The Unexpected Fantasist

By Fernanda Eberstadt | Aug. 26, 2007 | NYTimes.com

One evening in June, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago was addressing a small gathering at a book party in Lisbon. The occasion was the reissue of a volume of his poems originally published in 1975. Saramago, who is 84, is an austere man, extremely tall and so lean that he is practically concave. The night was hot, but he was wearing, as usual, a dark suit and tie. An outspoken atheist, Saramago maintains that religion is to blame for most of the world’s violence. Yet in his old age he resembles nothing so much as a steely churchman from a Renaissance altarpiece, a St. Jerome in the desert.

Saramago first won fame in the English-speaking world two decades ago with the publication of his novel “Baltasar and Blimunda,” a picaresque love story set during the Portuguese Inquisition and written in a fantastical vein that drew him comparisons with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His subsequent novels earned him a reputation for profound versatility. In his 1995 political parable, “Blindness,” a city is reduced to savagery by a mysterious plague of sightlessness. The Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, who directed “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener,” is currently making a film of the book.

For many years, Saramago was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but there were other Portuguese-language writers, like the Brazilian Jorge Amado, who seemed likelier bets. In October 1998, Saramago was preparing to fly out of Germany after the Frankfurt Book Fair when he was told not to board the plane, because he had just won the prize. He was a little stunned.

“He returned to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which was like Grand Central Station at rush hour,” recalls Christopher MacLehose, the legendary former publisher of Harvill Press in England who helped introduce Saramago’s novels to English-language readers. “The place went mad.”

Zeferino Coelho, Saramago’s Portuguese editor, remembers Saramago’s subdued reaction: “When he won the Nobel, Saramago said to me, ‘I was not born for all this glory.’ I told him, ‘You may not have been made for this glory, but I was!’ ”

It’s not much of a stretch to say that Saramago has since regarded his literary fame chiefly as a means of spreading his political convictions. A member since 1969 of Portugal’s notoriously hard-line Communist Party, Saramago spends much of his time at international forums, where he tends to deliver rather dull, pedantic speeches denouncing the European Union or the International Monetary Fund. Five years ago, however, he managed to create a worldwide scandal when, on a tour of the West Bank, he compared the situation in the Palestinian territories with “Auschwitz.”

To the literary critic Harold Bloom, the comparison with Auschwitz was “an unforgivable failure of imagination and humanity” on the part of a novelist he considers “second only to Philip Roth” among living writers. “Saramago’s novels are endlessly inventive, endlessly good-natured, endlessly skillful,” Bloom told me, “but it baffles me why the man can’t grow up politically. In 2007, to be a Portuguese Stalinist means you’re simply not living in the real world.”

At the book party in Lisbon, Saramago was in a more lyrical mood. His unscripted half-hour speech ranged widely in subject matter, from his own “blackness” of feeling when the leftist Portuguese Revolution of 1974 took a social-democratic turn, to how neorealism in 20th-century painting was unjustly eclipsed by Surrealism, to the staircase Michelangelo designed for the Laurentian Library in one cloister of San Lorenzo in Florence. “When I first saw this work, 30 years ago,” he said, “I trembled.”

Saramago concluded his talk: “Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate. What’s important is that he dig deep.”

To one side of the lectern where Saramago spoke, a lushly beautiful dark-haired woman stood in a white suit. This was his wife, Pilar del Rio. From time to time, del Rio, struggling to catch her husband’s eye, raised her hand to her mouth, indicating in insistent pantomime that he should drink from the bottle of water at his side. To me, she rolled her eyes at the absurdity of an old man too stubborn to hydrate himself on a hot summer night. Saramago seemed quite pleased to gaze at del Rio, but he wouldn’t drink.

Saramago has a mixed reputation in his native land. When he won the Nobel Prize, Portuguese readers evidently felt vindicated that one of their countrymen had at last received this high honor. Coelho, his editor, told me that from October to November 1998, “we printed 400,000 copies of his latest book. Overall, we have sold 2 million copies of Saramago’s works — this, in a country of 10 million people, is a lot.”

Yet Saramago also often appears to be disliked. In part this is the resentment of a country that has long been dominated by a small elite. In part, it is a matter of Saramago’s own unaccommodating personality. Everywhere I went in Lisbon in June, people described him as “cold,” “arrogant,” “unsympathetic.” When my interpreter inquired at a DVD store if a documentary about Saramago was in stock, the young salesman, startled by the request, replied, laughing, “I hope not!”

Abroad, even Saramago’s champions concede that he is a somewhat prickly character. “José Saramago is one of the most graceful men I’ve ever met,” MacLehose told me, “but he is pretty obdurate. He arrived at international recognition relatively late in life, after having long been a substantial thorn in the side of the Portuguese government, and he is very much his own man.”

Saramago himself appears undismayed by his reputation. “I am not a bad person,” he said at the book party. “I hurt only with my tongue!”

The following day, I went to visit Saramago at his home in Lisbon. His permanent residence is in the Spanish Canary Islands, where he has been living in symbolic exile since 1992, when the Portuguese government, apparently under pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked his supposedly heretical novel, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” from being nominated for a European literary prize.

He nonetheless keeps a pied-à-terre in a modern middle-class neighborhood of Lisbon. Inside, the house, shuttered dark against the encroaching sunlight, is as impersonal as a hotel suite. Virtually the only books on the living-room shelves are those by the author himself. (His compound in the Canary Islands, by contrast, has a university-size library, which he makes available to students.)

Pilar del Rio served coffee in demitasses. Del Rio is an elegant, voluble journalist from Seville. She is Saramago’s second wife — they married in 1988 — and is nearly 30 years younger than he. They met in the mid-’80s, when she was lecturing in Lisbon, she told me. Their marriage appears to be warmly symbiotic. Del Rio answers her husband’s correspondence under the e-mail alias of “Blimunda” and serves as his Spanish-language translator.

Eventually Saramago descended from an upstairs study and, upright as a soldier, took his place in an armchair. We talked for four hours. I asked questions, my interpreter translated, Saramago answered. Most of his replies began, “No, that is not true ... ,” and briskly devolved into lectures on working conditions in China, or how the late Soviet Union was in fact a capitalist economy “in disguise.” His tone was dry, professorial: it seemed as if he could continue for another day or two without breaking a sweat or cracking a smile.

The unyielding coolness is, admittedly, hard-won. There are few literary stars who have risen from as impoverished a background. Born in 1922, Saramago grew up in a small village about 60 miles northeast of Lisbon. His maternal grandparents were landless peasants who raised pigs, and Saramago’s early years were spent hoeing, chopping wood and hauling water from the pump. In his Nobel lecture, Saramago described his grandfather Jerónimo as “the wisest man I ever knew.” On summer nights when Saramago was a child, he recalled, his grandfather would take him to sleep outside under a fig tree and regale him with “legends, apparitions, terrors.” It was “an untiring rumor of memories” that later fueled his own literary imagination. “If my grandfather had been a rich landowner and not an illiterate pig breeder, I wouldn’t be the man I am today,” Saramago told me. “If I could choose my own background — even with the cold of the winters, the heat of the summers, sometimes going hungry — I wouldn’t change a thing.”

When Saramago was 2, his parents, searching for work, moved the family to Lisbon. For the young José, the transplant didn’t take. In “As Pequenas Memórias,” his childhood memoirs, which were recently published in Portugal, he portrays his native village, to which he returned from Lisbon for long stretches every year, as “the pouch into which this small marsupial — quiet, secret, solitary — retreated in order to create himself.”

The mark that the old village made on Saramago extended to his name itself. “When I showed up, aged 7, for my first day of school in Lisbon, I had to present my identity papers,” he told me. It was only then his parents discovered that the last name printed on his birth certificate was not their family name, de Sousa. The village clerk had instead registered the baby as “Saramago,” or “wild radish.”

“It was an insulting nickname villagers gave my father,” Saramago explained. “The clerk wrote it perhaps because he was drunk, perhaps as a prank. My father wasn’t very happy, but if that was his son’s official name, well, then, he had to take it, too. I think never before in history has a son named his father.”

From his peasant roots, Saramago acknowledged, he has derived a certain fatalistic pragmatism. The narrative sensibility that runs through his fiction was described by the critic Irving Howe as “caustic and shrewd.” In one book, a character whose viewpoint the reader suspects lies close to the author’s says, “Unless I can see things with these eyes of mine that the earth will one day devour, I don’t believe in them.”

Yet coexisting with this flinty skepticism is a taste for the fantastical. The joke implicit in Saramago’s fiction is that he has placed his sober, mistrustful protagonists in a world of magic, where countries detach themselves from the mainland and float out to sea, cities are struck by epidemics of blindness and an 18th-century renegade priest escapes the Inquisition in a flying machine whose means of locomotion is the human will.

This folk-tale sensibility is what differentiates Saramago’s novels from the middle-class, urban mainstream of American and Western European literature. If his literary sensibility seems closer to the absurdism of Soviet-era novelists like Mikhail Bulgakov or the fabulist realism of South American masters like Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, it is perhaps because fantasy and allegory are natural outlets for writers raised under political dictatorship.

In 1926, when Saramago was 3, a military coup overthrew the Portuguese republic. For the following 48 years, Portugal was ruled by a fascist regime whose slogan was “God, Fatherland, Family.” In the so-called New State of the dictator António Salazar, independent political parties and labor unions were outlawed, the press was ruthlessly censored and the economy was controlled by a few state-favored oligarchs. Salazar’s secret police, supposedly modeled on the Gestapo, sent suspected dissidents to the infamous Tarrafal prison in the Cape Verde Islands.

Coelho, Saramago’s editor and a fellow Communist, spent the last years of Salazar’s regime in hiding. “Except for our brief moment of glorious exploration in the 16th century,” he told me, “Portugal has always been a conservative, inward-looking place. We were ruled by the Jesuits and the Inquisition; we had no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution. It was not a difficult country to control. Salazar hated modernity. His ideal Portuguese was a small poor farmer, very Catholic, very submissive. Everything coming from the outside world was a menace, a potential source of contagion. We lived behind a curtain of silence.”

Saramago grew up in a household thoroughly anchored in the Salazarist system: his father was a policeman who over the years rose to be chief. “He was not secret police,” Saramago sought to clarify. “He was just a street cop, directing traffic, a profession that many uneducated people chose. It was not very nice for him when I later developed quite different political convictions, but there was never any conflict between us.”

Jesus is my Dorm Advisor

Patrick Henry College grooms fundamentalist kids to be America's future leaders. A new book looks at how these elite students cope with the pressure to bridge secular and religious worlds.

By Elizabeth Svoboda | Salon.com | Sep. 6, 2007

It was the beginning of November, with finals just a few weeks away, but papers and tests were the last things on Derek Archer's mind. He and other Patrick Henry College students had been busy knocking on 5,337 doors, making 1,400 phone calls, and stuffing reams of fliers under windshield wipers -- all on behalf of Jerry Kilgore, Virginia's 2005 Republican candidate for governor. One day before the election, the teenaged Archer -- unable to bear the thought of inactivity -- stood up to address the other campaigners. "If you're not faithful in the small things, when it comes time to say, 'Hey, I want to be president of the U.S.,' God will not grant you those things," he told them. "So let's knock on those doors and make those calls, okay?"

Archer's rally-the-flock instincts might seem unnervingly precocious, but then, galvanizing the right-wing masses is exactly what he's being trained to do, in the same way that conservatory students are coached to sail through effortless arpeggios. "God's Harvard," Washington Post writer Hanna Rosin's account of the year and a half she spent on Patrick Henry's campus in Purcellville, Va., is an in-depth account of the grooming process students like Archer undergo. Like Regent University (disgraced Bush aide Monica Goodling's alma mater) and Liberty University, Patrick Henry exists for the sole purpose of transforming fundamentalist kids with intellectual chops into America's future conservative leaders. On paper, at least, the school is ahead of the curve: Since it opened in 1999, its graduates have worked for almost every Republican congressperson, and every year, the 300-member student body scores as many White House internships as Georgetown's.

More than 80 percent of Patrick Henry's students -- average SAT score 1320 -- hail from households where parents approach child rearing like a controlled experiment, home-schooling their offspring to deflect ungodly outside influences. Patrick Henry's founder, Republican activist lawyer Michael Farris, has sought out these hothouse kids ever since the school's inception. In his mind, they are the ideal clay from which to mold leaders who express the certainty of their convictions as clearly on the congressional floor as they do in the pulpit. "In conservative circles," Rosin writes, "homeschoolers are considered to be something of an elite group -- rough around the edges but pure in their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity."

Most Americans, if they've heard of Patrick Henry at all, relegate it to the same category as schools like Bob Jones University -- institutions designed to churn out a never-ending supply of cheerleaders for Christ (prominent Bob Jones alums include TV preacher Billy Graham and "Left Behind" author Tim LaHaye). But Rosin shrewdly pinpoints how Patrick Henry's mission diverges from that of its less plugged-in fundamentalist peers and why those differences matter. Farris doesn't just want to produce students who are on fire for the Gospel -- he wants to train them to occupy the highest offices in the land, to upend the conventional wisdom that seizing worldly power requires compromising spiritual principles. He doesn't want "adapters who bend to the will of the mainstream," Rosin asserts, but "shape-shifters who can move between two worlds with their essential natures intact."

On the surface, Farris has succeeded with flying colors. It's only a matter of time, some Hill staffers think, until the first president from Patrick Henry is elected. But shape shifting is a tricky prospect, and Rosin is most compelling when she explores the ways Farris' vision sometimes unravels as students navigate between the outside world and the college's insular bubble. Filmmaker Mark Shane is one of the school's most impressive graduates; he got a White House internship his sophomore year, then nailed down a summer job working for a major television network. But when he returned to campus in the fall, his very success at carrying out Farris' dictate -- making a mark in the secular world -- seemed, ironically, to cast a shadow over him. He lost his position as resident advisor, and he started to forgo chaste dorm gatherings in favor of clubs that served up alcohol and exposed flesh. He professed to have kept his faith -- "If people are partying and the Holy Spirit says, 'Get out,' I have to get out" -- but when Rosin pressed him about how he managed to reconcile his lifestyle with his beliefs, he hit a wall. "I don't know," he shot back. "I'm only twenty-one years old."

Patrick Henry professors know that the complicated two-step between secular and religious realms is likely to result in what students call "stumbling," intellectual as well as moral. Rosin's explanation of how the faculty gird their young charges against this danger reads like a crash course in Orwellian doublethink. Biology teacher Jennifer Gruenke answers students' questions "on two levels: one for the secular world and one for Christians." She assigns them a biology textbook that features a sizable section on primate evolution, but she also endorses the biblical account of creation. Many students feel comfortable shuttling between these two disparate worldviews, a good illustration of how compartmentalized thinking can blot out contradiction. (In this respect, they seem like heirs to Enlightenment philosopher Francis Bacon, who wrote that science and religion should be "kept separate and never mingled or confounded.")

Patrick Henry's perennial charge to its students -- that they learn to occupy incompatible spheres simultaneously -- resonates in unique ways among the school's female population, and Rosin is an astute chronicler of the fallout. Young women who might have gone to Harvard or Yale had they been raised in other households must reconcile their own desire for high-powered careers with the Christian subculture's expectation that they retreat into submissive wifely roles.

Though Farris has paid lip service to the importance of educating women, campus rules enforce traditional notions of inequality between the sexes (women are not allowed to lead morning chapel, for instance). It's "The Feminine Mystique" all over again, with a fundamentalist spin, and many Patrick Henry women cope by retaining only partial awareness of the conflicting messages the school sends. Rebekah Stargel, a blond campus athlete whose Florida legislator father wrote the original Save Terri Schiavo bill, told her parents starting at age 2 that she wanted to join the CIA. She lived in St. Petersburg and studied Russian in pursuit of that goal. When she spoke with Rosin, her visions of the future were downright schizophrenic. "I don't like the idea of being someone's wife," she said. "But I do wanna have like fifteen kids. And I want to homeschool them all."

It's easy, based on the book's title alone, to assume that Rosin is out to demonize the young evangelicals at Patrick Henry, to damn them in the scathing light of their own inflexible beliefs. Indeed, a journalistic hack would have no trouble portraying these kids as miniature Jerry Falwells, not strictly by compromising accuracy but by cherry-picking significant details. (Archer, for instance, dates his conversion to age 6 and writes editorials with tag lines like, "I implore you, my fellow Christians. Do not stand here idle.")

But Rosin is a better and more honest writer than that. Despite her own aversion to fundamentalist dogma -- at one point she states, point blank, that she doubts any of her subjects would ever moderate their views enough to win her vote -- she steers largely clear of political ax-grinding. There's no Al Franken-esque invective against the GOP elite; instead, Rosin approaches her investigation in a more detached, anthropological spirit. Like Naomi Schaefer Riley, who wrote about faith-based campuses in 2004's "God on the Quad," Rosin does not seek to pass judgment on the brave new world she is observing, but to probe participants' complex motivations in order to get a better sense of how it operates. Accordingly, her protagonists come off not as ideologues programmed to the nines, but as vulnerable human beings evaluating their place in life.

One of the book's subjects, Sarah Chambers, lived with Rosin and her husband, Slate editor David Plotz, for a few weeks while completing an internship in Washington. Chambers grew so attached to the couple's young children that she gave their daughter a white model horse that she herself had cherished as a girl. One evening, Plotz challenged her: Since our family hasn't accepted Christ, do you think we're going to hell? Chambers had to reply. "Yes," she said finally. "But I'm not jumping up and down with joy about it." It is at moments like these that Rosin's narrative rises above the level of culture-war dispatch and becomes, instead, a rare window onto the turmoil that results when convictions anchored in the abstract are exposed to the messiness of reality.

Such evergreen observations aside, it's impossible not to feel like Rosin's timing is just a little bit off. The 2006 midterm purge of congressional Republicans and the accompanying surge of anti-Bush sentiment -- the born-again president's approval rating now hovers around 30 percent -- have diminished the odds that Patrick Henry students will make an immediate impact on the political landscape. Still, the new breed of savvy evangelical the school is producing will outlast temporary power shifts; the days when religious leaders courted irrelevance by questioning a Teletubby's sexuality are over. Despite the difficulties involved, students like Archer and Chambers are learning to grasp the delicate balancing act that's required to straddle two worlds, the importance of assuming protective coloration to ascend within the secular hierarchy. Those outside their narrow sphere would do well to pay close attention.

Conscience of a Conservative

by Jefferey Rosen | NYTimes.com | Sept. 9, 2007

This article will appear in the Sept. 9 issue of the magazine.

In the fall of 2003, Jack L. Goldsmith was widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament. A 40-year-old law professor at the University of Chicago, Goldsmith had established himself, with his friend and fellow law professor John Yoo, as a leading proponent of the view that international standards of human rights should not apply in cases before U.S. courts. In recognition of their prominence, Goldsmith and Yoo had been anointed the “New Sovereigntists” by the journal Foreign Affairs.

Goldsmith had been hired the year before as a legal adviser to the general counsel of the Defense Department, William J. Haynes II. While at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court might indict American officials for their actions in the war on terror. Goldsmith described this threat as “the judicialization of international politics.” No one was surprised when he was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions — both drafted by Goldsmith’s friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office — about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations. Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law — although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted,” he told me recently.

After leaving the Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith was uncertain about what, if anything, he should say publicly about his resignation. His silence came to be widely misinterpreted. After leaving the Justice Department, he accepted a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, where he currently teaches. During his first weeks in Cambridge, in the fall of 2004, some of his colleagues denounced him for what they mistakenly assumed was his role in drafting the torture memos. One colleague, Elizabeth Bartholet, complained to a Boston Globe reporter that the faculty was remiss in not investigating any role Goldsmith might have played in “justifying torture.” “It was a nightmare,” Goldsmith told me. “I didn’t say anything to defend myself, except that I didn’t do the things I was accused of.”

Now Goldsmith is speaking out. In a new book, “The Terror Presidency,” which will be published later this month, and in a series of conversations I had with him this summer, Goldsmith has recounted how, from his first weeks on the job, he fought vigorously against an expansive view of executive power championed by officials in the White House, including Alberto Gonzales, who was then the White House counsel and who recently resigned as attorney general, and David Addington, who was then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and is now his chief of staff. Goldsmith says he is not speaking out for the money; though he received a low six-figure advance for the book, he is, after deducting some minor expenses, donating the advance and any profits to charity. Nor is he speaking out because he disagrees with the basic goals of the Bush administration in the war on terror. “I shared, and I still share, a lot of their concerns about what we have to do to meet the terrorist threat,” he told me. When I asked whether he thought Gonzales should have resigned and whether Addington should follow, he demurred. “I was friends with Gonzales and feel very sorry for him,” he said. “We got along really well. I admired and respected Addington, even when I thought his judgment was crazy. They thought they were doing the right thing.”

Goldsmith told me that he has decided to speak publicly about his battles at the Justice Department because he hopes that “future presidents and people inside the executive branch can learn from our mistakes.” In his view, American presidents for the foreseeable future will, like George W. Bush, face enormous pressure to be aggressive and pre-emptive in taking measures to prevent another terrorist attack in the United States. At the same time, Goldsmith notes, everywhere the president looks, critics — as well as his own lawyers — are telling him that pre-emptive actions may violate international law as well as U.S. criminal law. What, exactly, are the legal limits of executive power in the post-9/11 world? How should administration lawyers negotiate the conflict between the fear of attacks and the fear of lawsuits?

In Goldsmith’s view, the Bush administration went about answering these questions in the wrong way. Instead of reaching out to Congress and the courts for support, which would have strengthened its legal hand, the administration asserted what Goldsmith considers an unnecessarily broad, “go-it-alone” view of executive power. As Goldsmith sees it, this strategy has backfired. “They embraced this vision,” he says, “because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it.”

I have known Goldsmith since we were at law school together. In addition to being intellectually curious and having good judgment, he always struck me as a pragmatic rather than an ideological conservative. Born in 1962 in Memphis, Goldsmith is the son of a former Miss Teenage Arkansas whose parents ran a celebrated nightclub. Growing up, he had two stepfathers, one of whom he describes in the book as “a mob-connected Teamsters executive” who was “Jimmy Hoffa’s right-hand man and for decades a leading suspect in Hoffa’s disappearance.” His upbringing seems to have contributed to his down-to-earth sensibility. After earning degrees at Washington and Lee University and Oxford, he thrived at Yale Law School, where he developed what he calls “an allergic reaction to Yale’s left-wing jurisprudence and political correctness.” He later clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and taught law at the Universities of Virginia and Chicago. He is married, and he and his wife have two sons.

When Goldsmith was asked, four years ago, to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, he jumped at the opportunity. Working for the office is one of the most prestigious jobs in government: former heads and deputies include the Supreme Court Justices William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The Office of Legal Counsel interprets all laws that bear on the powers of the executive branch. The opinions of the head of the office are binding, except on the rare occasions when they are reversed by the attorney general or the president.

In the post-9/11 era, the office has played a crucial role in providing legal cover to jittery bureaucrats fearful that officials in the White House, Defense and State Departments or the C.I.A. might be prosecuted for their actions in the war on terror. The Justice Department, after all, is the branch of government responsible for prosecutions, and its own prosecutors — as well as independent counsels — would be hard pressed to prosecute someone who had relied on the department’s own opinions in good faith. For this reason, the office has two important powers: the power to put a brake on aggressive presidential action by saying no and, conversely, the power to dispense what Goldsmith calls “free get-out-of jail cards” by saying yes. Its opinions, he writes in his book, are the equivalent of “an advance pardon” for actions taken at the fuzzy edges of criminal laws.

In the Bush administration, however, the most important legal-policy decisions in the war on terror before Goldsmith’s arrival were made not by the Office of Legal Counsel but by a self-styled “war council.” This group met periodically in Gonzales’s office at the White House or Haynes’s office at the Pentagon. The members included Gonzales, Addington, Haynes and Yoo. These men shared a belief that the biggest obstacle to a vigorous response to the 9/11 attacks was the set of domestic and international laws that arose in the 1970s to constrain the president’s powers in response to the excesses of Watergate and the Vietnam War. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, for example, requires that executive officials get a warrant before wiretapping suspected enemies in the United States.) The head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the first years of the Bush administration, Jay Bybee, had little experience with national-security issues, and he delegated responsibility for that subject matter to Yoo, giving him the authority to draft opinions that were binding on the entire executive branch.

Yoo was a “godsend” to a White House nervous about war-crimes prosecutions, Goldsmith writes in his book, because his opinions reassured the White House that no official who relied on them could be prosecuted after the fact. But Yoo’s direct access to Gonzales angered his boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to Goldsmith. (Neither Ashcroft nor Gonzales responded to requests for interviews for this article.) Ashcroft, Goldsmith says, felt that Gonzales and the war council were usurping legal-policy decisions that were properly entrusted to the attorney general, such as the creation of military commissions, which Gonzales supported and Ashcroft never liked.

The matter came to a head in the fall of 2003, when Bybee left the Office of Legal Counsel and Gonzales suggested Yoo as a candidate to lead it. Ashcroft rejected the suggestion. Yoo then recommended his friend Goldsmith to the White House as a suitable alternative. Goldsmith interviewed with Ashcroft at the Justice Department and with Gonzales and Addington at the White House. In his interview with Addington and Gonzales, Goldsmith recalls talking about the dangers of international law and the importance of military commissions. He got the job.

Several hours after Goldsmith was sworn in, on Oct. 6, 2003, he recalls that he received a phone call from Gonzales: the White House needed to know as soon as possible whether the Fourth Geneva Convention, which describes protections that explicitly cover civilians in war zones like Iraq, also covered insurgents and terrorists. After several days of study, Goldsmith agreed with lawyers in several other federal agencies, who had concluded that the convention applied to all Iraqi civilians, including terrorists and insurgents. In a meeting with Ashcroft, Goldsmith explained his analysis, which Ashcroft accepted. Later, Goldsmith drove from the Justice Department to the White House for a meeting with Gonzales and Addington. Goldsmith remembers his deputy Patrick Philbin turning to him in the car and saying: “They’re going to be really mad. They’re not going to understand our decision. They’ve never been told no.” (Philbin declined to discuss the conversation.)

In his book, Goldsmith describes Addington as the “biggest presence in the room — a large man with large glasses and an imposing salt-and-pepper beard” who was “known throughout the bureaucracy as the best-informed, savviest and most conservative lawyer in the administration, someone who spoke for and acted with the full backing of the powerful vice president, and someone who crushed bureaucratic opponents.” When Goldsmith presented his analysis of the Geneva Conventions at the White House, Addington, according to Goldsmith, became livid. “The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.” (Addington declined to comment on this and other details concerning him in this article.)

Goldsmith then explained that he agreed with the president’s determination that detainees from Al Qaeda and the Taliban weren’t protected under the Third Geneva Convention, which concerns the treatment of prisoners of war, but that different protections were at issue with the Fourth Geneva Convention, which concerns civilians. Addington, Goldsmith says, was not persuaded. (Goldsmith told me that he has checked his recollections of this and other meetings with at least one other participant or with someone to whom he described the meetings soon after.)

Months later, when Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. “If you rule that way,” Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, “the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.”