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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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David Kessler, Dean of the Yale School of Medicine In October 1990 David Kessler, then the medical director of Albert Einstein Hospital in the Bronx, was offered a substantial promotion. U.S. president George H. W. Bush ’48 nominated him to head the Food and Drug Administration, and when his appointment sailed through Congress, Kessler suddenly found himself heading an organization in trouble that was, he said, “underfunded, understaffed, and demoralized.” As he labored to put the FDA’s house in order, Kessler soon began attracting national attention with his campaign to “clean up the anarchy in food labeling”—an effort that grabbed headlines when U.S. marshals surrounded a food warehouse and seized 24,000 gallons of orange juice falsely labeled as fresh. “It’s wonderful to see the FDA metamorphosis from a lapdog into a watchdog,” said one commentator. The agency was about to become an attack dog. In this often riveting book, Kessler documents his quixotic and, though he left the FDA in 1997 to head the Medical School, ongoing crusade against the tobacco industry. The old saw about never wanting to see how sausage and legislation—add regulation to the couplet—are made is amply illustrated in these pages, for as Kessler quickly learned when the FDA team he assembled began to probe the industry, tobacco’s influence in Washington was pervasive and powerful. In protecting its interests, tobacco had never lost. “The industry seemed invincible,” said Kessler, but the tobacco companies had clearly never tangled with the likes of the FDA commissioner. “He’s like a revival preacher,” said a Philip Morris executive. Indeed, on these pages Kessler writes with the single-minded intensity of the true believer, and while the reader sometimes wonders whether Kessler ever relaxes, or, for that matter, sleeps, it is clear that the battle demanded self-sacrifice, nerves of steel, and an inordinately thick skin. Kessler’s tack was to demonstrate that the tobacco industry, despite public comments to the contrary, had long known about the addictive properties of nicotine. If the FDA could establish that there was an intent to addict, it could exert regulatory control over the industry. After combing through thousands of pages of documents, visiting tobacco companies, and talking to a steady stream of informants with cloak-and-dagger code-names such as “Critical,” “PC,” “Veritas,” and, of course, “Cigarette,” Kessler and his team painstakingly assembled the evidence to craft tobacco-control regulations. No sooner were these adopted than they were challenged as unconstitutional, and though the FDA would eventually lose in the Supreme Court, “the world in which the tobacco companies did their business had been fundamentally transformed,” said Kessler. “The FDA’s investigation had changed popular thinking forever.”
Kim
Todd ’92 When the first colonists set foot on the North American continent, they found an unnerving and alien landscape filled with unfamiliar plants and animals. The prime motivation for many of these pilgrims was to recreate a religious Eden, but at least a few of the travelers were imbued with a more practical streak and a sense of what poet Wallace Stevens called “the ultimate elegance—the imagined land.” In their imagination, America would be populated with the flora and fauna they grew up with, and they quickly reached back overseas to import the organisms that would make the fields and forests feel like home. “These men had visions, and they wanted to build them out of cells rather than stone,” writes Kim Todd. In this chronicle of how and why such species as pigeons, honeybees, gypsy moths, brown trout, and sea lamprey were—sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident—imported to the continent, Todd, an environmental historian, presents tales that range from the remarkable to the poignant. There’s the story of the ubiquitous starling, an English blackbird now found in huge flocks throughout North America. It owes its presence here to a single reference in Henry IV, Part One, and the desire of an eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin to populate the country with every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. Then there’s the depressing account of the decimation of Hawaii’s bird population by the mosquito. Until the 1820s, the islands actually had no mosquitoes, but when whalemen left larvae behind in water barrels, the noxious insects prospered and went on to spread various avian plagues that wreaked havoc on birds that had no natural immunities. “These tales of exotic species are steeped in sadness. While they appear tales of addition, subtraction is the underlying theme,” writes Todd. Still, the situation could have been worse, she notes. As the buffalo was hunted almost to extinction, one cattleman looked out over the near empty range and proposed bringing in herds of kangaroos.
William MacLeish
’50 For some children, having a famous parent is a blessing; for others, it is a curse. For William MacLeish, son of the well-known poet, it was a bit of both. In a memoir that is part homage and part apology, MacLeish, an environmental journalist, attempts to come to terms with his father, who died at age 90 in 1982. It must have been a remarkable upbringing. MacLeish tells how “Archie,” a graduate of the Class of 1915, came of artistic age in France in the 1920s, a place where the likes of T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway were houseguests. The family returned to the U.S. just ahead of the Depression and bought “Uphill Farm” in Conway, Massachusetts. There, William was born, and since poetry did not pay the bills, his father, then on assignment for Fortune magazine, was often away from home. “I was desperate for Archie,” says William. “I created an intimacy out of absence.” The family would be reunited in Washington, D.C., where Archie became Franklin Roosevelt’s Librarian of Congress. There are charming recollections of FDR, Dean Acheson, Felix Frankfurter, Carl Sandburg, and the folksinger Leadbelly, and later there are stories about William’s time at Yale as a member of the Class of 1950 and his service in the Brewster administration during the tension-filled 1960s and 1970s. In addition to easing the University’s passage into coeducation and and through May Day, MacLeish was also instrumental in recruiting writer William Zinsser to edit the Yale Alumni Magazine in the 1970s. Throughout the book, there is plenty of the father’s poetry—and the son’s angst as he grapples with Archie’s question: “What are we to make of ourselves in the presence of this incomprehensible cosmos?”
Dana
Milbank ’90 Dana Milbank’s travels on the presidential campaign trail for the New Republic and then for the Washington Post taught the reporter to savor the low road. The experience also convinced him that “nasty, smashmouth politics” has had a bum rap, says Milbank. “There’s even reason to believe that tough, negative campaigning helps strengthen new leaders, boost creativity in policy-making, and bring reform to government.” Many people wish it were otherwise, but as Milbank shows in the presidential demise of Bill Bradley and John McCain, as well as in the rollercoaster polling wars between George W. Bush and Al Gore, going negative seems to win votes. Rather than examine why this might be true, the author instead concentrates on “the human comedy that unfolds behind the news.” Milbank is a master of campaign minutiae, recalling such largely forgotten incidents as Orrin Hatch’s presidential bid and his implicit invitation to George W. Bush to run as his vice president; Gary Bauer’s fall off a stage, frying pan in hand; the orange-shirted teenage shock troops of Steve Forbes; and the fact that Bush communications director Karen Hughes bought her oversized shoes from a supplier for male cross-dressers. In addition, the author covers campaign press food, staff food fights, dirty linen (literally), and sleeping arrangements for the economy- conscious Gore staff. He also probes campaign financing, the art of groveling (“Bush is pandering smarter than Gore is pandering”), and the candidates’ backgrounds. Smashmouth deals more with the primaries than the election, more with handlers and aides than the elusive presidential hopefuls themselves. Serious themes gradually take shape, nevertheless, as the candidates’ tortoise-and-hare debating story comes to reflect a larger contrast between Gore’s wavering inspirations and the Bush campaign’s hard-nosed management.
Paul Kane ’84 A haunting world emerges from the poems of Drowned Lands, the latest winner in the James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series. Paul Kane writes of experiences in which differences between body and landscape, life and afterlife, and real and mythical are nearly indiscernible. Typical is “At the Terminus,” which shows people disembarking from trains that run along “the third rail of mortality.” The poem is, at first, a glimpse of everyday life—that is, until Kane writes, “If this is the afterlife, why hurry along the platforms?” The terminus of life is shown to be an extension of the civilization that people have constructed for themselves. The division between life and death is so small that “Everyone’s face here shines with an eclipse of memory in which nothing’s quite recalled and yet everything’s familiar,” says Kane. The stream of disquiet that flows gently through this book comes not from the events depicted, but from the understated (and nearly nonexistent) emotion with which the people react to the events. It is as if, in Drowned Lands, life is to be merely endured, rather than loved …
Brief Reviews Thurston Clarke ’68 The author, a self-confessed “islomane,” travels around the world from Franklin Roosevelt’s Campobello to George Orwell’s Jura to understand the allure that islands have exerted throughout human history.
Georgina Dopico Black ’95PhD Duke University Press, $19.95
Paul Lussier ’81 Lussier’s debut novel features an unflattering view of the Revolution’s icons as a world-wise hooker and her naïve lover team up with a band of unlikely guerrillas to lead America’s bumbling leaders to victory.
Karla Gottlieb ’88 Although outmanned and outgunned, an 18th-century black leader helped a ragtag army of rebellious slaves resist some of the best-equipped soldiers of the British empire. Historian Gottlieb profiles a nearly forgotten hero.
Caitland Macy ’92 There are echoes of Faulkner and The Great Gatsby in this loss-of-innocence novel that traces the post-college fortunes of several friends as each tries to negotiate the gilded world of New York City in the 1990s.
Tom Wolfe ’57PhD In this collection of essays, many of them previously published, and a novella, “America’s maestro reporter/novelist” tackles everything from the sexual behavior of teenagers to the literary feud Wolfe has had with Updike, Mailer, and Irving.
More Books by Yale Authors Jonathan Barnett ’58, ’63MArch, editor David E. Bernstein ’91JD Christiane Bird ’77 Georgina M. Dopico Black ’95PhD Guillermo A. Calvo ’74PhD, Rudi Dornbusch, and Maurice Obstfeld, editors Jim Childress, Chad Floyd, William Grover ’69MArch, Jeffrey Riley ’72BArch, and Mark Simon ’72MArch Tom Conner ’85PhD, editor John W. Danford ’76PhD Thomas M. Daniel ’51 Randy Charles Epping ’83MA Daniel Esty ’86JD, Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Damien Gerardin, editors Bruce Feiler ’87 Richard Foster ’63BE, ’66PhD, and Sarah Kaplan Arthur Galston, Eaton Professor Emeritus of Botany, and Emily Shurr, editors Jeffrey Garten, Dean, Yale School of Management James Gollin ’53, ’56MA Arthur Gordon ’34, Bill Hartfiel ’51, and Don Klassen Christopher Hoenig ’80 Heyward Isham ’47, editor Karl Jacoby ’97PhD Charles E. Lindblom, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics and Political Science Paul MacAvoy ’60PhD, Williams Brothers Professor of Management J. D. McClatchey ’74PhD, editor Jeffrey Merrick ’79PhD and Bryant T. Ragan, editors Louis Putterman ’80PhD Gabriella Safran ’90 Katrin Schultheiss ’84 Richard Selzer, Professor of Surgery (retired), School of Medicine Jonathan Spence ’65PhD, Sterling Professor of History Harold H. Tittmann ’51, ’54LLB Connie Voisin ’86 Jay Winik ’80, ’93PhD
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