Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs

Natural Born Killer : Chapter & Verse : Open Book : Off the Shelf

In this election year, don't expect the candidates or the daily news media to define the most intractable issues most thoughtfully. For that, we need different voices. Looking beyond the sound bites and attack ads, we can find them in recent books by Harvard authors. Among the useful volumes are They Only Look Dead (on liberalism) by E. J. Dionne Jr. '73; Breaking the News (the media) by James Fallows '70; The Good Life and Its Discontents (socioeconomic policy) by Robert J. Samuelson '67; and Fresh Blood (immigration) by Sanford J. Ungar '66. Three additional titles deserve special attention, both for the issues they address-violence, segregation, health care-and for what they say about the potential for broader, more thoughtful forms of journalism and policy analysis.

When Fox Butterfield first met Willie James Bosket Jr., the prisoner was chained to the door of his cell. In a physical sense, the shackling reflected Willie's status as "the most violent criminal in New York State history"-a man who had 55 more years of solitary confinement to serve. Metaphorically, the humiliating posture appears as a sort of perverse crucifixion, the fulfillment of Willie's determination to distinguish himself in the only way he knew how.

In July 1962, while Willie was still in the womb, his father, Butch, stabbed two men in the heart in a Milwaukee pawnshop. Willie's mother, Laura, returned home to Harlem and gave birth in December, three months before Butch was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders. Willie did not learn his father's history or whereabouts until he was seven years old. He was thrilled by the news.

By then, Willie had stolen groceries and assaulted an old woman. Other children taunted a local wino; Willie stuck nails into his feet. When one of Laura's companions scalded her on a radiator, Willie hit him with an iron pipe, then slashed him with a knife. By age 8, Willie was a "human nuclear chain reaction," someone so unpredictably violent and aggressive that he earned the tag of ultimate respect on the street: "crazy nigger." When he threw a typewriter out of a school window, just missing a pregnant teacher, he was expelled (from second grade) and sent to Bellevue for observation. His institutional life had begun. After he was diagnosed as depressed, Laura said, "I'll beat the craziness out of him." It didn't work: by the time he was 15, Willie claimed he had committed 2,000 crimes, including 200 armed robberies and 25 stabbings. They culminated in seven violent weeks in 1978, when he kicked another boy off a roof to his death, and then murdered two men during subway robberies.

Simply writing about Willie must have posed enormous challenges for Butterfield, a reporter for the New York Times (and one of this magazine's incorporators). There was the matter of telling Willie's story-he was eager to be so immortalized-without being used. Butterfield never cedes his authority. In addition, the material itself must have been almost unendurable. What could be worse than learning about Willie, age nine, being used for sex by pubescent girls in the neighborhood, and then by his grandfather? Perhaps the spectacle of Butch earning his college degree Phi Beta Kappa in Leavenworth-and then, within weeks of being paroled, raping his girlfriend's six-year-old daughter, returning to jail, and killing his girlfriend and himself in a botched escape. Again, the reporter's discipline remains firm. Reconstructing the horrors that deformed father and son, he portrays psychopathy unerringly. Nor does he find exoneration in the Boskets' environment. Willie, utterly without human ties, and therefore without fear, lacks the "inner core of human sensibility."

What Butterfield does do, and what makes the book so important, is far more ambitious. He creates a larger narrative (the subtitle's "American tradition of violence") tracing the Boskets back to the slave society of Edgefield County, South Carolina-the most violent ground in the most slave-dependent state. It was here, Butterfield explains, that the defense of "honor" by dueling was a way of life. It was a culture that spawned Pres-ton Brooks, who famously caned Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate in 1856, and in later decades spawned the brutal repression of Reconstruction, and lynching, and murderous public figures like J. William Thurmond, father of the current Senator, Strom. By the 1890s, the homicide rate in neighboring Saluda County exceeded New York City's a century later.

Translated into a southern urban context of unbending segregation and poverty, Butterfield argues, that culture of "honor" and extralegal force became the defense of "respect." Brought north, concentrated in slums, fueled by drugs, and armed by ubiquitous handguns, it erupted in horrific street violence. In this sense, Willie was merely "the last car on a long runaway freight train" from the rural south to devastated inner cities. "He had all that dread momentum."

The journalistic risks Butterfield has taken will provoke debate. But his research, from South Carolina county courthouses through Willie's psychiatric records, supports his interpretations well. Moreover, he is fully aware of the policy challenges his work poses. In an epilogue, Butterfield points above all to the failure of parenting as the cause of the disaster he documents, given the violent American tradition. As his overwhelming book makes desperately clear, this societal disease is as complex and deadly as AIDS, and as resistant to simple cures.

After encountering Willie Bosket, visiting the cruelly named Mott Haven neighborhood in the South Bronx with Jonathan Kozol comes almost as a relief. Kozol has a habit of showing Americans parts of our country we would rather ignore. His reporting, dating back to his acclaimed debut in Death at an Early Age, though written in clear, workmanlike prose, maintains none of the professional journalist's reserve. From the outset, Kozol is a passionate participant.

This time the journey begins with an 18-minute subway ride from Manhattan's East Side: "When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest."

Mott Haven is at Ground Zero. Its 48,000 residents include 4,000 junkies, scores of drug dealers (who strictly control their business hours so as not to interfere with children's after-school play in the local park), and dozens of prostitutes who support their addictions by turning $3 and $5 tricks for truckers passing through. Median household income in 1991 was $7,600. One-quarter of the women tested in obstetric wards are HIV-positive. Asthma is pandemic, especially among children, reflecting not only vile housing and pollution but the unending tension of living with violence and death. A necrology at the end of the book recounts the household fires, the falls down unsafe elevator shafts, and the random gunshots that claimed lives during the year of Kozol's visits, from mid-1993 to mid-1994.

Here is a lesson from the neighborhood's P.S. 65, which ranks 627th out of 628 New York City elementary schools in reading:

"What are these holes in our window?" asks a fourth grade teach-er…in a rapid drill that, I imagine, few of those who read this will recall from their own days in school.
"Bullet shots!" the children chant in unison.
"How do police patrol our neighborhood?" the teacher asks.
"By helicopter!" say the children.
"What do we do when we hear shooting?"
"Lie down on the floor!"

This is a community where the home away from home is the prison complex on Rikers Island, complete with nursery. Accept that as a norm and it is hardly surprising to read about the inmate born in prison and now dying of AIDS whose 25-year sentence is reduced by 18 months to give him credit for "time served as an infant."

Nowhere, it seems, should there be any reason to hope for a better life. But Kozol finds dozens of hopeful human beings. If Fox Butterfield immersed himself in society's outlaws, Kozol makes his way to the churches and kitchen tables of their victims-people who grimly keep going on through prayer and fragile family ties, behind tenement doors that barely hold the outside at bay. One of his guides is Reverend Martha Overall, a 1969 graduate of Radcliffe, formerly a lawyer specializing in finance and now pastor of St. Ann's Church, a haven within Mott Haven. Another is Alice Washington, enfeebled by AIDS, struggling to get her son David through high school and into college.

Through them, Kozol gains safe conduct into what has become a foreign country. Seen from the inhabitants' eyes, "All the strategies and agencies and institutions needed to contain, control, and normalize a social plague…are, it seems, being assembled," he writes at the beginning of a page-long sentence-an indictment, really-at the heart of the book. All the "strategies and services" he lists, from prisons to in-school "grieving rooms" to soup kitchens, are required "if our society intends to keep on placing those it sees as unclean in the unclean places." Kozol quotes Ana Oliveira, an AIDS worker, who says of the complex of programs and social services, "In reality, it is a form of quarantine, not just of people who have AIDS but of people who have everything we fear, sickness, color, destitution..."

For Kozol and the people he meets, race ultimately is at the heart of the matter. He recounts the indignities: separation of privately insured (white) from Medicaid (black and Hispanic) patients in a superb private hospital's maternity wards; the attention a black shopper attracts in a fancy midtown store. Even language in common use takes on an inescapable racial tinge. On the phrase "the breakdown of the family," Kozol quotes a minister to this effect: "Of course the family structure breaks down in a place like the South Bronx! Everything breaks down in a place like this. The pipes break down. The phone breaks down. The electricity and heat break down. The spirit breaks down. The body breaks down…. Why shouldn't the family break down also?"

The ghetto's most important casualties are the innocent children who live there. A 15-year-old girl tells Kozol her status in life is "like being `hidden.' It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again." Her half-sister, a year older, asks how New Yorkers would feel if they simply found the South Bronx population gone one day-and answers her own question, "I think they'd be relieved. I think it would lift a burden from their minds."

What is the antidote to the "toxicity of life" Kozol finds here? Surely it isn't subjecting children to more of the same. They know where the good life is-in midtown, and, especially, in "Connecticut," the suburbs. It isn't that too little money is being spent on services for these needy human beings; it is, Kozol insists, that the barriers of race keep them where they are, in the worst possible place, and so conveniently out of the rest of Americans' sight.

One step further removed from journalism, yet not all the way to the detachment of the historian or the policy analyst, is Theda Skocpol's Boomerang. Here the question is not what to do about something amorphous (violence, segregation, poverty), but about something seemingly tractable: paying for and delivering health care. Moreover, her book is about the most recent attempt to do something: the Clinton administration's "health security" plan.

Skocpol, professor of sociology and of government (and a Harvard Magazine director), here plays both the insider-she visited Camp David to advise on the 1995 State of the Union address, and got access to the health planners' working papers-and the advocate-she is on the side of "governmentally mediated reform" to address problems of cost and access to health care.

The fate of the president's health initiative raises a basic question. How could a policy proposal, introduced to widespread popular acclaim, fail so completely so quickly? Skocpol traces many strands of evidence. Some lead to tactical blunders, such as the president's near-silence on the issue in the months after he introduced it. Some concern structural features of contemporary American democracy, notably the "hyperpluralism" of members of Congress more beholden to myriad interest groups than to any common party vision or discipline.

But Skocpol's central argument goes to the core of the debate over what government ought to do. The president boxed himself in, she writes, because he "was trying too hard to be a fiscally responsible reformed Democrat." Driven to cut the deficit bequeathed to the country by Republican administrations of the 1980s, "Clinton assiduously avoided the `tax and spend' modalities of traditional New Deal liberalism-only to fall victim instead to the political pitfalls of substituting regulations for spending, of trying to use government quietly and indirectly." In so doing, the health security plan fell into a trap brilliantly set by "antigovernment conservatives" in search of a cause to help them woo middle-class voters.

A scholar of American social policy, Skocpol draws an illuminating contrast between Social Security and the Health Security Plan. Americans embraced the former, she writes, as it "primarily promised to distribute money" in the form of new, federally financed benefits with few strings attached. The latter, constructed around "tight, new regulations," offered little new money to anyone, and came to be seen as a threat to existing and comfortable, even if imperfect, health benefits. In brief, regulations without payoffs don't cut it.

Larger issues remain. One is how to break out of the unvirtuous cycle of policymaking. During the 1980s, Skocpol notes, Democrats preserved pet programs in name, while Republicans starved them in fact; so hobbled, they understandably didn't work very well, and so the public became further disenchanted with the efficacy of government, setting the stage for more cutbacks. Another is political leaders' inability to accomplish anything if they fear speaking the truth. Skocpol faults Bill Clinton for failing to level with Americans on the costs of his program and the role of its complex "health alliances." The public, she says, became more skeptical about his program because the president wouldn't address its finances head-on.

Of course, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, Newt Gingrich went out of his way to market the "Contract with America" while skirting its costs to popular social benefits like Medicare, Medicaid, and federal aid to education. Might he and his allies, so triumphant at the polls in 1994, want to reflect on how little they have enacted into law, in an eerie mirror image of the president they so revile?

Surely these questions leave room for much more journalism and analysis of the sort Butterfield, Kozol, and Skocpol have given us.

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs