#1600 A Conversation with Richard Rhodes

Wilson, and a series of essays, including some fairly sharp essays. I learned today that he used to write for Playboy, when Playboy was a really important part of the discourse, when Playboy was making a real run at having some of the best cartoonists and some of the best humorists and some of the best writers in America, and, of course, there were also the Playboy interviews that were so very important during that era, almost forgotten today. Well, amazing. I'm just thrilled to be sitting here just minutes after I had to say goodbye, and I had noticed a passage in his book, Looking for America, which was published in the late 1970s, when I was just getting out of college, and my friend, Sue Halpern, had given it to me when we were working together, you know, living in the same place, and then I came upon this blue paperback, which I got from one of the most important friends I've ever had. I wrote to her and said, hey, I just opened this book and there's an inscription from you saying that the essay on the Kennedys is particularly interesting, and so I've been rereading the book and I'm so impressed that I've contacted Richard Rhodes out of the blue and said, is there any possible way that you might be willing, under exactly the right circumstances, to sit for an interview, or maybe even a series of interviews?

When you write that sort of thing to an eminent person, you know, you have to be prepared. You have to put on a little body armor, because they're so busy and they're so eminent and they have to say no virtually all the time in order to do what they do, to get the time that they need for their research and their writing and their thinking and their lecturing. But he immediately wrote back and said, yes, of course. And then he said, yeah, let's do more. And then today, when we actually met, he said, yes, let's do a series, and so we're going to.

And this is part, this is why listening to America is important and why we morphed from the Thomas Jefferson Hour to this. So, under the rubric of the Jefferson Hour, you know, how do you get to Richard Rhodes talking about Ted Kennedy or Gerald Ford or the obscenity case against the pornographic film Deep Throat? It's hard to spread the umbrella of Jefferson sufficiently widely to do some of the things that I really, really want to do. And here's what's happened. You know, Richard Rhodes is one of the handful of the greatest writers in America and has written books of just profound importance, especially the two on the hydrogen and the atomic bomb, but others too.

A recent excellent book on energy. He is towards the end of his career, so he has not much to prove anymore. And, as he said today, these kinds of conversations help him process some of the things he's trying to think about. He's giving a lecture soon on malignant deterrence of nuclear weapons at Yale. So, you know, maybe this is useful to him, but it's really great for us.

And I will find more. I'm hoping that Patricia Limerick will agree to do a couple of interviews on this broader subject, which is America at 250.. Where are we? How did we get here? What does it signify?

What should we be concerned about? What's unresolved in American life? How well have we lived up to our promise as a nation? When you hear this today, when you hear him laugh, when you hear him reflect, when you hear him pause to think about what his answer is going to be, just say to yourself,

that's what American discourse should sound like. If you can help us, you know, taking this airstream around the country, there'll be gas charges and campground charges. And once in a while, it's going to be an expensive journey, but I think it's going to be worth it, not just to my own unbelievable satisfaction. You can count on that. But I think to yours too.

And frankly, I think even to America's. What I really, really love to do is to be the best interlocutor that I can be, to be the best moderator I can be, to give people safe space to speak and to, if possible, to draw them out. And so that's what we're trying to do here. And frankly, we need help. And if you can help at any level, from gas cards to ranches in Wyoming or Kansas, we would be absolutely thrilled.

It's tax deductible. So let's go to the program. My interview, the first of a number with Richard Rhodes.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this very special edition of Listening to America. I have an amazing honor to be able to talk with the eminent Richard Rhodes. You probably remember The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. That's just one of 23 books that Mr. Rhodes has written.

You've had all sorts of awards, the MacArthur Prize, Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, Alfred B. Sloan, an amazing life and an amazing career. And it's not over yet. Welcome, Mr. Rhodes.

Thank you very much. Let me just ask the most basic of questions. How did you get here? I know that you had a difficult and unpropitious childhood, and now you're one of the most extraordinary writers in America.

And eventually my brother went to the police at the brave young age of 13.

. And we were remanded, happily, to a very marvelous children's home, a boy's home, that was a working farm with all the healing qualities that one finds in growing things and caring for animals and so forth. And then Kansas City, dear Kansas City, where I grew up, had a local scholarship fund to send boys to Yale. Yale was all male in those days. And I was evidently the only person who ever literally qualified.

I mean, I really had no money even to go to college at all. So I got a four-year all-expenses-paid scholarship to Yale, which really transformed my life, of course. But I learned to write, probably. Well, I'd like to say, since the boys' home was 75 miles from a girl I fell in love with at church camp one summer, we had to conduct our romance by letter. I think I wrote her 400 letters in one year, which is more than one had calculated.

That's probably when I learned to write, just having to fill a letter every day. Anyway, I was really destined for the Methodist ministry. And I thought about it since then and wondered why. And the answer seems to be, it was really the only place where you could think about philosophic issues, where you could explore the depths of humanity, if you will. And I was primed by my childhood experiences to be extremely interested in human violence and how it works and what we can do to reduce it in our world.

So once I got to college and discovered all the rich literature of Western civilization, I really kind of jettisoned all that and gave up the idea of the ministry. But I think that approach to writing has always informed my writing. I try to look for what's under things and around things, as well as the subjects themselves. Born on the 4th of July in.

How do you range so far and how do you begin to choose what you're going to write about? Well, look, the problem for writers in.

Something I learned when I wrote for many years for magazines. full time went back, when you could actually write good stories for magazines instead of just celebrity gossip, if you will. I learned very quickly that if an editor had an idea, the idea was already sold. And thus, I ended up writing about many, many different subjects, along with those that interested me personally. The books are more related to the fact that, in order to survive as a writer, I've had to find grant money to supplement the advances that publishers are prepared to pay.

For someone who is basically a mid-list author, my books typically sell 50,000 to 60,000 copies a year. But that's not bestselling level. Bestselling level starts at 100,000.. So, with the exception of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which was briefly on the New York Times bestseller list, my books have not in themselves been sufficient to support a reasonable middle class life. I found that the Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation, which is a major foundation in New York City, had a wonderful program for providing grants to write books at the intersection of American life and science and technology, issues of science and technology. So most of my books, since I found that source, have been around the subject of technology. I might have liked to write about other things, but one does what one must do in order to make a living in any situation. And the subjects have been, I mean, there's nothing more fun than diving into something you know nothing about. When editors would say, there's a psychic dog living in central Missouri.

Why don't you go write about that? That was great fun to do and interesting. And similarly, when I'm suddenly writing about, Ed Wilson happened to be an old friend of mine, we had for many years said I should write his biography. And I got done just in time because he had an accident in the community where he lived and fell and a rib punctured a lung and he was gone within a week. So various things.

I mean, I think there are two ways that people write, if you're writing as a profession. One is you have a sort of life list. I call it my possibles bag of things that might be books, if I can convince the publisher to fund them. And the other is things that fall in your lap by accident. As it were, Hedy Lamarr emerged because the Sun Foundation had a book committee.

I was on the book committee coming up with ideas to find writers to write about in their grant program. And when I heard about this fascinating woman who was an inventor on the side and invented one of the fundamental technologies of all the digital electronics of today, in the pursuit of trying to find a way to knock off German submarines, knowing nothing whatsoever about electronics, she still managed to put together the collection of people who could help her do that. Too interesting to pass up.

You make it sound as if you're sort of a journeyman. Something comes up, you're willing to take it. But here's just what Isidore Rabi said about the making of the atomic bomb. He says, it's an epic worthy of Milton.

Nowhere else have I seen the whole story put down with such elegance and gusto and in such revealing detail and simple language, which carries the reader through wonderful and profound scientific discoveries in their application. That's Isidore Rabi. That's like one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. So how did you get to the vortex of the atomic world and stay there so long?

In any case, I was eight years old in 1945.

. My entire childhood had been the Second World War. I remember, it's almost my earliest memory, Pearl Harbor, going from door to door in our neighborhood in Kansas City, knocking on doors. My brother and I, Stanley, was a couple of years older than I. It was like stirring anthills to knock on someone's door and say, as we did, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

Everyone inside started moving around, turning on the radio. It was a real thrill for a couple of little guys, about five or six years old, to have this happen.

The idea that something that had consumed all of my life so far could be somehow ended by one bomb. That's the way it felt at the time. Of course, it was more complicated than that. Turned me toward an interest in science. After that, I began to read the wonderful science stories in Life magazine of the day.

They published a lot about physics. I started taking them to school and burdening my classmates at show and tell time with lectures on the nucleus and so forth, which was, as I think, back on it, something I'm still doing. in a way. I mean, I'm not a scientist, but I'm certainly an explainer of science. That's kind of what a lot of my books have been.

So that interest continued. And if my childhood, I think, had been different, I probably would have gone into physics, which I find endlessly fascinating. It was out of that basis that, when the time came to think about what was my, in fact, first full length work of nonfiction, I had been a novelist. before that I published four novels, two declining sales, I might say. But nevertheless, I had the good training of writing novels.

I'd like to tell students who don't always hear this, that there's no difference really between nonfiction and fiction, except that nonfiction has to be connected to a set of external reference. The facts, as it were, that are the authority behind what's in. But narrative nonfiction has characters, it has plot, it has structure. You determine where you're going to cut into the story and how you're going to carry it along. You look for notable incidents that would dramatize the events.

It's a very different business from academic nonfiction, if you will, where they're pursuing a different purpose. My purpose is to tell a good story, but get the facts right, so that people are hearing as close to what actually happened as one can get in writing history, which is not all that close.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I can't tell you how honored I am to be able to be speaking with Richard Rhodes. Mr. Rhodes, I've been reading your books all of my life. These are not monographs.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thousand pages long. I've been through it a couple of times. Did your publisher ever say, how do you expect me to pay for this and sell this thing? I mean, that's a massive book on this subject.

I'm sorry to turn what should be a literary conversation into a financial conversation, but these are the realities of writing in this. these days. It's just become a very difficult area, except for bestselling writers who are already bestsellers. In any case, Michael kept the book on the shelf for six months while I scrambled the funds. That's when I encountered the Sun Foundation.

happily. They had another project that they needed a writer for, and I signed on for it. Once I started working on this book, I decided that I was going to make it the best book I possibly could, however long it took, whatever I had to do to support myself while I was writing it. Fortunately, I entered that field at just the time when a lot of the people who had been central to the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs were still living and were still compos mentis, so I could go find them and interview them. I interviewed Robbie, whom you quoted.

I interviewed Louis Alvarez, who designed the detonation system for the first bombs. Many, many others in that field, all of whom are gone now, sadly, so, you really can't replicate the chance that I had at that time.

They told their story so many times that the edges were all worn off. The facts were all jumbled. One of the nicest compliments I got from one of those endorsements that's in the book was, I learned things from him that I didn't know about what we were doing. I think that was a mediocre thing. That's the highest praise.

Absolutely. And it was very important to me, it always has been, to get the facts straight. There's nothing sadder than history that accumulates errors because nobody went back.

So I didn't. I mean, I really was quite innocent about those things. My novels hadn't sold much. I'd been basically a magazine writer for about 10 years, making a living writing a magazine story almost every month, starting from scratch. It was a real scramble.

It was an even worse scramble with writing making Atomic Bomb, because the advance didn't last that long. And I got some grants from various foundations to see through some of the work. In those days, if you wanted to see a document, you had to get on a plane or drive in a car to wherever that document was stored in a library somewhere, typically the National Archives in Washington or the Library of Congress, and go through the actual documents themselves. And although that was kind of difficult, in some ways, trouble, on the other hand, there's nothing like holding the real documents in your hands. I will never forget going to Berlin and holding in my hand a letter from Otto Hahn and Fritz Flassman to Lisa Meitner saying, there's some strange burst in our experiment with uranium here.

What is going on? And visiting the little village in Western Sweden where she and her nephew went walking one day in the snow and figured out something that they called fission. Those things or those experiences are irreplaceable. But on the other hand, if one wants to use, for example, the Annals of Parliament, the English Parliament, they have the entire Annals of Parliament all the way back to like 1500. online.

You can look at debates between people or investigations of things that happened in the year 1810, and it comes alive as if you were right in the room at a congressional hearing. So these days, it's really possible to stay at home and do almost all the things that used to involve.

So you're looking at File 1, then at File 2, later at File 6.

. Today, in your bathrobe, you have access to not everything, but an amazing amount of the world's information. Someone like you might feel like, I'm one of the heroes who had to do it the hard way, but I'm sure you're grateful for what's happened.

Here we are, two different parts of America.

First of all, the doomsday clock. I looked it up again this morning. That's the bulletin of atomic scientists for the last 50 or 60 years have tried to warn us where we are on the doomsday clock, how close we are to nuclear annihilation, or at least detonation. Currently, it said at one and one half minutes to midnight, the closest ever, that's the closest the clock has ever been. And that includes the Cold War.

And I lived through the Cold War. I have a vague little memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Richard, that feels wrong. That feels a little wrong to me. Why does it deserve to be at a minute and a half before midnight?

I'm not sure what their reasoning was,

I call it malignant deterrence. And it has to do, it happened originally between India and Pakistan during that little war they had in 1999, where Pakistan, I think it was, decided that if they had nuclear weapons, they could conduct a conventional war under the umbrella of their nuclear weapons. And the other side wouldn't dare escalate and might not even dare to get into that war. Certainly, both sides would not escalate because of the risk of nuclear exchange. Putin is now using, has been using that approach, malignant deterrence, in his war in Ukraine.

The same thing. He's waved his nuclear weapons around. That's terrifying because of the risk of inadvertence or misunderstanding, or accident. You know, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of our planes accidentally flew into the Soviet Union and terrified everybody. It wasn't supposed to be there.

It was just off course. And the Russians weren't sure what was going on. So that sort of thing. But the change, although seemingly subtle, has really increased the level of risk of nuclear exchange.

What does the US do? How do we absorb that moment?

We've managed somehow to keep them. It's absolutely extraordinary that a weapon of that destructive capacity should never have been used in anger since 1945.. It's really just world changing that. that's true. But here is the first break in that long, long piece, if you will.

An uneasy piece, to be sure, but it's still a long piece of a kind. And the kind that the men who worked on the bomb really did believe would be the outcome. When Niels Bohr arrived at, the Danish physicist arrived at Los Alamos, one of the other scientists there told me later, he said, we'd been living in the darkest corner of our science. Physics had been almost a spiritual field, he said, before the war. And suddenly we were working on a weapon of mass destruction.

But he said, Bohr came and he gave us hope because he said, look, you're looking at the dark side of this new weapon. There's another side, which is the possibility that it will put an end to world scale war. Well, it did. So long as everyone thought of it that way. But now we're thinking of it in a different way.

And I think there's a. there's a crack in this wonderful facade. And I have no idea what follows. I really don't. I've been able to think of anything.

Do we counter with a nuclear strike on the Soviet, on Russia? Well, that would be insane. I mean, the whole theory is that if, if we've got nuclear weapons, we Russia, you're not going to attack us, whether we have a conventional war down the road.

We've had a couple of moments, the Cuban Missile Crisis, MacArthur wanting to use such weapons in Korea, a couple of other moments like this. But we have never crossed that line. Oppenheimer's view, at least in some of his moods, was the third one opens the door, the third one throws the door open, and now all bets are off. What do you think of that? Well, that's basically what I was just.

One was certainly that Korea is such a mountainous country that no one was sure these rather small World War II type bombs would be effective, and they didn't want to dilute the terror, if you will. The other was grimmer, and that is. nobody in our government wanted to make the next nuclear attack on Asian people. That would have cemented the world belief that we were racist and all the things that the Japanese thought of us at the time. So we didn't.

And it was that kind of consideration all through the Cold War that I think really kept the lid on, kept the cap on the bombs, if you will. It was only occasionally when there were inadvertent misunderstandings of one kind or another that the planes got scrambled and bombs got loaded. Fortunately, again, the message went through and it didn't happen.

. As we look at the world, some people think the flashpoint is on the Pakistan-Indian border. Other people think that North Korea is the most likely to use one. Then there's, of course, the Putin issue. Where do you think the most current danger resides in the world?

Sig came back from a recent trip to Korea, really worried that Kim had basically moved to malignant deterrence, that he decided that his country was never going to merge with South Korea, that neither side wanted it, but that he couldn't live with South Korea down there all the time anymore, and that therefore he was going to attack them. Sig published an op-ed, I think, in a major journal at that time, just a few months ago, on that very subject. And nothing's happened that I've heard of since then. But it's still certainly something that's brooding on the horizon. Obviously, Putin's new malignant deterrence is a terrifying prospect.

The whole business, and on another level, and not a nuclear level, even though we know Israel has nuclear weapons,

the Pakistani, the Gaza problem is very serious. India and Pakistan learned their lesson in their 1999-plus call. They backed off and began working on the kind of ways to reduce the risk that the United States and the Soviet Union put together during the Cold War after the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know, hotlines, and red phones, and so forth, military communications, back and forth, to regularize. When new technologies come into the world, they have all sorts of intended and unintended consequences.

The way the human race deals with them is to surround them with laws, and traditions, and structures that will bring them under some kind of human control. We're still way far away from that with nuclear weapons, I'm sorry to say.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm with Richard Rhodes, the eminent author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a biography of Hedy Lamarr, a biography of E.O. Wilson, several novels, a recent book on energy, and Dark Sun. So, when you wrote Dark Sun about the hydrogen bomb, which of these two things is true? You already had done most of the work, because you'd been writing about it and telling her what's such a big deal in the first one, and so on.

Or, you sighed and thought, oh my goodness, now I have to master yet another.

It was a mess, and of course, Oppenheimer got involved. They set out to ruin him and succeeded. The Oppenheimer movie makes it look as if it was Louis Strauss who single-handedly brought down Oppenheimer, but it was really the Air Force. Oppenheimer was promoting a kind of defensive system where we would have early warning radar around the country, and basically fighter aircraft to take down Soviet bombers. There were no missiles yet, and the Air Force wanted big bombers.

I mean, that's what you do. You fly big bombers. Finally, after all the years of not being able really to destroy a target, I don't know if you've seen the recent series that Tom Hanks put together called Masters of the Air, but you get a sense of just how limited were the bombings of those planes during the Second World War. Ultimately effective, but it cost a lot of lives. So, from the Air Force, he just wanted to be able to defend against an attack, and the Air Force wanted big bombs.

That's what finally made them decide they had to get rid of this guy, which they did just by lifting his security.

But going to the security hearing, so Oppenheimer is silenced or destroyed by questionable associations before the war, by the Chevalier affair and his garbled accounts of it over the years, and by his lukewarmness on the hydrogen bomb. You're saying that it was the lukewarmness on the hydrogen bomb that really was the cause of his fall. Certainly Strauss had a personal.

He needed the backing of the military, and he got it. Bob Sterber, who was associate director of Los Alamos during the war, and a very close friend of Oppenheimer's, told me later, he said, you know, Robert really was destroyed. He was never the same human being again. And I thought of a phrase of Yeats's, that someone was a smiling public man. That's kind of what Oppenheimer became, and not able to do science anymore because he was so far away from it.

You know, what do you want? Robert gave you the atomic bomb and a whole series of those, and then he gave you the hydrogen bomb. And then Robby looked at these people lined up in front of him, designed purely there to destroy the man, and said, what do you want, mermaids? That was the kind of man Robby was. He got up and walked out of the room.

I love Robby. You know, he's the.

It was such an enormous blast of sound. Other than things like that, it was a show about Oppenheimer. It's kind of paradoxical that you build such a big screen and a big story around this man, but it did very well what it did. And it was a pretty good portrait of Oppenheimer. He was a little more confident than he really was.

The secret of Oppenheimer was that he was a very insecure man. Robbie said once of him, he could never decide. Robbie said, he reminds me of someone that a friend of mine once said could never decide whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus or B'nai B'rith.

Why didn't you stand up and say, hey, hey, I'm the guy. I know more about this than any person in the world. I wrote the book. You should buy my book. Here I am.

And the guys with the white coats would come in and carry me away, right? You must have felt that, though. You must feel that you're maybe.

it wasn't Einstein that Robert Oppenheimer went to see when they thought about maybe we'll blow up the atmosphere. It was one of the lead scientists, administrators of the program. But that's all right. Who would know? Einstein was never a part of the Manhattan Project, which most people don't realize.

The government was afraid that he would blow the whistle on the whole thing, as he'd been a pacifist in the First World War. And so he never got a security clearance.

I think Oppenheimer was. I mean, first of all, we would never have had an atomic bomb before the end of the war without his work and the work of his team at Los Alamos. When they discovered that the plutonium that was coming out of the big reactors in Hanford, Washington, was contaminated with isotopes of plutonium, such that if you tried to fire one piece up the barrel of a cannon, even at 3,000 feet per second, a 12-foot cannon, the piece would melt down before that matched the piece up. In other words, you'd have a fizzle. And it wouldn't be of any great consequence, a few hundred tons of TNT at most.

When they learned that, he was so depressed, he almost resigned from his job and took all his friends around him to say, Robert, you can't resign. You've got to stay on this. And then he reorganized the entire laboratory around this problem. And they solved it in time, invented whole new technologies. The entire construction industry today uses shape charges to blow up buildings, those wonderful, elegant buildings that we see going down directly right on top of themselves.

That's a company I once wrote a story about. But they used the kind of shape charge materials that were developed in order to find a way to make a bomb work with plutonium. So they did all of these things. He was pretty sardonic about what they were doing. He once said, we didn't do any physics between 1939 and 1945..

It was very high-level engineering. But to pull all these people together, I interviewed Edward Teller, who was one of Robert Oppenheimer's mortal enemies, because Oppenheimer wouldn't let him go off and build hydrogen bombs when they were working on the atomic bomb. I interviewed Teller in a very contentious little interview. Teller finally threw me out of his house. But at one point, he said, all right, I will let you ask me three questions, and only three questions.

He had a deep Hungarian accent. And one of the questions that I asked him was, what did you think of Robert Oppenheimer as the laboratory director? And I thought I'd get all sorts of wonderful spew about what a horrible human being he was. Instead, Teller looked at me and said, Robert Oppenheimer was the best lab director I ever knew. And I thought, oh, this whole interview was worth that one sentence.

And it was. If he thought that, then Oppenheimer's success at Los Alamos, which was something that was possible because he was so broadly humanistic, a human being. He was a poet. He learned Sanskrit, so he could read the Bhagavad Gita and the original Sanskrit. He read widely in literature.

As well as science. He was astute about understanding other people's psychology. And all these qualities came together. He was also someone who played roles all the time. I think it was Robbie who said he liked to play games.

And I didn't mind. I enjoyed it. It was fun. Meaning. he liked to pretend to be something else than he was.

Characters, if you will. And it's pretty clear that when he got the job of becoming director of Los Alamos, he said to himself, I'm going to be the best director there ever was, and took on that role. For example, Hans Bethe, who is one of the most lovely, equitable, level human beings I've ever met in my life. He said, you know, Robert could really be sharp tongued if you made a mistake before the war. And of course, we all make mistakes.

So, of course, you were at the other end of this at some time or another. And he said he was that way after the war. But he wasn't that.

But by then he'd been attacked so many times that he was convinced that anything he said that was extendable enough, extensible enough that you could cut it and re-edit it. That's what people would do to him. So he decided he would say, how many minutes of airtime will I actually have on your show? And typically for Teller, you know, three minutes. He'd say, well, then I will give you exactly three minutes of my time.

Ask me your questions. So he really couldn't edit. Yeah. Right. So I came in with the book.

Well, Looking for America, the book you have. I came in with looking. I had sent him that as a sort of. I'm not going to write bad stuff.

I do a lot of work on Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb and so on. I was reading a book of this book of your essays and came upon this extraordinary passage on Oppenheimer and just thought not only is that good history, but that is really, really good writing. So then I read the rest of this book, this lovely book, 1978, I think you published it. So you were a child at that time. Basically, there's an essay on Edward Kennedy, the last of the Kennedys, and about the sort of psychological burden of being Edward Kennedy.

There's this thing on Gerald Ford and a really beautiful essay on Oppenheimer, a lovely essay on the Mississippi River. Then you wrote an essay about the deep throat Linda Lovelace trial in Memphis. And it's felt there that you were sort of channelizing a little of your H.L. Mencken. That was really, because you start by talking about it as a circus act.

And I mean, my family and I, we were buying the finest steaks in town. And the pay was good. And I was really struggling then to support myself with magazine writing on a monthly basis. So Playboy was a godsend at that time. And I did a lot of different stories for them.

But the deep throat story, their editors followed a practice that some editors do, as you know, which is sometimes to cross a sign. I wrote a piece about the early years of the cocaine epidemic. And I don't use drugs at all. I mean, my drug was alcohol for many years, and I finally put it away. But I certainly wasn't in the cocaine business.

The one time I did cocaine for the story, I felt like I'd done too many cups of coffee. That was about all I got out of it. But they were a good place to work, whatever people think of the.

Really abusive. I was 30 pounds underweight at the age of 12 when I entered the boys home. Again, 30 pounds in three months on all this wonderful farm food that we grew.

. There was almost no social structure for abused children in those days. Years later, when I went back to the court to be released from its control as an 18-year-old, the social worker who had handled our case came up to me and said, you know, we didn't know what to do with you two boys. After all, you had two parents, she said. That was evidently the standard.

But she said you were both so obviously starved. That's what saved us.

This was at a Senate hearing. What about all the children who die from polluted milk? And the doctor said, well, that's God's will, isn't it?