Span: December 1994

The Workaday World of

Doctor John Bartlett

Chasing News Stories •

IDa

Wheelchair Balancing PowerWith Diplomacy Feminism's Identity Crisis

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One of the encouraging developments that makes headlines alongside all the stories of calamities, natural and unnatural, besetting the world these days is the spread of democratic government. This phenomenon will be underscored December 9-11 when the democratically elected leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere countries gather in Miami, Florida, for a "Summit of the Americas" to discuss how democracy has been made to work, and how to make it prosper and endure.

We have prepared a short synopsis of the issues that inform this historic gathering as a follow-on to an article

by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who discusses the need to balance power with diplomacy. In this context, Lake justifies such actions as the U.S. military incursion into Haiti, a country that will be represented at the Summit now that its democratically elected President has been restored.

To the long list of annual days established to commemorate worthy causes-such as World Population Day, Human Rights Day, and International Day of Peace-has been added World AIDS Day, which was marked on the first of this month. The World Bank used the occasion to call for a major increase in funding to fight AIDS and to launch a new campaign to provide financial support to those countries most affected by this tragic disease.

It is astonishing that despite the immense accomplishments of science and technology, we are confronted with a disease of epidemic proportions for which no cure is known. And this despite the fact that "we know more about HIV than any other virus in history," according to Max Essex, Harvard University's top AIDS expert who, in our first of four articles on the subject this month, discusses the search for an AIDS vaccine. He also issues a warning to world governments and international organizations that without greater support, development of a vaccine will be delayed indefinitely, with devastating consequences.

Many people, contending that AIDS is limited only to certain groups and that other diseases around the world claim far more lives, seem to believe that too much fuss is being made over this disease. What is not adequately understood is the degree to which AIDS is spreading through all strata of society, including children, and the fact that it affects adults in their most economically productive years when, often, they are the sole support of their families.

Those on the front lines of the battle against AIDS are the physicians who treat AIDS patients daily. We have an in-depth portrait of one of them, Dr. John Bartlett, the man pictured on our cover, and a short report on a book written by Dr. Abraham Verghese, a doctor of Indian origin, discussing his experience treating AIDS patients in a small, southern American town. Though there is little good news in the saga of AIDS, Pallava Bagla reports encouragingly on the numerous cooperative efforts under way as India and America join forces to fight this epidemic.

2 The Hunt for an AIDS Vaccine

7

by Max Essex

The Workaday World of Doctor John Bartlett

by Ann K. Finkbeiner

11 AIDS in India

12

by Pal/ava Bagla

A Town, Its People, and AIDS

13 Dying Metaphors Take Flight

14

Globe-trotting in a Wheelchair

16

Of Wings and Wheels

by Cathleen Schine

by Janet Cawley

by Banjay Bhatnagat

18 Balancing Power With DiplomacyAn American Perspective

by Antho~y Lake

Summit of the Americas Sunday River Skiing Focus On...

Feminism's Identity Crisis The Class of '69

by Miriam Horn

The Single Woman-Hollywood's

Fatal Attraction

by Vasantha K. Krishnaraj

44 American Library Turns 50 by Vera Sharma 46 The Saga of Wankaner House by Digvijay Sinh Front cover: Dr. John Bartlett is chief of the infectious diseases division of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

Publisher, Thomas A. Homan; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Assistant Managing Editor, Swaraj Chauhan; Senior Editor,.Amrita Kumar; Copy Editors. A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistant, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor. Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover-USIA. 2-3-posters courtesy National AIDS Control Organization. 7, 9-USIA. 17left-Avinash Pasricha; right-eourtesy Sanjay Bhatnagar.

22-27-Gary Guisinger. 28 bottom left-Avinash Pasricha; right-R.K. Sharma. 34-35courtesy of the White House. 37 top right and bottom-Joanna B. Pinneo-Aurora; B. Pinneo-Aurora; botcenter-Richard KalvarfMagnum. 40 top & center-Joanna tom-Michael O'Neill. 42-43-eourtesy Movie Star News. 44-45-USIS Bombay. 464h-top & bottom left-eourtesy Digvijay Sinh; bottom row-Preeti Bedi. Inside back cover-Digvijay Sinh. Back cover-School of Visual Arts, New York.

Published by the United States Jnformatio~ Service, American Center. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad~ Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflecJ the views or policies of ,the U.S. Government. Use o/SPAN articles in other publications isencouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price o/magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120 (Rs. 110 for students); single copy, Rs. 12.

Though the biomedical obstacles have been unprecedented, cooperative ventures between the public and private sectors could bring AIDS vaccines to market within three to five years.

I

the n next decade, tens of millions of people around the world will become infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS. Once infected, each individual will have an average offive to ten years to live.

Existing treatments cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per person, yet they purchase just one or two more years of life. By contrast, a vaccine to prevent HIV infection would save not only lives but also money. costing $100 or less to administer.

Scientists have struggled for ten years to develop an AIDS vaccine, without significant result. But today we know more about HIV than any other virus in history-far more than scientists knew about polio or hepatitis B when they created vaccines for these viruses-and we have made remarkable progress toward overcoming the biomedical obstacles involved. Still, to prevent a major expansion of the pandemic, including the spread of new strains, vaccine researchers will have to target the disease in areas where it is growing most rapidly.

More Than One Vaccine HIV is a retrovirus that attacks and eventually destroys the immune system by causing a progressive loss of T helper lymphocytes. (A lymphocyte is a kind of immune cell that circulates in the blood; T helper lymphocytes, known as T4 cells, are required to activate most types of immune responses.) Nearly all adults who become infected with HIV remain healthy for four to six years before developing the first signs of disease. This period of dormancy may represent an initial immune response that emporarily restrains the virus. During this first phase of infection,

fewer than one in a thousand T4 cells is infected; fewer than one in a thousand of these infected cells actually procreate at any particular time. Within eight to ten years of infection, however, the proportion of infected T4 cells begins to rise.

Eventually, the virus's rate of replication exceeds the body's ability to replace damaged cells. Free virus spills over into the blood, and immune functions are lost.

Throughout the course of infection, the genetic makeup of the virus is constantly changing. HIV mutates much faster than other viruses. Mutations may occur in the genes that dictate the kinds of proteins that form the virus's core or surface or in the regulatory genes that determine how rapidly the virus replicates. When mutations alter the virus's core or surface proteins, the biological properties of the virus may change. It may become more adept at infecting T4 cells or causing immune-cell pathology, making the virus more lethal. Other genetic changes may make it easier for the virus to evade the body's immune surveillance, even when it doesn't kill the immune cells themselves.

New mutants may eventually emerge too fast for the immune system to respond.

This may be one reason that the period of dormancy ultimately gives way to more severe infection.

The fact that HIV mutates so rapidly within its host means that more than one vaccine will almost certainly need to be developed. An infected person may harbor one version of the virus in the reproductive tract while a more mature version circulates in the blood. Thus the virus this individual might transmit through heterosexual intercourse is different from the virus he or she might transmit by sharing needles or through other blood-to-blood contact. A mature virus that can be maintained by blood-to-blood transmission may then lose some of the genetic characteristics needed for heterosexual transfer. As a result of this genetic variation, a vaccine targeting bloodto-blood transmission will have to defeat a different version of the virus than a vaccine intended to prevent heterosexual transfer.

In addition, because the genetic makeup of HIV varies across regions as well as within individuals, different vaccines will be

needed to defeat the virus in different regions ofthe¡world. At least nine subtypes of HIV-I (the main type of HIV), labeled A through I, have been identified in various parts of the world. So far, only one subtype-B-has been found in the United States. Most people infected with subtype B were exposed through homosexual contact or intravenous drug use. As a result, subtype B, which has been in the West for 15 to 20 years, is not well adapted to heterosexual transmission.

Several other subtypes of HIV -I predominate in different regions of subSaharan Africa. In western India, the dominant subtype is C; in Thailand, the dominant subtype is E. Subtypes found in Africa and Asia seem to be more easily transmissible between heterosexuals: More than 90 percent of Africans and Asians with HIV became infected by heterosexual contact. (HIV-2, the second major virus type found to cause AIDS, occurs primarily in West Africa; it is a much lower priority for vaccine development because it is far less prevalent than HIV-I, is transmitted less efficiently, and is less lethal. The same vaccine will probably not work for both viruses.)

Although the genetic makeup of different strains within a given HIV subtype may vary by up to ten or 15 percent, antibodies that neutralize one will usually neutralize another.

Between subtypes, however, such cross-reactivity is minimal.

The amino acid sequences of the core and envelope proteins of different HIV subtypes may vary as much as 20 or 30 percent. To boost the chances of success, then, different vaccines will have to be made for each subtype.

An individual's best chance for protection against any infection requires a vaccine prepared from a virus that exactly matches the virus to which he or she will be exposed-in particular, the piece of the virus that attaches to the host cell. This is why a new influenza vaccine is provided for each flu outbreak.

But the HIV found in two different people can differ even more than flu viruses found in two distinct flu epidemics.

Take the hypothetical example of an American man who becomes infected with HIV through Factor VIII, a clotting

factor used to treat his hemophilia. What variables should researchers consider in developing a vaccine to protect the man's wife? If SOUTH AMERICA a vaccme were prepared from a virus that perfectly matched that of the husband's in terms of viral subtype, transmission route, strain, and gene sequence, the wife might have a 90 percent chance of protection if she were exposed by the same route. But she would be exposed through semen, not blood-the route through which her husband was infected. This difference might reduce the protection rate to, say, 80 to 85 percent. If the vaccine preparation were made from a viral strain from the same region of the country where the Factor VIII donors reside, as opposed to the exact virus from the exact donor, the odds might decrease to 70 to 75 percent. Ifit derived from a virus in another part of the country, the protection rate might fall to 60 to 65 percent.

If the vaccine were prepared using an African or Asian subtype, the odds of protection might be as low as 30 to 50 percent.

Creating an AIDS Vaccine Like any other vaccine, an AIDS vaccine must stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies that will prevent the virus from bonding to the host cell. The first step in creating an AIDS vaccine, then, is to identify the tiny site on the virus's surface that latches on to the host cell. This is the surface protein, from which the vaccine will ultimately be made.

Like the proteins that cover the surfaces of other complex viruses, these proteins have sugars attached to them and so are called glycoproteins. The glycoproteins on the surface of HI V consist of two surface molecules that resemble a golfball on a tee-gpl20 is the ball, while gp41 is the tee. Together, they are known as gp160. Only a small, discrete region of the gpl20 glycoprotein forms the bond with the target cell.

In 1985, Tun¡Hou Lee, then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and I identi-

Some nine subtypes of the H IV-I virus infect people in different regions. ( Black circles indicate that the subtype is prevalent.

The I subtype, only recently identified. is nOIsholVn.) Differelit vaccines will likely be needed to defeat each subtype.

fied the proteins on the outer surface of HIV. At the same time, other scientists were working on the other half of the puzzle: Identifying the host cell attacked

by HIV and discovering the receptor molecule on the surface of the cell, to which the virus bonds. In 1985, Steve McDougal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, showed that the virus preferentially attacked T4 cells by attaching to a receptor called CD4, which is expressed at high density on the surface of T4 cells and has a high affinity for gp120.

These discoveries set the stage for the initial efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine. In the late 1980s, U.S. and European companies such as MicroGeneSys, Genentech, and ImmunoAg began to prepare vaccine prototypes, using the same basic techniques as those used to develop vaccines for diseases such as hepatitis B. Most of the prototypes are made from gp 120 or gp 160 and expressed using bioengineering techniques in mammalian cells, yeast cells, or insect cells.

So far, these prototypes have failed to produce a strong immune response. Indeed, in June the U.S. government shelved plans to launch large-scale tests of two AIDS vaccines after a panel of 35 scientists predicted that they were likely to protect no more than 30 to 40 percent of potential vaccinees.

Although the prototype vaccines succeed in stimulating the production of antibodies, only a small proportion of these antibodies manage to block the segments of the gp 120 molecule where attachment occurs. These are probably the only antibodies that will be able to defend against HIV infection. The rest of the antibodies are directed at blocking other parts of the gp 120 molecule, and so

provide no immune protection. What's more, while other sites on the gp 120 molecule are able to stimulate the production of large num bers of antibodies, the stra tegically important sites are far less effective at inducing an immune response.

The problem of weak or diversionary antibodies is unique to HIV infection.

With other viruses, such as those that cause flu or polio, the presence of antibodies that react with the virus indicates some level of immune protection. A vaccine that succeeds in mimicking the virus well enough to trick the immune system into producing a large number of antibodies will then protect subjects against infection. With HIV, however, both infection and vaccination produce high concentrations of largely useless antibodies. To make current vaccines effective, then, researchers must find ways to boost the immune response these vaccines produce, either by stimulating an increase in the overall production of antibodies or by eliminating the parts of the vaccine molecule that generate useless antibodies.

Innovative Approaches Some scientists hope to improve the performance of AIDS vaccines by mixing in a better generic immune stimulant, or adjuvant, to enhance the effectiveness of the specific antigen~the virus or piece of virus used to provoke immune response. By boosting the overall production of antibodies, these adjuvants would presumably increase the number of protective antibodies, thereby augmenting the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Adjuvants are not particular to any given vaccine, but can be used with vaccines for diseases from tetanus to flu. The only adjuvant currently used in human beings is aluminum hydroxide, which is relatively weak. Several researchers are now preparing to test new types of adjuvants for use with AIDS vaccines. One of the most promising is a stimulant developed by Charlotte Read Kensil of Cambridge Biotech. Known as QS21, it is a purified complex carbohydrate drawn from the bark of the South American soapbark tree, Quillaja saponaria. The new adjuvant has already been shown to

work well with the feline leukemia vaccine and is now ready for human trials. Once tested for efficacy and safety, it may be used with AIDS vaccines.

Better stimulants could improve the performance of almost any existing vaccine. For instance, the hepatitis B vaccine offers only about 85 percent protection against initial infection. Improved adjuvants might boost the proportion of cases covered to 95 percent.

Another important new approach under way is to redesign the antigen used in manufacturing the vaccine. Scientists are using genetic engineering techniques to delete the regions of the gp 120 molecule that induce useless, interfering, or diversionary antibodies and to enhance the display of regions of the molecule that induce the production of neutralizing antibodies.

The production of weak or useless antibodies results from the density and distribution of sugars on the surface protein ofHIV. The greater the degree of such glycosylation on a virus's surface, the weaker the host's ability to mount an immune response to a given virus. In HIV infection, glycosylation is a major problem: Unlike other viral antigens used as vaccines, the gp 120 molecule is at least half sugar.

Some sugars are attached to gpl20 in such a way that they make it fit perfectly with the host cell receptor, like a lock and key. These sites help the virus survive by making it more infectious. A bioengineered vaccine molecule should preserve these sugar structures so that the antibodies created in response to the vaccine will also fit the virus perfectly. Other sugars, however, coat the entire molecule, creating a shield that makes it less effective at inducing any protective response at all~a process known as sugar masking.

These sites should be deleted to enhance the body's immune response.

So far, vaccine researchers have grown bioengineered gp 120 or gp 160 vaccines either in mammalian cells, where the glycosylation process is most natural and thus more likely to preserve attachment sites, or in insect or yeast cells, where fewer sugars are added and the effects of sugar masking are minimized. Neither solution has worked well: Vaccines grown

in mammalian cells do not solve the sugar masking problem, thus eliciting fewer antibodies, and vaccines made in insect or yeast cells do not generate antibodies that fit the virus well enough.

A more promising approach is to bioengineer a gp 120 molecule that preserves the "good" sugars but eliminates the "bad" ones. The first step is to discover which sugars should be preserved and which deleted. Tun-Hou Lee, now a professor of virology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently mapped and analyzed all the sugar sites on gp 120. He found that of24 sites, about half maintain the same position even among different strains and subtypes ofHIV. He reasoned that these sites must be essential to the virus's survival. And indeed, six of these 12 sites appear to help the virus infect human lymphocytes cultured in vitro. He concluded that these sites must be involved in maintaining the three-dimensional structure of the virus surface, while the other six must shield the molecule from the immune system.

Lee has now bioengineered new gp 120 molecules to preserve the "desirable" sugar molecules and delete those that interfere with immune stimulation. A vaccine using the redesigned molecule is now ready for the first stage of clinical evaluation. If it works as expected, it promises to selectively generate protective antibodies, making it far more effective than other gpl20 and gpl60 prototype vaccines now being developed.

Although Lee invented this new approach to address the particular problems posed by HIV, a number of other illnesses, from malaria to schistosomiasis, have similarly resisted traditional methods of vaccine preparation. Most of these infections have not been considered important enough to warrant major research investments, since other methods of prevention or treatment are available.

Lee's technique may lead to powerful new vaccines for such diseases.

Taken together, these two innovations~ a more effective adjuvant and a redesigned antigen~promise to boost significantly the level of immune protection provided by any

particular vaccine. But to maximize protection against HIV, a variety of vaccines will still be needed, based on the specific epidemiological variables-subtype, stage of infection, and route of transmissionthat characterize HIV infection within different target populations.

Testing in the Right Places Today, more than a dozen prototype AIDS vaccines have been tested for safety; three or four are ready for largescale human trials to determine efficacy.

So far, however, all of the current prototypes address the major epidemiological variables in the same way: Most were prepared from viruses taken from American or European patients with advanced AIDS who contracted the disease through drug use or homosexual transmission. At the time these samples were drawn, in the 1980s, researchers simply did not realize the degree or importance of genetic variation in HIV. As a result, the vaccines developed from these sample viruses are best suited to protect against subtype B, and against blood-borne ra ther than heterosexually transmitted infections. (Male homosexual intercourse is sometimes considered blood-borne rather than sexual transmission because the virus is likely to enter the bloodstream directly, as a result of tears and bleeding in the rectum.) Moreover, because they target genotypes found in later rather than earlier stages of infection, all the vaccine antigens now being developed are better adapted to therapeutic usesboosting the immune response of people who are already infected-than to preventing infection in the first place.

So far, companies have proven unwilling to invest in the development or testing of preventive vaccines for heterosexuals in developing countries, despite the fact that such individuals will account for 90 percent of the 50 million new infections anticipated in the coming decade. Western manufacturers see little chance that the investment in a vaccine for use in developing countries would payoff. Because the process of producing an AIDS vaccine is so complex, the ultimate product is likely to cost something like $100

WOMEN

MEN The incidence o{ A IDS is expecled 10 rise dral1lalically in Ihe neXI several years, \1'ilh al leasl 90 percen I of nell' infeclions occurring in Ihe developing world. All Ihe AIDS vaccines nOli' in clinical Irials are hased on viruses laken Fom American and European palienls and lI'ill/wl be eflec1ive in olher regions such as Aji-ica.

1994 NORTH AMERICA WESTER EUROPE OCEA IA LA TIN AMERICA SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA CARlBBEA EASTERN EUROPE S.E. MEDITERRANEAN NORTHEAST ASIA SOUTHEAST ASIA TOTAL WORLD

per dose, well beyond the price range of most people in developing nations.

The corporations sponsoring vaccine research also favor the development of therapeutic vaccines over the development of preventive vaccines. Even though it is more difficult to make a therapeutic vaccine-it's hard to generate an immune response strong enough to control or reverse an infection that is already established-therapeutic vaccines are likely to be more profitable because frequent doses oflarge amounts of vaccine protein will be needed to maintain immune protection. A preventive vaccine would need to be administered only once or a few times.

Research on a therapeutic vaccine, moreover, is not likely to bring us much closer to a preventive vaccine. It is impossible to tell whether a vaccine might boost immune responses in a healthy person by testing it, on a person whose immune system is already compromised.

For example, the fact that an experimental vaccine fails to stimulate antibody production in an infected person might simply mean that the patient's immune system is damaged. The vaccine would need to be tested all over again to determine whether it would work better in a person whose immune system was intact.

It is essential that researchers redouble their efforts to develop preventive vaccines, and that these new prototypes be based on HTV subtypes found in Africa and Asia. Because the rates of new infections in many A-frican and Asian countries are so much higher than in North

1996

1994

1996

963,000

1,087,000

160,000

181,000

545,000 24,000 1,002,000 6,411,000

691,000 28,000 1,182,000

109,000 3,000 250,000

138,000 3,000 295,000

225,000 25,000 47,000 77,000 1,968,000

7,881,000 280,000 30,000 59,000 149,000 6,236,000

7,052,000 150,000 3,000 9,000 15,000 984,000

8,670,000 187,000 3,000 12,000 30,000 3,118,000

11,287,000

17,623,000

8,737,000

12,637,000

America and Europe, prototypes targeting these subtypes can be tested much more quickly than prototypes targeting subtype B. When rates of infection are high, far fewer participants are needed to show positive results, and the process takes far less time. For example, if the rate of new infections is ten percent, as it is for some populations in Thailand, Uganda, and Rwanda, we could demonstrate with statistical confidence that a vaccine candidate protected 60 percent of the vaccinees if it reduced the rate of new infections from 100 to 40 in a vaccinated population of 1,000. If the rate of new infections is 0.1 percent, as it may be in some U.S. populations, obtaining the same information in the same time period would require 100,000 vaccinees.

By testing a smaller number of participants in countries like those mentioned above, researchers could save money, time, and ultimately lives. Several small trials could be conducted for the cost of conducting a single large-scale trial in the West, allowing researchers to gain information about the effectiveness of different viral strains, adjuvants, molecular configurations, doses, and methods of administration.

Testing prototype vaccines in countries where HIV is spreading most rapidly could significantly reduce the amount of time it will take us to arrive at a workable HIV vaccine-time in which countless new cases of HIV infection will otherwise occur.

An international agency such as the World Health Organization (WHO), or

CHILDREN

1994

14,000 6,000 <1,000 61,000 1,996,000 26,000 <1,000 2,000 1,000 68,000 2,175,000

TOTAL

1996

1994

18,000 9,000 <1,000 79,000 2,672,000

1,138,000 660,000 27,000 1,313,000 15,459,000

36,000

402,000 28,000 58,000 94,000

<1,000 2,000

1996 1,286,000 838,000 32,000 1,556,000 19,222,000 503,000 34,000 73,000

2,000 251,000

3,020,000

181,000 9,605,000

3,070,000

22,200,000

33,330,000

the wealthy nations themselves, must step forward to assume the costs of developing and distributing AIDS vaccines for preventive use in poor countries. WHO has already taken similar steps to ensure the distribution of vaccines for certain childhood diseases, such as the OPT (diphtheria-pertussis-typhoid) vaccine. The difference is that these vaccines are no longer expensive to produce, so the overall cost of subsidizing production and

distribution is much lower than for an AIDS vaccine. In the case of hepatitis B, which requires a more expensive vaccine, WHO has proceeded more cautiously.

But this is no time for caution.

Early in 1994, the Japanese government announced that it would spend $3,000-4,000 million over the next seven years to support population control and AIDS programs in developing countries.

It is not yet clear exactly how the recipients will allocate this money. But if each of the leading industrialized nations pledged a similar amount, the total sum (allocated properly) would certainly be enough to support the development and distribution of this crucial vaccine. The sums involved are large, but they represent only a fraction of these nations' overall foreign aid budgets.

Reasonable people differ on how long it would take to develop effective AIDS vaccines for use in developing countries.

My own estimate is that, if the public and private sectors cooperate, they can bring such vaccines to market within three to five years. Without such cooperation,

however, development of these vaccines will be delayed indefinitely, with devastating results both locally and abroad.

Subtypes present in developing countries will likely spread to the West, perhaps with more efficient heterosexual transmission than we are accustomed to seeing for subtype B. Among heterosexuals in Thailand, for example, subtype E seems to be more easily transmitted and to move much faster than subtype B.lt may bejust a matter of time before it crosses borders and oceans' to trigger a more serious epidemic among heterosexuals in the United States and Europe.

If we are not motivated by the ethical mandate of protecting millions of people at risk in developing countries, perhaps the threat of newer and even deadlier HIV epidemics at home will goad us to action. 0 About the Author: Max Essex is chair of [he Harvard AIDS Insti[u[e and 0/ [he deparlmen[ of cancer biology a[ the Harvard School of Public Heal[h. He has made several discoveries crucial to [he unders[anding 0/ AIDS, including identi/ying the pro[eins on [he sur{ace 0/ H I V closely linked [0 its le[hal effec[s.

The Workaday World of Doctor John Bartlett I should say at the outset that a few years ago I wrote a book with John Bartlett called The Guide to Living with HIV Infection. Bartlett is a physician and chief of the infectious diseases division of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Throughout our collaboration Bartlett was working fulltime, which to him means 100 hours a week, and so he did his writing on airplane trips. As a result his contributions to the book were Baltimore-to-wherever-size fragments that either were unrelated to earlier fragments or else overlapped them. He This article is reprinled subscriptions

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missed the first deadline by almost two years, and the second deadline by more than three months. Finally, when our increasingly impatient publisher told us the book was incoherent, Bartlett did something he had not done before: He read the manuscript. Then he called me up, shouting, "There's holes in this book. This book has holes in it!" And so that summer, while continuing to put in his idea of a workweek, Bartlett filled in every hole to such an extent that he added 150 pages to a 450page manuscript. He was guided, he said, by the thought that his readers, whom he pictured as his patients, would be best served if they knew everything that he knew about HIV. The story of the book is classic Bartlett. He oversubscribes: "I have a great deal of difficulty saying no," he says. During his

100-hour weeks he spends 25 hours with patients, about 100 of whom have AIDS. He takes from ten to 20 telephone calls a day from his own patients, from patients in the care of other physicians, and from colleagues. He administers seven drug trials for potential AIDS medications. He spends ten hours a week in meetings and another 15 to 20 hours teaching and giving talks (last year, for instance, he gave 104). He serves on eight editorial boards, six Johns Hopkins committees, II national committees, and II AIDS-related councils. He spends untold time ("Jeez, I don't know. God it's awful") running the infectious diseases division. And for 25 hours a week he writes: Peer reviews for journals ("maybe one a day"), grant proposals, regular columns for an in-house newsletter about infectious diseases and for The Alternative, a local gay newspaper. Since 1970 he has written 445 articles and book chapters, and since 1984, six books. He does every job intelligently, meticulously, comprehensively, and just after the deadline.

Bartlett deflects attention. He is middle-aged, of medium height, medium weight, has not much hair. At meetings he hunches over the table, hands folded, head turtling up, mostly watching whoever is talking. He would hardly be a presence at all except for the way he watches. His eyes never leave your face; he must see clear through to the back of your brain; he must know you. Bartlett himself, however, is not so knowable. Why does he work those hours? Better yet, why does he stay in the field of HI V infection, from which most professionals wash out within a few years, and which he himself calls "a battle you can't win"?

Direct interrogation will get you nowhere; his responses are blandly unsatisfactory: "I'll never burn out from AIDS because I always have diversions," he says, meaning teaching, writing, seeing patients without AIDS. You marvel at his zeal, and he issues disclaimers: "I'm not the kind of guy that volunteers to go to the down-and-out clinics. I'm not a missionary."

Maybe so. Bartlett also describes himself as competitive, says he loves contests; he loves winning. But AIDS is no contest.

Death wins every time, yet the doctor keeps punching. So the question remains: Why? Still searching for answers, I followed Bartlett around for a workday; a Bartlett workday starts well before dawn.

First Bartlett makes coffee; he doesn't eat breakfast. He has had a hard time finding coffee filters lately, so he rinses out the one he used yesterday, makes a fresh pot, and starts preparing for two upcoming speaking engagements. The first is for a conference on the care of patients in the early, asymptomatic stages of HIV infection. Bartlett prepares talks the way many other scientists do, not by writing notes but by arranging projector slides. He decides he needs a slide he doesn't ha ve, one tha t summarizes a case stud y of six people known in his trade as look backs-patients who received transfusions of HIV-infected blood, in this instance from the same donor as much as ten years ago. After such a length of time, people with HIV infection are normally near death, and the counts of their CD4 lymphocytes-the immune-system cells that HIV infects-are near zero. Bartlett is adamant about the missing slide because

of that study's startling results: Five of the six look backs now have CD4 counts that are higher than 1,000, which is above normal even for healthy people. The sixth look back has a lower count not because of HIV but because he has a disease being treated with immune suppressants. The unexpected implications are that the strain of HIV that infected the look backs was not particularly virulent.

When Bartlett is happy, he shouts. "Look at this. This is great-this means that some people might live!" He pages through the study. "You're always grasping for straws in this disease, because the message you give patients is usually pretty grim if you're going to be honest. So far the word on the street [the medical street] is that nobody ever gets cured of AIDS. But this study means that at least some people live a long time." He draws up a bar graph to summarize the study on a new slide, then backpedals a bit: ''I'm not sure this study's true. I'm not sure it's etched in stone that some people are not going to have progressive disease." Progressive disease means people first get the opportunistic diseases of A IDS, then die. Bartlett's handwriting is small, neat, and always legible; he erases deliberately.

"I have a patient who got infected a long time ago, who I thought was going to be like this. But her CD4 count just crashed. I've got to tell her today."

By six in the morning, he has finished the two talks. Now he begins the bibliography for a paper on antibiotic-associated colitis. "My life before AIDS," he explains, "this bug, C. difficile, that I spent a lot of years with."

Bartlett found his way to Clostridium difficile via art school, to art school via the study of infectious diseases, and to infectious diseases via a tour of duty in Vietnam after medical school. And what led him to medical school? "I don't have a good idea. I don't really know," he says, characteristically oblique. In any event, he trained in cardiology, entered military service, and volunteered for a fever ward in Vietnam. "Every day we'd have hundreds of soldiers with malaria," he says, "temperatures of 105, looked like they were going to die. We'd give them chloroquine, and they'd be ready to fight in two days-unbelievable. " So when Bartlett returned home, he took up the study of infectious diseases (or, in medical jargon, ID). He specialized in diseases caused by anaerobes, bacteria that live without oxygen. He worked at the Wadsworth Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles, California, for 18 hours a day, seeing patients and doing research, and spent the whole two years writing a single paper on anaerobic infections of the lung. "That's what did me in, the damn paper," he says. "It was awful. It was a tour de force. It was brutal."

At that point Bartlett told himself he needed another dimension to his life, so he went to Paris to study art. 'Took $600," he says. "I got in with a crowd that had a methodical lifestyle. They went to art classes in the morning, and then art classes in the afternoon, and then they'd go to art classes at night." Four or five months later, when he had run out of money--even though he had sold a sculpture to a church for $20Q--and when it had

John Barrlell's busy schedule, stretching 15 hours a day, includes allending to patients, teaching, writing articles and books, and serving on eight editorial boards, six Johns Hopkins commillees, II national committees, and II AIDS-related councils.

become "clear to me that painting was not satisfying for 100 percent of my energy," Bartlett came home to his anaerobes.

Within several years, however, Bartlett had answered most of his questions about lung infections. In the mid-1970s he took the advice of his mentor, the physician Sherwood L. Gorbach, now at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, who had told him to "get out of the lung and go below the diaphragm, because that's where all the action is." More specifically, Gorbach had suggested the study of antibiotic-associated colitis-unrelenting diarrhea that occasionally befalls people who are taking antibiotics. "So I discovered the bug that causes it, C. difficile, " Bartlett explains, "and that's probably the thing I'm most known for. It was great fun."

A bug, in more formal terms, is a bacterium, a virus, a fungus, or a parasite. Bartlett reasoned that antibiotics must be upsetting the balance of the flora indigenous to the digestive system, allowing one bug to grow wildly. And after 481 laboratory tests and thousands of sacrificed hamsters, Bartlett narrowed the possibilities to the genus Clostridium-anaerobes, among which is the bacterium that causes botulism-and then to C. difficile. It turns out that C. difficile can be killed off with an antibiotic called vancomycin. People with antibiotic-associated colitis can now be cured.

For Bartlett, the victory over Clostridium difficile illustrates how much fun 10 is.

At eight o'clock Bartlett puts on his long white coat and heads for the 10 case conference, a weekly meeting of the residents, fellows, and attending physicians on the 10 service.

In case conferences a resident describes a patient's symptoms, medical history, test results-in other words, all the clues-but gives no diagnosis. The rest of the physicians vote on a diagnosis, and then the resident reveals the true culprit. This week the resident presented three such cases, and the physicians got all three wrong. To Bartlett case conferences are pJ.lre pleasure. So are his rounds on the 10 ward. "It's really fun to go

around and see a patient, and look down a microscope and see the enemy, and give a drug and kill it. Stamp it out. Patient gets cured." You can see Bartlett's point: 10 is fun.

In 1980 Hopkins offered Bartlett the position of chief of its 10 division, which at the time wasn't much to be chief of: Three faculty members and one secretary. Bartlett accepted and has since built the division to 18 full-time faculty and a total staff of 99.

From nine o'clock until II :30 Bartlett returns telephone calls from an inch-high stack of pink message slips: "Hi, this is John Bartlett," the name elided into "Jabartlett" and followed by a silence, then short questions and shorter answers: "I don't know; you called me. Okay. Fine. Sounds good. Bye." His secretary asks if he'll take a call from someone with AIDS-not his patient, not even in Baltimore. He will: "I already talked to your mother. There aren't any trials open right now." He listens for a minute, then begins a barrage of questions. "Where do you live? What antiretroviral agent are you taking? What's your C04 count? Other than thrush, you're okay? Are you taking something for PCP [Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia]?

It sounds like you're in good care. I'll find out about the next trial and call you back. I have your telephone number."

Bartlett takes such telephone calls routinely. People with HIV infection want to enroll in the drug trials at Johns Hopkins because they can get free, state-of-the-art care. Bartlett's drug trials are usually all booked up-and he certainly doesn't need more regular patients; but he genuinely worries about the callers. "I try to find out if it makes any sense for them to come to Hopkins. If they're getting standard therapy, it makes no sense. If they're getting bad care, I don't tell them they're getting bad care but that we ought to chat about it and they should bring their medical records, and I'll call whoever's taking care of them. It happens about once a day." Will Bartlett really call back about the trial? "Yes." He looks surprised, even offended. "Yes." By now Bartlett is late for a patient. He tears down the hall to the clinic, white coat streaming behind him. Another physician stops him, asking about a look back who has a blood disorder.

The physician doesn't know whether his patient is likely to have been infected and wants advice: Should he recommend an immediate HIV test or could he wait until his patient comes

back four months from now? "Call her in," Bartlett says. "She's going to be positive." The physician doesn't believe it: "She is?"

"Ninety percent of the lookbacks are positive," Bartlett says.

His colleague argues, "But I had one that wasn't." Bartlett heads down the hall: "Then your number's up," he yells back.

(Happily Bartlett was wrong: The woman would beat the odds and test negative for HIV.) Now walking even faster, Bartlett says: "I hate this. Drug users and gay men-they know this HIV is there; it's in their minds. But these lookback people, they got a transfusion in 1984, and they're just going about their lives. One lookback lady-I told her she was positive, and she stood up and threw a chair at me." Bartlett streaks into the clinic, rounds a corner, stops at the waiting room, says, "Mrs. X? Come with me," and disappears.

Twelve-forty in the afternoon. Bartlett returns more phone calls. One of them is from a physician in a Delaware hospital: A young man has meningococcal meningitis; his brother died 23 years earlier from the same disease. Could it be the same bug?

"There's no way," Bartlett says, then starts his questions again.

"Is he comatose? Did the family get prophylaxis?" He recommends penicillin and "a very good ID doctor you've got up there." Bartlett hangs up. He seems depressed and gets closemouthed about the young man's outlook. "It doesn't look good," is all he'll say. Bartlett's manner changes when he has to say something grim. Sometimes he withdraws, gets terse, and changes the subject. Other times his voice gets plaintive and his sentences have the inflection of incredulity, as ifhe can't believe conditions can really be so awful. This time he cuts off conversation, hands me an Atomic Fireball, and says, "Have lunch." He doesn't eat lunch. "I'm in trouble. I have a patient at one, a patient at two, and a talk I haven't prepared at 3:30. Oh my God, it's 1:30."

The two o'clock patient is the one he had been thinking about early in the morning, the lookback whose CD4 count just crashed. She is in her seventies and contracted HIV from her husband, who had received an infected transfusion. When her husband was diagnosed, Bartlett took her aside and told her, "From now on, life will be hell." Recently she told him she thought that was a strange phrase to come from a physician.

But, she added, he was right. "Life was hell then, and it's hell now." She couldn't bring herself to tell anyone that she was infected-not most of her family, not her friends. She told Bartlett she is afraid that her dentist of 40 years will stop treating her and that her ophthalmologist will refuse to operate on her cataracts. Later I asked how she had handled the news of her CD4 count, and Bartlett got closemouthed again: "Not very well."

Bartlett's final patient of the day leaves at 3:30. Then Bartlett gives a talk to the class of a colleague, returns a few more phone calls, runs off to a dinnertime committee meeting about the dispensing of federal money to AIDS caregivers, and gets home by nine o'clock. "Now I'll get some food, because the supper at those meetings is never very good," he says, "and I'll turn something stupid on TV and read all 14 proposals I didn't get to

today." He says he's not exhausted when he goes to bed at around II o'clock, nor when he gets up four hours later.

I return to those two unanswered questions: Why does Bartlett work so hard and how can he stay in AIDS? He certainly knows exactly what he's up against. Indeed, I am convinced that part of the reason Bartlett missed our book deadlines was that he so hated the topic. Once, in 1986, I interviewed him when his back had given out and he was working from a hospital bed in his office. He was unusually eloquent: "It's painful. Every patient we see is going to die.

Every patient I see I have to lecture about how to get a living will. I have to tell everyone they're going to die. I have to tell the family they're going to die. It's awful; it's just awful. I go on rounds; it's no fun. We get them over hurdles, but they're always going to die. They're young, basically healthy people, and it's not easy. They're all going to die; all the patients are going to die. And all the stigma associated with this .... Where can you have some dignity with your death?"

But Bartlett has a certain genius for arranging multifarious facts into a good story. "I have the opportunity to talk to people who know they're going to die, and to show them they'll get therapy and that they can buy into the future. A guy got HIV infection in 1985, denied that he had it, and came back in 1990 near dead. And he got worked up, psychiatry took care of him, medicine got him over all his infections; it was great. Now he's working and he's gained all his weight back. He's not going to survive this. But now he's a meaningful part of society with a longevity that I don't think any of us feel comfortable in trying to predict. He may live for years and years and years. You get enough of those to make it fun. At least somewhat. You get enough of that to keep it going." Bartlett is crystal clear that he's losing his struggle against AIDS, but he has developed a strategy: Keep close score and count skirmishes, not battles, and certainly not wars.

Bartlett chose ID because he loves contests, and if there is a worthy contest on this Earth, it's AIDS. But if the question is why he works so hard and stays in AIDS, loving contests isn't the whole answer. When he talks about all the patients with AIDS dying or about the young man with meningitis or about the woman whose counts crashed, he doesn't sound worried about losing a contest. He sounds unhappy because he honestly hates what's happening to those people. And when he's voluble about the triumphs ofID or the hopefulness of the look back study, he doesn't sound vindicated or victorious; he sounds relieved. Jo M. Leslie, a physician's assistant who has worked with Bartlett for years, says he does what he does for a ridiculously simple reason-because "he so wants things not to be bad."

How remarkably unmodern, to skip breakfast and lunch, take no breaks, work 100 hours a week so that things won't be bad. People don't do that anymore, do they?

0 About the Author: Ann K. Finkbeiner is a freelance science writer.

She also teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

IN INDIA

by PALLAVA

BAGLA

America and several international organizations are helping India grapple with the rapidly spreading epidemic.

The deadly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes AIDS was unknown 15 years ago. Now it has infected more than 12 million people worldwide. Over 80 percent of all HIV-infected individuals live in developing countries, and in Asia the largest number (about two million) are in India, Thailand, and Myanmar.

In India HIV is spreading rapidly. In Bombay alone, infection levels among prostitutes are estimated to have increased 20-fold in the past seven years. This is among the most rapid rates of increase seen anywhere in the world and it is especially alarming in a country with a population of 900 million. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by 1996 there will be two to three million HIV infected people and 179,000 confirmed cases of AIDS in India. Says Gray Handley, science attache at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi: "India has remarkable potential for the transmission of HIV." AIDS in India is characterized by the grim fact that "all the patterns of HI V transmission are thought to be present here," says Handley, who monitors Indo-U.S. programs to combat AIDS in India. These include heterosexual and homosexual promiscuity, contaminated blood transfusion, mother to child transmission before or at birth, and intravenous drug abuse with needle sharing.

Till date, according to P.R. Dasgupta, who heads the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India has had 885 AIDS cases, since the first case was detected in 1986.

"Roughly 96 people have died so far, although our reporting is not 100 percent foolproof," he says. Dasgupta believes that the incidence of HIV infections in India will plateau as we enter the next century.

NACO, with a five-year budget of $100 million from the World Bank, WHO, and various other institutions, is focusing its efforts on understanding the epidemic and

promoting awareness about AIDS through communication and education. For this purpose, AIDS information units have been set up in all the states and union territories of India. "We are currently trying to buy some commercial space on television so that our communication package can become really effective," Dasgupta says.

AIDS high-risk groups, comprised of truck and bus drivers, professional blood donors, prostitutes, and intravenous drug users, serve as "sentinels" in NACO's surveillance program. Dasgupta explains: "We draw limited blood samples, say about 400, every six months from these high-risk groups. These are tested for HIV and the virus-positive cases are considered fresh cases. Based on these cases we can assess whether the incidence of HIV infection is rising or plateauing. Of course the trends will be fully visible only years later."

Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, and Manipur are among the most affected regions of the country. To assist India in developing effective preventive efforts, the U.S. Agency for International Development has recently embarked upon an AIDS Prevention and Control (APAC) project in Tamil Nadu. The $ I0 million, seven-year program will support nongovernmental organizations working in the field of AIDS prevention and will fund media campaigns supporting the use of condoms. APAC hopes to persuade populations to practice HIV preventive behavior and measurably reduce the spread of the disease in Tamil Nadu.

In fact, India and the United States have been collaborating for several years on various fronts to help assess and control the AIDS epidemic in this country. "Back in 1986-87," says Handley, "the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, assisted India in testing blood samples of prostitutes from Tamil Nadu to find India's first cases. Since then the U.S. has continued to work with India through efforts which include a fellowship program for training Indian personnel in HIV epidemiology and a recent University of California at Los Angeles grant to fund enhanced AIDS surveillance In northeastern India.

While finances are not a limiting factor in India's fight against AIDS, according to Handley, behavioral research in the AIDS arena has lagged behind other areas of research. Now, however, concerned organizations and the government are realizing the importance of assessing behavior in the highrisk groups. For instlince, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay is planning to

organize an international meeting on HIVrelated behavior research in 1995 where, Handley says, "the cutting edge of research and prevention methodology will be discussed and joint research will be launched." Over the next two years or so, this research will address basic questions such as who is at risk, and how HIV transmission can be reduced through intervention in behavior patterns.

India also has joined the worldwide effort to develop an AIDS vaccine and test other prevention strategies. A National AIDS Research Institute (NARI) has been set up in Pune with the help of a U.S. grant called PAVE (Preparation for AIDS Vaccine Evaluations) under which NARI and Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, Maryland, collaborate on AIDS-related research and the training of Indian personnel. PAVE, according to Handley, "does not actually fund vaccine testing. It generates baseline data about the disease and about populations at risk. This is for later use, ifIndia decides to participate in vaccine trials."

Through this $750,000, three-year grant, NARI can also support research on nonvaccine prevention efforts. Dr. Janet Rodrigues, who heads NARI and is co-principal investigator of the PAVE project headed by Dr. Robert Bollinger of Johns Hopkins, identifies "detailed epidemiology of HIV as the thrust areas of research at her institute."

She says there is an "urgent need to check the high sero-incidence rate of HIV in India.

NARI is involved in a major longitudinal study where a cohort of sero-negative people has been identified. We will follow this group to study details of sero-incidence. This group will eventually become a predictor of sero-conversion, or when a person becomes HIV positive."

In yet another move to fight the killer, NACO is trying to involve the corporate sector in anti-AIDS programs.

Dasgupta feels that organizations like the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry should participate because "they have large labor forces that are prone to HIV infection." NACO is being assisted by the Indian Medical Association, India's Christian Medical Association, and public sector and private doctors.

The scene appears active enough, but the acid test is: Will all this effort halt the rapid spread of the disease in India?

0 About the Author: Pallava Bagla is a science writer based in Delhi and is assistant editor of Science Reporter.

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I have been thinking about metaphors lately, and I think you should think about them, too. I have been thinking that the dying metaphor deserves to live.

In his classic 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell made a simple division: There is what poets do, the metaphor newly invented that "assists thought by evoking a visual image," and there is the dead metaphor, which no longer evokes any visual image at all. The dead metaphor has been around so long that it has reverted; it is now just an ordinary word.

"Brand-new" is one example. When I've thought about it, which is not very often, I've assumed it was an expression that had something to do with Madison A venue thinking up new names for old products, or new products for old markets. But the dictionary says it probably derived from a "brand" that was a piece of wood burning on a stove and so meant, originally, fresh from the fire. And there's "deadline."

A deadline is something I have never looked forward to. I just never realized why. It means a line around a prison beyond which a prisoner will be shot.

Even dead metaphors are poetry to poets. Randall Jarrell was a master at breathing life into these poor creatures, and what life! Here, with the word

"overtone," is one of thousands of examples from his novel Pictures From an Institution: "Gertrude thought children and dogs overrated, and used to say that you loved them so much only when you didn't love people as much as you should.

As much as you should had a haunting overtone of as much as I do--an overtone, alas! too high for human ears. But bats heard it and knew, alone among living beings, that Gertrude loved."

But what about Orwell's third category, the dying meiaphor, gasping uncertainly, neither ordinary word nor vivid image? Dying metaphors disgusted Orwell. Euphemism, vagueness, or any kind of lazy, unthinking use of ready-made phrases covers up meaning, often brutal political truths. And dying metaphors are nothing if not euphemistic, vague, lazy, unthinking, and ready-made.

Still, dying metaphors will always be with us, for metaphors must make their way from newborn to corpse somehow. They cloak not only the politicians' brutal designs; they cloak ordinary thoughts and intentions as well. But what do they cloak them with? Odd, intriguing figurative speech. Look beneath the metaphor to the true meaning of a statement. Clarity is intellectual morality.

But then, for the sheer joy of it, look at the cloak itself, at the dying metaphors.

They, too, are poetry, and we are poets because of them.

I am often accused of "flying off the handle." What does that mean? It used to mean, to me, that some member of my family was insensitive, unsympathetic, uncooperative~and unsupportive. Now, I see myself flying through the air, flung

from the handle of an ax like a loose blade, sparkling steel cutting through the blue of the bright sky, soaring, noble and alone, toward the heavens! My life has been considerably enriched.

Some years ago, I experienced a metaphor epiphany while watching Chariots of Fire. On the screen, one of the skinny young men in flapping white shorts drew a line in the dirt with his foot, then carefully stood, placing the toe of his primitive running shoe against that line.

The music began pumping, the scrawny Brits in their underclothes ran like gods, emotions soared, mine among them"Toe the line!"

I forget who won the race. But I'll never forget that moment-an awakening, a usage revelation. Unblock that metaphor! My mother, left with the dog when my brother and I went off to college, called me one evening, miserable, and said, "The dog is... dogging my steps."

Pause. "He's hounding me, too!" she cried out in excitement of her linguistic discovery. And so, understanding, she forgave.

"Toe the line" was one of Orwell's examples of a dying metaphor. It has so thoroughly lost its pictorial power, he wrote incredulously, that it is often written "tow the line." Until my Chariots of Fire epiphany, I, knowing full well how to spell it, had nevertheless pictured its meaning as "tow the line." But it was a picture: A downtrodden, oppressed sort of fellow in a blue peasant blouse, a rope over his bent shoulder, hauling a barge heavy with its cargo of conventions, rules, expectations.

Now here's a question. In a recent newspaper article on women in film, a high-level female producer was quoted in this way: "You do have a responsibility to make movies that are commercial, and you do try to tow the studio line." Was she misquoted? Did she in fact say "toe

the studio line"? Very likely. But perhaps, on the other hand (a lovely dead metaphor: "on the other hand"), perhaps she's never seen Chariots of Fire or read "Politics and the English Language." In which case, she might have imagined, as she spoke, a downtrodden, oppressed sort of female producer in high heels, a rope over her bent shoulder, hauling a huge barge heavy with studio conventions, rules, expectations.

I don't know the answer to my question, but I think that for many reasons, including all those downtrodden folk unnecessarily hauling all those barges when they could simply be standing with their toes neatly aligned, we should revive the dying metaphor.

I used to think a potboiler was a book that bubbled with trashy sex and intrigue.

A beach book. Now I know the reference is not to the book itself but to the author's boiling pot, brimming with meat and potatoes earned through his hack labors, writing, you know-a beach book.

One can become overenthusiastic, it is true. I interpreted "Curses! Foiled again," to mean "Curses! My opponent's narrow, flexible sword has touched me again!" Then I looked up "foiled" in the dictionary.

It means ... foiled.

But so what?

The dying metaphor gives to the world a fresh and vivid sense of absurdity. We are sticks in the mud stabbing in the dark.

Think what a stick in the mud really is.

Feh! And think, now, what you yourself are. A living body of language-nosy, handy, tongue in cheek. You can have a belly full and go belly up, stomach one thing, palm off another. Headstrong, hotheaded. And best of all: Cheek by jowl.

Picture a cheek by a jowl. Very close indeed. We're homesick one day, suffering from cabin fever the next. We're windbags or razor-tongued.

There is a preposterous, literal-minded grandeur to the deconstructed dying metaphor, a quality otherwise found only in Greek myths and Saul Steinberg drawings.

0 About the Author: Cathleen Schine is a novelist.

Her most recent work is Rameau's Niece, a satire of New York's intellectual life.

Globe-trotting

in a Wheelchair The first wheelchair-bound journalist on U.S. television, John Hockenberry has never let his chair stand in the way of getting a story-no matter how daunting the physical challenge or in which part of the globe.

John Hockenberry has stellar journalistic credentials that include covering volcanos, turmoil in the Middle East, and the war in the Persian Gulf, along with being a finalist in the "journalist in space program" of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Hockenberry, a former star reporter and host for National Public Radio (NPR), also has a wheelchair. It's a fact that probably escaped many of his radio listeners but surely is being noted in his role as a correspondent on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network television newsmagazine program, Day One. How is he coping with being identified as network television's first disabled journalist? "As I've said before," Hockenberry remarks, "being the first person in a wheelchair to do anything is interesting for about ten minutes."

This is, after all, someone who had himself lashed to a donkey for a six-hour rid({ over three mountain ridges so he could interview Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq; who once crawled up four flights of stairs on his arms in Amman to get an interview; who once persuaded Yasser Arafat's bodyguards to pick him up and carry him, wheelchair and all, and then seat him beside the PLO leader.

Worrying about what people will think about him and the chair is nowhere on his radar screen.

"After a while, you just stop noticing Copyright

Š

1993, Chicago

Used with permission.

Tribune

Company.

All rights reserved.

it," the 37-year-old, boyish-looking Hockenberry says. "But you know people love these categories. They love ... "-and here his voice deepens, in the style of an announcer-" 'the first African-American who piloted a submarine through the Indian Ocean at dawn.' This is just the world we live in."

The television world Hockenberry inhabits is the hour-long Day One. Hockenberry says his chair never was an obstacle when he talked to ABC officials about signing on. Tom Yellin, the show's executive producer who considers himself "blessed" to have found Hockenberry, says: "When it's appropriate to have a shot with the wheelchair, we will. When it isn't, we won't."

Hockenberry was 19 and a math major at the University of Chicago, Illinois, when he and the chair were brought together. During a warm week one February, he and his roommate decided to hitchhike to Massachusetts to visit the roommate's girlfriend. They made it as far as Pennsylvania where, in one of those moments that forever illustrate the cruelty of coincidence, the two hitchhikers were picked up by a woman driver and her friend.

"The car we were in went off the road," Hockenberry recalls quietly. "Everyone always asks whose fault it was. I have no idea. She sort of fell asleep at the wheel."

The driver and her friend were killed, the roommate escaped injury, and Hockenberry was left paralyzed from the chest down.

After hospitalization and rehabilitation, he eventually returned to the university but "they had one [wheelchair] accessible building at the time and there were like 230 centimeters of snow that winter. It was way over the wheelchair threshold, and I just said, 'This is insane.'"

So Hockenberry set course for Eugene,

Oregon, a destination chosen in part because "I wanted to go to the same school [the University of Oregon] this guitarist I really liked went to." There he studied math, composition and piano, played the guitar, and got married. He also signed on first as a volunteer, then as a regular, with the local NPR station.

When Mount St. Helens exploded in March 1980, the whole news department, save one, rushed off to cover the volcano.

Hockenberry, the cub reporter, was left to do everything else. Eventually he was assigned to cover the mountain, was hired

by NPR as a network correspondent in Seattle, Washington, and then became a newscaster in Washington, D.C., for the network's daily newsmagazine program, All Things Considered, a position that lasted until late 1984.

After a journalism fellowship, he returned to Chicago with NPR and in the mid-1980s was one of 40 finalists in the NASA program-a plan that was scrapped after the Challenger space shuttle explosion. In 1988, he shipped out to Jerusalem as the network's Middle East correspondent, an assignment that also included coverage in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon.

"I did go over there with the idea there were not going to be as many ramps, and that it would be harder. And I came back realizing that if I think of my freedom as a function of how many ramps there are, I would make myself a prison out of ramps.

"What I learned is that freedom is really the result of how you remove obstacles-like the obstacle of your own ego, the obstacle of your own pride, the obstacle of where you think-you are versus where you actually are."

The Chicago Tribune's labor reporter,

Globe-trotting in a

OF WINGS AND WHEELS

Wheelchair Steve Franklin, who was a Middle East correspondent for the paper when Hockenberry was in the region, says: "The first thing about John is that he is incredibly daring. He works harder than the average triathlon runner. He always overcomes [his disability] in ways people don't even understand."

Franklin recalls that in Amman he and Hockenberry interviewed some people in a building with no elevator: "John crawled up four flights of stairs on his arms. He would just say, 'Okay, fine, I'll do it.' He would outwork anyone."

Back in New York by 1990, Hockenberry was host of NPR's Heat, a freewheeling two-hour late-night show mixing topical discussion, listener calls, poetry, and music. It lasted just eight months but won the prestigious Peabody Broadcasting Award. He then spent seven months covering the Gulf War, returning to host an NPR call-in show from Washington before being contacted by ABC. .

So far, Hockenberry has gone to Somalia to do a piece for Day One, then to Zaire. He has worked on pieces about a son who killed his father in Washington state; the public defender system in New Orleans, Louisiana; adoptions in Texas; AIDS research; the foster care system in San Francisco, California; and a profile of a rap singer.

In addition to his three-year ABC contract, Hockenberry is working on a book, tentatively titled "Incomplete Coincidences: Thoughts on the Middle East, the American Revolution and the Craft of Advanced Wheelchair Repair."

In his spare time, he rolls around New York City, reads "everything," and is a "theater maniac."

"I've been incredibly lucky," Hockenberry says, as he reflects on his life. "I get up every morning and go: 'God, don't complain, you idiot. There may be time for that later.'"

0 About the Author: Janet Cawley writes for the Chicago Tribune.

The author, the first wheelchair-bound officer of the Indian Information Service, reminisces over his recent stint as a diplomat and editor of India News in Washington, D.C.

I

t was with mixed feelings that I boarded the Air India flight for New York. I was thrilled at the prospect of going to America on a diplomatic assignment at the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. But the excitement was tinged with a bit of apprehension about going to an unknown land-and in a wheelchair. Not that I had not traveled before with my wheelchair. It had been my companion during my forays in India-from Pune to Calcutta and from Bombay to the hill shrine of Vaishno Devi in Kashmir.

Come to think of it, I have come a long way in my wheelchair. In 1969 I was diagnosed as suffering from muscular dystrophy. With the passage of time, the disease led to progressive weakening of my muscles. My body and my gait became increasingly unsteady. I would frequently fall down while walking, but I continued attending school regularly, nonetheless. I went on to the University of Delhi where I received my bachelor of arts degree in 1980. By then I had lost the use of my legs and had started using a wheelchair.

In 1979 I had opened a small general store and was running it on my own. In the morning my father would drop me off at the store on his way to work. As I couldn't stand and take things off the shelves for customers, I turned it into a self-help store.

When the graduation results were declared, I discovered that I had secured second position in the university. This changed everything. I knew now that I could and should get something more

out of life. So I changed tack and set my sights on a career in the Indian Civil Service.

After going through a rigorous selection process, I was called for my first interview for a position as legislative assistant in the Indian Parliament. I was carried into the room before the selection board, much to the surprise of the members, who subjected me to a grueling session. Finally, one gentleman on the board asked me how fast I could write. I quickly pulled out a pad and scribbled "Sanjay Bhatnagar, Lok Sabha Secretaria t." When the results were declared I discovered I was first among the seven people selected. In 1983 I topped yet another competitive examination, and I joined the Ministry of External Affairs.

Still not satisfied with life, I applied for an executive post in a premier bank.

Though I cleared the examination I was not appointed because of my handicap.

The anguish and frustration inspired me to write a book entitled Breaking Free on the problems faced by disabled persons and how they could be overcome.

I continued with my government job but still felt I had miles to go. In 1985, I appeared for the intensely competitive combined Civil Service examination.

Though my name figured in the final list of successful candidates, my appointment was again withheld because no handicapped person had so far been appointed to Group "A" service. But as they say, luck favors the brave. The then Minister for Personnel, P. Chidambaram, intervened and saw to it that I got my due. So in 1986 I joined the Indian

Sanjay Bhatnagar with colleagues at the Press Information Bureau in New Delhi, and with Dr. Peter Law, chairman of the Cell Therapy Research Foundation in Memphis, Tennessee.

Information Service (lIS).

Thus it was six years later that I found myself boarding the plane for America to take up an assignment in Washington as second secretary and editor of India News, the fortnightly publication of the Indian Embassy.

One of the first things that struck me about Washington was-from the perspective of a disabled person-the remarkably barrier-free environment. Evidently much thought has gone into making life less difficult for the physically challenged. The unencumbered freedom of movement was something I had never experienced before. I could go anywhere-by subway and bus. And I went wherever fancy took me-to shopping malls and galleries, exhibitions, tourist spots-having the time of my life. I found the station managers and bus attendants very helpful, and it was great to have other passengers wait while I boarded the bus in style.

A welcome aspect of the rehabilitation scene in the United States is the high level of acceptance that people with disabilities have in society, which accounts for the large number of disabled people moving about in wheelchairs, in cars, on mass transit, without the slightest trace of consciousness or inhibition. Of course, much of this has got to do with a recently enacted piece of legislation-the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which guarantees equal rights and opportunities to the disabled. Across the offices and boardrooms of America, more and more disabled persons are entering fields of productive endeavor.

One of my most fruitful interactions exhilarating to watch the world's most during my stay in the United States was powerful democracy at work and to draw with Dr. Sambhu Banik, an Indian comparisons with the working of the American who was one of the architects world's largest democracy, 'India. of the ADA and who served under PresiAnother point of interest was the windent George Bush as the executive direc- dow to the United States provided by the tor of the President's Committee on plethora of TV channels. I can hardly Mental Retardation. Our professional detail the hours of fun and learning that I relationship soon blossomed into a strong had sitting before the television, explorfriendship. Banik introduced me to ing different aspects of the American Dr. Paul Ackermann, director of Inter- experience. My favorite programs conational Cooperation and Agency Af- incidentally were those that had to do Murphy fairs of the National Institute on Dis- with the mass media-the Brown show and the Mary Tyler Moore ability, Research, and Rehabilitation.

Ackermann offered many useful insights show of yesteryears. into the rehabilitation scene in the It was an experience in itself to see the United States. media cover various events, starting with I took advantage of my stay by availing the Rodney King case and the riots in Los myself of the advanced facilities for treat- Angeles to the bombing of the World ment of muscular dystrophy there. I vis- Trade Center and the earthquake in ited Memphis, Tennessee, to meet Dr. California, as also the floods in the MidPeter Law, chairman of the Cell Therapy west. At any given time, one had the Research Foundation, whose pioneering option of getting as much information as work in gene therapy may one day bring one desired from the many channels. relief to the lives of muscular dystrophy Talking of information, I spent hours patients the world over. I had a memo- surfing through cyberspace--conversing rable exchange of correspondence with with kindred souls--on issues as diverse Jerry Lewis, the well-known comedian as karma, the human experience, Woodand moving spirit behind the Muscular stock, and rehabilitation.

Dystrophy Association (MDA). He inOn a more down-to-earth level, the spired me to make full use of my experi- memory that I will forever cherish is of ence with the MDA-and to do my bit in the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washemulating that experience in India. ington. The clear blue skies, the green Of course, as a media person, the high grass, the pink cherry blossoms, and the point of my stay was the exciting and eager crowds thronging to the Mall to spectacular campaign for the 1992 look at the alluring blossoms-these were presidential elections. I found myself just some of the scenes that I took in as I rooting for Bill Clinton and following roamed freely and of my own will in my with great interest his journey from Hope, powered wheelchair-free at last, free like 0 Arkansas, to the White House. It was a bird soaring high.

Balancing Power With Diplomacy An American Perspective

The author, President Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, discusses the considerations and interests that guide American decisions to intervene militarily in another country. The article is adapted from a speech he gave in late October at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I want to speak with you about the relationship between power and diplomacy-particularly American power and American diplomacy-in a dramatically changed world.

This is an extraordinary moment in world affairs. The single, overarching threat of the Cold War has vanished. The international environment is starkly new-a far cry from the old strategic landscape, in which every move and alteration was interpreted in relation to the Soviet threat. But even in this new era, some old truths remain.

The first is that divisions and debates about our role in the world are as old as our Republic. On one side stand severely limited foreign engagement and protectionism; on the other, active American engagement abroad on behalf of democracy and expanded trade.

After World War II, thanks in large part to the threat posed by the Soviet Union, that debate was resolved in favor of active engagement. Today, as in the late 1940s, we face again the old impulse to retrench. And today, as in the late 1940s, our interests demand that we check those impulses. But our task is more difficult now, because we undertake it in circumstances not of the late 1940s but of the I920s: Much of our society seeks a rest from the rigors of international activism and there is no single threat against which to rally public opinion.

A second old truth is this: Ideas matter. They are at stake in most of the daily struggles we see around the world. As President Clinton has said, "We face a contest as old as history-a struggle between freedom and tyranny; between tolerance and isolation. It is a fight between those who would build free societies governed by laws and those who would impose their will by force. Our struggle today, in a world more high-tech, more fast-moving, more chaotically diverse than ever, is the age-old fight between hope and fear."

This brings me to the third old truth in this new era: Power still matters. We are not the world's policeman. But in this struggle between hope and fear, our power will make the critical difference, as it did in two world wars and the Cold War. And at the heart of American power lies the threat or use of military force. Without it, Haiti would not today be at the dawn of a difficult but exciting democratic opportunity. And without it, Iraq would today be threatening its neighbors wit9 a dangerous military deployment on the borders of Kuwait.

In short, diplomacy disconnected from power usually fails.-At the same time, power without diplomacy is dangerously lacking in

purpose. Not a novel thought. In antiquity, Thucydides set out with graphic horror in the Melian dialogue the weakness of diplomacy without the backing of force. The sound arguments of the Melians for preserving their independence provided no defense against an Athens bent on subjugation. Without the power to back their positions, Melos's men were put to the sword; women and children were sold as slaves.

The same arguments in Europe in the late 1930s were resolved by Hitler and his policy by panzer, and in the Pacific by Pearl Harbor.

Following World War II, farsighted statesmen like Dean Acheson worked to keep that lesson in the American mind. Acheson and other wise men knew that the United States needed all the instruments of diplomacy and power to defend vital interests and prevail over the long haul in the Cold War. It was Acheson who coined the phrase, "negotiate from a position of strength."

Today, of course, American diplomacy draws considerable strength from its economic power and the power of our example. It is not only that our global economic reach makes the American voice an important one on almost every global issue. The new global economy may also be causing a small revolution in diplomacy. As the economy of every nation depends increasingly on participation in the single world marketplace, most become more vulnerable also to the effects of economic isolation.

This means that they may be more susceptible to both economic incentives and economic penalties. South Africa presents a wonderful example of this. And we have seen just how effective both incentives and sanctions can be in our negotiations with North Korea over their nuclear weapons program. We welcome the North Korean decision that led to an agreement. It may not have been accidental that real progress in the talks occurred last summer when it became clear we were about to bring a sanctions resolution to the U.N. Security Council.

We also see the power of sanctions in the behavior of Serbia.

Indeed, you can draw a direct line from the dramatic effects of the isolation of the Serbian economy to the evolving policy of Siobodan Milosevic.

But the very heart of America's power is military force. This is why President Clinton has vowed that our armed forces will remain the best trained, the best equipped, and the best prepared military in the world. I say remain the best, because the efficient and rapid way in which our military conducted their operations in the Gulf and Haiti

can leave no doubt about their current readiness and strength.

The Cassandras attacking our readiness are wrong: We have prepositioned arms in hot spots like the Persian Gulf, expanded our sea and airlift capabilities, and increased funding for operations and maintenance in fiscal 1995 by 5.7 percent. There are indeed readiness and mobility concerns for the future that we must address, but our troops' rapid and highly efficient successive deployments to Haiti and Iraq confirmed our confidence: We remain prepared to fight and win two major regional conflicts almost simultaneously.

Our challenge is not only a matter of maintaining our military might. We also need a new national debate today on the critical questions of when, where, and how to use military force. In the late 1940s and 1950s, there was just such a wide-ranging discussion on questions of nuclear doctrine and limited war. We need a similar exchange today.

When will we use force? The short answer remains what it always has, or should have, been-when our interests require us to do so.

During the Cold War, our interests were defined overwhelmingly in terms of the threat to the United States posed by Soviet nuclear weapons. That led to the policy of nuclear deterrence.

The policy of containment also flowed from America's definition of interest in the light of the Soviet threat. The national consensus behind containment helped produce victory in the Cold War. But as Vietnam showed, the relationship between means and ends in fighting limited wars was never satisfactorily defined.

Today, with an ever increasing choice of possible missions in a rapidly changing world, our thinking needs still finer resolution. We must be as clear as possible on when and where we will use military force. For there is no more important decision a President makes.

No matter how clear our military doctrine, that decision has and should always come down to a judgment that weighs the importance of a particular mission, defined in terms of our interests, against its presumed costs.

Here, in general if not perfect order of priority, are the seven national interests, taken in some combination or even alone, that the Clinton Administration believes can merit the use of our military, especially in areas of greatest strategic significance: • To defend against direct attacks on the United States, its citizens at home and abroad, and its allies.

• To counter aggression, which is central to preserving a peaceful world.

• To defend our most important economic interests, because it is here that Americans see their most immediate personal stake in our international engagement.

• To preserve, promote, and defend democracy, which in turn enhances our security and the spread of our values.

• To prevent the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; and to prevent acts of terrorism.

• To maintain our reliability. When the United States makes commitments to other nations, we must keep our promises.

• And for humanitarian purposes, such as combating famine and other natural disasters and in cases of overwhelming violations

of human rights.

An array of interests need not mean disarray in setting our priorities. By itself, none of the interests in this general hierarchywith the certain exception of attacks on our nation and its allies and the possible exception of aggression elsewhere--should automatically lead to the use of force. But the wider the range of these interests at risk, the more likely that we will call again on our military. That is why, in Haiti, when we saw democracy denied, our borders threatened, our reliability On the line, and a reign of brutality so close to our own shores, we saw a compelling case for intervention.

It is not our interests alone that decide when and where to use force. Against the interests at stake we must measure the costs and benefits of each specific operation, and answer such questions as: Is there a clearly defined, achievable mission? What is the environment of risk we are entering? What are the prospects for success?

What is needed to achieve our goals? What are the potential costs-both human and financial-of the engagement? Do we have a realistic exit strategy?

There is no algorithm here-no simple formula that asks us only to fill in the numbers in calculating the risks and the requirements.

But we do know that those are the factors we must consider as we decide when and where to send our young men and women into danger.

There is also a set of guidelines that help shape how we use force, and its likely utility.

When we send American troops abroad, we will send them with a clear mission and the means to prevail. And when we use force, we must be prepared to use it unflinchingly, To do otherwise endangers the interests we seek to safeguard, as well as the troops we send.

We should never delude ourselves: Deploying our military often will not solve underlying problems, and we must carefully limit the missions we choose. Force can defeat an aggressor, but it will not conjure democracy into existence or flip the switch of prosperity. It may only begin to make a solution possible farther down the road.

When we do act, we will do so with others when we can, but alone when we must. In some cases, in which we should not act unilaterally, we may choose to join in multilateral action as we share the burdens and spread the risks. The United States has consistently led the effort to build coalitions to meet the needs of the international community. Joining together in common cause makes us all stronger, and deepens our moral authority.

The more deeply our interests are threatened, of course, the more inclined we are to act alone. That is why we have said that we will act by ourselves in the Persian Gulf, if necessary-and did so earlier when the Iraqis plotted against the life of a former President of the United States and thus against our whole people, as well.

Finally, a cautionary note on another potential guideline. Some have argued for a simpler policy: That we should assert a sphere of influence in our own hemisphere and in limited areas abroad, leaving to others the task of maintaining stability and order in their own spheres.

This view is dangerously wrong.

Certainly, proximity counts. Had Haiti not been so close to our shores, we would have been less likely to act. The dramatic advance of democracy in this hemisphere is one of the truly stirring

developments of our time, and we have an obvious interest in preventing any unraveling of that achievement.

We recognize that all nations have greater concerns for their immediate surroundings than they do for distant regions. But as a great nation, whose interests and ideals are global in scope, we cannot-and will not--eede to others a right to intervene as they wish in the affairs of their neighbors without regard to international norms.

Specifically, we must expect of others that they will respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of their neighbors.

Every time we have used force, we have balanced interests against costs. And in each case, our use of our military has put. power behind our diplomacy, allowing us to make progress we would not otherwise have achieved.

Iraq poses a case of threatened aggression in which a broad range of American interests are engaged. So we are leading a coalition under the authority of the United Nations-but are prepared to act alone if we must. The result of the President's decisive action has been not only the near-resolution of the current crisis, but a new injunction by the Security Council against future Iraqi aggression.

In Haiti, where lesser but nonetheless important interests are at stake, we also acted-but at a potentially lower cost. Over three years, we had exhausted all avenues of negotiation and the use of economic sanctions in our efforts to redeem the pledges of two administrations to restore the democratically elected government there. It was only the use of force that could finally bring success.

When the Haitian generals received the news that the 82nd Airborne Division was, in fact, airborne and headed their waythey gave way. As a result, we achieved peacefully what we were prepared to do under fire.

In Bosnia, we have not seen aU the progress that we would like, but when diplomacy has been married to military power, positive movement has been the result. For example, the Sarajevo ultimatum succeeded primarily because the threat of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) air strikes was concrete.

In Rwanda and Somalia, our missions were primarily humanitarian, our interests more narrow. Only the American military could have done what it did, saving hundreds of thousands of lives. There, as elsewhere, international peacekeeping efforts can only give a fractured society a window of opportunity-a time of relative security-in which to heal its own wounds. No outside force can impose on any society what is, in the end, its own responsibility.

A final point: Policy, of course, does not succeed or fail in a vacuum. Public opinion and the Congress rightfully play central roles in how the United States wields its power abroad. Perhaps the outstanding lesson we learned during Vietnam was the importance of what Les Gelb once called "the essential domino": Public opinion. That conflict taught us to think more carefully about costs, more carefully about willpower as well as firepower, and more carefully about the length of engagement. But above all, it taught us that the United States cannot long sustain a fight without the support of public opinion.

Images of violence, misery, and brutality naturally call up theimpulse to intervene. The television screen transforms a particular

incident into an apparently universal condition. The camera, unfortunately, does not have peripheral vision. My country, and perhaps my country alone, the viewer feels, can do something about this carnage.

But when images of casualties-our casualties-appear, everything can change instantly. The costs become painfully obvious, and the question arises: Can this possibly be worth even one American life?

Neither of these sentiments should surprise or dismay us. Both reactions are expressions of the high value Americans place on human life. And we are better people for it.

But while as individuals we all may share this painful ambivalence, it is the responsibility of government to make real choices and to act-distinguishing between the essential and the tangential, acting on the basis of what is right, and then, when action is taken, doing so without hesitation or vacillation.

We know, from our most recent experience in the Persian Gulf, that the American people are not so averse to the use of force as some might think, especially if classic interests like security in Europe or the Middle East are in question. And as a new Rand study indicates, they want to see us succeed onCe we are committed.

Congress, we have seen, also supports the use of force whenever the nation's classic interests are at stake. That is a great advantage, since it is imperative that the executive branch and Congress work together in foreign policy.

Americans know that the passing of the Cold War, reassuring as that is, does not mean we live in a world of true safety. We also know that we have before us an opportunity to build a world of more democracy, more tolerance, and more pluralism. It is the kind of opportunity that comes, at most, once in an era. To defeat the dangers and seize the day, we must summon our creativity and all of our diplomatic skill. And to that skill, we must always harness our power. So let us keep fixed in our minds the precept of one of the Enlightenment's great realists, Frederick the Great, who said: "Diplomacy without arms is music without instruments."

And let us remain alert to the danger of slippage and retreat. We must reject the calls from the left and the right, as well as the rhetoric of Neo-Know-Nothings of no particular view, to stay at home rather than engage. We are fighting a new round of the old struggle between engagement and retrenchment. The debate is less clearly defined than it was in the period between the two world wars. But every time a foreign aid bill is slashed ...a troop deployment opposed on ideological rather than practical grounds ...or a good trade agreement is attacked, it is part and parcel of that traditional argument. The impulse to retreat from the world, like the fog, comes in on little cat feet. So I ask you to join in efforts to keep our nation from becoming befogged in the face of a new world of continuing danger. For it is also a time of immense opportunity.

I think we will seize it.

0 About the Author: Al1lhony Lake was professor of international relations at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. Massachusetls. before he assumed his currel1l position. He previously served President Jimmy Carter as director of policy planning.

Summit of the Americas The 34 democratically elected leaders of the Western Hemisphere are gathering in Miami, Florida, December 9-11 at the invitation of President Bill Clinton to create a hemispheric partnership for the promotion of democratic governance, well-being, and prosperity throughout the region.

THE SIC 'IFICA "We've arrived at a moment of very great promise and great hope for the Western Hemisphcrc," President Clinton says. "Democratic values are ascendant. Our economies are growing and bccoming more intertwined every day through trade and investment. Now we have a unique opportunity to build a community of free nations, diverse in culture and history, but bound together by a commitmcnt to responsive and free government, vibrant civil societies. open economies. and rising living standards for all our people."

SOME DERLYINC CONDITIO S By the year 2000 the hemisphere will have a population close to 800 million and a gross product in excess of $9 trillion. U.S. exports to Latin Amerieamostly of manufactured goods-jumped from $30.000 million to $79.000 million between 1985 and 1993, creating up to 900.000 U.S. jobs. Foreign direct investment to Latin America has doubled since 1990 to almost $15.000 million.

Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing sustained economic expansion and generally declining inf1ation.

THE THEMES I. Making Democracy Work: Reinventing Government.

II. Making Democracy Prosper: Hemispheric Economic Integration.

III. Making Democracy Endure: Sustainable Development.

Summit participants have expressed interest in issuing a Declaration of Principles and an associated Plan of Action to transform principles into concrete. measurable activities.

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The summit marks the first meeting of the leaders of the nations of North America, the Caribbean, Central America. and South America in more than a generation. and it is the first-ever hemispheric summit of solely democratically elected leaders. It is also the largest summit ever held in the United States, and the largest gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders in history.

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skiing. Tt's the time for enthusiasts to pack up their equipment and attire-from jeans and sweaters to jazzy Spantex and Gortex outfits-and hit the trails. A prime destination on the East Coast is the Sunday River Ski Resort in Bethel, Maine, which has been voted the best ski area in the eastern United States for the past five years by readers of Ski magazine.

Sunday River is an unexpected success. Tn the late 1970s when its present owner, Leslie B. Otten, had little more than a college degree and a passion for skiing, Sunday River was, well, a white elephant. The resort drew a handful of skiers to its single peak and minuscule skiing trails, measly chairlift, solitary ski lodge, and minimal number of rooms.

Otten started out as Sunday River's assistant manager, then quickly became manager. Tn 1980 he borrowed $840,000 and purchased the resort, which still recorded an unprofitable number of skiers. The resort's dismal status was mirrored in Bethel's local economy where its industrial base of agriculture and forest products was spiraling downward in the face of

modernized technologies and foreign competition.

But Otten, whose purchase raised a few eyebrows and elicited some snide remarks from the ski industry, revolutionized Sunday River and revitalized Bethel. Since taking over the resort, Otten has outfoxed M other a ture and outwitted the Eastern competition. Today the resort has expanded to include about 70 kilometers of trails that span more than 240 hectares and follow the contours of seven interconnected peaks.

Sunday River also boasts New England's largest computercontrolled snowmaking system, a major factor behind the resort's success. With access to rivers, Sunday River's state-ofthe-art technology can pump 30,000 liters of water per minute through 110 kilometers of pipes and 55 kilometers of hoses connected to 1,000 snow guns that blast the white stuff onto 90 percent of the runs. Tn 1993, Sunday River had 7.5 meters of snow cover; only 4.5 meters was natural. Its sophisticated system is now used by other resorts in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Sunday River's lift system (also rated number one in the East by Ski magazine) includes highspeed chairlifts that guarantee short lift lines and maximum skiing time-another plus point. Standing in a lift line can be numbingly cold in New England.

Otten has also engineered a mind-boggling real-estate boom.

He put up nine condominium complexes with indoor and outdoor pools, 88 town houses, New England's largest slopeside hotel and conference center, a ski dorm for 200 people, numerous ski lodges with restaurants and bars, shops, a daycare center, and started up the first ski train east of the Rockies.

The result? Smirks have been replaced by impressive talk. In 1993-94, after all, Sunday River logged in 528,046 skiers-a record for the resort and a staggering statistic given the hideously cold winter that kept many skiers off all Eastern slopes that year.

Otten, a ski buff to the core, knows what the enthusiast wants: Maximum fun, beautiful surroundings, and price control. At a time when lift ticket costs are turning skiing into a sport for the elite, Sunday River offers affordable rates and enticing package deals. At night when the trails are free of skiers, the snow guns â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ "# and grooming machinery carefully maintain the runs. New trails never lead to wholesale deforestation and destruction. Selected trees are carefully removed and immediately replaced by ground cover, including wild flowers, that holds down the topsoil.

No wonder the people of Bethel are behind Sunday River and its skiing dynamo. After a few New England-style town meetings, Bethel approved further expansion. On December 26, the resort plans to open its new Bethel Station, an adjunct to the original village that will feature a "Victorian" hotel, movie theater, harmoniously designed residential and commercial establishments, and a railroad depot that will drop off skiers arriving from Portland, Maine's largest city, on the Sunday

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East to west Sunday River is more than five kilometers wide with 230 hectares of skiable terrain and a vertical drop of 700 meters. Seven interconnected peaks, each served by its own lift system, means it is not unusual for a skier to get in 20 or more long runs per day.

Sunday River operates two daycare centers for children six weeks to six years of age.

During holiday periods, the resort also offers Kidz Night Out programs, and vaudeville-style entertainment with jugglers and clowns. Center left: Apres ski activities. Bottom: A trolley-like bus provides shuttle service.

Left: Though Sunday River is renowned for its challenging terrain, it is also a great place to be a kid. Ski coaches differentiate who's ready for what by the color of a child's balloon. A red balloon means: First time on skis.

River Silver Bullet, a restored train with bogeys that date back to the early 1900s.

But what makes skiing such a great pastime, and why is this particular resort so right for the I990s? First, skiing is a healthy activity that doesn't require expertise to provide a rosy glow, good fun, and thrills that begin with the first chairlift ride to a mountain top. Stunning high-altitude vistas surround a choice of trailheads that are identified by the degree of difficulty. The run downhill, often through pine groves, turns into a powerfully private interlude with the wind on your face and the clatter of your skis the only sound as you circumvent or take on a mogul-a bump in a ski run.

Skiing is also that rare activity that easily flows into a communal experience shared by family or friends. At Sunday River, day-care centers keep toddlers happily occupied.

Anyone over two years old can take courses that are a great source of oldfashioned camaraderie. Sunday River even has exclusive programs for the physically disabled to help them master skills to enjoy the mountains.

When the runs shut down at day's end or the need to relax sets in, skiers congregate around a fireplace to sip hot cocoa and satisfy the hunger that comes from physical exercise in the invigorating air. They jump into a heated swimming pool, or whirlpool, or soak in the cleansing heat of a sauna. At night they enjoy bonfires and barbecues replace skis for ice-ska tes and work off more energy, cuddle under a blanket on a horsedrawn sleigh, dance at a nightclub, talk quietly in the corner of a piano bar, tryout a variety of cuisines and ambiences at different restaurants.

Skiing resorts, such as Sunday River, are modern-day. winners because they create the right setting for visitors to discover the joy that comes with skiing-a joy that includes getting in touch with yourself, others, and the beauty that exists in the winter-white mountains.

0 About the Author: Kathleen Cox, aformer columnist for The Village Voice in Nell' York, is based in Nell' Delhi Il'here she serves as the South Asian editor for the : ,,,,r-:r: travel book FODOR's.

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FOCUS Clockwise from left: B.V. Karanth addressing the seminar, Adoor Gopa/akrishnan, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, and Andre Millard.

A group of 45 filmmakers, film critics, music composers, and academics from the United States, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Morocco, participated in a seminar on "Film and American Culture" at the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC) in Hyderabad from September 29 to October 4.

Among the Indian participants were filmmakers Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, and B.V. Karanth. Other wellknown film personalities from the subcontinent included Syed Salahuddin Zaki (Bangladesh) and Tissa Abeysekara (Sri Lanka).

The seminar focused on the cultural meaning of American films and their influence on the cultures of the developing world. Andre Millard, director of the American Studies Program at the University,of Alabama in Birmingham, who led the seminar, traced the early growth of the American cinema. He said that the "impact of marvelous, rather

Polo The U.S. Military visited New Delhi playing one match Indian Army team, hibition matches.

Polo Team last month, against the and two ex-

The Americans drew first blood and held the Indian Army scoreless during the first chukker in a hard fought match on November 20. The Indians, however, went on to win eight to two, Major Adil A. Mahmood, Adjutant of the President's Bodyguard, who played for the Indians, said later: "The score belies the actual performance of the Americans.

They gave us a jolly good fight."

matchless, technology of the American film industry has spawned cultural imperialism but there is no design, conspiracy, or agenda ...

"What is desirable is vibrant cultural communication through films. In a two-way stream one can hold to one's mores and cultural moorings through the process of education even when one is getting exposed to diverse cultural products."

Randor Guy, a Madras-based film historian, attributed several technological innovations in Tamil cinema to American influence, particularly that of Ellis R. Dungan (see SPAN, August 1994) who made Tamil films.

Swapan Mullick, a film critic of The Statesman, said Hollywood had taught filmmakers to translate universal human values onto the screen in a manner that could be understood anywhere. Dasgupta, maker of Charachar, hailed Hollywood's influence but added that Indian films were making their own impact abroad, Other presentations of note included "American Films by nonAmerican Filmmakers" by Gayatri Chatterjee of the Film and Television Institute at Purie; "A Psychoanalytic Approach to Violence in Crime Film" by B.L. Chakoo, professor of English at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar; "Changes in the Attitudinal and Cinematic Treatment of the Cowboy Mystique" by Tutun Mukherjee of the department of English at Osmania University, Hyderabad; "American Sci-Fi Films" by professor S. Ramaswamy of Bangalore University; and "The Impact of the American Film on Indian Culture" by Moutushi S. Chakravartee of the department of English at the Pre-Examination Training Centre in Ranchi.

The valedictory address at the seminar was presented by eminent film director and music composer, BY Karanth.

However, the Americans won an exhibition match against Kakajan Polo Club six to three, They lost six to three against the President's Estate Polo Club.

Before World War II, the U.S. Army was responsible for popularizing polo in America. In the 1930s, the U.S. Army Polo Association had 1,500 players.

When mechanized armored vehicles replaced the horse for

transportation in combat, the Army sold off its vast stock of horses and ceased backing equestrian sports.

Interest in polo within the U.S. military was revived in 1992 when the U.S. Military Polo Team was formed to meet the visiting British combined services team, The Americans first visited India in early 1993, paying their own transportation and other expenses. Since then, American interest in polo has gained momentum and a small amount of support from the U.S. Military Sports Association. The U.S. Military Polo Team hosted an Indian Army Polo Team in September 1993, and played matches in France and England commemorating the 50th anniversary of "D-Day."

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eminism's Identity Crisis

by WENDY

"The confident political resurgence of women today will have to withstand a resurgent belief in women's vulnerabilities, " the author writes in her analysis of a movement-and a label-that still makes many women uneasy.

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.... A majority of American women agree that feminism has altered their lives for the better. In general, polls conducted over the past three years indicate strong majority support for feminist ideals. But the same polls suggest that a majority of women hesitate to associate themselves with the movement. As Karlyn Keene, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed, more than three quarters of American women support efforts to "strengthen and change women's status in society," yet only a minority, a third at most, identify themselves as feminists.

Many feminists take comfort in these polls, inferring substantial public support for economic and political equality, and dismissing women's wariness of the feminist label as a mere image problem (attributed to unfair media portrayals of feminists as a strident minority of frustrated women). But the polls may also adumbrate with unarticulated ambivalence about feminist ideals, particularly respect to private life. If widespread support for some measure of equality reflects the way women see, or wish to see, society, their unwillingness to identify with feminism reflects the way they see themselves, or wish to be seen by others.

To the extent that it challenges discrimination and the political exclusion of women, feminism is relatively easy for many women to embrace. It appeals to fundamental notions of fairness; it suggests that particularly social structures must change but that individuals, women, may remain the same. For many women, feminism is simply a matter of mommy-tracking, making sure that institutions accommodate women's familial roles, which are presumed to be essentially immutable. But to the extent that feminism questions those roles and the underlying assumptions about sexuality, it requires profound individual change as well, posing an unsettling challenge that welladjusted people instinctively avoid. Why question norms of sex and character to which you've more or less successfully adapted?

Of course, the social and individual changes demanded by feminism are not exactly divisible. Of course, the expansion of women's professional roles and political power affects women's personality development. Still, many people manage to separate who they are in the workplace from who they are in bed, which is why feminism generates so much cognitive dissonance. As it addresses and internalizes this dissonance and women's anxiety about the label "feminism," as it embarks on a "third wave," the feminist movement today may suffer less from a mere image problem than from a major identity crisis ....

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Robin Morgan, the editor in chief of Ms., and Ellen Levine, the editor in chief of Redbook, two veterans of women's magazines and feminism, offer different views of feminism's appeal, each of which seems true, in the context of their different constituencies. M organ sees

a resurgent feminist movement and points to the formation of new feminist groups on campus and intensified grass-roots activity by women addressing a range of issues, from domestic violence to economic revitalization. Levine, however, believes that for the middleclass family women who read Redbook (the average reader is a 39-yearold wage-earning mother), feminism is "a nonissue." She says, 'They don't think about it; they don't talk about it." They may not even be familiar with the feminist term of art "glass ceiling," which feminists believe has passed into the vernacular. And they seem not to be particularly interested in politics ....

Editors at more upscale magazines-Mirabella, Harper's Bazaar, and Glamour-are more upbeat about their readers' interest in feminism, or at least their identification with feminist perspectives. Gay Bryant, Mirabella's editor in chief, says, "We assume our readers are feminists with a small 'f.' We think of them as strong, independent, smart women; we think of them as pro-woman, although not all of them would define themselves as feminists politically." Betsy Carter, the executive editor of Harper's Bazaar, suggests that feminism has been assimilated into the culture of the magazine: "Feminism is a word that has been so absorbed in our consciousness that I don't isolate it.

Asking me if I believe in feminism is like asking me if I believe in integration." Carter says, however, that women tend to be interested in the same stories that interest men: "Except for subjects like fly-fishing, it's hard to label something a man's story or a woman's story." In fact, she adds, "it seems almost obsolete to talk about women's magazines."

Carter, a former editor at Esquire, recalls that Esquire's readership was 40 percent female, which indicated to her that "women weren't getting what they needed from the women's magazines."

Ruth Whitney, the editor in chief of Glamour, might disagree. She points out that Glamour runs monthly editorials with a decidedly "feminist" voice that infuses the magazine. Glamour readers mayor may not call themselves feminists, she says, but "I would call Glamour a mainstream feminist magazine, in its editorials, features, fashions, and consumerism."

Glamour is also a pro-choice magazine; as Whitney stresses, it has long published pro-choice articles-more than any other mainstream [American] women's magazine, according to her.

And it is a magazine for which women seem to constitute the norm: "We use the pronoun 'she' when referring to a doctor, lawyer, whomever, and that does not go unnoticed by our readers."

Some women will dispute one underlying implication of Carter's remarks-that feminism involves assimilation, the merger of male and female spheres of interest. Some will dispute any claims to feminism by any magazine that features fashion. But whether Ms. readers would call Harper's Bazaar, Mirabella, and Glamour feminist magazines, or magazines with feminist perspectives, their readers apparently do, if Carter, Bryant, and Whitney know their audiences.

Perhaps the confident feminist self-image of these upscale magazines, as distinct from the cautious exploration of women's issues in the middle-class Redbook, confirms a canard about feminism-that it is the province of upper-income urban professional women. But Ms. is neither upscale nor fashionable, and it's much too earnest to be sophisticated. Feminism-or, at least, support for feminist ideals-is not simply a matter of class, or even race.

Susan McHenry, a senior editor at Working Woman and the former executive editor of Emerge, a new magazine for middle-class African-Americans, senses in African-American women readers "universal embrace of women's rights and the notion that the women's movement has been helpful." Embrace of the women's movement, however, is equivocal. "If you start talking about the women's move-

ment, you hear a lot about what we believe and what white women believe." .... But unease with the term "feminism" has been a persistent concern in the feminist movement, whether the unease is attributed to racial divisions or to residual resistance to feminist ideals. It is, in fact, a complicated historical phenomenon that reflects feminism's successes as well as its failures.

.... In the 19th century many, maybe most, women who took part in the feminist movement saw themselves as paragons of femininity. The great historic irony of feminism is that the supposed feminine virtues that justified keeping women at home-sexual purity, compassion, and a talent for nurturance-eventually justified their release from the home as well. Women were "the less tainted half of the race," Frances Willard, the president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, declared, and thus were the moral guardians of society.

But in the long run, identifying feminism with femininity offered women limited liberation. The feminine weaknesses that were presumed to accompany feminine virtues justified the two-tier labor force that kept women out of executive positions and political office and out of arduous, high-paying manual-labor jobs (although women were never considered too weak to scrub floors). By using femininity as their passport to the public sphere, women came to be typecast in traditional feminine roles that they are still playing and arguing about today. Are women naturally better suited to parenting than men? Are men naturally better suited to waging war? Are women naturally more cooperative and compassionate, more emotive and less analytic, than men?

A great many American women (and men) still seem to answer these questions in the affirmative, as evidenced by public resistance to drafting women and the private reluctance of women to assign, and men to assume, equal responsibility for child care. Feminism, however, is popularly deemed to represent an opposing belief that men and women are equally capable of raising children and equally capable of waging war.

Thus feminism represents, in the popular view, a rejection of femininity.

Feminists have long fought for day-care and family-leave programs, but they still tend to be blamed for the work-family conundrum.

Thirty-nine percent of women recently surveyed by Redbook said that feminism had made it "harder" for women to balance work and family life. Thirty-two percent said that feminism made "no difference" to women's balancing act. This may reflect a failure of feminists to make child care an absolutely clear priority ....

Feminism and the careerism it entails are commonly regarded as a zero-sum game not just for women and men but for women and children as well, Ellen Levine believes: Wage-earning mothers still tend to feel guilty about not being with their children and to worry that "the more women get ahead professionally, the more children will fall back." Their guilt does not seem to be assuaged by any number of studies showing that the children of wage-earning mothers fare as well as the children of full-time homemakers, Levine adds. It seems to dissipate only as children grow up and prosper.

Feminists who dismiss these worries as backlash, risk trivializing the inevitable stresses confronting wage-earning mothers (even those with decent day care). Feminists who respond to these worries by suggesting that husbands should be more like wives and mothers are likely to be considered blind or hostile to presumptively natural sex differences that are still believed to underlie traditional gender roles ....

eminism's Identity Crisis

.... Worth noting is that in the legal arena feminism has met with less success than the civil-rights movement. The power of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s was the power to demonstrate the gap between American ideals of racial equality and the American reality for African-Americans.

Wc'vc never had the samc professed belief in sexual equality: Federal equal-employment law has always treated racial discrimination more severely than sex discrimination, and so has thc Supreme Court. The Court has not extended to women the same constitutional protection it has extended to racial minorities, because a majority of justices have never rcjectcd the notion that somc dcgrcc of sex discrimination is only natural. ..

The Comforts of Gilliganism Central to the dominant strain of feminism today is thc belief, articulated by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, that women share a differcnt voice and different moral scnsibilities. Gilligan's work-notably In a Different Voice (1982)-has been effectively attacked by other feminist scholars, but criticisms of it have not been widely disseminated, and it has passed with ease into the vernacular. In a modern-day version of Victorian True Womanhood. feminists and also some antifeminists pay tributc to women's supelior nurturing and relational skills and their general "ethic of caring'" Sometimes feminists add parenthetically that differences between men and women may well be attributable to culture, not nature. But the qualification is moot. Believers in gender difference tend not to focus on changing the cullUral environment to free men and women from stereotypcs, as equal-rights feminists did 20 years ago; instead they celebrate the feminine virtues.

It was probably inevitable that the female solidarity at the base of the feminist movement would foster female chauvinism. All men are jerks, I might agree on occasion, over a bottle of wine. But that's an attitude. not an analysis, and only a small minority of separatist feminists turn it into an ideology. Gilliganism addresses the anxiety that is provoked by that attitude-the anxicty about compromising their sexuality which many feminists share with nonfeminists.

Much as they dislike admitting it, feminists generally harbor or have harbored categorical anger toward men. Some would say that such angcr is simply an initial stage in the development of a feminist consciousness, but it is also an organizing tool and a fact of life for many women who believe they live in a sexist world. And whether or not it is laced with anger, feminism demands fundamental changes in relations between the sexes and the willingness of feminists to feel like unnatural women and be treated as such. For heterosexual women, feminism can come at a cost. Gilligan's work valorizing women's separate emotional sphere helped make it possible for feminists to be angry at men and challenge their hegemony without feeling unwomanly. Nancy Rosenblum, a professor of political science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says that Gilliganism resolved the conflict for women between feminism and femininity by "de-eroticizing it." Different-voicc ideology locates female sexuality in maternity, as did Victorian visions of the angel in the house. In its simplest form, the idealization of motherhood reduces popular feminism to the notion that women are nicer than men ....

In part, the trouble with True Womanhood is its tendency to

substitute sentimentality for thought. Constance Buchanan, an associate dean of the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. observes that feminists who believe women will exercise authority differently often haven't done the hard work of figuring out how they will exercise authority at all. "Many feminists have an almost magical vision of institutional change," Buchanan says. "They've focused on gaining access but haven't considered the scale and complexity of modern institutions, which will not necessarily change simply by virtue of their presencc." ...

From Marilyn to Hillary Confronted with the challenge of rationalizing and accommodating profound differences among women, in both character and ideology, feminism has never been a tranquil movement, or a cheerfully anarchic one. It has always been plagued by bitter civil wars over conflicting ideas about sexuality and gender which lead to conflicting visions of law and social policy. Ifmen and women are naturally and consistently different in terms of character, tcmperament, and moral sensibility, then the law should treat them differently, as it has through most of our history, with labor legislation that protects women, for example, or with laws preferring women in custody disputes: Special protection for women, not equal rights, becomes a feminist goal. ... But ifmen and women do not conform to masculine and feminine character models, if sex is not a reliable predictor of behavior, then justice requires a sexncutral approach to law which accommodates different people's different characters and experiences ....

In academia this has been dubbed the "sameness-difference" debate, though no one on either side is suggesting that men and women are the same. Advocates of laws protecting women suggest that men and women tend to difler from each other in predictable ways, in accord with gender stereotypes. Equal-rights advocates suggest that men and women differ unpredictably and that women differ from one another unpredictably ....

In the 1980s this debate about sex and law became a cottage industry for feminist academics, especially postmodernists who could take both sides in the debate, in celebration of paradox and multiculturalism.

On one side, essentialism-a belief in natural, immutable sex differencesis anathema to post modernists, for whom sexuality itself, along with gender, is a "social construct." Sensitivity to race- and class-based differences among women also militates against a belief in a monolithic feminine culture: From a postmodern perspective, there is no such category as "woman."

Taken to its logical conclusion, this emphasis on the fragmentation of the body politic makes postmodern feminism an oxymoron: Feminism and virtually all our laws against sex discrimination reflect the presumption that women do in fact constitute a political category. On the other side, to the extent that postmodernism includes multiculturalism, it endorses tribalism, or identity politics, which for some feminists entails a strong belief in "women's ways." Thus the theoretical rejection of essentialism is matched by an attitudinal embrace of it.

Outside academia, debates about sex and justice are sometimes equally confused and confusing, given the political and ideological challenges of affirmative-action programs and the conflicting demands on women with both career aspirations and commitments to family life.

Feminists often have to weigh the short-tenn benefits of protecting wage-earning mothers (by mommy-tracking, for example) against the long-term costs of a dual labor market. Sometimes ideological clarity is lost in complicated strategy debates. Sometimes ideological conflicts are put aside when feminists share a transcendent social goal, such as

suffrage or reproductive choice. And sometimes one ideological strain of feminism dominates another. In the 1970s equal-rights feminism was ascendent. The 1980s saw a revival of protectionism.

Equal-rights feminism couldn't last. It was profoundly disruptive for women as well as men. By questioning long-cherished notions about sex, it posed unsettling questions about selfhood. It challenged men and women to shape their own identities without resort to stereotypes. It posed particular existential challenges to women who were accustomed to knowing themselves through the web of familial relations. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed more than a hundred years ago, equal-rights feminism challenges women to acknowledge that they are isolated individuals as well. Stressing that like "every human soul" women "must make the voyage of life alone," Stanton, the mother of seven and a political organizer who spent most of her life in crowds, exhorted women to recognize the "solitude of self."

This emphasis on individual autonomy didn't just scare many women; it struck them as selfish-as it might be if it were unaccompanied by an ongoing commitment to family and community. Twenty years ago feminists made the mistake of denigrating homemaking and volunteer work. It's hard to imagine how else they might have made their case. Still, the feminist attack on volunteering was simplistic and ill-informed. Feminists might have paid attention to the historical experiences of middle-class African-American women combining paid work, volunteering, and family life. They might have paid attention to the critical role played by the volunteer tradition in the 19th-century feminist movement. Women's sense of their maternal responsibilities at home and in the wider world was at the core of their shared social conscience, which feminists ignored at their peril. Feminism will not succeed with American women, as Constance Buchanan notes, until it offers them a vision that reconciles the assertion of equal rights with the assumption of social responsibilities.

That's the vision Hillary Clinton is striving to embody, as a family woman and a feminist, an advocate of civil rights and a preacher of a caring and sharing politics of meaning .... The difficulty she encountered during the campaign persuading people that she has a maternal side reflects the strong popular presumption that a commitment to equality is incompatible with a willingness to nurture.

We should know better. In fact millions of American women working outside the home are exercising rights and assuming responsibilitiesfor better or worse, that's one of the legacies of feminism. Women who sought equal rights in the 1970s have not abandoned their families, like Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer, as antifeminists predicted they would. Instead they have overworked themselves, acting as breadwinners and primary caretakers, too. Given the absence of social and institutional support-family leave and day care-it's not surprising that women would turn for sustenance to traditional notions of sex difference. The belief that they were naturally better suited to child care than men would relieve them of considerable anger toward their husbands. As Victorian women invoked maternal virtue to justify their participation in the public sphere, so contemporary American women have used it to console themselves for the undue burdens they continue to bear in the private one.

Notions of immutable sex differences explained a range of social plight of displaced homemakers, the persistence of inequities-the sexual violence, the problems of women working double shifts within and outside the home. The general failure of hard-won legal rights to ensure social justice (which plagued civil-rights activists as well as feminists) might have been considered a failure of government-.-to enforce civil-rights laws and make them matter or to provide social

services. It might have been considered a failure of community-our collective failure to care for one another. Instead it was roundly condemned as a failure of feminism, because it provided convenient proof of what many men and women have always believed-that biology is destiny after all. Equal-rights feminism fell out offavor, even among feminists, because it made people terribly uncomfortable and because legal rights were not accompanied by a fair division offamilial and communal responsibilities.

Feminism Succumbs to Femininity .... It's clear that women are moving, but in what direction? What is the women's movement all about?

Vying for power today are poststructural feminists (dominant in academia in recent years), political feminists (office-holders and lobbyists), different-voice feminists, separatist feminists (a small minority), pacifist feminists, lesbian feminists, careerist feminists, liberal feminists (who tend also to be political feminists), antiporn feminists, eco-feminists, and womanists. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive categories, and this is hardly an exhaustive list. New Age feminists and goddess worshippers widen the array of alternative truths. And the newest category of feminism, personal-development feminism, led nominally by Gloria Steinem, puts a popular feminist spin on deadeningly familiar messages about recovering from addiction and abuse, liberating one's inner child, and restoring one's self-esteem.

The marriage of feminism and the phenomenally popular recovery movement is arguably the most disturbing (and potentially influential) development in the feminist movement today. It's based partly on a shared concern about child abuse, nominally a left-wing analogue to right-wing anxiety about the family. There's an emerging alliance of antipornography and antiviolence feminists with therapists who diagnose and treat child abuse, including "ritual abuse" and "Satanism" (often said to be linked to pornography).

Feminism is at risk of being implicated in the unsavory business of hypnotizing suspected victims of abuse to help them "retrieve" their buried childhood memories.

Steinem has blithely praised the important work of therapists in this field without even a nod to the potential for, well, abuse when unhappy, suggestible people who are angry at their parents are exposed to suggestive hypnotic techniques designed to uncover their histories of victimization.

But the involvement of some feminists in the memory-retrieval industry is only one manifestation of a broader ideological threat posed to feminism by the recovery movement. Recovery, with its absurdly broad definitions of addiction and abuse, encourages people to feel fragile and helpless. Parental insensitivity is classed as child abuse, along with parental violence, because all suffering is said to be equal (meaning entirely subjective); but that's appropriate only if all people are so terribly weak that a cross word inevitably has the destructive force of a blow. Put very simply, women need a feminist movement that makes them feel strong.

Enlisting people in a struggle for liberation without exaggerating the ways in which they're oppressed is a challenge for any civil-rights movement. It's a particularly daunting one for feminists, who are still arguing among themselves about whether women are oppressed more by nature or by culture. For some feminists, strengthening women is a matter of alerting them to their natural vulnerabilities.

There has always been a strain of feminism that presents women as frail and naturally victimized. As it was a hundred years ago, feminist victimism is today most clearly expressed in sexuality debates-about pornography, prostitution, rape, and sexual harassment. Today sexual (Continued on page 41)

Reprinted from News &

u.s.

World Report.

June 6. 1994. published

at

Washington, D.C.

T

he parents of the Wellesley class of '69 nodded approvingly as the senator scolded the graduating seniors for their generation's indulgence in "coercive protest."

Mostly Republican and mostly middle class, these proud moms and dads had driven their big American sedans from suburbs around the country to see their daughters embark on the life for which their education had prepared them: That of "well-adjusted civic-minded housewives," in the words of Time magazine.

Then Hillary Rodham, a 21-year-old senior from the Chicago suburbs, mounted the podium. As the first student speaker in the history of Wellesley graduation ceremonies proceeded extemporaneously to upbraid Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, her 400 classmates felt their parents turn to stone. "I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while," the student government president began on that sunny afternoon 25 years ago. "For too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. Our questions about our institutionsour college, our churches, our government---eontinue.

Every protest, every dissent, is an attempt to forge an identity ~in this particular age."

In the crowd, trying to ignore their parents' dismay, Rodham's classmates listened gratefully. There was Kathy Smith of Wilmington, Delaware, who had defied her mother's warning that an educated girl would never find a husband.

There, Janet McDonald of New Orleans, who until Wellesley had never met a white person who wasn't a nun. And there, Kris Olson of New York City, who was shortly to be cut off by her parents for moving into a commune. For seven minutes, the entire class stood and cheered Rodham's defiant words. "Senator Brooke Upstaged at Wellesley Commencement" read the Boston Globe's front page the next day.

The generation gap opened wide that day amidst the church steeples of bucolic New England. These girls of the 1950s had grown up with sweater sets and proms and mothers who stayed home, and few would ever entirely reject the model of good motherhood on which they had been weaned. But as Rodham pointed out that day, it was "men with dreams" who had shaped their consciousness-"men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program."

As the first generation to come of age in the feminist era, the new graduates might want their mothers' lives, but they wanted their fathers' lives as welL Or they wanted neither. Rodham's rebuke to the authority of a senator pleased her classmates, who still dressed for dinner

to the Wellesley motto: Not to be served, but and studied proper posture, to serve? Could they create such a thing as a because they found their heThe young Hillary Rodham (second row. roes in Tom Wolfe's Electric marriage of equals, balance the demands of seventh/rom right) was Kool-Aid Acid Test and marriage and motherhood and work, recclass president and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on oncile their '60s aversion to what Rodham graduation speaker.

Ice. Rodham had marched in had called "our prevailing acqUIsItIve, competitive corporate life" with their desire to Boston after the assassination of Martin Luther King, 1r., provide for their children or support husand had ridden a train to the bands pursuing their own public service careers? Weaned on mistrust of the system, how Chicago Democratic convenwould they handle the power that the feminist tion and witnessed police beatings of demonstrators. movement had fought to win? "We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understand and attemptJust three weeks before graduation, they had all watched in ing to create within that uncertainty," Rodham said on graduadisbelief as California Governor Ronald Reagan called in tion day. "The only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, helicopters to dump a skin-stinging powder developed for the by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel Viet Cong on protesters who were occupying Berkeley's People's Park. and the way we know."

Coming of age on the threshold of vast social change, each of the women who celebrated their 25th college reunion last June has confronted the same questions as Hillary Rodham Clinton, though in private, burdened with neither the symbolic weight of Asked if she has ever called a cop a pig, U.S. Attorney Kris the first lady's role nor the often harsh light of public life.

Olson Rogers smiles and takes the Fifth [Amendment]. Since Would they, as Rodham had at the Children's Defense Fund the question has been asked in police headquarters in Portland, and Watergate Impeachment Committee, dedicate themselves Oregon, it seems a reasonable response. Yet the irony remains:

The radical who organized protests following Kent State and wrote a law school critique of political trials has 25 years later become "the man."

For the class of '69, the Establishment was a corrupt fraternity to be shunned. Their parents may have elected Richard Nixon for his promise oflaw and order. But their peers had faced down hoses and dogs and the National Guard. For activists like Olson or her more moderate friend Hillary Rodham, to pursue power meant defying their generation's conviction that "the system" deformed all who entered and was utterly beyond repair. For a woman, it also required a leap into largely uncharted terrain with few models of what a powerful woman should be.

From the beginning, a generation of women like Olson learned to negotiate the corridors of power by subverting expectations in both substance and style. At Wellesley, she recalls, "We'd go in our little Villager dresses and white gloves to meet the CEO of some multinational. And then we'd demand they divest. It disabused them of their stereotypes. And I found I could say things in a softer way that enabled them to be heard." She carried the white gloves with her to Yale Law School, where she would daintily sip tea in the afternoon and then don a psychedelic jumpsuit at night to stage light shows with fellow commune members.

Like many of her peers, the new U.S. attorney in Oregon is still a package of apparent contradictions.

Her turquoise and beaded American Indian bracelets dangle about her wrists as she signs an authorization for wiretapping. While opponents of gay rights gained legislative victories around Oregon, the state's chief federal law enforcement officer invited the Gay Men's Chorus to sing a Grateful Dead tune at her swearing in.

Olson's first sustained exposure to the world of crime and punishment came of necessity. Cut off by her conservative parents, she put herself through law school working 40-hour weeks in jails and juvenile institutions and developing alternatives to sentencing. She was returned to the parental fold only when she was engaged to Jeff Rogers, son of Nixon's secretary of state. Their wedding guests included secret servicemen, Chief Justice Warren Burger, and Olson's commune friends.

The couple have spent 22 years experimenting with ways to balance a family and two high-powered careers. In the first of what would be many reciprocal sacrifices, Jeff gave up his first job offer out of law school, in the U.S. attorney's office, so Kris could clerk for a federal judge without a conflict. She would later step aside so Jeff could be city attorney, as he would subsequently yield the U.S. attorney nomination to her-moves never entirely without tension, she says. After the birth of their second child in 1980, they became the first couple ever to share a Justice Department job--two desks in one room, alternating days-so each could join fully in their children's care.

It was as a deputy U.S. attorney under a Republican administration that Kris Rogers discovered the limits of the compromises she would make. When Reagan appointee.

Charles Turner ordered her to get an indictment on a former

Black Panther on a dubious firearms charge, she brought enough witnesses before the grand jury that it was ultimately persuaded not to indict. Turner complained to Washington that she was insubordinate, a complaint he repeated when she chaired a committee of local civic leaders that recommended the decriminalization of street prostitution. Forced out of the office, she wondered if her career was at an end.

Appointed U.S. attorney by President Bill Clinton, Rogers still worries relentlessly about the tension between her ideals and her life. "I have been co-opted by power to a certain degree. I censor myself a lot, package things in more palatable terms." She sees compromises in her personal life as well: "I should give up more of my creature comforts, live more simply, in greater ecological harmony. I should have my kids in public school and volunteer there. It's that damn Wellesley motto. It never leaves us in peace."

Their mothers may have yearned for big backyards and new dinettes. But this generation's love of battered Volkswagens and tattered jeans spoke of their righteous contempt for material things. For women in particular, raised in households where fathers brought home the bacon, it seemed inconceivable that the pursuit of money ever would be central to their lives.

Little did the Wellesley women of '69 anticipate that two decades hence, half of them would be the primary breadwinners in their families.

Nobody embodied the disdain of the worldly more than Susan Alexander, a religion major at Wellesley and later a Presbyterian minister. "Money was the stuff of the militaryindustrial complex," she says. "We were interested in higher things." Twenty-five years later, financial analyst Alexander is supporting her son alone and like many of her generation has changed her mind.

Brought up in the New Jersey suburbs by a mother who had quit her secretarial job to get married, Susan found her model for the life of the spirit and mind in the "incredible female academicians" at Wellesley. She flourished at Princeton Theological Seminary but soon had her first unwelcome brush with fate. She could not get ordained. "If God wants you to be ordained, he has to demonstrate that-somehow ajob has to be offered," Susan says. "But congregations pick their own ministers, and most were not into the idea of a woman. So I found it difficult to convince God." In the 1973 recession, she found herself unemployed, a misery endured at some time by nearly a fhird of the class of '69.

Despairing of her prospects, Alexander took a pragmatic turn, training in psychotherapy to qualify for pastoral counseling.

Through her work with alcoholics and the mentally ill at a Bowery mission, she was indeed finally ordained, and at 31 it appeared her life was at last secure. She married a "charming and romantic" man. They settled in a Long Island, New York, suburb, and at last she got "a call."

Then she got pregnant, and her job disappeared. So did the

.:.

KRIS OLSON ROGERS The Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney condemns "timid leaders pandering to a public" whipped into a hysteria about crime.

SUSAN ALEXANDER "[ should be in Africa feeding the hungry," says the former minister who runs her own .financial researchfirm and is writing a spy thriller, "but [ didn't have a lot of choices. If my son was going to eat, [ had to work."

LONNY LASZLO HIGGINS "If you want to be a healer, you have to be a listener. [ believe that a woman brings a different kind of compassion to medicine."

family's money, as her alcoholic husband drank up what little Alexander could bring in. When he turned violent-beating up her mother, pulling a gun on Alexander and their infant sonshe demanded he go .

Alone and out of work with a nine-month-old baby, she went as a temporary to Wall Street. For all her 1960s aversion, it was there the minister found her authentic calling. The nonprofit world of social service, all dingy and broken down, "had not been an environment reinforcing to one's self-esteem." On Wall Street, "the whole environment bespoke power." On Sundays, she still preached in poor churches, but otherwise she had no social life. "I made a choice to be with my son. I also made the choice not to be resentful."

Alexander has learned that the world reserves its admiration for worldly achievements. "I envy people who've had the ability to stay home and raise families. But I don't see a lot of marriages where the woman is getting as good a deal. It's socially acceptable, and there's pressure to do it. But once you

do, that's where the encouragement and rewards and respect dry up."

Two years ago, at 45, Alexander pulled up roots and moved to a job in Luxembourg-fulfilling a long-held desire to live in Europe. She runs her own struggling financial-research firm and is writing a spy thriller. Continuing to learn through trial and error ("mostly error"), she is overweight, has ulcers, and hates getting older. "Ageism is much worse than sexism. For women it's death."

If she has lost her youthful idealism, she has gained an appreciation of the compromises life often requires. "When you're young, you have great contempt for the lives people end up living. You think people have more choices than they have.

Now, I admire people who've paid the mortgage, sent the kids to college, maintained a relationship, no matter how pedestrian that all is."

When the head of her residency at Tufts Medical School learned that Lonny Laszlo Higgins had spent the better part of a decade with a flashlight in her mouth performing pelvic exams on Third World women, he was appalled. "He called it a waste of good training," she recalls.

For Higgins and other women of her generation, it was a familiar response. Turned down at seven medical schools ("Why should we displace a male candidate for someone who will just get pregnant?"), she is a woman whose uncompromised idealism has often required defiance and the forfeiture of much of the status and perks of her profession. The Peace Corps notion of making recompense for U.S. imperialism was not big with her elders, nor was the idea that Western scientists could learn from traditional healers.

But gracious living was not going to do it for Higgins. At Wellesley, she spent a summer astride a horse, assisting Appalachian midwives. While finishing med school and her obstetrics residency, she nursed her two new babies at the hospital when on call. Knowing she wanted more time with them than any conventional medical career could afford, she and her lawyer husband, David, sold their house, bought a boat, and set out to sea as a family. Educating their children aboard ship, they spent the next five years traveling through Central America, French Polynesia, Tonga, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea.

With a clinic aboard ship and donated medical supplies, Higgins provided medical care wherever they went. She soon realized, however, that she was potentially doing more harm than good. "We'd come in on this magic ship and perform miracles and then we'd leave, and all we'd done was undermine the local health workers." They shifted their focus to education, training locals in primary maternal and child care.

In 1983, their trip came to a halt in the tiny coral atolls of the U.S. Trust Territory in Micronesia. In this tropical land of abundance, they found appallingly high mortality rates: Fort)! to 60 children per 1,000 were dying of dehydration and

malnutrition because of a lack of basic sanitation. The 66 U.S. nuclear tests on Bikini had caused a high incidence of radiation illness. And the infusion of Americanjunk food and pop culture had eroded the indigenous diet and social traditions.

After discussions with the Marshallese government, they created the Marimed Foundation and raised $4 million to build the Tole Mour, a tall ship designed as a floating clinic and school from which they could educate islanders in preventive medicine. An intensely animated and candid woman, Higgins approached the islanders "not as the great white fixer but as the guest of the local healer, to learn." Her own medical expertise she offered in local idiom. Lungs with pneumonia, she told them, "sound like rain crashing on the reef." On island after island, she invited her students to perform pelvic exams on her before trying the strange procedure on neighbors.

After five years, the local dispensaries were well stocked, Marshallese public health nurses were making regular visits to community-health workers, the system was self-sufficient, and Higgins needed a new job. Toward the end of their stay, she and David had begun working with troubled teens, bringing them aboard ship for extended journeys to rediscover their grandfathers' proud seagoing tradition. That experiment became the foundation for their present work in Hawaii. The Tole Mour provides an alternative to incarceration for teenagers convicted, often many times over, for drug offenses or violent crimes. On sea voyages, the kids develop an extended family, learn trust and teamwork and accountability for their own behavior, and make "a critical rite of passage into adulthood," in David's words.

Still thoroughly imbued with the communal spirit of the 1960s, both on board ship and now at home on Oahu, Higgins's family is typically less nuclear than clan-like. Recently, when she delivered a homeless woman's baby and saw child services whisk the infant away to seek a foster home, Higgins herself provided one so the mother could visit her child. At 47, she is thinking about having another baby of her own. "My needs have long been defined by others, which in some ways is easy, an irresistible call. Now, I want to learn to take care of myself."

As a child, Janet McDonald Hill never set foot in the fine restaurants of New Orleans or rode in the front ofa bus. Until she got to college, the only white people she had ever spoken to were the nuns at her school. It is little wonder then that the day she arrived at Wellesley, she wanted to flee immediately, back to the refuge of her segregated black world. But at her mother's insistence she stayed, and there began her evolution into a powerful advocate of integration in an increasingly separatist world.

For the five black women admitted to Wellesley in 1965, the redefinition of gender roles was secondary to the revolution they were waging in civil rights and race. The issues that preoccupied their white classmates didn't burn for women raised by working mothers frequently better educated than

their spouses. For them, the consuming questions were those then being put to the world by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Indeed, it was Janet's mother who chose Wellesley out of a magazine for her only child. A formidable woman who had earned a master's in music from Arkansas Normal School, Mrs. McDonald owned and ran a dental lab with her eighth-gradeeducated husband. "My mother told me I could do it, so I could do it," Janet now says.

By her senior year, she was at the head of student government with Hillary Rodham-serving as chief justice of the college court-and on her way to a master's in math at the University of Chicago. Her many years as a special assistant to Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander led to their partnership for the past 14 years in a management consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. While many of her classmates have shunned the for-profit world, Hill has long focused on corporate America, where she believes most of the nation's power lies. She now advises clients ranging from Major League Baseball to IBM on how to recruit and develop women and minority managers.

Unwavering in her commitment to integration, Hill has little patience for such fashions as ethnic separatism on campus or "diversity training" at work. "We're wrong if we think women can't mentor men or whites can't mentor blacks. I like to think I'm a mentor for young white men. T simply don't know what a female or a black attribute is."

Hill's commitment to integration has been evident in her family life as well. Married after graduate school to Dallas Cowboys star running back Calvin Hill, she refused to segregate her family anew behind the walls of celebrity and privilege, choosing instead to raise her son Grant-now a basketball star himself-in a regular suburban tract home among people of various races and classes. When Calvin moved to Cleveland to play with the Browns, she stayed behind so as not to disrupt her career or remove Grant from public school.

A supremely self-possessed and elegant woman, Hill learned early to defend her family's zone of privacy. But that did not mean losing sight of the family's larger obligation to the world.

Although she jokes about how often she is overlooked in articles about her famous husband and son ("I guess they think Grant sprang full-blown from Calvin's head"), she is grateful for the rare picture they offer the world-a loving black father serving as role model for his son.

The lessons have not been lost on Grant, who led Duke University to the national championship finals last year and is now headed for a multimillion-dollar career with the National Basketball Association.

"My mom taught me to respect women, because she commands so much respect," he says.

"With parents who taught me right from wrong, T know I can send a message that's more positive than a lot that are out there." Though he is a fan of rap music, even militant rap, Grant believes that "the people who are going to change the world are people like Janet Hill, who work at it every day. She's got it goin' on. We can call her-Janet X."

What Kathleen Smith Ruckman dreads most is the cocktail party question, "So what do you do?" Too often, her answer-"I am a mother to my children"-brings nothing but blank stares.

Surrounded at Wellesley by classmates noisily rejecting the perceived domestic prison of their mothers' lives, Kathy Smith did the unfashionable thing: She chose to stay home with her kids. Only about ten percent of her class resisted the pressure to strike out into the world, and they all paid a price, Kathy believes, in diminished respect and self-esteem. Theirs was a rebellion not against the old narrow range of options for women but against the narrow thinking of some who were redefining women's choices.

Kathy's rebellions have always taken such an odd, inverted turn. As a kid, her defiance of her mother took the unlikely form of straight A's. Kathy's job was to find a good husband, her mother warned. She should be a majorette and date a lot of boys as her sister had, rather than scaring them off with her overly smart ways. "Dressed in a dress, baking cookies, watching all the soaps on TV, my mother was bored but unable to see other choices," says Kathy. "And if that was good enough for her, it was good enough for me." When Kathy asked for music lessons, her mother refused, deeming them a wealthy person's luxury. When at the urging of a mentor, she chose Wellesley, her mother told her not to go: "She told me I didn't belong among those people or their fancy ideas."

Kathy went anyway and did find herself at odds with the new ideas. "People came ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Hillary was part of that. I found it hard to take. Here was this thing I'd worked so hard for, and they were cynical about it.

They laughed at all the traditions." A psychology major with an interest in child development, Kathy found particularly distressing feminism's "devaluation of anything related to the care of children." Just a few years earlier, the unofficial Wellesley motto had been "ring by spring or your money back." Now in the springtime of feminism, Kathy was embarrassed to be engaged.

In the ten years after college, Ruckman moved nine times for her husband's career, bearing four children along the way and rearing them nearly on her own. "My husband's work as a pediatric cardiologist was so demanding that when the kids were little, he was simply unavailable," says the suburban Maryland housewife. Though she has been angry "off and on" about how much time her husband spends working, "it's he who's losing in the end," she says. "He's now seeing what he's missed by not being involved with the kids. I don't envy him and wouldn't wish his life on my children."

Though her own musical ambitions were thwarted, Ruckman has raised a gifted string quartet. Her kids have played for Presidents and won national awards, her daughter is now at a conservatory studying piano, and this past summer all four children spent seven weeks together at a music festival in Colorado. Between carpools and scheduling accompanists for

JANET McDONALD HILL "When my son wants to outhip me, I just have to remind him that I've been black twice as long as he has. "

KATHLEEN SMITH RUCKMAN "We lI'ere the turning poil1l year for feminism, but Iwasn 't bu)'ing if. Toda)' , Il"hen 1see nannies pushing babies, 1 pit)" the mothers."

her kids, Ruckman helps run the music program at her church and tutors at several Washington, D.C., schools. "I would urge you not to make the common mistake of assuming that a woman who chooses to stay at home with her children is doing nothing," she says. "I am acutely aware that this lifestyle is a luxury and becoming increasingly so in our economy. But I don't think serving req uires a profession or public life. Schools are collapsing because of too little parental involvement. f'd like to see both women and men establish a balance in life, so that career success does not equal having others raise your kids."

0

HILLARY

SPAN

HilJan¡ About the Author: Miriam Horn, a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, /i¡eelances for Vanity Fair and the New Republic.

RodhaIll

Clinton

RODHAM

CLINTON

"I knoll'. 1acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most.

What power wouldn '( 1 trade now for a little more time with my family?"

eminism's Identity Crisis continued from page 33

violence is a unifying focal point for women who do and women who do not call themselves feminists: Eighty-four percent of women surveyed by Redbook considered "fighting violence against women" to be "very important."

(Eighty-two percent rated workplace equality and S4 percent rated abortion rights as very important.) Given this pervasive, overriding concern about violence and our persistent failure to address it effectively, victimism is likely to become an important organizing tool for feminism in the 1990s ....

Why is feminism helping to make women feel so vulnerable? Why do some young women on Ivy League campuses, among the most privileged people on the globe, feel oppressed? Why does feminist victimology seem so much more pervasive among middle- and upperclass whites than among lower-income women, and girls, of color?

Questions like these need to be aired by feminists. But in some feminist circles it is heresy to suggest that there are degrees of suffering and oppression, which need to be kept in perspective. It is heresy to suggest that being raped by your date may not be as traumatic or terrifying as being raped by a stranger who breaks into your bedroom in the middle of the night. It is heresy to suggest that a woman who has to listen to her colleagues tell stupid sexist jokes has a lesser grievance than a woman who is physically accosted by her supervisor. It is heresy, in general, to question the testimony of self-proclaimed victims of date rape or harassment, as it is heresy in a 12-step group to question claims of abuse. All claims of suffering are sacred and presumed to be absolutely true. It is a primary article of faith among many feminists that women don't lie about rape, ever; they lack the dishonesty gene.

Some may call this feminism, but it looks more like femininity to me.

Blind faith in women's pervasive victimization also looks a little like religion .... Insights into the dynamics of sexual violence are turned into a meta physic. Like people in recovery who see addiction lurking in all our desires, innumerable feminists see men's oppression of women in all our personal and social relations. Sometimes the pristine earnestness of this theology is unrelenting. Feminism lacks a sense of black humor.

Of course, the emerging orthodoxy about victimization does not infect all or even most feminist sexuality debates. Of course, many feminists harbor heretical thoughts about lesser forms of sexual misconduct. But few want to be vilified for trivializing sexual violence and collaborating in the abuse of women.

The Enemy Within The example of Camille Paglia is instructive. She is generally considered by feminists to be practically pro-rape, because she has offered this advice to young women: Don't get drunk at fraternity parties, don't accompany boys to their rooms, realize that sexual freedom entails sexual risks, and take some responsibility for your behavior. As Paglia says, this might once have been called common sense (it's what some of our mothers told us); today it's called blaming the victim.

Paglia is right: It ought to be possible to condemn date rape without glorifying the notion that women are helpless to avoid it. But not everyone can risk dissent. A prominent feminist journalist who expressed misgivings to me about the iconization of Anita Hill chooses not to be identified. Yet Anita Hill is a questionable candidate for feminist sainthood, because she was, after all, working for Clarence

Thomas voluntarily, apparently assisting him in what feminists and other civil-rights activists have condemned as the deliberate nonenforcement offederal equal-employment laws. Was she too hapless to know better? Feminists are not supposed to ask.

It is, however, not simply undue caution or peer pressure that squelches dissent among feminists. Many are genuinely ambivalent about choosing sides in sexuality debates. It is facile, in the context of the AIDS epidemic, to dismiss concern about date rape as "hysteria."

And it takes hubris (not an unmitigated fault) to suggest that some claims of victimization are exaggerated, when many are true. The victimization of women as a class by discriminatory laws and customs, and a collective failure to take sexual violence seriously, are historical reality. Even today women are being assaulted and killed by their husbands and boyfriends with terrifying regularity. When some feminists overdramatize minor acts of sexual misconduct or dogmatically insist that we must always believe the woman, it is sometimes hard to blame them, given the historical presumption that women lie about rape routinely, that wife abuse is a marital squabble, that date rape and marital rape are not real rape, and that sexual harassment is cute ....

To the extent¡ that there's a debate between Paglia and the feminist movement, it's not a particularly thoughtful one, partly because it's occurring at second hand, in the media.¡There are thoughtful feminist debates being conducted in academia, but they're not widely heard.

Paglia is highly critical of feminist academics who don't publish in the mainstream; but people have a right to choose their venues, and, besides, access to the mainstream press is not easily won. Still, their relative isolation is a problem for feminist scholars who want to influence public policy. To reach a general audience they have to depend onjournalists to draw upon and sometimes appropriate their work.

In the end feminism, like other social movements, is dependent on the vagaries of the marketplace. It's not that women perceive feminism just the way Time and Newsweek present it to them. They have direct access only to the kind and quantity of feminist speech deemed marketable. Today the concept of a feminist movement is considered to have commercial viability once again. The challenge now is to make public debates about feminist issues as informed as they are intense.

It's not surprising that we haven't achieved equality; we haven't even defined it. Nearly 30 years after the onset of the modern feminist movement, we still have no consensus on what nature dictates to men and women and demands oflaw. Does equality mean extending special employment rights to pregnant women, or limiting the Sixth Amendment rights of men standing trial for rape, or suspending the First Amendment rights of men who read pornography?

Nearly 30 years after the passage of landmark federal civil-rights laws, we still have no consensus on the relationship of individual rights to social justice. But, feminists might wonder, why did rights fall out of favor with progressives just as women were in danger of acquiring them?

The most effective backlash against feminism almost always comes from within, as women either despair of achieving equality or retreat from its demands. The confident political resurgence of women today will have to withstand a resurgent belief in women's vulnerabilities.

Listening to the sexuality debates, I worry that women feel so wounded. Looking at feminism, I wonder at the public face of femininity.

0 About the Author: Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and a Guggenheim Fellow, has written many books, among them A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight From Equality and I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional.

THE SINGLE WOMAN HOLLYWOOD'S

FATAL ATTRACTION

She is beautiful. She is promiscuous. She is the serpent in the garden of Eden. Is she Hollywood's favorite myth?

Going by the recent crop of American movies, there seem to be enough grounds to suspect that Hollywood's favorite bogeyman is a bogeywoman, haunting movie screens with a vengeance approaching the ludicrous. One of the better known, early indicators of this sinister trend is Fatal Attraction (1987), starring Glenn Close as the manic single woman who unleashes a brutal vendetta on her married lover's unsuspecting family. Could this trend be a manifestation of the "backlash" that, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi, is threatening to nullify the very gains that American women have wrested from their society since the epochal 1970s?

Faludi is especially critical of the role that popular culture has played in disseminating a myth about the post-1970s emancipated woman. In a significant number of soap operas and movies of the past few years, the single woman emerges as the arch enemy of decent, law-abiding citizens. Like a predator, she stalks the office rooms and bedrooms of suburban America, seeking men, single or married, for whatever they can give her-sex in the elevator, money, power, or that most tantalizing of treasures, a family.

Some of these films not only depict single women in a very unflattering light but, even more ominously, threaten women who see bonding with each other as a way of resisting male hegemony. In Single White Female (1992), Bridget Fonda takes in a female roommate, Jennifer Jason Leigh, because she wants to avoid her ex-boyfriend. It looks as if Fonda and Leigh are all set to enjoy a rewarding relationship, especially after Leigh intervenes to rescue Fonda from sexual harassment by her boss.

A beautiful tale of two women trying to heal each other's insecurities turns into a psychodrama as Fonda stumbles onto her roommate's murky past, which includes a history of

Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female: They shared clothes and confidences until they became too close for comfort.

What with films showing women betraying women for the sake of men and men rescuing women from women, Hollywood seems to be taking a grim view of the possibilities of sister-

hood. Interestingly, this view appears to be mental illness. Leigh is, in fact, a split . consanguineously related to Hollywood's projection of the single woman's "manlessness" that personality who becomes a brazen huntress of illicit pleasures by night. Once the truth is supposedly gives her the power to assert an discovered, a chain of events is unleashed unholy influence on her male-dependent sister, an influence that is invested with all the virulence which culminates in Fonda being held hostage of a pestilential infection. She is a virtual fury

by Leigh. The film climaxes in an ironic reversal of circumstances when Fonda is rescued by wreaking bloody revenge, displaying maniacal rages that would make Rambo cower with fear. none other than her salacious boss.

Another 1987 release, Black Widow, has TheIn The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992), resa Russell in the role of a femme fatale who the movie that inspired a Hindi remake, lures rich men into matrimony and murders Khalnaaika, Rebecca De Mornay is left bereft, them. Debra Winger, who plays a Justice emotionally and economically, when her docDepartment investigator, is obsessed with tor husband commits suicide following his Russell's glamorous lifestyle and this obsession female patient's damaging disclosure.

De leads her to pursue the "black widow" until she Mornay's loss is compounded when she missucceeds in putting an end to her murderous carries, and the resulting infertility becomes a career. In the course of this pursuit, Winger falls deft metaphor for the emptiness of her future life. So, overlooking her late husband's crime in love with the man who is her suspect's next intended victim and what follows is a game of of sexual misconduct toward his patient, De deadly intrigue as the two women pit themselves Mornay sallies forth to destroy the womanplayed by Annabella Sciorra-whom she against each other, Clnetrying to destroy the man and the other trying to save him. blames for wrecking her life.

By cleverly insinuating herself into the household as a nanny for Sciorra's newborn baby, De Mornay methodically proceeds to alienate Sciorra from everyone who is close to her-her husband, children, and even her best friend. By weaving an intricate web of lies, she succeeds in persuading Sciorra's husband to doubt his wife's sanity. But when he refuses to respond to her overtures, De Mornay, already threatened by the risk of discovery, turns bloodthirsty.

Sciorra's girlfriend, who accidentally discovers De Mornay's identity, meets a gory end and Sciorra herself is saved from a similar fate only by the timely intervention of the hired help-a mute, black man whom she had kicked out of the house earlier under the false impression, created of course by De Mornay, that he had evil designs on her little girl.

camps with their entire savings after having magnanimously given a night of good sex to Thelma, who is as gullible as Louise is tough.

Stripped of cash, the two women are forced to resort to armed robbery which effectively seals the case against them because they are now lumped together with hard-core criminals.

When the law eventually catches up with them, Thelma and Louise are headed toward the yawning abyss of the Grand Canyon. The film closes with a breathtakingly beautiful shot of

Scenes of violence almost always follow the women's sudden and overwhelming sense of their own irreparable loss when confronted with the spectacle-simultaneously tempting and nauseating--of domestic harmony. Rebecca De Momay's terrifying outburst in the toilet and Glenn Close's crazed behavior in tearing up her lover's bed and boiling alive his son's pet rabbit, speak of a demonic force that threatens to assail that most sacred of social institutions, the family.

Her solitariness transforms the single woman into a menacing outsider who is dangerously free to exercise the powers of her libidinal energy at will.

Can one conclude from this that the same conditions that prompted Isadora Wing, the sexually liberated heroine of Erica long's novel of the 1970s, Fear of Flying, to observe that it is "heresy" to be single in America, still prevail in the 1990s?

World over, it is still men, by and large, who control the media and who, therefore, are responsible for the creation of myths for popular consumption.

One of the origins of the myth of the single woman could be a collective fantasy born of the need to cope with changing gender equations. Women are thus returned to traditional roles that were discarded in the march towarci sexual freedom and equality and in this fantasy, the single woman has no place. She becomes the archetypal outsider, the serpent in the garden'1()f Eden that threatens the sacred covenant between Adam and Eve, the primal couple.

Patriarchal societies have always attempted to define women in terms of men. For instance, the conmlOn factor that seems to unite perceptions of women in American and Indian societies is

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise: They copped out of life in search of thrills and excitement. Top: Glenn Close, Michael Douglas, and Anne Archer in Fatal Attraction: A happily married man's weekend fling turned his life into a living hell. the need to have men render them socially acceptable. In the absence of men, they are pictured as running wild, messing up their lives as well as everyone else's, and breeding chaos and anarchy instead of children. Take a movie like Thelma & Louise (1991). What begins as a weekend jaunt for Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), away from the emotional pressures of love and the claustrophobia of a stale marriage, rapidly turns into a nightmare when Louise shoots dead a lout who tries to rape Thelma. The rest of the film is about their desperate attempt to escape the clutches of the law by driving across the border to Mexico.

On the way, a smooth-talking hitchhiker de-

their 1966 T-bird arching defiantly over the hungry abyss as the cops watch, stunned.

Despite its sensitive and sympathetic handling of the two women who stumble into a career of crime due to the callousness of men, doesn't their tragedy hold a covert message? As women who dared to wander out of the charmed circle of love and marriage in search of thrills and excitement, they seem to be paying a price for violating a sacred code. Is there no alternative for such women other than to cop out of life, by leaping over the Grand Canyon like Thelma and Louise?

Mercifully, the vast majority of single women don't actually do these things much as the storytellers would like us to believe.

Truth is stranger than fiction, they say.

Women like Lorena Bobbitt and Cynthia Mason Gillett have proved that this is so. This is not the time and place to attempt an explanation or justification of these women's violent attacks on their husbands. I shall be content merely to point out that they were not single women.

0 About the Author: Vasantha K. Krishnaraj was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1992-93 and has compleled a PhD on African-American writer Alice Walker at the University of Kerala, Trivandrum.

erican Library iii

The American Center Library in Bombay was inaugurated

on November

23, 1944, Thanksgiving Day, as part of the U.S. Office of War Information, the predecessor organization

to the U.S.

Information

Service.

World War II was on, and the library catered to the needs of American soldiers and the press at its location in a wing of the National

City Bank of

New York, now Citibank, in the Fort area. The writer, who has been associated

with it for 49

of its 50 years as either patron or employee,

offers

some reminiscences.

Lefi: lawaharlal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu visited the library in its early days. Right: Ainslie T. Embree, professor emeritus of South Asian history at Columbia University in New York, chats with writer/educator Dinha S. Cuha at an anniversary celebration on November 23. Some 150 guests heard Ainslee deliver a talk titled "Are There Universal Values?" Far right: The library has been located in the Sundeep building on New Marine Lines since 1968.

Turns 50 I

first became acquainted with the American Center Library, Bombay, in 1945 when I began accompanying my mother there in search of reference material to help with her translation work. I was recuperating from a long illness and had been advised against taking up employment, so I enjoyed the opportunity to sit and read books or magazines at one of the long, polished wooden tables during our frequent visits.

We were friends of N.M. Ketkar, the assistant librarian, and he introduced us to the two American librarians, Flora Bell Ludington and Lucille Dudgeon.

One day in 1946, Ludington called me into her office and asked whether I would like to work for the library as a receptionist. I said yes, and began my job some weeks later.

Bombay in those years was a very different place from what it is today. Trams plied up and down Hornby-now Dr. Dadabhai NaorojiRoad. The streets were often filled with local people and

foreign soldiers, sailors, and tourists.

Horse-drawn Victoria carriages were much in demand for sight-seeing trips.

At the library's entrance, an American flag fluttered over the imposing polished wooden door and the tall plate-glass window next to it.

My table was behind the window and I felt as if I were on display, but I soon got used to it. In fact I began enjoying the opportunity in spare moments of observing the pedestrians and traffic that passed by. My work consisted ofhaving visitors enter their names in the register, filing index cards, placing magazines on display, and putting books back into order on the shelves.

The library received about 200 visitors a day in the early years after the war. Businessmen, students, journalists, and the general public liked to spend part of their lunch hour reading in the quiet, air-conditioned environment. The library had 4,000 books, several American newspapers, 30 to 40 magazines, and numerous college catalogs and pam-

phlets. Unfortunately, seven months after I joined, there was a retrenchment and my position was abolished.

In 1950 the library added a circulation section, and Wayne M. Hartwell, chief of library operations, sent me a letter asking if I would be interested in being the head of this section. I accepted and took up my new post in new quarters; the library had shifted in 1948 to the ground floor of the Adelphi, a building near Churchgate station.

In 1954, the library moved next door to the International building. The additional space there permitted creation of a children's room.

Colorful furniture and shelves were constructed of a size and height convenient for them. The children were not allowed to borrow books themselves, but elders could do so for them.

The number of visitors during the mid -19 50s increased to 600-800 a day. We even stayed open on Sundays with a skeleton staff. One Sunday we had 1,200 visitors, a record for a single day.

Since 1968 the library has been housed on the ground and first floors of the Sundeep building on New Marine Lines. Today, library director Vera Merwanji and her staff of 12 serve an average of 290 visitors a day and answer 1,375 reference queries a month. The library's collection includes 15,000 books, 200 periodicals, four Ameri-

can newspapers, and other periodicals and documents on microform, as well as databases on CD-ROM, videocassettes, and a photocopying service.

Iquitmyjobin 1961 to take care of my little girl and to pursue an unfulfilled dream of being a writer. I now visit the library regularly for research and to borrow books, and, of course, to visit former colleagues. I also attend as many film shows, lectures, and book discussions as I can there, and I look forward to spending many more such delightful hours in the years to come.

I often recall the wellknown personalities I met at the library-authors such as Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, and James Michener, for instance, and Ambassadors Chester Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith.

I am always pleased when people tell me they recognize me from my days of working there. I remember a young boy with a speech defect who used to borrow copies of Popular Mechanics. He often seemed depressed, and I encouraged him in his interest.

When I ran into him a few years ago, he told me he was happily married, had children, and was operating his own garage. He said coming to the library had given him the knowledge and self-confiderlCe to pursue his interest.

I am sure that the library has done the same for many others.

0

From the family album: A 1937 photograph of Wankaner House and interior, along lrith a more recent view C!fierrenovation.

crlieSaga Wartkqner J{ouse A scion of the royal family of Wankaner fondly recalls memories of the stately mansion built by his grandfather in Bombay, which now houses the U.S. Consulate General.

YL

n interesting phenomenon in the early history of the United States was the country's purchase of vast tracts of land from monarchs. Notable among these transactions were the "Louisiana Purchase" from Napoleon of France in 1803, the "Florida Acquisition" from King Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1819, and Alaska from Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1867.

In addition to these real-estate purchases from royal rulers in Europe was a more recent-and admittedly much smaller-one from a former royal family in India. In 1957, my father, Maharana Raj Shri Pratapsinhji of Wan kaner, sold Wankaner House in Bombay to the U.S. government for Rs. 1,722,000. Today the property, which serves as the U.S. Consulate General and the residence of the Consul General, would fetch a princely sum perhaps 1,000 times that price.

Wankaner House is now called Lincoln House. The reason for its sale was to settle the estate duty levied on my father when he inherited this property from my grandfather, H.H. Maharana Raj Shri Sir Amarsinhji, KCSI, KCIE, who was the last ruler of Wankaner State and the builder of Wankaner House. The deed was deftly negotiated by William Taylor Turner, then U.S. Consul General, to whom my father's secretary, K.D. Mehta, handed over the keys.

The saga ofWankaner House began in 1931. My grandfather, ruler of a small princely state, had great administrative acumen, foresight, development capabilities, and architectural knowledge. An avid builder, he also constructed among the best and most impressive palaces in Wan kaner, now being given over to international tourism.

He wanted to build a mansion for

W ankaner House in its reincarnation as Lincoln House.

On left is author Digvijay Sinh.

himself and his family outside his state and his first choice was Mount Abu, the nearest hill station to Wankaner. But then he changed his mind and shifted focus to Bombay. He purchased 10,000 square yards [8,360 square meters] of land on the seafront called the Mahalakshmi Battery Site, a place where cannons and weapons were stored by the British. One of those cannons was fitted at the entrance of the house and it stands there today.

As this plot extended to the seacoast, it had to be fortified.

The building took five years to complete. It was officially inaugurated in 1936 in the presence of Lord Brabourne, Governor of Bombay presidency.

Some of the well-known civil construction firms of the time were associated with the project. The architects were Gregson, Batley & King and the contractors, Shapurji Palanji. The electrical fittings were done by F&C Osler, the sanitary fittings by Richardson & Crudas, painting and interior decoration by William Jacks, and furniture by G. Mackenzie and John Roberts. This was the Art Deco era, and the finest furniture of that period adorned every room in the building.

After the purchase, Consul General Turner sent the plans ofWankaner House to Washington to seek advice as to where the strong room should be located. The reply was that the whole building was fit enough to be a strong room!

The sale deed included a banquet table, dining tables, buffet tables, writing tables, dressing tables, card tables, circular center tables, beds, settees, almirahs, easy chairs, cabinets, cupboards, teapoys, large mirrors, etc., all purchased from the best Art Deco furnishers in India. Every item of the sanitary fittings came from Shanks of Scotland. The public rooms had the choicest marble and the dining room was fitted with a parquet wooden floor for ballroom dancing.

Wankaner House had a central hall, two dining rooms, two drawing rooms, two sitting rooms, two study rooms, two dispense rooms, and 14 bedrooms, each with an attached dressing room.

Overlooking the seafront is a beautiful swimming pool where I swam for the first

time since 1957 with my son on July 4, 1993, American Independence Day, courtesy of Charles Mast, the immediate past Consul General. It was here that I had been coached in diving by an Olympic ace, Hill Gardener. There was also a small rifle range on the back lawns, laid by my uncle, M.K.S. Chandrabhanusinhji, who was a champion shooter. The secretarial staff rooms, servants' quarters, and kitchen are now the visa section of the consulate.

r.B

asically intended to be a city house for my grandfather and his family, Wankaner House was used for family gatherings, social events, as a summer home on the seafront, for visits to Bombay for shopping or health reasons, education of the children, commercial contacts, and as a base for traveling abroad. Two of my sisters' marriages took place there-with the Maharaj Kumar of Kutch and the Maharaja of Bijawar, respectively. My own engagement ceremony was held there as well. Princely families closely related to us, such as those of Kutch, Kota, Panna, Partabgarh, and Palitana, used the house for their marriage ceremonies, too. Some important meetings and gatherings also took place there. Indian princes sometimes met there to discuss common strategies for the administration and development of their states. I recall the big reception the people of Wankaner gave to my grandparents before they set sail to Europe for the coronation of King George VI in 1937. This trip was followed by a tour of the United States during which they visited the Ford automobile factory in Detroit and bought a Ford V8 saloon to add to a 1935 Buick sedan and an older Marmon seven-seater already at the house.

I recollect the World War II years when Bombay was teeming with "GI.s," "Aussies," and British troops. From the top floor of Wankaner House we watched naval ships and aircraft carriers entering the Bombay harbor. We were lucky that Wankaner House was not requisitioned for war operations.

After independence, circumstances

changed. With the advent of socialism and the anachronism of owning such vast properties in modern India, Wankaner House could not continue in private hands. But if we had held on for another ten to 15 years, we might have thought of converting it into a five-star hotel. The location is certainly ideal and this would have been in line with the tourism projects we are developing at our palace in Wankaner. Incidentally, the latter houses the only collection in India of American wildlife trophies.

At the same time we are happy that the property is today in good hands. But for one small alteration in a staircase from ground level to the first floor, no structural changes have been made. Wankaner House has escaped the fate of other privately owned properties in Bombay, many of which have been knocked down and replaced by multistoried flats. Every brick, stone, and fitting is intact according to the plan laid down by my grandfather.

The lift still has his name on the license.

We are grateful to John J. Eddy, the Consul General from 1987 to 1990, who specially invited my father for the installation of a photograph of my grandfather in the main reception hall. A plaque placed on the cannon also refers to my grandfather.

Some years earlier a photograph of my grandfather had been placed in the conference room on the first floor.

But most importantly, this transfer of property from our family to the United States government has enabled us to maintain cordial ties with every successive Consul General. Each one of them pays a visit to Wankaner to experience the hospitality of a former Indian ruler in his home palace.

There, on a pedestal, sits a beautiful silver model of Wankaner House, presented by the people of Wankaner on August I, 1937. Next to it is the old bronze plaque engraved with the words "Wankaner House."

D About the Author: Digvijay Sinh was a member oj the Lok Sabhafrom 1980 to 1989 and union minister for environment from 1982 to 1985.

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