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How Harry Shearer Discovered the Soul of Richard Nixon

by OliveGreenfield Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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The renowned satirist, actor, author, and musician Harry Shearer—you might know him as the bassist of Spinal Tap, the voice behind a panopoly of Simpsons characters (Mr. Burns and Flanders among them), host of Le Show, and a former Saturday Night Live player—has done his share of presidential impersonations, but no subject has captured his imagination like Richard Nixon.

In Nixon’s the One, a series that first aired on British television and premieres October 21 as a YouTube series, the 70-year-old Shearer reenacts the follies of our 37th president word for word from Nixon’s secret Oval Office recordings. (In the exclusive clip above, Nixon and an aide discuss how to destroy the networks, and come up with something that sounds a lot like Fox News.) The “comedy-drama,” co-written by the distinguished Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, is pure unadulterated Nixon. And Shearer, a talented impersonator, has nailed the cringe-inducing, can’t-help-but-watch pathos of perhaps our oddest and most paranoid Oval Office inhabitant. I caught up with the actor last week to discuss his comic attraction to Tricky Dick, his favorite Simpsons character, and the one thing he can’t stand about The Daily Show.

You also can listen to the unabridged audio version* (~46 minutes):

Mother Jones: You spent a great deal of time researching and developing this project. What draws you to Nixon?

Harry Shearer: I’m drawn to him like a bunch of flies to a pile of fascinating comic characteristics. I grew up in Southern California, and Nixon was omnipresent. I have dim memories of actually seeing the “Checkers” speech, where he saved his vice-presidential bid by making a very mawkish, lachrymose speech. He was accused of taking—here’s a quaint concept—illegal campaign contributions, and defended himself by saying, oddly enough, somebody gave us this dog, black and white checkered, and we’re gonna keep her. And that saved his bacon! And then, you know, he had this silly kitchen debate with Khrushchev; in 1958 he runs for president at the first televised debates and loses to John F. Kennedy; runs for governor of California two years later and has this remarkable press conference after he loses where he says, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” and then, of course, spends the next six years running for president.

MJ: Being kicked around!

HS: And kicking around. And so he sort of stood above and beyond the normal creepy politician. The first thing I was aware of as a kid was his hardball, if not mudball, politics. You may remember this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post which had Richard Nixon crawling up from down below in the sewer, followed shortly after by a picture of Nixon with just the words, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Nixon with his endemic five o’clock shadow!

MJ: So it was essentially his creepiness that attracted you?

HS: That was the first thing. But then it became obvious that there were really funny characteristics about this guy, chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times—just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.

MJ: Are you saying that he had more pathos than the average president?

HS: No, not more pathos. More—if the cortex is just a series of twists and bends and folds, he had more folds. Laughter.

Listen to an unedited audio clip of the previous exchange:

MJ: How long did it take you to feel you really had him nailed?

HS: I’ve been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called The Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him—if that’s a word—for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best. It was Nixon as a guest on an infomercial, where he was demonstrating a teeth-whitening miracle product. It was an opportunity to do full Nixon make-up and do the whole body, and a really great moment for me to see how far along I was.

MJ: Did you see any traits this time around that you hadn’t captured in your earlier impersonations?

HS: Yeah. I did emphasize more something that I’d never seen anybody capture, which is, for a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, he had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures. If you go look at that iconic moment where he’s standing on the bridge of the helicopter about to get in after he’s resigned, and he gives a salute, it isn’t a crisp, military salute at all. His hand is sort of like this butterfly flying away from his forehead. And he would purse his lips, he would flutter his eyelashes—there were a lot of these kinds of gestures.

MJ: Nixon has been satirized by Philip Roth in Our Gang. Anthony Hopkins played him in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Frank Langella in Ron Howard’s Frost Nixon. Dan Aykroyd did him early on in SNL.

HS: With a mustache!

MJ: Indeed.

HS: For added verisimilitude.

MJ: Who do you think has done him best or worst, mustaches aside?

HS: I’m not going to get into that. I saw a little bit of Anthony Hopkins after we did our show out of curiosity—I’m not a big Oliver Stone fan. But even sighted men have different versions of the elephant. And this is my version.

MJ: One of your most harrowing scenes covers the minutes before Nixon’s televised resignation speech. It really makes you cringe as Nixon nervously attempts to make jokey small talk with the television crew. Did you do anything special to prepare for that very emotional scene?

HS: It’s interesting. That is the one scene that is not from the White House taping system he installed. It was videotaped by an anonymous CBS engineer, and that tape circulated around in many bootleg versions of really dire video quality. When I went to the repository of the Nixon tapes at the National Archives, I befriended one of the guys there, and I said, “You know that tape?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, we have a great broadcast-quality version of it.” And so I managed to get a copy. And for years I would watch that tape with friends, and I’d memorized that scene long since. We’d recite it along with watching it—it was just such a wonderful moment.

MJ: Laughs. Is that what you do for fun in the Shearer household?

HS: Instead of betting on football! But—this sounds like goofy actor talk— having lived with that scene for all these years, the closest I could come to understanding it was the following: Here’s a guy who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk. And he manages through sheer determination—let’s be Horatio Algeristic about it—to rise to the top of the greasiest pole in America. And now he has to climb off that pole in humiliation and mortification. And what does he do in this room for these eight minutes? He engages in small talk.

I just thought it was ironically goofy. Then, while we were making this series, I happened upon a memoir by a mid-level White House staffer, and he had been in the room that night. This guy’s memoir told me what Nixon’s last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: “Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!” That was just so bizarre.

Now we’re rehearsing the scene, and suddenly it came to me what was going on. This was the beginning of his next campaign! This night was to become the beginning of his campaign for rehabilitation. In his mind, all those crew members were going to walk out of there saying, “He wasn’t bothered. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t upset. He was the nicest guy. He was making jokes, he even wished us a Merry Christmas!”

MJ: Christmas in August?

HS: He wanted them to remember him at Christmastime. He was planning little seeds of his rehabilitation. That’s my theory.

MJ: Listening to so many of these Nixon tapes that never made a lot of news, what other new gems did you discover?

HS: I wasn’t looking for newsworthy material. My partner, Stanley Kutler—the historian whose life has been steeped in these tapes and who filed the lawsuits that made them public—we were looking for the character stuff, the stuff that made us laugh. I’m not sure there are any bombshells left.

MJ: Well, did you learn anything new about Nixon?

HS: I couldn’t help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama’s. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. He wasn’t necessarily leading the parade, but they did happen during his administration. And he actually gave a speech late in his truncated second term advocating a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.

MJ: Sounds like a Commie!

HS: Imagine the number of drugs you’d have to administer to Obama to get him to make that speech!

MJ: Or any Democrat. Nancy Pelosi. Harry Reid. Even Paul Krugman wouldn’t advocate that, or at least I don’t think so.

HS: Even Bernie Sanders probably wouldn’t! If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.

MJ: Did you feel any sympathy for the man as you spent hours putting on make-up to look like him and produce these hours of reenactments?

HS: I wouldn’t say sympathy. Because sympathy implies you’re taking his side in things.

MJ: Empathy?

HS: Empathy gets a little closer to it. You know, I came up working for Jack Benny—I was a child actor. I think through osmosis I kind of got what his comic genius was about. If one recalls Jack Benny’s comic persona, he was not a nice man. He was vain, he was miserly, he was a bad boss, all characteristics we would regard as unlikable, and yet he was a lovable performer, because he was portraying the very flawed humanity of that character. And I wasn’t playing Nixon’s satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy. Here’s the eerie part: We were word accurate. We did our own transcripts. We actually hired John Dean’s transcriber.

MJ: And some of these tapes are hard to make out.

HS: Oh, they’re incredibly difficult. We hired someone who is skilled at that and even she had “inaudibles” and guesses at words. I have these digital sound-processing tools so, as we were rehearsing, the cast and I would discuss these phrases that just didn’t sound quite right. And I’d run the tape again through more of these tools, and almost magically words would pop out. And all of a sudden, Oh my God, that’s what he’s saying!

We had more script revisions than a troubled sitcom. The script supervisor would come around after what we thought was a great take and say, well, you moved this word or you paraphrased this. And I would curse her, but we’d do it again. And strangely enough, the takes where I got the words absolutely right, true to the transcript, were the performances that I felt and looked most Nixonian. Getting to his weird word choices and the weird word order and the repetitions and the backtracking that make it impossible almost to memorize got me closer to that guy.

MJ: Did you find that he had his own unique internal logic?

HS: Absolutely. When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there’s a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he’s still taping. I was writing these sketches and trying to approximate the way he and Haldeman would jump over each other and race to confirm each other and then race to negate each other, and Nixon’s way of expressing himself. So by the time we’re doing the real stuff, I felt so familiar with that inner world of his. The relationship with Kissinger is so funny and goofy we made a whole episode out of it. Kissinger was everything Nixon hated: a Harvard professor and a Jew and an intellectual. And Kissinger knew it. But the offer to be in a position of power was so intoxicating that he put up with all that shit.

Especially in the Kissinger scenes, Nixon would repeat the word “never” as if on a loop: “There’s never gonna be people from Harvard invited into this White House ever again. Never. Never. Never.” And he’s saying this right to Henry’s face, knowing that every time it’s a little pinprick into Kissinger’s gut. He did that on several occasions. You hear the “never, never, never” partly, I think, because Nixon knew that so many of the crazy things he told his staff to do they would ignore. There’s a scene in the pilot episode where he tells Haldemann flat out, “Destroy the tapes!” and he says “Can you do that?” and Haldemann nods and says, “Yes.” Of course, the tapes aren’t destroyed.

There’s another scene where he’s bitching about how he never got invited to a social occasion at the White House when Kennedy was president. Now, Kennedy is long dead by this point, and this is still burning deep within Nixon. That’s one of the things that I think is one of the darkly comic parts of his character. He just couldn’t let go of these resentments.

MJ: What was the response to the series in England?

HS: It got a great critical response.

MJ: You know how they love to feel superior to us.

HS: Yes, and sometimes they’re right. But I was thinking about why the show could get made there with this sort of creepy accuracy and couldn’t get made here. I just imagined if I’d been in the office of an American highfalutin’ cable channel, there would’ve been meetings that started with, “We know he didn’t like black people, but did he have to hate Jews too?” And I wanted to avoid those meetings. I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.

MJ: Who are easy to caricature.

HS: Drawing as well as acting. So in some ways, Brits just saw him as another one of those, except without a crown. Whereas in this country, at least when I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, “Oh, Jefferson had slaves?” It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn’t somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

MJ: Does the fact that Nixon attained the highest office in the land say something about America?

HS: Every president that makes it up there says something about the country. I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the ’90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s—a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I’m sure, though there’s no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

MJ: He should’ve trademarked it.

Harry Shearer Mark Sullivan/WireImage

HS: But now, in the grip of a very similar wave involving terrorism, we’ve succeeded in a far greater receding of our civil liberties in the name of avoiding an enemy much less powerful than the enemy when we were afraid of with Communism. Yet that fear propelled Nixon to the White House. Nixon’s genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam war. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election—but he didn’t tell us that then.

MJ: Is there any other president you’d like to play?

HS: Well, I’ve, on my radio show I’ve played every one since—

MJ: How’s your Garfield?

HS: Poor. But who’s to know?

MJ: Good point.

HS: My Franklin Pierce is spot on. But I’m not sure that there’s anybody else that’s as psychologically complex and who’s given us this window into his soul that Nixon gave us. That’s what I find absolutely addictive and seductive.

MJ: You’re the voice of many characters on The Simpsons: Mr. Burns, Smithers, Flanders, and probably 27,000 others. Stupid question: Do you have a favorite?

HS: Stupid answer: C. Montgomery Burns. Watch the following clip of Shearer reading a scene:

MJ: Is there a Nixonian quality to Mr. Burns?

HS: Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it’s the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

MJ: Will The Simpsons ever end, and if so, what should happen in the finale?

HS: As they say in Washington, above my pay grade. But I’ve long had an answer to the first question, which is that The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it—so I give us another 50 years.

MJ: Long may you wave.

HS: Thank you.

MJ: Is it true that Spinal Tap is reuniting to do a collection of Crosby, Stills & Nash covers?

HS: It’d be great! But sadly, no. I think you can look for a Crosby, Stills & Nash reunion doing Spinal Tap covers before you look for the other.

MJ: I’d like to see that! So, looking around at the state of political satire—SNL, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, etc.—how would you say the form is faring today?

HS: Well, I will say one thing that all those shows have in common, which I find sad, if not reprehensible. Satire is an art best practiced behind the back of the intended target. I think inviting politicians on a satirical show becomes a very big trap. Because one of two things happen: Either you have to kind of unsharpen your fangs because you can’t be quite as cruel to people to their face as you are behind their backs…

MJ: When you have the Pakistan dictator on, you kind of yuk it up with him.

HS: Yeah. Or you don’t defang, and those guests get the word and they stop coming. I think the former has happened in all three cases. I remember when Christopher Guest and Marty Short and I joined SNL in 1984. And we said to Dick Ebersoll, then the producer, “This show is established. We can get our own ratings. We don’t need these guests that can’t do comedy and are often politicians—everything kind of gets distorted by that.” In fact, the first show of that season had no guest host. And we thought “Okay, great!” And by show three, our guest host was Jesse Jackson, and he had moved half of Operation Push into our office so they could make free long-distance calls.

MJ: He did Green Eggs and Ham on SNL and it was very funny.

HS: Yeah, I just think everyone knows you go on those shows if you’re a politician to, “humanize yourself”—to show, “Hey, I can take a joke.” Well, why should satire be in the service of humanizing these people who are supposed to be the target of our venom and vitriol? I think that’s unseemly.

MJ: So many political satirists seem to be on the liberal side of the equation. Are there any great humorists out there with a conservative bent?

HS: Yeah, sure. PJ O’Rourke has been funny and conservative for years. I find myself being lumped in with the left, though I’m as critical of Obama as I have been of any president. I think it’s the satirist’s job to be critical of—the cliché—the guys with the monopoly on the guns. In the United States you have to amend it to say the guys with the majority of the guns. Or the bigger guns. But I think that’s the gig. Otherwise you become a court jester. You become the satirist who ended up writing jokes on the side for one of the recent presidential candidates. Well, now you’re really a hired gun. You’re just comedy oppo research.

*In the audio version, Shearer got a few facts wrong: Nixon is emerging from the sewer in the Herblock cartoon, but he isn’t actually peeking out from under a manhole cover. Also, the “Would you buy a used car…?” poster was created by Nixon’s Democratic opponents, not Herblock.

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How Harry Shearer Discovered the Soul of Richard Nixon

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These Women Are the NRA’s Worst Nightmare

by WilliamWby Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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A march across the Brooklyn Bridge, June 2014. John Minchillo/AP

Kelly Bernado woke to the headlines after working her late shift as an ER nurse in Seattle, and she cried through the day and into the next, the shooting at her own son’s high school a year before haunting her all over again. In Houston the morning after it happened, Kellye Burke was on her way to pick up a Christmas tree, her six-year-old son nestled in his car seat, when she saw the large LED road sign publicizing a gun show and felt the urge to scream. In Brooklyn, Kim Russell felt a surge of adrenaline when she heard the news; after choking back the nausea, she began agonizing about what her first-grader would hear at school. She’d never told her daughter about the time when a robber shot her friend to death and wounded her, then pressed the cold muzzle against her forehead as she begged for her life.

At home in an Indianapolis suburb the morning following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Shannon Watts, a 41-year-old former public relations executive and mother of five, created a Facebook page calling for a march on the nation’s capital: “Change will require action by angry Americans outside of Washington, D.C. Join us—we will need strength in numbers against a resourceful, powerful and intransigent gun lobby.” The seed for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America—today a national organization backed by nearly 200,000 members and millions of dollars—had been planted. “I started this page because, as a mom, I can no longer sit on the sidelines. I am too sad and too angry,” Watts wrote. “Don’t let anyone tell you we can’t talk about this tragedy now—they said the same after Virginia Tech, Gabby Giffords, and Aurora. The time is now.”

Three days later, five women convened in Brooklyn for a Skype call with Watts and formed the group’s first chapter. They felt that what happened in Newtown was like another 9/11. None of the women had experience as political activists, but they did remember Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the pioneering grassroots movement of the 1980s that rewrote laws and battled cultural resignation about alcohol-related traffic deaths. They also realized they had an asset that MADD organizers could only have dreamed of: social media. As word of a new effort to confront gun violence sprang up in Facebook feeds, offers flooded in to help launch more chapters, from Virginia and Texas to Kentucky and Colorado.

Kim Russell, Lucia McBath, and Erica Lafferty during the NRA’s 2014 annual meeting. Everytown for Gun Safety

Today, Moms Demand Action has teams on the ground in all 50 states, elbowing their way into policy hearings and working to motivate “gun sense voters” fed up with the carnage. In less than two years, the organization has compelled more than a half-dozen national restaurant chains, internet companies, and retailers to take a stand against lax gun laws, and has joined forces with one of the nation’s most deep-pocketed political operators to hold elected leaders to account. Many groups have taken on the nation’s 30,000 annual firearm deaths—and this latest effort bears resemblance to the Million Mom March in the wake of the 1999 Columbine shooting, whose organizers also sought to be “a MADD for guns.” But no group has risen so far, so fast, influencing laws, rattling major corporations, and provoking vicious responses from hardcore gun rights activists. With its ambition to turn out a million voters for the November midterms, Moms Demand Action may be emerging as a potent threat to the National Rifle Association’s three-decade-long stranglehold on gun politics.

If stricter national gun laws seemed imminent in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, just four months later the popular narrative was that any chance for change had been deep-sixed. A majority in the US Senate approved universal background checks for gun buyers, but the bill fell a few votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Once again, the NRA had won.

But Moms Demand Action took the fight to another arena—public opinion, with a special focus on brand-conscious corporate America. After Sandy Hook, Second Amendment activists had stepped up a tradition of openly carrying firearms into Starbucks stores (“open carry” is legal to varying degrees in all but a few states), so in May 2013, Moms launched a campaign urging members to “#SkipStarbucks” on Saturdays and post pictures of themselves having coffee elsewhere. Watts and Kate Beck, a Moms leader in Starbucks’ hometown of Seattle, published a scathing op-ed on CNN.com calling out the company’s inaction and citing an accidental shooting at a Starbucks in Florida and a rally at another in South Dakota that drew 60 armed activists. “As mothers,” they said, “we wonder why the company is willing to put children and families in so much danger. Nobody needs to be armed to get a cup of coffee.”

When CEO Howard Schultz announced in mid-September that firearms were no longer welcome on Starbucks’ premises, he declined to discuss the steady pressure applied by Moms, whose 54 Facebook posts over three and a half months had reached more than 5.5 million people and spawned a 40,000-signature petition.

Not long after, dozens of men carrying semi-automatic rifles descended on a Dallas restaurant where four Moms members were having lunch. The women took pictures and turned it into a national news story. It was “a public relations disaster” for the open-carry activists, says veteran Republican strategist and gun owner Mark McKinnon. “Lesson learned? Moms trump guns.”

Social media had helped set off a tectonic shift. “Now there’s this passionate community of people who can instantly be in touch in a very public and affirming way,” says Kristin Goss, a political scientist and author of Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. “That’s a very new thing for this cause.” Second Amendment activists have long relied on gun shows, stores, and ranges to rally their faithful, she says, “but for supporters of gun regulations, what’s that space—the emergency room? It’s Facebook.”

Shannon Watts. Chang W. Lee/New York Times/Redux

But a few high-profile victories and rapid growth had brought an age-old problem: Moms Demand Action struggled to raise enough money to sustain a corps of national and regional leaders. In summer 2013, Watts met with Mark Glaze, head of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in Montana. They talked at length as they rode a mountain gondola beneath the expansive vistas near Big Sky, forging a plan to build the furthest-reaching operation yet to go toe-to-toe with the NRA. Bloomberg’s group had what Moms needed—not just big funds, but also an expert policy shop and a sprawling political network—but it lacked what Moms had in spades: grassroots firepower and an appealing image. As one political operative who has worked on the guns issue put it, “If you were desperately trying to rebrand your organization because everybody hates you for taking their cigarettes and sodas and guns, wouldn’t you leap at the moms?”

As the nation prepared to light anniversary candles for the 20 children and six educators of Sandy Hook in December, the two groups announced their combined operation: Everytown for Gun Safety, backed by a whopping $50 million from Bloomberg, who vowed to double the NRA’s political spending in 2014. “We were the perfect solution to each other’s problems,” Glaze, who was Everytown’s executive director until this June, told me. Momentum toward reform could have vanished after the background check bill went nowhere, he notes, “as often happens when you sort of lose with your big moment and your advocates in the field fade away. We were determined not to let that happen.”

There seemed a snowball’s chance that Congress would take on guns again, but Moms had other plans. Starting in January it campaigned against Facebook—where people regularly advertise guns for sale and can easily circumvent background checks for buyers—soon prompting the site to introduce better protections for minors and crack down on potentially illegal sales. In the spring, when Texas open-carry activists showed up armed at national restaurant chains in Dallas and San Antonio, Moms responded with a volley of press appearances, petition drives, photo memes, and hashtags. Guys flaunting loaded assault rifles at Chipotle? Time for #BurritosNotBullets. At Chili’s? #RibsNotRifles. At Sonic, America’s Drive-In? #ShakesNotShotguns. It took less than two weeks for Chili’s and Sonic to officially reject firearms at their eateries; in Chipotle’s case, just 48 hours in the crosshairs was enough.

More MoJo reporting on the Open Carry movement


Fearing Rising Backlash, NRA Urges Gun Activists to Stand Down


Spitting, Stalking, Rape Threats: How Gun Extremists Target Women


Gun Activists With Assault Rifles Harass Marine Vet on Memorial Day


Target Gets Drawn Into Gun Rights Battle


Target Remains in Crosshairs of Texas Gun Fight


Gun Activists Flaunting Assault Rifles Get Booted From Chili’s and Sonic

Moms made Target the next battleground, gathering images posted by open-carry activists who’d toted their AR-15s in the toy aisles and declared the retailer “very 2A friendly.” With Moms’ hashtag activism plugged into Everytown’s political machinery and mailing list of 1.5 million names, Target headquarters in Minneapolis got hit with 11,000 phone calls and 390,000 petition signatures within a month. Moms also called out Target’s new strategic partner The Honest Company (the baby products line from young mom Jessica Alba), staged “stroller jams” at Target stores in Texas and Virginia, and protested outside the company’s annual shareholder meeting.

Just before July Fourth, the nation’s fourth-largest retailer announced that firearms were no longer welcome in its 1,789 stores.

Last week, Moms launched a six-figure ad campaign targeting Kroger over its gun policy, and on Monday, Panera Bread—which approached Moms months ago to discuss the issue—announced that it does not want firearms brought into its stores.

Forcing corporations to take a stand against gun activists is no small feat, says Glaze, an experienced Washington lobbyist. “Changes to the culture are more important than legal changes in some ways,” he says. “This sends a message that having guns everywhere makes people uncomfortable, which goes directly against the gun lobby’s agenda—to normalize having them everywhere.”

“As each fresh shooting Horror is met by the same inaction in Congress, a roiling frustration may be awakening an army of moms who see themselves as outsiders armed only with their clout as voters and agitators.” So wrote a reporter for Time magazine—in May 2000, on the eve of the Million Mom March on Washington. The parallels between that grassroots movement and today’s are striking. The Columbine massacre in April 1999 had gripped the nation, but it was a rampage at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles four months later that set off the movement, after Donna Dees-Thomases—a 42-year-old mom and part-time corporate publicist living in New Jersey—saw news footage of a daisy chain of children being led away from the building. “Think about what those kids saw,” Dees-Thomases said in the Los Angeles Times about the attack that left five seriously wounded, including three kindergarten-age boys. (All the victims survived, though the gunman killed a mail carrier elsewhere before the rampage ended.) “I thought, ‘Why haven’t we done anything?'”

The method then was email, internet newsgroups, and an 800 number listed in newspaper ads; soon the Million Mom March had chapters all over the country. They campaigned for “common sense gun laws,” and their march on Washington, which drew roughly three-quarters of a million people, included a stroller parade. They soon merged with the long-established Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and fought to shape policy at the state and local levels as well.

But where the Million Mom March was limited by its focus on legislation, its agenda soon eclipsed by the election of George W. Bush, and then 9/11, Moms Demand Action has gone a different route. “They’ve been incredibly creative with campaigns that don’t rely upon elected officials, and finding alternative pathways to influence,” says Goss, the political scientist. They also have the opportunity of heightened public awareness: A spate of mass shootings beginning with Virginia Tech in 2007, Goss says, has given rise to “a critical mass” of survivors and family members devoted to keeping gun violence at the forefront.

And Moms has actively recruited them. “One of the real lessons of MADD is that people understand tragedy on a human scale,” says Chuck Hurley, its CEO from 2005 to 2010. “Everybody could understand Candy Lightner and her daughter being killed,” he says, referring to the organization’s founder and her 13-year-old, who was struck by a drunk driver in 1980. “There’s no way people can understand 30,000 firearm deaths. The bigger the number, the less real it is.”

“I think we’re absolutely key,” Lucia McBath told me in April, outside the packed Indianapolis hotel conference room where a delegation from Moms and Everytown was holding a press conference against the backdrop of the NRA annual convention just a few blocks away. McBath, whose teenage son, Jordan Davis, was gunned down in 2012 in a dispute over loud music by a man citing Florida’s broad self-defense laws, speaks softly but emphatically. “Mothers know how to get things done,” she continued, explaining that they can motivate each other and connect with families in a way no one else can. “A lot of mothers are suffering in this country over the nature of the violence.”

McBath has been astonished by the outpouring of support in the wake of her son’s death. “I feel like I have a whole nation praying for our family, and I’m deeply humbled by that.” A fundamental shift on guns is inevitable, she says. “With the tobacco industry—how many years and how much effort did that take? Or gay rights? To change the culture you have to change the mindset, and that takes time. I know we will succeed.”

Erica Lafferty was 27 when her mother, Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, was slain confronting Adam Lanza. She took up the cause just three months later. “I could literally hear her voice in my head,” Lafferty told me in Indianapolis. “‘Child, get out of bed and do something productive.'” After a year of speaking out and lobbying Congress with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, she met Watts—”she just gives me this mom hug”—and it struck her: Had the roles been reversed, had she been killed and her mother become an activist, “she absolutely would not be doing what I’m doing,” focusing on politicians in Washington. “She’d be doing what Shannon is doing, gathering all of these moms.”

Confronting child gun deaths—especially those stemming from negligent storage or use of firearms, which go unprosecuted in many states—is an obvious imperative for Moms. “It’s hugely important to our organization,” Watts told me. The strategic promise is also clear: In the early 1980s, most Americans saw drunk-driving deaths as “a problem you had to live with,” according to Hurley. Among MADD’s crowning achievements was to redefine them as crimes. MADD put relentless pressure not just on political leaders but also on the liquor industry—in no small part by turning a spotlight on kids who had been killed.

Last Christmas Eve in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a man who’d been “messing with” a 9 mm handgun unintentionally shot and killed his two-month-old daughter as she slept in her glider. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, yet local law enforcement officials said they were undecided about pursuing criminal charges. Typically that might’ve been the end of it, but Moms Demand Action voiced outrage via social media and the local press. Within two weeks the DA announced plans to prosecute. (He said no outside group influenced his decision.)

“While we fully support the father being held accountable for this crime, we also acknowledge the horrific grief this family is experiencing,” Moms Demand Action said after the charges were announced. “We hope their tragedy can serve as an example that encourages others to be more responsible with their firearms.” The father later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment, which could have brought up to 15 years in prison. He got six years’ probation and no jail time.

Moms also drew attention to a case in February in North Carolina, where a three-year-old boy wounded his 17-month-old sister after finding a handgun that their father—who wrote a parenting advice column in a local paper—had left unsecured. (The infant recovered.) “The parents have been punished more than any criminal-justice system can do to them,” a captain from the county sheriff’s department said soon after the shooting. After Moms swung into action, the father was charged with failure to secure his firearm to protect a minor; his case is pending.

“All too often DAs are loath to get involved, saying a family has suffered enough,” Watts says, “especially in states where laws are inadequate.” But just as MADD battled to tighten drunk-driving standards and stiffen penalties, Moms is pushing to toughen negligence and child-access prevention laws. One study found that 43 percent of homes with guns and kids have at least one unsecured firearm, and in 2013 at least 52 children killed themselves or others after coming across loaded guns, a Mother Jones investigation showed. “This idea of ‘accidental’ gun deaths, when something is truly negligence, has to be remedied,” Watts says.

Moms Demand Action has also campaigned aggressively for laws to disarm domestic abusers—legislation categorically opposed by the NRA until it quietly began moderating its stance this past year. Every year more than a million women are physically assaulted by an intimate partner, and when a gun is present, the likelihood of their being murdered goes up more than fivefold. Women regularly are shot to death even after obtaining court protection orders against their abusers, according to a New York Times investigation last year. The phenomenon was on grim display again in July, when a man who’d had multiple restraining orders against him shot to death six of his ex-wife’s family members in Texas, including four children. Thanks in part to Moms’ lobbying, six states have moved on the issue in 2014, including Wisconsin and Louisiana, where bills were signed by conservative governors Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal.

Moms has also chipped away at the status quo by battling state laws that allow people to pack heat in schools or bars and by working with cities to require “social responsibility” measures (such as preventing their products from appearing in video games) from gun manufacturers bidding for lucrative police department contracts.

Universal background checks for gun buyers these are not, acknowledges Mark Glaze. But what’s one of the first things you have to do if you want to sustain a movement? “You have to rack up some victories.”

It’s no coincidence that from the start Moms Demand Action has been armed with effective slogans and well-orchestrated campaigns against corporations: Watts has deep experience—from the other side. Before she decided to become a stay-at-home mom in 2008 when her youngest kids started middle school, she spent a decade as a PR executive for large firms, including Monsanto, where part of her role was to defend their controversial GMO products. She also handled crisis communications for corporations at FleishmanHillard; prior to that she’d been an aide to a Democratic Missouri governor and a speechwriter in the state Legislature.

All of which her detractors have tried to use against her. “Shannon Watts may be a liar, but she’s a professional liar,” the editor of BearingArms.com scoffed recently about her résumé. Opponents have also invoked her career to declare that she’s not a real grassroots mom and denounced her as a “Democratic Party operative.” And that’s the tame stuff. As Moms’ clout has increased, gun rights activists have aggressively targeted its members and leaders, calling them “Bloomberg’s whores,” “thugs with jugs,” and far worse. Watts has been at the receiving end of menacing phone calls and violent images posted online. She gets emails from people threatening to rape and murder her and her children. “They call me every horrific name you’ve ever heard, and say they hope that if I die it gets televised so they can watch,” she told me. (Watts has alerted the FBI to specific threats and has noted publicly that her home is protected by dogs and an alarm system.)

For decades the gun rights movement has relied on aggressive rhetoric—an overbearing government is coming to take your guns—and during the Obama presidency the NRA’s leadership has doubled down on stoking anger among its members. But in its most exaggerated form, and directed at a group of sympathetic women, that rage has created a public relations nightmare for the gun lobby—particularly in Texas, where Moms Demand Action has 7,000 active members and counting. In late April, as I first reported in Mother Jones, a veteran NRA board member in Houston confronted the leader of Open Carry Texas, warning that the backlash from flaunting semi-automatic rifles in public was jeopardizing the gun lobby’s longtime control of “a massive number of votes” in the Statehouse. The head of Open Carry Texas retorted that the NRA was siding with the “ultraliberal gun-control bullies” of Moms Demand Action. Some members of Open Carry Texas used disturbing intimidation tactics, including hounding a Marine veteran through city streets with assault rifles, shooting up a naked female mannequin, and publicizing a woman’s personal information online and exposing her to vicious harassment.

By June, the NRA’s lobbying wing made an extraordinary move, denouncing the Texas activists’ demonstrations as “foolishness” and “downright weird.” But when the enraged activists cut up their membership cards, the NRA beat a fast retreat and apologized.

Whipping up gun rights die-hards in recent years may have helped it sway lawmakers and elections. But in the process, the century-and-a-half-old NRA, once known for championing marksmanship, hunting, and gun safety, has all but ceded that legacy. And while most of its members, polls show, favor gun safety measures such as broader background checks, closing loopholes, and securing guns from the mentally ill, the leadership has stuck to its hardline position.

Key to Moms’ message is that being a socially responsible gun owner has nothing to do with being anti-gun. In fact, some of the leadership is deeply experienced with firearms. As an ER nurse in Seattle, Moms regional leader Kelly Bernado has cared for patients physically shattered by gun violence—but as a police officer in the 1990s, she often rolled up on armed suspects and faced split-second decisions with her weapon drawn. “I find the people who carry weapons and think they can be some sort of hero in these situations absolutely ridiculous,” she told me. (Though she came “very, very close” in one domestic-violence situation, Bernado never fired on anyone during her career.)

Kellye Burke, who grew up in rural Texas in a family tradition of gun ownership dating back to frontier days, says it was the notorious “good guys with guns” speech from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre one week after Sandy Hook that drove her to action. “It just personified the sickness and the callousness that has overtaken our country,” she says. “The fact that they’re still not acknowledging that this is an actual problem—it’s just zero accountability and zero responsibility. And that trickles all the way down to the individual gun person who thinks, ‘I can do whatever I want and basically screw everybody else.'”

The ripple effect that certain gun deaths now have across social media—from Trayvon Martin in Florida to two-year-old Caroline Sparks in Kentucky to college kids in Santa Barbara—echoes their comprehensive toll. Thirty-thousand Americans die from guns every year, but assume that even just five people are severely affected by each person’s death and now the damage afflicts 150,000 more Americans annually. Over 10 years, that’s a total of 1.8 million people. Now add the number of gunshot victims each year who survive—one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate suggests at least 64,000, not including accidents—and the overall number of Americans directly affected by shootings each decade climbs to 5 million.

“Newtown concentrated the horror in one place,” as Judith Palfrey, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me at the one-year anniversary. Still, polls show that few Americans vote based on gun policy. The most ambitious goal of Everytown, with Moms Demand Action as the vanguard, is to alter that calculus—and they may just have a chance. “Moms are an important and powerful constituency that can uniquely tap into the emotion of the electorate,” says GOP strategist McKinnon. “At the very least they can get a hearing. Whether or not they can actually mobilize voters, we don’t know yet.”

Leaders of the movement preach patience as well as tenacity. “The NRA has been in this for a very long time, so I don’t only see this through the lens of 2014,” says Howard Wolfson, a top political adviser to Bloomberg. “This is not a one-time electoral effort.”

The leading new gun reform groups share the same essential goals, though there are differences on how to achieve them. Americans for Responsible Solutions, the super-PAC and lobbying shop started by former congresswoman and mass-shooting survivor Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, is throwing millions of dollars this year behind 11 Senate and House candidates who back stricter gun laws. However, the group won’t target Democrats such as Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Mark Begich of Alaska, who voted against the background check bill.

Support for allies “is obviously very helpful,” Wolfson told me, “but there are two sides to this coin. From our perspective, we also want to make sure the people who oppose gun safety pay an electoral price.” In July, Everytown rolled out a 10-point questionnaire for congressional candidates on gun safety priorities; the plan is to reward supporters and go after those who don’t measure up—even if, says Wolfson, that means endangering the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. It’s a page straight from the NRA playbook.

“This is about building a foundation,” Watts says, “and it can’t be built on whether you have Democrats or Republicans in office. Many Democrats have shown that they are just as in the pocket of the NRA as their Republican counterparts. This has to transcend political labels.”

As Watts sees it, that’s the only way to defeat the ingrained “nothing happened, nothing will” narrative that so frustrates her and the women who’ve joined her. “It’s such a ridiculous idea that because something doesn’t pass in weeks or months that all hope is lost.”

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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These Women Are the NRA’s Worst Nightmare

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Tennessee Gubernatorial Nominee Explains Why He Wants to Send Governor to Electric Chair

by tobedzieto123 Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Charlie Brown for Governor

They did it again. On Thursday, Tennessee Democrats picked a statewide candidate with zero political experience. His campaign platform is based on sending incumbent Gov. Bill Haslam (R) to the electric chair. Charlie Brown, a retired engineer from Oakdale whose name is misspelled on his own Facebook page, may owe his victory in the gubernatorial primary to appearing as the first name on the ballot. But he gives full credit to God. “I got down on my knees and prayed about it,” he told Mother Jones, when asked about his campaign strategy. “That hit you pretty hard, huh? That took you for a loop, huh?”

In 2012, anti-gay activist Mark Clayton, who also had no political track record won the nod to take on GOP Sen. Bob Corker. His name was also the first name listed on the ballot. Clayton initially filed to run against Haslam this year but was rejected by the state party. The state party did not, however, unite behind a more experienced candidate to challenge the popular Haslam.

The 72-year-old Brown did not raise money or campaign actively for the seat. Instead, he sent two letters to the editor to every major newspaper in the state, outlining his plans for Tennessee, which included bringing back teacher tenure, restoring benefits for civil servants, spending his gubernatorial salary on large deer for hunters, and raising speed limits on the interstate highways to 80 mph “because everyone does anyway.” (Brown says he has been pulled over for speeding, but “not lately.”) “Let me give you something: My main interest is to put the Bible back in school,” he said on Friday. “You can write that down.”

“I’d still like to put his butt in that electric chair and turn it on about half throttle and let him smell a little bit,” Brown said of Haslam. “You can print that if you want to.”

Shortly before the election, he says a higher power intervened on his behalf. “I was sitting on the interstate waiting on a guy,” he said, “and something hit me just like that, and it said to get down on your knees to pray. I got down right there on the interstate. There’s a wide place, where there’s a pullout. There wasn’t anybody there. And I got down and asked the Lord to get me through this thing and he did. Now listen, I’m not no preacher, I’m just a Christian. I’m just a sinner saved by grace. I’m just like everybody else.”

Brown said he would update his Facebook after he got off the phone (it has since been taken down), and plans to campaign more actively in the fall, but downplays the uphill challenge he faces.

“I’m gonna campaign big time!” Brown said. “They said I was unknown—I’ve been in the newspaper for years under Peanuts!”

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Tennessee Gubernatorial Nominee Explains Why He Wants to Send Governor to Electric Chair

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Why This Summer Could Be the Arab Summer

by MadgePiddington Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Three and a half years ago, the world was riveted by the massive crowds of youths mobilizing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand an end to Egypt’s dreary police state. We stared in horror as, at one point, the Interior Ministry mobilized camel drivers to attack the demonstrators. We watched transfixed as the protests spread from one part of Egypt to another and then from country to country across the region. Before it was over, four presidents-for-life would be toppled and others besieged in their palaces.

Some 42 months later, in most of the Middle East and North Africa, the bright hopes for more personal liberties and an end to political and economic stagnation championed by those young people have been dashed. Instead, a number of Arab countries have seen counter-revolutions, while others are engulfed in internecine conflicts and civil wars, creating Mad Max-like scenes of post-apocalyptic horror. But keep one thing in mind: the rebellions of the past three years were led by Arab millennials, twentysomethings who have decades left to come into their own. Don’t count them out yet. They have only begun the work of transforming the region.

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Why This Summer Could Be the Arab Summer

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 June 2014

by Oliver9602 Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

Here is Domino peeking out from under one of Marian’s sweatshirts. I guess cats just like caves. It’s not like it’s been chilly around here these days.

And now, I’m off to the dentist to see if we can finally install a crown. The first two didn’t fit properly, so we’re hoping third time’s the charm. It will be nice to be able to chew on both sides of my mouth again.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 June 2014

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Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Interpretation of Clean Air Act

by JackieMesserly Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

A few years ago, the EPA added carbon dioxide to an established program that limits emissions of harmful pollutants. But there was a problem: the Clean Air Act says that permits are required by any source that emits more than 250 tons of a covered pollutant. Because CO2 is such a common gas, this would have forced tens of thousands of small sources to go through an expensive and pointless permitting process, something EPA wanted to avoid. So, for CO2 only, they unilaterally changed the threshold to 100,000 tons per year. This exempted most large businesses, but it also gave critics an opening to challenge the law. Today they won:

The Supreme Court, in a split ruling, has blocked the Obama administration from requiring special permits for some new power plants, but upheld them for others. In a dense 5-4 decision Monday, the justices said the Environmental Protection Agency had wrongly stretched an anti-pollution provision of the Clean Air Act to cover carbon emissions in new or modified plants.

But the ruling was confined to only one regulatory provision, and it is not likely to directly affect the broader climate-change policy that the administration announced earlier this month. That policy relies on a different part of the law that says states must take steps to reduce harmful air pollutants, which include greenhouse gases.

This doesn’t affect the EPA’s recent proposal that would limit CO2 emissions from power plants, since that relies on a different provision of the Clean Air Act that’s already been blessed by the Supreme Court. However, today’s ruling is a demonstration of something I’ve mentioned before: When an executive agency modifies the way it interprets a law, it’s a fairly routine affair. Interpretations of federal statutes, especially complex regulatory constructions, are notoriously difficult, and agencies do it all the time. There’s no presidential “lawlessness” or “tyranny” involved, and disputes over these interpretations are routinely resolved by courts. In this case, it was obviously a close call, since the decision was 5-4 and the opinion was long and dense.

This is what’s likely to happen in other cases where the Obama administration has interpreted a law in ways that his critics don’t like. If the critics are serious, they’ll go to court, and in some cases they’ll win. In others, they’ll lose. Welcome to the 21st century.

UPDATE: I wrote this hastily because—and I know you’re going to love this excuse—a temporary crown fell out and I had to pop out to my dentist to get it re-cemented. But now that I’m back, it’s worth pointing out that today’s Supreme Court decision actually upheld most of the EPA’s new limitations on CO2 emissions. The main reason I highlighted the one piece they struck down was because I wanted to make a point about presidential “lawlessness” that’s become such a talking point on the right these days. In the case of the 250-ton rule, the EPA tried to reinterpret the law and the court ruled against them. Other interpretations were upheld. That’s the way this stuff goes.

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Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Interpretation of Clean Air Act

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How Egypt’s Generals Sidelined Washington

by Adan Baird Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Since September 11, 2001, Washington’s policies in the Middle East have proven a grim imperial comedy of errors and increasingly a spectacle of how a superpower is sidelined. In this drama, barely noticed by the American media, Uncle Sam’s keystone ally in the Arab world, Egypt, like Saudi Arabia, has largely turned its back on the Obama administration. As with so many of America’s former client states across the aptly named “arc of instability,” Egypt has undergone a tumultuous journey—from autocracy to democracy to a regurgitated form of military rule and repression, making its ally of four decades appear clueless.

Egypt remains one of the top recipients of US foreign aid, with the Pentagon continuing to pamper the Egyptian military with advanced jet fighters, helicopters, missiles, and tanks. Between January 2011 and May 2014, Egypt underwent a democratic revolution, powered by a popular movement, which toppled President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. It enjoyed a brief tryst with democracy before suffering an anti-democratic counter-revolution by its generals. In all of this, what has been the input of the planet’s last superpower in shaping the history of the most populous country in the strategic Middle East? Zilch. Its “generosity” toward Cairo notwithstanding, Washington has been reduced to the role of a helpless bystander.

Given how long the United States has been Egypt’s critical supporter, the State Department and Pentagon bureaucracies should have built up a storehouse of understanding as to what makes the Land of the Pharaohs tick. Their failure to do so, coupled with a striking lack of familiarity by two administrations with the country’s recent history, has led to America’s humiliating sidelining in Egypt. It’s a story that has yet to be pieced together, although it’s indicative of how from Kabul to Bonn, Baghdad to Rio de Janeiro so many ruling elites no longer feel that listening to Washington is a must.

An Army as Immovable as the Pyramids

Ever since 1952, when a group of nationalist military officers ended the pro-British monarchy, Egypt’s army has been in the driver’s seat. From Gamal Abdul Nasser to Hosni Mubarak, its rulers were military commanders. And if, in February 2011, a majority of the members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) abandoned Mubarak, it was only to stop him from passing the presidency on to his son Gamal on his 83rd birthday. The neoliberal policies pursued by the Mubarak government at the behest of that businessman son from 2004 onward made SCAF fear that the military’s stake in the public sector of the economy and its extensive public-private partnerships would be doomed.

Fattened on the patronage of successive military presidents, Egypt’s military-industrial complex had grown enormously. Its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP), though a state secret, could be as high as 40 percent, unparalleled in the region. The chief executives of 55 of Egypt’s largest companies, contributing a third of that GDP, are former generals.

Working with the interior ministry, which controls the national police force, paramilitary units, and the civilian intelligence agencies, SCAF (headed by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, doubling as the defense minister) would later orchestrate the protest movement against popularly elected President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. That campaign reached its crescendo on June 30, 2013. Three days later, SCAF toppled Morsi and has held him in prison ever since.

The generals carried out their coup at a moment when, according to the Washington-based Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Egyptians had a favorable view of the Muslim Brotherhood, 52 percent approved of the Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, and 53 percent backed Morsi, who had won the presidency a year earlier with 52 percent of the vote.

Washington Misses the Plot

Remarkably, Obama administration officials failed to grasp that the generals, in conjunction with Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim, were the prime movers behind the Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”) campaign launched on April 22, 2013. Egyptians were urged to sign a petition addressed to Morsi that was both simplistic and populist. “Because security has not returned, because the poor have no place, because I have no dignity in my own country…,” read the text in part, “we don’t want you anymore,” and it called for an early presidential election. In little over two months, the organizers claimed that they had amassed 22.1 million signatures, amounting to 85 percent of those who had participated in the presidential election of 2012. Where those millions of individually signed petitions were being stored was never made public, nor did any independent organization verify their existence or numbers.

As the Tamarod campaign gained momentum, the interior ministry’s secret police infiltrated it, as did former Mubarak supporters, while elements of the police state of the Mubarak era were revived. Reports that cronies of the toppled president were providing the funding for the campaign began to circulate. The nationwide offices of the Free Egyptians—a party founded by Naguib Sawiria, a businessman close to Mubarak and worth $2.5 billion—were opened to Tamarod organizers. Sawiria also paid for a promotional music video that was played repeatedly on OnTV, a television channel he had founded. In addition, he let his newspaper, Al Masry al Youm, be used as a vehicle for the campaign.

In the run-up to the mass demonstration in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square on June 30th, the first anniversary of Morsi’s rule, power cuts became more frequent and fuel shortages acute. As policemen mysteriously disappeared from the streets, the crime rate soared. All of this stoked anti-Morsi feelings and was apparently orchestrated with military precision by those who plotted the coup.

Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times provided evidence of meticulous planning, especially by the Interior Ministry, in a report headlined “Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi.” They quoted Ahmad Nabawi, a Cairo gas station manager, saying that he had heard several explanations for the gas crisis: technical glitches at the storage facilities, the arrival of low quality gas from abroad, and excessive stockpiling by the public. But he put what happened in context this way: “We went to sleep one night, woke up the next day, and the crisis was gone”—and so was Morsi. Unsurprisingly, of all the ministers in the Morsi government, Interior Minister Ibrahim was the only one retained in the interim cabinet appointed by the generals.

“See No Evil”

Initially, President Obama refused to call what had occurred in Egypt a military “coup.” Instead, he spoke vaguely of “military actions” in order to stay on the right side of the Foreign Assistance Act in which Congress forbade foreign aid to “any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”

Within a week of the coup, with Morsi and the first of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood followers thrown behind bars, SCAF sidelined the Tamarod campaigners. They were left complaining that the generals, violating their promise, had not consulted them on the road map to normalization. Having ridden the Tamarod horse to total power, SCAF had no more use for it.

When Morsi supporters staged peaceful sit-ins at two squares in Cairo, the military junta could not bear the sight of tens of thousands of Egyptians quietly defying its arbitrary will. Waiting until the holy fasting month of Ramadan and the three-day festival of Eid ul Fitr had passed, they made their move. On August 14th, Interior Ministry troops massacred nearly 1,000 protesters as they cleared the two sites.

“Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” said Obama. However, in the end all he did was cancel annual joint military exercises with Egypt scheduled for September and suspend the shipment of four F-16 fighter jets to the Egyptian air force. This mattered little, if at all, to the generals.

The helplessness of Washington before a client state with an economy in freefall was little short of stunning. Pentagon officials, for instance, revealed that since the “ouster of Mr. Morsi,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had had 15 telephone conversations with coup leader General Sisi, pleading with him to “change course”—all in vain.

Five weeks later, the disjuncture between Washington and Cairo became embarrassingly overt. On September 23rd, the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters ordered the 85-year-old Muslim Brotherhood disbanded. In a speech at the U.N. General Assembly the next day, President Obama stated that, in deposing Morsi, the Egyptian military had “responded to the desires of millions of Egyptians who believed the revolution had taken a wrong turn.” He then offered only token criticism, claiming that the new military government had “made decisions inconsistent with inclusive democracy” and that future American support would “depend upon Egypt’s progress in pursuing a more democratic path.”

General Sisi was having none of this. In a newspaper interview on October 9th, he warned that he would not tolerate pressure from Washington “whether through actions or hints.” Already, there had been a sign that Uncle Sam’s mild criticism was being diluted. A day earlier, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden stated that reports that all military assistance to Egypt would be halted were “false.”

In early November, unmistakably pliant words came from Secretary of State John Kerry. “The roadmap to democracy is being carried out to the best of our perception,” he said at a press conference, while standing alongside his Egyptian counterpart Nabil Fahmy during a surprise stopover in Cairo. “There are questions we have here and there about one thing or another, but Foreign Minister Fahmy has reemphasized to me again and again that they have every intent and they are determined to fulfill that particular decision and that democratic track.”

The Generals Axe the Secular, Pro-Democracy Movement

Fahmy and Kerry were looking at that democratic “track” from opposite perspectives. Three weeks later, the military-appointed president, Adly Mansour, approved a new law that virtually outlawed the right to protest. This law gave the interior minister or senior police officials a power that only the judiciary had previously possessed. The minister or his minions could now cancel, postpone, or change the location of protests for which organizers had earlier received the permission of local police. Human Rights groups and secular organizations argued that the 2013 Protest Law was reminiscent of Mubarak’s repressive policies. Washington kept quiet.

Two days later, critics of the law held a demonstration in Cairo that was violently dispersed by the police. Dozens of activists, including the co-founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, Ahmed Maher and Muhammad Adel, seminal actors in the Tahrir Square protests against Mubarak, were arrested. Maher and Adel were each sentenced to three years imprisonment.

Following the coup, the number of prisoners rose exponentially, reaching at least 16,000 within eight months, including nearly 3,000 top or mid-level members of the Brotherhood. (Unofficial estimates put the total figure at 22,000.) When 40 inmates herded into a typical cell in custom-built jails proved insufficient, many Brotherhood members were detained without charges for months in police station lockups or impromptu prisons set up in police training camps where beatings were routine.

The 846 Egyptians who lost their lives in the pro-democracy revolution that ended Mubarak’s authoritarian regime were dwarfed by the nearly 3,000 people killed in a brutal series of crackdowns that followed the coup, according to human rights groups.

The sentencing of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement—which through its social media campaign had played such a crucial role in sparking anti-Mubarak demonstrations—foreshadowed something far worse. On April 28, 2014, the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters outlawed that secular, pro-democracy movement based on a complaint by a lawyer that it had “tarnished the image” of Egypt and colluded with foreign parties.

With this set of acts, the post-coup regime turned the clock back to Mubarakism—without Mubarak.

Setting the World’s Mass Death-Penalty Record

On that same April day in the southern Egyptian town of Minya, Judge Saeed Elgazar broke his own month-old world death-penalty record of 529 (in a trial that lasting less than an hour) by recommending the death penalty for 683 Egyptians, including Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie. The defendants were charged in an August 2013 attack on a police station in Minya, which led to the death of a policeman. Of the accused, 60 percent had not been in Minya on the day of the assault. Defense lawyers were prevented from presenting their case during the two-day trial.

Elgazar was a grotesquely exaggerated example of a judiciary from the Mubarak era that remained unreconciled to the onset of democracy. It proved only too willing to back the military junta in terrorizing those even thinking of protesting the generals’ rule. A US State Department spokesperson called the judge’s first trial “unconscionable.” But as before, the military-backed government in Cairo remained unmoved. The Egyptian Justice Department warned that “comments on judicial verdicts are unacceptable, be they from external or internal parties as they represent a serious transgression against the independence of the judiciary.”

When the second mass sentence came down, Kerry murmured that “there have been disturbing decisions within the judicial process, the court system, that have raised serious challenges for all of us. It’s actions, not words that will make the difference.” A defiant Nabil Fahmy responded by defending the verdicts as having been rendered by an independent judiciary “completely independent from the government.”

One predictable response to the military junta’s brutal squashing of the Brotherhood, which over the previous few decades had committed itself to participating in a multi-party democracy, was the swelling of the ranks of militant jihadist groups. Of these Ansar Bait al Muqdus (“Helpers of Jerusalem”), based in the Sinai Peninsula and linked to al-Qaeda, was the largest. After the coup, it gained new members and its terror attacks spread to the bulk of Egypt west of the Suez Canal.

In late December, a car bomb detonated by its operatives outside police headquarters in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura killed 16 police officers. Blaming the bombing on the Muslim Brotherhood instead, the interim government classified it as a “terrorist organization,” even though Ansar had claimed responsibility for the attack. By pinning the terrorist label on the Brotherhood, the generals gave themselves carte blanche to further intensify their ruthless suppression of it.

While SCAF pursued its relentless anti-Brotherhood crusade and reestablished itself as the ruling power in Egypt, it threw a sop to the Obama administration. It introduced a new constitution, having suspended the previous one drafted by a popularly elected constituent assembly. The generals appointed a handpicked committee of 50 to amend the suspended document. They included only two members of the Islamist groups that had jointly gained two-thirds of the popular vote in Egypt’s first free elections.

Predictably, the resulting document was military-friendly. It stipulated that the defense minister must be a serving military officer and that civilians would be subject to trial in military courts for certain offenses. Banned was the formation of political parties based on religion, race, gender, or geography, and none was allowed to have a paramilitary wing. The document was signed by the interim president in early December. A national referendum on it was held in mid-January under tight security, with 160,000 soldiers and more than 200,000 policemen deployed nationwide. The result: a vote of 98.1 percent in favor. (A referendum on the 2012 constitution during Morsi’s presidency had gained the backing of 64 percent of voters.)

The charade of this exercise seemed to escape policymakers in Washington. Kerry blithely spoke of the SCAF-appointed government committing itself to “a transition process that expands democratic rights and leads to a civilian-led, inclusive government through free and fair elections.”

By this time, the diplomatic and financial support of the oil rich Gulf States ruled by autocratic monarchs was proving crucial to the military regime in Cairo. Immediately after the coup, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) poured $12 billion into Cairo’s nearly empty coffers. In late January 2014, Saudi Arabia and the UAE came up with an additional $5.8 billion. This helped Sisi brush off any pressure from Washington and monopolize power his way.

The Strongman as Savior

By then, huge photographs and portraits of General Sisi had become a common fixture on the streets in Cairo and other major cities. On January 27th, interim president Mansour promoted Sisi to field marshal. Later that day, SCAF nominated him for the presidency. A slew of stories started appearing in the state-run media as well as most of its privately owned counterparts backing Sisi and touting the benefits of strong military leadership.

Sisi’s original plan to announce his candidacy on February 11th, the third anniversary of Mubarak’s forced resignation, hit an unexpected speed bump. On February 7th, Al Watan, a newspaper supportive of the military regime with longstanding ties to the security establishment, printed an embarrassing front-page story placing Sisi’s worth at 30 million Egyptian pounds ($4.2 million). Within minutes of its being printed, state officials contacted the paper’s owner, Magdy El Galad, demanding its immediate removal. He instantly complied.

Sisi continued to place his henchmen in key positions in the armed forces, including military intelligence. On March 26th, he resigned from the army, declaring himself an independent candidate. Nonetheless, as Alaa Al Aswany, a prominent writer and commentator, revealed, senior military commanders continued to perform important tasks for him. There was nothing faintly fair about such an election, Aswany pointed out. Most other potential candidates for the presidency had reached a similar conclusion—that entering the race was futile. Hamdeen Sabahi, a secular left-of-center politician, was the only exception.

Despite relentless propaganda by state and private media portraying Sisi as the future savior of Egypt, things went badly for him. That he would be crowned as a latter-day Pharaoh was a given. The only unknown was: How many Egyptians would bother to participate in the stage-managed exercise?

The turnout proved so poor on May 26th, the first day of the two-day election, that panic struck the government, which declared the following day a holiday. In addition, the Justice ministry warned that those who failed to vote would be fined. The authorities suspended train fares to encourage voters to head for polling stations. TV anchors and media celebrities scolded and lambasted their fellow citizens for their apathy, while urging them to rush to their local polling booths. Huge speakers mounted on vans patrolling city neighborhoods alternated raucous exhortations to vote with songs of praise for the military. Al Azhar, the highest Islamic authority in the land, declared that to fail to vote was “to disobey the nation.” Pope Tawadros, head of Egypt’s Coptic Christian Church whose members form 10 percent of the population, appeared on state television to urge voters to cast their ballots.

The former field marshal had demanded an 80 percent turnout from the country’s 56 million voters. Yet even with voting extended to a third day and a multifaceted campaign to shore up the numbers, polling stations were reportedly empty across the country. The announced official turnout of 47.5 percent was widely disbelieved. Sabahi described the figure as “an insult to the intelligence of Egyptians.” Sisi was again officially given 96.1 percent of the vote, Sabahi 3 percent. The spokesman for the National Alliance for the Defense of Legitimacy put voter participation at 10 percent-12 percent. The turnout for the first free and fair two-day presidential election, held in June 2012 without endless exhortations by TV anchors and religious leaders, had been 52 percent.

Among the regional and world leaders who telephoned Sisi to congratulate him on his landslide electoral triumph was Russian President Vladimir Putin. No such call has yet come in from President Obama.

For Washington, still so generous in its handouts to the Arab Republic of Egypt and its military, trailing behind the Russian Bear in embracing the latest strongman on the Nile should be considered an unqualified humiliation. With its former sphere of influence in tatters, the last superpower has been decisively sidelined by its key Arab ally in the region.

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, has written 34 books, including After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. His latest book is A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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How Egypt’s Generals Sidelined Washington

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Brunette Ambition – Lea Michele

by Myrna Posted on May 20, 2014

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Brunette Ambition

Lea Michele

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: May 20, 2014

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Seller: Random House, LLC


The star of the hit show Glee shares her experiences and insider tips on beauty, fashion, inner strength, and more in an illustrated in an illustrated book that’s part memoir, part how-to, and part style guide.   Lea Michele is one of the hardest working performers in show business.  Whether she’s starring as Rachel Berry on Glee, rocking a glamorous look on the red carpet, recording her solo album, or acting as the spokesperson for L’Oreal, Lea is the ultimate multi-tasker.  She knows better than anyone that it is difficult to be your best self and keep things in perspective when your to-do list is overflowing and you are faced with challenges, so she’s developed a foolproof system for remaining healthy and centered.  In Brunette Ambition, she reveals the lessons and advice that have worked for her–from beauty and fashion secrets to fitness tips, and career insights.  Supplemented with never-before-seen photos and revealing anecdotes, it’s the book Lea wishes she’d had in her teens and early twenties: A practical and inspirational guide to harnessing tenacity and passion and living the fullest life, no matter what obstacles life puts in your way.

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Brunette Ambition – Lea Michele

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Koch vs. Koch: The Brutal Battle That Tore Apart America’s Most Powerful Family

by Justina74L Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Morris eased the pickup truck to the side of the road. The wide, busy thoroughfares of 1950s Wichita, Kansas, were just five miles southwest, but here on the largely undeveloped outskirts of the city, near the Koch family’s 160-acre property, the landscape consisted of little more than flat, sun-bleached fields, etched here and there by dusty rural byways. The retired Marine, rangy and middle-aged, climbed out of the truck holding two sets of scuffed leather boxing gloves.

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“Okay, boys,” he barked, “get outside and duke it out.” David and Bill, the teenage Koch twins, were at each other’s throats once again. Impossible to tell who or what had started it. But it seldom took much. The roots of the strife typically traced to some kind of competition—a game of hoops, a round of water polo in the family pool, a footrace. They were pathologically competitive, and David, a gifted athlete, often won. Everything seemed to come easier for him. Bill was just 19 minutes younger than his fraternal twin, but this solidified his role as the baby of the family. With a hair-trigger temper, he threw the tantrums to match.

David was more even-keeled than Bill, but he knew how to push his brother’s buttons. Once they got into it, neither backed down. Arguments between the twins, who shared a small room, their beds within pinching range, transcended routine sibling rivalry. Morris kept their boxing gloves close at hand to keep them from seriously injuring each other when their tiffs escalated into full-scale brawls. The brothers’ industrialist father had officially hired the ex-soldier to look after the grounds and livestock on the family’s compound. But his responsibilities also included chauffeuring the twins to movies and school events, and refereeing the fights that broke out unpredictably on these outings.

Morris laced up one brother, then the other. The boys, both lean and tall, squared off, and when Morris stepped clear, they traded a barrage of punches. A few minutes later, Morris reclaimed the gloves and the brothers piled breathlessly into the cab. He slipped back behind the wheel and pulled out onto the road.

Pugilism was an enduring theme in the family. The patriarch, Fred Koch—a college boxer known for his fierce determination—spent the better part of his professional life warring against the dark forces of communism and the big oil companies that had tried to run him out of the refining business. As adults, Fred’s four sons paired off in a brutal legal campaign over the business empire he bequeathed to them, a battle that “would make Dallas and Dynasty look like a playpen,” as Bill once said.

The roles the brothers would play in that drama were established from boyhood. Fred and Mary Koch’s oldest son, Frederick, a lover of theater and literature, left Wichita for boarding school after 7th grade and barely looked back. Charles, the rebellious No. 2, was molded from an early age as Fred’s successor. After eight years at MIT and a consulting firm, Charles returned to Wichita to learn the intricacies of the family business. Together, he and David would build their father’s Midwestern company, which as of 1967 had $250 million in yearly sales and 650 employees, into a corporate Goliath with $115 billion in annual revenues and a presence in 60 countries. Under their leadership, Koch Industries grew into the second-largest private corporation in the United States (only the Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant Cargill is bigger).

Bill, meanwhile, would become best known for his flamboyant escapades: as a collector of fine wines who embarked on a litigious crusade against counterfeit vino, as a playboy with a history of messy romantic entanglements, and as a yachtsman who won the America’s Cup in 1992, an experience he likened, unforgettably, to the sensation of “10,000 orgasms.” Koch Industries made its money the old-fashioned way—oil, chemicals, cattle, timber—and in its dizzying rise, David and Charles amassed fortunes estimated at $41 billion apiece, tying them for sixth place among the wealthiest people on the planet. (Bill ranks 377th on Forbes‘ list of the world’s billionaires.) The company’s products would come to touch everyone’s lives, from the gas in our tanks and the steak on our forks to the paper towels in our pantries. But it preferred to operate quietly—in David’s words, to be “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.”

But if Charles and David’s industrial empire stayed under the radar, their political efforts would not remain so private. After spending decades quietly trying to mainstream their libertarian views and remake the political landscape, they burst into the headlines as they took on the Obama administration and forged a power center in the Republican Party.

Politicians, as one of Charles’ advisers once put it, are stage actors working off a script produced by the nation’s intellectual class. Some of the intellectual seeds planted by the Kochs and their comrades would germinate into one of the past decade’s most influential political movements: Though the intensely private brothers downplay any connection, they helped to provide the key financing and organizational support that allowed the tea party to blossom into a formidable force—one that paralyzed Congress and ignited a civil war within the GOP. After backing a constellation of conservatives, from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, Charles and David mounted their most audacious political effort to date in the 2012 presidential campaign, when their fundraising network unleashed an estimated $400 million via a web of conservative advocacy groups.

Just as their father, a founding member of the John Birch Society, had once decried the country’s descent toward communism during the Kennedy era, the brothers saw America veering toward socialism under President Obama. Charles, entering his late 70s, had not only failed to see American society transformed into his libertarian ideal; with this new administration, things seemed to be moving in the exact opposite direction. Now he and David, along with other allies, would wage what he described as the “mother of all wars” to defeat Obama and hand Republicans ironclad congressional majorities.

Yet for all the attention the Kochs—including the “other brothers,” Frederick and Bill—have received, America knows little about who they really are. Charles and David have gained a reputation as cartoonish robber barons, powerful political puppeteers who with one hand choreographed the moves of Republican politicians and with the other commanded the tea party army. And like all caricatures, this one bears only a faint resemblance to reality.

The family pictured at David and Bill’s graduation from MIT Courtesy of MIT Museum

As with America’s other great dynasties, the Kochs’ legacy (corporate, philanthropic, political, cultural) is far more expansive than most people realize, and it will be felt long into the future. Already, the four brothers have become some of the most influential, celebrated, and despised members of their generation. Understanding what shaped them, what drove them, and what set them upon one another requires traveling back to a time when the battles involved little more than a pair of boxing gloves.

Fred Koch came up in a place where sometimes all that separated prosperity from poverty was an unfortunate turn in the weather. Quanah, Texas, located just east of the panhandle and eight miles from the Oklahoma border, was a town of strivers, and Fred watched his father’s rise from penniless Dutch immigrant to successful newspaper owner. By the time his four sons were born—Frederick in 1933, Charles in 1935, David and Bill in 1940—Fred’s technical talent and unrelenting ambition had made him the co-owner of a multimillion-dollar oil engineering firm.

Fred told his sons he wanted them to experience “the glorious feeling of accomplishment.” If he handed them everything, what would motivate them to make something of themselves? “He wanted to make sure, because we were a wealthy family, that we didn’t grow up thinking that we could go through life not doing anything,” Charles once recalled. Fred’s mantra, drilled repeatedly into their minds, was that he had no intention of raising “country-club bums.”

Though his children grew up among Renoirs and Thomas Hart Bentons on an estate across from the exclusive Wichita Country Club, Fred went out of his way to make sure they did not feel wealthy. “Their father was quite tight with his resources,” recalled Jay Chapple, a childhood friend of the Koch twins. “Every family was getting a TV set that could possibly afford one, but Fred Sr. just said no.” The brothers received no allowances, though they were paid for chores. “If we wanted to go to the movies, we’d have to go beg him for money,” David once told an interviewer. In the local public school, where the Koch boys began their educations alongside the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers from the Cessna and Beech factories, it was their classmates who often seemed like the rich ones, he remembered: “I felt very much of a pauper compared to any of them.”

Fred rarely displayed affection toward his sons, as if doing so might breed weakness in them. “Fred was just a very stiff, calculated businessman,” Chapple said. “I don’t mean this in a critical way, but his interest was not in the kids, other than the fact that he wanted them well educated.” He was not the kind of dad who played catch; he was the type of father, one Koch relative recalled, who taught his children to swim by throwing them into the pool and walking away. “He ruled the boys with an iron fist.”

Fred traveled frequently on business, but when he was home, the household took on an air of Victorian formality. After work, Fred often retreated to his wood-paneled library, its shelves filled with tomes on politics and economics, emerging promptly at 6:30 p.m., still in coat and tie, for dinner in the formal dining room. “He just controlled the atmosphere,” Chapple recalled. “There was no horseplay at the table.”

Every dictatorship has its dissident, and Frederick played this part early on. While the three younger boys took after their father, he gravitated toward his mother’s interests. Mary Robinson Koch helped to nourish Frederick’s artistic side, and when he grew up they often took in plays and attended performing arts festivals. Frederick was a student of literature and a lover of drama who liked to sing and act. He wasn’t athletic, displayed no interest in business, and loathed the work-camp-like environment fostered by his father, with whom he shared little beyond a love of opera.

By the late 1950s, when Frederick was in his 20s, many in the family’s circle of friends assumed that he was gay. “You know, those things, especially in an environment like Wichita, were almost whispered,” says someone who spent time with the family and their friends during that era. (Frederick told me he is not gay.)

Fred Koch chose Charles as his successor early on, intensifying a bitter sibling rivalry. Courtesy MIT museum

In the 1960s, mention of Frederick even vanished from one of his father’s bios: “He and Mrs. Koch have three sons,” it read. “Charles, William, and David.”

Fred’s disappointment in his eldest son caused him to double down on Charles, piling him with chores and responsibilities by the age of nine. “I think Fred Koch went through this kind of thing that ‘I must have been too affectionate; I must have been too loving, too kind to Freddie, and that’s why he turned out to be so effeminate,'” said John Damgard, who went to high school with David and remains close with David and Charles. “So he was really, really tough on Charles.”

“I think Mary did a lot to protect the twins,” Damgard added, but Charles grew up with the impression that he was being picked on. As an 11-year-old boy, pleading for his parents to reconsider, he was shipped off to the first of several boarding schools, this one in Arizona.

As Charles admits, there was little about his teenage self that suggested he was destined for greatness. He was smart, but with the type of unharnessed intellect that tends to land young men in trouble. He got into fights, stayed out late drinking and sowing wild oats. David has called his older brother a “bad boy who turned good.” When it came time for high school, his exasperated parents sent him to Culver Military Academy in northern Indiana, an elite military school that had a reputation for taking in wild boys and spitting out upright, disciplined men (notable alumni include the late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, actor Hal Holbrook, and Crown Prince Alexander II of Yugoslavia). Charles considered it a prison sentence, and during his junior year he was expelled after drinking beer on a train ride to school after spring break.

Asked later how old Fred took the news, the best Charles could say was, “I’m still alive.” Fred banished Charles to live with family in Texas, where he spent the remainder of the school year working in a grain elevator until, after some begging, he was reinstated at Culver.

When Charles became Fred Koch’s work-in-progress, he also became a lightning rod for his youngest brother’s jealousy. Bill was in some respects the most cerebral of the brothers, but he was also the most socially awkward and emotionally combustible. In his baby book, Mary had scrawled notations including “easily irritable,” “angry,” and “jealous.” As a young boy, Bill resorted to desperate gambits for attention. Once, according to Charles, when Mary warned her son to take a hog’s nose ring out of his mouth, Bill proceeded to gulp it down instead, necessitating a trip to the hospital.

Bill’s volatile emotions made it difficult for him to concentrate in school, and his worried parents eventually sent him to a psychologist, who advised that the only way to help Bill was to remove the source of his smoldering resentment—Charles. “We had to get Charles away to boarding school because of the terrible jealousy that was consuming Billy,” Mary told the New York Times‘ Leslie Wayne in 1986.

Bill recalled a Lord of the Flies-like childhood, in which his parents were frequently away—Fred to travel, Mary to attend social events—leaving him and his brothers in the care of the household help “to grow up amongst ourselves.” He remembered Charles as a mischievous bully who perched astride the family storm cellar during backyard games of King of the Hill and flung his brothers down to the ground whenever they tried to scramble to the top. Still, Bill idolized his older brother, though Charles made it painfully clear that he preferred David’s company.

Bill and David were twins, but David and Charles were natural compatriots. David was self-confident and athletic, with a mild temperament and a contagious, honking laugh. “Charles and David were so much alike, they were always really good friends. And Bill probably felt a little left out,” said their cousin Carol Margaret Allen. “Charles always had quite a following of girls, and so did David. And Bill—I think he would have liked to have had more girls following him. He was not as gregarious and outgoing.” Awkward and uncoordinated, Bill spent his childhood trying to keep up with his brothers. His self-esteem plummeted. “For a long time,” he later reflected, “I didn’t think I was worth shit.”

When it came time for the twins to attend prep school, they had their pick of prestigious institutions. David chose Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in northwestern Massachusetts that groomed East Coast Brahmins for the Ivy League. He credited the school, where he would distinguish himself on the basketball and cross-country teams, with transforming him “from an unsophisticated country boy into a fairly polished, well-informed graduate.” But Bill opted for Culver Military Academy, Charles’ alma mater. This alarmed Mary, who later confided to an interviewer that her son had become unhinged in his fixation on Charles.

“This was not a lovey-dovey family,” mused a member of the extended family. “This was a family where the father was consumed by his own ambitions. The mother was trapped by her generation and wealth and surrounded by alpha males. And the boys had each other, but they were so busy in pursuit of their father’s approval that they never noticed what they could do for each other.”

“Everything,” the relative added, “goes back to their childhood. Everything goes back to the love they didn’t get.”

On Christmas Day 1979, the four brothers, now aged 39 to 46, gathered in the dining room of their childhood home, the long table set with lace placemats and gold-rimmed crystal wine glasses. Also at the table were Charles’ wife, Liz, and Joan Granlund, the former model who’d become Bill’s secretary and girlfriend.

As was the family custom, Mary was hosting the Christmas dinner. Fred, who had died of a heart attack 12 years before, peered down from an oil painting on a nearby wall. But over the course of the evening, the festive mood evaporated, largely thanks to Bill.

Ever since joining Koch Industries in 1974, Bill had felt like the third and lesser wheel to David and Charles. He brooded over his role within the company, as well as over how Mary, who had just turned 72, planned to distribute her estate.

Seated across from his mother, Bill began to vent. Growing up, he had perceived Mary as cool and distant. Now he blamed her for laying the foundation for his emotional turmoil. She had not loved him; she had treated him unfairly. According to Charles, Bill also pressed her on the disposition of the family’s art collection. Their father had given Charles some paintings before his death; Bill insisted Mary even things out by leaving more of the collection to him.

Charles tried to calm his brother down: “I’m not going to fight you over any property, but just leave Mama alone.” Bill laid into Charles, too, whom he faulted for running their father’s company like a dictator. Fred may have selected Charles as his successor, but Koch Industries belonged to all of them.

Mary struggled to hold back tears. The discord, occurring on one of the few occasions when the Kochs still gathered as a family, finally overcame her. Sobbing, she pushed back from the table and hurried from the room.

It was the last Christmas the Kochs spent together.

The family business, which Charles had named Koch Industries in his father’s honor, had grown at a staggering rate with Charles at the helm. One of his first major deals was the acquisition of Great Northern Oil Company, owner of a Minnesota-based refinery that had ready access to a steady supply of Canadian crude. Fred had purchased a 35 percent stake in 1959; to gain a majority for the buyout, Charles had joined forces with his father’s old friend, Texas oilman J. Howard Marshall II, who swapped his 16 percent share in Great Northern for Koch Industries stock. The refinery became a company cash cow, fueling Charles’ expansion into natural gas and petrochemicals and pipelines. Koch had grown into a large company, but its success lay in the fact that it could still operate like a small one: Where its rivals lumbered along, it could make deals and strategic decisions without a laborious board approval process, moving decisively and swiftly.

Perhaps too swiftly for Bill. He’d risen from salesman to head the company’s mining subsidiary, Koch Carbon, and like Charles had a reputation for being highly analytical. But in meticulously studying every facet of an issue, he could be prone to waffling. He sought the opinions of high-priced consultants, commissioned studies, and snowed in managers with reports and memoranda. He asked endless questions, many of them astute, but to what end? At Koch, it was results that mattered. Profits. And the division Bill ran, according to Charles, was not faring so well.

Bill nevertheless pressed for more and more responsibility. William Hanna, the executive to whom Bill reported, noted: “It was important for Bill to be important.”

By 1980, Bill was openly dismissive of his brother, referring to him as “Prince Charles.” Over dinner one night at Boston’s Algonquin Club with his brother David and George Ablah—a family friend with whom the Kochs had recently joined in a $195 million real estate deal—Bill commented that Koch Industries had a reputation for screwing over its business partners. David was outraged. “You’ve got to retract that statement,” he said.

Bill’s criticisms—intemperate as they could sometimes be—were not merely rooted in sibling rivalry. He and other shareholders had developed some legitimate worries about the company’s direction. Koch Industries had run afoul of agencies ranging from the Department of Energy to the Internal Revenue Service, and it even faced a criminal indictment for conspiring to rig a federal lottery for oil and gas leases.

Bill had also grown troubled by the increasing amounts of company money Charles diverted to his “libertarian revolution causes”—causes Bill considered loony. “No shareholders had any influence over how the company was being run, and large contributions and corporate assets were being used to further the political philosophy of one man,” Bill said later.

Charles’ philosophy had been deeply influenced by their father, whose experiences helping to modernize the USSR’s oil industry in the early 1930s turned him into a rabid anti-communist who saw signs of Soviet subversion everywhere. A staunch conservative and Barry Goldwater backer, Fred was among the John Birch Society’s national leaders; Charles joined in due time, and by the ’60s was among a group of influential Birchers who grew enamored with a colorful anti-government guru named Robert LeFevre, creator of a libertarian mecca called the Freedom School in Colorado’s Rampart mountain range. From here, Charles fell in with the fledgling libertarian movement, a volatile stew of anarchists, devotees of the “Austrian school” of economics, and other radical thinkers who could agree on little besides an abiding disdain for government.

By late 1979, as tensions with Bill were escalating, Charles had become the libertarian movement’s primary sugar daddy. He had cofounded the Cato Institute as an incubator for libertarian ideas, bankrolled the magazine Libertarian Review, and backed the movement’s youth outreach arm, Students for a Libertarian Society. He had also convinced David to run as the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate in the 1980 election (Bill had declined). David was able to pour unlimited funds into his own campaign, circumventing federal restrictions on political contributions.

Their father had loathed publicity, scrupulously guarding the family’s privacy. But, to Bill’s dismay, Charles and David’s activism was beginning to draw attention to the company and the family. Worse, at the very moment that the Energy Department was investigating Koch Industries for violating price controls on oil, David and his Libertarian Party running mate, Ed Clark, were on the campaign trail openly antagonizing the agency by calling for its eradication.

Before the storm: Bill, Charles, and David in Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1968 Photo: Mikki Ansin

Beyond politics, Bill and other Koch shareholders also had concerns about liquidity. Bill was one of the richest men in America, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But only on paper. He had needed to borrow money to buy a mansion near Boston. Nearly all of his net worth was locked up in a closely held private company. The market value of Koch stock, unlike that of publicly traded companies, was opaque. If any of Koch’s shareholders wanted to cash in their holdings, they would likely be forced to do so at an extreme discount.

Koch shares did pay a dividend (about 6 percent of the company’s earnings), but Bill considered it stingy. Charles’ growth-obsessed operating style called for plowing almost all earnings back into the company. This strategy expanded Koch Industries, but not the bank accounts of its shareholders—at least not immediately. Bill had interests he wanted to pursue: art, fine wine, yachting.

Bill began furtively meeting with Koch shareholders, some of whom shared his frustrations. The most obvious solution was taking the company public. Charles opposed this option. The last thing he wanted was more oversight from government bureaucrats.

On Thursday, July 3, 1980, an 11-page single-spaced letter landed on Charles’ desk. His blood pressure rose as he read: This was not just another of Bill’s regular, overheated missives. His brother was accusing him of keeping the board in the dark about key corporate matters, including its run-ins with regulators: “The directors and shareholders must look on helplessly as the corporation’s good name is dragged through the mud.”

Bill delved into the “extremely frustrating” liquidity issue, complaining that it was “absurd” that shareholders who were “extremely wealthy on paper” had almost no ability to utilize their assets. “What is the purpose of having wealth if you cannot do anything with it, especially when under our present tax laws on death they will undoubtedly end up in the hands of government and politicians?” If these problems were not solved, he warned, “the company will probably have to be sold or taken public.” Though the letter was addressed solely to Charles, Bill had circulated it to some of the shareholders. It was a declaration of war.

Six days later, on July 9, 1980, Charles took his customary place at the head of the long, polished wooden table in Koch Industries’ conference room. A large world map hung behind him. As usual, David sat to Charles’ left, and Sterling Varner, the company’s president, to his right.

Charles was known for his inscrutable impassiveness. But that afternoon, as the directors gathered for a board meeting, he was visibly angry. He had added a last-minute item to the agenda: “W.I.K. Has Leveled Serious Charges.”

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Koch vs. Koch: The Brutal Battle That Tore Apart America’s Most Powerful Family

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Look Me in the Eye – John Elder Robison

by Myrna Posted on April 28, 2014

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Look Me in the Eye

My Life with Asperger’s

John Elder Robison

Genre: Psychology

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: September 25, 2007

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Seller: Random House, LLC


NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “As sweet and funny and sad and true and heartfelt a memoir as one could find.” —from the foreword by Augusten Burroughs Ever since he was young, John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits—an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother, Augusten Burroughs, in them)—had earned him the label “social deviant.” It was not until he was forty that he was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. That understanding transformed the way he saw himself—and the world. A born storyteller, Robison has written a moving, darkly funny memoir about a life that has taken him from developing exploding guitars for KISS to building a family of his own. It’s a strange, sly, indelible account—sometimes alien yet always deeply human.

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Look Me in the Eye – John Elder Robison

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