We kick off the new year by talking about the end of the world! Guest Ron Rosenbaum discusses his new book on nuclear war, the paradox of deterrence, the evolution of literary journalism, Nixon's final lie, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 1 - Disarm
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and this is a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. This is the first episode of 2013, and we start off with a bang. Well, to be precise, we start off with the bomb. This episode's conversation is one of my favorite living writers, Ron Rosenbaum. I've been a fan of Ron's writing since 1993, when I've read The Devil in Long Island, his piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine about the bizarre happenings and what was supposed to be the most boring place in the world, the suburban Long Island. I got in touch with Ron around 1998 for a publishing project that went nowhere, and he was kind enough to give me some time when I called the New York Observer, where he was a columnist, and asked to speak to him. Since then, we've stayed in touch by email and occasional meetings. Last month, I asked him if he'd like to come on the show, and he was kind enough to consent. We talked about his new book, How the End Begins, The Road to a Nuclear World War III, hence the bomb comment earlier, as well as his literary influences, some of his other books, like explaining Hitler, the Shakespeare Wars, and how literary journalism has changed over the 40-plus years he's been at it. You can find Ron's current writing at Slate in Smithsonian magazine, but I think one of the best things any writer or reader can do is pick up a copy of the secret parts of Fortune, the collection of his essays and journalism covering 1970 to about 2000, and just dive in. He's really one of the most rewarding writers out there, and I'm honored that he made time for a conversation for the show. I'm hoping to have him on again when his next book comes out, but he gave me the journalistic advice that I should never ask a writer when his next book will come out. [MUSIC] My guest on this episode of The Virtual Memory Show is Ron Rosenbaum, author of How the End Begins, The Road to a Nuclear World War III, which just came out in paperback from Simon and Schuster. This is my first question, is where did the book come from? I know you had an essay back in the late '70s on Nuke porn and the bomb, as we know it. Where did this book originate? Well, you only have a few life-changing moments in your life, like really life-changing, and one for me was seeing Peter Brooks' Bidsummer Night's Dream when it opened, and that eventually led to a book on Shakespeare, the Shakespeare Wars. And another one was in a missile silo, ready room, where I was handed the keys that the missile crewmen used to turn to launch a missile, ten missiles, for each team. That was capable of killing 20 million people, usually in the course of a nuclear war, that would kill up to billion or more could be an extinction event for the planet. Just holding those keys and twisting them in the test slot that they used to keep their readiness sharp made me realize just how close we were to the greatest Holocaust imaginable. In some ways, in the course of writing this book, I realized that a book on nuclear war is really a book on Holocaust, and my first standalone book was explaining Hitler, which was, of course, in some ways a Holocaust book. And so that was published in 1978. I learned a lot of scary things, I published some scary things, but in 1989, when the collapse of the Soviet Union happened, it seemed as if we could leave nuclear war fears behind, but in fact, around the year 2007, which is when I got the idea for this book, there were a number of troubling developments that made me think that we were entering a new nuclear age, one that might be even more dangerous, and so I decided I would investigate that. And that event was the Israeli bombing of the Syria? Well, there were a number of things. There was the Israeli bombing of the Syrian nuclear reactor, which could have led to a regional nuclear war, because Pakistan has, what's known as the Islamic bomb, and Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, and the Soviet Union could have been involved. And then I discovered that from a small military affairs magazine published in the UK, Air Force's Monthly, that US fighter jets were having dogfights with Soviet nuclear bombers, I'm sorry, Russian nuclear bombers, that Putin in 2007 had announced the resumption of what he called strategic flights, which were bombers with nuclear-capable bombers that kept flying up to the very borders of the west coast of the US and probing into the Arctic regions of Canada, and we would scramble fighter jets to buzz them and make them turn around. But here, the US and the Russian Federation, the two huge nuclear superpowers, were wingtip to wingtip, and we didn't know whether they had nuclear weapons in those bombers. And so there was that. And then more and more information was coming out about how many close calls there were we didn't know about during the Cold War, and I started interviewing some specialists in command and control, i.e. those people who devise and criticize our ability to make sure we don't accidentally or inadvertently start a nuclear war because of false warning signals. And it became clear that it was just as dodgy and ramshackle and shaky a system as it was when I looked into it and found various flaws back in the late '70s. And I felt this, I needed to expose this to tell the world that we're flying blind and heading for trouble. And what's the reaction been like and what have you seen outside of general book reviews, what's the response been with the nuclear circles? Nuclear people have praised the book, I mean, anti-nuclear people. And it's taken its place in the great debate, which goes on among anti-nuclear people as to whether total nuclear disarmament is a realistic possibility, you know, or a bombacle for the end of all nuclear weapons, or whether that's unrealistic, or whether it will lead to more conventional wars, or whether there's some way to de-alert and reduce nuclear forces to the minimum, but that still gives each side genocidal power. I have a piece coming out in Scientific American, actually, in which they ask me to imagine 50 years from now what our nuclear future was. And what I said in my book and the premise of my Scientific American story was that people, no matter how much you warn them, have gotten used to nuclear weapons not being used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I went to Hiroshima, by the way. And there's this complacency, and what I said in my book was that it might take a small nuclear war to shock us into realizing that we had to abolish nuclear weapons. Basically, it's been about two years since the hard cover came out into paperback. Has it been changes or is there anything new in the paperback in particular about world developments? Well, you know, after a long struggle in which the Republican defense hawks in the U.S. Senate added so many riders to the treaty ratification. And so did the people on the Russian side. You're talking about the START Treaty? The START Treaty, yeah. They ratified it, but there were so many riders and the two sides didn't agree as to the legitimacy of the riders. They had agreed to the basic treaty, but, you know, there were -- that it was clear that, yes, we -- both sides had agreed to get down to 1,550 nuclear warheads on each side by 2018. But there were all sorts of exits and outs from the treaty, and if we tried to put up an anti-ballistic missile shield, as we keep trying to do, the Russians say they could withdraw from the treaty, and we say there are all sorts of reasons we could withdraw from the treaty. So even that treaty is kind of on shaky ground, and it's clear that nothing is going to be done for the more important aspect of avoiding an accidental nuclear war, which is taking the missiles in silos, underground silos, on both sides, which are really on hair-trigger alert. Use it or lose it, as they call it, and can be fired based on false signals to de-alert them. And the treaty didn't cover that, and there's just no progress toward it, and not much will towards making it happen. And so I think we're still -- have a sort of damocles holding above us, particularly when you consider the growing ability of hackers to attack military targets, you know, and it's claimed that they can't get into our nuclear command and control system, although it's said that the Chinese are constantly attacking the Pentagon, and who knows whether one day some group of people with bad intentions, or maybe they want good intentions, they want that small nuclear war, will manage to get inside the nuclear football and issue launch orders from one side or the other. It's not impossible, particularly since there are now nine nuclear nations, and we supposedly have the greatest safeguards, but the other nuclear nations may well not. It actually leads me to the question of one of the big developments of the last few years, the Arab Spring, and what impact you think that might have in terms of, as we've seen, destabilizing the Middle East and also putting Israel, which is the one country that we know as nuclear weapons in the region. Well, unless you include Pakistan in the region, which is, they have now, it's estimated, 200 nuclear weapons, and their supervision, which they keep boasting of, is very poor, and they don't have what's called permissive action links, which allows the authorized government to control the launch of missiles. And even if they did, the regime is so unstable that the authorized government could be the Taliban in control of 200 nuclear warheads in the blink of an eye, and so, yes, things are getting far more tense and dicey all over the Middle East. Well, how much of that do you think you can attribute to a sort of fallout from invading Iraq, just in terms of, well, Iran rapidly pursuing a nuclear program after Iraq's invasion, Syria, as we see, trying to put something together, even if it wasn't for themselves, that notion that if you, during the Bush era, at least, if you don't have a bomb, you run the risk of being invaded. Do you think that holds up? Yes, I, you know, there was in a, I think it was Tariq Aziz, or someone like him, during the first Iraqi war, who said that from now on, the lesson is that if you don't want to be invaded by the U.S., get nuclear weapons. And we saw Libya turned over its program, and, again, I don't know what lesson we give to, you know, these dictators. They were scared, you know, and they didn't have, they yet to have a bomb, and they were. But, again, they give up the bomb, and then, you know, with them it's NATO. Yes, exactly. And NATO supported invasion, which isn't to say that I'm advocating proliferation in the Middle East at all, but the one country you didn't mention in the proliferation, and the non-proliferation was South Africa, which I believe is the only country to actually give up its weapons. Yes, they, you know, they had a nuclear program, and they did commendably give up their nuclear program after Mandela took over. Do you see that as any sort of example for other nations, or are they seen as an exceptional war? So far no other nation has followed that example. Yeah. Speaking of exceptionalism, how does this book fit into the arc of the other books that you've done, explaining Hitler, the Shakespeare Wars, and now this? You also have SA Collection and another one that you've edited. Yes, the big question, or one of the big questions in Hitler's studies was the exceptionalist question. Is Hitler on the continuum of other evil doers in history just on the far, far, and a very, very, very bad man, but still someone we explain with the same methods we use, psychology, sociology history, as we explain other evil doers? Or was Hitler in some exceptionalist realm of radical evil all by himself? And I reported the debate on that. I wasn't really, I'm still not sure. With Shakespeare, the exceptionalist question is, was he just a very, very, very great writer at the extreme end of the continuum, but in the same realm as Tolstoy of Gerta? Or did Shakespeare create a realm unto his own that was exceptional in the sense that it was beyond, in some way, what other great writers had done? And again, it's an unanswerable question, but it's a question that makes you think more about what we say when we talk about something being Shakespearean, and its uniqueness, et cetera, et cetera. And with nuclear weapons, the exceptionalist question is really goes to the laws of war, the laws of just war, the ethical questions raised by, you know, there's been thousands of years of debate on what is acceptable in wartime. You don't kill civilians deliberately. You try to minimize collateral damage, et cetera, et cetera. There are all sorts of ethical gradations, and they're embodied in all sorts of Geneva and Rome conventions on genocide and this and that. But are nuclear weapons just more exponentially more powerful than conventional weapons but still should be considered under the same rules as conventional weapons have been built up? Or do they transgress, transcend, and make us reevaluate the whole framework of the morality of war that these are weapons that should not be used for any reason? And it was 1995 ruling, I believe, by the World Court. Unfortunately, I mean, they didn't have a force of law and we don't subscribe to their rulings anyway, but they did say that one reason that nuclear weapons are exceptional is that radiation lasts over time and can poison forever, basically, which conventional weapons can't do. So I think there is a case to be made that nuclear weapons are exceptional. It's interesting. I was just thinking of it in terms of in the New York Times yesterday when the Syria may be mobilizing its chemical and biological weapons, and does this indicate some sort of red line that they're crossing? As though nuclear weapons are sort of in the weapons of mass destruction, larger, you know, Venn diagram, I suppose, or do they, again, stand completely outside that realm? And again, sort of the question that you seem to raise throughout the book is that notion of retaliation and vengeance. Yeah, I think that's the part of the book where I get most radical, I think, in which I say that since any use of nuclear weapons can't help but be genocidal in its effects, there's no excuse to retaliate even if one is struck first by nuclear weapons. And this goes to the whole, you know, much-bally-hued framework of deterrence that supposedly worked during the Cold War, although I think it was really only luck that we escaped nuclear war back then, not the framework of deterrence, which basically says, you know, if you strike me, we threaten to strike back at you. If you kill 20 million people or just by 100 million people, whatever, that means that your first strike has proven deterrence doesn't work. So what's the point of carrying out the threat to strike back, except for pure vengeance that will result in the genocidal murder of tens, hundreds, millions of, yeah, the other half of the planet of civilians who had no participation in the order to strike in the first place. So I finally felt, I actually urge, at the end of the book, anyone who is ever holding the keys that can be twisted to launch a nuclear missile, not to do it, even if you're given an order to do it. Yes, actually, the genesis of my Harper's article back in the 70s was coming across a small clipping from inside the New York Times about a major who asked this incredibly subversive but also incredibly logical question. When he gets in order, he was down in the missile silos with the keys training to, or he was training to go down there and to twist the keys and be ready to launch. And he said, okay, I'm ready, I'll be ready, but how will I know if I get in order to do so, this order won't have come from an insane president, or how will I know that the president who gives this order is saying at the time. Nixon was president and Nixon was very often drunk and at one drunken occasion said something like, I could go into the next room and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead. And I investigated the chain of command and as did Defense Secretary Schlesinger, who tried to warn everyone after he got nervous about Nixon, lower down on the chain of command. And if you get in order from Nixon, check with me first, but there's really constitutionally no bar to the commander in chief ordering a military action. You know, his, the people beneath him are supposed to follow waters and not to ask him to give, you know, write out a term paper about why he's doing it, but just to do it and do it fast. And yet he managed to, well, he ended up getting cashier from the army you'd said. Oh, yes, major hearing. Yeah. So, by asking this question, major hearing was declared psychologically unfit, I believe, and he sued to, and that's what brought it into the times was he, he sued to retain his status. I mean, he wanted to be a missile ear, as they're called. And he thought he was being more than psychologically fit. It was like a healthy thing to do to ask whether you're being forced to carry out a genocidal order by a psychopath. And yet, if by asking that question, by raising the issue, and by suggesting that others might have those doubts too, those in the military and the defense strategy to say, well, then you're undermining deterrence, you're undermining the threat that's keeping us safe, and you're inviting a first strike. So it gets all immensely complicated, but I think major hearing was a hero for raising the question. What effect do you think that had psychologically, both during the Cold War, and after that deterrence was built on that paradox of we will retaliate, but if you strike us, there's no point in retaliating, that, you know, what effect do you think that has gotten done, again, the national minds that are the international mindset? Well, not enough. You know, I think we're all in denial. No one really wanted to look at, you know, to parse out what this meant. You know, the nuclear strategists all knew it. You know, they were in favor of our second strike capability being specifically designed to hit cities and murder civilians, because there'd be no point in our second strike attacking their missile silos, because the missile silos will have been emptied having been fired on us. So with our nuclear submarines and our bombers, we plan to retaliate and kill the most people we could. That was our declared policy. Yeah, I think that, you know, I'm not sure whether it was mailer who said that nuclear war made all of a psychopaths, but this is sort of the psychopathic paradox at the heart of deterrence theory. And, you know, we're all sailing along and feeling good after the Soviet Union fell that it worked. But I don't think it worked because of the brilliance of the strategy. I just think it worked because of luck. I mean, there were times where nuclear alerts were declared because a flock of geese was picked up by NORAD radar. And there was another time when the KGB had convinced itself that NATO was planning a surprise attack disguised as an exercise and had alerted, was actually, they thought the U.S. was going to, the son of Reagan, was going to initiate a sneak attack on the Soviet Union, disabling them. And they were preparing to preempt this illusory sneak attack with their own first strike. And it was only a Soviet mole who alerted the working for MI6, who alerted the British, who alerted the Americans, who said, let's not make this exercise so realistic because we're scaring them with our preparations into thinking we're going to attack them. What impact do you think the drone warfare that's been going on under the current administration began under the previous one when we talk about sort of the psychological effect of war? Do you see that creeping into the things we shouldn't really be doing or a Pandora's box we're opening, not along the same massive level as the bomb? No, I agree. I've written about this. I've suggested that the way we conduct drone strikes is bordering on war crimes because particularly the so-called signature strikes where we, you know, in Afghanistan and Waziristan, we see Islamic-looking guys with guns in a car and that's the signature quote-unquote of a terrorist. And so we blow them away and they may just be not planning a terrorist operation but fighting among themselves, who knows. And there's also the distancing since the drones are manipulated from rooms in Nevada and Maryland. I think that's what makes me feel that it starts to fall into those nuclear lines when there's a sense of diminished accountability, I suppose. I'm just sure if it's diminished, but there certainly is a distancing from it. But I think they know they're killing people. I mean, they're watching these people being blown up. And with the nuclear war, you don't see that. So I don't know whether that makes it worse or better or whatever, but there is some kind of sterility and distancing in it. But I think what's worse is just blowing people away because of the way they look rather than any certainty that they're waging war on us in some way or danger to us. And after last month's mini Intifada, the rise of the Iron Dome in Israel, that sort of seeing the initial, not quite ABM, but an anti-missile shield that actually worked pretty well. What effect do you see something like that having? We've seen, as you said, the ABM idea of a missile shield is enough to rile the Russians to no end. Do you see this as a sort of incremental step in developing those systems and what effect do you think that could happen? Well, a couple things. I mean, I think the Russians are right not to object to having missiles on their border, even though we say, well, it's only to protect ourselves against Iran or only to protect ourselves against North Korea or something like that. You know, considering history, missiles on the border of Russia are not a good idea. And yet we will rush again to that. And we're still, you know, Obama discontinued the Polish missile shield, but still we're now supposedly putting a missile shield at sea, and the Russians still are not going for that. And, you know, as far as the Iron Dome and missile shields in general, you know, they almost have to be 100% effective, especially if you're dealing with nuclear weapons. With the Iron Dome, you were dealing with rockets, which could certainly cause many deaths, but not nuclear weapons. And, you know, I guess the Israelis felt they have no choice, but it's not a guaranteed source of protection. But again, seeing that developing as a strategy to put in place, much like building a wall to stop suicide bombing instead of a number of other things they could have done to perhaps stop suicide. I know, that's what I'm saying. Nothing else did. And that's one of the weird, you know, we all think things are, this is a terrible way to go about things and you realize, this is actually an effective way to go about it. I mean, I think given away the wall work because it gave the Palestinians an excuse not to have to keep trying to blow themselves up. And also made them look at themselves instead of looking at them. And then one of the main conclusion you drew in the book was the notion from the, I think, 1950s, a proposal by an admiral that the nuclear arsenal should have been sub-based and not bomber and silo-based. If you could sort of walk us through what that strategy is. Yeah, well, it all comes down to what we developed the so-called triad of different methods of delivering nuclear warheads. From deep undersea, undetectable, supposedly submarines, from bombers and from missiles-based and silos. And of all three, I mean, if you want to rank them in terms of dangerousness, the ones that have the most human control are bombers. Some Marines can be cut off from their communications base. Communicating with submarines is very difficult if they want to remain undetectable. But worst of all are these missiles and silos, which are, supposedly, can be launched just on the basis of what's called dual phenomenology. If there's a radar signal of an incoming launch and a satellite signal of an incoming launch, our missiles and silos are in this use it or lose it position where they have a few minutes to decide whether to launch themselves or theoretically be destroyed in their silos by these incoming missiles. So that's what's the hair trigger status and really they should be gotten rid of. They're totally useless and alarmingly dangerous on both sides. But no one's doing anything about that. People are just complacent. Again, weapons that are built never to be used. Moving on to some of your other work. I was wondering, do you feel a sense of proprietorship about other topics you've covered? You mentioned that in the initial new article you wrote, you uncovered the secret way in which a single missile ear could activate both keys and not need the second missile ear in that room. And the effect that had in adding permissive action links, things of that. Do you feel that towards any other of the major articles you've done over the years? Yeah, a couple. One, obviously, I've been written about lately, is the Esquire article I did on phone freaks or blue boxers who were the first proto-computer hackers. And Steve Wozniak's mother set the article to Wozniak, who showed it to his friend Steve Jobs, and the two decided to use my article as a template for building illicit blue boxes in their garage. They found the other, I gave some of the codes for the phone free hacking, and they found the others in the Stanford Engineering Library, and they actually did build some blue boxes, but that was really the beginning of the Apple partnership. But you don't get a break on iPads or anything? People ask me that. I feel like the culture is so monetarily oriented. I feel a great satisfaction at having, in some way, contributed to the development of Apple. Who knows if Mrs. Wozniak hadn't sent my article to Steve, whether he and Jobs would have gotten together and proceeded as they did. I guess another one might be Skull and Bones. I was the first to write about the Yale Secret Society. And another one, I suppose, another area, I suppose, might be the question of moles in the CIA and the Soviet Union and the mole war that James Angleton waged turning the CIA inside out. I tried to find a mole. I think it's really too complicated to explain, but I think I found the solution to what was going on there. And the idea of a notional mole that Kim Filby, perhaps, who was a very close to Angleton, the Russian mole inside MI6, was defended by Angleton betrayed Angleton. And his secrets, and Angleton was always paranoid. And Filby fed his paranoia that there was a mole within the CIA, and Angleton ended up paralyzing the CIA in his search for a mole. So I guess that's one. I know, well, Watergate and Richard Nixon. I covered Watergate. I was the village voice, White House correspondent. I was there in the East Room of the White House. But more importantly, in my collection, the secret parts of fortune, I reprint a case I made that I feel is maddening that media journalism has left Nixon off the hook by saying, yes, he was guilty of the cover-up, but he didn't order the burglary, which really makes Nixon a victim of supposedly, and it takes Nixon's line. And it was a victim of, quote, "overzealous," unquote, "subordinates," and only instituted the cover-up out of loyalty to them. When in fact, I believe it can be proved that Nixon himself did order the break-in. And I, again, a long complicated story, explained the motivation and the proof for it. How did you find most of the apology or the apologies for him been posthumous in that sense? I don't think they know they're apologizing. I mean, they think, oh, Woodward and Bernstein exposed the cover-up, and they did, but they did not expose Richard Nixon's true guilt, his final lie, the one he took to the grave, and the one that I find it disturbing, and historians are willing to accept, and so I keep pounding away at that. So those are a few, anyway. I guess, yeah, one of the stories I'm most well in, well, a couple of stories I did for the New York Times magazine, one on the Great Ivy League nude posture photo scandal, which no one knew about how a pseudo-scientist, who was a genesis, convinced Ivy League and seven sisters' schools to allow the photographing of their students, mostly their freshman students, mostly nude. And I discovered where 10,000 photographs of Yale students were residing in the anthropological wing of the Smithsonian Institution. There was that, and then there was a story about my homeland, Long Island, Long Island, back then. That's the first thing I ever read of yours. Yeah, it was how this incredibly boring suburban towns, townships, I grew up in, I grew up in, I grew up in Be sure on the south shore of Long Island, lovely town, but really boring. As was most of Long Island, as I was growing up, but suddenly, in the 80s, it turned into a kind of tabloid hell with serial killers, wife murderers. Amy Fisher. Amy Fisher and Joey, and I thought to explain that in some way Long Island, as America's first suburb, was America's future. We were seeing the future, and I still am proud of being from Long Island. It's a unique place, but it's a place that's weirder than most people realize. As you put it, I'm from New Jersey, we get Bruce Springsteen, you guys get Billy Joel. I know, well actually, it's funny, maybe that was the reason I wrote an attack that has earned me many enemies on Billy Joel for Slade. Google it, people, it's very funny. So the Boyd Pop Music Criticism, that'll always get you into trouble. How do you think literary journalism's changed over the course of your career, and your journalism, I ascribe is very literary in a lot of respect? Well, I think there's a lot of great stuff being done. It's, you know, I think it's being revived and places like long forms, and good reads, and e-books, and things like that. You know, I think there's an appetite for it. There are not as many hard copy magazines who publish 10 or 12,000 word stories, but there are places you can get it done. I found myself loving doing these magazine stories for so long, because I had great editors to write for, and who let me just have a lot of fun pursuing these stories. But eventually I began writing books and found that there was a satisfaction in doing a long book, and it was difficult to do long magazine stories while you were doing long books. But I developed a kind of, I don't know, new area of my writing essayistic column, personal columns for the New York Observer where Peter Kaplan was editor and slate where Jacob Weisberg and Julia Turner were our editors. So I enjoy causing controversy, and it's funny, I didn't do this until I was after 40, because in some way I felt like it wasn't until I was after 40 that I actually felt sure of my opinions on things. Then maybe I became too sure, I'm not sure, but then I realized I was seething with opinions, and also it gave me a chance to write about literature in a way that, you know, I say a total English major nerd at Yale specializing in the metaphysical poets and the ability to write about them and poetry and books and things like that. I studied under Harold Bloom while you were there, right? I took this lecture course, but if you read the chapter on Harold Bloom in my Shakespeare book, you might get a different picture from the worshipful one he's generally accorded. And what was your, well, as Bloom as a strong precursor, what was your response to him or how do you think your studies within may have affected the way you approach phenomena in journalism? Or do you think there was any effect? Well, you know, the great thing I learned at Yale that applied to journalism was close reading. You do the metaphysical poets, you have to be a close reader, you have to look for seven types of ambiguity. And the great discovery I made when I first became a journalist was that that kind of attentiveness to the metaphysical poets could be applied to the things that you encounter. In journalism, police reports, autopsy documents, trial transcripts, that sort of thing. They all yield up their secrets off in any way to close reading. And I suppose my objection to Bloom was that he was not a very good close reader. He was more a, I don't know, a hectoring, a bloviator and at least about Shakespeare. And, you know, a brilliant man, but nonetheless, he did not really tell you anything new about full staff. He just sort of blew him up to Macy's Thanksgiving parade, balloon size. And the introduction to the secret parts of fortune, you mentioned, I think it's important that journalists investigate ideas as thoroughly as they do politics and crime. And do you see anyone continuing in that tradition? As you put it, it really thinks... Oh, I think there's a lot of that. You know, I started teaching seminar at Columbia Journalism School back in 1999 on the journalism of ideas. And I think that this was something that I found myself discovering. I think the pleasures of, in a way, they're not accepting the conventional take on things. One of the first most controversial things I did was a total trashing of Elizabeth Kula Ross and her five stages of grieving and dying, which I interpreted basically as a way of guiding people along the pathway to really shut up and die. And making things easier for the nursing profession, which, of course, took it up because they would prefer that all their patients accepted death rather than the Dylan Thomas line, do not go gentle into that good night. And also, you know, once you looked at Elizabeth Kula Ross, there's no science behind it, and yet it still becomes built into the fabric of our culture now, and it's, you know, total bullshit, if you ask me. The final question comes to my brother, who you've corresponded with as a big fan of your work. Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? Well, Tolstoy, in part because I've read more of him, you know, I'm not sure whether I would be able to make the choice. I almost find Dostoevsky too intense. And in literature, the ideas are too close to the surface. I like the ideas he explores, but somehow the fabric of life in the great Tolstoy novels is something amazing and goes beyond mere ideas. Not that Dostoevsky doesn't. I just have not read enough to make that judgment. Ending on a note of exceptionalism. That's right. Ron Rosenbaum, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Gil. How the End Begins, the Road to a Nuclear World War III, is available in paperback from Simon and Schuster at the few remaining bookstores in America and Amazon. Amazon. Thanks. [Music] And that was Ron Rosenbaum. You can find his current writing online at Slate and Smithsonian Magazine. You should definitely check out his books, How the End Begins, Explaining Hitler, the Shakespeare Wars, and make sure you grab the secret parts of Fortune. They're all available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and better bookstores. Now, this episode doesn't have a sponsor, but I do want to thank the In on 23rd, a boutique hotel that's located in New York City at 131 West 23rd Street. Due to a little miscommunication, I had to find a quiet space in Manhattan for me and Ron to record this episode on pretty short notice. I've stayed at the Inn on 23rd, a few times, and they were kind enough to let us use their library and dining area to record. If you're looking for a unique little place in Chelsea, it's right by a subway line, then I recommend the Inn. You can find it at InnOn23rd.com, and 23rd is 2-3-RD. And that was a virtual memory show. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to the show and find past episodes on iTunes or at my website, chimeraobscura.com. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]