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 INTERNATIONAL EDITION
JANU
JA Y 1 , 2019 _ VOL.172 _ NO.02
NUARY 2

F E AT R ES
S

HISTORY LESSON
Martin Luther King Jr. at home in
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. Preston
Lauterbach’s Bluff City details events that
20
contributed to King’s assassination in
0HPSKLV7HQQHVVHHLQ$SULO Mission The Secret Life of
0 , & + $ ( /  2 & + 6  $ 5 & + , 9 ( 6 ʔ* ( 7 7 <

Accomplished? Ernest Withers

COVER CREDIT Trump wants to end
Illustration by Alex Fine for Newsweek America’s endless wars. The
military doesn’t disagree.
But how best to do it?
For more headlines, go to
NEWSWEEK.COM BY JAMES LAPORTA
A new book about a critically
lauded black photographer
highlights new eividence
about the death of MLK.
BY PRESTON LAUTERBACH

1
 */2%$/(',725,1&+,() _ Nancy Cooper

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63(&,$/ 352-(&76 (',725 Fred Guterl

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&2:ʝ)5(( =21(
“Clean meat” means
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CREATIVE
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Rewind

TheArchives
On Christmas Day 1996, child beauty pageant queen JonBenét
1997 Ramsey disappeared from her Boulder, Colorado, home. A lengthy
ransom note was left in her bedroom, but eight hours later her father found
her body in the basement; she had been strangled and bludgeoned. Her death
transfixed millions of Americans, wrote Jerry Adler, with both “the grisly
nature of the murder and the novelty of putting mascara on the lashes of a
6-year-old.” Her parents—briefly suspected—were exonerated by DNA
evidence. Decades later, Ramsey’s murder remains unsolved.

1982
Newsweek declared the breakup of Ma
Bell’s monopoly “the most memorable in
antitrust enforcement” history. Thirty-six
years later and AT&T is still generating
historic lawsuits: In December, the Justice
Department challenged the mega-merger
of AT&T and Time Warner—a deal that a
federal judge in D.C. had already approved.

&/2 &.:,6()520/()76,0216ʡ6<*0$1(:6:((.$1'5(:(&&/(6

2008
As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
squared off for the Democratic nomination,
the U.S. was “just beginning to grapple
with questions of race and gender” that the
campaign would “raise again and again.”
How effective was the grappling? The
2020 election—which will likely include
the most diverse group of candidates in
U.S. history—should provide an answer.

4 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

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Periscope NEWS, OPINION + ANALYSIS

MONEY CHANGES
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10 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

 “I don’t want to have cam meras
all over my office.” »3

2020 VISION

On the Money
Governor Steve Bullock is a white guy from Montana stumping on
FDPSDLJQɿQDQFH UHIRUP &DQ WKDW DORQH ZLQ 'HPRFUDWLFKHDUWV"

it’s barely 2019, but the 2020 democratic
presidential primary is already so packed
with possible candidates that debate planners
must be plotting how to expand their stages. One
of the not-so-subtle questions dogging the scrum “if we really want to address income inequality, if
is whether a white male can or should headline a
Democratic ticket.
Amid Trumpian despair, in the post-Obama,
#MeToo universe, a significant wing of the par-
ty has gravitated toward the idea that none but
star-quality female candidates of color (Michelle!
Oprah!) can hope to resurrect the rainbow coali-
tion that elected President Barack Obama. In a re-
cent analysis, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie suggested that
/ ( ) 7  - 2 1 $7 + $ 1  . , 7& + ( 1 ʔ* ( 7 7 <  72 3  5 , * + 7  - 2 (  0 & 1 $ / /<ʔ* ( 7 7 <
get big money out of American politics.
“If we want to address all the other big issues
in our electoral system and our political system,”
Bullock told Iowa State Fair visitors last summer,
we want to address health care...you’re not going to
be able to do it until you’ve also addressed the way
that money is corrupting our system.”
Campaign finance, he argues, is foundational—
the connective tissue that bridges the identity
politics of the coastal elites and the kitchen-table
issues of the American heartland. Unsurprisingly,
reforming the system has been the centerpiece of
his political career.

it will be easier for a black candidate—male or fe- As Montana attorney general, Bullock defend-
male—to get the Democratic nomination because ed the state’s ban on corporate campaign spend-
of the growing diversity of the party’s base. ing against a challenge from American Tradition
But Steve Bullock is hoping to meet, if not tran- Partnership—a conservative advocacy group with
scend, the political moment. The two-term Mon- a history of concealing its donors—all the way to
tana governor is among a crop of white male politi- the Supreme Court in 2012. More recently, in 2015,
cians from red states testing the presidential waters, as governor, he persuaded Montana Republicans
including Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and former to support a bipartisan campaign finance reform
Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke. Yes, he was one bill that required all groups spending money on
of just three Democrats to win guber- elections to disclose their donors.
natorial contests in states that went Last summer, he sued the Internal
for Donald Trump in 2016. And yes, BY
Revenue Service and the Depart-
he worked with a Republican-con- ment of the Treasury over a deci-
trolled Legislature to expand Medi- NINA BURLEIGH sion to no longer require politically
caid. But his real pitch is fighting to @ninaburleigh active nonprofits to identify their

NEWSWEEK.COM 11
Periscope
major donors to the government.
The case is pending in federal dis-
trict court in Montana.
Unlimited corporate spending and
limited public disclosure have “un-
dermined us, because people don’t
believe the system is responsive to
their actual concerns,” Bullock tells
Newsweek. “They don’t think they
have a shot at influencing elections,
and that affects trust in institutions.”
He may be on to something. The
new Democratic House majority is
expected to make campaign finance
legislation one of its top priorities,
and as Democrats begin declaring
their White House intentions, the
issue is becoming a clear ideologi-
cal marker. “I don’t think we ought
to be running campaigns that are
funded by billionaires, whether it
goes through super PACs or their
own money that they’re spending,”
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Mas-
sachusetts told reporters after she
announced the formation of a pres-
idential exploratory committee in
late December. “Democrats are the
party of the people.”
Americans overwhelmingly sup-
port campaign spending reform. A
poll last year by the Pew Research
Center found 77 percent of those
surveyed agreed that “there should
be limits on the amount of money
individuals and organizations can
spend” on political campaigns. Only
20 percent agreed with what is es-
sentially the law under the Citizens
United ruling—that they should be
able to spend as much as they want.
Nearly three-quarters of the public
thinks it is “very important” that ma-
jor political donors not have more
influence than others, while an ad-
ditional 16 percent viewed this as
“somewhat important.”
Stephen Spaulding, chief of strat-
egy at the government watchdog
12 NEWSWEEK.COM
2020 VISION
group Common Cause, insists that
fighting “dark money”—political
contributions from outside inter-
ests that don’t have to disclose their
donors—can motivate voters and
is a bipartisan issue. According to
a Wesleyan Media Project report
produced in partnership with the
Center for Responsive Politics, such
groups have spent more than $750
million to help or harm candidates
since 2010 and were responsible
for more than 38 percent of TV ads
during the 2018 election cycle.
“Outside the Beltway, voters do not
view reducing the undue influence
of money in politics to be a partisan
issue,” Spaulding says. “Too many of
them think special interests have too
much sway in our elections and in
the halls of power.”
Spaulding points to a smattering
of ballot measures limiting dark
money and spending that voters ap-
proved in both red and blue states
during the midterms. In Phoenix,
for example, voters overwhelmingly
supported requiring donors to local
campaigns to disclose contributions
of more than $1,000. In Denver,
voters passed a “Democracy for the
People” initiative, which will create a
voluntary public financing system for
city elections. “Voters care about this
issue and want elected leaders to stop
talking about the problem and start
“People don’t think
they have a shot at
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advancing solutions,” he says.
The new House members sup-
ported by the Justice Democrats PAC,
including vocal freshmen like New
York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have
made opposition to money in politics
a primary issue. The organization
supports only candidates who do not
take any corporate PAC or corporate
lobbyist money, and the progressive
lawmakers have joined it in calling
for a constitutional amendment to
abolish private donations to politi-
cians and campaigns. They instead
want public funding for campaigns.
Such strict standards could wound
populist upstarts like O’Rourke, who
spurned PACs but was the No. 2 recip-
ient of oil and gas money in the mid-
& /2 & . : , 6 (  ) 5 2 0  72 3   ' 5 ( :  $ 1 * ( 5 ( 5 ʔ* ( 7 7 <  6 $ 5 $ +  5 , & ( ʔ 7 + (  :$6 + , 1 *72 1  3 2 67ʔ* ( 7 7 <  : , / / , $ 0  & $ 0 3 % ( / / ʔ& 2 5 % , 6 ʔ* ( 7 7 <
terms, having accepted more than
$492,000 from individuals associat-
ed with the industry. A fight erupted
over his ideological purity among on-
line leftists in the last weeks of 2018.
Bullock is more centrist on pro-
gressive Democratic issues like
immigration and health care, but
his desire to overhaul campaign fi-
nance runs deep. Montana banned
dark money more than a hundred
years ago, after the so-called Copper
Kings—three wealthy mining indus-
trialists—bought almost the entire
political apparatus in the state, from
the U.S. Senate down to the local sher-
iffs. The legacy of their influence ex-
ists today in the form of the largest
Superfund complex in the United
States: vast open pits leaking acidic
water polluted with heavy metals
around Butte, the result of relaxed
mining standards in boom times.
“The history of Montana,” says Bullock,
“really is the history of first corporate
control over our elections and the cit-
izens finally saying enough is enough.”
On the national stage, Citizens
United not only promotes “quid pro
quo corruption,” he says, but has an
J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

effect on political behavior even be-
fore the cash is spent. Bullock point-
ed to Republicans’ financial consid-
erations amid their frantic push to
overhaul the tax code in 2017. “My
donors are basically saying, ‘Get it
done or don’t ever call me again,’”
Representative Chris Collins of New
York told reporters.
Despite Bullock’s efforts, the Su-
preme Court struck down Montana’s
ban on corporate campaign spend-
ing in a 5-4 decision in 2012 with-
out hearing oral arguments. But the
governor believes the legal battle was
productive because it created a factual
COST CUTTING
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record of the patterns and effects of
corporate spending that did not ex-
ist when the court issued its Citizens
United ruling in 2010.
“The Supreme Court threw out 100
years of Montana history and tradi-
tion that, at the end of the day, elec-
tions should be about people talking
to people,” he says. “That made me
more resolute to say...we’ve got to fig-
ure out a way for people to have trust
in their elected officials.” In June, he
signed an executive order requiring
companies bidding for state contracts
to disclose their political spending.
Bullock’s crusade against dark
money has won him support from
both parties in Montana. “He does
have some good progressive views
but comes across as a Montana good
ol’ boy,” an anonymous Republican
operative opined to Politico Magazine
last year. “He would be a really good
general election candidate.”
But, of course, the primaries come
first. And as the new House fills with
diverse members who lean left, pro-
gressive lawmakers grab the bully
pulpit for populist issues, and con-
tenders of color launch broadsides
against Trump, it’s unclear how
much oxygen there will be for Bull-
ock and campaign finance reform.
Moreover, Senator Bernie Sanders,
the democratic socialist from Ver-
mont and another potential 2020
candidate, has already claimed the
anti-corruption mantle.
Nevertheless, that seems to be
where Bullock is most comfortable.
When Newsweek asked him where
he stood on free college, “Medicare-
for-all” and abolishing Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, the gov-
ernor laughed, and his spokesman
redirected the interview to the top-
ic of dark money. (For the record, in
Montana Bullock froze college tui-
tion and expanded Medicaid, and he
has criticized a number of Trump’s
immigration policies, including the
“zero tolerance” policy that has led
to family separations at the border.)
For now, Bullock will talk dark
money as he uses his Big Sky Values
PAC to travel to early-voting states
like Iowa and New Hampshire. Mon-
tana’s senior senator, Jon Tester,
thinks the White House is the ulti-
mate goal. “Yeah, he’s running,” he
told reporters in December.
Bullock himself is more coy. “I’m
about to walk into a good legislative
session,” he says, “and that’s what
I’m focused on.”
NEWSWEEK.COM 13
Periscope
P O L IT IC S
MarriedtotheMob
7UXPS KDV EHHQ ZUDSSHG LQ 0DɿD FRQQHFWLRQVIRUGHFDGHV
+HUHŠVKRZKHOHDUQHGWRWDONOLNHDGRQ
on a rainy day in the spring of
1976, FBI Special Agent Myron
Fuller took the New York subway to
Brooklyn to interview Donald Trump.
The future tycoon, about 30, was just
getting his real estate career off the
ground, aided by secret payments
from his father. Fuller found Trump
working out of a temporary office
in a double-wide trailer on a muddy
construction site. “There were boards
covering wet dirt, in lieu of cement
walkways,” Fuller recalls to Newsweek.
He knocked on the door and went in.
“His secretary sat there by the entrance,
and Trump was a door away from
there.” Ushered in, he found Trump
sitting behind his desk. The business-
man did not get up to
welcome the agent. “He
never came around, and
I do not recall him shak-
ing my hand,” Fuller says. JEFF STEIN
The FBI agent was car- @SpyTalker
rying out an errand for
the bureau’s Miami office, to follow
up on a tip that mobsters had asked
Trump to front for them in a purchase
of the Fontainebleau hotel. Once a
beachside favorite of movie stars and
the rich, the hotel was also a notorious
hangout for Mafia kingpins like Sam
Giancana, who famously met with
CIA agents in the hotel’s Boom Boom
Room to plot the assassination of Fidel
Castro. But in 1976, the Fontainebleau
was teetering on bankruptcy, and the
mobsters needed a straw man to buy it.
Fuller asked Trump a simple ques-
tion. “Why would your name come
14 NEWSWEEK.COM
up as a possible buyer for them?” The
future president of the United States
responded calmly that “he did not
know.” He had “heard about” some
people wanting him to buy it, he told
Fuller, but not much more. Fuller,
with nothing else to go on, closed his
notebook. Trump summoned his limo
driver to take the agent back to the city.
More than 40 years later, Fuller,
who gained fame for the FBI bribery
sting dramatized in the movie Amer-
ican Hustle, chuckles ruefully about
the encounter, reported here for
the first time. “Seeing who he is now,
learning more about him in the last
two or three years, I do have some
regrets that I didn’t have a bell and
whistle going off there
and go further,” he says.
BY And nothing further
did connect Trump to
the Fontainebleau’s
eventual sale to a mob
front. Nor do public
records show the budding real estate switchblades and start fights in school.
operator was ever indicted, much But it’s also evident that by the time
less convicted, in any of the big cases he was 30, the future president was
that brought down the five Mafia on the FBI’s radar as someone the
families who ruled New York. But Mafia might turn to in a pinch. And
Fuller’s encounter offers a timely win- by the time he was 70, with a business
dow into a history that explains how trajectory studded with mobsters, it
Trump learned to talk—and act—like should’ve come as no surprise that
a don, even in the hallowed precincts he was paying hush money to women,
of the White House. allegedly offering a secret hotel deal to
To be sure, Trump’s upbringing Vladimir Putin, calling his longtime
in Queens, where the Mafia was former lawyer Michael Cohen a “rat”
ubiquitous, helped form his wiseguy or denouncing prosecutors for pres-
persona. So did an apparent behav- suring his associates to “flip.”
ioral disorder that caused him to buy This was the life he had chosen.
J A N UA R Y 18, 2019
 WISEGUYS Trump hired Cohn, the
ruthless New York lawyer, to help navigate
the city’s real estate business. Some of
Cohn’s clients, like the Genovese crime
family, controlled construction unions.

GOING TO THE DARK SIDE

In December, as the president dis-
paraged Cohen with Mafia lingo (the
onetime fixer told a federal court that
Trump had directed him in violating
campaign finance law), a flurry of
coverage noted the origins of rat and
how Trump had used it before, along
with flip, more wiseguy slang for
cooperating with the feds. The press
“New York was so
totally corrupt and so
% ( 7 7 0 $ 1 1  $ 5 & + , 9 ( ʔ* ( 7 7 <
and his business and political oper-
ations than still-unproven theories
about his collusion with Russian
interference in the 2016 election.
Trump’s descent into the gangland
may have begun with Roy Cohn, the
ruthless lawyer whom Trump hired
to help navigate the bare-knuckle
New York real estate business. Long
notorious for helping Senator Joseph
McCarthy unleash the 1950s “red
scare” that ruined the careers of scores
of Hollywood figures, federal workers
and journalists, Cohn in the 1970s
represented leaders of the Vito Geno-
vese crime family during a federal
racketeering investigation. As it turns
out, around the same time Fuller was
interviewing Trump in 1976, Cohn
was adding a former Connecticut
attorney general to his law firm who,
on the side, was representing a local
mobster by the name of Andrew D’Am-
ato in a bid to buy the Fontainebleau.
Looking back on the events years
later, Fuller says, “I presume that
Miami’s knowledge of D’Amato’s
efforts to purchase the Fontaineb-
leau hotel is what led them to Trump.”
In 1977, D’Amato was convicted of
conspiracy in a financial swindling
scheme in Hawaii with other known
mobsters. Now in his 90s, D’Amato
did not respond to messages left at
his home in Connecticut.
Some of Cohn’s Mafia clients
controlled New York’s construction
unions, whose blessings Trump
needed to complete his projects. So
he “hired mobbed-up firms to erect
Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza

clutched its collective pearls. But lost apartment building in Manhattan,

in the horror over Trump’s language
were the much darker inflection
points of his journey through the
underworld, relationships arguably
more revealing about the president
controlled by the mob including buying ostensibly over-
in the ’80s that you priced concrete from a company con-
trolled by Mafia chieftains Anthony
had to have some way ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul Castellano,”
to work that world.” Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay John-

NEWSWEEK.COM 15
Periscope
ston wrote in Politico in 2016. Village
Voice investigative reporter Wayne Bar-
rett, who chronicled Trump’s deals in
books and articles through the years,
wrote that Trump probably met Fat
Tony through Cohn. “This came at a
time when other developers in New
York were pleading with the FBI to free
them of mob control of the concrete
business,” Johnston wrote.
One benefit of such connections
was that workers tearing down the
Bonwit Teller building where Trump
Tower was planned could take
allegedly illegal shortcuts around
strict city regulations for disposing
of construction waste. According to
a Newsweek source who asked not to
be identified because his family is
well-known in the construction busi-
ness, the asbestos and concrete were
dumped near abandoned docks in
Brooklyn and other discrete places
instead of prescribed sites farther
away—saving time and money. The
White House referred Newsweek to
the Trump Organization, which did
not respond to an inquiry.
“On paper,” as one of several news
accounts put it, the demolition work-
ers were members of Local 95, a Geno-
vese-controlled union. But in reality,
they were undocumented workers
from Poland and South Korea. Ron-
ald Fino, son of a Buffalo, New York,
Mafia capo, told Newsweek they were
known as “the sneaker brigade” for
“remov[ing] the asbestos illegally.”
(Through the years, Trump denied
knowing about the illegal workers,
but in 1998, after years of litigation,
he quietly paid a total of $1.38 million
“to settle the case, with $500,000 of it
going to a union benefits fund and the
rest to pay lawyers’ fees and expenses,”
The New York Times revealed in 2017.)
“New York was so totally corrupt
and so controlled by the mob in the
’80s that in order to be a successful
16 NEWSWEEK.COM
POLITICS
businessman, you had to have some
way to work that world,” former FBI
agent Walt Stowe, who grew close to
Trump through the years and says he
never saw the developer do anything
illegal, told The Washington Post’s
Robert O’Harrow Jr. in 2016. But by
1988, Trump was feeling so comfort-
able associating with Mafiosi that he
did his first name-licensing deal with
a luxury limo rental company owned
by John Staluppi, a made member of
the Colombo crime family, according
to William Bastone, founding editor of
The Smoking Gun website. And by that
time, Trump was deep into his quest
for an Atlantic City fortune.
But early on, Trump relied on his
associations with underworld char-
acters to open his grandiose (and
ultimately bankrupt) gambling dens
on the boardwalk. One of the more
interesting characters back then was
Daniel Sullivan, “a 42-year-old giant of
a man with great charm and a crim-
Some thought Trump
was an informant.
“How did he deal with
the mob all these years
and never appear
before a grand jury?”
inal record,” who “dealt with labor
problems at Trump’s construction
sites,” according to O’Harrow’s deep-
dive story. Trump went into a drywall
manufacturing business with Sullivan,
which was “among the firms impli-
cated in a racketeering scheme involv-
ing the carpenters’ union and the
Genovese crime family” represented
by Cohn, O’Harrow wrote. Sullivan
also brought Trump into an Atlantic
City land-leasing deal with Kenneth
Shapiro, whom law enforcement
authorities had identified as a finan-
cier and agent for Philadelphia mob-
ster Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo.
Advised by the head of New Jersey’s
Gaming Enforcement agency that the
Sullivan connection could hurt his
& /2 &. :, 6 ( ) 5 20  / ( ) 7  ( ' 8$5 ' 2  0 8 12= $ /9$ 5 ( =ʔ$ )3ʔ* (7 7 < 5 2% (57  $ /( ; $ 1 ' ( 5 ʔ* ( 7 7 <  % 8 5 ( $8  2 )  3 5 , 6 2 1 6 ʔ* ( 7 7 <  ) % , ʔ* ( 7 7 <
chances for casino licenses, Trump
bought him out and told the FBI that
he was severing all ties with the big guy.
But they stayed in touch, according to
a 1983 civil suit Sullivan filed against
New Jersey authorities: At one point,
Trump offered him a job as his orga-
nization’s chief labor negotiator, with
a $75,000 salary, he swore in court
documents. In the end, no evidence
has surfaced showing Trump was ever
charged in any Mafia-related probes.
THE SNITCH?
Former law enforcement officials say
Trump had a close and curious rela-
tionship with the New York division of
the FBI. “We saw Trump in the office
all the time,” former FBI Special Agent
Mark Rossini tells Newsweek. He was
a “hip-pocket source,” Rossini says, for
James Kallstrom, a wiretapping expert
who supervised Mafia investigations in
New York, and Rudy Giuliani, the top
federal prosecutor in Manhattan who
would later become mayor of New
York and, eventually, Trump’s personal
lawyer amid the “Russiagate” probe.
(Kallstrom denied that Trump was a
source. Giuliani did not respond to a
J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

request for comment.) Rossini won-
ders whether Trump’s cultivation of
FBI agents protected him in the Mafia
probes. “All the construction unions
were mobbed up” in the 1980s, Ros-
sini noted. “How did he deal with the
mob all these years and never appear
before a grand jury?” Fuller also thinks
“Trump was an informant for some-
body in the FBI New York office.”
But Bruce Mouw, who headed the
New York FBI’s investigation into the
Gambino crime family, dismisses
insinuations that Trump was either
a mob asset or confidential bureau
source. “I don’t believe it,” he tells
Newsweek. Contacts with mobbed-up
union chiefs, he says, “were done
through the construction companies,
not the developers.”
But a remark Trump himself made
at an event years later suggested he
was well placed to share tips on Mafia
personalities with favored FBI officials.
During the height of his fame as star
of The Apprentice, Trump claimed that
“every network“ tried to get him to do a
reality show, but he refused.
“I don’t want to have cameras all over
my office, dealing with contractors,
politicians, mobsters and everyone
else I have to deal with in my business,”
he told a 2004 panel at the Museum
of Television and Radio in L.A. “You
know, mobsters don’t like, as they are
talking to me, having cameras all over
GOODFELLAS Trump employed “mobbed-
XS ɿUPVŤ WR EXLOG SURMHFWV LQ 0DQKDWWDQ
according to one writer. From top: Trump
Tower; mug shots of Salerno and Castellano,
who controlled a company that reportedly
did business with Trump. Opposite: Cohen.
the room. It would play well on televi-
sion, but it doesn’t play well with them.”
What’s clear is that Kallstrom, a for-
mer Marine, grew close to Trump over
the years. The real estate developer
donated over $230,000 to Kallstrom’s
Marine Corps–Law Enforcement
Foundation and provided it free space
in his Atlantic City casinos for fund-
raisers, according to several accounts.
Kallstrom’s foundation, in which Rush
Limbaugh is a director, was also “the
single biggest beneficiary of Trump’s
promise to raise millions for veter-
ans” in a lead-up to the 2016 Iowa
Republican debate, Barrett wrote. “A
foundation official said that Trump’s
million-dollar donation this May, atop
$100,000 that he’d given in March,
were the biggest individual grants it
had ever received.”
Kallstrom became an influential
Trump defender and Hillary Clin-
ton critic during the 2016 campaign,
bashing then–FBI Director James
Comey for failing to nail Clinton on
her private email server and accusing
Obama administration officials of
committing “perjury” in their pursuit
of Russian ties to Trump and his asso-
ciates. In March 2018, he went further,
accusing Comey and disgraced former
FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Str-
zok of having “a backup plan to frame
Donald Trump” as a Russian agent.
Neither federal prosecutors nor U.S.
intelligence officials have reported evi-
dence of any “plot to frame Trump.”
To the contrary, former FBI Director
Robert Mueller was appointed special
counsel to investigate alleged Russian
plotting to tilt the election to Trump—
with the candidate’s knowledge and
NEWSWEEK.COM 17
Periscope POLITICS

approval. One of Mueller’s subjects
of interest has been a now-infamous
2016 meeting that Trump’s son Don-
ald Jr., then–campaign chief Paul
Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kush-
ner eagerly took with a Russian agent
offering “dirt” on Clinton.
Russia’s intelligence services, oli-
garchs and gangsters are seamlessly
connected, according to multiple
news accounts through the years. And
since the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991, the Russian mob has made
huge inroads into the American under-
world, sometimes forming alliances of
convenience with La Cosa Nostra. As a
teenager, Trump’s future lawyer Cohen,
“Mobsters don’t like
The Wall Street Journal reported last
year, “frequented Brooklyn’s ethnic
Russian neighborhoods and married
into a Ukrainian family.” At a friend’s
wedding, he “bragged to another guest
that he belonged to the Russian mob.”
The friend didn’t believe it, but when
Trump pursued a hotel deal in Moscow,
Cohen was dispatched to seal the deal,
working through shady characters
to offer Putin a top-floor penthouse,
according to BuzzFeed News.
The Trump Organization had long
been awash in illicit Russian money,
author Craig Unger claimed in a 2018
book, House of Trump, House of Putin:
The Untold Story of Donald Trump and
having cameras all over
the room. It would
play well on television,
but it doesn’t play
well with them.”
“heard about” a pitch for him to buy
“Had I been a little bit sharper, I think
the Russian Mafia. “It started out as a
simple money-laundering operation
at Trump Tower in 1984, when a Rus-
sian mobster came to Trump Tower
with $6 million in cash and bought
five condos. This is the template for
what begins to unfold. At least 1,300
Trump condos in the United States
have been sold similarly. All cash pur-
chases through anonymous sources,”
Unger told Newsweek last August.
Russian mafia expert Mark Galeotti
says it’s all about greed. “I have seen no
serious evidence of any explicit link
between Trump and Russian mobsters.
Rather, what I have seen is evidence of
the extent to which the Trump Orga-
nization seems to have been willing
to engage with dubious investors and
buyers—some Russian, many not—
whom more reputable corporations
would not have touched,” Galeotti
recently told Vice.
That seemed the case all the way
back in 1976, when Trump calmly
told FBI agent Fuller that he had
the notoriously mob-connected Fon-
tainebleau hotel. There was no shock
in his response, no indignation that
the FBI would present him with such
an allegation. Fuller thinks back to
that moment in the construction site
trailer, and he wonders how history
might have taken a different course if
he or someone else in the FBI had kept
a more critical eye on Trump.
“At that time, the only people who
were interested in buying the Fon-
tainebleau were the mob,” he says.
I might’ve—well, it might’ve been a
+ ( 1 1 <  5 $<  $ % 5 $ 0 6 ʔ$ ) 3ʔ* ( 7 7 <

direction we could have gone.”

OF RATS AND MEN One former FBI

agent says Trump was a “hip-pocket
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later become the president’s personal
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18 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

 26 for women. Generations ago, men
and women both entered the workforce
far younger, so while today’s millennials
are better educated than their grand-
parents, they’re also experiencing real
life later. Couples had children much
younger and had more of them; today,
the average age of a first-time mother in
New York City is 31, while that number
was, on average, 26.3 across America.
So what’s the real issue?
We’re more likely to let our kids
OPI N I O N
crash on our couches than tell them

Growing Pains
to get a job and pay rent. We don’t
push our kids to build families of their
own; as life expectancy has increased,
‘Adulting’ is hard. But only because parents so has adolescence. Americans aren’t
are too lazy to teach their kids expected to start building a life, par-
ticularly middle- and upper-class
Americans, until they’re nearing their
30s. There are many Americans who
last month, america learned But here’s the catch: Living at home make decisions that force them into
about something the millen- doesn’t necessarily breed dependency. adulthood—single mothers, for exam-
nials like to call “adulting.” The term As of 1940, more than 30 percent of ple, aren’t going to be taking “adulting”
started as a sort of quasi-joke—when- 25- to 29-year-olds lived at home with classes. But the question is how we can
ever a millennial would do something parents or grandparents. They were encourage young people to “adult” in
age-appropriate rather than radically adulting, even while living at home. non-circumstance-driven fashion.
immature, this was an act of “adulting.” Parents expected their kids to do The answer is thrusting responsibil-
Now, though, millennials apparently chores, to prepare for life. Instead of ity on young people. That’s painful for
require training in being an adult. blaming living at home, then, we have parents. I know. I have two young chil-
According to CBS News, Rachel Fle- to blame our style of parenting. dren, and the thought of them strug-
hinger has co-founded While speculation gling is painful to me. But “adulting,” as
an Adulting S cho ol, has run rampant that Nietzsche might put it, is suffering—
which includes online BY economic hardship has and through that suffering, we become
courses on simple sew- forced millennials to responsible human beings capable of
ing, conflict resolution BEN SHAPIRO stay home longer and bettering the world around us.
and cooking. CBS sug- @benshapiro thus fail to “adult,” the Or we can keep coddling our
gests the cause for such truth is that we’ve sim- kids—and, via the government, cod-
classes: Many millennials “haven’t left ply become lazier as parents. dling ourselves. But at some point, if
childhood homes”—in America, 34 This is a generational problem. Since everyone is busy “adulting” while we
percent of adults aged 18 to 34 still the Greatest Generation, adults have keep pushing off the age of adulthood,
lived with their parents as of 2015, up become less and less adult. Our grand- there are no adults left. There are just
from 26 percent a decade before. parents had to grow up during the children. And leaving kids in charge
There’s a good deal of truth to this. Great Depression and World War II; of society is an incredibly bad idea.
If you’re living at home, with Mom they learned to “adult” long before they
&  -  % 8 572 1 ʔ* ( 7 7 <

and Dad doing their best to spoil you, were actual adults. As of 1940, the aver- Ơ Ben Shapiro is editor-in-chief of
you’re less likely to know how to do age age of first marriage was 24 for men The Daily Wire and host of The Ben
laundry, cook or balance a check- and 21 for women; today, the average Shapiro Show, available on iTunes
book. Dependency breeds enervation. age of first marriage is 28 for men and and syndicated across America.

NEWSWEEK.COM 19
 Mission

20 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

 T R U M P WA N T S T O E N D A M E R I C A’ S E N D L E S S WA R S .
M E M B E R S O F T H E M I L I TA R Y D O N ’ T D I S A G R E E . T H E Y J U S T W O N D E R H O W
% ( 6 7  7 2  : , 7 + ' 5 $ : ʡ $ 1 '  : + $7  7 + ( <  ) 2 8 * + 7  ) 2 5  $ 1 < : $<

Photo illustration
by J A M E S L A P O R T A by G L U E K I T

NEWSWEEK.COM
21
 resident donald trump wants to
bring Americans home again. Sev-
enteen years after the 9/11 attacks,
U.S. troops are currently engaged
in seven countries under outdated legislation, and
the commander in chief has suggested that two of
those open-ended wars may be closing.
Ignoring officials’ advice, he declared victory
over the undefeated Islamic State group (ISIS) last
month and ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 U.S.
troops from Syria. He also significantly cut Amer-
ican forces in Afghanistan by instructing the Pen-
tagon to rotate home 7,000 service members in
early 2019.
Like George W. Bush declaring “Mission Accom-
plished,” Trump has asserted that American forces
will come home under a banner of victory. He
argued on Twitter that if his predecessors brought
troops home and crippled militant extremists, they
would have been hailed as national heroes.
Growing public fatigue with endless wars was
a significant factor in Trump’s election, research
suggests. Voters are frustrated with foreign policies
that commit U.S. troops and money but lack a clear
definition of victory—with no exit strategy, in other
words. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 presiden-
tial candidate and normally a scorching Trump
critic, has told reporters she agreed with him on
withdrawing from Syria and Afghanistan. And the
military—that 1 percent of U.S. citizens who bear
the burden—doesn’t disagree. Current and former
Pentagon officials tell Newsweek that Trump isn’t
wrong to want an end to those wars, and that the
president has a point that some of the criticism he
has received is unfair.
Fifty-six percent of current and former U.S. ser-
vice members approve of the job Trump is doing,
while 43 percent disapprove, according to a recent
nationwide survey from the Associated Press. (The
AP polled more than 4,000 current U.S. military
personnel and veterans.) Fifty-one percent said they
believe the Trump administration has made the U.S.
safer from terrorism; 35 percent said they do not.
But military officials say Trump’s search for
immediate results in long-term national security
strategies are getting the better of him: Wars do
not end in iconic moments (except in World War
II, perhaps). And victory, especially in Afghani-
stan, is an illusion.
22 NEWSWEEK.COM
Reveille Comes Whether You Want It To or Not
the tweet landed a minute after midnight
Eastern time on January 1. The announcement was
from the Defense Department: Patrick Shanahan,
a former Boeing executive with no military experi-
ence and a year and a half in government, was now
acting secretary of defense.
Reveille comes whether you want it to or not, a
fellow Marine once told me. Translation: We knew
this was coming, and here it is. The tweet made
clear that James Mattis, last of the generals
touted as the “adults” in the administration—
and an outspoken opponent of the Syrian with-
drawal—was gone.
Since the U.S. first intervened in the Syrian
civil war in 2014, the American footprint has
grown, now around 2,000 strong. As for ISIS,
estimates suggest its numbers range between
25,000 to 30,000 fighters and sympathizers
who are embedded in the local population.
A senior Defense Department source, speak-
ing three days before Mattis’s departure, tells
Newsweek no U.S. general was happy with the
decision to pull back U.S. troops from Syria.
The withdrawal could spark an ISIS resurgence
similar to the Taliban’s growing influence and
territory in Afghanistan. Time spent forging
alliances in the region and training the Syrian
Democratic Forces feels wasted, the official
says. What was all the bloodshed and sacrifice
for if, in the end, America was simply going to
leave the Kurds open to slaughter? Not to mention
the costs among individuals and nations.
“The generals right now are working on mak-
ing sure that the withdrawal is orderly, safe and
with the least amount of exposure for current and
future operations and relationships with our local
partners,” says the source, who has knowledge of
the Syria plans. “Were [military leaders] caught off
guard with [Trump’s] decision? Yes. But the presi- BATTLE FATIGUE
dent ordered something, and their job is to provide From top: Trump, who
asserts that U.S. forces
him with the best way to do that something. They will come home under a
don’t make policy.” banner of victory, visits
The president’s decision to withdraw was not with troops in Iraq on
December 26, along
communicated through proper channels before he with Melania; protesters
tweeted about it, the source says. The conversation outside the White House
before a decision normally involves the secretary of on April 1, 2018; rubble on
the outskirts of Damascus,
defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Syria; acting Defense
National Security Council and the State Department. Secretary Shanahan.
J A N UA R Y 18, 2019
 WAR

That did not occur, fueling concern among the

brass—and U.S. allies—about the many unknowns
and the mercurial president.
U.S. officials tell Newsweek the sudden withdrawal
of forces would undercut strategic U.S. alliances with
regional allies; free Russia and Iran to re-establish a
full military presence and solid footing in the Med-
iterranean; and leave U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters
vulnerable to being decimated by a Turkish air cam-
paign. A complete withdrawal would mean giving up
a valuable regional position to forces that threaten
U.S. interests in the area, including the interests of
allies such as Israel and, to some extent, Jordan.
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“ T H O S E people died trusting T H AT T H E R E

WAS A P L A N B E T T E R T H A N ‘ I D O N ’ T K N OW, M U D D L E A RO U N D
F O R A F E W Y E A R S , ’ B U T T H E R E W A S N ’ T. ”

“It takes time to ensure you have appropriate

checks and balances when you decide to with-
draw your presence in such a manner. Alliances—
past, current and future—may be permanently
jeopardized. Strategy and priorities may change,
but we need to concern ourselves with the effects
of every decision,” the senior Defense Department
source says.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina per-
suaded the frustrated president to slow the with-
drawal from Syria, expanding the time line from
30 days to four months, Newsweek confirmed. The
news was first reported by The New York Times.
Graham outlined the conditions the president will
meet before U.S. forces pull out. Among them is the
permanent destruction of ISIS, deterring Iranian
operations and protecting Kurdish fighters. Pen-
tagon officials were uncomfortable with the short
time line and tentative objectives. National security
adviser John Bolton said U.S. forces would remain
in Syria until ISIS was defeated and Turkey gave
assurances not to attack the Kurds. In short, it’s a
work in progress.
The caveats were omitted from the president’s
original December 19 announcement that took the
Pentagon by surprise prompting Mattis’s exit. On
January 5, Kevin Sweeney, the Defense Department
chief of staff, resigned.

NEWSWEEK.COM 23
Afghanistan Is a Failed War
u.s. troops have been in syria for just four
years. They’ve been in Afghanistan for 17—and with-
drawing from America’s longest war is correspond-

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ingly more complicated.
In the short term, U.S. officials fear a complete
pullout would undo the current political negoti-
ations aimed at reconciling differences between
Kabul, the Taliban and the U.S., while also reinforc-
ing the view that America’s word cannot be relied on.
But the post-9/11 wars have outlasted back-to-
back two-term presidential administrations, and
the majority opinion in U.S. military and veteran
circles—despite recent declarations of progress—is
that Afghanistan is a failed war that rolls on, rack-
ing up futile foreign policies, American lives and
taxpayer dollars. Some Afghanistan vets say they’d
be glad to see the war come to a close, but many have
wondered what their comrades died for—was it for
nothing? It’s a question that haunts. Already, those
who fought early in the war have seen the Taliban
retake territory for which American blood was shed.
“I agree with those who feel it’s a good move [to
withdraw],” says former U.S. Marine Staff Sergeant

“THE PRESIDENT ORDERED SOMETHING, AND THEIR JOB

I S T O P R O V I D E H I M W I T H T H E B E S T W AY T O D O T H AT S O M E T H I N G .
They don’t make policy.”
Lucas Dyer, a 13-year veteran of the infantry and
Afghanistan. “But the question lingers: What was it
all for? I know what my part was for, and I know
why my Marines died. To close a chapter on this war
or any war is hard.”
Former U.S. Marine Sergeant Matthew Moores, a
medically retired tank commander and Afghanistan
vet, tells Newsweek he blames the architects of the war,
not the troops. “They were professionals who died
doing their jobs. They didn’t die for nothing; they died
to protect and support the men and women to their
left and right,” says Moores. “There is nobility in that,
and nothing can take it away from them. What does
piss me off, though, is that those people died trusting
that there was a plan better than ‘I don’t know, mud-
dle around for a few years,’ but there wasn’t.”
“Muddle” refers to comments last month from

24 NEWSWEEK.COM

A WORK IN PROGRESS retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, the
From top: A frustrated
former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Trump was persuaded to
slow down naval exercises He told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that his
with South Korea; U.S. “best suggestion” was for a small number of Amer-
Army General Mark
ican forces to remain in Afghanistan and “muddle
Milley in Warsaw, Poland;
Senator Graham; U.S. along,” according to leaked audio obtained by Task
troops leave from Bagram & Purpose, an online news website covering the U.S.
$LUɿHOGLQ$IJKDQLVWDQ
military and veteran communities.
In the meantime, any change in U.S. commit-
ment is not visible on the ground. “There is noth-
ing going on with Afghanistan right now,” says the
senior Defense Department official. “I think that the
administration did not anticipate all the flak from
the GOP leadership regarding withdrawal.”
Since the president announced the cut to
Afghanistan troop strength by half—a precursor,
many believe, for a complete withdrawal at
some point—Graham has touted the Penta-
gon line that military-beat reporters began to
hear months ago. “The conditions in Afghani-
stan—at the present moment—make American
troop withdrawals a high-risk strategy,” Graham
wrote on Twitter. “If we continue on our present
course we are setting in motion the loss of all our
gains and paving the way toward a second 9/11.”
Many current and former U.S. service
members believe the Defense Department
had found a new line to justify keeping the
so-called “forever war” going, replacing talking
points such as “We’re turning a corner,” and
“We’re making progress.”
I first heard Graham’s language in September
2018 from U.S. Marine Brigadier General Roger
Turner, the former commander of Task Force
Southwest in Afghanistan. “We are preventing a
return to pre-9/11 conditions,” Turner said. Marines
who served with the one-star general in 2017 tell me
that statement, on the ground, translates to “Make a
shitty situation less shitty.” Turner had led the first
Marine deployment back to southern Helmand
province since 2014, as part of Trump’s new strategy.
“The stronger the Afghan security forces become,
the less we will have to do,” Trump said when out-
lining his administration’s policy in August 2017.
“Afghans will secure and build their own nation, and
define their own future. We want them to succeed.”
At the time, Trump said he understood Americans’
dissatisfaction: “I also share their frustration over a
foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy,
WAR
money and, most importantly, lives trying to rebuild
countries in our own image, instead of pursuing our
security interests above all other considerations.”
Trump’s campaign rhetoric often focused on suc-
ceeding where his predecessors failed—asserting
that he could put an end to both terrorist groups
and legacy foreign-policy mistakes, quickly. Trump
didn’t explicitly promise to get out of Afghanistan,
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote, but having
made a point of his opposition to the Iraq War, he did
appear to be noninterventionist.
Trump has said the wars of Presidents George W.
Bush and Barack Obama have been a waste of money.
And although his administration has used the same
congressional legislation that started the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan to expand or revitalize armed
conflicts in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iraq and Niger,
it’s hard to say he’s wrong.
In August 2017, Trump seemed to understand
what his predecessor, Obama, had learned when
trying to end the war in Iraq: “A hasty withdrawal
would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS
and Al-Qaeda, would instantly fill, just as happened
before September 11.” But the following April, he
struck a different note at a Michigan rally. “We have
spent $7 trillion—trillion with a t—$7 trillion in the
Middle East,” he said, citing an inflated estimate. “You
know what we have for it? Nothing. Nothing.”
Strong leadership and strategy are more important
than ever, if the U.S. is to clear out. “A complete with-
drawal from Afghanistan would leave the fractious
nation to the intrigues of a theocratic Iran, a rising
China and especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not to
mention Pakistan and India, in yet another iteration
of the 200-year-old ‘Great Game’ for influence in the
region,” Newsweek’s Jeff Stein reported in September.
“Mattis leaving is a big blow,” a second Defense
Department official tells Newsweek. “It’s becom-
ing harder to defend Trump, even among the
Trumpkins at the Pentagon. We’re profes-
sionals and rolling with the punches, but the
concern is that we are in chaos with Chaos
gone,” a reference to Mattis’s military call sign.
Shanahan and his commander in chief are facing
an enormous challenge. The U.S. hasn’t won a major
war in 30 years—but the country has been at war, in
one place or another, nearly all the time since. Sol-
diers never want to cut and run. But is it better to wait
for victory, or simply to declare it and come home?
NEWSWEEK.COM 25
 In his new book, BLUFF CITY, Preston Lauterbach
tells the story of a critically lauded black
photographer, highlighting new evidence about events
leading to the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

The
SECR ET
LIFE

o
ER NEST
W ITHER S
26 NEWSWEEK.COM
 DISORDERLY CONDUCT
Martin Luther King Jr. at the
sanitation workers’ march in
Memphis on March 28, 1968.
Withers captured the clearly
shaken King at the head of
the crowd, which extended
three blocks behind him. The
ORQJWLPH SDFLɿVW ZDV XQVHWWOHG
by disruptive marchers: “Never
before,” writes Lauterbach,
“had one of his marches turned
violent from within.” Opposite:
Withers in front of his Beale
Street photo studio, circa 1956.
 MEMPHIS BEATS
Withers was 34 and
had been working
professionally for a decade
when he took this photo
of Presley with singer
Brook Benton in Memphis
in 1957. Like other black
journalists, Withers was
intent on presenting a true
portrait of black life, like
the rich music scene on
Beale Street where Presley
hung out. “In the eyes
of the African-American
press,” writes Lauterbach,
“white media disseminated
demeaning stereotypes of
black people, diminished
black achievements
and highlighted black
debauchery.” Opposite:
The National Guard on
Beale Street after the
March 28, 1968, riot.

E
rnest withers was a professional photographer
when few African-Americans were. A talented hustler
who could navigate a brutally segregated South, he had
a canny eye for history in the making at a time when his-
tory was broiling, during the 1950s and ’60s. His work covering the
civil rights movement appeared in newspapers across the country.
A native of Memphis, Tennessee, he was there when Elvis Presley
broke through, capturing him visiting the black singers in the Beale
Street clubs that inspired his music (and his hips). He also produced
powerful images of the Emmett Till murder trial in 1955; the deseg-
regation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957;
and the rise of the Black Power movement. One of his most famous
photos captures Martin Luther King Jr. riding a newly integrated
bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after that boycott ended in 1956.
Withers supported social justice, but his legacy is tangled by a
secret association with the FBI. Like many of his generation, he
was a patriot; he’d served in the Army during World War II and was
disturbed by the anti-war movement of the 1960s. He was a man of
his time, too, in his distrust of Communists, whom FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover believed were behind King’s civil rights movement
and militant Black Power leaders like Eldridge Cleaver. Such feelings,
Preston Lauterbach suggests in his new book, Bluff City: The Secret
Life of Photographer Ernest Withers (W.W. Norton & Co., January 15),
were behind the decision of an African-American photographer
to become a well-compensated informant against black activists.
Hoover’s Memphis agents were tasked with monitoring
local civil rights leaders, including the Reverend James Lawson,
co-founder of the Committee on the Move to Equality (COME),
which was committed to civil disobedience, and John B. Smith of
the Invaders, a Black Power offshoot openly defiant of King’s phi-
losophy of nonviolence. Because of his coverage of the movement,
Withers was trusted and invited to local meetings. In turn, his
photo studio on Beale Street was an unofficial Invaders hangout.
He fed his findings to his FBI contact, William Lawrence.
That double life came to a head during the Memphis sanitation
workers strike, which began after the accidental death of two
workers in February 1968. Hundreds went on strike, and a march
was planned for March 22, then rescheduled, because of a freak
snowstorm, for March 28. Lawson was chairman of the strike
committee and invited King to speak at the march.
As Lauterbach writes, Memphis authorities were unprepared
for a mass march; the largest up to that point had topped out
in the low hundreds. This one would measure up to the 1965
Selma-Montgomery campaign in Alabama.

28 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

 CIVIL RIGHTS

On the night of March 27, King was in New York City, at the
home of singer and activist Harry Belafonte. King, the first pres-
ident of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
established in 1957 to end segregation, had been tirelessly pro-
moting his Poor People’s Campaign—with its shift from social to
economic injustice—and a planned march on Washington. (The
campaign’s first phase was the erection of a shantytown, to become
known as Resurrection City, on the National Mall, an idea that
alarmed Hoover.) King was exhausted, but he and Belafonte spoke
late into the night. At dawn he boarded a flight for Memphis.
King arrived a half hour late, at 10:30 a.m. When he stepped out
of his car, the large crowd became hysterical with excitement. As
the march began, writes Lauterbach, “King could have lifted both
feet and been propelled by the great momentum behind him.”
Many of the thousands of protesters were carrying “I Am a
Man” signs. Withers had suggested the signs and distributed the
lumber to make them, and they would feature prominently in
the photographs he’d take that day.
His Rolleiflex also captured the clearly shaken King at the head
of the crowd, his arm linked with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, his
top man for over a decade. It had been 12 years since the photog-
rapher had taken the image of King on a Montgomery bus, Aber-
nathy at his side. “King had been 27 on that day in 1956,” writes
Lauterbach. “Now he was crowding 40. He looked 50.”
High school followers of Smith, some armed with tire irons
and Molotov cocktails, began to use the “I Am a Man” signs as
weapons. Soon conflicts broke out between those protesters and
over 300 officers from the city’s police department. The demon- MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. LAY DESPONDENT.
stration quickly turned into a riot. “King had stood in the eye of After leaving the scene of the riot, he and his group had
extreme violence before, withstanding a police attack in Selma, checked into the Holiday Inn Rivermont, a high-rise hotel
a racist mob attack in [Chicago suburb] Cicero and a bomb ex- overlooking the Mississippi, about a mile and a half from
plosion at his home in Montgomery,” says Lauterbach. “But never ZKHUH WKH PDUFK EHJDQ 7KH\ WRRN D VXLWH RQ WKH HLJKWK ʀRRU
before had one of his marches turned violent from within.” King had got into bed fully clothed and pulled up the covers.
After less than half an hour, King was spirited away in a car. While burning through a chain of Salem cigarettes,
Lawson said later that he had urged King to leave but that he had he spoke to Abernathy. “Maybe we just have to admit
refused until he was practically forced into the car. Local author- that the day of violence is here,” King said. “Maybe we
ities, however, would say that King abandoned the march, fearing just have to give up and let violence take its course.”
for his safety, without trying to stop any of the violence or proper- Abernathy had never seen King like this, nor heard
ty destruction. “The Assistant Chief of Police,” writes Lauterbach, him talk this way. In his depression, King contem-
“would quote King as saying, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ The quote plated calling off the Poor People’s Campaign.
would form an important part of an FBI smear campaign to come.” To lift King’s mood, another aide arranged for an
In the end, the police beat and gassed protesters, arresting 300 important friend to get in touch. Stanley Levison
and shooting four alleged looters. Along the city’s famed Beale phoned King’s room from his home in New York City.
Street, “glass shards from broken store windows and fractured An adviser and fundraiser for King’s SCLC, Levison
two-by-twos used for the signs choked the gutters.” had been a faithful friend for many years. As a former
DIɿOLDWH RI WKH &RPPXQLVW 3DUW\ 86$ /HYLQVRQ KDG
The following excerpt from bluff city: the secret life of photogra- EHHQ +RRYHUŠV MXVWLɿFDWLRQ IRU LQYHVWLJDWLQJ .LQJ DV D
pher ernest withers, by Preston Lauterbach, begins after the march. SRVVLEOH ţ5HGŤ LQʀXHQFH RQ WKH FLYLO ULJKWV PRYHPHQW
Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. ƣ The bureau tapped Levison’s phone and picked up his

A l l Ph o t o g r a p h s © D r. Er n e s t C . W i t h e r s , Sr. c o ur t e s y of t h e W I T H E R S F A M I LY T R U S T 29

conversation with King in Memphis. Agents heard King tell Levison
that a local Black Power group called the Invaders had incited the riot.
In the confusion of March 28, 1968, it’s easy to lose sight of the
day’s key issue: the possibility that the FBI sabotaged the march.
The riot happened during a month of increasing federal anxiety over
the Poor People’s Campaign and two days after the FBI proposed
smearing King to curtail support among potential supporters. If the
bureau had indeed encouraged the riot, it would need someone
HOVH WR EODPH &UHDWLQJ D ZHGJH EHWZHHQ .LQJ DQG %ODFN 3RZHU ɿW
the bureau’s objective of preventing the rise of a black messiah who
could electrify and unify the black nationalist movement, beginning
a true black revolution. The conduct of Lawrence, Withers’s longtime
handler, in documenting the riot provides clues of treachery.
While King smoked in bed, Withers conferred with Law-
UHQFH 7KH QH[W GD\ /DZUHQFH ɿQLVKHG D ORQJ PHPR DERXW
WKH ULRW ZKLFK WKH 0HPSKLV RIɿFH VHQW WR +RRYHU
Lawrence had three sources of information about the demon-
stration: Withers, Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter Kay Pittman
Black and a third party whose observations closely match those of
CREATING a w e dg e B ETWE E N
KING AND BLACK POWER fit the
FBI’S O B J EC TI VE of P RE V E N TING
T HE R I S E o f a B L AC K M E S S I A H .
0HPSKLV SROLFH XQGHUFRYHU RIɿFHU 0DUUHOO 0F&ROORXJK ZKR KDG
LQɿOWUDWHG WKH ,QYDGHUV $GGUHVVLQJ WKH IDFWRUV WKDW FRQWULEXWHG WR
the violence, Lawrence wrote that Lawson’s COME strike support
group had unwittingly armed anyone who showed up to march.
The COME group handed out hundreds of prepared plac-
ards made of cardboard and carried on long 4-foot pine poles.
Before the march, it was apparent to these three sources that
many of the young people were planning to use the plac-
ards as sticks and clubs because they were indiscriminately
ripping the cardboard away, leaving a 4-foot pole in their
hands, which many of them waved in a threatening manner.
Lawrence was referring here to the “I Am a Man” strike support
posters. Addressing how the two-by-twos became weapons,
Lawrence’s “source one” for this memo—Withers—made the most
VSHFLɿF DFFXVDWLRQ DJDLQVW DQ ,QYDGHUV OHDGHU LQ SURYRNLQJ WKH
riot. “Source one pointed out that prior to the start of the March
28, 1968 march that John [B.] Smith and some of his associ-
ates were in his opinion inciting to violence in that they were
30 NEWSWEEK.COM
CIVIL RIGHTS
indiscriminately giving out the 4-foot pine poles to various teen-
age youngsters in the area and John Smith was heard by source
one to tell these youngsters, identities not known, not to be afraid
to use these sticks. He did not elaborate as to what he meant.”
Later in the summary, Lawrence wrote, Withers “pointed out that
as mentioned…these individuals [the Invaders] had done much by
their previous statements and actions…to incite some of the more
ignorant and greedy youths who were in the march.” By “previous
statements and actions,” Withers reportedly meant the Molotov cock-
tails that the Invaders had distributed three weeks before the march.
Lawrence’s—and the FBI’s—explanation for the origins
of the riot was that COME had handed out the sticks, the
Invaders had instructed the youths in using them as
weapons and a nonviolent march had become a riot.
But there are problems with this formulation. For one,
Invaders leader Smith denied that he had handed out sign-
posts to youngsters at the march or encouraged their use as
weapons. Such a denial is what one would expect, but Smith
got some pretty strong backup from McCollough, the police
RIɿFHU ZKRŠG LQɿOWUDWHG WKH ,QYDGHUV
,Q  0F&XOORXJK WHVWLɿHG WR WKH
House Select Committee on Assassi-
nations (HSCA), which was conducting
an inquiry into the King assassination.
McCollough corroborated Smith’s claim.
Another point in favor of Smith came
out of the HSCA inquiry itself. The
committee conducted a thorough inves-
tigation of the riot, using its power to sub-
SRHQD )%, ɿOHV DQG JDLQ DFFHVV WR FRQ-
ɿGHQWLDO VRXUFHV ,W VWXGLHG /DZUHQFHŠV
March 29 memo to headquarters and his source’s accusation that
Smith had handed out the two-by-twos and told people to not be
DIUDLG WR XVH WKHP 7KH +6&$ WRRN WHVWLPRQ\ IURP WKDW FRQɿ-
dential source and found discrepancies between the informant’s
testimony and the statements in Lawrence’s memo, concluding,
“The informant denied having provided certain information that
KDG EHHQ DWWULEXWHG WR KLP DQG SODFHG LQ KLV LQIRUPDQW ɿOHŤ
:KHQ /DZUHQFH KLPVHOI WHVWLɿHG EHIRUH WKH FRPPLWWHH KH
said his sources of information on the riot and the Invaders
had been accurate. Afterward, Lawrence told Withers that
the HSCA “had asked me if info attributed to [Withers]—in
my letterhead memo [of March 29] had actually been fur-
nished by him—and I had to reply that it had been.”
Lawrence acknowledged that he couldn’t tell Withers
what to say to the HSCA but warned him that “denying that
he had ever furnished info which I attributed to him…would
nevertheless create a situation indicating that He or I had
perjured ourselves in that I said one thing and he another.”
J A N UA R Y 18, 2019
 WHERE DO WE
GO FROM HERE?
Withers captured King
resting in the Lorraine
Street Motel in Memphis
in 1966, following his
March Against Fear. Two
years later, King would
be assassinated on the
balcony of the motel.

NEWSWEEK.COM 31
 BEARING WITNESS
“Withers got his break in
journalism at the moment
photography emerged as
the most powerful new
weapon in the rebellion
against racism,” writes
Lauterbach. That moment
was the killing of Emmett
Till and the Mississippi
trial of his accused killers
(far right), covered by
Withers. He also captured
Melba Pattillo Beals
(left), one of the Little
Rock Nine, in 1957, and
members of the Invaders,
an offshoot of Black Power,
accused by the FBI of
agitating violence at the
March 28, 1968 march.

“ M AY B E W E J U S T h a v e t o a d m i t THAT THE DAY OF VIOLENCE

The HSCA leveled no perjury charges but concluded that “the
discrepancy tarnished the evidence given by both the Bureau and
the informant, and it left the committee with a measure of uncer-
tainty about the scope of FBI involvement with the Invaders.”
As Lawrence said, someone perjured himself about the Invad-
ers in the riot. All the evidence indicates that it was Lawrence who
fabricated the story of Smith inciting violence and misattributed
this version of events to his “source one” informant, Withers.
In the months following the 1968 riot, Lawrence would repeat
the Smith story with greater embellishment. In a lengthy report
dated May 6, 1968, he upgraded the statement about the sticks to
a direct quote: “[Withers]…recalled hearing John B. Smith tell some
of the youngsters, ‘Don’t be afraid to use these sticks if you have to.’”
Perhaps the strangest thing is that Lawrence never pursued the
matter further, indicating that his case against Smith must have
been weak. The FBI never arrested or prosecuted Smith on charges
DVVRFLDWHG ZLWK WKH ULRW GHVSLWH WKH HYLGHQFH LQ LWV ɿOHV WKDW KH KDG
incited it. The evidence shows that the FBI falsely used Withers as
D VRXUFH RI XQWUXH LQIRUPDWLRQŜD UHYHODWLRQ LI QRW RQH WKDW FODULɿHV
WKH EXUHDXŠV UROH RU :LWKHUVŠV LQ VSRLOLQJ .LQJŠV ɿQDO PDUFK
While Lawrence inaccurately held Smith responsible for
inciting violence in his March 29 memo, he failed to disclose his
informant’s own proximity to the signs used that day as weapons.
In a May 6, 1968, report, Lawrence wrote, “[Withers]
pointed out that the COME group had organized the march
and had made a bad mistake by giving out several hundred
pre-constructed pasteboard placards which had been stapled
onto long pine poles or sticks.”The distribution of the poles
appears here as a “bad mistake” on COME’s part, according
to Withers, the person who brought the lumber to the strike.
Lawrence rehashed the story of the two-by-twos even more
vividly later in the report. He wrote: “On the night of March 28,
 >:LWKHUV@ DGYLVHG WKDW WKH ELJJHVW GHɿQLWH FRQWULEXWLQJ
factor to the violence in his opinion was the fact that the COME
JURXS KDG IRU WKH ɿUVW WLPH LQ DQ\ RI WKHLU QXPHURXV GDLO\ PDUFKHV
furnished wooden sticks to the marchers, as previously they had

32 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019


i s H E R E , ” K i n g s a i d . “ M AY B E W E J U S T H AV E T O G I V E U P. ”
merely used cardboard placards which could not become lethal
weapons. He pointed out that giving out several hundred hard
pine sticks was tantamount to giving out an equal number of
baseball bats which could easily be used to break windows and
which could be used as weapons by the participants in the march.”
Again, it seems strange that the person who supervised
bringing the sticks to the march—Withers—could so
quickly claim that what he had done “was tantamount
to giving out an equal number of baseball bats.”
In neither instance did Lawrence note Withers’s role in
putting the two-by-twos into play, though he seems to have
EHHQ DZDUH RI LW ,Q D PHPR WR WKH 0HPSKLV RIɿFH GDWHG $SULO
2, 1968, Lawrence provided deeper detail on the origin of the
sticks. “[First name unknown] Harvey, brother of Fred Harvey,
and who is a teacher at Jeter High School, earlier in the week…
rent[ed] a Skil saw which was taken to the Minimum Salary
2IɿFH RI $0( &KXUFK QH[W WR &OD\ERUQ 7HPSOH ZKHUH -&
Brown cut the pine wood into four-foot lengths for the placards.”
CIVIL RIGHTS
Much of this memo has been redacted. But those names—Har-
vey and Brown—corroborate what Withers told a German sociol-
ogist in 1982: “If anybody is…responsible for that riot up there, as
anybody, I might be responsible…because I and Harvey and J.C.
Brown back here went down…there to rent the saw to cut the sticks
that was used in the riot, and we certainly wasn’t doing it by plan.”
Also on April 2, Hoover may have directed the use of FBI
funds for some yet unknown endeavor. A teletype from him
to the Memphis bureau that day reads in part (the document
is heavily redacted): “In the event it is necessary to [name
redacted] for actual expenses incurred, authority is grant-
HG WR SD\ KLP XS WR VHYHQ ɿYH GROODUV ,I SD\PHQW LV PDGH
obtain itemized accounting of his expenses.” Lawrence’s
signature appears, acknowledging receipt of Hoover’s memo.
Perhaps the FBI Memphis memo describing the construction of
the signs and the teletype with Hoover’s payment authorization also
contain information linking the FBI to the two-by-twos. But until
we are able to view unredacted copies of both, we’ll never know. ƴ
NEWSWEEK.COM 33
 “IF ANYB ODY

SIGN OF THE TIMES

“I Am a Man,” the message of
the sanitation workers’ march
on March 28. Agitators within
the crowd would use lumber
from the signs for weapons.

34 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

is RESPONSIBLE
FOR THAT RIOT up there, AS ANYBODY,
I MIGHT be responsible,”
WITHERS said in 1982.

SW K 35
5
 CIVIL RIGHTS

lauterbach notes that it remains unclear whether the A CHILD IN TIME

Some argue that, in
signs Withers suggested were to create a stronger visual or if,
working for the FBI,
as the FBI suggested, there was a hope of encouraging violence Withers betrayed
among the strikers. Whatever the intention, Withers’s action trag- his people. But his
unparalleled access to
ically altered the course of the civil rights movement. King felt
the inner workings of the
the violence was a stain on his leadership. A week later, on April 3, civil rights movement also
he would return to Memphis to restate his plea for nonviolence, provided indelible images
that galvanized support
delivering his triumphant “Mountaintop” speech (“I have seen
for King and other leaders.
the promised land.…”), which poignantly hinted at his mortality. Withers’s gift for capturing
The following evening, on April 4, King was shot on the bal- intimate emotional
PRPHQWVZDVVLJQLɿFDQW
cony of the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray. “If the windows
on Beale Street hadn’t been broken,” Lauterbach writes, “King
would have had no reason to come back.”
Memphis ministers, black and white, pleaded with Mayor
Henry Loeb, to concede to the union’s demands. He would not.
It took President Lyndon Johnson to force his hand. A solution
was negotiated on April 16, ending the strike. Workers received
a pay raise of 15 cents an hour.
King’s Poor People’s Campaign went forward. Resurrection
City, the first stage, was erected on the National Mall (population

WITHERS “PERSONIFIES THE

flawe d hero.I T H I N K W E N E E D to embrace
h i m F O R A L L T H AT H E WA S . ”

3,000), culminating in the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace and
Freedom on June 19, 1968.
It wasn’t until 2010, three years after Withers’s death, that his
work for the FBI was revealed in a series of articles by Marc Per-
rusquia in The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper that
sued the FBI to open the Withers informant file, which Lauter-
bach used to research Bluff City. Despite incriminating evidence,
Lauterbach writes that even during Withers’s years as an informant,
his “courage and commitment through the most physically threat-
ening and emotionally trying times of his life are beyond reproach.”
Withers’s association with the FBI ended in the late ’70s. The dec-
ades of compensation allowed the photographer to put his eight
children through college. By the ’80s, his work was famous, exhib-
ited all over the country. He spent the last two decades of his life,
until his death in 2007, publishing books and delivering lectures.
The Withers Collection Museum and Gallery remains on Beale
Street, evidence of a rightfully celebrated if imperfect artist—a
man who “personifies the flawed hero,” writes Lauterbach. “I
think we need to embrace him for all he was.”

36 NEWSWEEK.COM
Horizons SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY + HEALTH

& 6 $  , 0 $* ( 6 ʔ* ( 7 7 <

38 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

 OPINION

Clean
Break
A world without slaughterhouses
is closer than you think

NEWSWEEK.COM 39
Hori
SO3H
“if we can grow meat without
the animal, why wouldn’t we?”
This question wasn’t from a sci-
ence fiction writer or the head of the
Humane Society of the United States.
Rather, this came from Tom Hayes
toward the end of his tenure as the
CEO of Tyson Foods, the largest pro-
ducer of meat in the U.S.
Why would the CEO of Tyson,
whose brand has become synony-
mous with chicken, want to remove
the animal from production? In part
because meat production will be
more efficient that way; by growing
meat without bones, feathers or hair,
we can get more of it with the same
resources. United Nations scientists
say that raising and killing animals for
food is “one of the major causes of the
world’s most pressing environmental
problems, including global warming,
land degradation, air and water pollu-
tion, and loss of biodiversity.”`
In 2017, an animal advocacy think
tank found that a majority of people
were uncomfortable with how ani-
mals are used in our current food
system and that nearly half want to
ban slaughterhouses. Oklahoma State
University got similar results with a
follow-up survey. Couple that with
the fact that there are simply not
40 NEWSWEEK.COM
O abroad deserve to be applauded. But
ţ1RVFLHQWL˽F
 meat development. In a report to the
breakthroughs are
necessary to bring
meat without the
animal to our plates.”
enough resources to scale up current
meat production to feed the world.
Fortunately, we are approaching
the day when Hayes’s slaughter-free
meat is a reality. Companies around
the world are rapidly bringing down
the cost of animal-free meat, which
is grown directly in a facility similar
to a brewery rather than as part of an
animal. This “cell-based” product (aka
“clean meat”) is exactly like what every-
one is used to, right down to the DNA.
Furthermore, there is no fecal con-
tamination, and it does not require
the chronic use of antibiotics.
With all these benefits, the question
“Why wouldn’t we?” becomes even
more difficult to answer. Although
there are technical
challenges to scaling up
BY
production to be cost
competitive with con-
JESSICA ALMY ventional meat, no sci-
@Jessica Almy entific breakthroughs
OPINION
are necessary to bring it to our plates.
The main question now is which
country will lead the way. The gov-
ernments of Japan, the Netherlands
and Israel have already invested in
research and startups. Given the mag-
nitude of the global problems clean
meat can help address, those efforts
we should also care about that suc-
cess here in the U.S.; according to the
Department of Agriculture, Ameri-
cans ate a record amount of meat in
2018—over 222 pounds per person.
There are signs the government
wants to be at the forefront of clean
White House, the National Academy
of Sciences singled it out as a tech-
nology with particularly high growth
potential. Secretary of Agriculture
Sonny Perdue has noted the impor-
tance of cell-based meat in keeping
the U.S. a prominent meat exporter.
“Shouldn’t we...be about how we can
grow and feed people more efficiently
and effectively?” he asked. “These tech-
niques need to be embraced.”
And then, just a few weeks ago, the
Food and Drug Administration and
the Department of Agriculture for-
mally announced their plan for joint
oversight of clean meat production
within their current regulatory frame-
works. The announcement gives lead-
ing clean companies, like Memphis
Meats and Just, a clear signal that
they will have a straightforward and
fair path to market in the U.S.
If we listen to Hayes and Perdue, we
& 2 :  , / % 86 & $ ʔ* ( 7 7 <  3$ 3 ( 5   * ( 7 7 <  ʦ  ʧ
will recognize that we should not only
embrace meat without the animal
but do everything possible to bring
animal-free meat to the world.
Ơ Jessica Almy is director of policy
at the Good Food Institute, a non-
profit focused on finding plant-based
alternatives to animal products.
J A N UA R Y 18, 2019
 NEWSGEEK

BestVideo
Gamesof 2018
From epic fantasy to Tokyo’s criminal underworld to the Old West,
the most outstanding games of 2018 spannedan eclectic mix of genres
and worlds, hailing from major developers and small indie studios alike.
Our favorites, in alphabetical order

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NEWSWEEK.COM 41
Culture HIGH, LOW + EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

TOOLS OF
THE TRADER
Cheadle (with
Rannells) as
Mo, the coke-
fueled leader of
DɿQDQFLDOKRXVH
circa 1987.

42 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

 HEDY, NOT HEDLEY
7KHVHFUHWOLIHRID+ROO\ZRRGERPEVKHOO» P.46

TELEVISION

MadMoney
Don Cheadle’s new Showtime comedy, Black Monday, introduces
an overlooked (and equally reprehensible) wolf of Wall Street

it’s a moment that will undoubtedly
haunt him as long as he lives: Don Cheadle,
dressed as a car wash attendant, backup dancing
in a 1989 music video for R&B star Angela Win-
bush’s hit song “It’s the Real Thing.” Cheadle, then a
struggling actor, had showed up for a friend’s cast-
/ ( )7  (5 , 1 6, 0 . , 1 ʔ6+ 2:7 , 0 (  72 3 5 , *+ 7  6 , /9 (5  6& 5 (( 1& 2/ / (& 7, 21 ʔ* ( 7 7 <
out, show off, be loud, be bold. Do all the drugs. Have
all the sex. There wasn’t a lot of introspection.”
Cheadle has no particular fondness for films
or shows about people with money either. “Actu-
ally, a lot of times it disgusts me,” says the actor, a
noted activist involved in human rights and cli-

ing call and was recruited by the choreographer,
Debbie Allen. The result, an ’80s extravaganza of
cheese—big hair, shoulder pads, bedazzled hats
and synthesized beats—would look right at home
in Cheadle’s new Showtime comedy, Black Monday
(premiering January 20).
The series takes place during what is often called
the Decade of Greed, an era of conspicuous con-
sumption fostered by the Reagan administration—
inspiration for not only Oliver Stone’s biting critique
of financial predation, 1987’s Wall Street, but also the
current U.S. president, whose identity was forged in
the gilded excess of the ’80s. Cheadle plays a manic
stock trader named Maurice “Mo” Monroe. The
actor has a curious nostalgia for “the
clothes, the shoes and the terrible synth
music that came out of that time,” but
his fondness ends there. “I graduated
from CalArts in ’86,” he tells Newsweek. ANNA MENTA
“It was a very demonstrable period: Show @annalikestweets
mate change issues. (Cheadle has co-authored two
books, including Not on Our Watch: The Mission to
End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond.) “That kind of
gluttony is hard to take.”
And yet, just two years after the 54-year-old
wrapped five seasons of Showtime’s House of Lies—
where he earned a Golden Globe playing a ruthless
management consultant named Marty—he’s back
in the world of money, money, money. “In both
cases, I blame David Nevins,” says Cheadle, refer-
ring to the CEO of Showtime. What makes his
new dark comedy “palatable and enjoyable,” says
the actor, is that it is also a scathing takedown of
excess. Black Monday flirts with satire, the tone
as frenzied and irreverent as the title
character, who, among other things,
BY does coke with his robot butler and
karate-chops doors down. “I hope peo-
ple want to watch us, because it’s not
like anything I’ve ever seen on TV before.

NEWSWEEK.COM 43
Culture
[My character] is wild in the best way—
made of gamble, insanely unafraid,
with no anchor and no balance.”
The story, from creators David
Caspe (Happy Endings) and Jordan
Cahan (My Best Friend’s Girl), fiction-
alizes an explanation for the stock
market crash on Monday, October
19, 1987. (The opening credits of the
pilot, directed by Seth Rogen and Evan
Goldberg, claim “no one knows what
caused the crash…until now.”) Mo’s
goal is to take his No. 11 team to No. 1
on Wall Street—if only he had the cun-
ning of Marty on House of Lies. “Mo’s
not nearly as intelligent,” says Cheadle,
an executive producer of the show.
Perhaps not so true to life is that
Mo’s ragtag team of Wall Street trad-
ers is remarkably diverse for the time.
There was no pushback on such real-
ity-bending, says Cheadle. “That was
the point of what we were trying to
do. These characters get to do things
that you wouldn’t get to if we were
a traditional ‘house’ of 98 percent
white men. We already know how it
would be if it was Leo DiCaprio and
Jonah Hill. How do these guys do it?”
Regina Hall (Girls Trip) plays fierce
trader Dawn; Andrew Rannells is the
firm’s only straight white dude, a fresh-
faced newbie named Blair; Horatio
Sanz, as Wayne, is Latino; Yassir Lester,
as Yassir, is Muslim. It was Cheadle
who pushed to cast Hall, who recently
became the first black woman to win a
best actress award from the New York
Film Critics Circle, for 2018’s Support
the Girls. He had seen her pull an auda-
cious stunt at the 2016 American Black
Film Festival Honors. “Regina King
was being honored,” says Hall. “She
and I get confused all the time—her
picture gets put in for mine and vice
DEALER BEWARE Hall stars as a
black female trader “who plays
the same game men play.”
44 NEWSWEEK.COM
TELEVISION
versa. So we played a joke. We didn’t
tell the stage people, but when they
announced ‘Regina King,’ I walked
out giving kisses, waving, got to the
podium and said, ‘ Thank you so
much everyone!’”
Cheadle was impressed. “Her
humor and her humanity—it all came
through in that three minutes that I
saw her onstage. I thought, That’s
Dawn! A lot of other names and dif-
ferent ethnicities came up, but I said,
‘If Regina says yes, just give it to her.’”
Hall loves that Dawn is “a woman
whose function is not in connection
to the male character—meaning that
she isn’t the wife, and it doesn’t feel
auxiliary. She plays the same game
men play.” Dawn is a married woman
who, nonetheless, exploits the under-
lying romantic tension with Mo; by
ţ6KRZ Rɼ EH ORXG
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the third episode, she has tricked him
into making her a partner at the firm.
As it turns out, there was a black
female trader in the ’80s—a surprise
to Hall, who tracked her down. “We
talked about how forceful she had to
be just to be heard,” the actress says.
Cheadle turned to the 1991 book
Den of Thieves, James B. Stewart’s
best-selling account of the insider
trading scandals of the mid-’80s.
Though the junk bond deals of finan-
ciers like Ivan Boesky and Michael
Milken were illegal, the laws were
rarely enforced until 1989, when
Boesky and Milken were convicted of
fraud. “One of the most interesting
things Stewart shows,” says Cheadle,
“is how people were willing to work
around every rule and regulation
because the reward is so potentially—
well, rewarding.”
The biggest challenge was playing
high. “Mo’s done a lot of coke,” says
Cheadle. “Your body doesn’t know
that you’re just acting when you’ve
been doing that for 14 hours. You
leave the set, and you’re like, ‘Wow,
why do I feel so edgy and nervous?’
That can be hard to drop.”
Did he, as actors often do, have to
find a way to empathize with Mo?
“No,” he says flatly. “People like that
are making moves for themselves
and shitting on everyone else. I
don’t have a lot of empathy for him,
and I tend to cheer when he gets his
comeuppance.”
The series is obviously critical of
both the decade and Wall Street, but
it’s not, says Cheadle, a comment on
current corruption. Nor is it “trying
to make some statement on race,” he
( 5 , 1 6, 0 . , 1ʔ 6 + 2: 7 , 0 (
adds. “It’s not medicine in any way,
shape or form.” Rather, it’s a new
story that “you wouldn’t get to with
98 percent white men. We are the
wretched refuse of the upper crust
of blue-blood, elite white boys.”
J A N UA R Y 18, 2019
Nicole Kidman

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Culture

5($'< )25 +(5 &/26(ʝ83 At left,

Lamarr in 1940. Next page, Mandl,
left, and MGM co-founder Mayer, who
gave the actress a contract in 1937.

novels about each—2016’s The Other

Einstein and The Only Woman in the
Room (Sourcebooks Landmark, Jan-
uary 8)—and sees parallels in their
uncommon tenacity and willing-
ness to buck norms, as well as a fate
shared by so many women through-
out history: invisibility.
In writing her narratively con-
nected, fictionalized biographies,
Benedict is not unlike an archaeol-
ogist digging up clues to moments
of epiphany. For Maric, it was “an
incredible rise from a backwater in
19th-century Siberia, where it was
illegal for girls to attend high school,
to become one of the first women in
a university physics program.” Soon
after marrying Einstein, he intro-
duced his theory of relativity, and
Benedict is not alone in thinking

)520/()76816(7%28/(9$5'ʔ&25%,6ʔ*(7 7<%(7 70$11$5&+,9(ʔ*(7 7 <  + 8 /72 1  $ 5 & + , 9 ( ʔ* ( 7 7 <

Maric deserves some of the credit.
For Lamarr, it was a frequency-hop-
ping weaponry system that ulti-
mately led to cellphone, Wi-Fi and
BOOKS GPS technology.
The 2018 documentary Bomb-

TheLadyVanishes shell showcased Lamarr’s talent

as an inventor. She was already an
international star in 1942 when she
Before she was a movie star and inventor, patented what she called her “secret
Hedy Lamarr escaped from a marriage to Austria’s ‘Merchant communication system,” but Bene-
of Death.’ A new novel imagines those years dict was more interested in the years
before, when the Austrian Jew was
still in Vienna. “My books are almost
like origin stories,” says the author,
lo oking at them, you exotic seductress opposite top male whose next book will be about Win-
wouldn’t think Mileva Maric stars like Clark Gable during Holly- ston Churchill’s wife, Clementine.
and actress Hedy Lamarr had much wood’s Golden Age. “Hedy the film star wasn’t invisible,
in common. Maric, Albert Einstein’s But Marie Benedict of course. But the young Hedwig
first wife, was a reserved and brilliant saw as many similarities BY
Kiesler—nobody knew her.”
mathematician. Lamarr was, at one as differences. The com- Kiesler was 18 when she began
time, known as “the most beautiful mercial litigator turned MARY KAYE acting; a scandalous (for the times)
woman in the world,” cast as the author has written SCHILLING nude scene in the 1933 Czech film

46 NEWSWEEK.COM J A N UA R Y 18, 2019

 Ecstasy made her an instant sensa- conversations among readers, about World War II story, an immigration
tion. But when Fritz Mandl, one of being honest about how we view our- story and a patriot’s story,” says Ben-
Austria’s richest men, proposed later selves and others.” edict. “Her Jewish survivor guilt com-
in 1933, she accepted. “Her life with Lamarr never cared for Hollywood pelled her to contribute to the war
Fritz was mind-boggling,” says Bene- life. “A perfect night was at home, effort after she arrived in America.”
dict. He was a notorious munitions tinkering with her inventions,” says Lamarr saw the frequency-hopping
manufacturer—the “Merchant of Benedict. “Hedy lived in a box—she system—her idea but co-invented
Death”—with ties to Mussolini and couldn’t get out of it.” The actress with composer George Antheil—as
Hitler. At their various homes and grew frustrated by the arm-candy the true expression of who she was,
at Nazi conferences, the young Mrs. roles offered her, and eventually the says the author. The Navy ultimately
Mandl was privy to the Third Reich’s parts dried up. rejected the patent for reasons never
major players, including scientists But The Only Woman in the Room spelled out. It was a big improvement
talking about secret weapons. Lamarr, isn’t the story of a movie star. “It’s a over the easily jammed torpedo sys-
always interested in building things, tems the U.S. was using but probably
used the meetings to develop her too advanced to implement. The Navy
latent aptitude for applied science. and others would later repurpose the
But she soon tired of Mandl’s technology after the patent expired;
obsessive need to control her, and in “Hedy meeting in 1962, an updated version appeared
1937 she flew her gilded coop, imper-
sonating her maid to escape. She
Mayer and on Navy ships.
Lamarr died in 2000 and was
ended up in London, where MGM’s being recruited posthumously inducted, with Antheil,
Louis B. Mayer offered the 22-year-
old a contract and a new last name.
into Hollywood into the National Inventors Hall of
Fame in 2014. “I write fiction, so this
As Benedict was writing The Only could have been is my perception,” says Benedict, “but
Woman in the Room, she was aston-
ished at how little had changed. “I
taken from a I think the moment her patent was
rejected was the beginning of the loss
had written several scenes over six current headline.” of her real self.”
months when the Harvey Weinstein
allegations surfaced, which precip-
itated the #MeToo movement,” she
says. “And those scenes—where she’s
meeting Mayer and being recruited
into Hollywood? They could have
been taken from a current headline.”
Lamarr was an opportunist who
“utilized her beauty as a tool,” says
Benedict. “I don’t think she thought
of her looks negatively, but she
wished people would see beyond
that. In her lifetime, I think that was
impossible for her.”
And would it be possible today?
“One of the things I asked early read-
ers was ‘Did it surprise you that Hedy
Lamarr was capable of such an inven-
tion? And what does that say about
negative perceptions of women
that linger today?’ Hopefully, that
might stimulate some questions and

NEWSWEEK.COM 47
Culture Illustration by B R I T T S P E N C E R

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<RXFRZURWH6HWK0H\HUVŠVʰʮʯʯ
White House Correspondents’
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48 J A N UA R Y 18, 2019
 Tinalbarka wants to be a lawyer.
She and her family fled violence in Mali.

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