I cannot leave the truth unknown.
—Sophocles, Oedipus
I WASN’T SURPRISED,” said Cynthia Thomas. “I’d been saying for months that something like this was bound to happen. It was so obvious. You push these boys too far, what’s in their heads is so awful and so violent. Of course you’re going to have problems with violence.”
On November 5, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed fourteen people on Fort Hood military base. Cynthia Thomas was deeply upset, but she understood what had happened. Earlier that year, she had started the Under the Hood Cafe to offer soldiers a refuge from the base, a place to hang out where they could find comfort and, if they wanted it, psychological, psychiatric, and legal help.
“This stuff happens, on a smaller scale, all the time: soldiers killing someone or stabbings, shootings. All the time. People don’t understand. We can have two weeks and there will be three, four, five violent incidents. And people don’t see them. The violence. Everything is just all the time. A soldier snapping and doing this is not surprising. People don’t want to see it, they don’t want to hear about it. But it’s here. It will go on happening.”
Cynthia Thomas is a Cassandra. In ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra was royalty, the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. Besotted by her beauty, Apollo fell in love with her and gave her the gift of prophecy. But when she spurned him, he retaliated by adding to her gift of prophecy the fate that no one would believe her. So the Trojans ignored her when she warned them not to bring in the great wooden horse left by the Greeks. And it was Cassandra who warned Agamemnon of Clytemnestra’s murderous rage on his return from war. Cassandra must have known she was doomed to die then, too, because that was her unique gift: to see what others did not.
The savage irony of Cassandra is that, as we read her prophecies, we know that they are true, but no one else does. As such, she is one of the first characters in literature to offer readers that invaluable plot device, superior knowledge. Believing Cassandra, when everyone else derides her, we see simultaneously two contradictory points of view. We learn that any situation can contain truths that we may not be able to see but that are, nonetheless, visible. And she teaches us that sometimes it is the despised who know most.
But Cassandra captivates our imagination also because she embodies that baffled rage that we all feel when no one else can see what we see. The epitome of frustration, because she is doomed always to be right, Cassandra shows us that the truth is knowable but won’t necessarily set us free.
The world is full of Cassandras, individuals whose fate it is to see what others can’t see, who are not blind but compelled to shout their awkward, provocative truths. That’s why, after any industrial or organizational failure, individuals inevitably surface who saw the crisis coming, warned about it, and were mocked or ignored. In Libby, Montana, Gayla Benefield was a classic Cassandra, insisting that there was something wrong with the town, even when all around her didn’t want to know anything about it. But when you meet Gayla, she has none of the wild eyes or inspired fury of the classic portrayals of Cassandra; she’s a middle-aged mother and grandmother who blends right into her surroundings. Nothing physically marks her out as a rebel or nonconformist, but she seems, from an early age, to have seen things that others did not.
“In high school, I remember our teacher wanted us to have silhouettes taken behind a sheet. And there was just something about it that made me uneasy. I didn’t know why it wasn’t right but I knew it wasn’t.” Gayla paused for a moment, reaching for the facts, trying to make sure she captured an accurate memory. Then she laughed. “Maybe it was just that I wasn’t going to take off my false boobs! Whatever it was, I led the walk out.”
Taking a stand seems to have become something Gayla did easily. She felt comfortable being different, even when it meant being pilloried or left out.
“I took mechanical drawing in high school—no girl ever had done that at our school, but I didn’t know why. I remember, I was sat in a far corner away from the boys.”
That childhood experience of difference and exclusion, along with no small degree of endurance, stood her in good stead when, from 1974 to 1999, Gayla figured out that her neighbors were dying of asbestosis. She had to be curious enough to notice the number of people using oxygen tanks. She had to be good at recognizing patterns. She had to be resourceful enough to dig up information and keep examining what she found, even when, for those twenty-five years, everyone told her to ignore it. Where did that drive come from?
“My grandfather was a Russian immigrant who ended up in eastern Montana. He taught me not to fight the system, but always to question it. He was the best American you could ever find. He was always trying to find a better way to do things. I never danced to a different drummer but I questioned. I’ve always questioned. I’ve brought my kids up to question. I wasn’t a blind follower. Never have been.”
Cassandras are often also whistleblowers, determined not just to see what others don’t see, but to act upon it, trying to alter fate. Both see things that others don’t see because they are questioners, driven to ask: What is really happening? Does it have to be that way? Am I missing something? Is there some other explanation or solution? They’re driven, dedicated, often quite obsessive truth seekers—even (or sometimes especially) when no one agrees with them. But that is almost the only generalization you can make about these extremely and willfully sighted people.
The world contains millions of Cassandras, in all walks of life and all of them different. Academics have struggled to find identifying qualities they all have in common, but to no avail. It used to be thought that whistleblowers were more likely to be women because, as newcomers to most institutions, they didn’t have the same stake in the status quo. It was a nice theory but turned out not to be true.1 There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between age or years of service, and neither pay nor education level turn out to be good predictors, either. Religion doesn’t seem to play a definitive role; while all Cassandras have a pronounced sense of right and wrong, as many derive their morality from history or personal experience as from any formal faith. And despite the fact that these troublesome truth tellers are sometimes thrown into jail or sent for psychiatric assessments, there seems to be no evidence that, as a group, they are crazy.
What we do know is that society needs people like Gayla Benefield: individuals willing to ask awkward questions, trace tricky connections, and challenge embedded assumptions. Because although it’s fiendishly difficult to size the level of threat, corruption, and crime within organizations, no attempt to do so has ever emerged with good news. In the United States, in 2000, the Ethics Resource Center in Arlington, Virginia, found that a third of public and private employees had personally observed misconduct. A far higher percentage—80 percent—of directors of internal auditing said they had observed wrongdoing by their organizations. And when Harry Markopolos testified before a U.S. Senate committee in 2009 about the Madoff fraud, he argued that “white-collar criminals cause far more economic harm to this nation than armed robbers, drug dealers, car thieves and other assorted miscreants put together. These fraudsters steal approximately five percent of business revenues annually, dwarfing the economic losses due to violent crime, yet not nearly enough federal law enforcement resources are devoted to catching them.”2 Thomas Gabor, a criminologist at the University of Toronto says the situation in Canada is even worse.
“Canada has been very delinquent in dealing with white-collar crime, even worse than the U.S.,” says Dr. Gabor. “There’s no public pressure to prosecute white-collar crime. In Canada, there’s a real preoccupation, sometimes excessively so, with social crimes and people falling through the safety net. But one of the problems is that, to combat white-collar crime, you need a dedicated program, attorneys with expertise in that area, and you have to be prepared to spend millions of dollars and interview thousands of people. It could be that one reason no one wants to tackle it seriously is precisely because it is so pervasive.”
Other kinds of threats and disasters, too—the Challenger explosion, the poorly coordinated response to Hurricane Katrina, climate change—can only happen when individuals and organizations turn a blind eye to what they know. In the United States, vast amounts of federal legislation have been introduced to try to protect whistleblowers. The first of these, in 1912, protected federal employees who wished to offer information to Congress, and much subsequent legislation has been focused on ensuring that government employees in particular are protected. The Whistleblower Protection Act (1989) and the No Fear Act (2002) seek to protect federal employees from retaliation and the loss of their jobs, while the False Claims Act, passed during the Civil War, sought to elicit help from ordinary citizens against contracting fraud. That law offers a percentage of the settlement to the whistleblower and, since Congress reinforced the act in 1986, the Justice Department has recovered more than twenty billion dollars. (It is on this act that the Madoff whistleblower, Harry Markopolos, hopes to build his new business investigating fraud.) The Office of Special Counsel was also created in 1979, specifically to investigate complaints by federal whistleblowers.
They are not cynics, but almost always start as optimists, not nonconformists but true believers. They are not, typically, disgruntled or disappointed; they’re not innately rebels but are compelled to speak out when they see organizations or people that they love taking the wrong course. When Gayla Benefield first began piecing together the puzzle of ill health in Libby, she expected her findings to be the start of something wonderful.
“In my heart of hearts, I felt that by bringing W. R. Grace to task, they would come back and say: What did we do? What can we do to heal you? How can we put it right?” She shrugged and gave a sad, small smile. “That is the dreamer part of me.”
Such naïveté is common. When Pat Lewis designed his risk model for Bear Stearns, or Paul Moore drew the board’s attention to risks within HBOS, they did so as committed employees trying to contribute to stronger businesses. They might have expected to be treated as heroes, certainly not as pariahs. And when Sherron Watkins wrote to Enron chairman Ken Lay, she thought he would welcome her questions and appreciate that, far from trying to wreck the company, she was trying to save it.
“I’d been so loyal!” Watkins recalled. “I thought his first response would just be to want to get to the truth, to know what was going on in his company! It was the sense that, if you tell the captain the ship is sinking, he is going to man the lifeboats.”
The letter Watkins wrote, detailing accounting problems she could not resolve and risks she believed Lay did not know about, did not go to the press; she wrote to Lay as the person she believed was most likely to fix the problems she’d identified. And Watkins never went public. Only after the company had collapsed did investigators find her letter.
“I thought good would prevail, that we’d unwind some deals, restate earnings, that they’d be grateful to me for identifying the problems. I only found out later that Lay almost instantly took legal advice about whether he could fire me!”3
When Harry Markopolos first started examining Bernard Madoff’s investment strategies, it wasn’t with a view to discovering criminality. The last thing on his mind was identifying systemic failures in the Securities Exchange Commission. Markopolos explored Madoff because he wanted to see if he could copy him, not bring him down.
In many instances like this, what enables Cassandras to see what others don’t is a tremendous eye for detail. They don’t allow distance or theory to obscure the nitty-gritty of what they are doing; in fact, they relish it. They don’t wrap themselves up in dogma, but relish facts and arguments. In just the same way that Alice Stewart immersed herself in all the domestic detail that might explain childhood cancers, Cassandras typically like getting down to the bare bones of otherwise abstract problems.
That’s what James Hansen did in the late 1970s. Having completed his Ph.D., writing on the atmosphere of Venus, he was a geek, not a dissident, buried in his data and oblivious to the student riots that surrounded him. Soon Earth’s atmosphere became more captivating than Venus’s, as he grappled with the detail of chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone layer. One of his key interests, he wrote, was “radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres, especially interpreting remote sounding of the earth’s atmosphere and surface from satellites.” In 1981, he published a paper predicting that the following decade would be unusually warm, and the decade after that warmer still. He was right, and he kept being right, but his work was full of detail and caveats, identifying areas of ignorance and uncertainty that would constitute a lifetime’s work.4 He had not set out to prove or disprove theories of climate change; his work didn’t begin with ideology. He started with detail and merely kept following where the data led him.
It’s also what Daniel Ellsberg did. He was perhaps predisposed to be skeptical of authority; at the age of fifteen, Ellsberg lost his mother and sister when his father fell asleep while driving. “I think it did probably leave an impression on me, that someone you loved and respected could fall asleep at the wheel and they needed to be watched.” It was detail, not dogma, that turned him finally against the Vietnam War. After working for Robert McNamara at the Department of Defense, Ellsberg insisted on going to Vietnam and seeing for himself, firsthand, the reality of government policy. On his return, he read the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers and learned in immense detail of the many times the public had been misled by administrations that said one thing while doing another.
Detail, facts, and research drove Sheila Bair, too, when, in 2006, she was appointed to head the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—the government insurance company that guarantees some eight hundred thousand American banks. Bair had been worried for some time about the amount of debt that banks were carrying. She had watched the growth of sub-prime mortgages with alarm and now she wanted to find out what was really going on. What she did was simple: She bought a database of sub-prime loans and studied it, something any federal regulator could have done.
“We just couldn’t believe what we were seeing. Really steep payment shock loans and sub-primes … Very little income documentation, really high prepayment penalties.”5
Without the beguiling fog of ideology, and with the gruesome details right in front of her—data about real people buying real loans for real houses—she was in no doubt about what was going on around her. In March 2007, she issued a cease-and-desist notice to shut down one of the worst sub-prime offenders, Fremont Investment and Loan.
From an entirely different vantage point, Aaron Krowne gained the same insight. Krowne wasn’t a financier, far from it. He was a computer science and math graduate working as a software developer. Fascinated by economics since the dotcom bubble, he was just a keen, smart observer who liked asking himself questions about what he saw around him.
“I have a strong moral sense from my father and I learned you collect the data, form a hypothesis, and try to confirm or disprove the hypothesis. You don’t impose your views on a priori findings; you present what you find even if it isn’t what you want. Because it is important for all our lives and the well-being of society. I just felt a need to say something and speak up.”
What gave Krowne something to speak up about was his experience in 2005 when he tried to buy a home.
“I was in a situation where I had to leave the apartment I was in or buy it. The owner wanted to sell, so I looked at the buy versus rent fundamentals and made a chart of the price for that kind of unit over ten to twenty years. And it spiked up just like a bubble! Everyone was saying you have to buy! But I said: Look at the fundamentals. I’d have had to get an exotic loan to come out ahead monthly and I just didn’t feel comfortable after such a rapid run-up. So I declined and had to move.”
Toward the end of 2006, Krowne noticed a lot of sub-prime lenders going under. He thought that the bubble he’d spotted was about to pop, so he launched a little Web site to ask hard questions about what was going on, why, and who was responsible.
“It started as just a single page, with seven or eight lenders on it. I called it Implode-o-Meter for a little humor, the whole thing was so ridiculous. I posted it on some economic blogs I frequented and it caught on. Traffic steadily increased and it got picked up actively by newsletters and a few months later by Bloomberg TV and CNBC. By March 2007, it was pretty well ensconced as the biggest site for the mortgage industry itself, with everyone sending in tips and information.”
The site was fed by the industry it reported on, so Krowne was getting live, firsthand, unmediated information from hundreds of sources across the industry. His site demonstrated that the knowledge was out there.
“Ninety-nine percent of the information that we got—tips from people in the companies—proved correct. People out there knew what was going on in their organizations. We’d get a lot of vociferous denials from management—but the angrier they got about leaks, the more true the leaks turned out to be. There were very few instances where the problem was a disgruntled employee making things up. We did all we could to verify the information, at risk to ourselves, but the information we got was usually very honest. There is a phenomenon where whistleblowing is almost always accurate; otherwise why take the risk?”6
Krowne wasn’t a banking insider or a policy wonk or even an economist. He was just a guy on the ground who looked around and asked himself questions about what he saw. Being an outsider may have been an advantage, giving him a less biased perspective on what he heard and saw. Most Cassandras are outsiders, either by accident of birth, or life, or by dint of what they see that sets them irrevocably apart.
“When my relatives heard I was working at a bank, they thought I was going to be a teller!” Frank Partnoy laughs now at what he considers, nevertheless, to have been a significant advantage when he became a Wall Street investment banker.
“I grew up in Kansas and didn’t have the built-in blinders that someone with more pedigree might have. My parents didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. And maybe to me the stakes seemed lower. To many people, once you’re at Morgan Stanley and have climbed the mountain, the idea of leaving it behind is unthinkable. For me, it wasn’t such a big deal.”
In F.I.A.S.C.O., Partnoy unsparingly chronicles his growing enthusiasm and then disgust with the trading world he moved in. Not being from that world helped him to see what kind of world it was—and what the costs of conformity would entail.
“Everyone I knew who had been an investment banker for a few years, including me, was an asshole. The fact that we were the richest assholes in the world didn’t change the fact that we were assholes. I had known this deep down since I first began working on Wall Street. Now, for some reason, it bothered me.”
Partnoy left and wrote first about his own experiences and then, in Infectious Greed, about the rampant explosion not in derivatives but in financial disasters caused by derivatives. He predicted that there would be more, and this was early, in 2003. (In 2002 he had also tried to explain to Congress that Enron had collapsed not because of a few bad men but because of derivatives, but no one really paid attention then, either.) Then in 2006 he was back in Washington, warning about the structural problems inherent in credit ratings agencies like Moody’s. Apart from having a strong stomach for unpopular positions, why could he see what others did not?
“I am the sort of person who wakes up every morning, I wipe the slate clean and everything is up for grabs and I am constantly questioning everything. I think also there’s something about my educational experience at Yale Law School. Those three years are so focused on questioning everything; that’s what Yale Law School is by design—an institution whose constituents are trying to make the world a better place all the time. It seems to generate a lot of people who don’t wear blinders and try to keep them off, almost religiously.”
Partnoy left banking to work in academia, a world, he says, where prestige, intellectual respect, is the equivalent of a bonus. You can’t use prestige, he says; you can’t spend it. It just makes you happy. But he’s not only a professor; as well as academic papers, he also writes popular books about finance and history and he testifies before Congress. He is never exclusively wedded to one mind-set, but always traveling between perspectives. It’s what Hannah Arendt called “thinking without a banister.”
“Even within my profession, I think people climbing the ladder are constrained. So you have to make sacrifices not to be constrained. For me freeing myself from those constraints is what gives me happiness and gives me freedom. When you are a teenager, or in college, you’re always reexamining your life. But when most people graduate, they stop doing that and I wonder why. Is it that it gets too draining to keep questioning your life?”
This highly unconstrained travel, between points of view, is hard work and it can be risky, not just because it can take you off of well-established career paths, but because it provokes questions that, as a Cambridge professor once sternly reminded me, “one is not invited to ask.” Questions that one is not invited to ask make everyone uncomfortable, not least because they don’t easily lend themselves to prepared answers. But in the intersection between disciplines, real insight can be gleaned.
Although ensconced inside an establishment newspaper—the Financial Times—Gillian Tett was, in her own way, an outsider: a pretty, slight, blonde woman working in structured finance. That she has a gentle lisp and a Ph.D. in anthropology definitely set her apart from mainly male, macho bankers. In 2006, when she and her team became seriously alarmed by what they saw in structured finance, they tried to point out the dangers. It was, she says, a lonely endeavor, too boring and technical, too much nitty-gritty, and bad news to boot. But she credits some of her insight not to her outsider perspective but to her training as a social anthropologist.
“Anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she said. “You’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City [of London] don’t do that. They are so specialized, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. One of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because everyone failed to ask hard questions: Why are credit cards so cheap? Why can I get such a big mortgage? The silence suited everyone! Who had incentives to see? No one. What was missing in banking was the wider perspective, the context. But that didn’t happen in finance. It wasn’t in anybody’s interest to look further.”
That absence of holistic thought, Tett believes, allows us all to become narrow and deep. Buried deep at the bottom of our riverbeds, we are blind to connections and dependencies. We see only what we know and like and are lulled into a sense of mastery by our isolation from challenge. That feels comfortable, of course, until different perspectives bring unwanted and unwonted challenges.
“One of the most powerful people in the U.S. government at the time stood up on the podium at Davos and waved my article, the article that predicted the problems at Northern Rock, as an example of scaremongering.” 7
The fragmentation of the banking world, together with its sheer complexity, she argues, encouraged financiers to regard banking as its own world, distant and detached from the rest of society. This became very clear when she was summoned one day to Canary Wharf—a major business district of London which is, she was at pains to point out, an island.
“So I was called to Canary Wharf by this banker who said: ‘I don’t know why you keep saying [collateralized debt obligations] and structured finance are opaque and murky. It’s all on Bloomberg terminals; it’s right there.’ But what, I asked him, what about the people who don’t have Bloomberg terminals? He looked at me as if to say: There are people out there without Bloomberg terminals—and we’re supposed to care about them? He had just retreated to his Bloomberg cyber village.8 They had become like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, who could see shadows of outside reality flickering on the walls, but rarely encountered that reality themselves. The chain that linked a synthetic [collateralized debt obligation of asset-backed securities], say, with a ‘real’ person was so convoluted it was almost impossible for anybody to fit that into a single cognitive map.”9
Being able to draw a cognitive map requires traveling well outside of our immediate knowledge and safety. It means meeting people not like ourselves, in industries and neighborhoods far from our own, and, when we’re there, having the confidence and curiosity to keep asking questions. Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who so famously warned about the property bubble and impending financial collapse, says that his work is deeply informed by his wife, who is not an economist at all but a clinical psychologist. Drawing our cognitive map calls on a breadth of experience, either from different disciplines or different life experiences.
At first sight, there’s nothing remotely unconventional about Roy Spence. He’s enjoyed a highly successful career running a Texas advertising agency whose clients have been some of the business legends: Sam Walton of Walmart, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines. Spence’s company does what all ad companies do and Roy is like successful executives you meet everywhere: handsome, energetic, polite, punctilious. Just an ad guy, you might think.
But Roy was one of the few people to turn down business with Enron. And he seems to be one of those people who can tap into the zeitgeist and see things that others don’t. Was it being in Texas, when the rest of the ad world is based in New York, that gave him his particular take on events?
“It helps,” he agreed. “It helps that if you come home from Manhattan with your head stuffed full of nonsense, everyone here will tell you.”
But much more important, he felt, was his experience growing up with his sister, Susan, who was born with spina bifida.
“When I used to push my sister to school, I thought I was crippled. If you come from a place that is vulnerable to start with, it’s out in the open: We have something different going on here. That changes who you are and how you look at things. When you’re out there, you see yourself being looked at and you become the watcher, too. You start to see how other people see. And the vulnerability of other people, too.”
He paused for a second, remembering his sister.
“People thought my sister was different. Well, she was: she could never walk. But people couldn’t see beyond that. You saw how blind they were. And it makes you think: If they’re missing so much about me and about her, what am I missing about them?”
The image of the young Texan boy pushing his sister to school, scrutinizing faces while trying to imagine the thoughts behind them, is striking: simultaneously he sees through his own eyes, his sister’s eyes, and the eyes of those watching him. The dialogue he has with himself about those different perspectives is one definition of thought.
What Roy describes is akin to empathy but goes far beyond it. He doesn’t see through the eyes of power, but through the eyes of the vulnerable.
“I am married to a soldier,” says Cynthia Thomas, proprietor of Under the Hood. “But you shut your feelings down in the military to survive. They all choose to bury their heads in the sand because it is easier that way. It is drilled into your head that you have to be supportive. And you believe that the military will take care of them if something happens. So you are in this bubble where you can’t really see what’s going on.”
For years, Thomas says, she lived in that bubble. She took it for granted that the military would look after her husband and their family, that nothing would go wrong, that they were okay. And she was surrounded by other wives and families who did exactly the same thing. But then, as the Iraq War wore on, she started to see events from a very different perspective, the perspective of powerlessness.
“Tim was wounded in 2005 and came back on life support. In 2007, he was redeployed even though he was not supposed to be. He had brain injuries, fractures on his pelvis. His doctor said he won’t be able to save himself if he gets shot at. But they didn’t care, they redeployed him anyway. And then my stepson called and said he was joining the Marines. The bubble popped. I thought—oh my god, after everything that happened, these wars are going to be endless and our kids will be fighting them. That moment, I thought, if I don’t do something or try to, this will go on forever. And I was upset but I finally did something, I opened up to human beings.”
Seeing life through the eyes of young vulnerable men, in a world where most mass media only charts the progress of the powerful, showed Thomas a world of suffering she had been blind to. Thomas’s mantra now is that, in war, there are no unwounded soldiers; and she has opened her coffeehouse to tend to all of the wounded. Anyone can come in, regardless of political opinion. It was her openness to them that allowed her to see how dangerous life was becoming for the soldiers of Fort Hood. The soldiers aren’t getting the help they need, she says, because once diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) they aren’t supposed to be redeployed.
“There’s real pressure here not to diagnose it. We have soldiers on fifteen medications and they have an adjustment disorder, a mood disorder, you can call it anything but PTSD because they know if they have PTSD, they can get a medical discharge and the government would have to pay them for being disabled and that’s a lot of money. The military is a business; if your employee can’t do his job, you get rid of him. So you just have this tension building, boys needing help and everyone refusing to see they need help.”10
At first, it was hard for Thomas to find a site for her coffeehouse; just having that physical presence would raise issues that most of the town preferred to overlook. Killeen is a tight-knit military community, and many fear getting in trouble with Command; everyone hopes that trouble will pass them by. But Thomas sees what others won’t because she looks with the eyes of the most vulnerable.
“Just looking around this community and seeing the cost of the war, it is so hard on a daily basis. Walking around on post and looking at really young faces—eighteen, nineteen—they’re babies! Oh my god, they don’t grasp the severity of it. Nobody understands. You can’t describe it. We have boys coming back so young and their lives are ruined. No one knows the cost of war. They don’t want to think about it. They’d have to look in the mirror and say, this is what we did.”
For Thomas, being able to look in the mirror and see clearly has become a fundamental part of who she is. You can almost hear the dialogue she has with herself, asking whether she’s done enough, seen enough, said enough. Given a formal culture of obedience, this isn’t necessarily what you would expect from an Army wife, but there are many in the Army who think long and hard about what they will, and will not, do.
“I’ve always felt people in the military generally would go out of their way to help, far more than people not from a military culture,” Lawrence Rockwood told me. “My mother, father, right back to my great-great-grandfather had been in the military and that’s what I’d grown up with. That’s why, when I went to Haiti, I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to be turning a blind eye. It was like their compassion switch, their ability to see what was going on, had been switched off.”11
Captain Rockwood was one of twenty thousand troops sent to Haiti in 1994, on a mission to oversee the peaceful transfer of power to democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. An intelligence officer, his job was to develop informants in order better to protect the incoming government. But his informants kept ending up dead or imprisoned. Every day, reports of beatings, rapes, kidnapping, and murder—some in graphic detail—crossed Rockwood’s desk. Much of this seemed to be taking place in Haitian prisons and Rockwood knew that the departing regime would, if it could, use its last days in power to eliminate its political opponents. He repeatedly wrote up his reports, detailing systemic human rights abuses and requesting permission to visit the prisons to document who was there.
But Rockwood’s reports on human rights violations never seemed to make it into the Daily Intelligence Summary, designed for high command. When he protested, his superior officer told him, “One hundred percent of what you hear, don’t believe, and fifty percent of what you see don’t believe.” Orders to be blind seemed strange to the experienced intelligence officer, who had been deployed to Haiti on a humanitarian mission. Rockwood grew more and more distressed at the knowledge he had. He wanted to visit the prisons and document who was there; it was the only way he could think of to protect the inmates.
“I figured that, if they knew we had a list of names, they might stop eliminating people. Their actions would be more transparent and they would face prosecution if it could be shown that so-and-so was in the prison on this date when the U.S. went in—and then he disappeared. That was the best way to protect them. And I had a lot of informants—people going in and out of the jail—who did know what was going on.”
“For ten days I turned myself into an absolute nuisance, going to five or six different groups making a nuisance of myself, asking permission to visit. Finally I was told it wouldn’t happen for a week. That’s what I found unacceptable: that a decision was being made that would lead to the unnecessary deaths of noncombatants.”
Rockwood decided he couldn’t wait another week. He would go and look for himself. He knew this was a career-ending move but he did not feel that he could fulfill his military duty if he did not see for himself what was happening. When he got to the prison, his worst fears were confirmed.
Rockwood was subsequently given psychiatric evaluations (which he passed) and told to resign or face a court-martial for disobedience. He chose to be court-martialed. He refused to resign. What, I wondered, had made him so determined to see for himself what was going on?
“I felt I had to act. I had to justify my position: there is a line you will not cross. When I was a boy, my father was in the military and he took me to Dachau. He taught me that there are times you must take a stand. You must know there’s a line you do not cross, times that it is more important to do the right thing than to obey orders and stick with your team. And I thought about Nuremberg and orders that should not be obeyed. And how important that rule was.”
A sense of history, of patterns, helped Rockwood to see what was at stake. But it wasn’t until many years later, when Universal Studios got it wrong, that Rockwood understood what else had made him insist on seeing what others wanted him to ignore.
“They wanted to make a movie about me, but I’m so glad it never got made,” he laughed. “Because, in the movie, what motivated me was I came in contact with a young Haitian boy and he gets killed and that is supposed to justify what I do. But that was horrifying! I don’t need to have a relationship with someone to know that the Haitians are human! There doesn’t need to be a personal connection for compassion to be turned on. Can I only be compassionate when these people are like me? That’s what really motivated me. And what was so strange and what upset me so much was that, because these people were not like me, I wasn’t supposed to care about them. I was just supposed to look away.”
That Rockwood succeeded in looking beyond the sides of his riverbed, could see people not like himself and see that they mattered, shows that we don’t have to be blind. The expectations of a culture of obedience were overcome by compassion. And that determination—to side with the powerless—has stayed with him. Today he nurses heroin addicts, another group, he says, society would prefer not to see.
Rockwood felt a passionate dedication to what he perceived to be his military mission; he simply saw no conflict between his obligation to the Army and his obligation to Haitians. After Hurricane Katrina, Maria Garzino felt that same commitment when she saw the people of New Orleans on television.
“The looks on their faces: that hopelessness thing,” Garzino recalled. A member of the Army Corps of Engineers, she had recently come back from Iraq and what she saw on television seemed horribly familiar.12
“You look at the faces of individuals and they know they have a good chance of being dead very soon. And they’re pleading for help that should be there. And you realize, it isn’t coming. It didn’t come. The failure was something beyond an inadequate response. It was a break in trust. When someone doesn’t do their best, your trust is gone. How do you restore it? I volunteered to go down to New Orleans in any capacity because I wanted people to understand that the Army Corps cared deeply. All I could guarantee was that I would do my best. That’s the only way we could restore trust.”
Garzino was experienced in emergency work and she loved it. After begging and conniving to be sent to New Orleans, she was made pump team installation leader, assigned to install new pumps that were supposed to protect the city for the next fifty years.
“Pretty quickly I realized something was wrong. Working with contractors on emergency work is very fast paced so you need a relationship of trust. The first things that are said are: this is a twenty-four-seven project, we are going to help each other, that’s the deal. Failure isn’t an option. Forthright disclosure is essential; you have to be direct and honest. But I was noticing that contractors didn’t want to say anything, they were hiding things and it was hard to get information.”
Garzino kept pressing for the information she needed and hoping for the best. But she didn’t understand how MWI, Moving Water Industries, had got the contract for pumps that appeared to be ill-suited to their task.
“My problem is, this seems to be good-old-boy network, where they only tell me what they think I need to know. This is not a good candidate for partner of the year. Delivery dates were short. We have only a few months to get the pumps in place. NOAA [The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] is predicting three or four storms that year that could hit the area, so we have to get this done. Then the schedules slipped. That was unacceptable.”
As Garzino relayed the detail of her story to me, she struggled to stay calm. Her frustration with a firm that didn’t seem to care about deadlines or quality or the life-and-death nature of the job distresses her to this day.
“We started testing and the pumping systems fell apart each time we turned them on. Very concerned is an understatement. When you turn these pumps on, they blow their guts out—in very different ways. The head people would bypass me and call New Orleans and get lesser requirements. So they tried to reduce the specification. Well—why even bother testing? It was so ridiculous, they never made it through testing. The final test was laughable—they just did away with testing the pump assembly and said ‘Hopefully they will hold together long enough.’ ”
Garzino finally cracked when she heard the people of New Orleans being assured that the pumps would keep them safe. She knew no such guarantee could be made. Being very careful to follow fastidiously the chain of command, in 2006 she began to press for a process of review. When she couldn’t get any satisfaction, in 2007 she went to the Office of Special Counsel, part of the Department of Justice charged with investigating whistleblower complaints by federal employees.13 The OSC insisted that the inspector general of the Department of Defense investigate her concerns. While that report upheld many of her complaints, it nonetheless concluded there had been no serious violations. But Garzino would not be deterred and she submitted highly detailed counterarguments. She was emotional about her campaign but she knew it was the nitty-gritty engineering detail that proved her argument.
“Two A.M. I’m replying to e-mails. I have a twelve-foot-tall pile of documents on my desk. If you paid me for the work I did on this,” Garzino recalled ruefully, “I could retire right now. Every night. Every weekend. If you realize you won’t give up, then you must do the best job you can.”
The inspector general was told to look again, but again came back saying the pumps were safe. In an unprecedented move, the OSC then decided to appoint an independent engineering expert to analyze all the available information. His report entirely vindicated the years of Garzino’s effort, finding that the pumps installed in New Orleans did not protect the city adequately and that the Army Corps of Engineers could have saved $430 million in replacement costs by buying proven equipment.
“Everything I said was affirmed; it was the greatest day of my four years in this thing. It absolutely justified the pain.”
Pitting herself against the Army Corps, against a powerful contracting firm, made for a long and frightening battle. Why, I kept wondering, hadn’t she given up? A passionate love of engineering (coupled with a hatred for bad engineering) was part of the answer. So too was a determination to finish what she had begun and a serious commitment to public trust. But key to Garzino’s determination was her sense that someone had to stand up for the people of New Orleans who had already been so badly let down.
“There was a day we drove down to where the pumps were going to be installed. I remember there was a lot of debris around, they were changing the road to allow heavy construction traffic to get through. And they raised the body of an eight-year-old girl. And no one would look. No one wanted to acknowledge what had just happened. But that is what needs to be at the forefront of your mind! Let’s talk about this! But they couldn’t even look that in the eye. People don’t want to look at a really bad thing. One reason this stuff is allowed to happen is because people don’t want to look at it and acknowledge it. There were a whole lot of people there that day but no one talked about it.”
For Rockwood and Garzino, seeing what everyone wanted to deny and acting on that knowledge was an intrinsically necessary act. Both had a strong sense of duty, not just to their organization but to what that organization stood for. For Joe Darby, who handed in the photographs of Abu Ghraib, the decision was just as taxing but just as clear.
“After about three days, I decided to hand the pictures in. You have to understand: I’m not the kind of guy to rat somebody out. I’ve kept a lot of secrets for soldiers. In the heat of the moment, in a war, things happen. You do things you regret. I have exceeded the proper use of force myself a couple times. But this crossed the line to me. I had the choice between what I knew was morally right and my loyalty to other soldiers. I couldn’t have it both ways.”14
Darby too was able to think beyond his friends and his colleagues and see that there were other people, very different from himself, who mattered.
“One of the things you have to understand is the mentality of where I grew up, in western Maryland. It’s a small town, and there’s not a lot of work. So most people are either in the military, in the Reserves, or they’re related to somebody who is. They’re good people, but I knew they weren’t going to look at the fact that these guys were beating up prisoners. They were going to look at the fact that an American soldier put other American soldiers in prison. For Iraqis. And to those people—who basically are patriotic, socially programmed people who believe whatever they’re told—the Iraqis are the enemy, and screw whatever happens to them. Ignorance is bliss they say but you can’t stand by and let this happen.”
Cassandras and whistleblowers show us that the forces that enable willful blindness can be overcome. That this can happen feels heroic but rarely feels like heroism in real life. Men like Lawrence Rockwood and Joe Darby, women like Cynthia Thomas and Gayla Benefield see through the eyes of the powerless, and what they see changes who they are and clarifies what they feel is right. But this change and clarity come at a high cost, because their full-sightedness explodes the status quo.
Because the confrontations between Cassandras and the rest of the world are so profound, they are reflected back to us in stories; the conflict between a passion for truth and the desire for illusion has been a mainstay of drama since Oedipus. Whether it’s Hickey, smashing the myths that sustain the bums of Harry Hope’s bar in The Iceman Cometh, or Gregers Werle determined to excavate family secrets in The Wild Duck, or Emilia revealing to Othello the folly of his jealousy, the bearer of truths have to be punished. All of these dramas of revealed truths—and they’re all tragedies—can be at times almost unbearable to watch as one truth dismantles multiple illusions. Cassandras may see the truth, but they inspire fury because those truths were so energetically and necessarily hidden, and because their revelations demand change. We side with the truth teller but, in the comfort of the theater, we don’t have to bear the cost.
In the real world, the cost of being a Cassandra is more ambiguous. In one study of whistleblowers, 30 percent of them had been removed from their offices by men with guns—that is how dangerous they were deemed to be.15 Most weren’t surprised to lose their jobs but were disappointed by how hard it was to find employment subsequently. After a brief flurry of publicity, Sherron Watkins found that, in Houston, most employers were wary of someone with a reputation for being outspoken. Maria Garzino often found herself sitting at her desk with nothing to do. For years, Gayla Benefield had to endure the open hostility of her neighbors, while for Frank Partnoy and Cynthia Thomas perhaps the hardest part is explaining why they’ve stepped out of their presumed roles. Joe Darby was excoriated by his neighbors when he came home. Once Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld named him on television, he had to relocate and assume a new identity. His old friends weren’t proud that he had held America to a higher standard; for him to have looked beyond them was just a form of betrayal.
“He was a rat, he was a traitor, basically he was no good,” said Colin Engelbach, commander of the VFW post in Darby’s hometown. “His actions were no good, borderline traitor. Do you put the enemy above your buddies? I wouldn’t.”16
But not all Cassandras are punished. Though many have had to wait to see their prophecies validated and to earn respect for their foresight, courage, and perseverance, they have all found themselves more powerful with the truth than without it. The mother who discovered child abuse in her family found in herself a stronger, more capable parent than she had known she could be. The executive who dared to resist the power of silence in a meeting can look back at a problem fixed instead of buried. The bystander who wasn’t passive, the soldier who could not obey, all take as their reward a comfort in knowing that they did what they could and did not choose to look away. Hannah Arendt says that such individuals gain the knowledge that, whatever else happens, they can live “together with themselves,” continuing in their minds a dialogue that is neither incriminating nor soporific but dynamic and alive.
The greatest shock, for Cassandras and whistleblowers alike, is their revised view of the world. Having started as conformists and loyalists, they emerge from their experience wary of authority and skeptical of much that they see and read and hear. Seeing the truth, and then acting on it, changes their vision of life. This independence of mind can instill a profound sense of isolation. But setting themselves free from consolatory fictions can also reveal new allies and soul mates and inspire a vibrant and purposeful identity.
“I don’t regret any of it,” says Joe Darby. “I made my peace with my decision before I turned the pictures in. I knew that if people found out it was me, I wouldn’t be liked. But the only time I have ever regretted it was when I was in Iraq and my family was going through a lot. Other than that, I never doubted that it was the right thing. It forced a big change in my life, but the change has been good and bad. I liked my little quiet town, but now I have a new place, with a new job and new opportunities.”
Cynthia Thomas’s commitment to running the coffeehouse absorbs her night and day. She used to be the one in her family who stayed in touch, brought everyone together; now she’s too busy to take a day off. She says her parents are supportive—they’re from the military too—but still don’t quite understand. But having seen what she’s seen, she can’t go back.
“I always used to say ‘I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.’ And now I know. I found myself in this cause and I am not the same person anymore.”
For all the punishment and pain they sometimes endure, those who struggle to see share a core belief that seeing the truth matters and will have an impact. The most telling quality of Cassandras is that they believe they can have an impact, that change can happen when the truth is confronted, not ignored. Nobody I’ve spoken to has articulated that more clearly than Sherron Watkins when she talked about meeting the FBI whistleblower, Coleen Rowley, and the MCI World-Com whistleblower, Cynthia Cooper.
“Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, and I were all together because we had been on that cover of Time magazine. And we were talking about what made us do what we did, and did we have anything important in common. So, we are all three women. We’re also first born. We’re also women of faith. We’re also breadwinners for our families. But I think the most telling thing about us is that we grew up in tiny towns with less than ten thousand people. And in that small kind of town, there is the sense of, oh goodness, that tree fell down and knocked down that little shed, let’s go call the city, or, there’s trash in that vacant lot, better pick it up. There’s that sense that your actions matter. What you do matters.”17