by Mark Bowden
Poor Lincoln. By all accounts he appears to have been the gentlest and most honorable of husbands and fathers, and yet he found little solace even at home. Burlingame records the constant duplicity and groundless suspicion, the nagging criticism and jealous rants of Mary Lincoln, who—coming home on a steamboat from Lincoln’s triumphant entry into a fallen Richmond—reportedly flew into such a rage that she slapped her husband in the face.
“It is surprising how widespread [the criticism] was,” said Burlingame. “And also how thin-skinned he could be. But that was the nature of partisanship in those days; you never could say a kind word about your opponent.”
As if things have changed.
Many appreciated Lincoln’s greatness and goodness while he lived, of course. He was elected twice to the presidency, after all, and was revered by millions. History records more grief and mourning on his death than for any other American president. But as a consensus forms about historical events and people over time, the past is simplified in our memory, in our textbooks, and in our popular culture. Lincoln’s excellence has been distilled from the rough-and-tumble of his times. We best remember the most generous of contemporary assessments, whether the magnanimous letter sent by his fellow speaker on the stage at Gettysburg, Edward Everett, who wrote to him, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes”; or Edwin Stanton’s “Now he belongs to the ages,” at the moment of his death; or Frederick Douglass’s moving tribute in 1876 to “a great and good man.”
This process of distillation obscures the difficulty of Lincoln’s journey, and it makes, by comparison, our own age seem diminished. Where is the political giant of our era? Where is the timeless oratory? Where is the bold resolve, the moral courage, the vision?
Imagine all of those critical voices from the nineteenth century as talking heads on cable television. Imagine the snap judgments, the slurs, and the put-downs that beset Lincoln magnified a millon times in social media. How many of us in that din would hear him clearly? How many of us would have noticed him doing well? His story illustrates how even immortality—let alone humbler things like skill, decency, good judgment, and courage—is rarely even recognized, and never goes unpunished.
Dumb Kids’ Class
Atlantic, June 2012
Catholic school was not the ordeal for me that it apparently was for many other children of my generation. I attended Catholic grade schools; served as an altar boy; and, astonishingly, was never struck by a nun or molested by a priest. All in all I was treated with kindness, which often was more than I deserved. My education has withstood the test of time, including both the lessons my teachers instilled and the ones they never intended.
In the mid-twentieth century, when I was in grade school, a child’s self-esteem was not a matter for concern. Shame was considered a spur to better behavior and accomplishment. If you flunked a test, you were singled out, and the offending sheet of paper, bloodied with red marks, was waved before the entire class as a warning, much the way our catechisms depicted a boy with black splotches on his soul.
Fear was also considered useful. In the fourth grade, right around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, one of the nuns at St. Petronille’s, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, told us that the Vatican had received a secret warning that the world would soon be consumed by a fatal nuclear exchange. The fact that the warning had purportedly been delivered by Our Lady of Fátima lent the prediction divine authority. (Any last sliver of doubt was removed by our viewing of the 1952 movie The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, wherein the Virgin Mary herself appeared on a luminous cloud.) We were surely cooked. I remember pondering the futility of existence, to say nothing of the futility of safety drills that involved huddling under desks. When the fateful sirens sounded, I resolved, I would be out of there. Down the front steps, across Hillside Avenue, over fences, and through backyards, I would take the shortest possible route home, where I planned to crawl under my father’s workbench in the basement. It was the sturdiest thing I had ever seen. I didn’t believe it would save me, but after weighing the alternatives carefully, I decided it was my preferred spot to face oblivion.
At the schools I attended, each grade level was divided in two. Teachers observed their charges’ performance, and sorted them accordingly. Even in that euphemism-deprived period, no adult ever labeled the two academic tiers explicitly, but we children saw the truth. There was the smart kids’ class, and there was the dumb kids’ class.
It was the same in all three of the parochial schools I attended. My family moved twice: from Glen Ellyn, where I attended St. Petronille’s through sixth grade; to Port Washington, Long Island, where I attended St. Peter of Alcantara for seventh grade. After a year, we left Long Island for Maryland, where I attended eighth grade at St. Joseph’s, in Cockeysville. These were formative years, from ages eleven to fourteen, from boyhood to adolescence. And both times we moved, I began the school year in the dumb kids’ class. Judging by my yellowed report cards, it’s safe to say that the nuns at St. Petronille’s had been merely whelmed by my potential. Since the nuns at the new schools had never met me, they decided to start me in the class where expectations might be more easily met.
Children are exquisitely attuned to the way adults size them up, so there was never any mystery about where anyone stood. Those of us in the dumb kids’ class took it as a badge of honor. Smart kids were pampered kiss-asses, overly concerned with pleasing teachers and parents. Dumb kids took no shit. With the burden of expectation lifted, we were unafraid, boisterous, occasionally defiant, and generally up to all manner of mischief. Dumb kids were fun. My bet is that when a comprehensive inventory is made of my generation, it will be found that not one person from a smart kids’ class was ever expelled from a Catholic elementary school. If there was trouble to be had—stealing wine from the sacristy, sneaking into the basement to smoke cigarettes, peering up the stairwells at girls’ underpants—the dumb kids got there first.
Dumb kids were also tougher than smart kids, as a rule. You didn’t last long on the playground with the dumb kids if you were unwilling to take a swing at somebody, or were too afraid of getting hit. I was not particularly brave, or tough, but I had fallen off my bike at a young age and, to my mother’s horror, broken one of my front teeth. Thankfully, this was before the age of universal cosmetic dentistry in America. Throughout grade school, my broken tooth gave me a degree of rough-and-tumble cred that was as invaluable as it was false. I had also observed—and moving from school to school gives a kid a broad sample—that you usually had to hit somebody only once to be considered dangerous enough to be left alone. Drawing blood guaranteed actual respect. At St. Joseph’s, a popular activity was humiliating the weak kids by dropping them into the “spit pit,” an outdoor stairwell that led down to the school’s basement. Victims would be spat upon as they tried to escape up the steps. I bloodied the mouth of the first bully who suggested such a fate for me, immediately claiming the status of legendary playground thug.
Such were the invaluable lessons of the dumb kids’ class. So when the nuns promoted me to the smart kids’ class midway through the school year, I had the best of both worlds. Oven-night, I was anointed with academic potential, a designation all the more meaningful because I had earned it. Arriving with my broken tooth and dumb-kid rep, I instantly became the most feared and respected student in my new classroom. It was too much success for a twelve-year-old to handle. Soon after my first elevation, I remember my new seventh-grade teacher roughly pulling me aside on the playground and announcing that my head was so big, she wished she could “just pop it with a pin!” This was a disturbing concept, and still occasionally visits my dreams: a towering, wrathful nun, pink face wrapped and pinched in starched white linen, wielding a huge pin pulled from some obscure corner of her habit. This was the closest any of the good sisters ever came to abusing me, if you don’t count the Fátima message. Still, given my swaggering s
elf-importance, she showed saintly restraint.
I relished my role as the bad boy among the goody-goodies. Once, in the second half of eighth grade, our nun, a kindly old soul, fell asleep at her desk while I was reading aloud the answers to the previous night’s homework from her teachers’ edition of our math book. She would award this privilege to a student who had performed especially well on a test, so what I did next was abject betrayal. Before nudging her back to awareness, I read out the answers to the next few homework assignments. This was the kind of thing a dumb kid did without thinking, but among the smart kids, it was considered daring and ingenious.
The combined efforts of saints Petronille, Peter, and Joseph failed to make me a religious man, but my Catholic-school years shaped me in many ways. The nuns taught us to think about big things, about the whole sweep of life and death and right and wrong. Such thoughts could be disturbing, but they were valuable. The nuns taught us that the capacity for evil is real and present in this world, especially inside ourselves. They taught us to at least consider the moral implications of our actions and ideas, and they showed us that real goodness is in giving up something not when doing so is easy, but when it is hard.
Nevertheless, some of the best lessons came from my “dumb” classmates, and those two mid-semester promotions. It’s well and good to enjoy the world’s esteem, I learned, but better still to be underestimated.
Saddam on Saddam
Philadelphia Inquirer, July 2009
Saddam Hussein was perfect. From first to last, perfect in every way. So perfect—and here I hope you can grasp the subtlety of the man’s self-image—that he could see and even admit to some personal flaws. How can a man who admits his own flaws be perfect? Because to be perfect he must!
After all, only Allah is completely free from error, and for a man to claim he is the equal of God would be prideful and impious; it would of all possible errors be the worst.
The Iraqi tyrant believed the world would begin to understand his true greatness only after five or perhaps even ten centuries had passed. And even though he was only imperfectly understood in his lifetime, he told his American interrogator, 100 percent of the Iraqi people had voted for him in his last presidential election. His pride in this was understandable. One hundred percent! Out of love, each and every one.
These glimpses into Saddam Hussein’s character emerge from twenty-five interviews and “conversations” with the captured dictator by FBI special agent George Piro, a young Lebanese American who was chosen for the job, in part, because of his fluent Arabic. Piro was interviewed on 60 Minutes earlier this year and most of the revelations from the sessions have been widely reported, but what particularly interested me in the agent’s detailed notes was Saddam’s personality.
Years ago I made a study of Saddam for the Atlantic. My request to interview him received no response so I pieced together a portrait of him from his speeches and published interviews, and from people who had known or interacted with him personally.
What emerged was a portrait of unfathomable, murderous vanity.
“Repetition of his image in heroic or paternal poses; repetition of his name, his slogans, his virtues, his accomplishments seeks to make his power seem inevitable, unchallengeable,” I wrote. “Finally he is praised not out of affection or admiration but out of obligation. One must praise him.”
What that story sought was to show how Saddam, at the peak of his power, saw himself. Having never met him, I could only speculate about his inner life. Piro’s interviews with him in the months after his capture in December 2003, before he was turned over to Iraqi authorities, offer an invaluable glimpse inside Saddam’s head, and to some extent into the heads of such strongmen everywhere—think of Kim Jong Il or Robert Mugabe.
Saddam was, at least in his own mind, a multifaceted genius. His boundless intellect displayed wisdom, courage, insight, leadership, military expertise, historical analysis, literary gifts … the list goes on and on. Part of that greatness was his generosity, which—and this says all you need to know about the man—he was even willing to extend to his enemy interrogator. In their fourteenth interview, on March 3, 2004, Saddam offered to instruct Piro in how to be a more effective questioner.
Piro asked Saddam what he meant, and the tyrant played coy.
“A doctor does not chase people asking them what is wrong,” the tyrant said. “They come to him.”
Piro chose not to ask for Saddam’s help, but he did make a point of playing along with the sixty-six-year-old prisoner’s illusions, treating him, within limits, with respect.
The agent listened to Saddam’s poetry and praised it and cleverly used his supposed appreciation of the tyrant’s speechwriting talents to pry open a discussion of Iraq’s weapons programs—Iraq had destroyed its most dangerous weapons but continued to bluff about having them to ward off invasion or attack from Iran or the United States. Saddam said he fully intended to resume building such weapons as soon as pressure from the United Nations eased.
Piro listened to Saddam’s decidedly self-aggrandizing take on some of the more notorious episodes in his career, such as the purge of 1979. Saddam filled an auditorium with top Baath Party officials, had the doors locked, and then unmasked a supposed plot to overthrow him. Chief plotters rounded up in advance were made to confess onstage, and then Saddam began fingering alleged coconspirators in the audience one by one—they were led off to be summarily tried and executed. He conducted this nightmare like theater, pacing the stage, smoking a cigar, visibly enjoying himself, alternately lecturing the terrified underlings and weeping—or pretending to weep—over their alleged betrayal. The session was videotaped, and copies were widely distributed.
Piro asked him whether such displays were orchestrated to spread fear rather than the “love” he insisted the Iraqi people felt for him, and from the tyrant’s response you get the sense that he really did not much differentiate between the two concepts. Both were aspects of something more important: respect. As for the theatrics, Saddam said that he tended to smoke cigars in time of stress; that fear was only one of many emotions present at the event, which he likened to a “family gathering”; and that the video was primarily informational—made and distributed “to present information to Iraqis living outside the country concerning events occurring within Iraq.”
As the discussions proceeded it became clear that Saddam was the star in the truly epic tale of his own life, and that everyone else was just a bit player. He was the all-wise, all-loving center of the world’s oldest and greatest nation, the true center of human civilization, albeit a bit down on its luck in recent centuries, but certain to prevail ultimately.
Any evidence of disparity between the brutal way his regime conducted business and his own flowery and benign conception of it was either a lie, a forgery, a consequence of some “simpleton” down the chain of command, or, in cases like the wholesale displacement of the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq (Saddam had the marshes drained) or the gassing of the Kurds, a matter of majestic imperative. There was no place in his worldview for sympathy or regret.
Shown a video of a woman from the Marsh Arab culture complaining pitifully that because of Saddam’s actions she and her family had lost everything, the tyrant laughed and scoffed, “What did she have before? Reeds?”
It also seems Saddam was not wedded to any normal concept of cause and effect, at least where he was concerned. When he was asked why he invaded Kuwait, for instance, his answer would differ from one day to another: because Kuwaitis were draining Iraq’s economy dry by stealing oil or because a Kuwaiti official had met a peace initiative with an insult. On another day it was because the United States and Kuwait were secretly conspiring to attack Iraq; on another because the Kuwaiti people, whom he considered historically Iraqi, had “invited him” to invade. When you are all-powerful, it seems, you don’t need any one reason, or any reason, for that matter. You act because you wish to act, because fate moves through your fingertips.
Wh
en you are all-powerful you are unconstrained by logic and fairness, which are principles for lesser mortals. When Piro asked Saddam about mistreatment of prisoners during the first Gulf war, Saddam “did not deny that others may have ‘behaved in a bad manner,’” but said he had not been informed of it. “He stated that he subscribes to a document much older than the Geneva Convention, the Quran. The Quran and Arab tradition believe that it is ‘noble’ to treat a prisoner well.”
This piety is, of course, laughable coming from one of the most brutal dictators in modern times, whose prisons were notorious for routine torture and summary execution. “We assigned responsibility to who was going to handle the situation,” he said in explaining his innocence of widespread executions when his regime crushed the Shiite uprising in 1991, and he grew indignant when Piro suggested that in some cases he might not have known of atrocities because he did not want to be informed of his underlings’ methods. “Who says that I did not want to know?” Saddam asked. Piro informed him that he had.
The bottom line is that Saddam was not terribly concerned about consistency, moral or otherwise. He loved platitudes and saw himself as a model leader, but there was nothing he would not do to retain power. If ruling meant being brutal on occasion, so be it: “The sins of a government are not few,” he said.
“He must know that it will end badly for him,” I wrote in 2002. He certainly knew it two years later, when the United States had invaded Iraq; overthrown him; hunted him down; and, after gently questioning him for months, handed him back to his countrymen. He was executed on December 30, 2006.