with Nehru during which he suddenly took off his jacket and began to turn somersaults, at which one of the Chinese delegation joined in the fun by rolling on the grass.\n\nChiang's low opinion of Britain's military capabilities was deepened as the Japanese swept forward to overrun the colonies of Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong \u2013 the day after Pearl Harbor, they had also occupied the foreign concessions in Shanghai. On his return from India, the Generalissimo sent a message to the embassy in London asking that Churchill be told how shocked he was by the military and political situation he had found there. He copied the cable to T. V. Soong to be passed to Roosevelt. London needed to take urgent action, he wrote; otherwise, Japan would be virtually unopposed. If, on the other hand, the British gave the Indians real power, they would rally to the Empire. 'As for military preparations,' he added, 'the present Indian preparedness is very much behind even that the British had in Malaya.' After visiting Burma in the spring of 1942, he wrote to Churchill that he had never seen anything 'to compare with the deplorable and unprepared state, confusion and degradation of the war area' .\n\nThe dislike was reciprocal. Just before Pearl Harbor, a mission from London had concluded that the government in Chungking was incapable of dealing with its problems, and that Chiang 'did not have an intelligent grasp of the situation'. Churchill could see the psychological downside of having to call on Chinese troops to help defend the colonies of India, Burma and Hong Kong, and had no desire for China to undermine the re-imposition of the Empire in the East. He consistently expressed surprise at the importance America placed on China, which he dismissed to Roosevelt as 'four hundred and twenty five million pigtails'. As his personal representative in Chungking, the Prime Minister sent General Adrian Carton de Wiart, a valiant, one-eyed, one-handed First World War veteran who said he expected to find China 'full of whimsical little people with quaint customs who carved lovely jade ornaments and worshipped their grandmothers'.\n\nStill, the Japanese pressure on Burma forced the British to change their mind, and to accept Chinese troops. Despite his feelings about the country which had pioneered the imperialist penetration of his country, the Generalissimo sent 25,000 men, and flew with Meiling to Lashio in northern Burma to supervise their deployment, making a speech to his officers from the balcony of a missionary centre. While he took his after-lunch nap, the telephone rang to warn that Japanese planes were on their way. But none of Chiang's English-speaking aides were around, and nobody at the other end of the line spoke Chinese. So the message did not get through, and the raiding aircraft were almost overhead when the Nationalist leader scrambled into a car to be driven to a safe shelter. Less dramatically, the visit gave him a chance for a brief meeting with Stilwell who had flown in after a stop-over in India on his way to Chunking. Playing her accustomed role, Meiling took over from the 'nervous and sweating' interpreter. The American recorded that Chiang 'seems willing to fight and is fed up with the British retreat and lethargy. Also extremely suspicious of their motives and intentions.'\n\nAfter arriving in the Chinese capital, Stilwell was invited to dinner with the Chiangs; the Guangxi generals, Li and Bai, were present, but kept quiet. After the meal, the Generalissimo delivered a lengthy lecture on the importance of holding the Burmese city of Mandalay, where he had sent troops under one of his most capable generals, Sun Liren. He also insisted that Stilwell must be in charge in Burma, whatever London wanted; otherwise, he would pull out his forces. He later changed tack, and agreed to the British commander, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, taking overall control \u2013 the American was informed by a letter from Meiling. In the following months, he would become well accustomed to Chiang's mind swings that made coherent strategy hard to pursue.\n\nThe two men had three more meetings, some attended by the Chinese general Shang Zhen, a polo-playing, English-speaking northerner who acted as liaison with foreign forces and would become one of the American's closest contacts in the Chinese military. Then Vinegar Joe flew to take charge of two Chinese armies which had been stationed on the 300-mile Rangoon-Mandalay railway in the middle of the country, while the British held positions to the east and west towards the borders with Thailand and India. Stilwell found the Fifth Army, under General Du Yuming, 'solid on tactics. Ready to fight' and the Sixth Army, commanded by General Gan Lichu, 'OK'. He was less taken with his supply chief, a relative of Chiang, 'a damn glutton, a fat man' who was stealing Lend-Lease supplies.\n\nAs the Japanese advanced towards a town called Toungoo, Stilwell saw the chance of a classic flanking attack by Chinese and British units. But Du refused to move. When Field Marshal Alexander asked him where his field guns were, the Chinese general said they had been moved to safety. What use were they if they would not be used in battle, the British commander asked. Du explained that his army was China's best because of its field guns \u2013 'If I lose them the Fifth Army will no longer be the best.' Stilwell sent a message to Chiang asking him to order Du to join the attack. When he got no response, he flew to Chungking.\n\nThe reason for Du's attitude soon became evident. Following his usual practice, Chiang was in direct touch with him, bypassing Stilwell and advising caution. Under pressure from Stilwell, the Generalissimo said one division could advance, but, when the American got back to Burma, he found Du wavering between depression and a gung-ho stance. At one point, the Chinese general went into his room and refused to come out. Chiang was still showering his subordinates with messages advising caution. He even gave individual instructions to the few Chinese tanks in Burma.\n\nHis plan undone by Chiang's interference, Stilwell asked in his diary for 1 April whether he was the April fool. 'Chiang Kai-shek . . . can't keep his hands off: 1,600 miles from the front, he writes endless instructions to do this and that, based on fragmentary information and a cockeyed conception of tactics. He . . . thinks he knows everything, and he wobbles this way and that, changing his mind at every change in the action.'\n\nReturning to Chungking, the American told Chiang he wanted to be relieved of his command. The Generalissimo lied that the divisional commanders had been acting against orders, and would be shot. Stilwell was not fooled. The Nationalist leader, he decided, had 'been boss so long and has so many yes-men around him that he has the idea he is infallible on any subject . . . He is not mentally stable, and he will say many things to your face that he doesn't mean fully or exactly.' But he also judged that Chiang was 'determined and forceful, and wants to get on with the war'.\n\nOne outcome of the confrontation was that Chiang appointed a Cantonese general in his forties, Luo Zhuoying, as Stilwell's executive officer \u2013 a senior figure who was meant to do as the American instructed. Stilwell called Luo, who had fought in the defence of Changsha, 'snappy, energetic, forceful'. He believed Chiang had come round to his idea of fighting a big battle to halt the Japanese. The Generalissimo had reason to be on his best behaviour since Claire Booth Luce, the wife of his important supporter Henry Luce, had flown in to write an article for _Life_. The soft-soaping continued when Meiling sent Stilwell a pot of marmalade made from the fruit in the garden of her home across the river. An accompanying note told him: 'You have a man's job ahead of you but you are a man, and shall I add \u2013 what a man!'\n\nAfter lunching with Mrs Luce, Chiang flew for two days of conferences in Burma, where he was greeted by a Gurkha guard of honour complete with a bagpipe and drum band. During the visit, he and Meiling were caught in the open by ajapanese air raid \u2013 a bomb fell 50 yards from diem but did not explode. On their way back to China, according to die authorised biography by Hollington Tong, 18 enemy planes searched the sky for their plane, but did not find it.\n\nDespite the Generalissimo's anti-British sentiments, Stilwell sent Chinese troops to the unsuccessful aid of British units; the front which the Allies had tried to draw across the middle of Burma was undone when Japanese forces moved in from the Thai border to the east, turned the line and raced up the railway to block the highway to China, greeted as liberators by the anti-colonial inhabitants. The American's irritation with the Generalissimo exploded when Chiang sent him a message saying that Chinese soldiers liked watermelons, and telling him to arrange a supply of them for the troops. His angry reaction became known in Chungking, and created further bad blood with the Generalissimo. The incident would be cited by Stilwell's champions as an example of the Nationalist leader's pettiness. But Chiang had a deeper reason for his growing alienation \u2013 the way Stilwell had used up good Chinese troops in his abortive bid to help the British. The air force commander Claire Chennault, who was close to the Chiangs and loathed Stilwell, recorded that the Generalissimo regarded this as 'the sheerest sentimentality and incredible military callowness', adding that, 'If Stilwell had been a Chinese general there seems little doubt that his performance would have ended with the firing squad.'\n\nAs the Japanese advanced northwards, Chinese commanders again refused to follow Stilwell's orders. The American went to the front, and personally directed an infantry attack. He wanted to throw another Chinese division into the batde, but its commander refused to send trucks to transport it \u2013 he wanted the lorries to move supplies to be sold in China.\n\nSome Chinese did hold off the Japanese for a few days in a couple of encounters. But the retreat quickly turned into a rout with some Chinese units heading west to India. Stilwell's Executive Officer, General Luo, got his men to seize a train so that he could head for safety up the single-track railway north of Mandalay: the locomotive collided with an oncoming train, putting the line out of service for two days. As the enemy surged forward, more good troops were lost. Chinese planes were destroyed on die ground. Throngs of refugees headed for the Yunnan frontier on the deep Salween Gorge.\n\nStilwell was nowhere to be found. On 1 May, Chennault had sent him a message advising that air force headquarters were being transferred back across the border, and suggesting that he fly out, too. 'Am staying at the front,' the general replied. The next day, he disappeared.\n\nThe Japanese advance had cut China's land supply route through Burma. Worse, it threatened south-western China. The Imperial Army had been temporarily halted by the destruction of the bridge across the Salween Gorge, but would clearly soon find a way of rebuilding it. Then the province of Yunnan would be at its mercy. From there, it could strike northwards to Sichuan and Chungking. Stilwell's absence meant there was nobody on the spot to organise resistance.\n\nChennault was only too ready to step into die breach, asking Chiang for authorisation to bomb the enemy on the far side of the gorge \u2013 though this would mean killing civilian refugees as well. He got the go-ahead, and launched concentrated dive-bombing and strafing attacks that devastated the Japanese vanguard and destroyed scores of trucks moving up reinforcements. The result was a stand-off across the gorge which held for two years.\n\nAs the Japanese halted their advance, Stilwell reappeared \u2013 in India. The day after refusing to fly out of Burma, he had left his headquarters to walk 140 miles westwards through the jungle with a party of twenty-six Americans, sixteen Chinese, thirteen British plus some forty medical personnel from a Quaker hospital, Indian cooks and mechanics, twenty mules and a dog. They started their trek in vehicles, then took river boats, scaled 75-degree gradients and wended their way through snake-infested jungles. All survived.\n\nThe media hailed a heroic achievement, something to be proud of amid the debacle in Burma. The legend of Vinegar Joe was born. But it is hard not to see the walkout as, at best, an aberration bred by the frustrations he had encountered and, at worst, a grave dereliction of duty by a commander who, whatever the frustrations of dealing with the Chinese, should have stayed at his post to organise the retreat. Stilwell explained that, rather than flying to safety, he needed to set an example by staying with his group, small as it was. He did not explain what good that did when China faced the very real threat of an invasion of Yunnan. Even his supportive political officer, John Paton Davies, called it a case of 'questionable command judgment'.\n\nHis selfish irresponsibility was underlined by his failure to inform Chiang of what he was doing. He had found time to keep in touch with his patron, George Marshall, in Washington, but did not tell his superior officer that he was abandoning his troops to their fate. In a grave loss of face, the Generalissimo only learned what was happening from a message Stilwell sent to the American military mission in Chungking saying the Chinese had disintegrated, and that it was useless to try to exercise command over them. 'Stilwell deserted our troops,' Chiang commented. 'I doubt that he knows the importance of military discipline.' Vinegar Joe had good reason to resent the way the Chinese leader had behaved, but his own conduct greatly deepened the distrust between them while heightening his messianic view of his mission.\n\nStilwell arrived in India suffering from dysentery and jaundice \u2013 the result of a bad yellow fever serum he had been administered. Writing to his wife, he described himself as looking like 'the guy in the medical books with his skin off, showing the next layer of what you have'. He told a press conference: 'We got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.' By the end of May, the Japanese not only held most of Burma with its rice, oil, minerals and 16 million inhabitants, but had also isolated China by land as well as sea.\n\nAfter a dinner with journalists in Delhi, Stilwell wrote a memorandum for Chiang with his proposals to reorganise the Chinese army. He handed it to Chiang in Chungking at the beginning of June. It was characteristically blunt; in letter to his wife, Stilwell called it 'like kicking an old lady in the stomach'. After looking at the paper, Meiling said, 'Why, that's what the German advisers told him.'\n\nThe memorandum began by saying that the army was too big. It could not be fully supplied with American weapons; better to have 'a few dependable, well-equipped, well-supported divisions' than mass forces. Units should be merged to bring them up to their paper strength. Inefficient junior and middle rank officers should be dropped. Rewards for gallantry should be made swiftly, medical services improved and punishment be 'prompt and ruthless no matter what the rank of the offender'.\n\n'Division and Army commanders are a great problem,' Stilwell went on in an explosive passage.\n\nVery few of them are efficient. They seldom get up to the front and they very rarely supervise the execution of their orders . . . Reports from the front are accepted without check, and very often prove exaggerated or are commonly ignored, often with fatal consequences . . . Many of the officers are personally brave, but most of them lack moral courage . . . I recommend a rigid purge of inefficient commanders . . . without a clearing out of the inefficient, the Army will continue to go down hill, no matter how much material is supplied to it.\n\nThe memorandum mentioned Chiang's messages to the field, and said a new command system was needed, with an overall chief who would control supplies, transport and communications as well as fighting forces. Chiang must give this commander a directive, and then let him get on with the job without interference. With such reforms, Stilwell reckoned that the Chinese would be able to hold off the Japanese until Allied force was brought to bear \u2013 the fightback in the Pacific had just begun with the American naval victory in the Midway.\n\nThe implications of Stilwell's proposals went well beyond strictly military considerations, threatening the system in which generals were as much political barons as military figures. Merging understrength divisions would reduce the money received by commanders for men who existed only on paper. The appointment of an omnipotent commander would shift power from the regional potentates. If an efficient army of thirty divisions saw the light of day under a single commander, it would inevitably pose a major threat to the Generalissimo. To attack senior figures as Stilwell did was to shake the pillars of the temple. 'The head cannot be lopped off, otherwise nothing would be left,' Meiling commented.\n\nThere was another fundamental issue involved. Chiang was a nationalist, and would not take dictation from foreigners. He was all too ready to accept American help, but he had no intention of finding himself obliged to follow a reform path laid down by Washington. As he would show repeatedly, he regarded maintaining his independence as an essential element in his authority. The more the United States pushed, the more resistant he became, the more anti-American, the more determined to go his own way.\n\nStilwell should have been aware of all this, though his diary contains no mention of it. He was behaving as if he were in a stable democracy, where a professional army is answerable to an elected government, fenced off from interference in politics. But, in Chiang's China, as in future Asian quagmires, there was no fence; the whole structure rested on the supremacy of the military. If he did not grasp this, Stilwell was extraordinarily obtuse for a man in his position and with his experience of China. If he did know the implications of what he was doing, he was equally misguided since he was, in effect, declaring a political war which he had no means of winning, ensuring that his laudable aim would be damned in Chiang's mind as a fundamental threat that had to be blocked.\n\nTo cap it all, Chiang was annoyed at what he viewed as a lack of material support from Washington, and held Stilwell responsible \u2013 he regarded the Chief of Staff as a quartermaster whose job was to ensure a never-ending flow of supplies. To make his discontent known, he sent a message to T. V. Soong in Washington talking of 'demoralising doubts' among his officers at how their country was being treated. Forwarding this to Roosevelt, the Foreign Minister added a note saying that the 'Generalissimo feels himself entirely out of touch with the main decisions of strategy which profoundly affect China's future . . . in vital questions, his role is that of an onlooker'. It was hardly an observation which TV. would have made off his own bat. To mollify Chiang, the President agreed to let a Nationalist representative sit on the munitions board that decided arms supplies. But, for security reasons, Marshall refused to allow China to join the conferences of Allied Chiefs of Staff \u2013 his caution was justified since the Japanese were breaking Chinese codes and could read everything transmitted to and from Chungking.\n\nYet another cause for discord arose from Stilwell's burning desire to reverse the rout of April 1942. Reopening the Burma Road was, obviously, greatly in China's interests since supplies now had to be flown over the Himalayas on the route known as the 'Hump' which could handle far less tonnage than the highway. But the Generalissimo did not share the American's fixation with making up for the humiliating defeat of his first major field command. Having been at war for five years, Chiang saw no need to hurry. For him, keeping the military balance was much more important than recapturing a colony for the British.\n\nBut Stilwell's quest for revenge was unstoppable, and was justified by a plan that, though initially sensible, broadened out into a wider strategy which took leave of reality. The American proposed to train two Chinese armies, one made up of men who had reached India, the other based in Yunnan. The first was to be known as X Force, the second as YForce. With the British landing from the sea in the south of Burma, X and Y would pierce the Japanese defences from west and east, take the country and reopen the highway to China. So far, so good \u2013 so long as Churchill lifted his eyes from Europe and agreed to commit men and landing craft to the Far East.\n\nBut Stilwell then envisaged his two armies sweeping into China to join a newly trained third force, called Z, which would push the Japanese back to the ocean where American ships would land GIs to achieve a great final victory. A few elite units might be formed, but the scope of the plan demanded a mass mobilisation that took no account of the military performance of the Chinese since 1937, Chiang's reservations about modernisation, the fragile state of China, the strength of regional autonomists in the south \u2013 or Japanese strength.\n\nChiang went along with the part of the plan which presented no threat to him. The Chinese units in India were far away, so nothing was lost by agreeing to that part of the proposal. He could also do with good troops being trained for the central army. But, when it came to agreeing to send them to Burma, he dragged his feet \u2013 he preferred to hold them in reserve against the independent-minded Governor Long Yun of Yunnan.\n\nHe and Meiling were being wooed by Stilwell's American rival, the air force adviser, Claire Chennault. The Texan, who had managed to reduce the number of Japanese air raids on Chungking, had been authorised by Washington to recruit American military fliers who were given an honourable discharge and went to China on one-year contracts, receiving US$500 for each plane they brought down. Chennault believed as deeply in the power of planes as Stilwell did in that of infantrymen. He held that Japan could be strangled by air raids on its ships launched from China, while his fighters and bombers held back enemy troops on the ground. The prospect of winning the war from the air and not having to commit large forces appealed to the Chiangs as much as it did to Roosevelt \u2013 and to future presidents. The Americans had just made their first bombing attack on Tokyo, known as the Doolittle raid from the name of its commander. Launched from aircraft carriers, it appeared to show the potency of the air approach, but it also demonstrated the consequences that could follow.\n\nAfter dropping their bombs, the Doolittle planes headed towards an airstrip in Chiang's home province of Zhejiang on the East China coast. Foreseeing the danger of sparking off a Japanese reprisal there, the Generalissimo had insisted that the aircraft fly to a safer area inland. But the American pilots disregarded this, and headed for Zhejiang. None of the planes reached the airfield, crash-landing or being scutded as they approached, the pilots parachuting to safety. As Chiang had feared, the Japanese swept in to stop coastal airfields being used for future raids, using biological weapons that included bombs carrying birds infected with anthrax \u2013 in one country alone the death toll from the germs developed by Japan's scientists in Manchuria was put at 50,000. The Generalissimo directed the defence operations from Chungking on the other side of China, with chaotic results that led to heavy casualties. A report by an American colonel who visited the battlefield said the Chinese had poor equipment, and no medical facilities or transport. Most of the conscripts arrived tied to one another. The regional commander spent the campaign in a villa 50 miles behind the front.\n\nUnabashed, Chennault demanded that more of the capacity on the Hump run should be used to bring in aviation fuel and supplies. 'My stomach is getting nervous,' he told Teddy White on one occasion. 'I used 40,000 gallons this past ten days, and I got only 17,000 gallons in.' To drop one ton of bombs, he needed eighteen tons of supplies. The transport planes burned as much fuel flying over the Hump as they brought in their holds. Bulldozers, trucks and other equipment Chennault needed to build airfields had to be diverted from the army.\n\nNaturally, this brought him into mounting conflict with Stilwell who wanted as large a volume of supplies as possible. The two men were chalk and cheese \u2013 a Confederate versus a Yankee, a Good Ole Boy who recognised human foibles against a puritan who prized moral courage. All they shared was an intense self-belief, and physical afflictions \u2013 Chennault was very hard of hearing while Stilwell had hardly any sight in his left eye as a result of an explosion of an ammunition dump in the First World War and needed a thick lens on his right eye. Meeting the two of them later, Britain's Chief of Staff, Alan Brooke,* described Stilwell as 'a hopeless crank with no vision', and Chennault as 'a very gallant airman with limited brain'.\n\nOne of the lesser, but characteristic, clashes between the two Americans followed Chennault's decision to open a brothel for his pilots. One of his officers was sent to recruit prostitutes who had fled to Guilin from Hong Kong. The establishment was officially devoted only to dancing, but there were plenty of dark corners and a garden from which the girls inevitably returned with grass stains on their dresses. The place also became a centre for organising diversion of Lend-Lease supplies to the black market. When the Lieutenant General learned about it, he had the place shut down.\n\nIn the competition for Chiang's favours, Chennault was the clear winner, aided by Meiling, who had always been interested in aviation and who called the Flying Tiger pilots her 'boys'. At a dinner she and her husband gave for them in February 1942, one of the fliers recalled, Meiling 'lectured us in a motherly sort of way about our behaviour, bragged about us, and told us she was very proud of us and honored to be our honorary Commander-in-Chief. She revelled in their success in downing Japanese aircraft \u2013 though their critics accused them of exaggeration, they reported 299 confirmed 'kills' and perhaps twice that number of aircraft destroyed in the air or on the ground. While Chennault's hopes of winning the war from the air were not to be borne out, his unit, which was renamed as the Fourteenth Air Force in March 1943, did a lot of damage to enemy shipping, reduced the bombing of Chungking, and assisted Chinese armies in key battles.\n\nChiang's concern about where China stood in the Allied scale of priorities deepened in the summer of 1942. When German victories in North Africa gravely threatened the British position there, Washington decided to move China Theatre planes based in India to Egypt and to divert other aircraft intended for the Nationalists there. The Generalissimo pointed out that the planes in India came under Stilwell's mandate \u2013 so he could not understand why the general had let them go. The situation in Egypt might be serious, he added, but so was the position in Zhejiang, which had been provoked by an American action and the refusal of the pilots to follow his instructions about where they should land.\n\nThe truth was that Stilwell had been told of the decision to move the aircraft from India after it had been made, and was also unhappy that his forces had been weakened. But Chiang was not to be stopped. At a meeting with Stilwell attended by Meiling, he produced what became known as the Three Demands \u2013 three US divisions to be sent to Burma to open the road to Yunnan, 500 planes to be dispatched to China and 5,000 tons of supplies to be flown over the Hump each month. Adopting her role as spokeswoman for her husband and China, Meiling pulled no punches. If the demands were not met, she warned, the odier Allies could 'wash out the China Theater'. Since each British defeat led to the removal of equipment, 'there is no need for China to continue the war'. Why did Britain 'always have to have someone else to pull her chestnuts out the fire', she asked. Chiang wondered why London did not send its 'thousands of planes' to Egypt. In case anybody missed the point, Meiling noted that 'the pro-Japanese element is very active'. According to American minutes, she added: 'The Generalissimo wants a yes or no answer to whether the Allies consider this theater necessary and will support it.' The Chinese account has her saying: 'The question was whether or not the United States wants China to make peace.'\n\nStilwell told Washington of the demands and complaints. He also sent his deputy to Washington to discuss the issue. But, given the war situation in Europe and North Africa, there was no way Chiang's requirements could be met \u2013 and his threats were obviously hollow. Making peace with Tokyo would undermine his nationalist claims, and getting even limited US supplies was better than receiving nothing. For all his irritation, good progress was being made at the training camp at Ramgarh in northern India where the 66,000 Chinese soldiers of X Force were being drilled by Americans with arms flown in from the United States.\n\nStilwell commuted the 2,000 miles between Chungking and Ramgarh over the Himalayas in a battered DC-3 cargo plane equipped with a few chairs and a camp bed. Several times the plane lost its course, but it was never attacked by Japanese fighters. For the first time, Chinese soldiers at Ramgarh were paid their wages directly, instead of receiving what was left after their officers had skimmed off their take. They had health care and were properly fed, gaining an average of 20 pounds. General Sun Liren, who had fought well in Burma, and the short, stocky, General Liao Yaoxiang showed themselves capable commanders while Stilwell impressed the soldiers by talking to them in Chinese.\n\nBut he was under attack in Washington, as well as in Chungking. Chiang had a direct channel to the White House that ran from an American academic, Owen Lattimore, whom Roosevelt had sent to him as a personal adviser, to a member of the President's staff, Lauchlin Currie. After a visit to China, Currie recommended getting rid of Stilwell, along with Ambassador Gauss. George Marshall quickly moved to defend his protege. But it was a warning signal that Stilwell was not everybody's cup of tea back home. The pressure was not only political. After one stormy meeting with the Chinese, Vinegar Joe developed stomach trouble, and vomited five times during the night. The next day, a blood test showed he had worms. Over the next thirty-six hours, he took eight different medicines, and then recorded: 'Feeling better!' In his diary, he called Chiang a prejudiced, conceited despot. 'The Chinese government,' he wrote, 'is a structure based on fear and favor, in the hands of an ignorant, arbitrary, stubborn man.'\n\nChiang was equally critical of the American. In a cable to T. V. Soong and the ambassador in Washington, he complained: 'The China Theatre has no organisation, or preparation for it . . . It seems that victory or defeat and the life or death of the China Theatre has nothing to do with Stilwell. This man does not place much value on organisation, concrete planning, and overall implementation.' The Burma campaign still rankled, Chiang complaining that the American 'did not ask for my instructions beforehand, nor did he make any direct report to me. His undertakings were devoid of human feeling and reason.' These were two men who were meant to be working together to fight Japan. But there was also another player who would extend her operations from Chungking to Washington and Hollywood as the rivalry within Chiang's family-in-law intersected with the Generalissimo's grip on power and his relationship with Vinegar Joe.\n\n* * *\n\n* Later Lord Alanbrooke.\n\n# CHAPTER 22\n\n _Snow White, Madame Empress_\n\nIN 1942 AND 1943, Meiling Soong was the most powerful woman in the world. Her influence might depend on her husband, and be limited largely to dealing with foreigners. But the American entry into the war had made her a key figure in handling China's most important ally. She attended top-level conferences, and held the code book for messages between her husband's American adviser, Owen Lattimore, and the White House. Dubbing her 'Madame Empress', Stilwell described her in his diary as:\n\nQuick, intelligent. Wants to get things done. Wishes she was a man. Doesn't think deeply, but catches on in a hurry. Very frank and open . . . Impulsive to point of precipitation . . . A clever, brainy woman . . . Direct, forceful, energetic, loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history. No concession to the Western viewpoint in all China's foreign relations. The Chinese were always right; the foreigners were always wrong.\n\nIn her mid-forties, Meiling showed her growing authority by summoning Stilwell, Chennault and the two heads of the Chinese air force to a meeting on 1 July 1942. She asked the Chinese what they required. Two hundred planes, they replied. And Chennault? Three hundred, he said. That made the magic figure of 500 contained in Chiang's Three Demands. So, Meiling said, all that needed to be done was for Stilwell to 'get busy and tell' Washington. When the others had left the room, she added, 'We are going to see that you are made a full general!' 'The hell they are!' Stilwell recorded in his diary.\n\nKeeping up the pressure, she called for Vinegar Joe's report to Washington, and upbraided him on the telephone when she found he had not put in recommendations of his own to back the Chinese demands. Then she summoned him for a meeting, kept him waiting and called in her secretary to take everything down. 'Obviously mad as hell,' the general recorded in his diary. 'She had snapped the whip and the stooge had not come across, and she'd reported to Chiang Kai-shek that I had.' But the Chiangs' persistence earned a reward when Roosevelt told the Generalissimo he could expect 5,000 tons of supplies a month from the beginning of the following year, plus 265 combat aircraft. Three airfields were developed at Kunming, Dali and Lijiang in Yunnan to handle the traffic. How the cargo would be split between Stilwell and Chennault was a matter for bitter dispute between the two men, but Chiang had got part of what he wanted \u2013 and his wife could share the credit.\n\nMeiling was firmly established as the caring face of the regime, making well-publicised visits to hospitals, urging women to join the war effort, writing articles for foreign publications and recording broadcasts for the United States. One Christmas, she staged a nativity play for the foreigners, which ended with her husband handing the guests red silk ties with his monogram. She tried her hand at warlord politics with a mission to the huge and largely autonomous north-western region of Xinjiang, where she won the support of the Governor, a man so afraid of assassination that he examined melons to check that they had not been injected with poison. She also visited Chinese troops in India, and came home with an enthusiastic report on progress there. An American correspondent asked if she did not grow tired of having to appear as a great heroic figure. 'If you ever publish this, I'll have your head off,' she replied. 'But, yes, I do get tired of it.' Though her health was suffering, she showed no sign of letting up as Chungking received its highest-ranking American visitor in October 1942.\n\nDefeated by Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1940, the Republican, Wendell Willkie, had been sent on a world tour by the White House in an act of wartime bipartisanship. His trip came after America had scored big naval victories in the Pacific, and after the landing at Guadalcanal in the Solomons at the start of the advance through the Pacific islands to the Japanese homeland. In Chungking, a lavish programme of visits, banquets, military displays and meetings awaited Willkie. Shacks were pulled down; poor-looking shops were ordered to close; peddlers and beggars were cleared from the streets. The big, exuberant politician, with his mop of hair and charismatic style, was important not only as Roosevelt's envoy. He might run again for the presidency, and, in the meantime, could put pressure on Washington to replace Stilwell with somebody more pliant.\n\nThere was a slight hitch when Willkie flew in aboard a converted bomber. The welcoming party led by H. H. Kung marched down the runway carrying big bouquets of flowers as an army band played 'America the Beautiful'. But the plane had not yet taxied to a stop, and it turned and moved forward. 'There were squeals and a great dropping of bouquets and band instruments as the greeters scattered,' Graham Peck of the US information service recalled. By the time the plane halted and the visitor came down the steps, the welcoming party had re-formed, and the band was playing the Kuomintang anthem.\n\nFrom the start, Willkie fell for the show the Chiangs put on for him. He described the ranks of carefully drilled children waving flags along the road from the airport as 'an impressive show of the simple strength in people and emotions which is China's greatest resource.' He decided to stay in a government guest house rather than with the well-informed Ambassador Gauss, who muttered that he would vote for the Socialist candidate at the next presidential election. He was impressed by an enormous military parade held in his honour, and got a carefully prepared glimpse of the war on a trip aboard a luxurious train to the Yellow River.\n\nChiang's adopted son, who acted as escort on that trip, presented the visitor with Japanese swords and French wine which he said had just been captured by Chinese soldiers who had made night sorties across the river \u2013 Peck reported that the supposed booty was on sale locally. The only Japanese Willkie saw, through a telescope, was a soldier sitting in his undershirt at the mouth of a tunnel on the other side of the waterway. But, when he was told that enemy planes had dropped bombs nearby, he called the reporters accompanying him and said: 'Well, boys, I guess they were after us all right.' Going on to Xi'an, he was greeted by more crowds of flag-waving children, and returned to Nanking declaring that 'Military China is united. Its leaders are trained and able generals; its armies are tough fighting organisations of men who know both what they are fighting for and how to fight for it.'\n\nThe regime had the good sense to fix a meeting between Willkie and Zhou Enlai to show its open-mindedness, but, otherwise, it kept control of the visitor. Stilwell was sidelined; when he did meet Willkie, the politician did not ask him for his views. Chiang stressed the importance of air power, and Chennault presented a memorandum claiming that he could achieve the downfall of Japan with a force of 147 planes. Stilwell noted in his diary that the visitor had been 'immersed in soft soap, adulation and flattery'. But an independent-minded American Foreign Service officer, John Carter Vincent, depicted Willkie as a man who smelled of raw beef to the Chinese \u2013 Chiang was said to have ordered the windows of his office opened when he left, to 'let the smell of the foreigner out'.\n\nThe Generalissimo had added to his tides by becoming President of the Chinese Republic on die death of the venerable Lin Sen, and there was even what looked like political progress to show the American that the regime was not as dictatorial as its critics said. A coalition of six non-Kuomintang parties had formed the Democratic Federation the previous year as a third force between the regime and the Communists. The group had offices in Kunming, Chengdu and Guilin, and published two newspapers. Its members were harried by die secret police, but Chiang had die People's Political Council, on which it was represented, reorganised to give an appearance of democracy. The number of appointed delegates from various parties and organisations was cut, and the elected representatives raised to 70 per cent. This was, in fact, die opposite of what it seemed since the Kuomintang controlled the elections, and could ensure that most of those who voted would back its candidates. By reducing the number of appointed seats guaranteed to small parties and professional groups, the move actually increased the regime's control. The Communists and die Democrats reacted with a boycott diat made the Council even more of a fig leaf for Chiang. But nobody could accuse him of not having tried.\n\nThe Willkie trip was a perfect occasion for Meiling. Described by the American military attache, David Barrett, as 'exuding charm at every pore', she found Willkie an easy conquest. Appearing at a tea party with die cloak of an air marshal thrown dashingly over her shoulders, she told the politician in her American-accented English that he was a very 'disturbing influence', a confession which visibly gratified him.\n\nTheir relationship progressed one evening when Chiang presided over a huge reception for the visitor. The Generalissimo, his wife and Willkie formed a receiving line. Among the guests was one of the politician's principal backers, Gardner Cowles, publisher of _Look_ magazine, who was accompanying Willkie on the world tour. As the evening went on, the politician asked Cowles to take his place in the receiving line because he and Meiling were going to leave the room.\n\nThe publisher stepped in, and, when Chiang left about an hour later, Cowles went back to one of T. V. Soong's houses where he and Willkie were staying. There was no sign of the other man. Cowles sat drinking Scotch which Meiling had sent him when he said he could not take Chinese rice wine. Soon after 9 p.m., as the publisher recorded in his privately published memoirs, 'there was a great clatter in the courtyard. The Generalissimo marched in, visibly furious. He was accompanied by three bodyguards, each carrying a little Tommy gun. Trying to restrain his rage, the Generalissimo bowed coldly, and I returned the bow.'\n\nChiang asked where Willkie was. Cowles said he did not know.* He then offered Chiang tea. After they had drunk this in silence, the Generalissimo repeated his question, and Cowles repeated that he had no answer. At that, Chiang stormed through the house followed by his bodyguards. He searched every room, peered under the beds and opened cupboards. Not finding what he was looking for, he left without saying anything.\n\nCowles sat up drinking more Scotch. At 4 a.m., he recorded, 'a very buoyant Willkie appeared, cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl. After giving me a play by play account of what had happened between him and Madame, he concluded that he had invited Madame to return to Washington with us.'\n\n'Wendell, you're just a goddam fool!' Cowles exclaimed. He acknowledged that Meiling was 'one of the most beautiful, intelligent, and sexy women either of us had ever met', and he could understand the tremendous attraction between her and Willkie. But the politician had to be discreet. There was already gossip among correspondents in Chungking about the two of them. Mrs Willkie would probably be waiting to meet him at the airport in Washington. If he wanted to run against Roosevelt again, arriving with Madame Chiang would be a considerable embarrassment.\n\nWillkie stomped off to bed, but was up a couple of hours later for breakfast. He had a speech to make, and asked Cowles to go to see Meiling to tell her she could not fly to the United States with him. The publisher inquired where he could find her. Willkie suggested an apartment which she kept on the top floor of a hospital for women and children. With her own private guards protecting them, that was where they had gone the previous night.\n\nWhen Cowles delivered the message, Meiling asked who was preventing her making the trip. Cowles took the responsibility on himself, explaining that it would be unwise politically for Willkie. Before he knew what was happening, she scratched her long fingernails down both his cheeks so deeply that the marks remained for a week.\n\n'It is interesting the influence which enforced celibacy has on judgment \u2013 and the course of political events,' noted an American diplomat in Chungking. Though he followed Cowles's advice, Willkie ended the visit by suggesting that Meiling should visit the United States to win support for China with her 'brains, persuasiveness, and moral force . . . with wit and charm, a generous and understanding heart, a gracious and a beautiful manner and appearance, and a burning conviction'. There was a suggestion that the idea had come from her.\n\nThe Sino-American relationship warmed further when, immediately after Willkie's departure, Chiang announced in his National Day speech that the United States \u2013 and Britain \u2013 had agreed to waive all territorial rights in China, abandoning their concessions. This had become inevitable in the context of the wartime alliance, though it had no immediate practical effect since the Japanese had taken over the settlements in Shanghai and other occupied cities. Showing his feelings for the British, the Generalissimo congratulated them on having won a moral victory over themselves.\n\nMeanwhile, the relationship with Stilwell veered dramatically. One lunchtime, the Nationalist leader and Meiling summoned the US naval attache, and criticised the general, knowing their views would be passed on to Washington. But, then, in early November 1942, Chiang suddenly told Vinegar Joe that he could issue orders to anybody in the Chinese headquarters, and promised fifteen divisions for a Chinese-British-US offensive in Burma which Stilwell hoped to launch in the spring. Chiang's designated successor, General Chen Cheng, who got on well with the American, was appointed to command the Y Force which was to attack Burma from south-west China. But Roosevelt and Churchill then decided to delay the start of the offensive until the end of 1943. Transport of supplies to China was ranked last in Allied planning at their summit in Casablanca. Stilwell's only compensation was the award of the American Distinguished Service Cross for his combat performance. Chiang gave a celebratory dinner, followed by a film provided by the Americans. 'There was a lot of kissing and swapping of wives,' Stilwell wrote in his diary of what appeared on screen. 'What crude barbarians we must still appear to them.'\n\nMeiling was not at the dinner. She had flown to New York at the end of 1942, suffering from a combination of ailments, including a bad back, sinus trouble aggravated by her smoking, skin rashes, insomnia, exhaustion, dental problems and damage to her ribs suffered in her accident in Shanghai in 1937. On top of which, Chiang suspected she had stomach cancer, and wanted her to take tests not available in China. His wife was carried into the Stratoliner plane leased from TWA, accompanied by two nurses and her niece, Jeannette Kung, who liked to dress as a man and wore her hair in masculine style. Arriving at a military airfield outside New York, Meiling was met by Roosevelt's close aide, Harry Hopkins.\n\nOn the way to the Harkness Pavillion medical centre, where a whole floor was reserved for her under a false name, she began by telling Hopkins that she had come only for medical treatment. But then she went on to talk at length about relations between the United States and China, to say the best way of winning the world war was to concentrate on beating Japan, to attack Stilwell for losing Chinese troops in Burma, to criticise Britain, and to praise Chennault. Eleanor Roosevelt visited her three times in hospital \u2013 the President's wife owed her a personal debt since Meiling had made sure her son, James, had received a proper diet when he visited China as a marine after undergoing an operation for a gastric ulcer. 'She seemed to me quite nervous and suffering a great deal; she could hardly bear to have anything touch any part of her body,' Mrs Roosevelt recalled in her memoirs. 'Madame Chiang seemed so petite and delicate . . . that I had a desire to help her and take care of her as I would have if she had been my own daughter.'\n\nSomething appears to have gone wrong in January 1943, when Meiling called on T. V. Soong to go to New York to help her. Stilwell noted rumours in Chungking that her mission had bogged down. But, once her treatment was completed and she had rested for two weeks at Roosevelt's house at Hyde Park in New York State, she regained her usual drive, and was ready to take up Wendell Willkie's suggestion to barnstorm America, heavily promoted by Henry Luce. Her aim was to raise funds for Chungking and put China on the map in the minds of the people of its most important ally. In the process, she would make herself even more famous. As a US army public relations officer, Don Knight, put it, for most of Americans, China at the time of Pearl Harbor meant Marco Polo, Pearl Buck's novel and film _The Good Earth_ , Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan (who was American). After her visit, he added a fifth entry \u2013 'the billions contributed to that pretty Mrs Chiang'.\n\nThe tour began in mid-February 1943. Staying at the White House, Meiling brought her own silk sheets which had to be changed every day \u2013 more often if she took a siesta. Usually, the President sat beside visitors on a sofa, but, to avoid being 'vamped', as he put it, he had a card table set up with a chair for her on the other side. Roosevelt found the visitor 'hard as steel'; when he asked her at dinner how strikers would be dealt with in China, she drew a nail across her throat. In conversations with senior administration figures, she pressed for more military aid, getting agreement to deliver most of the supplies to Chennault and to send in a new model transport plane which, however, proved unsuitable for conditions over the Hump. She told the Secretary for War he had beautiful hands, and invited everybody to go back to China with her. Criticising Stilwell, she recounted the watermelon incident in Burma as an example of his 'bitter and contemptuous attitude'.\n\nThe first woman, and the first Chinese, to address both houses of Congress, Meiling got a four-minute standing ovation before she began speaking to the Senate. She started modestly, pretending she had only realised just before she arrived that she would be asked to say more than 'How do you do? I am so very glad to see you.' She launched into a hymn to Sino-American friendship and the importance of the Far East in the war. Assuming that her audience would not be familiar with Chiang's strategy, she declared that it was better 'not to accept failure ignominiously but to risk it gloriously'. 'I feel that it is necessary for us not only to have ideals and to proclaim that we have them; it is necessary that we act to implement them,' she concluded.\n\nMeiling \u2013 called 'Snow White' in the State Department code \u2013 scored another success at a banquet in her honour attended by Vice-President Henry Wallace and Mrs Roosevelt. She charmed 172 reporters at a press conference with the President in the Oval Office of the White House, for which she wore a dress decorated with the wings of the Chinese air force. Her impact was such that American military planners worried about congressional and public opinion shifting in favour of a greater emphasis on China to the detriment of the campaign in Europe. Back in New York, she addressed a rally of 20,000 people at Madison Square Gardens where Willkie described her as 'an avenging angel'. Luce put her on the cover of _Time_ , and she was written up by American papers as the spirit of an indomitable China fighting Fascist aggression for democracy. American heartstrings were tugged, and missionary links drawn upon to the full.*\n\nIn New York Meiling took the whole of the forty-second floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Towers for herself. Security men kept watch outside her rooms, and cleared the corridors and a lift when she left. She brought her own staff, and, one night, invited the Willkie backer, Gardner Cowles, to dinner. The invitation specified a black-tie occasion, but they were alone except for the four servants who, she assured her guest, did not understand English \u2013 so they could speak freely.\n\nThen she told the publisher that her union with Chiang was a marriage of political convenience, and recounted the story of his having said on their wedding night that they would not have sex \u2013 a tale which, as Cowles recorded, he was not sure he believed. Next, she moved into the reason for inviting him. She was sure Willkie could get the Republican presidential nomination, and urged Cowles to do all he could to achieve this. 'I was to spend whatever amount of money I thought was necessary,' he wrote in his memoirs. 'She would reimburse me for all expenditures.' Funding to buy the presidency for Willkie would, presumably, have come, in part at least, from the residue of US loans to China sitting in the American bank accounts of the Chungking regime. 'If Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world,' she told Cowles. 'I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world.' It was, as Cowles noted, a totally mad proposal, 'but I was so mesmerized by clearly one of the most formidable women of the time that this evening I would not have dismissed anything she said'.\n\nFrom New York, Meiling went to Boston, Chicago and California. The United China Relief fund collected large sums as she spoke to rallies across the country. At her alma mater of Wellesley College, she strolled across the campus in slacks, which were not accepted garb there at the time. 'Anyone who can look as smart as Madame Chiang in slacks may wear them,' the college president remarked. In Hollywood, stars including Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman, Shirley Temple and Mary Pickford joined the welcoming committee, and she met Spencer Tracy and Henry Fonda. On 31 March a big banquet was followed by a night in aid of China at the Hollywood Bowl, attended by 30,000 people, during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played 'The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March'. Actors Edward G. Robinson and Walter Houston read a narrative on China, and Meiling told of the Rape of Nanking. The producer was David O. Selznick, of _Gone With the Wind fame_.\n\nAlong die way, Meiling developed distinct diva tendencies. She objected to an American officer who called her 'M'am' rather than 'Madame' until he pointed out that the former term was the way the British Queen was addressed, at which point she grew radiant. The historian Jerome Chen records that she refused to give an interview to a reporter because he was black. When she met the adviser Owen Lattimore, who had returned to the United States at the end of his mission, she cut him dead at a reception in San Francisco \u2013 presumably because he was of no further use. During her stay at the White House, her way of clapping her hands to summon servants, rather than ringing the bell, went down badly. There was consternation when she insisted on a shipment of English cigarettes being fetched from bond in New York and flown to Washington. The Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, whose men went to get the cigarettes, told his staff Roosevelt was 'just crazy to get her out of the country'.\n\nBefore the Madison Square Garden rally, she declined to come down from her hotel suite to a dinner organised by Luce and attended by 270 prominent people, including nine state governors: she was, she said, conserving her energy for her speech. While she was in New York, Churchill visited Washington, and she invited him to come to see her. To save the Prime Minister the trip, Roosevelt laid on a lunch at the White House for Meiling and the British leader, but she refused to make the trip with what Churchill described as 'some hauteur'.* As it headed across the country, her train stopped in the early morning in a small town in Utah where the whole population lined up on the platform to greet her. Meiling preferred to stay in her berth, and sent one of her maids out onto the platform where she was greeted by the locals as the real thing.\n\nBack in New York, she received Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to London and father of the future president. His diary recorded that he had been told by the British newspaper baron and minister, Lord Beaverbrook, that Meiling was a lesbian who was being accompanied by her girlfriend \u2013 a reference to the mannish Jeannette Rung. When he met her, Kennedy found her 'a most interesting and attractive woman'. He told her that she was both managerial and had sex appeal. 'You mean like Gypsy Rose Lee?' she replied. She smoked incessantly, and Kennedy noted that she told him the tests showed she did not have stomach cancer. She spoke of editing a newspaper, or of being paid vast sums for her writing. Then she showed him two of her stories; one, he recorded, was 'a bit naughty'. After that, she sent out to Schrafft's drug store for strawberry sodas, saying she did not care if they upset her stomach, which they did not.\n\nWhile Meiling was grandstanding from coast to coast, news of floods, crop failures and a plague of locusts in central China began to reach Chungking. Worst hit was Henan province where no rain had fallen in 1942. The diversion of the Yellow River by Chiang's blowing of the dykes had deprived large areas of irrigation. The troops of the Nationalist general, Tang Enbo, had imposed grain taxes running from 30 to 50 per cent \u2013 sometimes they might take all a peasant's crop. Grain was moved out of the province to be sold elsewhere, but army warehouses still bulged with food as up to 30 million peasants faced starvation. 'If the people die,' an officer said, 'the land will still be Chinese. But if the soldiers starve, the Japanese will take the land.'\n\nWhen a Chungking newspaper ran a story on the famine, it was suspended for three days. Teddy White, whose boss at _Time_ magazine was boosting Meiling's American trip, decided to go to investigate. He observed endless streams of people walking in the cold along the railway tracks, falling and dying where they lay. At stations, refugees 'swarmed over the [rail] cars like ants on a dead worm, clinging on wherever they could find a foothold or handhold,' wrote the American information officer, Graham Peck. 'For hundreds of miles the railroad was littered with the corpses of those who had been too weak to hang on.' In the rail junction of Zhengzhou, the surviving inhabitants were 'like scarecrows, whining and crying or stumbling in silence'. In the city of Luoyang, reported another correspondent, people were packed into wagons like lumber, so close together that they could not move. Outside the city, dogs dug bodies out of piles of sand. Families sold their children; white slavers bought girls; speculators arrived to snap up land at low prices. Mothers were said to exchange babies, saying, 'You eat mine; I'll eat yours.' A woman was found boiling her two-year-old child as food; a father was charged with strangling his two boys to eat them; the bones of a boy were discovered in a big pot in a village which had been told to take in destitute children.\n\n'Half the villages were deserted; some simply abandoned, odiers already looted,' White's report went on. 'Spring compost rested in heaps, untended. To hear a sound or see a person in such a village was startling: an old man tottering through the street all by himself; or in another village two women shrieking at each other with no one else in sight . . . what were they arguing about in death? One saw, as one travelled, people chipping bark from trees, with knives, scythes and meat cleavers. They were stripping bark from all the elms . . . because you could grind the bark and eat it.' An orphanage he visited 'stank worse than anything I have ever smelled. Even the escorting officer could not stand the odor and, holding his handkerchief to his nose, asked to be excused. These were abandoned babies. They were inserted four to a crib. Those who could not fit in cribs were simply laid on the straw. I forget what they were fed. But they smelled of baby vomit and baby shit, and when they were dead, they were cleared out.'\n\nWhite reckoned the death toll at 2 million. As many more faced death. Another 2 million had fled the province. A group of peasants came to see him one night with a petition they asked him to take to Chiang. In their county, two thirds of the 150,000 people had nothing to eat; 700 were dying each day. Chungking had ordered taxes to be remitted, but they had already been collected so it was too late. The government also earmarked $200 million for relief, but only $80 million was actually sent.\n\nOn his return to Chungking, White got an audience with the Generalissimo who 'received me in his dark office, standing erect and slim, taut, holding out a stiff hand of greeting, then he sat in his high-backed chair, listening to me with visible distaste'. Chiang denied that the peasants were being taxed: had he not ordered that taxes be remitted in distressed areas? 'They see a foreigner and tell him anything,' he said to one of his aides. In China, cannibalism was impossible, he added. When the correspondent said he had seen dogs eating corpses, Chiang replied that this, too, was impossible.\n\nTo prove his points, White produced photographs by another journalist who had accompanied him. Chiang's knee began to jiggle slightly as he asked where the pictures had been taken. When White told him, he took out a little pad and brush pen to make notes. 'He asked for names of officials,' the American recalled. 'He wanted more names; he wanted us to make a full report to him leaving out no names. In a flat manner, as if restating a fact to himself, he said that he had _told_ the army to share its grain with the people. Then he thanked us; told me that I was a better investigator than \"any of the investigators I have sent on my own\". And I was ushered out twenty minutes after entering.' Sanctions were taken, grain was rushed in, relief kitchens were opened and the army gave back some of its food.\n\nWhite had filed an epic story on his way back to Chungking. By chance, it got through an inattentive censor. Meiling heard about it \u2013 not the kind of news she wanted America to read while she was busy raising support and funds. She asked Luce to fire White. The publisher refused, but his magazine ran only 750 words of the far longer report, excising all mentions of failures by officials, corruption and peasant anger.\n\nWhite's story was not the only sand in the relationship Meiling was trying to nurture with America. A fresh Roosevelt-Churchill conference at the White House, known as Trident, led to a decision to scale down the much-delayed Burma operation. At the meeting with Stilwell and Chennault, Roosevelt asked die general what he thought of Chiang. 'He's a vacillating, tricky, undependable old scoundrel who never keeps his word,' Vinegar Joe growled, according to Chennault's memoirs. Roosevelt cut in to ask the air force commander for his opinion. 'Sir,' Chennault replied, 'I think the Generalissimo is one of the two or three greatest military and political leaders in the world today. He has never broken a commitment or promise made to me.' When word of Stilwell's remark got back to him, Chiang sent his wife a message complaining: 'Not only does he abuse us and humiliate us, he thinks nothing of threatening us and of making false accusations against us. This is indeed too bitter a pill to swallow. For the sake of the future and for the successful prosecution of die war, I hope that President Roosevelt will understand the difficulties of my present position.'\n\nThere was also cause for concern about Chiang's literary activities. As Meiling had begun her tour of die United States, he had a book published in China. Priced at only 10 cents to encourage sales, _China's Destiny_ had been largely ghosted for the Generalissimo by a man who had initially joined Wang Jingwei when he left Chungking, but who subsequently returned to the regime and was lodging with Chiang's secretary. The 213-page work became a must-buy for anybody who wanted to be in with the regime. Sales soared through the hundreds of thousands, some said up to a million. The book insisted on die supremacy of traditional Chinese ways and blamed foreigners for all the country's ills. A subsequent volume on economic theory, not generally regarded as Chiang's strong point, claimed that the country's sages had 'understood all the principles of economic development'. Both books were highly conservative and paternalistic, stressing the need for order and discipline, and subordination of individuals to the state. Chinese intellectuals gave it a dusty reception. The American scholar John King Fairbank, in Kunming at the time, said the academics there thought it was 'twaddle' and an affront.\n\nChiang's highly reactionary message could have alienated the public of China's main ally; so an English language version was shelved, and then issued in a version which cut out objectionable passages. Meiling was widely believed to have been behind the decision. The Chungking censors deleted references to the book in copy from correspondents. The State Department classified its copy of the Chinese original as 'top secret'. Washington was about to award the Generalissimo the Legion of Merit, the highest award that could be given to a foreigner; it would hardly do for the recipient to be known as an opponent of everything the Allies were meant to be fighting for.*\n\nAt the beginning of July, Meiling flew back to Asia with her niece in a converted Liberator bomber. When the plane landed for a stop-over at Assam in north India, her clothes were wrinkled and her hair untidy. A GI took a photograph of her as she left the aircraft. Meiling hurried back inside and sat glaring out of the window, insisting that the soldier be ordered to destroy the film. The two women had amassed such a treasure trove of American goods to take home that some had to be brought in on another aircraft. At Assam, one of the crates was dropped and broke open. The US army grapevine had it that inside were ermine brassieres, which was probably not true; but there was certainly a lot of cosmetics, groceries and lingerie, wrote Graham Peck. Angered, the American soldiers dropped other crates, kicked the contents around and then threw them into the Liberator.\n\nMeiling had been expected to land at the airfield being developed for American bombers at Chengdu, but the pilot decided to head for Chungking instead. Unaware of this change of plan, Chiang flew to Chengdu \u2013 by one report, his plane almost colliding with his wife's on the way. The Americans at Chungking, who had not been warned of its arrival, suspected that Meiling's aircraft might be ajapanese decoy. So they drove up in a jeep to check it out on the runway. This time, Madame Chiang had made sure she was ready to meet the reception committee she expected. As she walked down the steps, her hair done and her face made up, she realised there was no party to greet her return home. So she stood alone, tapping her foot bad-temperedly. Jeannette Kung, in masculine clothes and with her hair cut short, ordered the American pilot of their plane to pipe fuel into some empty drums so that she could take it for her own use. The pilot refused. Jeannette commandeered a station wagon being driven past by two Chinese officers. As she did so, an American sergeant asked her, 'Sure you know your way into town, bud?' The two angry women left in a great grinding of gears. Behind them, members of their party grabbed food and cushions from the plane.\n\nA secret report by the American adviser, Arthur Young, recounted that, when Chiang flew back to Chungking from Chengdu, his pilot tried to save time by touching down without circling the airstrip as was customary. At the same time, another Chinese plane, carrying Chiang's son, flew in to land in the opposite direction. Its pilot managed to lift it to avoid a head-on collision. Already in a bad temper because of the mix-up over Meiling, Chiang called for the head of the airfield administration, and threatened to have him shot, though the near accident was nothing to do with him or his staff. After Meiling, Ailing and H. H. Kung intervened on the official's behalf, his punishment was reduced to being given a 'great demerit' before being forced to retire.\n\nTo welcome Meiling back, the Kungs held a reception for foreigners in the garden of their large house. A throne-like chair was set up on a dais in front of an ornamental screen. Meiling was to sit there and greet the guests. Then Chiang decided to come, too. That caused a protocol problem \u2013 the dais was not large enough for two thrones. So a couple of wicker chairs were set on the lawn, but the Chiangs received the guests standing up. Photographs of Meiling meeting Hollywood stars were shown. Graham Peck recalled that, looking beautiful but rather annoyed and wearing lace gloves, she stood in front with her husband behind her muttering, _'Hao, hao, had'._ 31\n\nThe rumour mill said Chiang had scolded Meiling for her behaviour in the United States which he considered inappropriate at a time of such suffering in China. It is also quite likely that one of the various intelligence services working for him had followed the Meiling\u2013Willkie relationship \u2013 the Generalissimo's furious behaviour when he went to the American's villa on the night of the Chungking reception demonstrated his suspicions. Chiang was widely reported to have taken a mistress. The stories were so prevalent that the critical American diplomat John Service reported them to the State Department: 'There is so much smoke, it would seem that there must be some fire,' he wrote. The main rumour focused on a young nurse on his staff. Various other women were mentioned, including Chiang's early concubine from Shanghai, Yao. There was even speculation that he might have seen Jennie again though her memoirs say she did not meet him after he banished her in 1927.\n\nService's report said Meiling took to referring to her husband as 'that man' and complained that the only time he put in his false teeth was when he went to see his mistress. One day, the American added, Meiling had found a pair of high-heeled shoes under Chiang's bed, and had flung them out of the window, hitting a guard on the head. On another occasion, she was reported to have thrown a vase at her husband, and so injured him that he did not receive callers for four days. A woman visitor said that, every time she went into Meiling's bedroom, she saw the same pair of carefully pressed trousers 'draped so ostentatiously across the foot of the other twin bed that she was quite sure the Generalissimo was no longer using them'. In a conversation with Stilwell, she 'let out that she has a hell of a life with the Peanut', the general wrote in his diary. 'No one else will tell him the truth so she is constantly at him with the disagreeable news. It can't be easy to live with the crabbed little bastard and see everything balled up.'\n\nOnly power could hold the internalised traditionalist and the Westernised woman together. For all the smiling photographs of them together, the couple had always been deeply different. Chiang dealt in harangues and homilies; his wife was far more sophisticated. Despite the New Life proclamations, she smoked heavily and took luxury for granted while he was happy with simple food and military conditions. At their home on the peak above Xikou, her bed was large and soft, his small and hard; at the villa in Ruling, the bathroom had a Western toilet and a traditional Chinese squatting hole for each of them. Meiling's visit to the United States introduced another element \u2013 she now saw herself as a world figure, and intended to establish her power, even if it meant provoking a take-no-prisoners family feud.\n\nThe little sister's success threw down a gauntlet to her brother, threatening T. V. Soong's position as Chungking's point man in Washington. Stilwell wrote that Meiling had 'put it over like a tent' on Roosevelt. She bragged that the President had promised her to send two divisions to the China theatre. Hump supplies rose to 8,000 tons after her return. T. V. knew that he was the person best equipped to run the Nationalist regime, with his administrative ability, his understanding of finance, his contacts and his modern grasp of the world. He could see the danger of collapse if reforms were not brought in. He was reported to be so contemptuous of H. H. Rung that he could barely speak civilly of his brother-in-law. His ally, General Chen Cheng, was known for his disgust at the corruption and inefficiency in the army. Another military associate, Xue Yue, had repeatedly shown himself to be one of the very few effective field commanders.\n\nThe conditions were ripe for a power bid by the portly, owl-spectacled Soong, who was given the improbable code name of 'Rhumba' by the Americans. He had another reason to act \u2013 his position in Washington enabled him to ensure that companies run by him and his brother, T.L., were able to profit hugely from the American aid chain. The amount of money that went through their various enterprises during the war years was estimated at US$3.5 billion, and some of it stuck to the Soongs, partly from a transport company of theirs which handled distribution of supplies in south-east China. That was something to be protected from his sister's growing influence.\n\nAny move by TV. would threaten his oldest and youngest sister, and their spouses. If he became prime minister, Chiang's wings would inevitably be clipped, and Meiling's ambitions would be dashed. But if she got anywhere near to realising her worldwide plans, he would be relegated to the back seat. Each sibling needed to act to check the other, and, as is customary in such battles, the conflict was played out over an apparently extraneous issue \u2013 Joseph Stilwell.\n\nT.V. drafted a plan for a new command structure that would eject the American general and replace him with a Chinese who might well be Soong's ally, Chen Cheng. Knowing Chiang's very different feeling for Vinegar Joe and Chen, he could calculate that this would win the support of the Generalissimo. Meeting Roosevelt, Soong said there was 'cause for concern about Sino-American cooperation' if Stilwell was not replaced. His telegram to Chiang reported that the President was concerned.\n\nOn 13 September 1943 Meiling began her offensive by calling Stilwell to the Chiangs' residence. Waiting with her was Ailing. Short, dumpy and with tiny hands, the eldest Soong sister was the epitome of what Vinegar Joe detested in China. She was said to control a bank through which she bought American dollars at the ridiculously low official rate, just before a fresh splurge of printing of banknotes sent the Chinese currency plunging even further. One frequently told story had it that, when a special plane was sent from Chungking to collect her from her home in Hong Kong after Pearl Harbor, she insisted on taking her dachshund with her to China. The pilot said this would make the aircraft overweight. Ailing was adamant. So a security man was left behind, and subsequently killed by the Japanese. Given the difference between the weight of a small dog and that of a man, the story made no sense; but it said much about the way she was regarded.\n\nChiang's American adviser, Owen Lattimore, recorded that Meiling was much under her sister's influence, and that the Generalissimo had more confidence in her than in the wife whose marriage to him she had set up. For her part, Ailing had good reason to line up with Meiling against their brother. If T.V. increased his power in Chungking, it could only be at the expense of her husband, both as head of the government and in the Finance Ministry. If, on the other hand, Soong's grip on Lend-Lease was diminished by his being humbled, that would open up a very tasty cornucopia for the Kungs.\n\nThe sisters \u2013 Stilwell referred to Meiling in his diary as May, and to Ailing as Ella or Sis \u2013 told him they were worried about China's military forces, and wanted to do something about it. He gave them 'the low-down on conditions in the Army', and said they were appalled. In fact, it was what they wanted to hear. Apart from jousting with her brother, Meiling was out for the scalp of General He Yingqin, the War Minister with whom she had first crossed swords at the time of the Xi'an Incident. According to Stilwell, she called He 'the unmentionable' and 'that goddam old fool'. The generals round Chiang were, she said, 'like a lot of ostriches with their heads in the sand and their bottoms sticking out. How I would like to take a big club and go after them.' Stilwell was an ideal ally; he despised He as 'a terribly conceited little monkey', a feeling increased when the minister sent him a letter complaining that a bottle of iodine had been broken in transit by the Americans. The meeting at the Chiang residence came up with the revolutionary idea that Meiling should become War Minister. 'May craves action,' Stilwell noted. 'We signed an offensive and defensive alliance.'\n\nVinegar Joe had no idea what was really going on. His diary shows him to have been an innocent caught in the middle of a feud which he read the wrong way, assuming that the sisters had been told by T. V. Soong at the urging of George Marshall to 'get behind me and co-operate'. He might have recalled an incident the previous year when Soong had failed to pass on to Chungking a letter from Roosevelt laying out Stilwell's remit in clear terms, including his decision-making authority over Lend-Lease supplies. He might have also pondered the way in which General Chen Cheng, the T.V. ally and commander of YForce at the training centre in Yunnan, had told the Generalissimo that the American had called one of Chiang's relatives a bandit.\n\nThe struggle intensified in the following weeks. The sisters told Stilwell they had argued the case for army reform so strongly that Chiang had walked out of the room. But T.V., who had flown into Chungking, attacked the American for his arrogance. The family battle reached a climax over two days in the Chiangs' home. Chennault's aide, Joseph Alsop, who was close to Soong as well as being related to Roosevelt, recalled the Foreign Minister returning from the argument in a state of complete exhaustion. Chiang certainly would have preferred a more emollient replacement for Stilwell. But he did not feel comfortable with TV., preferring the more biddable Kung. On one occasion, he had told Owen Lattimore, 'T. V. Soong has been so long in the United States that he thinks like an American \u2013 to my mind a not very intelligent American.'\n\nOn 17 October 1943, the overall Allied commander in the India-China theatre, Lord Louis Mountbatten, flew to Chungking for talks, ingratiating himself with Chiang by saying that he wanted to draw on his vast experience, and presenting Meiling with a vanity case from Cartier with her initials set in diamonds \u2013 the Chiangs reciprocated with gifts of jade seals. Mountbatten aided the sisters by saying he had no wish to have to find a replacement for Stilwell to head the Chinese in the Allied forces. Accompanying him, an American general in charge of military aid also argued Stilwell's case. Ailing and Meiling urged Vinegar Joe to tell the Generalissimo his only aim was the good of China, say he was ready to cooperate fully, and blame any mistakes on misunderstandings.\n\nAfter considerable hesitation, Stilwell went to see Chiang, who delivered a lecture on the proper relationship between a commander-in-chief and his chief of staff, and warned him not to fall victim to a superiority complex. 'I listened politely and Peanut said that under those conditions we could go on working harmoniously again,' he wrote. Chiang recorded in his diary: 'Stilwell has expressed his regrets and I am glad to retain his services and once again to put my confidence in him. This represents a turning point in Sino-American relations.'\n\nThe sisters had, Ailing remarked, been 'down to the last trench' and had put the family jewels on Stilwell. Later, she added that she had been obliged to choose between her own flesh and blood and the good of China \u2013 which was one way of putting it. As for himself, the American wrote: 'All through this mess I have felt as free as air \u2013 no regrets and no self-blame. A grand and glorious feeling.' The Generalissimo noted in his diary that he was 'ready to let bygones be bygones' and show 'magnanimity'.\n\nThe eldest Soong's ambitions were dashed, for all to see. 'TV. got a good swat,' Stilwell noted as he began to piece together what had been happening around him. Chen Cheng lost his command of Y Force. Though He Ymgqin survived, Chiang raked him over the coals for the slow pace of troop replacements. A family meeting held in December ended with another row over T.V.'s suggestion diat all China's economic agencies should be unified under his control \u2013 Chiang was said to have thrown a teacup at him. To protect themselves, Soong got his brother to move the headquarters of their transport company handling Lend-Lease supplies to New York.\n\nThe strain of having bested her brother made itself felt on Meiling. She was suffering from dysentery and influenza; John King Fairbank found her tired and 'her head shook a bit as old men's do' though she was trying hard to be a great lady. 'Conversation too cosmic to be real,' Fairbank wrote after their meeting.\n\nAn actress, with a lot of admirable qualities, great charm, quick intuition, intelligence; but underneath, emotions that are unhappy . . . bitterness about something, a penchant for acting a part which produces falsity . . . Occasionally a real laugh, with a round and relaxed face and higher-pitched voice, which seemed natural and at ease and made all the rest seem forced and tragic.\n\nShe told Fairbank that everybody was an actor in a great experiment whose denouement they did not know. But, with Wendell Willkie waiting for her in the USA, American acclaim, her brother sidelined, her protege, Stilwell, in the ascendant, Meiling had every reason to see herself as Madame Empress. As for her husband, he had allowed the family contenders to fight it out, and had emerged with his own power unscathed. Now he was ready to meet his international peers.\n\n* * *\n\n* Cowles does not mention an interpreter but there must have been one.\n\n* Missionary enthusiasm was reflected in the title of a book published in America in 1943 \u2013 _Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Christian Liberators of China_. It called them 'divine instruments for altering the fate of the sleeping giant which is China'.\n\n* Churchill wrote that FDR was 'somewhat vexed', but, 'in the regretted absence of dame Chiang Kai-shek, the president and I lunched alone in his room and made the best of things'. (Davies, p. 267)\n\n* The full version later appeared in an unauthorised edition critically annotated by an American Communist sympathiser, Philip Jaffe (see bibliography).\n\n# CHAPTER 23\n\n _'All Asia Is at Stake'_\n\nTHE ALLIED SUMMIT held in Cairo at the end of November 1943 consecrated China as one of the big four powers which were to shape the post-war world. A month earlier, it had been included in the Four Power Joint Declaration on the pursuit of the war with the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain. As well as the plenary sessions, Chiang and Meiling had private meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill in their villas by the pyramids. But Stalin, who had a non-aggression pact with Japan, chose not to attend, insisting on a separate subsequent meeting with the President and Prime Minister in Teheran. That underlined the way in which, however much the American President boosted its claims to great power status, the Nationalist regime was very much the junior partner of the four.\n\nThe contrast between the Generalissimo's attendance at Cairo and the state of his country was striking. The Japanese were still on the attack. Despite American supplies, the Nationalist armies remained weak. More than half a million troops, mainly from mercenary armies, had switched to the collaborationist regimes in Nanking and the north. Inflation roared ahead at 243 per cent in 1943 as the volume of banknotes printed doubled by the year, and the Japanese added to the economic chaos by flooding southern China with $100 billion in counterfeit money. Corruption and speculation soared. Military spending took 60 per cent of the budget. Taxes covered only an eighth of government revenue. Across the Nationalist areas, a quarter of the inhabitants were estimated to be refugees or homeless. Drought hit the south, killing more than a million people; yet troops sold food to the Japanese as starving people perished around them.\n\nThe Cairo summit was held at the heavily guarded Mena House Hotel which was turned into a miniature fortress with anti-aircraft guns and massed searchlights. Kai-shek and Meiling were the first participants to arrive, after a four-day air journey from Chungking with a twenty-strong delegation from which T. V. Soong was conspicuously absent. The Generalissimo kept to his routine, rising at 5 a.m., meditating, and working till 6 p.m. when he and his wife took a walk in the garden of their villa. The British general, Sir Alan Brooke, wrote in his diary that Chiang reminded him of 'a cross between a pine marten and a ferret. Evidently with no grasp of war in its larger aspect and determined to get the best of the bargain . . . a shrewd but small man . . . very successful at leading the Americans down the garden path.'\n\nMeiling accompanied her husband into the conference, and made her presence very much felt. Churchill found her 'most remarkable and charming'. Meeting her for the first time, he said he supposed she regarded him as a scoundrel and imperialist out to grab more colonies; to which she replied smoothly: 'Why are you so sure what I think of you?' For Brooke, she was 'a study in herself, a queer character in which sex and politics seemed to predominate, both being used indiscriminately, individually or unitedly to achieve her ends'.\n\nFor the opening session, Meiling wore a black satin dress with a yellow chrysanthemum pattern, slit up the side, a neat black jacket, big black tulle bows at the back of her head, a black veil over her face, light stockings and black shoes with large brass nails. At one point, she shifted position, showing what Brooke called 'one of the most shapely of legs' through the slit in her dress. 'This caused a rustle among those attending the conference and I even thought I heard a suppressed neigh coming from a group of some of the younger members,' the general added. Far away from the New Life provisions against cigarettes, she chain-smoked, using a long holder. Because of eye trouble, she wore what the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan described as 'some very strange kind of glasses' \u2013 she took the opportunity to visit a medical centre set up by the Americans and to see Churchill's doctor who told her she would only get better when the strain of her life relaxed.\n\nChiang's inability to speak English gave the bilingual Meiling her opportunity. Repeatedly, she butted into the discussions to correct the translators, leading to confusion as to who was talking for China. When the interpreter relayed points to Chiang, she interrupted to recast them to her husband. When he replied, she again broke in to say she needed to convey the full meaning of the Generalissimo's thoughts. Brooke felt she was 'the leading spirit of the two'.\n\nShe also joined a group photograph taken in the garden with her husband, Roosevelt and Churchill, thus giving China two of the four places in the record books. Madame sat on the left of the white-suited Prime Minister, smiling at him while he appeared to be chuckling at what she had just said. At the other end, Roosevelt seemed to be making a point to which Chiang smiled, despite his lack of English. The picture was widely circulated in China as a sign of the eminence of the Generalissimo and his wife.\n\nThe main issue at Cairo was to confirm the common front against Japan and discuss the launching of an offensive in Burma, though the Chinese took the opportunity to ask Roosevelt for more money and supplies. Chiang kept changing his mind, even about whether to attend sessions. Mountbatten wrote in his diary that the others had been 'driven absolutely mad' by his behaviour. Chinese generals were unable to reply to questions about their own forces. When they tried to insist on control over the use of American planes and supplies, George Marshall told them: 'Now let me get this straight. You are talking about your \"rights\" in this matter. I thought these were _American_ planes, and _American_ personnel, and _American_ materiel. Don't understand what you mean by saying we can't do thus and so.'\n\nFinally, agreement was reached to launch a Burma offensive in the spring of 1944, with the British staging a sea landing using American landing craft. The summit ended with a declaration that, after the defeat of Japan, China would regain Manchuria and the island of Taiwan, known in the West by the name of Formosa given to it by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Roosevelt offered Chiang a vague undertaking that America would train and equip ninety Chinese divisions, but without any timescale. Chiang disagreed with the President and Prime Minister about dismantling Japan's imperial system after the war. He advocated a softer approach, reflecting both his antagonism to Westerners telling Asians how to organise themselves, and his realisation that he might have to cut some deals with Tokyo if the war went badly for him.\n\nRoosevelt and Churchill then left to meet Stalin in Teheran, while Chiang and his wife flew back to Chungking, leaving Stilwell and the political adviser, John Paton Davies, behind to be briefed by Roosevelt on his return from the talks with the Soviet dictator. The good news was that Stalin agreed to declare war on Japan after Germany had been defeated. The bad news for China was that the Teheran meeting decided on a cross-Channel invasion of France plus landings from the Mediterranean. This meant all available landing craft would have to go to Europe. So the Burma operation would be postponed again. On the way back to their quarters, Davies recalled, Stilwell held his head in his hands. In his diary, the general noted that 'a brief experience with international politics confirms me in my preference for driving a garbage truck'.\n\nIn a broadcast fireside chat after getting back to Washington, Roosevelt lauded Chiang as an 'unconquerable man . . . of great vision [and] great courage'. The United States and China, he added, were closer together than ever before in deep friendship and unity of purpose. But the evolution of American strategy in the Pacific had major implications for the Generalissimo, as the focus switched from fighting Japan in, and from, China to an island-hopping advance that left his country on one side. With US forces unlikely to land in large numbers in China, the Americans began to ask themselves pertinent questions.\n\nWhy was Chiang keeping 200,000 troops tied down in northern China to watch the Red Armies which had some 50,000 men on the other side of the line? Why had the united front been allowed to wither after the New Fourth Army Incident three years earlier? Why were the US advisers in China not allowed to meet the Communists \u2013 had not Zhou Enlai remarked to John Paton Davies, half-jokingly, half-seriously, that he was ready to take Red Army troops to fight in Burma under Stilwell? American writers who went to the base of Yan'an generally painted a favourable picture, depicting Mao and his colleagues as agrarian reformers whose dedication, patriotism and honesty contrasted with the unreliability and venality in Nationalist ranks. Launching a debate which was to run through the following six years, the question arose of what attitude Washington should take if civil war broke out, and whether it could deal with Mao while remaining allied with Chiang.\n\nChinese suspicions of American intentions rose after a plot was discovered by the secret police chief, Dai Li, around the time of the Cairo summit. Several hundred younger officers were said to be involved. Motivated by anger at the corruption and inefficiency of the government and army, they would have kept Chiang as the ultimate leader, but would have got rid of General He, H. H. Kung, the Chen brothers and Dai Li. The rebels asked an American general involved in training troops for help. The reply was negative, but the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, took an interest. Returning from Cairo, Chiang ordered the plotters to be rounded up, and had sixteen executed.\n\nHe would have been even more concerned had he known of a conversation initiated by Roosevelt with Stilwell in Cairo. The President had asked how long Chiang could last. The general said a fresh Japanese offensive might topple him. In that case, FDR suggested, they should look for 'some other man or group of men to carry on'. On his return to China, Stilwell told his deputy that Roosevelt was 'fed up with Chiang and his tantrums and said so. In fact he told me in that Olympian manner of his: \"If you can't get along with Chiang and can't replace him, get rid of him once and for all. You know what I mean. Put in someone you can manage.'\" Another version had Roosevelt ordering contingency plans for the Chinese leader's assassination.\n\nThe Generalissimo's constant demands for money did not help matters, particularly since Chungking insisted on all transactions being done at the ludicrous old rate of 20 Chinese dollars to one unit of American currency \u2013 the black market level was many times that. Though his government still had nearly US$500 million in funds in the USA, Chiang called for a loan twice that size. When this was refused, he insisted that Washington cough up US$100 million in gold for the big airfield being built at Chengdu to house US Stratofortress bombers that were to attack Japan. Otherwise, he warned, China would be unable to offer any more assistance with the project in the form of hundreds of thousands of labourers who had been drafted in to build it. A compromise was reached after H. H. Kung had dropped remarks about Japan making 'some very good offers'. But the regime was getting a nasty reputation for financial blackmail, earning its leader the nickname of 'Cash My Cheque'.\n\nStill, for all the exasperation he would feel towards the Generalissimo, Roosevelt always ended up by regarding him as the figure round whom China might coalesce one day. To help the regime, he approved the establishment of a clandestine American outfit in China, independent of the OSS and of Stilwell. It was led by a naval officer, Milton Miles \u2013 known as 'Mary Miles' after a pre-war Broadway star. Under the innocent title of the Sino-American Cooperation Organisation (SACO), the group worked with Dai Li's secret police, supplying them with training and equipment which was meant to be used against the Japanese but was often directed against Chiang's domestic enemies. The operation would become a cause for controversy in later years, with Miles insisting that it was in the best patriotic interests of China and critics saying it supplied arms to a Gestapo. SACO operated from Dai Li's headquarters outside Chungking which also housed men from the OSS. Relations between the two American outfits deteriorated as the OSS became disenchanted with the Chinese police chief, seeing him as a hostile figure whose agents failed to carry out planned operations, spied on American officers, physically attacked them on occasion, used aid for their own purposes, and might even be passing information to the Japanese as the basis for post-war cooperation.\n\nThe tension between Dai Li and the OSS was symptomatic of increasingly frayed relations between Americans and Chinese. Chiang himself did not much like his ally, and distrusted American motives. His feelings went wider than the irritating Joseph Stilwell. They were exacerbated by what was meant to be a goodwill mission in the summer of 1944 by a Marine general who, however, got drunk at a banquet given by Dai Li and laid out home truths about China, including criticism of Meiling, that would have been relayed to the Generalissimo.\n\nAt the grassroots level, there was racism on both sides. Far away from the creature comforts of home, the Americans often saw the Chinese 'slopeys' as unwilling to fight and shot through with corruption \u2013 though the amounts of fuel that went missing from Chennault's bases made it clear that the local inhabitants were not the only ones diverting supplies to the black market.* Americans were shocked by the extent of the trading with the enemy which saw Japanese-made cars running on the streets of Chungking and medical aid sold by Nationalists to Japan. On the other hand, the drunkenness and demands for sex of Americans offended the Chinese. The US embassy reported that the 'better class of people' was taken aback by the rowdiness of the Westerners and the boorish manners and disreputable appearance of American fliers. Respectable Chinese women who walked in the streets of Chengdu with Americans found themselves being called prostitutes. An American officer and China expert, Oliver Caldwell, who had been born in die country and spoke the language fluently, wrote that he had never seen such racial prejudice from the Chinese as during the war, adding that it was frequently earned. After his experience in the OSS, Caldwell came to believe that the friction was being exploited and exacerbated by Nationalist figures like Dai Li who were anti-American and wanted to keep US influence to a minimum.\n\nHaving been rebuffed over Burma after Cairo, Chiang decided to go ahead on his own, as if to shame his Western allies. He put Stilwell in charge of the Chinese troops trained in India, with power to order them to take the offensive. Vinegar Joe wasted no time. On 21 December 1943, he led his 50,000 men into the north of Burma, armed with the vermilion seal of command given to him by Chiang.\n\nApart from reversing the defeat of 1942, Stilwell was intent on showing that properly trained, supplied and led Chinese troops could perform as well as anybody. The US enjoyed air superiority by now, and food and ammunition were dropped to the troops as they advanced. American commandos, known as Merrill's Marauders from the name of their leader, Frank Merrill, harassed the Japanese on the flanks.\n\nThe aim was to cross 200 miles of jungle, swamps and 6,000-foot mountains to take two strategic towns that would open the north-eastern route to China. The Y Force troops based in Yunnan would then move forward from the west to form a link. Leading the march over the terrible terrain, Stilwell slept in bamboo huts, tents and dugouts, washed with water in his helmet, ate C-rations from a mess kit and handed cigarettes to soldiers. For his sixty-first birthday in the jungle, Stilwell was presented with a cake inscribed 'Uncle Joe'.\n\nOn 7 March 1944, the first big objective was taken, a town called Maingkwan in a strategically important valley. Labour gangs and engineers moved in to work on a road and pipeline between India and China. But Chiang did not want to risk the Y Force, under its new commander, 'Hundred Victories' Wei Lihuang, a veteran of the Northern Expedition who had scored one of the rare Nationalist successes against the Communists in Jiangxi a dozen years earlier. Rather than seeing these troops go into the jungle in Burma, the Generalissimo preferred to keep them in China where they could contain the autonomist ambitions of the Yunnanese governor, Long Yun. Roosevelt sent a cable saying he found it 'inconceivable' that Y Force had not gone into action \u2013 Stilwell's deputy handed it to Meiling and she may not have passed it her husband since she said he might react badly. Vinegar Joe flew to Chungking to press the case for Wei's army to be unleashed, and his deputy, General Hearn, warned He Yingqin that, unless it moved, its supplies would be stopped. The order was given \u2013 though the War Minister, naturally, insisted that the decision was an entirely Chinese matter.\n\nGeneral Wei's men \u2013 with one of Stilwell's most trusted officers, Frank Dorn, as senior adviser \u2013 moved through precipitous river country in western Yunnan, aiming to push out Japanese who had occupied the area since 1942. Their target was the 5,000-foot deep Salween Gorge on the Burmese border, described by the Rockefeller Foundation as one of the three worst malaria areas in the world. Dorn reported that the officers were keen to fight. But they got bogged down in frontal battles and only advanced 20 miles in a month against fanatical resistance; in some cases, isolated Japanese units ate the bodies of their dead comrades. 'Generalship was atrocious, manpower was squandered. Ammunition wasted, and weapons misused and neglected,' the political officer, John Paton Davies, wrote later. The limits of Stilwell's training programme were cruelly exposed.\n\nIn Burma, meanwhile, the X Force advanced on its next objective, a town called Myitkyina on the narrow gauge railway north from Mandalay. Vinegar Joe was feeling his age. After one climb, he wrote of himself: 'All out of shape. No wind, no legs. Swore off smoking then and there. Felt like an old man when I staggered in.' He dreamed of breakfast at his home in California, and the 'fancy eats' he would enjoy when the war was over.\n\nFrank Merrill had a heart attack, and his commandos suffered badly from disease and casualties. But Stilwell ordered them to press on through the jungle towards the target, observing radio silence. On 17 May 1944, the attack on Myitkyina began with the seizure of the airfield. Then there was a bad setback when two Chinese units mistook one another for the enemy and opened fire, causing heavy losses. Merrill's men were in rebellious mood after all they had undergone, and developed a deep hatred for the unrelenting Stilwell. The Japanese swiftly reorganised the defence under the general who had taken Singapore from the British. 'Rain, rain, rain, mud, mud, mud, typhus, malaria, dysentery, exhaustion, rotting feet, body sores,' Stilwell wrote. 'A knockdown and drag-out affair.' Despite his superior numbers and control of the air, the battle lasted for two months.\n\nWhen Myitkyina finally fell, Stilwell was in Ceylon,* at the regional Allied headquarters where he had been summoned to fill in during Mountbatten's absence. He was promoted to be a four-star general, a rank he shared with only four other American officers. His view of Chiang was as harsh as ever. 'I believe the Peanut is going to pay dearly for being stupid and stubborn,' he wrote to his wife. 'The jackass had salvation offered to him free, and wouldn't take it. Now it's too late and he's screaming.' But the taking of Myitkyina and the progress of the Y Force, slow as it was, enabled the Chinese to link up as planned, and reopen the road for supplies to Yunnan.\n\nBy then, however, the Generalissimo had every reason to scream. In the spring of 1944, the Japanese launched their biggest single offensive of the war, Operation Ichigo. This was provoked primarily by the desire to choke off American bombing attacks on Japan from bases in eastern China \u2013 as Stilwell had foreseen, success in the air brought retaliation on the ground. But both he and Washington were taken completely by surprise, despite a warning from Chiang that Tokyo might try to exploit America's focus on Europe to 'liquidate the China affair'. Driving down to southern China, Ichigo had the second objective of creating a Japanese-controlled belt stretching from the north of Manchukuo to the border with Indo-China, and linking with the Imperial Army troops in Canton. Before the campaign began, the Japanese launched a propaganda blitz with pamphlets declaring that its enemy was not the Chinese but 'the white-faced demons'. Soldiers were told to stop ill-treating local people, and taught a marching song that proclaimed the kindness of their hearts.\n\nReaching its height as the Allies were staging the D-Day landings in Normandy, Ichigo involved half a million men, with anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 horses, 800 tanks and 12,000\u201315,000 vehicles. It began by sweeping across the Yellow River and into Henan province where Tang Enbo's troops crumbled \u2013 their commander was away at the time and his headquarters staff was surprised by the enemy while playing basketball. In three weeks, Chinese armies of 300,000 men were routed, with a kill ratio of forty Chinese to one Japanese. Three airbases and the key railway lines were soon taken. Chinese units fought one another for the spoils to be taken away. Peasants with crude weapons attacked the fleeing soldiers in revenge for their past exactions, in some cases burying them alive. Chiang refused to move troops blockading the Red Eighth Army to try to stop the enemy's advance. Typically, Chungking described the huge defeat in Henan as a 'defensive offensive'.\n\nIchigo next rolled south from Wuhan into Hunan, crossing the Miluo River where Chiang's Revolutionary Army had fought Wu Peifu eighteen years earlier. The Generalissimo called on the troops in the province, under the Cantonese Xue Yue, to fight to the death. The battleground was described by Teddy White and his colleague, Annalee Jacoby, as 'the most ravaged of all the belts of no man's land in all the country'. Chennault's planes flew non-stop attack missions. The Chinese had beaten off three attacks on the provincial capital of Changsha since 1938, but the Generalissimo refused to send arms to Xue, whom he suspected of being in league with southern autonomists. The spirit behind the previous victories evaporated. By advancing on a 120-mile front, the Japanese sheltered their central force from flanking movements that had vanquished them in the past.\n\nRaging arguments between Stilwell and Chennault disrupted the counter-offensive. The air force commander insisted that, with a little more supplies, his planes could halt the offensive. But Stilwell showed no interest in checking Ichigo which he viewed as proof of the fallacy of Chennault's theory that wars could be won in the air. His eyes were concentrated on Burma, not China. Relations between the two Americans plunged even further as Chennault came to believe that Vinegar Joe was taking a positive pleasure in seeing his predictions of doom come true. The airman wrote later that Stilwell's aides told him the general was deliberately scuttling positions in southern China as a gambit to force Chiang to grant him command of the Nationalist armies.\n\nWhile the Japanese moved south through areas that had provided the Nationalists with both grain supplies and army recruits, Chennault proposed throwing almost all the available planes into a massive attack on Wuhan to cut them off from their main base. According to Chennault's account, Stilwell stuffed the plan into his pocket and flew off to Burma from where he sent no response \u2013 the 'pocket veto' was one of his favourite ways of scuppering proposals he did not like.\n\nHowever, the general's overall strategy in China was being undermined by his patron in Washington. When he sent a message to Washington restating his belief that, to achieve ultimate victory, the Imperial Army would have to be engaged in a great battle in China, George Marshall replied that, if possible, Japan should be beaten without such a confrontation. In June, new B-29 Superfortress bombers flew from the huge base at Chengdu to stage their first raid on Japan. They were not part of Chennault's command, but the strategic tilt was clearly in the direction he had always backed, and diametrically opposed to Vinegar Joe's dream of a campaign headed by Chinese infantrymen. With Washington demonstrating its faith in air power and focusing on the advance across the Pacific, China was pushed into the wings of the war as far as the United States was concerned.\n\nThis may not have been immediately apparent when Roosevelt dispatched the most eminent American to visit China during the war. Vice-President Henry Wallace travelled first to the Soviet Union, and then flew to Chungking for a four-day stay. Having been much impressed by what he saw in Russia, he pushed Chiang to work with the Chinese Communists. In reply, the Generalissimo insisted that they were far from being 'agrarian democrats' as the Americans imagined, and asked Washington to display 'aloofness' to them. Why, he wondered, did die United States keep pressing him to come to terms with the Communists, rather than pressing them to come to terms with the Nationalists? But he did agree to let American military observers go to Mao's headquarters in Yan'an so long as they travelled under government auspices.\n\nKnown as the Dixie Mission, since it was operating in rebel territory like a Unionist delegation in Confederate lands, the initial party consisted of eight military members, plus John Service from Stilwell's political staff. As soon as he arrived, Service began to file glowing reports, saying that Mao had no intention of creating a Soviet state, favoured real democracy and wanted an alliance with Kuomintang liberals and other parties to bring about reform of the central government. A press party which followed was equally impressed. Missing from all these reports was any mention of the four-year Rectification Campaign which the fifty-year-old Communist leader had launched to ensure that he and his doctrine, alone, dominated \u2013 complete with confession of their errors by leading figures and a purge of 'enemy agents', many of them innocent of anything worse than having relatives who belonged to the Kuomintang.\n\nSeeing Wallace off on 24 June 1944, Chiang repeated his criticism of the Communists as untrustworthy, but said he would move towards democratic government if they fell into line with him. The left-leaning Vice-President, who had amazed his hosts at one point by insisting on pulling a rickshaw, did not believe him. Reporting to Roosevelt, he called the Generalissimo a 'short-term investment'. 'It is not believed that he has the intelligence or political strength to run post-war China,' Wallace added.\n\nMilitarily, China's performance was showing all its old weaknesses. As Operation Ichigo bore down on Changsha, troops under Xue Yue pulled out of the Hunan capital, hoping to be able to pummel the enemy from artillery positions in surrounding hills and attack them from the sides. But their guns were old and few. Unit commanders bickered. Collaborators moved easily through the hills to spy out Chinese positions, and carry out sabotage. Suspicious of Xue as a possible ally of opponents working to form a coalition to replace him, Chiang kept troops directly under his own control out of the fray, leaving the forces under the Cantonese general to bear the brunt of the fighting. Crossed wires and arguments with Chungking led to one army being trapped and destroyed. Chiang ordered the execution of several commanders. Then he told Xue to move west, towards Sichuan; instead, preferring to keep his independence, Xue headed south, and sent his crack Tenth Army to hold the city of Hengyang whose position made it the key to halting the enemy's advance.\n\nAt the end of June, the Japanese took the airbase at Hengyang, and enveloped the city. Elsewhere, the Nationalists would have melted away, but what Chennault called 'one of the truly great epics of the Sino-Japanese war' was about to unfold. As the air force commander could not refrain from remarking, Stilwell was far away conducting his campaign in Burma while the fate of southern China hung in the balance.\n\nTen thousand troops of the Tenth Army under the immediate command of a veteran of Taierzhuang barricaded themselves in pillboxes and in the grey brick houses of Hengyang. The Japanese vanguard was weakened by bombing and strafing raids, tiredness, food shortages and lack of ammunition as the American pilots of the Fourteenth Air Force halted their supply columns. Chennault put enemy losses at 210 planes, ninety of them caught on the ground in one raid. By coincidence, the cabinet in Tokyo fell, and the Imperial Army was being pushed off the strategic Pacific island of Saipan. According to Chennault, who had an obvious interest in picturing the summer of 1944 as a potential turning point, post-war interrogation of Japanese commanders showed that they were weighing the prospect of abandoning some positions in China to move forces to resist the US advance across the Pacific. However much truth there is in that, the battle of Hengyang stands as an indictment of the feuding and indecision that marked the war at the top \u2013 this time among the Americans as well as the Chinese.\n\nThe Japanese pulled back slightly in mid-July, setting off celebrations in Nationalist areas. Chiang still refused to send in supplies, but he did finally dispatch reinforcements to join forces preparing a flanking attack. The Chinese now had four times as many men as the Japanese in the Hengyang area. Though many suffered from malaria and subsisted on two bowls of rice a day, their spirit was 'absolutely amazing', an American intelligence officer reported. But, as so often, they were badly equipped, with, at best, bolt-operating rifles and few machine guns or heavy weapons. What Xue needed was weapons, not more sick men. 'It's not easy to fight with the guns I've got,' he remarked.\n\nAccompanying one unit to the front, Teddy White reported that only a third of the soldiers had a rifle. There were no vehicles, and just two antique French First World War artillery pieces. The soldiers were wiry, their yellow and brown uniforms threadbare, straw sandals on their feet and leaves on their heads for shade and camouflage. Before dawn one morning, they stormed the dug-in Japanese, but got nowhere. 'All that flesh and blood could do the Chinese soldiers were doing,' White wrote. 'They were walking up hills and dying in the sun but they had no support, no guns, no direction. They were doomed.'\n\nDespite issuing his usual constant instructions from Chungking, the Generalissimo never organised a major attack as the enemy sent in reinforcement with tanks, and set fire to the outskirts of the city. The air force was running short of fuel \u2013 at one point it was grounded for three days and was only saved from Japanese aerial attack by bad weather. Desperately short of food and supplies, the defenders sent urgent radio messages for help. But, when pressed by Chennault and his own deputy in Chungking, Vinegar Joe replied that to drop supplies would 'set a precedent for further demands that could not be met'. It was, he added, all a matter for Chiang. Receiving a request from Xue for 1,000 tons of supplies, he was reported to have replied: 'Let them stew.' Chennault's American lieutenants took the initiative by dropping some rice, medical supplies and ammunition from planes that swooped down to 300 feet over the flaming city. But it was nothing like what the Tenth Army required. A final request by Chennault for 500 tons of weapons to be parachuted to other Chinese troops to make an attack to relieve the city was turned down by Stilwell's headquarters as a 'waste of effort'.\n\nOn 7 August, the Tenth Army commander sent a radio message saying that the Japanese had entered the city. 'We are now in the midst of street fighting. Our men are all but wiped out,' it went on. 'This is my last message.' Hengyang fell the following day, after holding out for seven weeks. Three hundred of the defenders fought their way to join forces positioned only 2 miles east of the city. By then, Ichigo had destroyed half the good Central Army divisions engaged in Hunan. Stilwell may have been right in concluding that the Chinese would crumble sooner or later, but it is hard not to see Hengyang as a major missed opportunity.\n\nXue was one of the best Nationalist generals; the Tenth Army fought with great determination; the Japanese were exposed to encirclement and flanking attacks. If Stilwell had wanted to force a key battle, he could have put together his control of supplies and the air superiority of Chennault's planes to equip the troops in the city and those poised to attack the Japanese from the side and the rear. The Fourteenth Air Force could then have attacked the enemy's line stretching back to Wuhan. Instead, Vinegar Joe chose to focus on the campaign in Burma, and to do nothing to aid the Chinese soldiers for whom he expressed such undying admiration. Hengyang would probably have been lost in the end in any case: the Japanese could have brought overwhelming force to bear. But protracted resistance would have held them up, weakened them elsewhere by sucking in troops from other parts of China, given more time to prepare the defence of airbases further south and put a question mark over the whole Ichigo campaign at a time when Japan badly needed the men tied down in China to meet the expected American assault on its homeland.\n\nAfter a month's rest, die enemy resumed its southerly advance. Chiang ordered commanders who retreated without orders to be shot, but that did no good. The demoralisation of the previous years had eaten away at the fibre of his forces. The Nationalists had been so hard hit that he could put only 60,000\u201370,000 men into the field as the Japanese entered Guangxi province, housing the big American airbase and military training centre at Guilin. Chaos and panic spread, with the familiar hordes of refugees clinging to trains or fleeing on foot. Railway stations closed their ticket windows, and operated a black market at the back for those who could pay over the odds. Several hundred people were killed in Guilin station when a locomotive ploughed into a crowd on the tracks. Freight cars were fitted with several layers of steel to provide floors so that they could carry more paying passengers. Soldiers would charge steep prices to let people board trains which would steam a few miles; then they would stop; the passengers would be forced off at gunpoint, and the trains would go back for another load.\n\nThe Imperial Army's advance took place against the backdrop of political and military in-fighting in Chungking that brought the Generalissimo's running conflict with Joseph Stilwell to a head. On the one hand, the two men were confronted with the severing of China by the belt the Japanese established from the far north to the far south \u2013 and their inability to do anything to prevent it. On the other, they were engaged in a bitter, and unique, struggle for power. At the heart of their contest was the simple question of whether Chiang Kai-shek would continue to rule Nationalist China, or whether the country would follow the path laid out by Stilwell, Marshall and the War Department in Washington.\n\nOne key figure from the intrigues that had swirled round Stilwell the previous year was missing. The strains in the Generalissimo's relations with his wife had reached crisis point. Her behaviour on her American trip and then at Cairo had offended his notions of a wife's proper place. For all her social status and ability to charm English-speaking notables, it was he, not she, who was the ruler. His American adviser, Owen Lattimore, had observed what he termed 'a lack of total confidence between Chiang and Madame Chiang', and noted how the Generalissimo kept discussion of serious matters until after she had gone to bed.\n\nThe marriage was put under increased stress by her ambitions for the relationship with Wendell Willkie and by continuing rumours about Chiang conducting affairs \u2013 one official told Lattimore that his job was to supply young ladies to the Generalissimo. In the summer of 1944, an extraordinary tea party was held at the Chiang residence for foreigners, particularly journalists. 'Of late rumours about my private life have been in circulation,' the Nationalist leader told the guests. 'One says that I have secretly kept a woman last year. Another says that there has been an illicit relationship between myself and a nurse and the latter has given birth to a child.' He denied it all, and said the rumours jeopardised the future of the revolution given the importance of his moral example. Getting up from her chair, Meiling added: 'I wish to state that never for a moment did I stoop or demean myself to entertain doubts of his uprightness.'\n\nThe text of Chiang's statement was made generally available by the government information office. Naturally, the fact that he felt the need to speak publicly only fuelled the rumours. Meiling's illnesses were also causing her a major problem \u2013 she pulled down her stockings to show one American visitor the marks of a skin disease on her legs.\n\nIt was time for her to make another trip to the Western hemisphere. She hoped to score another triumph in the United States, but went first with her eldest sister to Brazil. There she rested while, according to a US National Security Agency document obtained by the author Sterling Seagrave for his book on the Soong Dynasty, Ailing had business talks with the Brazilian ruler about investing part of the family fortune in a safer place than China. Meiling then travelled to New York to be treated for nervous exhaustion for a month in the Harkness Pavillion. After that, she moved to the Kungs' house in Riverdale, outside the city.\n\nHer reception in the US was a far cry from that of the previous year. Hopes of a geopolitical partnership with Wendell Willkie collapsed when the Republican failed to gain the nomination to face Roosevelt, and then died suddenly in October 1944. Though Chungking still had its fervent supporters in die United States, its failure to live up to the bright vision she had painted on her first trip dulled her appeal. And the trip meant she was far from Chungking as Chiang and Stilwell came to grips.\n\nWhile Ichigo pushed forward, Roosevelt urged the Generalissimo to give Stilwell full responsibility and authority for coordination and direction of operations against the Japanese. 'I feel that the case of China is so desperate that if radical and properly applied remedies are not immediately effected, our common cause will suffer a serious setback,' the President had added. 'The future of all Asia is at stake along with the tremendous effort which America has expended in that region.'\n\nTo follow up that message, Roosevelt sent two emissaries to China \u2013 Patrick Hurley, a former Republican Secretary for War, and a businessman, Donald Nelson. While Nelson was to look at China's economic prospects, Hurley's brief was to get Chiang to commit himself to expanding Stilwell's authority, and to bring the Communists under the American's command with Lend-Lease supplies going to Yan'an. Stilwell had a visit from two Communist emissaries who said their forces would fight for him, but not under Chiang. Vinegar Joe replied that he hoped to visit Yan'an. Egged on by Marshall, Roosevelt said in one message to Chiang that it seemed 'unsound to refuse the aid of anyone who will kill Japanese'. When Stilwell wrote of moving troops from the north to fight Ichigo, he appears to have been thinking not only of the Nationalists blockading the Red Army there, but also of using the Communists.\n\nChiang had himself put on a show of reasonableness the previous spring by authorising talks with the Communists which lasted for all of four days, and made the gulf between the two sides evident. The Kuomintang team did no more than to re-state Chiang's position that the base areas and the Red Army must be put under his control. The Communists insisted on being recognised as a legal party, and on a 'democratic form of government' being introduced. The KMT said both would have to wait until the war ended. The Communists wanted to be authorised sixteen divisions \u2014 the Nationalists offered to let them keep ten. The Generalissimo saw no reason to give ground. The blockade of the main Red base area was proving quite effective, and the Japanese Three Alls campaign had hurt the Communists badly.\n\nThough he was concerned by Stilwell's desire to work with the Red Army and by Wallace's enthusiasm for the united front, it was over strategy in south-western China and then over Burma that Chiang found himself at loggerheads with the Americans in the early autumn of 1944. The Generalissimo wanted Guilin to be defended to the last. Flying south for an on-the-spot inspection, Stilwell concluded that it would be 'another rat trap'. Commenting on the calls for arms and supplies to be sent in, Vinegar Joe had another solution, writing in his diary: 'What they ought to do is to shoot the G-mo and Ho [He Yingqin] and the rest of the gang.' He ordered the Americans to pull out of Guilin \u2013 as they went, the prostitutes hung out signs: 'So long, buddies, and good luck.' Then Stilwell drew up what was called a 'flexible, manoeuvring strategy' for the Chinese defenders \u2013 in practice what this meant was abandoning the city. After some resistance, Chiang accepted this. But he recorded how affected he was by the loss.\n\nWhen Stilwell got back to Chungking, the Generalissimo told him that he wanted the US-trained YForce to return from Burma to defend Yunnan and its capital of Kunming. This threw the American into a fury; in his diary, he referred to Chiang as 'the crazy little bastard [with] that hickory nut he uses for a head . . . Usual cockeyed reasons and idiotic tactical and strategic conceptions. He is impossible.'\n\nStilwell promptly informed his boss, George Marshall, who was at an Anglo-American summit in Quebec and passed the news to Roosevelt and Churchill. From the Generalissimo's viewpoint, defending Kunming was much more important than linking up with Stilwell's troops in Burma. But, for the Allies, his attitude could only be a fresh irritation. The main point of the Burma operation had been to open up China's land supply line, and the Americans had trained Y Force for that purpose; now Chiang was proposing to withdraw them. Given the success of Operation Ichigo, they might be lost in Yunnan, and the Japanese would then be able to counterattack into Burma from China. The war was going well for the Allies in both Europe and the Pacific; only China and its ruler stood out as losers who went on causing complications.\n\nIn that context, Marshall had no trouble getting Roosevelt to put his name to a message to Chiang which must be unique as a communication from one Allied president to another. 'I have urged time and again in recent months that you take drastic action to resist the disaster which has been moving closer to China and to you,' it read. 'Now, when you have not yet placed General Stilwell in command of all forces in China, we are faced with the loss of a critical area . . . with possible catastrophic consequences.' Noting that the fall of the Guilin base threatened the Hump airborne supply route, Roosevelt called for 'drastic and immediate action' to avoid military disaster, and \u2013 contrary to Chiang's desire \u2013 for YForce to be reinforced in Burma. Stilwell must be given 'unrestricted command of all your forces', the message stipulated, adding a none-too-subtle reference to American aid.\n\nThe deeply antagonistic Claire Chennault later charged that Stilwell had been working since the summer for a final showdown, and had withheld supplies to engineer a situation where Chiang would have to cede command of his armies. In his memoirs, the airman wrote that, when he asked for help for the defenders at Hengyang, he had been told by the general's staff that Stilwell was working on a piece of 'real face losing' \u2013 presumably for the Generalissimo \u2013 and that help should be refused 'until things precipitate a bit more'.\n\nAn entry in the general's diary suggests that such thoughts were not far from his mind at the time. If the crisis in China was 'just sufficient to get rid of the Peanut without entirely wrecking the ship,' he wrote, 'it would be worth it.' He contrasted the Nationalist 'cesspool' and its 'corruption, neglect, chaos . . . hoarding, black market, trading with enemy' with 'Communist program . . . Reduce taxes, rents, interest. Raise production, and standard of living. Participate in government. Practice what they preach.' To reform Chiang's system, it must be 'torn to bits' and the Generalissimo had to go.\n\nStilwell's frame of mind ran counter to Patrick Hurley's attempt to craft an agreement that Chiang could accept. Later, as he swung to the far right and denounced Americans who had 'lost' China, Hurley maintained that he had been making good progress in talks with T. V. Soong. When Stilwell showed him the message from Roosevelt, he said he feared that the tough language would so annoy the Generalissimo that he would veto any accord. According to Claire Chennault, Stilwell agreed to delay pending the outcome of talks at Chiang's home which he did not attend. But, as these discussions were going on, the general arrived, and asked Hurley to step outside where he said he felt he could not hold back Roosevelt's message.\n\nThe two men went back inside. Stilwell accepted a cup of tea, and waited for a few minutes, savouring what was to follow. Then he announced that he had come to deliver a message from his President. Hurley interrupted to ask if there was a Chinese translation that Chiang would be able to read, rather than hearing its contents from an interpreter while Stilwell watched his reaction. The general said he did have a Chinese version.\n\n'I handed this bundle of paprika to the Peanut and then sank back with a sigh,' Stilwell recorded in his diary. 'The harpoon hit the little bugger right in the solar plexus, and went right through him. It was a clean hit, but beyond turning green and losing the power of speech, he did not bat an eye.' When he had finished reading, Chiang said simply, 'I understand,' and sat in silence, jiggling one foot. Then he put the lid on his cup. 'That gesture still means, I presume, that the party is over,' Stilwell said. After he had left, the Generalissimo exploded.\n\nGoing back across the river that night, the American noted the 'pretty sight . . . Lights all on in Chungking'. The next day, he wrote in his diary, 'The dope is that after I left the screaming began and lasted into the night.' In a letter to his wife, he wrote a few doggerel verses:\n\nI've waited long for vengeance \u2013  \nAt last I've had my chance.  \nI've looked the Peanut in the eye  \nAnd kicked him in the pants . . .  \nThe little bastard shivered,  \nAnd lost the power of speech.  \nHis face turned green and quivered  \nAs he struggled not to screech . . .  \nI know I've still to suffer,  \nAnd run a weary race,  \nBut oh! the blessed pleasure!  \nI've wrecked the Peanut's face.\n\nRoosevelt's message may have seemed the right thing to the straight-ahead Marshall, but it lacked the essential political follow-through. The Americans had no alternative to the Nationalist chief. They had rebuffed approaches from the anti-Chiang coalition formed by southern generals and the Democratic League. For all their interest in Yan'an, they were not ready to ally with the Communists and ditch the Nationalists. Unless the President was ready for America to take over effective control of China, or halt Lend-Lease supplies and abandon the KMT to its fate, his stern words merely amounted to bluff. In her biography of Stilwell, Barbara Tuchman suggests that the seriously ill Roosevelt was past caring about Chiang's dignity 'or else signed Marshall's message with little attention, which amounts to the same thing'. Defeating Germany, dealing with Stalin and beating Japan were what mattered \u2013 not a deeply irritating game in a fog-shrouded city few Americans had heard of. For all his doggerel jubilation, the President's message would seal Stilwell's fate.\n\nCalling the letter 'die greatest humiliation I have been subjected to in my life', Chiang noted that it was 'all too obvious that the United States intends to intervene in China's internal affairs'. Drawing a careful distinction between Vinegar Joe and the broader question of Sino-American cooperation, he told Hurley that the Chinese were 'tired of the insults which Stilwell has seen fit to heap upon them'. In his response to Roosevelt he said that, while he would accept an American as commander-in-chief, the general was unfitted. 'Almost from the moment of his arrival in China, he showed his disregard for the mutual confidence and respect which are essential to the successful collaboration of allied forces,' the Generalissimo added.\n\nAt the beginning of October, Chiang was emboldened by a message from H. H. Kung in Washington who quoted Roosevelt's close aide, Harry Hopkins as having said that the President would agree to replace Stilwell if the Generalissimo insisted. Hopkins later claimed he had been misquoted, but Stilwell wrote in his diary, 'FDR proceeds to cut my throat and throw me out'. At a meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, Chiang pounded the table as he called for the general's dismissal. To agree to Roosevelt's proposal, he added, would be to accept a new form of imperialism, making him no better than Wangjingwei and the collaborationists in Nanking. If the Americans withdrew support, the regime could survive in the four western provinces. News of his speech was leaked so that the American embassy could relay it to Washington as a sign of his intent.\n\nOn the night of 12 October, Hurley could not get to sleep, knowing he had to make a decision. At 2 a.m., he called his secretary and dictated the draft of a message to Roosevelt recommending Stilwell's recall. The general was 'a fine man', he said, 'but was incapable of understanding or cooperating with Chiang Kai-shek'. If he stayed, China might be lost. Before sending the cable in the morning, Hurley showed it to Stilwell who likened it to 'cutting my throat with a dull knife'. Suffering from a cold and sore throat, he still hoped that Marshall would prevail with the President.\n\nBut Roosevelt refused to send another sharp message drafted by the US Chief of Staff. Instead, he told Stilwell to ask Chiang for the names of three American generals he would accept as replacements. Knowing he was winning, the Generalissimo sent a cable to Washington saying that, as head of state and supreme commander, there could be no question of his right to demand the recall of an officer in whom he did not have confidence \u2013 enlarging the issue to one of his prerogatives as President and of China's sovereignty which Roosevelt could hardly gainsay. On 19 October the AXE FELL, as Stilwell put it in capital letters in his diary. Marshall sent a radio message recalling him. Albert Wedemeyer, a smooth operator who had spent time at the German staff college and then become a skilful desk general, would go to Chungking as the Generalissimo's Chief of Staff and commander of US forces. He was one of the generals Chiang had asked for.\n\nA minor Chinese official arrived at Stilwell's office with an offer from Chiang of a high Chinese decoration, the Special Cordon of the Blue Sky and White Sun. The American sent back an officer of equivalent rank with his refusal. He saw Qingling, who cried. At a last meeting, the Generalissimo insisted on how much he regretted what had happened, and put it down to their different make-ups. As Chiang accompanied him to the door, Stilwell quoted the Chinese motto, _Zuihou Shengli_ (Ultimate Victory). He wrote to his wife of 'hanging up my shovel and bidding farewell to as merry a nest of gangsters as you'll meet in a long day's march'. Chiang blamed the whole affair on Communist manipulation; eleven years later, he wrote that his heart still ached over his failure to have confided his knowledge of their schemes to the American.\n\nOne of the last Americans to see Vinegar Joe in Chungking recalled him saying: 'God help my successor.' Accompanied by Hurley and T. V. Soong, he went to the airstrip on the sandbank in the Yangtze. At the last moment, General He drove up and stepped onto the tarmac to salute. Stilwell returned the gesture, and then asked, 'What are we waiting for?' His desire to leave and his self-absorption were so strong that he could not stay in Chungking for just one day to brief Wedemeyer. Instead, he flew to Kunming, where he had dinner and attended an American touring variety show. Then he went to Karachi \u2013 'felt like hell', he recorded. The next day he set off for the United States, where he was told to say nothing about what had happened; 'Not a word \u2013 this is dynamite,' Marshall advised. But the story came out through the _New York Times_ whose correspondent Stilwell had called in before flying home.\n\nWhen the road to China from India through Burma was opened the following year, Chiang decided to name it the 'Stilwell Road' but Vinegar Joe was not invited back for the occasion.* Instead, he was named to command the US Tenth Army in Okinawa \u2013 the Japanese surrender came before he could see action. When he wanted to visit friends in northern China, the Generalissimo refused to give authorisation. Owen Lattimore, who called on him in Washington, recorded Stilwell as saying that he would be proud to shoulder a rifle in the Red Army. He died in his sleep on 12 October 1946; stomach cancer had affected his liver. The Generalissimo attended a memorial service in Nanking, and extended posthumous honours.\n\nFor Chiang loyalists and the right-wing China Lobby in the United States, Stilwell helped to open the door to Communism. The more generally accepted view portrayed him as an authentic American hero, a fearless soldier whose drive to introduce vitally needed reforms had been baulked by a reactionary, corrupt regime. Both verdicts are flawed. Had he been able to achieve what he wanted, Vinegar Joe would have left the Nationalists in far better shape to fight the impending civil war. While he was in Chungking, Yan'an got no American supplies. Their rise to power had nothing to do with him.\n\nAs to his heroic status, there is no denying his courage and awareness of what was wrong in China. The American media and government adroitly spun the Stilwell story after his return \u2013 Roosevelt personally authorised the publication of the account the general had given to the _New York Times_ which heaped all the blame on Chiang and served an obvious political purpose for the President in his 1944 re-election campaign. Teddy White of _Time_ then engineered the canonisation of Vinegar Joe with the publication of his diaries in a process that culminated in Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography published in 1970. But Stilwell's record in the field hardly marked him out as a great commander while, in military politics, he failed to do the job he had been sent to perform, and could not push through the wider changes he proposed to Chiang. His insistence on being at the jungle front in 1944 can be seen as a massive displacement exercise to escape from his main task, just as walking out from Burma to India in 1942 was an attempt to prove himself through individual effort, regardless of the consequences for the army he was meant to be leading. He exhausted his President's patience, and his honesty and principles too often appeared as priggish self-satisfaction. In his alliance with Ailing and Meiling, he blocked the best hopes of reform in China in 1943, strengthening, albeit inadvertently, forces he wished to overturn. He then failed to appreciate the impact of Operation Ichigo, and refused to help the Chinese when they needed it most.\n\nFundamentally, what Stilwell wanted to achieve and the way he wanted to achieve it were impossible, requiring the ditching of Chiang's regime and the imposition of a neocolonialism that would have made a mockery of the declared American commitment to democracy and national freedom. Vinegar Joe was the wrong man at the wrong time, and his Peanut emerged once more as the immediate winner, ensuring that America was tied even more closely to his cause, but with an accumulated backlog of bad feeling which could only colour post-war relations.\n\nWhile the last act of the Stilwell drama was being played out, Operation Ichigo rolled on, taking the Guangxi capital of Nanning. But provincial forces under General Bai put up a good enough defence to dissuade the Japanese from going any further, and they abandoned the city after setting it on fire. Other enemy units turned north towards Sichuan and Chungking, moving to a mountain town called Dushan where they halted. As if forewarned, the defenders did not bother to dig into a stockpile of 50,000 tons of military supplies there. Instead, Americans moved in to blow it up to prevent it falling into enemy hands.\n\nThere were good reasons for the Japanese to stop. Ahead were the heights of Sichuan. Their lines were much extended. They did not have winter uniforms. The aim of Ichigo had been to strike to the south-west, not to become involved in a war in the mountains. But it was intriguing that Dushan had been mentioned six months earlier in a rumour that Chiang had reached a secret agreement with the enemy. This was said to provide for a rectangular safe zone round Chungking; Dushan lay on its southern limit. In return for the line not being crossed, it was said, the Generalissimo would wind down resistance elsewhere, and promised to protect Japanese and collaborators after the war. When an American raised the matter with him, the Generalissimo neither denied nor confirmed it \u2013 'his spontaneous reaction was a dry cackle', his visitor recorded.\n\nChiang had indulged in several flirtations with the enemy in the past, and the lines of communication with both Tokyo and the collaborationist regime in Nanking had never been closed down. Some Americans suspected that Dai Li was passing information to the enemy in return for an assurance of their help in handing over occupied areas to the Nationalists when the war ended; on the only occasion the police chiefs agents were allowed to attend a briefing before a bombing raid on Japan, fighters were waiting to meet the US planes. A former Kuomintang official who had gone to work with the collaborationists in Nanking tried to produce an agreement in 1944\u201345,with some backing from Tokyo. This came to nothing \u2013 given the American advance in the Pacific, Chiang had no interest in a formal pact. But his stance on post-war arrangements in Japan at the Cairo conference certainly indicated that he was ready to be understanding towards the enemy of the skin. By conserving his remaining forces and their American supplies, he would be in a stronger position for the coming confrontation with Mao. Chinese collaborators would be useful allies in that struggle \u2013 in all but the most flagrant cases, their past behaviour could be overlooked in the interests of bolstering the Nationalist position in occupied areas. A later Communist historian even claimed that Chiang had ordered Nationalist troops to defect to puppet administrations so that they could be preserved to fight later against the Red Army.\n\nThe Generalissimo certainly needed to conserve strength for the future. Alone of the Allies, Nationalist China was ending the Second World War weaker militarily than ever. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been lost to Ichigo. The regime's already thin industrial base was weakened when the enemy overran areas to which factories had moved in the late 1930s. Tax revenue fell even further. National morale and the attachment felt by civilians to the government had plummeted.\n\nTo try to put new life into the administration, President Chiang called in the brother-in-law he had banished the previous year. Like a defeated warlord, T. V. Soong could now be brought back into the tent, his loss of face and his anxiety to ingratiate himself acting as a brake on the threat he posed. While TV. cut an impressive figure in Washington and London, his position in China was much weaker than it appeared to those impressed by his Westernised mind and brainpower. He might be the man best equipped to run the country, but his support came from a thin layer of businessmen and officials. His lack of army experience meant he was incapable of leading an essentially military state. He had no power base in the KMT party. He was, in the words of the diplomat, John Paton Davies, against whom he intrigued, 'acute rather than wise, tricky rather than deft, arrogant rather than poised, alien rather than persuasively different'. The only way he could regain his previous political eminence was through the exercise of his brother-in-law's favour.\n\nUnlike the family struggle of the previous year, TV. did not have to worry about his sisters. Far away in the United States, Meiling was unable to intervene, and the Kungs' status had been dented by a series of allegations of graft, diverting American loan funds and taking commissions on the purchase of planes. Their reputation sank further when reports spread of the crash-landing of an aircraft carrying the trousseau for the New York wedding of their elder daughter, Rosamund \u2013 the finery had been sewn by the Women's Work Department set up by Meiling to make clothes for soldiers. The Kungs' profiteering was common knowledge; after more than seven years of war and privation, they had become the unacceptable face of the regime. Despite censorship, a newspaper was able to comment that the cost of flying Rosamund's trousseau to America would have fed thousands of refugees, and that the labour at the Women's Work Department could have made uniforms for a regiment. As for the price of the wedding, that would have endowed a university.\n\nAppointed Acting President of the Executive Yuan \u2013 prime minister to Chiang's president \u2013 TV. immediately shook things up. Though suffering from recurrent stomach trouble, he worked late into the night, insisting on fast and more effective decision-taking. H. H. Rung was replaced as Finance Minister by a former Mayor of Shanghai reputed to be efficient and honest. The reform-minded Chen Cheng became War Minister, though Chiang kept General He as Chinese Chief of Staff. The new American commander, Wedemeyer, set to work to improve the army, using diplomacy to achieve results \u2013 though fans of Stilwell would dismiss him as a general more adept at playing politics than at fighting.\n\nIn the face of a massive Japanese offensive, military, political and economic weakness, and a presidential-level battle with the United States, Chiang had survived once again. But, as always since his rise to power in Canton two decades earlier, survival was never more than a temporary achievement. As the Imperial Army started to wind down Operation Ichigo and the Americans advanced across the Philippine Sea towards Japan, it was time to focus on the post-war shape of the country the Generalissimo aspired finally to unite under his rule as one of the Big Four powers of the world.\n\n* * *\n\n* Barbara Tuchman, in her book on Stilwell, cites an estimated take of US$4 million by American personnel on the black market up to the end of 1944.\n\n* Now Sri Lanka.\n\n* The road was abandoned in October 1945. In 2002, north Indian states pressed for it to be reopened to boost trade, but the government rejected the idea on security grounds. ( _Mizzima News_ , Dec. 5, 2002)\n\n# PART V\n\nTHE LONG GOODBYE\n\nYan'an, Shaanxi Province, November 1944\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\n\nSun Moon Lake, Taiwan, December 1949\n\n# CHAPTER 24\n\n _Red Leaves_\n\nTHREE WEEKS AFTER Joseph Stilwell was recalled, the man who had drawn the blunt knife across his throat flew over the seemingly endless hills of Shaanxi province towards a settlement built into the caves of the loess soil. Normally, the weekly US plane to the Dixie Mission at Communist headquarters in Yan'an carried only its crew and supplies. On 7 November 1944, it bore an improbable figure bent on bringing unity to China.\n\nTall, with a curling moustache and a carefully combed mane of white hair, Patrick Hurley had been born in a log cabin in Oklahoma. He followed a classic rags-to-riches career, working in coal mines and as a cowboy before making money and connections as a lawyer. In the army in the First World War, he put members of the Choctaw tribe at either end of telephone lines to baffle German code-breakers. As a politician, he rose to be Secretary of War under President Herbert Hoover, acquiring the rank of general, a title by which he liked to be addressed. He wore banks of medals when he put on his uniform, and used the royal 'we'. 'His handsome aquiline head suggested a Roman bust capriciously pasted up with butterflies of a huge bow tie, pinch-nose glasses, curly white moustache and coiffure,' the American information officer, Graham Peck, wrote.\n\nRoosevelt had enrolled Hurley as a tame Republican. Since he had nothing to do, the President sent him on the mission to back up Stilwell which ended up with die envoy taking the opposite tack. On the way to Chungking, Hurley had called at Moscow for a visit during which the Foreign Minister, Molotov, assured him that Mao and his comrades were not real Communists, and that the Soviet government was not associated with them \u2013 similarly, Stalin told the US ambassador in Moscow that Mao and his colleagues were just 'margarine Communists'. Flattered by information from such a high source, Hurley took it as his guiding light, alongside his belief that Chiang could be committed to introducing democracy.\n\nWhen the crotchety career diplomat Clarence Gauss retired in the autumn of 1944, Hurley was appointed to succeed him as American ambassador to China. He ordered a new Cadillac, and had the ambassadorial residence redecorated. He believed that, in return for the removal of Stilwell, Chiang had agreed to try to reach an agreement with the Communists, and he saw a chance for glory in bringing together the Generalissimo and Mao.\n\nAmerican policy towards China was in a mess, backing Chiang but also trying to get him to collaborate with his domestic enemy in the cause of national unity. Washington blew hot and cold, pressing the Generalissimo to make reforms but recalling Stilwell. As Germany's defeat loomed, attention was focused on Europe, and the advance towards Japan dominated thinking about the Pacific. Formulation of political policy in China was left much to Patrick Hurley, who was manifesdy as far out of his depth as he was convinced of his ability to work miracles. He knew nothing of the country, pronounced Mao Zedong's name as Moose Dung, and called Chiang 'Mr Shek'. The American adviser, Arthur Young, saw 'a senile old man who couldn't keep his mind on any subject'. An American journalist who visited the ambassador for lunch recalled that they spent three hours drinking before sitting down to eat. When he invited die American information officer, Graham Peck, to dinner, Hurley forgot who his guest was. At a banquet for prominent Chinese figures, he toasted the journalist, Annalee Jacoby, as 'the most important person in the world, my tall, blonde goddess of a bride', rambling on about their children, the joy she had given him and their wedding night. Far from being a blonde goddess, Jacoby was a short brunette \u2013 and was certainly not Mrs Hurley.\n\nThe ambassador had an unquenchable belief in his own abilities which helped the Generalissimo to play him like a fish, letting out enough line to encourage him to get the hook ever more deeply embedded in his jaws as he sought his rendezvous with history. Authorising Hurley's trip to Yan'an was a risk since it implied a degree of recognition, but, having got rid of Stilwell, Chiang was ready to show a conciliatory face. The Generalissimo could calculate that the Good Ole Boy from Oklahoma would end up by falling out with the Communist ideologues. To keep his finger on the pulse of the mission, however, he ensured that he conferred with Hurley before the envoy set out, so that the proposals the ambassador took with him expressed Chiang's views.\n\nZhou Enlai and the Dixie Mission chief, Colonel David Barrett, a stout China veteran, were at the airfield waiting for the supply plane. When the elegantly uniformed ambassador walked down the steps, Zhou hurried off to summon Mao. The Communist leader raced to the airfield in a Chevrolet ambulance he used for transport \u2013 it had been donated by the New York Chinese Laundrymen's National Salvation Association, as a sign on its side proclaimed. As Mao, Zhou and the army commander, Zhu De, came from their vehicle to meet him, Hurley yelled his favourite greeting, an American Indian war cry of 'Yahoo!' He and Barrett got into the ambulance to ride back to Yan'an with Mao, rattling over the potholes and bumps in the road in a cloud of dust.\n\nWith the colonel, a fluent Chinese speaker, acting as interpreter, the ambassador from Oklahoma and the revolutionary from Hunan exchanged stories about their rural boyhoods. Barrett recalled that interpretation was not easy 'due to the saltiness of the General's remarks, and the unusual language in which he expressed himself. His discourse, in addition, was by no means connected by any readily discernible pattern of thought'. That night, Hurley attended a huge banquet for the anniversary of the Russian revolution, disrupting the proceedings with yells of 'Yahoo!'\n\nThe main Communist base region had evolved from the original haven round Yan'an into an area of some 135,000 square miles which was run without reference to the Nationalists. Its two main military units \u2013 the Eighth Route Army and the reconstituted Fourth Army \u2013 numbered half a million men plus auxiliaries: a massive recruiting drive would double the size of the armies by the following spring. In addition, the Communist militias were 2 million strong. Chiang was as much the enemy as the Japanese. Slogans denouncing the Kuomintang decorated walls while Mao tightened his grip on power and prepared for the post-war struggle, hoping the Americans would need the Communists to fight the Japanese and would provide weapons and political support in return.\n\nLike the Long March, the cave town of Yan'an, with a pagoda as its main landmark, became a sacred reference point as the place where the ideology and practices of Maoism were finally forged. Since history belongs to the winners, the Communists were depicted as the only true resisters to the Japanese as they rallied China's peasants to a nationalist revival and met the rigours of wartime by a self-denying production campaign. Under the quasi-divine leadership of the Great Helmsman, the eventual victory of the revolution was seen as an inevitable process which, whatever obstacles it encountered, could be subject to no second-guessing while it drew on the legacy of resistance as a badge of legitimacy.\n\nThe Communist hosts had gone out of their way to make a favourable impression on the Dixie Mission. The Americans were offered political discussions, reports of resistance to the Japanese and tours of model rural developments. The dedicated, clean-living Communists appeared eminently reasonable, removing anti-Kuomintang slogans in areas the visitors toured so as to avoid raising doubts about their allegiance to the united front. Puffing on Camel cigarettes in his armchair, Mao showed his emollient face; if agreement could be reached, he declared, Chiang would 'naturally' continue as President, and die Communists would not overthrow die Kuomintang or confiscate land. There were dances and long nights fuelled by Haig & Haig and Johnny Walker flown in by the Americans.\n\nThe political adviser, John Service, compared die progressive ways of Yan'an with the 'enthronement of reaction' in Chungking, and called for an end to Washington's unilateral support for the Generalissimo. In talks with the political officer, John Paton Davies, Mao undertook to collaborate fully if US forces landed in eastern China, provided the force was big enough and brought the Communists supplies. Davies forecast that 'Chiang's feudal China cannot long coexist alongside a modern dynamic popular government in north China'.\n\nThe reality which the Americans missed was noted by the contemporary diaries of a Soviet emissary, Petr Parfenovich Vladimirov. Unlike Western sympathisers whose writings dominate non-Chinese accounts of the time, Vladimirov was an unquestioning Communist, though, as a patriot, he was alienated by what he saw as Mao's 'organic dislike' of the Soviet Union. This colours his broader ideological verdicts, but, as reportage of what was going on in Yan'an, his diaries leave no doubt about the need for serious revision of the picture propagated after the Communist victory. This cannot be taken as a vindication of Chiang's regime vis-a-vis his major foe, but it does show that, as so often during the Generalissimo's life, the black-and-white picture of events which became conventional wisdom after his defeat in 1949 should be shaded in grey.*\n\nIn 1940\u201341, the failure of the Hundred Regiments Offensive and the attack on the New Fourth Army had cost the Communists dear. The Japanese Three Alls campaign had dealt a substantial blow to the base. As a result, Vladimirov noted in 1942, the Red Armies 'have long been abstaining from both active and passive action against the aggressors'. Another Russian returning from a visit along several hundred miles of the front line reported seeing no Communist troops \u2013 when he asked about this, he was told they were hidden by camouflage. In January 1943, Vladimirov wrote that the Communist armies had been 'strictly ordered not to undertake any vigorous operations or actions against the Japanese . . . down to retreating under an attack and seeking, if possible, a truce'. Soldiers in one unit of the Eighth Route Army told him they had been instructed not to touch the enemy for fear of Japanese reinforcements being brought in. Like Chiang's space for time strategy, and knowing he could not liquidate the invaders, Mao was ready to cede ground to preserve the size of his forces for the reckoning to come.\n\nAn American mission that went to Hebei province, south of Beijing, in the spring of 1945 bore this out, reporting that the amount of fighting done by the Eighth Route Army there had been 'grossly exaggerated'. Vladimirov reckoned that 'the years of inactivity have had a degrading influence on the armed forces of the CCP. Discipline is slack and cases of desertion have become more frequent. The men neglect their weapons. Training in the units and in staffs is not organised. Cooperation between the units is not organised.'\n\nIn some areas, an American team noted, Communists had non-aggression understandings with collaborationist forces, which they infiltrated with the aim of winning them over when the war ended. Vladimirov saw a telegram from a Communist army making it 'absolutely clear that there is a permanent contact between the Communist Party leadership and the Supreme Command of the Japanese Expeditionary Force'. This contact 'had been established long ago under great secrecy'. A liaison officer appointed by Mao was attached to the Japanese general staff in Nanking, moving freely between the enemy command and the Fourth Route Army. Other sources make plain that there were also contacts in Shanghai between leaders of the Communist underground and the collaborationist authorities. In some of the areas where the Red Armies faced Nationalists or Japanese troops, trade went across the lines with the Communists buying arms and supplies from their enemies in return for exports of salt, wool and cattle.\n\nThe long-accepted account of the economic survival of the base area puts this down to a huge productive effort fuelled by devotion and self-sacrifice. The areas under Communist control were mostly poor and short of natural resources. On one trip out of Yan'an, Vladimirov was astounded by the poverty of peasants who offered their sisters or daughters for a tiny portion of rice. Disease was rife. Local commanders imposed their own taxes.\n\nIn the hard era of 1942\u201343, food prices rose steeply and quotas of produce which peasants were required to deliver to the Communists were increased. Inflation rose. Following the example of H. H. Kung, the printing presses were used to provide the regime with more cash, which devalued the base area currency. A talk with a member of the leadership left Vladimirov in no doubt about the critical nature of the economic and financial situation. The campaign to boost production and impose frugality was not enough. Another means of finance was needed to sustain the regime economically and give it funds to buy military equipment.\n\nDuring the Long March, the Communists had seized opium and repressed drug consumption. Seven years later, to cope with the severe economic pressure, the Politburo decided to get into the narcotics trade while outlawing its use in the base area. By 1942, according to research by the historian Chen Yung-fa, opium had become the most important financial resource. An official remarked to Vladimirov that selling salt to Nationalist areas only produced 'an undernourished purse'. 'Now,' he went on, 'we send along an undernourished bag of opium and bring back a caravan loaded with money.'\n\nIn September 1943, the Russian wrote that it was impossible to conceal the scale of opium production, though soldiers were sent to tear up poppies along roads used by American visitors. A Communist cadre explained to the Comintern agent that, while Mao realised that it was not good to be in the drug business, 'opium was to play a vanguard, revolutionary role and it would be erroneous to ignore it'.\n\nThe records in Yan'an referred to narcotics as 'foreign trade', 'special product' and 'soap'. The enterprise was known as the 'Local Product Company'. The opium was bought by itinerant merchants or taken out by the Red Army. Chen Yung-fa's study shows that, in 1943, nearly a million boxes of opium were exported, raising $2 billion. By the following year, the revenue had gone up ten times, and profits accounted for up to 40 per cent of the administration's total revenue.\n\nAs well as being unaware of the drug supply side of Yan'an, the Dixie Mission also remained ignorant of the way in which Mao was consolidating his dictatorship with a mixture of force, fear, manipulation and personal magnetism. He stamped on colleagues suspected of allegiances to the Soviet Union and the Comintern. He saw off his Moscow-trained one-time rival, Wang Ming, who was in any case seriously ill \u2013 there were reports that the political police chief had arranged to feed him poisonous medicine. In a rehearsal for future purges and mass mobilisations, campaigns were launched to ensure loyalty and to uncover Kuomintang spies. Hundreds of agents, real or supposed, paraded to admit their guilt. In the decade after the Long March, Yan'an developed into a hermetically sealed, paranoiac breeding ground for a ruler who harked back to the most authoritarian of emperors and cast aside the dreams of moderate progress which Nanking had spawned but had been unable to sustain.\n\nAt the opening day of talks with Hurley, Mao blamed China's problems on the Kuomintang. Unsurprisingly, the Communists rejected the proposals Chiang had agreed with the ambassador before he left Chungking; instead, they called for a coalition government, a joint military council, American supplies for their army, and the freeing of political prisoners, including the Young Marshal. Hurley, who was suffering from a cold, said this seemed fair, but asked to consider their proposals further. On his third day in Yan'an, he came back with a document that added promises of democracy and liberty to the Communist draft. 'The Chinese traditionally do not much show their feelings in their faces, but it was evident from their expressions that they were greatly pleased,' Colonel Barrett recalled. Mao and Hurley each signed a copy, the ambassador as 'Personal Representative of the President of the United States'.\n\nWhen he got back to Chungking, Hurley was told that Chiang was ill, and could not receive him. But T. V. Soong warned the ambassador he had been 'sold a bill of goods by the Communists', and said the government would never grant what Mao had asked for. Chiang took ten days to react. Then he issued hard-line proposals calling for Chungking to take control of Communist troops.\n\nMao dismissed this as 'tantamount to complete surrender'. To Hurley's observation that the Communists could get a foot in the door, he replied: 'A foot in the door means nothing if the hands are tied behind the back.' He also used the ultimately insulting Chinese epithet of 'a turtle's egg' for the Generalissimo, and raised the temperature by threatening to publish the document Hurley had signed and, in part, co-written. That would expose him as an envoy who had put his name to an agreement with the Communists on behalf of his President without even having shown it to America's ally in Chungking. When Barrett told him of Mao's threat, the ambassador seemed about to burst a blood vessel. 'The motherfucker, he tricked meh,'John Paton Davies records him as having said. Falling back on an old Oklahoma saying, Hurley added: 'Why do leaves turn red in the fall? Because they were so green in the spring.' After a message from the ambassador, the Communists relented, and agreed not to publish the document \u2013 for the time being.\n\nWhat Hurley did not grasp was the reluctance of either Chiang or Mao to enter into an agreement that would weaken them when their struggle for control of China resumed. The Communist leader must have known that the Generalissimo would reject the conditions he laid down to Hurley, let alone the ambassador's subsequent additions. In an eight-hour conversation with the Russian, Vladimirov, Mao described Chiang as 'a dictator, a butcher, and a half-wit' and made it plain that the Americans were naive in striving for concessions which neither side intended to make. But, equally, neither Mao nor Chiang wished to be seen by the Americans as responsible for the failure of the Hurley initiative. Both hankered too much after US supplies and support for that.\n\nUnable to accept that he was trying an impossible squaring of the circle, Hurley blamed T. V. Soong for turning Chiang against the proposals he had signed in Yan'an. His composure was further shaken when Chiang arranged a briefing for him at the start of 1945 by the secret police chief, Dai Li, and his American confederate, 'Mary' Miles, of the undercover SACO group. The subject was a mission to Yan'an by Lieutenant Colonel William Bird of the American OSS agency which Hurley had not been told about.\n\nBird, accompanied by David Barrett of the Dixie team, had laid out sensational plans for cooperation between the Americans and the Communists. Up to 5,000 US airborne troops would use the base area as the launching pad for sabotage against the Japanese while a division would be moved in from Europe to work with the Red Army, possibly leading to invasion of Japan from Shandong. The OSS would supply training teams, equip up to 25,000 guerrillas, and bring in at least 100,000 Woolworth one-shot pistols (one-shot so that they could not be kept and used against the Nationalists). In return, Communist troops and militia would be deployed when the Americans wanted. The OSS suggestions were evidently to the liking of the hosts \u2013 they presented Bird with a fine sword taken from ajapanese officer.\n\nThough they kept the ambassador in the dark, the American officers had outlined the proposals to the War Minister, Chen Cheng, and to T. V. Soong, asking them not to tell Chiang. They should have known that no Chinese official was going to keep such an explosive plan from the Generalissimo, who decided to block it by arranging the briefing, which was bound to enrage Hurley. Dai and Miles had a motivation of their own \u2013 they both wanted to do down the OSS which the police chief saw as an opponent and the American viewed as a rival. TV. attended the meeting, and took the opportunity to stir the pot. The ambassador concluded that Barrett and Bird had offered the Communists recognition, undermining his own efforts. He sent Roosevelt a message to condemn those involved. The President sided with him, and considered apologising to Chiang. The OSS initiative died a swift death.\n\nThe crisis produced a fissure in American ranks that could only strengthen Chiang's position. Hurley accused Stilwell's successor, Albert Wedemeyer, of harbouring staff who were conspiring against him. Relations were further strained by a Communist request for an American loan and a proposal from Mao and Zhou that they should go to Washington on an unofficial basis to explain the situation in China; they hoped to be invited to the White House. Both notions were channelled through Wedemeyer, not Hurley. When the general told the ambassador, he grew even more irate. (There was no official American reaction to the idea.)\n\nThe tension had domestic ramifications since Wedemeyer was staying in the envoy's house. Annalee Jacoby recalled that they had 'loud, noisy quarrels', and that the general told the War Department in Washington about the condition of the ambassador's mind. For several days, Hurley refused to talk to his lodger, which was particularly awkward at the meals they shared. Then, the ambassador came into the soldier's room one night while he was reading in bed. 'He sat on the edge on my bed, clasped my right hand in both of his and said that he was sorry for his behaviour towards me,' Wedemeyer recalled.\n\nHurley brought in two press attaches to burnish his image while the Chungking censors excised any criticism of him from the dispatches of American correspondents. He ejected the political advisers, including John Paton Davies. Still, his remaining staff did not stint their criticism of the regime; when Hurley went on a visit to Washington, they sent a joint message to the State Department in his absence saying that unqualified support of the Generalissimo would accelerate the outbreak of civil war, and that the United States should cooperate directly with the Communists and other antijapanese parties.\n\nNot surprisingly, Hurley exploded. In a complete reversal of his original stance, he now saw anybody who envisaged cooperation with Yan'an as his personal foe. He got Washington to agree to give a full endorsement of Chiang's regime \u2013 and had the offending diplomats recalled. In a supreme exercise of imagination, he blamed China's problems on 'the imperialist governments of France, Britain and the Netherlands'.\n\nThus, the Generalissimo emerged from this tragicomedy with even stronger backing, and the removal of diplomats who were ready to think of regime change. In America, the right and the emerging pro-Chiang China Lobby geared up for a witch hunt that began with the trial of the Foreign Service officer, John Service, and later flowed into McCarthyism.* Chiang was also comforted by the attitude of the emollient Wedemeyer, who pursued Stilwell's programme to train and equip elite units but avoided confrontation \u2013 he held a weekly planning conference with Chinese generals to signal a new era of cooperation. In a discussion of whether to move the capital to Yunnan, Wedemeyer said he would stand by Chiang come what may. 'Both Hurley and Wedemeyer have shown sympathy for and understanding of our problems,' the Nationalist leader wrote in his diary.\n\nIn fact, the rangy, sharp-featured general, who could have stepped out of a Western movie, shared many of his predecessor's views \u2013 but he knew how counterproductive it would be to air them in Chungking. With Washington, however, he pulled no punches. In a series of messages to George Marshall, he stressed the incomprehensible degree of disorganisation, muddled planning, lack of training for modern war and the destructive effects of political intrigue, pride and mistrust \u2013 he also found it tragic that many high-ranking Chinese officials were asking him to arrange their evacuation to America. The Generalissimo, he wrote later, was 'very sensitive and almost as intuitive as a woman . . . It was my feeling that he was not too well equipped, either in training or experience, to cope with the multitude of problems confronting him.'\n\nWedemeyer also enjoyed better relations than his predecessor with Claire Chennault, giving the air force commander more supplies and authority to organise an air attack on Wuhan which has hardly been mentioned in the history of the time. It began with a mass firebomb raid by seventy-seven Stratofortress bombers just before noon on 18 December 1944. Chennault's own planes from the Fourteenth Air Force kept up the assault. Fires burned for three days, gutting the docks and warehouses as well as destroying the Japanese air force facilities on the ground. The military effect was devastating; what the attacks did for the civilians of Wuhan can only be imagined. For Chennault, it was proof of the doctrine of air power he had always espoused, and he claimed that it inspired the firebombing of Japan which preceded the atomic bomb. However, in his moment of triumph, the Texan airman fell foul of a power play in the American military, and found himself squeezed out, leaving China in the early summer of 1945 after being decorated by Chiang \u2013 like so many figures in the Generalissimo's life, he would be back.\n\nAs Chennault's planes were attacking the city where he had once held sway, news came of the death of Wangjingwei, who had suffered from diabetes and the effects of the wound from the assassination attempt in Wuhan. Taken to a hospital in Japan, Sun Yat-sen's original heir died in November 1944; his remains were put in a tomb at Nanking which was later blown up by the Nationalists with Chiang's approval. Wang's death further facilitated existing contacts with the collaborationist regime which had been maintained by the Nationalist secret police since 1941. Wang's successor was an old contact of Dai Li, and the two men ensured that clashes were kept to a minimum.\n\nThe winding-down of Operation Ichigo had reduced the military pressure. In one notable encounter, Nationalist troops put up stiff resistance to a Japanese attack on an airbase at Zhijiang in Hunan \u2013 within Chiang's alleged safe haven. American-trained troops flown in by Wedemeyer executed a series of adroit tactical moves while Chennault's fliers enjoyed air superiority. Supply and medical chains worked more effectively than usual, and the Chinese commanders co-operated. It was a highly significant performance that boded well for the future \u2013 though, as always, Chinese casualties were much greater than those of their foe, the Japanese were reckoned to have lost 6,500 men.\n\nBut the situation in the south remained dire. On a trip through the region in the spring of 1945, Graham Peck saw 'a land of numbing wretchedness' with burned-out towns and hordes of ragged refugees. Guangdong suffered its worst cholera outbreak since 1932. A visiting journalist reported that, in Canton, there were just ten syringes and forty-eight needles for inoculations; profiteers in Shanghai cornered the market in both and demanded high prices for them.\n\nAt one railhead, however, Peck found that the station had been rebuilt and redecorated, complete with potted plants. A few hundred feet of track were being relaid, to accommodate some carriages and a locomotive. The reason for this activity was that Chiang was due to fly in and be photographed there as a sign that the Chinese were fighting back. One carriage was his personal one. While it was sitting on a siding, locals had ripped out its fittings for fire fuel. When Peck passed through, 'three or four scarecrow families of refugees were crouched under the monstrous deluxe coach, beating palm fiber against the track with rocks, softening it as new stuffing for the seats in the car'.\n\nThe clearly approaching American defeat of Japan led Chiang's opponents to consider ways of ousting him before he extended his control over post-war China. The OSS officer, Oliver Caldwell, was approached by a Mr Chen who said he represented one of the big national sworn brotherhoods, and asked for a message to be passed to Washington that the secret societies were ready to cooperate with non-Chiang politicians to put the Guangxi general, Li Zongren, in power. Caldwell forwarded the proposal to Washington, where it gained considerable support when discussed by the Cabinet. But Admiral Leahy, the head of the navy which was running the secret SACO operation with Dai Li, spoke strongly for Chiang. When the President took a poll of the meeting, there was a narrow majority in favour of continuing to support the Generalissimo.\n\nIn a linked initiative, regional potentates including Long Win of Yunnan, the Model Governor of Shanxi and some of the Sichuan generals, were discussing the formation of a coalition to block Chiang's domination when hostilities ended. Long had made his capital of Kunming a haven for dissident politicians who planned to set up a Government of National Defence, linking independent elements of the Kuomintang, Communists, the Democratic League and other smaller parties. One idea was that the regional rulers would stop fighting the Japanese, expecting them to turn on Chiang and destroy him, thus leaving them free to take charge after the war. Like earlier anti-Chiang coalitions, this movement was shot through with its own contradictions \u2013 the US Consul in Kunming wrote that 'it would indeed be difficult to imagine a more heterogeneous group of feudal barons and radicals, idealists and practical politicians'. After an unsuccessful mission to Kunming by Meiling and T. V. Soong, the Generalissimo fired a 'silver bullet' by allocating Long Yun sufficient Lend-Lease aid for three divisions. The plot collapsed.\n\nThe Red Army was also showing its intentions by making ground in east China, where it expected to link up with an American landing, as well as consolidating its main base in Shaanxi and its smaller areas round Kaifeng on the border between Shaanxi and Henan. South of the Yangtze, fighting broke out between Nationalists and Communists who were taking up positions round Shanghai in the expectation of a Japanese withdrawal. The Communists also advanced into Hunan, getting to within 50 miles of Changsha.\n\nStill, despite the reservations he expressed to Washington, Wedemeyer was in a sufficiently optimistic mood to work on a plan for an offensive by 1.7 million men to retake Canton to provide ports for American landings he thought would be needed to defeat the Japanese. But the Generalissimo was in a grave frame of mind when he made his New Year diary entry for 1945. The only thing of which he felt proud, he wrote, was that he had not allowed his meditation and his morning and evening prayers to have been interrupted for a single day.\n\nChiang soon had cause for concern on a broader front as Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met at Yalta on the Black Sea in February 1945. Once more, China's second-class status was made evident \u2013 not only was its leader not invited; he also had to wait four months to be told officially of what had been decided, though he appears to have got a good idea earlier from his own sources. In return for agreeing to back Chungking and confirming that it would enter the war against Japan after Germany surrendered, the Kremlin had been handed port and railway concessions in Manchuria, and the right to move troops there when Tokyo was beaten.\n\nThis raised the worrying prospect that the Soviets would impede the Nationalist return to the lands lost in 1931, and hand over territory to the Communists when they withdrew. 'I feel more than simply hurt and sad,' Chiang wrote in his diary. 'The Chinese people have . . . been placed in an unparalleled and dangerous predicament . . . Henceforth we have no choice but to take our own fate in our own hands and struggle for a place in the sun by the sweat of our own brow. There is no other way to break through the oppressive and enveloping darkness.' Roosevelt's death on 12 April 1945 caused Chiang further uncertainty. 'Roosevelt had at times shown a tendency to appease the Communists,' he noted. 'But he set a limit to that . . . After his death, I am afraid that the British will exert a greater influence on American policy. As to Sino-Soviet relations, we should all the more be vigilant.'\n\nChiang's solution was extraordinarily ambitious, and would be pursued until the Cold War made it unfeasible. He resolved to exploit the growing rivalry between the two superpowers to his own advantage by playing on the desire of each to keep China out of the hands of the other. Ideology had nothing to do widi it \u2013 he calculated, quite correctly, that Stalin would be motivated by realpolitik rather than solidarity with the Chinese Communists. This meant he could prepare to fight Mao when he judged the moment right while concluding a pact with the Soviet Union which was negotiated in Moscow by T. V. Soong.\n\nSigned in June 1945, this handed Stalin inducements in Manchuria in the shape of joint operations of the main railway, Soviet use of Port Arthur* as a naval base, and the neighbouring city of Dairen\u2020 becoming a free port. The independence of Outer Mongolia was recognised, meaning that Moscow would be able to make its influence felt there. In return, Chiang got recognition of Manchuria as an integral part of China, an undertaking that Soviet troops would only stay in the former Manchukuo for three months and a pledge of non-interference in the north-western territory of Xinjiang. Most important, the treaty renewed Moscow's recognition of the Nationalists as the government of China, and Chiang could be further comforted by a decision at the American-Soviet-British summit at Potsdam affirming that Korea as well as Japan would fall into Washington's sphere at the end of the war, thus establishing a regional counterweight to the Soviet presence.\n\nStalin, who did not believe in the ability of the Chinese Communists to take power, had kept them in the dark about Yalta, and did not consult them before reaching the agreement with the Nationalists. As in the 1920s and at Xi'an, he put relations with Chiang ahead of those with his ideological allies, seeing China as an Asian buffer zone that would protect the Soviet Union against attack from the east. As one ruling dictator to anotfier, he was more comfortable dealing with the Chinese President than the prickly, opinionated Mao. For his part, the Generalissimo had told his adviser, Owen Lattimore, that Stalin was a man whose word could be counted upon though, as an expert in the shifting sands of agreements, he would worry repeatedly about the Georgian playing a double game with Mao.\n\nTwo months after the Sino-Soviet truce, the Generalissimo was dining with the new Mexican ambassador on a swelteringly hot evening in Chungking when Emperor Hirohito broadcast Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945. The dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been a surprise to Chiang. His planning had been for a war that would drag on for at least another year, and its sudden end aborted Wedemeyer's scheme for a great offensive in southern China. Now, it was time to look to the future. In a radio address, the Generalissimo said the enemy had been militarism, so there should be no revenge on the 'innocent people of Japan'. Calling an emergency military meeting, he worked for four days on his plans. In his diary he wrote: 'God be praised for wisdom He has revealed to me and for the blessings He has bestowed upon me . . . His guidance has enabled me to forge ahead with courage and in a spirit of humility.'\n\nIn a diary entry on 2 September, when Japan's surrender document was signed with the Americans, Chiang gave the outcome of the war a personal touch by noting that 'fifty years of national humiliation as well as the indignities and insults that I have endured, are being washed away'. But he also noted that 'while old wrongs have now passed into history, we are in danger of being engulfed by new ones'. A week later, he sent General He Yingqin to accept the surrender document for China at a ceremony in Nanking at which the enemy delegates were allocated lower chairs than the Chinese. Chiang reflected that 'the crisis with which the nation is faced today is more serious than at any time since the Japanese invasion of Mukden on September 18th, 1931. If we are not careful, we will give Stalin and Mao Zedong the opportunity to do irreparable damage to our plans.'\n\nThe most important thing, he decided, was to take over Manchuria where Soviet troops had moved in after Moscow launched its offensive on Japan a week before Tokyo surrendered.* This meant a massive movement of his armies which had been kept in southern China as part of the pre-atomic bomb strategy of recapturing Guangdong and linking up with American landings there. Wedemeyer warned against the dangers of a hugely extended military line from the south to the very north of China.\u2020 It has been argued that the dispatch of the best Nationalist troops to the north-east constituted a major blunder, and that Chiang would have done better to have established a strong defensive line on the Great Wall. But, if the Generalissimo was to live up to his claims to be the leader of the nation, he had to regain Manchuria, its significance heightened by its fourteen years under foreign rule. It was the most industrialised part of the country, and a prize the Nationalists needed to improve their economic position. Ceding it to the Communists under Soviet auspices would have meant handing his adversary a major prize, giving them a huge area in which to establish their rule and build up their forces. Once they had done so, the likelihood must have been that they would have moved south sooner or later. A defensive line on the Wall would have required sustained and increased American support. So it was not surprising that Chiang decided to send his best troops to reclaim the north-east.\n\nThe United States came to his aid by ordering Japanese troops to give up only to the Nationalists, and by landing Marines to occupy strategic points in Shandong and Hebei provinces. The US forces worked only with Chiang's troops, which naturally strengthened the Communist view that Washington was its enemy. Though Stalin advised seeking a modus vivendi with the Nationalists, the Red Army chief, Zhu De, instructed his men to occupy any cities they chose. Chiang denounced this as an 'abrupt and illegal action' which led Yan'an to brand him as a ruthless, Fascist chieftain who cared more for the Japanese than for his countrymen. Despite the vituperation, however, both sides needed to show an eagerness for national unity after the long conflict with Japan. The country was sick of war, and expected progress towards internal peace. So China's two great enemies of almost two decades met for the first time since Chiang's purge of 1927.\n\nPatrick Hurley was first out of the plane, a broad smile on his face as he waved his fedora hat in triumph. Behind him, in a rumpled blue cotton uniform, his hair long under a solar topi, pudgy and soft-faced, came the fifty-one-year-old Mao Zedong. In an arrival statement the Communist leader said political and military problems should be 'resolved in accordance with justice and reason, as well as on the basis of peace, democracy and unity [to] build a unified, independent, prosperous and strong new China.' Asked how he had found his first flight, Mao replied, 'Very efficient.' Then Hurley ushered him into his black Cadillac to drive into Chungking.\n\nThe suggestion of meeting had come from Chiang, with three invitations starting the day before Japan surrendered. Mao, who had just presided over a party conference that buttressed his position, did not reply immediately. When he accepted, he asked the Russians to guarantee him a refuge at their military mission in Chungking if he needed it; as an additional precaution against his plane being shot down, he insisted that Hurley go to Yan'an to fly in with him. 'How comical this is!' Chiang noted in his diary. 'Never imagined that the Communists could be so chicken-hearted and shameless. Only three days ago, communist newspapers and radio denounced Hurley as a reactionary imperialist. This selfsame imperialist has become Mao's guarantor of safety.'\n\nHis arrival in Chungking on 28 August 1945 was the first time the Communist leader had been outside the base area in Shaanxi since the end of the Long March ten years earlier. While he had established himself as the unquestioned leader of his party and chief of the Red Armies, his experience was limited to the world around him in Yan'an. His knowledge and judgement of international affairs, and their effect on the power struggle in China, was, in the words of the historian Odd Arne Westad, 'schematic and shallow . . . his analyses [built] on guesswork and castle-building'.\n\nOn the night Mao came to town, Chiang held a dinner for him. The Generalissimo toasted the hope that 'we can now go back to the days of 1924'. Mao smoked between courses, and ate like a trencherman. 'I treated him with utmost sincerity,' the Generalissimo noted in his diary, using one of the words by which Chinese often judge one another. But things soon went wrong, and the Nationalist leader noted of Mao: 'His appetite seems insatiable . . . he does not hesitate to take advantage of my friendliness to make exorbitant demands.'\n\nThe gulf between them was enormous. Chiang was intent on not giving up significant political or military power. In the spring, he had spoken of setting up a National Assembly, and forming a coalition administration \u2013 but he immediately added that there was no way the Kuomintang would 'abdicate to a loose combination of parties'. He proposed a significant cut in the size of the Red Army, and the extension of his regime's authority over all China. Mao wanted Communist governors in five northern provinces and the chairmanship of the Peiping military council, plus a substantial army.\n\nThe two leaders left the talks to negotiating teams, while controlling things from behind the scenes during more than a dozen sessions of discussions. The Reuters correspondent, Doon Campbell, wrote that Chiang showed the visitor off at social occasions as if to say, 'Look \u2013 isn't he a prize exhibit?' At a tea party, Mao shouted, 'Long live President Chiang Kai-shek!', but the object of his tribute was not moved. On 4 September the Generalissimo recorded that he got up at dawn to pray God to show Mao the way to national peace and unity. Following one meeting, he noted in his diary: 'I promised him to resolve all our differences in a spirit of fairness and magnanimity. He asked for twenty-eight divisions.' After another talk and a photo-session with Mao and Hurley, the Chinese President recorded that Zhou Enlai had upped the Communist demand to forty-eight divisions. 'This shows how difficult it is to negotiate with the Communists,' Chiang complained. 'Such is their faithlessness and duplicity!'\n\nThree weeks into Mao's stay in Chungking, the two leaders announced what was described as a temporary agreement to avert civil war, including the formation of an all-party government. The Communist leader then agreed to answer questions put in writing by Doon Campbell, who was summoned to his house and was handed the answers by the Communist press chief, the soft-spoken daughter of a wealthy Shanghai family. Campbell's report, filed in lower case cablese, quoted Mao as saying 'eyem confident in outcome of present negotiations dash they cannot break down . . . what china needs presently is policy peaceful reconstruction dash no other policy stop therefore civil war in china must be determinedly averted.' The censor passed Campbell's cable without any alteration.\n\nApart from the negotiations with the Nationalists, Mao found himself facing angry protests from General Wedemeyer after Communists in Shandong bayoneted to death the leader of an OSS unit \u2013 the dead man, Captain John Birch, would later be adopted as an icon by the far right-wing American movement named after him. Wedemeyer warned Mao and Zhou that news of the killing would have a 'very disturbing effect' in the United States. At the same time, Communists in Hebei province were holding captive another American intelligence mission. In both cases, part of the motive appears to have been to prevent the OSS men collecting evidence of Communist understandings with local puppet troops which would have sat uneasily with their patriotic image. When Mao and Zhou recalled their party's friendliness towards the Americans, Wedemeyer noted that this had changed in recent months. Zhou had the Hebei group freed \u2013 only for Communists in Shaanxi to seize an OSS party there.\n\nAt the beginning of October, Mao, who had taken the opportunity to meet leaders of the liberal Democratic League and the Democratic Socialist Party, decided it was time to prepare to return to Yan'an. On 8 October he was guest of honour at a dinner attended by 500 people at which he again shouted, 'Long live President Chiang,' to loud applause. Among the guests was Chiang's American champion, Henry Luce, who noted that, in their conversation, the Communist leaders greeted his comments with a 'polite grunt'.\n\nThe next day, Mao called on his rival for an hour-long conversation. The Generalissimo wrote in his diary that, when he asked the Communist leader for his views on cooperation with the Kuomintang, 'he was evasive and did not give any clear-cut answer'. When he said the Communists should give up the idea of independent territory, Mao agreed \u2013 'but was he really convinced? Was he moved by my sincerity?' It sounded as if the Communist leader was just anxious to get back to his safe haven. He had grown depressed during his time in Chungking, and must have longed for more familiar surroundings.\n\nOn 10 October, China's National Day, the two men had two meetings, with Chiang insisting that Communist areas must be part of the national system if China was to be a unified country. When Mao left the next day, an agreement was announced to call a political consultation conference, guarantee civil liberties, recognise the legality of all political parties, and release political prisoners. But there was nothing on the strength of the armed forces or the distribution of provincial administration \u2013 or on how the proposed National Assembly was to be elected to usher in democracy. As Doon Campbell noted in a letter home, 'Neither side trusts the other and [neither] will make the first concession. Each side is out to prevent provincial bloc building by the other. Each wants territorial, military, civil, political control. Yet each side claps hands for democracy, unity, freedom, nationalisation of the armies.'\n\nBy then, both armies were on the move, the Communists occupying 200 towns and the Americans moving Nationalist troops to the north by air and sea. Chiang postponed the political conference until the following year because of the military situation. On 15 October he held a tea party for foreign correspondents to assure them that he was still in control. In a letter home the next day, Campbell noted his 'soft, delicate hands and enormous charm. He speaks no English but tries \u2013 \"seet down\".' Meiling, who had returned from New York, was also in attendance. The correspondent described her as 'quite dishy \u2013 it isn't fright that sends shivers down your spine when you shake hands with her. She is one of the most physically attractive forty-year-olds I have come across. Her poise and make-up are impeccable.'\n\nOn his return to Yan'an, Mao fell into what seemed like a trauma. According to his interpreter, he lay for days 'prostrated on his bed, his body trembling. His hands and legs twitched convulsively, and he was bathed in a cold sweat . . . He asked us for cold towels to put on his forehead, but it didn't help. The doctors could do nothing.' Mao's collapse may have been, in part at least, the result of his realisation of how little the dominance he had established in the enclosed world of his party counted for on the wider stage, and how resolute his opponent was. Having had his hopes raised by Hurley's initial mission to Yan'an, he returned from Chungking isolated, and facing a regime that enjoyed the backing of both Washington and Moscow and was ready to break any part of their agreement when and as it wished.\n\nRecovering, Mao reacted with characteristic obstinacy. The Chungking agreement was merely a scrap of paper, he told a meeting. As for Stalin's instruction to seek a modus vivendi with the Nationalists, he asked: 'Does this mean that we are going to hand over our guns to the Kuomintang?' His answer was firm as it was evident \u2013 'The arms of the people, every gun and every bullet must all be kept, must not be handed over.'\n\nThough it had ended the war on the winning side and was one of the Big Four with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, China was in an extremely bad way. Major cities were devastated. The Japanese had stripped the countryside. The economy was crippled. The regime enjoyed little support outside the ranks of its members. The Red Army had grown in size; the Communists had extended their support among the peasants; and were now free of the pressure of the Japanese campaigns in the north. Still, the moment Chiang had been waiting for since 1937 had arrived. He set up a headquarters for Manchuria including his son, and appointed as regional commander General Du Yuming, who had caused Stilwell such aggravation in Burma. Du had just shown his loyalty and usefulness by carrying out a coup on Chiang's behalf to remove the troublesome Yunnan governor, Long Yun, who was held as a virtual prisoner in Chungking.\n\nBut the Soviet occupation forces were proving less than helpful. In places, they stopped the Americans landing Nationalist troops while allowing the Communists to expand and demanding that big industrial plants be put under joint Sino-Soviet control. In protest, Chiang withdrew a liaison mission he had sent to deal with the Russians in Manchuria, and invoked American help. This produced the desired effect on Stalin, who did not want a major clash with Washington and wished to maintain the relationship with Chungking. At the Kremlin's instruction, the Soviet commander, Marshal Malinovsky, changed tack to define his aim as being 'to assist the Chinese government [to] establish its political power in the north-east'. The head of the occupation force in the former Manchukuo capital of Changchun declared that it was 'not permissible to oppose the Nationalist government', and the city's Communist mayor was sacked.\n\nStalin agreed to delay the withdrawal of Soviet troops until the Generalissimo had enough men in Manchuria to take over properly. Chiang sent troops and southerners to run major cities. He pointedly ignored local figures, and rejected out of hand a suggestion that the Young Marshal might be freed from captivity to help establish the Nationalists in his former domain \u2013 the Communists, on the other hand, used Zhang's brother to recruit Manchurian support. To strengthen the Nationalist position, the Central Army won a big battle against heavily outnumbered Communist troops on the route north of the Great Wall.\n\nWith Mao forced to accept the reality of his position and go along widi Soviet policy, Chiang appeared to have his best prospect ever of establishing his authority from the South China Sea to the Manchurian-Soviet border, achieving a reach not enjoyed by any ruler since the fall of the Manchu Empire. Stalin went as far as to tell Washington that he would not object if the United States kept troops in China. In fact, as Wedemeyer warned Washington, Chiang lacked the means to occupy all Manchuria against Communist opposition. His apparent strength at the end of 1945 rested on the collusion of the Soviet Union, and his ability to retain backing from both Washington and Moscow.\n\nThat was soon thrown into doubt by the development of the Cold War. Policy-makers in Washington grew increasingly concerned at the prospect of Stalin asserting himself in Manchuria. The ultimate nightmare was of Moscow taking control of China through a fatal combination of pressure from the Chinese Communists and a weak, overextended central government that had not recovered from the damage of the war with Japan. Combined with its strength in Europe, this could make the Soviet Union the winner of the post-war confrontation.\n\nThe issue of what to do about China was pushed to the point of decision by the final implosion of Patrick Hurley. Visiting Washington at the end of 1945, the ambassador went to see President Truman to complain about the way he believed he was being undercut by the State Department. Two hours later, he announced his resignation, blaming diplomats who sympathised both with the Communists and with European imperialism. Ignoring the way in which the ambassador had courted Mao, right-wing Republicans in the United States tried to turn him into a martyr of Communist infiltration of American diplomacy, making the administration's China policy into a domestic political issue that would fester for years. Realising immediate action was necessary, Truman telephoned George Marshall, who had just retired from his wartime post of Chief of Staff, and asked him to go to China as his special envoy. The general said he would do whatever the President wanted, and hung up, anxious that his wife should not overhear. He wanted time to break the news to her that, instead of a rest, he would be heading to deal with a challenge which had defeated his country since Pearl Harbor.\n\nMarshall had the double task of stemming Soviet influence and of getting the Nationalists and Communists to cooperate to build a strong China. If there was anybody whom Truman and the American people trusted to work such a miracle, it was the man who had organised the Allied victory in the Second World War. Later, he would become Secretary of State and author of the plan to rebuild Europe that bore his name. Between lay China, and the deepest morass of his career as Chiang outplayed the greatest power on earth.\n\n* * *\n\n* Vladimirov, whose diaries have rarely been quoted, later served as Consul General in Shanghai and became ambassador to Burma before dying in 1953.\n\n* Service was arraigned after he had left files at the office of the _Amerasia_ magazine which had Communist sympathisers among its senior staff. He was acquitted.\n\n* Now known as Dalian-L\u00fbshan.\n\n\u2020 Now Dalian.\n\n* Among their first acts was to detain the Last Emperor, and fly him to the Soviet Union from where he was returned to China five years later, to be 'remoulded' through labour and study.\n\n\u2020 He also suggested putting Manchuria under a United Nations mandate. This would have been an affront to Chinese sovereignty \u2013 and would have been unacceptable to Moscow since the Nationalist permanent Security Council seat would give them veto power.\n\n# CHAPTER 25\n\n _Mission Impossible_\n\nTHE EIGHT-YEAR WAR WITH JAPAN had been an extended body-blow for a regime already shot through with weaknesses. The length, scale and nature of the conflict had debilitated China and the Nationalists. In the words of the historian Hans Van de Ven, 'society itself had come unstuck'. A film director recalled that 'in the months after victory, we all felt defeated'. Later, Mao would tell a group of Japanese who apologised for their country's conduct that he owed Tokyo thanks for, without the war, he might still have been living in a cave in Yan'an. Political reform which could have rallied support for the Nationalists was derailed. T. V. Soong's attempt to make government more effective ran into two obstacles \u2013 Chiang above him and hundreds of thousands of ineffective officials below. The death of Dai Li in a plane crash, variously attributed to an accident, Communists or American sabotage or fall-out from a wartime Japanese intrigue, deprived Chiang of a trusted follower, but the repression the secret service chief had masterminded did not slacken. 'The Chinese masses are used to what you might call cruelty, they understand it, they have always understood it,' a police colonel told a foreigner. 'If we were to use kid glove methods we would be lost.' Many persecuted intellectuals and students decided to do what they were suspected of, and became Communists.\n\nGeneral Chen Cheng, who was suffering from stomach ulcers, sought to make the army more efficient by disbanding bad regiments and melding units from different regional armies to curb their autonomy. But many either stayed where they were, living off looting and banditry, or joined the Communists. One group of officers was so indignant at the disbandment that it staged a 'crying demonstration' at the Sun Yat-sen memorial in Nanking. When the Guangxi leader, Li Zongren, pointed to the danger of supplying recruits for the Red Army, Chen replied: 'If they go over to the Communists, we shall cook them in the same pot with the Reds.' Li pointed out that the pre-war campaigns had not cooked the Reds; Chen responded, 'That was because our air force was not yet strong enough.'\n\nConditions in the ranks remained as bad as ever, despite a well-publicised episode in which Chiang used his stick to beat an officer at whose camp ill and starving recruits had died. The basic truth was that he had only half a dozen fully operational, properly trained and equipped divisions, each containing around 11,000 men. His army, as a whole, looked huge. But, after the devastation of the internal wars and the conflict with the Japanese, Chiang was extremely weak militarily \u2013 and this counted so much when he chose to decide the future by military means.\n\nHad he wished to, he might have done more to exploit his position as the only man who stood for China. Had he gone along with American ideas for a coalition administration, he could have used his status to ensure he came out on top, with Washington tied more firmly to him as a result. But, despite occasional liberalisation gestures, he was as intent on destroying the Communists as he had been in the previous decade, and shied away from any flexibility that might be seen as weakness \u2013 on top of which, he distrusted the Americans. So, victory won, things went on as before. Though an expert survivor, the Generalissimo learned nothing because he could not see beyond his own limited horizons.\n\nNationalist carpetbaggers moved into liberated areas, grabbing assets from people accused, rightly or wrongly, of having collaborated. Chiang accepted the help of former puppets and even Japanese officers, lending credence to the story that he had fixed up a mutual protection deal in the later stages of the war. 'Reconstruction' taxes were levied, and the state's agents seized buildings and factories, as the regime sank its claws ever deeper into the business world. Urban Manchuria became what the historian Edward Dreyer has described as a 'kleptocracy' under General Du Yuming, Joseph Stilwell's _b\u00eate noire_ in Burma who was considered unusually corrupt. A fresh famine swept through Henan.\n\nIn the countryside, the rural masses were alienated by oppression, corruption and the policy of collecting land tax in grain. Nationalist troops brought back the old order with them. A report by the American journalist Jack Belden, from a county in Henan province where the Communists had implemented their programme of change during the war, gave a taste of what happened when government forces returned. Peasants who had taken part in land reform were publicly executed. Farmers who had campaigned for rent reductions were buried alive, sometimes together with their families \u2013 in one village, Belden saw two dozen bodies, including those of women and children, being dug out of a pit. In another, a landlord who returned after fleeing with the Japanese had members of twenty-four of the twenty-eight families in a village killed, some being thrown into a well. Militias extorted money, and bought rifles from troops.\n\nThe Communists had used violence ruthlessly on their enemies in the countryside, but the repression that accompanied the return of the Nationalists added to the alienation from a regime which had nothing to offer in answer to Mao's doctrine of rural revolution. As a result, when the Red Armies withdrew under Nationalist pressure, local units continued to operate; they might not be truly Communist, but their experience could only make them support the cause, with at least tacit backing from the peasantry around them. As they revenged themselves for repression, killed landlords and threatened officials, such guerrilla outfits kept alive a spirit of revolt that would provide the Red Armies with a sea of support when the time came to make their move against Chiang.\n\nThe regime remained a tightly controlled oligarchy, personified by the 'Four families' \u2013 the Chiangs, T. V. Soong, the Kungs and the Chen brothers. The economy was the area that affected most people worst. 'On top of the lack of military protection, the broad mass of Chinese could not count on the government to run the economy in the national interest,' as the adviser, Arthur Young, noted. Inflation roared ahead, making money virtually worthless and increasing the value of an American dollar forty-fold.\n\nCorruption was a way of life. There were scandals over government bonds and an American gold loan involving members of Chiang's inner circle, including Big-Eared Du. Supplies from the United Nations relief organisation, UNRRA, were diverted to the black market after being handed over to the Chinese for distribution. In one place Jack Belden visited in Central China, soldiers stopped supplies getting to an orphanage, selling them from their own warehouse while the children died of hunger. An American doctor who insisted on personally safeguarding a railway wagon of aid destined for a Communist-held area died from hunger and exposure after being shunted onto a siding in a lonely area with no heat or food.\n\nA tiny upper crust prospered, making fortunes on the black market and driving round big cities in imported limousines \u2013 meeting his officers in Shanghai, Dai Li had been moved to remark on the number of their cars blocking the road outside. American military personnel, who each cost 500 times as much to sustain as Chinese troops, sped through Chungking and Chengdu with their 'Jeep girls'; H. H. Kung complained that they ate so much meat that there would soon be no animals left. Meanwhile, millions starved. A satirical show in Shanghai called _How Officials Get Promoted_ , which was set in olden times for safety's sake, featured a governor whose headaches could only be cured by application of gold bars.\n\nAs George Marshall set out for China in December 1945, a cartoon in the _New York Times_ showed him looking at a table covered with broken crockery labelled 'Our China Policy'. On arrival in Shanghai, he was given a downbeat assessment by General Wedemeyer of the chances of bringing Nationalists and Communists together. Agreement was impossible, the American commander explained, since the first were determined not to give up any of their power while the second wanted power for themselves. But the straight-ahead envoy refused to be put off. 'I am going to accomplish my mission and you are going to help me,' he told Wedemeyer. The Reuters correspondent, Doon Campbell, who saw him many times, recalled that, apart from an occasional 'wrath-of-God expression over some diabolical let-down', Marshall was patience personified. He needed to be, given the nature of his mission.\n\nTruman said that American policy aimed to produce 'a strong, united and democratic China'. His envoy carried a stick in the form of a presidential warning to Chiang that 'China disunited and torn by civil strife could not be considered realistically as a proper place for American assistance'. But his claims to be an honest broker were undermined by US military supplies pouring in to the Nationalists, and the use of US ships and planes to move Chiang's soldiers to the north. Washington set itself the aim of keeping out of the internal Chinese conflict. But this was specious reasoning.\n\nApart from 60,000 men sent to hold ports, industrial centres and mines as the Japanese left, Truman was determined to hold back Soviet influence, and saw the Chinese Communists as part of a worldwide movement orchestrated from Moscow. He feared that Stalin was aiming to establish authority over Manchuria, and one of Marshall's main aims was to ensure that Nationalists were strong enough to check this. American aid to Chiang's regime was clearly one-sided, and produced growing alienation among the Communists. Though Mao and Zhou Enlai saw the advantages of working with the Marshall mission as they built up their strength, Jack Belden was struck by slogans daubed on walls on the northern plain proclaiming: 'Oppose Chiang Kai-shek's betrayal of China to America.'\n\nIn fact, from the moment Marshall arrived in Chungking on 21 December 1945 \u2013 his sixty-sixth birthday \u2013 the Generalissimo entertained doubts about him. As Chiang had shown repeatedly, he put his own position first, and would do all he could to stall his main ally if that was threatened. He felt no fondness or debt towards Washington whose intervention nationalists could easily view as a quasi-imperialistic resumption of foreign interference in China. Incidents such as the rape of two Chinese girls by American marines in Peiping aroused popular feeling against the wartime ally, while the equation of progress with Westernisation espoused by modernisers in the first half of the century had lost much of its appeal for a regime that had survived on its own terms during the long years of war.\n\nThe American drive for a coalition government could only help the Communists, and the search for peace inhibit the re-conquest of Manchuria. While Chiang was anxious to fight his domestic enemy as quickly as possible, and on the widest scale, the Communists' interest lay in delay to gain time to build up military and political strength. So the American bid to negotiate a truce and engage in talks about a coalition could only be seen by the Generalissimo as helping his foe. Internationally, he was leery of alienating Stalin by appearing to be too close to Washington, and was anxious to keep as much room for manoeuvre as possible between the two superpowers. The powerful Kuomintang figure Chen Lifu warned that 'anybody else coming here would be better than General Marshall' since his mission would expose the Americans to the Communist propaganda, and bring blame on the Nationalists if it ended in failure.\n\nThe envoy's tone went down badly \u2013 Chen recalled that he spoke like a colonial governor 'and severely lectured us'. There was also the background of Marshall's championing of Stilwell, and his authorship of some of the toughest messages sent over Roosevelt's signature during the war years. After hosting a banquet and then holding the first of sixty meetings with Marshall over the following year, Chiang confided to his diary that the emissary had no understanding of China's internal problems and the behaviour of the Communists \u2013 'in the end, this will have a harmful influence on major events,' he added.\n\nStill, the mission got off to a promising start as a three-man committee of Marshall, Zhou Enlai and a Nationalist former Foreign Minister, Zhang Zhun, swiftly reached an agreement for a truce to take effect in mid-January, though it left the Nationalists free to continue moving troops into Manchuria. This was followed by an accord to cut government forces to a maximum of 700,000 and the Red Armies to 140,000 in eighteen months. Chiang would remain in supreme command, and the Communists would pull out of their southern base areas. Yan'an regarded the agreement as a success in that it was recognised as a negotiating partner, rather than a target for destruction.\n\nPolitical reforms were also agreed in principle, including the calling of a consultative conference with non-Nationalist parties and the establishment of an interim state council which the Kuomintang would not dominate. Here, again, the Communists saw progress since they would be able to line up with smaller parties to challenge the KMT. The Americans pressed for disbandment of the secret police, and Marshall showed what he had thought of Dai Li by refusing to give the American undercover agent 'Mary' Miles permission to attend his funeral \u2013 Miles took leave and went anyway.\n\nMarshall appeared to have achieved yet another success when the Russians began withdrawing from Manchuria in mid-March, 1946, apparently as a conciliatory move towards an increasingly tough-minded West \u2013 six days before the withdrawal began, Churchill, with Truman beside him, had made his speech about the Iron Curtain. The Soviet troops stripped the territory of whole factories and anything else they wanted; an American inquiry put the value of the loot at US$2 billion \u2013 the Soviet estimate was far lower. The presidential envoy made a six-day trip to the North during which he met Mao; in the evening they watched a film, stretched out on reclining chairs under thick rugs. Marshall appeared to have pulled off die impossible. When he paid a visit to Washington in mid-March, he was greeted as a hero. In fact, this was precisely the moment at which he was doomed to fail, and civil war to the deadi became inevitable.\n\nChiang had agreed to the truce in the expectation that a combination of backing from Washington and Moscow would enable him to build up overwhelming strength in Manchuria. He sent his son, Ching-kuo, to Moscow to sound out Stalin on a wider agreement. But, reversing his earlier stance, the Soviet leader launched a broadside against the presence of American troops in China. In the Cold War context, Chiang's attempt to avoid choosing between the USSR and the USA was becoming untenable. The belated publication of the Yalta agreement, together with Soviet conduct in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, deepened concern about the Kremlin's intentions. Intelligence reports from Manchuria told of collusion between the remaining occupation troops and Communists as Stalin steered an erratic course that could only direaten the Generalissimo. On 6 March 1946, the Chinese government issued a protest about Soviet behaviour in Manchuria, and called for die immediate withdrawal of the whole of the Red Army. Chiang had made his inevitable choice.\n\nAs Chiang saw his hopes of working with both Washington and Moscow dashed, the agreements brokered by Marshall were unravelling fast. The Soviet withdrawal freed the Communists to launch an offensive. The Russians left them a trove of captured Japanese weapons \u2014 Tass news agency later put the volume at 700,000 rifles, 14,000 heavy and light machine guns, artillery, mortars and 700 vehicles, including tanks.\n\nThough Chen Cheng's reforms did cut die size of the Nationalist forces from 3 million in 1945 to 2.6 million by die middle of the following year, die troop reductions agreed by the Marshall committee remained a dead letter. Some cosmetic measures were introduced for the secret police, but repression continued as before. Strong elements in both die Nationalists and the Communists were none too keen on moving towards democracy. While Marshall regarded a coalition as a means of bringing peace, the Communists saw it as a step along die road to power, and, appreciating that in a way the Americans did not, Chiang was bound to avoid opening the door to the enemy. He dismissed the idea of giving significant powers to a national assembly. Pressure from the right diluted the promised reforms, leading to a boycott of the consultative conference by the Communists and Democratic League, whose Chungking newspaper offices were attacked by organised mobs as hardliners staged big anti-Soviet demonstrations.\n\n## THE AMERICAN CONNECTION\n\n32. Chiang, Meiling and Joseph Stillwell are all smiles for this photograph despite their differences.\n\n33. Vinegar Joe (centre, in profile)atthe front in Burma.\n\n34. The aerial prophet: Claire Chennault (right) and Albert Wedemeyer (left) with Yunnan warlord Long Yun.\n\n## SNOW WHITE IN THE NEW WORLD\n\n35. Meiling addresses a rally in New York in 1943.\n\n36. As guest of honour at a Hollywood dinner, with _Gone With the Wind_ producer David 0. Selznick.\n\n37. Disturbing influence: Wendell Willkie.\n\n## MEETING OF FOES\n\n38. Mao Zedong (left) flies to Chungking for talks with Chiang. With him are US Ambassador Patrick Hurley and Zhou Enlai.\n\n39. Mao and Chiang exchange toasts at a banquet in Chungking \u2013 Hurley looks on from the side.\n\n## IN THE RED BASE\n\n40. Chiang inspects Yan'an after the Communist base was taken by the Nationalists in 1947.\n\n41. Mao rides out before the government troops move in.\n\n42. Broken China: the _New York Times'_ view of George Marshall's mission.\n\n43. Chiang and Meiling greet the American envoy.\n\n44. Bank raid: a crowd seeks its money as the economy spirals out of control.\n\n46. Resignation: Chiang leaving Nanking in January 1949 after resigning \u2013 but he continued to pull the strings.\n\n47. New Life: the Generalissimo in Taiwan.\n\nWhen Marshall returned to China in mid-April with a new aid package, civil war was in full swing in Manchuria where the Red Army had taken the city of Changchun. The Nationalists refused to continue the Marshall talks until they withdrew. The Communists were unyielding. So Chiang ordered a successful siege. By early summer, the Nationalists held all the major cities in the south and centre of Manchuria. Their advance infuriated Marshall, who could not accept the basic fact that Chiang was more interested in the victory he saw ahead than in a peace with the Communists which would lessen his own power.\n\nMeanwhile, the Generalissimo supervised the return of the capital to Nanking in May 1946, installing himself in an office suite in the building behind Sun Yat-sen's presidential quarters, or receiving visitors at the Officers' Moral Endeavour Association furnished with a glass-topped walnut desk, red leather chairs and a sofa. A portrait of Sun Yat-sen hung on the wall. The floor was covered with chequered linoleum. Among his visitors was a French general sent by de Gaulle to award him the grand cross of the Legion of Honour with a citation hailing him as 'First Fighter for Democracy'. Chiang then visited Peiping where he attended a huge rally held in his honour in front of the Forbidden City, before flying to Mukden to inspect operations in Manchuria.\n\nBy now, he was accusing Marshall in his diary of acting aggressively, 'his face and voice . . . harsh . . . I tried to patiently endure this and ignore his behaviour towards me.' The American had some strong cards to play, direatening to end the use of US transport planes, advising Washington not to increase aid, and talking of calling off his mission if the Nationalist offensive continued. As a result, the Generalissimo agreed to a fresh truce, which he later called 'a most grievous mistake'. It enabled several Communist armies to evade pressure in China itself, but, most important, it meant that Nationalist troops in Manchuria stopped only 30 miles south of the big city of Harbin in the far northern province of Heilongjiang, which became a major base for the Communists, giving them time and space to develop their forces.\n\nAs the climate got hotter and more humid, the Chiangs moved to the mountain resort of Ruling above the Yangtze, where Marshall and his wife occupied a villa across the stream in the middle of the village. Chiang worked as hard as ever \u2013 one official who had been appointed as a secretary recounted arriving on his first day at 6 a.m. only to find that the Generalissimo had already received two visitors. Still, there was time for evening meals in the mountains, to which he and Meiling invited Katherine Marshall while her husband was away mediating. They were carried up the slope in chairs with white-fringed awnings by blue-clad coolies. Waiting for them were wicker chairs and a hot supper. Twenty-five guards stood watch. Mrs Marshall, whose spelling was atrocious, described it as 'a scene out of Arabian Knights [sic]'. In a letter, she recorded that, on the last evening of his stay, Chiang said it had been his happiest summer. 'He had never had any fun before,' Katherine Marshall wrote to a friend. 'I guess not. Married at 14 to a woman 20 he did not like for nuts and War ever since.'\n\nInvited to the Chiangs' villa one evening, John Robinson Beal, an American who had been called in to advise on the regime's publicity, found the fire crackling in the hearth of the main room below a 'not very good' painting of the Nationalist leader. The Chiangs were playing draughts in one corner, he wearing a plain khaki uniform and she in a black dress with a tan, sweater-like top. Meiling said she had been taught the game five days earlier by Mrs Marshall, who also gave a croquet lesson.\n\nWhile Chiang was in Ruling, his troops moved across the Yellow River into southern Shaanxi, and took dozens of counties in Jiangsu and the Shandong-Henan-Shanxi region. In August, Nationalists planes bombed the Communist headquarters of Yan'an. Ignoring Marshall's opposition, Chiang ordered an offensive on the city of Ralgan* north-west of Peiping, which had become a major Red Army centre. The commander of that campaign, General Fu Zuoyi, who had gained his military education in the United States and was highly regarded by the Americans, was another of the accomplished commanders whom Chiang distrusted for his regional links \u2013 in this case with the Model Governor of Shanxi.\n\nThe Nationalist build-up in Manchuria meant that the Red Army, now renamed as the People's Liberation Army (PLA), was outnumbered three-to-one. Against such odds, it retreated from most of its urban centres into the countryside, only fighting when it was sure of winning, and then moving off swiftly after grabbing the enemy's weapons. In a final bid to check the Nationalist offensive which was sabotaging Marshall's mediation efforts, Washington slapped an embargo on military aid. Truman warned Chiang of his view that 'the selfish interest of extremist elements, equally in the Kuomintang as in the Communist party, are hindering the aspirations of the Chinese people'.\n\nUnless there was convincing proof of genuine progress towards a peaceful settlement, the President added, 'it must be expected that American opinion will not continue in its generous attitude towards your nation.' The words had clearly been written by Marshall. The Generalissimo drew the conclusion that 'American policy towards China has worsened as the result of the failure of Marshall's mediation effort'. The envoy, he concluded, had done irreparable damage not only to China, but also to the United States.\n\nStill, Chiang expressed himself ready to show willing by agreeing to a pause in the fighting. But the Communists insisted that the Nationalists must fall back to their earlier positions. Since Chiang was clearly not going to agree to that, Marshall began to admit that his efforts might be futile. In a sign of his lack of success with the two main players, he looked to the small liberal groups to act as an intermediary, but that was never going to get anywhere. The Communists criticised the envoy as an imperialist who was too supportive of the Nationalists while Chiang accused him of not caring 'whether China survives or perishes'.\n\nThe rejection of Marshall's suggestion of another truce spelled the end of the three-man committee, and led Zhou Enlai to fly back to join Mao in the north. Intent on pressing ahead militarily, Chiang summoned leading generals to a conference in Nanking which he did not grace with his presence, leaving the chairmanship to Chen Cheng. The War Minister read out an order from the Generalissimo that the railway line from Peiping to Wuhan should be taken within three weeks, a clearly impossible task. Li Zongren, the only one to protest at the idea, sent Chiang a message pointing out that the order could not be carried out. The leader's reply 'commended' Li's viewpoint, and the order was shelved in another example of the way he would set impossible targets, and then abruptly switch tack.\n\nWhatever their difference, Chiang maintained correct relations with the American envoy. He invited the Marshalls for a picnic on an island in the Yangtze for his birthday along with Henry Luce, who was on another visit. On another occasion, when Meiling was talking to Mrs Marshall on the telephone, her husband took the receiver and said, 'Hello; I see you tomorrow' in English, the first English sentence the envoy's wife had heard him utter.\n\nOn Christmas Eve 1946, Marshall, whose wife had gone for medical treatment in Hawaii, was among the guests at a party at the Chiangs' home in Nanking. A lighted Christmas tree stood in one corner. There were cocktails, and when the Martinis ran out, Meiling mixed some more. Dinner consisted of tomato soup, gelatin salad, roast turkey with trimmings, raisin pie, brandied fruitcake and ice cream; then, the party moved back into the living room for sweet melon and coffee. Dressed in a Father Christmas outfit, one of Chiang's aides stepped from behind a screen to hand out presents. Marshall got a reading board to use in bed. Liqueurs were served to round off the occasion.\n\nBy then, the American envoy was ready to pack his bags, leaving relations with the government to an academic and old China hand, John Leigh ton Stuart, who had been appointed ambassador. Born of missionary parents in Hangzhou and former head of an American-sponsored university in Peiping, the tall, dignified Stuart, who had just entered his seventies, was to become a tragic figure as he tried to cope with the disintegration around him. His first dispatch to the State Department reflected the deeply divergent aims he was trying to achieve, expressing his great desire to see Chiang survive, but also hoping for a revival of the old revolutionary aims and the installation of democracy.\n\nThe slim chances of that happening were evident when the National Assembly met at the end of the year to draw up a new constitution. The Kuomintang had made plain its intention to dominate, and the Communists and the Democratic League boycotted the session. Loud applause broke out as a Kuomintang elder handed Chiang the new constitution at a session on Christmas Day. It came in a gold box with ribbon on the front, looking, noted John Robinson Beal, 'a bit like a five-pound box of chocolates'. Naturally, the document contained promises of freedom and progress, but it laid down a powerful presidential regime designed to the leader's specifications. To celebrate the occasion, Kai-shek and Meiling were hosts that evening at a Chinese opera performance starring the celebrated actor, Mei Lan-fang, who performed his female role 'as graceful and smooth in his movements as a seventeen-year-old girl'.\n\nAt their last substantive discussion, Marshall had warned Chiang that the Red Army was too strong to be defeated. The Generalissimo would have none of it. His foes had to be dealt with militarily, he insisted, forecasting victory within ten months. Though he did not say so, he was also sure that war would break out between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that China would benefit as both sides courted it.\n\nOn 7 January 1947, Marshall went home. Chiang, who was suffering from a cold that had led him to have an electric heater placed above his chair, drove to Nanking airport to see him off. The American attributed his failure to 'almost overwhelming suspicion' between the Nationalists and the Communists, aggravated by a 'group of reactionaries' in the Kuomintang and 'dyed-in-the-wool Communists'. True enough, but nobody in China had asked for Marshall to undertake his mission. His had been an American operation, well-meaning, certainly, yet fatally flawed. Washington's aid to Chiang disqualified its envoy as an impartial mediator \u2013 as Joseph Stilwell said, even George Marshall was not able to walk on water. He had not been able to cut the knot with the Generalissimo. But the two truces he had engineered had enabled the Communists to escape from the enormous Nationalist pressure in the spring and summer of 1946, and given them vital time to regroup. As his envoy returned, Truman declared support for the Nationalists, while saying Washington would not intervene in Chinese affairs, as if the US$2 billion Washington had sent in aid plus another US$1 billion worth of cut-price equipment did not constitute intervention.\n\nWhatever his personal qualities and abilities in other fields, Marshall had proved no more adept than his predecessors in China. His mission ignored a visceral struggle that stretched back two decades, and was now encompassed by the Cold War. As the Nationalist secret police arrested, tortured and killed anybody who looked liberal, a Communist song proclaimed 'Chiang is a murderer, butchering countless Chinese. His face is covered with the people's blood.' In such a context, well-meaning intervention in pursuit of a democratic coalition had no chance of getting anywhere. Chiang and Mao preferred the fight to the death that had shaped their lives.\n\nWith his troops victorious in the north, the Generalissimo added Marshall's scalp to that of others who had tried to get him to change his ways. But his victory meant he now stood alone as he confronted his greatest enemy. The moment of truth for him, and his country, had arrived.\n\n* * *\n\n* Now known as Zhangjiakou.\n\n# CHAPTER 26\n\n _Dying Light_\n\nON 7 AUGUST 1947, Chiang Kai-shek flew over the loess country of northern Shaanxi to the town where Mao had found his haven at the end of the Long March. The Generalissimo walked briskly through Yan'an, accompanied by a triumphant group of generals led by General Hu Zongnan, the 'Eagle of the North-West' who had ring-fenced the base area during the war with Japan.\n\nAfter George Marshall's departure at the beginning of the year, Hu had launched the offensive from Xi'an that the Young Marshal had refused to lead eleven years earlier. Aided by Muslim cavalry, he had taken Yan'an without a fight \u2013 the Communist leadership had already trekked out. The place was of no importance in itself, and the bleak countryside of northern Shaanxi offered no benefits for the Nationalists. But that meant little beside the symbolism of having forced Mao and his colleagues to flee once more, the Communist leader on a horse while his troops marched round him. Chiang went to see Mao's house and the long tunnel connecting it to Zhu De's headquarters as Nationalist photographers took snaps of poppies and the 'Local Product Company' building to show that the Communists had been dealing in opium.\n\nA combination of huge forces, American supplies and transport, plus some good generalship in the north had put Chiang in what looked like an unassailable position in the first eighteen months after the end of the war with Japan. Mercenary armies came back under the Nationalist flag. He had the active support of the China Lobby in the United States, combining politicians in Washington, a network of businessmen round T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung, and the influence of the Luce magazines. The Republican, Thomas Dewey, seemed well placed to beat Truman in the 1948 presidential election \u2013 after a visit to America, Chen Lifu told a Shanghai newspaper that this would mean 'extraordinary measures' to send military aid to China. But, as so often, Chiang's position was more hollow than it appeared. By the time he walked through Yan'an, his military fortunes had peaked, and the disintegration of areas under Nationalist control was racing ahead.\n\nHyperinflation was destroying the middle classes and honest officials; wholesale prices in Shanghai rose by 45 per cent in a single month. The mother of the author of _Wild Swans_ , Jung Chang, had to hire a rickshaw to carry the huge pile of notes needed to pay her school fees in die Manchurian city of Jinzhou where beggars tried to sell their children for food. Labour unrest grew \u2013 there were 4,200 strikes in Shanghai in 1946\u201347. In some universities, police agents masquerading as students patrolled the campuses with guns under their gowns searching for subversives. In Peiping, troops fired on a protest by 3,000 students, killing several. In Kunming, five dissidents were shot by police, and more than 1,000 were held in a jail, pulled out of die cells at midnight to kneel in the gravel yard while soldiers waved bayonets at diem and told diem to confess to being Communists \u2013 the American journalist Jack Belden added that more than thirty were buried alive. The protests were encouraged by the Communists, but were, above all, a sign of war-weariness and alienation from a regime that had nothing more to offer.\n\nNot that support for the Communists was as widespread and automatic as subsequent propaganda would assert. The party demonstrated great skill in organising the peasantry, but its revolution was often imposed rather than being the result of spontaneous popular uprising. This was particularly true in Manchuria where die end of die Manchukuo system had left a power vacuum. Chiang had appointed trusted figures to run the region, but they were foreign to it, as were the troops he drafted in from the south. Moving into the gap, the Communists used the time given to diem by the George Marshall truces to purge class enemies, introduce land reform, mobilise the peasants and build up a strong rural support mechanism for the People's Liberation Army. Harbin and other towns and cities in the far north served as political and economic centres. Communication links were rebuilt, administrative cadres formed, and resources channelled into strengthening Lin Biao's forces. The symbiosis between ideology, grassroots revolution, political organisation and military force reached a peak. As the historian Stephen Levine has put it, 'Without the revolution there could have been no military victory for the Communists, but without the Communists there would have been no revolution.'\n\nChiang's lines were hugely extended while the size of the territory he sought to control depleted his reserves. His armies were largely confined to cities and dependent on rail links which could be sabotaged \u2013 between 1945 and 1947, the Communists destroyed 10,250 miles of track, and the Nationalists rebuilt only 3,700. Instead of pursuing the aggressive blockhouse strategy of the mid-1930s, government troops preferred safety, staying put behind urban walls, and leaving the countryside to their enemy. They were also weakened by a spy ring which recruited senior defectors and ran a secret wireless transmitter that kept Communist armies apprised of their plans.\n\nNationalist generals feuded among themselves as much as ever, and Chiang went on appointing commanders for their perceived loyalty rather than their skill, as in his decision to send the incompetent, corrupt \u2013 but faithful \u2013 Du Yuming to Manchuria. Their inability to manage big forces led to bungling, confusion and inefficiency. Chiang issued instructions without consultation, or after meeting only a few close aides. Orders sent to the field following his 9 p.m. military conference in Nanking were often out of date when they arrived the next day. In one case, a Nationalist commander received conflicting instructions from his immediate superior, the Chief of Staff and the Generalissimo, all of which deprived him of an impending victory.\n\nThe first Communist counter-attack came in Manchuria at the start of 1947 when the lean, phlegmatic Long March veteran, Lin Biao, staged three successful short-term PLA raids across frozen rivers in the bitter north-eastern winter \u2013 the Young Marshal recalled that it was so cold there that soldiers urinated on their rifles to free the frozen bolts. These victories were important not only for the Nationalists they destroyed but also for the arms seized. Success led to an overconfident frontal attack in the early summer that was beaten back. However, a fresh offensive in the autumn isolated government armies by surrounding the cities they held and cutting railway lines, yielding more weapons. As Mao issued an exhortation to 'try for complete annihilation', Chiang replaced Du Yuming as commander in Manchuria with Chen Cheng, and sent reinforcements north. He was getting more American arms after Truman decided the situation merited lifting the embargo imposed by Marshall the previous autumn.\n\nThere was also heavy fighting in Shandong where the Nationalists lost nearly 100,000 men in two battles. Communist forces crossed the Yellow River in the summer of 1947, marching to the old base area of Oyuwan above the Yangtze which they occupied the following spring. Chiang changed the path of the Yellow River for a second time, building dykes to return it to its artificial course to divide Communist forces on either side. The water rose above the barriers, causing flooding which affected 500 villages, as well as displacing 400,000 people who had settled in the river bed after the diversion of 1938, further increasing the regime's unpopularity in the region.\n\nBut it was in Manchuria that the first decisive stage in the civil war unfolded. Both the Nationalists and the Communists fielded their best trained and best equipped armies. Divisions formed by the Americans faced units Lin Biao and his colleagues had prepared for a major conventional campaign. In the summer of 1948, the Communists launched 700,000 troops on a new offensive. Reduced by death, wounds and desertion, Chiang's men were outnumbered almost two-to-one. Lin Biao also had the support of a mass of peasants, well-drilled and motivated by land reform. In addition, he and his subordinates proved themselves masters of swift movement, feints that unbalanced the enemy and sheer fighting ability, using modern equipment taken from the Japanese and Nationalists.\n\nChiang recalled Chen Cheng, who was increasingly ill with stomach trouble, and sent 'Hundred Victories' Wei Lihuang, from the Salween Gorge campaign, to take command in Mukden. This brought no improvement. Three airlines \u2013 one run by the prophet of air power, Claire Chennault who had returned to China \u2013 flew in supplies, but they could not carry enough weapons and food. Though Chiang had command of the skies, poor maintenance and losses had reduced the number of usable planes in the air force from 1,000 planes in 1945 to a fifth of that number. For safety's sake, bombers tended to stay so high that their attacks lacked any precision.\n\nThe Nationalists held three major cities \u2013 the Manchurian capital of Mukden, the former Manchukuo capital of Changchun and the industrialised centre of Jinzhou on the corridor up from the Great Wall. The manner in which Chiang lost all three showed his faults as a tactician, and how he had lost the initiative which had been his after the Japanese surrender. The US Consul General remarked that government tactics would have resembled a comedy of errors if the results had not been so tragic.\n\nWhen Lin Biao advanced towards Jinzhou, the Generalissimo flew to Mukden to order almost half the city's 230,000-strong garrison to march south-west to help save the other city. He then moved to Peiping to direct operations from there, without keeping the War Minister or the general staff informed of what he was doing. As the 100,000-strong column moved slowly down from Mukden, the PLA took Jinzhou after a siege and a heavy bombardment \u2013 a blockhouse defensive system planned for the city had been left incomplete as the contractor sold building materials on the black market. Chiang ordered the column to continue, only for it to be surrounded and badly defeated. That was a disaster for the defence of Mukden, which was cut off. Starvation spread; corpses lay in the gutters; people fought and bribed their way onto planes. After the garrison commander defected, the PLA entered the city as the cold wind whistled through empty avenues.\n\nChangchun, the most northerly Manchurian city held by the Nationalists, fell after a siege that deprived it of electricity, gas and water. 'Crowds of people were always rummaging in refuse dumps for anything that might serve as fuel,' the wife of the British consul recalled. Lack of food led to cannibalism \u2013 human flesh was on sale for the equivalent of US$1.20 per pound. In a civilian zone set up behind a barbed wire fence between the opposing armies, bodies lay so thickly in the street that there was no space to walk between them. After a Winnanese unit in the garrison defected, the Communists captured the city. The death toll was estimated at anywhere from 120,000 to 300,000.\n\nAcross the north-east, the Nationalists had suffered 400,000 casualties. General Du Yuming, who had been sent back to the region to replace the hapless Wei, withdrew at the head of 140,000 men. The Communists captured more than 2,000 trucks, 200 tanks and armoured vehicles, plus a large array of guns. They absorbed huge numbers of defecting Nationalist soldiers who had heard tales of the good treatment the Communists gave prisoners. In an interview at the end of October, Chiang reached back to the loss of Manchuria after 1931. 'History is repeating itself,' he said. If the Communists took the region, 'it would mean the virtual beginning of another world catastrophe'.\n\nBy mid-November, the survivors of the Long March did, indeed, control all Manchuria with its rich mineral deposits, agriculture, and what industry was left behind after the Soviet looting. The one-time guerrillas from southern and central China had won a major conventional campaign in far-away territory which they had turned into a revolutionary heartland. They had scored an enormous victory in terms of morale, and shown that they understood the idea of total war, melding political and economic factors behind a tough, trained, well-equipped and united army which knew what it was fighting for, as Lin Biao and his colleagues demonstrated clarity of vision and consistency with a marked ability to manage very large bodies of troops in an effective manner. The Communist victories were also revolutionary in Chinese terms as battles of annihilation which aimed to wipe out the enemy as a fighting force, very different from the tradition of leaving the adversary with a means of escape. Singing a song that looked forward to 'driving Chiang the Thief to his doom', the PLA moved down towards Peiping and the major port of Tianjin, where refugees had swollen the population to nearly 2 million as a 15-mile moat was dug and municipal officials prepared to sue for peace.\n\nOther Communist armies had recaptured Yan'an, and were advancing on big cities in central China showing tight discipline under standing orders to respect property and civilian welfare. The Long March veteran Chen Yi launched a 400,000-man force on an offensive in Shandong which took the provincial capital of Jinan after heavy fighting. West of Peiping, the Nationalist general Fu Zuoyi tried to regain control of rail links, but his armies were surrounded and defeated. He pulled his remaining troops back inside the city wall as the Communists took the airport and the Summer Palace outside the city, along with the power plant.\n\nChiang tried to rally political support by appointing a relatively liberal figure, Wang Wenhao, as Prime Minister, and calling a National Assembly in Nanking. The 2,700 delegates ranged from young businessmen to elderly scholars, and included a beautiful Manchu who was named Miss Assembly. Naturally, there was no place for the Communists and the Democratic League which had been outlawed for collaborating with them. Still, after an optimistic speech from the Generalissimo, the discontent in Kuomintang ranks became evident. A delegate from Henan criticised the leader's report as 'inadequate', and the Assembly decided to set up seven committees on a wide variety of issues. These produced hundreds of resolutions, including one calling for the liquidation of 'wealthy families'. But the Assembly still voted to give Chiang 'extraordinary powers' during the campaign against the Communists, and elected him President by 2,430 votes to 269.\n\nHowever, things went off the rails in the first round of voting for the vice-presidency. Chiang's candidate, Sun Yat-sen's son, Sun Fo, finished second to the Guangxi general Li Zongren, who, however, lacked the necessary margin to win outright. Despite intimidation by Chiang loyalists, later rounds of voting elected Li. Given Chiang's supremacy, the position meant little, but the episode showed the strength of feeling in the party.\n\nThe Generalissimo was inaugurated into the presidency in a ceremony in the former imperial complex in Nanking where Sun Yat-sen had been sworn in as first President of the Republic in 1912. Afterwards, he and Li, with their wives, greeted dignitaries lined up to congratulate them. Wearing a simple gown and a single decoration, the Generalissimo posed with Meiling for a formal photograph; then they went outside for a group picture with members of the Assembly, Chiang's expression radiating confidence while his wife stared determinedly ahead.*\n\nThe Generalissimo worked in a three-room suite on the first floor of a 1930s brick building at the back of the complex, behind a courtyard with two pine trees. A long passageway led between the imperial pavilion where Sun Yat-sen had worked and Chiang's building. Midway along the passage was the Unicorn Gate, with mythical creatures carved in stone on either side, which was only opened for the Generalissimo. In the main room of the brick block, he sat at a glass-topped desk or in a brown armchair to receive visitors. On the floor above, he presided at meetings in a conference room with rows of black leather armchairs draped with white antimacassars. A photograph of Sun Yat-sen stared down. On the wall of the adjoining Supreme State Conference Hall were characters for loyalty, filial piety, kind-heartedness, good faith and peace.\n\nAs Chiang was being voted into office by the National Assembly, one of his long-term sparring partners was setting out for home. In 1946, the Christian General had arranged to be sent to the United States on an unlikely mission to study irrigation and water conservation. Once in America, he spent his time meeting contacts, attacking Chiang, and calling for an end to the dispatch of American weapons which, as he pointed out, often ended up in the hands of Communists. Visiting him at an apartment he took on Riverside Drive in New York, Teddy White found Feng Yuxiang barricaded behind cases of groceries, coffee, tins of soup and canned meats as if living under siege. In 1948, the general decided to go back to China, and took a Russian ship to travel via the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But, on 5 September, Soviet newspapers reported that the projector had caught fire during a film show on board, and that the warlord had died either of asphyxiation or a heart attack: there was immediate speculation that this was one of Chiang's dirty tricks, but no evidence of foul play was produced.\n\nTwo months later, there was bad news for the Generalissimo from the United States. The pro-Chiang Republicans failed to win the presidential election of 1948, and the activities of the China Lobby on their behalf had deeply irritated Harry Truman. He refused to let Meiling stay at the White House when she made another mission to raise support and funds. 'I don't think she liked it very much, but I didn't care one way or the other about what she liked and what she didn't like,' Truman remarked later, adding that he guessed the 'grafters and crooks' in the Chinese government had stolen a billion dollars from loans. 'They're all thieves, every damn one of them,' he added. Estimates were to put T. V. Soong's wealth at anywhere from US$500 million to double that amount while Ailing and her husband were said to have had a billion between them.\n\nNationalists reflected bitterly on the difference between Greece, where the Truman administration committed itself fully to a government victory in the civil war with Communists, and China, where it took a much cooler attitude. What tfiey did not appreciate was how the playing field had tilted. George Marshall had got a close-up view of the regime and its leader that could not encourage any increase in support. Truman called the loss of the north-east 'a great blow' but the Soviet withdrawal from Manchuria lessened the fear that Stalin would use it as a springboard in the Far East. Halting Lin Biao's forces would involve the United States in sending troops of its own in huge numbers, which was not something the White House was ready to do. Chiang had had his chance, and his conduct in the six years since the arrival of Joseph Stilwell meant that he had run out of rope. He had squandered too many chances and disappointed too many hopes to be given another go.\n\nNot that American policy was any more coherent than it had been since Pearl Harbor. A cable to the State Department on 29 November 1948 from the ambassador encapsulated the dilemma Washington could not resolve. Commenting on Meiling's trip to seek more aid, the aged John Leighton Stuart wrote:\n\nWe are confronted with the choice of aiding a leader who has not only lost the support of his own people but has allowed the military situation to deteriorate to a point where Barr [Director of the US Military Advisory Group in China] is convinced it is too late to be retrieved even with immediate American advice and materiel, or of witnessing the establishment of a Communist-dominated coalition. If we hold out no hope to Madame Chiang of increased military assistance, Generalissimo will probably yield to the strong pressure from Kmt to delegate powers to others. But by same token, these others will then probably feel compelled to compromise with victorious Communists. On the other hand, should Madame Chiang be given assurances of increased and continuing military aid, we can expect a continuance of the Generalissimo in power, with his ineffective manner of handling affairs, and a rising tide of resentment against us for prolonging the war.\n\nIn the circumstances, the best the State Department could come up with was a White Paper saying the USA had done all it could in China, and making plain that it would do no more. In Washington, Marshall called the situation 'critical'. But, when Chiang blamed the setbacks in the north on the Yalta agreement and said the United States must send help, all he got in return was an acknowledgement of his message from the White House. Sun Fo called for the appointment of an American supreme commander in China of the calibre of Douglas MacArthur, the viceroy of Japan, but Truman ruled that out. Though it ensured that the Nationalists retained their permanent seat on the Security Council of the new United Nations, the administration again suspended aid.\n\nThe choice was clear \u2013 the Cold War was to be fought in Europe, not in China. The decision not to commit to Chiang would provoke the search for The Men Who Lost China and McCarthyism, fuelling the rise of the Republican right, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. From Roosevelt's confused attempts to cast China as a major power whose leader belonged in the club of democratic nations to the debacle sweeping over the Nationalist regime, the inability of American policy-makers to rise above the tangle they set for themselves stands as a failure of attention and nerve, an example of how a preponderant power should not let itself behave.\n\nThe railway city of Xuzhou had been where Chiang had won the backing of the Christian General against the left-wingers in Wuhan in 1927. Nearby was the walled town of Taierzhuang where the Chinese had registered their victory in 1938. Sitting at the junction of north-south and east-west lines and with a population of 300,000, Xuzhou was the vital junction between north China and the rich Lower Yangtze. More than a year earlier, the Communists had told the American journalist Jack Belden that the war would be decided by the battle for the city. Echoing the metaphor about the Japanese and the Communists, a Nationalist minister said that, while Manchuria was a limb, central China was the heart.\n\nTwo Communist armies totalling more than half a million men, with twice as many peasants as bearers and helpers, advanced towards Xuzhou in the late autumn of 1948, establishing themselves in a triangle between the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. The East China Field Army, led by Chen Yi, who had been with Mao in the original Soviet base in Jiangxi, fought its way through southern Shandong while the Central Plains Army advanced from the west under Liu Bocheng, 'the one-eyed dragon', who had lost an eye in a grenade explosion and had served as Chief of Staff on the Long March, drinking a libation of chicken's blood to seal a pact with the Yi people of Yunnan.\n\nThe Nationalists built up an equivalent force for what became known as the Huai-Hai battle because it took place between the Huai River and the parallel Longhai railway line. Chiang could have pulled back south of the natural defensive line of the river, but he chose to fight on the flat countryside outside Xuzhou rather than relinquishing the rail junction. One Nationalist army group was positioned to the west, one inside the city, and two to the east. Chiang's forces controlled the air and enjoyed supremacy in artillery, vehicles and tanks \u2013 his adopted son, Wei-kuo, commanded an armoured unit. But they had few planes left, and proved incompetent in using heavy guns and motorised equipment. Their generals were badly coordinated, and subject to the usual instructions from Chiang in the capital. After General He Yingqin had got one of his men appointed in overall field control, the Generalissimo made sure he had his own man on the spot by sending in his protege, General Du Yuming, as deputy commander.\n\nThe PLA won a first victory when they took a town defended by 90,000 troops, only a few thousand of whom escaped. In contrast to the traditional image of Communist infantrymen and peasants storming the barricades of reaction, the victory was won with a final tank assault against a double defensive ring of walls and moats. Caught in a huge pincer movement, three Nationalist armies totalling 300,000 men were swiftly surrounded and subjected to intense bombardment. Their motorised units bogged down in the mud, while their pilots flew too high for accurate bombing. Their intelligence was poor compared to what the Communists learned from peasant supporters. Static defensive tactics left the government divisions as sitting ducks in face of the PLA's speed and manoeuvring skill in attacking weak spots one by one with massive force in pursuit of Mao's doctrine of annihilation.\n\nOne Kuomintang general was killed in action. Another shot himself after sending Chiang a farewell message following the defeat of his army. Cut off on the barren, wintry plain, some government units ran short of food. Defections soared. A photographer flying over the area in mid-November reported that every village for 30 miles was on fire. Xuzhou airfield was abandoned as the PLA formed a 20-mile arc north of the city. Soldiers and officials fought to board the last planes. Fuel dumps were blown up, sending smoke 8,000 feet into the air.\n\nThe overall Nationalist commander, General Liu Chih, a rotund man with gold-capped teeth, had flown out to the safety of the town of Bengbu, standing on the Huai River and the railway line from Nanking. Armies which had withdrawn from the battle concentrated there with their American trucks and armoured vehicles. At the beginning of December, Liu sent two of these armies back to relieve a unit surrounded by the PLA. 'We are closing a trap,' he told a visiting correspondent. But the counterattack failed under heavy Communist artillery fire, and a Nationalist division defected. On 16 December government tanks and trucks rattled across the Bengbu bridge, followed by long lines of infantry, to establish a new defensive line 30 miles closer to Nanking. As they did so, the Communists issued a list of forty 'war criminals' \u2013 Chiang headed it followed by T. V. Soong, H. H. Kung, Meiling and Nationalist generals, including the Peiping defender, Fu Zuoyi.\n\nThe Xuzhou garrison of more than 100,000 men under General Du was cut off; the PLA radio bragged that they were 'encircled as tightly as in an iron barrel'. Abandoned American vehicles lay in fields, and long lines of Nationalists troops were marched off to prisoner-of-war camps. Landlords were purged, and land distributed to the peasants. Like the Kuomintang troops in 1926\u201427, the PLA impressed the villagers by behaving well, and paying for supplies. Local people turned into guerrilla fighters. A militia leader gave a simple explanation. 'These are our fields,' he told an American correspondent.\n\nThe chain of military disasters was accompanied by the bursting of a brief economic bubble in coastal cities caused by the flow of civilian aid organised by the United Nations. The diversion of goods onto the black market had produced a sheen of prosperity in some places, particularly in Shanghai where even blood plasma donated by the American Red Cross was on sale in shops for US$25 a pint, and supplies were smuggled out to be sold to the Communists for gold bars. Then the remorseless pressure of inflation and depreciation of the currency took its toll. With military spending sky-rocketing, the volume of new banknotes printed by the government rose twenty-two times in a year. A single US dollar was worth millions of its Chinese counterpart. A mill was reported to have bought up banknotes to pulp into high quality paper which was more valuable. A well-known professor killed himself because he could not pay for his hospital bills. A major general jumped to his death from a ship saying he could not bear watching his family dying of hunger. In Shanghai, the issue of certificates that could be redeemed later for gold drew queues of 200,000 people who stood through a rainy night; seven were trampled to death.\n\nAs money became useless, shopkeepers were unwilling to sell because they knew prices would double within a few days. Farmers hoarded food, further boosting prices in urban areas. Businessmen moved operations to Hong Kong and other safe havens. China was proving the truth of Lenin's observation about the power of hyperinflation to undermine a regime.\n\nThe government was reluctant to act both because it needed all the cash it could print to pay for the war, and because it feared that taking drastic measures would increase its unpopularity. Some steps were tried to control prices, wages, credit and production but they had little effect given the way in which the regime was pumping up inflation. As the economist Chang Kia-ngau pointed out, such measures were aimed at the symptoms of the economic disease, not its cause.\n\nA new currency, the gold yuan, was introduced. Each unit was to be worth 3 million of the old money. Individuals were to hand in gold and silver in return for the new notes. The scheme had to be aborted when word got out and sparked a storm of speculation \u2013 T. V. Soong was blamed for the leak, and sent off to become Governor of Guangdong, after which the Chen brothers launched an investigation of his affairs. In August 1948, a new attempt was made, and Chiang's thickset, crew-cut son, Ching-kuo, went to Shanghai to oversee implementation, launching a 'tiger hunt' against speculators. Using methods he had seen in the Soviet Union, he made a target of the middle class to try to raise popular support for what he called a social revolution, and forced shopkeepers to sell hoarded goods at low prices. This produced a buying stampede \u2013 a coolie who snapped up a bottle of penicillin was asked if he knew what it was; 'No, but I know it's worth more than money,' he replied.\n\nMany shopkeepers were ruined. Confidence in the new currency dropped sharply, and it plunged in value, wiping out the savings of those who entrusted their valuable metals to the government. There were runs on banks. Rioters raided food stores. Ching-kuo turned on the rich, confiscating their assets and detaining some. In a sign of the Godfather's loss of influence, the son of Big-Eared Du was among those pulled in \u2013 after a newspaper ran a photograph of him in handcuffs on its front page, the old man refused to go out or to receive guests for more than a month before decamping to Hong Kong. Ching-kuo's agents also raided the warehouses of the Yangtze Development Corporation, an enterprise controlled by the Kungs. One of their sons, David, was detained. In an echo of her reaction to W. H. Donald's criticism of her sister, Meiling flew to Shanghai to confront her stepson on behalf of her family. According to one account, she slapped him in the face for what he had done. The Kungs were said to have threatened to release embarrassing information about the Chiangs if their son was not freed. David made a settlement to the government, reportedly US$6 million, and left for Hong Kong and New York. Ching-kuo resigned, presumably having been told by his father he had gone too far.\n\nChiang's New Year message for 1949 contained what was billed as a peace offer, but the terms were so unyielding that it was bound to be rejected by the Communists. After a lull at the turn of the year, fighting resumed at Xuzhou where bodies were thrown into open graves, cannibalism was reported and people wore winter coats made from the skins of dogs and cats they had eaten. Chiang halted supplies to try to force the garrison to break out, but they made no concerted move. On 7 January, a section of the defences was breached. Some Nationalist troops surrendered; others tried to get away. General Du fled disguised as an ordinary soldier, pretending to be the prisoner of his bodyguards who were dressed as Communists; but he was captured.* Another general did escape, shedding his uniform and being taken through the lines in a wheelbarrow. According to Chiang's son, Ching-kuo, the loss of the city meant that the Communists gained control of 'our chemical shells' and used them against the Nationalists.\n\nOn 15 January, after looting the shops, the last Nationalist crossed the Huai River, blowing up the main bridge and killing thirty civilians who were on it at the time. The campaign cost the Nationalists 200,000 casualties. Even more men surrendered or defected. Victory opened the road for the Communists to the Yangtze, Nanking and Shanghai. Officials and their families there joined an exodus to the south on 'dispersal trains'. So many members of the Legislative Yuan left the capital that the body lacked a quorum. In the north, the Communists took Tianjin, firing their rifles in the air as they marched past the great Western buildings in the former American and British Concessions.\n\nThough he thought of trying to raise a new army in Yunnan, Chiang's eye was now on Taiwan, which had been returned to China after the surrender of Japan following a fifty-year occupation. He had sent Chen Cheng there as Governor to prepare the island as a new base \u2013 four of the Generalissimo's cars were taken over as a sign of his intentions. Refugees boarded boats from Shanghai to cross the Strait; more than 2,000 passengers died when one hit a Japanese mine and sank.\n\nThe 14,000-square-mile island was an ideal base both because Chiang's navy would protect it, and because of the lack of Communist presence. The prospect of safe passage to the offshore bolt hole also induced Nationalist generals to stay loyal to the island's master. The coming of the mainlanders wreaked havoc in what had been a harshly ruled but relatively progressive Japanese colony. The island's currency depreciated and the black market flourished. There was a cholera outbreak. Education declined. Mainlanders used military support to grab local businesses and impose government monopolies. The islanders showed their resentment with a revolt on 28 February 1947 after police beat an old Taiwanese woman who resisted arrest for selling cigarettes in contravention of the monopoly. Troops fired on a protest rally, and the ensuing repression took anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 lives. Taiwan was cowed, and Chiang could go ahead with the transfer of troops, along with the navy and air force. He also held on to two islands off the coast, Matsu and Quemoy, which the Communists failed to take in a rare Nationalist success.\n\nPolitical pressure to seek an end to the war rose when the Executive Yuan proposed an immediate unconditional ceasefire. But there was no way the Generalissimo could even start to talk about Mao's conditions \u2013 elimination of reactionaries from government, punishment of war criminals such as himself and his wife, confiscation of 'bureaucratic capital', land and army reform, an end to treaties with imperialists, and, less threatening, adoption of an Anno Domini calendar. The gall Chiang was tasting became even more bitter when it became clear that his northern commander, Fu Zuoyi, was negotiating to surrender Peiping. An appeal to Truman for a 'firm statement of American policy in support of the cause for which my Government is fighting' evoked no response. From his headquarters in Nanking, Chiang conducted tense late night conversations about military movements with his generals in the field, and then found it difficult to sleep. Pills did not help, so he took to drinking a cup and a half of whisky to help him nod off.\n\nOn 21 January 1949 the Generalissimo rose at his usual early hour. He wrote a letter to Fu urging him to resist, and then prayed in church. After holding a lunch for the presidents of the five Yuans, Chiang went to a meeting of the Kuomintang Central Committee to announce that he was handing over to the Vice-President, Li Zongren, 'in the hope that the fighting will come to an end and that the suffering of the people can be lessened'. Some committee members broke into tears. Others tried to dissuade him. But it was time for a last tactical retreat.\n\nLeaving the Central Committee, Chiang drove in his black Cadillac to visit the Sun Yat-sen memorial on the edge of the city. With the aid of a walking stick, he climbed the white steps he had ascended nineteen years earlier behind the coffin of the founder of the Kuomintang. Entering the great hall, the Generalissimo bowed three times before the marble statue of the doctor. When he came out into the sunshine, he spent a while looking out over his capital, then walked down the steps between thick ranks of guards, followed by a posse of generals. He drove to the airport and flew with his son to Hangzhou \u2013 Meiling was away in America. In the city he had led a revolutionary 'Dare to Die' unit in 1911, he stayed at the air force academy, and went out to dinner at a restaurant. Before going to bed, he told Ching-kuo: 'I feel most relieved after unburdening myself of such a heavy load.'\n\nAs soon as Chiang was gone, Li Zongren put out peace feelers to Mao Zedong. Two days later, Peiping was handed over to the Communists. In icy weather, an advance guard of 200\u2013300 PLA men marched in, described by one observer as 'red-cheeked, healthy looking and seeming in high spirits'. Behind them came a column of students carrying portraits of Mao and Zhu De. Observers noted that most of their equipment was captured American materiel. Under the surrender deal, General Fu's name was taken off the list of war criminals, and his troops integrated into the PLA.\n\nReturning to his home village, Chiang decided that 'the fundamental cause of failure this time is that the old system had collapsed before the new one could be established'. The blame, he wrote, lay with the Kuomintang for having done nothing to reform society or promote the people's welfare. The sixty-two-year-old Generalissimo walked in the countryside, watching the birds and relishing the peace. His son cooked taro which he enjoyed. 'He often looked at his grandsons and smiled,' Ching-kuo recorded in his diary. At the Lunar New Year at the end of January, Chiang paid tribute to his ancestors at the family temple. In the evening, lantern parties with dragon dances were held in his honour.\n\nDespite the walks and smiles for his grandsons, Chiang was still intent on pulling the strings of what remained of the Nationalist administration, as he had done in earlier retreats to Xikou. His resignation had been ambiguous. His statement said that Li Zongren 'will act for me', leaving it unclear whether he was stepping down definitively or just taking a break. Pressed by reporters, officials in Nanking telephoned Xikou and came back to journalists with the formulation, T have decided to retire,' which left matters no clearer. Chiang was still the Generalissimo and Director of the Kuomintang. Keeping in touch with loyal commanders and officials, he issued orders that undercut Li Zongren, whose hopes of peace were dashed by stern Communist terms and opposition from his long-time Guangxi colleague, General Bai, who wanted to go on fighting.\n\nChen Lifu went to Xikou to confer with his old boss over the Lunar New Year. The Model Governor, who had pointed to a pile of cyanide pills on his desk when interviewed by _Life_ magazine and said he would rather kill himself than surrender, also visited Chiang before decamping to Nanking with his province's gold reserves \u2013 his capital fell to the Communists in April after house-to-house fighting. The Generalissimo's lobbyists in Washington encouraged Republican congressmen to press Truman to help the Nationalists, and to introduce a Senate bill for aid totalling US$1.5 billion \u2013 it did not get through, but the China Lobby kept up the pressure, expanding its following in Congress with the backing of Henry Luce's publications.\n\nFrom Xikou, Chiang telephoned senior generals to issue orders. Li Zongren recalled one evening when the Generalissimo called the army Chief of Staff diree times during a dinner. He also had the faithful General Tang Enbo, who was in command of the Shanghai region, arrest the governor of his native province of Zhejiang for disloyalty without informing Nanking. On the other hand, when Li asked Chiang to agree to free the Young Marshal, he replied that, as a retired man, he could not act in matters of state.\n\nAs the victors of the Huai-Hai battle moved towards Nanking and Lin Biao's troops sliced southwards, a major disagreement arose over defending the Nationalist heartland. Li and his team wanted to use the Yangtze as a defensive moat, holding out on the southern bank. The participation of Tang Enbo's large army based in Shanghai was an essential part of the plan. But Tang refused to join in \u2013 for his own reasons, Chiang was telling him to remain where he was. At a conference organised by Li Zongren, the head of the Operations Department pointed out that this would weaken the attempt to stop the PLA crossing the river. Tang said he did not care; he had orders from Chiang, and they must be followed. Slamming the table and sweeping the papers in front of him onto the floor, he shouted threats to shoot the operations chief and stalked out \u2013 his threat was not treated lightly since Tang was known for his temper; he had once killed the owner of a ship on which he was travelling after it hit a pier. Li Zongren looked at General He Yingqin, who had by now become Prime Minister, and wondered what they should do. 'If the big boss does not agree, what can we do?' was He's reply. 'Let the situation go to blazes.'\n\nChiang wanted to hold on to Shanghai so that he could extract as much of its wealth as possible to be transferred to Taiwan. He also wanted to take trusted troops to the island rather than seeing them chewed up in fighting along the Yangtze. The city was subjected to brutal military misrule as Tang's troops looted shops and occupied homes, executing dissident students in the streets while crowds besieged banks trying to draw out their remaining deposits. Green Gang men loaded gold and notes from the Bank of China onto ships to be taken across the Strait. China's national collection of antiquities and art treasures which had followed Chiang round his various capitals also made the voyage. So did the Young Marshal, who was installed in a police post on the island.\n\nTo try to straighten out the situation, Li attempted to get Chiang either to resume power or to leave the country. That was a waste of time \u2013 the Generalissimo's purpose was to leave Li dangling while he built up his new power base in Taiwan, where he could make a fresh start and would face no opposition. While he did that, he had no desire to make things easier for his successor; indeed, his interest lay in Li failing \u2013 a successful defence on the Yangtze would have spelled the end to his ambitions to re-emerge as the Nationalist leader when he saw the time as right.\n\nHis peace efforts blocked by tough Communist conditions, Li approached both Washington and Moscow. The notion of an American air and naval blockade along the Yangtze was floated, linked to Chiang's definitive retirement. This would have divided China in the way of Germany, Korea and Vietnam. Had Washington accepted the idea, the recent history of East Asia might have been very different, or Americans might have found themselves fighting the PLA at the height of the Cold War. But, predictably, Truman and Marshall were not interested.\n\nNanking also sought Russian intervention. Stalin was tempted \u2013 the idea of a weak and divided China under Soviet influence had its attractions while he worried that a triumphant Mao would become an independent force like Tito in Yugoslavia. In 1948, he had sent an emissary to urge Mao not to seek total victory for fear of provoking US intervention. Now, Moscow advised the PLA to stop on the Yangtze rather than aiming to conquer the whole nation. Mao was in no mood to listen; fourteen years later, he would note that the Chinese revolution had succeeded against Stalin's will, and that the roots of the subsequent split with Moscow lay in the Kremlin's attempt to check him.\n\nIn a final bid to win Chiang's support, Li Zongren flew to Hangzhou for a meeting at the air force college there. According to Li's memoirs, the Generalissimo assured him of support, but, even at this drastic juncture, considerations of 'face' prevented the Guangxi general from insisting on specific undertakings. When Li got back to the capital, he found that the government had left for Canton. After a sleepless night, he took a jeep to the airfield, and flew to his native region in the south-west.\n\nThe fall of Nanking was symptomatic of the collapse of the regime. Mobs rampaged through the streets; troops blew up the railway station; soldiers and police shed their uniforms. Looters stripped abandoned houses \u2013 the American journalist Seymour Topping watched an old woman in a ragged black tunic hobble away on bound feet with four elaborately embroidered cushions from one villa. At the huge Executive Yuan and the Ministry of Communications, everything that could be removed was stolen, including the window frames. The residences of General He Yingqin and Li Zongren were ransacked, in the latter case with the help of the housekeeper.\n\nThe Mayor tried to escape in a car with 300 million gold yuan, but was beaten up by his chauffeur and bodyguards who broke his legs and left him on the road after making off with the money. At the airport, crowds of civilians tried to force their way onto the few planes left. Senior officials and generals took piles of furniture and belongings, including, in one case, a grand piano. A dazed Kuomintang official was photographed standing in line grasping a tennis racket. A Peace Preservation Committee was formed to arrange the handover of the city, its chairman sitting alone in a dingy, pea-green room in the Cairo Hotel.\n\nThe PLA crossed the Yangtze without opposition on 20 April 1949. The defenders melted away or defected, one unit turning its guns on the Nationalist boats in the river and protecting the Communist craft. Nanking was formally taken three days later by steel-helmeted troops in mustard-brown uniforms accompanied by tanks. Watching them, the French military attache, Jacques Guillermaz, was struck by how tired they looked as they marched in, bags of rice slung over their shoulders.\n\nThough students staged a welcoming rally, most of the people in the streets regarded the newcomers silently. A dozen PLA soldiers burst into the bedroom of the American ambassador, pointed to the furniture and said, 'These will soon belong to the people.' There was a more serious incident when Communist forces fired at a British naval vessel, the _Amethyst_ , which had been sent up the river to take supplies to the embassy. Three British ships tried to go to its aid, but were shelled in their turn. In all, forty-four sailors were killed and eighty injured, and the _Amethyst_ remained trapped for 100 days as its captain refused to sign a confession of 'criminally invading Chinese territorial waters' \u2013 the ship eventually escaped under fire, using a passing boat as cover. In the past, foreign warships had sailed at will on the Yangtze; now they were unwelcome intruders.\n\nTo the east, Hangzhou was taken, isolating Shanghai. To the west, Lin Biao's army surged to Wuhan, then marched south through the rain. Other Communist units drove into Jiangxi to take Nanchang. The Guangxi Muslim general, Bai Chongxi, tried to organise resistance in Hunan; still anxious to check independent-minded commanders, Chiang used his influence to deny him supplies.\n\nOn a last visit to Shanghai, where he stayed in the Moral Endeavour club, the Generalissimo issued instructions for the defence of the city that had contributed so much to his rise to power. 'Seeing the Republic of China on the verge of death, I am moving ahead with tears in my eyes,' he wrote in his diary on 7 May. 'There is only one road ahead, but it is torturous. Don't fear. The road has been blazed with blood by our revolutionary forefathers. We must move forward today \u2013 forward, never retreat. Around us is darkness; ahead of us are dangers. With a ray of hope and my allegiance to Dr Sun Yat-sen, I will continue my struggle without fail.' Others were less determined. In despair at the current of events, the Generalissimo's long-time ideological mentor, Dai Jitao, killed himself. So did one of Chiang's secretaries who left a note saying, 'The light is dying.'\n\nTang Enbo swore to make Shanghai a second Stalingrad. He had coolies dig a large moat and build a 10-foot-high bamboo barrier \u2013 it was said that one of his relatives was in the wood business. The general imposed arbitrary taxes to raise funds, requisitioning houses, hotels and dance halls which his troops stripped of anything valuable. Censorship blocked out news of Nationalist defeats, but the city was awash with rumour and fear. Frantic crowds besieged banks as the value of the currency spiralled down even further and outgoing ships charged extortionate prices for berths. 'The city was filled with men, women and children rushing about in dilapidated trucks or pedicabs,' wrote the Filipino Consul-General. 'People with blank stares [were] running around aimlessly for places of safety.' Most of the defenders melted away as the warlord troops had done against the Nationalists twenty-two years earlier. The business community paid them to go quietly and made a placatory offer of funds and medicine to the PLA. Tang Enbo headed for Canton, awaiting further orders from his master. On 24 May 1949, the Communist vanguard marched up the Avenue Edouard VII in the old French Concession area. A few Nationalist soldiers tried to hold out, but then changed into black gowns and fled. A huge portrait of Mao was put up at the Great World entertainment centre. On the same day, Li Zongren asked the American ambassador to get him a statement of support from Washington. Leighton Stuart cabled the State Department that, despite all his sympathy for the acting President, he could not envisage any statement from the US which 'would be effective in changing the course of military events'.\n\nThe political, economic and military situation grew even more chaotic for the Nationalists as their military defeats rolled on. Tang Enbo's concentration in Shanghai had left no troops to defend the region to the south, so the Communists moved swiftly down from the Yangtze. Chiang repeatedly intervened to undo defensive plans worked out by the Guangxi generals. Defections sapped the government's position; General Bai was forced to retreat from Hunan after the provincial governor switched sides. As the PLA advanced, General He stepped down as prime minister, telling Li that, if he did not do so, he would have only two alternatives \u2014 desertion or suicide. Chiang showed his political influence by getting the Chen brothers to block the appointment of Li's preferred candidate as his successor. Instead, the Model Governor took the job.\n\nWhile the Nationalists crumbled, there were indications that the Communists might not have finally set their face against an understanding with the United States. In June, a friend of the American ambassador who had been to the north told John Leighton Stuart that Mao and Zhou Enlai would welcome a visit from him. At the same time, an Australian journalist approached the former head of the Dixie Mission, Colonel David Barrett, who was in Peiping, with what he said was a message from Zhou that the Communists were split between a pro-Soviet faction and a liberal group headed by Zhou which wanted working relationships with foreign governments, notably America. The State Department was very cautious on both fronts, and, at the end of the month, Mao ruled out any rapprochement with a speech hailing Moscow as China's true friend \u2013 despite Stalin's attempts to halt the PLA \u2013 and saying he expected no help from the West.\n\nHaving moved hundreds of thousands of troops, his bureaucracy and the gold and silver reserves to Taiwan, Chiang was now ready for his final act on the mainland. In July, he flew through bad weather to Canton and laid out plans for military operations. He also established a body called the Extraordinary Committee of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang to control party affairs, with himself as chairman. Without consulting the Prime Minister in advance, he appointed Tang Enbo as Governor of Fujian, across the Strait from Taiwan. According to Li Zongren, some southern generals grew so angry that they proposed arresting Chiang: as Li pointed out, since he had the national treasury and the loyalty of many of the other commanders, a rerun of the Xi'an Incident would achieve nothing.\n\nConvinced that it was only a matter of time before a Third World War between the United States and Communism paved the way for his resumption of power on the mainland, Chiang paid visits to the right-wing governments in the Philippines and South Korea. Failure to come to his aid would cost the democracies dearly, he warned in an interview. 'If we cannot stop Communism in China, I am sure it will spread to the whole of Asia,' he added in an early exposition of the domino theory that would reach its apogee in Vietnam. But Washington made it plain there would be no eleventh-hour rescue mission.\n\nIn the increasingly unreal atmosphere, Chiang returned to Canton, where he expressed outrage at the extent of gambling and drug smuggling. Meeting General Bai, he said that if they stuck together, all would not be lost. Moved, the Muslim soldier told his colleague, Li Zongren, that he thought the Generalissimo was sincere this time. So Li invited Chiang to dinner. His guest arrived with a heavy detachment of guards who ringed the building. Ching-kuo went to the kitchen to check each dish to make sure it did not contain poison.\n\nFollowing the dinner, Li requested an interview with Chiang and, according to the account in his memoirs, delivered an angry and lengthy attack, listing the Generalissimo's shortcomings and wrongdoings. To Li's surprise, Chiang reacted humbly, and accompanied him to the door, waving goodbye as he left. But it was too late for a recovery. The Eagle of the North-West, Hu Zongnan, was forced to retreat from Shaanxi to Sichuan. Gansu province and the city of Lanzhou were lost in the northwest. The huge territory of Xinjiang went over to the Communists. On 1 October, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic in the restored capital of Peking, declaring that 'the Chinese people have stood up'. At the end of the month, Canton fell, 'with scarcely more than a quiet sigh', as the _New York Times_ reported. The Nationalists moved to the safest city they could identify, Chungking, though Chiang headed in the opposite direction, to Taiwan.\n\n'The past year has been the darkest and bleakest in my life,' Chiang noted in his diary on his birthday at the end of October, adding, however: 'I am confident that I shall receive the divine decree and can consummate my task.' He then set down a typical self-admonition mixing flagellation and self-regard: 'I have spent my past life in vain. I have suffered ignominy and defeat. However, I should not be worried, angry, nor should I be conceited. I have nothing to be ashamed of before God and man. How lucky I am to have the love of God. Danger and difficulty lie ahead. I must heighten my vigilance so that I can revive China and re-establish the republic.'\n\nOn 11 November he received a letter from the Model Governor, writing as Prime Minister, which said that, without his presence in Chungking, collapse was almost inevitable. Three days later, the Generalissimo made a five-hour flight to the city where he had spent seven of the war years. His son, who accompanied him, recorded that Chungking was 'in the grip of panic, terror, and an atmosphere of deadly silence'. Chiang tried to get Li Zongren to join him. But, suffering from bleeding bowels, the general decided to go to hospital in Hong Kong before heading for New York where he checked in at the Presbyterian Hospital.\n\nGuizhou province fell after General Bai decided to conserve his troops across the border in his native Guangxi and a local general was executed for purloining money meant for his soldiers. By the end of November, the Communist forces led by the Sichuan native, Deng Xiaoping, were closing in on Chungking. On the 29th, Chiang held a military conference to give detailed orders for retreat. He had to walk back to his residence because the streets were blocked with fleeing people and cars. At 10 p.m. rifle fire broke out on the edge of the city, and there were frequent explosions. At dawn the next day, the Generalissimo decided to fly to the Sichuan capital of Chengdu. One story had it that, before getting in his car, he paid a last visit to military headquarters in Chungking but found it deserted. Seeing a map on the floor, he picked it up and burned it to prevent it falling into the hands of the enemy. Then, when his car stopped in the crush of fleeing traffic, he got out and walked to the other side of the jam to commandeer a jeep. As he went, according to the recollections of a police agent, 'he wanted to kill all the people he hated'. Most of the inmates of the secret police jail run with the Americans of the SACO programme were shot. Political prisoners held in a coal mine were executed. There was also one special life Chiang wanted taken.\n\nGeneral Yang Hucheng, the man who had suggested the kidnapping in Xi'an, had been brought to Chungking and kept with his family under house arrest. As the Communists approached, secret police agents went round. First, they shot one of Yang's sons. Then the general was murdered, followed by his daughter, and six members of his staff and their families. The bodies were doused in acid and buried, the general in a brick flower box. Another of Yang's sons later unearthed the bodies, and took his father's corpse for proper burial in the city where he and the Young Marshal had snatched the ruler of China thirteen years earlier.\n\nChungking fell on 1 December 1949. Deng Xiaoping became Mayor and political commissar. The Communists also took Guangxi, as Bai was forced to retreat. In Chengdu, Kuomintang members who remained called on Chiang to resume the presidency, and the north-western 'Eagle', Hu Zongnan, organised his troops to defend the city. Many of the inhabitants were trying to flee. Vehicles jammed the streets. Soldiers fired at random. Looters grabbed what they could of what was left. On 8 December, the Executive Yuan voted to remove the capital of China to Taiwan. On the 10th, thirteen years almost to the day after he had prepared what was meant to be the final elimination of the Communists from his headquarters in Xi'an, Chiang went to the airfield to fly to Taiwan. There were no radio stations to give guidance, and heavy cloud prevented the navigator working by reference to the land below. The DC-4 plane flew by the instinct of the pilot and his reckoning of the wind. At 9 p.m. a break in the cloud enabled him to see an island off the coast of Fujian. The course for Taiwan was set. The major on the flight deck went back to tell the Generalissimo. He just nodded.\n\nAfter arriving, Chiang went with his son to a hotel at one of the island's beauty spots, Sun Moon Lake. There he received a message telling him of the loss of Yunnan. According to his biographer Hollington Tong, the sixty-two-year-old Nationalist leader sat quietly for an hour before telling Ching-kuo they should take a walk. They reached the edge of a forest where Chiang sat and meditated. Then he suggested a fishing expedition. Ching-kuo found an old man who had a boat and went back to the hotel to fetch money to pay for it. His father set off alone, casting a net. According to this story, he caught a fish that was five foot long \u2013 'it was a good omen and Chiang felt the curtain of his black thoughts lifting'.\n\nThe civil war had taken perhaps 5 million lives, on top of the 1 o million or more who perished in the conflict with Japan and up to 3 million in Chiang's earlier campaigns. Small-scale fighting continued as Hu Zongnan's army conducted a rearguard action in the far west and General Bai held out on Hainan Island. Other Kuomintang troops stayed in the Burmese border region, becoming big players in the opium trade of the Golden Triangle region. But, despite such last-ditch resistance, the regime that had ruled for two decades ended without any great final confrontation with its enemy. The crucial battles had been fought a year or more before. Since the loss of Manchuria and the north followed by die great defeat in the Huai-Hai campaign, Chiang had been preparing for his long-term future.\n\nIn Taiwan, he developed a litany to explain the defeat, from which he fully expected to spring back with a triumphant return to die mainland. He had shown too much good faith in the face of Red treachery. The changes in American policy had been the result of the machinations of international Communism. But all was not lost. 'If I can continue my ambition and carry it out,' he wrote in his diary at Christmas 1949, 'I should become aware that the new undertaking and history should begin from today.'\n\n* * *\n\n* Photographs of the occasion currently mounted outside the hall are set on a background of fallen leaves.\n\n* He was held as a war criminal until being pardoned in 1959 after expressing repentance for his misdeeds.\n\n# EPILOGUE\n\n _Next Year in Nanking_\n\nON HIS RELEASE FROM XI'AN at the end of 1936, Chiang spoke of having been given a second life. Thirteen years later, his flight to Taiwan provided him with a third. For twenty-six years, he ruled as dictator of the Republic of China on the island 100 miles off the coast of the mainland. Most of his associates followed him across the Strait, though some, including Li Zongren and the Yunnan governor Long Yun, made their peace with the new regime in Peking. Others preferred to go to America, like the Kungs, or to Hong Kong, like Big-Eared Du.\n\nFacing the bastion of Asian Communism, Chiang became a Cold War icon in the 1950s, assured of American protection as the Nationalists clung on to their Security Council seat in an increasingly bathetic echo of the era when Roosevelt had seen the Generalissimo as a pillar of the new world order. Around 1960, he proposed to invade the mainland after the chaos of Mao's Great Leap Forward, but Washington declined to back an offensive or provide him with the atomic warheads he wanted. In 1971, the United Nations finally admitted the People's Republic as the only legitimate representative of China, including Taiwan. The following year Richard Nixon visited Beijing and the United States signed the Shanghai communique which proclaimed 'there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China'. Full diplomatic relations followed in 1979. For all his claims to be sole legitimate ruler of his country, Chiang's life and career after 1949 were markedly different from the previous quarter of a century, which is why this book ends then.\n\nAfter suffering from recurrent bouts of pneumonia, Chiang died of a heart attack on 5 April 1975, aged eighty-seven \u2013 seventeen months before Mao Zedong passed away in Beijing. Meiling, who had been spending more time in the United States, was back in Taiwan during her husband's last days, and secretly took the Young Marshal to see the corpse before it was laid out for official mourning. The Generalissimo's son, Ching-kuo, became President. Under him and his successor, Lee Teng-hui, the island turned into a great economic success story, and evolved into a fully fledged democracy, realising Nationalist ambitions and seeking to establish its own identity as it confronted reunification demands from Beijing.\n\nThough a giant statue of the Generalissimo looks down in the monumental mausoleum erected to his memory in Taipei, his legacy has faded by the year as the island evolves a character distinct from the Nationalist past, electing a president and a legislature from the opposition. Having failed to impress herself on the post-Chiang Kuomintang leadership, Meiling retreated to a house on Long Island and then moved to an apartment in Manhattan where she died in 2003 at the age of 106. Chiang's face has been taken off some banknotes, and officials have been told that they can remove his portrait from their office walls if they wish to.\n\nThe Cold War made an objective assessment of Chiang almost impossible as the past was viewed through the lens of what followed. Either he was a faithful friend of the West who had been undone by Communist cunning, Western irresolution and treachery in the State Department; or he was a reactionary, cruel, incompetent dictator who was no better than the warlords, who betrayed the true interests of his nation by failing to stand up to the Japanese in time, and who perverted the sacred teachings of Sun Yat-sen. Verdicts on the Nanking regime range from revisionist historians who see it as an essential stage in the construction of modern China to those who condemn it as a corrupt, reactionary nest of self-seeking politicians, generals, gangsters and businessmen. Both views contain their degree of truth, but each fails to take the true measure of the man and his time, judging him by absolute standards which could not be expected to be applied to China in the first half of the 20th century.\n\nChiang was undoubtedly a reactionary authoritarian who set no great store by the lives of his compatriots and put the defeat of the Communists ahead of fighting the Japanese. There was no way he could conform to the American dream that resistance to Fascism and democracy should walk hand-in-hand. He was a bad administrator with no understanding of economics and deep suspicion of the mass movement needed to invigorate the country. While his overall strategic concept against Japan made eventual sense, it entailed huge losses of life and territory, with the attendant demoralisation and weakening of his regime. As a tactical commander, he had a poor record and owed his military status to politics and control of money and supplies, not battlefield prowess. He exploited factional divisions and prized loyalty above merit in making appointments. He tolerated corruption and amorality that would help to destroy his administration. His short-term battles against the Americans ended up by losing him the one ally who mattered. Worst of all for somebody engaged in a constant struggle for supremacy, he doomed himself to be the man who lost China.\n\nBut the purely negative verdict on Chiang which followed the Communist victory ignores the often vital nature of his role. Even if progress was patchy and the effects were felt in a relatively small portion of the country, his was a time of modernisation such as China had not seen before, until the outbreak of the war with Japan slammed on the brakes. The Nationalists established the institutions for a modern state, however imperfectly these functioned. The Northern Expedition gave China back its status as a nation, buttressed by the quest for strong central authority to replace the anarchy of the warlord era \u2013 a quest that continued up to the outbreak of the war with Japan in 1937 and resumed after 1945. The Nanking Decade saw the country engaging with the rest of the world. The foreign concessions were abolished, industry and finance began to develop, roads and railways were built, and air services began. Though often in opposition to the government, there was a flowering of thought, literature, art and the cinema \u2013 and, despite the horror of the purges unleashed in 1927, the repression used by the regime was nothing compared to what was to come under Communism.\n\nThe scale of Chiang's defeat masks the equivalent scope of his earlier success. At Sun's death in March 1925, he was not even a major contender to lead the Nationalists. By the following summer, he was the dominant figure in Canton and led the Nationalist forces on the triumphant campaign to the Yangtze. Nine months on, he was at the head of the Kuomintang right in Nanking, emerging on top against the leftist government in Wuhan. In June 1928, Peking was taken and, a year later, Chiang defeated his principal military and political rivals.\n\nDespite that dazzling succession of victories, however, he lacked the political, administrative, ideological and economic bases on which to construct a new China in the face of almost constant warfare and huge natural disasters \u2013 one study puts the number of people who died from military violence or famine in China between 1916 and 1949 at 35 million. From the assumption of power in Canton in 1926 to the flight from Chengdu in 1949, everything happened too fast; he could not stop to consolidate. Instead, he had to confront recurrent military and political challenges from rivals, the Japanese and the Communists. Huge as the Nationalist forces were on paper, their effective strength was far smaller, and Chiang's central army was severely weakened in the fighting along the Yangtze in 1937\u201338. Nor was the regime very effective at totalitarianism \u2013 despite his lack of concern for human life, the Generalissimo did not bring to bear the degree of sustained ruthlessness shown by Mao or by the imperial suppression of the Taiping Rebellion. The only way he knew of operating was to go on as before, extending his authority little by little over recalcitrant provinces, playing clan politics, printing money and issuing orders that he often had no means of enforcing.\n\nHis short-term political skills were of the highest order, but, for all the sweeping statements in his diary, he lacked a long-range vision that could give coherence to his actions. Obedience was all. The Chinese were to be treated like children, not offered any aspirations beyond the approval of their uniformed father figure. Chiang's manipulative, secretive, suspicious nature played a key part in his early successes, but then prevented him from developing a team to run China and sealed him in a hermetic status quo isolated from his country.\n\nProfoundly conservative, walled off from reality, the Generalissimo was stuck mentally in the era in which he had grown up, making him incapable of offering anything new to a country that was crying out for progress. Obsessively, he pursued his set ideas to the bitter end. Brilliant at tactical retreats and at engineering temporary compromises, he was also deeply stubborn, convinced that he, and he alone, personified his country. His expressions of admiration for his mother enabled him to construct a selfless, dedicated, long-suffering image with which he could identify, a rock to cling to as he navigated the rapids of the 'inter-dynasty' period between the Manchus and the Red Emperor. Given all that, his greatest feat was to have survived for so long at the head of an increasingly united China, even if that unity would become the platform for his greatest adversary.\n\nTo establish more accurately Chiang's influence, for good or ill, consider what might have happened had he not been there. Without him, would the Nationalists ever have marched out of Guangdong in search of national unity under Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin or one of the regional generals who rallied to the Kuomintang flag? If they had staged a northern expedition, would any of the other potential leaders have been able to hold the movement together, let alone take it on to Peking and the key alliance with the Manchurians? Without Chiang, the odds would have been on a continuation of the warlord era, and the fragmentation of China into eternally conflicting fiefdoms.\n\nIf the Generalissimo had been killed in Xi'an in 1936, would the pro-Japanese elements in the administration have allied themselves with Tokyo? If so, a vast Chinese army trained by imperial officers could have joined Japan in an attack on the Soviet Union from the east while Hitler moved from the west, altering the whole history of the Second World War. If Chiang had been replaced at the head of the Nationalists after the outbreak of the war in 1937, would anybody else have been able to hold unoccupied China together for so long? However loose the coalition over which he presided, the Generalissimo alone came to personify his country, preventing the Japanese from achieving political success to accompany their military victories. And, then, what would have happened if Chiang had not been there to manoeuvre so effectively against Stilwell and Marshall? If a coalition government had emerged with a reformed army, Washington would have felt obliged to support it to the end, thus either heading off the final showdown of 1948\u201349 or turning China into another divided Cold War nation, split along the Yangtze.\n\nNor was defeat by the Communists as much a matter of historical inevitability as the post-1949 conventional wisdom holds. For two decades, Chiang held the advantage, shown vividly by the great retreat of the Long March. Had the Xi'an Incident not taken place, the Generalissimo might well have finally crushed the Red Army. Nine years later, the Communists had been seriously weakened by Japanese campaigns in the north, and, in 1946, the PLAwas pushed back to the north of Manchuria. The protective sea of the peasantry was of little help in any of these cases. Rather than the inescapability of Communist victory, it was the weakness of the Nationalists, Chiang's failure as a military leader, and economic disintegration that sent the one-time man of destiny fleeing to Taiwan.\n\nYear by year, the Generalissimo has become less of a taboo subject in Communist China. Archives in Nanking have been opened. Xikou has been renovated, and attracts crowds of tourists. The Chiangs' villa in the mountain resort of Ruling has been kept as it was when Kai-shek and Meiling left it for the last time. The military headquarters in Lushan from where the Generalissimo launched the campaign that forced the Red Army onto the Long March can be visited. His Shanghai house is a music school. The pavilion from which he fled outside Xi'an has been preserved, bullet holes and all. His wartime home in Chungking stands by the river. His residence in Beijing during the abortive defence of Manchuria against the Communists has become the headquarters of a property company, but the Kuomintang symbols are still inlaid into the floors and ceilings. Visitors to Sun Yat-sen's presidential palace in Nanking can walk down a passage to the brick building from which Chiang ruled and stand in the auditorium where he was elected as President.\n\nThere may be an undeclared motive underlying this tolerance of traces of the enemy of the people. Under Chiang, China had a one-party administration organised on Leninist lines with a repressive internal security apparatus and a refusal to permit democracy. There was growing involvement with the rest of the world. Shanghai was the icon of growth and modernity pursued by economic channels rather than through political progress. Coastal areas prospered while vast rural regions remained backward hinterlands. The army played a big political role, and the leader hung on to supreme command of the military even when obliged to step down from other posts. A middle class emerged, with an elite that drew its power and wealth from political connections \u2013 and sent its children to be educated in America. A wave of corruption sapped the ruling party. The banking system was run by the state, and was riddled with financial black holes. The government announced ambitious infrastructure plans, and foreign investors saw China as a new business frontier. There was an alliance with Washington against a common foe.\n\nEach of those factors is at play again in the China of the early 21st century. So Chiang's era in power can be seen in many ways as a precursor of the post-Mao nation. After three decades of revolution pursued with religious zeal, China is returning to a more normal state which it had previously experienced under the Generalissimo.\n\nIn that context, Chiang and his era become less of the nightmare painted after the Communist victory, and more of a period of missed opportunities under a regime and a ruler who lacked the resources and strength to carry their mission to a conclusion. Following the route of the Long March in the south-west at the end of 2002, I asked my young guide what he thought of Chiang. He replied that, if the Nationalists had not been defeated in 1949, China would have been spared tens of millions of deaths, and would have ended up much as it is today. Walking by the river in Xikou, I put the same question to a thirty-year-old university graduate who was showing me round the Generalissimo's home village. 'Chiang was a major figure, who made major mistakes,' she answered, and then, after a pause, added, 'Like Chairman Mao.'\n\nWaiting for the wheel to turn, the Generalissimo has not given up the cause, even in death. His body has not been buried. To have interred it on Taiwan would have admitted final defeat. So the corpse lies in a marble casket at his country home by a lake outside Taipei, awaiting its eventual return to the mainland Chiang always considered it his destiny to unite, but which, in a quarter of a century of endless struggle, he doomed himself to lose.\n\n# NOTES\n\nCCK |  Chiang Ching-kuo  \n---|---  \nCET |  _China Express and Telegraph_  \nCKS |  Chiang Kai-shek  \nCP |  _Conference Proceedings on Chiang Kai-shek and Modern China_ (Taipei, 1982)  \nCWR |  _China Weekly Review_  \nMC |  Madame Chiang (Soong Meiling)  \nNCH |  _North China Herald_ , Shanghai  \nNYT |  _New York Times_  \nOH |  Harry S. Truman Library for Oral Histories, Missouri  \nPRO |  Public Records Office, London  \nSCMP |  _South China Morning Post_  \nRTR |  Reuters news agency  \nUP |  United Press news agency\n\n## PROLOGUE: THIRTEEN DAYS IN XI'AN\n\n This account is based on the author's visits to Xi'an, where the Young Marshal's headquarters and other sites are preserved, and Huaqing, where bullet holes can still be seen in CKS's pavilion, and on Bertram, pp. 124\u201338; Tien-wei Wu, particularly pp. 76\u201381; NCH for December 1927; Selle, Chapter 23; CKS and MC in _China at the Crossroads;_ CKS's diary, written after the event, Tong, pp. 212\u2013237; and the recollections of Zhang Xueliang in the four-part video recording, _A Century Walked Through_ , made available by Kuo Kwan-ying.\n\n Wu Tien-wei, p. 80; NCH, 20 January 1937.\n\n Bertram, _First Act_ , p. 134.\n\n MC in CKS, _Crossroads_ , pp. 93\u20135; Han-sheng Lin in Coox, p. 234.\n\n The Communist side of the Xi'an story is well told in Short, pp. 347\u201352.\n\n Borg, p. 225.\n\n Gibson, p. 322; Selle, p. 323.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, pp. 55\u20136.\n\n NCH, 20January 1937.\n\n MC in CKS, _Crossroads_ , pp. 84 et seq.\n\n Selle, p. 326.\n\n Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 209; see also photograph at Zhang compound in Xi'an.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, p. 129.\n\n CKS, _Crossroads_ , pp. 215 et seq.; Young-tsu Wong in Barrett and Shyu, p. 17; Mao, _Selected Works_ , p. 294.\n\n MC, _Crisis in China_ , p. 141.\n\n Central News, 28 December 1936; Selle, p. 334.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, _Century_ , Part Three.\n\n Chen Li-fu, p. 126; MC, _Crisis_ , p. 83; CKS, _Crossroads_ , p. 213.\n\n _ChinaPost_ , 7June 2002; SCMP, 18 October 2001.\n\n## 1: COLD REALITIES\n\n NCH, October 1887. Description of Xikou from audior's visit, 2001.\n\n Photo caption at CKS's birthplace.\n\n Xikou villager Sheng Zheng-sheng, quoted in local records, 1984.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju (Chenjieru), pp. 231\u20135.\n\n Ibid., p. 7; Loh, _Chiang_ , p. 10; Furaya, p. 6.\n\n Loh, ibid., p. 11.\n\n Ibid., pp. 9\u201310, 120.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 54.\n\n Tong, p. vii.\n\n Ibid., p. 12.\n\n Taylor, pp. 6\u20137, 15.\n\n Tong, pp. 13\u201314.\n\n Furaya, p. 18; Tong, p. 15.\n\n Furaya, pp. 16\u201318. The quotes are from lectures Chiang gave in 1944 and 1946.\n\n Loh, _Chiang_ , pp. 124\u20135, finds apocryphal nature of 1908 meeting 'generally acceptable'.\n\n Hahn, _Chiang_ , pp. 13\u201314; Furaya, p. 30.\n\n## 2: SWORN BROTHERS\n\n Jerome Chen, pp. 278\u20139. A more positive view is presented by Audrey Wells in her analysis of Sun's thought, which she calls 'a courageously unique syntfiesis of Eastern and Western ideas', (p. 201)\n\n Selle p. 110; Furaya, p. 40.\n\n Sun on Lea, in an exhibition at presidential palace, Nanking.\n\n Reinsch, p. 2.\n\n Loh, _Chiang_ , p. 42. Photographs of Zhang: Spence and Chin, pp. 53, 98\u20139.\n\n CP, Vol. I, p. 297; Furaya, p.34.\n\n Reinsch, pp. 1\u20133; Berg\u00e8re, _Sun_ , p. 229.\n\n Martin, p. 80; NCH, 1 May 1913.\n\n Friedman, p. 143.\n\n Jerome Chen, p. 309; CP, Vol. II, pp. 11\u201312.\n\n Berg\u00e8re, _Sun_ , p. 250; Friedman, p. 89.\n\n Selle, pp. 133\u20138; Hahn, _Soong Sisters_ , p. 51.\n\n NCH, 13 November 1915.\n\n CP, Vol. II, pp. 25\u20137.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 79 et seq.; CP, Vol. II, pp. 24\u20135.\n\n CP, Vol. II, p. 2g; Loh, _Chiang_ , p. 131; Furaya, p. 57.\n\n NCH, 27 May 1915; CP, Vol. II, p. 32; Chen Chieh-ju, p. 81.\n\n CP, Vol. II, p. 34, pp. 37 et seq.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 87.\n\n Berg\u00e8re, _Sun_ , p. 274; Chien Tuan-sheng, pp. 86\u20137.\n\n## 3: GOING TO EXTREMES\n\n Loh's study, _Chiang_ , gives a thorough examination of CKS's character which is drawn on here, including the warrant, pp. 132\u20133; Martin, pp. 81, 243 (note 9).\n\n Loh, p. 32; Chen Chieh-ju, p. 49; Chen, Wang and Wang, p. 11.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 7; Tang, p. 252; Chen, Wang and Wang, p. 10; Loh, _Chiang_ , p. 32.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 32.\n\n Ibid., pp. 3\u201321.\n\n This and the following is from Chen Chieh-ju, Chapter 2.\n\n PRO, Alston\/Curzon FO 405\/236\/219.845 of 24 March 1922.\n\n Berg\u00e8re, _Sun_ , p. 302; Saich, _Origins_ , p. 40.\n\n CP, Vol. I, p. 278.\n\n Sie, p. 131.\n\n This account is from Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 21 et seq.\n\n The wedding story is in Chen Chieh-ju, Chapter 4.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 53, 66\u20139.\n\n Ibid., p. 73; Taylor, pp. 12\u201314.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 83\u20135.\n\n SCMP, 3 October 1997.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 88, 91.\n\n Ibid., pp. 91 et seq.\n\n Berg\u00e8re, _Sun_ , pp. 200, 302; Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 97, gg.\n\n Loh, _Chiang_ , pp. 70 et seq.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. log et seq.\n\n Loh, p. 142.\n\n Ibid., p. 72.\n\n Consul letter on show at Mus\u00e9e Kahn, Paris, 2002; Wilbur, _Frustrated Patriot_ , p. 128; Saich, _Origins_ , p. 121.\n\n Loh, _Chiang_ , pp. 76\u20137, 80\u20131, mainly quoting CKS's diary.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 112\u201313.\n\n Loh, _Chiang_ , p. 87.\n\n## 4: THE WILL OF HEAVEN\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 119 et seq.\n\n Lary, _Warlord Soldiers_ , p. 72.\n\n Francke, p. 266.\n\n Tsin, p. 57 et seq.\n\n Bonnard, pp. 295\u20136.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 130\u20134; CKS, _Soviet Russia in China_ , p. 21; Chen Chieh-ju, pp\u2013131. 133\u20135.\n\n Wilbur and How, pp. 88\u20139.\n\n Furaya, p. 117.\n\n Borodin's life and his time in China is well told in Jacobs's biography.\n\n Bennett, p. 221; Abend, _Life_ , p. 19.\n\n Jacobs, pp. 115\u201316.\n\n Friedman, p. 57; Berg\u00e8re, _Sun_ , pp. 319\u201320.\n\n CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , p. 24.\n\n PRO, FO 371-12440\/9156. FO 94\/87\/10; Wilbur and How, Document 3.\n\n PRO, FO 371-12501\/9132. F 6605\/3241\/10; Wilbur and How, p. 490.\n\n Loh, pp. 94\u20135.\n\n Ibid., p. 95.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 155.\n\n Jordan, _Northern Expedition_ , p. 17.\n\n Landis, in Chan and Etzold, p. 76; Martin, p. 81; Chen Li-fu, p. 64; Loh, _Chiang_ , p. 98.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. xxiii.\n\n Wang, p. 89; Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 142, 156.\n\n Quotes in this and next paragraphs in Loh, _Chiang_ , pp. 63\u20135; Chen Chiehju, p. 142.\n\n CCK, _Calm,_ p. 121.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 175.\n\n Ibid., pp. 155\u20136.\n\n CWR, 12 June 1924, p. 82; Tsin, pp. 88 et seq.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 148.\n\n CET, 23 October 1924; Swisher, pp. 2-3; NCH, 15 November 1924; CET, 23 October 1924.\n\n Swisher, p. 3.\n\n NCH, 29 November and 9 December 1924.\n\n Wilbur, _Patriot_ , p. 290; RTR, 27 March and 2 April 1925.\n\n CET, 19 March 1925.\n\n## 5: THE RED PROTECTOR\n\n NCH, 3 March 1937; Wilbur and How, p. 117.\n\n Bennett, pp. 124\u20135; Wilbur and How, pp. 523 et seq.; Cherepanov, p. 104.\n\n CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , p. 51; F. F. Liu, p. 20.\n\n Salisbury, p. 258; NCH, 4 April 1925.\n\n Wilbur and How, p. 145; Swisher, p. 32.\n\n F. F. Liu, p. 16; Wilbur and How, p. 485; NCH, 5 September 1925; Chen Chieh-ju, p. 158.\n\n Short, p. 157; Chan and Etzold, p. 223; CET, 12 March 1925; RTR, 16 March 1925.\n\n Wilbur and How, pp. 698, 219.\n\n Wang Ke-wen, p. 27; Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 177\u20138.\n\n Furaya, p. 153; Chen Chieh-ju, p. 168.\n\n RTR, 4, 6 and 9 June 1925.\n\n Swisher, p. 7.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 168.\n\n Wilbur and How, pp. 523 et seq.\n\n NCH, June and July 1925; Abend, _Life_ , p. 17.\n\n T'ang, _Wang_ , pp. 113-14; Wilbur and How, pp. 168 and 203 (note 89).\n\n Cherepanov, p. 158; T'ang, _Wang_ , p. 114.\n\n Cherepanov, p. 158; T'ang, _Wang_ , p. 115.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 164; Wilbur and How, p. 480; Jacobs, p. 183.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 164.\n\n Ibid., pp. 161\u20132; Cherepanov, pp. 163\u20136.\n\n NCH, 17 October 1925; Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 12.\n\n Young, OH, p. 23; Abend, _Life_ , p. 19.\n\n Ch'i, pp. 174 et seq.; Botjer, p. 55; Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 18; Van de Ven, pp. 137\u20138.\n\n Young, OH, pp. 22\u20133; Jordan, _Expedition_ , pp. 15\u201317.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 304; Furuya, p. 165; NCH, 28 November 1925.\n\n Wilbur and How, p. 698.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 182.\n\n Boorman, Vol. I, p. 206; Chen Li-fu, pp. 24\u20135.\n\n Jerome Chen, p. 315.\n\n Chen Li-fu, p. 26.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 181 et seq.\n\n Chen Li-fu, p. 28.\n\n Wilbur and How, p. 252.\n\n Chen Li-fu, p. 29.\n\n Cherepanov, p. 202; Van de Ven, pp. 146\u2013157 includes latest Chinese research; NCH of 1 May 1926 has report dated 5 April.\n\n _Min-kuo jih-pao_ newspaper, quoted in Wilbur and How, p. 257.\n\n NCH, 3 April, 1926, 29 May 1927.\n\n Jordan, p. 60.\n\n NCH, July 10 1926; Wilbur and How, pp. 705\u20136.\n\n Report of I4June 1926, French Foreign Ministry papers E-505-4-E22-LA, p. 160; Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 198\u20139.\n\n French Foreign Ministry papers E-505-4-E22-LA, pp. 174, 152; Jordan, pp. 50 and 60.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , p. 19; Chen Li-fu, p. 37; Wilbur and How, p. 292; French Foreign Ministry papers, Chine 187 E50-51.\n\n## 6: LORDS OF MISRULE\n\n Tai Hsuanchih, p. 20; NCH, 27 September 1928; Abend, _Life_ , p. 64; Pu Yi, pp. 185, 183.\n\n Wu Peifu is the subject of Odoric Wou's biography; Powell, p. 84.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part One.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 256\u20137; the Model Governor is the subject of Donald Gillin's biography.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , pp. 64\u20135; the Christian General is the subject of James Sheridan's biography.\n\n Hewlett, pp. 125\u20137.\n\n Eastman, _Family_ , p. 233.\n\n Tai Hsuanchih, p. 26.\n\n Ibid., Chapter IV; Wilbur and How, p. 310; Friedman, Chapter 9.\n\n Chien Tuan-sheng, p. 12.\n\n Pelissier, p. 293.\n\n NCH, 4 September 1926.\n\n CET, 16 October 1924.\n\n Tuchman, p. 109.\n\n Spence, _Gate_ , pp. 142\u20133.\n\n## 7: TO THE NORTH\n\n Anon., _Military Exploits_ , p. 80, with slight grammatical corrections.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 206.\n\n Cherepanov, p. 226; Wilbur, _Revolution_ , p. 51; Wilbur and How, Document 26; Botjer, p. 56; Abend, _Life_ , p. 33; Van de Ven, pp. 137\u20138.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 24; Wilbur and How, Document 26.\n\n Lary, _Region and Nation_ , p. 7; overview of Guangxi, pp. 21\u20137.\n\n Cherepanov, p. 236; Wilbur and How, Documents 49 and 66.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 71; Lary, _Region_ , p. 67; Tong and Li, p. 164.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 277.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , p. 33; Jordan, _Expedition_ , pp. 74\u20138, 278, 211.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 207\u20138.\n\n NCH, 7 August 1926.\n\n Ibid., 2 February 1929.\n\n Cherepanov, p. 256; Fitzgerald, _Why China_ , p. 90; NCH, 4 September 1926.\n\n Wilbur and How, pp. 318\u201319.\n\n NCH, 31 August and 11 September 1926; RTR, 27 August 1926; Powell, p. 85.\n\n Cherepanov, pp. 241\u20132; Wilbur and How, Document 69.\n\n NCH, 11 September 1926.\n\n Chen Li-fu, p, 43.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 85.\n\n Wilbur and How, p. 324, and Document 69.\n\n NCH, 6 November 1926.\n\n Wilbur and How, p. 324.\n\n NCH, 31 December 1926.\n\n Wilbur, _Revolution_ , p. 62; RTR, 23 November 1926; Lary, _Region_ , p. 218; Van de Ven, p. 192.\n\n Chen Chiehju, p. 214; NCH, 31 December 1926.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , pp. 212, 240\u20131.\n\n Isaacs, p. 111; Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 201. Part Three ofjordan has detailed evidence.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , p. 281; following para, MC, _Conversations_ , pp. 7\u20139, 70.\n\n NCH, 4 March 1927.\n\n RTR, 12 December 1926; NCH, 18 December 1926; French Foreign Ministry papers Chine Vol. 188, Serie E, carton 505, p. 194; Chesnaux, _Labour_ , p. 331.\n\n Misselwitz, p. 91.\n\n Wilbur, _Revolution_ , pp. 64\u20138; Short, p. 166; Isaacs, p. 117.\n\n NCH, 18 and 26 December 1926.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. 210; Ransome, pp. 67\u201370.\n\n Cherepanov, p. 266; Wilbur and How, Document 69.\n\n French Foreign Ministry papers Chine 188 E-505; Isaacs, p. 126; NCH, 26 January 1927; Wilbur and How, Document 80.\n\n NCH, 26 February 1927.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, pp. 218 and 236.\n\n Ibid., Chapter 23.\n\n Ibid., p. 224.\n\n Ibid., pp. 226\u20137.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , pp. 283\u20134.\n\n NCH, 26 March 1927.\n\n Jacobs, p. 240.\n\n Chen Li-fu, p. 53.\n\n## 8: LIGHT, HEAT, POWER\n\n Leo Ou-fan Lee, pp. 6\u20137; Wen-hsin Yeh in Wakeman and Edmonds, pp. 132, 139.\n\n Fewsmith, pp. 116, 118\u201319.\n\n Pan, _Shanghai: A Century of Change_ , p. 51; Johnston and Erh, _A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai_ shows mansions and offices that have survived.\n\n Guillermaz, p. 17.\n\n NCH, 25 November 1930; Perry, p. 170; Dong, pp. 154\u20136, 160\u20133; NCH, 13 March 1926.\n\n Chesnaux et al., _China from the 1911 Revolution_ , p. 183.\n\n Sternberg, pp. 82\u20133.\n\n Johnston and Erh, _Last Look_ , p. go; Dong, p. 97.\n\n Dong, pp. 40\u201351; Pan, _Shanghai_ , pp. 41\u20132. Studies of prostitution include Hershatter and Henriot. Wakeman's _Policing Shanghai_ has an excellent shorter account and survey of crime in the city.\n\n Martin, Chapters 2 and 3; on general role of narcotics, see Dik\u00f6tter et al., _Narcotic Culture_.\n\n Wakeman, p. 25.\n\n NCH, 11 August 1923, 16 and 23 May 1925, 17 November 1925.\n\n The pistol is on display at the Shanghai Museum of Public Security.\n\n Pan, _Old Shanghai_ , pp. 38 et seq.; study of Du in Y. C. Wang, _Journal of Asian Studies_ , Vol. 26; Auden and Isherwood, p. 170.\n\n Wakeman, pp. 25, 122, 202\u20135; Exhibition, Musee Albert Kahn, Paris, 2002.\n\n Misselwitz, p. 25; NCH, 24 March 1927.\n\n Misselwitz, p. 27.\n\n Jordan, _Expedition_ , pp. 115\u201317, 211\u201312.\n\n Sergeant, p. 75; NCH, 25 March 1927.\n\n Sergeant, p. 74.\n\n NCH, 2 April 1927.\n\n Ibid.\n\n Ibid.\n\n## 9: THE GREAT PURGE\n\n NCH, 2, 9 and 16 April, 1927; Wilbur, _Revolution_ , p. 108; Chen Li-fu, p. 55.\n\n Martin, pp. 88\u201390, 113\u201315; French Foreign Ministry papers, Chine, Vol. 189, p. 15.\n\n Powell, pp. 158\u20139; Pan, _Old Shanghai_ , pp. 53\u20134.\n\n This account of Wang's murder draws on Martin, pp. 91\u20133, 104\u20135; Chen Li-fu, pp. 60, 63; Pan, _Old Shanghai_ , pp. 48\u201351. Relations between Communists and the Green Gang are explored in Frazier, _Republican China_ , November 1994.\n\n This account of the purge is based on editions of the NCH for April, 1927; Wu 'Chiang Kai-shek's April 12 Coup' in Chan and Etzold; Wilbur, _Revolution_ , pp. 99\u2013113; Seagrave, pp. 228\u20139; Fewsmith, Chapter 5.\n\n Zheng Chaolin, pp. 103\u20134; CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , p. 47.\n\n Van de Ven, p. 181; Chen Li-fu, p. 62.\n\n Wilbur, _Revolution_ , p. 112; NCH, 23 April 1927; McDonald, p. 312.\n\n CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , p. 48; Dong, pp. 184\u20135; NCH, 30 April 1927; Wilbur, _Revolution_ , pp. 110\u201311; NCH, 23 April 1927; Swisher diary, 24 April and 29 May 1927; Sheean, p. 227.\n\n Short, p. 188; McDonald, p. 316.\n\n Chapman, pp. 231\u20132.\n\n Coble, _Capitalists_ , pp. 33, 34\u20135, 40; NYT, 4 May 1927; NCH, 30 April, 21 May and 4 June 1927; Martin, p. 197.\n\n NCH, 16 and 30 April 1927.\n\n Trotsky, p. 384; Taylor, pp. 42\u20133; photograph in Academia Sinica library, Taipei.\n\n _Daily Express_ quoted in NCH, 14 May 1927; Misselwitz, p. 97; NCH, 14 and 21 May 1927; Jacobs, pp. 255\u20136; RTR, 14 April 1927.\n\n Sheean, pp. 197\u20138.\n\n Sheridan, _Warlord_ , pp. 197\u2013292, and Chapter 9.\n\n _Jordan, Expedition, p_. 130.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Two.\n\n Tong, p. 86; Tong and Li, pp. 216\u201317.\n\n Taylor, pp. 32\u20133, 37\u20138.\n\n Misselwitz, p. 118.\n\n Coble, _Capitalists_ , p. 38; Abend, _Tortured China_ , pp. 176\u20137; NCH, 11 June 1927; Misselwitz, p. 123.\n\n NCH, 25 June 1927.\n\n North and Eudin, p. 107; Short, pp. 190\u20131.\n\n North and Eudin, pp. 111, 127.\n\n Ibid., p. 123 and Chapter 6; T'ang Leang-li, p. 155.\n\n Misselwitz, p. 126; Sheean, p. 240; Jacobs, p. 279.\n\n Zheng Chaolin's memoirs give a rank-and-file account of events, pp. 131\u20133.\n\n Bennett, p. 301; Sheean, p. 256; NCH, 30 July 1927.\n\n Sheean, p. 302.\n\n RTR, NCH, 13 August 1927; CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , pp. 51\u20132.\n\n Wilbur and How, p. 427; Davies, p. 183.\n\n CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , p. 52.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 219\u201320, 222.\n\n NCH, 20 August 1927.\n\n Misselwitz, pp. 138\u20139.\n\n NCH, 17\u201324 December, 1927; Wilbur, _Revolution_ , pp. 164 et seq.\n\n SCMP, 14 December 1927; NCH, 24 December 1927; photographs, Spence and Chin, pp. 90\u20132; Swisher, pp. 115, 91.\n\n NCH, 14 December 1927, 10 November 1928.\n\n NCH, 16 July 1927.\n\n## 10: POLITICAL UNION\n\n Mowrer, pp. 80\u20131; FBI Memorandum to the Director, 9 January 1943, quoted in Seagrave, p. 261: Chen Chieh-ju, p. 194.\n\n Chen Chiehju, p. 187, dinner described in Chapter 19; Snow, _Journey_ , p. 85; Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 86.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, Chapter 25.\n\n Ibid. pp. 252\u20134.\n\n NCH, 1 October 1927.\n\n NYT, 24 September 1927; Chen Chieh-ju, p. 257; NCH, 1 October 1927.\n\n Chen Chieh-ju, p. xxix.\n\n Ibid., pp. 260\u20133.\n\n Jung Chang, p. 66.\n\n The letter was subsequently published by a newspaper, Crozier, p. 6.\n\n Wellesley Person of the Week, 14 August 2000.\n\n James Hsioung Lee, p. 41.\n\n Cowles, p. 90.\n\n NCH, 17 December 1927.\n\n Sues, pp, 69\u201370.\n\n Crozier, p. i23;Furayap. 236.\n\n## 11: CAPTAIN CHIANG\n\n NCH, 7\u201314 April 1928.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 47\u20138; NCH, 27 October and 17 November 1928; F. F. Liu, pp. 61\u20132.\n\n Abend, _Tortured China_ , pp. 90\u20131; NCH, 5 May 1927; Van de Ven, pp. 137\u20138.\n\n Kuo Min, 2 May 1928.\n\n Furaya, pp. 244\u20135.\n\n NCH, 12 May 1928; Botjer, p. 81.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , p. 78\u201380; RTR, 21 May 1928; Furaya, p. 247.\n\n NCH, 12 May 1928; RTR, 7 May 1928; Kuo Min, 8 May 1926; _Toho_ , 14\u201315 May 1928; CKS, _China's Destiny_ , p. 123.\n\n _Manchuria Daily News_ in NCH, 7 July 1928.\n\n Furaya, pp. 263\u20134; Kuo Kwan-ying, Part One.\n\n Strand, p. 11.\n\n Abend, _Tortured China_ , pp. 259 et seq.\n\n Pu Yi, p. 196; Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Two.\n\n Abend, _Tortured China_ , p. 251.\n\n Kuo Min, 27 July 1928.\n\n Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 138.\n\n RTR, 13 December 1929.\n\n RTR, 21 January 1929.\n\n Charles Musgrave in Esherick, _City_ , pp. 139 et seq.; RTR, 22 April 1929; NCH, 1\u20138 December 1928 and 4 May 1929; Kuo Min, 24 October and 1 December 1928.\n\n Boorman, Vol. I, p. 76.\n\n NCH, 2 February, 9 March, 6 April and 4 May 1929; Abend, _Tortured China_ , p. 256; NCH, 21\u201328 January 1930; NCH, 9 and 30 March 1929.\n\n NCH, 28 December 1928; RTR, 2 December 1928; NCH, 25 February, 8 April and 20 May 1930; Martin, pp. 117, 137\u20139.\n\n CWR, 20 June 1931.\n\n Kuo Min, 4 December 1929.\n\n Hedin, pp. 27\u20138; Mackerras, p. 122.\n\n Wang Ke-wen, pp. 49 et seq.\n\n NCH, 16 March 1929; Wang Ke-wen, pp. 250, 258; Kuo Min, 23 March 1929; Falgiot and Kauffer, p. 78; Chen Li-fu, p. 65; Eastman, _Abortive Revolution_ , pp. 74\u20135.\n\n Misselwitz, p. 161; Kuo Min, 3 August 1928.\n\n NCH, 5 January 1929; Crozier p. 30; NCH, 5 January 1926; Kuo Min, 17 January 1929.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, p. 50; NCH, 14 April 1929.\n\n RTR, 4 April 1929; NCH, 13 April 1929; Kuo Min, 9 April 1929.\n\n NCH, 8June 1929.\n\n Abend, _Tortured China_ , pp. 61\u20132.\n\n NCH, 25 May 1929.\n\n RTR, 13 October 1930; Sheridan, _Disintegration_ , p. 186; Coble, _Capitalists_ , p. 87.\n\n NCH, 8 July 1930.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , p. 118; Chen Li-fu, p. 266; RTR, 11 April 1930.\n\n NCH, 28 October 1930; Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 147.\n\n Kuo Min, 19 November 1930; NCH, 3 December 1930; RTR, 3\u20134 March 1930; Central News, 5 March 1930; Chen Li-fu, pp. 104\u20135.\n\n _Rengo_ , 7 May 1930.\n\n NCH, 9 June 1931.\n\n## 12: TWO CHINAS\n\n Short, pp. 281\u20132; NCH, 1 December 1931; Longhua, author's visit, 2001; Dik\u00f6tter, _Crime_ , pp. 292\u20133; Fairbank, _Chinabound_ , p. 68.\n\n Falgiot and Kauffer, pp. 36, 39, 41\u20132, 46\u20137, 63; Wakeman, pp. 138\u201341, 151\u201360.\n\n Falgiot and Kauffer, pp. 67\u20138; Warren Kuo, Vol. II, pp. 313\u201319.\n\n NCH, 1 December 1931; Falgiot and Kauffer, p. 79.\n\n Eastman, _Abortive Revolution_ , pp. 93\u20136.\n\n Short, pp. 282\u20133, and Chapter 8 on Communist purge.\n\n NCH, 27 January 1931; Dreyer, pp. 160\u20131; Short, pp. 256\u20137. Figures for the troops CKS put into the field in the five campaigns against the Communists vary considerably because of discrepancies between the strength of units on paper and their actual numbers: I have taken those in Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , p. 246.\n\n Dreyer, pp. 163\u20134; Short, pp. 258\u201360.\n\n Kuo Min, 3 July 1930.\n\n NCH, 1 March 1932; Mao put the number at 300,000 (Short, pp. 286\u20137).\n\n Short, p. 287.\n\n Martin, p. 140: Seagrave, p. 333; NCH, 23 August 1933.\n\n NCH, 23 July 1931; Abend, _Life_ , p. 124.\n\n NCH, 11 and 18 August, 1 and 8 September 1931.\n\n Ienaga, pp. 6\u201311; Iris Chang, p. 218.\n\n Bix, pp. 276, 176; Ienaga, pp. 6, 11\u201312; Furaya, p. 309; Amelia Hill, 'The Day the Earth Died', _Observer_ Magazine, London, 2 March, 2003.\n\n Furaya, p. 309.\n\n Furaya, pp. 316\u201319; Selle, p. 268; Mitter, pp. 77\u20139; Bix, pp. 240, 236\u20139, 247.\n\n NCH, 3 November 1931.\n\n Mitter, pp. 85\u20137.\n\n Photograph, Nanking Presidential Palace.\n\n Taylor, p. 59, quoting diaries for 15\u201316 December 1931, and p. 60 for diary of 27 December 1931.\n\n Wang Ke-wen, p. 306.\n\n Ransome, pp. 65\u20136; Abend, _Tortured China_ , pp. 267 et seq.; Wang Ke-wen, p. 311.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Three.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , p. 132; Wakeman in Wakeman and Edmonds, pp. 141 et seq., 151, 158.\n\n## 13: HEART AND SKIN\n\n NCH, 2 February 1931; Jordan, _Trial_ , pp. 11\u201312; Furaya, pp. 350\u20131.\n\n Furaya, pp. 348\u201351; Jordan, _Trial_ , pp. 7, 11\u201312; Selle, pp. 270\u20132.\n\n Selle, p. 273.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , pp. 186\u201391.\n\n Ibid., p. 193.\n\n Kwei, pp. 148\u201351; NCH, 9 February 1932.\n\n Boorman, Vol. I, p. 77.\n\n Fewsmith, p. 18; Soong interview with _New York American_ , 2 May 1932.\n\n For CKS's role in this and the following two paragraphs, UP, 14 February 1932; NCH, 23 February 1932;Jordan, _Trial_ , pp. 103, 105, 121\u20132, 130, 138, 144, 155; CKS in NCH, 17 October 1934.\n\n Jordan, _Trial_ , pp. 146\u20138.\n\n Ibid., p. 223; Henriot, _Shanghai_ , pp. 92\u20133.\n\n NCH, 22 March 1932; Henriot, _Shanghai_ , pp. 94\u20135; Abend, _Life_ , p. 193; Fogel, _Journal of Asian Studies_ , Vol. 59\/4; NCH, 22 March 1932.\n\n Photographs in Han Suyin, _China, 1890\u20131938_ , pp. 212\u201314.\n\n Jordan, _Trial_ , pp. 230\u20131.\n\n Kuo Min, 10 June 1932.\n\n Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 180.\n\n Beasley, p. 261.\n\n NCH, 3 December 1932.\n\n NCH, 26 February 1929; RTR, 2 March 1929; UP, 12 March and 25 May 1929; RTR, Kuo Min, 27 March 1929; NCH, 1 February 1933; RTR, 4 September 1932; NCH, 7 and 14 September, 23 December 1932.\n\n Kuo Min, 6 August 1932; RTR, 9 and 11 August 1932.\n\n Lattimore, p. 48; Jordan, _Trial_ , p. 103, credits the Jiangxi governor with first applying this old expression to the Japanese and Communists.\n\n NCH, 19 October 1932; RTR 14 and 15 July 1932; Kuo Min, 19 December 1932.\n\n Fleming, pp. 35\u20136.\n\n NCH, 16 October 1935; NCH, 24 January 1934.\n\n NCH, 11 November 1933, 14 December 1932.\n\n NCH, n and 18 January 1933.\n\n Fleming, p. 80.\n\n RTR, 20 February 1933.\n\n Selle, pp. 280january1; RTR, 4 March 1933; NCH, 1 and 8 March 1933; Fleming, p. 92.\n\n NCH, 8 March 1933.\n\n NCH, 15 January 1933; Kuo Min, 24 September 1933.\n\n NCH, 22 March 1933; Selle, p. 281.\n\n NCH, 22 March 1932.\n\n RTR, 8 and 10 March 1933; Kuo Min, 12 March 1933; NCH, 15 March 1933; Selle, pp. 281\u20134; RTR, 5 May 1933; Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Two.\n\n Stolley, pp. 22\u20133; Furaya, p. 408.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , p. 204.\n\n NCH, 24 May 1933.\n\n Ibid., 25 April 1934; Sheridan, _Warlord_ , p. 274.\n\n NCH, 20 September 1933; Furaya, pp. 417\u201318.\n\n## 14: FOLLOW THE LEADER\n\n CP, Vol. III, p. 151; White, _History_ , p. 117; Wakeman in Wakeman and Edmonds, p. 168.\n\n NCH, 4 November 1935, i5January 1936; Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , p. 28; Chiang speech at Omei College, September 1935.\n\n Wei and Liu, pp. 64\u20135, 68; Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , p. 32; Wakeman in Wakeman and Edmonds, particularly pp. 170 et seq.\n\n Tien's _Government and Politics in Kuomintang China_ gives an overview.\n\n Kirby, _Republican China_ , April 1987.\n\n Kirby in Wakeman and Edmonds, p. 182.\n\n Duara in Wakeman and Edmonds, p. 316; Dik\u00f6tter, _Crime_ , pp. 295 et seq.; Yeh, pp. 10\u201311.\n\n Mann, Chapter 9; Botjer, p. 135.\n\n NCH, 14 and 28 June 1933; Kuo Min, 12 September 1933; Sheridan, _Disintegration_ , p. 223; CP, Vol. III, p. 648.\n\n Fleming, pp. 159\u201362.\n\n Chennault, p. 39.\n\n The Sino-German relationship is dealt with in papers in CP, Vol. IV, by E. G. Mohr, Liang Hsi-huey and Hsin Ta-mo; Eastman, _Family_ , pp. 205\u20136; Van de Ven in Wakeman and Edmonds, pp. 99 et seq.\n\n Spence, _Gate_ , pp. 288, 298 et seq.; Roux in Shanghai annes 30, p. 107.\n\n Tien, p. 47\u201352.\n\n Ibid., pp. 54-65; Eastman, _Abortive Revolution_ , pp. 47, 78\u20139, 308\u20139; Wakeman in Wakeman and Edmonds, pp. 141 et seq.\n\n UP, 16 July 1935; Tien, p. 23.\n\n Dik\u00f6tter, _Crime_ , p. 212; NCH, 11 February 1930.\n\n Eastman, _Abortive Revolution_ , p. 35; CP, Vol. III, p. 173; Abend, _Tortured China_ , p. 303; NCH, 7 January 1936.\n\n CP, Vol. III, p. 648; NCH, 29 May 1934 and 2 September 1936; Cochran in Yeh, pp. 85\u20136.\n\n Sheridan, _Disintegration_ , p. 231\u20132; Eastman, _Family_ , p. 202.\n\n Zhang Kaimin in Wakeman and Edmonds, p. 61.\n\n Pringle, p. 95; Brook and Wakabayashi, p. 277; Coble, _Capitalists_ , p. 195; Young, OH, p. 47.\n\n NCH, 24 January 1934; Eastman, _Family_ , p. 70; NCH, 1 July 1936; Brodie, p. 120.\n\n Wakeman and Edmonds, p. 53; NCH, 24 January 1934; Tawney, p. 77.\n\n Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , pp. 147\u20139.\n\n Coble, _Capitalists_ , pp. 61\u20135; Perry, p. 106; Perry in Wakeman and Edmonds, p. 263.\n\n Sheridan, _Disintegration_ , p. 22.\n\n Coble, _Capitalists_ , pp. 86\u201390; Abend, _Life_ , p. 215.\n\n NCH, 1 November 1933.\n\n Ibid.\n\n This account is based on Coble, _Capitalists_ , pp. 178 et seq., and McElderry (p. 59 for Bank of China).\n\n Leith-Ross, pp. 207\u20138.\n\n Coble, _Capitalists_ , pp. 220, 231\u20135, 249\u201350.\n\n Sheridan, _Disintegration_ , p. 209; Young, OH, pp. 30\u20132; Tong and Li, p. 419; Li Pu-sheng in Tien, p. 23; Eastman, _Abortive Revolution_ , pp. 18\u201319, 216.\n\n Dik\u00f6tter et al., _Narcotic Culture_ , pp. 332\u20133; Wakeman, pp. 264\u20136; Brook and Wakabayashi, pp. 286\u20139 and 312.\n\n Nellist, p. 110; Leith-Ross, pp. 207\u20138; Sues, pp. 88\u201390, 92\u20134.\n\n RTR, 1 March and 18 April 1934.\n\n This summary draws on Sheridan, _Disintegration_ , pp. 187\u2013203; Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , p. 19.\n\n Wei and Liu, p. 78.\n\n Tong and Li, p. 306.\n\n RTR, 1 October 1933.\n\n Warren Kuo, Vol. II, pp. 556\u20137; Eastman, _Abortive Revolution_ , p. 125.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , p. 195; NCH, 26 December 1933.\n\n Fleming, p. 177.\n\n Schwarcz, pp. 214\u201315, 236\u20138, 246\u20137.\n\n MC, _New Life_ , pp. iii\u2013v; _Time_ , 3 January 1938.\n\n Cheng and Lestz, pp. 298 et seq.\n\n Schwarcz, p. 215; NCH, 21 March 1934; Central News, 12 December 1934; NCH, 5 May, 13 June 1934, 24 April 1936.\n\n NCH, 4 January 1933; Kuo Min, 28 November 1932; NCH, 29 April 1936.\n\n Coble, _Capitalists_ , p. 236. The following passage draws on Chapter 8.\n\n Crozier, p. 169.\n\n NCH, 4 April 1935 and 19 February 1936.\n\n Stelle, pp. 289\u201390.\n\n White, _History_ , p. 117.\n\n## 15: THE LONG CHASE\n\n Smedley, _Battle Hymn_ , p. 121; Short, p. 2; next para, Vladimirov, pp. 140, 272.\n\n Farmer, p. 169.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, pp. 173 et seq.; missionary in next para, James, p. 19.\n\n Based on author's visit to Kuling-Lushan, March 2002.\n\n NCH, 29 November 1933.\n\n RTR, 20 September 1933; Hedin, p. 59.\n\n NCH, 20 December and 1 November 1933.\n\n NCH, 20 and 29 November 1933; RTR, 15 October 1933; NCH, 7 April 1935; NCH, 6 December 1933.\n\n Selle, pp. 289 et seq.\n\n Kuo Min, 29 April 1934; Short, pp. 313; Mao, p. 231.\n\n Wilson, _March_ , pp. 55\u20137.\n\n Kuo Min, 20 July, 19 and 24 September, 1934.\n\n Kuo Min, 6 June 1934; NCH, 20 June 1934; RTR, 1 July 1934; NCH, 4 July 1934.\n\n NCH, 24 October 1934.\n\n RTR, 12 October 1934.\n\n Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 183; RTR, 24 and 31 October, 2 November 1934.\n\n This and preceding account from Selle, pp. 305\u20136.\n\n Ibid., p. 304.\n\n NCH, 24\u201331 October, 28 November 1934; RTR, 22 October 1934. The NCH reports read as if written by W. H. Donald.\n\n Salisbury, pp. 62\u20133; Wilson, _March_ , p. 74.\n\n Salisbury, pp. 92\u2013104; Short, p. 4; Wilson, _March_ , pp. 77\u20139.\n\n Wilson, _March_ , pp. 137\u201343; Central News, 3 and 14 December 1934; NCH, 26 December 1934.\n\n Wilson, _March_ , p. 113.\n\n Hedin, pp. 64\u20137.\n\n NCH, 3 April 1935.\n\n Ibid., 5 June 1935.\n\n RTR, 6 April 1935; NCH, 10 and 17 April 1935.\n\n Davies, p. 161; Lacam, p. 122 \u2013 the photograph of the head on a post is opposite p. 65.\n\n Hall, p. 175; Lacam, p. 158.\n\n NCH, 24 April 1935.\n\n Mao, p. 128.\n\n RTR, 19 May 1935; NCH, 5 June 1935.\n\n NCH, 12 June 1935; RTR, 6 June 1935; NCH, 12 June 1935.\n\n Wilson, _March_ , Chapters XV and XVI for Dadu River; Snow, _Red Star_ , pp. 224\u20139; Short, pp. 324\u20136.\n\n Short, pp. 327\u20138.\n\n Furaya, pp. 455\u20136.\n\n Wilson, _March_ , p. 204.\n\n Pelissier, pp. 336\u20138.\n\n## 16: END OF ENDURANCE\n\n NCH, 20 November 1935; Central News, 14 October 1936.\n\n PRO, FO paper F 10393\/27\/87, Clark-Kerr to Halifax, 31 August 1938; NCH, 13 May 1926; NCH, 2 February, 13 May and 3 June 1936; Abend, _Life_ , pp. 207\u201310.\n\n RTR, 1 November 1935.\n\n Central News, 2 November 1935.\n\n Chen Li-fu, pp. 115\u201316.\n\n Levitch, pp. 243\u20134.\n\n Central News, 9 June 1936; Tong and Li, p. 308; NCH, 2 and 9 September 1936; Abend, _Life_ , p. 198.\n\n Selle, pp. 313\u201314.\n\n NCH, 2, 9 and 23 September 1936.\n\n NCH, 11 and 4 November 1936.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Three.\n\n Wu Tien-wei, pp. 24\u20135.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Three; Route Army office and church photograph from author's visit to Xi'an, 2002; NCH, 20 January 1937.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Three.\n\n NCH, 2 and 16 September 1936.\n\n Eastman et al., _Nationalist Era_ , p. 206; this and next para draw on Van de Ven, pp. 231, 244.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, p. 112; Jason Pipes, Internet postings, 1996\u20132001.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , pp. 223\u20134; Van de Ven, pp. 247\u20139.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Three; Van de Ven, pp. 276, 286.\n\n Borg, p. 225; NCH, 31 March 1937.\n\n Wu Tien-wei, pp. 200\u20132; NCH, 10 February 1937.\n\n Donald Gillin, 'Problems of Centralization in Republican China', _Journal of Asian Studies,Vol_. 27\/4, pp. 839\u201341.\n\n Ho-Wang, Han-sheng Lin, in Coox, p. 234.\n\n Farmer, pp. 242 et seq., 263.\n\n NCH, 27 January 1937.\n\n Chang Jui-te on illiteracy in _Modern Asian Studies_ , Vol. 30 \/ 4, p. 1049; Gibson, pp. 362\u20133; Ch'i, pp. 43\u20139, and, more generally, Chapter 2.\n\n CCK, _Calm_ , p. 123.\n\n Kuo Min, 10 April 1937.\n\n Abend, _Life_ , pp. 240\u20135.\n\n Details in Ikuhiko Hata's paper in CP, Vol. II, pp. 497\u2013524.\n\n Hata in CP, Vol. II, p. 515.\n\n Guillermaz, p. 44.\n\n Ibid., p. 45.\n\n Ibid., p. 47.\n\n Farmer, p. 14; CCK, p. 124; Hsu, p. 583; Spence, _Search_ , p. 422.\n\n Hata in CP, Vol. II, pp. 521-2.\n\n Central News, 29 July 1937; Liang Hsi-huey, p. 126; Bix, pp. 321\u20132.\n\n## 17: THE MOST DREADFUL NIGHTMARE\n\n This account of why the bombs were dropped is from Chennault, p. 45. Contemporary accounts also speak of a plane climbing to avoid anti-aircraft fire, loosing bombs as it did so.\n\n Farmer, pp. 46 et seq. for this and next two paragraphs.\n\n This account is based on contemporary accounts, notably from the NCH and by Farmer, Abend, Timperley and Donald, plus histories of the city by Dong, Henriot, Lynn Pan, Sergeant and Wakeman, military studies by Dreyer and Ch'i, Van de Ven and Teitler and Radtke and Bix's biography of Hirohito.\n\n Farmer, p. 78; Bix, pp. 324\u20135.\n\n Farmer, p. 55.\n\n NCH, 18 September 1937; Van de Ven, p. 321; Teitler and Radtke, p. 115.\n\n This and next paragraph, Selle, pp. 339\u201340.\n\n Farmer, p. 85; Timperley, p. 119.\n\n Timperley, pp. 85\u20136.\n\n Farmer, p. 85; NCH, 25 September 1937.\n\n Farmer, p. 97; Bix, p. 333.\n\n Pelissier, p. 382\u20133.\n\n Bix, p. 326.\n\n NCH, 8 September 1937.\n\n Gibson, p. 385; Ch'i, p. 43; CP, Vol. II, pp. 627\u20139.\n\n Smedley, _China Fights Back, pp_. 123\u20136.\n\n Eastman et al., _Nationalist Era_ , pp. 207\u20138; Guillermaz, p. 65.\n\n NCH, 8 September 1937.\n\n RTR, 27 November 1937.\n\n NCH, 1 and 8 December 1937.\n\n Iris Chang, p. 68 quoting Sun Zhawei, _Nanking Beige_ (Taipei, 1995), pp. 31\u20133; the Atlantic Monthly Online.\n\n Selle, pp. 341\u20132.\n\n Iris Chang, pp. 72\u20133.\n\n Ibid., pp. 74\u20136.\n\n Caldwell, p. xiv.\n\n _Guardian_ , 4 October 2002.\n\n This account draws on Iris Chang's account of the massacre, the NCH for December and January 1937\u201338, Powell, Bix, Timperley and Farmer.\n\n Iris Chang, pp. 50, 53.\n\n Cheng, Lestz, Spence, p. 330; Farmer, pp. 101\u20132.\n\n Iris Chang, p. 44.\n\n Bix, pp. 343\u20135.\n\n RTR, 10 December 1937.\n\n Gibson, p. 391; RTR, 10 December 1937.\n\n RTR, 21 December 1937.\n\n CKS, _Wartime Messages_ , p. 49; NCH, 12 December 1937; _Time_ , 3 January 1938.\n\n Selle, pp. 343\u20134.\n\n## 18: I AM THE STATE\n\n Mowrer, p. 107.\n\n Han Suyin, _Destination_ , p. 58; White, _History_ , pp. 90\u201391.\n\n RTR, 30 March, 2 and 7 April 1939.\n\n Mowrer, p. 109.\n\n Farmer, pp. 136\u20137.\n\n Bertram, _Unconquered_ , pp. 163\u20134, 444.\n\n Coox in Coox and Conroy, p. 303.\n\n NCH, 28 February 1940.\n\n _Wang, Journal of Asian Studies_ , Vol. 26\/3; Van de Ven, p. 423.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, p. 234; Farmer, p. 289.\n\n Farmer, p. 120; NCH, 2 February 1938; Mowrer, p. 94.\n\n Farmer, p. 128.\n\n Farmer, p. 146.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, p. 102; Tong and Li, p. 356.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 372\u20133.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, p. 102; Farmer, p. 150.\n\n NCH, 29 March 1938.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 353\u20134, 417; Domei, 4 April 1937; Auden and Isherwood, p. 151; Teitler and Radtke, pp. 175 et seq.; Van de Ven, pp. 329\u2013333.\n\n NCH, 1 June 1938; Furaya, p. 603; Van de Ven, p. 336; Teitler and Radtke, pp. 190 et seq.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, pp. 174\u20135.\n\n Domei, 14 June 1938 ; RTR, 12 and 14 June 1938; Davies, p. 22.\n\n CKS, _Selected Speeches_ , p. 20; Jerome Chen, p. 109.\n\n Selle, p. 342; Central News, 5 October 1937; Chen Li-fu, pp. 135\u20136.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 131, 140.\n\n Bix, p. 348.\n\n MacKinnon, _Modern Asian Studies_ , Vol. 30 \/ 4, October 1969, pp. 933\u20135.\n\n Kataoka, p. 69.\n\n Eastman, _Seeds_ , pp. 89\u201390.\n\n Cherepanov, pp. 307\u20138; Dorn, p. 185.\n\n NCH, 25 August 1938.\n\n RTR, 25 August 1938.\n\n Farmer, p. 130.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, pp. 64\u20135; Tong, Vol. II, pp. 582-3; Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 210.\n\n Wu Chi-wei, pp. 228\u20139, 245, 277, 279\u201380, 282.\n\n Farmer, pp. 168\u20139.\n\n Han Suyin, _Destination_ , pp. 91\u20132.\n\n Mowrer, pp. 78\u201380; Auden and Isherwood, pp. 64\u20135.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, pp. 64\u20135.\n\n Farmer, pp. 172\u20133.\n\n White, _History_ , pp. 74\u20135.\n\n RTR, UP, 22 October 1938.\n\n Autumn 1938 battles: Yangtze, RTR, 21 September, NCH, 28 September; Jiangxi, RTR, 10 October; Wuhan, RTR, 11\u201313 October, NCH, 29 September, Auden and Isherwood, p. 157.\n\n Auden and Isherwood, p. 55; Selle, pp. 345\u20136.\n\n Han Suyin, _Destination_ , p. 64.\n\n Farmer, p. 180.\n\n Han Suyin, _Destination_ , pp. 79\u201380.\n\n Farmer, p. 184.\n\n NCH, 5 October 1938; Dreyer, p. 233; Bix, p. 346.\n\n RTR, 1 November 1938.\n\n Alley, p. 14.\n\n Farmer, p. 193 with poster opposite; Han Suyin, _Destination_ , pp. 98\u2013101.\n\n CP, Vol. II, p. 668; Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , pp. 54\u20135; Farmer, pp. 186\u201391.\n\n RTR, 17 December 1938; NCH, 21 December 1938.\n\n## 19: IN THE CLOUDS\n\n CP, Vol. III, p. 421; Vol. II, pp. 653\u20134.\n\n Bramall, pp. 30, 23; _China Daily_ , 7\u20138 April 2001; Farmer, pp. 192, 199.\n\n Fairbank, _Chinabound_ , p. 243.\n\n Esherick, Chapter 11; Farmer, pp. 207\u201311; White, _History_ , pp. 66\u201376; Han Suyin, _Destination_ , p. 162; Peck, p. 143.\n\n White, _History_ , pp. 67\u20138; RTR, 29 December 1939; White and Jacoby, pp. 8\u20139; Esherick, Chapter 11.\n\n White and Jacoby, pp. 56\u20137; Eastman et al., _Nationalist Era_ , pp. 130\u20133.\n\n Farmer, p. 210; White andjacoby, p. 8.\n\n White, _History_ , p. 72; Caldwell, p. xvi.\n\n Eastman et al., _Nationalist Era_ , p. 131; Basil, p. 2; Han Suyin, _Destination_ , p. 163; Fairbank, _Chinabound_ , p. 243.\n\n Peck, pp. 413\u201316; NCH, 21 December 1938; Farmer, p. 226.\n\n CP, Vol. III, p. 649.\n\n Ch'i, _War_ , pp. 153\u201364.\n\n NCH, 7 December 1938 and 4 January 1939.\n\n Payne, _Diary_ , pp. 111\u201312.\n\n Peck, pp. 603\u20134.\n\n Ibid., p. 606.\n\n White, _History_ , pp. 120; Lattimore, pp. 155\u20136; Yu Maochun, pp. 43\u20134.\n\n Peter Clarke, _The Cripps Version_ (London: Allen Lane\/The Penguin Press, 2001), p. 152\u20136.\n\n Davies, pp. 183\u20134, 233, 343; Tuchman, pp. 262; Crozier, p. 216.\n\n Payne, _Diary_ , pp. 130\u20133, 258, 393.\n\n Davies, p. 192; White, _History_ , p. 74.\n\n Guillermaz, p. 87; White, _History_ , pp. 75\u20136; Hart, pp. 27\u20138; Farmer, pp. 222\u20135.\n\n Peck, pp. 419 and 481.\n\n Lin Han-sheng in Coox and Conroy, pp. 211\u201341.\n\n Boyle, pp. 228-31; CP, Vol. II, p. 665; RTR, 2January 1939; Boyle, p. 231, 278\u20138; RTR, 5 April 1939; Homer, p. 75.\n\n White andjacoby, p. 124.\n\n Farmer, p. 204; Eastman et al., _Nationalist Era_ , p. 140.\n\n White and Jacoby, p. 140.\n\n White, _History_ , p. 77; Bix, p. 346; Ch'i, _War_ , Chapter 2; Stilwell, p. 117.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 426\u20138; Stilwell, p. 80.\n\n Donald Gillin, 'Problems of Centralization in Republican China', _Journal of Asian Studies_ , Vol. 29.\n\n Linebarger, pp. 230\u20131, 373, 380.\n\n Ch'i, _War_ , pp. 187\u20139.\n\n Lattimore, p. 147.\n\n Caldwell, p. 73; Ch'i, _War_ , p. 211.\n\n Wang, _Journal of Asian Studies_ , Vol. 26\/3.\n\n White, _History_ , p. 163.\n\n Eastman et al., _Nationalist Era_ , pp. 152\u20133; Ch'i, _War_ , pp. 166\u201376; Young, _Helping Hand_ , pp. 300\u20134 and _Wartime Finance_ , p. 304; Botjer, pp. 211\u201314.\n\n Jerome Chen, p. 43; Payne, _Diary_ , pp. 99\u2013100.\n\n Selle, pp. 348\u20139.\n\n Ibid., pp. 350, 367; _Shen Pao_ , Shanghai, 11 November 1946.\n\n Farmer, pp. 233\u20134.\n\n Han Suyin, _Destination_ , pp. 220\u20131.\n\n RTR, 25 May 1939.\n\n This account is from Farmer, pp. 230\u20134; RTR, 4\u20135 May 1939; White, _History_ , pp. 76, 80\u201383; NCH, 10 and 24 May 1939; Pelissier, p. 389.\n\n Guillermaz, p. 81; Farmer, p. 233.\n\n Han Suyin, _Destination_ , pp. 236, 256, 270.\n\n Furaya, p. 541; NCH, 24 May 1939.\n\n Han Suyin, _Destination_ , pp. 255\u20136.\n\n## 20: MAGNETIC WARFARE\n\n RTR, 18 and 21 November 1938.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 379\u201382; following para, Wakeman in Yeh, pp. 314\u201321.\n\n Wasserstein, p. 20; Boyle, p. 278; NCH, 16 October 1940 and 19 February 1939; Domei, 11 June 1939; Boyle, pp. 281\u20135; Wakeman, _Badlands_ , has first-rate account.\n\n NCH, 16 August 1939; Domei, 10 October 1939.\n\n Ch'i, _War_ , pp. 590 et seq.; NCH, 3 January 1940.\n\n Peck, pp. 277\u20138.\n\n Williams and Wallace, pp. 65, 69\u201370.\n\n NCH, 4 April 1940; RTR, 20 June 1940; Hahn, _Soong Sisters_ , p. 276; Havas, 28 August 1940; Ch'i, _War_ , pp. 62\u20133.\n\n Boyle, pp. 289\u201393; Kataoka, p. 191.\n\n NCH, 16 October 1940; Boyle, pp. 299\u2013304; Furaya, p. 654.\n\n UP, 17\u201318 October 1940; Farmer, pp. 238\u201340.\n\n White, _History_ , pp. 113\u201314.\n\n Domei, 18 November 1939.\n\n Van Slyke, _Modern Asian Studies_ , Vol. 30 \/ 4, October 1996, pp. 979 et seq.\n\n NCH, 16June 1940.\n\n Benton, _Fourth Army_ , Appendix, gives exchanges between Mao and Yunling; Xiang agreement, p. 773.\n\n Ibid, pp. 515\u201316, 545\u20136.\n\n Ibid., pp. 563\u20134, 567.\n\n White andjacoby, p. 76; Benton, pp. 572\u20138.\n\n White, _History_ , pp. 115\u201317.\n\n Bachrack, p. 17; Carlos Baker, _Ernest Hemingway_ (New York: Scribners 1969).\n\n Kataoka, p. 270; Tong, p. 287.\n\n## 21: PEANUT AND VINEGAR\n\n Davies, p. 223; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, marist.edu\/psf\/box2\/a15bo2.\n\n Furaya, p. 725; Payne, _Diary_ , pp. 44\u201350.\n\n Bachrack, p. 18; Koen, p. 27.\n\n Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, marist.edu\/psf\/box2\/a16bo5.\n\n Davies, p. 221; White, _History_ , p. 134. Van de Ven (Introduction and Chapter 1) presents a closely argued critical analysis of Stilwell which revises the admiring portrait in Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography.\n\n White, _History_ , p. 158.\n\n Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 248.\n\n CP, Vol. IV, pp. 224 et seq.; Tuchman, p. 235; Davies, p. 337; Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 245; Snow, pp. 61, 69, 73\u20135, 70\u20131.\n\n Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, marist.edu\/psf\/box2\/a15go3; Tuchman, p. 282.\n\n Tuchman, p. 235; Davies, p. 280\n\n Tong, p. 183; Stilwell, p. 50.\n\n Stilwell, p. 50, 54\u20135.\n\n Stilwell, p. 62; Romanus and Sunderland, p. 103.\n\n Tuchman, pp. 285, 288\u20139.\n\n Stilwell, p. 63.\n\n Ibid., p. 77.\n\n Ibid., pp. 77\u20138, 80.\n\n Ibid., p. 81; Tuchman, p. 281; next para, Tong, p. 305.\n\n Chennault, p. 159.\n\n Stilwell, pp. 92\u20135.\n\n Chennault, pp. 160 et seq.\n\n Davies, p. 240; Van de Ven has detailed account, pp. 39\u201349.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, p. 41.\n\n Stilwell, pp. 105\u20136.\n\n Ibid., p. 113.\n\n Romanus and Sunderland, p. 154; Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 66\u20137.\n\n Romanus and Sunderland, p. 168.\n\n Davies, p. 242.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 59\u201360.\n\n Amelia Hill, _Observer_ Magazine, London, 2 March, 2003; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, marist.edu\/psf\/b0x2\/a16001; Stilwell, p. 158 \u2013 the report was by Colonel David Dean Barrett, the military attache. US air strategy, Van de Ven, pp. 53\u20134.\n\n White, _History_ , p. 142.\n\n Alanbrooke, entry for 23 November 1943.\n\n White, _History_ , p. 140.\n\n Robert Smith, p. 65.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, p. 55; Stilwell, p. 119.\n\n Romanus and Sunderland, pp. 169\u201371; Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 70\u201372.\n\n Stilwell, pp. 122\u20133, 126.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 43\u20134, Stilwell, p. 115.\n\n## 22: SNOW WHITE, MADAME EMPRESS\n\n Stilwell, p. 122.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, p. 158; Stilwell, pp. 120\u20131.\n\n Stilwell, p. 122.\n\n Guillermaz, pp. 89\u201390; MacKinnon and Friesen, p. 92.\n\n Peck, p. 427\u20138.\n\n Hart, p. 33, quoting Barrett; Tuchman, pp. 333\u20134.\n\n Stilwell, p. 156\u20137; Chennault, pp. 212\u201316; Tuchman, p. 335.\n\n Hart, p. 34; Davies, p. 255.\n\n Cowles, pp. 88\u20139.\n\n Davies, p. 255.\n\n Stilwell, p. 194.\n\n Robert Sherwood, _Roosevelt and Hopkins_ (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 660\u20131; Eleanor Roosevelt, _This I Remember_ (New York: Harper, 1949), pp. 282\u20133.\n\n MacKinnon and Friesen, p. 120.\n\n Seagrave, p. 384.\n\n Congressional Record, 1943, pp. 1080\u20131.\n\n Cowles, p. 90.\n\n Ibid.\n\n Seagrave, pp. 389\u201390.\n\n Lattimore, pp. 168\u20139; Jerome Chen, p. 79; Tuchman, pp. 352\u20133.\n\n Seagrave, p. 389.\n\n Amanda Smith, pp. 581\u201361.\n\n Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , p. 160; White, _History_ , p. 150; Belden, pp. 61\u20134.\n\n White, _History_ , pp. 146 et seq.; Peck, p. 393; Belden, p. 62.\n\n White, _History_ , pp. 147\u20138.\n\n Ibid., p. 155.\n\n Furaya, p. 761; Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 118, 122 \u2013 Chapter 6 has account of Casablanca and Trident from Chinese records.\n\n Fairbank, _Chinabound_ , pp. 252\u20133.\n\n Tuchman, p. 369; Stilwell, pp. 203, 211\u20132, 215.\n\n Peck, pp. 477\u20138, also for arrival in Chungking in next paragraph.\n\n Young, OH, Appendix.\n\n Peck, p. 477.\n\n Service, pp. 92\u20136; Peck, p. 477; Stilwell, p. 229.\n\n Seagrave, p. 411.\n\n Lattimore, p. 142.\n\n Stilwell, p. 229.\n\n Quotes in following passage are from Stilwell, Chapter 7. Soong, Van de Ven, p. 59.\n\n Feis, p. 78; Lattimore, p. 113.\n\n Stilwell, pp. 232\u20133.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 145, 378\u20139; Furaya, p. 769; Stilwell, pp. 232\u20133.\n\n Service, pp. 79\u201384; Seagrave, p. 410.\n\n Fairbank, _Chinabound_ , pp. 245\u20136; Furaya, p. 778.\n\n## 23: 'ALL ASIA IS AT STAKE'\n\n Boyle p. 323; Eastman in Akira Iriye, p. 284; Hsiang and Levine, p. 180; Peck, pp. 21\u20133; Potter and Potter, p. 31.\n\n Churchill, p. 328; Alanbrooke, 23 November 1943. Cairo, Van de Ven, pp. 60\u201471.\n\n Hahn, _Chiang_ , p. 375; Alanbrooke, 23 November 1943.\n\n Churchill, p. 329; Alanbrooke, 23 November 1943; Harold Macmillan, _War Diaries_ (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 304.\n\n Alanbrooke, 23 November 1943.\n\n Stilwell, p. 255; Davies, p. 278.\n\n Stilwell, p. 252; Davies, p. 281.\n\n Roosevelt 'fireside chat', 24 December 1943; Stilwell, p. 256.\n\n Davies, p. 247.\n\n Tuchman, p. 455; quoting Gauss\/Service reports in USFRC 44, pp. 312, 319\u201326, 334\u20136. Following para, Stilwell, p. 252; Frederick Marks, _Wind Over Sand_ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 182.\n\n Tuchman, p. 413.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, p. 233; Wilson, _Tigers_ , pp. 221\u20132; Caldwell, pp. 54\u201360.\n\n Caldwell, pp. 113\u201314.\n\n Ibid., pp. 102\u20133, 207.\n\n Stilwell, pp. 274 et seq.\n\n Davies, p. 298.\n\n Ibid., p. 299.\n\n Stilwell, pp. 273 et seq.; Van de Ven, pp. 74\u20137 calls the operation 'a gamble that did not work'.\n\n Toland, p. 618.\n\n Ch'i, _Nationalist China_ , pp. 9 et seq.; Dreyer, pp. 284 et seq.; White and Jacoby, Chapter 12; Peck, p. 560.\n\n Chennault, p. 309.\n\n Ibid., p. 302; White and Jacoby, p. 188.\n\n Chennault, pp. 300\u2013301; Tuchman, p. 472. Stilwell and Ichigo, Van de Ven, pp. 80\u20132.\n\n Furaya, p. 793.\n\n Peck, pp. 588, 590.\n\n Lattimore, p. 139.\n\n Ibid., p. 186.\n\n Tuchman, p. 470.\n\n Chen in Saich and Van de Ven, pp. 265 et seq.\n\n Ibid., pp. 273\u201392.\n\n Stilwell, pp. 329 et seq.; Tuchman, p. 489; CCK, _Calm_ , p. 5; Stilwell, p. 327.\n\n Chennault, p. 300; Stilwell, pp. 316\u201317.\n\n Chennault, pp. 320\u20131.\n\n Tuchman, p. 492.\n\n Furaya, pp. 809, 804.\n\n Tuchman, p. 498, quoting Ambassador's report to State Department.\n\n Liang Hsi-huey, pp. 270\u20131; Stilwell, p. 343.\n\n Davies, p. 337; Stilwell, p. 346; CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , p. 118.\n\n Tuchman, p. 504; Stilwell pp. 346\u20137.\n\n Lattimore, p. 217; for closely argued revisionist view of Stilwell, see Van de Ven, Introduction and Chapter One.\n\n Davies, p. 383.\n\n Caldwell, p. 90; Yiji Akashi in Coox and Conroy, p. 267; Eastman in Akira Iriye, p. 286.\n\n43 Davies, p. 378.\n\n44 Tuchman, p. 411; Snow, _Journey_ , p. 217; Peck, p. 556.\n\n## 24: RED LEAVES\n\n Peck, p. 638.\n\n Feis, pp. 208, 212\u201313; Davies, p. 368.\n\n Al Ravenholt of UP in MacKinnon and Friesen, p. 144; Peck, p. 639;Jacoby in MacKinnon and Friesen, pp. 142\u20133.\n\n Vladimirov, p. 261.\n\n Barrett, p. 51.\n\n Service, p. 1037; Vladimirov, pp. 211 et seq.\n\n Exhibit 252, Institute of Pacific Relations Hearings, pp. 808\u20139; Davies, p. 363.\n\n Vladimirov, p. 58; Maochun Yu, p. 222.\n\n Dreyer, p. 293; Vladimirov, pp. 30, 35, 483\u20134, 83, 162. Van de Ven, pp. 87\u20138.\n\n Vladimirov, pp. 55\u201360, 109, 111\u201313, 120.\n\n Chen in Saich and Van de Ven, pp. 265 et seq.; Vladimirov, p. 123.\n\n Vladimirov, pp. 83, 89.\n\n Vladimirov, p. 134.\n\n Chen in Saich and Van de Ven, pp. 273 et seq.\n\n Barrett, p. 63.\n\n Hart, pp. 49, 51\u20132; Davies, p. 382.\n\n17 Vladimirov, p. 287.\n\n Hart, pp. 59\u201360.\n\n Ibid., p. 61.\n\n Wedemeyer, p. 313; Jacoby in MacKinnon and Friesen, p. 143.\n\n Chennault, pp. 329\u201330; Furaya, p. 818.\n\n Wedemeyer, pp. 323\u20134.\n\n Dreyer, pp. 304\u20135; I am indebted to Keith Stevens for pointing to the importance of the Zhijiang battle, and for providing a Chinese map of the encounter. Peck, p. 650; Moorad, pp. 221\u20132.\n\n Peck, p. 650.\n\n Caldwell, pp. 9, 26\u20137, 202.\n\n Service, pp. 1418\u201323.\n\n CCK, _Calm_ , p. 52; Furaya, p. 824.\n\n Furaya, p. 824.\n\n Ibid., p. 821; Westad, pp. 31 et seq.\n\n Furaya, p. xiii.\n\n Ibid., pp. 831\u20132.\n\n On Chiang and Manchuria, see exchange between Donald Gillin and Martin Bernal, _New York Review of Books_ (25 February 1971). Also Arthur Waldron's account of what might have happened if CKS had not tried to take Manchuria, in Robert Cowley, _What If?_ (London: Macmillan, 2000).\n\n Feis, p. 357.\n\n Moorwood, pp. 5\u20137.\n\n Vladimirov, p. 491; Furaya, p. liii.\n\n Ibid.; Westad, pp. 167\u20138.\n\n Westad, pp. 167\u20138.\n\n Doon Campbell papers; Furaya, p. 853.\n\n Campbell papers.\n\n Yu Maochun, pp. 235\u2013241.\n\n Bland, p. 119; Campbell papers.\n\n Furaya, p. 853.\n\n Short, p. 403 and for following para.\n\n For events in Manchuria, see, in particular, Steven Levine's account of the Communist victory and Odd Arne Westad's analysis of the effect of the start of the Cold War on China. This passage draws on Levine, pp. 49\u201351, and Westad, pp. 119 et seq.\n\n Westad, p. 135.\n\n Bachrack, pp. 27 et seq.; Koen, pp. 66\u201373.\n\n## 25: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE\n\n CP, Vol. II, pp. 732 et seq.; Yu Maochun, p. 256; Van de Ven, p. 443; Pickowicz in Yeh, pp. 395\u20136.\n\n Tong and Li, p. 437.\n\n Dreyer, p. 325.\n\n Belden, pp. 224\u20136.\n\n Ibid., pp. 6, 39.\n\n Young, OH, pp. 76 et seq.; Beal, p. 138.\n\n Belden, p. 20.\n\n Westad, p. 136; Chen Li-fu, pp. 184-5; Bland, p. 153; Jung Chang, pp. 104\u2013112.\n\n Clubb, OH, p. 37.\n\n Westad, pp. 163\u20134.\n\n Guillermaz, p. 151.\n\n Bland, 154; Stuart to Secretary of State, 21 July 1946 in Rea and Brewer, p. 2; Dreyer, p. 324; Levine, p. 240.\n\n Beal, p. 40; Bland, pp. 580, 586, 589.\n\n Beal, pp. 147\u20139.\n\n Furaya, pp. 884, 885.\n\n Ibid., p. 882.\n\n Tong and Li, p. 447.\n\n Bland, p. 569.\n\n Beal, p. 333.\n\n Stuart to State Dept, 21 July 1946, in Rea and Brewer, p. 3.\n\n21 Ronning, p. 116.\n\n Beal, p. 349.\n\n## 26: DYING LIGHT\n\n _Pictorial History_ , Vol. II, pp. 265\u20138.\n\n Koen, p. 34.\n\n Jung Chang, p. 97; Belden, p. 404.\n\n This passage draws on Chapter 4 of Levine.\n\n CP, Vol. II, pp. 728 et seq.\n\n Loh, _D\u00e9b\u00e2cle_ , p. 11.\n\n Belden, pp. 354\u20137.\n\n Loh, _D\u00e9b\u00e2cle_ , p. 12; Topping, p. 312.\n\n _Japan Times_ , Tokyo, 25 February 2002; Hutchings, p. 248; Levine, p. 124; _Time_ , 1 April 1948.\n\n Levine, p. 237.\n\n Dreyer, pp. 350 et seq.\n\n Pepper, p. 387 gives details of military discipline.\n\n Sheridan, _Warlord_ , pp. 277\u201381; White, _History_ , p. 96.\n\n Merle Miller, _Plain Speaking_ (New York: Putnam, 1973), pp. 288\u20139; Seagrave, pp. 426\u20137.\n\n Stuart to State Department, 29 November 1948, in Rea and Brewer, pp. 282\u20133.\n\n Belden, p. 421; _Time_ , 15 November 1948.\n\n _The Times_ , 2 and 4 December 1948.\n\n Topping, pp. 32\u20133.\n\n Ibid., pp. 35\u201342.\n\n Belden, pp. 407, 410; Chang Kia-ngau in Loh, _D\u00e9b\u00e2cle_ , pp. 24\u20135.\n\n Chang Kia-ngau in Loh, _D\u00e9b\u00e2cle_ , p. 24.\n\n Belden, p. 408.\n\n Taylor, pp. 154\u201361; Perry, p. 126; Dong, pp. 288\u20139; Taylor, pp. 153\u20134.\n\n _The Times_ , 20 January 1949.\n\n Barnett, pp. 30\u20139; Belden, pp. 386\u201393.\n\n Topping, p. 44; CCK, _Calm_ , p. 146; Tong, p. 425.\n\n CCK, _Calm_ , p. 152; Topping, p. 52; Bodde, p. 100; _The Times_ , 24 January 1949.\n\n CCK, _Calm_ , pp. 154 et seq.\n\n Dong, pp. 291\u20132.\n\n Guillermaz, pp. 191\u20132.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 515\u201316.\n\n Topping, p. 64.\n\n Guillermaz, p. 197; Topping, Chapter 4, describes Nanking's fall; Belden, p. 456.\n\n Topping, p. 63.\n\n Belden, p. 440; CCK, _Calm_ , pp. 207, 214\u201315.\n\n Stuart to Secretary of State, 24 May 1949, in Rea and Brewer, p. 326; Barber, p. 125.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 522\u20138, 526.\n\n Hart, p. 76.\n\n Ibid., pp. 534\u20135.\n\n CCK, _Calm_ , p. 239.\n\n Tong and Li, pp. 536\u20137.\n\n Ibid., p. 541.\n\n CCK, _Calm_ , pp. 276\u20137.\n\n Ibid., p. 283; Taylor, p. 184.\n\n Kuo Kwan-ying, Part Four \u2013 also for following paragraph.\n\n Tong, pp. 476\u20137.\n\n Rummel, p. 12.\n\n CKS, _Soviet Russia_ , pp. 211 et seq.; CCK, _Calm_ , p. 297.\n\n## EPILOGUE: NEXT YEAR IN NANKING\n\n Rummel, p. 12.\n\n# BIBLIOGRAPHY\n\n## NEWS SOURCES\n\n_North China Herald_ , Shanghai (NCH) (weekly edition of _North China Daily News_ ), _China Express and Telegraph_ (CET), _China Weekly Review_ (CWR), _South China_ _Morning Post_ (SCMP), Reuters, United Press, Kuo Min and Kuo Wen news agencies, Central News, Domei, _The Times_ (London), _Guardian, New York Times, Time_ magazine, Havas news agency\n\n## PERIODICALS\n\n_Republican China_ and _Twentieth Century China_ , St John's University, New York; _China Yearbook, China Quarterly; Modern Asian Studies; Journal of Asian Studies_\n\n## ARCHIVES\n\nPublic Records Office, London; French Foreign Ministry, Paris; Kuomintang, Taipei; Academia Sinica, Taipei; Harry S. Truman Library for Oral Histories; Franklin D. Roosevelt Safe files; Doon Campbell private papers\n\n## BOOKS\n\nAbend, Hallett, _Tortured China_ (New York: Washburn, 1932)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _My Life in China_ (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943)\n\nAlanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord (ed. Alex Danchev and Dan Todman), _War Diaries_ (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001)\n\nAlley, Rewi, _Amongst Hills and Streams of Hunan_ (Peking: New World Press, 1963) Anon, _Suppressing Communist-Banditry in China_ (Shanghai: China Today, 1934)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _President Chiang Kai-shek: His Life Story in Pictures_ (Taipei: n.p., 1971)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _In Everlasting Memory of the Late President Chiang_ (Taipei: n.p., 1977)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _Military Exploits of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek_ (n.p., n.d.)\n\nAuden, W. H., and Isherwood, Christopher, _Journey to a War_ (London: Faber & Faber, 1938)\n\nBatbayar, Bat-Erdene, _Twentieth Century Mongolia_ (Cambridge, MA: White Horse Press, 1999)\n\nBachrack, Stanley, _The Committee of One Million_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976)\n\nBaker, Barbara, _Shanghai_ (Oxford: OUP, 1998)\n\nBarber, Noel, _The Fall of Shanghai_ (New York: Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1979)\n\nBarrett, David, _Dixie Mission_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)\n\nBarrett, David, and Shyu, Lawrence N. (eds), _China in the Anti-Japanese War_ (New York: Peter Lang, 2001)\n\nBarnett, A. Doak, _China on the Eve of the Communist Takeover_ (London: Thames & Hudson, 1963)\n\nBasil, George, _Test Tubes and Dragon Scale_ (Chicago: Winston, 1940)\n\nBeal, John Robinson, _Marshall in China_ (Toronto: Doubleday, 1970)\n\nBeasley, W. G., _The Modern History of Japan_ (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1982)\n\nBedeski, Robert, _State-Building in Modern China_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)\n\nBelden, Jack, _China Shakes the World_ (New York: Modern Reader Press, 1949)\n\nBennett, Milly, _On Her Own_ (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1993)\n\nBenton, Gregor, _Mountain Fires_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _New Fourth Army_ (Richmond: Curzon, 1999)\n\nBerg\u00e8re, Marie-Claire, _L'age d'or de la bourgeoisie chinoise_ (Paris: Flammarion, 1986)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _Sun Yat-sen_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)\n\nBerkoff, Robert, _Strong Man of China_ (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1938)\n\nBertram, James, _First Act in China: The Story of the Sian Mutiny_ (New York: Viking, 1938)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _Unconquered: A Journal of a Year's Adventure Among the Fighting Peasants of North China_ (New York: John Day, 1939; reissue, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975)\n\nBianco, Lucien, _Origins of the Chinese Revolution_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971)\n\nBix, Herbert, _Hirohito_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2000)\n\nBland, Larry (ed.), _George C. Marshall's Mediation Mission to China_ (Lexington: George C. Marshall Foundation, 1998)\n\nBodde, Derk, _Peking Diary_ (New York: Octagon Books, 1976)\n\nBooth, Martin, _Opium_ (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996)\n\nBonnard, Abel, _In China_ (London: Routledge, 1926)\n\nBoorman, Howard (ed.), _Biographical Dictionary of Republican China_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967\u201371)\n\nBorg, Dorothy, _The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933\u201338_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964)\n\nBotjer, George, _A Short History of Nationalist China 1919\u20131949_ (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979)\n\nBoyle, John Hunter, _China and Japan at War, 1937\u201345_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972)\n\nBramall, Chris, _Living Standards in Sichuan, 1931\u201378_ (London: SOAS, 1989)\n\nBrandt, Conrad, _Stalin's Failure in China_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958)\n\nBrodie, Patrick, _Crescent Over Cathay_ (Oxford: OUP, 1990)\n\nBrook, Timothy, and Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi (eds), _Opium Regimes_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)\n\nCaldwell, Oliver, _A Secret War_ (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972)\n\nCandlin, Enid Saunders, _The Breach in the Wall_ (London: Cassell, 1973)\n\nChan, F. Gilbert (ed.), _China at the Crossroads_ (Boulder: Westview, 1980)\n\nChan and Etzold (eds), _China in the 1920s_ (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976)\n\nChang, Iris, _The Rape of Nanking_ (London: Penguin, 1997)\n\nChang, Jung, _Madame Sun Yat-sen_ (London: Penguin, 1986)\n\n\u2014\u2014, _Wild Swans_ (London: HarperCollins, 1991)\n\nChang Kia-ngau, _The Inflationary Spiral: The Experience in China 1939\u20131950_ (New York: John Wiley, 1958)\n\nChang, Maria Hsia, _The Chinese Blue Shirt Society_ (Berkeley: University of California, 1985)\n\nChapman, H. 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Theodore White) (New York: Schocken Books, 1972)\n\nStolley, Richard (ed.), _Life: World War Two_ (New York: Bullfinch Press, 1999)\n\nStone, Albert H., and Reed, Hammond, _Historic Lushan_ (Hankou: Arthington Press, Religious Tract Society, 1921)\n\nStrand, David, _Rickshaw Beijing_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)\n\n\u2014\u2014, 'A High Place Is No Better Than a Low Place: The City in the Making of Modern China', in Yeh, _Becoming Chinese_ (q.v.)\n\nStrauss, Julia C, _Strong Institutions in Weak Politics_ (Oxford: OUP, 1998)\n\nSues, Ilona, _Shark's Fin and Millet_ (New York: Little, Brown, 1944)\n\nSun Tzu, _The Art of War_ (Oxford: OUP, 1963)\n\nSutton, Donald, _Provincial Militarism, and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army_ , 1905\u201325 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980)\n\nSwisher, Earl, _Canton in Revolution, 1925\u20131928_ (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977)\n\nTai Hsuanchih, _The Red Spears, 1916\u201349_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985)\n\nTang, Peter S. 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Gregor Benton) (Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997)\n\n# INDEX\n\nAbend, Hallett ,  \non Sino-Japanese conflict\n\nAbyssinia\n\nAcademia Sinica University\n\nAh Feng (Chen Jieru; Jennie)\n\nbaby girl adopted by\n\nChiang's marriage to\n\nChiang's secretarial work done by\n\nChiang's talk of death to\n\nChiang's temper and\n\non Ching-kuo's departure\n\nconcern of, for Chiang's health\n\ndeath of\n\ngonorrhoea suffered by\n\nleaves for California\n\nMeiling marriage arrangement and\n\nat Soong dinner\n\nAlanbrooke, Lord, _see_ Brooke,\n\nAlan Alexander, Field Marshal Harold\n\nAlliance of Workers, Merchants, Intellectuals and Peasants\n\nAllied Chiefs of Staff\n\nAlsop, Joseph _Amethyst_ Amoy, _see_ Xiamen\n\nAnguojun (National Peace Army)\n\nAnhui province\n\nJapan attack on\n\nAnqing\n\nAnshunchang\n\nAsaka Yasuhiko, Prince\n\nAssociation of Whampoa Schoolmates\n\nAuden, W. H.\n\nBai Chongxi\n\nBai Lang (White Wolf)\n\nBank of China\n\nBaoding\n\nBarrett, David\n\nBartlett, F. H. E\n\nBauer, Colonel Max\n\nBeal, John Robinson\n\nBeaverbrook, Lord\n\nBeijing, _s_ _ee_ Peking\n\nBelden, Jack\n\nBell and Drums Towers\n\nBenton, Gregor\n\nBergman, Ingrid\n\nBeria, Lavrenti\n\nBerlin-Tokyo anti-Communism pact\n\nBertram, James\n\nBig Eight Mob\n\nBingxingguan\n\nBirch, Captain John\n\nBlack Stuff Company\n\nBlue Express kidnap incident\n\nBlue Shirts\n\nBlyukher, General Vasilii Konstantinovich\n\n(Galen) _passim_ ,\n\nChinese confidence in\n\nend of Chiang's partnership with\n\nreturns to Soviet Union\n\nshooting of\n\nBorodin, _see_ Grunzeberg, Mikhail Markovich\n\nBoxer rebellion\n\nBrandt, Loren\n\nBraun, Otto\n\nBritain\n\nalone against Nazis\n\nBurma Road closed by\n\nBurma Road reopened by\n\nChiang's hostility towards\n\nChinese troops accepted by\n\nloan from\n\nNanking Incident agreement with\n\noffer of mediation from\n\nresists action against Japan\n\nZhang Xueliang visits\n\n_see also_ Churchill, Winston\n\nBritish Communist Party\n\nBrooke, Alan (later Lord Alanbrooke)\n\nBruce, Brigadier General CD.\n\nBrussels conference on China\n\nBuck, Pearl\n\nBureau of Information and Statistics\n\nBurma\n\nChinese-British-US offensive in\n\noffensive against, agreed at Cairo Summit\n\n_see also_ China-Burma-India sector (CBI)\n\nBurma Road\n\nCai Tingkai\n\nCai, General\n\nCairo Summit\n\nCaldwell, Oliver\n\nCampbell, Doon\n\ncannibalism\n\nCanton\n\nChiang's\n\nvisit to\n\ncommerce in\n\nCommunists shot in\n\nCommunist uprising in\n\ncurfew in\n\nfall of\n\nJapanese take\n\nKuomintang cells established in\n\nlife in, under Sun\n\nmartial law in\n\nsecretive nature of\n\nShameen bomb and\n\nSun's abortive army mutiny in\n\nSun's attack on\n\ntrade union activity in\n\nworkers flood into\n\n_see also_ Guangdong province\n\nCanton Army\n\nCanton Christian College\n\n_Canton Republican_\n\nCantonese Nineteenth Route Army\n\n_passim_ ,\n\nCapa, Robert\n\n_Cat Country_ (Lao She)\n\nCC Clique\n\ncensorship\n\n_Central China Post_\n\nCentral Military and Political Academy, _see_ military Academy\n\nCentral Opium Suppression Committee\n\nCeylon (now Sri Lanka)\n\nChahar\n\nChang Kia-ngau\n\nChangchun\n\nChangsha\n\nburning of\n\nJapanese beaten back from\n\nJapanese move into\n\n_Chao-ho_ -g\n\nChapei:\n\nJapanese puppet administration in\n\nWusong front with\n\nChen Cheng, General\n\narmy reorganisation by\n\nbecomes Manchuria commander\n\nbecomes War Minister\n\nregime's main conduit to semi-autonomous forces\n\nWuhan defence entrusted to\n\n_Chen: Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Life_ (Eastman)\n\nChen Duxiu\n\narrest and jailing of\n\nChengchow, _see_ Zhengzhou Chengde\n\nChengdu\n\nCheng Ju-cheng, Admiral\n\nassassination of\n\nChen Gongbo\n\nChen Guofu\n\nDai Li's battle with\n\nChen, Jerome\n\nChen Jiongming, General (the Hakka General) ,\n\nadvance on Canton by\n\nassumes title of commander-in-chief\n\ndeath of\n\noffensive on Shantou by supporters of\n\nChenjitang\n\nChen Lianbo\n\nChen Lifu ,\n\nbecomes Education Minister\n\nDai Li's battle with\n\nopens anti-Japan talks with Zhou Enlai\n\nChen Mingshu\n\nChennault, Claire ,\n\non Chiang\n\nclaim of, for defeat of Japan\n\nleaves China\n\nStilwell's clashes with ,\n\nWedemeyer's relations with\n\nChen Qimei\n\nassassination of\n\nbecomes Shanghai's military governor\n\nChiang's funeral eulogy for\n\nYuan deposes\n\nChen Yi\n\nChen Youren (Eugene Chen)\n\nChen Yung-fa\n\nCherepanov, A. I. ,\n\nChiang criticised by, in memoirs\n\nChiang Ching-kuo (Chiang's son) ,\n\nbecomes President of Taiwan\n\nas Elizarov\n\nexchange deal concerning\n\nChiang family\n\nChiang Kai-shek:\n\nAcademy Principal's role of\n\nadmonition of, to Zhang and Yang\n\nadopted son of\n\nAh Feng (Jennie) and\n\nalternative origins of, as set down by second wife\n\narranged marriage of, to Mao Fu-mei\n\nChiang Kai-shek - _continued_ assassination attempt on\n\nassassination fears of, after Chen murder\n\nassassination plots against\n\nassault on Chen offensive led by\n\nbad health suffered by, in childhood\n\nbecomes Chairman of Military Council for\n\nNorth China\n\nbecomes chairman of Political Council\n\nbecomes Chairman of State Council\n\nbecomes Chairman of the Executive Yuan (or\n\nPrime Minister)\n\nbecomes General Director of Kuomintang\n\nbecomes head of Central Opium Suppression\n\nCommittee\n\nbecomes President\n\nbecomes President of the Chinese Republic\n\nbecomes top Nationalist military figure\n\nbirth of\n\ncalligraphy practised by\n\nCanton house rented by\n\nChen assassination's effect upon\n\nchildhood and early life of\n\nChina Revolutionary Party joined by\n\nChing-kuo and\n\nChristianity adopted by\n\na Cold War icon\n\nComintern criticised by\n\ndeath of\n\ndiminishing taboo status of\n\ndisciplinarian nature of, at Whampoa\n\nat Dragon Middle School, Fenghua\n\nearly campaigns entrusted to\n\nepididymitis suffered by\n\nexceptional powers of, withdrawn by\n\nKuomintang\n\nExecutive Yuan chairmanship relinquished by\n\nfiery nature of\n\nfiftieth birthday of\n\nFleming's analysis of\n\nflight of, to help Sun\n\nflight of, to International Settlement\n\ngeneral's rank achieved by\n\nGeneralissimo title given to\n\ngenerals executed by\n\nGuangdong Army's chief-of-staff s role of\n\nhandbills criticising\n\nhands over to Li Zongren\n\nheads for Taiwan\n\nJapanese military school rejects\n\nkidnap of _(also knoum as_ Xi'an Incident)\n\nand Kuomintang, military intentions for\n\nlarge number of posts held by\n\nLiao's assassination and\n\nliterary activities of\n\nLuce's assessment of\n\nand Mao, comparisons with\n\nMao's meetings with\n\nMao's unflattering assessment of\n\nmarriage of, to Ah Feng (Jennie)\n\nmarriage of, to Soong Meiling\n\nmeditation habits of\n\nmeetings with Communists authorised by\n\nMeiling's behaviour offends\n\nMeilu Villa, Ruling, HQ of\n\nmilitary career of:\n\nat Chinese army school\n\ndecision to pursue\n\nin field artillery regiment, northern Japan\n\nat Shimbu Gakko school\n\nMilitary Department headed by\n\nmilitary magazine published by\n\nMoscow visit by\n\nname of\n\nin Mandarin\n\nat Phoenix Mountain School\n\nprivate schooling of, at Ningbo\n\nreaction of, to Ye's attack on Sun residence\n\nreading list of\n\nrecurrent health problems of\n\nreturn of, to Xikou\n\nrevolutionary army brigade commanded by\n\nRoosevelt expresses doubts about tenure of\n\nand Roosevelt's demands for Stilwell's control\n\nRoosevelt's lauding of\n\nrumours about private life denied by\n\nschools of\n\nShanghai students and workers demand\n\nremoval of\n\nshare trading speculation by\n\nShimbu Gakko military school accepts\n\nsolitary nature of\n\nson of\n\nSoong Meiling and\n\nSun names, as chief of staff\n\nin Taiwan-J8\n\nteachers' recollections of\n\nThree Demands of\n\nTong's biography of\n\non Wang\n\nWang's death and\n\nat Whampoa Academy's opening ceremony\n\nWinter Offensive ordered by\n\nworking-day routine of\n\nWuhan regime expels\n\nin Yan'an\n\nZhang Jingjiang's opinion of\n\nZhou meets, during kidnap _see also_\n\nChina; Kuomintang; Northern Expedition\n\nChiang Meiling (Chiang's wife), _see_ Soong\n\nMeiling\n\nChiang Meiling, _see_ Soong Meiling\n\nChiang Shu-an (Chiang's father)\n\nChiang, Jennie, _see_ Ah Feng\n\nCh'i Hsi-Sheng\n\n_China at the Crossroads_ (Chiang)\n\nChina Mutual Progress Association\n\n_China Times_\n\n_China Yearbook_\n\nChina:\n\nagreement on Nanking Incident signed by\n\nanti-subversion laws in\n\narmy of\n\nBritain and America waive territorial rights in\n\nChiang's Reorganised Government takes office in\n\neffect on, of Sino-Japanese Conflict\n\nengagement of, with the wider world\n\nincome tax introduced in\n\ninflation in\n\nJapan's war with, _see_ Sino-Japanese Conflict\n\nmilitary accord with Japan signed by\n\nNanking favoured as national capital of\n\nnational currency introduced in\n\nnorthern, seen by Japan as sphere for expansion\n\nofficers' plot in, against government figures\n\nPeople's Republic of, proclaimed by Mao\n\nprovincial populations of\n\nrailways expand in\n\nrecognition of, by foreign powers\n\nRevolutionary Party of\n\nSoviet aid to, diminishes\n\nSoviet pact with\n\nuneconomically small farms of\n\n_see also_ individual provinces; Kuomintang\n\n_China's Destiny_ (Chiang)\n\nChina-Burma-India sector (CBI)\n\nChinese Communist Party\n\n_see also_ Communists Chinese River Steamship Administration\n\ncholera\n\nChongqing, _see_ Chungking Chungking ,\n\nChiang chooses, as base for reconstruction\n\nfall of\n\nJapanese air raids on ,\n\nWillkie's visit to\n\nChurchill, Winston\n\nat Cairo Summit\n\nIron Curtain speech of\n\nRoosevelt and Stalin meet\n\nWashington visit by\n\n_see also_ Britain\n\nCiano, Count\n\nCi Xi, Dowager Empress\n\nClark-Kerr, Sir Archibald (later Lord Inverchapel)\n\nClayton, Buck\n\nCoble, Parks\n\nCohen, Morris\n\nCold War\n\nComintern ,\n\nCommunists:\n\nBingxingguan victory for\n\nCanton uprising by\n\nChiang authorises meetings with\n\nChiang's\n\ncampaigns against\n\nin Chungking\n\ndesertions from\n\nDulles's view of\n\nEighth Army of\n\nFourth Army of _passim_ ,\n\nheadquarters of, bombed by Nationalists\n\nHundred Regiments Offensive by\n\nKuomintang joined by\n\nmarch to Sichuan\n\nNanchang rising staged by\n\noffensive launched by, after Soviet withdrawal\n\npossession of armies by\n\nrural radicalism engendered by\n\nShanghai assassinations authorised by committee of\n\nThird Party' between, and Kuomintang\n\nYan'an recaptured by\n\nZhang Xueliang meets\n\n_see also_ Long March; Mao Zedong; Yan'an; Zhou Enlai\n\nconscription\n\nCouncil of Defence\n\ncoup of\n\nMarch\n\nCoward, Noel\n\nCowles, Gardner\n\nMeiling and\n\nCripps, Stafford\n\ncrop failure\n\ncurrency\n\nCurrie, Lauchlin\n\nDadu\n\nDaijitao\n\nkills himself\n\nKuomintang propaganda role for\n\nDai Li\n\ndeath of\n\nOSS disenchanted with\n\nplot discovered by _Daily Express_ (London)\n\nDairen\n\nDali\n\nDalian, _see_ Dairen\n\nDalian-Lushan, _see_ Port Arthur\n\n_Das Kapital_ (Marx)\n\nDavies, John Paton\n\nDavis, John\n\nDemocratic Federation\n\nDemocratic League\n\nDemocratic Socialist Party\n\nDeng Xiaoping\n\ntyphoid suffered by\n\nDeng Yanda\n\nDewey, Thomas\n\nDikotter, Frank\n\nDing Ling\n\nDixie Mission\n\nDonald, William Henry _passim_ ,\n\non Chiang\n\ndeath of\n\nhome truths from\n\nleaves China\n\nleaves Zhang's employ\n\nMeiling and ,\n\nand Meiling's road accident\n\nOrder of the Brilliant Jade awarded to\n\nsleaze concerns of\n\nZhang's cure and\n\nDong, Stella\n\nDongzhou\n\nDoolittle attack\n\nDorn, Frank\n\nDreyer, Edward\n\ndroughts\n\ndrugs trade ,\n\nencouraged by Japanese\n\nDuara, Prasenjit\n\nDulles, John Foster\n\nDurham Light Infantry\n\nDuYuesheng (Big-Eared Du) ,\n\n_passim_ ,\n\nin Chungking\n\nDu Yuming\n\ncapture of\n\nEastern Expedition\n\nEastern Jewel\n\nEastman, Lloyd\n\nEgypt\n\nElder, Jimmy\n\nElizarov, Nikolai Vladimirovich, s^Ching-kuo\n\n_Elmer Gantry {hems)_\n\n_Empress of Russia_\n\nEnlarged Conference of the Kuomintang\n\nExtraordinary Committee of the Central\n\nExecutive of the Kuomintang\n\nE-Yu-Wan, _see_ Oyuwan\n\nFairbank, John King\n\nFairy Glen hotel\n\nFalkenhausen, Alexander von ,\n\nFarmer, Rhodes ,\n\non Chiang\n\non Chungking\n\non Chungking air raid\n\n_Madame Chiang's Messages in War and Peace_ and\n\nFarmers' League\n\nFederation of Democratic Parties\n\nFeng Yuxiang (the Christian General)\n\nanti-Japanese army formed by\n\nanti-Nanking coalition formed by\n\nbecomes Minister of War\n\nin Chungking\n\ncontrol of Henan promised to\n\ndeath of\n\nKuomintang joined by\n\nNorthern Expedition joined by *\n\nnorthern war zone commanded by\n\nopium taxes imposed by\n\nWu Peifu betrayed by\n\nFessenden, Sterling\n\nFiery Old Crow\n\nFifth Army\n\nFiori, Captain\n\nFirst All-China Congress of Workers\n\nFitzgerald, C. P.\n\nFleming, Peter\n\nfloods\n\nFlying Tigers\n\nFonda, Henry\n\nFoo Foo-wang\n\nFoochow, _see_ Fuzhou Forbidden City\n\nFord, Henry\n\nFormosa, _see_ Taiwan\n\nFour Power Joint Declaration\n\nFourteenth Air Force\n\nFrance falls to Germany\n\nFrancke, Harry\n\nFrench Concession\n\nFudaka, General\n\nFukien, see Fujian\n\nFujian\n\nTang Enbo appointed Governor of\n\nFu Xiaoan\n\nFuzhou\n\nJapanese take\n\nFu Zuoyi, General\n\nGalen, $\u00a3e Blyukher, General Vasilii Konstantinovich\n\nGandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma)\n\nGansu province\n\nGauss, Clarence\n\nGeneral Labour Union _Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek,_ _Christian Liberators of China_\n\nGermany:\n\nrecognises Manchukuo\n\nSoviet Union attacked by\n\n_see also_ Hitler, Adolf Gibson, Michael\n\nGiles, Bertram\n\nGoebbels, Joseph\n\ngold standard\n\nGoldwater, Barry _Good Earth, The%Q^_ Goodnow, F. J.\n\nGoodrich, Ernest Payne\n\nGovernment of National Defence\n\nGreat Leap Forward\n\nGreen Forest, University of\n\nGreen Gang\n\nGreenwich Naval College, London\n\nGrunzeberg, Fanya\n\nGrunzeberg, Mikhail Markovich (Borodin)\n\ndeath of\n\nLiao's assassination and\n\nproclaims Chiang as dictator\n\nself-defence force established by\n\nwarrant for arrest of\n\nGuangdong Army\n\nGuangdong province\n\ncivil and economic problems in\n\nconquest of\n\n_see also_ Canton\n\nGuangdong-Guangxi Anti-Japanese National Salvation Army\n\nGuangxi clique\n\nopen rebellion by\n\nGuangxi province\n\nGuilin\n\nGuillermaz, Jacques\n\nGuiyang\n\nGuizhou province\n\nGu Shunzhang\n\nHahn, Emily\n\nHainan\n\nHakka General, _see_ ChenJionming, General\n\nHan Chinese\n\nHan Fuju, General\n\nHangzhou\n\nbay at\n\nHankou\n\n_see also_ Wuhan\n\nHan Suyin\n\non Chungking air raids\n\nHanyang\n\n_see also_ Wuhan\n\nHardoon, Silas _Havj_\n\nHayworth, Rita\n\nHearn, General\n\nHebei province\n\nHedin, Sven\n\nHe Gengshan\n\nHeilongjiang\n\nHe Long\n\nHemingway, Ernest\n\nHenan province ,\n\ndrought in\n\nfamine in\n\nJapan attack on\n\nHengyang\n\nfall of\n\nHenriot, Christian\n\nHe Songling, _see_ Wang Shouhua\n\nHe Yingqin, General\n\nChen Cheng and\n\nMeiling's dislike of\n\nsteps down as Prime Minister\n\nZhang Xueliang replaced by\n\nHirohito, Emperor ,\n\nassassination attempt on\n\nHiroshima\n\nHider, Adolf\n\nSoviet Union attacked by\n\n_see also_ Germany\n\nHo Chi Minh\n\nHonest and Clean Hotel\n\nHong Kong\n\nHong Xiuquan\n\nHonjo, General\n\nHoover Institution, California\n\nHopkins, Harry\n\nHouston, Walter\n\n_How Officials Get Promoted_\n\nHsieh Ping-ying\n\nHsuchow, _see_ Xuzhou Huai-Hai battle\n\nHuang Jinrong (Pockmarked Huang)\n\nHuang Xing\n\nHubei province\n\nJapan attack on\n\nHu Gongmian\n\nHu Hanmin\n\nchairs Legislative Yuan\n\nChiang's removal of\n\ncounter-government joined by\n\ndeath of\n\nForeign Minister's role of\n\nsent to Moscow\n\nStanding Committee membership of\n\nHunan province\n\nCommunists' advance into\n\nconflict in\n\nJapanese drive into\n\nHurley, Patrick\n\nresignation of\n\nHuxley, Aldous\n\nHu Yisheng\n\nHu Zongnan\n\nIchang, _see_ Yichang _Idzumo_\n\nIkezaki Tadakata\n\nIndia ,\n\nRamgarh training camp in\n\nIndo-China\n\nInner Mongolia\n\nInverchapel, Lord, _see_ Clark-Kerr, Sir Archibald Iris\n\nIron Gate Society\n\nIsaacs, Harold\n\nIsherwood, Christopher\n\non Meiling\n\nIshiwara Kanji, Lieutenant Colonel\n\n_Izvestia_\n\nJacobins\n\nJacoby, Annalee\n\nJapan:\n\nairfield and radio station seized by\n\natom bombs dropped on\n\nbestial savagery of, in Nanking\n\nbiological weapons employed by\n\nceasefire with Moscow agreed by\n\nChapei puppet administration established by\n\nChiang's first encounter with\n\nChina's war with, _see_ Sino-Japanese Conflict Chinese troops told to quit\n\ndeclares war against China\n\ndemonstrations and boycotts against\n\nDoolittle attack on\n\nexpansion of, into China\n\ngarrison established by\n\nin inquiry report on Manchuria\n\nJinan incident involving\n\nlaunches offensive after Shanghai attack on\n\nmonks\n\nLeague of Nations quit by\n\nManchukuo created by\n\nManchuria and northern China as objective\n\nof\n\nmilitary accord with China signed by\n\nmove into Indo-China\n\nneutrality agreement signed by in WW\n\nOperation Ichigo launched by\n\nreaction against, after Mukden incident\n\nShandong German concession acquired by\n\nShanhaiguan attacked by\n\nStalin signs non-aggression pact with\n\nsurrender of\n\nwithdrawal agreement by\n\nwithdraws recognition of Nationalist\n\nGovernment\n\nZero fighters employed by\n\nzone dominated by\n\nJehol province\n\nJiang Dezheng as version of Chiang's name\n\nJiang Qing\n\nJiangsu province\n\nJiangxi province ,\n\nRed Army of\n\nJianqxi province\n\nJinan ,\n\nJinzhou\n\nJiujiang\n\nmartial law declared in\n\nriots in\n\nJoffe, Adolf\n\nJohnson, Nelson\n\nJordan, Donald\n\nJourney's End Inn\n\nJujian\n\nJung Chang\n\nKadoorie, Elly\n\nKaifeng\n\nKalgan\n\n_Keep Wuhan!_\n\nKeijiFuraya\n\nKennedy, Joseph\n\nKiichiro Hirauma, Baron\n\nKirby, William\n\nKnatchbull-Hugessen, Sir Hughe\n\nKnight, Don\n\nKong Xiangxi (H. H. Kung) ,\n\nin Chungking\n\nExecutive Hunan chairmanship given to\n\nfinance portfolio given to\n\nfinance portfolio taken from\n\nKonoe, Prince\n\non Northern Expedition\n\nKorea\n\nSouth\n\nKriebel, Colonel Hermann\n\nKuibyshev, V. V.\n\nRuling ,\n\nJapanese occupy Chiang's resort at\n\nKung, Ailing, _see_ Soong, Ailing Kung family\n\nKung, H. H. _see_ Kong Xiangxi Kung, Jeanette\n\nKung, Rosamund\n\nKunming\n\nairfield developed at\n\nKuomintang (KMT) (Nationalist Party)\n\nbusiness district attacked by\n\nChiang becomes General Director of\n\nComintern's criticism of\n\ncongress of (1929)\n\ndissolution of, ordered by Yuan\n\ndomineering intention of\n\ndwindling membership of\n\nEnlarged Conference of\n\nExtraordinary Committee of the Central\n\nExecutive of\n\nFeng joins\n\ngeographical spread of, outside Guangdong\n\nguiding ideology of\n\nheightened appeal of, as a unifying force\n\nincreasing radicalisation of\n\nPropaganda Department of\n\nreconciliation conference of ,\n\nrecruiting by\n\nreorganisation congress of\n\nRevolutionary Committee of\n\n'Third Party' between, and Communists\n\nthree-way split of\n\ntorture used by\n\nwar within, after formation of anti-Nanking\n\ncoalition _see also_ China; Northern Expedition\n\nKwantungArmy ,\n\nadvances on Peiping\n\nLabour Volunteer Corps\n\nLampson, Sir Miles\n\n_Lancet_\n\nLandis, Richard\n\nLanzhou\n\nLao She\n\nLary, Diana\n\nLattimore, Owen\n\nLea, Homer\n\nLeague of Nations\n\nbombing of civilians condemned by\n\nChina's presence at\n\nand inquiry report on Manchuria\n\nLeahy, Admiral\n\nLee Teng-hui\n\nLeith-Ross, Sir Frederick\n\nLenin, Vladimir Ilich\n\nLeonard, Royal\n\nLester, Muriel\n\nLevich, Eugene\n\nLevine, Stephen\n\nLewis, Sinclair\n\nLiao Yaoxiang, General\n\nLiao, Mrs ,\n\nLiao Zhongkai\n\nassassination of\n\nfinance portfolio of National Government taken by _Life_ magazine\n\nLijiang\n\nLi Jishen, General\n\nLindbergh, Colonel\n\nLin Biao _passim_ Lin Sen\n\nLin Yutang\n\nLinyi\n\non loyalty\n\nLittle, Edward Selby\n\nLiu Chih\n\nLiu Zhenhuan\n\nLixingshe\n\nLi Zhilong, Captain\n\nLi Zongren\n\nChiang hands over to\n\nlocusts\n\nLoh, Pichon\n\nLominadze, Besso\n\nLondres, Albert\n\nLong March _passim_ ,\n\nend of\n\nsetback suffered during\n\nLong Yun\n\nLonghua barracks\n\n_Look_ magazine\n\nLu Xun\n\nLuce, Claire Booth\n\nLuce, Henry ,\n\nLudendorff, Field Marshal Erich von\n\nLuding\n\nLue, Henry\n\nLugou Bridge, _see_ Lukouchiao Bridge\n\nLukouchiao (Marco Polo) Bridge\n\nLuo Zhuoying ,\n\nLuoyang\n\nLushan\n\nLytton, Lord\n\nMcCarthyism\n\nMcCausland, John\n\nMacDonald, Ramsay\n\nMacKinnon, Stephen\n\nMcLure, Bob ,\n\nMacmillan, Harold\n\nMacNaghten, General E. B.\n\n_Madame Chiangs Messages in War and Peace_ (Chiang Meiling)\n\nMadame Sun Yat-sen Political Thought Training School for Women\n\nMadame Tussaud's\n\nMadison Square Garden\n\nMa, General\n\n'magnetic warfare'\n\nMaingkwan\n\nMainhu\n\nMalaya\n\nMalinovsky, Marshall\n\n_Manchester Guardian_\n\nManchu (Qing) Empire\n\nfall of, foretold\n\nKorea and\n\npopular revolts against\n\nPu Yi's accession and\n\nManchukuo\n\nStalin recognises\n\ntacit recognition of\n\n_see also_ Manchuria\n\nManchuria ,\n\nbecomes 'kleptocracy'\n\nbiological-warfare research in\n\ncivil war rages in\n\nCommunists control\n\ninquiry commission on\n\nJapan has sights _on_\n\npower vacuum in\n\nrecognised as integral part of China\n\nSoviets withdraw from\n\n_see a_ _lso_ Manchukuo\n\nMandalay\n\nMao Dun\n\nMao Fu-mei ,\n\nChiang's ill treatment of\n\ndeath of\n\nson of\n\nMao Zedong\n\nAmerican writers' depictions of\n\nand Chiang, comparisons with\n\nChiang's meetings with\n\nChinese Soviet republic declared by\n\ndeath of\n\nGreat Leap Forward of\n\non Hunan conflict\n\nHurley meets\n\nleadership consolidated by\n\nLi Zongren's surrender to\n\nManchuria controlled by\n\nMarshall visits\n\nPeople's Republic proclaimed by\n\nput under virtual house arrest\n\nRectification Campaign of\n\nRed Army units join\n\nreward for capture of\n\nService's glowing reports on\n\ntrauma suffered by, after Chiang meetings\n\ntruce conditions of\n\n_see also_ Communists; Yan'an Maotai\n\nMarco Polo Bridge, _see_ Lukouchiao (Marco\n\nPolo) Bridge Marshall, George\n\ndeparture of\n\nMarshall, Katherine\n\nmartial law\n\nMarx, Karl\n\nMatsu\n\nMatsui Iwane, General\n\nMay Incident\n\nMei Lan-fang\n\nMencius\n\nmercenaries\n\nattack on\n\nMerchants'Volunteer Corps (MVC)\n\nMerlin, Martial\n\nMerrill, Frank\n\nMerrill's Marauders\n\nMiao Terrace\n\nMiles, Milton\n\nmilitary Academy (late renamed Central Military and Political Academy)\n\nanti-Communism emerges at\n\nmagazine of\n\nmoves to Nanking\n\nrecruitment for\n\n_see also_ Whampoa Fort Miluo River\n\nMinistry of Communications\n\nMisselwitz, Henry _Mizzima News_\n\n_Modern Asian Studies_ (Waldron)\n\nMolotov, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich\n\nMongolia\n\nMorgenthau, Henry\n\nMorris, H. E.\n\nMoscow-Nanking non-aggression pact\n\nMountbatten, Lord Louis\n\nMowrer, Edgar\n\nMu Zhiying\n\nMukden (now Shenyang) ,476,\n\nairfield and radio station of, seized by Japanese\n\nMyitkyina\n\nNagasaki\n\nNanchang\n\nuprising in\n\nNanking ,\n\nattack on, in Sinojapanese Conflict\n\nbecomes Heavenly City\n\ncapital returns to\n\nchiang favours, as national capital\n\nChiang returns to, with full powers\n\nChiang's Reorganised Government takes office in\n\ncounter-government formed in\n\ncrisis deepens in\n\ndefensive stance of, forced by Sun Zhuanfang\n\nfall of\n\ngovernment buildings in\n\nJapan ships shell\n\nnew government sworn in at\n\nopium monopoly bureau established in\n\nsevers relations with Moscow\n\nNanking-Moscow non-aggression pact\n\nNanning\n\nNanuye mountain\n\nNapoleon\n\nNational Government of the Chinese Republic\n\nNational Oriental Library\n\nNational Reconstruction Commission\n\nNational Revolutionary Army (NRA)\n\neight corps of\n\nNational Salvation Association\n\nNational Spiritual Mobilisation\n\nNationalist Party, _see_ Kuomintang\n\nNechanev, General Konstantin\n\nNehru, Jawaharlal\n\nNelson, Donald\n\nNew Life movement , _New York Times_\n\nMeiling's article in\n\nNguyen Ai Quoc, _see_ Ho Chi Minh Ningbo\n\nbiological attack on\n\nNingxia province\n\nNixon, Richard\n\nNomonhan\n\nNorth Africa _No_ _rth China Daily News:_\n\nMorris as owner of\n\nreports in\n\n_North China Herald_ , reports in\n\nNorthern Expedition _passim_ , _passim_ ,\n\nsecond stage of, formally proclaimed\n\nNorthwest Automobile Transportation Company\n\nOffice of Strategic Services (OSS)\n\nofficers' plot against government figures\n\nOld Marshal of Manchuria, _see_ Zhang Zuolin Operation Ichigo ,\n\nsoldiers claimed by\n\nwinding down of\n\nOpium Suppression Bureaux\n\nOpium Wars\n\nOyuwan\n\n_Panay_ ,\n\npavlov, Pavel A.\n\nPawley, Muriel\n\nPayne, Robert\n\nPearl Harbor\n\nPechkoff, General Zinovi\n\nPeck, Graham\n\nPeiping, _see_ , Peking Peking ,467\n\nbecomes People's Republic's capital\n\nNixon visits\n\npuppet government installed in\n\nrenamed Peiping\n\nseparatist government formed in\n\nPeople's Liberation Army (PLA)\n\n_see also_ Red Army People's\n\nPolitical Council\n\nPerry, Elizabeth\n\nPeyrefitte, Alain\n\nPhilippines\n\nPickford, Mary\n\nplague\n\nPort Arthur\n\nPotsdam\n\nPowell, John\n\nPoyangLake\n\nPu Yi (Last Emperor) ,\n\nabdication of\n\nenthronement of, in Manchukuo\n\nPye, Lucian\n\nQian Zhongfei\n\nQing Dynasty, _see_ Manchu (Qing) Empire\n\nQingdao\n\nQuemoy\n\nRabe, John\n\nRansome, Arthur\n\nReagan, Ronald\n\nRed Army ,\n\n'Anti-Japanese Advance Detachment' of\n\nrenamed People's Liberation Army _(q.v.)_\n\nwithdrawal of, under Nationalist pressure\n\nRed Spear Society\n\nReorganisation Society\n\nrepression\n\nReuters reports on Chungking air raid\n\nRevolutionary Military Council\n\n_Revolutionary Handbook, The_\n\nRibbentrop, Joachim von\n\nRobinson, Edward G.\n\nRockefeller Foundation\n\nRogers, Ginger\n\nRoosevelt, Eleanor\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin D.\n\nat Cairo Summit\n\nChiang lauded by\n\nChiang's tenure questioned by\n\ndeath of\n\nMeiling and\n\nStalin and Churchill meet\n\nStilwell recalled by\n\nStilwell's overall command demanded by\n\n_see also_ United States of America Roosevelt, James\n\nRoy, Mahendranath\n\nRussia, Japan's defeat of\n\nRyukichi Tanaka, Major\n\nSaipan\n\nSalt-Water Sisters\n\nSalween Gorge\n\nSassoon, Victor\n\nSeagrave, Sterling\n\nSecond Revolution\n\nSeeckt, General Hans von\n\nSelznick, David O.\n\nServants'Association\n\nService, John ,\n\nShaanxi province\n\nfamine in\n\nShameen ,\n\nbomb at\n\nShandong province\n\ncrime in\n\n_see also_ Jinan Shang Zhen\n\nShanggao\n\nShanghai _passim_ ,\n\nBuddhist monks from Japan attacked in\n\ncapture of\n\nChen Qimei becomes military governor of\n\nChiang's last visit to\n\nChinese abandon\n\nconference in\n\nfilm industry of\n\nHuxley on\n\nJapan's assault upon\n\nKuomintang cells established in\n\nMajestic Gardens of\n\nOpium Suppression Bureau in\n\npopulation of\n\nsex workers in\n\nin Sino-Japanese conflict\n\ntyphoon in\n\nunions call for a government of\n\nShanghai Arsenal\n\nShanghai Local Peace Preservation Association\n\nShanhaiguan\n\nShantou ,\n\nJapanese take\n\nShanxi province\n\nJapan attack on\n\nShaoguan\n\nSheean, Vincent , _Shen Pao_\n\nShenyang, _see_ Mukden Shihou (Chiang's half-brother)\n\nShijing\n\nShiozawa, Admiral\n\nShiro Ishii\n\nSichuan province\n\nChiang chooses, as base for reconstruction\n\nfamine in\n\nLong March crosses into\n\nSilk Road\n\nSingapore\n\nSino-American Cooperation Organisation (SACO)\n\nSino-Japanese Conflict , _passim,_\n\nChiang and Meiling leave Nanking during\n\ncivilian bombing condemnation during\n\nJapan's terminology for\n\nKaifeng taken during\n\nMoscow-Nanking non-aggression pact during\n\nNanking rape within\n\nJapanese atrocities during\n\nShanghai battle within\n\nmovement of factories during\n\nWestern silence during\n\nWuhan taken during\n\nXuzhou attack during\n\nSixth Army\n\nSmedley, Agnes\n\nSneevliet, Hendricus\n\nSnow, Edgar\n\nSnow Mountains\n\nSocialist Democratic Party\n\nSociety to Study Sun Yat-senism\n\nSokolsky, George\n\nSongjiaoren\n\nSongjiang\n\nSoochow, _see_ Suzhou\n\nSoong, Ailing ,\n\nSoong, Charlie\n\nSoong family\n\nSoong Meiling , _passim_\n\nafter Chiang\n\nBrazil visit by\n\nat Cairo Summit\n\nCampbell's assessment of\n\nChiang offended by behaviour of\n\nChiang's marriage to\n\non China's women\n\ncollection of writings published by\n\non cover of _Time_\n\nDonald and ,\n\nFlying Tigers and\n\ngraduation of\n\nHedin's view of\n\nhonorary degrees awarded to\n\nLegislative Yuan joined by\n\nLushan house acquired by\n\n'Madame Empress' tag applied to\n\nnervous exhaustion suffered by\n\n_New York Times_ article written by\n\nprominent role of\n\nroad accident injures\n\nskin disease suffered by\n\nspokesperson role for, in Sino-Japanese Conflict\n\nStilwell's analysis of\n\nstomach cancer suspected in\n\nsymbol of upper class\n\ntour of America by ,\n\nUS Congress addressed by\n\nWillkie and ,\n\nworld influence of\n\nSoong, Qingling\n\nSoong, T. L.\n\nlookalike of\n\nSoong, T. V. (Soong Tzu-wen) ,\n\nappointed Acting President of the Executive Yuan\n\nappointed Governor of Guangdong\n\nassassination attempt on\n\nin Chungking\n\nand Japan imports\n\nnational budget and Central Bank promised by\n\nNationalists' finances run by\n\npact with Soviets negotiated by\n\nreplaces Wang\n\nresignations of\n\nrising standing of\n\nStilwell's message to\n\nWashington loan deals secured by\n\n_South China Morning Post_\n\nSoviet Union ,\n\naid from\n\nceasefire with Tokyo agreed by\n\nChiang Ching-kuo returns from\n\nChiang signs non-aggression pact with\n\nChina's pact with\n\nintervention of, sought by Nanking\n\nneutrality agreement signed by, in WW\n\nreduces aid to China\n\nwithdrawal of\n\n_see also_ Stalin, Joseph\n\nSri Lanka, _see_ Ceylon\n\nStalin, Joseph\n\nagrees to war on Japan\n\nChiang turns to\n\nChiang's trust in\n\nRoosevelt and Churchill meet\n\nTokyo signs non-aggression pact with\n\n_see also_ Soviet Union\n\nStandard Oil Company\n\nState Council\n\nZhang Xueliang joins\n\nStennes, Walter\n\nStepanov, V. A.\n\nSternberg, Josef von\n\nStilwell, Joseph ('VinegarJoe') ,\n\nChennault's clashes with ,\n\nChiang denigrates, after Roosevelt's demand\n\non Chiang\n\nChiang's decoration offer refused by\n\nChiang's posthumous honours for\n\nCommunists emissaries' offer to\n\ndeath of\n\ndeparture of\n\ndiaries of\n\ndisappearance and reappearance of\n\nGuilin withdrawal ordered by\n\non Meiling\n\nrecall of\n\nroad named after\n\nRoosevelt's demand for overall command by\n\nsidelined during Willkie visit\n\nSoong's plan to eject\n\ntakes charge of India-trained troops\n\nTenth Army command given to\n\nStimson, Henry\n\nStrong, Anna Louise\n\nStuart, John Leigh ton\n\nSues, Ilona Ralf\n\nSuiyuan province, Inner Mongolia\n\nSun Fengmin\n\nSun Fo\n\ncabinet headed by\n\nSun Liren, General\n\nSun Mingjiu, Colonel\n\nSun Yat-sen _passim_ ,\n\nat Kuomintang reorganisation congress\n\nChen's invitation to\n\nChiang appointed by, to head new Military Department\n\nChiang becomes military adviser to\n\nChiang's 'wordless rapport' with\n\nChina Revolutionary Party established by\n\nat Christian College, Canton\n\nin Colorado\n\ndeath of\n\nas Director for Construction of All Railways\n\nfifty-eighth birthday of\n\nfinal departure of, to Shanghai\n\nfuneral ceremonies of\n\ngovernments of ,\n\nGrand Marshal title adopted by\n\nGrunzeberg and\n\nGrunzeberg's opinion of\n\nlife presidency of Kuomintang accorded to\n\nliver cancer diagnosed in\n\nlying-in-state of\n\nmercenaries hired by\n\nprovisional presidential role of\n\nremains of, taken to Nanking\n\nrevolutionary spirit of\n\nand Ailing Soong\n\nSoviet adviser acquired by\n\nSun Dapao nickname of\n\nThree Principles of\n\nWestern powers blasted by\n\nat Whampoa Academy's opening ceremony\n\nwomanising by\n\nYe's bombardment on residence of\n\nZhang meets\n\nSun Yat-sen Society\n\nSun Zhuanfang\n\nSutton\n\nSuzhou\n\nSwisher, Earl\n\nTaierzhuang\n\nTaiping rebellion\n\nTairov, V. K.\n\nTaiwan (Formosa)\n\nChiang heads for\n\nChiang in\n\nTaiyuan\n\nTakamatsu, Prince\n\n_Ta KungPao_\n\nTanaka, Baron\n\nTanaka, Ryukich\n\nTang Enbo\n\nappointed Governor of Fujian\n\nTangShengzhi (the Buddhist General)\n\nTanggu accord ,\n\nTanggu Truce\n\nTangku Truce\n\nTan Yankai\n\nTang Yulin\n\nTao Xingzhi\n\nTatekawa Yoshitsugu, General\n\nTawney, R. H. ,\n\nTemple, Shirley\n\nThree Prosperities Company (the Big Company)\n\n'Three Alls' campaign\n\nTianjin\n\nTientsin, _see_ Qingdao Tiltman, Hessell _Time_ magazine\n\nMeiling on cover of _Times_ (London)\n\nTimperley, Harold\n\nTingsiqiao\n\nTongdao\n\nTong, Hollington\n\nTongmenghui, _see_ United League\n\n(Tongmenghui) Topping, Seymour\n\nToungoo\n\nToynbee, Arnold\n\nTracy, Spencer\n\n_Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution_ (Isaacs)\n\nTrautmann, Oscar\n\nTrotsky, Leon\n\nTruman, Harry S. ,\n\nTsinan, _see_ Jinan Tsingtao, _see_ Qingdao Tuchman, Barbara\n\nUmeza, General\n\nUnited League (Tongmenghui)\n\nUnited States of America:\n\nChief of Staff to China appointed by\n\nChinese suspicion of\n\nDixie Mission launched by\n\nDoolittle attack by\n\nLend-Lease agreements of\n\nloan deals signed by\n\nPacific naval victories by\n\n_see also_ Roosevelt, Franklin D.\n\nUNRRA (UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration)\n\nUS Marines\n\nVan de Ven, Hans\n\nVichy regime\n\nVincent, John Carter\n\nVladimirov, Petr Parfenovich ,\n\nVoitinsky, Gregory\n\nWakeman, Frederic\n\nWaldron, Arthur\n\nWallace, Henry\n\nWang Bigun (Becky)\n\nWangjingwei\n\nanti-Nanking coalition formed by\n\nassassination attempt on\n\nattempted assassination of\n\ncensured\n\nChiang's fraught relationship with\n\ndeath of\n\nKuomintang expels\n\nMilitary and Political Councils within National Government headed by\n\nStanding Committee membership of\n\nwarns of Chiang's despotic ambitions\n\nWang Ming\n\nWang Shouhua (He Songling)\n\nWangTsai-yu (Chiang's mother)\n\non Chiang's first wife\n\nin Chiang's writings\n\ndeath of\n\nin Shanghai with Chiang\n\ntomb of\n\nWang Wenhao\n\nWanping\n\nWater Fairy\n\nWedemeyer, General Albert\n\nWei-kuo (Chiang's adopted son)\n\nWei Lihuang\n\nWenchang Pavilion\n\nWestad, Odd Arne\n\nWhampoa Fort\n\n_see also_ military Academy White, Theodore (Teddy)\n\nWhyte, Sir Frederick\n\nWiart, General Adrian Carton de\n\nWilliams, Dr J. E.\n\nWillkie, Wendell\n\ndeath of\n\nMeiling and ,\n\nMeiling tries to secure presidential nomination for\n\nWindsor, Duchess of\n\nWinter Offensive\n\nWoman's Work Department\n\nWomen's Assassination Group\n\nWoosung, seeWusong world depression\n\nWu, C. C.\n\nWuchang ,\n\n_see also_ Wuhan Wu Chi-wei, David\n\nWuhan _passim_ ,309,324,358\n\nair attack on\n\narmy of, moves into Henan\n\nChiang expelled by regime of\n\nJapanese launch attack on\n\nreaction of, to Shanghai attack\n\ntri-cities of\n\n_see also_ Hankou; Hanyang; Wuchang\n\nWuhan Chambers of Commerce\n\nWu Peifu (the Philosopher General) , 1Q8'\n\nChiang's first meeting with\n\ndiamond owned by\n\nFeng Yuxiang betrays\n\nWu Tiecheng\n\nWusong\n\nChapei front with\n\nXiamen\n\nXi'an\n\nChiang kidnap ('Xi'an Incident') at, _see_ Chiang: kidnap of\n\nCommunists' base in\n\nWillkie's visit to\n\nXiangYmg\n\nXiang Zhongfa\n\nXikou ,\n\nair raid on\n\ndifferent names of\n\nrenovation of\n\nsalt store in\n\nXinjiang\n\nXu Chongzhi, General ,\n\nXuEnzeng\n\nXuQian\n\nXue Yue\n\nXuzhou\n\nX, Yand Z Forces\n\nYale University\n\nYalta\n\nYan'an\n\nChiang visits\n\nCommunists recapture\n\nNationalists' blockade of\n\n_see also_ Mao Zedong\n\nYang Hu\n\nYang Hucheng, General\n\ndeath of\n\nheld prisoner\n\nYangtze River\n\nYangtze, power from\n\nYan Xishan (the Model Governor)\n\nanti-Nanking coalition formed by\n\nNorthern Expedition joined by\n\nnorthern war zone commanded by\n\nYao (Chiang's concubine)\n\nYao Xinning\n\nYardley, Herbert\n\nYe Ju, General\n\nYellow River\n\nblowing of\n\nYe Ting\n\nYichang\n\nYing Guixin\n\narrest and subsequent murder of\n\nYochow, _seeYaeyang_ Young, Arthur\n\nYoung China Party\n\nyuan (currency)\n\nYuan Shikai\n\nbecomes president\n\nChen edged out by, as military governor of Shanghai\n\nconfirmed as dictator\n\ndeath of\n\nYuan (government branches)\n\nYiieyang\n\nYunling\n\nYunnan province\n\nYu-piao (Chiang's paternal grandfather)\n\ndeath of\n\nYutai Salt Store, Xikou\n\nYu Xiaqing\n\nZhang Guotao\n\nZhangjiakou, _see_ Kalgan\n\nZhang Jingjiang ,\n\nChiang wedding speech made by\n\nChiang-Ah Feng relationship and\n\nmarriage of\n\nshare-broking company set up by\n\nZhang Renjie, _see_ Zhang Jingjiang Zhang Xiaolin\n\nZhang Xueliang (the Young Marshal) ,\n\nand Chiang kidnap\n\nbecomes Deputy Commander of Nationalist armies\n\nbecomes Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Bandit Suppression troops\n\nCommunists and\n\ncontinued detention of\n\ncourt marshal of\n\ndrug habit acquired by\n\nJapan accuses of 'insecure attitude'\n\nMussolini and Hitler impress\n\npressure on, from Japan\n\nresignation of\n\nresignation of, as deputy commander-in-chief\n\nState Council joined by\n\nWangjingwei criticises\n\nZhang Zhun\n\nZhang Zizhong, General\n\nZhang Zongchang (the Dogmeat General)\n\nassassination of\n\nZhang Zuolin (Old Marshal of Manchuria)\n\nassassination of\n\npearl owned by\n\nZhejiang province\n\nJapan attack on, using plague germs\n\nZhengzhou\n\nZhijia Shen\n\nZhong Wai Bank\n\nZhou Enlai\n\narrests of\n\nChen Jitang's agreement with\n\nChen Lifu's anti-Japan talks with\n\nChiang invites for talks on long-term relationship\n\nChiang meets, during kidnap\n\nnear death of, in mortar attack\n\nprice on head of\n\n_see also_ Communists\n\nZhou, Duke of\n\nZhu De\n\nreport of death of\n\nreward for capture of\n\nZhukov, Georgy\n\nZhu Yimin _Ziye (Midnight)_ (Mao Dun)\n\nZunyi\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n# A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer\n\n## Stories\n\n### Christine Schutt\n\n_for David_\n\n# Contents\n\nDARKEST OF ALL\n\nYOUNG\n\nDO YOU THINK I AM WHO I WILL BE?\n\nWEATHER IS HERE, WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL\n\nTHE HUMAN SEASON\n\nTHE LIFE OF THE PALM AND THE BREAST\n\nTHEY TURN THEIR BODIES INTO SPEARS\n\nSEE AMID THE WINTER'S SNOW\n\nUNREDISCOVERED, UNRENAMEABLE\n\nWINTERREISE\n\nTHE BLOOD JET\n\nAbout the Author\n\n# DARKEST OF ALL\n\nTHE YEARS, SHE SAW, fell heavily as books: the missing husband pinging a racket against the chuff of his hand, her charmed sister at the rental's beach, the raging Jean herself. In a coil of towel, the little boy named Jack was powdered free of sand. She tended to him then\u2014absent, curious, easeful\u2014and he calmed under the warmth of her hand. Now Jack's body was his own and not a thing she felt branched of, her hands growing out of; mother and son, they had even smelled the same once, when Jack's teeth were growing in. Now she did not get close enough\u2014did not want to get close enough\u2014to smell him. Jack's skin was given over to the wild fluctuations of his age, which meant it was one day clear and smooth, and the next erupted, and still later newly healed and probably sore. Now the boy smoked.\n\nIt was what he asked for first with the smoke of something smoked down clouding around his head: \"Did you remember cigarettes?\" Yes, yes, her soft assent. \"But what I need,\" Jack said, \"are socks.\" Snack foods, paper, stamps: the listlessly articulated list from every visit grew as the corridors grew, or so it seemed to Jean as she walked through the swabbed facility with its smell of Lysol and fish!\n\n\"Stamps,\" Jack said, \"are what I really need. I want to write to friends.\"\n\nJack said, \"I wrote myself here,\" and he showed Jean what he did every night on the edge of the table, which was a deeply scarred table, full of dates and initials, profanations, codes, and there on the edge, his knife-worked JACK. Jack said, \"I want people to know I've been here and that I was okay. I had friends. Fuck,\" he said, \"I've made a lot of friends,\" and so he had. An odd assortment said hello or made motions to speak to Jack each time they bumped past.\n\nJean said to Jack, \"So what do you do with your friends?\"\n\n\"They're not all friends,\" he said. \"Some of them\"\u2014and he pointed to a boy with an old black face and voluptuously muscled body\u2014\"that guy,\" Jack said, \"already has a kid. He's been in jail. And the fat girl bit a girl for trying to comb her hair. I don't talk to that crazy. Nobody does. There were stitches. That's how bad it was.\"\n\nHow bad it was Jean told her sister. Jean called the place the facility, eschewing its bucolic name and using Jack's slang when she was angry. Then she called the facility a dry-out place, a place for rehab on the cheap. A motel or a conference center, the facility had past lives in the same way as did its staff. First name only, confessing only their abuse, the pallid staff wore cushioned shoes and shuffled small steps. Their talk, too, was small and coughed out with erasures from whatever they saw looking back\u2014not that, not that\u2014but ahead, the home contract, the dickered pact, the rules to school the house against the wily abuser. \"Addiction,\" the staff said, \"we've been there\u2014and been there. Relapse is common with friends still using.\" The staff twitched matches, frantically serene.\n\nJean told her sister, \"These are the guys helping Jack with his homework. These are the people meant to be his friends.\"\n\nBut Jean's sister, being her sister, and wiser, Jean's sister said, \"This is where Jack should be.\"\n\nThe hours at the facility were blocked and named: group, individual, free. \"I'm climbing steps,\" Jack said, smiling. \"I'm making progress here, Mother. You'd be proud!\"\n\nJack. She was used to the shard of his name since he shortened it. His hair color, too, had changed, was leaden and beaten by the last school's cap, the same he wore through the meeting.\n\n\"Jack!\" she said.\n\n\"What?\" he asked.\n\nMother, son, counselor, here they were again, the weekend group in consultation: _family_ was the name on the schedule.\n\nWho was getting better? she wondered. Who was sick?\n\nJean asked her wiser sister, \"Am I?\"\n\n\"Are you?\" she asked back.\n\nYes, it was all too common a story\u2014Jean knew, she admitted as much\u2014a woman on her own and what she had to do because of the children. Because of them she had to ask the missing husband for what he did not have that yet was needed.\n\n\"Look at what I've had to do for money,\" Jean said, home again, on the couch with the quiet son, Ned. The men she had let wander into the apartment. Think of them! And she did\u2014and didn't he? \"Don't you think of them sometimes?\"\n\nNed said, \"I was very young, Mother.\"\n\nIt was Jack, years older, who had said he remembered a man who shook her upside down for quarters.\n\n\"Oh,\" Jean moaned as Ned was getting to and scratching some unreachable places. \"Oh, I hope you don't remember,\" she said. Then, \"Yes! That feels good!\" she said, and said again, \"That feels good!\" and Jean let her towel drop in a way that made her wonder since there wasn't a man to put lotion on her back should she ask her son to do it.\n\nJean, at the facility, said to the counselor, \"Ask Jack what he did with my bank card. I bet he didn't tell you.\" Freely spending with the purpose to be caught, it seemed, Jack had bought what in the moment moved him, leaving waxy, bunched receipts between the sheets for her to find of what he had signed for with abandon, largely. Felonious boy, that Jack! Skulking the facility, as she had seen him, butting what he passed\u2014doors, walls, wheeled racks hung with visiting coats\u2014Jack scared Jean a little, and she came home tired.\n\nAnd Ned was tired! Tired from scratching. Tired from the yawn of Saturday, from homework, from art class, from girls. From streets and apartments, cigarettes, beers\u2014from more girls. On almost any Sunday, late in the morning and cragged in a gray sheet, the boy slept in his room, which was also gray. Thin light, lingering smoke. Something there was about Ned gray, too: the pale skin of his outstretched leg, blue-black hair in a cuff at his ankle. Only his foot, the heel of it, was full of color\u2014not old pavement to be razored\u2014Ned's foot was young. It invited petting, touching to say, Wake up. \"Wake up,\" she said, looking at the covered boy because she did not want to see what was on the bedside table, although Jean saw it clearly: the cigarettes first, the ashy spill around the glasses, orange juice pips on the rim of the old-fashioned. Haywire spirals yanked out of notebooks, Post-its curling on the tops of papers: _See me!_ one of them said. Jean was looking at the screen-dead computer. The drawers, too, she saw but did not open. She knew enough about Ned. She knew he drank and smoked, carried condoms, broken jewelry. She knew he liked to kiss; he liked the girls. Girls, girls, girls, girls. Their voices ribboned out from faces closely pressed against the cradle of the phone\u2014babies still, most often shy. \"Is Ned there?\" they asked.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Jean said\u2014and said\u2014\"he's still asleep.\"\n\nLifted in the wind, the blinds banged their music on the sill; it was a sound of diminutive breakage\u2014of saucers, of cups\u2014in a rhythm like the rising and falling of a chest, like breathing, a boy's, his. Tiptoed and unsteady, she silenced the phone next to his bed. She put the ringer on off\u2014and why not? The callers for Ned would call back, so let him sleep, she thought, another hour. Let him grow in his twisted sheets! Bent, crooked, an impression of bones he was, a tent of bones, a sudden arm slung above his head and the black tuft of hair there as startling as his sex.\n\nThink of something else, think of the Sunday papers. Consider this fall's color on girls stood back-to-back, with their skinny arms crossed, as girls crossed them, coyly. The girls who visited Ned stood at the door coyly, toed in and stooped with baby backpacks on their backs, asking from behind ragged bangs, \"Is Ned home?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she had to say, \"but still asleep.\"\n\nAnd Jack? Jack was now so tipped against the sun\u2014the bright shard of his name again\u2014that just to speak of Jack hurt Jean's eyes; and she did not want to think about the place where she had been or what Jack was doing there or what he would be doing there at night in the facility.\n\n\"Not knowing where he sleeps is fine by me,\" Jean admitted, but only to Ned. To Ned she complained. Now when she sat on the couch, still red from washing off the facility, she said, \"Jack makes me believe he has paid for whatever it is we are doing to him. Does that make sense?\" She said, \"Please, my back.\"\n\nNed said, \"You never made Jack do this.\"\n\nSometimes Ned used a comb on her back. He made tracks and designs with the comb. He wrote his name and asked, \"So what did I write then?\"\n\nShe sat on the couch, tickled by the comb tracking through the lotion, and she said to Ned, \"I can't help myself sometimes. When I am in family I say terrible things....\" And she told the boy what things she had said about a man who was yet the father\u2014and she knew that, yet she would speak. She wanted to tell Ned everything. Now, every weekend, it seemed, she came home parched and queasy, calling out to Ned, \"Are you here? Anybody home? Yes? No? Who else?\"\n\nOnce a girl with rainbow hair lay unbuttoned on Ned's bed. The girl was quick to sit up, and she smiled at Jean, but the distraction of the girl's hair, knotted and skyward from however the girl had been with him, was such that all Jean saw was the girl's hair and those parts erect from tugging. Just look at the girl's stubby nipples! So this was Ned's idea of pretty, Jean thought, and wondered, Was the girl disappointed in her? Was she drab to the girl? For that was how she felt.\n\n\"Is this your mother?\" from the girl in a girl's voice, just a whisper.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThis was the mother breaking open gelcaps and licking up sleep or the opposite of sleep, extreme wakefulness, speed. This was the mother using scissors between her legs, staying ready, staying hairless, should someone want to lick her.\n\nSomething Jean could never bring up at the family consultation in the facility was what she was doing at home because she was hardly ever sober herself, but she was prudent in her daily use of substances. She measured, she counted, she observed fastidious rituals. She soaped and creamed and powdered when the high was at her throat. At night she drank\u2014then only ales, wines, rarely hard liquor. But she drank to ease the restlessness from the petty drugs she took, gouging tinbacks with a pencil to release sealed tablets, over-the-counter nondrowsy\u2014four, six, eight pills a pop\u2014uninspired habit, nothing serious, but growing, at the worst growing, at the worst becoming what her father's habit was: Vicodin, Prozac, Valium, Glucotrol, Synthroid, Mevacor, plain old aspirin. Jean's father had offered, saying, \"I don't know what it's called, but it's good.\" No, no, no, Jean had resisted. She wanted most of her habit nonprescription and cheap.\n\nNo one noticed what she did.\n\nThis was especially true at the facility, where Jean had expected to be found out as if passing by a screen and seen clear through; but she slipped past and into the facility with her son and her son's counselor, and she was fearless again. Everyone was looking at Jack, asking him, \"So what do you do around users?\"\n\nJack said, \"I don't.\"\n\nEveryone agreed his was a good answer, clever.\n\nAvoid some mothers, Jean thought, avoid me; the thought of being worse than the mother she remembered as having was hurtful, but not so hurtful as to keep her from using more expensive substances. The guilt didn't keep her from calling Suzette and speaking in their code, \"I need some panty hose,\" and welcoming the girl at any time of the night\u2014even introducing Suzette to Ned. \"We work together,\" she had said. A traveling house of a girl come to them at any hour, a bulk, a shape zippered or buckled, pilot glasses, sneakers, Peruvian hat, Suzette didn't much surprise Ned. He was used to interruption, to the phone at odd hours and hand-delivered gifts, the rustle of things dried, split pods, seeds flying. The flare-up affairs with names Jean might use for weeks\u2014Nora, Mark, David, Marlene\u2014Ned was familiar with this much of the life his mother had in another part of the city.\n\nThe city, if only that were to blame, but there was her own father, the one who managed to be sick in the country. Jean's father couldn't remember Jean's address or the names of the boys, saying, \"Your oldest will be sixteen before I see him,\" when Jack was almost eighteen yet already sick the way he was. And Jean was sick, too\u2014and maybe Ned. The baby creases of his neck often smelled of smoke, greasy exudations from the bonfired night, tin bright, pin size, salty.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" Jean said, and Jean's careful sister asked\u2014and asked often\u2014if Jean was taking anything she shouldn't.\n\nJean said, \"Nothing. Why should I?\"\n\nOnce Jean let Ned visit Jack, and she was happy to have Ned's company, and Jack was made happy, too, just to see his brother. They shivered to be near before they touched and were teasing again, boys again, brothers. The brothers walked together and apart from Jean, waving at their mother with their smoking hands because they could, being here, at the facility. Look at the troughs of sand used for ashtrays! They were mad smokers here at the facility, but what else was there to do, Jack asked, except to smoke and answer questions and earn steps? Every week he reached a new level; now there was talk about a contract.\n\n\"The home contract is something we agree on,\" Jack said, \"if I'm to come back to the city and live with you.\"\n\nHe showed Jean a draft. To the question about curfew, he had written, _None._\n\nJack said, \"Shit, Mother, I snuck out all the time.\"\n\n\"So where were you going?\" Jean asked; but when he made to speak, she said, \"Don't tell me.\"\n\nShe didn't want to read Jack's home contract either and not, as it happened, when Ned was along and all of them sitting at the gashed table with Jack pointing. \"See? My name's all over this fucking place.\"\n\n\"Jack, please!\" Jean said.\n\n\"I've lived without a curfew,\" Jack said, and every weekend said, \"I've changed. I'm on the third step. I want my medal.\"\n\nAt the scarred table with her sons, Jean cried. \"There is so much to be sorry about,\" she said, but her sons were embarrassed, it seemed to her, and sad and scornful of her rustling for a hankie. \"Anyone?\" she asked. \"I'm sorry.\" She bent her head, snuffling, using a cloth when she found one. \"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"I'll be all right.\"\n\nThe story Jean most often told Ned was about Jack and what Jack did. She told Ned of the friends his brother had made at the facility, even the fat girl now, the one who had bitten a girl for approaching with a comb, even she was his friend. Jack said he was popular, the most popular kid. Jean said, \"I think he thinks he is running for class president.\" Jean said, \"Where does he think he is?\"\n\nIn family, Jack said he wanted to live in L.A. He said he was old enough, he had worked last summer, he had had the responsibility of a job.\n\n\"Putting up boxes!\" Jean said.\n\nJack said to the counselor, \"Do you understand now? Do you see what I've been saying? Look at her!\"\n\nJean, in passing Ned's room, said, \"I don't want to talk about your brother.\"\n\nNed said, \"Mother!\" Sometimes he said, \"It's not your fault,\" and he offered, \"I'll rub your back if you'll rub mine.\" Sometimes he said, \"Why do you listen to Jack?\"\n\nNed said, \"I don't know. I don't know the answers to all your questions.\"\n\nNed said, \"Why should I?\" when the question of curfews came up. \"Jack didn't.\"\n\nSometimes Ned got angry and his hand, long still against her back, withdrew, and he went to his room and turned up his music. The telephone rang; he slammed the door or he talked to Jean in the way his brother did, absently: the flat-voiced \"Yes,\" the \"What?\" that was nasty. The nimble imitative skill Ned showed was common. Jack did it and others of his friends and Ned's friends, she had heard them speaking to their parents in their parents' voices. They groaned new words that meant dumb and ugly. She said, \"Talk to me in your own voice, Ned, talk to me so I can understand.\"\n\nSometimes Ned did speak earnestly, and when he spoke to her in this voice, she wanted to take him by surprise, to touch him, to kiss his mouth as it moved\u2014and would go on moving, saying, \"Mother! Don't!\"\n\nSometimes Ned said, \"Will you not, please,\" but she went on. She wormed her fingers between his toes; she tickled him or worked Q-tips, painfully, around the curled folds of his ears. \"Damn it, Mother, that hurts!\" Yet he was the one who asked her to do it. \"Cut my nails,\" Ned said, and she cut too close.\n\nShe said and she said and she heard herself saying\u2014whining, really\u2014\"Please, you are the only one who knows how to scratch.\"\n\nHadn't she heard? Jack asked; but, no, the sound of a body thrown against a wall was not a sound she had ever heard. The sound of a hand raised against another body, yes, that was familiar to her, and objects ripped, broken, smashed, whipped, snapped, yes; wails against a scurrilous tirade she had heard many times before, and the blast of her own voice was familiar. Think of all that noise! So what did Jack know compared to her?\n\n\"Plenty,\" Jack said, and he read from his home contract delirious stories. What he had done and what in the future, once home again, he would contract not to do: no more drugs with lyrical names; those suggestive tabs of magic, he vowed he would not take\u2014no, not again, never again. He didn't need to be high. He was going to think.\n\nMeetings, yes, he agreed to go to them, to find them.\n\nStrategies for avoiding users: avoid users.\n\nCurfew.\n\nCurfew was always an issue.\n\nEvery weekend Jean repeated, \"Write it down! No later than one o'clock!\" when Jack, of course\u2014of course, extreme!\u2014said, he said, \"The home contract has to do with trust. No.\"\n\nThen she thought of Jack as he appeared in his home contract stories, the ones he wrote so freely, attaching pages to the contract, pulling from his pocket more stories penciled on folded notes with linty seams and so worn in their appearance that she wondered: Had Jack started these stories before the facility? Was he writing these scary stories while they were happening at home to Jack, the school actor\u2014always dramatic?\n\nThe starless urban nights he described, kiosks on corners, the shuddering homeless, Jack and his buddies, whoever at the time, even he didn't always remember which friends but that there were several, and they walked the city. They stood in the sheeted stalls on busy streets\u2014all-night markets in awful light; but the surly cashiers sold them anything: imported beers and cigarettes, for which they pooled their money. Jack had stolen from his mother to buy what he snorted in bathroom stalls. He stole so largely he was caught.\n\n\"Look at the pages I've got!\" he said and thumbed the home contract.\n\nHome, in a tub she kept hot, she sweat out the smell of the scrub used at the facility; she soaped; she flexed her toes and admired the polish she still put on, insisting she would yet be playful, as once she had been playful, surely, and perverse and curious and young. On her knees, in a bathroom, she hung over the tub and watched, as he did, a small rising.\n\nOh, they had their casual routine. Jean and Ned, the two of them, she thought, living well together and easily, passing even shyly in the hall, sliding against the wall to keep from touching. Observant, quiet, gently agreeing or asking on the way out, \"Do you want anything?\" This was the way they were together, alone, Jack at the facility and the husband years missing.\n\nTub-pink and powdered, holding out the lotion, asking, \"Will you do my back now, please?\" Often asking, \"Please, my back?\"\n\n\"Please, stay home,\" she called out, but Ned did less and less. And less and less he called, or when he did his voice was muzzy, or else he sounded angry and baffled. \"What's the number where you are?\" Jean asked and heard him speak to someone near, \"Whose house is this? Where are we?\"\n\nOh! To have those summers back and time on the rental's beach, a weathered house where sand collected on the windowsills and grass blades thatched the mudroom. Country on a small green scale was what she told her sister that she missed. Jean missed the sloppy blossoms that were roses, beach roses, casual pink daubs against the fence and sugared sand. Blown before picked, the beach roses, perfuming the air as a girl would, largely indiscriminate, the beach roses Jean missed and the smell of them and the colors of this country, which was not the country she drove through on her way to the facility. No, that country\u2014why talk of it?\n\nJack only talked about the city, about his enemies and friends. Cale, Urbinger, Schwartz were guys out to get him when Jack got back, which was one of the reasons he feared going back and joked of never leaving the facility. Fucking Urbinger claimed Jack had stolen his watch and that he, Jack, owed him.\n\n\"Jack,\" Jean said.\n\n\"What?\" Jack asked. \"What is it?\"\n\nThe tabs he let melt on his tongue were easy to come by in the parks where he dangled in the stories he was telling\u2014dopey sleeper\u2014waking to the skaters' whir, the poor's hobbled passing. Gnawed-at gnawing rats, bald and balding, tamed up his leg snooting food\u2014that's how still Jack was, watching: island drummers, bobbers in exploded shoes, the man in his python, parading his snake. Venomous keepers, women padlocked\u2014threaded lips, encrusted ears\u2014the faces Jack saw had the caught look offish. Fishy, guilty, up to no good, they were passing out cards to any hand that would take one, and he did, didn't he? \"So much in the city is easy to come by,\" Jack said, which was what he was about. The story was his; some of it was attached to the home contract. \"The Z-B Club,\" Jack said, \"is real. It happens near the park every night.\"\n\nThe friends Jack described jingled in Jean's ears when she listened to Jack's story. The braid beads on girls, the strung shells, buttons, bells they wore around their necks, several at a time\u2014yoked, choked\u2014the sounds they made, the chafe of jeans when they walked, the chafe of candy-colored lighters: sweet cannabis smoke! The club lights expose the air confettied with drugs, with curlicues of edible, mind-bending paper. That stupid Cale got sick\u2014and almost died\u2014but he was rushed to Lenox Hill. \"Where I live,\" Jack said, \"is dangerous. That's why I need the home contract. I need some rules to live by.\"\n\nJean came home from the facility and soaked in hot water until she was warm again and asked Ned to please put some lotion on her back. \"I don't care if it is cold,\" she said. She wore her bathrobe as a stole, shrugging to where she wanted it. \"There,\" Jean said, \"and there.\"\n\nIn the gourd-green and -yellow of October, on sullen afternoons, Jean watched Jack carve JACK along the rim of the mutilated table in the dining hall. He was putting his own name everywhere, chipping at it while he lured his mute friends with smut. Boys with home-done haircuts and scars, they touched themselves lightly and laughed. She had walked toward this same scene before and seen them and seen Jack, slunk in his stories\u2014then, then, then\u2014gouging the table with a fork.\n\nJean was afraid for Jack. Jack was such a baby! Jean was afraid for him when she looked to where he slept in the cinder block facility: two floors, picture windows. B movies, fifties sets, people sashed in bloody curtains were what Jean saw looking up to where Jack lived. The facility had once been something else\u2014a health club, a retreat, a motel? There was the empty swimming pool just beyond the patio\u2014another good spot for a death. Here were crazies who would bite a hand that moved to touch them. And such sounds Jean had heard, lonesome and wild, streaking past Jack when he was on the phone to her and cowled, as she imagined, secretive, shoving off others, saying, \"Asshole! I'm talking to my mother!\"\n\n\"Who is it?\" Jean asked.\n\n\"No one,\" he said. \"This kid.\"\n\nThe sky cleared; the horizon was precise. She asked Ned, \"What do you think about Jack? What did you think about what he said? Did you believe him?\" Jean asked, \"Can someone mix all those drugs and stand?\" She asked, \"Do you think Jack's any better?\"\n\nNed said, \"How should I know? I wasn't there.\"\n\nHome from the beach! The little boys come home! The hair on their heads\u2014matted shocks stuck up in sleep\u2014was warmly fragrant of weeds and sea. Jean had liked to smell the boys. She had bent to their heads and sniffed, but their shirts! Always their shirts smelled worn and unwashed to her\u2014sour, brown.\n\nThe beach in noon light was hurtful as foil to look at, and she didn't.\n\nThe beach in any light. In the white folds of Ned's skin, in the white folds of Jack's, she had fingered baby sweat. Jean had lifted the wisps of hair from off their baby scalps, marked as the moon, with their stitched plates of bone yet visible, the boys; how often she had thought to break them.\n\n# YOUNG\n\nSOMETIMES I SURPRISED MYSELF and went to where my young husband was sitting\u2014and he was often sitting, inky, cross, a writing tablet under his arm\u2014and I went down on my knees. I was between his legs on the night I first met her, the girl of this story; and again when the doorbell rang and rang with our neighbor on the care of the shared garden, I was in his lap.\n\n\"Human hair balled in nylons keeps the deer away. Beetles eat the roses, but in this climate everything grows,\" our neighbor said.\n\nMolds, I thought of, all kinds of fungus.\n\nNothing bad had ever happened to me; my father was sending us money, and my young husband and I were grateful. I wrote thank-you notes on heavy cards vined with my initials. I had a new last name and told my young husband, and anyone who asked, that I liked it. I said I had always wanted to be at the end of the alphabet, and this was true, but I was lying when I said I wanted to meet new people. My fantasy was to be crippled enough to be allowed to read in bed all day, yet when I wanted to go to the theater, I could. I bought tickets to a lot of plays and lied about the cost. I lied about money. Sometimes we had less and sometimes more than I reported. But who would have known what cut flowers cost? The tulips were expensive! Common, yes, ordinary, nothing of the wistful about them, nothing poetical, but they were clean and sturdy, and I went on lying about how much flowers cost. I lied about other things, too, sometimes fantastically, even garishly. Any story about where the girl and I went was untruth; I embellished.\n\nAmsterdam for the weekend\u2014not likely!\n\nAnd what was expected of me?\n\nWe were visitors, my young husband and I, and we were ignorant. Should we consider the garden beds our business, too? we wondered. And could we cut the roses, or were we just to mow the grass? Other concerns I had were over dates, rivers, architectural styles; I wanted to know. What was a caryatid, an obelisk, a cataract? I had to look up new words and many of the same words. _Pusillanimous_ was one I could never remember! The girl taught me how to say _Magdalen_ on a day full of histories\u2014this is where and this is where and this is where it happened. Here indeed was an English friend when the brusque wind that was our neighbor smelled of garden. \"I am used to,\" our neighbor whined on and on, \"I am used to.\" Water, rake, prune. That garden was all of the time.\n\nEventually we fought over it, the neighbor and I, but the garden came with the flat as shared. It was shared, yet I was too shy to walk freely in it, and my young husband had other tours in mind.\n\nAlone, arrived at the British Museum, I walked toward the great sooty columns and into the shadowed interior; skirts, I heard, and whisperers scuffling past. Heroines, full of restraint, circled medieval weaponry: Fanny Price and Lucy Snow, commonly known\u2014like the tulips\u2014yet I favored them as heroines. They had integrity, and though I did not, I strove to be better and was inspired by my visits to the manuscript rooms. Seals, documents, signatures\u2014their makers really lived!\n\nI tramped along the Long Water alone, and sometimes my young husband came, too, but what I wanted was a dog. I had some breeds in mind, and we went to kennel shows to see them. We pretended we were buying, or I pretended, and my young husband indulged me. He let me stay to see the setters show off in the ring. He let me coo and calculate the cost. Much too much money!\n\nThis is the woman I was then, spoiled, fearful, idolatrous, a mix that our neighbor, I think, recognized. A big box in a car coat, our neighbor stood at the gate to the garden, and I stood at the window looking down at her. We looked at each other for what felt like a long time, unsmiling and curious, seeming to ask, What is it like where you live?\n\nI missed home and I didn't miss home. I said I could live here forever just to be surrounded by the scribbling ghosts. My young husband was scribbling something. Situated, alert, he quoted E. P. Thompson from _The Making of the English Working Class._ I quoted some writers, too, a bit more obvious, yes, but love poems: \"Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day, Tomorrow when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say?\" We took ourselves seriously. We were foolish, but we believed\u2014or I did\u2014that in another country we might take up our work; here, in a place where every third house had its plaque, its honored dead, we might see what we were meant to do, and we might know to do it.\n\nIt was all this not knowing. What are you going to do and what are you going to do? At least here were no nearby parents to ask, \"What happens now?\" We were living far away in a watery country; brush past the shrubbery and it spilled. I loved it, England, yes. Mostly I wanted to be here and not home. The rock walls greened in the fissures, and the terraces were overgrown\u2014woodbine, musk rose, eglantine. Shakespeare's benevolent spirit. Keats once, alone along Well Walk; but the dead in the galleries were women who had suffered in love\u2014as who had not?\u2014only these women were famous for it. Say anything, teach anything, prove anything, monsieur; I can listen now.\n\nI did not always want to listen to my young husband speak. His voice, I thought, was flat and had no music\u2014and neither did mine, which was reason enough to be quiet. On buses, in taxis, I often put my finger to my lips. After the theater, with the accents in our ears, it was best to be quiet.\n\nThe rain made us quiet and kept us indoors with books, and I was happy. I liked reading, and I still liked bringing my young husband off in the fogged winter light. It seemed then that our bodies were English pale and that the rain against the window made rivulets of shadow\u2014did it? Was the night sky I saw quite so pink?\n\nI wasn't sure.\n\nI wasn't sure of a lot of things after they had happened.\n\nA new morning, January, Magdalen, the deer park, I was without my young husband and in the girl's company. The frozen grass was still green, very hard underfoot. My shoes were flimsy and wet, while the girl, I saw, was wearing boots\u2014Wellingtons, of course, why not?\n\nOr else she wore high heels with leather pants.\n\nOther sounds, sighing.\n\nHer everyday shoes swiped like rags against the floor; her lips stuck when she licked them to talk. I licked them for her\u2014ah!\n\nToo fast.\n\nFirst came the cashmere sweater with its voluptuous neck, then the tapered houndstooth slacks, the wrist-thin ankles, the narrow foot. These parts of her belonged to a girl from a glamorous home and endless funds to live by. Sidesaddle in the chair, she was wearing rolled against her neck this luscious red sweater. She was fair; she was slight. Oh, she was and she was! The tangles she thumbed off her comb I took up on an impulse that surprised me. The way I had always felt about shed hair in lockets or worked into bracelets and clasped was that shed was dirty.\n\nBut I took up strands of her, took up her lipstick, the fringe she wore for underwear. \"May I?\" I asked and borrowed belts with buckles from another century to be bound up with her, a tartan girl in mist and lamplight, a girl in a winter coat the rain had beaded.\n\nWe stayed too long in the bedsit.\n\nThe bedsit was hers, a place tunneled to through dank cobbled streets the color of slime. The journey was cold, but the bedsit was very warm. I put my leg near the source and felt burned, yet hours and hours went by in her bedsit, and we were late for what was planned.\n\nMy young husband asked, \"Is the bedsit her idea of poor?\" He also said, \"Go! Get out! It will do you good!\" So I went to the theater when what he meant for me was join the wives, those Bermondsey mavens after trivets and toast racks, fish knives and forks. \"Ivory soaked in milk gets the stains out,\" I learned, and I learned about churches. So, so that was the apse, that the transept, the aisle. The wives of young husbands I met had, many of them, taken up stone rubbing. On their knees and in their overcoats, they rubbed as under tents. I thought they looked like lily pads. The floors they knelt on, and I knelt on with them, the floors were pond colored, uneven, cold. Our coats were no protection. The girl had me over to get warm. She stood close; her close breath smelled of tea. Slight breasts, hip bones, lips. Then I was on my knees again, on my stone-rubbing knees, and my knees were sore. The harsh carpet hurt.\n\nI tend to rush.\n\nThe night she leaned over to kiss my hand, my hand held out on the table, that time the candles singed my hair, that time we leaned so close was it beekeeping or Quentin Bell\u2014what were we talking about when I said, \"Me, too, yes\"? I said, \"Yes, the same way, me, too,\" and later I tried to write it out to her, and what I said was corny but stupidly, stupidly true!\n\nThe girl was, was...I was word poor, tongue tied, halfway embarrassed, but why, in the first place, did I write to her? The letter was smeared in the rain when I mailed it\u2014but I mailed it.\n\n\"Why did you?\" was what my young husband asked, but this was later.\n\nAnother time my young husband was with us and sat on the floor of her bedsit in his coat. He had been away.\n\nI believed my young husband. He could have! I believed him when he said he had been in the States staying with his parents, asking for money and more time abroad, giving excuses, showing the notes for a book. I believed he had a book although I had not seen it.\n\nAnd never, never did I think that he was lying, that he was, as I was, making calls to someone, saying, \"I meant to, but I didn't,\" saying, \"I'm afraid,\" saying, \"Where?\"\n\nExcept that I was young, why did so much of what happened surprise me?\n\nI did not want to be married. That was the feeling I had when I opened the closet door and saw his side of things, which was so much like my side of things, rumpled and slung, that I thought we were unsafe, and I was afraid.\n\nWe were too much alone.\n\nWe were too much alone with no reason to wake and slept on and on with even the curtains open. Nothing could wake us. We slept on, then stayed up late with weekend visitors, mostly unexpected yet all related. They came with traveler's checks and maps, saying tricky words aloud because, I think, like me they were proud of knowing how _Leicester, Glyndebourne, St. John_ were pronounced. And the names themselves, the English had such names! Persevering oaks of names, deeply stained copper beaches. I wondered why had I picked his name, my young husband's last name. What did I hope to do with a name no one could pronounce?\n\nThe girl\u2014oh, to be as smart as that! Pouncing lightly on Virginia Woolf the way she did, saying, \"The books are all chorus and no plot.\" Who cared if the ideas were not always original? The girl was professorial and sure; complex sentences expressed complex thoughts. Pater and Ruskin. _Caryatid,_ I knew she would know it.\n\nOther excitements.\n\nThe way she drank leaving some of what she drank on her lips.\n\n\"Kiss me.\"\n\n\"Here?\"\n\n\"Kiss me!\"\n\nThe slipknot of laughter was so easily loosed in her.\n\n\"Be an adult,\" she said, \"be false and effusive,\" and I was. When my young husband came through the door, I jumped off the bed and kissed him, too. I told him how glad I was to see him back.\n\n\"Just in time to help me with the garden,\" I said, but we did nothing to the garden. The shared garden was bearded by July, and our neighbor complained. First on the phone, then in person, she asked, \"Are you making a meadow?\" Her notes hissed under the door. Two, three, four of them, none were answered\u2014how could I? The very way she wrote, her backward-slanting, pinched characters looked more like ants to me than letters, ants marching over creamy paper. _You, you, you, you, you._\n\nAt night the ditch in the middle of the bed, the numbers illumined on the clock. I felt movement when, back-to-back, I tried to sleep with him. He had bad dreams and woke up moaning and lay as in a coffin, wide awake. My young husband was thinking about his future. He said he was thinking about business school, which took me by surprise. He was thinking about making money\u2014and he did! Or so I am told. The friends who still see him say.\n\nWe were young.\n\nAt a pub once and under swags of weeds we were meant to kiss by, my young husband said I was a fool.\n\nWhat could we have been talking about when he said, \"You don't know a thing about me\"? He said, \"You never did.\" _But I thought, I thought, I thought was_ the way a lot of my sentences started then with him, then with her. Youth and appetite! Something else about this part of my life, when I spent most nights with a man I called my young husband\u2014I kicked him for not coming sooner to the rescue with the cigarettes. I called him names at restaurants when I was drunk with visitors. I said, \"Who knows?\" when anyone asked me what he was doing. I said he was a liar when I was a liar, too. I went out of my way to hurt him, spending too much money\u2014I was mean to my young husband, and I often no more knew why that was than I knew what it had to do with our lives.\n\nAnd there was more that was significant. Her teeth, her lips, her lip-like part. And more, more you should know, how, about to board the plane for home, my young husband broke the bottle of expensive wine that he had saved so conspicuously. The wine was red, of course, and ran under and around my shoes.\n\n# DO YOU THINK I AM WHO I WILL BE?\n\nHE BOUGHT A LUNCH that needs water to make, and he took a long and sour piss. The fan is broken; he feels sick. The lilies he was sent last week look afflicted; the petals, scummy. After only a short fragrance, the lilies are wrinkling to a faded dirty pink; but he cannot give them fresh water, and in the moment he hates where he lives. Glass spikes the walls that separate the back lots' tired gardens: brick borders, wilted impatiens. No one is home to water.\n\nWater again. He would feel a whole lot better if he could stand in a shower and think, but there's the water again. Water is part of his problem, NO WATER WEDNESDAY\u2014the sign has been up for days in the elevator. How could he forget except that he forgets? Explanations, probabilities. Who is it on the phone he does not answer and when he does hangs up? \"Who is this?\" he asks, thinking, Madeline!\u2014but he hears only fuzz. The clock, too, is doing something.\n\nHe has known Madeline from when she was a smaller version of what she is now.\n\nIs it five o'clock already? He cannot distinguish sounds with so much screaming around him.\n\nChildren and animals.\n\nSomewhere in the apartment is a dog, or else the stained impress on the throw rug is a shadow. He can't smell dog, but there are signs. The worn paint along the doorjamb from where the dog abased himself and the fact of too much dust point to dog. Dog and the city! It is noisy and dirty just as they said.\n\nThey, they, the folks back home (his mother, really), he still thinks he can call her, and he picks up the phone for the fun...and Jesus Christ! Wouldn't you know it! Over the noise he can hear a far-off voice. He treats the phone as if he has been listening in, and he hangs up carefully. He didn't come home to talk to anybody except, perhaps, Madeline. He would make an exception for Madeline, especially. She writes, _I will write him a letter, but I can't excuse myself._ She writes that she has met another David, this time named Ralph. Silly name, really, unless it rhymes with _chafe,_ the way the English say it. \"Rafe, strafe, abrade, grate, rake,\" he speaks aloud to himself, and adds _scour_ and _blister_ to the list. _Here is okay,_ she writes, _actually, I think here is good._\n\n_Flayed_ is the last word he thinks of when he reads how she hopes they can meet sometime. _We should although???when??_ Her visible evasions, the fence of question marks she puts around _when_ \u2014these gestures hurt his feelings; but after a drink, it won't bother him at all, the unlikeliness of their meeting.\n\nTheir unlikeliness.\n\nLove of this kind has flared before in him; he has been pursued and has, himself, pursued. Madeline, especially. Dear Madeline.\n\nHis desk is in the light he left on from this morning.\n\nThis morning he did not walk a dog although there is something doggy about his apartment; this room, hard lived here. Too much trash! And too many books he hasn't read. Their rightful owners must come back. If he puts his ear to the floor, and he puts his ear to the floor, he can hear slippers slapping toward him. He waits. He waits on his knees. He waits until the quiet, long unnoticed, disconcerts him. What is he supposed to do?\n\nHe walks through rooms and hears a woman's voice asking him, \"What is it you want?\" Most of what he knows comes from putting his face up close. The resinous dope box he sniffs at now is for how he used to smell. He doesn't smoke anymore, but he drinks. He still drinks and he mixes with ice so the no-water Wednesday won't affect him. There are cubes left surely. No? No.\n\n\" _No_ starts your every sentence,\" his old girlfriend said, or else she said, \"Don't!\"\n\nFuck her! Now that he has his drink\u2014without ice\u2014and the light is still on at his desk, he can start. He is looking for a way to start, and he gets up from his desk to find it.\n\n_Dear Madeline._\n\nThe word he wants is _fouled._\n\nWho would have guessed? September, the sensible yet willing month, and suddenly so hot! He looks backward to when he last saw Madeline. Not in September, August, July, but, yes, in June, with the chestnut trees in their shortlived show, deeply green and bobbing\u2014that's when he last saw her. That's when he last saw his old girlfriend, too. He saw the wells beneath her eyes, dark and wet from fucking. She was almost pretty, but when she stood, it was too much skin even for him; and it seems more terrible now when he thinks of Madeline.\n\nNow, and what time is it now? The church hasn't bonged.\n\nA cloud watcher, Madeline has said she is in love with light. Summer solstice is a grief she looks forward to, simultaneously loving the light and bemoaning that the light marks the beginning of days nightly shorn.\n\n_And now it is official,_ Madeline has written, _the start of the school year, and I am twenty-one!_\n\nNineteen ninety-five, 1996, 1997, 1998. To be all those years in Madeline's company and yet spared her anguish\u2014 _You're never really over it,_ Madeline's words. He has been spared what has happened at home and what goes on happening, or so she says. \"I admit it. I am bad, and I know my poor parents suffer!\" Madeline in her high, protestant voice. \"I can't help myself. I'm young.\" The ongoing moodiness that has sent her on record-time drives. Philadelphia to New York to Boston, New York to Vermont, Connecticut to New York, he has only heard about the trips, those midnight visits she makes so that she might sleep away from home.\n\nIn July was it? Madeline arrived at his place in expensive shoes\u2014just straps\u2014and a skirt the size of a dish towel. Mostly he had seen her in uniform. Year after year, lovelier. Glasses, contacts; braces, a mouth.\n\nMidsentence, midsummer, they went outdoors and sat in the park, and Madeline yanked back her hair while speaking, tightly tied it, although it came undone. Again and again, she pulled back her hair, and he liked how she did this suddenly, expertly, fast, exposing a swimmer's face in its just-surfaced smoothness.\n\n\"My story is nothing special,\" she said then. \"He likes that I'm a girl.\"\n\nThe arms she clasped around her legs are thin. She has no breasts to speak of, and the clothes she wears are throw-away thrift shop. Madeline has an orphan appeal, and her famished prettiness gives off heat.\n\nThe room is too warm. He says, \"Some air in this stink box I live in will help,\" when he knows of no remedy.\n\nAnother time Madeline simply called to say that she was in town for an interview with a magazine or a TV station, something glamorous that had happened to her just because she is special.\n\n_Do you think I am who I will be_? she writes with the prospect of graduation and the glamorous job. Half of him loves her and half hopes she fails.\n\nHis responses to her are always the same: _Great news, Good luck, Hope I see you._ He imagines her reading his letters. He imagines she yawns. He is not original, handsome, or young. Years are passing. Soon there will be snow underfoot by noon turned to slush. A wavy salt stain will abstract his shoes. Ice then, and weather soon. Her words in the park were \"Mr. Gates\"\u2014laughing at him\u2014\"I will write you, Mr. Gates. I will e-mail! I will phone!\"\n\n_Do you think I am who I will be?_ has years and years of future in it. How long has it been since he has seen her? Was it really last June, or the summer before, or even another year? There is joy to be had in what he is doing, teaching, but he has maxed out all his credit cards and lost sight of the joy and feels fucked. Glutted with the hoopla of passage and doughy skies and cold lawns\u2014and the stupid napkins he has balled in his pocket!\u2014toothpicks and addresses, presents and promises never to forget when he would like to forget, when he will forget and travel! Yes, he should go to Tibet for the cause. He should visit Prague fully funded. He should make more money, he should take time off, he should, he should, he should, he is thinking, shaking through the drawer for a coaster. He finds the dog collar in the same drawer, and he knows now with certainty where the smell comes from and why the cushions on the sofa are damp seeming, oily. He empties his pockets of the party and carries the collar around his room and into the kitchen again and back to his room again with a little more whiskey and a splash\u2014there _is_ water!\u2014in a heavy glass. The heavy, cut-crystal glass, another clue, was left behind from when the dog lived here. He is almost certain that when the dog lived here, there was more to drinking; there was company on the couch. A lot of days felt like Saturday. It didn't matter if it rained, and even when she stopped kissing him, he didn't mind. He thinks of his old girlfriend demanding, \"What is it you want?\" Some days he knows. Today he wants whiskey, he wants to take off his party clothes, he wants to sleep on the couch. He wants no more faces\u2014not even Madeline's.\n\nHe has caught his school cold, or else he is allergic, but to what? He can only think it is the dog who lived here and wonder how much of the dog is left. A collar, some rubbed-away places, but maybe there is hair? The old girlfriend's hair, he remembers, there wasn't very much of it. His own hair, too, is no more than smoke. The parched season is dangerous, and those who are sent to put out the fires thrash past in flames on the news. He is thirsty again, but he will not move. He sits at his desk and takes small breaths while the ravening dog scratches toward him.\n\n# WEATHER IS HERE, WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL\n\nWHATEVER THEY SAW LOOKED vaguely obscene until their hearts kicked in. Then they were in a car going at easy speed past once-in-a-life fields full of a dawn and a beauty unexpected in the home state with the ugly name.\n\nShe did not like to say it.\n\nSo they passed a field of alfalfa, a field of corn, a border of trees. The red-and-white barns were all there was of people; even the animals, it seemed, were put away; only tuneless crows in heavy flight surprised them\u2014and the sound of their own voices.\n\n\"What don't you want to tell me? Tell me what,\" she was shouting at the others\u2014George mostly. The village scale on which she had lived was a greenhouse of sharp smells, and she was not worldly. She did not know, and she did not know unless George, sleeping near her, explained. George, in his nimbus of genius rumors, was a loose mouth asleep against her book bag, a loose, large, wet-looking mouth\u2014too alive!\u2014she had never kissed it. She wanted to be quits of that history of stains, no more the fishy smells on her sheets.\n\n\"I'm coming down,\" she said. \"The high is passing through me.\"\n\nNow she was sleepy and slightly depressed.\n\nOh, what was she doing in this car with these people?\n\nSam, the braggart, was smoking on the stoop and toting up what parts of him still worked. He was smoking and eating at the same time. He was smoking and eating and laughing at himself. They watched him squish soft fruit between his teeth.\n\nOther annoyances, hers, Sam on the porch now in her underwear.\n\n\"Who said you could?\" she said.\n\n\"Oh, come on, come on, come on, come on,\" Sam said, stuck on his own subject. \"Let me,\" he said. \"I'm an old hair braider from way back. Let me,\" he said to Alice, and then to her, \"Please, you could be cute.\"\n\nBut the hair braids brought on more headache, and she went calling after George until she saw and woke him: George, pillowed on his own books now, cheek grooved with reading Chekhov. Ordinary life, she said, was so confusing, and George said, \"Don't be ashamed.\"\n\nShe thought, He doesn't know me.\n\nSam was sucking on his pipe stem and turning up the violence on TV. \"Fuck,\" he said, faulting her for acting intellectual. Every day\u2014the rest of his life\u2014Sam said he wanted to get high and fuck!\n\n\"Good luck,\" she said; but she had too much work to do to join him. She had a paper to write\u2014this was college.\n\nDays without sleep or food, she was locked in her room and writing papers. \"Yes!\" sometimes shouted when she read what she had written and approved of it: yes, yes, yes. The illusion of efficiency was easily heightened by the pills Alice gave her; and she was days awake and without appetite until, tearful and hungry, she gorged on junk snacks from the grocery. On its own, ready-made dip from the dairy section, she sucked it off her fingers\u2014oh!\n\n\"Oh, I am so smart!\" Sam said, all the time, to which she and Alice made faces.\n\nThey made faces at the faces George made whenever the three of them eavesdropped on Sam with a girl in bed. \"Did anyone ever tell you how...how blue, how small.\" Her room was right next, so she rarely missed what Sam was doing in his, but the sounds of him depressed her, and Alice seemed glum, and George, tired.\n\nThe raft of George's room tossed in his doors opening.\n\nShe told him, \"I'm bored or I'm lonely. I'm something. I don't know which, but Sam doesn't help.\" She went on talking about her mother and her problems with her mother. \"George?\" she asked then, wondering. He seemed to be staring at something he saw behind her when she spoke. He was at the window and the afternoon shone through him. His hair, she saw, stood up, surprised. He leaned against the windowsill, a wan, indoor, unembarrassed boy, and she wondered what George was doing in this house with them.\n\nHe was leaning in a stupor against Alice's long legs and laughing with the laughers on late-night shows.\n\nHe was smudging magazines with reading in the bath.\n\nHe was toking on the stoop and talking places he would travel.\n\nTravel, the breezy takeoff, the names of Daddy's friends in case, dope in the tin box meant for mints\u2014no, she said, this was not her Mexico. She said, \"I was expecting pain, and I got it,\" and she told George how they were chased into the suburbs until the driver lost the threatening car and could slow past the houses. Harmless-looking houses, but inside one of them was the makeshift clinic where at dawn it began, and she was last. The abortionist! Girl after girl\u2014some were women\u2014walked in on her own to where the doctor did it, then was carried out knocked out, obscenely padded, elsewhere looseness, breasts and buttocks\u2014ugly! Later, but not much later, quickly, in fact, they were dressed and in the kitchen before the driver took them back to the hotel. She said the pineapple they offered was freshly cut and juicy.\n\nEverything she said came out like sex, which might have been the way she was or the way it was in the house.\n\nBut what was that genius George reciting wearing only a towel?\n\nThe death dates of important thinkers, the titles to their essays, and the size of their estates. Genealogies and distances, Latin mottoes, old boundaries, gonfalon flags, divisions of heraldry\u2014partitions, ordinaries, charges, furs\u2014were some of George's topics.\n\n\"Mary Moody Emerson slept in her shroud\u2014took it on her travels\u2014and wore out many.\"\n\n\"Farther has to do with distance, further has to do with more in time or degree.\"\n\n\"You're a better student than I am,\" he said to her, \"but I am more ambitious.\" Later\u2014much later, in fact\u2014she thought how George had seduced her with this line, taking her seriously, acknowledging her efforts. She didn't even think of where he was standing when he spoke, looking in at her sudsing in the tub.\n\n\"Let me in,\" he said, scooping up a poof of foam with which he crowned her.\n\n\"No,\" she said, but he stepped out of his shorts and slipped in behind and put his hands beneath her breasts. He touched the pointy bones that were her hips, the swollen folds of her small sex.\n\n\"Stand up,\" he said.\n\n\"No,\" she said, laughing and at the same time rising to see her body fleeced with soap he blew away. Then George was pressing his fleshy mouth between her legs, and a part of her wondered if she was why George was living here in this swaybacked house miles from campus.\n\n\"Where's George?\" Sam asked.\n\n\"My room,\" she said. \"What's so funny about that?\"\n\nAnd nothing was funny about George sitting on old laundry\u2014all sore knees and reddened elbows\u2014and using his hand to ash what he smoked. Sam had rolled it for him.\n\n\"Fuck,\" she said, \"fuck, fuck,\" while she tried to get George's attention. She shook him and asked, \"Do you remember how many you took?\"\n\nLater, when George had slid off the laundry and was using the floor as a bed, she wanted to know from Sam what George had swallowed. Was it anything like what they had had before? Then she was asking George. She was shaking him, exhorting\u2014pleading, \"Don't fall asleep!\" but Alice, on the landing, said, \"Fuck these boys.\"\n\nAlice said, \"You want to be careful. You don't think it happens, but it does.\" Alice, flicking stems and seeds from the resinous box between her legs, did not look up as she rolled thin cigarettes, laughing some, crying, saying, \"You know how susceptible I am. I'll fuck anyone once,\" and then Alice said she was ashamed; and the plank between them broke, and she and Alice commiserated, \"We're such dopes.\"\n\nThe messy intimacy of fucking aroused her, and she put down towels so as not to bleed through the sheets and told George, yes, some whiskey would do and fucking, yes, it helped, always, yes; but her bed was too jouncy and squeaky ridiculous for him, and there was the blood and a smell he could taste\u2014a rusty taste, he said. He did and did not like it, so they quit.\n\nGeorge said, \"I want to be happy more of the time than you are happy.\"\n\nGeorge said, \"You are always going to have the problem of your mother.\"\n\nGeorge said, \"And there's also your temper.\" George said and he said and he said on the last afternoon when they picked at picnic food someone had made. The cheese was in a sweat, and the deviled eggs slimed off the dish, and the drink poured out flat and tasteless; but she drank and she ate and she fought off feeling sick. That was that.\n\nThe restless house rolled over hardly breathing, yet awake; and in this way it started. She and George. Alice and George. She and Alice and George. She and Alice and George and Sam. George and Sam. Sam and Alice. She and George again. She and Sam\u2014but only once\u2014and finally only Alice.\n\nFast past the wavy fields full of light and meaning\u2014drive fast!\n\n# THE HUMAN SEASON\n\nMONDAY AND MONDAY AND Monday pass, all ragged _-_ sky and midday-sun sameness, all closets and drawers she stares into. None of what kept time once works.\n\nOrlando!\n\nShe left home just as finally, then kept going back until she had found it: baby shoes, lace cap, scribble, and ribbons; what she was before she was, before otherness and memory. The nights without Orlando home go on.\n\n\"Don't even start!\" Orin says, but she does. \"It's always something wrong, goddammit!\" Orin says, or else, \"I'm exhausted.\"\n\nOrin, no sweet name there, just ordinary, ornery, elbow-ugly Orin, asks if she has thought of something positive, say a movie. Tonight, tomorrow, he doesn't care\u2014does she?\n\nShe shrugs and shrugs again when the movie is over, and Orin asks, \"Whose idea was that?\"\n\nEarlier or later, the same night or any other, Orin asks, \"Why did you bring me here?\"\n\n\"You said you were hungry. Weren't you?\" she asks.\n\nNights, Orin leaves to wake up in his bed downtown. Even now, with Orlando gone, Orin says he will not stay the night\u2014don't ask him! Don't ask for any more money either; he does not have it! No more time for the Post House and Billy's or any of that overpriced Indian shit. The sweaters he has bought her, the shoes, the trips\u2014what more does she want?\n\nIt has to do with her mouth, Orin, still sober, guesses.\n\n\"Yes,\" she says, excited.\n\n\"You're such a dirty girl,\" he says, but tonight he wants to drink.\n\nOrlando, sweet Orlando, her boy, where is he calling from, what space of clanky sounds, many voices, music? \"Are you drinking?\" she asks.\n\nNo, he has called only to tell her this because it is amazing really, but it happened, just today he saw her, he saw his mother as she must have been once, on a school lawn, a girl with heavy eyebrows and a journal.\n\nFrom where did he get this idea of her, from what photograph? How has Orlando imagined her, and is he the kind of boy to speak to the girl she was, and would she have talked to him? All the questions she might ask, but she lets Orlando talk.\n\nShe is so interested in him!\n\nOrlando talks and talks. Of course he is keeping up; it's not all work here, hardly. Orlando says there is a girl.\n\nSomething about Orlando's voice\u2014is it greener in Vermont?\n\nPretty college, place just rained on and swayed with water, his home now, where he lives, she has not been there. She says, \"I'd like to see your room.\" The green beyond his window she imagines; birch bark, fogs, solitudes, this surely is the landscape where the poet walked. He, with his vigorous hair and worked hands, the farmer-poet in the photograph.\n\n\"I'd like to get away from earth awhile,\" Orlando says. \"Yeah, it's all here.\"\n\nOrlando again. This time, a little money, please, an advance on his allowance. \"Don't worry,\" he assures. \"I'm fine.\" Everything is nearly finished; he plans to come home after. He wants to bring a friend, okay?\n\n\"What do you think?\" is her response although she does not\u2014she does not!\u2014want anyone else.\n\nOrin says, \"Spoiled bitch,\" when she shows him the phone bill. He reads, \"October two, October three, four\u2014what the hell was it that week?\"\n\nClothes, books, teachers, the plans for Christmas that change. She wants to know what Orlando is doing, and so she calls him, and Orlando calls her, too; he calls collect, and they talk, and she imagines what he is doing and remembers what she did. Does anything change? She is a girl again and churning up spit to wash out the wine taste that sours her mouth. She wants to go home to a bath but is too afraid to say so, and she lets herself be fucked.\n\nOrlando's girl sleeps under ironed sheets while his mother is used to the unwashed and defeated. His mother is used to the quiet in the late afternoon when she lies across his bed.\n\nThe muted TV is blinking action; the cold casserole is sunk\u2014and she, she is undressing in Orlando's dark room; she is getting into his bed. Orlando's pillow smells of her from other nights.\n\nOrin, in the near dark, she hears him slurring, \"Go ahead, you sick bitch, rub yourself off on his sheets! I'm leaving!\"\n\nDoes she sleep?\n\nThe next thing she knows, Orin is breaking a picture frame close to the bed. \"Here's something for you to boo-hoo about,\" and he smashes the glass part and tears up the picture inside.\n\nWho is it? She won't look.\n\nAre the stars not yet damped when Orin, on the phone to poor Orlando, shouts, \"Your mother is dead. Talk to me?\n\n\"Orin, please, it's too late for that.\" The face she wears when she speaks is her youthful face from college. The long face isn't long but simply regretful; she is too young to be a young man's mother, too young for these abrasions\u2014Orin's scorn. _Little_ is the word he puts in front of what is hers.\n\nNow there is only the mail, which mostly means writing checks. Pay to the order of doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor.\n\nHow many times a week does she go is what Orin wants to know.\n\nBut a lot of what happens she does not understand. That time Orin said he couldn't walk and made her call an ambulance, that time seemed incredible to her, and Orlando was at home, too. The boy was ten or eleven and saw what a drama could look like. Yelping obscenities, Orin was lifted, dragged, shoved onto, strapped in; he could not hold out his arms and snatch at what he passed riding through the house on a stretcher, shouting, \"I'm in so much fucking pain!\" Nothing could be found wrong, yet he got the pain pills for it, his crooked condition.\n\nConfusions, she remembers, and embarrassments. Orin asleep at the dinner party and sick-drunk in the garden. \"Orin, please,\" she was calling out softly, \"not the hydrangeas.\"\n\nThe crystal, the chair\u2014watch it!\n\nOrin, uncomfortable in company, suspicious, loud, clumsy, in the habit of shouting, \"Dim bulb, get me some ice\"; Orin saying to Orlando, \"Dim bulb, what do they teach you in that school?\"; saying, \"This kid is on another planet. I knew more at six.\" Nasty, nasty, Orin must have been a nasty child, the kind whose excuse for any cruelty was to see what would happen.\n\nOrlando says, \"Don't let Orin be there when I come. I don't want Isabel to meet him.\"\n\n\"Isabel,\" she says, so that's the friend's name.\n\nShe misses Orlando.\n\nLight, ease, expectation, youth's surety, if she could only have it back. If she could have it back and be smarter. Stupid, she was stupid, swallowing pills before the purveyor explained them. She was tripping in the woods with no way home, stunned on the roof above the street fair. The girl she was sucked cock in cars until the head-on blare of air-conditioned air veered into violent headache. Why didn't she think to move? Stupid to be loudmouthed, loaded, stoned, to be passing cars when the sign says not to, to be fucking and fucking indifferent guys. No wonder she got into trouble. The gloom of the makeshift clinic, a row of cots and castered screens to close off those induced by drips, a woman's kind of suffering, she was not spared this, the mucousy consequence of fucking too freely. Stupid girl!\n\nOrlando! She was smart enough at least to keep him.\n\nThe face in the reflective surface of the TV's screen is middle-aged and sly\u2014her own face, talking. She is talking on the phone to Orlando, saying, \"Think of what you'll miss if you don't visit. The lighting of the tree, the fireworks over the park.\" Rude surprise, this face she sees, but she keeps on looking at it, studying what happens as she talks and listens, until Orin turns the TV on and she disappears.\n\n\"Go fuck Sprint somewhere else!\" he says.\n\nThe yarl of the sports announcer making his pitch, the shush of small confessions, advertisements, music.\n\n\"Whisper,\" she says to Orlando, then all they do is breathe. Close, long sounds\u2014is he sighing? Orlando is at her ear, her ear pressed hard against the receiver, her burning ear into which he is pouring his sincere, sweet self!\n\n\"Come home,\" she says to the boy, \"and bring your girl.\"\n\n\"I don't want there to be a fight,\" Orlando says, and she tells him there won't be, just watch.\n\nWatch the way the drinking works on Orin's body, a bag of sand sagged in the easy chair, bobbing in the sprung-seated easy chair, a shapeless shape, a clay pale, a damp face, a man drunk on vodka, the bottle of which he keeps at hand.\n\nThe foamy spittle in the corners of his mouth repels her.\n\nMaybe Orlando should stay at a friend's, maybe he is right when he says home's too dangerous.\n\n\"Only think about it,\" she says to the boy.\n\nOrin, in the background, is the scary noise.\n\nOrlando says, \"No, I can't, not this time.\"\n\nAnd not when the new growth pinks the slick branches, not in spring, when Orlando needs sleep.\n\nHe says, \"Mother, think.\"\n\nShe thinks of the constant sounds from year to year, the machinery's wail in summer and in the fall the sound of children from the next-door school. The piercing nag, the way the bully rules\u2014such certitude!\u2014children talking, endlessly talking. They have so much to say. Winter, then, the inward month; in winter the sounds are close. The sounds are of heat roiling from the radiators, creaks from the furniture, pipes. She likes these house sounds that go on until the weather changes, and the windows are opened, and it is spring, and summer is about to happen again.\n\nListen!\n\nThe future in her ears comes out like this.\n\n# THE LIFE OF THE PALM AND THE BREAST\n\nTHE MIRROR, THE MIRROR untethers the room and sets it afloat above the park. The mirror makes her tipsy, and perhaps she is tipsy here, turning to look out at the winter sky and shy black skyline, out at a dainty city with the lights come softly on. Such pleasures! The views from a building secure as a banker in his snug, plush coat\u2014there is so much to be pleased by.\n\nThere is the flawless father who pleases her and the washed windows that front the seeping dark and pearly dusk. Inside, the colors she has picked are deep and expensive. Reds, blues. The fire is lit and the damp balsam, twisted up with spruce and draped along the mantel, smells green. Speckled pears, nuts, oranges\u2014even a grapefruit\u2014color the garland and double in the mirror they partly frame. No wonder she is dizzy.\n\nLittle boys are running through the room in velvet shorts. She cannot tell which boys are hers; they are so look-alike, she hesitates to take one.\n\n\"You?\" The small neck pulses in her grip. There is, too, the familiar wet mouth, the cheeks, winter chapped and warm, the child-pungent hair she puts her face to.\n\nThe little boys at night in bed, they smell of soap the sheets are washed in; but in the morning, salty.\n\n### SPRING\n\nThe guests have gone and the children are asleep and the au pair is drying the dishes when she invites the flawless father, the same she calls by many other names and all of them endearing, she invites the flawless man for a walk outside. Just up and down a few of her favorite blocks, under the fringe of pear trees. The streetlights make a lace of their blossoms.\n\n\"We live in a pretty neighborhood,\" she says, and he agrees.\n\nThe little boys use their Sunday palm as whips while the girl cousins quietly flank him, this father, her lover\u2014their uncle!\u2014the faithful man who promises the boys won't, no, not to the girls they will not. \"Boys!\" is all he says, and the boys drag their fronds like sticks across the fencing.\n\nThe park side of the street is guttered with elm seeds, and the catkins she points out, aren't they sexy?\n\nThe shy grace of new flowers in clean skirts, spring it is, yes, and the bare, skinned morning, opening slowly, seems to shiver.\n\n\"Yes,\" she says in the tremulous light of late spring, Sunday, late, the children far below on the street at the park in the part of Sunday that is theirs, when she can walk through the kitchen undressed and calling to him, \"What else would you like to eat?\"\n\nThe flawless man says he would know where to find her on any afternoon, but his voice still comes as a surprise when the manicurist holds the phone to her ear, and she hears him ask, \"Can you be ready for Paris\u2014in an hour?\"\n\nOh, it is fun to be rich and darling!\n\nWedding linen, cut flowers, drawers that shut soundly. The silver nested in felt bags, passed-down pieces, tarnished spoons, she warms them in her hands. Mother Pet's initialed tongs, the berry spoon from Nana.\n\nIt is always this way before a party, isn't it? The dead are moving their mouths when the living come slamming in. \"Back so soon?\" she asks the boys. Caught in the spring rain, caught before lunch, the flawless father and the flawless boys are come back long before expected. \"Stay away from me! Stay where you are,\" she says. Stay there beyond the kitchen, where the muddy boots pant and lacrosse sticks drip wetly.\n\n\"You're not still in Bermuda\" is what she says to the boys when they sock-slide in the kitchen half undressed. Their bodies are tanned; only the flawless father isn't peeling. His shoulders are hairless and smooth and freckled with runny freckles. She feels if the freckles are raised, and she feels how warm he is and keeps her hand at his back while he asks her who exactly is coming.\n\nPansy, Daphne, Lily, Georgia.\n\nThe young women friends, yes, he likes them\u2014he likes all women, really, but these washed wands in small clothes especially! They are all legs and arms and don't stand still to talk but rock on their hips and gesture. \"Sorry, sorry, sorry,\" they say. They are late but they are eager. Even if they swing in on crutches with their own young husbands just behind, the young women are jaunty. She watches from across the room how the young women surprise themselves with what they say to him.\n\nFirst lilac, everywhere. Smell.\n\n### SUMMER\n\n\"Whatever you want,\" he says. \"I'm painting.\"\n\nThe ceremonies are over; it is summer and he is painting. Hatless, shirtless, he is on the ladder rolling paint on the mildewed cottage ceiling. Paint catches in his hair and in the hair on his arms and in the saddle of his back. He is paint-flecked with a color called French white. He is pollinated, a flower, dusted.\n\nLook at him, the way the paint washes off in the water's blast, swashing down his face, his malleable face, the tolerant mouth turned up at the ends, the eyes that when he smiles pleat sweetly\u2014no other word for it. He is such a boy. The way he is about water, how he likes to stand in it.\n\nThe waters off Penobscot are sun chinked and cold; nothing skits the surface that might bite. The surface is a mirror to mirror the spruce tipped toward it, and the pink-cliffed shoreline blushes deeply. At sunset he swims. His heavy arms break water. His heavy, lifting arms are mostly water, and the water is cold; she has felt it; and when he wobbles out of the water over the mussel-stuccoed shore, he makes the noise of someone cold. He huffs and grins at what he has just done.\n\nBut what he has not done! He has not finished...and not finished, not finished reading _Ulysses_ or even started the Thoreau. He is wall building in the garden still; he is walking the island, going out in the boat. \"See where he is?\" She points for the children. \"He is at the water after stones for the wall.\" See? He hefts a stone on his shoulder and holds another at his hip up the hill to the low wall with its band of black-eyed Susans.\n\nHow is it he carries these stones but easily, lightly? Oh, he is so perfectly good! He is the way, she thinks, a hero should be.\n\n### FALL\n\nLate August\u2014is summer so short and over? It is cold enough this morning for a fire! The rain clouds the fields, and the blown fog boils until they leave the cottage and it lifts. \"Can you see?\" she asks. The barrens have begun to redden, and the goldenrod wags gold.\n\nOh, snatch past reds that in passing smear! Shut your eyes on the sumac!\n\n\"Go fast,\" say the children when the sudden road cleared invites them.\n\nThe flawless man's hands and his arms and the hair on his arms, she takes pleasure in the sight of his arms when he is driving them back to the onrush of the city\u2014September, October, November! Binders, apples, pencils, socks\u2014so fast and already they are home, home, where an unexpected face she wears streaks past familiar mirrors and dismays her. Although he says...he says such things\u2014oh, it embarrasses her what the flawless man says, and she wants to believe him. She does believe him!\n\nOf equable temperament, generous, upright, faithful, kind: the flawless father, lover, friend is all of these; and his hands, turned outward, are cupped for her. Yes, she likes to be done to, she likes to be bossed and made to feel what she feels\u2014fleshy, cleft, insatiable, a bit of a tramp on the spit of his hand, the same hand deft enough to catch in passing a doll the boys have twisted into splits.\n\nHe swipes up the doll\u2014so much hair on a stick\u2014and ever the flawless uncle, he shuts the doll's legs and smooths her dress and says to the owner, \"Avoid the boys. Come sit by the fire and play near us,\" and when the girl goes home, the boys take her place and loll by the heat on their bellies, pushing trucks. The fire stuns them. Their cheeks are flushed, and when she finger combs their hair, their hair is wet. \"Go to bed,\" she says, and the flawless father walks them.\n\nFalling and falling all night into sleep, the boys are noisy breathers and kick at their covers.\n\nHow has it happened they have these boys is something she likes to say, and she says it, walking to where he is sitting in front of the fire, \"How is it we...?\" So much of what she says at night goes unfinished. She would rather kiss and be kissed and watch the soft collapse of cindered logs in the darkening room where they are themselves greater darknesses, touching.\n\n### WINTER\n\nLap robes and cushions and candlesticks, greenery and oranges, spiky flowers, rows of things red, silver bowls of Christmas bulbs, decorations made of candies, these are some of the jammy comforts attached to this time when radiator heat squiggles palpably and whitely in the room. \"Aren't you thirsty?\" she asks the flawless father, and she asks the boys; but the boys go on gouging chocolates and sucking out the cherries. Their lips, when she licks them, are sweet.\n\nAnd other parts of them are sweet. The pocked baby parts of their hands, the sugared wells between their fingers, the boys are grooved for licking and taste good.\n\nWhat makes her so special except that she is, yes, surely, look at the unfolded body the flawless man helps her keep: how he comes up from behind her, and the urgent first abrasive pleasure is a pleasure she would like to repeat even as it happens, so that she does. Her body flashes in the mirrored door where the city floats in the white light of winter, in the pink of spring, soft June, the heat wave that shrivels, August, October; the city wakes, rises, backdrops the dark head pressed against her breast.\n\nIs it any wonder she is dizzy?\n\nShouldn't she be afraid?\n\n# THEY TURN THEIR BODIES INTO SPEARS\n\n### I\n\nOn the first night they took her to the locals' favorite for lobster, she got sick, and they consoled her home with excuses. It must have been the boat to the island and the egg-white scum that spilled from the claws when she cracked them. It must have been the distance she had traveled to visit. Imagine their surprise! Suddenly their daughter's girl knocking open the screen door, carrying a string bag of oranges, a few clothes, and some tapes, no plans, but an appetite, it seemed, for what the island fetched up in traps. Lobster, her favorite, although the face she wore on their walk back home was cast down and waxy. Ellen put her to bed while he looked at the sky and thought how sad a girl could be at twenty.\n\nHe was eighty. He had lived long enough to see the children's children shrivel into age, and he wanted to tell his granddaughter what it meant, really, to be eighty and alive.\n\n\"That old!\" she gasped when in the morning they spoke.\n\n\"Yes, I am, and I know things. Be happy. Don't wait.\"\n\nHe struck up the fire and stayed squatted to watch it take; in the kitchen Ellen frittered at their breakfast. Eat, drink. This was a treat for them, Ellen was saying; it was not every day their granddaughter visited, and they were happy to see her. Happy again, the word sprung wild as the islands regal wagging, fields of weedy purples and golds, red geraniums against the chalky houses. Their umpteenth summer here alone, his and Ellen's, and they woke to the weather, pleasure bent.\n\nOld folks' pleasure, maybe; maybe that was what the girl would call it. Seed-dry and slow\u2014too many books, no TV; birds their only entertainment. Old folks they were with old folks' ways. The temperature's night plummet meant it was cold when they awoke, and he often made a fire.\n\nHe had been laying kindling when the girl scuffed in, wearing a blanket\u2014no robe\u2014next morning.\n\n\"Charlotte!\" Ellen said. \"Aren't you cold?\"\n\nNo, thank you, yes, thank you, no was his granddaughter speaking\u2014the darling! Look at the bits of cloth she wore when she was dressed. No breasts. Jutted movement, bones\u2014her bones, Charlotte's\u2014were handles, too visible. She had what so many girls had that made them turn their bodies into spears. Wing blades and wrist bones, bones, bones, a girl distinctly outlined, her eyes were fixed on the water.\n\n\"I haven't been here in such a long time,\" she said.\n\nHe reminded her of what she needed to know if she should go out in the boat. The cove. The lily pond. The ledge where the eagles nested.\n\nThey kept the house door unlocked.\n\n\"Crime is everywhere, Poppie. Even here,\" she said, but he laughed.\n\nHe said, \"You don't need to drive anywhere, but I trust you with the car.\" He said this although he wasn't sure. Never had he seen the girl off but he thought she would fail. This girl, he thought, was so much like his daughter, and he watched as she swayed down the path swapping branches. Was she talking to herself?\n\n### II\n\nCharlotte said her mother always expected to see a prettier daughter. This was on the porch, when they sat, the three of them, in the morning and watched the waves in their halfhearted slash against the shore.\n\nEllen said, \"You mustn't listen to your mother. She doesn't know what she is saying.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Charlotte said. \"Mom's just being mean.\"\n\n\"She is,\" Ellen said and she put her arms around the girl and told her how pretty she was and how much loved.\n\nCharlotte, cheered, told stories about her mother. \"Mother says she is a very good camper.\" Charlotte made a sound, a little like a laugh, but then, it seemed, she saw what he saw and, made afraid, turned quiet.\n\n### III\n\nHe thought umpteen years when he calculated time on the island with only his wife, but in total, as a family, it was fifty years\u2014hardly umpteen\u2014summer after summer in the cranky rusticator, brambled, slanted, bleached. Dishes of opened mussel shells blued the bathroom vanities, stones from the beach held back books. Faded top sheets in sea-glass colors\u2014green, blue, yellow, pink\u2014lifted in the wind unanchored by the blankets Ellen kept in chests. After breakfast every morning Ellen opened the bedroom windows wide to the sea and aired the house even as he nudged the fire downstairs. Years with and without a daughter. Without a daughter had been better.\n\n\"Your grandmother and I are here to be happy,\" he said when Ellen was gone with her basket and shears. He said, \"Try to be happy yourself while you're here,\" and he walked off the porch toward the water. If his knees could be oiled, he thought, he might reach the shore faster.\n\n### IV\n\n\"This is serious,\" Charlotte said, and she lolled on the dock with him and talked about school and her father and the Wilderness Defense and her father (again) and the criminal amounts of money made on Wall Street. \"I mean I'm glad for Daddy and all, but there are too many poor people in the country.\"\n\n\"Swim!\" he said. \"The water is not so cold.\"\n\n### V\n\nLunch, and he told the girl to eat her pickle before he did. What he loved about the girl were her girlish ways. How she broke up a muffin to find the berries and pelleted the cakey crumbs to feed the chickadees, the way she called to all living things in a clear voice, he loved this much about her, and the way she licked her lips or twisted her hair when she was thinking. Her far-off face when she was thinking, her ardent, flushed face. The shallow pan of breastbone, her close, pretty ear. Darling girl, his darling, he confused her sometimes with his daughter.\n\nEllen was saying, \"They have said they will call us when they think we can visit your mother.\"\n\nHe wished his granddaughter had gone somewhere else to rest. He wanted no more stories about his daughter. He was too old. Old, sick, set back by the same news that his daughter was not happy.\n\n\"That's the least of it,\" Ellen said.\n\n\"I was tired last night, Poppie, if that's what you mean. I don't get sick often.\"\n\nHe asked, \"So why don't you eat instead of picking?\" How he must look to her\u2014beaked, lidded, wattled, a moody old man with shames and losses, very few friends, no hobbies. Crabbed, sullen, closed off, failed. All he had done was make money, money, money, enough to buy a summerhouse when he was yet young and then old, old for a long time, long enough for his daughter to squander lots of it\u2014money.\n\nHe said, \"You'd do well to think of what's happened to her.\" He was about to say more when Charlotte began to cry.\n\n### VI\n\nHow he had found his bedroom, he could not remember, but the sun through the trees stippled the blanket that covered him, and he knew, at least, that it was late afternoon, the bay calmed, the water too blue and sun scratched to look at. He knew he had slept and that the shrill part of the day was over; the house was very quiet. The quiet of the wholly present tense, the luxurious absence of melancholy, ire, and whatever other meanness switched him through the house, all was easy and now. Now and now and now. He stepped onto the porch with a dish of peanuts and his drink, his glasses, his book. Hearts ease at dusk, the sky orange edged at first, then \"Ellen!\" he was calling. \"You're missing this. Come look!\" But she was already just behind him, humming approvingly at the plummy clouds.\n\nBut here she comes, blooded with sunset, his daughter and his granddaughter. His granddaughter saying, \"It's all right, Poppie. There's no reason to be sad.\"\n\n\"Jimmy,\" Ellen said, \"Charlotte is asking you a question,\" and she was shaking him back to the porch and the girl who was grown.\n\nHis daughter is combing with her fingers what is left of her hair. Her face is flat against a screen. She is talking but he doesn't know about what.\n\nSee the candles, the cake.\n\nBalloons, brushed against, snap, and her fine hair stands on end, and her black patent leather shoes make staticky cracks, and a little girl cries, \"They bite!\"\n\nThe sunburn that had put him to sleep woke him to his wife asking, \"Are you cold, dear?\" saying, \"Charlotte, darling, get Poppie his jacket, will you?\"\n\n\"I'm not hungry,\" he said. \"I feel sick.\"\n\n### VII\n\nEllen brought him beef broth and would gladly have sat on the next bed watching if he hadn't said, \"Go on, go on, go on,\" and when Ellen asked again \"Are you sure...?\" he frowned at her until the door shut softly and she was gone.\n\nHe slept. His dreams closed abruptly, and he woke at spooky no-man's-hours and stayed awake until the shape he knew for his wife became his wife. The room cohered. The table, the dresser, the lamp, the rug seemed no longer some dead man's effects, and he stood, whole and unencumbered, watching the glaucous outdoor colors deepen. A windless hour and he could hear, or thought he could hear, the gurgle of low-tide muck, its stinky, hissing bounty.\n\nHe had had a daughter once. She picked the shore to fill glass globes with decorative reminders of the sea. Ever a brooder, weeping over the unretrievable summer, she let the anger rise in her, like tide, until it brimmed and spilled and ended in showy injuries, smashing the glass globes against the bathroom tiles and walking through the house in bloody feet.\n\nThe morning yellowed and he was well again and picked his way to the granite shelf that in the light had dried. Here he sat, for a long time sat, proudly agile, an old, old man\u2014eighty!\u2014in only a flannel robe, thin pajamas, and boiled wool slippers, all gifts his wife insisted on. \"Wear them, Jimmy, or you'll catch your death of cold!\"\n\n\"Poppie!\"\n\nCharlotte, he saw, was zigzagging toward him, happy. \"Poppie! Granmum says to come in and get warm.\"\n\n### VIII\n\n\"Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, for God's sake, please!\" He was looking in the bird book for what had flown overhead.\n\nHe wouldn't look at Ellen and he turned away from her in his chair, away from Charlotte, too. The girl took up so much room. \"You've been on the phone for hours, Charlotte!\" he said. Her cheerful response was unwelcome.\n\n\"Poppie!\" she said and then piping sounds into the phone.\n\n\"Get off the phone, Charlotte. Now,\" he said and he was standing. He was looking right at her and she was smiling.\n\nShe hung up the phone and waved a notepad and said, \"This is my trip to Boston, Granmum. I'll leave it here for now.\"\n\nHe knew the kind of Kleenex crud a crying girl left behind. Notepads and numbers on notepads, numbers turned fat with writing over and over them, and over names and other numbers, cars, flights, addresses. He had found such wreckage before and called to his wife, \"What is this?\"\n\n# SEE AMID THE WINTER'S SNOW\n\n### 1986\n\nONCE THEIR FACES easily pinked in the Christmas gaudy. Toy-mad and dithered, the boys at Christmas, running out of close parties and open to the wind. We crossed to walk the park side and looked up through the trees to see the sky was turned to firmament; the stars to ancient purpose; nothing was as it was, but indwelling spirit swelled and fat with Christmas. Mother buttered strudel and cried for no occasion except that they were gone, NettaandDaddy, her own, who used to have, who used to do, who always something-something at this time of year. Mother cried for me and for the boys and for my sister (who would not forgive her).\n\n\"But what have I done?\" In the tunnels of tree stands, she cried, and at the first snow, and sometimes when the boys brushed against her, and always when the boys sang. Her tears delighted them. \"Nana's crying! Nana's crying! Nana's crying, Mother!\"\n\n\"Mother,\" I said, \"come help me,\" and she watched from a stool as I toothbrushed the silver.\n\n\"Who besides us is coming?\" she asked.\n\n\"No one, no; and no to that question, too.\" No, I am not. He did not, we never. She did not understand why I didn't take him to court or why my in-laws kept their money or why I bothered to bake. What did she raise in me, my mother, except such disappointment that all I could do was rush from the kitchen and put on the music that made me feel holy and sad and slightly foolish? \"Personent Hodie,\" thumped and vigorous, embarrassed me, but \"See amid the Winter's Snow\" was quieting, and Mother sipped her drink. I didn't mind then the hard light, bright as any snowfield and flaring off the buildings our windows faced; I could stand to look hearing little-boy church voices vaulted in the background.\n\nThe boys were in the background, too; my own, and Mother's, these boys talking for the toys they moved in battles sounded through the afternoon. The pursed, soured, shrunk about our lives, Mother's as much as mine, fell away when the radiators shushed and spit and we were safe.\n\nWhere were the boys then just before Christmas?\n\nWho would sugar the cookies?\n\nMother lay in bed and read whatever had taken her fancy in the airport: the royals this Christmas with their corgis at Balmoral\u2014look! Mother wanted to live in a castle just like that\u2014and why not? Didn't she deserve it? Mother using up the bubbles in her afternoon ablutions. Mother was a red fragrance, profligately splashed. Her suitcase and the silky lingerie she packed were acrid with the mixed-up smell of her and her perfume and what she drank.\n\nWhat did she bring that was new this time?\n\nLess and less, the same and the favorites, lace ripped and straps thinned. Nothing to borrow...single earrings and unstrung pearls, dulled rings home mended with Band-Aids...grit in the boxes she used to case them, her jewels, as Mother called them. Her jewels or her sparkles...\"Oh, what a Sparkle Plenty you are! Darling!\" Mother was belling the cat with us now for how many Christmases? \"Count,\" and Mother did. \"That was the year your father, your husband, my ex-husband, your ex-husband, the ugly boyfriend\u2014who was he?\"\n\n\"Mother, please, can we talk of something else, please.\"\n\nThe snow tracks fast filling in with falling snow, winter solstice in the Sheraton Avenue house, where she sat at the top of the staircase and saw her handsome brothers off. Black mufflers, camel coats, lustrous patent leather dancing shoes, her brothers in formal dress. Mother said she saw them from the staircase and from the landing's window sliding on those shoes, boys still, in and out of light. Good-bye! She huffed at the window to make a smoke to draw in, but the ring came out small and her mark disappeared.\n\n\"You dasn't\" was how the maid said no to Mother. \"You dasn't go in your brothers' rooms when they are out.\" My mother went in anyway, but looking for what?\n\n\"I wanted to be surprised,\" Mother said. \"I was nosy. Even when I knew what it was in a drawer, I opened it.\"\n\nI was also that way. For a long time, even after I knew the contents, I opened Mothers house; but she didn't bother to look through my rooms anymore. In powdered undress she sat on the edge of my bed and said, \"So this is Christmas.\"\n\nMy sentiments exactly when the boys were gone, although there was tonight with the boys at the theater\u2014her treat. \"Remember?\"\n\nShe had almost forgotten.\n\nShe said, \"I don't feel well today,\" and she went back to bed with a littleglassofsomething, as she called it. She wanted to take advantage of the quiet and for a while to shut her eyes, to clear her head, to think of other things besides Christmas. Mother said, \"I have no business buying theater tickets, but I'm glad I did, of course, for the boys. The boys should get to see good theater\u2014only the expense of it!\" Money, money, money, the icy blast of Christmas through the rotted sash. I had felt that chill before and longed for bed.\n\n\"Want more to drink?\" I asked.\n\n\"You are so much like me,\" Mother said, holding out her glass.\n\nI hoped not, but I was.\n\nI was rushing bacon and using too much soap on pans; whatever I cooked in them came out tasting soapy. \"I can't eat this, Mom,\" from a boy. Me, forgetting and forgetting or getting there late. \"Mom!\" I was full of apology but unprepared. Whoever carried safety pins and never got lost? \"I will make it work, I will make it work, be patient.\" The boys did not believe me any more than I believed my mother when she said, \"I promise.\" Mother promised Rollerblades for Christmas; for the other boy, Australia. Mother said to me, \"When he is twenty-one, I am taking him.\"\n\n\"Does it snow in Australia?\" he asked, come home and out of the sky's new falling and already anxious to be gone again and released and dangerous and loud.\n\n\"Be quiet,\" I said. \"Both of you. Nana is resting.\"\n\nBut Nana was calling to them, and if she was resting, then why was she talking?\n\nThey went on asking, \"Nana?\" walking into her room, trailing gifts from Dad to show but running out before they did.\n\n\"Nana's crying, Mother!\" from both boys in excited voices. \"Nana's crying!\"\n\nThe stink of old-lady perfume, and Mother, an old lady, crying over it. \"Not broken, only spilled,\" I assured her, \"and only a little spilled, all right then, enough to wear and not to cry over, Mother.\" I righted the empty glass and set the clock back so she could better see it.\n\n\"Your sister has always been so angry,\" Mother said to me, and she was crying again because we should have been together. \"We're too few as it is,\" she said. \"She should be here and her husband and those children. They don't even know me. What are their names? You see, I forget. This is not my idea of Christmas.\"\n\nI reminded her about the theater and said tomorrow Frannie would call.\n\nBut NettaandDaddy, NettaandDaddy doused the plum pudding and put it aflame.\n\nI said, \"Your drink, Mother, here.\"\n\n\"Your sister,\" she said, sipping. \"I don't dare around her.\"\n\nMother grunted off her bathrobe and trembled down the hall in just her nylons and brassiere. She said, \"What are you going to wear?\" and she watched me dress and wondered when it happened she got old, and I was old, too, she assured me, and my sister was older than both of us. Mother said, \"Daddy wasn't so very old when he died, yet poor Daddy. They would not let me see him. They didn't even call in time for me to see him. They just put him in the ground. I found out later.\"\n\n\"Mother...\"\n\n\"See how you like it. See what it feels like...lost, and now you have to worry.\"\n\n\"Mother...\"\n\nShe was trying on my perfumes and asking, \"Local?\"\n\n\"Cheap,\" I answered. I said yesandno to everything else she asked me. It is not as it was with NettaandDaddy; we will never again. \"Give me,\" I said and took her drink and snuffed the fumes and thought I would catch fire.\n\n\"Outside,\" I said, \"it looks like Christmas,\" and it did. The snow, expected but turned larger, sifted in the wind and worked its intimate diminishment. Only the sky was left to see and violet-colored, lavish flakes falling on our tongues. Aahhhhhhh at the heavens running backward and Mother repeating, \"I don't dare fall. If I fall...\" The boys said they would catch her. Then the snow's assaulting angle sharpened, and it stormed, and we couldn't see the sky, and Mother was crying. She was very, very drunk by then, and it came as no surprise to me that she fell at a curb, almost at the theater, amidst a host of people. Mother fell on her knees, and I let strangers help her.\n\n### 1996\n\nYes, I think, yes, we are smiling at the missing boy's smile, my mother and I, in the last room, low, north facing, dark, with harsh, budget carpet and trunklike furniture that a janitor bangs into with his cart\u2014ouch! Over the noise of running water and, later, the vacuum, I shout at Mother, and I pretend that he is here, sixteen and shirtless, straightened teeth, the missing boy my mother says isn't a baby anymore, is he?\n\nThe next time we are smiling at a boy for real, a grandson bending to his grandmother's chair. Heartbreaker is what he is, and my mother says, \"Yes,\" and she touches his wrist. That point of grace or seriousness or whatever the boy's wrist bone suggests, it is there that she touches him.\n\nThe white band of skin is from his watch.\n\nWhy no watch? I wonder. Where is it?\n\n\"Hello, Nana.\"\n\n\"Louder,\" I instruct.\n\n\"Hello, Nana!\"\n\nHis hand, his shapely hand, is a ruddy reminder of health against the pale summer blanket Mother wears like swaddling. He turns out his hands, and Mother takes them to her face and smells. June, the white-flower month, ripe privet greens the air, and the palm against my mother's face, I guess, must smell as sweet. I listen to her breathe him in. Her breathing is a screechy hinge to a garden my mother would speak of, her own. The garden is behind and around my mother; sun patches the floor\u2014and the light! But the sound she makes makes me think how clean the boy must smell in a season not yet noon when Mother will be\u2014how old will Mother be? Where is she?\n\nToday she is in school. Today the ambulatory are teachers, and Mother must apologize for being late\u2014again!\u2014with homework. This is a visit we make in the summer, when the boy's school is not in session.\n\n\"I perused the books,\" Mother says. Then in a voice that suggests there might be spies punitively near, Mother whispers how she misses, misses her children; but after lunch Mother says, \"Why be so fussy!\" Mother's eyes don't go along with her smile. Is she in there looking out her eyeholes at me?\n\n\"Mother?\"\n\n\"You are older,\" Mother says to me. \"Oh, but you look so old!\"\n\nI am surprised, too, surprised to be as old as women once hard for me to look at.\n\nDressed in a blanket at table 3, Mother says, \"Surprise me,\" and she lets herself be fed. \"I know peas,\" Mother says, now lighthearted. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\"You are older,\" Mother says to me after what has just passed for lunch. \"Oh, but you look so old!\" To the boy, suddenly evident, she says, \"Come closer,\" and he does. He bends close enough for her to touch his shoulder.\n\nHis shoulder and his arms are firmly shaped, and as with every part of him\u2014his teeth, his skin\u2014he is unmarked and smooth. He might take anything on\u2014he could carry his nana!\n\n\"So she can see you,\" I say, and the boy is on his knees close enough for her to touch his shoulder, but she touches his nipple instead.\n\n\"Mom!\" he says.\n\nI keep my mouth shut so tightly my teeth hurt. Don't ask me why. I say, \"Take up her hand and squeeze it tight.\"\n\nWhen this boy frowns, he looks like his older brother.\n\nMother, in her chair, says she can drive around, too, and I curl on the floor at her feet like a dog and sleep. When I wake, Mother and I are at the top of a sloping lawn that meadows to a lake. Mother is talking to her mother about the rain: how the lake is high from it, rain and more rain. The rains bruise the ruffled flowers. The lake is black.\n\nNow in our dream comes more rain; it peens the water colorless.\n\nNow a white sky and commonly blue water, and now black water, choppy. I think I hear the neighbors jumping in off the dock.\n\n\"Agnes!\" someone cries, and Mother startles. \"It's a bird.\" The snake has eaten its eggs, she explains, and we must be careful. Mother says, \"Be careful. These aren't just grass snakes but something bigger,\" and she holds up her little feet in immaculately white canvas sneakers.\n\nMother's snakes, once they slither into her story, they stay, and their slime, she says, is like snot, and it sickens her, really, and she gags. She leans over the chair and spits up all the peas she ate.\n\nI am glad the boy is not here to see the depressant clarity of the unused, the way they wipe down the rooms here and swipe at the blinds. I wonder, Does Mother notice? The tightly rigged bed bleeps alarm: just my purse against the pillow sets it off.\n\nA nurse strides in and scolds, \"Again!\"\n\nI am curled at Mother's feet like a dog when here is a nurse asking, \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"This is the safest place to sleep,\" I say. \"The bed rings.\"\n\nOh, this is no birdcage, Mother's nursing home, not the birdcage she liked in La Jolla, with its patio views of the ocean. That unobstructed tower in the sun, does she remember it, the one I think she planned on and often pointed to, saying, \"That's where the gray ladies perch.\"\n\nThank heavens the boy is not here to hear us sighing into a gaze over something of his. Today I have the boy's books, paperbacks mostly, but this one\u2014look! Chemistry! The split spine has loosed its cover; the cover wags like a tooth from how he worried it. Clearly, the book has been handled; clearly, he worked. \"Like you, Mother,\" I say, \"he wants to be a good student.\"\n\nMother says, \"I am.\"\n\nMother turns the missing boy's watch cap inside out to where the dark spice of his scalp is strongest. I know; I have smelled it and felt, too, the wet wool between my fingers and thought, How itchy it must be. And, Why does he wear it?\n\nWith the watch cap at her mouth, can Mother see him?\n\nHooded in a sweatshirt, he stands with his thumped fists pushing out his pockets. He rocks on his feet; his eyes are shut, water drips from his nose. The boy might be this way to her or in the back row of class, a goof-off with his watch cap on, captioning lewd drawings, or maybe she sees the long slide of his legs stuck out to trip up his friend.\n\n\"How did he get to be so unattractive!\" she asks. \"How did he?\"\n\nThe boy? I am outraged. I am thinking, You, you are unattractive, Mother.\n\nWhat did she expect? Of course, this is not the boy who ran steeply in circles on the field that was the beach when the tide was out, but he is still a pleasure to look at.\n\nTake up the hankie weight of his shapely T-shirt, the washed sock, the sticky handle to his racket, and he might be seen as he was some afternoons when he skidded on the court or, later, when his wet hair was combed back and blackly curling at his ear.\n\nTake up the hoop he wears. Is the post still warm, or the strap to his watch? (His watch, at least, is not lost!) The graduation gifts, see them? The watch again, the pen, the unpolished buckle decoratively scored and darkly initialed. A girl's name gouged in his journal cover, the journal from the suitcase I have brought of things to show Mother because he will not come, not today at least. Here is a braided bracelet from the summer, a stained bandanna. What does Mother know of him, the boy who is missing, except what I put into her hands? The boy's blue shirt, ironed spineless as a towel, I put the boy's shirt into Mother's hands.\n\nAll the missing boys, we miss them.\n\n\"He is not a baby anymore,\" Mother says.\n\n\"No, no,\" and not so young, and hardly dutiful, though I have wished. I have wished for his company through the watery heat I have had to wade through just to get here.\n\nMother's room is north facing; the inside air is cold.\n\n### 2000\n\nOur mother is living in the home state again in the deadend part of one of those places for when there are no other places but this, a tiled corridor bristling with obstruction, idlers in slippers, uncomfortable chairs, carts, screens, trays, lids. Every door is open, even to the lady who shouts.\n\nMother, I don't think, shouts; but Faye on the night shift says that she hits. In the last few days Mother has grown more bewildered, and she doesn't want to go to bed. Faye has told me Mother says she has given up looking for us. Mother says her girls are with Netta and Daddy at the lake. Netta and Daddy are taking care of us.\n\nI saw our mother in June, my sister saw her in October, but both times all our mother talked about was home, the one Mother had with Netta and Daddy on the lake. Our mother talks of the lake; she talks of lawns and elms around her\u2014elms not yet sick. Mother grew up in the shade of these in a house with help, a cook, a baker, a laundress, old Peter, who just raked the leaves. The house looked out to the lake, the one she talks about now, asking, \"Are you out at the lake? Have you seen Netta and Daddy?\"\n\nWe don't understand it. Why, if our mother has released herself to wander, can't Mother wander near the ocean? The ocean brought skies that soothed her. \"Oh, look at the size of those clouds!\" Mother would say. \"Will you look at the size of those clouds!\" Spacious, God-blown clouds they were, and we spent a lot of time looking up.\n\nSo why did we bring Mother to the downward look of home, except that she is nearer home? Our mother is back in the home state, where the winters are so long. The sky, too, is not much to look at; and the lake, Mother's lake, is severe\u2014very deep. Her lake, we remember, is silty, unusually dark, a green almost blue, and in no way like the lakes across the road. Those lakes in this land of lakes are shallow enough to be yellow. Some are swamps; mosquitoes appear on the first warm breath. September, October, November. Mosquitoes dangling over the pumpkin gore, Indian summer, it is easy to be stung then. Common in March and April to see the insects' soft appearance, or to walk through snows and snow fogs in May, to fan our underarms in August heat come in early June. Spring in the home state is often no spring at all. Summer is changeable, humid as a mouth sometimes or parched.\n\nLook out the window. See for yourself.\n\n\"Look out the window, Agnes!\" is what Faye says she says to our mother, but our mother stares at her lap. Her head, Mother says, is too heavy to lift. Besides, she has seen it. She knows where she is. Mother is belted in her chair and slumped. The nurses keep her parked near the station, where she hides behind her hair and barks. She will talk only in her room. She will talk about the lake. She will cry. \"Tell Netta and Daddy we are never to be apart again. Camp is almost over.\"\n\nA ringing phone confuses her unless it's held against her ear, then Mother knows to talk. She asks, \"Are you out at the lake? Will you send old Peter for me? I want to go out with Daddy in the Shepherd and watch the race.\"\n\nThis Mother is sixteen again and rocking in the mahogany chest Daddy calls the Shepherd. The warmed leather seat where she sits in the back puts her to sleep, that and the rocking motion of the boat against the pier, because Daddy is not yet ready to let Agnes's older brother cast off.\n\n\"What the hell do you think you're doing?\" Daddy is always mad at the grown-up sons, the brothers; but Agnes, Daddy adores. She is only Daddy's no matter what that Netta says. Netta is the one who doesn't belong. She is jealous of what Agnes can do. Agnes can swim and so be with Daddy; poor Netta never learned how.\n\nOn the porch and sitting sternly, Netta does needlework that strains her eyes; she sits with her back to the pier, preferring a view of the garden.\n\nThe pier, the lake, that part of the estate removed from Netta, is where Agnes spends most of her time. The pier is not so long as it is wide. There is a floating dock Agnes swims to, or else on the pier she puts a project between her legs and glues or paints. Agnes starts before the pier is in the sun, when it is cold yet and wet underfoot; the water soaks the first layer of newspaper she lays to work on. The backs of her oiled legs are inky, and her sticky fingertips catch in her hair. Her hair! Her hair is a spun sugar, a matter of light, fine as glass and a white blond\u2014even between her legs.\n\nOh, put your hand to it now, feel!\n\nAgnes is aflame, and flammable with such fair skin, she uses an umbrella in the sun.\n\nIs it any wonder then that Daddy wants her in his boat? To keep an eye on her and hold off boys.\n\nAgnes's spun-sugar hair, her white-blond hair, whiskers her breasts when she bends to her work. \"Not bad,\" she says, appraising what she has done, \"but I should have, I should have...\" Her jealous mother on the porch agrees. Her jealous mother calls the work dashed off and nothing serious.\n\nAgnes is sixteen, and her chest shows a cleft when she bends, and there, between her breasts, Agnes sweats.\n\nAfter forty, she will have no desires.\n\nMy sister and I hold the phone to our ears and breathe. We talk about Mother and the drapery of her skin, for instance, and what's between her legs.\n\nWe think of our legs, too, each of us, alone; I can hear how we breathe; I know.\n\nWe are lucky to live far away. We don't have to see our mother. We can get reports from Faye.\n\nFaye says, \"Yesterday it was horses. In the stable next door a boy was crying because his horse had died.\"\n\nI wonder\u2014my sister wonders\u2014How did Mother find dead horses?\n\nFaye says, \"Remember how old she is.\"\n\nOur mother, talking at the phone, is purely sixteen. Agnes is sixteen years old and talking boys, always boys. Always it is the boys with her, that is what Agnes's jealous mother on the porch says. \"Always boys,\" she is muttering. \"Agnes...we're going to...\" Oh, that jealous mother's shadowed face is witchy. Just look! Look at her! Under a light made for handiwork, Agnes's mother is beading sweaters. She is sewing doll clothes, using her hands, loving her hands, loving them in the arduous business of manicures. The jealous mother's fingernails are pearls. Agnes wants to suck them. She wants to pet her mother's oily hair. She wants to ring a finger with it, play with its crimped, thick curliness. Netta's hair is black, too, nothing of Agnes's white blond is there.\n\nAnd this is important: only Netta's hands are pretty, which is why Netta is so jealous of Agnes. Agnes is beautiful all over. That's the word used, _beautiful,_ and once a boy in a boat used _radiant_ to describe her. \"The radiant Agnes under her umbrella,\" he said, then something else, but what it was Agnes does not remember.\n\nAgnes does not want to remember everything.\n\nFaye says that even parked near the glass doors, parked with no other place to look but out, our mother will not look out. She refuses to be jogged from the lake. Snowed-over shapes, rain, passing coats, none of what is happening around our mother is happening. The way our mother sees it, she is sixteen.\n\nAgnes is sixteen years old. She wants to quit school, go to Italy, and study art. She is interested in the men, too, yes, sure, that's true. At sixteen, Agnes is a sweet sweet on sweets\u2014she won't deny it. Also, and not to be forgotten, Agnes is rich.\n\nNo wonder then that Daddy wants her in the Shepherd, away from all the boys and to himself. No wonder then that she can't stay in school\u2014could anyone? Agnes wants to go to Italy and paint, and oh\u2014why not say it?\u2014she wants to fuck around; she is luxurious.\n\nLuxurious women do not need big breasts\u2014that's a myth, although Agnes contends Daddy likes them. Lucky then that the witchy wife has them\u2014and her hands, of course, her pearly nails; but Daddy likes his witchy wife's heavy breasts. These Agnes has seen Daddy straining after from as far away as the pier. They are a whiteness under the close lamp; the rest of Netta is smudged. Gray, beige, claret, brown, of these Netta usually wears brown. Even in the summer she wears long brown skirts and horrible shoes, like men's shoes with stacked heels. The hats she picks to wear are squat; flowers, birds, and clouds of veil are perched on them. Each jewel she owns has a blouse to go with it. Netta's is a grave style\u2014but her daughter! That Agnes! Her wispy daughter is another story. _Wispy,_ yes, _slight, whimsical, coy, feathered, birdlike, catlike_ are all words used to describe that girl.\n\nWhere did Agnes come from?\n\nWho taught her how to dress?\n\nAgnes is walking in mismatched shoes. She is wearing white when she should not, wrong clothes to right affairs. To the parties her mother approves of, Agnes comes breathless and late.\n\nNone of this matters now. Our mother can be late or she can be early. \"Calm down!\" Faye says they have to say to her. \"Agnes, dear, calm down. You haven't missed a thing. You're on time.\"\n\nOur mother cries, \"I am sorry,\" and she tells the nurses that she is painfully, painfully, painfully shy, although no one would know it to watch her. No one would guess how hard it is for her to talk when there are so many people in the room. Our mother is, she confesses, a long tremble. She stays in her chair. She says, \"I have to be careful I don't fall.\"\n\nOur mother stays in her chair now most of the time, slack as a bathrobe, tottering, mumbling, giving her excuses to the floor.\n\n\"Yes,\" we say to Faye, \"we have seen her, we can guess.\"\n\nOur mother asks the same questions.\n\nWe are thousands of miles away from our mother\u2014have been for years\u2014and yet our mother asks, \"Are you with Netta and Daddy? Are you out at the lake?\"\n\nOur mother says, \"I don't think Netta likes me anymore. She never comes to visit.\"\n\nThat must be why Agnes goes back to the lake long after she has left sixteen: it is to see her witchy, jealous mother, who even from her bed on her back at eighty is castigating, \"Agnes...what are we?\" when Agnes is not sixteen anymore. She has not been any trouble for years, although she can't remember where she put her babies. Her babies, the boys, the dead ones\u2014these are her troubles, these are what Agnes has to be sorry for.\n\nThere are dead horses in the home state, dead babies; she begins to make sense.\n\n\"Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!\" our mother cries, or else Mother speaks to them, the boys, the dead babies. She says their names and cries.\n\nMother never says she drank.\n\nOur mother has seen her sons through the scrim of the other side. She has talked to them. She tells Faye the boys are grown up. They are young men with Daddy's eyes.\n\n\"Not yours or yours,\" our mother says, and she swears at the nurses. \"Yours are shit.\"\n\nFaye tells us; Faye tells on Mother.\n\nFaye says one of the nurses slapped our mother by accident when Mother tried to work her way out from under the belt they use to secure her. Our mother is a danger to herself and will sometimes try to walk. She will get to the lake however she can. \"Better not try it!\" Faye says, and she tells our mother it is cold outside. The lake is frozen.\n\nSnowless, black, flecked with frosts, the lake is a starry sky with Agnes skating on it. She is a skater. No one would believe it to look at her\u2014but look! Her ankles are bone; skates don't hurt. Only the cold hurts. It blows at the bridge of her nose and gives her a headache. Skating home, she is skating into the wind. The arctic air hits the tops of her legs, which is why she can't move them now! \"For God's sake,\" Agnes says, \"tell Netta to get the Epsom salts, and tell her no cold water, please!\"\n\nOur mother says the camp food stinks. She says, \"Oh, boy, when I get home.\" When she gets home, she wants a lot of Hattie's custard. \"Tell Netta,\" our mother has instructed us, my sister and me, \"tell Netta to ask Hattie, please.\"\n\nFaye says that the day nurses often report on our mother's unwillingness to eat. Our mother says, \"This is not what I ordered!\"\n\nWith Daddy it is baked Alaska. With Daddy it is the Waldorf, where Agnes wears a hat and lots of lipstick. The reason she has no eyebrows is she has no eyebrows! Her hair is still white blond but short, very short, a boy's on a face with a punched-out mouth. Some part of her there is always swollen. The ledge above her eye, a greater prominence in places prominent\u2014here and here and here\u2014Agnes tends these greater lumps. She wraps elbows in Ace bandages, holds ice against her jaw. \"She is a mess,\" the witchy jealous mother tells anyone who asks. \"What happened this time?\" This time, like the last, Agnes simply did not look. She never looks but that she runs, runs after whatever it is rolling away on the incline. The witchy mother says, \"Lucky Daddy isn't alive to see this.\"\n\nOur mother's fingernails are yellow.\n\n\"Poor thing,\" Faye says, but she lets our mother ring and ring, knowing what it is she wants, which is just what she can't have.\n\nOur mother, on the phone, says, \"My brothers don't like me. They think I am bad, but I am not. I am trying to be good. I want to go back to the lake.\" And she does.\n\nOur mother is sixteen. Under the umbrella and oiled against the sun and half asleep, she is an open jam jar in the heat, a white honey, an edible fragrance, a light the boys look up at from their boats. \"Agnes,\" they say, with nothing else to say. They use her name and idle near her, rocking on the wakes of other passing boys, always someone, someone waving, calling out, \"Agnes!\"\n\nAgnes has a flask, too; Agnes drinks and smokes and knows the names to pills.\n\nNo wonder then that Daddy says, \"In the boat, Agnes, now.\"\n\nIn the Shepherd Agnes holds out her hand and rakes the water. Agnes says, \"Daddy is right about the boys. I always pick the wrong ones.\" Faceless men whose faces she knows are some of what she sees in the water.\n\nFaye says our mother says that as soon as Daddy gets here, she is leaving. Cars can be heard cracking over the gravel. Our mother hears the cars and cries out, \"Daddy's sent old Peter for me. I knew it!\" The nurses wheel her out of the bingo room because she is crying. Our mother is crying, \"I want to go out in the Shepherd with Daddy and see the races.\"\n\nOur mother, in her room, goes on and on about it, how she isn't good with numbers but she will try. She wants to play. Mother wants to go out again, please. She wants to try. \"I'll be good, I'll be good, I'll be good. I want to get out of this shit-hole place. Jesus!\" And his name, the way she says it, comes out sorrowful and red.\n\nThen Agnes is not sixteen anymore but a woman with dead babies\u2014only dead babies, which is surely what she means when she talks of the dead horses. Sets of silver and dishes, named cars, Italy long after she has thrown away her brushes, our mother does not ask anymore where it is packed.\n\nA lot, of course, has been sold\u2014had to be. Our mother's daddy is dead; the trust fund he left her is nearly depleted.\n\nOur mother can't tell us apart on the phone, but she knows our voices. She remembers our names; and when we answer to them, she cries that she is ready. She wants to go back to the lake, to Netta, of course, and Daddy.\n\n\"Please,\" she says, \"it's time.\"\n\nOur mother's incessant cries, we can hear them when we are not on the phone. We can smell her when the nurses lift her into bed. We don't need Faye to tell us. We can see, we can see Agnes; she is a girl, and then for a long, long time she is not.\n\n### 1960\n\nHer arms belonged to a Hattie, potato-white, fat-puckered, floury-fat arms, which when she lifted them to put away the jam smelled sour. Hattie was a sour-smelling cook, finished work and in a coat\u2014no sweater! Unbuckled boots and too-small scarf despite the cold. Outside in a running car Hattie's husband was waiting. He was the one to drive her. These were the baking days, those sighing days\u2014less light and nearing holidays\u2014when he brought Hattie here in the morning gloom and took her home, darkling.\n\nHard to see under the bill of his cap, a farmer's cap, and he, a farmer, smelling of mucked stalls and cheese. We had smelled him before. Mr. Rassmusen, Elmer Rassmusen as he was called by Netta, whose house it was where Hattie baked. \"Mr. Rassmusen is here, Netta!\" from us, waiting for the cookies to cool, the awful-sounding cookies that tasted so good: Springerle. \"Does Mr. Rassmusen get any?\"\n\nHattie says, \"He has his heart to think about.\" Phony eggs and no bacon are what he has for breakfast now, poor man! They sold their chickens\u2014what's the use? _Hardscrabble_ is the word Frannie thinks of, and the cornstalks' yellow clatter in the wind when the wind blats through, as it mostly does, in our country in the dead of winter. What a phrase! Don't use it. The dead go nowhere; we have dug them up.\n\n(Mother has some babies in the ground, but I think they do not sleep.)\n\nHattie says, \"Be careful you don't burn your tongues,\" and she shuffles to the car in her unbuckled boots. The path is all ice and she is stooped against falling.\n\nThe thought of her bare arms beneath her rough coat makes us itch. Let's never be poor!\n\nPoor Hattie was farm-poor and ugly, ugly and poor as the old women Netta visited. Netta took us to Miss Pearl's, whose cookies made us sick. \"No thank you,\" we said, polite girls and sisters, born wide years apart but matching. Miss Pearl, the dressmaker, pinned us for approaching birthdays; but March was not as close as Netta thought. Uncertainties, instructions, moments of clarity and surprise, bright hurts.\n\n(My mother's face in a mirror we once shared first informed me of beauty.)\n\nFrannie is oldest; I am youngest. A sister in between would be nice\u2014Frannie says. Frannie says it is sad about our brothers.\n\n\"Where were you girls?\" from Netta, already thinking of next year's Christmas, needling sequins to sew on a saddle. The camel is for the wise men on their journey. Across the desert! Under the stars!\n\nNetta didn't know about the dog, how he plashed across the river and came home steaming. She didn't know how long we had played outside but that Hattie was here, yes; Netta said she could smell it, and we could, too: the onion odor of the woman mixed with butter and almond.\n\n(Mother, I remember, unbuttoning even as she ran up the stairs, crying, \"I can't stand myself!\")\n\nOne day the pocky rain beat away the snow.\n\nWe made toffee without Hattie in the kitchen or Netta to boss us. The toffee was oversweet and hot and dripped off a stick\u2014from the garden? Then our birthdays passed and we were _in_ the garden. We were shoeless, sockless, and putting on a play that Frannie had directed because it was her idea in the first place.\n\nFrannie's flaxen braids went past her waist so she could sit on them and play Rapunzel.\n\n(Did I mention that our mother was an actress?)\n\nHattie was not a woman of expression or patience, but she played our audience and gruffed, \"What girls you are! What made you think of this?\"\n\nSometimes her surprise surprised us, as when we piled what we picked out, which she then scolded us to eat. But who likes bitter rind in jelly? And why not swig vanilla? The way it smelled, we thought it would be sweet!\n\n(\"She gets it from her mother,\" they say about me.)\n\nFrannie is Frannie and _good, smart, responsible,_ those stout terms grown-ups use on us wearing their accurate faces. Hattie does not have many faces. With her it's a scowl or a smile...and she looks like...Netta says, \"Eleanor Roosevelt!\" Hattie, apron off and in her everyday clothes, looks like Eleanor Roosevelt, top heavy, jowled, a preposterous hat. Her teeth, too\u2014Hattie's\u2014are made out of wood and wooden yellow.\n\nNetta says to us, \"Be thankful for what you've got.\"\n\n\"I am!\" Frannie says, and I say, \"We are!\"\n\nWe are, we are, we are, we are everywhere running through the house, shooed out of rooms. \"Go outside or watch TV!\" In the old war footage the women wear scarves and rush across rubble.\n\n\"Aren't you glad you weren't born then?\" Netta asks because she _was_ alive then. She _lived_ through the war although not as meanly; nevertheless, she says, \"Really, aren't you glad you weren't born then?\"\n\n\"We are!\" but we like to pretend we are the dispossessed, and we pick at Hattie's coffee cake to make it last the war. The snow blows up and sideways, and what was close outdoors is blurred in so much weather. Will Mr. Rassmusen drive through it? The whiteness squalls across the fields.\n\n(I miss my mother.)\n\nStranded in the country! Even the sander couldn't get through to us, not to mention Mr. Rassmusen. Hattie said, \"His heart is old...I hope he knows enough to stay at home.\" By then the phones were down and the deep house groaned. The sound was the sound of ice settling over the lake, and we ran away from what we heard, ran throat-hurt through our Netta's house. The magical house, the big house, the house I wanted as my own. The doors when opened huffed attic air, and we danced across the ballroom and slid to the windows and saw snow-blind-close trees. Who could get near us?\n\n(In another house I put my mouth over Mother's and cried down to a baby, \"Can you hear me?\")\n\nHattie is shouting into the dead phone so Mr. Rassmusen might hear. \"See how the roads are tomorrow. Don't drive!\" This big, ugly woman is in tears. Thirty-five years come June and she can count on her hand the nights apart from Mr. Rassmusen. They met when they were not much older than we are. Their daddies both farmed. But it's never been dull, farm life. Farm life is full of incident: bladed equipment, animals, blood.\n\nTonight Hattie's story is the fox! Found midwinter, his flattened, frozen carcass breaks in half when P.J. bats with it. That P.J.! He came to collect Hattie once and walked in calling, \"Ma!\" There wasn't but the one car and Hattie heeding to it.\n\nOut here the land is vacant. The fields look sad.\n\nWe should have a fire and sit close, knee to knee, feet to the flames\u2014let the heat muddle us! We should get warm enough to wander. Netta's house is very large and unlived in without kids. Netta says she _loves_ having us live here. \"You have no idea,\" she says, \"how much.\" We roam and look into and open; we make the house ours and use different tubs, strike fires in comfortable rooms, because Frannie can use matches. She lights the library fire and we sit with Hattie's cookies in our laps, eating, lazing, reading until we leave the stupefying fire to lean against the windows in the sunroom with the parrots. How cool it is, but what is that we smell? What is Hattie making?\n\nHattie says, \"Now you're in the kitchen, do you want to help?\"\n\nWe stand beating and beating the frosting, which catches on our arms, so we lick at ourselves until the frosting peaks and we can make a road down the middle. We're done! Done and dumbed with sugar and listening\u2014 _shhhhh._\n\nThe plow makes cow noises as it lumbers up the hill, and somewhere men in clouds of snow are tossing sand and shoveling. Mr. Rassmusen, we hope, stays in; such strenuous work could kill him\u2014his heart. His heart and his back! Hattie hopes the man is smart enough to make P.J. do it. P.J. is young. P.J. is not much older than we are; but he smells like a man to us, earthy and unsafe. Unshaved, unwashed, uncouth. _Uncouth?_ Frannie's word. She can be a show-off, Frannie can. She can smarm her way into something sweet. Hattie simply forgets what time it is\u2014almost dinner!\u2014and she tells us stories. The day P.J. and his older brothers went shirtless near the forage blower and came out bloodied with their own blood or something else's. Hattie's stories. The sick-making smell of skunk and the mutt's whining home from it. Who dared go near him? Even when he smelled of himself or of the marshy water he swam in, that mutt was not a dog to get close to. The rats in her barn sleeked through the silage, fearless. Hattie's stories. Cows and horses, litters of kittens found egged in strawed places, this was how she lived. She left out sadness.\n\nThe coarse stink of onion grass and her rushed and dingy hairdo. Hattie in the sleeveless dress she wears to cook in\u2014housecoat cotton, no matter the cold\u2014Hattie is here when she is not here. Hattie's slippers and sleeveless dress she keeps in the backstairs bathroom. We have to hold our breath the whole time in there\u2014hurry!\n\nThis happened in the middle of summer in the middle of another play of Frannie's devising. My part was small, but it called for me to swing the hammock until Frannie fell out. Of course, she fell too hard; but it was not, Netta assured me, my fault.\n\nHattie said, \"It's both yews' fault.\"\n\nI hated Hattie then.\n\nFrannie had her cast signed so many times it looked like her yearbook page. Silly flowers and hearts in colored pens, accounts of love, old secrets. She wrapped her arm in plastic and held it in the air when she swam; she screamed if she thought I had splashed her. \"Get a towel!\" She was fearful the ink might run and the precious cast crumble.\n\n(Mother used a hanger and scratched her own back bloody; I saw.)\n\nSomeone's coming; headlights rove over the snow, and Hattie hopes it is not who she thinks it is, but his headlights show in the falling. The rest is darkness.\n\n(They say our mother is happier where she is.)\n\nWhat did Hattie know then that we did not?\n\n(Mother had her secrets; she had more than most.)\n\nThe passenger door was ledged with snow that sighed over Hattie when she closed it.\n\nMy dream began that all was blackness and terrible stars, yet they could see where they were going, and the roads, too, I thought, were cleared. They drove in heat and quiet, and Hattie took her scarf off and smoothed what she wore for hair. There wasn't much.\n\n\"Lick,\" Hattie saying. \"Lick the spoon.\"\n\nThat smell I brushed against waiting at her waist for her lap.\n\n_Come back!_\n\n# UNREDISCOVERD, UNRENAMEABLE\n\nBEFORE THIS, THE ISLAND'S outreachings\u2014vetch, creeper, bittersweet\u2014the podded and nodding, all was bedlike August and inviting us to sleep. But we didn't sleep; we wanted to be self-sufficient and secure and scouted the island to stockpile whatever could be eaten, burned. Mother boiled rose hips and sweetened grains with berries popped between her fingers\u2014her slender fingers and their used, bruised stains! Our mother, of course, knew how to feed us; she knew which leaves to crush and hold against our noses. Lemongrass, mint, lavender, thyme. With such scents as these our mother soothed us, and at night she told the stories with the cautions at the end: \"That's how accidents happen.\"\n\nMy sisters wanted to be the stories, central and adored, but I was of an age that wanted stories about Father as I was now, a boy whose swollen sex woke him with alarm, and then the delight in its easing.\n\nI wanted the story of Father's looking on, spellbound\u2014his word\u2014by the simmering Oma stitching up her lip with only whiskey to numb the work. Not that Oma drank much. Not even her lip, split enough for stitches, could make her drink. Nothing that happened to our father's mother's mother\u2014not the lip, not the fire, not the loss of her Dora\u2014could raw our Oma to tears.\n\nWas I so brave as that? I didn't ask.\n\nOur father's mother's mother was brave, and our father was brave, too. He was the one who cut down the suicide, that possum-ugly, mud-dark, urinous man. \"Tell us again,\" but in the stories Mother repeated, our father came out married. He came out worn and running away, leaving Mother with the next bad job.\n\n\"Is that a true story?\" we asked, unbelieving.\n\nThe island life was good then, but not so good as we would stay here.\n\nHere, the ocean and its drama, an island cliffed and beaten by ferocious waves on one side and at the other flat and lapped. \"Water, water everywhere and not a one of us can swim!\" Our mother's song for us when Father took us to the pond. The pond, in the center of the island, was where we learned to swim, holding to the soft bank and kicking such a froth until the bridge of my nose burned from snorting water and it seemed I was water, blinded and blued with water, my face all snot and spit. \"Let go!\" Father said, and he kicked me loose, and I sank. This happened over and over again while Mother stood by singing.\n\nOur mother says the mornings now are hardest and that I should know how many nights she cannot sleep unless she braces her body between the bodies of my sisters.\n\nBut I was speaking of before, before the rain washed out our start, our father, and the very boat that brought us; before the rain, the island was dewed and bejeweled with water caught in plattered leaves we drank from as from glasses. Deer, which must have clicked across the ice one winter, bounded past us, and there was smaller wildlife\u2014fox, raccoon, rabbit, squirrel\u2014and birds of northeastern, fall-serious colors. Mussels, periwinkles, dust-scuttling crabs, and bark-colored fish, the shallow water could be farmed, and we gathered what the high tide left behind. We gathered low-bush berries and mosses we could eat. This was our beginning, when the insistent squaw of seagulls crashing after urchins, susurrant grasses, and groggy frogs, the thin pitch, high pierce of insects was our music on any clear morning. The trees swept through the afternoon until stilled by the sun, they held themselves erect as candles, and the island flamed, and Father told my sisters, \"Wish!\" and they did, I think; I saw their mouths move. The island was in such ways silencing. The nights, guttering in kerosene, were starry and long\u2014and the cold, the cold! Often I was witness to my mother when she held out her hands and said, \"Look at how cracked,\" when she said, \"No matter how beautiful it is here, I am lonely.\"\n\nTo me she confided how she missed seeing other people, simply people passing, strangers whose stories she liked to make up; and when she thought there was no one but us now to know her own story, she was sad.\n\nI was a son. The island, I knew, would not always be my home\u2014even if my sisters never married and pursued eccentric crafts, I would not come back to act as the stunted bachelor brother. My aim was to...well, I couldn't see an end exactly. The ordinary world we had left behind looked far away. The ordinary world from the islands highest point hung at a watery distance like laundry, like cold-smelling and sun-smelling coarse cloth. No harbor mess of lobster traps and low-tide stinks from here. From here, where I went sometimes for the view, I saw what we had left and what I could go back to.\n\nImagined blocks in fall's whetted light, fall's winds, a new smell, school.\n\nBut it was August. The island was hushed, and the pond where we swam was turned to scum. My sisters sulked. \"Daddy,\" they said, \"don't make us.\" I had no choice but to ease off the bank and into the water as example to my sisters, who yet resisted, saying, \"He's a boy, Daddy, please don't make us.\"\n\nThe intoxicant of _swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming_! Alone, afar, adrift from my family and Father shouting from the shore made me wonder at the submerged and muffled experience of water, which was also the experience of my age\u2014fourteen. I might sign on board if a boat passed near enough, I might explore the mainland.\n\nI saw my oldest sister's sex in sudden passing, a hairless white hardness and a dark slot. I saw her and touched myself and was not ashamed. The island conspired to sex us; the leaves, torn, milked, and there was hissing. The stones' soft shapes marked and swashed by rising water\u2014rising water itself\u2014ferns unfurling, teary gums and oozes from the trees, slimes, foams, the sweat that fell from Mother's face when she was bent to anything...all, all of it aroused me. My sister, the oldest, yet not so old but that she wandered in undress, made me want to hurt her. What would she feel like to squeeze?\n\nThe skin on her arm when I twisted it was hairless and cool, and I could feel the bone in her arm, whereas the youngest's arms were all flesh. The youngest was easier to drag; her hip bones knocked against the stones; and she bumped along the length I dragged her; yet she liked to be dragged\u2014they both did\u2014and spooked and swung around and chased and carried. Piggybacked and given up to jouncing, the oldest sagged the reins by which she held me; and she leaned back and looked up and in a clip-clopped voice noised her pleasure at the sky. So this was childish play, and I was aroused, and I kissed her.\n\nShe said, \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Act like someone else,\" I told her, and she didn't move when I touched her but stayed on her back and still.\n\nThe fog descended on the island, and the wind came up, and there was lightning where we lived. Our father died. Rain, rain, rain runneling down a mud slide, our father stuck and drowned. Mother made a spoon of her fingers and scooped mud from his eyes.\n\nI begged against his ear to breathe.\n\nMy sisters cried.\n\nOn the cliff side of the island Mother beat me nearly deaf. \"There are goats if that's your purpose,\" she shouted.\n\n\"But what is my purpose?\" I asked, and I was mad in pain and sick and Mother said at first she didn't know what and then she did. \"Why not stay here and people the island?\" she asked. \"Why not fuck me?\"\n\n# WINTERREISE\n\nUSED TO BE EVEN in the rain we walked hooded in water-repellent bicolor suits that swished and sounded as if we were fat when we were thin, both of us, Margaret and I, and only walking for the routine and the way it felt, hands free, holding nothing. Children, leashes\u2014my first husband\u2014we left even the dogs sleeping to meet each other at the entrance to the park marked by the great elm, that folktale tree with its house-wide trunk sprung green. We meet there still although not as often\u2014and no more in the rain.\n\nNo more in the morning either, but in the afternoon when we are certain of the weather and the light, then we walk. We take the bridle path where the low, gnarled cherries cut the cutting wind off the reservoir. In spring the wind undoes the blossoms, and they snow on us; but in winter the stripped cherries are all black trunk and hugely tumored. Last winter Margaret asked that we avoid them, and we did. We took the road and went south beneath the sycamores. The sycamore, or plane tree, as my husband calls it, is a true city tree and seems always in autumnal leaf somehow, not yet exhausted, not yet stripped. Nothing, I think, not even the scarlet oak, Thoreau's favorite, can exceed the sycamore's assertive seriousness and grace, but my husband prefers the ginkgoes.\n\nMargaret does not have a husband anymore to poll for his favorites\u2014if he ever had favorites, trees that is, which I doubt. \"A man,\" Thoreau says, \"sees only what concerns him,\" and Margaret's husband has always been concerned with just himself. He does not write to or see his children. Not even when his grandson was born did the man think to call his daughter. His absence in the lives of his son and daughter has worried Margaret on our walks. She says, \"I wish he would see them.\"\n\nI start to say, but Margaret says, \"I know what you're going to say\u2014and thank you, really, I mean it.\"\n\nWe are in October, one of the great man's months, March being the other, and because I aspire to see as purely as Thoreau did, I read the essays at night and bring him with me on our walks. I like to think it cheers Margaret, and she says it does, although she says a lot of things, I think, to make me happy. Today, for example, when we meet at the elm, I see she stands unsteady in a wind that is quite gentle; yet when I ask her if she would rather not walk, she says, \"No, no, no, I'm hoping to see something red. I'm ready.\"\n\nThere is little of red on our walks; the city mostly yellows. The ginkgoes are especially good at this. The fans that are their leaves never brown but turn, at the same instant, a like yellow. The trees look like matches, evenly planted, erect, and alight down the street. My husband admires them and is saddened, as am I, when the late rains thrash them from their branches.\n\nBut the ginkgoes have just begun to turn; we are not so far in the season, and Margaret and I have time, have weeks, I hope, to seek the reds, the sumac and the serviceberry, the flush of burning bush against the blue water when the water is blue and hard to look at in the afternoon angles of the sun. Near to the tennis courts and the north water station and the bridge this happens: the bridle path widens and rubbles and is hard to walk, so we turn onto the grassy swell and lean against the peeled trunk of a sycamore. We stop walking so that Margaret can catch her breath, and then it is we squint west, southwest across the water.\n\nThe reservoir wholly bright hurts memory enough to make a viewer weep, but Margaret\u2014amazing woman that she is\u2014doesn't. She looks at the water while I cry, not loudly, of course, not even a lot of sniffle, just the eyes wet but distorting and coloring the white water so that I don't see water but rather our collective past, Margaret's and mine; I see the afternoons we have spent together. Those days we shoved onto the rocky paths with our children strapped in strollers that sometimes stopped short with our cargo nearly thrown against the stones we would drive over. We bumped over curbs, too, recklessly, the way young wives do with their health so casually assumed, wagging bags of it shouldered loosely. In our neighborhood, Margaret's and mine, the bills fly for the simplest meals, although as young wives we made elaborate dinners, by the book, especially planned, costly. Parties these were, dinner parties for our young husbands and the other young husbands and wives from whom we hoped to gain\u2014what?\n\nSo many of them now have left the city or moved to other parts of the city, met perhaps with their own disasters. I see few of the old gang anymore; only Margaret, really, from those times persists, lives, albeit alone, in the same prewar six in the Nineties off Fifth. If I press my cheek against her bedroom window, I can see the park.\n\nNow when I visit her or when we walk, Margaret will remember someone we knew, and we will speculate about him and him and her. The couples\u2014so many\u2014what has become of? The little girls in French organza on the holidays\u2014remember? The fabulous couple who sold apartments one after the other must have made a killing! Surely they are living grandly wherever it is in Connecticut. Margaret says, \"I am not so sad they are gone.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" I say, and we agree the quiet life now is what we wanted all along. We are glad the dinner parties are over, the silver wrapped and on the high shelf, the linens packed in tissues. No more the tedious procedures for making pies and peeling chestnuts; we have only to walk. Dinner will take care of itself; no one comes home hungry.\n\nMargaret, especially, finds it hard to eat at night. Our walks are meant to help her appetite, but even the cannabis her son secrets her in hollowed books does not ease the way she has felt since\u2014since when? I am not sure when. Margaret asked me to keep it a secret, and I did until a hot, dark night my husband came home and found me listening to Schubert's _Winterreise_ and the last, most melancholy songs. He asked, \"Is it so cold already?\"\n\nThe _Winterreise_ is music I save for January, which Thoreau found, as I do, the hardest month to get through. Winter, and the bridle path is impassable and even the road walked south is balked with ice and banked snow. When we walk in winter, we must walk slowly, although we walk very slowly all the time now.\n\nThe speed suits our purpose, although I must remind Margaret of this fact whenever she falls into a fit of apologizing, as she does often, saying, \"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so slow.\" Then I remind her of what we are about on our walks. We are attending to nature. What business have I in the woods, Thoreau asks, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? So Margaret and I sit on the bench near the playground and look up at the honey locust's acid green. The underside of the tree is darkly branched, veined as a body is, a green heart. Everywhere, I find, the landscape gives us back ourselves, and when the etched bark of the suffering elm reminds me of my suffering friend who would keep, above all, her dignity, I weep. I weep, and I am out of the woods again!\n\nMargaret says, \"Don't you apologize now.\"\n\nTo live each day as well as we can was Thoreau's goal, and I want it to be mine\u2014but to see my friend scarved like a pirate! Margaret's hair was once...it was once old yellows, greens, and blues. Schoolgirl thick, braided, bound, fantastically clipped in enormous clips, her hair was a feature untouched by her husbands leaving or the upset with her boy, his expensive confusions, his noisy failures. These disappointments had never disclosed themselves in Margaret's hair, although much of the rest of her contracted. Her brow was a scowl even sleeping. I knew. I had come upon her sleeping once and seen it: the arguments she must have had in sleep! This was when we drove to see her son at his college and slept in the last bed to be had in leaf season.\n\nThe leaves, I remember, and the colors on the toy-scale hills. Once we were beyond the broken and abandoned about the city\u2014cones, netting, dividers, the many cautionary signs\u2014the road widened and smoothed, and it seemed then we were alone and pioneering into the riotous crayoned woods of a time when teachers had said, \"Color something special for Thanksgiving.\" Red, red, red, orange we admired all the way to the white and shuttered towns, the needle steeples of the churches and incorporated signs reading seventeen something, seventeen something, earlier and earlier all the way to Margaret's son, found lolling on a green once crossed by minutemen. \"Imagine!\" we had extolled, though nothing impressed him.\n\nThe boy had said, \"I'm not getting anything out of school, Mom. I want to take a year off instead. I want to travel.\"\n\nMargaret said, \"Peter\"\u2014his name\u2014\"Peter, will you use your head!\"\n\nThe boy stayed on another year writing lackluster papers on the history of art, then groaning home for holidays\u2014another Christmas, another Easter. He blued the apartment with French cigarettes until his weary mother said, \"So travel, if this is what you want.\" The boy worked his way across\u2014across oceans, continents, misogynistic countries\u2014forgetting what he looked like in the dirt-poor towns, the kind he was after. He wrote, \"I've had enough of comfort,\" so that who would have guessed his unexpected self-discovery? Cabinetmaking! Which he practices with mixed results near what was once his college.\n\nMargaret, on our walks, sometimes speaks of him, of Peter, she begins, \"If I had\u2014\"\n\nThoreau would have us live with nature in the present, above time.\n\nBut it is hard to live above time. The church bell sounds the hours and the neighborhood streets are trafficked with our pasts, backpacked students in a jangle of keys, fretful mothers. Weekday mornings, afternoons, the coffee shops clog while kids pool change. Must be three-thirty, school out, nearing four, I guess, until the ambulance's wail or the pushy must of fire trucks, the clamor of it all, insists it is ongoing and anytime; this is a city.\n\nThis is a city, but we are in the park. We are straining to be in the park, Margaret and I, and out of reach of time and memory and sickness, which yet wash back beneath the trees. Nothing withstands sensation; the tremulous body will not hold still or still enough in the present to catch, by hand, small fish. But Thoreau, Thoreau could hold himself so stilly that rodents burrowed in his pocket, snakes slithered at his feet. He stood, as any tree might, ready, alert, large; the scrambling world would nest in him, he was in such ways constant and outstretched.\n\nI am not so generous.\n\nOnce invited to hold her in bed, I took up Margaret's hand instead and petted it, and when the nurse came in with her cruel means to relief\u2014sharp objects, colorless drugs\u2014I said, \"I'll just step out for a bit.\"\n\nThe soldierly Thoreau drums past me; I am not brave. The slick at Margaret's neck I know for sweat I will not touch for fear of catching what she has, and this is stupid, I know. I am ashamed of these feelings and of much else that I imagine when we are walking: the sea's disgorged of shipwreck on Cohasset's rocky shore. I see what Thoreau saw of the brig on Grampus Rock. The matted, livid, swollen, and mangled, his adjectives, piled easily as salvage, yet he would look at the dead as at a gown or scarf or tossed-up bonnet. Such losses in indifferent winds are sung, yet he would look, Thoreau, he had his pencil, surely, his diary.\n\nMargaret has said, \"I would like you to help me pick out a dress. I want pearls around my neck for the viewing.\n\n\"I want to look at the Great Thing boldly,\" she says.\n\nI want to look at trees and not at losses past or those to come; yet the boles in the trees, those trees struck half dead, the startled quality of the exposed and leafless, the dusty feather-duster grasses waving in the shallows their piteous good-byes\u2014oh, the undulant lot of it moves with meaning! Nothing is only what it is, but we must\u2014I must\u2014insist on its underside, its theme, when what I have on my arm is just my friend.\n\nMy friend is fifty-six years old; the female parts of her have been scraped out. Her face is plucked, sketched. The enormous forehead is an oiled stone; the balled lids are lashless. Whatever came before and marked her has been sanded away.\n\nThe husband who left her on the side of the road\u2014gone.\n\nGone the restless son, the sometimes sickly daughter.\n\nBetrayals, losses, the inane nights alone slip like shawls from off her shoulders, lightly, and the late light turns her gold.\n\nShe says, \"The clarity of it all\"; she says, \"My heart.\" She is elusive, of course; she is dying. Thoreau, on the morning of his death and being read to, is said to have said, \"Now comes good sailing.\" Quotable to the very end, he is a hard, clean object, a white stone in dark water, woods, greens, needles underfoot. He is a walker; he walks a distance, as we would, from here to here.\n\n# THE BLOOD JET\n\nNECK PRICKLERS, IRRITANTS, THE papery labels seemed glued on, and I cut them off before I wore the shirts he gave me for no reason and which for no reason he often threw away. He was the boss, of course; he could do what he wanted. He insisted we visit the murdered wife's house, where, poking and poking with his finger at my head, he said, \"Bang, bang, bang,\" then told me how the banker husband shot her. He took me backstage to meet famous musicians. Rich friends he knew gave us tours of their estates, and he hinted at his own wealth's growing. He showed off his full-deck-thick clipped wad of money and the diamond his mother once wore on her hand. \"It could be yours,\" he said, \"if you behave.\"\n\nWhat a life this was!\n\nHe picked limes over lemons every time, and he liked toothpicked onions in his dry martinis. Martinis and daiquiris and old-fashioneds, scotch on the rocks, margaritas with salt. He was a drinker; this was in the eighties. I was thirty-six or thirty-seven but in surprising ways quite young.\n\nImagine growing up outside a village with one of everything, a dress shop, a dealership, a river. Everything named for what it was\u2014so many Nancys and Barbaras and Judys, and most in passed-down clothes that must have itched.\n\nI, I was skin sensitive even then.\n\nHe said, \"You think you're so much better than me.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, \"I don't,\" and though I lied\u2014and did think he was coarsely born\u2014he was lying, too, when he made up his moneyed past and passed off the powerful as friends. They were simply his clients, and he was treating. And there never was a second wife, adored, a well-born blond named Amy. She was nowhere in his apartment; I looked. The dispossessed stood landlocked and small in his famished pile of photographs: fences, stoops, indoor fights, and no sign of Amy at all. His apartment had an over-warm, shut-in smell\u2014too much man! Black hand towels, beige furniture, space-age lamps with saucered hoods, and sharp-edged ashtrays, surely gifts. The bookends were fashioned from golf clubs, and the books were, most of them, thrillers. No pictures of the living anywhere, not even of his daughter, the one he talked of, saying, \"You don't look like her. She's pretty.\"\n\nHow can I explain what I did next? I let him move in and forgot my daughters and made myself presentable. This involved shopping and spending his money or returning what he had bought me. I returned two expensive dresses, kept the watch and ruby earrings (rubies!), exchanged the scratchy mohair sweater and the clothes with chains for decoration, the frilly perfumes. He had someone else in mind, or he pretended there was someone else, and often when we fucked, he called me Amy.\n\nI called him nothing; he was as he was. His torso was creased from the folds of his bellies, and his unmuscled legs rasped walking. He moved slowly yet sweated; even newly ironed, the armpits of his shirts smelled sharply, and the strained seams of his worn pants advertised his ass, his hairy ass now in heavy motion, thrusting. I was dumbed to saying nothing, to calling him nothing but a cock, a very big cock. What else could you call that red trumpeting thing he slapped across my face?\n\nMy skill was spending, he said, and I sure knew how to do it. He said, \"Where's your wallet, cunt?\" when we both knew where it was, at home, on my dresser, empty. He said and he said, \"No one cares about you. You think you're pretty? Look again.\" Foam flecked the corners of his mouth when he spoke; his lips were fat. He drank. He said my husband was smart to trade me in and only he was so dumb as to stay on\u2014oh! Oh, it pissed him off, seeing me, and I was greeted with presents he tossed in gritted rage. My friends wondered why I put up with it. I said, \"I think I must hate my life\u2014I must.\" I did!\n\nEven on the island, where the tree frogs chirruped tunefully, I thought about other islands I had been on, and I spoke my husband's name out loud and sentimentally. I indulged in feeling sad; I said, \"I can't help myself too many times until the long long-distance calls I made home angered him to whining on the phone, \"Babies, I miss you, I do.\" He imitated me in a hideous voice, or else he shouted, \"Why don't you ever look at anything? Why don't you see what there is to see?\"\n\nHe was right, of course. I thought of the past; I compared. I considered skin\u2014was it porous or not? Don't ask me to describe his. I will tell you that he had slightly feminine highbrow taste. His shirts, for instance, were French cuffed and very soft. So why didn't he think soft with me?\n\nHe was never nice, yet I let him move in. This, I thought, was experience. This was preparation for some life or this was life after a certain age: acutely felt, clearly flat. No romance.\n\nMy daughters hated him. The oldest said she would never come home. \"I'll stay at Gran's,\" she said, \"and so will Cissy,\" although he liked Cissy, so I sometimes arranged to get Cissy, and we went out together, the three of us. Once we went to a soda shop, and he ordered a sundae\u2014a sundae!\u2014he spooning off and feeding her the whip cream. Prissy, he called her, also Little Dope, Cis Miss, Stupid Puss, Sis. At least I never let him drive Cissy anywhere\u2014I was that much a mother\u2014yet I, who was meant to look out for the child, I drove too fast and drunkenly when I took Cissy back to her gran's, my mother's, that bitch's.\n\nCrying then, always crying, I called Cissy my baby. She was my baby, my youngest and favorite. Cissy, my favorite, turned forward, hair beaten back, the curls on her baby head whapped straw dry and stiff by the time we got there\u2014\"Home again, home again, jiggity jog\"\u2014singing all the way to Mother's house, where my oldest daughter was somewhere inside and would not see me. Even my mother stayed behind the screen when she spoke. Mother was afraid of me, I think, when I was the one without children, outside. Because of him, I think, I lost them. I blamed him and I blamed my ex-husband, blamed my mother, everyone....\n\n\"Why did you let him into your house?\" my mother said.\n\nWhy did I?\n\nHe pulled the plugs to lamps to turn them off. He took pictures from the walls and broke them. I was afraid of what he would do. He poked with a hanger after tags I might have buried under rinds and smearing grease. The whiskey sediment in last night's glasses, last night's bloody plates. Violence and sickness. The dried-out, board-hard dish towel in its contorted, twisted shape. All was fragmented, unfinished, discomposed. \"Why don't you get a fur coat?\" he asked. \"Call your friend what's-it's. She'll know\"\u2014 _unlike you_ the unspoken parenthetical at the end of whatever he said to me. Easily cruel, the man scissored stitches to the large griefs and the small griefs, his expression seeming mean or sad.\n\nI began to think he was lying about his daughter, the pretty girl who never came to see him; and he was hateful to the boy who called some evenings asking for his dad. \"Don't call me here again,\" he said to the boy. \"You little fuck, it's none of your business.\"\n\nThe times I cautioned him, \"Remember, he's your son,\" he said, \"What do you know about being a parent?\"\n\nWhat did I? My oldest daughter vowed never to visit.\n\nMy oldest daughter said, \"You hate everyone,\" and she was right: I did hate many people. I hated disproportionately, vociferously, indulged in wrathful scratching and saying how I hated...I hated my mother, my ex-husband, him. Any inconvenience\u2014\"We don't have,\" \"We won't take,\" \"We can't do\"\u2014abraded old sores or made them, and I berated and insulted and slurred helpless persons and said _fuck_ and _fucking_ all the time. My daughters, witnessing, trailed with puzzled faces. \"Will you fuck off?\" I said to them\u2014and to him.\n\nI especially hated him and thought, If I only had his money...For he had money, and money gentles everything, except when it is given cruelly; then the thwart of cancellations and delays abrades. Think of a starchy collar against a sunburned neck.\n\nA day in spring too bald yet still pastel, the wind is hard through the trees. We are touring the murdered wife's house, where the carpeting sweeps through the gaping rooms\u2014few divisions, recessed lights, marble surfaces, money. The banker husband's, surely; what is she but aggravation\u2014a threatening debt, stupidly indifferent. \"A bit like you,\" the man says to me, \"a lot like you.\" He says, \"So go on. So _waah, waah, waah_ about money,\" but his hands come first.\n\nI am saying horrible things and hitting back, and we are standing in the murdered woman's bedroom. The house belongs to no one now until the bullet holes are fixed and someone else wants to live here. We don't!\n\nI already owned a house, but in the summer, for my sake, he rented within walking distance of the beach. The season cost as much as a car, but the house on the lane was invisibled by hedges, and I had lots of time on my own there\u2014no children. So what did I have to complain of? That's what he wanted to know.\n\nAt night, weepy, I wandered out of doors to such sensations as I had had once with a boy who fanned his hair for me to sleep on\u2014soft.\n\nThe heat blows through the summer rental; the house billows or seems to, and I am glad glad glad the man is gone! I can call my girls now and talk and talk until my tongue swells, and I am tired.\n\nCissy on the phone scolds, \"It's always sex with you, Mother. I'm too young.\"\n\nI was thirty-six, yes, thirty-six, and he was older by eleven years exactly. He said he would die first, especially with me around, but he promised trust funds for the girls, so I stuck it out carelessly and heard time clang past.\n\nWhy didn't I have more fun?\n\nOnce, in the beginning, before the neighbors, before the cops, he met us at the zoo. Cissy, I think, suspected he was coming, or something like him, something large and wheezing and hairy. Cissy, as a child, was open arms to anybody, but when he made to speak, she cried for me to lift her.\n\nWhy didn't I take my child to me and run?\n\nHe said from the start he was a misanthrope, but I didn't believe him. I thought...I thought adult life was meant to be uncomfortable, full of anguish and embarrassment; but after a while, I felt no embarrassment. What people saw, they saw.\n\nThe real estate agent saw us rushing from the murder scene to the lawn, saw this fat man hitting me, and me hitting this fat man, and both of us screaming how we hated and swearing we would\u2014yes, definitely, today, no more fucking around but seriously over now, no more, before we killed each other.\n\nThink of poisonous solvents that smoke through cloth. Think of miseries, stinks. He was steak-red and fat, and we were both full of wine when the house winked in high sun, a bloody charge against my eyes.\n\n\"Some renovation,\" the real estate agent had said, and it could be ours.\n\nNo thanks! I wanted to live at home again with my mother and the girls, but I didn't know how to ask.\n\n\"What a fucking sad sack!\" he said. He said horrible things, but I said worse.\n\nThe real estate agent in her locked car leaned on her horn as if, like water on the rabid, it would startle us apart. The dusty snarl of us, us on the front lawn in full sun fighting. Sun! How I cursed it! Heat chafed, itchy, cankered, and confused by the freakish rush of summer, and this man pushing me against the car, saying, \"Get in, goddammit, before I kill you.\"\n\nDo it! Do it! Do it! was my heart\u2014is still my heart when I think of him, and I think of him. I wonder at that tin-bright vision, that acidic bite of spit, that embrace, that poetry by which I live.\n\n# About the Author\n\nChristine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections _Nightwork_ and _A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer_. The former was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the _Times Literary Supplement_. Schutt's first novel, _Florida_ , was a National Book Award finalist for fiction in 2004, and her second novel, _All Souls_ , was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction in 2009. Her latest novel, _Prosperous Friends_ , is out now from Grove Press.\nAll rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2005 by Christine Schutt\n\nGrateful acknowledgement is made to the following magazines, where these stories first appeared in slightly different form: _Alaska Quarterly Review, American Voice, Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, NOON, Shade, Unsaid,_ and _Web del Sol._\n\nCover design by Mauricio Diaz\n\n978-1-4804-3847-7\n\nThis edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.\n\n345 Hudson Street\n\nNew York, NY 10014\n\nwww.openroadmedia.com\n\n# EBOOKS BY CHRISTINE SCHUTT\n\n**FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA**\n\nAvailable wherever ebooks are sold\n\n**Open Road Integrated Media** is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.\n\n**Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases**\n\nSign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.\n\nSign up now at\n\nwww.openroadmedia.com\/newsletters\n\n**FIND OUT MORE AT**\n\n**WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM**\n\n**FOLLOW US:**\n\n**@openroadmedia and**\n\n**Facebook.com\/OpenRoadMedia**\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}