White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Memories of Baltimore and Another Riot

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I was in Baltimore the last time it burned. That was back in April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Washington also burned at that time.

There was something surreal about the mood of the riots in both cities. The anger from African-American rioters seemed to be directed wholly against property.

I walked among the rioters, up 14th Street to the U Street Corridor, the commercial hub of the Shaw area of Washington. Later that day, I drove around Baltimore. They seemed to me to be an uncommonly respectful pair of riots.

In Washington, young African-American men directed me where to go safely; one looter, coming out of a shop on 14th and F Street, asked me if I needed anything, as though he were the proprietor.

Over the decades, I have wondered about those riots. I think they were indeed riots of anger as well as sorrow. King, the great civil rights leader, had been murdered, and already people knew there would not be another like him.

For days I drove around Baltimore, where I lived at the time, and Washington, where troops were patrolling and curfews were in place. With a large “PRESS” sign taped on my car’s windshield, I was allowed to drive around both cities, and I watched them come to grips with reality. A Washington Post writer described how a white motorist and a black motorist had waved each other through an intersection, both feeling they were doing something significant.

But Washington is not Baltimore. And, at that time, Baltimore was as segregated as any Southern city.

The proprietor of a bar near The Baltimore News-American, the Hearst newspaper where I worked, would shoo away blacks with this lie, “This is a private club and I can’t serve you, but I can sell you a bottle to go.”

I wanted to challenge this, and urged a black friend on the newspaper, Lee Lassiter, to come with me and make a stand. He averred, not because he was lacking in courage, but because he was fighting another battle over bars. Lassiter and other activists were trying to restrict the spread of cheap bars in the ghetto, where licenses were indiscriminately issued by a white board to white businessmen.

Unlike Washington which, in some ways, was a more secure community and where there was certain amount of integration, the whites in Baltimore took little interest in the blacks. There was no sense that they shared a city.

Baltimore’s politics were white; its sensibilities were white; and it was comfortably assumed that in the profusion of row houses, there were happy blacks, living a happy parallel life — although that term was not used. Not true then, and not true now.

This is a subjective comment, but I have always felt there is a kind of special dejection in the Baltimore ghetto.

While there was manufacturing, steel and shipbuilding and a car plant in Baltimore, guaranteeing good union jobs, there were pockets of prosperity. As these jobs faded in Baltimore, and other American cities, so did the hope for a route to the middle class for those in the ghetto.

As crime increased everywhere, it surged in Baltimore. Gun ownership shot up, mostly among ghetto youth.

Baltimore’s police – who probably felt the affect in their families, if not in their own aspirations, of the end of industrial prosperity — took out their frustrations on those who had even minor malefactions.

Men in uniform easily degenerate into bullies. I saw this in London. When a policeman and a suspect face off, after the policeman is sure that he is not facing an ambush, he has absolute power over the suspect. It is an intrinsically ugly moment: when the handcuffs click, justice and liberty are at bay. Later in court, or through a civilian review, those things may be re-established. But when the suspect is under lock and key, the police power is absolute — and it is absolutely corrupting.

Police officers go over the line often, and I have seen this all over the world. Race worsens things, but it is not a necessary ingredient.

It is sad for me that, 47 years later, Baltimore should have been torched by a mob. It is sad, too, that things in the row houses of Baltimore are as bad as ever, and that the mob is still the only voice black Baltimoreans think they have.

— For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Small Charities Tackle ‘Disruptive’ Cancer Research

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No diagnosis strikes fear into people as thoroughly as cancer. It is the sum of all fears when it comes to health.

My mother died in 1961, when treatments were few, in great pain from cancer of the uterus. Four treasured friends died of cancer more recently, but in equally awful ways; Barbara of bone cancer, Grant of colon cancer, Ian of brain cancer, and JoAnn of melanoma.

Cancer deserves its position as the most feared disease, even if it is not as lethal as it once was and many cancers can be treated. To know someone in the throes of cancer is to know something terrible. Heart disease kills more of us, but cancer is enthroned as the ultimate horror.

Yet we are, in some measure, winning the war on cancer; to medical science, it is less mysterious and more conquerable. But it has been a long battle against an implacable enemy.

The war on cancer is war with many theaters; cancer itself being a misnomer, as there are many cancers with very different profiles, rates metastasis and treatments.

So it is both puzzling and appalling that Congress has allowed funding for government biomedical research to languish and has made it subject to the blunt tool of sequestration. Less money means everything slows down; research projects are drawn out or cancelled, and scientists are discouraged.

Nothing is as fatal for research as uncertain funding. You cannot shut down a line of research and start it up again as funds become available: It blunts the picks.

Scientists at the hard-rock face of research cannot be expected to sustain commitment when they do not know if their research grants will be renewed in the next budget cycle. Lawyers can anticipate steady work, why not can cancer researchers? When we implore young people to study biomedicine, we are asking them to take up a career of uncertainty.

Enter the non-government funders, from giants like the American Cancer Society to small but determined outfits like the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR).

This organization, according to its president, Franklin Salisbury, Jr., believes in “adventure funding.” Although he eschews the description, Salisbury’s efforts might be called seed funding at the genomic and molecular level; understanding the role of genes in cancers and finding the mechanisms that control cells. He emphasizes the gap between science and medicine, and the need to provide funding to bridge that gap.

Salisbury also underscores the need for regular funding, rather than large periodic and unpredictable infusions. His organization, founded in 1973 by his father, Franklin Sr., a creative entrepreneur, and Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian-born physiologist and biochemist who won the Nobel Prize 1937, has been keeping research alive for some researchers like Dr. Curt Civin of the University of Maryland Medical Center and Dr. Harold Dvorak of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

NFCR is just one — and a small one, with a $15 million annual budget — of hundreds of cancer-related charities. Its uniqueness and what it portends for the whole future of research is its willing support, within the research community, of disruptive biomedical technologies as well as its appreciation for long-term support for particular scientists. These scientists are part of establishment teaching hospitals like Massachusetts General, as well as an honors list of top universities from Harvard to Oxford and across the Pacific to China.

Increasingly, China is becoming more important in biomedical research. American dollars are finding their way into Chinese research Institutions, as a new wave of collaboration outside of traditional channels is being established. These are sometimes housed in open medicine centers, six of which NFCR supports.

With the pressure here on government funding, researchers fear the government will fund only the safe and sure projects. This is being felt across the broad range of biomedical research in the, as scientists are turned away in larger and larger numbers from the National Institutes of Health empty handed. Respected researchers are turning to innovative funding sources, including crowdsourcing. A renowned virus researcher at Columbia, Dr. Ian Lipkin, is trying to raise $1.27 million, having been turned down by NIH, by crowdsourcing

For better or worse, cancer research is going retail. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Boneyard for the Graybeards

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He moves across the lobby of Washington’s Metropolitan Club with the assurance of a man in his own environment. This is the habitat of party elders, Republican and Democratic. This is their comfort zone– safe, secure, orderly and predictable. This is where graybeards lunch, scheme and reminisce. It is as someone once called it: a hotbed of social rest.

Here on the well-worn Persian carpets, men and women of achievement in many fields, not the least politics, talk over unexceptional food, always with an eye for another grandee who deserves a wave across the dining room.

The man who just entered the lobby is a Republican through and through. He has done a lot for the party; has advised at the highest levels, since the Reagan presidency; and has been rewarded with a major ambassadorship. He will know a lot of people in the dining room on any day and even more will know him.

To dine at the Metropolitan Club is to step back to a time when eminent graybeards—yes, they were almost exclusively men and almost all lawyers–worked behind the scenes to help presidents and their parties. Names like Barbour, Clifford and Cutler come to mind.

Now lobbyists now whisper in influential ears, and the doyens of the Metropolitan Club are not in demand. Like the Georgetown dinner party, some things are now in the past.

There is no time for profound consideration, no time to weigh the data and no time to exercise institutional memory. Omar Khayyam’s moving finger writes very fast now; so to deal with new situations and crises, politicians fall back on old ideology. “Is it progressive?” ask Democrats. “What is the free-market solution​?” ask Republicans.

Blame the warp-speed news cycle, and its overemphasis on politics over programs; the quick response over data and rumination. The relentless news machine wants speedy answers, everything in an instant.

A few blocks from the Metropolitan Club, the bloggers and twitterers in the White House press briefing room parse and comment upon the words of press secretary Robert Gibbs just as fast as he speaks. This is a de facto system where the trap is constantly sprung for the gaffe not the substance. If no gaffe is likely to occur, induce one.

Step forward Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times with her race-heavy question about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This happened at the end of the last presidential press conference, when the chosen reporter usually goes for something light or fun. Not Ms. Sweet.

A few seconds at the end of that press conference eclipsed President Barack Obama’s earnest but dull defense of his health care reform proposals; eclipsed the previous 55 minutes. Obama was in a place he did not want to be, and he would stay there for weeks. No time to ask some party elder how best to handle the situation.

If Democratic grandees are sidelined in the new news-driven politics, then Republican statesmen, like the man at the Metropolitan, have been sent into exile. They can write an occasional op-ed and argue at think-tank seminars. But for now, the party has been hijacked by its broadcast wing. Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin have become the censors of the party. They intimidate its elected officials and will brook nothing they hear from their own wise counselors.