Mitt Romney–Prep School Bully

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Evening Update: In the most disturbing eyewitness report yet, a Mitt Romney classmate involved in the assault on John Lauber has told ABC,

“’It’s a haunting memory. I think it was for everybody that spoke up about it. . .because when you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye you never forget it. And that was what we all walked away with,’ said Phillip Maxwell, who is now an attorney and still considers Romney an old friend. ‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ said Maxwell, of the anecdote first reported by the Washington Post. Maxwell said Romney held the scissors helping to cut the hair of a student, John Lauber, who was presumed to be gay and who had long hair. ‘It was a hack job. . . clumps of hair taken off.’ Asked if he has any doubt that what Romney did could be considered bullying, Maxwell responded, ‘Oh my god, are you kidding?. . .  I castigated myself regularly for not having intervened. I would have felt a lot better about myself had I said ‘hey, enough.’ When I saw the look on his [Lauber’s] face, it was a look I’ll never forget,” said Maxwell. ‘When you see a victim, the sense of trust betrayed in this boy who was perfectly innocent for being different. This was bullying supreme,’ he said.”
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Afternoon Update: This situation has gotten murkier all day, with Romney’s spokesperson (in my initial post below) denying that the candidate had any recollection of such an incident, then Romney himself later saying he didn’t at the time think of the classmate as gay, but implying that he did indeed know and remember him. He continues to say he doesn’t recall this incident, though he adds he won’t “argue” with the report of it. And while the Romney campaign is reportedly trying to arrange for former classmates of his to vouch for him, the only one contacted so far is still deciding whether or not he’s going to speak on behalf of Mitt’s campaign. Then there is one former classmate, quoted here via ABC who the campaign will probably not be asking for a character reference:

“One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s–who refused to be identified by name–said there are ‘a lot of guys’ who went to Cranbrook who have ‘really negative memories’ of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as ‘evil’ and ‘like Lord of the Flies.’ The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember [the hair-cutting incident]. ‘It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful. For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true. How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?’ the former classmate said.”

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“Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
‘He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!’ an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled. A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another.”

That is the opening of a lengthy bombshell article by Jason Horowitz in today’s Washington Post about the abusive and appalling treatment he reports Mitt Romney led against classmate John Lauber in 1965.  Before going to press Horowitz asked Romney’s campaign for comment:

“His campaign spokeswoman said the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident. ‘Anyone who knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body,’ Andrea Saul said in a statement. ‘The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.’”

The nearly 5500-word article seems to be meticulously sourced and carefully reported, though I’m sure Romney allies and rightwingers will attack the reporter and the Post. Still, with five classmates remembering the incident so vividly, all looking back on it with deep regret, I predict this denial will be assailed until the campaign–or even the candidate himself–is forced to come up with a more believable response. The image of Mitt Romney rallying a veritable ‘lynch mob’ to forcibly pin down their classmate and make him submit to a sadistic and weird kind of de-feminizing of his supposedly effeminate affectation–his hair that swooped over an eye–is sick and disgusting, especially when contrasted with President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality yesterday.

Apart from the possible political repercussions from this story, it is also very sad. The effects of this incident in Lauber’s life echoed down through the years. While Romney suffered no discipline for his deeds at “the famously strict” Cranbrook, Lauber was expelled prior to graduation, for smoking a cigarette. He died in 2004. I suspect I’ll be updating this post and commenting again on the story as it develops. For now, I urge you to take the time to read the disturbing article.

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Warding off a Zealous Censor of Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”

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With the news of  Maurice Sendak’s sad passing today, I’ve been reminded of a brush with intolerance that I experienced many years ago, when one of his most popular books unexpectedly became an issue with a censorious customer.

When I worked in my family’s Cleveland bookstore, Undercover Books, the children’s book section was not my strong suit. I was responsible for ordering our adult books and shelving and merchandising them in their separate sections of the bookstore.

While I looked after the adult books, my sister Pamela ordered all our kids books and worked on the best ways to display them, including the type of merchandise that I regarded skeptically—board books, plush books, sticker books, scratch & sniff books, etc. Pam knew these titles and their authors best, and had a far better knack than I of finding a particular thin-spined book when a customer came in asking for a specific title, as they often did. She had it all over me in this department, and also on our brother Joel—whose chief responsibilities included future business planning and working on the main sales floor, waiting on customers face to face—and our parents Earl and Sylvia, who handled myriad duties such as bank deposits and bill-paying, as well as minding the cash register and waiting on regulars and walk-ins. But when it came to helping a grandmother, relative, or family friend seeking a book for a little one, or a middle-grader, the call often went out for Pam. But she couldn’t be available at all times and I recall she sometimes just wearied of being summoned for this often challenging duty. Grown-ups were so often unsure what a child might like they could take a really long time deciding on a gift book to buy, even after many offerings had been shown them. So, every now and then I would be pressed into duty to take care of a customer who simply had to buy a children’s book.

One such occasion arose one day in the early 1980s, when a rather elderly woman customer who I recognized from a previous visit to our store, a Mrs. Stewart, came in and without hesitation asked if we had Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. She was emphatic in saying she wanted to purchase it, in fact, she said, “I want to buy all the copies you have.” I blanched, worrying if I’d be able to find a copy, or multiple copies if we had them—we always hated to miss a multiple copy sale if we could avoid doing so. There was something weird about Mrs. Stewart’s nervous energy, but it didn’t stop me from feeling satisfaction when I quickly put my hands on a copy, and established with certainty that it was our last one. Mrs. Stewart had come back to the children’s section with me and I eagerly presented it to her, adding that it was unfortunately our only copy, though I added, we would certainly be ordering more. She grabbed it from me, a bit aggressively, and said, “I’m going to buy it so no one else can. You should not be selling this book. It shows a naked boy and his private parts. I want you to stop selling this book. You must not reorder it or sell it any longer!”

Suddenly recalling that on her earlier visit to the store Mrs. Stewart had asked for a fundamentalist tract that we didn’t carry, I realized that I had a kind of religious fanatic on my hands, with some essential human right suddenly at stake, the freedom to read. By this time I was highly agitated, and more than a bit angry at her high-handed claim to tell me what books we should sell in our bookstore. Wanting to get her out of the store as quickly as possible, and before she made a scene in front of other customers, as smoothly as I could manage I took the book from her hands—as if I were simply walking her back up to the cash wrap where she could complete her transaction—mumbling some indistinct nicety about the naked boy in the book. Reaching the register, which was almost to the front door, I changed my tone and said as forcefully as I could without actually yelling, “I won’t sell you this book, Mrs. Stewart, and I won’t allow you to tell me what books we should be selling, or what is proper for customers to buy. You’ll have to leave now, please.”

Realizing that in my gambit to get her out of the store, I had also taken from her hands what she considered to be this very offensive book, she reached to regain possession of it but by now I was behind the counter and handed the copy to my mother. Angry and frustrated, Mrs Stewart began yelling, repeating with horror in her tone, “The boy in that book is naked and you should not be it selling it. I must buy that book so no one else can!”

Again, trying to avoid yelling over her, I said, “I will not sell you this book. Our customers have a right to buy any of our books, and we will not stop carrying this book just because you don’t approve of it.” She took a long time to decide to leave, though eventually she saw that I wasn’t going to sell her the book under any circumstances. She never came in our store again.

Over the years that have followed—as a bookseller, and later as an editor and publisher and engaged literary citizen—I alway take note of Banned Books Week as it comes around on the calendar (this year it will be held September 30-October 6), when libraries and bookstores are encouraged to make displays of books that intolerant people have demanded be removed from library stacks and bookstore shelves. I wonder about the sort of person who would do this, and then think of Mrs. Stewart with her strident voice and straining neck muscles—determined to persuade me that we must not allow anyone else to buy Maurice Sendak’s picture book, lest they see little Mickey’s nakedness—the very face of intolerance.

July 11, 2021

As a postscript to the 2012 post of mine above, I want to share an image of a poster Maurice Sendak drew to support the American Booksellers Association Freedom to Read campaign in 1991. A copy of the poster was part of an exhibit and sale at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan that Ewan Turner and I attended yesterday at the invitation of children’s book scholar Michael Patrick Hearn. Note the many books labeled on it, from Catcher in the Rye to Native Son to The Giving Tree. His own In the Night Kitchen might’ve been on there, too, if old Mrs Stewart had had her way!

 

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#FridayReads, May 4-“Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland” & “Rifftide”

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#FridayReads Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, artist Joseph Remnant and editor Jeff Newelt’s posthumous publication of one of the late Pekar’s last manuscripts, lovingly assembled. Also, Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Joe Jones, as Told to Albert Murray, edited by Paul Devlin–Jones was longtime drummer in the Count Basie Band, a garrulous soul.

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Katherine Bradford at Edward Thorp Gallery–a Guest Post by Kyle Gallup

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My wife Kyle Gallup is a visual artist who also writes for LeftBankArtBlog. Her latest piece, published there on April 28, is on the New York painter Katherine Bradford, whose current exhibit at Edward Thorp Gallery is up through May 26. The work of Bradford’s shown to the left is “S.O.S., 2012.” I hope you enjoy reading Kyle’s review here as a guest post and if you’re able to, get out and see Katherine Bradford’s paintings at the gallery.

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Treasuring Early Natural History Books

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Always happy to see a story involving my old hometown Cleveland’s book culture–Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly reports that an 1886 book of natural history and ornithology, Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, a copy of which was discovered in 1995 in the library of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is now being republished by Princeton Architectural Press. PAP’s catalog listing for the book shows that the new edition has been retitled  America’s Other Audubon by Joy Kiser, the librarian who found one of twenty-five remaining copies of the rare book.

The author, Genevieve Jones, an amateur naturalist of her day, was inspired to create the book after seeing Audubon’s Birds of America paintings at the World’s Fair of 1876. She created sixty-eight original lithographs in making her book, which contemporaries described as “the most beautiful book ever produced in America.” Sadly, Jones died before it was finished and her family labored seven years to see to its completion, then underwriting printing and selling it by subscription. Only 90 copies were produced, and among the subscribers were Theodore Roosevelt and President Rutherford Hayes.

I love old natural history books, such as The Journal of A Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion, to which H.G. Wells contributed an Introduction upon its publication in 1919–a few months before the author died of multiple sclerosis at age thirty. Two sample entries from Barbellion’s youth, January 3, 1903: “Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing 0n ‘How Cats Spend their Time.'” and March 18, “Our Goldfinch roosts at 5:30. Joe’s kitten is a very small one. ‘Magpie’ is its name.”  I have an old Penguin copy of the book and a reprint published in 1989. Then there’s Fishes: Their Journeys and Migrations by Louis Roule, originally published in 1933, which I republished as a Kodansha Globe title in 1996, with a new Introduction by George Reiger of Field & Stream magazine. A reviewer of the original edition wrote, “Will please the nature student, the Izaak Walton enthusiast, or the reader who delights in believe-it-or-nots.” Living in an age of diminishing biological diversity with an accelerating pace of extinction, it is important to be aware of species and varieties that used to be common and are no more, or increasingly scarce, and I treasure these books for aiding that effort, decades after they were first published. That’s kind of miraculous.

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Continuing to Correct Politico and Drudge

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Some readers of this blog will have noticed yesterday that an incorrectly reported Politico story–about Barack Obama as author of Dreams From My Father–which was then inflated on the Drudge Report in to a bogus “Obama lied” meme, led to me being quoted in TPM’s story on the dust-up, because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996. The TPM story ran under the headline, “‘Dreams From My Father’ Publisher: Drudge, Politico Obama Hits Bunk.”

And now today, Craig Silverman–who in 2007 published a book with me, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Our Free Speech –writes about this situation on his blog, where he covers media mistakes and corrections, in a column, How Politico can fix its mistake about Obama book. In his piece, Craig does an excellent job taking away useful lessons from the episode that all media people and news orgs should consider following, especially on how to handle the aftermath of a mistake. For media people who care about preventing errors, and the misinformation and harm that flow from them, I urge you to heed Craig’s constructive advice.

For the record, I’ve also written about correcting the Politico error and the Drudge amplification of it here, and earlier wrote about publishing Dreams From My Father here.

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Correcting Politico and Drudge on “Dreams From My Father”

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Happy to be quoted at length in this TPM story by Brian Beutler about the erroneous reporting by Politico, which mistakenly reported today that Barack Obama had failed in the earliest editions of Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance to acknowledge that he created composite characters in the book. I know otherwise because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996, as I have written on this blog. I contacted TPM this afternoon to correct the record on the needlessly murky situation created by the false report that originated with today’s Politico story by Dylan Byers, then amplified on the Drudge Report. You may click on the TPM story or read it below.

A former executive of the original paperback publisher of President Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father weighed in on Wednesday’s manufactured controversy over whether Obama represented fiction as fact by using composite characters in his autobiography.
“It is unfathomable to me how Dylan Byers of Politico could have overlooked the very plain disclaimer that the book carried from the very start,” Philip Turner said to TPM via email. Turner was an editorial executive with Kodansha America, which published the paperback version of Dreams from My Father in 1996.
“The reference to ‘compression’ appears on page ix of the Introduction of the book I published then, which I have on my desk as I write this message,” Turner says. “What’s more, the 1996 paperback was an exact reprint with no changes of the hardcover edition that had been published a year earlier….” (emphasis added).
The fact that Obama used composite characters in his memoir — and that he disclosed this in the book’s introduction — was widely known before it was mentioned again in an excerpt from David Maraniss’ upcoming Obama biography, published Wednesday in Vanity Fair. It even featured prominently in a 2007 story by Politico’s top political reporter Mike Allen.
But on Wednesday, Politico published a story that made no reference to the disclaimer, suggesting Obama had misled his own readers. That piece has since been appended with a correction, but still reads as an indictment of the President.
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For the record, this is the entire comment I sent to TPM which they quote from above:

As the first paperback publisher of “Dreams From My Father,” in 1996, I feel obliged to confirm everything in the above TPM story by Benjy Sarlin. The reference to “compression” appears on page ix of the Introduction of the book I published then, which I have on my desk as I write this message. What’s more, the 1996 paperback was an exact reprint with no changes of the hardcover edition that had been published a year earlier. For the record, I was editor-in-chief of Kodansha America then, and we acquired the rights to publish the book from Random House, whose imprint Times Books had done the hardcover. In the early 2000s Kodansha’s license to publish the paperback expired and rights reverted to Random House. Their Three Rivers Press imprint republished it in paperback in 2004 with a new preface by the author, and yet his original Introduction, with the disclaimer about “compression” remained in the book then.

It is unfathomable to me how Dylan Byers of Politico could have overlooked the very plain disclaimer that the book carried from the very start. I wonder if commenter @wpilderback isn’t right in his explanation below: “This was an opportunity for them to remind people that Obama slept with a white woman, and nothing more.” Even if Byers just made a stupid and avoidable mistake, I’m sure Drudge was only too happy to perpetuate the error.       

For readers interested in further information on the paperback edition I published, I refer you to a personal essay I published last month on my blog The Great Gray Bridge, via this link:  http://philipsturner.com/2012/03/11/dreams-father-circa-1995-96/

 

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The Obama Campaign, Punching Early and Hard

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So much political news the past few days, much of it about the anniversary of the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, and I’ve linked to some excellent pieces on that below*. Meantime, I really like how aggressively the #Obama2012 campaign is setting out to define Romney. While the Bin Laden dust-up is getting more coverage, yesterday there was this ad that ended with the line, It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account, and now today it’s backed up with this infographic I saw on TPM showing Mitt’s foreign investment holdings. One hopes that at least some press people will be asking Romney’s people about these offshore accounts, and keep them on turf they’d rather not have to defend.

Mitt had such lousy opponents in the Republican primary that I detect he and his campaign are ill-prepared for what’s going to hit them in terms of coordinated opposition messages, one layered on top of another.  The copy below is straight from the Obama-Biden website, as is the graphic whose name on the jpeg is “Romney_World Map”. 

Mitt Romney has invested his money around the world, from the Cayman Islands to Ireland to Australia. We don’t know if he’s using these accounts to avoid paying his fair share in taxes, but we do know that in 2010, Romney’s tax rate was a startlingly low 13.9%. This means Romney pays a lower tax rate than many teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other middle-class Americans—even a lower rate than most other millionaires.
If elected, Romney’s proposed tax plan would cut tax rates for the wealthy even further—cutting his own taxes and protecting loopholes that he benefits from. At the same time, he opposes the President’s Buffett Rule, which would require millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. That’s not right.

Another salutary benefit of this early aggressiveness will be to energize the DEM base, which will be delighted to see the campaign’s determination to play rough–accurate and tough. For sure, there will be people in the press who decry this aggression, but as Josh Marshall has repeatedly pointed out with his bitch-slap theory of politics, if you can make your opponent look weak, or even, in old-fashioned gender terms, “un-man him,” you’re on the way to winning your race. I’m still worried about the enormous amount of Super-Pac spending that is going to be thrown against the president (and other DEMs) but there’s no question which candidate is running the better campaign at this point.

*See this collection of excellent journalism and commentary from the past couple days:

1) David Corn’s excellent tick-tock on the Bin Laden raid and the president’s decision to launch it. PBO is a cool customer. Read this and I think you’ll see what I mean.

2) Rick Ungar’s piece on forbes.com, about what he believes is the bad character revealed by Mitt’s cheap “Jimmy Carter” shot. What’s more, I would add, it undercut his supposed point. It was stupid politics, while revealing a bad heart, at least over this.

3) James Fallows up-close recollection of President Carter’s failed raid to free the American hostages in Iran, and why Romney got the point so wrong.

4) And two pieces, one by Jed Lewison in Daily Kos, and the other by Michael Hirsh in National Journal, about the real politicization of 9/11, including Mitt’s appearance today in lower Manhattan with Rudy Giuliani.

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