“…I have Israel's back”

After Muhammad, the founder of Islam, died in 632 A.D. there was a dispute over who should succeed him. The secular leadership (Caliphate) of Islam was given to Muhammad’s father-in-law, although many believed it should have passed to his purportedly chosen successor and son-in-law Ali. Those who chose to follow Ali called themselves Shia Ali – or “Partisans of Ali” – whose shortened form is Shiite.

Ali did in fact become the fourth Caliph, but among Shiites he is considered to be the first Imam or spiritual leader and was believed to be endowed with infallibility. Ali was murdered and thereafter eleven generations of Imams descended from him. Curiously, each of these Imams were also killed either by poison or murder except the 12th. Upon each Imam’s death his role and title passed to his son in hereditary succession. However, the 12th Imam was five years of age when the title passed to him, and while he was not murdered, he did disappear in 872 A.D. Shiites believe he has never died. Since his disappearance, they believe he has been living in the “occultation” – an eschatological belief among Shiites that the 12th Imam will reappear when Allah decides and will come in the form of a messiah-like figure called the Mahdi. Upon his reappearance, the 12th Imam al-Mahdi will rule the world for a certain number of years, during which he will establish Islam as the global religion and restore peace. Jesus will be a subordinate ruler at his side and this will continue until the Judgment Day arrives. 

Shiites make up 15% of all Muslims, but 90% of Iranians are Shiite and 80% are Twelvers – i.e. believers in 12th Imam eschatology. Twelvers believe that the 12th Imam currently directs the lives of chosen ones. The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Twelver as is his mentor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, was also a Twelver.

When Ahmadinejad spoke before the UN in 2005, shortly after becoming Iran’s president, he ended his address with a prayer calling for the return of the Mahdi – the 12^th Imam. In a later meeting with a senior conservative ayatollah, he was filmed speaking about that UN address. That film circulated within Iran as a DVD and was on the Internet where a copy was made and broadcast by the Public Broadcasting System in December 2005. A translation of Ahmadinejad’s remarks reveals his belief that he is one of the chosen ones and thus is being guided by the 12^th Imam:

On the last day when I was speaking before the assembly, one of our group told me that when I started to say "In the name of God the almighty and merciful," he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself.

I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink. When I say they didn't bat an eyelid, I'm not exaggerating because I was looking at them. And they were rapt.

It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic.

In speeches within Iran since his presidency, Ahmadinejad has said that the main mission of the Islamic Revolution is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam, which Twelvers believe will happen in a worldwide apocalypse of catastrophic proportion – i.e. war, economic chaos, and social upheaval. The Twelvers believe that it is their duty to hasten the return of the Mahdi by creating the apocalyptic chaos. This is the prism though which we must listen and understand the rhetoric of Iran’s anti-American and anti-Israel threats.

Throughout the Cold War years, the US and Soviet relied on mutually assured destruction to deter a nuclear war between them. Whichever side launched a nuclear attack could be assured that the other side would get enough nuclear missiles in the air to accomplish mutual destruction. Although Israel has several hundred nuclear missiles that would surely spearhead a retaliatory response to an Iranian nuclear attack, mutually assured destruction does not deter Iran. Its leaders and the proponents of its nuclear weaponry are not intimidated by a nuclear response from Israel or the US because nuclear war would pave the way for the return of the 12^th Imam.

Obviously, then, the time to strike Iran is before it is able to retaliate – before it has nuclear weaponry. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, certainly knows that. His Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has publicly warned that Iran will soon enter a “zone of immunity” in which foreign attack will be futile. Iran is furiously excavating the interior of mountainous over-cover – hardly the act of a nation interested in peaceful uses of nuclear energy as it often claims. “Attacks” by unknown sources have so far relied on computer bugs, explosions, and the assassination of four scientists working in Iran’s nuclear program. These interventions have delayed nuclear progress but not crippled it.

Last week, Netanyahu visited the US to meet with Obama. He no doubt hoped he could persuade the President that further threatening rhetoric by either of them was fruitless. Warnings, sanctions, and diplomacy haven’t worked and aren’t likely to work because Iran’s leaders believe that the American people don’t want another war after Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet without a line in the sand there is nothing that will give the Iranian leadership pause about the risk of continuing their program. When President Bush invaded Iraq and warned them that they were next, Iran suspended their program. This president doesn’t worry them.

But Netanyahu’s hope that meeting with Obama would focus on an honest assessment of the growing threat of a nuclear Iran was delusional. For Obama it was just another whistle stop in his reelection campaign.

The invitation for a White House meeting had been extended a month earlier when representatives of the administration traveled to Israel to discuss Iran and try to persuade Israel from acting unilaterally. When Netanyahu arrived on American soil hoping he could get Obama to ratchet up his resolve, what he found was Obama’s public relations spin machine running wide open. Obama was determined he would not take another drubbing like the one Netanyahu gave him last May. (See my blog Netanyahu Scores; Obama Bombs, May 28, 2011).

Before meeting with Netanyahu, Obama was scheduled to speak to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Therefore in full campaign mode, he invited AIPAC officials to a White House visit before the speech to complain that he wasn’t getting credit for all of the pro-Israel initiatives he’d instigated. Moreover, the White House spin machine had arranged an unprecedented 45-minute meeting for Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine – notably a pro-Democrat journal – to interview the President. Predictably, it consisted mostly of softball questions. Read the interview for yourself. It’s online.

The pressure Obama applied to Netanyahu last May to move back to the 1967 borders cost him Jewish support, and with the election just nine months away, he is scrambling to win back Jewish voters and donors.  His comments to the AIPAC audience of 13,000 were intended to show what a friend of Israel he is. Yet as he took the stage, he was initially met with a lukewarm reception by the audience. Among many things, he asserted that as president, “I have provided critical funding to deploy the Iron Dome system that has intercepted rockets that might have hit homes and hospitals and schools [along the Lebanese border.]” This is untrue; Congress funded the Iron Dome system under the leadership of Senator Mark Kirk during the Bush administration.

The Obama speech was filled with the usually-abundant usage of the personal pronoun “I” along with untruths and half-truths. But refuting them one by one is not my aim in this blog. The speech was an appeal to Jewish Americans. Whether Obama succeeded in winning them back depends on his audience’s command of the facts.

The meeting between Obama and Netanyahu followed the Sunday speech – a speech in which Obama made not one laudatory remark about his guest on the following day. Not one. And yet he was effusive in his comments about Shimon Peres who holds the largely ceremonial office of Israel’s President and accompanied the Netanyahu legation

Obama and Netanyahu clearly don’t like each other. An open microphone recently caught Obama’s sentiments in a meeting with France’s President Sarkozy: “I can’t stand Netanyahu,” Sarkozy said, “he’s a liar.” “You’re tired of him,” Obama complained, “what about me? I have to deal with him every day.”

In Jeffrey Goldberg’s well-publicized interview, he asked Obama, “Are you friends? Do you talk about things other than business?” Obama’s response is revealing:

You know, the truth of the matter is, both of us have so much on our plates that there's not always a lot of time to have discussions beyond business. Having said that, what I think is absolutely true is that the prime minister and I come out of different political traditions. This is one of the few times in the history of US-Israeli relations where you have a government from the right in Israel at the same time you have a center-left government in the United States, and so I think what happens then is that a lot of political interpretations of our relationship get projected onto this.

One recent political interpretation didn’t need much interpreting. At a conference last month in Tunis, Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State, was asked by a Tunisian student why Obama panders to “Zionist lobbies.” Fair question, she said, and added that during an election season "a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention." Does that mean politicians lie in order to get votes? Can the pro-Israel proclamations from a politician running for reelection be trusted? And why didn’t Clinton dispute the premise of the student’s question?

In his interview for The Atlantic, Goldberg asked Obama, “Do you think [the Iranian leaders] are messianic? Listen to Obama’s response:

I think it's entirely legitimate to say that this is a regime that does not share our worldview or our values. I do think, and this is what General Dempsey was probably referring to, that as we look at how they operate and the decisions they've made over the past three decades, that they care about the regime's survival. They're sensitive to the opinions of the people and they are troubled by the isolation[sanctions] that they're experiencing.

Does Obama really think a fanatical end-of-the-world eschatology is a worldview? That our differences are just their “values” versus ours? Does he really believe that the Iranian leaders care one whit about the survival of their regime if it brings the return of the 12^th Imam? Does he really believe that Iran’s leaders are “sensitive to the opinions of the people” – some of which are dying in their putrid jails? America is confronted with maniacs in Iran and we have a president who is lost in space!

As Netanyahu watches the nuclear clock tick down in Iran, he has to be concerned with how reliable an ally he has in Obama during an election year – or afterward, for that matter. Since Obama needs the Jewish vote he can say things like "There should not be a shred of doubt by now: When the chips are down, I have Israel's back," as he did in his AIPAC speech. Will a reelected Obama make the same assertion?

If Israel doubts that Obama will take the tacitly promised military action when sanctions and diplomacy fail – and they will surely fail – Israeli leaders have two options. They can accept a nuclear Iran, which means other countries in the Middle East will also “go nuclear” and that would likely be the end of Israel in the neighborhood. Or Israel could go it alone and strike as it did against Iraq and Syria. Regardless of the success of an Iranian attack, it would roil the Middle East and spike gas prices – not good for an incumbent in an election year.

If Israel goes it alone, Obama is caught in a bind. In his AIPAC speech he acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself. He could hardly then take a stand against Israel’s actions, and he would be hard-pressed to deny help to Israel if he was asked. Yet he would not give Netanyahu the “red line” he wanted – i.e. a clear set of conditions that Iran could not misinterpret as the military option trigger. After all, it’s an election year and Team Obama seems more focused on deterring Israel than stopping Iran’s march toward a nuclear bomb. That message should have been loud and clear to Netanyahu. I think it was.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Eyal Gabbai, the former director general of the Israeli Prime Minister's office, said Netanyahu's meeting with Obama "will be the last time they can speak face-to-face before a decision is taken.” What does that mean?

Is Israel poised to strike? Would it strike only nuclear weapon facilities, some of which are target-hardened? Would it target Iran’s unprotected electrical grid and infrastructure, paralyzing its economy? Both?

If Israel were to succeed in destroying critical weapon-making assets, they would be rebuilt. No doubt Russia and China would help in the effort. Even if Iran’s program is set back for years, it won’t be set back permanently. The only thing that would bring about a permanent solution is regime change.

Moreover, there are an estimated 200,000 missiles in the countries surrounding Israel – in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran and those in the hands of Hamas in Gaza. An attack on Iran would surely bring those missiles raining down on Israel. The war would therefore widen to include those countries. China and Russia would at least be Iran’s allies in the conflagration as arms suppliers. The US could not sit on the sidelines when its only ally in the Middle East is under such an attack.

Given the risk of counter-attack and understanding Iran’s apocalyptic 12^th Imam theology, why would Israel limit its objective to disabling nuclear facilities when regime change is the only permanent solution – assuming there is a solution short of mutually assured destruction? Israel’s destruction is virtually assured if Iran gets a bomb. Why would the Israeli leaders wait on a dithering president in a reelection campaign whose loyalty to the historic relationship between our two countries is suspect?

What Obama succeeded in accomplishing in his meeting with Netanyahu last week was to convince the Prime Minister that whatever America’s ally in the Middle East decides to do, Obama will know nothing about it until it’s underway.

James Q. Wilson’s Broken Windows

The era of the 1960s was marked by an unpopular war in Vietnam, social unrest in the country, and an increasing crime rate in the cities. Although Barry Goldwater made crime an issue in the 1964 presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson, who was running to hold on to the presidency he assumed after the Kennedy assassination, declared crime to be a state issue. The federal government didn’t have the power – nor should it have – to fight crime, candidate Johnson said.

And yet 47 years ago this week, President Johnson, in a pontifical message to Congress, announced the formation of a federal Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. It would be composed, he wrote, of “men and women of distinction who share my belief that we need to know far more about the prevention and control of crime.” With typical Johnsonian hubris, he declared:

No agency of government has ever in our history undertaken to probe so fully and deeply into the problems of crime in our nation. I do not underestimate the difficulty of the assignment. But the very difficulty which these problems present and the staggering cost of inaction make it imperative that this task be undertaken.

Two years later the commission had consumed the efforts of 19 commissioners, 63 staff members, 175 consultants, and “hundreds” of advisers according to the Summary of its report entitled The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. Like the work product of most federal government commissions, the recommendations of this one were little more than platitudes, clichés, and slogans which were not actionable, measurable, or related to crime prevention. Very little of the Commission’s work was analytical – i.e. translating data into meanings. Instead, expert opinion replaced an analysis of hard facts. And a good deal of that was in the form of “feel good” theories about the root causes of criminal behavior – poverty, racism, broken homes, poor education – and unproven assertions, such as the ineffectiveness of incarceration as a crime deterrent. That last argument has always been a puzzle to me, since incarcerated criminals are obviously deterred from preying on society.

The flaws in the Commission’s report did not escape the notice of a young Harvard political scientist – the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Government – James Q. Wilson. Professor Wilson’s expertise was public administration, most notably criminality. He was far brighter than anyone on the Commission or the incumbent in the White House. Writing in the Fall 1967 edition of The Public Interest (which today is National Affairs) Dr. Wilson mused:

Despite the widespread popular concern with "crime in the streets," the report of the President's Crime Commission … is not likely to be a best-seller. In this, it will be no different from the report of most other blue-ribbon commissions, and for the same reasons: it offers no "solution" to the problem and it provides no convenient answers to the question of what we might do short of solving it.

His article continued:

That famous but anonymous person – the "reasonable man" or the "intelligent layman" – would, I suppose, have some rather obvious questions about crime in America. He would want to know how much crime there is, whether there is more or less today than twenty years ago, what could be done to reduce or prevent it, and how criminals could best be handled to reduce the chance of their causing more mischief. In getting the answers to those questions, he would expect to be told whether we need more policemen; whether foot patrolmen are (as he supposes) better than motorized officers; whether the laws should not be changed to make arrests and interrogations easier for the police; whether the probation and parole system is working and, if it is not or if the issue is in doubt, whether "tougher sentences" should be handed out; how much police "brutality" there is and what can be done about it; whether capital punishment is of value; and how we can get rid of the drug addicts. These, at least, are the subjects of most editorial and political speeches on the subject of crime … [yet] the reader will have to search diligently for answers to these questions [in the Commission’s report.]  

Out of the 200 recommendations produced by the labors of the Commission, Wilson complained, only six were about making the streets safer. In contrast, 25 were devoted to assuring that the criminal was treated fairly by the police and courts. More than a few recommendations focused on rehabilitating the criminal while in the detention system. Some recommendations were mental mush like “hire better people, pay higher salaries, require more training, collect more information.” Of this burlesque of real thinking, Wilson wrote:

The lay reader might respond, "yes, of course, but what do we do tomorrow morning that will reduce the chance of my wife having her purse snatched by some punk on the way to the supermarket?" Not much, it appears.

My purpose here is not to revisit the shortcomings of a musty government report, but rather to reveal the brilliant mind and thought of James Q. Wilson who died last week from leukemia. His grasp of what the Commission should have produced versus what it did produce is classic Wilson. Last month the American Enterprise Institute gathered to honor his intellect by establishing the James Q. Wilson Chair in American Politics and Culture. Arthur Brooks, the President of the AEI, assured the audience that future occupants of the Chair would “share Jim’s commitment to the highest standards of empirical research …” – standards visibly lacking in the Johnson Commission’s findings.

Following encomiums by George Will and Charles Murray, no intellectual pygmies themselves, Jim Wilson took the podium to a standing ovation, recalling that last time everyone stood up while he was in a room was in recognition of an archbishop who standing behind him. His acceptance speech was devoted to the rationale for the AEI, which he concluded by saying:

… if you do good research on how the world really works, if you have the right data and the right assumptions, and you make the right arguments, and (even) if you do this in a nonpartisan and objective way, it will lead in the great majority of cases to conservative conclusions, because good research amplifies that the world operates, when it operates successfully, on principles that conservatives embrace. It reinforces our commitment to free enterprise, personal freedom, and military strength.

Yes, Jim Wilson was a conservative thinker, but he was not an ideologue. The arguments displayed in the sweep of his oeuvre – criminality, education, welfare, human character, and morality among them – were anchored in hard data, solid facts, and evidence-driven experience because those qualities were required to comprehend the complex and often unpredictable real world in which his ideas produced policies. In an interview years ago he contrasted ideology and sound thinking:

I know my political ideas affect what I write, but I’ve tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I’ve written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn’t know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.

Perhaps nowhere among his written work is sound thinking more evident than the article for which he is best known – “Broken Windows” – which appeared in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic magazine. It is online and well worth reading.

Wilson had observed that the role of police gradually changed over time from maintaining order to fighting crime. This shift had begun in the early 1960s when the crime wave coincided with social unrest of that era, but Johnson’s “war on crime” gave the role transformation its impetus and even accelerated it. All of the strategies of the Johnson Commission and other schools of thought about policing failed because they overlooked an obvious fact – any behavior that is tolerated provides an incentive for it to be repeated – often on a larger scale. As Wilson expressed it “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” Negative behaviors that are not confronted cause “disorderly streets” which leads to more disorderly behavior until community breaks down.

Wilson did not reach this conclusion in the vacuum of his research cube. He and his co-author, George L. Kelling, walked the streets with beat cops and rode in the cruisers with motorized patrols so that they could see with their own eyes the evidence that led them to conclude that criminals take their clues from the community’s tolerance for disorder. If drunks are only permitted to drink on side streets from containers in bags, the thoroughfares and intersections will remain clear for the community to use. A drunk who passes out on a main sidewalk is hustled off to jail for disorderly conduct. He is not allowed to sleep it off on the sidewalk. Gang meetings, drug dealings, and rowdy commotions are broken up. Graffiti is quickly removed. Broken windows are repaired. If these things are done, the streets are safe. If they are not done, disorder escalates.

Only by their personal observation were Wilson and Kelling able to see and understand that motorized patrolling was not as effective as walking a beat – contradicting “conventional wisdom.” These were black neighborhoods and the police were white. A police officer on foot cannot separate himself from the street people. He is accessible to talk to them and to be talked to by them. Police officers in cars are more likely to roll down the windows to talk with people than to get out of the car. There are many reasons to be seen talking to an officer on foot, whereas, walking up to a marked patrol car and speaking to its occupants through a window can earn the sobriquet “fink.”

When there is order on the streets, the community has a sense of ownership and self-policing. A purse-snatcher is more likely to be reported promptly and even identified. This kind of neighborhood behavior is rooted in a time before policing became an occupation. Protection against crime, fires, and animals was a community responsibility and was staffed by rotating volunteers. With the advent of police forces, neighborhoods began to think that protection was not their responsibility and the community suffered for it.

Community ownership also suffered with the advent of mobility. If the streets become intolerably disorderly, those who could afford it moved out. Unattached adults moved in. Abandoned property was damaged or destroyed. Criminal activity took over the streets. In a time before people had the option or means to move out of a community, they stayed and fought to preserve its values and safety. Disorderly behavior was not permitted in an immobile society and communities were more cohesive because of their intolerance.

But aggressive policing runs counter to the ideology of the liberal left for whom tolerance is a virtue. Against that mindset, Wilson made this compelling argument in “Broken Windows:”

This wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no one" – and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order – is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.

“Broken Windows” describes an experiment that confirmed its theoretical foundation. A car with its hood up and no license tag was purposely left on a street in the Bronx and a similar car was left on a street in Palo Alto, California. The Bronx car was set upon within ten minutes by a family – a father, mother, and a young son – who stole its radiator and battery. Within 24 hours everything of value had been taken, followed by random destruction of the car – windows were broken, upholstery was ripped, and parts were torn off. Most of the “vandals” were well-dressed white people in a black neighborhood.

The Palo Alto car fared better. It was essentially ignored for more than a week. Therefore, the researcher smashed the windshield with a sledgehammer. Within hours, the car was completely destroyed and overturned – again by well-dressed white people who otherwise acted quite respectably.

Like Johnson’s failed wars on poverty and racial discrimination, his war on crime also failed because it was ideologically rooted rather than grounded in experimentation, observation, and more experimentation, thereby yielding facts about how these things worked. But in 1994 Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York City and he appointed William Bratton as Police Commissioner. Both men were enlightened enough to admit that “crime fighting” was a failed policing strategy and that it was time to tack the crime wave differently. Policing would be done in accordance with the “Broken Windows” theory. The murder rate fell from 14.5 per 100,000 residents in 1990 to just 4.8 by 2002 when Giuliani left office – an astonishing reduction of two-thirds. Robberies, home break-ins, car theft all fell by similar amounts. As other municipalities adopted “Broken Windows,” they got similar results. Maintaining orderly streets won out over fighting crime.

Giuliani and Bratton took heat from the media and the left, which called their program an assault against the squeegee men. Squeegee men confronted motorists who had stopped at a light and cleaned their windshields, often without permission. Then they aggressively demanded payment. It was a shakedown racket that had been tolerated in the past. In time, motorists by-passed the area and its economy suffered. When squeegee men were no longer tolerated by the police – and they couldn’t move to another neighborhood because there was intolerance there also – the practice ceased and the neighborhood economy revived.

Wilson’s insightful intellect was not confined urban policy. Among the eulogies published upon news of his death was one in the Wall Street Journal entitled “James Q. Wilson in His Own Words.” It printed excerpts from his writings over the years. My favorite, "A Cure for Selfishness," was published in the Journal originally on March 26, 1997:

Perhaps the most powerful antidote to unfettered selfishness is property rights. If we are grazing cattle, we will conserve the land if we own it. If we are catching lobsters off the Maine coast, we can restrict over-fishing by allocating space to groups who informally "own" each space. If we want to conserve elephants, we should let people own the elephants. If we wish to water our rice in Bali, we do better if each village has ownership in a part of the water. If we want to conserve our country's oil reserves, we do better if the reserves are owned by firms than if the government "controls" the whole deposit.

The sheer common sense of his argument here is unimpeachable. Yet it runs counter to government policy which confiscates natural resources and holds them hostage to political ideology.

Wilson’s books and essay compilations are not well-known among mainstream readers. But they are gems of well-thought arguments. On Character is a collection of character essays and a good starting point for a new Wilson reader. But just as provocative is American Politics, Then & Now: And Other Essays or The Moral Sense, whose reviewer called it “the most significant reflection on this matter since Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Book reviews can’t get more effusive than that.

Wilson’s academic career was enviable. After leaving Harvard in 1987, he was the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at UCLA until 1997, and from 1998 to 2008 he was the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. In 2009 he became Distinguished Scholar in Boston College’s Department of Public Science and its first Senior Fellow at the College’s Gloria and Charles Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, the Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation, and a lifetime achievement award by the American Political Science Association.

In a memoriam published the day after he died, Arthur Brooks recalled their first meeting when Wilson appeared unannounced at Brooks’ Ph.D. dissertation defense. Brooks confessed that his dissertation could “surely compete for the most tiresome dissertation of all time.” Moreover, observing its length, one of Brooks’ thesis advisers deemed it “a refutation of the axiom that brevity is the soul of wit.”

Brooks, whose area of scholarship was also social science, was taken aback that someone as esteemed in their field as Wilson would care to hear him wax eloquent on the demand strategies for symphony orchestras. Only years later did he understand, as he came to know him better, that Jim Wilson was interested in everything. Life for him “was like a roadside curio shop, full of hidden and unrecognized intellectual treasures.”

Most of our neighborhoods are safer today because of an article written 30 years ago by James Q. Wilson, and those of us who engage in research and analysis in our careers could learn much from his probing intellect. For these gifts we owe him a debt of gratitude.

iJobs v.2.0

(… continued from last week)

When it came to the architecture of the Apple I and II and later the Macs, Jobs decided the operating system and applications should run only on Apple hardware. It was a strategic mistake. PCs had not yet become mainstream and that is always a dangerous time for technology developers because the format that the market will ultimately embrace is not yet known. Remember VHS and Betamax? They were not interchangeable and since more content could be stored on the larger, bulkier VHS, it became the ultimate winner. Betamax players became relics.

Jobs’ decision to stick with an integrated design left the door open to developers who pursued modular designs. For example, when IBM decided to introduce a PC, even though its management believed the company’s future was in mainframes, it had to get into the market fast because it was a latecomer. The PC development team was sequestered in Boca Raton, Florida and told to produce a product in one year. The IBM mainframe processor, operating system, hard drive, and applications couldn’t be quickly converted to work in its PC, so IBM chose a modular design. Intel provided its processor, several suppliers provided hard drives, and Microsoft created a GUI-based Windows operating system for IBM, reserving the right to sell it to other PC manufacturers. Ironically, the Apple operating system was superior to Microsoft, but it would only run on an Apple product, whereas the Microsoft operating system was adaptable to any PC. In time the Apple equivalent of a PC – the Mac – would garner only 5% of the market because of its vertically integrated design. Third-party printers and other peripherals also wouldn’t run on Macs because they couldn’t interface to Apple’s integrated design. The market quickly recognized the restrictions of the Apple and the flexibilities of other PCs. Apple lost.

Woz had anticipated that this would happen and wanted to sell his operating system to other PC producers from the outset, even though those producers would use it compete in the market against Apple. But even then, Apple would be successful because vendors and competitors would be using the Apple operating system. Instead, that advantage shifted to Microsoft. Unwittingly, Apple put Microsoft in business. Jobs – and later John Sculley who had come to Apple as its new CEO – recognized that the integrated architecture was a mistake.

Apple became a public company in the last month of 1980. About 300 people became millionaires, multimillionaires, and several venture capitalists became billionaires. Among them, at age 25, Jobs was a multimillionaire as was Woz, barely 30. But many who should have gotten stock before the public offering were left out. Some were old friends who went back to the days when Jobs and Woz were headquartered in the Jobs’ garage. Because he was by nature a generous person, Woz began giving some of his stock options to people he thought deserved them.

One of the people denied options was Daniel Kottke. He had been a college classmate of Jobs, gone to India with him when Jobs was searching for himself, and he had helped in early trade shows for the Apple II, manning a demo table and doing the grunt work. Kottke had been Jobs’ housemate for two years. He was truly upset that he hadn’t gotten stock options and, marching to Jobs’ office, tried to talk to him about it. But confronted by Jobs’ unblinking stare, Kottke broke down in tears, turned around, and left. It bothered one of the Apple engineers so much that he told Jobs, "We have to take care of your buddy Daniel. If you will give him some stock, I’ll match whatever you give. Jobs said, "OK. I'll give zero and you give zero." So much for loyalty.

As a public company the rules of the game changed and Jobs’ cavalier management style cast doubt among the Board that he was suited to run the company’s day-to-day operations. Persuaded that he would continue to lead product design and strategy, Jobs participated in recruiting the new CEO, John Sculley, whom he enticed to leave the presidency of Pepsi Cola in 1983. With predictable Jobs bravado, he challenged Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

For a while the two were able to stay out of each other’s way, but Sculley and Jobs held different visions of the future and Apple’s role in it, so Jobs was increasingly isolated and ultimately resigned in 1985. In a fit of petulance, he sold all of his Apple shares for $70 million in a down market. But now he had the ability to finance himself and started NeXT computer, which went nowhere. He also acquired a small company from George Lucas for $5 million that would become Pixar. Creating computer-generated animation occupied Jobs’ creativity for a while but it wasn’t his first love. At one point, he put the company on the market for $25 million but there were no takers. Then came the technology breakthrough at Pixar which resulted in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, and Finding Nemo. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. It was a happy ending for Jobs but not for the people who created the breakthrough. They got very little money out of the sale. Kottke redux.

Jobs had been in the wilderness for ten years when the Apple Board announced in 1996 that it was buying NeXT for $427 million, ousting its CEO, Gil Amelio, and bringing Jobs back to run the company. Apple was only months from bankruptcy. Remarkably, Jobs persuaded his arch-rival, Bill Gates, to put $150 million into Apple. Jobs performed a quick survey of the company’s product line and announced to the senior team that they were to get out of all of the product proliferation that had occurred since he left. Apple would make a desktop and a laptop for the home and professional markets – four computers. No more. Almost overnight 3,000 people were terminated and the company retrenched.

The iMac was introduced in 2000 at a time when Napster was riding high and young people (the primary market for iMacs) were ripping tunes and sharing them. A CD player/copier was added to the iMac design but there was no software to manage a music library. This led to the iPod and ultimately iTunes. Jobs negotiated a deal with the recording artists – reminding them that something is better than nothing, and nothing was what they were getting – and the iTunes store began selling the recording artists’ music by the song rather than by the album. Each song sold for 99 cents, with Apple retaining 29 cents. Overnight, the iTunes store became the biggest music retailer in the world selling a million downloads the first day it was open and eight million four months later. The songs were just a way to sell iPods with its proprietary file format and high margins. Yes, Jobs stuck with the integrated architecture.

In 2007 Jobs released the iPhone to the market, which bought over six million units in 15 months. It was a combination phone, camera, content player, and Internet client and browser, allowing emails and text messages to be sent and received. Then in 2010 the iPad was released and sold 300,000 on the first day and three million in the first 80 days. The “i” products, including those not yet released orbit around the iMac as its digital hub, which will possibly migrate to the iCloud in the future.

The integration of these satellite products around the digital hub was likely envisioned by Jobs sometime after he returned to Apple. He concluded that the age of the Internet was fast reaching maturity and that a new age of digital device integration was beginning. In his MacWorld 2001 presentation, Jobs discussed his conception of the digital hub business model – whose satellites would be digital phones, digital photograph and movie cameras, PDAs, CD players, and MP 3 music devices. It was remarkable insight for the time. The iPod/iTunes, iPhone, and iPad became those satellites, albeit in more modern formats as digital technology advanced.

It’s interesting, therefore, to hear Isaacson’s account of the iPad creation when told by Jobs and when told by one of the senior engineers also interviewed. Remember that Jobs had envisioned the PDA as a satellite to his digital hub as early as 2001. As the iPod and iPhones assumed their orbits in the Apple digital constellation, they were not single-function devices. More and more functionality was added to them both at launch and in successive versions. When it was introduced, the iPad was also not a single-function PDA. It was a digital platform for text (books, periodicals), audio (music, audio books), video (movies), games, applications, and Internet browsing.

Jobs recalled the genesis of the iPad for Isaacson. It occurred at a party he attended in 2009 at which a Microsoft engineer boasted that his company was working on a tablet PC. Afterward, Jobs said, “F--- this, let’s show him what a tablet can really do.” He called his team together and directed them to come up with a touch screen tablet with no keyboard or stylus.

Jony Ive, the head of design for Apple, recalled a different genesis story. He told Isaacson that his team had been experimenting with a touch input screen device in a sort of “skunk works” without Jobs’ knowledge or direction. Until its functionality was more or less perfected, he was loath to let Jobs’ know about it for fear that it might earn another “this is s---” summary judgment with an order to kill it. “I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad, because I knew it was so important,” Ive told Isaacson. When the device was bulletproof, Ive showed it to Jobs privately with no audience to posture for and Jobs loved it.

Here again is the accursed Reality Distortion Field convincing Jobs that the ideas of others had really been his own and that things really had happened in the inflated way he later recalled them. Jobs frequently took credit for the work of others. It revealed not only a character flaw in his leadership style, if it can be called that, but also his tendency to look upon the senior executive team as personal staff rather than an organization of specialized functions, each with its own agenda. Even when he took the ideas of others and made them better, Jobs failed to give credit; he always took credit. Predictably the turnover at the top of the organization was high.

For all that he did well, Jobs was inept at human relations. Nowhere was that ineptitude more evident than in his family.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs and his on-and-off girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan. She was born in May 1978 just after Jobs and Woz formed Apple. Initially Jobs denied paternity, going so far as to file a sworn statement with the court that he was sterile and incapable of fathering a child. When Apple went public, making Jobs a multimillionaire, his daughter and former girl friend continued to live in poverty on welfare. Only because of court-ordered DNA tests was Jobs finally compelled to admit that he was Lisa’s father. The court not only ordered him to pay child support, he was ordered to repay $5,000 to the county for the welfare it had paid to Chris Ann Brennan.

Lisa was a teenager before she had any kind of a relationship with Jobs and only then when she moved in with him, his wife, and their children – Reed, Erin, and Eve. Lisa lived there for several years before she left for college, which Jobs financed. It’s odd that someone who was so hostile to his parents for abandoning him would do the same to his daughter. But that was Steve Jobs.

As many adopted children do, Jobs began to search for his biological parents. He found his mother in 1986 through the doctor who delivered him. His mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson, was living in Los Angeles and revealed that Jobs had a sister by his biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali. He met his sister, Mona Simpson, and they hit it off at once. She was at his bedside when he died.

When Jobs was searching for his mother, he learned things about his father that convinced him he didn’t want to meet him. But Mona did. The man who abandoned her and her mother was managing a small café and coffee shop in Sacramento. Jandali asked about her brother, but she feigned ignorance, saying he had gone off somewhere and they would likely never hear from him again.

Her father told Mona about the “good old days” … "I wish you could've seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant. I used to run one of the best restaurants in Silicon Valley. Everybody used to come there, even Steve Jobs used to eat there. He was a great tipper.” Jandali didn’t know his son’s adopted name was Steve Jobs. Mona said nothing.

She later revealed the conversation to her brother. “Yeah, I was in that restaurant once or twice and I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria,” Jobs said, “it was most certainly him. And I shook his hand and he shook my hand. And that's all.”

Jobs was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Tests revealed that his was a slow growing type that had a good chance of being cured, but for certain, with surgery, his life could be prolonged many years. Enter the Reality Distortion Field. Instead of surgery, Jobs chose unorthodox diets, acupuncture, fasts, purges, even a psychic. He delayed surgery for nine costly months before scheduling it. The tumor was removed and his health rebounded for a while. But the 9-month delay in surgery had crossed the tipping point and it was apparent to his public that his weight loss and increasing gauntness revealed a very sick man. He began to set his affairs in order in Apple. A successor was named to run the company. And in his own way, he began to think of his family.

My story has now come full circle. Walter Isaacson consented to write Jobs’ story. When asked why the notoriously secretive Jobs would grant such a license after all these years to write of a life filled with so many shortcomings, Jobs said he wanted his kids to know who he was. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did,” he said.

When Isaacson interviewed Erin Jobs, just a teenager at the time, about her father she said, “Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s really cool, so I’m fine. I don’t really need more attention.” Having four children myself, two of them girls, it’s hard for me to believe Jobs’ children didn’t need his time and attention regardless of the importance of his work to the world. Mine did. But it’s really hard for me to believe that a man who is dying and truly wanted his children to know him would choose a biographer and a book to do it.

In his last interview with Jobs, Isaacson recalls sitting with him in his backyard garden. Jobs began talking about God. "Sometimes I believe in God,” he said,

… sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it's 'cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on.

He stopped and thought. "Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone."

Then he paused again. "And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices."