Monday, December 20, 2004
December 20, 2004WHITE HOUSE LETTER
Bush's Cabinet Picks Come Already Vetted by Life's TestsBy ELISABETH BUMILLER
ASHINGTON - Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel and President Bush's nominee for attorney general, is the son of Mexican migrant farm workers who never finished grade school.
Jim Nicholson, the ambassador to the Vatican and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of veterans affairs, grew up in a house without plumbing on a tenant farm in Iowa and sometimes went to bed hungry.
Carlos M. Gutierrez, the chief executive of the Kellogg Company and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of commerce, learned English from a bellhop in a Miami hotel and got his start as a truck driver delivering Frosted Flakes in Mexico City.
Mike Johanns, the governor of Nebraska and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of agriculture, grew up on a dairy farm in Iowa and has said that everything in life was easy after that.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of state - and one of the highest-ranking African-Americans in the administration - grew up in segregated Birmingham, Ala., and was friends with one of the girls killed in the church bombing there in 1963.
Most striking of all, Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and until Dec. 10 Mr. Bush's nominee to be homeland security secretary, is a high school dropout and the son of a prostitute who may have been murdered by her pimp.
For weeks now, Americans have watched the tearful nominating scenes in the White House Roosevelt Room as the president has selected embodiments of the American dream for his second term. Of 9 new appointments to his 15-member cabinet, 6 have the kind of hard-luck stories much admired by Mr. Bush. So do a number of other cabinet members from Mr. Bush's first term.
"The president appreciates those who understand the values of hard work, integrity and personal responsibility," said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. "Those are values that are often instilled in people at an early age."
But Mr. Bush's love of up-by-the-bootstraps stories is far more complex than that, friends and analysts say, and offers a window into the psychology of the president.
First, Mr. Bush's choices reflect the sentiments of a man who was incubated in the world of the East Coast elite but has a spent a rebellious lifetime trying to make his own way. Mr. Bush's cabinet is notably light on Ivy League graduates, and only one of his past and present choices, John Ashcroft, the departing attorney general, attended the president's undergraduate alma mater, Yale.
Only one of his choices graduated from Harvard College, and that was Tom Ridge, the departing homeland security secretary who attended on a scholarship and grew up in veterans' public housing. Mr. Gonzales did graduate from Harvard Law School, and Elaine L. Chao, the labor secretary, graduated from Harvard Business School, as did the president, but she arrived in the United States as a Chinese immigrant on a freighter in New York Harbor at the age of 8, speaking no English.
"Elaine Chao believes deeply in the American dream because she has lived it," Mr. Bush said in typical remarks when he nominated Ms. Chao in 2001.
Second, Mr. Bush seems to identify with the hardscrabble stories, as difficult as that may be to believe about a man who was born into one of the most privileged families in the United States. As Jim Hightower, the former Texas agriculture commissioner, memorably cracked about Mr. Bush's father in comments since applied to the 43rd president: "He is a man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."
Stanley A. Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist at the City University of New York, argues that there is in fact something to the remark, and that Mr. Bush, who said last spring that he had to "knock on a lot of doors to follow the old man's footsteps," truly believes that he had to overcome hurdles on his way to the White House.
"He was born into a family where there were enormous expectations for the kids, and he literally spent a lifetime not measuring up," said Mr. Renshon, whose recent book, "In his Father's Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush," is a psychological study of the president.
"In Bush's case," Mr. Renshon added, "he follows in his father's footsteps, he doesn't make it for decades, but he keeps on plugging, and he succeeds. But I think it was very complex for him because he often didn't know where his parents' and family help ended and his own contribution picked up. He had to carve out his own sphere in a very big shadow."
Finally, the cabinet choices make a political point by underscoring what Mr. Bush likes to promote as important values of his administration: ownership, opportunity and individual initiative.
Of course, in the case of Mr. Kerik, whose nomination imploded in questions about his past legal, ethical and financial dealings, some wonder if the president became a little too wrapped up in the romance of the American dream.
"Bush is a good judge of character," Mr. Renshon said, "but he gets swept away."
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December 20, 2004
The Heady Days of J. R. and Landry Are History in Humbled DallasBy RALPH BLUMENTHAL
ALLAS, Dec. 15 - The losing Cowboys are fixing to defect again, the police chief and city manager were shown the door, a 350-pound gorilla made his own grand exit, and the hometown daily, former employer of the ex-reporter now ensconced in City Hall, is pinning Pulitzer Prize hopes on a pitiless exposé of everything gone wrong.
It has been that kind of year for Big D, Texas's second biggest - oops, third biggest - city; San Antonio gained a 6,000-person edge to slip in with just over 1.2 million, behind Dallas's longtime archrival, Houston.
"You know, I didn't like it," said Mayor Laura Miller, a once-fearsome investigative reporter who, as ex-colleagues joke, went over to the dark side. "I liked saying we're the eighth largest city in the nation. I don't like saying ninth."
The news hasn't been all bad, as Ms. Miller, 46, is quick to point out, reciting highlights of a $1.2 billion project - second biggest in the city's history (after the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport) and one she originally opposed - to create a new roadway, designer bridges and urban recreation area 10 times the size of Central Park along a derelict Trinity River that now regularly floods.
And she said, "I resent it when The Dallas Morning News says I fumbled the ball" just because the Cowboys, looking for favorable terms, are negotiating for a new football stadium in Arlington, having abandoned Dallas's historic Cotton Bowl in 1971 for fancier quarters in Irving. "I didn't want to play ball," she said.
But the tone may have been set in March when Jabari, a 13-year-old western lowland gorilla, apparently managed a flying leap over a 14-foot-wall at the Dallas Zoo and ran amok, mauling a toddler and his mother and a third visitor before being shot dead by the police.
The next month, The Morning News published a special 20-page section, "Dallas at the Tipping Point," a collaboration between a reporting team and consultants from Booz Allen Hamilton, examining every major parameter of city life and concluding: "Dallas calls itself 'the city that works.' Dallas is wrong." Dallas, it found, was a city in crisis, "and City Hall seems not to know."
Mayor Miller disputed the last part - "We're not in denial" - and said she didn't care for the lurid cover artwork depicting a storm over the city. But in all, she said, "It wasn't wrong."
Meanwhile, at Founders Plaza, a few steps from the haunting site of the Kennedy assassination, which remains Dallas's top tourist attraction, the county is considering moving the crude cedar cabin that may or may not have belonged to the city's first settler, John Neely Bryan, but that long seemed a remnant of Dallas's rugged pioneer past.
The city was humbled in other ways as well, watching sourly as conventioneers thronged Houston's budding entertainment district while Dallas struggled to begin a master plan study and select a flagship hotel for its own convention hopes, which it did at its final City Council meeting of the year on Wednesday, giving a provisional go-ahead to a developer for a 1,000-room Marriott. (In fairness, the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau may have been distracted, some of its executives having been found earlier wooing clients at topless bars.)
Based largely on a wave of property crimes, Dallas once again leads the F.B.I.'s list of high-crime big cities this year. Efforts to cope with a growing homeless population by making it illegal to take a shopping cart off the property of the store it belongs to did not solve the problem, but instead produced bizarre fleets of cannibalized baby strollers and shopping carts. The dramatically slanted City Hall that attracted architectural plaudits when it was completed in 1978 has become a magnet for derelicts.
Dallas officials also spent part of the year trying to figure out how a handful of police narcotics informants were able to plant some 330 kilograms of gypsum and other harmless substances on 30 innocents, mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants, to frame them on drug charges in 2001.
The scandal wounded Police Chief Terrell Bolton, a 24-year department veteran and an African-American. He was eventually fired in August, but not fast enough for an angry Mayor Miller. She and the City Council forced the retirement of the city manager, Ted Benavides, leaving the mayor and 14 other Council members a clearer field to attack each other, with racial tensions bubbling just below the surface. Mr. Bolton is now suing the city.
If it seems at times like Southfork, home of the feuding Ewing clan that enlivened the long-running television serial "Dallas," the action may only be getting started. Amid widespread dissatisfaction over pervasive problems from crime to education to development, a petition drive is aimed at putting a revolutionary change in city government to the voters in May.
The measure would create Dallas's first "strong mayor" government, replacing a system often described as weak-weak-weak - a weak mayor, weak city manager and weak City Council, imposed by a federal judge in 1990 as a remedy for the city's historic disregard of democratic niceties. Currently, the mayor is the only citywide elected official, presiding over a Council of 14 other members who are elected from neighborhood districts, some largely black, others predominately Hispanic and white.
The Council hires the city manager, who carries out policy - and need only please a majority of eight, not necessarily including the mayor. Meanwhile, the mayor, the only one elected to represent the whole city, is all but powerless to govern without a consensus, a challenge in the city's historically fractious racial and political climate.
Dallas's last mayor, Ron Kirk, the first African-American to hold the office, left it in 2002 to run what became a losing campaign for the United States Senate and is now a candidate to head the Democratic National Committee. As mayor, he was known for building coalitions and ending what he called City Hall's "blame game."
But the same success has often eluded Ms. Miller, who is white and filled Mr. Kirk's seat first in a special election and then won a four-year term of her own until 2007. She remains a polarizing figure saddled with the enemies she made as an investigative reporter, particularly as a columnist for The Dallas Observer, a freewheeling alternative weekly.
"One thing I did I can't change is I wrote about lots of people," she said, citing several black community figures she accused of wrongdoing. "There were no sacred cows," she said. One of them is now a regular visitor at Council meetings, denouncing her.
Ms. Miller credits her husband, Steve Wolens, who spent 24 years as a Democratic representative in the Texas House before retiring last December, with helping her understand the difference between journalism and politics.
"When you're a journalist, you're pure, you see things in black and white, you don't understand gray any more," Ms. Miller said. But as a politician, she said, she has learned to compromise and temper her famously sharp tongue, at least sometimes. As one visitor who once overheard her venting in a City Hall elevator said, "I've never heard anyone who looks like that talk like that."
Yet with all of that, Dallas, a city of middle-aged woes that still likes to think of itself as young, seems adrift. One remedy sparking debate is to give the mayor, or her successors, some real power.
The latest flashpoint is the petition drive, which collected 30,332 signatures and needed only 20,000 - to force the "strong mayor" measure onto the city ballot in May. The Council spent much of Wednesday's meeting trying to figure out ways of challenging the signatures, which need to be certified by the city secretary by Dec. 23.
"I think people want a discussion," said Mary Suhm, the acting city manager and a longtime municipal employee. "City services need to be revamped."
Darwin Payne, a historian, author and professor emeritus of journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said the time was ripe for change. "People in Dallas are grasping for anything that would work," he said.
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News Home - Help
Bush Defends Rumsfeld As 'A Caring Fellow'
2 hours, 51 minutes ago
By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Accused of being insensitive to U.S. soldiers in Iraq (news - web sites) and their families, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld received a fresh endorsement Monday from President Bush (news - web sites), who called him "a caring fellow."
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"I have heard the anguish in his voice and seen his eyes when we talk about the danger in Iraq and the fact that youngsters are over there in harm's way," Bush said at a White House news conference.
Still, a poll suggests slippage in public support for Rumsfeld.
Just over half in a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll, 52 percent, said Rumsfeld should resign, and 36 percent said he should not. Rumsfeld's job approval has been dropping, with 41 percent now approving and 50 percent disapproving. People were evenly split on Rumsfeld's performance in May, but most approved of his handling of the job about a year ago.
Congressional criticism of Rumsfeld has increased in recent weeks, with lawmakers of both parties accusing him of appearing indifferent to soldiers' pleas for more armored vehicles. Some have complained about his use of a mechanical device to sign condolence letters to military families whose loved ones have died in battle, rather than signing them himself.
"My goodness, that's the least that we could expect of the secretary of defense, is having some personal attention paid by him," Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), R-Neb. said Sunday. Rumsfeld said last week he will personally sign letters in the future.
Bush, who personally signs condolence letters, was asked why he was willing to overlook Rumsfeld's failure to do the same.
"I know Secretary Rumsfeld's heart," Bush said. "I know how much he cares for the troops," adding that Rumsfeld and his wife visit hospitalized soldiers "all the time to provide comfort and solace."
He said beneath Rumsfeld's "rough and gruff, no-nonsense demeanor is a good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes."
Rumsfeld's tough demeanor made him hugely popular after the Sept. 11 attacks and during the military campaigns to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime in Iraq.
But the substance of Rumsfeld's performance also has come in for severe criticism.
Many say false prewar assumptions about Iraq and a lack of planning for postwar operations led to the problems seen in Iraq today. As casualties mounted in Iraq, some lawmakers viewed Rumsfeld as arrogantly dismissive of their concerns that the Pentagon (news - web sites) wasn't providing enough troops to stop the growing insurgency. Some Democrats called for his resignation after revelations of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners created an international furor.
In recent weeks, several Senate Republicans have questioned whether Rumsfeld should resign. But powerful senators, including Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., say Rumsfeld should stay.
The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, has declined to call for Rumsfeld's resignation, blaming Bush's war policies for problems in Iraq.
"If I thought those policies would change by changing the secretary of defense, I'd be all for it," Levin said on CNN. "But I don't see that that is the ticket to policy changes."
Asked what Rumsfeld needs to do to rebuild lawmakers' trust, Bush said the secretary will "continue to reach out to members of the Hill, explaining the decisions he's made."
"And I believe that in the new term, members of the Senate and the House will recognize what a good job he's doing," Bush said.
___
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December 20, 2004
Fetus Cases Show Signs of SimilarityBy BENEDICT CAREY
he reports coming out of Kansas over the weekend seem beyond grisly, as if pulled from a horror movie: a woman kills an expectant mother, rips a baby girl from the victim's abdomen, then shows off the child to friends, neighbors and a pastor as her own.
The woman accused as the attacker, Lisa M. Montgomery, 36, of Melvern, Kan., was charged with kidnapping resulting in murder and is due to appear in court today. The baby, pulled from the womb of her mother, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in the eighth month of the pregnancy, is doing well, The Associated Press reported.
Although more than 1,000 pregnant women have been killed in the past decade, according to a Washington Post article published yesterday, experts say that in only a handful of these cases does the killer try to steal the unborn child. Each case is different, they say, but the psychological threads are similar: a desperate longing for a child combined with either psychopathic tendencies or a psychotic break, which creates a delusional belief that a infant must be claimed, at any cost, to be "saved" or "returned" to its rightful mother.
Psychiatrists said they could draw no firm conclusions about Ms. Montgomery without evaluating her. But the woman, who has two high-school-age children, told people in recent months that she had been pregnant with twins and miscarried, the authorities said, suggesting the possibility of postpartum depression, the psychiatrists said.
"Some women feel that the ability to be pregnant and give birth is very essential to being a successful woman," said Dr. Gail Saltz, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital, "and the inability to maintain a pregnancy can be devastating."
"Add fluctuating hormones, and you can have someone who develops a postpartum depression and a psychosis that could drive them to do completely out-of-character, irrational things," Dr. Saltz said.
Forensic psychiatrists say a pregnancy does not even have to be real. In a rare condition, pseudocyesis, the stomach bloats slightly in response to an obsessive belief by a woman that she is pregnant. "Most often women do this to fool the husband, and they don't want to break the spell and there comes a time when they need to go get a baby," said Dr. Saul Faerstein, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Most often, it means taking a child from a stroller or nursery, Dr. Faerstein said.
Murder suggests deeper psychological trouble, as illustrated by several cases in which women have killed expectant mothers and taken infants. In 1987, an Oregon woman, Darci Pierce, killed a pregnant woman and performed a Caesarean section with a key. Described as grandiose and deceptive, Ms. Pierce, who was adopted, was desperate to have a child of her own to "prove" that she was a better mother than her adoptive and biological mothers, said Dr. Michael Stone, a specialist in forensic psychiatry at Columbia University who has followed the cases.
In 1995, a Chicago woman, Annette Williams, enlisted two men to help kill a pregnant mother of two, using scissors to cut free the unborn child. According to Dr. Stone's evaluation, Ms. Williams had a pathological dependence on her boyfriend, who wanted her to have a baby. "What they had in common is this amorality, it seems to me, a deep sense of entitlement, and a longing to have this baby at all costs," Dr. Stone said.
Ms. Montgomery, news reports said, showed off the baby proudly, as if nothing were wrong. This almost certainly reflects delusional thinking, psychiatrists said.
Psychosis may give rise to elaborate narrative fantasies of good and evil and voices commanding some action. The criminal complaint said Ms. Montgomery found her victim over the Internet, where a picture of the pregnant woman could have prompted any number of thoughts and plots, forensic psychiatrists say.
"In these cases a woman might have a delusion that that's my baby in that woman, she's stolen it, and if I don't rescue it she's going to kill it, and the motivation is so overwhelming that you just lose contact with reality," said Dr. Jack M. Gorman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "It's hard for people who've never had this kind of experience to understand, but the voices and hallucinations and demands become overwhelming."
Denise Grady contributed reporting for this article.
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December 20, 2004
After the Ovitz Trial: Ushering in a New Era of Humility in HollywoodBy LAURA M. HOLSON
OS ANGELES, Dec. 19 - When Michael D. Eisner, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, showed up in Georgetown, Del., last month to testify in the trial over the hiring and firing of Michael S. Ovitz, his former No. 2, he parked his car a block from the courthouse and walked through the town square with only his lawyer by his side. When Mr. Eisner's testimony ended after a grueling five days, he hopped into a rented car and drove himself to a nearby airport.
It was particularly un-Hollywood-like behavior, given that Mr. Eisner is as rich, powerful and demanding as any entertainment executive today. His low-key demeanor seemed to reflect a new era of humility in Hollywood, in sharp contrast to the tale of corporate excess and betrayal, dominated by outsize personalities, playing inside the courthouse.
The Disney trial is in recess until Jan. 11, when testimony from numerous expert witnesses will be heard. Whether Disney wins or loses, the criticism of its management and board has already had an impact both inside and outside the company.
"Michael Eisner is not going to get off scot-free no matter what happens," said Samuel L. Hayes III, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School. "The financial community has already exacted its discipline, notwithstanding what the legal niceties are."
For many academics and analysts, the trial over the $140 million severance package of Mr. Ovitz, the former Hollywood agent who was hired as Disney's president in 1995 and fired 14 months later, signals the end of an era in which celebrity executives managed their companies as personal fiefs. Shareholders, burned by the 2000-02 downturn, now demand more predictable performance and accountability.
Influential yet hardly flamboyant executives are emerging as the new power elite in Hollywood. They include Peter Chernin, the chief operating officer of the News Corporation; Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman of Time Warner's entertainment and networks group; and Tom Freston and Les Moonves, the co-presidents of Viacom.
"Today's media executives grew up as part of much larger companies and they have learned they have to work within the corporate scheme of things," said Tom Wolzien, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. "What this trial has shown is that even the bosses have a boss to answer to - in this case the board, and ultimately the shareholders."
Patrick McGurn, special counsel at Institutional Shareholder Services, a group that monitors corporate boards, said he believed that Chancellor William B. Chandler III, who is presiding over the case, will rule that the severance package paid to Mr. Ovitz was fair. But that does not mean he will not have a critical thing or two to say.
"He'll turn it into a primer for future boards, saying, 'Don't let this happen to you,' " Mr. McGurn predicted.
Disney executives declined to comment, noting that the company is still in litigation. But Disney seems already to have gotten the message. The company had long been criticized for having a weak board, one that corporate governance specialists said had too many personal ties to Mr. Eisner and was unwilling to stand up to him.
Reveta Bowers, who ran a school attended by Mr. Eisner's children, was a board member until last year. So was Robert A. M. Stern, a prominent architect who built Mr. Eisner's Aspen retreat and designed Disney's theme parks.
During the trial it was disclosed that, in 1996, Mr. Eisner even took the unusual step of asking directors to nominate his wife, Jane, to the board in the event of his untimely death or in case of his death or disability. They agreed.
Mr. Eisner said at the trial that he sought directors who understood Disney's culture, even if they had no corporate experience. "It didn't go over too well in the governance community," he conceded. He said it was appropriate to place his wife on the board after he died because he was one of Disney's largest shareholders.
"I don't think any chief executive would dare ask for that today," said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University. "At least they wouldn't put it writing."
The company has sought to shore up its board, asking experienced corporate executives to serve as independent directors. Disney recently named to its board Fred H. Langhammer, the former chief executive of Estée Lauder Companies, who has no Disney ties.
And the board has made formal practices of other processes, including hiring an independent search firm to find Mr. Eisner's successor and holding more meetings without management present.
Already, the board's newfound independence is showing. Earlier this year, after a shareholder rebellion led by two former directors - including Roy E. Disney, the nephew of the company's founder - Mr. Eisner was stripped of his chairmanship by his fellow directors. This summer, some directors told Mr. Eisner that he could not remain in any capacity once his contract expired in 2006.
In meetings with some board members, Mr. Eisner had explored the idea of staying on as chairman, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. "I think the board must have learned by now," Mr. Coffee said, "that you can't defer to the chief executive without causing lots and lots of unpleasantness."
While Hollywood will always be dominated by relationships, gone are the days when colleagues embraced each other as life partners and brothers, as Mr. Ovitz said in court about his relationship with Mr. Eisner.
"Can you imagine anyone at G.E. today saying that about anyone else at G.E.?" Mr. Wolzien asked, referring to General Electric, the conglomerate that owns both NBC and Universal Studios.
Industry analysts say the hiring of a dominant personality like Mr. Eisner or Mr. Ovitz is far less likely to occur these days, largely because media companies themselves have become huge conglomerates through acquisitions. Today's chief executives do not have time for the day-to-day operational minutiae of a media conglomerate. Instead, they must behave more like diplomats who can steer the executives who manage each division.
As for Mr. Ovitz, his lack of success at Disney, several trial witnesses said, was a result of his inability to adapt to Disney's more collegial culture. Mr. Eisner, for example, said that theme-park workers complained after Mr. Ovitz hired a private limousine to drive him around Walt Disney World in Orlando at a 1996 corporate retreat instead of taking a bus like other executives. And at the 1996 opening of the Disney store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Mr. Eisner said, Mr. Ovitz complained that he was not asked to cut the ribbon.
Mogul-like behavior, no matter how trivial, is even less tolerated today as investors burned by corporate scandals and falling stock prices demand accountability.
"We're seeing executives begin to show quiet leadership, a 'we're all in this together' attitude," Mr. McGurn said. "It's not what we used to see."
Particularly galling, Mr. McGurn said, was Mr. Eisner's testimony regarding an interview by Larry King in 1996 on his CNN talk show, when Mr. Eisner told Mr. King that he would hire Mr. Ovitz again if given the opportunity. In truth, Mr. Eisner was then asking Mr. Ovitz to try to get a job at the Sony Corporation.
"That's something there is zero tolerance for today," Mr. McGurn said. "To be presented with a question and you point-blank lie, that's a kiss of death." (During the trial, Mr. Eisner said he regretted his remarks. He was hoping that Sony would buy out Mr. Ovitz's contract.)
True, some media companies are still run by their older, brash founders, including Rupert Murdoch, 73, who is chief executive of the News Corporation, and Viacom, which has been controlled by Sumner M. Redstone, 82, since 1987.
But the younger generation of leaders beneath them have kept their egos in check - so far.
The News Corporation recently extended the contract for Mr. Chernin, who makes $17 million a year, although it is not likely to become chief executive; Mr. Murdoch is expected to name one of his children instead. Mr. Freston, who turned MTV into a juggernaut for Viacom, eschews the limelight as well.
Mr. Bewkes, who oversaw the ascendancy of HBO, earned respect in the late 1990's by quietly turning what was then a pay cable station running mostly recycled movies into a gold mine of original programming as well. He has gained more authority in recent years.
Just how or when Mr. Eisner and Mr. Ovitz can regain the credibility they lost as a result of their fractured relationship is anyone's guess.
James Ellis, a lawyer for Mr. Ovitz, said he believed that his client would regain his footing despite his fall from grace at Disney. "He's been dogged by litigation for almost the last 10 years, with allegations of dishonesty or incompetence," Mr. Ellis said. "The trial has been his first opportunity to tell his side of the story."
Mr. Eisner also says he believes he can recover his reputation. One of the poignant moments in the trial came when a private memo he wrote in 1996 was introduced. "Every character, every executive is fallible," Mr. Eisner wrote to Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Mr. Eisner's autobiography, "Work in Progress."
"Admitting a mistake wisely, taking the flak, fixing the problem; these are the things that bring about salvation," he wrote.
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December 20, 2004
A Toy With a StoryBy JOHN MARKOFF
AMHILL, Ore. - There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on the QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Oregon, which is the home and circuit design lab of Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer.
Ms. Ellsworth has squeezed the entire circuitry of a two-decade-old Commodore 64 home computer onto a single chip, which she has tucked neatly into a joystick that connects by a cable to a TV set. Called the Commodore 64 - the same as the computer system - her device can run 30 video games, mostly sports, racing and puzzles games from the early 1980's, all without the hassle of changing game cartridges.
She has also included five hidden games and other features - not found on the original Commodore computer - that only a fellow hobbyist would be likely to appreciate. For instance, someone who wanted to turn the device into an improved version of the original machine could modify it to add a keyboard, monitor and disk drive.
Sold by Mammoth Toys, based in New York, for $30, the Commodore 64 joystick has been a hot item on QVC this Christmas season, selling 70,000 units in one day when it was introduced on the shopping channel last month; since then it has been sold through QVC's Web site. Frank Landi, president of Mammoth, said he expected the joystick would be distributed next year by bigger toy and electronics retailers like Radio Shack, Best Buy, Sears and Toys "R" Us. "To me, any toy that sells 70,000 in a day on QVC is a good indication of the kind of reception we can expect," he said.
Ms. Ellworth's first venture into toy making has not yet brought her great wealth - she said she is paid on a consulting basis at a rate that is competitive for her industry - "but I'm having fun," she said, and she continues with other projects in circuit design as a consultant.
Her efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new life inside modern custom chips has already earned her a cult following among small groups of "retro" personal computer enthusiasts, as well as broad respect among the insular world of the original computer hackers who created the first personal computers three decades ago. (The term "hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into them.)
More significant, perhaps, is that in an era of immensely complicated computer systems, huge factories and design teams that stretch across continents, Ms. Ellsworth is demonstrating that the spirit that once led from Silicon Valley garages to companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer can still thrive.
"She's a pure example of following your interests and someone who won't accept that you can't do it," said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the first portable PC and an original member of the Homebrew Computer Club. "She is someone who can do it and do it brilliantly."
Ms. Ellsworth said that chip design was an opportunity to search for elegance in simplicity. She takes her greatest pleasure in examining a complex computer circuit and reducing it in cost and size by cleverly reusing basic electronic building blocks.
It is a skill that is as much art as science, but one that Ms. Ellsworth has perfected, painstakingly refining her talent by plunging deeply into the minutiae of computer circuit design.
Recently she interrupted a conversation with a visitor in her home to hunt in between the scattered circuit boards and components in her living room for a 1971 volume, "MOS Integrated Circuits," which she frequently consults. The book concerns an earlier chip technology based on fewer transistors than are used today. "I look for older texts," she said. "A real good designer needs to know how the old stuff works."
Several years ago Ms. Ellsworth cornered Stephen Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, at a festival for vintage Apple computers and badgered him for the secrets of his Apple II floppy disk controller.
"I was very impressed with her knowledge of all this stuff, and her interest too," recalled Mr. Wozniak, whose fascination with hobbyist computers three decades ago helped create the personal computer industry.
She attributes her passion for design simplicity to her youth in Dallas, Ore., 35 miles south of Yamhill, where she was raised by her father, Jim Ellsworth, a mechanic who owned the local Mobil station.
She became a computer hobbyist early, begging her father at age 7 to let her use a Commodore 64 computer originally purchased for her brother, and then learning to program it by reading the manuals that came with the machine.
In a tiny rural town without access even to a surplus electronics store, her best sources of parts were the neighborhood ham radio operators. She learned to make the most of her scarce resources.
"It goes back to necessity," she said. "It went back to not having enough parts to design with when I was a kid."
Her first business foray came during high school when she began designing and selling the dirt-track race cars that she had been driving with her farther. Using his service station as a workshop, she was soon making so much money selling her custom race cars that she dropped out of high school.
It was fun for several years, she said, but eventually she decided that she needed to get away from the race car scene. A friend had an early Intel 486-based PC and thought they could make money assembling and selling computers. She decided he was right: "I looked at the margins and it seemed like a great way to make money."
They went into business together in 1995, but soon had a falling out and split up. For a short time Ms. Ellsworth considered leaving the computer business. Instead, she opened a store near that of her former partner, then drove him out of business. Ultimately her store became a chain of five Computers Made Easy shops in small towns.
"My business model was to find areas that were far enough away from the big cities where the larger stores were," she said. "I could generate a lot of loyalty and charge a bit more. It worked out well for quite a while."
Eventually, the collapsing price of the PC made it impossible to survive, she said, and in 2000 she sold off her stores.
"When the machines got down to $75 margins, then even putting a technician on the phone to answer a question meant you were almost losing money," she said.
Free from her business obligations, she decided to return to her first love - hobbyist electronics. She was eager to study computer hardware design, but soon found that there weren't many options for a high school dropout.
She moved to Walla Walla, Wash., and began attending Walla Walla College, a Seventh Day Adventist school that offered a circuit design program. Her attempt at a formal education lasted less than a year, however. She was a cultural mismatch for the school, where she said questioning the professors' answers was frowned upon.
"I felt like a wolf in sheep's clothing," she said.
On her own again, Ms. Ellsworth decided to pursue her passion, designing computer circuits that mimicked the behavior of her first Commodore. She turned to a series of mentors and availed herself of free software design tools offered by chip companies.
Her hobby produced a chameleon computer called the C-1. Changing its basic software could make it mimic not only a Commodore 64, but ultimately more than nine other popular home computers of the early 1980's, including the Atari, TI, Vic and Sinclair.
Two years ago she showed it off at the Hackers' Conference, an annual meeting of some of the nation's best computer designers. To her surprise, she received a rousing ovation - and a series of job offers.
One person who took notice was Andrew Singer, a computer scientist who is chief executive of Rapport Inc., a start-up based in Mountain View, Calif.
Mr. Singer contracted with Ms. Ellsworth as a consultant and has since found that she has abilities that engineers with advanced degrees often do not.
"It's possible to get a credential and not have passion," he said. He compared Ms. Ellsworth to Mr. Wozniak and to Burrell Smith, the hardware designer of the original Macintosh. Neither had formal training when they made their most significant contributions at Apple.
Ms. Ellsworth was also discovered by Mammoth toys, which hired her to design the Commodore-emulating chip for the joystick. She began the project late last June and finished, including a frantic last-minute trip to a Chinese manufacturing factory, in early September - a design sprint fueled by Mountain Dew and 20-hour days.
"It worked out tremendously well for our company," said Mr. Landi, president of Mammoth. "It has entirely changed the way we design electronic toys." He said that he has signed Ms. Ellsworth up for a series of design projects, although he would not divulge the financial details.
Old-fashioned video games like the ones on Ms. Ellsworth's product have become less common recently because kids have grown jaded and expect a "wow" factor, like intense graphics or realistic images that older computers could not produce, said Shyam Nagrani, principle consumer electronics analyst for iSupply, a market research firm based in El Segundo, Calif. He added, however, "The parents are likely to pick this up and say, 'Why not? The kids may like it.'"
When the C64, as the joystick is called informally, appeared on QVC last month, Ms. Ellsworth watched with obvious pride.
"It was one of one of the best projects I've ever done in my life," she said. "It was a tribute back to the computer that started it all for me."
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December 20, 2004OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Local HeroesBy ANDREW BORENE
inneapolis — IF the Pentagon hopes to start bringing American troops home from Iraq while also increasing security there, it will have to find a way to do more with less. One approach could be expanding the Marine Corps combined-action program, an initiative that was successful in Vietnam and has shown early promise in Iraq.
The concept behind the program is that if American and foreign troops operate together, each will gain knowledge from the other as to the best way to counter an insurgency. In Vietnam, platoons were created that combined marines and Vietnamese militia members. The Americans were handpicked, chosen because they had shown particular respect for the local culture. They were expected to live in the villages they were assigned to defend, striving to "work themselves out of a job" by training their Vietnamese counterparts in police work and security operations.
The most striking success of the program was a rapid increase in actionable intelligence. Living in Vietnamese hamlets for months, the marines got a chance to get to know the locals, who in general had kept a careful neutrality in the war. This helped to humanize the American presence and reduced the passive support many civilians had been giving to Vietcong guerrillas. For many, their respect for (or fear of) the communist guerrillas waned, and they broke their silence about intelligence leads.
In the long run, it was one of the few efforts that managed to win some "hearts and minds" in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the top brass lost interest in the program in the early 1970's and, well, the rest is history.
Last year, under the leadership of Gen. James Mattis, members of the First Marine Division in western Iraq began adapting the program to aid poorly trained Iraqi National Guard and police forces. Although it is too soon to declare success, reports from the military and the news media suggest that Iraqis in the combined-action program perform better in combat, have higher morale and are considerably more reliable than their regular Iraqi military counterparts.
Expanding the program would be best accomplished by teaming coalition troops with Iraqi security troops, or even paramilitary groups as in Vietnam, and placing them in cities along the main supply routes. This would significantly bolster the coalition's ability to gauge popular sentiment and gather intelligence leads on the pursuit of enemy leaders. It would also reduce the high profile of the coalition forces.
While the situations in Vietnam and Iraq are not identical, when it comes to battling insurgents it is always vital to erase their advantages in popular support and local knowledge. A few good marines learned how to do that during Vietnam; perhaps trying it again in Iraq can bring about a different ending.
Andrew Borene, a law student at the University of Minnesota, was a first lieutenant with the Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq. He is an adviser to Operation Truth, a veterans' advocacy group.
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December 20, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
War on the CheapBy BOB HERBERT
reg Rund was a freshman at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 when two students shot and killed a teacher, a dozen of their fellow students and themselves. Mr. Rund survived that horror, but he wasn't able to survive the war in Iraq. The 21-year-old Marine lance corporal was killed on Dec. 11 in Falluja.
The people who were so anxious to launch the war in Iraq are a lot less enthusiastic about properly supporting the troops who are actually fighting, suffering and dying in it. Corporal Rund was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Because of severe military personnel shortages, large numbers of troops are serving multiple tours in the war zone, and many are having their military enlistments involuntarily extended.
Troops approaching the end of their tours in Iraq are frequently dealt the emotional body blow of unexpected orders blocking their departure for home. "I've never seen so many grown men cry," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former infantry platoon leader who founded Operation Truth, an advocacy group for soldiers and veterans.
"Soldiers will do whatever you ask them to do," said Mr. Rieckhoff. "But when you tell them the finish line is here, and then you keep moving it back every time they get five meters away from it, it starts to really wear on them. It affects morale."
We don't have enough troops because we are fighting the war on the cheap. The Bush administration has refused to substantially expand the volunteer military and there is no public support for a draft. So the same troops head in and out of Iraq, and then back in again, as if through a revolving door. That naturally heightens their chances of being killed or wounded.
A reckoning is coming. The Army National Guard revealed last Thursday that it had missed its recruiting goals for the past two months by 30 percent. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, who heads the National Guard Bureau, said: "We're in a more difficult recruiting environment, period. There's no question that when you have a sustained ground combat operation going that the Guard's participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult."
Just a few days earlier, the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, told The Dallas Morning News that recruiting was in a "precipitous decline" that, if not reversed, could lead to renewed discussions about reinstatement of the draft.
The Bush administration, which has asked so much of the armed forces, has established a pattern of dealing in bad faith with its men and women in uniform. The callousness of its treatment of the troops was, of course, never more clear than in Donald Rumsfeld's high-handed response to a soldier's question about the shortages of battle armor in Iraq.
As the war in Iraq goes more and more poorly, the misery index of the men and women serving there gets higher and higher. More than 1,300 have been killed. Many thousands are coming home with agonizing wounds. Scott Shane of The Times reported last week that according to veterans' advocates and military doctors, the already hard-pressed system of health care for veterans "is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war."
Through the end of September, nearly 900 troops had been evacuated from Iraq by the Army for psychiatric reasons, included attempts or threatened attempts at suicide. Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, an assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997, said, "I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war."
When the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq is considered, some experts believe that the number of American troops needing mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.
From the earliest planning stages until now, the war in Iraq has been a tragic exercise in official incompetence. The original rationale for the war was wrong. The intelligence was wrong. The estimates of required troop strength were wrong. The war hawks' guesses about the response of the Iraqi people were wrong. The cost estimates were wrong, and on and on.
Nevertheless the troops have fought valiantly, and the price paid by many has been horrific. They all deserve better than the bad faith and shoddy treatment they are receiving from the highest officials of their government.
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December 20, 2004
A Dinner in Ukraine Made for Agatha ChristieBy C. J. CHIVERS
IEV, Ukraine, Dec. 18 - The presidential candidate appeared for a hushed meeting an hour before midnight on Sept. 5, arriving in a black Mercedes-Benz at an exclusive dacha outside the capital here. He was accompanied by a campaign manager. He had left his bodyguards behind.
Waiting for the candidate, Viktor A. Yushchenko, were two leaders of the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., the country's successor to the K.G.B., including Gen. Ihor P. Smeshko, its chairman. Mr. Yushchenko was leading in the presidential race. He had sought the meeting to discuss, among other things, death threats against him.
The four men drank beer and ate boiled crayfish from a common bowl, as well as a salad made of tomatoes, cucumbers and corn. Later, they selected vodka and meats, and then cognacs for a last drink. When the meeting ended about 2 a.m., Mr. Yushchenko went home to bed and began, his supporters say, to die.
More than three months later, the dinner at the dacha has assumed the character of an Agatha Christie mystery mixed with a cold war spy tale. Mr. Yushchenko, his doctors say, had been poisoned. But how? And by whom?
In interviews with investigators, members of the Yushchenko campaign, toxicologists, a son-in-law of Ukraine's president and three of the four men at the dinner, a picture emerges of confusion and frustration at a criminal investigation laden with complexity.
The day after Mr. Yushchenko's late meal, which a Russian newspaper has called "The Last Supper," he was gravely ill. By the time he had been stabilized and stood in the Ukrainian Parliament on Sept. 21 to accuse the administration of the departing president, Leonid D. Kuchma, of plotting to kill him ("Do not ask who is next," he said. "Every one of us will be the next."), his face was erupting in a grotesque mask of cysts.
He was also racked with pain and weakened by what his doctors in Vienna now call a surreptitious dose of TCDD, the most toxic of the organic compounds known as dioxins, and a contaminant in Agent Orange.
That much is known. But the most popular theory - that Mr. Yushchenko was poisoned at the dacha - contains flaws, strong enough that even his own supporters raise questions about it. And as investigators seek deeper insight into the case, they say a chief obstacle has been Mr. Yushchenko himself, who has used the poisoning almost as a theme in his campaign, but has not fully cooperated with the authorities, even as the trail of his would-be assassin grows cold.
Ukraine is headed for a repeat presidential election on Dec. 26 that is likely to decide the direction of this nation of 48 million as it continues its evolution from a post-Soviet state. But since the political crisis set off by the disputed Nov. 21 election was defused by court and parliamentary decisions to hold a new race, this dinner has overshadowed almost all else.
With a plot that would make Christie proud, much of Ukraine's leadership finds itself in the role of suspect, including General Smeshko, the S.B.U. chairman, who met with a Western reporter for what he described as the first time in a 32-year career.
"The main message is this: Our security service did not do Mr. Yushchenko any harm, and did not try to do him any harm," he said. "This we know for sure. All other versions we will check."
When asked how he reacted to being mentioned publicly as a suspect, General Smeshko, who has two young sons, answered with a question. "How would you like it if your kids asked you, 'Did you do it, Dad?'" he said, locking eyes with a reporter for several long moments.
He added: "It is really painful. We will do everything to know the truth. Basically, this is a case for the dignity of our whole service."
To achieve that, the S.B.U. must navigate the demands of Ukraine's most intense criminal investigation while weathering a popular belief that it may have been involved in the crime. It faces a case in which the principal theories are many, varied and so far impossible to prove wrong. And politics are visible at every turn.
Depending on who is talking, Mr. Yushchenko was poisoned either by his enemies in Mr. Kuchma's government, or by members of his own inner circle. Alternately, he was poisoned by Russia's intelligence services, or by organized crime figures working for any of the above.
Some say the failed assassin was Vladimir N. Satsyuk, General Smeshko's former first deputy and a member of Parliament. He was the host of the dinner, at his private dacha. The food was prepared by his personal cook. He resigned from the S.B.U. last week. (Officially, the cases are unrelated; Mr. Satsyuk resigned after a court ruled he could not hold both an executive position in government and a seat in Parliament.)
Mr. Satsyuk bristles at the subject. "It deals with my honor and the honor of my family," he said. "I am ready to cooperate in order to find the real cause."
Finding the real cause seems unlikely for now. A thorough investigation would require a reconstruction of Mr. Yushchenko's meetings, movements and meals, but Mr. Yushchenko, busy with his campaign, has not been of much help.
Volodymyr Sivkovych, chairman of a parliamentary commission that has reopened its investigation into Mr. Yushchenko's illness, complained that Mr. Yushchenko has declined even to give a proper statement to his commission or to investigators. Nor have Ukrainian investigators received the latest test results from Vienna, which they say are essential evidence.
David V. Zhvaniya, the Yushchenko campaign manager who arranged the dacha meeting and attended it himself, said he and Mr. Yushchenko had refused to appear because they had no faith in the commission.
Mr. Sivkovych, he said, is aligned with Mr. Kuchma or Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich, the rival to Mr. Yushchenko in the presidential race. Mr. Sivkovych called that assertion "lies."
Law enforcement officials also remain frustrated, even after the former general prosecutor, whom Mr. Yushchenko did not trust, was fired this month.
The investigation has been reopened by the new general prosecutor, with support from the S.B.U. But Lt. Gen. Igor V. Drizhchany, who is in charge of the S.B.U.'s legal department, said investigators are still learning of medical assessments through the news media.
"All the political goals have been achieved," he said. "But those who most need the evidence - the people who must catch a murderer - do not have it."
He continued: "I cannot reproach anybody, because I know that the presidential race is taking place. But these are still the facts."
Mr. Yushchenko declined to be interviewed on this subject; through a spokeswoman he said he relied on private medical information because he did not trust the government.
"I wanted the first word to be said by the doctors," he said in a statement. "Only then would come the turn of the investigators."
One senior law enforcement official said that after doctors found dioxin in Mr. Yushchenko's blood, the candidate met informally on Dec. 16 with a newly assigned prosecutor and pledged to cooperate, but only after the election.
Without his cooperation, the case has taken the form of theories, and for the news media the most popular has been the dinner at the dacha. But as details and a greater understanding emerge, that version remains open to question.
First, General Smeshko said, Mr. Yushchenko was ill and in pain before the meeting, and had postponed the dacha visit a day because of exhaustion and a backache. Mr. Zhvaniya confirmed that, but said Mr. Yushchenko has a history of back troubles, and his pain the previous night might not have been related to poison.
A second, more intriguing, complication is that toxicologists say that after a person is contaminated with dioxins, it typically takes three days to two weeks before symptoms appear. Mr. Yushchenko was racked with pain hours after the dacha dinner, which understandably cast initial suspicion on the meal. But the theory was weakened this month when doctors in Vienna announced that the poison was dioxin; his would be the only known case of a dioxin acting that fast.
Dr. Arnold Schecter, a specialist in dioxin contamination at the University of Texas, and co-editor of "Dioxins and Health," a medical reference, said it was possible but highly unlikely that Mr. Yushchenko was poisoned on Sept. 5. "It doesn't make sense, medically," he said. "I would go back 14 days before that."
Mr. Zhvaniya agreed. "It is a stupid theory," he said. "The poisoning could have happened at any moment. He was always touring. He met hundreds of people in hundreds of places. To link it to that evening can be called only paranoia."
Mr. Zhvaniya said that if Mr. Yushchenko had been intentionally poisoned, he believed it probably occurred while he was in the Crimea in late August. He also said the most likely suspect was an organized crime figure, perhaps collaborating with Russia and members of Mr. Kuchma's administration.
Mr. Zhvaniya, a member of Parliament and a commission on organized crime, said he had listened to a taped conversation of a Russian crime figure offering to help a member of the Kuchma administration. "He more than once offered his services in poisoning, or removal," he said.
When pressed for a copy of the audiotape, he declined. "After the election," he said.
Russia's special services scoff at suggestions of their involvement. "I consider it below my dignity to comment on," said Boris N. Labusov, the senior spokesman of the S.V.R., Russia's foreign intelligence service.
Mr. Kuchma's family, which also has said it was not involved, said the dacha theory was foolish. Any government wanting to kill an opponent, the family's line of thinking goes, would not try it at a meeting with government officials. "I think they are not kamikazes," said Viktor M. Pinchuk, Mr. Kuchma's son-in-law and a member of Parliament.
Elements of the popular dacha theory are also inconclusive or wrong.
Among them are suggestions that Mr. Yushchenko was vulnerable because it was the only time his guards did not check his food - a function of questionable value for a poison that is said to be odorless and tasteless, and takes days to manifest itself. The news media have also written, based on a comment by one of Mr. Yushchenko's doctors, that dioxin might have been slipped into his soup. No soup was served at the dacha that night, the three men who dined with Mr. Yushchenko said.
Mr. Zhvaniya also dismissed statements by Mr. Yushchenko's wife, Kateryna Chumechenko, who is an American citizen, that she tasted something medicinal on his lips after he returned from the dacha. "She is a normal woman, and to her with the words K.G.B. and S.B.U. comes an unreasonable reaction, the more so because she was brought up in the United States," he said. (Toxicologists say dioxins are tasteless, although Dr. Schecter pointed out the provenance of this assertion is uncertain; he knew of no one who had ever tried tasting them.)
Still, public attention remains focused on the late-night meal, frustrating investigators who say a larger window of time needs to be examined, and infuriating Mr. Satsyuk, the host, who challenged the opposition leader to accuse him to his face.
"I am ready to meet live on the air with Mr. Yushchenko," he said. "I would like him, looking into my eyes, to say that he was poisoned at my dacha. I can do this at any press conference at any time."
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ballot boxWhy Are You Asking Me?The president's don't-ask, don't-tell press conference.By Chris SuellentropPosted Monday, Dec. 20, 2004, at 3:27 PM PT
What is the purpose of a presidential press conference? Is it to allow reporters to ask the president questions? Or is it to get the president to answer them? Dodging the question is one of the most important (and most-used) weapons in a politician's arsenal, of course. In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara cited the traditional ploy of answering the question you wish you were asked, rather than the question you actually were asked. (Think of it as the reverse of Donald Rumsfeld's first rule of war: You reply to the question you might want or wish to have, not the question you have.) But President Bush, as he demonstrated during Monday's question-and-not-answer session with the White House press corps, has dispensed with that old trick. Instead, Bush, having invited reporters to ask him questions on live television, repeatedly told reporters that their questions would be better directed at someone else.
How long will U.S. troops be in Iraq? Ask Gens. Abizaid and Casey. What's the broad framework for Social Security reform? Ask Congress. Has the Iraq war improved the prospects for peace in the Middle East? Go ask the Palestinians. Every time he was confronted with a difficult question, Bush answered, Go ask someone else. You expect a press secretary or a Cabinet officer, to say, "I'll get back to you," or "That's above my pay grade," or "You'd have to ask the president." Well, now the president has been asked. And he told us to ask you.
"Well again, I will repeat, don't bother to ask me," Bush said in response to a question about what "tough measures" might need to be taken to establish private Social Security accounts. "Oh, you can ask me. I shouldn't—I can't tell you what to ask, it's not the holiday spirit." But I'm not going to answer, so don't waste your time: "I will negotiate at the appropriate time with the law writers, and so thank you for trying." On the question of how long American troops will remain in Iraq, Bush said, "The best people that reflect the answer to that question are people like Abizaid and Casey who are right there on the ground." On the Middle East peace process, Bush said, effectively, don't get your hopes up, but the Palestinians are the ones with the answer: "But I'm realistic about how to achieve peace, and it starts with my understanding that there will never be peace until a true democratic state emerges in the Palestinian territory. And I'm hopeful right now, because the—the Palestinians will begin to have elections. I have—well, not begin—will have elections, which is the beginning of the process toward the development of state. It is not the sign that democracy has arrived. It is the beginning of a process."
Bush did have a clear answer for one thing, in response to a question he wasn't asked. (Two things, if you include his clear admission that he won't be attending the Rose Bowl to watch his home-state Texas Longhorns.) During his introductory statement, Bush explained that Iraq will have "a fully democratic constitutional government" within a year, if the people of Iraq ratify the constitution that will be drafted by the government elected in January. Many observers have worried that the Sunnis in Iraq won't see the new constitution as legitimate (or "fully democratic") if they can't participate in the January elections. Bush dismissed those concerns: "More than 80 parties and coalitions have been formed, and more 7,000 candidates have registered for the elections."
You go to the polls with the democracy you have, not the democracy that you might wish or want to have, but the test of an "energetic" democracy isn't the number of political parties and candidates it fields for each election. That's the same logic the administration used to defend its unimpressive coalition for the Iraq invasion. OK, there aren't any Arab countries, and a lot of important Europeans are missing, but hey, look at the raw numbers! So what if we don't have the Sunnis (the French and Germans)? We have 7,000 other candidates (Costa Rica, Estonia, and don't forget Poland). It's an election of the willing. Or perhaps the able.
Chris Suellentrop is Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail him at suellentrop@slate.com.
Also in today's Slate:surfergirl: The view from Staten Island. reel time: Joel Schumacher's Symphony: Plus, Lemony Snicket, Meet the Fockers, and the very, very last word on biopics. readme: Sold!: Goodbye, Bill G. Hello, Don G.
What is the purpose of a presidential press conference? Is it to allow reporters to ask the president questions? Or is it to get the president to answer them? Dodging the question is one of the most important (and most-used) weapons in a politician's arsenal, of course. In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara cited the traditional ploy of answering the question you wish you were asked, rather than the question you actually were asked. (Think of it as the reverse of Donald Rumsfeld's first rule of war: You reply to the question you might want or wish to have, not the question you have.) But President Bush, as he demonstrated during Monday's question-and-not-answer session with the White House press corps, has dispensed with that old trick. Instead, Bush, having invited reporters to ask him questions on live television, repeatedly told reporters that their questions would be better directed at someone else.
How long will U.S. troops be in Iraq? Ask Gens. Abizaid and Casey. What's the broad framework for Social Security reform? Ask Congress. Has the Iraq war improved the prospects for peace in the Middle East? Go ask the Palestinians. Every time he was confronted with a difficult question, Bush answered, Go ask someone else. You expect a press secretary or a Cabinet officer, to say, "I'll get back to you," or "That's above my pay grade," or "You'd have to ask the president." Well, now the president has been asked. And he told us to ask you.
"Well again, I will repeat, don't bother to ask me," Bush said in response to a question about what "tough measures" might need to be taken to establish private Social Security accounts. "Oh, you can ask me. I shouldn't—I can't tell you what to ask, it's not the holiday spirit." But I'm not going to answer, so don't waste your time: "I will negotiate at the appropriate time with the law writers, and so thank you for trying." On the question of how long American troops will remain in Iraq, Bush said, "The best people that reflect the answer to that question are people like Abizaid and Casey who are right there on the ground." On the Middle East peace process, Bush said, effectively, don't get your hopes up, but the Palestinians are the ones with the answer: "But I'm realistic about how to achieve peace, and it starts with my understanding that there will never be peace until a true democratic state emerges in the Palestinian territory. And I'm hopeful right now, because the—the Palestinians will begin to have elections. I have—well, not begin—will have elections, which is the beginning of the process toward the development of state. It is not the sign that democracy has arrived. It is the beginning of a process."
Bush did have a clear answer for one thing, in response to a question he wasn't asked. (Two things, if you include his clear admission that he won't be attending the Rose Bowl to watch his home-state Texas Longhorns.) During his introductory statement, Bush explained that Iraq will have "a fully democratic constitutional government" within a year, if the people of Iraq ratify the constitution that will be drafted by the government elected in January. Many observers have worried that the Sunnis in Iraq won't see the new constitution as legitimate (or "fully democratic") if they can't participate in the January elections. Bush dismissed those concerns: "More than 80 parties and coalitions have been formed, and more 7,000 candidates have registered for the elections."
You go to the polls with the democracy you have, not the democracy that you might wish or want to have, but the test of an "energetic" democracy isn't the number of political parties and candidates it fields for each election. That's the same logic the administration used to defend its unimpressive coalition for the Iraq invasion. OK, there aren't any Arab countries, and a lot of important Europeans are missing, but hey, look at the raw numbers! So what if we don't have the Sunnis (the French and Germans)? We have 7,000 other candidates (Costa Rica, Estonia, and don't forget Poland). It's an election of the willing. Or perhaps the able.
Chris Suellentrop is Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail him at suellentrop@slate.com.
Also in today's Slate:surfergirl: The view from Staten Island. reel time: Joel Schumacher's Symphony: Plus, Lemony Snicket, Meet the Fockers, and the very, very last word on biopics. readme: Sold!: Goodbye, Bill G. Hello, Don G.
today's papersBloody SundayBy Sam SchechnerPosted Monday, Dec. 20, 2004, at 3:07 AM PT
Everyone leads with yesterday's twin car bombings in Shiite holy cities Najaf and Karbala, where at least 64 died and more than twice that number were wounded. The second blast, in Najaf, was far more deadly, killing at least 50 near a central square packed with people attending a tribal leader's funeral procession. The Washington Post paints a dark scene: "Streets were strewn with the twisted and charred wreckage of cars, as crowds wandered along the destruction with dazed, uncomprehending looks. Chunks of concrete were ripped from buildings and hurled onto ground soaked in rain, blood and cinder, framed in gray, stormy skies." (Early morning wires report that authorities have rounded up 50 suspects in the attacks.)
The papers all note that these attacks are part of a pre-election surge of violence in the relatively quiet Shiite areas—something Shiite leaders call a Sunni ploy to ignite a sectarian civil war. "They have failed before, and they will fail again," a moderate Shiite cleric is quoted as saying in the New York Times and USA Today. "The Shiites are committed not to respond with violence, which will only lead to more violence."
The NYT's story puts the attacks in context in its second graf, noting that the combined death toll was the second-worst since the interim government took over almost six months ago. (In the worst, on July 28, some 70 people died after a minibus packed with explosives plowed into a line of 500 job applicants waiting outside a police station in Baqubah, north of Baghdad.)
The papers' Iraq leads also mention another ghastly incident along what the NYT describes as Baghdad's "notoriously lawless Haifa Street": Some 30 gunmen ambushed a car carrying three Iraqi elections workers, dragging them into the wide boulevard, and killing them in broad daylight. The Los Angeles Times, WP, NYT, and USAT all front strange, harrowing AP photos of gunmen standing over a man in a fetal position just before the executions, which occurred in the middle of morning traffic.
Displaying a (relatively) reassuring grasp of the obvious, the State Department, the CIA, and even the Defense Intelligence Agency have told President Bush that the U.S. "isn't winning" the battle against the Iraqi insurgency, according to Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau. One such warning was apparently delivered last week bay Bush's new CIA chief, Porter Goss.
Certainly, a group of battle-hardened sergeants from the 3rd ID, which helped win the Battle of Baghdad early last year, says they never expected they would be shipping back out. "The first Gulf War was in and out. I thought this would be pretty much the same," says one in a long USAT story on the new deployment, which is slated to begin after the Jan. 30 election. The piece details the preparations, from flatbed trains ferrying hundreds of freshly painted tanks and troop carriers, to the Arabic phrase cheat-sheets troops are taping to the stocks of their assault rifles.
With a growing chorus of prominent Republicans bashing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sens. John Warner and Richard Lugar came to his somewhat qualified defense yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press. "The president makes the choice," Warner said, "and we're going to back the president."
And regarding the wildfire rumor that the president might not be backing Rummy anymore: It seems to have been debunked. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol denied a report that he'd told "everyone within earshot" that the White House had encouraged him, sotto voce, to write a scathing WP op-ed urging the SecDef's ouster last week. "I maybe said that if [Bush] pats me on the back and says, 'Good op-ed, Bill,' that would indicate something," Kristol clarified.
Also on yesterday's talk shows, and noted, as far as TP can see, only in a USAT news brief: White House Chief of Staff Andy Card told ABC's This Week that the administration was, in fact, aware of many of Bernard Kerik's "issues" when Bush nominated him. He didn't say which ones and when they may have decided to push the eject button.
The Wall Street Journal and LAT both mention a GAO report stating that, including the prescription drug benefit, Medicare may cost some, um, $27 trillion dollars over the next 75 years, more than seven times the estimated cost of Social Security over that period. Meanwhile, the NYT reports that the administration is looking for ways to cut growth in federal spending on Medicaid, the health insurance program for poor people.
On their front pages, both USAT and the WP handicap upcoming tussles between Bush and GOP congressmen, whose boldness has grown in tandem with their majority, opposing Bush's push for guest-worker visas and calling in right-wing chits in return for supporting Social Security privatization. While the Post kind of muddles the framing until the end, USAT does much better: "CONSERVATIVES TO CHALLENGE BUSH."
And the NYT returns to the question of who poisoned Viktor Yushchenko, invoking the hallowed name of Agatha Christie as it builds a long, suspenseful story around the boiled crayfish and beer dinner he had with the head of Ukraine's security service the night before he fell seriously ill. Unfortunately, the premise starts to fall apart when the paper speaks—has the WP and even this TPer—with Arnold Schecter, one of the most prominent U.S. experts on dioxin poisoning. The poison takes between three days and two weeks to generate symptoms, he says, making the dinner guests unlikely suspects: "It doesn't make sense, medically."Sam Schechner is a freelance writer in New York.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111240/
Everyone leads with yesterday's twin car bombings in Shiite holy cities Najaf and Karbala, where at least 64 died and more than twice that number were wounded. The second blast, in Najaf, was far more deadly, killing at least 50 near a central square packed with people attending a tribal leader's funeral procession. The Washington Post paints a dark scene: "Streets were strewn with the twisted and charred wreckage of cars, as crowds wandered along the destruction with dazed, uncomprehending looks. Chunks of concrete were ripped from buildings and hurled onto ground soaked in rain, blood and cinder, framed in gray, stormy skies." (Early morning wires report that authorities have rounded up 50 suspects in the attacks.)
The papers all note that these attacks are part of a pre-election surge of violence in the relatively quiet Shiite areas—something Shiite leaders call a Sunni ploy to ignite a sectarian civil war. "They have failed before, and they will fail again," a moderate Shiite cleric is quoted as saying in the New York Times and USA Today. "The Shiites are committed not to respond with violence, which will only lead to more violence."
The NYT's story puts the attacks in context in its second graf, noting that the combined death toll was the second-worst since the interim government took over almost six months ago. (In the worst, on July 28, some 70 people died after a minibus packed with explosives plowed into a line of 500 job applicants waiting outside a police station in Baqubah, north of Baghdad.)
The papers' Iraq leads also mention another ghastly incident along what the NYT describes as Baghdad's "notoriously lawless Haifa Street": Some 30 gunmen ambushed a car carrying three Iraqi elections workers, dragging them into the wide boulevard, and killing them in broad daylight. The Los Angeles Times, WP, NYT, and USAT all front strange, harrowing AP photos of gunmen standing over a man in a fetal position just before the executions, which occurred in the middle of morning traffic.
Displaying a (relatively) reassuring grasp of the obvious, the State Department, the CIA, and even the Defense Intelligence Agency have told President Bush that the U.S. "isn't winning" the battle against the Iraqi insurgency, according to Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau. One such warning was apparently delivered last week bay Bush's new CIA chief, Porter Goss.
Certainly, a group of battle-hardened sergeants from the 3rd ID, which helped win the Battle of Baghdad early last year, says they never expected they would be shipping back out. "The first Gulf War was in and out. I thought this would be pretty much the same," says one in a long USAT story on the new deployment, which is slated to begin after the Jan. 30 election. The piece details the preparations, from flatbed trains ferrying hundreds of freshly painted tanks and troop carriers, to the Arabic phrase cheat-sheets troops are taping to the stocks of their assault rifles.
With a growing chorus of prominent Republicans bashing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sens. John Warner and Richard Lugar came to his somewhat qualified defense yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press. "The president makes the choice," Warner said, "and we're going to back the president."
And regarding the wildfire rumor that the president might not be backing Rummy anymore: It seems to have been debunked. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol denied a report that he'd told "everyone within earshot" that the White House had encouraged him, sotto voce, to write a scathing WP op-ed urging the SecDef's ouster last week. "I maybe said that if [Bush] pats me on the back and says, 'Good op-ed, Bill,' that would indicate something," Kristol clarified.
Also on yesterday's talk shows, and noted, as far as TP can see, only in a USAT news brief: White House Chief of Staff Andy Card told ABC's This Week that the administration was, in fact, aware of many of Bernard Kerik's "issues" when Bush nominated him. He didn't say which ones and when they may have decided to push the eject button.
The Wall Street Journal and LAT both mention a GAO report stating that, including the prescription drug benefit, Medicare may cost some, um, $27 trillion dollars over the next 75 years, more than seven times the estimated cost of Social Security over that period. Meanwhile, the NYT reports that the administration is looking for ways to cut growth in federal spending on Medicaid, the health insurance program for poor people.
On their front pages, both USAT and the WP handicap upcoming tussles between Bush and GOP congressmen, whose boldness has grown in tandem with their majority, opposing Bush's push for guest-worker visas and calling in right-wing chits in return for supporting Social Security privatization. While the Post kind of muddles the framing until the end, USAT does much better: "CONSERVATIVES TO CHALLENGE BUSH."
And the NYT returns to the question of who poisoned Viktor Yushchenko, invoking the hallowed name of Agatha Christie as it builds a long, suspenseful story around the boiled crayfish and beer dinner he had with the head of Ukraine's security service the night before he fell seriously ill. Unfortunately, the premise starts to fall apart when the paper speaks—has the WP and even this TPer—with Arnold Schecter, one of the most prominent U.S. experts on dioxin poisoning. The poison takes between three days and two weeks to generate symptoms, he says, making the dinner guests unlikely suspects: "It doesn't make sense, medically."Sam Schechner is a freelance writer in New York.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111240/
December 20, 2004
Freezing Temperatures Stretch South to FloridaBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:06 a.m. ET
Freezing temperatures hit northern Florida on Monday morning and snow made mountain highways treacherous in the Appalachians as the first big cold wave of the season swept southward.
Even North Carolina's Outer Banks got a rare seaside dusting of snow, and more than 2 feet fell near the Great Lakes.
The blast of Arctic air -- one day before the official start of winter -- drove temperatures in the Florida Panhandle down to 31 degrees at Crestview, 32 at Pensacola.
The Florida citrus industry had no major worries because damage is seen only when readings stay at 28 or lower for at least four hours. But meteorologists warned that frost was possible Monday night and Tuesday morning even in central and southern Florida's fruit and vegetable growing regions.
Greensboro, N.C., posted a record low for Dec. 20 at 9, and Crossville, Tenn., dropped to 6. Farther north, it was 18 below zero at 9 a.m. at Massena, N.Y., with a wind chill of 28 below, the National Weather Service said.
Homeless shelters were near capacity in Atlanta -- where the temperature dropped to 16 -- and were busy even in the suburbs where the homeless population is not as high.
``When weather gets this bitterly cold, we see faces we rarely see,'' said Tyler Driver, executive director of The Extension, an emergency shelter for the homeless in Marietta, Ga.
As much as 4 inches of snow coated mountain roads in West Virginia, where 21 school districts closed for the day and others opened late.
``This last day of fall certainly doesn't feel like it,'' said Ken Batty, a meteorologist in Charleston, W.Va.
Parts of New England also had blowing snow, and more than 130 schools closed or had delayed openings in New Hampshire.
An autistic 9-year-old boy was missing in the woods near South Williamsport, Pa., where temperatures fell into the single digits during the night. Officials appealed to residents to search their property Monday for Logan Mitcheltree, who was last seen Saturday.
``There's a possibility; there's always hope,'' Deputy Fire Chief John West said.
Icy pavement was blamed for at least two traffic deaths in New Jersey.
The icy wind sucked up moisture from the Great Lakes and dumped 26 inches of snow on Michigan City in northern Indiana. The city's schools were closed Monday.
Bonnie and Jim Tilden got stranded Sunday near Rolling Prairie, Ind. ``It was terrible on I-94. You couldn't see at all, and we didn't see any snowplows,'' Bonnie Tilden said.
Blowing snow caused whiteout conditions in western Pennsylvania, and a tractor-trailer jackknifed across Interstate 80, setting off a chain-reaction pileup that wrecked up to 80 vehicles.
``I could hear the cars piling into each other for a good 10 minutes,'' said state Trooper Ted Hunt, who was attending to disabled vehicles on the side of the highway when the collisions started Sunday.
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December 20, 2004
The New Military Life: Heading Back to the WarBy MONICA DAVEY
ANHATTAN, Kan., Dec. 15 - Earlier this year, as Sgt. Alexander Garcia's plane took off for home after his tense year of duty in Iraq, he remembered watching the receding desert sand and thinking, I will never see this place again.
Never lasted about 10 months for Sergeant Garcia, a cavalry scout with the First Armored Division who finished his first stint in Iraq in March and is now preparing to return.
He and the rest of his combat brigade at Fort Riley, the Army base a few miles from this town, have been working for weeks, late into the frigid prairie nights, cleaning and packing gear and vehicles for the trip back to Baghdad after the New Year.
"I figured that the Army was big enough that one unit would not have to go back again before this thing was over," said Sergeant Garcia, 20. "It's my job and it's my country, and I don't have any regrets. But I kind of feel like I did my part. Just as I was readjusting to life back home, just as I was starting to feel normal again, this kind of throws me back into the waves."
No one is feeling normal anymore at Fort Riley and other bases across the country, where military life is undergoing a radical change. They are stoic here, and many point out, as Sergeant Garcia does, that they signed up for this.
Still, in decades past, troops had gotten used to a predictable rhythm to their deployments. Even during Desert Storm and Vietnam, most soldiers could expect to take just one trip into harm's way.
But with the military stretched thin in Iraq and in Afghanistan, some soldiers and marines are being sent to war zones repeatedly, for longer stretches in some cases, and with far less time at home between deployments than they say they have ever experienced before.
Here in Kansas, the base and the small towns nearby have begun to resemble an enormous machine in an endless cycle: bringing soldiers home with late-night celebrations in gymnasiums and screaming roadside banners, and then sending them off again, with fresh uniforms, new DVD players and snapshots, and formal farewells.
The motion is constant, whirring along, even as the world beyond Fort Riley's churning slows down for the holidays. Next month, a brigade of 3,500 Fort Riley soldiers will begin returning to Iraq for a second time; a few days ago, 3,500 others, many of whom arrived home to their quiet Midwestern post this fall, learned they would be headed back to Iraq as early as the middle of next year.
This frenzied pace is swiftly becoming the norm. Nearly a third of the 950,000 people from all branches of the armed forces who have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan since those conflicts began have already been sent a second time. Part-time soldiers - Army national guardsmen and reservists - who often have handled support roles, not frontline combat roles, are slightly more likely to have served more than one deployment to the conflict zones than regular Army members.
And, of the nearly 1,300 troops who have died in Iraq since the war began, more than 100 of them were on second tours.
The change is leaving its emotional mark on thousands of military families. Some family members say the repeated separations have been like some awful waking dream, holding their breath for their soldiers to make it home safely, only to watch them leave once more. Some families who have lost loved ones on repeat tours of duty said they felt a particular ache - a sense that the second trip pushed fate too hard.
Among some of the soldiers themselves, the thought of returning to Iraq carries one puzzling quality: Unlike so many parts of life, in which the second try at anything feels easier than the first, these soldiers say that heading to Iraq is actually more overwhelming the second time around.
"The first time, I didn't know anything," Sergeant Garcia said. "But this time I know what I'm getting into, so it's harder. You know what you're going to do. You know how bad you're going to be feeling."
During peacetime, marines have usually been deployed for six months, then stationed at home for 18 months, said Capt. Dan McSweeney, a Marine Corps spokesman. For now, Captain McSweeney said, the pace for some is closer to seven months away and seven months home. About half of the 32,000 marines now stationed in Iraq are serving second tours, he said.
The Army's goal is that fulltime soldiers can expect deployments one year of every three, and reservists expect to go away far less, one year of every six, said Lt. Col. Christopher Rodney, an Army spokesman. At the moment, though, Colonel Rodney said, some soldiers are leaving for a year and coming home for a year, though some tours have stretched longer, some stays at home shorter.
Army officials said they were seeking ways to make repeated deployments easier on soldiers and their families, as the Army is shifted to create more brigades and to spread the burdens. Colonel Rodney said that the military was also trying to give troops as much advance warning about deployments as possible. The Army's chaplains, too, said they were offering more extensive relationship counseling for military families as one way to ease the strains.
"This is a completely new and completely different kind of animal," said Sgt. First Class Tom Ogden, a member of an Army aviation unit from Fort Carson, Colo., who has spent nearly 20 years in the military.
"I've never seen anything like it," he said. "And what everybody is starting to know now is that this is going to be what's going on for the foreseeable future."
Sergeant Ogden, 37, returned home to his wife, Rene, and their 7-year-old twins in April. His unit is to leave again, he said, in March. "For me, this one will be harder," he said. "The last time, we thought there was an off-chance we would see some stuff. But things have escalated, and now we know we will."
At Fort Riley, soldiers and their families said they had wrestled with the new, faster pace. Some spouses said they worried about managing so much of life alone - children, bills, cars and home repairs.
"I think this is the new norm," said Sandra Horton, whose husband, Staff Sgt. T. J. Horton, is to leave Fort Riley for Iraq, once again, in January.
The Hortons have been through the stresses and loneliness of deployments many times in Sergeant Horton's 17 years in the service, and they said they would manage just fine this time, too. Again and again, they both said that this was simply his job, even if it meant that Ta'Von, 6, grew many more inches before his father saw him again.
Still, in a quiet moment, Ms. Horton acknowledged: "It feels never-ending now. We feel like he's always gone. But what can we do?"
For Specialist James Webb, a younger soldier here at Fort Riley, the family stresses seem overwhelming. "I feel like I'm in a no-win situation," he said.
Specialist Webb, 28, lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment off the base. He talks on the telephone for hours to his wife, who lives in Georgia. He said he was lonely, struggling with depression and being treated for post-traumatic stress from the roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades he saw as a gunner on the top of a Humvee.
He returned this fall, but has not been able to reunite permanently with his wife and three stepdaughters because he cannot find them on-base housing. His wife moved home, to Georgia, during his deployment, and now there is talk of another deployment as quickly as next year.
"There's been some distance," he said somberly of his wife, whom he married in October 2002, not long before his first deployment. "She's really not liking the military lifestyle at all. She tells me things would be better if I just moved back to Georgia."
Still, Specialist Webb said he hoped to remain a soldier for his career, though he said he worried about losing his family."At the same time, this is my job," he said. "I signed on the dotted line. And this is a small thing I can do for my country, to protect my wife and stepdaughters."
No one can be certain how the pace of deployment may affect the military in the years ahead: Will soldiers finish their enlistments and leave? Will fewer recruits agree to sign up? Two studies based on data before the 2001 terrorist attacks suggested that service members who had one or two deployments were more likely to re-enlist than those who had had no deployments, but the pace and danger levels of deployments have shifted since then.
Cpl. Kenneth Epperson, a Fort Riley soldier, said that he and his wife, Amanda, were fine with the pace of deployment. His daughter, Nikki, was born while he was in Iraq, and he has spent many weeks since he returned in April away from his family again, getting special training in California and Georgia.
"I joined the Army to be a soldier," said Corporal Epperson, who is 21 and headed back to Iraq in a few weeks. "I expected this."
Others were surprised.
At Camp LeJeune, in North Carolina, Lance Cpl. Peter Kirby said he probably would not re-enlist in the Marines when his contract ends in 16 months. He had thought about the military as a career, Corporal Kirby said, but was now leaning toward being a police officer or a park service worker.
"This isn't the life I'd like to lead," he said, adding that he was getting married in a few weeks. "If I'm going to start a family, I don't want to be absent in my kids' lives."
In Tucson, Elena Zurheide is preparing Christmas for her 7-and-a-half-month-old son, Robert III. "I hate Christmas," Ms. Zurheide said. "I hate holidays. I hate everything right now."
Her husband, Robert Jr., was a lance corporal in the Marines. He was killed in Falluja this spring, a few weeks before their son was born. He was on his second tour to Iraq.
"I never wanted him to go a second time," she said. "I just started having the feeling that we were pushing our luck too far, and he thought so, too."
She said she wrote to Corporal Zurheide's commander before he left, asking that her huband be permitted to stay behind - or that he at least be allowed to wait for the birth of their son. She said she never heard back.
"I should have broken his arm to keep him here," she said. "I knew it was too much to go again."
Her son, Ms. Zurheide said, looks just like his father.
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