Is it at all surprising that Freireich would be this way? The reason most of us do not scream "Murderer!" at our coworkers is that we can put ourselves in their shoes; we can imagine what someone else is feeling and create that feeling in ourselves. We can take that route because we have been supported and comforted and understood in our suffering. That support gives us a model of how to feel for others: it is the basis for empathy. But in Freireich's formative years, every human connection ended in death and abandonment-and a childhood as bleak as that leaves only pain and anger in its wake.

Once, in the middle of reminiscing about his career, Freireich burst into an attack on the idea that terminally ill cancer patients be given hospice care at the end of their lives. "You have all these doctors who want to do hospice care. I mean, how can you treat a person like that?" When Freireich gets worked up about something, he raises his voice, and his jaw sets. "Do you say, 'You've got cancer, you're certainly going to die. You've got pain and it's horrible. I'm gonna send you to a place where you can die pleasantly'? I would never say that to a person. I would say, 'You're suffering. You've got pain. I'm going to relieve your suffering. Are you gonna die? Maybe not. I see miracles every day.' There's no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism. On Tuesday morning, I make teaching rounds, and sometimes the medical fellows say, 'This patient is eighty years old. It's hopeless.' Absolutely not! It's challenging, it's not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live." He was nearly shouting now. "I was never depressed. I never sat with a parent and cried about a child dying. That's nothing I would ever do in my role as a doctor. As a parent I might do it. My kids died, I'd probably go crazy. But as a doctor, you swear to give people hope. That's your job."

Freireich continued on in this vein for several more minutes until the full force of his personality became nearly overwhelming. We all want a physician who doesn't give up and who doesn't lose hope. But we also want a physician who can stand in our shoes and understand what we are feeling. We want to be treated with dignity, and treating people with dignity requires empathy. Could Freireich do that? I was never depressed. I never sat with a parent and cried about a child dying. If we were asked if we would wish a childhood like Freireich's on anyone, we would almost certainly say no because we could not imagine that any good could come of it. You can't have a remote miss from that kind of upbringing.

Or can you?

In the early 1960s, a psychologist named Marvin Eisenstadt started a project interviewing "creatives"-innovators and artists and entrepreneurs-looking for patterns and trends. As he was a.n.a.lyzing the responses, he noticed an odd fact. A surprising number had lost a parent in childhood. The group he was studying was so small that Eisenstadt knew there was a possibility that what he was seeing was just chance. But the fact nagged at him. What if it wasn't chance? What if it meant something? There had been hints in the psychological literature. In the 1950s, while studying a sample of famous biologists, the science historian Anne Roe had remarked in pa.s.sing on how many had at least one parent who died while they were young. The same observation was made a few years later in an informal survey of famous poets and writers like Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swift, Edward Gibbon, and Thackeray. More than half, it turned out, had lost a father or mother before the age of fifteen. The link between career achievement and childhood bereavement was one of those stray facts that no one knew what to do with. So Eisenstadt decided to embark on a more ambitious project.

"It was 1963, 1964," Eisenstadt remembers. "I started with the Encyclopedia Britannica and then it turned into both Britannica and the Encyclopedia Americana." Eisenstadt made a list of every person, from Homer to John F. Kennedy, whose life merited more than one column in either encyclopedia. That, he felt, was a rough proxy for achievement. He now had a list of 699 people. He then began systematically tracking down biographical information for everyone on the list. "It took me ten years," Eisenstadt says. "I was reading all kinds of foreign-language books, I went to California and to the Library of Congress, and to the genealogical library in New York City. I tracked down as many parental-loss profiles as I could, until I felt I had good statistical results."

Of the 573 eminent people for whom Eisenstadt could find reliable biographical information, a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of ten. By age fifteen, 34.5 percent had had at least one parent die, and by the age of twenty, 45 percent. Even for the years before the twentieth century, when life expectancy due to illness and accidents and warfare was much lower than it is today, those are astonishing numbers.

At the same time as Eisenstadt was pursuing his research, the historian Lucille Iremonger set out to write a history of England's prime ministers. Her focus was on the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the start of the Second World War. What sort of backgrounds and qualities, she wondered, predicted the kind of person capable of rising to the top of British politics at a time when it was the most powerful country in the world? Like Eisenstadt, however, she got sidetracked by a fact that, as she wrote, "occurred so frequently that I began to wonder whether it was not of more than pa.s.sing significance." Sixty-seven percent of the prime ministers in her sample lost a parent before the age of sixteen. That's roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper cla.s.s-the socioeconomic segment from which most prime ministers came. The same pattern can be found among American presidents. Twelve of the first forty-four U.S. presidents-beginning with George Washington and going all the way up to Barack Obama-lost their fathers while they were young.2 Since then, the topic of difficult childhoods and parental loss has cropped up again and again in the scholarly literature. There is a fascinating pa.s.sage in an essay by the psychologist Dean Simonton, for example, in which he tries to understand why so many gifted children fail to live up to their early promise. One of the reasons, he concludes, is that they have "inherited an excessive amount of psychological health." Those who fall short, he says, are children "too conventional, too obedient, too unimaginative, to make the big time with some revolutionary idea." He goes on: "Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions."

I realize these studies make it sound as if losing a parent is a good thing. "People always kid me and say, 'Oh, you mean I'd be better off if I don't have parents, or if I murder my father?'" Eisenstadt says. "The idea that some people could be successful without parents is a very threatening concept because the common idea is that parents help you. Parents are essential to your life." And that, Eisenstadt stresses, is absolutely true. Parents are essential. Losing a father or a mother is the most devastating thing that can happen to a child. The psychiatrist Felix Brown has found that prisoners are somewhere between two and three times more likely to have lost a parent in childhood than is the population as a whole. That's too great a difference to be a coincidence. There are, clearly, an enormous number of direct hits from the absence of a parent.3 The evidence produced by Eisenstadt, Iremonger, and the others, however, suggests that there is also such a thing as a remote miss from the death of a parent. Your father can commit suicide and you can suffer from a childhood so unspeakable that you push it to the furthest corners of your memory-and still some good can end up coming from that. "This is not an argument in favour of orphanhood and deprivation," Brown writes, "but the existence of these eminent orphans does suggest that in certain circ.u.mstances a virtue can be made of necessity."4 When Jay Freireich arrived at the National Cancer Inst.i.tute in 1955, he reported to Gordon Zubrod, the head of cancer treatment. Zubrod a.s.signed him to the children's leukemia ward, on the second floor of the main hospital building in the center of campus.5 Childhood leukemia was then one of the most terrifying of all cancers. It struck without warning. A child as young as one or two would come down with a fever. The fever would persist. Then came a violent headache that would not let up, followed by infections, one after another, as the child's body lost its ability to defend itself. Then came the bleeding.

"Dr. Zubrod came around once a week to see how we were doing," Freireich remembered, "and he said to me, 'Freireich, this place is like an abattoir! There's blood all over the G.o.dd.a.m.n place. We have to clean it up!' It was true. The kids bled from everywhere-through their stool, urine-that's the worst part. They paint the ceiling. They bleed from out of their ears, from their skin. There was blood on everything. The nurses would come to work in the morning in their white uniforms and go home covered in blood."

The children would bleed internally, into their livers and spleens, putting them in extraordinary pain. They would turn over in their beds and get terrible bruises. Even a nosebleed was a potentially fatal event. You'd squeeze the child's nose and put ice on it. That wouldn't work. You'd pack gauze into the child's nostrils. That wouldn't work. You'd call in an ear, nose, and throat specialist who would go in through the mouth and pack the nasal pa.s.sage from behind with gauze-which then had to be pulled forward into the nose. The idea was to apply pressure on the blood vessels from inside the nasal cavity. You can imagine how painful that was for the child. Plus, it rarely worked, so you'd take out the gauze-and the bleeding would start all over again. The goal of the second floor was to find a cure for leukemia. But the problem was that controlling the bleeding was so difficult that most of the children were dead before anyone could figure out how to help them.

"When they came to the hospital, ninety percent of the kids would be dead in six weeks," Freireich said. "They would bleed to death. If you're bleeding in your mouth and nose, then you can't eat. You stop eating. You try to drink. You gag. You vomit. You get diarrhea from the blood in the stools. So you starve to death. Or you get an infection and then you get pneumonia, then you get fever, and then you get convulsions, and then..." He let his voice trail off.

Doctors did not last long on the leukemia floor. It was too much. "You got there at seven in the morning," one physician who worked on the second floor in those years remembers. "You left at nine at night. You had to do everything. I would come home every day, completely destroyed psychologically. I became a stamp collector. I would sit down at ten o'clock at night with my stamps, because it was the only way to take my mind off work. The parents were afraid. n.o.body would even go into the children's room. They would stand at the door. n.o.body wanted to work there. I had seventy kids who died on me that year. It was a nightmare."6 Not for Freireich. I was never depressed. I never sat with a parent and cried about a child dying. Freireich teamed up with another researcher at NCI named Tom Frei. Together, they became convinced that the problem was a lack of platelets-the irregularly shaped cell fragments that float around in human blood. The leukemia was destroying the children's ability to make them, and without platelets their blood couldn't clot. This was a radical idea. One of Freireich's bosses at NCI-a world expert in the field of hematology named George Brecher-was skeptical. But Freireich thought Brecher wasn't counting the platelets correctly when he did his a.n.a.lysis. Freireich was meticulous. He used a more sophisticated methodology and zeroed in on subtle changes in the platelets at really low levels, and to him the connection was clear: the lower the platelet count, the worse the bleeding. The children needed fresh platelets-over and over again, in ma.s.sive doses.

The NCI blood bank wouldn't give Freireich fresh blood for his transfusions. It was against regulations. Freireich pounded on the table with his fists, shouting out, "You're gonna kill people!" "You have to be careful who you say that kind of thing to," d.i.c.k Silver, who worked at NCI with Freireich, says. "Jay didn't care."

Freireich went out and recruited blood donors. The father of one of his patients was a minister, and he brought in twenty members of his congregation. Standard procedure in blood transfusions in the mid-1950s was steel needles, rubber tubes, and gla.s.s bottles. But it turned out that platelets stuck to those surfaces. So Freireich had the idea of switching to the brand-new technology of silicon needles and plastic bags. The bags were called sausages. They were enormous. "They were this big," said Vince DeVita, who was one of Freireich's medical fellows in those years. He held his hands far apart. "And you have this kid, who is only this big." He held his hands much closer together. "It was like watering a flowerpot with a fire hose. If you don't do it right, you put the kids into heart failure. The clinical director of NCI at the time was a guy named Berlin. He saw the [sausage] and said to Jay, 'You're insane.' He told Jay he was going to fire him if he kept doing platelet transfusions." Freireich ignored him. "Jay being Jay," DeVita went on, "he decided if he couldn't do it, he didn't want to work there anyway." The bleeding stopped.

Where did Freireich's courage come from? He's such an imposing and intimidating presence that it is easy to imagine him emerging from his mother's womb, fists already clenched. But MacCurdy's idea about near and remote misses suggests something quite different-that courage is in some sense acquired.

Take a look again at what MacCurdy wrote about the experience of being in the London Blitz: We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also p.r.o.ne to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration....When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.

Let us start with the first line: We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also p.r.o.ne to be afraid of being afraid. Because no one in England had been bombed before, Londoners a.s.sumed the experience would be terrifying. What frightened them was their prediction about how they would feel once the bombing started.7 Then German bombs dropped like hail for months and months, and millions of remote misses who had predicted that they would be terrified of bombing came to understand that their fears were overblown. They were fine. And what happened then? The conquering of fear produces exhilaration. And: The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.

Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all. Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma a.s.sociated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It created a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.

The next chapter of David and Goliath is about the American civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King Jr. brought his campaign to Birmingham, Alabama. There is one part of the Birmingham story that is worth touching on now, though, because it is a perfect example of this idea of acquired courage.

One of King's most important allies in Birmingham was a black Baptist preacher named Fred Shuttlesworth, who had been leading the fight against racial segregation in the city for years. On Christmas morning in 1956, Shuttlesworth announced that he was going to ride the city's segregated buses in defiance of the city's laws forbidding blacks from traveling with whites. The day before the protest, on Christmas night, his house was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was trying to do to Shuttlesworth what the n.a.z.is had been trying to do to the English during the Blitz. But they, too, misunderstood the difference between a near and a remote miss.

In Diane McWhorter's magnificent history of the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Carry Me Home, she describes what happened as the police and neighbors came running toward the smoking ruins of Shuttlesworth's house. It was late at night. Shuttlesworth had been lying in bed. They feared he was dead: A voice rose from the wreckage: "I'm not coming out naked." And, after a few moments, Shuttlesworth emerged in the raincoat someone threw into the parsonage's rubble. He was not crippled, not bloodied or blind; he was not even deaf, though the blast had blown windows out of houses a mile away.... Shuttlesworth raised a biblical hand to the concerned neighbors, and said, "The Lord has protected me. I am not injured."...

A big cop was crying. "Reverend, I know these people," he said of the bombers. "I didn't think they would go this far. If I were you, I'd get out of town. These people are vicious."

"Well, Officer, you're not me," Shuttlesworth said. "Go back and tell your Klan brothers that if the Lord saved me from this, I'm here for the duration. The fight is just beginning."

That's a cla.s.sic remote miss. Shuttlesworth wasn't killed. (A direct hit.) He wasn't maimed or badly injured. (A near miss.) He was unscathed. Whatever the Klan had hoped to accomplish had gone badly awry. Shuttlesworth was now less afraid than he had been before.

The next morning, members of his congregation pleaded with him to call off the protest. He refused. McWhorter continues: "h.e.l.l, yeah, we're going to ride," the cussing preacher said and addressed his board. "Find you any kind of crack you can to hide in if you're scared, but I'm walking downtown after this meeting and getting on the bus. I'm not going to look back to see who's following me." His voice deepened into the preacher register. "Boys step back," he ordered, "and men step forward."

A few months later, Shuttlesworth decided to personally take his daughter to enroll at the all-white John Herbert Phillips High School. As he drove up, a crowd of angry white men gathered around his car. Here is McWhorter again: To the child's disbelief, her father stepped out of the car. The men lunged at Shuttlesworth, baring bra.s.s knuckles, wooden clubs, and chains. Scampering west across the sidewalk, he was repeatedly knocked down. Someone had pulled his coat up over his head so that he couldn't lower his arms.... "We've got this son of a b.i.t.c.h now," a man yelled. "Let's kill him," the crowd screamed. From a white female cheering section came advice to "kill the motherf.u.c.king n.i.g.g.e.r and it will be all over." Men began smashing the windows of the car.

So, what happened to Shuttlesworth? Not much. He managed to crawl back into the car. He went to the hospital and was found to have minor kidney damage and some scratches and bruises. He checked himself out that afternoon, and that evening from the pulpit of his church, he told his congregation that he had only forgiveness for his attackers.

Shuttlesworth must have been someone of great resolve and strength. But when he climbed unscathed out of the wreckage of his house, he added an extra layer of psychological armor. We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also p.r.o.ne to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration....The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.

And then what happened at Phillips High School? Another remote miss! Upon leaving the hospital, Shuttlesworth told reporters, "Today is the second time within a year that a miracle has spared my life." If one remote miss brings exhilaration, we can only imagine what two bring.

Not long afterward, Shuttlesworth brought a colleague, Jim Farmer, to meet with Martin Luther King at a church in Montgomery, Alabama. Outside, an angry mob had gathered, waving Confederate flags. They began to rock the car. The driver reversed and tried an alternate route, only to be blocked once more. What did Shuttlesworth do? Just like at Phillips High School, he got out of the car. Here again is McWhorter: c.o.ke bottles shattered car windows around him as he paused to register a strange smell, his first whiff of tear gas. Then he beckoned Farmer out of the car and strode into the mob. Farmer followed, "scared as h.e.l.l," trying to shrink his bon vivant's ample body into Shuttlesworth's thin shadow. The goons parted, their clubs went slack, and Shuttlesworth walked up to the doors of First Baptist without a thread on his jacket disturbed. "Out of the way" was all he had said. "Go on. Out of the way."

That's three remote misses.

Losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob. It's worse. It's not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound. But what happens to children whose worst fear is realized-and then they discover that they are still standing? Couldn't they also gain what Shuttlesworth and the Blitz remote misses gained-a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage?8 "The officer who took Shuttlesworth to jail," McWhorter writes of another of Shuttlesworth's many run-ins with white authority, "struck him, kicked him in the shin, called him a monkey, and then goaded him, 'Why don't you hit me?' Shuttlesworth replied, 'Because I love you.' He folded his arms and smiled the rest of the way to jail, where, forbidden to sing or pray, he took a nap."

The work that Freireich had done in stopping the bleeding was a breakthrough. It meant that children could now be kept alive long enough that the underlying cause of their illness could be treated. But leukemia was an even harder problem. Only a handful of drugs were known to be of any use at all against the disease. There were the cell-killing drugs 6-MP and methotrexate, and there was the steroid prednisone. But each was potentially severely toxic and could be given in limited doses only, and because it could be given in limited doses only, it could wipe out only some of a child's cancer cells. The patient would get better for a week or so. Then the cells that had survived would start to multiply, and the cancer would come roaring back.

"One of the consultants at the clinical center was a man named Max Wintrobe," Freireich said. "He was world-famous because he wrote the first textbook of hematology, and he had written a review of the current state of the treatment of leukemia in children. I have a quotation from him that I show my students to this day. It says, 'These drugs cause more harm than good because they just prolong the agony. The patients all die anyway. The drugs make them worse, so you shouldn't use them.' This was the world's authority."

But Frei and Freireich and a companion group at the Roswell Park Memorial Inst.i.tute in Buffalo led by James Holland became convinced that the medical orthodoxy had it backwards. If the drugs weren't killing enough cancer cells, didn't that mean that the children needed more aggressive treatment, not less? Why not combine 6-MP and methotrexate? They each attacked cancer cells in different ways. They were like the army and the navy. Maybe the cells that survived 6-MP would be killed by methotrexate. And what if they added prednisone into the mix? It could be the air force, bombing from the air while the other drugs attacked from the land and sea.

Then Freireich stumbled across a fourth drug, one derived from the periwinkle plant. It was called vincristine. Someone from the drug company Eli Lilly brought it by the National Cancer Inst.i.tute for researchers to study. No one knew much about it, but Freireich had a hunch that it might work against leukemia. "I had twenty-five kids dying," he said. "I had nothing to offer them. My feeling was, I'll try it. Why not? They're going to die anyway." Vincristine showed promise. Freireich and Frei tried it out on children who no longer responded to the other drugs, and several went into temporary remission. So Frei and Freireich went to the NCI's research oversight board to ask for permission to test all four drugs together: army, navy, air force, marines.

Cancer is now routinely treated with drug "c.o.c.ktails," complicated combinations of two or three or even four or five medications simultaneously. But in the early 1960s, it was unheard of. The drugs available to treat cancer in those years were considered just too dangerous. Even vincristine, Freireich's prized new discovery, was utterly terrifying. Freireich learned that the hard way. "Did it have side effects? You bet," he said. "It caused serious depression, neuropathies. The kids got paralyzed. When you get a toxic dose, you end up in coma. Of the first fourteen children we treated, one or two actually died. Their brains were totally fried." Max Wintrobe thought the humane approach was not to use any drugs at all. Freireich and Frei wanted to use four, all at once. Frei went before the NCI advisory board to ask for approval. He got nowhere.

"There was a senior hematologist on the board by the name of Dr. Carl Moore, who happened to be a friend of my father's from St. Louis," Frei remembered years later. "I had always considered him a friend, too. But my presentation struck him as being outrageous. He didn't deal in pediatric diseases like childhood leukemia, so he talked about Hodgkin's disease in adults. He said that if you have a patient who has widespread Hodgkin's disease, then it's best to tell that patient to go to Florida and enjoy life. If patients are having too many symptoms from their Hodgkin's disease, you treat them with a little X-ray or possibly a little nitrogen mustard, but give the smallest dose possible. Anything more aggressive than that is unethical, and giving four drugs at a time is unconscionable."

Frei and Freireich were desperate. They went to their boss, Gordon Zubrod. Zubrod had been through the wars with Freireich over the platelets controversy. He had only reluctantly approved the vincristine experiment. He was responsible for what happened on the second floor. If somehow things didn't go well, he would be the one hauled before a congressional committee. Can you imagine? Two renegade researchers are giving experimental and highly toxic c.o.c.ktails of drugs to four- and five-year-olds at a government laboratory. He had grave reservations. But Frei and Freireich persisted. Actually, Frei persisted; Freireich isn't the kind of person who can be trusted with a delicate negotiation. "I couldn't have done anything without Tom," Freireich admitted. "Frei is the inverse of me. He is deliberate and very humane." Yes, the drugs were all poisons, Frei argued. But they were poisonous in different ways, which meant that if you were careful with the dosages-and if you were aggressive enough in the way you treated the side effects-the children could be kept alive. Zubrod gave in. "It was crazy," Freireich said. "But smart and correct. I thought about it and I knew it would work. It was like the platelets. It had to work!"

The trial was called the VAMP regimen. Some of the clinical a.s.sociates-the junior doctors a.s.sisting on the ward-refused to take part. They thought Freireich was insane. "I had to do it all myself," Freireich said. "I had to order the drugs. I had to mix them. I had to inject them. I had to do the blood counts. I had to measure the bleeding. I had to do the bone marrows. I had to count the slides." There were thirteen children in the initial round of the trial. The first was a young girl. Freireich started her off with a dose that turned out to be too high, and she almost died. He sat with her for hours. He kept her going with antibiotics and respirators. She pulled through, only to die later when her cancer returned. But Frei and Freireich were learning. They tinkered with the protocol and moved on to patient number two. Her name was Janice. She recovered, as did the next child and the next child. It was a start.

The only problem was that the cancer wasn't gone. A handful of malignant cells was still lurking. One bout of chemotherapy wouldn't be enough, they realized. So they started up another round. Would the disease return? It did. They needed to try again. "We gave them three treatments," Freireich said. "Twelve of the thirteen relapsed. So I decided, there's only one way to do this. We are going to continue treating them every month-for a year."9 "If people thought I was crazy before, now they thought I was completely crazy," Freireich went on. "These were children who seemed completely normal, in complete remission, walking around, playing football, and I was going to put them in the hospital again and make them sick again. No platelets. No white cells. Hemorrhage. Infection." VAMP wiped out the children's immune system. They were defenseless. For their parents, it was agony. In order to have a chance at life-they were told-their child had to be brought savagely and repeatedly to the brink of death.

Freireich threw himself into the task, using every ounce of his energy and audacity to keep his patients alive. In those days, when a patient developed a fever, the physician took a blood culture, and when the results came back, the doctor matched the infection with the most appropriate antibiotic. Antibiotics were never given in combination. You gave a second antibiotic only when the first one stopped working. "One of the first things Jay said to us was, no deal," DeVita remembered. "These kids spike a fever, you treat them immediately, and you treat them with combinations of antibiotics, because they're going to be dead in three hours if you don't." DeVita had an antibiotic that he had been told should never be administered in the spinal fluid. Freireich told him to give it to a patient-in the spinal fluid. "Freireich told us to do things," DeVita said, "that we had been taught were heretical.

"He was subject to so much criticism," DeVita continued. "The clinical a.s.sociates thought that what he was doing was completely nuts. He carried the weight of it. They would insult him-especially the guys from Harvard. They used to stand in the back of the room and heckle. He would say something, and they would say, 'Sure, Jay, and I'm going to fly to the moon.' It was awful, and Jay was there, all the time, hovering over you, looking at every lab test, going over every chart. G.o.d help you if you didn't do something for one of his patients. He was ferocious. He would do things and say things that got him into trouble, or go to some meeting and insult someone and Frei would have to come in and smooth things over. Did he care what people thought of him? Maybe. But not enough to stop doing what he thought was right.10 "How Jay did it," he said finally, "I don't know."

But we do know, don't we? He had been through worse.

In 1965, Freireich and Frei published "Progress and Perspectives in the Chemotherapy of Acute Leukemia" in Advances in Chemotherapy, announcing that they had developed a successful treatment for childhood leukemia.11 Today, the cure rate for this form of cancer is more than 90 percent. The number of children whose lives have been saved by the efforts of Freireich and Frei and the researchers who followed in their footsteps is in the many, many thousands.

Does this mean that Freireich should be glad he had the childhood he had? The answer is plainly no. What he went through as a child no child should ever have to endure. Along the same lines, I asked every dyslexic I interviewed the question posed at the beginning of the previous chapter: Would they wish dyslexia on their own children? Every one of them said no. Grazer shuddered at the thought. Gary Cohn was horrified. David Boies has two boys who are both dyslexic, and watching them grow up in an environment where reading early and well counted for everything nearly broke his heart. Here were one of the top producers in Hollywood, one of the most powerful bankers on Wall Street, and one of the best trial lawyers in the country-all of whom recognized how central their dyslexia was to their success. Yet they also knew firsthand what the price of that success was-and they could not bring themselves to wish that same experience on their own children.

But the question of what any of us would wish on our children is the wrong question, isn't it? The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma-and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.12 Freireich had the courage to think the unthinkable. He experimented on children. He took them through pain no human being should ever have to go through. And he did it in no small part because he understood from his own childhood experience that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest h.e.l.l healed and restored. Leukemia was a direct hit. He turned it into a remote miss.

At one point, in the midst of his battle, Freireich realized that the standard method of monitoring the children's cancer-taking a blood sample and counting the number of cancer cells under a microscope-wasn't good enough. Blood was misleading. A child's blood could look cancer free. But the disease could still be lurking in her bone marrow-which meant that you had to go through the painful process of gathering bone marrow samples, over and over again, month after month, until you were sure the cancer was gone. Max Wintrobe heard what Freireich was up to and tried to stop him. Freireich was torturing the patients, Wintrobe said. He was not wrong. His was the empathetic response. But it is also the response that would never have led to a cure.

"We used to do bone marrows by grabbing their legs like this," Freireich told me. He held one of his giant hands out, as if wrapped around a child's tiny femur. "We'd stick the needle in without anesthesia. Why no anesthesia? Because they'd scream just as much when you gave them an anesthesia shot. It's an eighteen- or nineteen-gauge needle straight into the shinbone, right below the knee. The kids are hysterical. The parents and nurses hold the kid down. We did that for every cycle. We needed to know if their bone marrow had recovered."

When he said the words "grabbing their legs like this," an involuntary grimace pa.s.sed across Freireich's face, as if for a moment he could feel what an eighteen-gauge needle straight into the shinbone of a small child felt like, and as if the feeling of that pain would give him pause. But then, as quickly as it appeared, it was gone.

When Jay Freireich was doing his medical training, he met a nurse named Haroldine Cunningham. He asked her out on a date. She said no. "All the young doctors were pretty aggressive," she remembers. "He had a reputation for being very outspoken. He called a couple of times, and I didn't go." But one weekend, Cunningham went to visit her aunt in a suburb outside of Chicago-and the phone rang. It was Freireich. He had taken the train out from Chicago and was calling from the train station. "He said, 'I'm here,'" she remembers. "He was very persistent." This was the early 1950s. They have been married ever since.

Freireich's wife is as small as Freireich is enormous, a tiny woman with a deep and obvious reservoir of strength. "I see the man. I see his needs," she said. He would come home from the hospital late at night, from the blood and the suffering, and she would be there. "She is the first person who ever loved me," Freireich said simply. "She is my angel from heaven. She found me. I think she detected something in me that could be nourished. I defer to her in all things. She keeps me going every day."

Haroldine grew up poor as well. Her family lived in a tiny apartment outside Chicago. When she was twelve, she tried the bathroom door-and couldn't get in. "My mother had locked the door," she said. "I got the neighbor from downstairs, who was the landlord. He opened the window and got in. We called the hospital. She died there. You don't really know when you're twelve or thirteen years old what is going on, but I knew she was unhappy. My father was away, of course. He was not a terrific father."

She sat in the chair in her husband's office, this woman who carved an island of calm out of the turbulence of her husband's life. "You have to realize, of course, that love doesn't always save people you want to save. Somebody asked me once, weren't you angry? And I said, no, I wasn't, I understood her misery.

"There are things that either build you up or put you down. Jay and I have that in common."

1 When Freireich was completing his medical training, a distant relative died and left him six hundred dollars. "I had a patient, a used-car dealer who said he'd sell me a used car," Freireich said. "It was a 1948 Pontiac. One night I was drunk and out partying with some girls, and I drove into the side of a brand-new Lincoln. I should have gone to jail for it, but the police came over and recognized me immediately as a county intern, so they said, 'We'll take care of it.'" This was what it was like being a doctor in those days. It is safe to say this doesn't happen anymore.

2 The twelve are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

3 Brown begins with these haunting lines from Wordsworth, whose mother died when he was eight: She who was the heart And hinge of all our learnings and our loves: She left us dest.i.tute and, as we might, Trooping together.

4 Or, as the English essayist Thomas De Quincey famously put it: "It is, or it is not, according to the nature of men, an advantage to be orphaned at an early age."

5 If you want to understand the full scientific context of the fight against leukemia, there is no better source than Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prizeawinning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Mukherjee has a full chapter on the war on leukemia. It is well worth reading.

6 In the 1960s, the daughter of the novelist Peter de Vries died of leukemia. He wrote a heartbreaking novel based on the experience called The Blood of the Lamb. De Vries writes: So we were back in the Children's Pavilion, and there was again the familiar scene: the mothers with their nearly dead, the false face of mercy, the Slaughter of the Innocents. A girl with one leg came unsteadily down the hall between crutches, skillfully encouraged by nurses. Through the pane in a closed door a boy could be seen sitting up in bed, bleeding from everything in his head; a priest lounged alertly against the wall, ready to move in closer. In the next room a boy of five was having Methotrexate pumped into his skull, or, more accurately, was watching a group of mechanics gathered solemnly around the stalled machine. In the next a baby was sitting up watching a television set on which a panel show was in progress...Among the parents and children, flung together in a h.e.l.l of prolonged farewell, wandered forever the ministering vampires from Laboratory, sucking samples from bones and veins to see how went with each the enemy that had marked them all. And the doctors in their butchers' coats, who severed the limbs and gouged the brains and knifed the vitals where the demon variously dwelt, what did they think of these best fruits of ten million hours of dedicated toil? They hounded the culprit from organ to organ and joint to joint till nothing remained over which to practice their art: the art of prolonging sickness.

7 The prediction we make about how we are going to feel in some future situation is called "affective forecasting," and all of the evidence suggests that we are terrible affective forecasters. The psychologist Stanley J. Rachman, for example, has done things like take a group of people terrified of snakes and then show them a snake. Or take a group of claustrophobics and have them stand in a small metal closet. What he finds is that the actual experience of the thing that was feared is a lot less scary than the person imagined.

8 "I had a patient like this many years ago," the New York psychiatrist Peter Mezan told me. "He'd built an empire. But talk about a catastrophic childhood. His mother died in front of him when he was six, with his father standing over her, screaming at her in rage. She was having a convulsion. The father was then murdered because he was a gangster, and he and his sibling were sent to an orphanage. He grew up where there was nothing except to overcome. So he was willing to take chances that other people wouldn't take. I think he felt that there was nothing to lose." To Mezan, there was no mystery-in his experience over the years-between this kind of outsize pathology in childhood and the larger-than-life successes that some of those bereaved children would have later in adulthood. The fact of having endured and survived such trauma had a liberating effect. "These are people who are able to break the frame of the known world-what's believed, what's a.s.sumed, what's common sense, what's familiar, what everyone takes for granted, whether it's about cancer or the laws of physics," he said. "They are not confined to the frame. They have the ability to step outside it, because I think the usual frame of childhood didn't exist for them. It was shattered."

9 The idea of administering repeated bouts of chemotherapy-even after the patient appeared cancer free-came from M. C. Li and Roy Hertz at the National Cancer Inst.i.tute in the late 1950s. Li hit choriocarcinoma-a rare cancer of the uterus-with round after round of methotrexate until he finally drove it from his patients' bodies. It was the first time a solid tumor had ever been cured by chemotherapy. When Li first proposed the idea, he was told to stop. People thought it was barbaric. He persisted. He was fired-even though he cured his patients. "That was what the atmosphere was like," DeVita says. "I remember there was a grand rounds around that time, to discuss choriocarcinoma. And the subject of conversation was whether this was a case of spontaneous remission. No one could even get their heads around the idea that the methotrexate had actually cured the patient." Needless to say, Freireich speaks of Li, even today, with awe. Once at a scientific meeting, a speaker slighted Li's accomplishments, and Freireich leapt up and roared, in the middle of the proceeding, "M. C. Li cured choriocarcinoma!"

10 Freireich stories are legion. At one point he ventured up to the twelfth floor of the NCI's clinical center, which housed the ward for adults who had chronic myeloid leukemia. CML is a form of leukemia that overproduces white blood cells. The patients' cell-making machinery goes into overdrive. The children Freireich was treating, by contrast, had acute lymphocytic leukemia. It's a cancer that results in the overproduction of defective white blood cells-which is why they are helpless in the face of infection. So Freireich began taking blood from adults with cancer of the blood on the twelfth floor and giving it to children with cancer of the blood on the second floor. Was it considered unusual to take white cells from CML patients? "Insane," Freireich said, looking back on that experiment. "Everyone said it was insane. What if the children ended up somehow getting CML as well? What if it made them even sicker?" Freireich shrugged. "This was an environment where the kids had one hundred percent mortality in months. We had nothing to lose."

11 I have simplified the leukemia story. See Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies for a more complete version. After Freireich and Frei demonstrated that they could make progress against leukemia with previously unheard-of doses of chemotherapy drugs, the oncologist Donald Pinkel took over and pushed that logic even further. It was Pinkel's group, at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, that pioneered "total therapy," which is best described as VAMP squared. Today's overwhelmingly successful leukemia treatments are essentially Pinkel's supercharged version of the VAMP regimen.

12 In his memoir The Theory and Practice of h.e.l.l, Eugen Kogon writes of what happened at the German concentration camp Buchenwald whenever the n.a.z.is came to the leaders of the camp and demanded that they select for the gas chambers those from among their own ranks who were "socially unfit." Not to comply meant disaster; the n.a.z.is would then turn the prisoner leadership over to the "greens"-the s.a.d.i.s.tic criminal element also interned at Buchenwald alongside Jews and political prisoners. On "no account," Kogon writes, could the "pure of heart" be asked to make that decision. Sometimes human survival demands that we commit harm in the cause of some greater good-and, Kogon writes, "the more tender one's conscience, the more difficult it was to make such decisions."

Chapter Six.

Wyatt Walker

"De rabbit is de slickest o' all de animals de Lawd ever made."

The most famous photograph in the history of the American civil rights movement was taken on May 3, 1963, by Bill Hudson, a photographer for the a.s.sociated Press. Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr.'s activists had taken on the city's racist public safety commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor. The photo was of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog. Even to this day, it has not lost its power to shock.

Hudson gave his roll of film from that day to his editor, Jim Laxon. Laxon looked through Hudson's photos until he came to the boy leaning into the dog. He was, he said later, riveted by the "saintly calm of the young [man] in the snarling jaws of the German shepherd." He hadn't felt that way about a photograph since he published a Pulitzer Prizeawinning photo seventeen years before of a woman jumping from an upper-story window in a hotel fire in Atlanta.

Laxon took the picture and sent it out over the wires. The next day, the New York Times published it above the fold across three columns on the front page of its Sat.u.r.day paper, as did virtually every major paper in the country. President Kennedy saw the photograph and was appalled. The secretary of state, Dean Rusk, worried that it would "embarra.s.s our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful." The photo was discussed on the floor of Congress and in countless living rooms and cla.s.srooms. For a time, it seemed like Americans could talk of little else. It was an image, as one journalist put it, that would "burn forever...the thin, well-dressed boy seeming to be leaning into the dog, his arms limp at his side, calmly staring straight ahead as though to say-'Take me, here I am.'" For years, Martin Luther King and his army of civil rights activists had been fighting the thicket of racist laws and policies that blanketed the American South-the rules that made it hard or impossible for blacks to get jobs, vote, get a proper education, or even to use the same water fountain as a white person. Suddenly, the tide turned. A year later, the U.S. Congress pa.s.sed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of the United States. The Civil Rights Act, it has often been said, was "written in Birmingham."

In 1963, when Martin Luther King came to Birmingham, his movement was in crisis. He had just spent nine months directing protests against segregation in Albany, Georgia, two hundred miles to the south, and he had limped away from Albany without winning any significant concessions. The biggest victory the civil rights movement had won to that point had been the Supreme Court's decision in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, declaring segregation of public schools to be unconst.i.tutional. But almost a decade had pa.s.sed and the public schools of the Deep South were still as racially divided as ever. In the 1940s and early 1950s, most Southern states had been governed by relatively moderate politicians who were at least willing to acknowledge the dignity of black people. Alabama had a governor in those years named "Big Jim" Folsom, who was fond of saying "all men are just alike." By the early sixties, all the moderates were gone. The statehouses were in the control of hard-line segregationists. The South seemed to be moving backwards.

And Birmingham? Birmingham was the most racially divided city in America. It was known as "the Johannesburg of the South." When a busload of civil rights activists were on their way to Birmingham, the local police stood by while Klansmen forced their bus to the side of the road and set it afire. Black people who tried to move into white neighborhoods had their homes dynamited by the city's local Ku Klux Klansmen so often that Birmingham's other nickname was Bombingham. "In Birmingham," Diane McWhorter writes in Carry Me Home, "it was held a fact of criminal science that the surest way to stop a crime wave-burglaries, rapes, whatever-was to go out and shoot a few suspects. ('This thing's getting out of hand,' a [police] lieutenant might say. 'You know what we've got to do.')"

Eugene "Bull" Connor, the city's public safety commissioner, was a short, squat man with enormous ears and a "bullfrog voice." He came to prominence in 1938 when a political conference was held in downtown Birmingham with both black and white delegates. Connor tied a long rope to a stake in the lawn outside the auditorium, and ran the rope down the center of the aisle and insisted-in accordance with the city's segregation ordinances-that black people stay to one side of the line, and whites to the other. One of the attendees at the meeting was the president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. She was sitting on the "wrong" side and Connor's people had to force her to move to the white side. (Imagine someone trying that on Mich.e.l.le Obama.)1 Connor liked to spend his mornings at the Molton Hotel downtown, doing shots of 100 proof Old Grand-Dad Bourbon, and sayings things like, A Jew is just a "n.i.g.g.e.r turned inside out." People used to tell jokes about Birmingham, of the sort that weren't really jokes: A black man in Chicago wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham. She is horrified: "Did Jesus say He'd go with you?" The husband replies: "He said He'd go as far as Memphis."

Upon arriving in Birmingham, King called a meeting of his planning team. "I have to tell you," he said, "that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign." Then he went around the room and gave everyone a mock eulogy. One of King's aides would later admit that he never wanted to go to Birmingham at all: "When I kissed my wife and children good-bye down on Carol Road in Atlanta, I didn't think I would ever see them again."

King was outgunned and overmatched. He was the overwhelming underdog. He had, however, an advantage-of the same paradoxical variety as David Boies's dyslexia or Jay Freireich's painful childhood. He was from a community that had always been the underdog. By the time the civil rights crusade came to Birmingham, African-Americans had spent a few hundred years learning how to cope with being outgunned and overmatched. Along the way they had learned a few things about battling giants.

At the center of many of the world's oppressed cultures stands the figure of the "trickster hero." In legend and song, he appears in the form of a seemingly innocuous animal that triumphs over others much larger than himself through cunning and guile. In the West Indies, slaves brought with them from Africa tales of a devious spider named Anansi.2 Among American slaves, the trickster was often the short-tailed Brer Rabbit.3 "De rabbit is de slickest o' all de animals de Lawd ever made," one ex-slave recounted in an interview with folklorists a hundred years ago: He ain't de biggest, an he ain't de loudest but he sho' am de slickest. If he gits in trouble he gits out by gittin' somebody else in. Once he fell down a deep well an' did he holler and cry? No siree. He set up a mighty mighty whistling and a singin', an' when de wolf pa.s.ses by he heard him an' he stuck his head over an' de rabbit say, "Git 'long 'way f'om here. Dere ain't room fur two. Hit's mighty hot up dere and nice an' cool down here. Don' you git in dat bucket an' come down here." Dat made de wolf all de mo' onrestless and he jumped into the bucket an' as he went down de rabbit come up, an' as dey pa.s.sed de rabbit he laughed an' he say, "Dis am life; some go up and some go down."

In the most famous Brer Rabbit story, Brer Fox traps Rabbit by building a baby doll out of tar. Brer Rabbit tries to engage the tar baby and instead gets stuck, and the more he tries to free himself from the tar, the more hopelessly entangled he becomes. "I don't care what you do wid' me, Brer Fox," Rabbit pleads to the gloating Fox, "but don't fling me in dat briar-patch." Brer Fox, of course, does just that-and Rabbit, who was born and bred in the briar patch, uses the thorns to separate himself from the doll and escapes. Fox is defeated. Rabbit sits cross-legged on a nearby log, triumphantly "koamin' de pitch outen his har wid a chip."

Trickster tales were wish fulfillments in which slaves dreamed of one day rising above their white masters. But as the historian Lawrence Levine writes, they were also "painfully realistic stories which taught the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment." African-Americans were outnumbered and overpowered, and the idea embedded in the Brer Rabbit stories was that the weak could compete in even the most lopsided of contests if they were willing to use their wits. Brer Rabbit understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer Fox did not understand himself. He realized his opponent Fox was so malicious that he couldn't resist giving Rabbit the punishment Rabbit said he desperately wanted to avoid. So Rabbit tricked Fox, gambling that he could not bear the thought that a smaller and lesser animal was enjoying himself so much. Levine argues that over the course of their long persecution, African-Americans took the lessons of the trickster to heart: The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery and by the masters themselves indicate that a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their masters' property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves.

Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that-at times-can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David's opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

The executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization led by King, was Wyatt Walker. Walker was on the ground in Birmingham from the beginning, marshaling King's meager army against the forces of racism and reaction. King and Walker were under no illusions that they could fight racism the conventional way. They could not defeat Bull Connor at the polls, or in the streets, or in the court of law. They could not match him strength for strength. What they could do, though, was play Brer Rabbit and try to get Connor to throw them in the briar patch.

"Wyatt," King said, "you've got to find the means to create a crisis, to make Bull Connor tip his hand." That is exactly what Walker did. And the crisis created by Wyatt Walker was the photograph of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog-leaning in, his arms limp, as if to say, "Take me, here I am."

Wyatt Walker was a Baptist minister from Ma.s.sachusetts. He joined up with Martin Luther King in 1960. He was King's "nuts and bolts" man, his organizer and fixer. He was a mischief maker-slender, elegant, and intellectual, with a pencil-thin mustache and a droll sense of humor. Every Wednesday afternoon he reserved for a round of golf. To him, women were always "dahlin'," as in "I'm not hard to get along with, dahlin's. I just have to have perfection." As a young man he joined the Young Communist League because-as he would always say, tongue planted firmly in cheek-it was one of the only ways a black person in those years could meet white women. "In college," the historian Taylor Branch writes, "he acquired dark-rimmed gla.s.ses that gave his face the look of a brooding Trotskyite."4 Once, when he was preaching in Petersburg, a small town in Virginia, he showed up at the local whites-only public library with his family and a small entourage in tow, with the intention of getting arrested for breaking the town's segregation laws. What book did he check out that he could wave in front of the a.s.sembled photographers and reporters? A biography of the great hero of the white South, Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general who led the Confederate Army in its battle to defend slavery. That was vintage Wyatt Walker. He was perfectly happy to be carted off to jail for breaking Petersburg's segregation laws. But he made sure to rub the town's nose in its own contradictions at the same time.

In Birmingham, King, Walker, and Fred Shuttlesworth formed a triumvirate. Shuttlesworth was the longtime face of the Birmingham civil rights struggle, the local preacher whom the Klan could not kill. King was the prophet, gracious and charismatic. Walker stayed in the shadows. He did not allow himself to be photographed with King. Even in Birmingham, many of Bull Connor's people had no idea what Walker looked like. King and Shuttlesworth were equipped with a certain serenity. Walker was not. "If you get in my way, I'll run smack dab over you" is how Walker described his management style. "I don't have time for 'good morning, good afternoon; how do you feel.' We've got a revolution on our hands."

Once, in Birmingham, when King was giving a speech, a two-hundred-pound white man charged the stage and began pummeling King with his fists. As King's aides rushed to defend him, McWhorter writes: They were astounded to watch King become his a.s.sailant's protector. He held him solicitously and, as the audience began singing Movement songs, told him that their cause was just, that violence was self-demeaning, that "we're going to win." Then King introduced him to the crowd, as though he were a surprise guest. Roy James, a twenty-four-year-old native New Yorker who lived in an American n.a.z.i Party dormitory in Arlington, Virginia, began to weep in King's embrace.

King was a moral absolutist who did not stray from his principles even when under attack. Walker liked to call himself a pragmatist. He was once attacked by a "mountain of a man"-six foot six, 260 pounds-when he was standing in front of a courthouse in North Carolina. Walker didn't embrace his a.s.sailant. He got up and came back at him, and each time the man's blows sent Walker tumbling down the courthouse steps, he picked himself up and came back for more. The third time, Walker recalled later, "he caught me good, knocked me almost senseless. And I went back up a fourth time. By this time, you know, if I'd had my razor I'd have cut him."

One famous night, the three of them-Walker, King, and Shuttlesworth-were about to preach to fifteen hundred people at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, when the church was surrounded by an angry white mob threatening to burn the building down. King, predictably enough, took the high road. "The only way we are going to save the people upstairs," he told the others, "is we who are the leadership have to give ourselves up to the mob." Shuttlesworth, imperturbable as always, agreed: "Yeah, well if that what we have to do, let's do it." Walker? He looked over at King and said to himself: "This man must be out of his G.o.ddam mind."5 (At the last moment, federal troops came and dispersed the crowd.) Later, Walker would embrace nonviolence. But he always gave the sense that turning the other cheek wasn't something that came naturally.

"At times I would accommodate or alter my morality for the sake of getting a job done because I was the guy having to deal with the results," he said once. "I did it consciously; I had no choice. I wasn't dealing with a moral situation when I dealt with a Bull Connor." Walker loved to play tricks on Connor. "I have come to Birmingham to ride the Bull," he announced, eyes twinkling, upon his arrival. He might put on a Southern drawl, and call in some imaginary complaint to the local police about "n.i.g.g.e.rs" headed somewhere in a protest, sending them off on a wild goose chase. Or he might lead a march that wasn't a march, one that went around and around, through office lobbies and down alleyways, until the police were tearing out their hair. "Oh, man, it was a great time to be alive," he said, recalling the antics he got up to in Birmingham. Walker knew better than to tell King all that he was doing. King would disapprove. Walker kept his mischief to himself.

"I think Negroes like myself have developed almost a mental catalog of the tone of voices of how a white face speaks to them," Walker told the poet Robert Penn Warren in a long interview just after the Birmingham campaign ended. "But everything that a white person says is interpreted by the nuance of the tone of voice, or maybe the hang of the head, or the depth of tone, or the sharpness of the tongue, you know-things that in the ordinary, normal ethnic frame of reference would have no meaning, take on tremendous and deep and sharp meaning."

Warren then brought up the trickster folktales of the African-American tradition. You can almost see a sly smile cross Walker's face: "Yes," he replied, he found "pure joy" in poking fun at the "master," telling him "one thing that you knew he wanted to hear and really meaning something else."