The Theft of Memory
Page 21
INSUFFICIENT NUMBER OF GERIATRICIANS: “Medical schools and residencies require little to no geriatric training, and many students are reluctant to get into the field because it is among the lowest paid in medicine….In 2005, there was one geriatrician for every 5,000 people over 65, according to the American Geriatrics Society; by 2030 that ratio is expected to increase to one for every 8,000 patients” (The New York Times, August 24, 2009). By way of contrast, there was one pediatrician for every 1,400 children in 2010 (op/ed by Dr. Dennis Rosen, The New York Times, July 22, 2010). The American Geriatrics Society (www.americangeriatrics.org) is a primary source of updated news and academic research relevant to healthcare for the elderly. Its monthly publication, Journal of the American Geriatric Society, is written for specialists and scholars in the field, but I’ve found it helpful in understanding challenges confronting eldercare physicians and strategies to increase their numbers.
CHAPTER 9
EFFORTS BY FBI TO DISCREDIT DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING: See, for example, David Garrow, “The F.B.I. and Martin Luther King,” The Atlantic, July 2002, and William Safire in The New York Times, November 20, 1975.
MY FATHER’S CAUTIONARY STATEMENT TO THE PROSECUTION IN THE TRIAL OF PATRICIA HEARST: “I have never made a commitment in advance of my own intensive study of the case and any opinion I may come up with is reached without regard to the side which may have retained me. It seems to me that the oath one takes to tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth is retrospective and encompasses the clinical study of the subject from its very inception” (Letter from my father to U.S. Attorney James Browning and his colleague David Bancroft, October 14, 1975).
MY FATHER’S RECORDS OF HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH PATRICIA HEARST: The notes he made during, and just after, each conversation are written in very small and densely crowded script. A sixty-three-page typed version of these notes includes his commentary and reflections.
MY FATHER’S TESTIMONY: The official transcript of the proceedings in United States v. Patricia Campbell Hearst is reproduced in The Trial of Patricia Hearst (San Francisco: Great Fidelity Press, 1976).
PATRICIA’S ALLEGED MISTREATMENT AS A CHILD: “Now, I don’t say that this is what happened, I wasn’t there,” my father testified. “This is her own image of what the first years of her life were….” He added that “she had a mixed picture of her childhood. She did have pets, a great deal of indulgence, and a great deal of freedom in many respects.”
THE ABSENCE OF THE CLOSET IN PATRICIA’S DRAWING: The defense had emphasized the traumatic effect of a period of several weeks in which she said she had been held in a small closet by her captors. In the drawing, my father testified, she indicated where the kitchen and bathroom were, and the bedroom-living room, and she drew “two lines, diagonal lines…, to indicate where the two front windows were.” She said the room had a large closet, which had two doors that opened and where a Murphy bed was kept. “And so she drew the two doors where the closet was, where the bed was kept, and she told me later that they kept much of the armament that they had there.” He said she did not indicate any smaller closet in the drawing. (The Trial of Patricia Hearst, cited above. See also San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 1976.) In my father’s notes from his interview with Patricia on January 22, 1976, one of five interviews that totaled about sixteen hours, I found what is apparently an exact copy of Patricia’s drawing. It’s a very simple sketch. She drew large circles to indicate the rooms and parallel lines to represent the windows and the large closet in which the armaments were kept.
PATRICIA WONDERED IF HER LAWYER, F. LEE BAILEY, HAD BEEN DRINKING: In her book Patty Hearst: Her Own Story, written with Alvin Moscow (New York: Avon Books, 1988), Patricia said, “He rose from the defense table, grabbing an unruly stack of notes, and I could see that his hands were shaking…and his face was flushed. I wondered if he had been drinking at lunch….He spoke for less than forty-five minutes, but as I cringed in my seat, trying to follow his disjointed discourse, it seemed like a lifetime.” See also The Boston Evening Globe, August 3, 1978.
OBITUARIES EMPHASIZED MY FATHER’S ROLE IN HEARST TRIAL: On the other hand, The New York Times Magazine (December 28, 2008), in a year-end issue devoted to twenty-four people who had passed away that year, gave a brief but warm portrayal of the trust his patients placed in him, exemplified in his close relationship with Eugene O’Neill.
VICTORIA CHAPLIN: The man with whom she “ran away” (my mother’s words) and whom she subsequently married, is Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée. Together, they created a circus performance, originally known as Le Cirque Imaginaire and later as Le Cirque Invisible.
CHAPTER 10
MY FATHER’S MEETING WITH EUGEN BLEULER: Dr. Bleuler had retired as director of the Burghölzli sanatorium in 1927, two years before my father’s visit, but continued to receive foreign visitors there. After their meeting, he took my father to a smaller sanatorium in the nearby town of Küsnacht where he kept his private patients. It was there that my father was permitted to sit in on consultations and accompany the doctors when they were examining their patients. Dr. Bleuler’s home, according to my father’s notes and my mother’s memory, was in a town called Zollikon.
RESIDENT SETTING UP MORPHINE DRIP: This must have been very early in the morning. I made a note that “my mother passed at 8:12 a.m.”
CHAPTER 11
OTHER PEOPLE WORKING IN ASSOCIATION WITH MY FATHER’S DOCTOR WERE MORE RESPONSIVE TO HIS NEEDS AND TO MESSAGES FROM SILVIA AND JULIA: After my father returned from the hospital, a visiting nurse came to see him once a week and a phlebotomist came twice a month to take samples of his blood, apparently by arrangement with his doctor’s office. At this point, according to Julia, she and Silvia did receive some belated guidance from his doctor in helping him recover from the ulcer.
MY FATHER’S LETTER OF CRITIQUE OF DR. MEYER’S CLINIC: He wrote this in August 1941 to Dr. John Whitehorn, who replaced Dr. Meyer as director of the Phipps Clinic on September 1, 1941.
MY FATHER RECOMMENDED A PSYCHOANALYST IN BOSTON WHO HAD BEEN DIRECTOR OF FREUD’S OUTPATIENT DEPARTMENT: The man in question was Dr. Eduard Hitschmann, who directed the Ambulatorium, which was Freud’s free or low-cost psychoanalytic clinic, from 1922 until he fled the Nazis in 1938, moving first to London, then to Boston in 1940.
THIRTEEN WOMEN STRANGLED IN OR CLOSE TO BOSTON: It was originally believed that there were eleven victims, but DeSalvo later confessed to two additional murders. In his book The Boston Strangler (New York: New American Library, 1966), journalist Gerold Frank lists the names and ages of all thirteen women. Five of them were between nineteen and twenty-three; the other eight were fifty-five or older.
DESCRIPTION IN PRESS ACCOUNT OF VICTIMS’ BODIES: See retrospective article by Loretta McLaughlin in The Boston Globe, June 7, 1992.
MY FATHER WAS ASKED BY THE COURT TO INTERVIEW DESALVO: In a letter of April 6, 1965, my father told the Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Health that, “in accordance with an order of the Honorable Arthur E. Whittemore, Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court,” the examination of the mental condition of Albert H. DeSalvo had been completed and that a transcript of the interviews would shortly be available.
MY FATHER’S OPINION WAS OVERRULED BY OTHERS IN THE MENTAL HEALTH DEPARTMENT: Unlike those who disagreed with him, he was not asked to testify.
THE COMPETENCY DECISION: The hearing took place in June 1966, and the court’s ruling was handed down in early July. The question of competency came up again in a pretrial hearing on January 10, 1967. The trial itself began the following day. (The Boston Globe, July 12, 2013.)
MY FATHER VIEWED THE COMPETENCY DECISION AS ILLOGICAL AND SELF-CONTRADICTORY: According to F. Lee Bailey, who was DeSalvo’s lawyer (and would later represent Patricia Hearst), the decision of the court was, in part, the consequence of negotiations he had carried out with the prosecution. Bailey later explained the rather labyrinthine strategy that led him to agree to this apparent compromise. See The
Defense Never Rests, by F. Lee Bailey with Harvey Aronson (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). See also Time magazine, January 27, 1969.
DESALVO’S LETTER TO MY FATHER: DeSalvo’s statement that “all of what has happen[ed] could have been avoided” if he had been under my father’s direct supervision, while he was in detention, is difficult to understand, because the strangulations had, of course, taken place before the time when he was under observation. This is only one of several aspects of the letter that remain perplexing; but DeSalvo’s professed sense of affection for my father seems to be authentic.
DESALVO’S GUILT: In 2013, a process known as DNA “familial searching” indicated a match between DeSalvo’s DNA and a sample of DNA found on the body of a nineteen-year-old woman who was believed to be his final victim. (The Boston Globe, July 12, 2013.)
CHAPTER 12
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MEMORIES: According to Schacter, “we tend to think of memories as snapshots from family albums that, if stored properly, could be retrieved in precisely the same condition in which they were put away. But we now know that we do not record our experiences the way a camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then recreate or restructure our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.” See The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, by Daniel L. Schacter (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001) and “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory,” by Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, May 2007.
VICTORIA’S DAUGHTER, AURÉLIA, RECALLED HER DINNERS WITH HER MOTHER AND MY PARENTS: In one of my father’s memos to himself, dated June 21, 1990, he said that he had met Victoria that evening, “following her appearance at the American Repertory Theater in Le Cirque Imaginaire. Met her husband, daughter, and son. Long conversation about Oona….” Aurélia has since become a star in her own right, touring internationally in an extraordinary one-woman performance, a continually evolving work of visual theater based on optical illusions, presented with an utterly original aesthetic sensibility, developed by Aurélia and Victoria. See also note for Chapter Nine, “VICTORIA CHAPLIN.”
EPILOGUE: 2015
HARVARD UNDERGRADUATES RANKED NUMERICALLY ON BASIS OF THEIR GRADES: According to the Harvard University Archives, this practice began in the early nineteenth century and ended at some point in the 1960s.
FIRST MARSHAL: I can no longer remember exactly what it was that the first marshal did at the time of our commencement. At present, according to the secretary of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, the first marshals lead the procession at literary exercises held a few days prior to commencement.
MY BOOK ABOUT ADULT NONREADERS AND THEIR CHILDREN: Illiterate America (New York: Doubleday, 1985).
A CHILD BEATEN WITH A BAMBOO WHIP: I described this child and other children in my class in Death at an Early Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).
MY INDECISION ABOUT MOVING INTO ACADEMIC LIFE: Looking back, I wonder why I felt convinced that I would lose something I valued if I crossed the line between two social settings. Hundreds of activists who made this move continued to be loyal to the interests of low-income children and their parents, and perhaps were more effective advocates because their academic roles may have accorded them more credibility. I think, in the long run, it was the question of physical and emotional vantage point that held me back. I continued to live in the same urban neighborhood for approximately eighteen years.
MY FATHER’S PRIMARY PHYSICIAN DECLARED HIM INCAPABLE OF MANAGING HIS AFFAIRS: This was in February 1996. Remarkably, as late as April 25, my father wrote to me that he was hoping to take my mother back to Europe for a final time. Six weeks later, he was in the nursing home.
About the Author
JONATHAN KOZOL received the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion for Death at an Early Age, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Rachel and Her Children, and countless other honors for Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and his most recent writings about poverty and childhood. For more information, visit www.jonathankozol.com.