Behind the Shock Machine (27 page)

“I could hear him arguing with the experimenter through the wall,” Enzo said.

I heard myself telling them that they had been part of a historic event but, as Enzo’s story spilled out, I realized how ridiculous I must have sounded; that all of them—Bernardo, Enzo, and Ada—had been part of something much bigger and more momentous than forty minutes in a scientist’s lab. Displaced by war, immigrating to a new country, and building new lives—Milgram’s experiment shrank into insignificance against the backdrop of their personal history. It’s no wonder that they hadn’t discussed it. And it’s no wonder that I couldn’t get them to remember their feelings at the time or how the experiment might have affected them. They had experienced much worse.

When I told them that people went further with strangers, they wanted to know why. And I couldn’t explain it in a way that satisfied them or me.

When I got back to Yale, I found two brothers-in-law in the recordings who could have been Bernardo and Enzo, but I wasn’t sure. What I heard was a worried-sounding teacher refusing to be fobbed off by Williams’s casual reassurances that his brother-in-law would not be harmed. The teacher had to insist he would not continue fifteen times before Williams gave up and announced that the experiment was over.

The night after I met the Vittoris, I stopped in New Haven for dinner at a restaurant called Basta. It didn’t strike me until I sat down and opened the menu that the day at the Vittoris had made me homesick for something. Maybe it was the laughter of the brothers-in-law at the kitchen table; Maria’s open admiration for her parents; or the granddaughter, home early from nursery school and allowed, because of my
visit, to watch an unrestricted amount of television. No matter how much he had tried to test the bonds of family and friendship, Milgram had failed. Instead of measuring obedience in condition 24, he’d measured the power of love.

7

MILGRAM’S STAFF

On his university’s website, J. Keith Williams, dressed in a suit and tie, smiled at the camera. He was fair-haired and pale-skinned. Unlike his father, he wore glasses. And unlike his father, whose photographs showed a man stern and unsmiling, Keith grinned easily. He was pleased, and thanked me, when I told him he looked like his dad.

Keith taught in the physician-assistant program at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and I caught him between classes in the lab. He shared with me his memories of his father. Keith remembered going to Yale with his dad one night, when he was about nine, to pick up a check from a Dr. Milgram. They parked in one of Yale’s side streets, and John told his son that he’d have to stay in the car. “He said I couldn’t come inside with him because it was secret. And I remember he left me sitting in the car, and it was dark, and all the buildings were stone with ivy growing on them; it was a little bit spooky.” I imagined the young Keith, circa 1961, sitting in the front seat, twiddling the radio knob, wanting to hear a human voice in the dark street—and never guessing that, in the building just a few feet away, some of the most famous and controversial experiments of the twentieth century were taking place and his dad was part of them. Little did Keith know that his dad’s stern demeanor would one day be famous.

I was curious to know whether John was as commanding and serious as he appeared. It was John, after all, who personified what
Milgram called a “malevolent authority.” Keith laughed and agreed. The role of the disciplinarian came naturally to his father. Keith’s grandfather had been a strict authority figure, too, and John’s three years in the military had reinforced his commanding air. In addition, John—the oldest of three sons, like Keith—had responsibility thrust on him from a young age. He married in 1951, when he was twenty-one, just out of the air force and a freshman at college. In 1956, his father had a stroke that left him paralyzed down the left side, and John and his small family, who had been living in a third-floor flat in New Haven, moved back into the Williamses’ family home to help John’s now-disabled father run the family business—a forty-four-seat restaurant—and contribute to the mortgage. By 1961, when the experiments began, they had only just moved out of the family home and into their own place in Southbury, Connecticut. John took the job at Yale because he needed the money. He was supporting his wife, Roberta, and eight-year-old Keith, and his high school science teacher’s salary wasn’t enough. In addition, Roberta was expecting another baby.

Keith remembered that, when he was a boy, his father “could be a little petulant, a bit short-tempered.” When I asked him to elaborate, he told me, “He was quite strict with me. . . . My father and I were a little distant at times when I was growing up because he was such an authoritarian.” As Keith grew older, discipline became a source of tension between them. But Keith put it down to his dad’s age—only twenty-two when Keith was born, he was young to be a father and “he was learning as he grew.” He noted that John relaxed as he matured and “was much easier” on his two younger sons.

Keith told me that while John could be sharp with him, “he also had a very warm side.” John was an active member of his community and a devoted golfer, and he and his wife had a busy social life: “My parents went out every weekend, played bridge, went singing—Dad played piano, ukulele, mandolin. They were very social.” According to Keith, John was “a very strong character, a good leader” who went on to become president of the teachers’ association credit union. He was also a popular teacher. And John passed on his love of science to his oldest son. Keith told me, “When I was in seventh grade, he taught
me how to dissect a live frog. You could see its heart and lungs working, and other kids in class passed out.” John Williams would remain a high school teacher after his stint at Yale, and in total would spend thirty-seven years teaching science in the Connecticut high school system.

Keith didn’t think that his father told his mother much at all about the job, and he even kept it secret from his best friend, with whom he sang bass in a barbershop quartet. It seemed that John took Milgram’s assurances of the need for secrecy seriously. “They didn’t want it to get out what was going on. It would ruin everything if people knew it was a setup.”

Even once the study was over, John didn’t talk about it with his son. In fact, it would be ten years before John explained what he had been doing with Milgram at Yale, when he realized that Keith, who was about to start college, might come across the study. “I think he brought it up when I had it in my textbook. Otherwise he didn’t talk about it all that much. When he did, he always talked highly of Milgram and the whole thing. I think he appreciated being involved in such a landmark study.

“He said they were definitely shocked by the results; it was groundbreaking research. He said people often laughed inappropriately, and a few times people ran out of the building and they had to chase them down and tell them it was all a setup.”

Keith told me that his father “didn’t have any bad feelings about it,” even though he’d found it stressful—particularly when he ran into people who’d been in the experiment. “One time he was at a restaurant, and one of the people recognized him and was upset by him. Even though he knew that the shocks weren’t real, the person left the restaurant when he recognized him, and Dad was a little upset that people would have a reaction like that.”

Keith was still conscious of the degree of responsibility that Milgram gave his father. “I was kind of shocked by it all—he was paid so little, it was amazing. Milgram was very appreciative, but later on I think there should have been more communication. He just moved on with his fame and fortune.”

Talking to Keith, I was conscious of John Williams’s absence—how
his father’s silence had left a number of gaps. How might John, an otherwise happy and active member of society (if a stern father), have felt about keeping his work secret from his wife and best friend? What did he tell his family he was doing all those nights and weekends he spent at Yale? And why did he maintain his silence about the experiments far beyond the period he was required to? I couldn’t reconcile the John Williams that I knew from the tapes, the cold and officious-sounding man, with the outgoing and gregarious entertainer Keith described.

I also thought of Jim McDonough, the learner, and what Williams and McDonough said to their wives and families about their work at Yale at the end of each shift. How did they feel about the stress they were required to inflict on the people who volunteered? And what was their relationship with the ambitious Milgram? Working together so intensively for nine months, they must have formed a friendship of sorts. I felt disappointed that these were questions that would never be properly answered; while John Williams’s death had been a surprise, Blass’s book had already told me that McDonough had died three years after the experiments from heart problems.
¹
All I could do was piece together as much of the story as I could from interviews with family members such as Keith, who had known intimately the men I had heard on tape and speculated about.

Keith Williams introduced me to his uncle Mark, John’s younger brother, who was the director of adult education at Clinton High School in Connecticut. While I interviewed Mark, I felt as if I got to do his job alongside him. He walked around the school with his phone in his hand, buzzing open doors and welcoming people arriving for night classes. Knitting and mah-jongg were always popular, but belly dancing had become the new favorite and the teacher had to get an assistant to cope with the demand, Mark told me.

Mark had also been hired by Milgram, to serve as a stand-in actor in some of the group experiments conducted in November 1961. He was only nineteen, a recent high school graduate. His memories were vague—he remembered there were three, or maybe four, other actors aside from John, one of them McDonough. The one thing he
did remember clearly was John’s “robotic” delivery: “Everything was monotone; he said the same thing every time.”

The brothers didn’t talk much about the experiment afterward. When they did, it was only in passing. “We referred back to it, but nothing about how he felt about it. You have to remember it was a job. It wasn’t like the high point of anyone’s existence.”

Mark was proud to have been part of the experiment but had no idea that it was so famous until he returned to graduate school in the 1970s. “I was taking ed psych, and I was in a classroom with thirty to thirty-five other people, and a film started. I remember I was writing in my notebook, and I looked up and saw Jack and thought, oh my God, I remember this!”

But Mark didn’t think that his brother would have found it stressful. “It was a game, there was nothing serious about it.” It would have been just another job to John, who possessed the family’s strong work ethic and had put himself through college. In all likelihood, John would have enjoyed it. He was four years older than Milgram, and that may have reinforced the natural authority that Milgram came to rely on. “Well, Milgram didn’t really get his hands dirty, and Jack was good at handling people. He was a teacher. If you’re dealing with his students, you’ve got to be the diplomat, the everyman,” Mark said.

I asked Mark if he had seen anyone getting upset during the experiment. “I remember the cringing when they were going up in voltage, but that didn’t stop them doing it. There was one guy who said he was a Korean War veteran, and I remember in the interview afterward he said, ‘Yeah, well, there are probably people all watching this back there behind that mirror,’ and I went, ‘Ooh.’ He was almost looking at me.”

He couldn’t remember whether he was told not to say anything about the experiments but said that if he and John were told to keep it secret, they would have. “You just don’t talk about those things. If you’re asked not to, you wouldn’t.” Besides, Mark said, it would have been hard to explain to other kids, although he “probably” told Craig, a good friend at that time.

Interestingly, he told me that John’s persona was at odds with his
personality. In contrast to what I had heard from Keith, Mark told me, “He might have looked stern, but that wasn’t my brother. He was acting! That was nothing like Jack. He was the life of the party; women loved him. Yes, absolutely. He was good-looking, he could sing, he had a lot of talent. What’s not to like?”

Mark obviously looked up to his oldest brother. To Mark, John had charisma: “well schooled” in drama with a talent for performance, he could play the piano and violin, and sang in Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, and in a barbershop quartet. “Every Christmas it would be like waiting for Jack to get there and play piano and sing. He was a natural performer. The peak of our wedding was Jack singing ‘Ave Maria.’”

Was John proud of having been part of the experiments? “Absolutely. No question. Because if you asked him about it, he’d say, ‘Yes, that’s me up there.’ . . . Jack’s become the face of the whole experiment.”

It certainly would have been a stressful job. As the experimenter, Williams dealt with subjects from the moment they arrived to the moment they left: greeting them, marshaling them through the experiment, taking notes on their behavior, fending off their attempts to pull out, ordering them to continue, and debriefing them. And in at least one variation, he played an aggressive teacher, rather than the experimenter. Probably in recognition of the amount of responsibility he had delegated to Williams, Milgram started him at $2 an hour, higher than McDonough’s $1.75. Milgram must have been conscious of how much he relied on the men because he gave them two pay raises in six months, with Williams’s rising to $2.40 and McDonough’s to $2.25 by March 1962.
²

In addition, the experiment could sometimes be dangerous. It wasn’t unheard of for Milgram’s staff to be assaulted—remember that, when one subject asked Williams if anyone had ever attacked him, he replied, “Once or twice.”
³
In one variation in which he played a teacher, Williams took over the shock machine after the experimenter had left the room and proceeded to “single mindedly . . . increase the shock step by step.” Milgram wrote that “the experiment ends when naïve subject takes physical action—eg switching off machine or physically
restraining Williams.”
⁴
In his book, Milgram noted that most subjects protested at Williams’s actions, and “five subjects took [physical] action” against him. One subject, described as a large man, “lifted the zealous shocker from his chair, threw him to the corner of the laboratory and did not allow him to move.”
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