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Thursday, Jul 5, 2001 12:35 AM UTC

Against the law

Two new books make it clear that the Supreme Court's notorious Bush vs. Gore ruling wasn't as bad as it seemed at the time. It was worse.

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The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush vs. Gore, which stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush, was one of most controversial rulings in the court’s history. It inspired an unprecedented flood of outrage: In print and in conversation, in chat rooms and classrooms, law professors, journalists and ordinary citizens alike expressed shock, disbelief and deep anger at the decision. As one might expect, the reaction to the ruling tended (though by no means absolutely) to break down along partisan lines, but there was a notable asymmetry: Outside the noisy precincts of braying-head TV commentators, the court’s supporters were considerably less outspoken — and assured — than its critics.

The implicit reasoning of those who backed the decision seemed to be “It wasn’t pretty, but it had to be done” — not a position easy to defend publicly. (And since the outcome was both favorable to their side and irreversible, arguments were unnecessary anyway.) The critics, for their part, were convinced that the nation’s highest judicial body, whose members are answerable to no one, had pulled off a judicial coup d’état, its conservative majority, on the thinnest of legal pretexts, arrogantly handing the election to the candidate it preferred — in the process possibly nullifying the votes of 50 million Americans.

I was among those who harshly criticized the Supreme Court’s decision. I have had no reason to reconsider that judgment. But, I suspect, like many people who followed the election carefully but are neither lawyers nor experts in the history of the court and constitutional law, I still harbored a small area of doubt as to whether the majority justices were really corrupt.

There were three reasons for this. First, there’s decorum: our belief in the incorruptibility of the Supreme Court justices, or at least our hesitation to publicly question it, is deeply ingrained. Second, there is the intimidating universe of law, a kind of parallel reality made up of a confusing maze of principles and codes. Although I believe judicial decisions are ultimately transparent, susceptible to the same analysis as legislation or executive rulings (they must be, or democracy and citizenship are trumped by “expertise”), it’s hard for even a reasonably well-informed citizen to feel absolutely confident when making judgments about legal matters. Without knowing the intricacies of the history of equal protection doctrine or how much weight to attach to precedent and consistency in evaluating the probity of a justice’s decisions, could one be absolutely positive that the majority’s decision was legally and morally bankrupt? Finally, there was the distorting element of partisan passion. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, with emotions running high, judgments could be unreliable.

More than half a year has now passed since Bush vs. Gore. Passions have cooled, and the first wave of expert commentary on the decision, represented by the two books discussed here, has appeared. And there is nothing in either of these volumes to dispel the thesis that the majority acted improperly, and probably corruptly, in Bush vs. Gore.

The two books offer a reasonably comprehensive spectrum of viewpoints. Alan Dershowitz’s “Supreme Injustice” is a lucid, heavily researched, no-holds-barred assault, written for a general audience, on both the ruling itself and on the justices who made it. Dershowitz, an author, Harvard Law School professor and Gore partisan (he provided pro bono legal representation for Democratic voters in Palm Beach County), is out for blood: His purpose is to convince us that the majority not only made bad law in Bush vs. Gore, but did so for contaminated and self-serving reasons. He writes, “The decision may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants … No honest person can any longer trust them to do justice, as distinguished from politics.”

Dershowitz presses his case on three fronts. First, he attacks the legal reasoning of the decision as a matter of law. Second, he examines the various majority justices’ previously expressed views, and demonstrates their utter inconsistency with the decision. This is “Supreme Injustice’s” most important contribution. Finally, he adduces considerable evidence that supports (though of course it cannot prove) the argument that the justices acted out of blatant partisanship, with some of them also motivated by self-interest.

At the heart of Dershowitz’s argument is his certainty that the majority justices would fail what he calls the “shoe-on-the-other-foot test” — that is, if Gore was ahead and it was Bush who was seeking a hand recount, the majority would have ruled differently. This is an extremely serious accusation, because deciding a case on the basis of the identity of a litigant is a violation of the judicial oath of impartiality. If there were a process to oversee the Supreme Court (and Dershowitz argues that there should be), such a violation would presumably result in the offenders being removed from office. Dershowitz challenges anyone who believes the majority would pass the other-foot test to prove it, “by demonstrating how their opinions in this case can be reconciled with their opinions in prior cases as well as with their extrajudicial writings.” Dershowitz concludes that the majority justices “shamed themselves and the Court on which they serve, and … defiled their places in history.”

Sunstein and Epstein’s “The Vote” is a quieter book, less fiery and focused but with greater intellectual range. A collection of essays by legal scholars, it’s aimed at a narrower, more expert audience than Dershowitz’s book. And unlike “Supreme Injustice,” it presents both sides: Its contributors include a number of eminent conservatives.

What’s noteworthy about “The Vote” is how weak, cramped and unconvincing the arguments made by the majority’s defenders are: Not a single writer finds himself able to defend the ruling in its entirety, and some of the concessions they make are huge. (The fact that none even addresses the “shoe on the other foot” test is telling.) As for the majority’s critics, they make many of the same legal points that Dershowitz does, as well as adding a few he misses, and they also delve fruitfully into broader areas of interpretation.

Three essays are particularly stimulating: Richard H. Pildes’ “Democracy and Disorder” relates the court’s fearful attitude toward democracy to its ruling in Bush vs. Gore; David A. Strauss’ “Bush v. Gore: What Were They Thinking?” attempts to capture the mindset of the majority; and Frank I. Michelman’s “Suspicion, or the New Prince” casts a critical eye upon what he argues is the court’s chosen role as a Machiavellian Regent, a kind of national savior making the “right” decisions for the country, which for reasons of efficacy dare not speak their name.

Unlike Dershowitz, the pieces in “The Vote” don’t call for the justices’ heads, and they don’t venture into the unseemly realm of the ad hominem. But a stiletto can be just as deadly as a broadsword, and their academic judiciousness makes them, in some ways, even more rhetorically damning than the polemical “Supreme Injustice.” (For those who really crave red meat, Vincent Bugliosi’s “The Betrayal of America” is prime porterhouse. Bugliosi asserts that the majority justices are common criminals.)

There is something viscerally satisfying about the experience of reading both books. The painful truth is that, except for those in a position to sit in judgment on Bush’s judicial appointments, there is no practical response short of civil disobedience to a misdeed committed by the Supreme Court. The condemnation of history is the only satisfaction Americans who were outraged by the decision will ever get. And that condemnation has begun.

Before turning to the central question raised by Dershowitz — whether the majority’s action was truly corrupt, rather than just shaky law (as even many of the majority’s defenders admit) — let us review the arguments against the decision made by Dershowitz and by some of the contributors to “The Vote.”

The majority considered two substantive arguments in finding for Bush. The first (which, tellingly, was the only one the court initially gave serious consideration, but which it later rejected), concerned whether the Florida Supreme Court usurped the authority of the Legislature by making new law. The second, the argument that finally prevailed, was that Florida’s differing counting standards constituted an equal protection violation under the 14th Amendment.

The equal protection argument runs aground immediately on the simple question of standing: who is harmed? (A question, Dershowitz points out, typically posed by Justice Antonin Scalia in the equal protection cases he has skeptically addressed — but one which he suddenly lost interest in.) No class of voters is placed at either an advantage or disadvantage by the existence of a general standard (“the clear intent of the voter”) that is applied differently in different precincts. As Michelman writes in “Suspicion, or the New Prince,” “all that [the court] found legally wrong was that the intent-of-the-voter standard — they thought unnecessarily — allows different honest counters, or groups of them, to make different dispositions of identical ballots, on a basis that is utterly random with respect to voter interest. No one’s equal dignity is impugned by this practice, and only Humpty Dumpty would describe it as valuing one person’s vote over another’s. Is this a human rights emergency? I would like you even to put a name to the human right undergoing violation here.”

Even worse is the fact that the remedy was far more harmful than the problem. By stopping the recount, the high court clearly denied many thousands of voters who cast legal votes, as defined by established Florida law, their constitutional right to have their votes counted. This is the aspect of the court’s ruling that must stick in the craw of even the most partisan Republican, because it profanes the most sacred tenet of democracy. It cannot be a legitimate use of law to disenfranchise legal voters when recourse is available. Dershowitz concludes, “This is the most perverse misuse of the equal protection clause I have seen in my 40 years as a lawyer, especially since the uncounted votes almost certainly were cast disproportionately by precisely those citizens whom the equal-protection clause was originally designed to protect — racial minorities.” He notes that even conservatives who applaud the decision’s outcome have found it hard to defend the equal protection principle.

As for the other argument, subscribed to in the end by only three justices (though generally preferred by conservative commentators, who dislike the liberal, anti-federalist implications of the equal protection finding), that the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling usurped the constitutional authority of the Legislature as set forth in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, Dershowitz argues that it is even weaker than the equal protection claim. Basically, he echoes the words of Justice John Paul Stevens, in dissent: rather than making new law, the Florida court simply did what courts do — it resolved an ambiguity in legislation. This is the principle of judicial review, enshrined in one of the canonical Supreme Court decisions, Marbury vs. Madison. The high court’s finding that Florida’s court had overreached to the point where federal intervention was required was without basis in law. (It was also contrary to the expressed judicial philosophy of the majority, but that goes without saying — as Dershowitz argues in minute and convincing detail, every single position taken by the majority justices goes against all of their previous positions.) Even if the Florida Supreme Court erred in its interpretation of Florida election law, which Dershowitz and several of the contributors to “The Vote” acknowledge is eminently possible, that would have been insufficient grounds to trigger federal intervention. Error alone is not enough: the Florida court’s interpretation would have to be so far afield as to be absurd. In an essay titled “‘In Such Manner as the Legislature Thereof May Direct’: The Outcome in Bush v. Gore Defended,” “The Vote” co-editor Richard A. Epstein mounts what his colleague Cass Sunstein called a “heroic” defense of the Article II argument, but it is less than convincing.

Then there is the decision’s much-criticized limiting provision — the “this train and this train only” coda. The majority wrote, “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” Dershowitz derisively writes, “Like a great spot-relief pitcher in baseball, this equal-protection argument was trotted out to do its singular job of striking out Vice President Gore and was immediately sent to the showers, never again to appear in the game.” David Strauss comments, “The Court’s attempt to limit its holding, with barely a fig leaf of principle, gives the game away. The majority was not concerned with principle. It smelled a rat in this case. It thought the Florida Supreme Court was up to no good. It could not explain what the Florida Supreme Court was up to in terms that engaged general principles that it was willing to embrace, but it was determined to intervene and stop that court. If the actions of the United States Supreme Court are to be defended, they must be defended in those terms.” In his essay, “Order Without Law,” Cass R. Sunstein notes that there is no logical reason that the court’s ruling should be “limited to the present circumstances,” adding, “The effort to cabin the outcome, without a sense of the principle to justify the cabining, gives the opinion an unprincipled cast.”

At a more general level, several commentators argue that the court’s involvement in such a political case was unwise, if not an explicit conflict of interest. In “Leaving the Decision to Congress,” Elizabeth Garrett argues that the court’s intervention into the political and electoral sphere harms both the court and the public’s image of our elected officials. Michelman, arguing that the court could and should have declined the case (as most experts expected it to do), writes, “It is not as if the Court lacked a proper, honorable alternative to decisive intervention. The majority’s woebegone plea to the contrary — ‘when contending parties invoke the process of the courts … it becomes our unsought responsibility to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront’ — cannot be sincere. Why is certiorari jurisdiction discretionary, then? What is a political question?”

These critiques concern the decision itself. But the heart of Dershowitz’s book concerns the shocking inconsistency of that decision with the views previously expressed by the minority. It’s widely known that the majority embraced arguments that were not only novel and legally dubious, but out of character for its members. But Dershowitz goes further, citing chapter and verse to reveal just how bizarre it was that individual members of the court ruled as they did.

For instance, in a discussion of Antonin Scalia’s judicial philosophy in a chapter titled “The Inconsistency of the Majority Justices with Their Previously Expressed Views,” he writes that Scalia has hammered away again and again on the theme of precedents, judicial consistency, predictability and “unbroken national traditions,” then notes, “In joining the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, Antonin Scalia violated every single one of these salutary principles to enable him to vote his political preferences. Not only did he violate these rules, but he did so specifically in order to avoid their intended prophylactic effect.”

The this-case-only limiting provision of the ruling is the most glaring violation of this dictum. After dismissing the argument itself (he notes that election cases are no more complex than death penalty ones, affirmative action cases and others), Dershowitz argues that it is precisely this type of “unique” case that Scalia, who decries judicial caprice and once wrote “The Supreme Court of the United States does not sit to announce ‘unique’ dispositions,” would normally avoid.

Still worse, he convincingly argues, is the incompatibility between Scalia’s expansive finding of equal rights violations in Florida and all of his previous rulings on equal rights. “Scalia has repeatedly said that his job is not to ‘revise’ the equal-protection clause, nor to ‘prescribe’ on his own authority ‘progressively higher degrees’ of equality. The equal-protection clause, in his view, cannot ‘supersede … those constant and unbroken national traditions that embody the people’s understanding of ambiguous constitutional texts’ … The Florida standard for hand-counting votes — the clear intent of the voter — fits precisely into Scalia’s criteria for a law or practice that should not be struck down: It is not expressly prohibited by the text of the Constitution, it bears the endorsement of many states over a long period of time, and it has never previously been challenged. Yet Scalia voted to strike it down, despite his previous strong view that there is no basis for striking down such a standard.”

According to Dershowitz, Scalia violated his judicial philosophy because wanted to make sure his boy got in. He succeeded, but — Dershowitz argues — at the cost of his honor and his reputation: “Had he passed the test posed by this case, history might well have remembered him as the man of principle he claims to be. But he failed the test, and failed it badly … Scalia’s vote in Bush v. Gore has shown that the most accurate guide to predicting his judicial decisions is to follow his political and personal preferences rather than his lofty rhetoric about judicial restraint, originalism, and other abstract aspects of his so-called constraining judicial philosophy, which turns out to be little more than a cover for his politics and his desire to pack the Court with like-minded justices.”

After this, it must give Scalia little joy to read that “Because I like Justice Scalia as a person, I was most disappointed with his precipitous abandonment of principle in the name of partisanship.”

If Dershowitz regards Scalia more with sadness than with anger, the other majority justices fare even worse. He is caustically dismissive of both Rehnquist and Thomas, whom he basically describes as, respectively, a partisan hack and an enraged, withdrawn, semi-competent partisan hack. “I was neither surprised nor disappointed by the actions of Chief Justice Rehnquist,” he writes. “No one I know seriously considered the possibility that Rehnquist had an open mind in this case.” The same holds true for Thomas, whom Dershowitz describes as a Limbaugh-listening reactionary who sometimes doesn’t even remove the rubber band from his stack of briefs and is consumed by hatred of his enemies, including Al Gore.

Finally, there are the two “moderates,” Kennedy and O’Connor. Dershowitz blasts O’Connor for departing from her federalist principles in Bush vs. Gore, notes her stated desire to retire under a Republican president and strongly suggests that her judicial vote was influenced by partisan and/or personal motives. “[O'Connor] has recently acknowledged to a friend that her vote in the election case may have hurt her reputation and endangered her place in history,” he writes. “She is right.” He criticizes Kennedy for abandoning long-held judicial beliefs on equal protection, the role of precedent, stay applications and the proper role of courts in politically charged cases, and speculates that Kennedy — who he says wrote the court’s final per curiam opinion — was trying to position himself to become chief justice when Rehnquist retires.

Defenders of the court find reasons to argue with all of the above critiques — although I believe that they would have to perform feats of casuistry unseen since the days when Ignatius Loyola strode the earth to do so. But from a rigorously nonpartisan point of view, perhaps the single most glaring problem with the decision is the court’s failure to allow Florida to hold a recount under uniform standards.

Even assuming that the high court was right to get involved in a murky issue of state election law in the first place; even assuming that it was wise for justices with an inescapably personal interest in the outcome to jump into a highly political dispute; even assuming that the issuance of the stay, which stopped the recount, really did prevent Bush from suffering the “irreparable harm” of a “cloud” over the “legitimacy of his election”; even assuming there was some way to reconcile the majority’s suddenly activist stance with all of its previous views about state sovereignty; even assuming that there was also some way to reconcile the majority’s highly tactical, avowedly one-time-only intervention with its members’ previous views about fidelity to precedent and the necessity of basing decisions on broad judicial principle; even assuming that the Supreme Court was correct in its adventurous (and again unprecedented) finding that Florida’s vote-counting standard was unconstitutionally broad; even assuming that this standard was a greater equal-protection violation than the existence of completely different voting systems throughout the state — even assuming all this, why didn’t the court simply remand the case back to the Florida court and ask it to come up with a universal standard for counting votes?

The court argued, in effect, that time had expired. But the “safe harbor” argument it put forward — that the Dec. 18 deadline, after which state electors could be challenged, was absolute — has been shown to be fallacious. (As David Strauss notes in “Bush v. Gore: What Were They Thinking?”: “This interpretation of 3 USC section 5 [the constitutional section concerning the "safe harbor" deadline] is wrong. No one, now, believes otherwise.”) As the conservative scholar Michael McConnell writes in his contribution to “The Vote,” “Two-and-a-Half Cheers for Bush v. Gore,” “Having rested the decision on the standardless character of the recount ordered by the state court, the logical outcome was to remand under proper constitutional standards.” And he admits that the court’s failure to do so “continues to cast long shadows both on the Court and on the Bush presidency.”

McConnell does not venture to speculate what those “long shadows” might be. But surely it is reasonable to conclude, given the totality of the record, that the Supreme Court failed to remand because it did not actually want a recount under any circumstances — and it did not want one because a fair recount might give the election to Gore.

If the majority did not want even a fair recount, there is only one possible justification that could be offered for its action: It was acting to prevent a national crisis that could have erupted had Gore prevailed and two sets of Florida electors appeared before a divided Congress. This is the argument made by Richard Posner, a conservative legal scholar and judge. “What exactly is the Supreme Court good for if it refuses to examine a likely constitutional error that, if uncorrected, will engender a national crisis?” he wrote. In his new book “Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts,” Posner asserts that pragmatism — in this case, the desire to head off a crisis — was the “hidden ground” not just of Bush vs. Gore but of many judicial decisions.

Dershowitz and Posner clash on this issue of a paternalistic Supreme Court using deception to “save” the country in a contentious exchange in Slate. Posner argues that courts that Dershowitz likes, such as the Warren Court, have frequently been disingenuous about their rulings: Dershowitz fires back that he never defended that aspect of the Warren Court and that there is no place in a democracy for secrecy. Posner’s position, a variant of the de-idealizing doctrine of legal realism, has a core of truth as regards jurisprudence in general, but it’s dubious whether it applies to Bush vs. Gore.

Returning to the question of the recount, there is one other possible explanation for why the Supreme Court majority did not want one: because it was convinced that a corrupt Florida Supreme Court would put its thumb on the scales and give the election to Gore. To be sure, this motivation and the “national crisis” motivation are not mutually exclusive. And there is reason to believe that elements of both were present in the majority’s thinking. Dershowitz writes, “I have been told that one of the dissenting U.S. Supreme Court justices characterized the mind-set of some of the majority justices as follows: ‘If the Florida Supreme Court is going to act like a bunch of Democratic political hacks, well, by God, we will act like a bunch of Republican political hacks.’”

Leaving aside the well-known, if apparently no longer unquestioned, dictum that two wrongs don’t make a right, is there compelling evidence that the Florida court was in fact in Gore’s pocket? David Strauss reminds us that, in fact, the Florida Supreme Court issued a number of important rulings that went against Gore, including rejecting his attempt to require Miami-Dade County to resume its halted recount. As Strauss points out, “At the time it seemed entirely possible, indeed perhaps probable, that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision on this issue cost the Vice President the election.”

Taking this into account, Strauss argues convincingly that “several members of the Court — perhaps a majority — were determined to overturn any ruling of the Florida Supreme Court that was favorable to Vice President Gore, at least if that ruling significantly enhanced the Vice President’s chances of winning the election. They acted on the basis of strong intuitions — which … is by no means necessarily inappropriate in itself — but the intuitions were intuitions about the outcome, not about the law.” The court “was not prompted by a reasoned judgment that the Florida Supreme Court made specific legal errors,” but a “general sense that the Florida Supreme Court was illegitimately manipulating the law to ensure that Vice President Gore won.” And that “general sense” was unjustified by the observable facts. (Dershowitz, in a telling aside, sheds light on why the U.S. Supreme Court may have had that “intuition,” noting snidely that “some of the justices … apparently got their facts more from CNN than from the evidentiary record in the case.”)

We are now in a position to consider the central questions raised by Dershowitz. First, would the majority pass the other-shoe test — that is, would it would have ruled as it did if it had been Bush who wanted the recount? Second, if it would not, does that by itself prove its corruption?

Dershowitz believes it does. He throws down the gauntlet to academic defenders of the decision. “I believe it is morally wrong for scholars to defend the majority justices, even if they think their arguments are theoretically defensible, unless they honestly believe that the justices themselves would have offered these arguments on behalf of Gore if the shoe had been on the other foot,” he writes. “For brilliant academics, clever arguments are easy to come by. But to publicly defend an argument that was presented only as a rationalization for a decision based on partisan political grounds rather than nonpartisan legal grounds, is to become complicit in an intellectual fraud perpetrated by the Supreme Court majority on the nation, and to encourage its emulation in future cases.” He goes on to challenge those who honestly believe that the majority would have passed the impartiality test to support their belief by citing opinions and other evidence.

I asked “The Vote” co-editor Cass Sunstein, a moderate liberal who in his piece offers qualified praise for certain aspects of the decision, whether he believed that the majority would pass the test. “I think it’s unlikely in the extreme that the majority would have made the same arguments if Gore had been ahead and Bush had been asking for a recount,” he replied. “I say this with sadness.”

I said that Dershowitz argued that on the face of it, failing the other-shoe test means a justice has made a corrupt ruling. Did Sunstein agree? “I wouldn’t go as far as Dershowitz in saying that the majority, by their ruling, violated their judicial oath of impartiality,” he said. “I think they thought that something had gone very wrong in Florida and had to be corrected. It wasn’t purely partisan, the simple desire to put Bush in office.”

Still, he added, “the decision is very troubling. I think perhaps they acted lawlessly. But I guess I feel that it’s good to give these people the presumption of good faith. They saw the events in Florida through their own lens; they saw the problem and acted by their lights. A number of them clearly thought that the Florida Supreme Court wasn’t playing it straight.”

Sunstein’s comments throw into sharp relief a key question about judicial ethics. Does the fact that a justice “sees things through his own lens” excuse him or her from charges of violating the judicial oath of impartiality? On the face of it, it would not seem to. After all, a lens can be distorted. Even criminals see things through their own self-serving lens.

In any case, the Supreme Court — Posner notwithstanding — is not a body that should engage in covert, outcome-driven, political actions, even if its “lens” shows it a monstrous Democratic menace rising up off the coast of Florida like Godzilla. In “Bush v. Gore: What Were They Thinking?” David Strauss argues that the most reasonable defense for the court’s ruling is that they were convinced the Florida Supreme Court would try to steal the election for Gore, that no reasonable use of law would allow them to stop the Florida court, and that they therefore engaged in “a kind of morally justified civil disobedience.” He concludes, “This was not a triumph for the rule of law.” Strauss is right.

Was it also evidence of corruption? On the whole, I think the evidence points to an answer of “yes.” I think the majority would not have passed the other-shoe test. And I agree with Dershowitz that that fact alone is damning.

There is an element of power and, perhaps inevitably, self-interest in all judicial decisions. As Sunstein remarked, “We’ve tended to have too idealized a view of the court.” But the idea that justice must be blind, that the most powerful court in the world — and arguably the most powerful institution in the country — must not sink into brazen partisanship, is a bedrock principle. We must stand by it, and those justices who violate it must be held accountable. By failing to live up to their judicial oath, by allowing political motivations to sway them, by besmirching democracy itself, the five members of the Supreme Court majority disgraced themselves forever. From history’s judgment, there will be no appeal.

Gary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya.

Sunday, May 13, 2012 9:00 PM UTC

“The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book

A reporter traces the shadowy fate of the definitive version of the Hebrew Bible

By Matti Friedman

An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.

The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”

The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.

All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.

It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.

The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”

While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.

This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?

The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.

If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.

This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.

Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Saturday, May 12, 2012 7:00 PM UTC

Augusten Burroughs: Conquer trauma by letting it go

Salon exclusive: The best-selling memoirist says past horrors haunt us because we think about them too much. Stop

By Augusten Burroughs
Excerpted from "This Is How" by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.

Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.

For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.

Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.

The therapeutic process takes time, commitment, and funding. Then, insight leads to understanding, which leads to choice. At last, they are free to move on.

It’s such a clean, well-defined structure for the process of healing. Almost like a paint-by-numbers portrait where all those black outlines are confusing at first, but in time, as you apply the correct colors in the right areas, the tangle of lines resolves into a perfectly clear image.

Unfortunately, our brains tend to color outside the line. First, there is the matter of understanding our past and the events that transpired.

Understanding what happened in the past is rarely truly possible. Because true understanding must incorporate context. Not merely what we experienced, but why. And the why requires knowing the motivations of the other people involved. Without the perspective of this context, our understanding will always be biased; it will be from a single perspective: Ours. And therefore, not necessarily accurate or true.

If you are on a highway and you drive past a car accident so severe that the hood of the car has been crushed up against the windshield, you may very well assume the occupants are dead. And perhaps this will haunt you because as you passed by the car, you glimpsed a little girl’s doll on the shelf behind the backseat. One look at that accident was all anybody would need to know what “unsurvivable” looked like. And you have never been able to forget that doll or the little girl who must have loved it and who died in such a terrible crumple of steel and glass. Let’s imagine that you are haunted by dreams where you come upon the accident and you see the doll and you do nothing.

Let’s say that what was unknown to you was that the car was a high-end Mercedes that featured crumple zones designed to absorb the impact of a crash while protecting the occupants within a safety cage. And let’s say that the two occupants inside the car were sitting there as you drove by and the man in the driver’s seat was on his cell phone.

“No, I mean totally like, trashed, totaled. We’re waiting; they’re supposed to send a tow truck. She’s good except she has to pee so she’s—”

“Oh my God, did you just tell Jason that I have to pee? Now he’s going to imagine me peeing. Don’t forget to tell him we found the doll at a tag sale but we need to buy wrapping paper. At least we think it’s the doll.”

“You hear that? Yeah, don’t think about her peeing. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right doll; we had to spend like three hours on Craigslist to find one.”

Imagine that after the tow truck arrives and our couple has been safely installed into a rental vehicle, they don’t really ever think about that crash again except both are pleased with the new car’s color. Neither liked the wrecked Mercedes’ particular shade of red.

In this example, you can see how your entire perception of what happened — and you were a witness — is completely distorted by your point of view.

So, if you were to enter therapy over being disturbed by this wreck, you could spend years discussing why the sight of the doll was so upsetting, and how impotent you felt being unable to stop and help but even if you could stop, what could you have done?

Possibly, the therapist would have you write letters to the dead little girl.

What this really accomplishes is the creation of a sort of personal myth. A series of well-remembered events with finely honed details. As accurate as they may be, they are accurate from only one perspective.

For many years, I believed that one’s past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one’s past and trying to gain understanding and “make peace” with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.

As with any addiction, the first step to overcoming it is to see it.

And once you see it, you have to stop it.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Once the current moment moves into the past, it is entirely gone. It ceases to exist except in documents, photographs, and an impression left in a sofa cushion. The past — and all the moments it contained — are no longer sharing this world with us.

They are no more real than Cinderella.

To spend time — year after year — in therapy or on your own thinking about your past and forming conclusions and stitching the elements into a narrative that you can name, “the truth,” in order to be “free” of it, is not how you become free from your past.

The past does not need to be reconsidered in the present and given a structure. The events of the past cannot be understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it.

When somebody says, “Therapy has been really helpful to me in terms of resolving some of my issues from the past,” what does this actually, in practical terms, mean?

Or somebody is “haunted” or controlled by their past. How is this possible?

When I first moved to New York, I became friends with a guy who seemed to be exactly the guy I wanted to be. He was very outgoing and had lots of friends and they probably all felt as I did: Like his best and closest friend.

After we’d been friends for almost a year, one night we were out drinking and he told me he had a confession to make, something he wanted me to know about himself.

I nodded and tried to look very sincere and open, while inside my mind it was the Kentucky Derby, with most of the money being placed on female-to-male transsexual. That wasn’t it.

He proceeded to tell me in great detail about the utterly atrocious physical abuse he’d experienced at the hands of his father and mother during his childhood. It was well beyond anything I myself had ever come close to experiencing.

After this evening, my friend spoke of his past abuse frequently. And I realized that all the time we’d been friends, all those moments prior to his revelation had probably been, in his mind, moments leading up to The Telling.

Only after The Telling could he be fully himself with me. His story of his past abuse was a large part of his identity. It was a protected secret that was kept out of view for acquaintances and coworkers. Only after a measure of trust and intimacy had been formed would there be almost a ceremony in which he detailed his abuse. Rather like unwrapping, slowly, an extravagant gift one knows is going to blow the mind of the recipient.

When we first became friends it had amazed me that he was single. I now understood that he was single because of
how guys reacted when my friend finally revealed his history. It was like encountering a new person. And my friend’s abuse was now like a third person with us wherever we went.

Who could blame him? It was a wonder he was still alive.

Today, I see it differently.

My friend is a dramatic example of somebody who is haunted by their past. But because the past is gone, how does it haunt? Of course, it does not. The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We re-experience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

We enter therapy and discuss our past. We formulate opinions about what happened. We create a rich, detailed world. In therapy or on our own, we focus our attention on something that no longer exists in order to understand or have perspective or acknowledge or own what has happened. And only after we decide this understanding or recognition has taken place do we stop worrying that particular tooth with our tongue.

For years, I believed this was how to live.

I was wrong. It’s how to stagnate.

I know now how to get over the past. It has worked for me in a deeper, more enduring way than any therapy I have ever had.

Writing six autobiographical books is what freed me from my past.

If the books had been cookbooks I expect I would feel just exactly as free. That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains.

Perhaps the process of writing — being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter — has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.

For the same reason, being out of a job and just hanging around is depressing in a thousand different ways. All you have is time. Sooner or later, you end up wandering around bad neighborhoods inside your head. Neighborhoods like, “They never should have fired me, those assholes.” Which may be true or it may be untrue but it’s irrelevant to everything. It is through work that challenged me and required continuous freshness that I began to occupy not the past but this, right now. My advertising career had not been challenging. Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.

And this, here, this line, that comma.

That’s what freed me from the past. The present kidnapped me. I climbed into its car when it held up its hand and showed me the candy. I hopped right in.

When something from my past upsets me here in my present, it’s because I let my mind think back to the past and grab hold of something.

This is how the past haunts us. We think about it.

Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess.

Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. Sometimes, a particular trauma may be the largest thing we have ever experienced. So we kind of move into it, make it our home. Because there’s nothing in our lives on the scale of that loss or that trauma.

So, you need a larger life. Something that can successfully compete with your past.

To live with your mind in the past — in the name of healing or understanding or overcoming — is to live in a fantasy world where nothing new or original is created. To “understand” one’s past is to handle clay that no longer exists and shape it into a bowl nobody can ever see or touch.

Denial of the painful events in one’s past is the same as obsessing over one’s past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power. Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song — these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry around, show people occasionally, put back in its black velvet pouch, and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

Then, when asked to join the pole vaulting club, pull the coach aside and whisper, “I can’t. See” — and remove your gem from your pocket — “this is my terrible thing and as I expected, showing it to you has taken your breath away and made you sympathetic. So I will be excused, I assume?”

Other people will allow you — they will never blame you or challenge you — to use your past as an excuse to not face the normal fears everybody has when facing their future. Even if you were brutally physically assaulted, you must not withdraw because you are afraid it will happen again. This is not a valid exit.

Your fears that it might happen again are perfectly reasonable and justified: It might happen again.

Many people believe that if something really bad happens to them, they have paid their dues and nothing else really bad can happen again. But on the day you attend your mother’s funeral or declare personal bankruptcy, there is no law in the universe that prevents you from also getting a speeding ticket and your first grey hair.

When multiple bad things happen, it can feel like “life is out to get you.” It’s not. And it’s not a sign, either. What you do is, you keep going. You stop waiting for fairness.

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

You do not need to work through your past so you can heal. You need to move forward and then you’re as healed as you’re likely to be.

Unless.

Unless you experienced something so unspeakably terrible, something so out of scale in magnitude that it simply doesn’t fit into the past. It is too large to be contained by time or space. And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it. This can help others.

Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful.

I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany.

He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived.

I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?”

He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”

I wondered if he had ever truly heard it once. I suggested he listen, hang on every word and try to see visuals in his mind of the story his grandfather was telling him.

Some stories must be carved into the present and the future by telling and telling again and then again until the story is part of us.

From “This Is How” by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

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Augusten Burroughs' many books include "Runnning With Scissors," "Dry," "Sellevision," "Magical Thinking" and "Possible Side Effects." His latest book is "This Is How." More Augusten Burroughs.

Saturday, May 12, 2012 4:00 PM UTC

Why did we move to Paris?

Leaving New York seemed ideal. Until the crazy landlord, topless exams, the French flu, the lack of credit cards...

By Rosecrans Baldwin
Excerpted from "Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down," by Rosecrans Baldwin, published in May 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2012 by Rosecrans Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Paris’s neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl — a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig’s tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20. But if you walk from one neighborhood to the next, there is little to suggest the numbers changing. So it was confusing. Anyway, if you began in the middle of the Seine and snaked around, we lived on the Right Bank in the top of the third arrondissement, called the haut Marais, the upper Marais, on Rue Béranger, a quiet little street curling down from Place de la République.

We’d chosen the apartment so we could be within walking distance of nearly everything. I’d overlooked its darkness and short ceilings for location’s sake: 15 minutes to Notre Dame; 25 to the Louvre.

Earlier generations of Americans wanted to live on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, where artists and students rambled, but the Left Bank had long ago priced out the artists and students. Now it was home to the rich of Paris, the wealthy of the retired-expat class, and Russian moguls, while the youthful and creative tended to live on the Right Bank, especially in the higher, cheaper numbers, the 19th or the 20th — if not the Right Bank of Berlin, or Toronto.

But we were very happy about our neighborhood, if not our quarters. Our apartment, located above a costume jewelry shop, was dismal and dark. The apartment above us was being renovated — I hadn’t heard the noises during my initial visit. So during our first days — we had a solid week before I was required at work — we tried to get out as much as possible.

Behind our street was a village of elbow streets, sunny walls and filthy corners, and many tucked-away shops. A ten-minute walk south was the proper Marais, the former Jewish quarter that had become a trendy shopping zone, but our northern district was still untrafficked. There were tailors and art galleries. Cafés and butchers. A store that sold athletic trophies and one that sold model trains. A blood-samples lab, a computer-repair agency, a video rental. On a leafy corner was a brightly lit lingerie-and-sex-toy boutique.

And where roads didn’t cross was an old covered market, the Marché du Temple, blue with a dirty glass roof. Some weekends, men trucked in what appeared to be stolen leather goods, but otherwise the market stood empty — Thursdays, maybe it was Tuesdays, a tennis league strung up nets inside — and the surrounding quadrant would be filled with people dawdling over café tables that they’d occupy for hours, chatting with friends. Then behind the market was Rue Bretagne, a picturesque street that wasn’t trendy yet. It would be soon, but not yet. Rue Bretagne had a park with a playground, two bookstores, a boutique that sold vintage radios, a booth that sold found photographs—it was the Left Bank I’d seen in picture books, preserved in time. At the center stood the oldest Paris farmer’s market still operating, Le Marché des Enfants Rouges, built in the 1600s, now ringed by food stalls that sold Moroccan tagines, huge piles of Turkish desserts, West African stews, even sushi.

It was fantastic.

Rachel and I tramped from dawn to late at night, and collapsed each evening. We also spent a lot of time having our pictures taken. Every service we signed up for in Paris — cell phones, Internet, electricity — required passport photos, with strict rules about their composure. On two separate occasions, we were asked to resubmit our photos; too much smiling. No visible happiness was allowed in official pictures — pas de sourire, visage dégagé.

To become Parisian was business très serieux.

Anyway, we set up home: Bought dishes, stocked the larder, purchased a mop and broom. We ate cheaply so we could afford a few good meals, including an expensive lunch one day inside the Musée d’Orsay, under rows of dazzling chandeliers, where we drank too much wine. Later we got caught in a rainstorm, running for shelter alongside the Seine. That week we must have seen … we saw a lot. But there were also errands to do.

For example, we visited a bank to open a checking account and apply for a credit card. Well, France didn’t have credit cards. Perhaps didn’t grasp them, conceptually — it wasn’t clear. The bank representative, who did not speak English, said I shouldn’t be bothered, that yes, our accounts included debit cards.

“No,” I said in French, “I apply for a card of credit.”

“This is what you have, a debit card,” she said.

“No. The debit card, it takes money, when I have money,” I said, going slowly to find the words. “I want a card that does not have a need for money.”

The banker rumbled it for a second. “Well,” she said, “we have an option where the card does not remove the money until the end of the month. Is that what you want?”

“No,” I said. “Something different.” I smiled cheerfully and tried again. “I want the card when I do not have money.”

“Maybe I do not understand,” she said. “What type of bank has cards like these?”

“American banks,” I said. “For example, if I want a computer for 2,000 euros, but I do not have 2,000 euros? I have a card. The card buys the computer. I give money to the card. Each month, a little money. Then: 2,000 euros.”

“Ah,” the banker said, pleased now, “you would like to arrange a loan!”

“Yes, but no,” I said. “I want a card. A card that gives a loan.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand, what kind of card again?” the clerk said.

“Its name is ‘credit card,’ ” I said.

The clerk looked at me closely to make sure this wasn’t all one big joke.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I do not think we have this in France.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

Toward the end of our first week, Rachel and I were sneezing, dizzy, exhausted, light-headed, almost fainting, lacking jet fuel, and coughing up sea-green mucus.

“The Paris Flu,” expats said. A persistent chest cold caused by French germs. “Everyone gets it,” I was told over a drink in Beaubourg, by an editor at the Herald Tribune, a friend of a friend. “Trick is,” he said, “you gotta eat the local honey. Go to that farmer’s market near you, Enfants Rouges. Introduce antibodies to your system from the Paris bees. Make sure you look for the sticker that says the bees are from Paris, that’s important.”

The next day, after a morning rain, there was a huff of good weather, and Rachel and I went out and purchased the honey of local bees. Then our stove broke. I was eating honey off a Kit Kat when the repairman rang the buzzer.

The repairman looked at our stove and drew squiggles on a ticket. He made to leave, so I handed the ticket back to him and attempted to explain that I couldn’t read his handwriting.

He wrote in block letters, CRÈME POUR LA PLAQUE.

So for lack of a creamy topping . . .

“The stove has plaque?” Rachel said from the doorway. She sniffled and went back into our living room, a cavern with dark beams.

I said quietly to the repairman, “Where do I find the cream for the plaque?”

But he’d already walked out. He was kind of a bastard.

In the hallway, he stopped in front of our neighbor’s door. There were buzz-saw sounds, and sawdust pouring in through an open window from the apartment upstairs. The repairman snatched the paper back from me and scrawled in carpenter pencil, “BHV,” then stomped downstairs, just avoiding a pregnant girl and her boyfriend.

“BHV,” I announced, closing the door. “What’s that?”

“Oh, the hardware store,” Rachel said, “near Hôtel de Ville. Bay-ash-vay. It’s the one with the lingerie section. I heard about it, I’ll take you later.”

- – - – - – - – - – -

Several letters arrived that week from the government. One said Rachel and I needed to be weighed, measured, and scanned for tuberculosis, immediately. Also, I’d be asked to pass a language test, since I’d be the one taking a job that could have gone to a French person.

Our appointment was the same day as the repairman’s visit. The health clinic was located near Place de la Bastille, not far away. We were in that paunch of Paris summer when the heat ballooned at one p.m., and the weather was lovely in a vehement way, glares everywhere.

At the clinic, Rachel and I were assigned to different waiting areas. After X-rays and measurements, I was directed to a language examiner’s office, for my French quiz.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I work in advertising.”

“What do you do in advertising?”

“I write.”

“What do you write?”

“I write for babies. Milk for babies.”

“Where are you from?”

“New York City.”

The examiner sat forward and said in English, “Wow, you are?” For five minutes she described to me how she was planning to visit Manhattan soon, it was a long-standing dream. “But isn’t it very dangerous?” she asked in English, her consonants sharp as thorns. “Do blacks and whites really get along?”

We stopped for a bite to eat on the way home, in a café on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. We ordered some white wine and frites, which came served with awful ketchup — and here I’d thought Heinz was universal.

“So,” Rachel said, “a lot of scientists have now seen me topless.”

“Oh, I know the feeling,” I said. I was holding my tuberculosis X-ray up to the window.

“Trust me, no, you don’t,” Rachel said.

She cinched her jacket, a green coat she’d bought especially for our move to France, and explained that things for women in Paris were quite different. “So the doctor is asking me questions. I have no idea what she’s saying. I think she tells me to remove my top. I’m pointing — This, my bra, she wants off? Yes, she wants off. Then I’m instructed to leave. Now that you’re topless, please go out that door. Only it’s a door for a closet with a yellow bulb inside, and at the other end there’s another door. I’m to go into the closet and wait for the other door to open.”

Rachel drank some wine. “So I’m asking myself, do I cover up, or go out full-frontal? Because I want to do it right. Do it the French way. What would Chloe do? I figured, probably a Frenchwoman would just walk out, you know, breasts on parade.”

“And?” I said.

“I went out French. The door opened, I checked my posture. It’s a big room, like an operating theater, with three male technicians. But they barely notice me. I’m like, You’re not even going to look? What does that say? Then I’m instructed to smoosh my chest against an upright X-ray machine, which was freezing, and they’re saying, Do it again, it’s not quite right. I mean, they’re wearing lab coats, but they’re also wearing jeans. How was I to know it wasn’t some crazy French reality TV show?”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Friday evening of the weekend before my first day at work, Pierre and Chloe invited us over for dinner. In the same room where I’d slept during my interview weekend, we drank tequila and listened to Charles Trenet and Wu-Tang Clan until about three a.m., when Pierre and Chloe’s downstairs neighbor complained about the noise.

Outside, the black sky combined Paris, summer, and the oncoming morning. Noises floated over our heads, but on Pierre and Chloe’s street it was quiet enough to hear the traffic signals buzzing. To get home, we rented Vélibs. These were the new bicycles that Paris had installed in a bikes-for-rent program. They’d become the latest badge of chic. Misty mornings, columns of riders pedaled beside the river, and pictures were everywhere of bare-legged women cycling around town in Chanel. Columnists filed reports on Vélib trends, Vélib crime especially — how the city’s bright young things rode Vélibs home after partying and crashed them into the Seine.

On the map, one street, the Boulevard de Magenta, appeared to run straight to our apartment. We looked down the hill, and there it was: four empty lanes plunging into blackness, flanked by gracefully decaying Haussmann slabs brambly with iron balconies. Rachel went first, her dress flapping in the wind. There was neon in her hair, then she was eaten up by the dark. I took off after her, 20 feet behind. Fifty feet behind. Soon she was gone. The boulevard flattened out, but for all my pedaling I was slowing down.

Rachel reappeared and found me gliding, kicking with my toes. The chain had come off my bicycle and was grinding on the road. There was no one around.

“We shouldn’t have had the tequila,” Rachel said, pedaling a circle around me.

“No, no,” I said, stopping, “not the tequila.”

We stood next to a bus stop and stared around. A Vélib stand was nearby. We parked the bikes and walked home. It was one of those moments when nothing could go wrong.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

The next morning I tried to take out the garbage, but the shed door wouldn’t budge. I yanked it, banged on it, was about to quit when Asif, the gardien, our building manager, whose rooms abutted the shed, rattled his shutters and yelled at me to shut up.

Asif came out, smoking. He wore an unbuttoned paisley shirt and blue jeans with embroidery on the seat. Asif appraised me and said something in French. I didn’t understand and attempted a retreat. That just pissed him off more. He whipped back his hair and snatched my trash, unlocked the shed, and tossed the bag inside.

His hair had the slow-motion buoyancy of a mermaid’s.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I do not have a key.”

“Give me your keys,” Asif snapped in French, with a destabilizing Pakistani accent. I could barely understand him. He was tall and lank, posing like a model. He pinched the neck of a four-inch key on my key ring and handed it back to me with two fingers, like a silver snake.

“You’re American?”

“From New York,” I said. “My wife,” I said, pointing at our bedroom window, just above his head.

“I love New York,” Asif said. “I’m going soon. You’ll tell me where your family lives?”

He pulled me inside his rooms. They smelled of sex. A cute brunette in a bathrobe was sautéeing peppers and chicken. She smiled at me. Asif downed some whiskey from a glass on top of a trash can, and poured us shots. We did a toast to New York City. He gripped my arms, beaming. When I explained I needed to go run errands (faire les courses), Asif went slack. “Fine, then leave!” he shouted, frowning, and disappeared into the bedroom.

Over time, I’d learn that Asif gained and lost euphoria faster than anyone I’d ever met.

That same morning, Rachel and I walked down to BHV, the home-and-hardware store with a lingerie section — it also had a jewelry section, and cabinets of designer handbags, and a lumberyard in the basement, and a kitchen-items section with space for cooking classes — where we bought cream for our stove. Turns out the cream worked. Our coils didn’t conduct electricity when they lacked moisturizer; apparently they’d gone dairy-free too long. And the same day, just when we couldn’t face one more spoonful of honey, our flu vanished.

We lived in Paris, Paris being not only the city of milk and honey, but also the city where milk and honey were solutions.

No one wonders, because who needs to ask?

That afternoon, we walked halfway across the city and rode a bus home, and collapsed in bed. Lying there on top of the comforter, staring at the dark beams crossing the white plaster ceiling, suddenly I was anxious and out of breath, overpowered by homesickness.

I wanted out of that apartment, out of Paris, as fast as possible.

Rachel said something into her pillow about being hungry. Ice cream, I said, I’ll go get ice cream.

I don’t even like ice cream that much.

I ran outside, le monde à mes pieds, to Place de la République, the large traffic circle behind our apartment. République was a racetrack with four lanes of vehicles whipping around two parks. No square in America looked so majestic, yet in Paris République was considered a retail zone — hardly special except for being where protesters gathered whenever the government threatened to raise the retirement age. In the center was a statue of a robed woman. She was Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, proud and tall, perhaps unaware that her robe was slipping. In several ways, she reminded me of Mireille. I stood on an island in the middle of the Boulevard Saint-Martin, which flowed into République, and waited through several traffic lights, just watching. New, new, new, I was thinking. Our previous life would be reversed within 24 hours: Me working in an office, in a language I barely spoke, and Rachel at home writing when she wasn’t attending French lessons. Was this a good idea? Was it the right thing to do?

It seemed like a colossal mistake.

But would I really prefer to be anywhere else? Hadn’t Rachel’s breasts passed inspection by Parisian experts? As long as no one talked to me about topics other than New York, wouldn’t I be fine?

I was scared. Well, so what?

I got the ice cream. We ate it in bed. Through the windows came fragrances from the trees outside and Asif ’s vegetable garden. We heard only birdsong. I remembered a letter Edith Wharton wrote about Paris in 1907 that I’d seen excerpted in a magazine back in the States: “The tranquil majesty of the architectural lines, the wonderful blurred winter lights, the long lines of lamps garlanding the avenues & the quays — je l’ai dans mon sang!” (“I have it in my blood!”)

At the time, I’d thought I knew what she meant. But now I knew.

Excerpted from “Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” by Rosecrans Baldwin, published in May 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2012 by Rosecrans Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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Rosecrans Baldwin is a founding editor of The Morning News. His first novel, "You Lost Me There," was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2010. His latest book is "Paris I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down." More Rosecrans Baldwin.

Monday, May 7, 2012 6:40 PM UTC

Robert Caro’s bloated LBJ biography

Robert Caro's latest LBJ tome has everyone -- even Bill Clinton! -- hyping it. They've been had

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“Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” When Bob Dylan wrote that line in 1964, the naked emperor was Lyndon Johnson, which makes that image perhaps the most disturbing in all of Dylan’s apocalyptic work.

By stripping down Lyndon Baines Johnson to his essence, Robert Caro has himself become an American legend. Since the publication of “The Path to Power” in 1982, Caro has transformed LBJ’s life into a cautionary tale of Shakespearean dimensions. In some wonky circles, the release of a new volume is heralded like the Summer of Love release of “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Can Caro possibly top his “Revolver”?”

I am proud to be one of those wonks.  Anticipating the release of “The Passage of Power,” I went full-metal LBJ, and reread every word of the previous 1,040 page “prequel” – “Master of the Senate.” Much like catching up on the last season of “Mad Men” before the new one begins, I time-traveled like the hero from the new Stephen King JFK-themed novel back to 1958, as the Master Senator (and Master Biographer) prepared for their rendezvous with world history.

The release of this new book has seen Robert Caro morph from legend to Literary Saint, a transformation aided and abetted by the Northern Liberal Media that Johnson so ridiculed. Charles McGrath of the New York Times recently wrote a piece  where Caro’s monastic work habits, nurturing relationship with his longtime editor and publisher, and total immersion into the life of his subject is detailed in every, and I mean every, detail.

And after this lengthy profile and slide show, the Times then unleashed crack literary critic Bill Clinton for a hagiographic “review” – which, no surprise, revealed more about Clinton than Caro or, yes, LBJ. The final premiere event was the by now traditional preview of coming attractions in the New Yorker. This time, the sneak peek  excerpt was Caro and historical writing at its very best. Things you thought you knew, things you think you have seen, are transformed. The background of the iconic photograph of Johnson being sworn in as president next to a bloodstained and haunted Jackie Kennedy on Air Force One take on entirely new meaning through Caro’s literary filter. Here are the last words of the article. “The oath was over. His hand came down. ‘Now let’s get airborne,’ Lyndon Johnson said.”

Few works of fiction, let alone history, are written that vividly, and after reading those words and that article, well, that’s when I decided to go back into the 1950s Senate and the wonderful world of cloture, cloakrooms and clout. A symbolic 1,776 pages later – 1,040 of “Master of the Senate” and 736 pages of “The Passage to Power,” here I now sit.

Remember that naked Emperor I mentioned earlier? I feel I’ve just read the same book twice. “The Passage to Power” breaks down to four books, one worth reading. Twenty-five percent is fresh, brilliant reporting (that New Yorker extract is by far the best part). Twenty-five percent is explicit and oft-cited retellings of stories from the previous three books. Twenty-five percent is editorial observations about LBJ repurposed from those previous three books. And 25 percent reads like a book proposal for what (hopefully) is to come in the next book.

Sadly, this is no “Sgt. Pepper’s.” It’s a greatest hits collection. Lyndon Johnson contained multitudes? Check. Adoptive father of civil rights movement? Check. Power that does not corrupt, but reveals? Check.

Caro also wanders off on tangents. These are not the fascinating tributaries of the history of the Senate that illuminated “Master of the Senate” or the luminous description of the Texas hill country in “The Path to Power.” Here there are chapters, long chapters, devoted to John Kennedy’s biography, even down to yet another recounting of the PT 109 saga. The chapter called “The Drums” seems entirely researched from watching readily available footage of the Kennedy funeral, with Caro’s insights on those days and that footage more appropriate for a DVD’s director’s commentary.

There are, of course, priceless nuggets of research gold scattered in this meandering stream. In the second to last chapter (and first part of the tease to the next book), Caro recounts LBJ’s eager questioning of an aide when he hears Robert Kennedy had been shot. “Is he dead? Is he dead yet?” This wishful thinking even shocked Johnson’s staff, and by 1968, they were not easily shocked. And then, there were the odds. According to Caro, before accepting the purgatory of the vice presidency, Johnson had his staff look up the odds for a president dying in office. Those odds worked out to a little less than 1-in-4 for a modern president. And as Johnson said to Clare Booth Luce on the night of Kennedy’s inauguration, “I’m a gambling man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.” And we wonder why he gets cast as the fall guy in many episodes of “Conspiracy Theatre“? But apparently, Caro doesn’t want to go there — any possible Johnson role gets dismissed in about a page.

My disappointment, as LBJ would say, comes “with a heavy heart.” The first book in the Caro series, “The Path to Power” and the third, “Master of the Senate,” are masterworks, deserving of any praise, hagiographic or otherwise. But the second, “Means of Ascent,” seemed a padded-out novella – it could have been edited down to a single, long New Yorker piece. Same thing here. These 736 pages could have been culled to 250 and still hit their target very hard.

Caro assumes the reader has not read any of the others in the series, so endlessly recounts what he wrote in them. At the same time, he wants to make sure that the reader is panting for the next installment to arrive, hence a lengthy tease to the next work-in-long-progress. It’s as if the 76-year-old author has made a deal for immortality, as long as he can just tease the reader into waiting another 10 years for him to get on with it.

Of course, each book should be able to stand by itself, and not require an act of devoted rereading before picking up the new one. Yes, but these books are also being written and produced as a definitive series, one long book now broken into five. They should stand with the big boys: Edward Gibbon‘s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Carl Sandburg’s life of Lincoln, and Shelby Foote’s three-volume narrative of the Civil War.

In Caro’s defense, although he treads water in “The Passage of Power,” what water. His incisive look at the fear and loathing Johnson had for Robert Kennedy (and vice versa) is a highlight. There are flashes of descriptive writing that achieve a kind of Stephen King-esque kind of time travel. In the case of his account of the food at a Texas state dinner for German Chancellor Erhard, Caro’s literary powers summon a longing for a bib, a handiwipe and some of that thar barbecue. But these passages are few and far between, surrounded by lengthy flashbacks to previous books, long quotes taken from those same books, and even, quotes recycled yet again from the book you are still holding in your hand. The book cries out for the Ghost of William Shawn and a red pencil. How can a book take 10 years of obsessive work and still seem sloppy? It is no service to either Caro or history that he has achieved what every great writer thinks he wants, but should not necessarily have: an editor with Stockholm syndrome.

There is another non-editor-related problem that haunts this book. An omission that will definitely haunt the new work in progress no matter how exhaustively teased: the absence of the erudite voice of Bill Moyers.

Moyers was Johnson’s press secretary when the Credibility Gap was being invented and perfected. But he still has not spoken in any insightful detail of those days, to anyone. Thanks to the New Yorker excerpt, I did learn that Moyers was standing in the back of the crowd during that traumatic swearing in on Air Force One. He’s the guy with glasses, standing upper right. But although a recent profile mentions that Moyers shares an office building with Caro, he remains AWOL in “The Passage to Power.”  Moyers has stated he is writing a book about Johnson where he will grapple with their shared past. But will he? One wonders if the long arm of LBJ will throttle him into silence. For a man of Moyers’ eloquence and moral insight to remain silent, when even Robert McNamara finally and very publicly grappled with his demons, is a loss to Caro’s lifework, to history, and worse, to the America that Moyers has served so well.

McGrath and Clinton’s full admiration for Caro — and their grudging respect for LBJ — does make one wish that Caro had learned just a few things from The Master. Perhaps, in an upcoming elevator ride as he and Moyers head to their respective offices, Caro might grab Moyers by the lapel, pull him close, and give him a bit of persuadin’ to attend a Texas-style chinwag. Hope so. Time is not on either man’s side.

If the 10-year gap between Caro’s book and the 45-year gap since Moyers resigned during the “Sgt. Pepper” summer is any indication, time is not on our side, either.

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More Erik Nelson.

Monday, May 7, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

“Bring Up the Bodies”: Hilary Mantel’s power play

The sequel to her Booker-winning "Wolf Hall" is a thrilling exploration of what it took to run Tudor England

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“Bring Up the Bodies,” Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, “Wolf Hall,” is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form — by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted — but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we’re sharing with them.

As with “Wolf Hall,” the central character in “Bring Up the Bodies” is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from “Wolf Hall” declares, “He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.”

This is, incidentally, Cromwell’s own assessment, but he’s saved from vanity by the fact that his confidence is not just well-placed but precisely placed; he is the ultimate realist, and he possesses that most potent of assets, an excellent knowledge of himself. In the thousands of fictional retellings of Henry’s reign — most of them focused on his ambitious second wife, Anne Boleyn — Cromwell is typically depicted as a ruthless schemer. He got rid of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when Henry wanted Anne, and he got rid of Anne, too, when the time came. The first ejection led to the foundation of the Church of England and the second to the execution of six people.

As Mantel tells it — she describes the novel as “a proposal, an offer,” rather than an assertion of historical truth — Cromwell represents the vanguard of a new era, one in which ability trumps noble birth. He can countenance any number of insults from the arrogant aristocrats he works with because he knows that “chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the money lender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and the kings are their waiting boys.”

He would never dream of voicing such thoughts, of course, and part of the marvel of Cromwell the character is his self-control. “I never forget myself,” he tells the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire at a moment when his temper has been sorely provoked. “What I do, I mean to do.” The style Mantel employs to write about this exemplar of the will is declarative to the point of bullishness; her voice is his. The character’s allure lies in his energy and his resilience, and it’s thrilling to hitch your readerly perspective to a man who can seemingly do anything and furthermore has the nerve to try.

But if Cromwell is a man of action, he’s also, at age 50, prone to reflection and haunted by the dead. “Bring Up the Bodies” opens with falconry in the picture-book English countryside during the king’s summer “progress” (a sort of nationwide tour) of 1535. Cromwell’s falcons are named after his two daughters, who, with his beloved wife, died in London’s intermittent epidemics. He hasn’t forgotten them, but it’s significant that he’s memorialized them as birds of prey. Above all, Cromwell nurses a grudge against all who participated in the downfall of his mentor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Yet, he is not without warmth. A conscientious and covertly tender householder, he presides over the lives of assorted dependents from various social classes. His carefully concealed soft spot for distressed gentlewomen and exiled court figures like Catherine and her daughter, Mary Tudor, leads him to make small but largely unappreciated efforts on their behalf.

We are shown that Cromwell is ruthless — there’s passing mention of hangings in Ireland, among other things — but we also know that he is loyal. This is his saving virtue. His allegiance is to England and to Henry, who, like the late Cardinal, has recognized his worth and raised him up. Some of the more notorious highlights of Cromwell’s career — the dissolution and sacking of monasteries and other Church property and the execution of Thomas More, depicted in “Wolf Hall” — are cast in this light: England’s riches should belong to the state, not to Rome, and be utilized for the benefit of her king and people. Like a modern Labor Party politician, Cromwell tries to pass poor laws and work programs in the face of mighty resistance from Parliament and the aristocracy.

Throughout the first two parts of “Bring Up the Bodies,” this is the Cromwell we accompany. He is the king’s most valued councilor and is effectively running the country. His enemies are preening, scornful and often foolish noblemen, out to promote clannish interests or reconciliation with Rome. Anne Boleyn, his former ally, has turned on him, and turned off the king. “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist,” Cromwell thinks. “He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does,” yet she has overestimated her own security. They are two of a kind, perhaps, but unlike him, she has let her success go to her head and will, in consequence, lose both.

Discouraged by Anne’s inability to give him a son and harried by the vixenish ways that once enthralled him, Henry falls for Jane Seymour, “a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.” It becomes Cromwell’s job not only to clear the way for Jane to become Henry’s third wife, but to make the king feel that he is justified in discarding a second spouse. Cromwell pursues this goal in the conviction that sooner or later Anne would have come after him and his friends.

That’s the setup, but as the interrogation and trials of Anne and her alleged lovers commence, Mantel carries the reader into harrowing territory. Cromwell tricks a foppishly romantic musician into boasting of having slept with the queen (Mantel does not endorse the view that the man was tortured into this admission) and conducts a series of interviews with the four doomed noblemen accused of being her lovers and of plotting against the king. The four also happen to be Cromwell’s political enemies and, furthermore, key participants in a satirical court entertainment that depicted Cardinal Wolsey being dragged to hell by devils. “He needs guilty men,” Cromwell tells himself. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”

Political horror is not a new literary mode — you can find it in the New Testament as well as in such 20th-century works as George Orwell’s “1984.” However, the protagonist in those stories is invariably the victim. “Bring Up the Bodies” devotes 270 pages to developing its hero, investing the reader in the superiority of his personality and cause, and then ushers him into the interrogator’s chair. Cromwell is contriving to send these people to the scaffold for crimes they quite possibly did not commit, however “guilty” they may be of others. Because he is our man ever bit as much as he is Henry’s man, we are, in some obscure way native to the laws of fiction, implicated. These are not easy chapters to read, although they are magnificently realized.

As assured as her implacable protagonist, Mantel walks the edge of a very sharp knife in the last part of “Bring Up the Bodies.” I don’t believe she cuts her feet on it, but sometimes it felt as if she were cutting mine. It’s impossible to repudiate Cromwell, but embracing him has become infinitely complicated. Of all the many fictional depictions of the moral quandaries involved in the exercise of great power, this may be one of the most disturbing. It comes much closer than any I’ve ever encountered to letting you know how it must feel to manage the fate of a nation: how intoxicating and how very, very perilous.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

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