David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog

by Malcolm Gladwell

  7 The prediction we make about how we are going to feel in some future situation is called “affective forecasting,” and all of the evidence suggests that we are terrible affective forecasters. The psychologist Stanley J. Rachman, for example, has done things like take a group of people terrified of snakes and then show them a snake. Or take a group of claustrophobics and have them stand in a small metal closet. What he finds is that the actual experience of the thing that was feared is a lot less scary than the person imagined.

  8 “I had a patient like this many years ago,” the New York psychiatrist Peter Mezan told me. “He’d built an empire. But talk about a catastrophic childhood. His mother died in front of him when he was six, with his father standing over her, screaming at her in rage. She was having a convulsion. The father was then murdered because he was a gangster, and he and his sibling were sent to an orphanage. He grew up where there was nothing except to overcome. So he was willing to take chances that other people wouldn’t take. I think he felt that there was nothing to lose.” To Mezan, there was no mystery—in his experience over the years—between this kind of outsize pathology in childhood and the larger-than-life successes that some of those bereaved children would have later in adulthood. The fact of having endured and survived such trauma had a liberating effect. “These are people who are able to break the frame of the known world—what’s believed, what’s assumed, what’s common sense, what’s familiar, what everyone takes for granted, whether it’s about cancer or the laws of physics,” he said. “They are not confined to the frame. They have the ability to step outside it, because I think the usual frame of childhood didn’t exist for them. It was shattered.”

  9 The idea of administering repeated bouts of chemotherapy—even after the patient appeared cancer free—came from M. C. Li and Roy Hertz at the National Cancer Institute in the late 1950s. Li hit choriocarcinoma—a rare cancer of the uterus—with round after round of methotrexate until he finally drove it from his patients’ bodies. It was the first time a solid tumor had ever been cured by chemotherapy. When Li first proposed the idea, he was told to stop. People thought it was barbaric. He persisted. He was fired—even though he cured his patients. “That was what the atmosphere was like,” DeVita says. “I remember there was a grand rounds around that time, to discuss choriocarcinoma. And the subject of conversation was whether this was a case of spontaneous remission. No one could even get their heads around the idea that the methotrexate had actually cured the patient.” Needless to say, Freireich speaks of Li, even today, with awe. Once at a scientific meeting, a speaker slighted Li’s accomplishments, and Freireich leapt up and roared, in the middle of the proceeding, “M. C. Li cured choriocarcinoma!”

  10 Freireich stories are legion. At one point he ventured up to the twelfth floor of the NCI’s clinical center, which housed the ward for adults who had chronic myeloid leukemia. CML is a form of leukemia that overproduces white blood cells. The patients’ cell-making machinery goes into overdrive. The children Freireich was treating, by contrast, had acute lymphocytic leukemia. It’s a cancer that results in the overproduction of defective white blood cells—which is why they are helpless in the face of infection. So Freireich began taking blood from adults with cancer of the blood on the twelfth floor and giving it to children with cancer of the blood on the second floor. Was it considered unusual to take white cells from CML patients? “Insane,” Freireich said, looking back on that experiment. “Everyone said it was insane. What if the children ended up somehow getting CML as well? What if it made them even sicker?” Freireich shrugged. “This was an environment where the kids had one hundred percent mortality in months. We had nothing to lose.”

  11 I have simplified the leukemia story. See Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies for a more complete version. After Freireich and Frei demonstrated that they could make progress against leukemia with previously unheard-of doses of chemotherapy drugs, the oncologist Donald Pinkel took over and pushed that logic even further. It was Pinkel’s group, at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, that pioneered “total therapy,” which is best described as VAMP squared. Today’s overwhelmingly successful leukemia treatments are essentially Pinkel’s supercharged version of the VAMP regimen.

  12 In his memoir The Theory and Practice of Hell, Eugen Kogon writes of what happened at the German concentration camp Buchenwald whenever the Nazis came to the leaders of the camp and demanded that they select for the gas chambers those from among their own ranks who were “socially unfit.” Not to comply meant disaster; the Nazis would then turn the prisoner leadership over to the “greens”—the sadistic criminal element also interned at Buchenwald alongside Jews and political prisoners. On “no account,” Kogon writes, could the “pure of heart” be asked to make that decision. Sometimes human survival demands that we commit harm in the cause of some greater good—and, Kogon writes, “the more tender one’s conscience, the more difficult it was to make such decisions.”

  Chapter Six

  Wyatt Walker

  “De rabbit is de slickest o’ all de animals de Lawd ever made.”

  1.

  The most famous photograph in the history of the American civil rights movement was taken on May 3, 1963, by Bill Hudson, a photographer for the Associated Press. Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr.’s activists had taken on the city’s racist public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. The photo was of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog. Even to this day, it has not lost its power to shock.

  Hudson gave his roll of film from that day to his editor, Jim Laxon. Laxon looked through Hudson’s photos until he came to the boy leaning into the dog. He was, he said later, riveted by the “saintly calm of the young [man] in the snarling jaws of the German shepherd.” He hadn’t felt that way about a photograph since he published a Pulitzer Prize–winning photo seventeen years before of a woman jumping from an upper-story window in a hotel fire in Atlanta.

  Laxon took the picture and sent it out over the wires. The next day, the New York Times published it above the fold across three columns on the front page of its Saturday paper, as did virtually every major paper in the country. President Kennedy saw the photograph and was appalled. The secretary of state, Dean Rusk, worried that it would “embarrass our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful.” The photo was discussed on the floor of Congress and in countless living rooms and classrooms. For a time, it seemed like Americans could talk of little else. It was an image, as one journalist put it, that would “burn forever…the thin, well-dressed boy seeming to be leaning into the dog, his arms limp at his side, calmly staring straight ahead as though to say—‘Take me, here I am.’” For years, Martin Luther King and his army of civil rights activists had been fighting the thicket of racist laws and policies that blanketed the American South—the rules that made it hard or impossible for blacks to get jobs, vote, get a proper education, or even to use the same water fountain as a white person. Suddenly, the tide turned. A year later, the U.S. Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of the United States. The Civil Rights Act, it has often been said, was “written in Birmingham.”

  2.

  In 1963, when Martin Luther King came to Birmingham, his movement was in crisis. He had just spent nine months directing protests against segregation in Albany, Georgia, two hundred miles to the south, and he had limped away from Albany without winning any significant concessions. The biggest victory the civil rights movement had won to that point had been the Supreme Court’s decision in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, declaring segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional. But almost a decade had passed and the public schools of the Deep South were still as racially divided as ever. In the 1940s and early 1950s, most Southern states had been governed by relatively moderate politicians who were at least willing to acknowledge the dignity of black people. Alabama had a governor in those y
ears named “Big Jim” Folsom, who was fond of saying “all men are just alike.” By the early sixties, all the moderates were gone. The statehouses were in the control of hard-line segregationists. The South seemed to be moving backwards.

  And Birmingham? Birmingham was the most racially divided city in America. It was known as “the Johannesburg of the South.” When a busload of civil rights activists were on their way to Birmingham, the local police stood by while Klansmen forced their bus to the side of the road and set it afire. Black people who tried to move into white neighborhoods had their homes dynamited by the city’s local Ku Klux Klansmen so often that Birmingham’s other nickname was Bombingham. “In Birmingham,” Diane McWhorter writes in Carry Me Home, “it was held a fact of criminal science that the surest way to stop a crime wave—burglaries, rapes, whatever—was to go out and shoot a few suspects. (‘This thing’s getting out of hand,’ a [police] lieutenant might say. ‘You know what we’ve got to do.’)”

  Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, was a short, squat man with enormous ears and a “bullfrog voice.” He came to prominence in 1938 when a political conference was held in downtown Birmingham with both black and white delegates. Connor tied a long rope to a stake in the lawn outside the auditorium, and ran the rope down the center of the aisle and insisted—in accordance with the city’s segregation ordinances—that black people stay to one side of the line, and whites to the other. One of the attendees at the meeting was the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. She was sitting on the “wrong” side and Connor’s people had to force her to move to the white side. (Imagine someone trying that on Michelle Obama.)1 Connor liked to spend his mornings at the Molton Hotel downtown, doing shots of 100 proof Old Grand-Dad Bourbon, and sayings things like, A Jew is just a “nigger turned inside out.” People used to tell jokes about Birmingham, of the sort that weren’t really jokes: A black man in Chicago wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham. She is horrified: “Did Jesus say He’d go with you?” The husband replies: “He said He’d go as far as Memphis.”

  Upon arriving in Birmingham, King called a meeting of his planning team. “I have to tell you,” he said, “that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign.” Then he went around the room and gave everyone a mock eulogy. One of King’s aides would later admit that he never wanted to go to Birmingham at all: “When I kissed my wife and children good-bye down on Carol Road in Atlanta, I didn’t think I would ever see them again.”

  King was outgunned and overmatched. He was the overwhelming underdog. He had, however, an advantage—of the same paradoxical variety as David Boies’s dyslexia or Jay Freireich’s painful childhood. He was from a community that had always been the underdog. By the time the civil rights crusade came to Birmingham, African-Americans had spent a few hundred years learning how to cope with being outgunned and overmatched. Along the way they had learned a few things about battling giants.

  3.

  At the center of many of the world’s oppressed cultures stands the figure of the “trickster hero.” In legend and song, he appears in the form of a seemingly innocuous animal that triumphs over others much larger than himself through cunning and guile. In the West Indies, slaves brought with them from Africa tales of a devious spider named Anansi.2 Among American slaves, the trickster was often the short-tailed Brer Rabbit.3 “De rabbit is de slickest o’ all de animals de Lawd ever made,” one ex-slave recounted in an interview with folklorists a hundred years ago:

  He ain’t de biggest, an he ain’t de loudest but he sho’ am de slickest. If he gits in trouble he gits out by gittin’ somebody else in. Once he fell down a deep well an’ did he holler and cry? No siree. He set up a mighty mighty whistling and a singin’, an’ when de wolf passes by he heard him an’ he stuck his head over an’ de rabbit say, “Git ’long ’way f’om here. Dere ain’t room fur two. Hit’s mighty hot up dere and nice an’ cool down here. Don’ you git in dat bucket an’ come down here.” Dat made de wolf all de mo’ onrestless and he jumped into the bucket an’ as he went down de rabbit come up, an’ as dey passed de rabbit he laughed an’ he say, “Dis am life; some go up and some go down.”

  In the most famous Brer Rabbit story, Brer Fox traps Rabbit by building a baby doll out of tar. Brer Rabbit tries to engage the tar baby and instead gets stuck, and the more he tries to free himself from the tar, the more hopelessly entangled he becomes. “I don’t care what you do wid’ me, Brer Fox,” Rabbit pleads to the gloating Fox, “but don’t fling me in dat briar-patch.” Brer Fox, of course, does just that—and Rabbit, who was born and bred in the briar patch, uses the thorns to separate himself from the doll and escapes. Fox is defeated. Rabbit sits cross-legged on a nearby log, triumphantly “koamin’ de pitch outen his har wid a chip.”

  Trickster tales were wish fulfillments in which slaves dreamed of one day rising above their white masters. But as the historian Lawrence Levine writes, they were also “painfully realistic stories which taught the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment.” African-Americans were outnumbered and overpowered, and the idea embedded in the Brer Rabbit stories was that the weak could compete in even the most lopsided of contests if they were willing to use their wits. Brer Rabbit understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer Fox did not understand himself. He realized his opponent Fox was so malicious that he couldn’t resist giving Rabbit the punishment Rabbit said he desperately wanted to avoid. So Rabbit tricked Fox, gambling that he could not bear the thought that a smaller and lesser animal was enjoying himself so much. Levine argues that over the course of their long persecution, African-Americans took the lessons of the trickster to heart:

  The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery and by the masters themselves indicate that a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their masters’ property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves.

  Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David’s opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

  The executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization led by King, was Wyatt Walker. Walker was on the ground in Birmingham from the beginning, marshaling King’s meager army against the forces of racism and reaction. King and Walker were under no illusions that they could fight racism the conventional way. They could not defeat Bull Connor at the polls, or in the streets, or in the court of law. They could not match him strength for strength. What they could do, though, was play Brer Rabbit and try to get Connor to throw them in the briar patch.

  “Wyatt,” King said, “you’ve got to find the means to create a crisis, to make Bull Connor tip his hand.” That is exactly what Walker did. And the crisis created by Wyatt Walker was the photograph of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog—leaning in, his arms limp, as if to say, “Take me, here I am.”

  4.

  Wyatt Walker was a Baptist minister from Massachusetts. He joined up with Martin Luther King in 1960. He was King’s “nuts and bolts” man, his organizer and fixer. He was a mischief maker—slender, elegant, and intellectual, with a
pencil-thin mustache and a droll sense of humor. Every Wednesday afternoon he reserved for a round of golf. To him, women were always “dahlin’,” as in “I’m not hard to get along with, dahlin’s. I just have to have perfection.” As a young man he joined the Young Communist League because—as he would always say, tongue planted firmly in cheek—it was one of the only ways a black person in those years could meet white women. “In college,” the historian Taylor Branch writes, “he acquired dark-rimmed glasses that gave his face the look of a brooding Trotskyite.”4 Once, when he was preaching in Petersburg, a small town in Virginia, he showed up at the local whites-only public library with his family and a small entourage in tow, with the intention of getting arrested for breaking the town’s segregation laws. What book did he check out that he could wave in front of the assembled photographers and reporters? A biography of the great hero of the white South, Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general who led the Confederate Army in its battle to defend slavery. That was vintage Wyatt Walker. He was perfectly happy to be carted off to jail for breaking Petersburg’s segregation laws. But he made sure to rub the town’s nose in its own contradictions at the same time.