Nebraska Magazine - Winter 10-11

Writing Contest | Scholarly Paperbacks Make Big Impact | Dancing in the Light | Quotable Cornhuskers

for members of the alumni association of the UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA–LINCOLN

WINTER 2011

Dr. Marie Chevrier, ’72, Bioweapons Policy Expert

Dancing in the Light When the news broke last March that veteran landscape photographer Lawrence McFarland had just won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for his vividly evocative photos of the Old American West, the former UNL Fine Arts graduate student sat at his desk and cried.

After nearly four decades of wandering the High Plains (while frequently sleeping in his car) in search of documentary landscape photographs that explore the mysteries of “light on surface,” McFarland had finally been recognized as a major national figure in contemporary visual art.

“Photography is only two things,” said the longtime image-maker while reflecting on his craft.

“It’s light and it’s surface. And from those two things, an amazing world opens up.”

By Tom Nugent

e was 33 years old on that amazing summer afternoon in 1975 – the afternoon when his life as a photographer changed forever.

He said he will never forget the moment when the uncanny incident took place.

It happened on an Apache Indian reservation – at San Carlos, Ariz. – when UNL anthropology instructor Liz Grobsmith warned her fascinated students that they were standing in a “sacred space” which contained “a tremendous amount of spiritual energy.”

That space was located between four “Apache crosses,” each of which represented one of the “cardinal directions” (north, south, east and west). Between the four markers, said the UNL anthropologist, there lived a vast kingdom full of ineffable presences ... the gods and demons and totems that ruled the invisible world of the Apache people.

For Lawrence McFarland (M.F.A. ’76), who was then a struggling young photographer unsure of his craft, this Arizona journey to the heart of another culture was a thrilling adventure.

“I can still remember every detail,” said the 68-year-old artist and professor of photography at the University of Texas,

H

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during a recent interview in Austin. “There were about ten of us on hand that day, and Liz explained very carefully how important it was to respect the culture we were studying.

“We were sitting under a cottonwood tree, and she stood in front of us. She was talking about the history of the Apaches and the meaning of the crosses [which were unrelated to the crosses of Christianity]. And then ... what happened next – I swear it happened; I’m not making it up – was very hard for me to understand.”

According to McFarland, a slender, gentlevoiced man with a soft gray beard, Liz Grobsmith spent about half an hour telling her UNL students about the “sacred space” in front of them. “She told us how the Apaches would conduct healing ceremonies there, and she warned us that it was dangerous to walk between the crosses – because the energy was so powerful that if you weren’t pure of heart, you would go crazy.”

McFarland listened carefully. Then, summoning his courage, he raised one hand and asked the instructor a question: “Liz, do you mind if I take a photograph here? Is it permitted?”

Grobsmith thought for a moment. Then: “Yes, I think that would be all right. But you need to understand: There’s an Apache

legend which says that if you take a photo of the crosses and you’re not of proper intentions, then your camera will break.”

Nodding thoughtfully, McFarland stood up and began preparing to take the photo. A moment later, he was joined by another eager student who was brandishing his own Nikon and also ready to start photographing.

McFarland zeroed in carefully, hoping to create an unforgettable picture of this sacred space.

At his side, meanwhile, the other student leaned forward, intent on capturing the best photo he could get.

And then it happened. “I heard this metallic sound,” said McFarland. “I looked over there, and I saw that the back of his camera had just popped open. … A moment later, he told us that his film had all been exposed, and that he wouldn’t be able to photograph the site.”

In that remarkable moment, said McFarland, the meaning of photography suddenly changed in front of his eyes.

“I still don’t understand what happened with that guy’s camera,” he said with a thoughtful frown. “But I can tell you one thing: That incident made me start thinking about photography in an entirely different way.

“All at once, it occurred to me that photographs weren’t just ‘visual records’ of places and scenes. What if they were actually visions into other dimensions? What if they were a window through which certain things ... certain forces could reveal themselves?”

Thunderstruck by this insight, the youthful McFarland was suddenly confronting an expanded universe of photographic possibilities. During the next 35 years – as he wandered the High Plains and the Great American Southwest in search of such “visions” – he often found himself grappling with energies and images and forces that he couldn’t fully comprehend.

Totally dedicated to his art, at times he lived on the edge of poverty while pouring almost every nickel he owned into cameras and film and developing equipment. He slept in his car at night for weeks at a stretch. He ate dirt-cheap beans and rice in greasy-spoon diners from Laramie to Tucumcari ... while his haunting photos of Arizona rock formations and High Plains Indian burial sites went mostly unappreciated and mostly ignored.

But he wouldn’t quit.

And then ... on a bright spring afternoon last March ... while sitting in a University of Texas classroom where he was teaching “ART335K,” he watched his computer screen

light up with an arriving e-mail message.

It was a letter of congratulations from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation – which had just awarded him one of its grants (typically, $40,000 to $50,000) for a future project in which he would assemble a lifetime’s worth of his documentary photos of the American West.

“I looked at that e-mail and I started crying,” McFarland recalled. “And I couldn’t stop. My students were all saying, ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’

“It took me at least 40 minutes to regain my composure. After all those years ... it was like a validation, or something. It was like: ‘Someone believes in me.’”

It was a riveting moment, he said.

Incredibly enough, however, the story doesn’t end there. Because what McFarland didn’t know, as he described the “Apache Holy Ground” photo that had changed his life ... was that Liz Grobsmith still keeps a copy of that same photo on her bedroom wall.

“Oh, yes, I remember that afternoon at the Apache reservation very well,” said Grobsmith, who taught anthropology at UNL for 25 years and is now the provost at the University of Northern Arizona.

“I remember telling Lawrence and the other students that we were on holy ground and that we needed to be very careful, very respectful. And a few weeks after that, he gave me a print of the photo that he’d taken that day. I had it framed, and it’s an extremely powerful work of art. It’s still hanging on my bedroom wall and it’s very meaningful to me.”

Although she doesn’t remember the moment when the back of the student’s camera “popped open,” Grobsmith said she often thinks about the uncanny spiritual power that she and her students felt on that long-ago day at San Carlos.

“I think we were all deeply affected by that experience,” she said. “And when I saw Lawrence’s photo, I knew he’d been especially touched.

“I think he’s a remarkable artist, and I’m absolutely thrilled to know that he got the Guggenheim in recognition of his extraordinary work over so many years.”

For McFarland, meanwhile, the uncanny incident at San Carlos has become the foundation stone for his philosophy of photographic art. As he loves to tell his students at the University of Texas: “After an incident like that, you begin to realize that infinity’s a whole lot bigger than it used to be!”

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Talking in the “Language” of snakes cFarland was born in Dodge City, M Kansas – the Old West frontier town made famous by lawmen Bat

Masterson and Wyatt Earp – and he grew up watching Saturday afternoon matinees in which legendary gunslingers went toe to toe on Main Street.

“On Saturdays, the big event for me was the movies,” recalled the prize-winning photographer, who’s received three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants in recent years, along with the Guggenheim.

“I’d get my weekly allowance – 15 cents a week, or maybe a quarter – and I’d head off to the matinee.

“The movies were always westerns, and many of ’em were set right in Dodge City.

And I’d see these lush landscapes up there on the screen, with all these gorgeous mountains in the background.”

Emerging from the movie house, however, the youthful McFarland was always surprised to discover again that the High Plains landscape around Dodge City actually consisted of flat grasslands stretching unbroken to the horizon. “I’d come out of the movie and look around,” he said with a chuckle, “and I wouldn’t see any damn mountains anywhere! So I told myself: ‘Okay, they’re probably on the other side of that horizon line.’

“In a way, I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to do with the camera for all these years ... trying to get on the other side of the horizon line, so I can find the mystical landscape that’s surely waiting over there.”

After McFarland’s father moved his family to small-town Oklahoma in order to take a job in a lumberyard, the young photographer began to “feel the passion” that flowed from snapping images of sagging barns and rural dirt roads and peeling signboards that spoke of a distant past.

Meanwhile, he was struggling to survive as a student. After stumbling through a couple of years at two Oklahoma colleges (“I thought in pictures, not words, so I didn’t get very good grades”), McFarland dropped out and began drifting as a solitary hitchhiker who often sang guitar-accompanied folk songs in local bars and cafes. At the same time, he took photographs of Old West landscapes – whenever he had the money to pay for film and developing supplies.

His professional life seemed to be going nowhere ... but then he finally got a major break. When he showed a few of his

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landscape photos to the staff of the famed Kansas City Art Institute, they were so impressed that they immediately offered him a tuition scholarship.

McFarland went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Institute (1973), and then signed on as a grad student in fine arts at UNL. Arriving in Lincoln in the fall of 1973, he was soon deeply involved in studying the two great passions of his professional life: photography and anthropology.

“I have good memories of UNL,” he said, “and that’s because Lincoln was the place where I really got interested in the land as a subject for photography. I was also fortunate because I got to know Norman Geske, who was then the director of the Sheldon [Museum of Art, located on the UNL campus]. I also got to know his excellent assistant, Jon Nelson, and I used to go over there all the time, just to talk with him about their collection of photographs. …

“I spent a lot of time looking at photographs and taking photographs at UNL ... and I got a lot of encouragement from what was a very lively art community in Lincoln. It was inspiring to hang out for several years with talented artists like painter-photographer Keith Jacobshagen, who still lives in Lincoln, and painters like Robin Smith and Harry Orlyk. All of us challenged – and supported – each other constantly.”

It was also at UNL that McFarland began to think of photography as a “language,” he said – as a mode of communication not fundamentally different than the Apache, Navajo and many other languages spoken around the world.

“I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with the Navajos on documentary projects in New Mexico and Arizona,” he said, “and after a while, you realize that they’re simply ‘reading the world’ in a different way than you are.”

To illustrate his point, McFarland described a recent photo assignment in which he accompanied famed Navajo storyteller William B. Tsosie, Jr. on a lengthy hike across a stretch of sun-walloped New Mexico desert. “We were walking along and a snake crossed the trail,” recalled McFarland. “And Will looked at the snake and then he said something like: ‘Okay, we’ve been warned.’ And he was also talking to the snake, telling it something like, ‘All right – don’t you be telling us this now!’

“The point is that this was just Will’s reading of the world around him. For me, a snake had just crossed the path ... but for Will, a friend had just stopped by to give him some advice.

“Our two worlds happened to overlap at that point – and that was exactly the point where I wanted to take photographs. Once again, I guess I was back on that ‘horizon line’ and looking for that next vision over the hill.”

At 68, He’s Still ‘Dancing In The Light’ fter leaving UNL and bouncing A around the American West for a few years – during which he often worked as a

part-time photographer and teacher – McFarland landed a coveted job as a professor of photography at the University of Texas in 1985. He’s been there ever since ... during a 25-year career spent teaching and creating photographs. In recent years, his striking landscape images have been exhibited in galleries from Austin to Oregon to Italy and Germany and beyond.

Married for the past 13 years to Grace Meyer (an ombudsman for the Office of the Texas Attorney General), Lawrence McFarland said he’s grateful to still be enjoying a lifestyle that allows him to travel the Old West almost each summer ... while also visiting Italy frequently to make photographs on the “amazing landscapes” of Tuscany.

“Life is a mystery, and so are the images you can find with your camera. I’m in my late 60s now, and it’s increasingly becoming about old age and death for me. But I still love to jump in my car and hit the road with my camera gear. These days, I often think of making photographs as a way of ‘dancing in the light’ – while doing your best to catch a moment of the dance on film.

“I still go out there for five or six weeks at a time, and I’ll sleep in the back of my Volvo station wagon rather than spend the money on a hotel or motel. I’d rather save it so I can stay out longer. I just make up a little bed in the back of the station wagon. I sleep on it at night, and during the day I’ll put my cameras on it as I drive along the countryside.

“Freedom! All day long, I’m wandering the rural highways of New Mexico or Arizona, and I’m always looking for that next photograph. I’m looking for that next meditation on reality ... for that next vision into dimensions I haven’t seen yet.” n To learn more about Lawrence McFarland’s photos and where you can find them: https:// webspace.utexas.edu/lmcf/public_html/

Capturing the “Mystery” of Landscapes ow do you make a picture of a H thunderstorm, if you want to open a window on its roaring, rain-lashed soul?

For nationally renowned photographer Lawrence McFarland, the strategy was simple: Drive head-on into the raging tempest at 70 miles an hour!

That’s exactly what McFarland did, back in the summer of 1989, when he spotted an onrushing thunder-boomer on Highway 84 in rural New Mexico. Wielding his camera with one hand, the award-winning photographer floored the accelerator on his battered Isuzu Trooper … and then zoomed directly into the eye of the blaster, while creating one remarkable image after the next. (See top photo, “Lightning Storm.”)

Said the 68-year-old McFarland: “That was a great example of what I like to call a ‘Drive-By Shooting.’ The wind was howling and the lightning was almost non-stop. It was pretty intense.”

Hoping to capture the essence of an abandoned outdoor movie screen on Highway 374 in Wyoming, McFarland took a different approach.

“I created that photograph in the middle of the day,” he recalled, “so that the lighting was even and the space around the drive-in got condensed. And I didn’t spend more than 20 minutes making that image, from beginning to end. Why? Because I only take photos when the light tells me it’s time. The gods edit my work; they tell me when it’s time to finish and move on.” (See center photo, “Drive-In Theater.”)

For another classic photograph, “Buffalo, on the High Plains, Kansas,” McFarland barreled past the galloping animal so fast that the image he took ended up a smeary blur.

Inside the blur, however, the great Buffalo’s head looms like a craggy monolith – a vivid symbol of America’s vanished past. (See bottom photo, “Buffalo, on the High Plains.”)

Ask Lawrence McFarland what he’s trying to accomplish by taking these actionoriented images of a world blowing by on the prairie wind, and the Texas-based artist will look you in the eye.

“I like the constant wind you get on the prairie,” he said. “I like the emptiness and the storms that can kill you. The struggle to live. The struggle outside you, and the struggle inside you.

“I don’t know what it means. I don’t. I just want to get it on film, so people can feel it.” n NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 27

QUOTABLE

T

he impact of a university’s alumni body can be measured in many ways – books authored, offices held, discoveries made, records set. A less conventional way of gauging that impact is through the eloquence and resonance of words written or uttered. The alumni of a great institution leave their mark in the very language we speak; to some extent, the story of the school’s influence can be told through famous quotations.

Compiling The Yale Book of Quotations (YBQ) has given me a unique vantage point from which to explore the wit and wisdom of the University of Nebraska. From this book and other research comes an impressive legacy of the university in quotations.

One area in which Cornhuskers have excelled is literature. Willa Cather, class of 1895, was one of the leading American novelists of the early 20th century. Among her better-known lines in The Yale Book of

Quotations are: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

A second notable literary University of Nebraska affiliate was Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Jay Shapiro (faculty member 1956-66), whose verse featured these passages:

“Interpretations of Legal History” (1923)

“More cross-examinations are suicidal than homicidal.”

Emory R. Buckner, 1904, (lawyer and prosecutor), Quoted in Francis L. Wellman, “The Art of Cross-Examination” (1936)

“Our throats were tight as tourniquets.”

“Auto Wreck” (1942)

“Five years unknown to enemy and friend He hid, appearing on the sixth to pose In an American desert at war’s end Where, at his back, a dome of atoms rose.”

“The Progress of Faust” (1958)

“O Pioneers!” (1913)

“I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.”

“Death Comes for the Archbishop” (1927)

Another area in which UNL people have made many contributions is that of politics and law. From a quotational perspective, the name of Theodore “Ted” Sorensen, ’49, J.D. ’51, looms particularly large. Sorensen was a lawyer who served as special counsel and speechwriter to President John F. Kennedy. He is often credited with having “ghost-written” Kennedy’s book, “Profiles in Courage,” and many of JFK’s eloquent speeches, including the Inaugural Address that is regarded as one of the preeminent orations in American history. Sorensen, who died Oct. 31, 2010, steadfastly denied such authorship, but it is reasonable to consider many of Kennedy’s most celebrated quotations at least as joint creations, including these: “We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.”

Speech accepting Democratic presidential nomination, July 15, 1960

“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.”

Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1961

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

Inaugural Address

“All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ [I am a Berliner].”

Remarks in Rudolf Wilde Platz, West Berlin, Germany, June 26, 1963

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Sorensen was by no means the only quotable Nebraska alum in politics and law.

Here are some others: “Law must be stable and yet it cannot stand still.”

Roscoe Pound, 1888, M.A. 1889, Ph.D. 1897, (legal scholar),

“The Constitution and each of the rights that every citizen has under it is precious to every one of us, not just the rights that I like and want for me, or that you like and want for you, but all of them for every man and woman.”

J. Lee Rankin, ’28, LL.B. ’30, (Solicitor General of the United States), Oral argument in Little Rock desegregation case, Aug. 28, 1958

CORNHUSKERS

By Fred R. Shapiro | Editor, The Yale Book of Quotations

In addition to Rankin, many other Nebraska-educated officials and social scientists were leaders in the struggle for civil rights. One of them wrote the following general statement about the nonhereditary nature of human behavior: “When we see two people whom we know to be equally gifted by nature so different in their response to the world and in their ability to enjoy life, we need no statistics to prove to us the importance of environment.”

Margaret W. Curti, 1913, A.M. ’15, “Child Psychology” (1938)

UNL achievements in science, both natural and social, are reflected in other quotes: “A society … which is riven by a dozen oppositions along lines running in every direction, may actually be in less danger of being torn with violence or falling to pieces than one split along just one line. For each new cleavage contributes to narrow the cross clefts, so that one might say that society is sewn together by its inner conflicts.”

Edward A. Ross (sociologist and faculty member 1901-06, doing his most important intellectual work at the University of Nebraska),

“In the year 1902 … becoming interested in the new theory of the electron, and combining this idea with those which are implied in the periodic classification, I formed an idea of the inner structure of the atom which … I have ever since regarded as representing essentially the arrangement of electrons in the atom.”

Gilbert N. Lewis, attended 1891-93, (chemist), “Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules” (1923)

“If there is magic in this planet, it is contained in water.”

Loren Eiseley, ’33, (naturalist), “The Immense Journey” (1957)

Cornhuskers in business include one of the most successful and respected figures of the contemporary era, investor-executive-philanthropist Warren Buffett, ’50, whose renowned sayings include: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

Quoted in U.S. News & World Report, June 21, 1993

Finally, a romp through the University of Nebraska’s quotation history turns up two extremely well-known lines that were uttered about Nebraska graduates.

First is perhaps the most famous quote of World War I, by Colonel Charles E. Stanton upon the arrival of the first American troops to join the Allied forces. Speaking at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris on July 4, 1917, Stanton said: Lafayette, nous voila!

[Lafayette, we are here!]

The American forces were led by General John J. Pershing, J.D. 1893, (later the only six-star general in the history of the United States Army), so this can be considered to be a quotation about a Cornhusker.

Second is the famed line intoned countless times by sidekick Ed McMahon about host Johnny Carson, ’49, on The Tonight Show: “He-e-ere’s … Johnny!”

In 2006 the TV Land network ranked this as number one on its list of “The 100 Greatest TV Quotes and Catch Phrases” of all time.

“The Principles of Sociology” (1920)

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During more than 30 years of groundbreaking research on chemical and biological weaponry, Dr. Marie Chevrier has studied some of the world’s most frightening agents of destruction. An internationally recognized expert on preventing the spread of such brutal killers as sarin nerve gas and “weaponized” anthrax, she was an important figure in helping shape the current versions of two international treaties that outlaw chemical and biological weapons.

After contributing to an influential non-governmental organization that won the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, Chevrier continues to advise governments and weapons-control think tanks around the globe on issues related to non-proliferation.

For a researcher who works daily in a world threatened by weapons of mass destruction, Chevrier is surprisingly upbeat and hopeful … while insisting that we can stop the spread of these lethal agents and thus prevent the unthinkable from happening. Her take-home message, in exactly 18 words: “We must demand openness from our government, and we must never allow secrecy about weapons to go unchallenged.”

By Tom Nugent

t was the kind of “Apocalypse Now” incident that an international expert on chemical weapons fears the most.

The date was March 20, 1995 ... and Dr. Marie Chevrier (B.A. ’72) – a professor of public policy at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) and one of the world’s foremost authorities on preventing the spread of biological and chemical weaponry – was in the middle of taking her morning shower.

Suddenly, there was a loud knocking on her bathroom door.

It was her husband, fellow UTD public policy professor Paul A. Jargowsky, and he had just been listening to a news roundup on National Public Radio.

As she worked to rinse the shampoo out of her hair, the former UNL psychology major was startled to hear her husband shouting through the door: “Marie ... terrorists just released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway and five people are dead.”

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 31

Wrapped in a towel and with her hair still wringing wet, the amazed weapons researcher made it out to the living room in record time.

Paul had the TV going by now, and the CNN report they watched together was frightening in the extreme.

As it turned out, a group of Japanese terrorists – a notorious and radical religious sect known as Aum Shinrikyo, or “Supreme Truth” – had just released deadly sarin nerve gas on several subway trains.

The brutally potent gas (a pinhead-sized drop is enough to kill the average person) had been contained in plastic packets left on the floors of the subway cars. The bags had then been punctured with the metal tips of umbrellas carried by five members of the sect.

The results were horrific, to say the least.

The nerve agent ultimately killed 13 passengers. More than 900 of the injured endured several hours of temporary blindness as the lethal substance interrupted their vision by blocking neuron signaling along the optic nerve and in the brain.

At first glance, the list of casualties in the Tokyo attack seems terrifying in the extreme. But Chevrier’s first reaction to the news was actually skepticism; given the enormous toxicity of sarin, she found it hard to believe that the damage had been so light.

“When Paul first told me that there were five dead,” she recalled during a recent interview with Nebraska Magazine in her Dallas office, “I told him: It can’t have been nerve gas – there aren’t enough dead people on the scene.

“Sarin is one of the most toxic substances in the world, and if it had been of good quality and had been dispersed more effectively, it could easily have killed hundreds – if not thousands – of subway riders that day. Thankfully, the stuff these terrorists used was of poor quality, and they didn’t really understand how to convert it from a liquid to an aerosol. They wound up leaving small puddles of it on the floor, and this is a heavy gas that evaporates very slowly.

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“There’s no doubt that many people in Tokyo dodged a bullet that day ... and although the tragedy was very real for those who were harmed, most of the potential victims were very lucky to escape.”

For Marie Chevrier (pronounced Chevree-AY), a Harvard University Ph.D. in public policy whose studies of chemical and biological weapons (and how to prevent their spread) have contributed significantly to shaping several international treaties aimed at controlling these apocalyptic agents, the “close brush with catastrophe” in Tokyo was a stark reminder of the huge security challenges we now face.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the importance of preventing the use of nerve gas or smallpox as weapons,” she said. “On the other hand, I’m actually rather hopeful about our chances for accomplishing that task.

“After the Tokyo attacks, a number of weapons experts were warning that this was ‘only the beginning’ ... and that we were going to be seeing a lot more of these kinds of episodes in the days ahead. I disagreed then, and I still disagree.

Weapons Convention treaty (ratified by the United States in 1998), the risk that nationstates will one day use chemical and biological weaponry for mass destruction is actually much greater than the risk presented by individual terrorists.

“People tend to get very excited, very alarmed about terrorism,” she explained, “but I still think the major challenge we face today is keeping countries and armies from developing or producing these weapons.”

Then, with a bright smile that reflects her surprisingly cheerful and laughterloving temperament: “Really, I think it’s important to keep your perspective on all this stuff. At times, I think all of us who work in the field are tempted to get carried away on visions of doom and gloom.

“But there’s actually a great deal of evidence out there to show that we can control these weapons and that we can prevent the unthinkable from ever happening.”

To buttress her argument, she described the remarkable fact that both Brazil and Argentina voluntarily halted their nuclear weapons development programs in the 1980s.

“A lot of people were surprised when they made the decision to give up their nuclear ambitions,” she recalled. “But those two countries decided they didn’t want to contribute to the arms race – and they signed the [1970] Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty [which now includes 189 nations] quite happily. They opted for peace and security, rather than weaponry, and that sent an important message all across the globe.”

Then, with a peal of the ringing laughter for which she’s well-known on the campus of the University of Texas at Dallas: “I do think we all need to keep our cool, even on a topic as grim-sounding as biological and chemical weapons.

“Except for the anthrax attacks in this country right after 9/11, we’ve actually seen very little in the way of chemical or biological terrorism around the world.”

“If you think about it, you realize that we’ve actually been pretty successful at preventing the use of these awful weapons, and I do expect that to continue.

According to the 59-year-old Chevrier, whose efforts were important in getting the U.S. Senate to approve the 1992 Chemical

“As I often like to tell my students, the most dangerous thing I do each day is to drive across Dallas on I-635!”

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he was born in Detroit but left there at the age of one and then grew up in the “wonderful little town” of Humphrey, Nebraska (Pop. 800), located “at the intersection of 81 and 91,” about a hundred miles west of Lincoln. In those days, little Humphrey was “a very interesting place” ... a wild and woolly crossroads where her father – a highspirited and hard-drinking FrenchCanadian immigrant named Rolland Chevrier – enjoyed a legendary status as the longtime operator of “Rolland’s Tavern.”

and the killings at Kent State University convulsed many American campuses, the idealistic Chevrier was in full-fledged revolt.

“That was certainly a different world,” Marie said, “and my two sisters and I grew up as pretty independent-minded kids. I can remember driving this battered old Jeep around the countryside at the age of ten.

For the youthful Chevrier, a crucially important lesson had been learned, even before the start of her sophomore year: Think for yourself; don’t let other people make up your mind for you.

“I had a good friend, Susie Van Ackeren, who lived on a nearby farm, and she was all of 11 ... and whenever she could, she’d take her father’s Jeep and we’d go out and herd cattle with it. We’d be bouncing along as merry as you please, with the cows all stampeding in front of us, and we thought it was the most natural thing in the world!”

Along with Jeep-herding cattle and occasionally locking horns with the nuns who ran her local Catholic grade school (St. Francis), Marie soon discovered a “magical place” that would change her life: the public library. A bright and creative student, she also began to shine in the classroom ... and nobody was very surprised when she won an all-tuition-paid Regents Scholarship to UNL. Arriving on campus in the summer of 1969, she was amazed by the buzzing intellectual curiosity – and the growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment – that was flaring all around her. By the spring of 1970, when the U.S. invaded Cambodia

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“That was an amazing time to be a college kid,” she remembers. “It was just a total ferment. My friends and I took over the ROTC building on the night of the Kent State shootings. I remember sitting on the floor all night, and then going back home to Humphrey wearing a black armband against the war. My dad questioned me about it and I just railed at him.”

That lesson was underlined in glowing neon a couple of years later, when UNL gave Chevrier “the educational experience of a lifetime” – a chance to spend an entire year studying abroad at the University of Bordeaux in France.

“From Humphrey to Paris in one leap!” said Marie, and her eyes gleamed with joyful nostalgia as she recalled her year of “soaking up French” on the streets and in the art galleries and cafes of her adopted country.

After double-majoring in psychology and French (she graduated in only three years), Chevrier went on to attend law school for a couple of years at the University of Washington in Seattle. But when she was offered a chance to manage a local rape crisis center (after serving as a legal aide there), she jumped at it.

What followed were five hard-edged and struggling years of exhausting work, as she labored to help battered women whose lives had been blighted by physical and sexual violence. Energized and deeply motivated by her experiences with rape victims, Chevrier sat down and asked herself how she could best contribute to the cause of peace and justice.

She wound up a year later as a master’s candidate – and eventually as a Ph.D. grad student in public policy at Harvard University. There she grew increasingly interested in international political issues ... and eventually in issues related to the spread of super-dangerous chemical and biological weapons.

Recruited by the University of Texas at Dallas (along with her professor-husband Paul Jargowsky, an urban affairs expert whom she’d met in the Harvard Ph.D. program), she landed in Dallas in 1991 and has been teaching and conducting worldclass public policy research ever since.

“I think I’m extremely fortunate to have been able to study at the graduate-school level at Harvard,” she said, “and I certainly learned a great deal from terrific professors like [the Nobel Prize-winning economist] Thomas Schelling, who was an expert on finding ways to prevent the spread of weapons and also an enthusiastic and supportive mentor.

“But I’m also very grateful to UNL, which is where I first got to learn about the world by studying in France ... and also where I started learning how to think for myself.”

uring her past 25 years as a weapons non-proliferation researcher and educator, Chevrier has distinguished herself by providing huge quantities of useful data to various international bodies dedicated to preventing the spread of chemical and biological weapons. Some examples: n As a member of the highly regarded Pugwash Study Group non-governmental think tank on limiting the use of these weapons, Chevrier helped develop recommendations that continue to play a crucial role in shaping the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty, which went into effect (with powerful inspection provisions in place) in 1998. (The Pugwash Group won the Nobel Prize in 1995, in large part because of its contribution to halting the spread of nuclear and chemical weapons.) n As a longtime member (and today the board chair) of the influential BioWeapons Prevention Program (BWPP), Chevrier has become a world leader in recent years in the struggle to develop inspection protocols that could put teeth in the international treaty (the Biological Weapons Convention of 1975) which currently attempts to control the spread and potential use of such vicious killers as “weaponized” anthrax and smallpox. n Perhaps her most important contribution to the field was the successful educational initiative she launched back in the mid-1990s, when she helped convince several members of the U.S. Senate to support the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty.

“We sat down and strategized,” Chevrier recalled with a delighted laugh, “and we asked ourselves how we could convince [former Nebraska Republican Senator] Chuck Hagel to get behind the treaty.

“Well, that one was easy. First of all, I told my colleagues, Chuck is from Nebraska. And he’s also a very thoughtful and open-minded legislator. But the best part of all is – he used to sit around my Aunt Clara’s dining room table in Columbus, and when one of my cousins got married, Chuck was the best man!

“With all of that going for us, how could we miss? And we didn’t. Chuck was very courageous on that vote, and in the end, he really helped to carry the day.”

During so many years of battling against the spread of hideous weapons of mass destruction, Marie Chevrier could easily have become a burned-out cynic. But she’s actually the opposite of cynical. As the busy mother of two young-adult children and also a determined outdoorswoman who recently took up sailing with her husband of 23 years, Chevrier said she’s feeling more hopeful and more optimistic about the future than ever before.

Describing her outlook on the future of arms control, Chevrier readily admits that there will be setbacks in the days ahead, and they will sometimes be quite painful.

“Still, I’m very hopeful,” she said. Why? “Because I think we can build the rational, inspection-based control mechanisms we need to stop the deployment of these weapons ... and because I think most people are basically good at heart and interested in doing what they can to try and create a just and peaceful world.

“If I have a take home-message, it’s simply that we must demand openness from our government, and we must never allow secrecy about weapons to go unchallenged.” n

Her husband said that “staying upbeat and cheerful about things” is simply part of her nature. “As long as I’ve known her, Marie has had this innate capacity to deal with even the most difficult problems while remaining cheerfully undaunted,” said Paul Jargowsky. “She came to Harvard as a young woman from small-town Nebraska, but she strolled right onto campus and took over. And she’s spent her entire career working in arms control, which had always been a realm dominated by men.

“But she didn’t let that slow her down for a moment. She cares very deeply about this issue – and she simply refuses to let herself be intimidated by anyone, regardless of their rank or reputation.”

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE

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uring her 25-plus years as an educator and researcher dedicated to preventing the spread of chemical and biological weapons, Marie Chevrier has studied some of the deadliest – and most horrifying – agents of destruction in the modern world.

Among the most hideous of the “weaponized” chemical and biological agents that she’s fought against are three especially noxious substances with enormously destructive power, if they should ever be unleashed by assailants who know how to use them effectively.

Two of the agents are biological: weaponized anthrax bacteria and smallpox virus. Anthrax was used to killing effect soon after 9/11, when five envelopes containing a specialized form of the bacterium were sent through the U.S. mail system. The anthrax produced 23 cases of the disease and killed five people in October of 2001, and the perpetrator has never been apprehended or prosecuted. The type of anthrax used in the attacks was

traced to a US biodefense lab that produced biological weapons before President Nixon terminated the offensive program in 1969.

Thankfully, no weaponized smallpox has ever been used against a human population – although the former Soviet Union did maintain a military program of smallpox weapons research, development and production in the years before the breakup of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s.

Smallpox is an extremely virulent human virus that causes disfiguring rashes and blisters. It was responsible for nearly 500 million human deaths in the 20th century alone. The disease kills an estimated 30-50 percent of the adults it infects, and about 80 percent of the children who contract it. This ancient enemy of humankind had been eradicated worldwide in the early 1970s – shortly before the Soviets began preserving and developing strains of the virus in their military laboratories.

The third deadly agent is sarin nerve gas, a chemical weapon that paralyzes the respiratory tract and triggers rapid, agonizing death in most of its victims, if they are fully contaminated. Sarin was released in the Tokyo subway by a group of religious terrorists in 1995, killing five passengers and injuring about 1,000 others. There is no ready antidote for sarin, and the nerve agent is so powerful that a drop the size of a pinhead can kill a human being almost instantly.

After studying – and working to eradicate – these ghastly weapons for the past several decades, Chevrier makes a compelling point: “Whatever it takes, we have to make certain that these terrible agents are never used against people, by terrorists or state governments. The stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.” n

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