Dreams of Earth and Sky (33 page)

Wyatt Walker is the hero of a chapter describing the battle between civil rights protesters and segregationist authorities in 1963 in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. This was a classic example of the underdog as trickster, cheating and making mischief in order to win. Walker was second-in-command to Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Walker organized operations on the ground while King attracted the attention of the world outside. Their strategy was based on two principles. First, provoke the enemy to violent actions that will horrify the world outside and destroy the legitimacy of the authorities. Second, never hit back. Make sure that all protests remain nonviolent and are seen by the outside world to be nonviolent.

Walker had a problem with carrying out the strategy. He had only twenty-two protesters, and it was difficult to provoke the authorities or to attract worldwide attention with such a small number. He played two tricks to make a small number look big. The first trick was to announce a protest march and then delay the start until a large number of spectators came out onto the streets to watch. At that point the television cameras and reporters could not tell the difference between protesters and spectators. The newspapers on the following day reported that eleven hundred protesters had marched. The second trick was to invite all the black high school children in the city to skip school and join the parade. Many hundreds of children came, prepared with freedom signs and singing freedom songs.

After some days of increasing crowds and increasing chaos, the
authorities did what Walker had intended them to do. They tried to disperse the crowd by turning high-power fire hoses and police dogs onto the children. A picture appeared on television and in newspapers all over the world, showing a vicious dog attacking a nonviolent black teenager. The teenager was in fact a spectator, not a protester, and he was not hurt. Walker said afterward, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” His strategy succeeded, and the result was the passage of the Voting Rights Act two years later, enforcing the right of blacks to vote in elections and ultimately overturning the political power of white segregationists in southern states.

To wage a long campaign of nonviolent resistance, underdog rebels need strict discipline and self-control, and they need a leader with the charisma of King. If the leadership is weak or divided, it is easy for nonviolent resistance to slide into violence and for violence to slide into terrorism. Violence means doing physical harm to wielders of power, such as soldiers or politicians. Terrorism means doing physical harm to innocent bystanders or to whole populations. As a rule, nonviolent tactics give legitimacy to resistance and terrorist tactics give legitimacy to oppressive government. Another inconvenient truth about underdogs is that many of them are terrorists.

Asymmetric wars are usually small wars, fought between a big country and a colony or a group of rebels. But big wars may also be asymmetric. World War I and World War II were big wars, and they were both in important ways asymmetric. World War I was asymmetric if we look at it from the point of view of the man who started it, Gavrilo Princip. Princip was a Bosnian Serb, belonging to a small group of underdogs who were resisting the power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which ruled Bosnia. He assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, when they drove through Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. To kill the archduke was an act of resistance. To kill Sophie was an act of terrorism.

Princip started the war and he won it. He achieved both of his grand objectives: the total destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the independence of the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia united his homelands Bosnia and Serbia in a confederation of Slav peoples. He did not even pay with his life for his victory. He was first imprisoned by the Austrians and then transferred by them to a hospital where he died peacefully of tuberculosis. From the point of view of Princip, the war was a complete success, and the deaths of a few tens of millions were only collateral damage. The war was also a complete success from the point of view of another group of underdog rebels, the Bolsheviks, who took advantage of the war to achieve their aims in Russia.

World War II was asymmetric in a different way. It was started in Europe by Germany and in Asia by Japan, as a conventional war to be fought by big armies on the ground. The aim of Germany was to fight World War I over again and this time win. The aim of Japan was to complete the conquest of China without interference from the United States. The war became asymmetric because Britain and the United States were determined not to fight World War I over again. Britain and the United States made the decision, before the war started, to build large bomber forces that could destroy the enemy homelands from the air.

Germany and Japan did not build strategic bomber forces. The bombing of London was done in a haphazard way by forces not designed for the purpose. The German V-1 and V-2 bombardments were too little and too late to have any substantial effects. Whether the bombing of Germany and Japan was militarily effective is still a matter of dispute. One fact that is not in dispute is that the British and American peoples supported the bombing campaigns, partly for military reasons but mainly to teach the enemy populations a lesson that they would not forget.

Both the Germans and the Japanese had fought all their earlier wars in other people’s countries, and now they would finally feel the horrors of war on their own skins. The Germans called the firebombing of their cities
Terrorangriffe
, terror attacks, and they were right. The British public knew that they were terror attacks and was willing to pay the price: 40,000 bomber crewmen dead.

Now, seventy years later, we can see clearly that terrorism worked. In 1945, the year when spectacular firestorms raged in Dresden and Hiroshima, something happened in Germany and Japan that was more profound than military defeat. The traditional cultures of Germany and Japan, which had been the most militaristic on earth, changed abruptly to become the most pacifistic on earth. The change was deep and lasting. Terrorism did not defeat the German and Japanese armies. The Russian and American armies did that. Terrorism did something more difficult and more permanent. It cured the German and Japanese insanities. Terrorism is shock treatment of the crudest sort, but it sometimes works when all else fails.

Gladwell’s book is not about big wars and big history. It is about individual people and their problems. In addition to those that I have mentioned, there are seven more underdogs with a chapter for each. They are real people and Gladwell brings them wonderfully to life. The book is divided into three sections. The first is called “The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages).” After Ranadivé comes Teresa DeBrito, a schoolteacher who is now principal of the Shepaug Valley Middle School in Connecticut. Her problem is a shortage of kids. The Shepaug Valley has been so gentrified that families with young children can no longer afford to live there. Nearby is the elite Hotchkiss private school, where parents pay exorbitant fees to have their children taught in small classes. DeBrito’s classes will soon be smaller than those at Hotchkiss. Parents and politicians think that smaller classes mean better education. But
DeBrito knows from her experience as a working teacher that bigger classes are usually better. One of the best classes she ever taught had twenty-nine kids. The moral of the story is: Things that appear to be disadvantages often turn out to be advantages, and vice versa.

The middle section is called “The Theory of Desirable Difficulty.” It begins with David Boies, who is an underdog because he is dyslexic. He struggled through high school and then enjoyed life as a construction worker. Building houses did not require reading. Now he is a famous trial lawyer in California. He says he is a good trial lawyer because he listens. His dyslexia is an advantage because he trained himself to learn everything by listening. He listens to the opposing lawyers and to the witnesses in trials and remembers every word they say. Remembering every word gives him the upper hand.

Emil Freireich had a horrible childhood in extreme poverty in Chicago. During his career as a doctor he was fired seven times for bad behavior. But he devoted his life to finding a cure for childhood leukemia. Leukemia was then a leading cause of death in children. The leukemia ward was a gruesome place soaked in blood, with children in terminal stages bleeding to death. Freireich worked there for twenty years and is largely responsible for the fact that childhood leukemia is now a curable disease. To find the cure and prove that it worked, he had to inflict pain on a lot of children, breaking rules and antagonizing his colleagues. To be tough helped. Freireich said to Gladwell, “I was
never
depressed. I
never
sat with a parent and cried about a child dying.… As a doctor, you swear to give people hope. That’s your job.”

The last section is called “The Limits of Power,” and begins with Rosemary Lawlor, who was a young mother in Belfast when the Troubles began in 1969. The British army imposed a curfew on the Lower Falls area of Belfast, and the people there were running out of food. An army of mothers, pushing prams filled with bread and milk,
broke the curfew. Lawlor describes how it happened. “We got the hair pulled out of us. The Brits just grabbed us, threw us up against the walls. Oh, aye! They beat us, like.” And then the tide turned. “Once all the people started coming out of their houses, the Brits lost control.… The Brits gave up.… We forced and we forced—until we got in, and we got in and we broke the curfew.… 
We did it.
”

The final chapter belongs to André Trocmé, the pastor of the village Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, which saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish refugees in France under the German occupation. One of the Jews saved was Pierre Sauvage, who was born in the village during the war. He later became a film producer in Hollywood and made a famous documentary film,
Weapons of the Spirit
, with some of the original villagers on screen, describing how the saving of Jews came about. The villagers were ordinary people, living lives of hardship and doing what they thought was right. Gladwell concludes: “It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.” Trocmé was marginal and damaged. He saved the Jews in the village but lost his son. He wrote afterward: “I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.”

Note added in 2014: In the published review I said that
Oregon Trail
was a RAND Corporation document. In fact it was an army report, and its official designation is
Project OREGON TRAIL Final Report, USACDC No. USC-6, February 1965. Volume 1, Main Report, TOP SECRET RD.
The full report consisted of two parts: the historical part, which was the biggest part and ought to have been published separately, and a war-game part, which described war games carried out at RAND and at Research Analysis Corporation that
were legitimately secret. The decision that I am protesting is the decision to lump the two parts together and classify the whole package as TOP SECRET. As a result of this classification, both parts remain inaccessible after forty-nine years. I am grateful to Lon Jones and to Ashutosh Jogalekar for letters stimulating me to dig out these facts. As usual, I learn from my mistakes only after the review is published.

CHURCHILL
’
S BOMB
IS
the story of a love triangle.
*
The three characters are Winston Churchill the statesman, H. G. Wells the writer, and Frederick Lindemann the scientist. Churchill was in love with war and weapons, ever since he was a small boy playing with a historic collection of toy soldiers. Wells wrote books about war and weapons, real and imaginary. Lindemann invented weapons and enjoyed trying them out. War and weapons brought the three of them together. But Churchill could only listen to one guru at a time. The chief source of Churchill’s ideas about the application of science to war was Wells in World War I and Lindemann in World War II. Lindemann and Wells, being rivals in love, had nothing but contempt for each other.

Churchill was deeply involved in the prehistory of the atomic bomb for forty years before the bomb existed. More than any other politician, and more than any of the leading scientists of that time, he took seriously the possibility of nuclear weapons. He was born with a romantic attachment to soldiering, enjoyed applying high technology
to military problems, and found kindling for his imagination in the science-fiction stories of Wells.

His personal friendship with Wells began in 1901, when he read Wells’s nonfiction work
Anticipations
and responded with an eight-page fan letter. The friendship lasted until Wells’s death in 1946. Churchill reacted enthusiastically to Wells’s book
The War in the Air
, which appeared in 1908 with vivid descriptions of the military uses of the newly invented airplane. In January 1914 Wells published
The World Set Free
, a story that gave starring roles to two new inventions: “land ironclads,” later known as tanks, and “atomic bombs,” later known as nuclear weapons. Churchill pushed the development and use of tanks in World War I. He understood that they would give soldiers a chance to break out of the horrors of the trenches, making warfare quick and mobile. His tanks came too late to get the boys out of the trenches in that war, but they arrived in time to have a decisive effect in World War II. He gave full credit to Wells for the idea.

Churchill’s thinking about nuclear weapons was summarized in a piece, “Fifty Years Hence,” published in
Strand Magazine
in 1931. “There is no question among scientists,” he wrote,