Jacob Epstein

My lesson from the Oregon experiment is that our system pours hundreds of billions of dollars into stuff, but pays little attention to whether any of that stuff is improving people’s health.  Adding more people to the insurance rolls –pouring more money into a low value healthcare system – isn’t going to improve people’s health.  Will it help the uninsured financially?  Sure.  Is providing financial security to poor Americans a good thing to do?  Absolutely.  No American should be one car accident away from bankruptcy.  But until we improve the underlying functioning of the healthcare delivery system, we shouldn’t expect any intervention that improves access to more healthcare services to have a meaningful effect on people’s health.

It had been five years since the Orthodox majority had won ­control of the school board. They had done so not as public-school parents (virtually all Orthodox children in the district attend private yeshivas), but as taxpayers. The new majority on the board cut taxes and budgets, angering the public-school community.

The school’s deans, who had handled discipline, had been laid off, and many students started arriving at school very late or skipping it entirely. Last year, the kindergarten school day was reduced by half. AP classes and ESL programs fell by the wayside. In the high schools, so many teachers have been laid off that students can’t fill their schedules: Some have five lunch periods and study halls in an eight-period day.

By last spring, the atmosphere at school board meetings had become angry and bombastic. The chairman, an Orthodox family attorney named Daniel Schwartz, decided to escalate the fight by giving a speech denouncing anti-Semitism in the district. Elementary-school children, he said, were telling their teachers that they hated the Jews; high-school students were appearing before the board and questioning its moral authority. He cited St. Augustine’s instruction that Jews could be tolerated but not accepted, a sentiment that he said was alive in Auschwitz and “the crematoria of Treblinka” and that was alive in Ramapo today. The district’s demographics, he said, weren’t changing; the Hasidim could not be wished away. “You don’t like it?” Schwartz told the audience. “Find another place to live.”

Even the mildest meetings of the East Ramapo School Board—ones when no board members call one another moral degenerates, when no references are made to Treblinka—contain a fascinating tableau: At a meeting in March, soon after Young-Mercer and the second remaining secular board members had resigned, seven yarmulked men looked down from the dais at a crowd of angry students and parents, most of them black and Hispanic. 

The students come to board meetings, in many cases, because their parents can’t. “Many parents don’t speak English or are too busy with work,” Olivia Castor says. But it leaves them in a difficult position: They are ostensibly the people the board is supposed to serve, but they have also become anti-board activists. “At a young age, you hear ‘Jewish’ and you automatically think, Oh, they’re trying to kill my school district,” says Tendrina Alexandre, a student leader at Spring Valley High School who graduated last year. “That’s not necessarily the case. I had plenty of Jewish friends that I grew up with. But then when you look at the school board, it’s like, What else are you supposed to think? Because it’s all Hasidic Jews. And it’s them against us.”

Nixon’s extraordinary abuse of his new power started almost as soon as he had put away his Inaugural finery. In February 1969 he told his staff that he wanted private funds raised to establish an intelligence unit within the White House to carry out around-the-clock surveillance of political opponents. This led to the hiring of a group of fanatics, bums, fools, and losers—most of them paid for with private funds but run by White House aides and right out of the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. Some were of Cuban origin and had participated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; to motivate them Nixon instructed that they be told that their mission was to root out Communists in the Democratic Party. 

The following year Nixon signed off on a plan (the “Huston plan”) that included not just wiretaps also but break-ins and intercepting mail; the plan was so extreme that even the powerful FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no civil libertarian, objected; though Nixon said that the plan had been rescinded parts of it were implemented. The list of “enemies” he ordered John Dean to draw up, was considered by many who were on it funny and even a point of pride, but it was a chilling exercise of power: the president used the levers of government, including the IRS, to audit and harass his opponents, a wide swath of people in public and private lives. Nixon was often heard on the tapes telling his aides he wanted them to “get the goods” on this or that perceived enemy. Edward Kennedy, presumably Nixon’s most powerful opponent for reelection, was put under twenty-four hour surveillance for a time by one of the clowns hired by the White House to carry out Nixon’s plan.

Nixon’s most serious problems arose out of his obsession about the leak of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971. This led—shortly after the Papers were first published in The New York Times—to the establishing, four days later, the White House “plumbers” office in the EOB. A sign saying PLUMBERS was on the door. But even before the plumbers office was fully set up Nixon’s aides implemented “Special Operation No. 1”: in a first step toward punishing the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, the White House sanctioned the gravest offense—a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to get the files of this particular patient. A raid of the office of the psychiatrist of a private citizen on the orders of the president of the United States. This clear flouting of the Fourth Amendment protection of private property from searches and seizures was the most disturbing act during this extraordinary period and it shook even conservative senators; Nixon knew that its discovery was the single greatest danger to him, and this was what he was so frantically trying to cover up.

The obsession over the leak of the Pentagon Papers also led to the mad suggestion by the president of the United States that the offices of the Brookings Institution be firebombed in order to get to the safes in the offices of former Kissinger aides, Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, who were suspected of keeping the drafts of some unpublished chapters of the Pentagon Papers. The president could be heard on the tapes instructing his aides: “Godammit. Get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” 

In this context the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972 was almost routine. This one, when the burglars were caught, which started the unraveling of Nixon’s secret plots against his enemies, was actually the burglars’ fourth attempt: in the first attempt they faked a banquet to get into the building but ended up locked in a closet; the second time they couldn’t break the lock on the DNC office door; the third time, on Memorial Day, they got into the DNC office but put a bug on the wrong phone, so on they went back to fix it. Perhaps because breaking in had become so habitual they got sloppy and left the immortal piece of tape on a door. 

In October 1973, Nixon rattled through a series of beheadings of those who got in the way of his desperate attempts to prevent the tapes into which he had sealed his own fate—as he was oddly aware—from being turned over to the prosecutors. He first ordered the attorney general, Elliott Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, the Independent Prosecutor who had subpoenaed the tapes and got a court order that they must be released. Richardson, a Boston Brahmin, also refused and was fired by the president; the next in line, Bill Ruckelshaus, a popular environmentalist, also refused and was fired. Finally, the next in line, Robert Bork, agreed to fire Cox. The prosecutors’ staff was barricaded in their offices trying to protect their files from the FBI, who had surrounded them and told them they could not remove their papers. As the bulletins rolled in, one after another on that dark Saturday night, it felt as if we were living in a banana republic and now there were grounds for fearing a President who was irrational and out of control. There was a run on the bookstores to buy legal scholar Raoul Berger’s Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (1969). No one knew how to impeach a president.

The atmosphere in Washington was unlike anything that had gone before or has happened since. We lived in fear. Knowing that the telephones of some of the presidents’ “enemies” were being tapped, we joked in our telephone conversations about our phones being bugged. (No Internet then, but just think of the Nixon people’s probable temptation to trace emails.) One Sunday morning when the newspaper delivery was late, a perfectly sane woman I knew said, “They’ve stopped the papers.” It got to the point where, near the end, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger felt compelled to send a memo to military commanders to obey no command that came from the White House to dispatch the troops to restore order.

This brings us to the strange character of Richard Nixon, probably the most peculiar person to serve as president of the United States. He was also an unlikely successful political figure. He didn’t particularly like people and few people liked him. He had very few friends, trusted almost no one. He was awkward in many ways, from his odd motions at times to his virtual inability to make small talk. Nixon’s confusion of opponents with enemies and his indulging his long nurtured grievances gave us a president who came to office filled with hatreds and was willing to use the instruments of government to “get” them. The president was a dangerous man.

But even then, we didn’t know just how dangerous were Nixon’s personality traits. Not until I was doing research for a book about him for the American Presidents series did it become clear that he was often drunk, barking out orders in after-midnight calls to his aides, his words slurred, and they would have to decide whether to carry them out. Worse still, on the advice of a wealthy backer who kept him stocked, Nixon began to take Dilantin, an anti-convulsive drug, on the grounds that it would lessen depression, though it had never been approved for that. Dilantin served to enhance the effects of too much alcohol: mental confusion, slurring of words, physical clumsiness. Often Nixon was holed up with his best and only close pal, Bebe Rebozo, outside the White House, in Key Biscayne or at Camp David. On the eve of the “incursion” into Cambodia, a disastrous spreading of the Vietnam War, the two men were at Camp David and one or the other would call Kissinger to make sure that the incursion went forward. “It’s your ass, Henry,” said one of them, their drunken voices hard to distinguish.

I never learned to type. The best I can do is hunt and peck with two fingers while looking at the keyboard. Instead of touch-typing, I was taught how to work with metal: shape flashings, solder wires, drill into tin. Learning such skills traces back to the fifth grade at Public School 187 in Queens. My teacher, Mrs. L., divided the class into those able to undertake a so-called “academic curriculum” and ultimately attend college, and those like me, only fit for vocational training, destined to work in factories or repair shops.

Mrs. L. was a squat, middle-aged woman with a dour mien. She made clear to us what marked a promising student: neat penmanship, proper posture, and sharp attention to her lessons. It did not take her long to conclude that I lacked all of these indicators.

I spent much of the class day looking out the window at our concrete playground, dreaming about stickball games, watching in my mind’s eye a Spaulding rocket far beyond the outfield. When not occupied with home runs, I studied a girl with a pageboy cut and a fetching smile. I swiveled in my seat and scratched my chair on the linoleum floor in an attempt to get her to look at me. Instead, all I got were sharp reprimands from Mrs. L. Moreover, my handwriting was poor. It didn’t seem worth the effort to perfect a capital J or G, with all of the curlicues of Parkman script. When the bell rang at 3:00 PM, I vaulted through the door, racing to the playground where sides were quickly chosen for the stickball game.

The first parent–teacher conference was held at the end of September, and Mrs. L. rendered her judgment. “He is not college material,” she said flatly to my mother and father. A brief listing of all of my deficiencies followed, including shifting in my seat, looking out the window, making noise with my chair, and sloppy penmanship. I lacked intelligence, motivation, and focus. Such pupils were best served by learning a trade. So it would be metal shop instead of typing class.

My parents listened quietly to Mrs. L.’s assessment. After they left, my father turned to my mother and offered a different conclusion: “He has shpilkes.” My mother nodded knowingly. Shpilkes is a Yiddish word that denotes “ants in your pants.” The restless traits I displayed in the classroom were familiar from my behavior at home. As far as my parents were concerned, shpilkes was nothing out of the ordinary for a boy in fifth grade, except that perhaps I had more of it than others.

Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men is very well documented, meticulously researched, and based on the author’s extensive reporting, not her personal life story. It also draws almost exactly the opposite conclusion as does Sandberg. In The End of Men, Rosin argues that the real crisis facing America today is not the dearth of women bosses, but the dearth of men at all levels except at the very top.

Rosin argues that the evolution of the service economy and the decline of blue-collar jobs have created a world that increasingly favors classically “female” talents, starting with a greater ability to sit still and listen in school, and continuing with better “people skills” of the kind needed to get ahead in the modern world. Rosin’s work is backed up not by social science studies on housework and sex but by hard facts. In the Great Recession, three quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost belonged to men. For every two men who will receive a BA this year, three women will do the same. Of the fifteen job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the US, all but two are occupied primarily by women. Not only that, Rosin finds similar patterns elsewhere in the world: “We are starting to see how quickly an order we once considered ‘natural’ can be overturned.”

Rosin is inclined to see the positive side of this story—she thinks it’s a good thing that women now occupy more positions of power—but she faithfully documents the downside as well. Middle-class, lower-middle-class, and poor men are dropping out of the workforce on a previously unimaginable scale. And this phenomenon, Rosin capably demonstrates, is extremely bad for women. Male underachievement, male unemployment, and male failure are undermining marriage, harming children, and destroying families.

The impact on the poor is already visible: the number of children who live in families headed by single mothers is at an all-time high, despite the evidence that children in such families have worse educational, financial, and psychological outcomes. Though it may be unavoidable, single motherhood generally isn’t good for the mothers either: raising children alone can be stressful and exhausting, maybe even more stressful and exhausting than running a large company. Sandberg has said many times that successful women must be sure to marry the right sort of man: helpful, respectful of her career, willing to split household tasks 50–50. But it will be difficult, if not impossible, for women to “dream the possible dream” if there are not merely few helpful men to marry, but few marriageable men at all.

The guéridon was a cart that the waiter could wheel alongside the diner’s table to whip up, over a spirit lamp, simple recipes such as steak Diane, bananas Foster and crêpes Suzette designed to delight and impress.

Grand restaurants used to be run by a floor brigade, led by the mâitre d’. Career waiters, like those that can still occasionally be spotted on the continent, were entirely responsible for the customer’s pleasure. The kitchen brigade were entirely subordinate.

A really talented waiter ran a gamut of flambéd and deglazed specialities, many of which began on the cart and have since passed back to the general menu. Fettuccine Alfredo, lobster Newburg, beef stroganoff – all would have had their original incarnation on the wagon.

Perhaps we should give more of our waiters a chance to shine again, to step into the spotlight so long hogged by the chefs. I’m all for letting them set fire to things in the dining room.

We hit the Hamilton Road, built between 1928 and 1932 by New Zealander Archibald Hamilton to link Erbil and Iran. It is a stunning feat of engineering, twisting and turning through deep limestone gorges and past raging waterfalls. We entered the 12km-long Gali Ali Beg, the “Grand Canyon of the Middle East”. Hamilton called it “one of the grandest formations of nature to be found in the world”, and he was probably right. The potential for adventure tourism, still nascent here, is as immense as the canyon itself.

We arrived in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan’s second city, known affectionately as Suly, its skyline dominated by the futuristic Grand Millennium hotel, a copy of Dubai’s Burj al-Arab, due to open later this year. We walked through the Grand Bazaar, Iraqi Kurdistan’s largest, the air suffused with incense and strawberries. Young boys ran around with silver trays loaded with sweet tea in tulip glasses. People waved and smiled. “Welcome! Welcome!” they shouted.

We ate kebabs of the most tender lamb imaginable and Kurdish sweet rolls studded with pistachios.