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Bob Pelletreau: Challenges for the United States in the Middle East (posted February 16, 2011)
Larry Kramer: Yale's Conspiracy of Silence (posted May 19, 2009)
Greg Austin: Commitments and Contributions (posted August 7, 2007)
Brian Walsh: Moneymaker Didn't Do It - Inky Clark Did (posted March 24, 2007)
Bob Pelletreau: Where We Stand in the Middle East (posted February 18, 2007)
Dave Johnson: A Proud Father's Daughter's Best-selling Book (posted October 6, 2006)
Larry Kramer: Nuremberg Trials for AIDS (posted September 15, 2006)
Dave Johnson: A Tale of Yale (posted July 31, 2006)
Bob Rosefsky: Touring Help Solicited (posted January 24, 2006) and Addendum (posted July 22, 2006)

Bob Pelletreau: Challenges for the United States in the Middle East (posted February 16, 2011)

[Bob Pelletreau's statement below was delivered on February 9, 2011 at Falmouth Academy, toward the close of the opening phase of Egypt's recent revolution and before Hosni Mubarak had resigned as president.]

Introduction

Thank you all for coming out on this cold New England evening to hear about a hot part of the world. The Middle East has grown hotter and more chaotic since your persuasive chair invited me several months ago to take part in the Academy's public lecture series. In fact, the area is boiling, from North Africa all the way across the Arab world to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There is a lot to talk about and think about. Tonight I will focus on five key issues for the United States, beginning with the popular uprisings that are shaking authoritarian governments across the region, then moving from west to east, looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict, the still unsettled situation in Iraq, our continuing policy failure with respect to Iran, and the most complicated and threatening of all these issues, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the AFPAK problem as Washington short hands it. I'll close with a few words for the coming generation, Falmouth Academy students and others in the audience.

The Legacy

I think it's fair to say that when President Obama took office just over two years ago, no previous American president had inherited a worse series of challenges in the Middle East than he faced. Iraq, where we had invested our armed forces and treasure so heavily, was continuing to bleed and reconciliation between the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish portions of the population remained elusive, perhaps unachievable. Iran, confident under conservative clerical control and awash in oil revenues, was resisting engagement with the West and drawing ever closer to nuclear breakout. A Taliban resurgence was underway in Afghanistan, fed by similar instability in Pakistan, and al-Qaeda was not only still at large somewhere in the remote AFPAK border area but was regaining an operational capability and metastasizing to Yemen and Somalia.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, after seven years of neglect and a belated but failed Annapolis process under President Bush, seemed thoroughly unpromising with a weak and divided Palestinian leadership, the HAMAS part of which accepted neither Israel nor peace negotiations, and an Israeli body politick moving steadily toward the right. President Bush's "freedom agenda" had floundered on the rocks when his magic formula of "elections now" brought a HAMAS majority to power in the Palestinian Legislative Council and gave new strength to Islamist movements in Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon.

Popular Uprisings

In recent weeks, we've seen unprecedented popular uprisings in a number of Arab countries. In the forefront have been Tunisia and Egypt, coincidentally two countries where I served as Ambassador, and where massive public protests have occurred calling for change. It began spectacularly and unexpectedly when an unemployed university graduate who had had his humble fruit stand closed down by the police set himself on fire and sparked a normally docile population to take to the streets in protest against their dismal living conditions. The demonstrators refused to be beaten back or quelled by police strong arm tactics but kept coming and kept swelling until the autocratic president was driven from power and forced to flee into exile in Saudi Arabia along with his corrupt family. A caretaker, transitional government of technocrats and opposition figures has now been formed to restore essential services and prepare for new, more open and democratic elections. It looks like a real transformation is under way.

The first question to ask is why Tunisia, not on anybody's list as particularly shaky, and why now. This was a country and society that seemed to be doing many things right, such as universal education for men and women, a low military budget and a positive economic growth rate. It was developing a large middle class and had become a popular tourist destination for Europeans. The government was authoritarian and repressive to be sure, but also determinedly secular and pro-Western. The cracks, however, were larger than we thought.

The global economic recession hit Tunisia hard. Unemployment rose along with poverty rates. The percentage of youth looking for work was lower than in neighboring Algeria or Morocco, but expectations among the large numbers of university graduates who could not find jobs were higher and the frustration became more unbearable. The young man who saw no way out and immolated himself became a symbol for the whole generation. His desperate act in front of the police station in a sad town of Tunisia's interior might have passed unnoticed, but it was captured on a cell phone camera and soon the whole world knew.

So technology played a role. With computers, I-pads and cell phones now in so many hands, governments have a harder time controlling the news and keeping parts of their populations cut off from what's happening elsewhere in the country or in other countries. Western journalists and news sources were largely blocked by censorship, but the intrepid Arabic news channel, Al-Jazeera, with its reporters indistinguishable from the protesters, sent out regular reports and spread the news across the Arab world with electrifying effect, particularly in Egypt. Twitter, Face Book and texting helped mobilize street demonstrations and spread warnings on police tactics and concentrations.

Tunisia's small but professional army had always been kept out of politics. When orders came to reinforce the police in putting down the riots, it refused to do so and refused to fire on fellow citizens.

WikiLeaks also came in for part of the blame or credit in the uprisings. Publication of confidential reports by the American Ambassador of corruption among members of President Ben Ali's family had the effect of turning gossip and rumor into fact and fueled popular anger. The Tunisian uprising is often referred to as the Jasmine Revolution but some are calling it the first WikiLeaks revolution.

The United States, to its credit, quickly shifted from calling for calm to recognizing the legitimacy of the demonstrations and was ahead of European and Arab governments in expressing support for the protests and for greater democracy. There's no question that this encouraged the demonstrators. President Obama in his State of the Union speech affirmed the United States stand, saying, "Tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people."

Egypt, a vastly larger country of over 80 million and much more important American interests than Tunisia, was next. Ignited by Al-Jazeera's coverage and through blogs and other cyber connections which gave new immediacy to police brutality, Egyptians poured into the streets of all major cities demanding that President Mubarak, 82 and Pharaoh for 30 years, step down and allow a successor to be chosen by democratic process, not by inheritance. Mubarak had been grooming his son, and if 30 years of one Mubarak had now become too much, the specter of 60 years of two Mubaraks was unbearable.

Many of the same factors were at play as in Tunisia – rising unemployment, growing gaps between rich and poor, stifled free speech and repression of the opposition, an aging leader increasingly cut off from real conditions-- but there were significant differences as well. Mubarak is not as alone and isolated as Ben Ali and his family were and is not so visibly rapacious. Mubarak is from and of the armed forces, the largest and most cohesive institution in Egypt. He is part of a proud tradition that overthrew King Farouk, removed British colonial influence and brought true independence to Egypt, first through Nasser, then Sadat, then Mubarak. Now the armed forces are keeping their political centrality through Omar Suleiman and Ahmed Shafiq, the recently appointed Vice President and Prime Minister. They are representative of today's senior officer corps who fought the wars with Israel, made an honorable peace with Israel, and regard themselves as guardians of the Egyptian Revolution. They are not standing aside. There are two transitions going on: from Mubarak's authoritarian regime to the more inclusive government that will emerge; and from Mubarak himself to the next chapter of the Armed Forces' key role in Egypt's governing structure.

The United States has had a more delicate and complicated job of finding the right course to take. Our interests include maintaining the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel as the guarantee against another major Middle East war, preserving our access to the sea and air lines of communication through and across Egypt which are the major supply routes for our forces in Iraq, the Gulf and further east, continuing cooperation against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and encouraging moderates within the Palestinian territories. There is also a less tangible factor of great psychological importance – having a secular, non-Islamist government in power in Egypt, the cultural capital of the Arab world, with a cooperative relationship with the United States is a great reassurance to the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, facing Iranian pressure and power across the Gulf. Not to mention keeping the oil transit lines open through the Suez Canal and the SuMed pipeline to the Mediterranean and Europe. The Administration has had to adapt its policy to changing conditions on the ground, combining behind-the-scenes contacts with megaphone diplomacy from Washington, protecting our substantial interests while trying to stay on the right side of history and change, and all the while working to ensure that Republican leaders are not proposing another course. So far I would say that the President's record for leadership in foreign affairs has been strengthened through his deft handling of the crisis. It is still too soon to be sure, however, that the next Egyptian government will be committed to a moderate foreign policy. For those who worry that United States influence in the region is in free fall, it is worth noting that the only outside country that matters in the Egyptian drama, for the government, for the transition leaders and for most of the protestors in the street, is the United States.

Another unanswered question is how far this wave of unrest will spread in the days ahead. Already we have seen significant demonstrations in Jordan and Yemen. Algeria and Morocco are uneasy, the Palestinian Authority has forbidden sympathy marches with the Egyptian street, and a surprising number of bloggers and activists are calling for protest in Syria. Will it extend to Saudi Arabia and the other "oil monarchies?" Bahrain is on edge while Kuwait, in a pre-emptive move, has opened its treasury and distributed $3500 in cash to each citizen. What is clear is that this is a threshold moment for the whole area. Governments old and new will have to pay more attention to public opinion, be more responsive to their citizens' aspirations, and allow greater participation in decision-making in the future.

The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Now let's turn to the other issues facing the Obama Administration in the Middle East, beginning with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is today lower on the White House priority list than it's been during his first two years in office. Thinking back, the President came out of the chute very fast, visiting the State Department on the second day after his inauguration to announce the appointment of George Mitchell as his special envoy for the conflict. At that time, rapid US engagement on the Arab-Israeli conflict was taken as a given.

By the time Obama made his Cairo speech in June, Mitchell had already been to Israel and the Palestinian territories twice and set up a Jerusalem office. In his speech, the President announced a new beginning between the United States and the Muslim world and signaled that achieving a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians would be a top priority. He called on the Palestinians to abandon violence and develop their capacity to govern and asked Israel to stop construction of settlements, which he labeled as "illegitimate." Then, turning to the Arab states, he called on them to make some specific gestures toward Israel beyond the vaguely worded Arab Peace Initiative.

Not understood at the time was that this high rhetoric hardly matched realities on the ground. Mitchell plunged into negotiating a settlement freeze with Israel's tough new Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, and immediately found himself enmeshed in the tangled history of similar past attempts to slow Israeli settlement activity. In fact no Israeli government since the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt, whether that government was from the left, right or center of Israeli politics, has been able to halt the settlement process on the West Bank. Moreover, there are now settlement supporters at every level of the Israeli bureaucracy, ready to subvert or undercut any deal their leaders might agree to. When Bibi finally agreed to a 10 month moratorium, it was limited to new residential construction starts. Existing construction could continue, public buildings would be exempt, and East Jerusalem would not be included. Even this limited moratorium was hard for the Likud-dominated coalition to accept, and Israel was not able to agree to an extension despite a number of sweeteners Washington was ready to offer. In fact, there has not been a single day over the past two years without robust settlement activity going on. When Secretary Clinton, in an attempt to sell the moratorium to Palestinians, characterized it as "unprecedented," this had little credibility in the eyes of West Bankers witnessing what was happening on the ground.

Moreover, making a settlement freeze the first step had the effect of raising its importance in Palestinian eyes and making it a test of the Obama Administration's ability to secure cooperation from Israel. The Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, has made curbing settlements a condition to entering negotiations, thereby painting himself into a corner, and despite a few brief openings, he is still refusing to sit down in direct negotiations with the Netanyahu government.

This early American miscalculation with respect to Israel was matched by a second miscalculation regarding the so-called Arab Peace Initiative. Somehow, Obama's advisors thought that Saudi Arabia and other Arab governments would be willing to make some gestures toward Israel to help persuade it to accept a settlement freeze. This misread the fundamental nature of the Initiative which was a pledge to make peace once a Palestinian-Israeli agreement had been achieved, not an offer to bargain before such an accord. The Saudis said "No!" So the Obama team began its foray into Arab-Israeli peacemaking with two setbacks. It was time to step back and reassess.

This time-out, which lasted until last summer, saw a considerable evolution in US-Israeli relations. Initial frostiness because of Obama's harsh criticism of settlements in Cairo and a first Netanyahu-Obama meeting at the White House that produced no warm vibes became chillier after the flotilla raid and an Israeli minister's announcement of new construction approvals right in the middle of a visit to Jerusalem by Vice President Biden.

But none of these developments foreshadowed any real weakening in US-Israeli relations. Strong Congressional reactions and insistent voices within the White House sought to restore the image and reality of close and cooperative relations. The President took steps to develop a warmer relationship with Bibi. Military and intelligence cooperation continued at a very high level. Washington has not wavered in considering HAMAS a terrorist organization with no role in peace negotiations. And Washington policy makers decided against advancing a US plan, which would have meant putting strong pressure on both parties.

New US Initiative

Despite its lack of success the first time around, the Obama administration was not ready to give up. A second effort, launched last September, just six months ago, seemed better prepared and orchestrated than the first. President Mubarak and King Abdallah of Jordan joined Abbas and Netanyahu at the White House for an impressive rollout. The US would not ask more of Saudi Arabia than it could give. We would no longer make a settlement freeze a pre-condition although we hoped Israel would agree to extend its moratorium.

But no dice. After a single Netanyahu-Abbas meeting, the moratorium expired and settler construction surged. The Palestinians, seeing no hope in a negotiation process with the Israeli Right have shifted their focus to the United Nations where a number of governments have supported a unilateral declaration of Palestinian sovereignty and a condemnation of settlements. This has not come to a vote yet in the Security Council and may not, because of the possibility, some would say likelihood, of an American veto.

Where do we go from here? Another American effort to bring the parties to the negotiating table is possible. There is always some issue to negotiate, however small, such as removing a checkpoint, canceling an eviction notice, approving a category of imports into Gaza. But how many times will George Mitchell be willing to play Charlie Brown as the football is snatched away? If you listened to the State of the Union speech, as I'm sure many of you did, you may have noticed that promoting Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations was one of the dogs that didn't bark. There was no mention of it at all as a priority in the period ahead.

This does not mean that things will stay the same. Palestinians cannot help but be affected by the popular uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world. Renewed violence is a possibility, even against the vastly more powerful Israeli army and security forces. The West Bank is relatively prosperous under Palestinian Prime Minister Salem Fayyad's policy of building Palestinian institutions from the ground up. In the short term, this has a lot in common with Netanyahu's approach of "economic peace." So what we may see in the period ahead is basically a continuation of the status quo, with modest improvements in West Bank living conditions, continuing incremental expansion of settlements, harsh containment of Gaza as it continues under HAMAS control, and half steps by Washington to try to manage the situation rather than resolve it.

In the longer term, and here I'm thinking in decades not years, assuming that the settlement process keeps nibbling more and more West Bank land and that the many areas of contact and cooperation which exist today between private Palestinian and Israeli citizens continue, greater integration of Israel and the West Bank may occur. Current concepts of sovereignty, based on 19th century models of the "nation state," may become blurred as is already happening in Europe. Palestinians may then agitate in Martin Luther King style non-violent resistance for greater equality within a single entity. Such an outcome would be almost beyond imagining today.

Iraq

Moving eastward, Iraq presents a different picture as the Iraqi government continues, unevenly, to exert more authority and the US military withdrawal is proceeding apace. As President Obama promised, we have reduced the American military presence from around 130,000 when he took office to under 50,000 today and ended active combat operations. The glide path is clear. We are on the way out. Left behind will be a substantial American civilian presence along with continuing internal violence and pockets of instability as ethnic and tribal lines continue to be sorted out, but not enough to persuade us to reverse course. The Administration, the Congress and public opinion are in full agreement on this. The dominant influence in Baghdad is today, and is likely to continue to be, Shia, with some elements such as the Islamist cleric Musa Sadr and his party deeply anti-American and close to Shiite leaders in Iran. We have been the instrument replacing a Sunni-dominant regime under Saddam Hussein with regional territorial ambitions and an affinity for weapons of mass destruction, with a Shia-dominant regime that is part of a Shia political expansion of a different sort. Was it worth it? Were our interests in the region advanced by it? Historians will be arguing this question for years, but as of today, it looks like the answer is "No."

Iran

Turning our attention to Iran, Obama the candidate promised to pursue a policy of engagement, but he did not come up with a policy initiative as fast as he did on Arab-Israel or AFPAK because the Iranians were having an election in June that might reshuffle the cards in a positive way. The election took place and, contrary to our hopes, Ahmadenijad was declared the winner amid overwhelming evidence of fraud that has caused the deepest split in the country's leadership since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Supreme leader Khamanei, who is chosen for life not elected, backed the Ahmadenijad victory and ordered the Revolutionary Guards into the streets to quell demonstrations by students and the so-called green movement. Conservative, right wing forces continue in power today with no real blowover from turmoil in the Arab world.

With its attention focused inward, the Iranian leadership did not respond to President Obama's extended hand and as the centrifuges continued to spin, our attention shifted to imposing tougher international sanctions that we hoped would create enough pressure to bring the Iranians into negotiations over their uranium enrichment activities and intentions. So far, neither course has worked, neither the invitation to dialog or pressure from tighter sanctions, and in a larger sense, it's been a 30-year foreign policy failure for both countries that we have not found the way to some kind of practical working relationship between our governments and peoples.

For the United States, it is clearly a loss not to have relations with a country as important as Iran. Here is a nation of over 70 million people, in the center of a sensitive geo-strategic area with Turkey and the Arab world on one side and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other, bordering the whole eastern side of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, having large deposits of petroleum and huge reserves of natural gas, with a rich and ancient civilization. All together, Iran is too large and central to be ignored or isolated. It is now the center of a Shia revival sweeping outward into Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian areas. It may be the next nuclear state. We need a more effective policy.

Paradoxically, Tehran seems to be in a similar position as Washington. Neither side sends a consistent message to the other. Both are divided between advocates of dialog and neo-cons favoring exclusion. Each harbors a residual animosity toward the other: Americans for the taking and holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 nightmarish days; Iranians for our role in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 and heavy-handed treatment during the cold war. When one side has seemed ready to talk, the other either misses or rejects the signal.

Iran's determination to become a nuclear power, perhaps a nuclear weapons power, has raised the stakes. Our opposition to its nuclear ambitions has made this a goal of virtually every Iranian. Most Iranian leaders see the threats of military action coming out of hawks in Washington or Tel Aviv as non-credible. Their nuclear program, what we know of it, is dispersed in over 40 sites, many of them in hardened underground bunkers, making a bombing operation an uncertain and complicated thing, to say nothing of the different ways Iran could retaliate. At the last meeting a few weeks ago in Istanbul, the Iranian delegation took a tough line, not willing even to discuss the nuclear issue unless their right to enrich uranium was recognized and unless the sanctions were lifted first.

This is an absolute non-starter for the United States. We see that tighter sanctions are producing growing pressure on Iran, but let's admit it, as long as Iran has the oil and gas that countries such as China, Japan and South Korea need, its export earnings will provide the cushion for its economy to survive at home.

In recent weeks, there has been a new element in the game of pressure known as Stuxnet, a computer virus that has infected Iran's centrifuges and set back its enrichment program for a year or so. An investigation by the New York Times has revealed the stuxnet virus as a joint Israeli-American project, a dramatic employment of cyber warfare that has started a new race with Iranian scientists to see whether continuing repairs and defenses can overcome and stay ahead of ever more sophisticated computer attacks.

Meanwhile, Washington will continue to pursue two paths, engagement and pressure, but in a larger sense, both countries will continue to be the losers from our mutual estrangement.

AFPAK

Let's now turn briefly to Afghanistan and Pakistan which, despite the lack of headlines, remains the greatest challenge to the United States and its allies of all the issues I've been discussing tonight. Let me outline a few of its complicating dimensions.

The Pashtun tribal territory, or Pashtun nation as some call it, extends on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border split only by an artificial line drawn by the British in colonial times across some of the most mountainous and inhospitable geography on earth. In most areas there is no recognizable border as such and tribesmen, many of them Taliban, go back and forth largely at will. Their primary loyalty is to clan or tribe or the Pashtun nation, or the Muslim religion, rather than either Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The unresolved Indian-Pakistani conflict permeates the AFPAK problem. India and Pakistan both have the bomb and some of our greatest concerns are the security of Pakistan's weapons and also their nuclear expertise. Much of Iran's nuclear technology came from a renegade Pakistani physicist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who ran a clandestine smuggling network that also supplied Libya.

The Pakistani Intelligence Service plays a double game, cooperating with us on the one hand to provide some intelligence on Taliban operations while on the other, maintaining ties to some of the Pashtun tribes to use as an irregular force against India and to counter Indian activities in Southern Afghanistan.

In Western Afghanistan, the Shiite Hazara tribal area, the influence of Iran is strong and could become a greater complicating factor to our policy if Iran decided to take a more aggressive course.

With our initial victory over the Taliban, opium production which it had suppressed, resumed and we have not found so far other crops or means of economic livelihood sufficiently attractive to persuade Afghan farmers not to grow poppies.

To top all this off, neither of our two erstwhile partners, Presidents Karzai in Kabul and Zardari in Islamabad, is a pillar of strength or a fully committed ally of the United States. Both are tinged with corruption and both are hedging their bets because they believe, with some justification, that the US is a short distance runner who sooner or later will run out of breathe and leave, as we did in the 1980s after the Soviets were defeated and we then went home.

Dick Holbrooke, one of the real stars of my generation in the Foreign Service, whom President Obama appointed as special AFPAK envoy, and who died in the saddle unexpectedly last fall, figured all this out and wanted authority to expand his mission to negotiate with India and Iran, but he did not get it

Our current involvement began, of course, in 2001 after 9/11 and after the Taliban leadership refused to surrender Bin Laden and his cohorts. We drove the Taliban militarily across the border into Pakistan and installed Karzai in Kabul. But we did not permanently defeat Mullah Omar or other Taliban groupings, and when we took our eyes off the ball to shift our forces and attention to Iraq, the Taliban was able to regroup and go back on the offensive in Afghanistan.

The Obama Administration's first strategic review two years ago, in March 2009, produced a counter-terrorism strategy aimed at "disrupting, dismantling and defeating" al-Qaeda. A new commander, Stanley McCrystal, with a Special Forces background was appointed and the US force level increased to 68,000. After an initial period, the general's assessment concluded that a counter-terrorism strategy could not be successful without a counter-insurgency strategy of holding territory, providing security to local populations while building Afghan army and police forces, and providing various forms of civilian assistance. This strategy is now being followed by General Petraeus. Our troop strength has crept up to about 100,000 out of a total NATO force of 140,000, and General Petraeus reports he is making some progress. The President has pledged to begin withdrawing forces this summer, but the extent of the withdrawal will depend on conditions on the ground.

In Pakistan, the United States remains very unpopular despite civilian and military assistance programs and generous humanitarian assistance during last fall's floods. Predator attacks have claimed some success against Taliban leaders and more importantly, the Pakistan army has begun to retake territory from Taliban control in the tribal areas. Internally, an increasingly Islamicized society has increased tensions between Shia and Sunni as well as between secular and religious elements, with frequent outbreaks of violence. Pakistan is, along with Indonesia, one of the two the largest Muslim nations in the world with a population of 180 million and no family planning program. Its needs will always outpace available external assistance.

So, on that happy note, it is safe to predict that the Middle East will continue to pose serious challenges to US foreign policy, for the remainder of President Obama's term and well into the future.

America's Next Generation

This leads me to my final point, directed at the students and young professionals in the audience. I hope that some of you, as you make your career choices over the next few years, will choose public service and specifically international affairs. You will have the satisfaction of working for objectives larger than yourselves, among stimulating, like-minded colleagues. The life is exciting, occasionally dangerous, never boring. And the problems you will be working on are the most challenging our country, indeed all countries, will face on our increasingly small planet. My generation and those involved in foreign affairs today have kept ourselves from being blown up in nuclear war and successfully navigated the Cold War with the Soviet Union. But we have barely made a start on the challenges of the 21st century: environmental degradation and global warming; nuclear proliferation; drug addiction; global terrorism and ethnic conflicts, population growth and food security, to name just a few. Finding solutions to these issues, or ways to manage them until solutions become feasible, will require the best efforts of the best and brightest among you. I hope some of you will accept the challenge.

Larry Kramer: Yale's Conspiracy of Silence (posted May 19, 2009)

[Remarks by Larry Kramer to the Yale Gay and Lesbian Association upon the occasion of its 25th anniversary and the 40th anniversary of the first homosexual student organization on campus and GALA’s presentation to him of its first Lifetime Achievement Award, Yale University, New Haven, CT, April 25, 2009.]

I have come here to apologize to you.

It took a long time for Yale to accept Kramer money. After a number of years of trying to get Yale to accept mine for gay professorships or to let me raise funds for a gay student center, (both offers declined), my extraordinary straight brother Arthur offered Yale one million dollars to set up the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies and Yale accepted it. My good friend and a member of the Yale Corporation Calvin Trillin managed to convince President Levin that I was a pussycat. The year was 2001.

Five years later, in 2006, Yale closed down LKI, as it had come to be called. Yale removed its director, Jonathan David Katz. All references to LKI were expunged from websites and answering machines and directories and syllabuses. One day LKI was just no longer here.

When this happened I thought my heart would break.

I wanted gay history to be taught. I wanted gay history to be about who we are, and who we were, by name, and from the beginning of our history, which is the same as the beginning of everyone else’s history.

By chance, just as we opened for business, Jonathan Ned Katz, our first visiting scholar, and Jonathan David Katz discovered that John William Sterling, Yale’s first really major benefactor, who died in 1918, had been gay and lived with one man only, James O. Bloss, all their adult lives. We released this information to the world, with great pride and excitement. What a way to launch ourselves! In no time flat I received a phone call from a classmate who is a partner in Shearman& Sterling, the giant law firm John Sterling founded, telling me that this information had not gone down well there and indicating that Yale would hear about it.

Jonathan David Katz, who is an art historian, put on an exhibition of the relationship of Robert Rauschenberg and his gay lover and how it affected his art. This, too, did not set well. Jonathan David Katz’s courses were taken away from him. He was told he could no longer teach.

A book of great historical importance was published in 2005. It is called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by the distinguished gay member of the Kinsey Institute, Dr. C. A. Tripp, It maintains that Lincoln was gay. I had a great deal to do with its publication. I had offered it to Yale. Yale wanted nothing to do with it.

When I set LKI up I didn’t know that gay studies included all kinds of other things and these other things ruled the roost: gender studies, queer studies, queer theory. And that then Provost Alison Richard, who immediately left to run Cambridge University, my attorney, Bill Zabel, and I were ignorant of the great semantic differences lurking in the words “studies” and “history.” Thus I was not able as I might have been when initial negotiations were transpiring, to insist that my brother’s money be funneled via the history department rather than leave it up to Yale, which plunked LKI just where it should not have been, in the women’s and gender studies department. The various queer and gender theories I came to quickly realize as relatively useless for a people looking to learn about our real history drowned us out completely. Month after month, over these five years, as I was sent constant email announcements of lectures and courses and activities that reflected as much about real history as a comic book, I slowly began to go nuts. I made pleas everywhere I could, in the Yale Daily News, to then Dean Peter Salovey and then History chair, Paul Freedman. Please put us in the History Department I begged. I made a public plea to another provost, Emily Bakemeier, at a Berkeley Master’s Tea. I brought letters to Provosts Long and Bakemeier from George Chauncey, then at Chicago and now, in no small part because of me, here at Yale, and from Martin Duberman, whom I had put on LKI’s advisory board, two of our most distinguished gay historians. Martin stated in no uncertain terms, and George concurred with him, then: “Yale is doing it wrong. You do not teach gay history via gender studies, via queer theory. You are making the same mistake every other gay program makes.”

Yes, I came to see this and this big deal activist came to see that he was powerless. I apologize to you. I bore witness to all this. I bore witness to the fact that the university was ridding itself of a teacher, Jonathan David Katz, who was exceptionally loved and admired. The kids stood up and cheered him nonstop with tears in their eyes. “He is the best teacher I have ever had for anything, period,” is a direct quote from one young man. On his last day at Yale, Jonathan somehow managed to get the Yale Art Gallery to remove from storage, for this one day, work by the following artists: Homer, Eakins, Sargent, Bellows, Demuth, Hartley, O’Keefe, Rauschenberg, Johns, Twombley, Nevelson, Martin, Indiana, Morris, and Warhol. Jonathan lectured in the Art Gallery to a packed house about why he considers each of these great American artists gay and how this is reflected in their work. I had brought one of the heads of the Phillips Collection in Washington. “What a brilliant piece of scholarship,” she said. This event, also, did not go down well somewhere in the murky invisible inner sanctums of Yale’s Soviet-style bureaucracy. Yale was getting rid of the only faculty member teaching the kind of gay history that I longed for and I was powerless to help rectify this great mistake. Yes, this famous big deal loud mouth activist apologizes to you, and to Jonathan. My lover, David, says I did not sit on the nest enough. I did not become enough of the Larry Kramer they were afraid of.

There were and are 22 courses offered in the Pink Book of LGBT studies for this year. Only one of them, the course George Chauncey teaches entitled US Lesbian and Gay History, is a gay history course. Here are the others:

• Gender and Sexuality in Popular Music

• Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, Poetics

• Cross-Cultural Narratives of Desire

• Gender Transgression

• Sex and Romance in Adolescence

• Biology of Gender and Sexuality

• Anthropology of Sex and Sexualities

• Beauty, Fashion, and Self-styling

• Gendering Musical Performance

• Gender Images: A Psychological Perspective

• Gender, Nation, and Sexuality in Modern Latin America

• Queer Ethnographies

• Music and Queer Identifies

The word “queer” also embellishes most of the activities and lectures and fellowships and appointments announced in those various emails. It seems as if everything is queer this and queer that.

Just as a point of information, I would like to proclaim with great pride: I am not queer! And neither are you. When will we stop using this adolescent and demeaning word to identify ourselves? Like our history that is not taught, using this word will continue to guarantee that we are not taken seriously in the world.

Here are some of the things that I have uncovered about our history in writing my new book, The American People:

• That Jamestown was America’s first community of homosexuals, men who came to not only live with each other as partners but to adopt and raise children bought from the Indians. Some even arranged wedding ceremonies for themselves.

• That George Washington was gay, and that his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were homosexual. And that his feelings for Hamilton led to a government and a country that became Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian.

• That Meriwether Lewis was in love with William Clark and committed suicide when their historic journey was over and he wouldn’t see Clark any more.

• That Abraham Lincoln was gay and had many, many gay interactions, that his nervous breakdown occurred when he and his lover, Joshua Speed, were forced to part, and that his sensitivity to the slaves came from his firsthand knowledge of what it meant to be so very different. And that the possibility exists that Lincoln was murdered because he was gay and John Wilkes Booth, who was gay, knew this.

• That Franklin Pierce, who became one of America’s worst Presidents, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became one of our greatest writers, as roommates at Bowdoin College had interactions that changed them both forever and, indeed, served as the wellspring for what Hawthorne came to write about. Pierce was gay. And Hawthorne? Herman Melville certainly wanted him to be.

• That most of the great actresses who endlessly toured America during the 19th century bringing theater to the masses were lesbians and occasionally dressed as men. Just like Katherine Hepburn.

• That the plague of AIDS was allowed to happen because much of the world hates us and most of the world knows nothing about us. They don’t know we are related to Washington and Lincoln.

I needed no queer theories, no gender studies, to figure all this out.

Why can’t we accept that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, hushmarkedry, or hundreds of other things, or had no name at all? What we do now they pretty much did then. Period. Men have always had cocks and men have pretty much always known what to do with them. It is just stupidity and elite presumption of the highest and most preposterous order to theorize, in these regards, that then was different from now.

Do you know that men loving men does not require the sexual act to qualify them as homosexuals? My American Heritage unabridged dictionary lists two definitions for homosexuality: the first: “sexual orientation to persons of the same sex; and the second: “sexual activity with another of the same sex.” In other words, it is not necessary, nor should it be, to have had sex with another of the same sex, to maintain that a person is homosexual. Why, then, do academics, indeed everyone, insist on this second definition over the first? This theory makes it all but impossible in many cases to claim a person as one of us.

Is Yale actually afraid to teach any of this? To actually name names out loud from Abe Lincoln to John Sterling to Robert Rauschenberg? And why is the History Department allowing history to be hijacked by the queer theorists just as the English Department allowed Paul DeMan and Jacques Derrida to highjack literature for the deconstructionists? That travesty found safe haven here at Yale too.

History is about people events more than it is about theory. We need to know specifically who our brothers and sisters, our ancestors, our own people, are and were! John Demilio has written an award-winning biography of Bayard Ruskin, the trusted associate of Martin Luther King, which reveals that Ruskin was homosexual. How many years did the world refuse to acknowledge that Jefferson had a black mistress? Such knowledge, when it was finally accepted, has invigorated black studies and given people of color a new pride in themselves and in each other, in their people, in their rightful place in America’s history.

Gays must have this! We must. We must if we are to endure.

I asked Peter Salovey recently why he thought LKI was closed down. Who was behind it? What was behind it? His answer was: “We’ll never know.”

In a recent Yale Daily News article, a gay staff reporter, sophomore Raymond Carlson, wrote that The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students lists Yale as among the bottom of the heap in terms of institutional support and administrative services for its gay students and gay studies.

For those of you here celebrating Yale’s acceptance of us I am here to tell you that there is not quite so much to celebrate yet. Yes, it is a long way from my freshman year in 1953 when I tried to kill myself. But like so much that continues to happen to us, there is still too much invisible shit blocking the acceptance that we need and we are due.

So I receive GALA’s award with a certain bittersweet acceptance. As I hope I have made clear, I feel very alienated from this University who took my brother’s money and my dream and slammed the door in both our faces.

In closing, once again I apologize to you for failing you. And for failing my brother, who died last year. And for failing myself. I wanted so very very much for the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay History at Yale to succeed for you and for all our people.

But, yes, thank you. We are all fellow warriors and I salute you.

Greg Austin: Commitments and Contributions (posted August 7, 2007)

For God, for Country, and for Yale? Did we ever really think about that while we were students? Now, with 50 years of accumulated wisdom, is it time for us to do a re-write?

As a start, should All Humanity come ahead of Country? Should Family come ahead of Yale? How many of us truly put God first, and how about those of us who do not believe in a personal God?

Okay, trying to keep it to 25 words or less, how about "For Contribution to Humanity, Commitment to Family, Adherence to Principles, and Continued Alumni Support"? Not snappy enough? Perhaps the re-write would be a good class project.

Turning to an entirely different subject: As a senior at Yale, I sent money (it might have been $15) to Fidel Castro to back his efforts to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Since then, I have supported many politicians, sometimes just with a vote, sometimes with money, and sometimes with real effort. I have had not only hope but also real confidence in my candidates. With only a couple of exceptions, the result has always been the same. I did not get what I expected. I should have learned that the first time.

Credit is due equally to my formal education and to the bull sessions at Yale for my desire, even now, to make political commitments. There can be no question that involvement is the right thing. However, I have grown to feel that I can safely devote more attention to family, friends, fishing, shooting, golf and the like, and less attention to politics, without severe harm to the Republic.

As to the critical issues faced by humanity, the older I get, the less I know for sure.

Brian Walsh: Moneymaker Didn't Do It - Inky Clark Did (posted March 24, 2007)

Since the end of the 19th century there has been a member of my family at Yale every thirty years, with a brother and a niece in between. My grandfather graduated from Yale in 1897, and my father in 1929, just twenty-eight years before that beautiful day of June 10th in 1957. My nephew and God-son then graduated in 1987, just to keep the string going.

When we were freshmen, I often thought how little Yale changed between my grandfather’s time and that of my father. My father thought my years at Yale were astonishingly different from his, though, for I remember his muttering that we no longer had to take Latin and Greek. Then there was also that matter of Yale’s national football championships in his 1920's of which he took great pride, even as a diver for Yale’s championship swimming team. What really got to him, I suspect, were those mustard yellow pants on our "eleven."

As the years passed, however, I began to see how remarkably similar were the 1920's and the 1950's in New Haven, and that the two world wars between my grandfather’s time and ours had relatively little effect compared to the enormous changes occurring from 1957 to my nephew’s experience at Yale. It is tempting to say this is all due to rapidly changing technology, but I am convinced it is much more a matter of a tremendously changing culture. Interestingly, from 1987 to 2007 not that much appears to have changed except technology.

Aside, from the obvious, such as co-education, a comparatively huge influx of racial and ethnic diversity, and an unprecedented expansion of the campus, including two new colleges, Yale has become much more meritorious in its admissions policies and strategies and more political as to how meritorious is defined. We had a hard enough time imagining a Yale with women, let alone a Yale where all who were admitted were guaranteed a way of paying for it. My recollection of our 1950's is that the campus was vastly Republican, if somewhat moderately so. Who would have guessed then what the political climate has become now?

Moneymaker didn't do it - Inky Clark did!

Bob Pelletreau: Where We Stand in the Middle East (posted February 18, 2007)

Yale ’57 Luncheon

February 3, 2007

Thank you, Dick [Jones], and thanks for the invitation. This is the first time Pam and I have come to this winter get-together and we think it’s a great idea.

A few weeks ago, I was in Egypt attending a conference and happened to be sitting next to the Foreign Minister at dinner one evening. We’d known each other for about 15 years, and after downloading on me the usual litany of complaints an American hears in the Middle East these days, he became ultra-serious and said, “You know, Bob, we in Egypt have invested our future in the United States. What really concerns us is not the one-sidedness of your policies or your unpopularity with our public opinion; what really concerns us is your incompetence.”

After the clear outcome of our mid-term elections, after the fall of his approval ratings into the thirties, after the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, compiled by foreign policy heavyweights of both parties, the President and his advisors have conducted a “strategic review” and rejected all these messages. Instead, they have come up with a policy adjustment that most Middle East experts regard as basically more of the same: a few more troops to Iraq (21,500 to add to the 130,000 already there); a more threatening posture toward Iran; still no engagement with Syria; a little more effort in Afghanistan, but we can’t afford much; and a little more involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an improvement but not enough to reverse six years of violence, hatred and growing separation between the two communities.

Let’s take a few minutes to look a little more deeply into where we stand in this violent and tormented region, our President’s nightmare and the probable determinant of his place in history, by briefly examining each of the Administrations five priorities in the Middle East, stated in its own terms as follows:

• pressing the war on terrorism;
• pursuing victory in Iraq;
• preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons;
• spreading democracy; and
• achieving a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would allow both parties, particularly our friend and ally Israel, to live in peace and security.

THE WAR ON TERRORISM

Most of us know where we were on 9/11. I happen to have been in Cairo and was able to spend the next week that I was stuck there sampling Egyptian reactions. There was no question that the government was with us. These were the same people who had assassinated President Sadat and almost killed President Mubarak, but popular reactions were more complicated. There was denial - that Egyptians could have been among the terrorists; fear - that America would blindly lash out at the countries they came from; revulsion - at the acts of discrimination against Arabs and Muslims that began to appear in this country; and finally, a certain grim satisfaction that said, “America, it’s your turn now.”

Our understandable response was to go after Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, perhaps the most remote and difficult terrain on earth, with impressive early results. We created a new sprawling bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, and have begun to tighten up on some glaring deficiencies. Intelligence cooperation with other governments has improved and the FBI and CIA now sometimes speak to each other and even share information. International money flows are more transparent and closely regulated. Our legislators and judges are struggling to define how far national security concerns in our era will be allowed to affect Americans’ right to privacy and the rights of defendants to a fair trial.

We seem, however, to have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his network remain at large and operational, the Taliban is coming back from its incomplete defeat, and opium production is soaring. And the reason for our diverted focus, Iraq, has turned from a nasty and tightly run dictatorship into a magnet and training ground for would-be terrorists.

IRAQ

It’s no secret that we and 26 million Iraqis are in serious trouble. Behind the daily spin of positive news, there is mounting evidence of the spread of civil war and a continuous drain of casualties, both ours and theirs, whose sacrifice will mark our respective societies for years to come. The recently released National Intelligence Estimate is properly pessimistic.

Our objectives four years ago when we launched this war of choice seemed clear: eliminate the threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, topple the tyrant, establish a free, stable and prosperous society. The means? A shock and awe bombing campaign followed by an armored drive on Baghdad. Forget about the looting. Forget about the thousands of dismissed Iraqi soldiers and police returning to their villages with their weapons and training but no future livelihood. Forget about securing the borders. Restore electricity and oil exports and the cheering Iraqis would do the rest.

Today, with multi-billion dollar deficits following multi-billion dollar deficits, it is clear to most that we are not succeeding, that we’ve bitten off more than we can chew.

The President still talks of victory, but 70% of Americans oppose his plan to send more troops who will become more active and exposed in the daily fighting in Baghdad. The Congress is clearly reflecting the public mood and we can expect much more rigorous focus and debate on the Hill than in the past. Much as we would like the President’s new plan to succeed, there seems to me very little likelihood that it will.

Yes, over the next few months we can surge five more brigades into Baghdad and they can play a bigger combat role (and take more casualties), but the Iraqi army is in no position to do its part. It can’t surge to the 18 brigades called for in the new strategy without ordering its Kurdish units to Baghdad and they have no interest in becoming involved in inter-Arab, Sunni-Shia sectarian fighting. In fact, the first Kurdish unit ordered south out of Iraqi Kurdistan had a desertion rate of over 50%. Inadequate equipment is another huge problem. And Baghdad is far from the only city in conflict, as recent horrendous bombings in Hilla and Kirkuk have demonstrated. It’s also possible that some militia groups will simply go to ground for awhile, hide their weapons, and wait us out.

The other Iraqi commitments in the plan are equally uncertain: reconciliation in a parliament that rarely achieves a quorum and often dissolves into shouting matches; agreement on the distribution of oil revenues, none of which come from Sunni areas; allocation of $10 billion of national funds to economic reconstruction when the oil exports that could generate these funds are hardly flowing due to sabotage and smuggling.

The limited consortium of neighboring countries which the Administration is trying to put together does not include Iran or Syria as the Iraq Study Group proposed. We are sending a very good team, General David Petreus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to replace a very good team, General George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, but it’s the policy that is deficient, not the troops or diplomats who are trying to make it work. What is needed here is a serious and comprehensive diplomatic surge, not another military surge, which has been tried before.

IRAN

A clear beneficiary of the removal of Saddam and the Taliban from power has been Iran which is today awash in budgetary surpluses thanks to the continuing high demand for its oil and gas and increasingly confident that its revolution is secure. Here is a nation of almost 70 million people, located in the midst of a geo-strategic area, possessing the world’s second largest gas reserves and fifth largest petroleum deposits, center of a rich civilization and culture, which the United States has been determinedly, unilaterally and unsuccessfully trying to isolate for over a quarter of a century. Our posture of hostility, instead of persuading Iran to forego uranium enrichment, has helped make it a national imperative which virtually every Iranian supports. It is a country with problems to be sure: an outrageous gamecock of a president who denies the holocaust, consorts with Chavez in Venezuela and is becoming too much even for many of his supporters, and an economy that is struggling to modernize amid corruption and lack of foreign investment, but despite these weaknesses, Iran’s influence is increasing, especially in Iraq and Lebanon.

We have tried various tactics: threats, shouts, prohibiting Americans from almost all contact, encouraging Europeans to engage, hauling Iran before the UN Security Council, but we’ve always withheld the thing the Iranian regime wants most, dialogue and recognition from the United States. Instead, we’ve been detaining Iranians in Iraq and continuing to wave a big stick, which in the view of a group of savvy Iranians with whom I’ve met in a track-two exercise, lacks credibility.

PROMOTING DEMOCRACY

The mission of promoting greater democracy in the Middle East is a worthwhile goal if it comes about through internal evolution and in ways consistent with Middle East societies and cultures, but it is doomed to failure if seen as a foreign implant. The word “democracy” as such has become too closely associated in peoples’ minds with a US policy initiative. A prominent democracy advocate in Jordan has told me he can’t speak out any more because he’ll be branded as an American puppet, and the courageous Egyptian sociologist Saad ad-Din Ibrahim, who has been repeatedly imprisoned for his efforts to open up the sclerotic Egyptian political system, is often vilified in Cairo as an American agent.

It would be more palatable and productive to talk about helping evolve governing systems that are responsive to the aspirations of those they govern, of developing transparent and accountable institutions, especially independent judicial systems and a free press, and of expanding civil society outlets that encourage greater popular participation, rather than pushing for immediate elections in places that have no voting experience or tradition. Otherwise, you risk seeing HAMAS elected in Palestine, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or hard-line Shia clerics in Iraq. That, of course, is exactly what has been happening.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Mentioning HAMAS brings me to the Arab-Israeli conflict which ought to be more of an Administration priority than it is. My own career has been more closely linked to this intractable conflict than any other: as a hostage taken by a Palestinian guerrilla group in Jordan in 1970, as our principal negotiator with the PLO in the late 80’s, as a member of Secretary Warren Christopher’s negotiating team in the 90’s and as co-director with Pam of an international conflict resolution organization in Jerusalem in 2004-2005.

The six years of the Bush Administration have been largely a story of disengagement, neglect and let the Israelis do as they wish, and the result has been wider divisions, less contact and interaction between Israeli and Palestinian officials, a declining economy and growing Islamization of the Palestinian community. Israel has overwhelming military superiority, but a proud and nationalistic people will always resist foreign occupation and Israelis will never be fully secure until they are at peace with their neighbors.

The last few weeks have seen some hopeful signs. Secretary Rice’s last visit to the region produced the prospect of informal talks between Palestinian President Abbas and Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert under our auspices, and both we and Israel have begun to realize, belatedly, that we have to provide more support to Fatah in its confrontation with HAMAS. The Saudis have also helpfully invited Fatah and HAMAS leaders to the Kingdom for reconciliation talks. But negotiation over the real issues is a long way off and even if we do get there, it may well be that the gap between what the Israelis are willing to offer and what the Palestinians are able to accept will be too wide to bridge. Meanwhile, the violence and the killing continue.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the results of our various policies in the Middle East - reducing the threat of terrorism, establishing stable and prosperous democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, dissuading Iran from developing nuclear weapons, expanding democracy and securing greater peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors - while all works in progress, all seem to be going downhill.

If 9/11 should have taught us anything, it is that the United States cannot build a wall and expect to live safely behind it while conducting selective military campaigns outside. We need to work with other governments and societies, as many as possible, to confront the global challenges of the 21st century: not only terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but problems such as ethnic conflicts, drug trafficking, HIV/AIDS and avian flu, and environmental degradation. A United States that acts in this manner, listens as well as speaks, and takes the views of others into account in shaping its policies, will be welcomed abroad as a partner, not distrusted as an adversary.

In the long run, there is really no other way.

Dave Johnson: A Proud Father's Daughter's Best-selling Book (posted October 6, 2006)

Some years ago my oldest daughter, Elizabeth, informed me that she was writing a novel. "That's nice, what's your novel about?" I asked. "Vlad the Impaler-- Count Dracula, and Eastern Europe." I used to tell the kids Dracula stories when we were living in the early 1970's in Tito's Yugoslavia, where I was doing research and writing. So I could hardly object to the subject, though I thought it unlikely that Dracula would have wide appeal.

Elizabeth worked on the book for ten years, carefully researching the topic in libraries and in Eastern Europe to which she had become attached. In the late 1980's with the fall of Communism, Eastern Europe had become more accessible and of more interest to Americans. As a Yale undergraduate Elizabeth helped form the popular Yale Slavic Chorus. After graduating in 1988 with a major in British Studies, Elizabeth and several of her sister "Slavs" obtained a travel grant to research and record folk music in Russia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. They came back with music, and Elizabeth, with a Bulgarian husband. So Elizabeth Johnson became Elizabeth Kostova.

Elizabeth finished work on her novel a few years later. She titled it, The Historian. (It is filled with professors, librarians, and diplomats who write history). The literary agent who read it was sure it was publishable given the popularity of The DaVinci Code. Indeed, Little, Brown snapped it up, and upon publication in 2005 it immediately went to the top of the New York Times fiction list, a record for a first-time author. A paperback edition is due in October 2006. SONY has bought the film rights and scripting is in progress. The Historian has been translated into 36 languages and has been a best seller in a dozen countries. We are all quite overwhelmed and astonished at Elizabeth's achievement.

The Historian is a good read, hard to put down once you start. Yale alums will recognize a number of places and scenes in the book, including Sterling Library.

Larry Kramer: Nuremberg Trials for AIDS (posted September 15, 2006)

AIDS has been a plague since 1982, although officially it never has been called one. I was recently asked by The New York Times to participate in a public forum entitled “AIDS at 25: What next?” I was not allowed to make the following remarks; indeed, a representative of The Times attempted to prevent the distribution of them to the audience. The forum was about the future of what is incorrectly called a “pandemic.” But you don’t learn much about how to live in the future until you understand the past. Surely Freud taught us this. Unfortunately, the future and what is going to happen is obvious. Many millions more people will die, drug companies will continue their insatiable and never-ending evil greed, and governments, particularly our own, will not stop their base, mean behavior in the face of so much death. None of this will change, no matter how many panels or public forums or Bill Gateses there are. It is deeply disheartening that 25 years later the message remains the same. No, we must face up to the past and ask why this plague has happened.

From the beginning AIDS has been a disease inextricably and irretrievably bound up in the minds of the world with homosexuals. There is not one person in the world, even South African wives infected by their itinerant truck driver husbands, who, when hearing the word “AIDS” or “HIV,” does not think the word “homosexual,” or, more likely, faggot or fairy or queer or their local equivalent. Homosexuals are hated everywhere in the world. That is why there is a plague, and why the plague will continue.

The mayor of New York when this plague started was a closeted homosexual. Ron Reagan, the ballet-dancing son of the president of the United States, was thought to be a homosexual even by his father and mother, who had her own sexual proclivities to hide. (See my book, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays: Penguin; and my play, Just Say No: Grove Press.) The original director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the division of the National Institutes of Health that should have been responsible for HIV and AIDS, was a homosexual. His assistant was a homosexual. The editor-in-chief of The New York Times that covered this plague so abominably and destructively was virulently homophobic. Even Mrs. Iphigene Sulzberger, the matriarch of the Sulzberger clan that owns The New York Times, became exceedingly unsettled when anything about homosexuals appeared in her paper. It is deeply disheartening that the actions of all of the above remain uninvestigated and unreported and unchallenged 25 years and more than 70,000,000 infections later.

Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien and Dr. Linda Laubenstein and Dr. Mathilde Krim and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and Dr. Lawrence Mass were the only doctors I know of who warned outright and from the very beginning that a virus was at large and immediate caution was required by all. Their warnings were in no way heeded. Dr. Laubenstein was the only doctor anywhere in the world I know of who said, bluntly and immediately and from the very beginning, “stop fucking each other to death.” The director of her NYU Medical Center, Dr. Saul Farber, branded her a crazy person and put a cap on the number of patients she was allowed to admit. No warnings of any sort ever came from any official anywhere, in the New York government, in the Federal government, in the NIH, in the Public Health Service. By the time the virus was actually identified, on the eve of 1985, pretty much every gay man in the world who had sex had been exposed to this virus or to someone who had been exposed to this virus.

We are currently witnessing endless commemorations of various milestones of HIV/AIDS, as it now is called. To commemorate something without even knowing and acknowledging its history and how the actions and inactions of individuals and institutions and governments caused and shaped that history of this plague is a harsh and tragic joke. This country still admits to shockingly little, even when it is staring us in the face. A formalized and honest process to establish the facts of the history of this plague must be initiated.

I do not expect The New York Times to own up to its own enormous role in allowing this plague to progress any more than I expect The New York Times to honestly and completely own up to its repellant record of reporting the Holocaust. On this latter unbearably sad subject I refer you to Buried by the Times, by Professor Laurel Leff, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). As with AIDS, it defies reason, nay sanity, what this “newspaper of record” did not report about the Holocaust. Additionally, just prior to the Holocaust, the Times Moscow correspondent from 1921–1934, a most peculiar man named Walter Duranty, received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for actually denying the gigantic famine and widespread starvation going on in Russia under Stalin’s purges. He and his paper completely whitewashed Stalin. What is it about this newspaper that it is so cowardly when it comes to fully and honestly reporting the horrors of our times? It is no small feat to falsely report, downplay, ignore, describe it as you will, three of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century. It makes one forever suspicious of the veracity and validity of their coverage of anything, most certainly of the world’s horrors today. When the leading newspaper in the world behaves like this, setting the template for all other papers all over the world to follow, which they unfortunately do, how are we to have a true history of anything?

These are the writers who covered HIV/AIDS for The New York Times: Richard Flaste, Erik Eckholm, Dr. Lawrence Altman, Nicholas Wade, Philip Boffey, Gina Kolata, and Philip Hilts. Each was as bad as the others. How bad? Read my book, Reports From the Holocaust (St. Martin’s Press) for details on how badly this newspaper has reported AIDS. Kolata was so bad that ACT UP plastered New York and the Times building with stickers: “Gina Kolata of The New York Times is the worst AIDS reporter in the world.” They took her off that beat. But they never replaced her with a reporter who covered AIDS specifically. And the job they are doing is still awful. The Times has never, ever, covered the politics of HIV/AIDS, particularly in America, as they cover the politics of other serious issues. But then, the politics of AIDS are inextricably embedded in all that I am writing about here. All grist for a Nuremberg Trials, no?

Yes, I would like to see something set up to document the real history of this plague akin to the Nuremberg Trials, which nailed Nazi responsibility for the Holocaust,. Why did or didn’t Edward Koch do X? Why did or didn’t Ronald Reagan do X? Ron Reagan, Jr.? Nancy Reagan? Dr. Richard Krause and Dr. Jack Whitescarver of the NIH? Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times? Sulzberger mother, son, and grandson of the Times? The drug companies that made Factor VIII? The list is an extensive and far-reaching one, certainly not confined to these major villains. Each of many, many people committed acts of inconceivable inhumanity that must be documented. Without such official documentation, the politics of homo-hating and bigotry will continue to rule the world and this plague will never end.

I have spent the past twenty-five years or so researching and writing my own history of America and of the cause of HIV/AIDS. My book is called The American People: A History. Writing and researching this history has convinced me that the plague of HIV/AIDS has been intentionally allowed to happen.

Two of my most recent findings are these:

HIV made its entrance into the gay population through infected Factor VIII as injected by gay hemophiliacs. Factor VIII is a treatment that prevents hemophiliacs from bleeding to death. It was available in trials beginning in 1975 and in distribution from 1978. It was manufactured and sold by these companies: Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Alpha Therapeutic Corporation, Armour Pharmaceutical Co. (a division of the Revlon Cosmetics Corporation), and Cutter Laboratories. Each single individual treatment of Factor VIII contains blood parts that have been spun down from the pooled blood of tens of thousands of people. This blood was collected from paid donors all over the world. Only one donor had to be infected for the whole vat of pooled blood to be infected. All of these companies came to know that the blood plasma they had bought all over the world and which they had used to make their Factor VIII was infected with what would become known as HIV. They did not heat-treat this blood, even though early methods to do so had been available since the end of World War II. Even when they possessed the knowledge that their product was infected, these companies did not immediately cease selling their Factor VIII. It will not be until 1987, in this country anyway, that Factor VIII would be completely cleared of poisons. (I am grateful to Pulitzer-prize winning science writer, Laurie Garrett, for first presenting this awful information in her book The Coming Plague, Penguin.) By then the gay population was well on its way to being hideously depleted. One single gay hemophiliac on infected Factor VIII having sex with only one other man on Fire Island in 1975 or so was all it took to get the whole chain rolling. No doubt there may be other scenarios for the origin of HIV in the gay population but this one can never be discounted.

I have also recently discovered that the first cases of AIDS in America were not in gay men. Five cases of extreme immune deficiencies were discovered between 1975 and 1981 in heterosexual women. They were reported by Dr. Henry Masur (et al.), then of Cornell and now of NIH. For very puzzling reasons, this report was not published until October 1982. Had this vital information been published when the discoveries were made, as it should have been, and before the July 1981 New York Times report of “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” (and let us not parse here Dr. Altman’s repellently loaded and inaccurate, homophobic prose in that announcement), HIV/AIDS would not have been forever labeled, with such disastrous results, as a gay disease. From this very first announcement in the Times, the gay population of the world has been and continues to be targeted for extinction.

Because the world hates homosexuals, the world is dying and will continue to die from HIV/AIDS. This plague is the result of a series of individual acts of commission and omission, a huge number of them intentional, that killed people, and were committed by and continue to be committed by people who knew better. Many of the same people who were around in the beginning are still around committing the same actions today. Perhaps Nuremberg Trials would sort such awful behavior out.

It has proved impossible to get any reputable and honest historian or journalist to write about any of the above (with the exception of Laurie Garrett). Telling the truth about this plague has so far proved impossible. A large number of straight publications declined to publish this piece. Seventy million-plus infections later, HIV/AIDS is still not called a plague. Eighty thousand people now die of the disease every day. That is 2,920,000 new dead people every year.

Sean Strub, Rodger McFarlane, and Will Schwalbe contributed information to the above. This piece was published in the August-September 2006 issue of Gay and Lesbian Review.

Dave Johnson: A Tale of Yale (posted July 31, 2006)

Elihu Yale

No doubt most Yale alumni know how Yale University acquired its name—from the eminent Elihu Yale, Governor of the East India Company in Madras, India in the 17th Century. Upon solicitation, Governor Yale contributed a trunk of books and cloth to the struggling Collegiate School in Saybrook. The School elders hoped he would add to his gift in subsequent years, pleased to have the institution named for him. It was a modest price to pay for immortality since his expected largesse never materialized.

Most of us know these facts, but not much more. This was the extent of my knowledge when in 1982 I was touring on the English-Welsh border with my family. I noticed we were near Wrexham and made a successful plea to detour to the Yale estate. I had remembered that Pierson College tower had been modeled after the chapel in Wrexham near the final

Elihu Yale tomb, Wrexham, England

resting place of Elihu Yale as indeed it was. We had an interesting visit and paid a call at Yale’s tomb. He had written his own curious epitaph:

Born in America, in Europe bred, In Africa travell'd and in Asia wed, Where long he liv'd and thriv'd; in London dead Much good, some ill, he did; so hope all's even And that his soul thro' mercy's gone to Heaven. You that survive and read this tale, take care, For this most certain exit to prepare: Where blest in peace, the actions of the just Smell Sweet, and blossom in the silent dust.

My curiosity had been aroused by the intriguing sentiments on the tomb but I did not have a chance to investigate further until 1988 when I received a Fulbright grant to take a group of faculty from my University (Tennessee) to learn about city development in India. Our affiliated Indian institution was Anna University in Madras

David Yale tomb inscription

(now Chennai). So now I had my chance to track down the elusive Mr. Yale in India.

Our group stopped in Delhi en route to South India and the US Ambassador, John Gunther Dean, kindly invited us to a reception at the American embassy. I mentioned to Amb. Dean that, as a Yalie, I was looking forward to visiting Madras where ElihuYale had been Governor. The ambassador replied that as a Harvard graduate he had been frustrated in gaining attention in New Haven to a Yale-related problem in Madras. Amb. Dean had contacted Yale to see if the University would help rescue the decaying last resting place of David Yale,

David Yale Tomb in Chennai, India before restoration

the son of Elihu. No response. Would I look into the issue, the ambassador asked. How could I turn down this challenge from a Harvard?

When I got to Madras I immediately contacted the American consulate there and was taken to the tomb by a delightful Indian lady who worked for the consul-general. The tomb was a 40 foot high obelisk, worthy of Christopher Wren, brown with age with a tree growing out of the spire—very romantic, except for the latrine smell emanating from its base. The lady from the consulate provided me with a perfumed handkerchief to hold over my nose so I could get closer to the inscription at the base. There was the plaque describing the sad tale of David Yale, dead at the age of four from one of the many fatal diseases endemic in 17th C. India.

My Fulbright program over, I returned to the States and

David Yale Tomb in Chennai, India after restoration

paid a call in New Haven to Eustace Theodore, the AYA director at the time. I laid out the situation to Eustace, a resourceful and enthusiastic man who was sympathetic to the cause. Eustace lined up a couple of well-heeled, anonymous alums who agreed to underwrite the preservation and restoration of the monument. This was done, though it took a year or so. The Archeological Survey of India, protector of Indian heritage, was put in charge of the project. David Yale now rests in protected peace.

I returned to Chennai in 2002 on another project and inspected the results. The tomb was now glistening white and protected from the street people with a fence. It seemed a perfect metaphor for the change from the old decaying, romantic India, to the new, gated Silicon Valley India of nearby Bangalore. In a way I preferred the romantic ruin.

Bob Rosefsky: Touring Help Solicited (posted January 24, 2006)

Let me be one of the first to Muse, and ask for some guidelines from classmates. I've started thinking about our 50th reunion next year (wouldn't miss it for the world) and also trying to set our leisure travel plans for the next 12-24 months. Eureka!  If the details all work out, we will drive to (and from) New Haven for the reunion. This might not seem like much of an effort to you ice-encrusted '57s who live in the snow belt, but we live in Palm Springs, CA (as I write on Jan. 23: sunny skies, mid '70s, humidity 14%) so we're going to take upwards of 4-5 weeks for the whole trip.

We've long wanted to do a major "road trip" throughout the US. We've been fortunate to have seen so much of the rest of the world, but not that much of our own land. If we do the trip counter-clockwise, we'll head through Phoenix and Albuquerque, then on into the murky unknown of the south. We'll dip down into Florida to visit family, and then head up the east coast until we reach New Haven.   Returning, we'll take a northerly route until we reach the Yellowstone region, then head south back to Southern California, catching the Utah canyons on the way. Or vice versa.  Only one required stop along the way will be Morgantown, WVA to visit our son and his family there.

We would welcome any ideas as to interesting places to visit along this as-yet-tentative routing. We don't mind straying somewhat from the primary routes. I suspect we'll spend from one to three nights in given stopping places, and shoot for about 300 miles per day when we're rolling along. Send your thoughts to me at rrosefsky@dc.rr.com.  (The address has fooled some;  note that it begins with two 'r's.) We will be most grateful for your ideas, and happy to hear from you in any case.

Addendum (posted July 22, 2006)

My deep thanks to all those classmates who responded to my call for touring guidelines set forth in my Jan. 24 class musing (below).  If we had taken everyone's counsel, we would have driven roughly 26,489 miles in two weeks, and would have had 32 Yale homes to stay in.   Your hospitality and friendship are most appreciated, and we shall reciprocate here in Palm Springs.  (Not today, though.  It's 120 F.  But it's a "dry heat."  17% humidity.)

However, a recent drive to and from Phoenix swayed us against driving to New Haven and back.   Something about older bones being immobilized for days at a stretch made us rethink the whole plan.   So we shall fly east for the reunion, and we look forward to seeing a good crowd of you there.   We've enjoyed past reunions immensely, and this one should be the best of all.