A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  For the next decade Mahomo traveled and spoke about the injustices unfolding in his home country. He encountered wide disbelief among his audiences. Beginning in 1969 he and a group of British film students spent three years getting various friends to obtain and smuggle out clandestine footage. He maintained his composure and resolve through innumerable setbacks. Slowly he assembled enough images and money to craft a full documentary. He knew that he faced potentially deadly retaliation. South African secret agents regularly assassinated “Communists” and “terrorists” all over the world.

  The experience opened my eyes even more to the reality of oppression and tyranny. It was not just the people of the Soviet Union or Communist China who endured mindless cruelty from their own governments; governments that cloaked themselves in the language of democratic rights were also guilty. Nana’s patience and reserve introduced me to the realities of South Africa but also showed me how raw outrage was not enough to create change. The pursuit of lasting justice requires a depth of commitment that transcends the emotion of the moment. I could see that real leaders had to learn how to live with a slow, deep, burning passion for justice that was both a source of motivation and a wound. One never knew whether one’s actions would really have effect, whether one would live to see the transformation for which one longed. The dedication itself—ringed and supported with a hope and trust in the direction of history—had to be enough.

  For some, the burden was too much or the answers never came. For others, including Nana, the frustration was rewarded with occasional moments of triumph that helped refuel the effort. A few months after we saw the film, The Last Grave at Dimbaza was shown on national television in the United States and won an Emmy. The debate over America’s political and commercial entanglement with apartheid intensified. New opponents of apartheid appeared among student, religious, and civil rights groups. And Nana went back to many more years in his restless and sometimes controversial search for political allies, personal advancement, ideological justification, and fundamental change in the country from which he was barred. After a few conversations, I never saw him again.

  But I never forgot him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In AND Out

  Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage … is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to transform a world which yields most painfully to change.

  —ROBERT F. KENNEDY

  In September 1972 we left Paris for good and returned to the rambling old house in Irvington. I was sixteen and enrolled in a nearby high school, Hackley School. Because of the intensity of French education, I found that I was a full year ahead of my peers, so I was bumped up into my senior year. I did my best to stay above water academically. I also continued to be interested in human rights. I learned of Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian neurophysiologist who had been arrested in the 1960s. The Soviet police sent him to one of their many psychiatric prisons on the grounds that anyone who opposed the Soviet Union’s policies must by definition be mentally ill, since the Soviet system was self-evidently the best in the world.

  Once locked away, the prisoners faced solitary confinement, physical restraint, forced injection with drugs, beatings, starvation, and death. In the face of such horrific treatment, Bukovsky proved particularly courageous. His first crime had been organizing a poetry reading; for that he was sent to psychiatric prison for three years. The second time he led a gathering to protest the arrest of other dissidents, and he was again jailed. In 1971 he secretly conveyed 150 pages of documents about the Soviet abuse of psychiatry to the West. He then received what was likely to be a permanent sentence. From the Soviet government’s standpoint, he had been crushed; once he was out of sight, they assumed he would disappear from everyone’s mind.

  Amnesia is a tool of injustice, and memory is one of the most important means to combat it. Bukovsky might be sitting in some hidden prison, and I might only be a high school student worrying about grades, SAT’s, and girlfriends, but I was determined to play some tiny part in keeping his name and his cause from fading away. And so I launched my own haphazard campaign to free him. I persuaded my classmates to write letters to the Soviet ambassador. I drafted petitions and took them whenever my parents attended gatherings of other activists.

  Even though I doubt anything I did benefited Bukovsky directly, the process became something of a spiritual discipline for me. I found a large picture of him and posted it in my room, and later in my college dormitory. I glanced at it every morning when I left and every evening when I returned. It served as a visual tuning fork to keep me from being distracted. It reminded me that every day I lived in freedom, he languished in prison. In this manner, he never became invisible. He was a living being, who woke each morning and shivered with cold and reached out every day to touch his prison bars. My actions might have seemed pointless to some, but they were not worthless to me.

  Nor, in the end, to him. Many years later, after he had been freed and when he made his first trip to the United States, I met him. I had the chance to shake that long-imprisoned hand—and he thanked me.

  I finished Hackley School in the spring of 1973, earlier than I had expected, and I decided to take an extra year before going to college. I worked a few odd jobs and used the money to take flying lessons. Looking for something to do in the spring, I sent out dozens of letters and was lucky enough to be hired as an intern for U.S. Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson had been elected to Congress in 1940. When war broke out, he enlisted in the military, but President Roosevelt sent word to the Pentagon to kick out all the congressmen and send them back to their jobs. Jackson was an old-school Democrat, a New Deal progressive who had cautious foreign policy views. In some circles he was viewed as a hawk on Vietnam, but he was also one of the leading proponents of human rights in the Soviet Union and around the world.

  I was installed as the most junior possible intern in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a roiling bullpen of investigators presided over by the great foreign policy expert Dorothy Fosdick. My job was to make photocopies, get coffee, attend hearings, take notes, and just soak up as much of the culture of the U.S. Senate as possible.

  It was a turbulent time, because just upstairs, in the Russell Senate Caucus Room, the brilliant lights of live television were shining down on the hot and hapless witnesses who were appearing before the Senate select committee on Watergate. Occasionally I got into the office early enough to get a seat at the very back of the room, where I watched the great crocodile of the Senate, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, preside over the tawdry story that was unfolding in front of him with the skill of a wily country judge. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the hearings went on, as it became clear that the culture of corruption in American politics had stained more deeply than anyone had previously been willing to admit. My rosy and enthusiastic view of the glories of democracy began to fade as I listened to men and women who worked for President Nixon testify to a long litany of lying, cover-ups, bribery, and other crimes. It all came to a head just as I was leaving Washington, when it became clear that the president of the United States himself had been part of the conspiracy. Impeachment proceedings jumped forward, and in August 1974 the president dramatically resigned.

  My role in Washington did not end at that moment, however, because I became involved in a project that took me back for the two following summers. Senator Jackson had become increasingly interested in the way large companies traded raw materials through international markets, rewarding some and punishing others as a way to increase their profits. He was in the midst of using the staff skills in the Investigations Subcommittee to probe the dealings of international oil companies.

  When I went back to work for him in the summer of 1975, I became interested in the global trade in blood products, and I researched how products such as Factor VIII were collected, how they were made, and where they were s
old. As I learned more and more about the industry, I became alarmed about how these firms were collecting blood from the poorest, most vulnerable, and often least healthy people in the world, from impoverished Nicaraguan peasants to skid-row bums in American cities. I learned that even though the products were thought to be infected with hepatitis (we only knew about hepatitis A and B then), they were being marketed aggressively in Europe and elsewhere as the most advanced form of treatment for hemophilia and other bleeding disorders. They were in fact very convenient for someone who could get a needle into his own veins, yet they came from a system so blinded by the desire for profit that the growing dangers of contamination were ignored.

  I persuaded Senator Jackson and some of his staff that there were serious questions which deserved examination. Senator Jackson eventually sent an official letter to all the major pharmaceutical companies that made blood products, asking them for more detailed information about the supply, manufacture, safety, pricing, and distribution of their products. We received two kinds of answers. Some companies sent us boxes and boxes crammed with promotional brochures, irrelevant memos, shipping manifests, factory manuals, and other loosely related material. The other companies sent us a single-page letter, which, in not very subtle but still highly legal terms, told Senator Jackson to go to hell.

  Jackson was not happy, and his team discussed pushing the investigation to a higher level of intensity. They began to consider issuing subpoenas and holding hearings in order to get to the bottom of what was going on. This process unfolded over many months. We made progress, but the staff became distracted because Senator Jackson was preparing to run for president of the United States in 1976. At the same time, they kept me working on the project.

  One morning I received a surprise phone call from the minority counsel, the head of the Republican staff of the committee. He wanted to meet with me personally—now. I was perplexed. Senior Senate staff members of one party do not usually summon interns from another party to hold urgent private meetings. I mentioned this to my immediate boss at the time, and he said, “Go see what he wants.”

  I walked through the immense hallways of the Russell Senate Office Building, passing office after office of different senators, with their great mahogany doors and American and state flags standing majestically in the hallways. My feet clicked and echoed on the vast marble floor. When I reached my destination, I was ushered immediately into the minority counsel’s office. He was seated behind his desk with his hands folded.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  I did.

  “I have asked you to come here because I understand that Senator Jackson is considering issuing subpoenas in the pharmaceutical investigation.”

  I said nothing.

  “I have consulted with the ranking minority member of the subcommittee, Charles Percy, and he has a problem with that. Specifically, he has a problem with you.”

  I was shaken. Percy was one of the most famous senators in the country, widely considered a decent man and a Republican moderate. He was also from Illinois, the home of most of the pharmaceutical manufacturers. The minority counsel continued with an edge to his voice.

  “We believe that your personal medical situation makes it completely inappropriate for you to be involved in any investigation of this industry. So we have decided that we will consider supporting this investigation only if you withdraw from it. You must recuse yourself immediately and completely. If you don’t, we will block any subpoena. So it’s your choice—the investigation either stops here or you quit and give it the chance to go forward.” He paused for effect and then waved his hand. “Now you can go.”

  I walked back through the long corridors in shock, realizing that I had just been exposed to my first direct case of political hardball. When I returned, I told the majority counsel, who was furious. Together we went to Senator Jackson, who was equally angry that the Republicans had called me in private. Jackson was a realist, and he said to me, “Bob, you know this presidential thing is coming up, so I would have a lot of trouble forcing this through right now. If I am elected president, you will come see me at the White House and we will use my authority to find out what is going on. And if I lose, I will return to the Senate and we will crack this resistance right here.”

  I left his office and thought, Well, something is going to happen; there is just going to be a delay. But Jackson did not win the nomination—that went to Jimmy Carter—and I gave up my position in the Senate. When Jackson returned to the Senate, he was swamped with foreign policy problems. A few years later he died suddenly, at the age of seventy-one. The subpoenas, the investigation, and the hearings never took place.

  Between Watergate, the endless agony of the Vietnam War, and the crushing of the pharmaceutical investigation, I decided that I had seen enough. I was finished with politics.

  In the fall of 1974 I had enrolled as a freshman at Princeton University, a bastion of dazzling opportunity and privilege. My father, my uncle, my doctor, and my godfather had all earned scholarships from Tennessee to attend Yale, and my initial idea had been that this was where I might go. When I applied to Yale, however, I encountered some harsh physical realities. Though I was now able to walk without braces, my knees remained weak. I still had joint bleedings, which would regularly confine me to a wheelchair for a week or more. Seen through this lens, the Yale campus presented many barriers. It had been built with the assumption that every student would be perfectly mobile. Classrooms could be reached only at the top of long stairways in buildings that were far apart. The mostly Gothic design of the dormitories and refectories, bunched together in “colleges,” meant that everyone had to navigate through a maze of difficult hallways and stairs. The architects seemed to have been committed to the idea that every passageway or building entrance required at least three randomly placed steps.

  Moreover, Yale was in the middle of a city, New Haven, so the students traveling between class and college activities had to cross urban streets all day long. Cities at that time did not build curb cuts to allow wheelchairs to roll smoothly from sidewalk to crosswalk. As I looked around, my heart sank when I realized that I could easily be confined to a small room, missing events and classes, forcing classmates to carry cold plates of food from distant dining rooms back to my point of incarceration. And while the admissions office expressed concern about my problems, no one was all that eager to discuss or to solve them. The Americans with Disabilities Act had not yet passed the Congress, and indifference or insensitivity toward people with disabilities was still more the rule than the exception.

  This was in direct contrast to Princeton. After I was admitted, the admissions office designated a specific person to help me resolve each difficulty. Though the campus was self-contained, it was still hard for me to navigate on foot. We hit on the solution of obtaining a small electric cart that would transport me from class to class. The university promised to put in external electric plugs anywhere I needed them—outside my dorm room, the dining room, and the major classroom buildings—so I could charge the cart as necessary. If I had a bleeding and needed care, I would be permitted to enroll directly in the school infirmary, without the usual medical review, so that I could have a quiet place to recover, three meals a day, and easy access to friends who would drop by with my assignments. The university offered to exempt me from the lottery for dorm rooms so that I could find the right room. If I experienced a lasting problem, the authorities said, they would even reschedule my class discussion groups to meet on the first floor so I did not have to climb stairs to attend.

  Of course the academic opportunities at both institutions were superb. I understood the tremendous privilege that each represented. Change was rippling through both universities and many other elite institutions as they tried to find a way to balance their traditional exclusivity with their desire to be more diverse. Every college in the country, including the Ivy League schools, was trying to figure out how to boost their enrollment of students disadvantaged by race
or class and give them the support that would guide them toward success. Yale and Princeton had also just fought major battles with their own conservative alumni, who did not want them to admit women. The first women at Princeton had arrived only five years before I enrolled, and the first full class that included women had just graduated.

  Schools were new to the issue of how—or even whether—to support students with disabilities. For some schools, the idea of admitting students with disabilities seemed perhaps to contradict the idea of gathering together “well-rounded” participants who were fully equipped to compete and to succeed. Subtle differences in attitude led to huge differences in outcomes. One school, with the best of intentions, told me, in essence, that it would be content for me to come as long as I could conform to its reality. The other university reversed the equation, saying, “We know that we need to change and that we have not been welcoming to some people in the past. Our goal is for you to feel fully included and to have everything you need while you are here to succeed.” In response, I gratefully picked Princeton.

  I arrived on campus and plummeted into the whirlwind of freshman year. During the first few weeks I was ecstatically happy. The campus was remarkable, but my new friends proved the greatest asset of all. Gathered from around the country and the world, representing innumerable backgrounds, drawn by different interests, they were electrifying. Given their array of talents, I also felt queasy. The man who became my first roommate and best friend was named Stephen Chanock. From Washington, he was tall and handsome, with a tousle of curly black hair. He was a swimmer who had competed nationally. He had scored higher than anyone I had ever met on all of his advanced placement tests. He was a math whiz. He played the piano beautifully and planned to be a composer. Or a doctor. Or both.