by John Hersey
Mr. BROADBENT. And did you sit in on this conference between the Superintendent and Mr. deary?
Dr. GOZAR. Certainly not. I can't stand the Super when he has a head of steam. Quandaries! I vacated.
Mr. BROADBENT. So you didn't know that Mr. Jones was trying to purchase a child until later?
Dr. GOZAR. That's right, but it wasn't much later. The Super hadn't been out of my office five minutes when this Mr. Jones came to call on me in person.
Mr. BROADBENT. What was your impression of him at the time of this visit?
Dr. GOZAR. High and mighty! The way he stares at the wrinkles on your forehead, as if your eyes are beneath him. He thinks he's a brave hunter. Soldat manque, that's my estimate.
Senator VOYOLKO. What kind of monkey you call him, miss?
Senator MANSFIELD. That was French. She was using French, Peter.
Senator VOYOLKO. See what I mean? It's getting like the United Nations around here. Some people don't even know what country they live in.
Mr. BROADBENT. This conversation was in your office?
Dr. GOZAR. Excuse me. You asked my impression of the child buyer, and I want to say just one more thing about him. The man has a terrifying ruthlessness. That bourbon-soaked nose is misleading, the child's-toy motorbike is misleading, the stuff he wears, the fake patience. Even what I was saying about him— the brave front. It doesn't hide what you'd expect. Underneath there's just one slogan: We Must All Obey! He's the devil himself.
Senator SKYPACK. I don't think I have to sit here and listen to that kind of libelous criticism of an outstanding businessman. Wisscy Jones, the concern he represents is making a contribution to the defense—I mean, you just don't know what you're talking about, Doctor.
Dr. GOZAR. This young man of yours asked me a question—
Senator MANSFIELD. That's all right now, Doctor. Mr. Broad-bent, go on with your interrogation.
Mr. BROADBENT. Mr. Jones came to talk with you in your school.
Dr. GOZAR. You remember my saying that Mr. Wairy told the child buyer about the talent-search charts in my office?
Mr. BROADBENT. That's right.
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Dr. GOZAR. He said he'd come to see them. My office is a big, square, dark room, with mahogany-stained wainscoting as high as your shoulder, and half a dozen bookcases with glass fronts, leather chairs, map globe—and deary's crazy charts plastered all over one wall. I said to him, 'Mister, I'm going to be blunt. I've made a lecture on the usefulness of literature, I've appeared at several English groups and reading circles giving that. On the nice way of saying things as opposed to the blunt way. For example, Victor Hugo said, "No army is as powerful as an idea whose time has come." Billy Whizbang said, "Cain't oppose bull-plop with buckshot."' You'll have to excuse me, gentlemen. This is a man's world, and I've gotten used to talking like a man to make my way in it. So I said to Jones, To be blunt: Phooey on the talent search/ I told him there was only one child in Pcquot worth bothering about for brains, that everyone knew who it was but his name wasn't even on the brain end of the talent-search chart. Jones asked who it was, and I told him, and he asked me if this was the boy who knew all the species of birds and animals, and I said that wasn't all he knew by a long shot.
Mr. BROADBENT. And this was the Rudd boy?
Dr. GOZAR. This was the Rudd boy, all right.
Mr. BROADBENT. Did Mr. Jones tell you his proposition?
Dr. GOZAR. Not just then. He asked me if Barry Rudd had a really extraordinary intelligence, and I said, 'I have a kind of contempt for intelligence all by itself. Coupled with energy and willingness, it'll go. Alone it winds up riding the rails/ So Jones got sarcastic on me and asked if I was one of your educators who believes in concentrating on the retarded. That's not educators/ I told him, 'that's missionaries. That's the missionary spirit. Leaving the ninety-nine sheep and going out for the lamb that's lost may be good theology, but it's mighty poor sheepery—and mighty poor schoolery, too/
Mr. BROADBENT. What is it that the Rudd boy has, then?
Dr. GOZAR. Enthusiasm! Quite early with children you encounter a certain enthusiasm. You work on that, and in some cases you find there's interest with only a small amount of understanding. You feel badly about that. But I've always found you can do more with that, you can play on that. I can think of some very successful professional men, former pupils of mine at Lincoln, who I don't think are very bright, but they're living up very close to their capacities. Bright ones sometimes get stuck along the route in some little byway of research and stay there all their lives. But when you get the one in a million with both —mind as clear as a window and incurable enthusiasm, too! That's Barry. That's Barry.
Mr. BROADBENT. Please go back to your talk with Mr. Jones.
Dr. GOZAR. He asked me Barry's I.Q. It's the highest I've ever seen in forty-six years in the school business, and it's the highest I'll ever see in my whole life. But who cares? Do you know what an I.Q. is, my boy?
Mr. BROADBENT. Why it ... it tells how bright a person is.
Dr. GOZAR. It does? Are you sure?
Mr. BROADBENT. Intelligence Quotient. I once sneaked a look in my high-school data folder in the principal's office and saw that I have an I.Q. of one hundred twenty-six. Is that—
Dr. GOZAR. Meaningless. Means nothing, unless you can tell me more. What test was it based on? There are fifty different tests, some good, some poor. You don't know. You don't even know the difference between an individual test and a group test.
Mr. BROADBENT. No, Doctor, I—
Dr. GOZAR. Yet you talk about I.Q. as if it were a thing.
Mr. BROADBENT. In school—
Dr. GOZAR. Personally, after forty-six years in this racket, I have more respect for the P.Q. than I have for the I.Q. I mean the Perspiration Quotient. I told Jones that. I told him that character is all that really matters. You take and give high in-
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telligence to a person with poor character, a person who uses his brains to further, rather than adjust, his natural selfish desires, then you're going to wind up with a dangerous enemy to the security of all of us.
Senator MANSFIELD. Could we get back to your conversation with the child buyer, please, Doctor?
Dr. GOZAR. I haven't gotten away from it. This is all what I told him. He began a lot of pompous talk then about national security—I guess he was leading up to his proposition—about a crisis in national defense. I told him crisis is the essence of democracy. The only way you can get forward motion is crisis. Ideal democracy is crisis, individual people gritting their teeth and doing their darnedest to overcome bad situations—cheating, chiseling, unfairness, discrimination, stupidity in high places. So what was he so excited about? Crisis! Well, he said he was worried about what was happening to the younger generation. And I told him, I said, 'I have a firm belief in the infinite potential of people; especially of young people. I suppose you think the younger generation is soft/ I said, 'that it doesn't have spunk, it's made up of loafers and beatniks who can't put their nose to the grindstone the way the older generation did. I belong to the older generation/ I said, 'and I think the younger generation is a distinct notch up. At times these young people don't thrill to the idea of work for work's sake, and in that they're the spit and image of people of our generation. You'll find kids break the law sometimes, but they don't break it anything like as horribly as grown people do. They can act silly in a meeting but not near as silly as some of your grown men in a fraternal-order initiation or even in the august halls of this State Capitol, Senators, excuse me. I've seen a high-school boy whooping with a couple of beers under his belt, but there's a dive called The Beach down our way, and it's so-called grownups who go there. For every juvenile delinquent, for every Sonny Wisecarver and
Alfred E. Newman, you have half a dozen Al Capones and Lucky Lucianos and Tommy Manvilles. Sure there's a lot of leeway in the ideals of the younger generation, but I'll
stake my career on the fact that idealism is on a higher plane among school kids than it is among their parents. Right today, if it was up to me to sell a program of idealism, hard work, and sacrifice for the sake of a distant goal, and if I had to choose between selling this program to youngsters or middle-aged people, I wouldn't hesitate a minute to pick on the young ones. All right, people can say I'm a starry-eyed visionary, an ivory-tower character, who doesn't know what life really is. I doubt that. I was born on a Western Connecticut milk farm that went broke when I was ten years of age. I missed a few meals from time to time. After high school I attended college through various means, chiefly by working at night in a cotton mill. I've worked summers and spare times, in shops, in cotton mills, as a dishwasher, in dairies, driving trucks, and even, once, in a foundry. I've run crews for the State agriculture service. I've worked as a member of C.I.O. unions, and I've been out on strike. And I've slaved at the books. Oh, yes, I've worked. I've got a B.A. and a B.S. and four master's degrees and a Ph.D. During the Depression I couldn't get summer jobs, so I took nine straight summer quarters at Silvcrbury College; everything they offered came up on rotation, and I took it all, not for degrees but to learn it, to know it. And listen, I've been a teacher for nearly half a century: that's where if you've been in an ivory tower, you come out. I don't think I qualify as an ivory-tower person. I've seen characters that would make your hair stand on end. I reject any ivory-tower classification for myself. If I'm an educational visionary it's not from having been shut in an ivory tower but from rubbing elbows with people who've succeeded through educational endeavor. I'm not soft. Don't think I'm a softy, just because I believe in people. I can be rough and tough when it's needed:
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listen: I'm not at all averse to having a little humor going in my school, but I don't have the slightest intention of having a noisy school, and one tap of my pencil on my desk in my office will bring a hush to the whole building/
Mr. BROADBENT. You told Mr. Jones all this?
Dr. GOZAR. I did!
Senator VOYOLKO. What about the kid?
Dr. GOZAR. Yes, I talked to the child buyer about Barry, too. I asked him, did he want to know how I got interested in Barry Rudd? Well, here's how. I work in the biology lab at Wairy High two hours before breakfast every morning. You see, when I first got to college, at Silverbury, I got the idea of being a biologist, to work for the U.S. conservation service. I took two bachelor's degrees, one in biology and one in history, because I figured I wanted to know what I was conserving—a B.S. and a B.A. I worked extra on it and got both degrees in one year; not combined but double. All the time I worked nights in a cotton mill. My shift got off at two in the morning, so I could do some studying before I turned in. I only had eight a.m. classes three times a week. I could get a solid four hours' sleep and be blessed with ordinary good health, and I have maintained that average ever since, to the present time. Four hours of sleep a night. This means I save four hours per night over the usual individual, and when you calculate that I've been doing that for half a century, it works out that I've enjoyed some seventy-five thousand hours of life most people miss. I could sleep longer quite readily, but I've set myself. And I thrive on it. I've been out from work exactly six days in all these years—I had an operation for piles in my late forties.
Senator MANSFIELD. About the child, if you please, Doctor.
Dr. GOZAR. Yes. I've kept up the habit of doing research work in biology. I like the search in research; a research person is a person looking for something intelligently—but it's fun, too.
Did you know, my dear Mr. Chairman, that 'research* and 'circus' are related etymologically? Know who told me that? Barry! Words are his daily bread. Anyway, one morning two years ago, it'll be two years ago in February, I was working at five a.m. in the biology lab at Wairy High, on a project on the caste system of termites—how a soldier termite can develop from a nymph that wouldn't normally become a soldier; in other words, the caste system isn't hereditary. Very instructive for us mortals. I usually work under a single hooded lamp in that big room, with slate tops on the big lab tables, and a sink at each end, and I concentrate pretty hard. It's as silent as King Tut's tomb in there; you could practically hear the queen termites laying their eggs. Well, that morning I heard a gentle stirring, and the edge of my mind thought, 'My God, I'm going to have to set me a mouse trap in here,' and a couple minutes later I looked up, and here was this pale circle of paste at the edge of the light with two of the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen in it, not looking at me but staring at my termites. I don't know to this day how that boy knew about my early-morning work, or how he contrived to get away from home at that hour. His home is in a tenement block on River Street, a quarter-mile from the school, and it was dead-o'-winter, and five in the morning. Anyway, he was just there, and he said, 'Mind if I watch, Dr. Gozar?' He came the next morning, and he had a piece of paper with a list of questions he wanted to ask me. Mind you, the child was only eight—fourth grade. He's been coming ever since. How I love that boy!
Mr. BROADBENT. You think the man Wissey Jones was right, then, in selecting him for purchase?
Dr. GOZAR. There's no child better. Barry combines drive and a keen, keen mind. He calls me Dr. Gozar, and I call him Mr. Rudd. I always call my high-school students 'Mr.' and 'Miss'— you see, besides being principal at Lincoln, I teach biology
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courses in both of the Pequot high schools—and so I call Barry 'Mr./ too. He learns from me, and I learn from him. He doesn't mind showing his ignorance to me—why should I mind showing mine to him?
Mr. BROADBENT. What else did you tell Mr. Jones?
Dr. GOZAR. I told him the real reason Barry had been passed over in deary's stupid wizard hunt was that Barry isn't a stereo-typic Brain. lie's fat—
Senator VOYOLKO. You told me that. The kid's fat.
Dr. GOZAR. —but he doesn't have an enlarged head, or a pigeon chest, or spindly legs and floppy wrists, or crybaby eyes, lie doesn't even wear horn-rimmed glasses, or any glasses at all.
Senator SKYPACK. You mean this little twerp is a boy's boy?
Dr. GOZAR. Are you a man's man, Senator?
Senator SKYPACK. You damn right.
Dr. GOZAR. Well, these categories are beyond me, sir. All I'm saying is that Barry isn't the commonplace bespectacled Brain. He has a marvelous diffidence about him:
'Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more/
Mr. BROADBENT. And did Mr. Jones get around to his proposition?
Dr. GOZAR. Yes, he came to it, sir. Roundabout.
Mr. BROADBENT. How do you mean, roundabout?
Dr. GOZAR. He began by saying that what we need to relieve our talent shortage in this country is a crash program, and I told him I thought that was the worst possible thing you could do. The way they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Manhattan Project to work up the atom bomb has a lot of people thinking that all you need to do to unlock supreme mysteries is to have an act of Congress, and empty Fort Knox, and start up a vast Federal agency—that money solves everything. We'll be having a crash program to locate God one of these days, pin
down a definite location for His throne. But I told Jones you can't free talent with dollars. You can't package talent, you can't put it in uniform bottles and boxes with labels. Ability slips through the cogs of a machine; machines are only as bright as the men who feed them data. I don't want an IBM machine telling me which of my kids'll be a doctor, which a lawyer, which a beggarman, which a thief. I don't want these government and industry scholarships for my youngsters, because a scholarship is a moral loan; there's quid pro quo in scholarships handed out under something called a National Defense Education Act. The only real defense for a democracy is improvement. Crisis and triumph over crisis. It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, a
nd fabricate for profit and defense. I tell you, I can sound off on that subject! And you should have seen friend Jones when I got going that way. He got red as a Mclntosh apple. The red spread from his nose outward. He began to sputter and wheeze. So I asked him, straight out, what he wanted of me, and he told me about wanting to buy a youngster. Perhaps Barry Rudd, if the boy lived up to his billing.
Mr. BROADBENT. And?
Dr. GOZAR. I threw him out.
Senator MANSFIELD. With your bare hands, Doctor? Nape of the neck and seat of the pants?
Dr. GOZAR. No, sir. My tongue's my bouncer.
Senator SKYPACK. Did he tell you what he has told this committee in confidence, in Executive Session, about what his company does with these brains he buys?
Dr. GOZAR. No, thank you, Senator, I wouldn't be interested in any of that. The idea of the purchase of talent was enough for me.
Senator SKYPACK. Mr. Chairman, I submit that if the public knew about the fine patriotic work that company is doing down there, a witness like this—
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Senator MANSFIELD. Mr. Jones has put us on our honor, Jack. I don't see how we can change that without his permission.
Dr. GOZAR. 'We Must All Obey!'
Senator MANSFIELD. That's not fair, Doctor. There's such a thing as honor, you know.
Dr. GOZAR. I believe in it, but I see very little of it as I wander around.
Senator MANSFIELD. Did you have any further questions, Mr. Broadbent?
Mr. BROADBENT. That's all, sir. You may be excused, Doctor. I will call Miss Charity Perrin.
Senator MANSFIELD. Thank you, Dr. Gozar. . . . Please stand —right there, miss—and well swear you in.
