What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

by Malcolm Gladwell

  For a number of years, Tortora has worked with Eric (not his real name), an autistic boy with severe language and communication problems. Tortora videotaped some of their sessions, and in one, four months after they started to work together, Eric is standing in the middle of Tortora’s studio in Cold Spring, New York, a beautiful dark-haired three-and-a-half-year-old wearing only a diaper. His mother is sitting to the side, against the wall. In the background, you can hear the sound track to Riverdance, which happens to be Eric’s favorite album. Eric is having a tantrum.

  He gets up and runs toward the stereo. Then he runs back and throws himself down on his stomach, arms and legs flailing. Tortora throws herself down on the ground, just as he did. He sits up. She sits up. He twists. She twists. He squirms. She squirms. “When Eric is running around, I didn’t say, ‘Let’s put on quiet music.’ I can’t turn him off, because he can’t turn off,” Tortora said. “He can’t go from zero to sixty and then back down to zero. With a typical child, you might say, ‘Take a deep breath. Reason with me’ — and that might work. But not with children like this. They are in their world by themselves. I have to go in there and meet them and bring them back out.”

  Tortora sits up on her knees, and faces Eric. His legs are moving in every direction, and she takes his feet in her hands. Slowly, and subtly, she begins to move his legs in time with the music. Eric gets up and runs to the corner of the room and back again. Tortora gets up and mirrors his action, but this time she moves more fluidly and gracefully than he did. She takes his feet again. This time, she moves Eric’s entire torso, opening the pelvis in a contralateral twist. “I’m standing above him, looking directly at him. I am very symmetrical. So I’m saying to him, ‘I’m stable. I’m here. I’m calm.’ I’m holding him at the knees and giving him sensory input. It’s firm and clear. Touch is an incredible tool. It’s another way to speak.”

  She starts to rock his knees from side to side. Eric begins to calm down. He begins to make slight adjustments to the music. His legs move more freely, more lyrically. His movement is starting to get organized. He goes back into his mother’s arms. He’s still upset, but his cry has softened. Tortora sits and faces him — stable, symmetrical, direct eye contact.

  His mother says, “You need a tissue?”

  Eric nods.

  Tortora brings him a tissue. Eric’s mother says that she needs a tissue. Eric gives his tissue to his mother.

  “Can we dance?” Tortora asks him.

  “OK,” he says in a small voice.

  It was impossible to see Tortora with Eric and not think of Cesar with JonBee: here was the same extraordinary energy and intelligence and personal force marshaled on behalf of the helpless, the same calm in the face of chaos, and, perhaps most surprising, the same gentleness. When we talk about people with presence, we often assume that they have a strong personality — that they sweep us all up in their own personal whirlwind. Our model is the Pied Piper, who played his irresistible tune and every child in Hamelin blindly followed. But Cesar Millan and Suzi Tortora play different tunes, in different situations. And they don’t turn their back, and expect others to follow. Cesar let JonBee lead; Tortora’s approaches to Eric were dictated by Eric. Presence is not just versatile; it’s also reactive. Certain people, we say, “command our attention,” but the verb is all wrong. There is no commanding, only soliciting. The dogs in the dog run wanted someone to tell them when to start and stop; they were refugees from anarchy and disorder. Eric wanted to enjoy Riverdance. It was his favorite music. Tortora did not say, “Let us dance.” She asked, “Can we dance?”

  Then Tortora gets a drum and starts to play. Eric’s mother stands up and starts to circle the room, in an Irish step dance. Eric is lying on the ground, and slowly his feet start to tap in time with the music. He gets up. He walks to the corner of the room, disappears behind a partition, and then reenters, triumphant. He begins to dance, playing an imaginary flute as he circles the room.

  5.

  When Cesar was twenty-one, he traveled from his hometown to Tijuana, and a “coyote” took him across the border for a hundred dollars. They waited in a hole, up to their chests in water, and then ran over the mudflats, through a junkyard, and across a freeway. A taxi took him to San Diego. After a month on the streets, grimy and dirty, he walked into a dog-grooming salon and got a job, working with the difficult cases and sleeping in the offices at night. He moved to Los Angeles, and took a day job detailing limousines while he ran his dog-psychology business out of a white Chevy Astrovan. When he was twenty-three, he fell in love with an American girl named Illusion. She was seventeen, small, dark, and very beautiful. A year later, they got married.

  “Cesar was a machoistic, egocentric person who thought the world revolved around him,” Illusion recalled, of their first few years together. “His view was that marriage was where a man tells a woman what to do. Never give affection. Never give compassion or understanding. Marriage is about keeping the man happy, and that’s where it ends.”

  Early in their marriage, Illusion got sick, and was in the hospital for three weeks. “Cesar visited once, for less than two hours,” she said. “I thought to myself, This relationship is not working out. He just wanted to be with his dogs.” They had a new baby and no money. They separated. Illusion told Cesar that she would divorce him if he didn’t get into therapy. He agreed, reluctantly. “The therapist’s name was Wilma,” Illusion went on. “ She was a strong African American woman. She said, ‘You want your wife to take care of you, to clean the house. Well, she wants something, too. She wants your affection and love.’ ” Illusion remembers Cesar scribbling furiously on a pad. “He wrote that down. He said, ‘That’s it! It’s like the dogs. They need exercise, discipline, and affection.’ ” Illusion laughed. “I looked at him, upset, because why the hell are you talking about your dogs when you should be talking about us?”

  “I was fighting it,” Cesar said. “Two women against me, blah, blah, blah. I had to get rid of the fight in my mind. That was very difficult. But that’s when the lightbulb came on. Women have their own psychology.”

  Cesar could calm a stray off the street, yet, at least in the beginning, he did not grasp the simplest of truths about his own wife. “Cesar related to dogs because he didn’t feel connected to people,” Illusion said. “His dogs were his way of feeling like he belonged in the world, because he wasn’t people-friendly. And it was hard for him to get out of that.” In Mexico, on his grandfather’s farm, dogs were dogs and humans were humans: each knew its place. But in America, dogs were treated like children, and owners had shaken up the hierarchy of human and animal. Sugar’s problem was Lynda. JonBee’s problem was Scott. Cesar calls that epiphany in the therapist’s office the most important moment in his life, because it was the moment when he understood that to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.

  For his show, Cesar once took a case involving a Chihuahua named Bandit. Bandit had a large, rapper-style diamond-encrusted necklace around his neck spelling “Stud.” His owner was Lori, a voluptuous woman with an oval face and large, pleading eyes. Bandit was out of control, terrorizing guests and menacing other dogs. Three trainers had failed to get him under control.

  Lori was on the couch in her living room as she spoke to Cesar. Bandit was sitting in her lap. Her teenage son, Tyler, was sitting next to her.

  “About two weeks after his first visit with the vet, he started to lose a lot of hair,” Lori said. “They said that he had Demodex mange.” Bandit had been sold to her as a show-quality dog, she recounted, but she had the bloodline checked and learned that he had come from a puppy mill. “He didn’t have any human contact,” she went on. “So for three months he was getting dipped every week to try to get rid of the symptoms.” As she spoke, her hands gently encased Bandit. “He would hide inside my shirt and lay his head right by my heart, and stay there.” Her eyes were moist. “He was right here on my chest.”

  �
�So your husband cooperated?” Cesar asked. He was focused on Lori, not on Bandit. This is what the new Cesar understood that the old Cesar did not.

  “He was our baby. He was in need of being nurtured and helped and he was so scared all the time.”

  “Do you still feel the need of feeling sorry about him?”

  “Yeah. He’s so cute.”

  Cesar seemed puzzled. He didn’t know why Lori would still feel sorry for her dog.

  Lori tried to explain. “He’s so small and he’s helpless.”

  “But do you believe that he feels helpless?”

  Lori still had her hands over the dog, stroking him. Tyler was looking at Cesar, and then at his mother, and then down at Bandit. Bandit tensed. Tyler reached over to touch the dog, and Bandit leaped out of Lori’s arms and attacked him, barking and snapping and growling. Tyler, startled, jumped back. Lori, alarmed, reached out, and — this was the critical thing — put her hands around Bandit in a worried, caressing motion, and lifted him back into her lap. It happened in an instant.

  Cesar stood up. “Give me the space,” he said, gesturing for Tyler to move aside. “Enough dogs attacking humans, and humans not really blocking him, so he is only becoming more narcissistic. It is all about him. He owns you.” Cesar was about as angry as he ever gets. “It seems like you are favoring the dog, and hopefully that is not the truth.…If Tyler kicked the dog, you would correct him. The dog is biting your son, and you are not correcting hard enough.” Cesar was in emphatic mode now, his phrasing sure and unambiguous. “I don’t understand why you are not putting two and two together.”

  Bandit was nervous. He started to back up on the couch. He started to bark. Cesar gave him a look out of the corner of his eye. Bandit shrank. Cesar kept talking. Bandit came at Cesar. Cesar stood up. “I have to touch,” he said, and he gave Bandit a sharp nudge with his elbow. Lori looked horrifed.

  Cesar laughed, incredulously. “You are saying that it is fair for him to touch us but not fair for us to touch him?” he asked. Lori leaned forward to object. “You don’t like that, do you?” Cesar said, in his frustration speaking to the whole room now. “It’s not going to work. This is a case that is not going to work, because the owner doesn’t want to allow what you normally do with your kids.…The hardest part for me is that the father or mother chooses the dog instead of the son. That’s hard for me. I love dogs. I’m the dog whisperer. You follow what I’m saying? But I would never choose a dog over my son.”

  He stopped. He had had enough of talking. There was too much talking anyhow. People saying “I love you” with a touch that didn’t mean “I love you.” People saying “There, there” with gestures that did not soothe. People saying “I’m your mother” while reaching out to a Chihuahua instead of their own flesh and blood. Tyler looked stricken. Lori shifted nervously in her seat. Bandit growled. Cesar turned to the dog and said “Sh-h-h.” And everyone was still.

  May 22, 2006

  PART TWO

  THEORIES, PREDICTIONS, AND DIAGNOSES

  “It was like driving down an interstate looking through a soda straw.”

  Open Secrets

  ENRON, INTELLIGENCE, AND THE PERILS OF TOO MUCH INFORMATION

  1.

  On the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas. He was wearing a navy blue suit and a tie. He was fifty-two years old, but looked older. Huddled around him were eight lawyers from his defense team. Outside, television-satellite trucks were parked up and down the block.

  “We are here this afternoon,” Judge Simeon Lake began, “for sentencing in United States of America versus Jeffrey K. Skilling, Criminal Case Number H-04-25.” He addressed the defendant directly: “Mr. Skilling, you may now make a statement and present any information in mitigation.”

  Skilling stood up. Enron, the company he had built into an energy-trading leviathan, had collapsed into bankruptcy almost exactly five years before. In May, he had been convicted by a jury of fraud. Under a settlement agreement, almost everything he owned had been turned over to a fund to compensate former shareholders.

  He spoke haltingly, stopping in midsentence. “In terms of remorse, Your Honor, I can’t imagine more remorse,” he said. He had “friends who have died, good men.” He was innocent — “innocent of every one of these charges.” He spoke for two or three minutes and sat down.

  Judge Lake called on Anne Beliveaux, who worked as the senior administrative assistant in Enron’s tax department for eighteen years. She was one of nine people who had asked to address the sentencing hearing.

  “How would you like to be facing living off of sixteen hundred dollars a month, and that is what I’m facing,” she said to Skilling. Her retirement savings had been wiped out by the Enron bankruptcy. “And, Mr. Skilling, that only is because of greed, nothing but greed. And you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  The next witness said that Skilling had destroyed a good company, the third witness that Enron had been undone by the misconduct of its management; another lashed out at Skilling directly. “Mr. Skilling has proven to be a liar, a thief, and a drunk,” a woman named Dawn Powers Martin, a twenty-two-year veteran of Enron, told the court. “Mr. Skilling has cheated me and my daughter of our retirement dreams. Now it’s his time to be robbed of his freedom to walk the earth as a free man.” She turned to Skilling and said, “While you dine on Chateaubriand and champagne, my daughter and I clip grocery coupons and eat leftovers.” And on and on it went.

  The judge asked Skilling to rise.

  “The evidence established that the defendant repeatedly lied to investors, including Enron’s own employees, about various aspects of Enron’s business,” the judge said. He had no choice but to be harsh: Skilling would serve 292 months in prison — twenty-four years. The man who headed a firm that Fortune ranked among the “most admired” in the world had received one of the heaviest sentences ever given to a white-collar criminal. He would leave prison an old man, if he left prison at all.

  “I only have one request, Your Honor,” Daniel Petrocelli, Skilling’s lawyer, said. “If he received ten fewer months, which shouldn’t make a difference in terms of the goals of sentencing, if you do the math and you subtract fifteen percent for good time, he then qualifies under Bureau of Prisons policies to be able to serve his time at a lower facility. Just a ten-month reduction in sentence . . .”

  It was a plea for leniency. Skilling wasn’t a murderer or a rapist. He was a pillar of the Houston community, and a small adjustment in his sentence would keep him from spending the rest of his life among hardened criminals.

  “No,” Judge Lake said.

  2.

  The national security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source, bin Laden will remain at large.

  The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The CIA had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

  The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11 to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11 a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to
improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the CIA on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the FBI and the NSA and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

  If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

  If you sat through the trial of Jeffrey Skilling, you’d think that the Enron scandal was a puzzle. The company, the prosecution said, conducted shady side deals that no one quite understood. Senior executives withheld critical information from investors. Skilling, the architect of the firm’s strategy, was a liar, a thief, and a drunk. We were not told enough — the classic puzzle premise — was the central assumption of the Enron prosecution.

  “This is a simple case, ladies and gentlemen,” the lead prosecutor for the Department of Justice said in his closing arguments to the jury: