In A 'Republic of Suffering', Death's Unifying Effect

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Mayer Reveals 'Dark Side' Of War On Terror

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Three of the five books nominated for a National Book Award in the non-fiction category are about the repercussions of war. The winners will be announced November 19th. We're going to hear from the authors of two of those non-fiction nominees.

Our first guest, Jane Mayer, is the author of "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals." She writes, quote, "as far of the war on terror, for the first time in its history, the United States has sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment American-held captives, making torture the official law of the land in all but name." According to her book, the International Committee of the Red Cross has used the word torture to describe some of the U.S. interrogation techniques. Mayer writes about those interrogations and how the vice president made sure that White House and Justice Department lawyers came up with legal justification for them and for the overall expansion of government powers on the war on terror.

Jane Meyer is a staff writer for the New Yorker. We spoke last July when her book was published. I asked her about the surprising origins of the extreme interrogation techniques. One of the amazing things about the interrogation program is that the techniques that the CIA used where largely based on the program called SERE, or Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. This was a Cold War program that was initiated during the Korean War that was used to subject American soldiers to the kinds of hashed interrogation techniques that they might be subjected to if captured, so that they'd learned how to resist them. And one of the reasons why this program was put into effect was, the 36 American soldiers who were tortured by the Koreans during the Korean War gave false confessions. And so, our program is based on techniques that were used and ended up getting false confessions from American soldiers.

Ms. JANE MAYER (Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, "The Dark Side"): It's an incredible irony. I looked around as a reporter and thought, why is it that we're seeing the same strange techniques being used on detainees in all the places where the U.S. is holding them? I mean, it was true in Guantanamo. It was true in Iraq. It was true in Afghanistan.

You'd see people hooded and shackled in a certain way, deprived of sleep, bombarded with really loud, horrible sounds. And there seemed to be a program. I didn't think it was possible that U.S. soldiers could have just kind of freelanced this and come up with it in exactly the same way all around the world.

And so, I was looking to see, is there a curriculum for this? And what I found was, in fact, there was a rule book for it, and the rule book was an arcane program, a secret program that's run for the Special Forces down in Fort Brag, and actually other services also have it, that's Fort Brag is the Army. The Navy has a version and the Air Force has a version, too.

And what this program was for was to recreate torture as it had existed during in the Cold War, Communist torture, in order to prepare soldiers in case they were ever taken captive, so that they could survive and resist it. And these programs became sort of like - I thought of them as like Petri dishes where they kept the virus alive in order to inoculate soldiers against it. But what happened in the war in terror was that the people who ran those programs wound up being turned to as experts on how to interrogate people. And that little virus in the Petri dish got out and spread through the United States military and through the CIA.

So it became, actually, the curriculum for how we were going to interrogate people ourselves, and it was something that had been used originally to get false confession out of people by Communists. But they, you know, so that we round up emulating the tactics of what we called the Evil Empire, and it had never been designed to get the truth. It had always been used to get false confessions, and inevitably, of course, what happened was, we wound up getting a lot of false intelligence out of people.

GROSS: So, the premise was, if you subject somebody to enough pain, they'll tell you whatever you want to hear?

Ms. MAYER: Well, that's the idea. And it's not just pain, actually. The program that they emulated is also one of psychological destruction. It's as much psychological as it is physical really.

GROSS: Such as?

Ms. MAYER: They did a lot of psychological research during the Cold War years in the CIA, to try to figure out what made people give false confessions, and whether there was kind of brain washing. And what they found out was that, if you subject people to severe isolation, where you really cut them off from all stimuli; you give them goggles. You give them - cover up their hands so that they can't feel anything, keep them in the dark so they don't know what time it is. They can't talk to anybody. They even tried suspending people in water tanks. You give them white noise.

Before long, people go crazy, and they also become very dependant upon their captors and bond with them. And the idea was that, we can manipulate them psychologically in order to get them to talk to their interrogators because they're going to be so desperate to have some kind of human bond. And so, that kind of research was - went into our Cold War CIA science experiments, and it wound up being taken back off the shelf.

The reason that we turn to these arcane and exotic programs was that, in truth, the CIA had not had a lot of experience interrogating people. The CIA, before 9/11, didn't hold prisoners. That was the province of the criminal justice system in this country and the military. And the military and the criminal justice system had very strict rules for what you could do. But suddenly, after 9/11, the CIA had its own prisoners and didn't really know how to interrogate them, and they turned to the wrong people.

GROSS: So, you know, you can understand why certain communist governments wanted false confessions. They want you to say, basically, I have sinned, and the communist government is great. You know, to say that on the record.

Ms. MAYER: Right. It's very useful for propaganda purposes.

GROSS: Exactly. But theoretically, that's not what the Bush administration wanted. It wanted real information about real terrorists. Is there any evidence that we've gotten any real information about real terrorists and terrorists' plots through these interrogation techniques?

Ms. MAYER: The record of what the Bush administration got out of the terrorist suspects who they tortured or coerced or use enhanced interrogation techniques, call it whatever you want, is secret still. We have not been able to examine the record. We don't have the interrogation transcripts. But those who have seen them have raised a lot of really disturbing problems about what they've produced. For instance, Jay Rockefeller, who is the senator, who is the chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee, put out a statement not so long ago saying, from everything he knows, and he knows as much as almost anyone about this program, there's never been a reason to torture anyone. There is no reason that they needed to move to this techniques.

GROSS: You know, in discussing the Bush Administration and al Qaeda, you described how the Bush administration kind of swang from one extreme to another, that, before September 11th, the Bush administration was either ignoring or downplaying all the information it was getting about the threats of al Qaeda, and it got a lot of information. But then, after September 11th, the Bush administration became obsessed with al Qaeda, in doing absolutely anything to stop them, including what many people believed is the torture of detainees.

And you write about Vice President Cheney in particular here, about how a lot of people close to him felt that he became paranoid, in part because he insisted on reading the intelligence first hand. You said he distrusted the CIA, and he wanted to see the information first hand, but he's getting that information unfiltered, unscreened. Why was that a problem?

Ms. MAYER: I'm so glad you asked about this because I actually think it's a really interesting dynamic that took place in the Bush White House right after 9/11, which was that - Both Cheney and Bush, but Cheney in particular wanted to see what's known as raw intelligence. They didn't want it analyzed by the CIA, and they wanted to see everything. And what this meant was, they were just completely bombarded with all kinds of horrible possible threats from all around the world, everything the United States government was able to vacuum up of enemy actions against the United States.

What experts said to me, intelligence experts said to me, and I quote Roger Cressey as one of them in this book, who was at the National Security Council, they thought it was a big mistake because what the vice president and president were getting was a lot of bad information. You get a lot of bad information with the good, a lot of unreliable reports that would be everything from people plotting nuclear attacks on the U.S. to Anthrax attacks, all kinds of awful things. But the president and vice president started every day looking at this stuff, and a number of people who saw these reports, they were called the Threat Matrix Report, felt that it really tainted their outlook in the way that might have almost thrown off their judgment.

GROSS: Because they were taking all of the false information mixed in with the real information and considering everything a threat, even if it was just junk.

Ms. MAYER: Right. I mean - and ordinarily, in the past, what the CIA has done is had morning briefings, of course, with presidents. But they only present what they feel is reliable and really worrisome. In this case, they just threw the whole kitchen sink in, and it was full of stuff that, you know, came from, you know, people phoning it in because they imagined they saw something awful when - you know, who knows whether it was or not.

There was no work done to try to evaluate the intelligence. It was just - all just thrown at the president and vice president. And people who knew Cheney for a long time, I talked to one man who was a longtime family friend of the Cheneys and really likes Cheney a lot. He said that, after 9/11, he changed. He just seemed steely, and he's known for having a really good sense of humor, actually. But it was if he had seen something terrible, this man said to me.

I think also that it's very hard for anybody outside of the government to be able to understand the amount of responsibility and worry that they felt, that if they didn't do everything they possibly could, America was going to be hit by a terrorist attack again, maybe a worse one, maybe even a nuclear attack. I mean, they had to live with this responsibility. And I've tried in the book to at least understand them and give them credit for trying to protect the country. They - it's not that they were a gang of criminals who were doing something wanton for fun. These are people who felt they were doing what was required and necessary to protect the country. But - and so they just went to extraordinary lengths, and I think that what happened was, as it became more clear that many people felt they'd gone too far, they couldn't turn back.

GROSS: At the end of your book, you write, what began on 9/11 as a battle for America's security became and continues to be a battle for the country's soul. I'm going to ask you to elaborate on that.

Ms. MAYER: Well, this is really very much why I wanted to write this book, was I felt that, while I was writing stories about torture and rendition, and some of these the extreme practices in the war on terror that seems so depressing, people would say to me, why - how can you write about this stuff? It's so depressing. And, in truth, what I knew was that, all along the way, there were people who were standing up against it, who were, in my view, very patriotic and who felt that this was - that there was another front in the war on terror. It wasn't just the U.S. versus the terrorists.

There was also kind of a civil war inside America, which was this battle for America's soul. And there were a lot of people who just felt in the military that this wasn't right, and we can - we've faced worse enemies and not descended to their level like this. There were a lot of people in the FBI who stood up and said, we're not doing this. We don't torture people. That's what our enemies do and spoke out internally. There were a number of lawyers in the Bush White House who did so, too.

And I guess I felt that there was a real live battle, an incredibly interesting struggle going on to define, how do we keep the country safe without mortgaging our ideals? And what I wanted to tell, partly in this book, was the story of that fight. It's a fight that's really a moral fight, an ethical fight, a historic fight, and I think something that I really wanted the country to think about, know about. So that's what I meant about the struggle for America's soul.

GROSS: My guest is Jane Mayer, the author of "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals." More after a break. This is Fresh Air.

My guest, Jane Mayer, is the author of "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals." It's nominated for the 2008 National Book Award for non-fiction.

Part of your book is about how dissent within the Bush administration, about how we were dealing with secret detention facilities and interrogation that many people have described as torture, how dissent about that within the Bush administration was squashed. Give us some of the more extreme examples of how that was stopped.

Ms. MAYER: Almost from the start, there were people who said - when these extreme ways of treating prisoners were proposed, they said, you know, this is outside of America's tradition. Since George Washington, we have been leading the cause of human rights, and particularly in the treatment of prisoners of war, we've always tried to be the most humane country in the world.

When lawyers in the administration tried to stand up for what they thought was the law, and it was a different interpretation from that, from Cheney's office in particular, they often found themselves ostracized, and careers came to an end. Some of the lawyers felt themselves to be in such danger, really, they feared retribution from the vice president's office to the point where two of them actually resorted to having to talk in codes, and they thought they might be in physical danger.

And those two were Jack Goldsmith, who was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and James Comey, who was the number two guy in the Justice Department, the deputy attorney general. And both of them were busy trying to withdraw the torture statute and fix the law on this area, but they really just became, you know, almost paranoid about whether they could do this without facing danger.

GROSS: You write that there was a group of Bush administration lawyers who wanted to challenge the SERE program. That's the Cold War program of interrogations that the Gitmo model was based on, that we were talking about a little earlier. And the radical plan of action that this group of Bush administration lawyers drew up to oppose the SERE program was called the Big Bang. So they wanted to shut down the secret detention centers and shut down the interrogation program. What was the plan and why did it fizzle?

Ms. MAYER: The Big Bang was - I mean, the reason they called it that was, they thought that it was going to take the bureaucratic equivalent of dynamite to blow up this program. They had tried to work through the channels in the White House, and every time they tried to get anywhere, they got squelched by mostly, again, by the - it's quite incredible, but Vice President Cheney and his office really seemed to kind of control these issues.

And so they decided they're going to have to try to go behind the vice president's back. And they met in secret in the Pentagon one weekend and drew up a plan that was going to be a potential speech for Bush to give closing down the CIA's black prison sites, transferring their prisoners to Guantanamo and calling for an end to Guantanamo eventually and putting everybody on trial so that they finally had some kind of due process. And what they - they drafted a very eloquent plan and speech, and they were going to give one copy to Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, and the other copy was going to go to Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. And they hoped, then, that those cabinet secretaries would be able to give it to the president, going around the vice president.

So what happened was plan - the first part of the plan worked well. Condoleezza Rice really liked it, and she was ready to try to get on board and give it to President Bush, but Rumsfeld was absolutely furious that they had done this without consulting him. And, in fact, they felt really in truth that he just opposed the plan but used the sort of bureaucratic anger to try to shut it down.

And so when a meeting was scheduled to discuss the Big Bang plan in the National Security Council, and Rice was going to try to discuss it, Rumsfeld said he absolutely refused to participate unless they would not discuss that subject. They could talk about Guantanamo, but they couldn't talk about the Big Bang.

So it died on the vine and, you know, they - many people wondered how much of the information that was critical of these programs really reached President Bush. They felt often that the vice president kind of strangled the paper flow so that the president really didn't learn about a lot of the problems in these programs.

GROSS: In the story, the way you tell it, Vice President Cheney really emerges as the kind of commander of the war on terror, not of the troops, but just of the overall strategy. And his chief counsel, David Addington, is the legal mind, expanding executive authority to make all this happen. And although it's expanding executive authority, presidential authority, it's really Vice President Cheney who's doing all of the analytical work to make it happen rather than the president himself. The president himself is just signing off on it, an accurate representation of the picture the way you're describing it?

Ms. MAYER: Yeah. It was an irony to me that, basically, the argument made by Cheney and his lawyer is always, we need to expand the power of the president. The president gets to decide these issues. But as one of the top White House officials said to me who was an opponent of this - some of this program, you know, he wondered, how often did the president really make these decisions, and how many of these decisions were made by Cheney. Frequently, they were made by Cheney. I mean, I did my best to document it, and I think, you know, there's plenty more for historians and other reporters to try to dig up, but you can really see that the fingerprints of the vice president and his office are all over the national security policy.

GROSS: Jane Mayer, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. MAYER: I'm so glad to be here with you. Thanks so much for having me.

GROSS: Jane Mayer is the author of "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals." It's nominated for a National Book Award for non-fiction. Our interview was recorded in July when the book was published. We'll hear from another nominee in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.
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In a 'Republic of Suffering', Death's Unifying Effect

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is Fresh Air. I am Terry Gross. The United States embarked on a new relationship with death during the Civil War, right to my guest Drew Gilpin Faust. Her book, "This Republic of Suffering," is one of the five books nominated for the 2008 National Book Award for non-fiction. The National Book Award winners will be announced in November 19th.

"This Republic of Suffering" is about how the carnage of the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history, assaulted conceptions of how life should end and challenge fundamental assumptions about life's value and meaning. Faust has written several other books about the Civil War, including "Mothers of Invention." She was inaugurated as president of Harvard University last year and is the first woman to hold that position. She's also a professor of history at Harvard. Drew Gilpin Faust, welcome to Fresh Air. Let's start with just a description of the magnitude of death during the Civil War.

Dr. DREW GILPIN FAUST (President, Harvard University; Author, "This Republic of Suffering"): The magnitude of death included 620,000 estimated military dead and uncounted numbers of civilian dead. And to understand what that means, I think we have to consider it in terms of the size of the population as a whole and think about the rate of death in order to be able to understand what such numbers might mean in the context of our own time. And 620,000 military dead was the equivalent of about two percent of the American population at that time. In today's terms, that would mean six million dead.

So, as we contemplate what kind of impact that might have on our own society, I think we can get some sense of what this level of death might have mean to Americans of the mid 19th century. Another way to think about it is to consider that as many soldiers died in the American Civil war as died in all American wars from the American Revolution through the first years of Vietnam. So, it was a war with a much higher cost of lives than any war we had engaged in up through the mid 20th century, the total of deaths.

GROSS: Now, you write that the massive numbers of dead and the gruesome ways in which the deaths occurred violated the prevailing assumptions about life's proper end, about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Dr. FAUST: I think part of this impact came from the fact that this war occurred in the middle of a Victorian era, in which notions about death were very much centered around the home and having an individual die in the midst of the bosom family, often on a death bed surrounded by individuals who would hear last words and be able to assess the future state of the dying person based on how the death occurred. And so many Americans, of course, in war died away from home, away from family, in circumstances on battle fields where such a death toll hadn't been anticipated, and therefore, there wasn't adequate provision for burial, for identifying the dead, for taking care of the remains of the dead.

GROSS: There was this idealized sense of what a good death would be, and that included some of the things you described, dying near family. What else?

Dr. FAUST: Well, this was an overwhelmingly Christian and, in fact, Protestant nation. And notions of the good death, the art of dying, had come down through Christian tradition over a number of decades and centuries, and this included the notion that the way one died had a predictive aspect to it, that you could tell whether someone was likely to go to heaven, was likely to be in a state in which he or she could be reunited with kin in a future life, in which an individual could die easily or hard depending on whether or not they were likely to be saved. And so, scrutinizing the death and being present to hear important last words that would end their life's narrative, all of that came to take on great importance and to be expected as a way of ending a life.

The other part of this, of course, was the notion of decent burial, a grave that could be identified, could be visited, could be marked, and a way in which the dead person could be remembered and in some sense remain in the bosom of the family, even though that person had departed. And of course, a soldier who was lost on a battle field, his grave unknown, could not be recognized and remembered in that way as well.

GROSS: And a soldier whose body was mutilated in war couldn't be dying the good death either.

Dr. FAUST: I think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of the human being as an integral soul, as a body and soul that could be united. I think one of the most striking aspects of the way Civil War death occurred is that it really challenged individual's understanding of what it meant to be human and what separated humans from animals.

You find often in Civil War Americans writing about death that they talk about bodies being treated like hogs or being treated like dead chickens and just thrown into pits. And so this anxiety about whether a human being was in fact different from an animal, based on how these bodies were being treated, was very troubling, very disturbing.

GROSS: You write that soldiers tried to construct a good death even in a chaos of war. What were some of the ways that they did that?

Dr. FAUST: Well, I think many soldiers tried to create situations in which the elements of the good death could be replicated. One of the striking things that I found reading soldier's letters and descriptions of battle fields after battles was the numbers of soldiers who surrounded themselves with photographs of their families as they were dying. So, instead of having the family around the death bed, instead they would array photographs around themselves, almost to replicate the notion that their family was present and that they could look into the eyes of their family as they were dying.

They also often expressed last words or last wishes in ways that they asked to have transmitted to their family members. And soldiers who survived were quite assiduous in sending to family member's information about the nature of the death of a comrade. So, these letters were very important link between home and battlefield that was meant to overcome that separation that we had introduced.

GROSS: My guest is Drew Gilpin Faust, the author of "This Republic of Suffering: Death in the American Civil War." It's nominated for a National Book Award for non-fiction. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.

We're talking about how the death toll of this Civil War affected American culture, religion, and burial practices. My guest, the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, is the author of "This Republic of Suffering: Death in the American Civil War." It's nominated for National Book Award for non-fiction.

Now, you write that soldiers who survived battles had to then bury the dead, and there were so many dead to be buried. There were new kinds of burial practices that were developed because of the mass level of death in the Civil War?

Dr. FAUST: I think it's hard for us to imagine the lack of systematic organization in the military in regard to death. And partly, it was because the level of death was so unanticipated. But there were no regular burial details. There were no graves registration services. For much of the war, there were not regular ambulance services in either army, although the Union army, by about 1864, improved that situation somewhat.

But this meant that usually, after battle, there was just chaos, and there were so many bodies and no organized attempt or plan to take care of them. So, after battles, there was always an active improvisation to get the dead buried. It often took a considerable period of time. There are letters from individuals visiting battlefields as long as 10 days after the actual battle saying that the dead still lay strewn about.

There are many descriptions of overwhelming stench, is the word that is often used, emanating from Gettysburg or Antedem and poisoning the air from miles around. So, this horror of not simply the number of deaths and the impact of those deaths, but simply the bodies and the difficulty of figuring out what to do with them was very present in the minds and lives of Civil War Americans.

So, what do we mean by new ways of dealing with the dead? Some of these were the kinds of dehumanizing practices that so threatened and scared Americans as they found themselves forced to throw bodies into mass pits without names, without identity. Most soldiers who died on the battlefield were buried without coffins. Probably half the cases of Civil War dead were not identified. And so, there was no way to let loved ones know, and there were no regularized processes in either Northern or Southern Army for notifying next of kin. This began to trouble soldiers and other - and families and officials enormously. And so, we can see in the course of the war the evolution of efforts to try to overcome the dehumanization and anonymity of these burial practices.

GROSS: I was really surprised to read in your book that, during the Civil War, the military did not have the responsibility of informing the next of kin of a soldier who had died, and they didn't have the responsibility of recording the names of soldiers who died. That was changed as a result of a few people who did a lot of work to change it, one of whom as Edmund B. Whitman, the chief quartermaster of the military division of Tennessee.

Dr. FAUST: Edmund Whitman had been a quartermaster, and the quartermaster corps was the unit of the military that was assigned responsibility for burial. And so he began to explore, at the behest of his superiors, through the areas of the western theater, just looking for Union graves and soldiers who were buried in every byway and road and on former battlefields in that area. And he found two things.

One was that there were graves everywhere. He described the South as a great charnel house of the dead because he found graves in copses of woods, by railroad tracks, under apple trees, in people's farmyards, behind churches, behind settlements of freed slaves - just all over the South he kept finding group and even individual graves. So he felt there was a substantial opportunity here to honor dead who would otherwise be lost.

The second thing he found was that these graves were often being desecrated by white Southerners who were angry about their defeat and felt that they could express some of that rage and frustration about the loss of war by doing their spring plowing as usual, even though the field was filled with union graves, by harming the graves in other ways. And so Whitman made the point to his superiors that, if action wasn't taken to protect these graves, that these soldiers would not just be ignored, they would be dishonored and desecrated.

So over a period of months, as he began his very systematic assessment of the locations of graves, he kept making the case that all these graves should be removed to the national cemeteries. Over the course of the years, between the fall of 1865 and then through and towards in the spring of 1866, up until 1871, Edmund Whitman kept traveling through the western part of the south to identify graves and he, at last, was supported by the federal government in his commitment to relocate as many as he could find into a system of national cemeteries.

He personally was involved in the relocation of over 100,000 Union bodies, and the program that evolved from his efforts in large part ended up reburying over 300,000 Union soldiers in 74 national cemeteries. So this was the real beginning of the national cemetery system. It also represented a program of a magnitude that had not before really been imagined as the responsibility of a federal government, that had been quite weak before the Civil War. This was not undertaken by the states. It was undertaken by the central government, and I think we can see in that an example of the new strength in the nation's state that emerged from the war and the kinds of responsibilities that it took on.

GROSS: So, I imagine from everything that you're saying about how the government and the military were unable to identify and name the dead during the Civil War that dog tags didn't exist yet?

Dr. FAUST: That's correct. There was no formal identification badge or process, and soldiers invented ways of counteracting that. In the war, they would sometimes pin pieces of paper with their names on it on themselves when they were going into a particularly difficult battle. Little tags, little identity badges were also for sale and were advertised widely in the North and South, and so some soldiers would buy those with their name and contact information on them. And then other soldiers just improvised by making sure there was always an envelope addressed to them somewhere on their person or writing their particulars about their address and next of kin in a diary or a Bible that they carried with them.

GROSS: You know, in writing about burials and reburials during the Civil War and its aftermath, you asked the question, why do living humans pay attention to corpses? And I thought, that's such an interesting question to ask. We just take it for granted that it's important to give corpses a proper burial. Why did you even pose the question?

Dr. FAUST: Well, if you think about efficiency or affecting those who were still alive to be affected, would you go around expending resources reburying the dead? I mean, if you have a purely instrumental view of social obligation or governmental obligation, would this be something you would think of? And, of course, we do, and, of course, this matters enormously to us. And I think Edmund Whitman explained it very well when he said that he was proud of the government spending so much energy and so many resources on what might be called, as he puts it, a sentiment.

In other words, this is a humanitarian age. This is an age that goes beyond the instrumental or the material. It recognizes the value of human life and the special nature of the body and the soul and their intertwined character. And so he sees it as a real affirmation of part of the humanity that many Americans feared the Civil War had dissipated.

GROSS: Now, you described how a lot of people used their religion to help comprehend the death and suffering that their loved ones experienced during the Civil War and to help give meaning to death, but at the same time, a lot of people found that the Civil War shook their very belief in religion. Can you talk about the Civil War as an increasing time of doubt?

Dr. FAUST: For me, it's summed up very eloquently in a statement by the southern poet, Sidney Lanier, who said, how could God allow this? I think many Americans felt that such horror was difficult to reconcile with the notion of a benevolent God.

At the end of the war, many southerners said to themselves, how could God have allowed our defeat? We thought we were God's chosen. If there is no victory for the South, if we're not God's chosen, how can I continue to believe in God? And so, those questions of reconciling suffering with the notion of a caring God was very difficult for many individuals.

One finds some of the most eminent writers of American history speculating on these questions in the context of Civil War. Herman Melville is one who writes a series of poems about the war that raised the question of, what is the nature of belief; how can there be belief? And Emily Dickinson, who, of course, found death her subject throughout her career of writing isolated in her father's house in Amherst, used the context and imagery of war as a way of exploring, very fully, the implications of death for the possibility of belief.

GROSS: I hope this isn't too personal to mention, but I know you've had breast and thyroid cancer and apparently are in the clear for all of that now. But did dealing with that contribute to your interest in thinking about death?

Dr. FAUST: I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did. I found that, when you are forced to think about death, life comes into a very sharp focus. So death gives you a particular window on the world around you. 19th century Americans believed, and this was part of the good death, that you lived a better life if you were always aware that it was going to have an end. It sharpened your experience of the world in which you were located.

20th and 21st century Americans try not to think about death. After I had my experiences with illness, I think I recognize something of the significance of the 19th century viewpoint - that thinking about death can enrich your life, not just detract from it. And so, in some way, I'm moved towards a more 19th century view of death than, perhaps, most common among my colleagues and friends in the 20th and 21st centuries.

There's a poem by Donald Hall, the last line of which is, it is fitting and proper that we should lose everything. And I think about that poem sometimes because the sense that things are not eternal, that you don't have them forever, enhances their value. I believe that's what he meant in that poem. I think that's the perspective that the 19th century attitude about death can offer to us, even in our own time.

GROSS: Well, Drew Gilpin Faust, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Dr. FAUST: It's been a great pleasure.

GROSS: Drew Gilpin Faust is the president of Harvard University and the author of "This Republic Of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War." It's nominated for a National Book Award for nonfiction. The national book award winners will be announced November 19th. Our interview was recorded last January, when Faust's book was published. This is Fresh Air.
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Shiny, 'Happy-Go-Lucky' People in a World of Blue

TERRY GROSS, host:

British screenwriter and director, Mike Leigh, who made "Vera Drake," "Topsy-Turvy," and "Secrets and Lies," has a new film called "Happy-Go-Lucky." It stars Sally Hawkins as a blithe 30-year-old London school teacher and Eddie Marson as her driving instructor. At this year's Berlin Film Festival, Hawkins won the Best Actress prize, and at the Norwegian International Film Festival, Leigh won the Bringer of Joy award. Film critic David Edelstein has a review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: As Poppy, the heroine of Mike Leigh's marvelous "Happy-Go-Lucky," Sally Hawkins is slim and cute, with a mouthful of big English teeth and supernaturally perky. She's so buoyant, it's as if gravity to her is just a suggestion. A London schoolteacher, Poppy is a glass-half-full kind of person.

In a bookstore, she attempts to engage the young man behind the register, tries again when he fails to respond, and finally gives up. She might have concluded he's a jerk. Instead, she gives a sigh and says, oh well, someone's having a bad day. When she emerges from the store to find her bike has been stolen, she does have a moment of melancholy. She says, I didn't get to say goodbye. Then she decides this is her opportunity to learn to drive.

The question Leigh implicitly poses is whether Poppy is fatuously happy, whether her take-it-as-it-comes, go-along-to-get-along cheerfulness is simply simpleminded. I'm delighted to say this isn't the case, but her worldview will certainly be tested. Leigh's theme is a classic one, the possibility of enchantment in a world that can be ugly and threatening. Examples range from the aptly named Disney film "Enchanted" to the Bozo-Goes-to-Buchenwald horror show "Life is Beautiful."

Poppy lives with her kid sister and a gal-pal, and there's a lot of bustle at the movie's margins. But the spine of the film is a series of five driving lessons with an instructor named Scott, played by Eddie Marson. Marson has a head that looks too big for his smallish body and a puttyish face that could probably seem congenial in a Seven Dwarfs kind of way but is here tense and gargoyle-like. Scott is a control freak, and in their first lesson, Poppy's giggles bring out the English schoolmaster in him.

Mr. EDDIE MARSON: (As Scott) OK. You see three pedals in front of you.

Ms. SALLY HAWKINS: (As Poppy) Yeah.

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) Will you please put your left foot on the left hand pedal and push it all the way down.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) Oh, he's a bit frisky isn't he?

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) OK Pauline, please take your boot off the pedal.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) Nobody has called me Pauline since I was two years old. Makes me laugh...

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) What am I supposed to call you?

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) How about Poppy?

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) Poppy?

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) Yeah. Whatever turns you on, Scott. I don't mind.

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) OK Poppy. Your boots are inappropriate for a driving lesson.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) Why, what's wrong with them?

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) You can't control the car in high heels.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) No, I can do a lot of things in this. You should see me in these babies on the dance floor.

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) Well, it may be good in a dance floor.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) No, just good on the dance floor, they are...

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) They may be good in a pink Cadillac on a beach when you're pissed with your boyfriend, but they're not suitable for driving.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) You're funny.

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) Now, next week, I want you to bring flat sole shoes.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) I don't look good any good in them.

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) I don't care how you look. It's how you drive.

Ms. HAWKINS: (As Poppy) Oh, I'll see what I can russle up for you, Scott. Leave it to me.

Mr. MARSON: (As Scott) Good.

EDELSTEIN: Leigh builds his screenplays through actors' improvisations, and he reportedly lay in the backseat of the car as Hawkins and Marson drove around and developed their rapport. Their performances are riveting. Poppy responds to Scott's orders with tongue-in-cheek exclamations of obedience, as if she thinks he has a sense of humor about himself. But Poppy's teasing doesn't lead to his loosening up, as in screwball comedy. No, he becomes angrier. He has road rage. He delivers tirades about the dangers of multiculturalism. To Leigh, he embodies a kind of burgeoning fascism, and if the early driving lessons are hilarious, the middle ones have notes of dissonance. By the end, they're unnerving bordering on scary.

Poppy's worldview is tested in other ways - by a boy misbehaving in class who turns out to have been abused and by her younger sister's domineering boyfriend. But Leigh takes the movie's look and tempo from her spirit.

The colors in Poppy's London pop, the reds and greens and blues are so vivid they make "Happy-Go-Lucky" seem larky in spite of everything. It's a beautiful balance. Of all Leigh's many films, this is the easiest, the least labored. It dawns on us slowly that Poppy's is not a life of whimsy but a design for living that's deep and hard-won. Sally Hawkins is so effervescent that after the film ended, I worried about her. It must have been so sad to leave Poppy behind. But I'd like to think Poppy will always be there in spirit. I think she'll make you want to cultivate your own inner Poppy.

GROSS: David Edelstein is a film critic for New York Magazine.
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