Category: Uncategorized

By Charlie Euchner
Special Projects Editor, New America

THE CHALLENGE: The hellish dracunculiasis (aka Guinea worm disease), which has no vaccine or medical treatment, has caused millions to suffer in poor and isolated communities in sub-Sahara Africa.

THE MISSION: Eradicate the disease.

THE MODEL: The Carter Center has coordinated and supported a range of partners to implement interventions to prevent the spread of the disease.

When Jimmy Carter was president of the United States, an aide named Peter Bourne talked to him about addressing a hideous affliction in rural African communities. Dracunculiasis, or Guinea worm disease, caused crippling pain and disability in its victims. As president, Carter focused on issues related to American interests. He declined.

In 1984, Bourne, now a health official at the United Nations working on an initiative called Freshwater Decade, again asked Carter to take on the disease. The former president had, in 1982, started the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization committed to reducing human suffering and strengthening human rights worldwide. One of the organization’s priorities was fighting neglected diseases. This time, Carter said yes.

Because the populations affected by dracunculiasis were poor and isolated, no national government or health organization had ever launched a substantial effort to eradicate the disease. No vaccine existed or was in development. Prevention depended on keeping people from coming into contact with water sources infected by the worm. But that was difficult because it required people to change entrenched behaviors and customs.

By 1986, the Carter Center launched the Guinea Worm Eradication Program and began work with governments, community leaders, and local stakeholders. Across Africa, the Carter initiative has coordinated a wide variety of community-based efforts to eradicate the disease.

When the Carter Center formally started its work, 3.5 million people in 21 countries suffered annually from Guinea worm disease. In 2022, only 13 cases were documented worldwide. Guinea-worm disease was on its way to becoming the second disease to be eliminated (smallpox was eradicated in 1980).

The Problem

Dracunculiasis appears to be as old as civilization itself. The disease has been found in the calcified remains of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian girl’s mummy. According to the Carter Center,  “the fiery serpent” in the Old Testament refers to the disease.

The disease originates when the Guinea worm releases larvae in stagnant water. The larvae infect microscopic crustaceans called copepods. When humans drink water or eat undercooked fish containing the copepods, the crustaceans release the larvae into the intestine. Those larvae mate, and the female offspring grow into meter-long worms resembling long pieces of spaghetti. A year after first entering a human host, the worms seek to exit the body by burrowing through the skin—and, in the process, creating awful wounds and excruciating pain, usually in the legs or feet.

To mitigate the burning pain, an infected person often plunges the wound into a pool of water. But that worsens the problem by allowing the worm to release its larvae into the water and restart the infection cycle.

In addition to the debilitating and painful wounds, victims also suffer fever, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. Some victims become permanently disabled and, in rare cases, die. An outbreak can ravage an entire village and shut down its economy for months.

“It’s one of those problems that once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” said Adam Weiss, the Guinea Worm Eradication Project director at the Carter Center. “Even some of the most stoic men in South Sudan, this brings them to their knees. They cry. They don’t want to admit it, but they do. It’s something you can’t walk away from.”

Once infected, the only treatment is to extract the worm slowly, an inch a day. Dripping water on the wound tricks the worm into leaving the body more quickly; caretakers then use a stick to pull out the worm. The trick is to work slowly. If the worm breaks, the part remaining in the body could cause fatal infections.

The Solution

To eradicate Guinea-worm disease, a community must prevent people from coming into contact with water that is infected with larvae. But many people need access to filtered water sources. Because a whole year passes from exposure to contaminated waters and the worm’s emergence through the skin, victims often attribute the disease to other causes. They are unaware that water is the source of the ailment.

The Carter Center has identified four critical interventions:

• Eliminate all contact with contaminated water and food and prevent people from using contaminated water sources for drinking, cooking, bathing, and recreation.
• Filter or treat existing water supplies. Provide people with water filters or add larvicide to water sources.
• Create new clean water supplies. Build freshwater wells that are not susceptible to contamination.
• Prevent infected persons from contaminating a water source. Keep victims from soaking their worm wounds in water sources.

These interventions rely heavily on behavioral change. They educate villagers on how the disease is spread and convince them to adopt the interventions. But only some entities can make that happen. To be successful, the Carter Center has acted as a hub for a diverse set of community leaders and volunteers, healthcare professionals, and politicians.

Partnerships

The Guinea Worm Eradication Program coordinates its partners – from heads of state to villagers – to implement interventions. For decades, Carter himself met with heads of state and health ministers of countries ravaged by the disease, including Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Yemen, India, and Pakistan. Using his prestige as a former American president, Carter worked to obtain clearance to establish eradication programs in each country.

Program staff have collaborated closely with national ministries of health and local public health authorities, whose support was necessary for operating and implementing interventions.

Support has also come from international humanitarian and global infectious disease organizations such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, who have been core partners in the program. They have provided expert guidance, case monitoring, supplies and money, and international certification of disease eradication.

Corporate partners and philanthropic organizations have provided funding and other resources. Carter enlisted the help of Edgar Bronfman, then the CEO of Seagrams, to use his position as a board member of DuPont, a chemical company, to develop cheap cloth filters that could be used to treat contaminated water. BASF, a German chemical company, has donated larvicide.

The most critical set of partners has been community leaders, grassroots organizations, and local volunteers. Since the start of the program, some 300 Carter Center workers have organized villages and settlements to enlist and coordinate these stakeholders. Over the years, thousands of people have contributed to the effort—including volunteers from other humanitarian organizations such as the Peace Corps and local community members.

Building Trust to Change Behavior

Volunteers and local stakeholders have performed a variety of roles. They have poured a larvicide into ponds; distributed simple water filters for home and business use; prevented infected persons from contaminating water sources; helped victims gather water; reported cases of infection; and worked in clinics and treatment centers.

The Guinea Worm Eradication Program has provided volunteers with modest rewards, such as small cash payments and t-shirts. Volunteering brings prestige in the community and often opens new employment opportunities. Working with the Carter program, volkunteers have set up treatment centers where victims could get care. Ordinary people have gotten gotten training in health care, which they can use to serve their communities and build a career.

In some cases, the program has built wells, which cost around $10,000. But many villages lack the suitable locations for wells. Preventing the spread of the disease requires enlisting the cooperation of the entire community to change its behavior.

Carter Center staff moved into the field for months or years and developed personal relationships with the people there. “You have to build trust,” said Weiss. “And that requires not just one visit from President Carter or the minister of health. It takes all of it happening. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it has to be systematic.”

Since a full year passes from exposure to contaminated waters and the emergence of the worm through the skin, victims often attribute the disease to fate, witchcraft, or the uncontestable will of God. That often fosters a fatalist attitude about the disease.

“The biggest challenge is just helping people to understand that they don’t have to continue suffering from this infection,” said Donald Hopkins, a special advisor to the project, in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company. “Once you get their trust by respecting them and showing empathy … things begin to change. And after that, it begins to snowball.”

When elders claim that the disease comes from juju and hexes—and not foul waters—workers need to reason with them on their own terms. In a conversation with a Muslim elder, one worker quoted the Koran’s description of water as a gift and a life force. He asked simply: Shouldn’t water be free of disease-ridden worms? Rather than arguing on the basis of science, the organizers engage locals on the basis of their faith and values.

Elders, faith leaders, and village heads have played a critical role. Their credibility and status enable them to educate community members and persuade them to comply with the interventions.

Prominent national figures also have visited villages to promote the program. General Yakubu Gowon, who led Nigeria from 1966 to 1975, visited communities to persuade people to cooperate with healthcare workers.

Former President Carter has always set the vision and demonstrated the tenacity needed to win the fight. He focused public attention on the disease, raised funds, advocated, and directly intervened to persuade a wide range of stakeholders to cooperate.

“When you take on a problem like this, like Guinea worm, you have to sweet talk the ministry officials, the political figures, the nurses, the doctors, the community activists, the farmers, the people who are…most at risk,” said Paul Farmer, a global public health leader, in a 2023 interview with NPR. “Carter’s had to sweet talk all these people. And that’s something that’s been very inspiring to many of us.”

When cajoling was not enough, Carter used more coercive tactics. When the prime minister of Ghana resisted making the disease a health priority, Carter told him he would begin to call the disease the “Ghana worm.” The Ghanaian leader made the disease a priority, and within years, it had been eradicated in the country.

As president, Carter won his most significant victories with his relentless attention to detail and negotiation. In the Israel-Egypt peace talks at Camp David, the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, and the Iran hostage crisis, Carter committed to a long-term bargaining process. That relentless approach has been made part of the DNA of the effort to eradicate the Guinea worm disease.

Intense surveillance is essential in remote and itinerant communities. As the disease neared eradication in 2023, 8,000 to 9,000 villages were under daily surveillance. Chad, South Sudan, and Mali each had more than 2,000 villages under daily surveillance.

The Carter Center and its workers must constantly make difficult decisions about where to allocate scarce resources. At a project drilling wells in South Sudan, men on motorcycles asked if the crew would “please, please, please” drill a well in their village. “We had to say no,” said Lynn Malooly. Scarce resources had to go where they would do the most good.

Complications

To succeed, the Guinea Worm Eradication Program has constantly adapted to unexpected challenges—including outbreaks of war and the spread of the disease to dogs and cats.

In Sudan, one of the world’s poorest nations, only 41 percent of the population has easy access to clean water. Sudan’s disease had the world’s highest incidence of dracunculiasis, with three times as many cases as all other countries combined.

Sudan was also considered the most dangerous country in the world for aid workers, owing to a civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2005. The violence prevented Guinea Worm Eradication Program workers from accessing villages for years.

In 1995, Carter personally negotiated a six-month ceasefire between the two warring factions. The break in fighting allowed program workers to survey villages and deliver filters and other disease-prevention supplies.

A second unexpected challenge was the rise of dogs and cats as disease carriers. In the past, scattered disease cases had been found in dogs and donkeys. Now, after years without any animal cases, the ailment was suddenly discovered in stray dogs in Chad. At first, the Carter Center’s team and its allies did not notice. “You don’t see what you’re not looking for,” said Weiss.

How much did the dog problem matter? At first, the Carter team and health experts could not answer that question. After all, the program’s purpose was to eradicate the disease in humans, not animals. But as the number of cases in dogs increased, the Carter team adopted a “whole health” approach, expanding the problem definition from waterways and villages to include dogs and cats.

Ultimately, investigators concluded that the dogs contracted the disease by eating fish entrails. Dogs were not known to transfer the disease to humans, but they could leave the larvae in people’s water. Eventually, the Carter team developed a three-pronged response: First, keep dogs away from water. Second, keep dogs away from fish entrails. Third, try veterinary deworming drugs to see if they make a difference.

The effort required sustained discussions and planning with villagers. Dogs play a vital role in farming, hunting, and protecting the home and work. Sometimes, tethering dogs to keep them away from water sources made sense. The program began offering cash rewards for reporting infected animals and tethering dogs.

By 2022, infections in animals declined by 21 percent. Chad reported infections in 605 animals, Mali in 41, Cameroon in 27, Angola in seven, Ethiopia in three, and South Sudan in one.

The End Game

The Guinea Worm Eradication Program has been a remarkable healthcare and community-building success. When the program began in 1986, 3.5 million people in 21 countries suffered from Guinea worm disease annually. By 1990, the number of cases worldwide fell to 623,579, and by 2000, to 75,223. By December 2022, only 13 cases were documented worldwide.

Most modern public health triumphs—such as eradicating smallpox or limiting the spread of polio, tuberculosis, or HIV—are won with breakthrough vaccinations and treatments. The Guinea worm disease could be eliminated without a vaccine or substantial financial investment. Instead, the Carter Center gradually and systematically built dynamic partnerships and nurtured grassroots public health solutions.

Besides relieving suffering and disability, ridding communities of dracunculiasis has also enabled economic and social development. With the disease at bay, farmers could return to the fields, and children could go to school. Improved water supplies not only improved health but also improved farm production. Education about disease transmission prepared villagers to confront other diseases that could endanger their health and well-being.

A 2013 study by Kelly Callahan and colleagues found widespread benefits beyond the eradication of the disease. “Eradicating Guinea worm disease has become a powerful, broad-based ‘engine for development,” said Kelly et al. “The prevention of NTDs [neglected tropical diseases], and their cost-effective interventions, fuels long-term economic growth and development, and human advancement. The effort to eradicate [Guinea worm disease] is considered one of the most cost-effective health interventions available.”

Fighting the Guinea worm has also boosted local healthcare capacity. Community surveillance systems for monitoring dracunculiasis cases have been used to track other diseases, including tetanus, lymphatic filariasis, and leprosy. In South Sudan, where less than half of the population has access to healthcare services, volunteers have been trained in basic healthcare skills to provide care for other ailments.

Women have played a prominent role in community organizing and treatment. Zanib Adam, the coordinator of hundreds of Red Cross volunteers in Ghana, notes: “When a woman coach leads a meeting, other women are more likely to speak up to ask questions and report problems. When a man leads a meeting, women are too shy to say anything.”

In Ghana, for example, the program has enlisted more than 6,200 women as Red Cross volunteers in teams of 10 to 12. These teams were deployed to different villages to implement interventions.

In 2015, Jimmy Carter was diagnosed with brain cancer. He set a personal goal to outlive Guinea worm disease. But he might not achieve this goal. In 2019, the World Health Organization changed its projected goal for total eradication from 2020 to 2030. Carter entered hospice care in February 2023.

“It’s going to be a slow roll to get to zero,” Weiss said. “If we take our foot off the gas in terms of trying to accelerate getting to zero and providing support to those communities, there’s no question that you’re going to see a resurgent Guinea worm. We’re going to make progress, even if it is not as fast as we all want it to be, but that progress continues.”

In 1963, eight years before National Public Radio hit the airwaves, GBH and a small network of radio stations dubbed the Educational Radio Network (ERN) teamed up to broadcast full, uninterrupted coverage of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As the march unfolded, quarter-inch tape rolled in Boston, recording speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, music by Mahalia Jackson and a young Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, an interview with Marlon Brando and much more…15 hours altogether. These tapes, now in the GBH Archives, are the most complete audio coverage of the broadcast in existence. This coverage, with transcripts, has been made available to the public in its entirety via OpenVault’s March on Washington Collection.

In honor of the 50th Anniversary of the March in 2013, Charles Euchner, the author of Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press, 2010) has written a Listeners Guide for the first 7 hours of coverage in order to help users navigate this comprehensive audio collection. Each section of the Guide represents one hour of broadcast audio, and explores background information on individual participants, groups and the planning of the march itself. To write Nobody Turn Me Around, Euchner interviewed more than 120 people who participated in the March. He also did extensive archival research, obtained previously unheard audio and video recordings, and searched FBI records through the Freedom of Information Act.

To read the entire account of the March on Washington, with audio clips from the Educational Radio Network, go here.

On August 28, the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, we celebrate the power of words.

On this day, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” oration before 400,000 souls at the National Mall. Dr. King was joined by countless others whose words should be remembered for the ages.

Fred Shuttlesworth charged the throng to “walk together, stand together, sing together, moan together, groan together.”

Roy Wilkins of the NAACP told the assembled to “remember Luke’s account of the warning that was given to us all. ‘No man,’ he writes, ‘having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.’”

From prison, James Farmer warned about the dangers of injustice in a nuclear age. John Lewis issued a blistering indictment of gradualism and complacency. Rabbi Joachim Prinz recalled the horrors of the Holocaust. Whitney Young highlighted the ills of inner cities.

And they sang: Marion Anderson and Mahalia Jackson; Peter, Paul and Mary; and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” prophesied a day when the racists would be punished, and “Only a Pawn in their Game” lamented the exploitation of poor whites in the racist appeals of George Wallace and his ilk. Mahalia’s “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned,” a symphony in one voice, set the stage for Dr. King.

Dr. King’s speech was the culmination of the day.

His ringing words—about the uncashed promissory note, about creative suffering and redemption, about freedom’s ring, about gathering at a table of brotherhood, about transforming “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony,” and, of course, about his dream—resound to this day.

Why do those words, all these years later, still challenge us, emotionally and intellectually? Three things, I think: the deeds attached to the words, the honesty of the words, and the consistency of the words. In short: authenticity.

First, deeds. The marchers’ words were connected to real-world experiences. Activists went into the most violent parts of the Deep South to sit in, enlist voters, teach classes, march, and confront their foes. In return, they suffered vicious verbal abuse, beatings, bombings, shootings. They were evicted from homes and fired from jobs. They were brought to court on trumped-up charges. They were slandered and ridiculed.

In 1963, the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake discovered why his good words required making good trouble. That summer, Blake put himself on the line at the protests at the Gwynn Oaks Amusement Park in Baltimore. Only then did he understand the need to make a sacrifice to foment change. At the March, he confessed: “We come, and late we come, but we come to present ourselves this day, our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God . . . a kind of tangible and visible sacrament [that] can manifest to a troubled world.”

When words are connected to action, they carry extra heft. Because they came from the deepest parts of their minds and souls, those words have the power to move people to action.

Second, honesty. The marchers never flinched from pointing to the bitter truths of American racism and violence. Uniquely among leaders, Dr. King told his people the plain, unvarnished truth about the struggles that they endured—and which awaited them still.

“I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations,” Dr. King said. “Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.”

Rather than offering easy solutions, like a standard-issue politician, Dr. King told them they needed to suffer more. He exhorted them to “go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of or northern cities” to confront the brutal violence of segregation. Some, he acknowledged, would die in the struggle.

Dr. King also pleaded with his followers to hold fast to the twin ideals of integration and nonviolence. The “young Jacobins,” as Jim Farmer called them, were impatient. Dr. King embraced their impatience but warned that the battle could be won only with disciplined action. Again and again, Dr. King and other speakers confronted their followers with uncomfortable truths, while avoiding the danger of despair.

Third, consistency. The words of August 28, 1963, were part of a larger discourse about America’s sins and promise. To be sure, every idea expressed at the March was debatable. By acknowledging that, the marchers deepened their understanding—and found ways to express their truths to allies and adversaries alike.

Civil rights activists contested the meanings of words like race, class, America, democracy, voting, law, education, protest, nonviolence, segregation, and revolution.

As the afternoon program was about to begin, the March leaders battled over the speech of John Lewis, the new leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Lewis riled the movement’s old-line establishment with his use of the words “revolution,” his depiction of the South as a “police state,” and his stark equation of America’s failure to offer “one man, one vote” with colonial struggles in Africa and Asia.

At one point, angered by Lewis’s rhetoric, the Catholic cosponsors of the March threatened to pull out. And so, Lewis bargained with Dr. King and Roy Wilkins and Walter Reuther to find words that would speak their truths while holding together a vast coalition.

Even the opponents of civil rights understood the need for consistency. The segregationist Strom Thurmond complained that civil rights would eventually extend to marriage rights and women’s rights. On that he was right—and would drive activism to new heights in the coming years.

Finding the right words to inform, inspire, and move to action is hard work. You never get it “right,” once and for all. But when you struggle with passion and integrity, you make progress possible. Words are essential not just for understanding and expression, but also for learning and changing the world.

Dr. King’s reverence for words made his life transcendent. Until the very end, he struggled to understand the world and then put his understanding into words and action. He thrust himself into the brutal challenges of injustice and the loving possibilities of redemption and change.

Six decades later, Dr. King and his fellow activists offer a model for the rest of us—speaking out and acting up—as we struggle with many of the same dark forces.

This originally appeared in the Beacon Broadside.

I wonder if the President will really understand what this day is all about,” King said. “If he doesn’t understand this one,” Levison said, “he’ll understand the next one.” On the National Mall, more than a quarter-million people had gathered to make sure that everyone from President John F. Kennedy down to the most modest shop owner understood that now was the time for America to embrace equal rights for all Americans. Everywhere King looked, he saw people with whom he worked, side by side, in the movement for civil rights.

(Get the PDF here.)

Sixty years ago, upwards of 400,000 people gathered at the National Mall for the March on Washington. A day of marching, music, and speeches closed with Martin Luther King’s iconic oration, which offered a hypnotic challenge in four simple words: “I have a dream.” With these words, King called on Americans, both Black and white, to struggle to reach a higher plane.

But for those words to be meaningful — not a gauzy Hallmark card, but a tough-minded call to action — King first had to preach a different four-word idea: “Unearned suffering is redemptive.”

The March on Washington, which took place on August 28, 1963, commanded the attention of the nation and the world for an entire day. Americans would not just see brief clips of King but would hear his entire speech. All three networks aired his speech live. He had to get it right.

The night before, in the Willard Hotel, King worked on his speech with his aides, Wyatt Tee Walker and Andrew Young. King found the dream an irresistible trope. The Bible teaches that “your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions.” King understood the mainstream appeal of the American Dream and used the phrase once before at a massive rally in Detroit’s Cobo Hall in June of 1963.

Walker and Young considered the dream concept trite. It sounded too hopeful, avoiding the harsh realities of racism in 1963 America. But King decided to keep the passage in his speech. As he often said about favorite phrases, “It just feels right to me.” In a sense, Walker and Young were right. During this key moment, if King allowed a sweet and sentimental phrase to dominate the day, he would be letting the moderates and liberals who preached patience off the hook.

In 1963, economic issues merged with basic civil rights; in fact, the March was billed as a gathering for “jobs and justice.” And there were more than 2,000 demonstrations, and protests moved to the North and West — into New York and Newark and Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis, and Los Angeles and San Francisco. But, while the movement was growing, it was also showing strains. Many younger activists rebelled against King’s commitment to nonviolence and integration. Malcolm X mocked the “Farce on Washington” and called for using “any means necessary” to fight white terrorism. And as John Lewis prepared to give a fiery speech on the Mall, white allies threatened to bolt the March unless he cut objectionable passages.

So how could King take advantage of this moment? How could he hold his coalition together and present a winning case to the white political and media power structures? How could he offer a thrilling vision of the future, with the dream motif, but also confront friends and foes with the “fierce urgency of now”?

His answer was radical — speak the truth, bluntly and without apology. Hence the starkest words of King’s stirring speech:

“I am not unmindful that many of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations… Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”

This phrase carries a double message. First: Because of the deep and thoroughgoing racism in American institutions and culture — not just in the South, but everywhere — Black Americans will bear brutal costs when they fight for their rights. Second: Only by fighting this fight can they “redeem” themselves — and the American promise of “a more perfect union.”

That phrase hit Harold Bragg, a longtime activist, “like an electric shock.”

“[King] was willing to face the truth and speak honestly to guide a divided America to a higher plane.”

Here was a true leader, refusing to gloss over the dangers of their cause. He warned them that continued struggle would bring more violence and death. Rather than luxuriating in the glow of a beautiful mass gathering of love and hope, King used the power of brutal truths. Nothing defines King’s legacy better than his radical honesty. Over his whole career — from the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) to his rallying sanitation workers in Memphis (1968) — King stubbornly insisted on telling the truth.

This honesty helped keep the movement together and brace activists for the struggles ahead — the Birmingham church bombing, the Selma march, the Poor People’s Movement, and much more — until his assassination in 1968. But his honesty often cost him support — and white supremacists escalated their campaigns of hate and violence. Before his assassination in early 1968, a Harris poll showed that 75 percent of the public disapproved of King.

King’s brutal honesty was not only needed during the beginnings of the civil rights movement, but maybe even more so today. The lesson for our own perilous time is basic. If we cannot explore our challenges with openness and honesty — with people of similar and differing experiences — we can’t properly confront our most important challenges. Leaders of our current times must heed King’s words and follow his example of truth-telling in the face of a hostile public. They must avoid easy bromides and cost-free promises and be willing to challenge not just adversaries but even their own followers at times.

King was far from perfect. In a sense, that’s the point. He was always struggling, just like the rest of us. But as he showed in Washington sixty years ago, he was willing to face the truth and speak honestly to guide a divided America to a higher plane.

This originally appeared in the blog of New America.

In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Western democracies were giddy about the global victory of market-based liberal systems. Decades of the Cold War were over. The logic of markets, rights, contracts, and law prevailed. It was, Francis Fukuyama famously declared, “the end of history.”

But in the last decade, authoritarianism has staged a comeback. Putin and Xi have consolidated power in Russia and China. Eastern bloc nations have revived ugly forms of nationalism. The U.S. and Britain have disavowed their durable alliances and free trade. Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines have cracked down on the opposition, as have Brazil, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. When the U.S. deposed Saddam Hussein, Iraqis did not greet Americans as liberators.

Stunned, small-d democrats now understand the leveling, destructive power of globalism. If Twitter can be used to rally pro-democracy activists in Tahrir Square, it can also be used to spread hateful lies and revive old prejudices. Angry mobs, living in online echo chambers, can be riled into dangerous wars against democratic norms and institutions.

Can anything be done to confront the rising tide of authoritarianism? Research suggests a simple answer: Put millions of bodies in the streets to demonstrate, peacefully, for democratic values.

No democracy movement has ever failed when it was able to mobilize at least 3.5 percent of the population to protest over a sustained period, according to a study by Erica Chenoweth of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Maria Stephan of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict“, Chenoweth and Stephan analyzed 323 political and social movements that challenged repressive regimes from 1900 to 2006. Such mass demonstrations are so visible, they found, that no one can ignore them. Their diversity and networks—with connections to schools, unions, churches, media, sports teams, fraternities, and even the military—gives them a superhuman voice and spirit. At that scale, most soldiers have no desire to suppress the protesters. Why? Because the crowd includes their family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

Call it the 3.5 Percent Solution.

What is the 3.5 Percent Solution?

Let’s suppose that Americans wanted to stand up against government repression. How could everyday Americans not just speak out, but also force elites to radically change direction?

With a population of 327 million, the U.S. would need to mobilize about 11.5 million people to assert popular, democratic power on the government. Could that happen? Maybe. More than 2.6 million people took part in the Women’s March, in cities all over the country (and world), on the day after Inauguration Day 2017. The U.S. would have to mobilize four times that many to push the reluctant Washington leaders.

That would take a lot of work, but it’s possible.

The logic of mass mobilization was first explained by a labor leader named A. Philip Randolph, who organized the black Pullman car porters in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1941, Randolph organized masses of black men to march in the streets of Washington to protest discrimination in the war industries. President Franklin Roosevelt called him to the White House, made some vague promises, and asked him to call off the march. Randolph said no, not until he got a signed executive order. Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia pleaded with Randolph to step aside. FDR dreaded the prospect of long columns of black men—maybe 100,000 of them—marching down Pennsylvania chanting about discrimination.

When Randolph stood firm, Roosevelt relented. He signed Executive Order 8802 and Randolph called off the march.

Randolph understood that reform requires activists to put their bodies on the line—peacefully. Without a willingness to be visible and accept consequences, like getting beaten or thrown into jail, the people in power do not take the opposition seriously.

As Gene Sharp points out in his three-volume masterpiece, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, regimes gain power when ordinary citizens consent to their rule. Usually, that consent is tacit, when people pay taxes, accept government regulations, and follow basic practices like sending kids to school; sometimes, it’s explicit, like adhering to court decisions and voting in elections. Nonviolent demonstrations, in effect, withdraw that consent. And no regime can survive when too many people refuse to obey the regime’s orders.

The most important demonstration of our time, the 1963 March on Washington, attracted from 250,000 to 400,000, according to crowd experts. Randolph called that march too and hired Bayard Rustin to organize it. The star power of Martin Luther King and other headliners like Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez made it historic.

The Roger Bannister Effect

That’s a far cry from the 11.5 million people needed for a 3.5 percent march. That’s where the Roger Bannister Effect comes in. Before Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954, many believed the feat impossible. Within a year, four others beat the mark. In the last 50-plus years more than 1,000 people beat it. Once people achieve a breakthrough, others duplicate it. The mind shapes what’s possible.

Such is the case with protests. Demonstrations have become as much a part of the system as elections and lobbying. In recent years, countless protests have surpassed one million. Worldwide, five million joined the women’s marches in 2017.

So think of the 3.5 percent goal, or 11.5 million people, as the political equivalent of the four-minute mile. It might seem impossible, but it’s actually quite possible.

In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to protest China’s effort to extradite criminal suspects from Hong Kong to China, where party-controlled courts mean rigged trials. On one day, crowds were estimated to reach more than one million in a nation-state of 7.4 million residents. That’s about 13.5 percent. More typically, the marches numbered in the hundreds of thousands, hovering around the magic 3.5 percent mark. The trick is to sustain the effort. The movement has to be ready to mobilize on short notice. Succeed once and it’s easier to succeed again—not automatic, but easier.

How to protest – and succeed

Protest movements attract the greatest, most diverse crowds when they focus on the consensus goals of fairness and democracy—against brutality and corruption—and keep their protests nonviolent.

If Americans ever wanted to stage a 3.5 percent March for Freedom, then, they must embrace a message that is both specific and mainstream. In 1963, the civil rights movement made a bold call for basic human rights, against the centuries of violence and indifference to the plight of blacks. Americans today would have to adopt the same kind of simple and clear message.

What universal values might such a march champion? Start with fair elections (against foreign influence, gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and big money). Broaden that appeal to include civil liberties, not just for Americans but for the “wretched refuse” seeking asylum and protection from civil war and life-threatening violence in other lands.

Foreign policy might offer another set of universal values to rally protesters. Most Americans support the idea of opposing brutal dictatorships and embracing democratic allies. With its vast consensus, global warming might make another focal point for rallying the masses. It depends how well the organizers frame the issue.

Specific ideas also need expression in universal outrages. In their marches for democratic revival in the U.S., protesters could cry out against specific grievances, like Russia’s cyberwar against the U.S., abuses at the U.S.-Mexico border, voter suppression, and Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

But getting too specific carries risks. On issues lacking a broad and deep consensus, the protesters risk alienating potential allies. So should protesters rally for Obamacare and the $15 minimum wage? Maybe, maybe not. If these issues cannot rally the masses—for the long haul—maybe they should be left off the agenda.

The key is to make it easy for people to rally. Organize everywhere. Any place where people gather for parades and rallies—streets, parks, public squares, campuses, stadiums, auditoriums, churches, schools—get the necessary permits. It won’t be any trouble in places with strong traditions of activism; but it will take work in less energized places.

The marches should also avoid the degrading rhetoric that certain destructive forces use to attack their enemies. In 1963, organizers approved most signs people carried at the March on Washington. That’s going too far, but today’s activists should focus on a strong assertion of values, not ad hominem attacks. Protesters should avoid also the bitterness and personal attacks common in social media. It might sound old-fashioned, but keep it clean. Don’t try to “win” arguments with vitriol. Avoid tit for tat. Repeat, relentlessly, what matters: Stop the violence. Stop the lawlessness. Stop the assault on democracy.

Organizers should train marshals to keep things peaceful and nonviolent. Nonviolent movements have twice the success rate of movements that involve even occasional use of violence. But nonviolence doesn’t just happen. It’s a skill—a hard skill. But anyone who wants can learn it and will have the support of countless friends and neighbors once the big day comes.

The protests should always appeal to the better angels of our natures. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we have to condemn racism but appeal to the better natures of people caught in its thrall. “Here’s what we have to say to all of America’s men and women falling in the grips of hatred and white supremacy: Come back,” AOC said. “It’s not too late. You have neighbors and loved ones waiting, holding space for you. And we will love you back.”

A protest demonstration is really a physical challenge to the regime: We’re here and you can’t push us around. We will assert ourselves. We will prevail.

No great movement can win without putting bodies on the line. “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen,” Timothy Snyder writes in his manifesto On Tyranny. “Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.”

Ultimately, the greatest impact of 3.5 percent protests could be at the ballot box. Democracy, by its very definition, thrives only when lots of people go to the polls. People need a reason to vote. If a positive force does not surge through the country, people will get stuck in the better-of-two-evils mindset. That’s enervating; it’s exactly what the enemies of democracy want. The 3.5 percent demonstration is the best way possible to arouse Americans who fear for our democracy.

Civil rights activists have always known, in their heart, the truth of Chenoweth and Stephan’s argument. America’s greatest lesson in the power of protest came in the civil rights era. “It’s just like geometry,” James Bevel, one of Martin Luther King’s acolytes said. “You add this, you add this, you add this, and you’re going to get this. It’s like a law. You can’t miss with this.

“If you maintain your integrity in your heart and honestly do your work, and your motive and intention is right, and you go and seek what’s just, there is no way for you not to achieve your objective.”

The hearts of veterans of the civil rights community broke this week when the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that Ernest Withers, the photographer who created some of the lasting images of the movement, was a paid informant for the FBI. 

Withers took some of the pictures that we remember most about that long-ago but still-present era when blacks struggled to break the back of a terrorist state and win their full rights as citizens. They marched and got beaten by mobs and cops. They signed up to vote and they lost their jobs and homes. They sang and they got thrown into jail. They spoke up and their churches and homes got shot at and burned.

Withers documented the trial in the Emmett Till case in 1955 and the planning for the Poor People’s March in 1968. He took pictures of Martin Luther King marching, riding a bus in Montgomery after the boycott, relaxing behind closed doors before his death. He took the iconic picture of sanitation workers marching in Memphis, bearing the signs “I Am A Man,” in the days before King’s assassination. He recorded demonstrations all over. He took pictures of those quintessential American institutions, jazz and baseball, which gave expression to black aspirations even while holding blacks down.

And now, after combing documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and matching reports of an informant named in FBI files as ME 338-R with a memo matching Withers to that tag, the Commercial Appeal reveals that Withers gave the FBI hounds information that J. Edgar Hoover and his henchmen could use to disrupt the civil rights and peace movements. The period of Withers’s activity is not clear; so far it looks like Withers worked for the FBI from 1968 to 1970.

 

The icons of the civil rights movement deserve to feel betrayed. They were battling a deadly enemy with little more than their bodies, minds, and souls. The FBI and its allies drew from the deep pockets of the federal government and private hatepreneurs. Withers’s information could have resulted in dire consequences for the friends he named. Some might have lost jobs and homes, got hit with audits and smear campaigns, the whole COINTELPRO bag of tricks.

So what Ernest Withers did was wrong, a terrible betrayal of the people who loved him and brought them into the most intimate places and moments.

But in researching my book Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, I heard stories that might lend a broader perspective on this betrayal.

I got lots of files from the FBI, many recycled from previous FOIA requests. It was obvious that the FBI was getting its agents into all kinds of church meetings and activist groups. And of course the FBI was tapping the phones of major figures not just in civl rights but all over politics and the arts. Someone had to be sitting in those meetings and taking notes. Some of them had to blend in with the crowd.

And the people in the movement knew it. The civil rights activists of the day sometimes laughed about who was in the meeting to snitch. Sometimes they knew, sometimes they didn’t. But as many told me, they didn’t care. What they were doing was righteous and open for all to see. The element of surprise sometimes played a role, but careful planning and discipline were more important. When surprises happened, the leaders were often the most surprised of all. The “dash for freedom” in the Birmingham campaign is just one example.

A man named Julius Hobson, who was active in Washington politics, sat in all the meetings to arrange for security at the March on Washington. The minutes of these meetings show that Hobson was excited about the toys of the security detail. He talked constantly about walkie-talkies and command hierarchies. He wanted to be in the middle of it all, even though Bayard Rustin, the brilliant march organizer, had recruited and trained black cops from New York to keep the peace using nonviolent means. And the Washington police and federal security officers were involved too. Years later, after Hobson died, FBI documents showed that he too was an informant.

Friends defended Hobson, saying he was undoubtedly feeding false information to Hoover & Co. Maybe yes, maybe no. We’ll never know.

We won’t ever know the full story of Ernest Withers either. Did he just need the money? Did he get framed? Did he want to rat on the Invaders, a Black Panther-style group on the rise in Memphis? Was he trying to deke the feds? Was he confused? Was he targeting enemies and promoting friends? Some of the above? All of the above?

The civil rights movement was the transcendent moment of our time. A vast community of people from all over — ministers and housewives and students, factory workers and sharecroppers and garbage men, teachers and artists and the unemployed — embraced a strategy of nonviolence and love to confront a vicious and corrupt system of racism. They won, not just for themselves but for all of us and all the world.

Part of what’s so amazing — and so profoundly moving — is that they were just ordinary people. They were not superhuman. They were courageous but also scared. They made mistakes, lots of them. They got sloppy and sometimes selfish and even ornery. But they rose above their flaws and transformed a nation, and that’s one of most beautiful things you can say. And no FBI file will ever change that.

This originally appeared in Beacon Broadside.

A shy and slight man, nearing 80 years old, toils away in a row house in East Boston. He’s wearing black, as usual—not as a fashion statement, but because it’s easy. He taps on his computer and answers his phone. At his feet sits his black Great Dane, Caesar. In his dark office, where floor-to-ceiling bookcases block the sunlight and manuscripts cover the tables, he seems to disappear. It’s an appropriate image. Gene Sharp is probably the most important person you’ve never heard of.

Sharp gets calls from dissidents across the globe, seeking permission to translate one of his books to use in their political campaigns. Sometimes he travels to international conferences. Last spring he went to one on Mohandas Gandhi’s 1930 salt march, the defining moment of India’s campaign for independence.

Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the most soaring rhetoric of nonviolence. But scholars generally agree that Sharp has done more than anyone to document how nonviolence works as a strategy of political action.

Sharp’s work helped script the peaceful uprisings that have defined the last generation in Eastern Europe, China, Burma, Latin America. In 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed atop an armored vehicle at the Russian Federation headquarters in Moscow to face down the putsch, one of Sharp’s pamphlets was seen fluttering nearby.

For nearly three decades, Sharp toiled at Harvard’s Center for International Studies. He also taught at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he is an emeritus professor. He lived on grants, and in 1983 he founded his own research group, the Albert Einstein Institution. Dazzled by his vision of revolutionary change, some of the best young minds in social science flocked to work with him.

UNDERSTANDING POWER

Throughout his childhood in Ohio, Sharp and his family moved often. His father, a stern Presbyterian minister, changed congregations regularly. Gene didn’t make many friends. He remembers playing with his dog, joining in softball games, and exploring the neighborhood. And reading. The Sharps finally settled in Columbus.

During World War II, Gene read newspaper reports of the conflict in Europe and the Pacific, dramatic accounts of Dresden and Hiroshima, and early reports of concentration camps and torture. He wondered what caused people to fight wars. At Ohio State, Sharp wrote an honors thesis on war. He joined a study group on civil rights at the YMCA and took part in an early sit-in at a luncheonette.

“There was only one man on duty,” he said. “There were 10 of us, an interracial group. Finally, they called the police, and amazing for Ohio at that time, [the police] were all African American. So we weren’t arrested. But we didn’t get served.”

After graduation, in 1949, Sharp went to London to be a reporter for Peace News, a 15,000-circulation weekly. Scholars at the Institute of Philosophy in Norway invited him to come to Oslo to study nonviolent action. He interviewed everyday people who resisted the Nazis simply by refusing to follow orders. He began compiling a typology of nonviolence.

He went to Oxford, where he tried to place nonviolence into a larger theory of power. Reading the classics of political theory, he found little satisfaction. Only Thomas Hobbes understood the underlying dynamic of power. In Hobbes’ Leviathan, the Sovereign trembles in fear that the masses will rise in revolt.

Power, Sharp realized, is a relationship. No government—even one with vast armies of soldiers and bureaucrats, control of the media and economy—can survive unless the people obey. The central imperative of nonviolent action is to withdraw consent from the regime until it accepts the demands of the people. If enough people refuse to obey the state, the state will lose its power.

BACK AT OHIO STATE

Sharp returned to Ohio State to get a graduate degree in sociology. He spent hours in the basement of the library, reading British and Indian newspaper accounts of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign for Indian independence. The yellowing newspapers told Sharp something that confused—even scared—him. Conventional wisdom held that nonviolence requires moral purity. It was considered synonymous with pacifism and the Christlike imperative to turn the other cheek. By refusing to meet violence with violence, activists demonstrated righteousness. That moral superiority aroused the public conscience.

But the newspapers told a different story. Using nonviolence did not require a pure moral spirit. The people in the Indian independence movement were not just the righteous few, but the flawed many. They used nonviolence because it worked, not because it was morally pure.

“The people used these methods in a very disciplined way [but] didn’t believe in them ethically,” Sharp said. “They were not basing their action on the moral superiority. I was at first a bit shocked.”

He asked himself, “Should I write this down?” To acknowledge that nonviolence is not necessarily a moral strategy seemed, in a way, illicit. But that’s what the evidence of Gandhi’s movement showed. The importance of Sharp’s insight was huge. Democratic revolutions do not need to wait for a morally pure generation. Anyone, anytime, can adopt a strategy of nonviolent revolution.

A PRAGMATIC STRATEGY

Sharp decided to spend his life documenting and analyzing the methods that ordinary people could use to resist repressive regimes. He wanted to say everything that needed to be said about nonviolence as a pragmatic strategy. Over the years, Sharp put this knowledge in the hands of oppressed people everywhere—in the nations of the old Soviet empire, in dictatorships from Asia to Africa to Latin America, in the Middle East. His works became how-to guides for achieving freedom and democracy.

In their zeal to destroy a bad regime—and to get even—activists are tempted to use violence against the government. But violence usually doesn’t work because it plays into the regime’s strength. Even when violence succeeds in overthrowing the regime, one group of tyrants simply replaces another. Repression and resentment begin a new cycle. To develop an effective strategy, activists need to identify the government’s weak spots and attack them. Using the right combination of nonviolent methods, activists can weaken their opponents.

Sharp embodies the academic ideal of careful competence. He eschews colorful expressions in favor of precision. He makes few grand claims for his work. But he believes his ideas about nonviolence could transform basic theories of power. That’s not, he said, because of his own brilliance as a theorist. It’s because he discovered a fundamental truth of politics and worked more than half a century to document it.

A THEORY OF POLITICS

Friendly critics lament that Sharp has not submitted his work—a massive collection of articles, arranged by topic—to rigorous academic testing. Colleagues have drawn up ambitious research agendas, which have languished. But Sharp believes in his ideas. He thinks he has developed a whole new theory of politics.

The theory can be stated simply: Power, even in the most closed and brutal dictatorship, depends on consent. Ordinary people can band together to withdraw their consent. Movements succeed when they refuse to resort to violence, since the regime always possesses superior instruments of violence. Ergo, the future of democracy and freedom depends on nonviolence.

Robert Helvey, a career military man, recruited Sharp to help train Burmese activists in their underground campaign against the military government. Sharp wrote the document that became From Dictatorship to Democracy, a concise restatement of his other work. The 88-page primer has been translated into dozens of languages. Some of his most eager readers are dictators and their henchmen. That’s a good thing, he said. “They’ll know what they’re up against. They will know that so many dictatorships have been brought down with the aid of these methods.

“They will have to be careful, because if they kill too many people it will weaken them. That will reduce the dangers to the demonstrators. That will mean more people will have the guts to go out and demonstrate. And the regime will reduce the degree of their brutality.”

Ironically, the military understands Sharp’s work best. “I’ve basically given up on [peace activists],” he said. “They think you get rid of war by refusing to take part and protesting. No! You get rid of war when people have something else they can do more effectively.”

AN ANONYMOUS STAR

Gene Sharp’s work will inspire democracy movements and scholars for generations to come. But the man behind the work remains an enigma.

Sharp never married because, he said, he wanted to devote his energy to his work. “I probably could never have had my life if I had married with children to support,” he said.

Asked how his best friends would describe him, he at first said he has “no best friends.” Then he laughed. A friend, he conceded, might answer, “I think I knew him somewhere.”

After prodding, he gave the final verdict: “‘He’s passionate, stubborn, persistent.’”

Sharp has always insisted on doing things his way. He does not want to charm donors or adjust the Einstein Institution’s agenda for them. A donor who kept the organization going for 20 years left after a disagreement. Recounting the incident, Sharp shrugged. These days, Sharp is almost all alone. The institute moved last year from Harvard Square to his row house. The staff now consists of just him and an assistant. A Salvadoran family living on the third floor helps with household chores.

Sharp’s only interest besides his studies is orchids, which he tends in a makeshift greenhouse on the top level of his house. Sometimes, he acknowledged, they get neglected.

Sharp is healthy but he knows his time is limited. He travels, but he’s more interested in completing his writings than explaining them to audiences. When he finally stops working, the Einstein Institution will probably expire.

In the U.S., Sharp remains anonymous. He doesn’t get invited to parties or conferences like other academic stars. Helvey, who says Sharp’s theories of nonviolence transformed his view of how the world works, laments Sharp’s anonymity. “He is more famous in 15 other languages than English,” he said.

In his 1973 masterwork, the three-volume Politics of Nonviolent Action, Sharp documented 198 methods of nonviolent action. “Someone recently told me there are three or four other ones that occurred in the last few years,” he said. “I’ll have to add them.”

This originally appeared in the Ohio State Alumni Magazine.

In 1984, at the age of 21, Garry Kasparov challenged Anatoly Karpov for the international chess championship. Karpov won the first four games with little trouble. As he faced the possibility of total humiliation at the hands of the veteran master, the young challenger adopted a new approach.

Rather than continuing his wild style of play, Kasparov decided to make more cautious opening moves.  Once he took full account of Karpov’s game strategy, he launched into a series of subtle but incisive moves, striking a balance between offense and defense. The new strategy produced 17 draws over three months. In Game 27, Karpov slipped in another victory to take a 5-0 lead. But Kasparov held his ground thereafter, forcing four more draws and winning the 32nd game. After 14 more draws, he won the next two games.  Stalemate ensued—for five more months.  Finally, after thousands of hours of play, the president of the International Chess Federation halted play and declared a draw.

From those months of humiliation, exertion, and fleeting triumph, Kasparov emerged a new competitor and a new man.  That “long and grueling tutorial” nearly re-wired his brain and launched one of the most storied careers in the history of competition.

In his new rumination on chess, life, and business, How Life Imitates Chess, Kasparov ponders his success on the chessboard and offers lessons for anyone else who thrives in a world of strategy and competition.

Kasparov writes that the key to his success against Karpov—and the key to success in general—was to become “deeply in touch with [one’s] own thought processes.”  Relying less on instinct, Kasparov for the first time appreciated the far-reaching consequences of every move.

“Karpov knew that I would consistently give up material for attacking chances, and he used this habit against me in the first match,” Kasparov writes. “Only when I began to rein in that instinct did I begin to out up effective resistance. That was the moment I first began to think about why I made the moves I made.”

Masters of sports, business, and politics often believe that their trials reflect the inner logic of the world. Garry Kasparov makes a good case for chess, which is, of course, a stylized version of an actual, if ancient, form of conflict.

Though Kasparov easily could have written (or, more likely, dictated to a ghostwriter) a trite volume about chess-as-metaphor, How Life Imitates Chess reveals that Kasparov understands life, and politics, at least as well as he does the game that made him famous.  In addition to compelling anecdotes about the game itself, Kasparov presents some compelling ideas that bear strongly on both business and politics.

In business, Kasparov preaches the importance of playing your own game. If you’re Nokia, Kasparov says, that means nurturing purposeful chaos—like Kasparov himself. If you’re IBM, that means a more conservative game, exploiting the moves and mistakes of others—like Karpov.

Winning, on the chessboard or in the boardroom, requires risking resources now for payoffs later—and having a strategic vision to guide tactical maneuvers. William Boeing, Kasparov notes, was no expert on flying when he envisioned his dream of an aerospace giant. But he had an intuition that air travel would become a major industry, and he backed it up with big investments in research and team-building. He was ready when Charles Lindbergh changed the national vision of air travel.

Politics also requires attention to the basic values of the battle. Bill Clinton’s 1992 “war room” won admirers for its ability to respond instantly to attacks. But Kasparov says its more valuable role was giving the campaign a focus. The famous mantra “It’s the economy, stupid” insured that everyone in the campaign spoke with one voice that resonated with the mood of the nation.

Kasparov himself has put his intellect, and his notoriety, on the line in the life-and-death world of politics.  With much the same approach that he used against Karpov—careful, guerrilla-style maneuvers—Kasparov has since 2005 taken on a power no less daunting than the Kremlin itself.  Kasparov sees the administration of Vladimir Putin as an affront to Russia’s burgeoning democracy. Putin has won broad support among a Russian public weary of the Yeltsin era’s chaos, but Kasparov fears a new dictatorship taking hold. He is hoping to bring his passionate and rational voice to the new Russia.

Kasparov’s challenge is that Putin still dominates the chessboard of Russian politics. Putin controls the military, Russian media, and many corporations. Still, Kasparov has access to international media, human rights leaders, and disgruntled forces inside Russia. The conflict is a far cry from the order of the chessboard, but Kasparov insists that there are common ties.

Kasparov argues that chess—quite unlike politics—is the world’s only purely intellectual form of competition. The game comprises a board and pieces that are visible to all. No one can hide assets or change the rules. Neither luck, nor misinformation, nor brute force ever comes into play.  Success, then, requires a mix of cold calculation, relentless questioning, and fantasy.

Kasparov’s worldview is an exhilarating combination of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Zen mastery of living in the moment, and constant self-analysis.  “Every move has a consequence; every move either fits into your strategy or it doesn’t,” he writes. “If you aren’t questioning your moves consistently, you will lose to the player who is playing with a coherent plan.”

Kasparov’s ability to concentrate on one thing—and to make it everything—requires an intellect so steady that most people probably cannot fathom.  Normally, getting through the day requires taking most things for granted.  The bus will arrive.  The coffee will be hot.  Rogue nations will behave themselves. You can’t question everything all the time, or you would never get out the door. But Kasparov suggests that even those of us who are not grand masters can learn to stop at key moments and make more deliberate decisions.

Winning requires a powerful combination of intellectual rigor and free spirit. You need to look several moves ahead (or several matches, if you’re seeking a world championship). But no matter how smart you are, Kasparov says, you can only calculate five or six moves ahead. Kasparov explains: “For every move, there might be four or five viable responses, then four responses to each of those moves, and so on. The branching of the decision tree grows geometrically. Just five moves into the game, there are millions of possible positions. The total number of positions in a game of chess is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.”

Precisely because so many moves are possible, a great chess player needs to find ways of reducing the number of viable moves. “The decision tree must be constantly pruned,” Kasparov writes.

Here’s where Kasparov turns to fantasy. He writes that he likes to imagine pieces as action figures with minds of their own, fighting in imaginary worlds. To conjure these whimsical images, Kasparov trained himself to take a daring leap away from logic.

“At the board I always tried to let my mind wander, to occasionally ignore the fog of variations and take a mental stab in the dark,” he writes. The subconscious holds more possibilities than any calculator could ever consider. Stepping outside pure rationality brings a new dimension of tactics and strategy. “Moves with an extra charge of fantasy can startle your competition into making mistakes.”

As he surveys the board, Kasparov often thinks about material, time, and quality—MTQ, in his shorthand. Each piece has an initial value—pawns 1, knights and bishops 3, rooks 5, and queens 9. But in practical terms, the pieces’ values change with every move.

In his competitive days, Kasparov usually played an aggressive game, sacrificing pawns and even a bishop (his favorite piece as a child) to set up an advance on the opponent’s king. Those pawns didn’t mean much to Kasparov except as wedges into enemy territory; but he got stuck on the other side of the board, with nothing to protect his superior pieces, the pawns would have been worth a lot more.

Kasparov’s recent involvement with an computer chess competition underscores the importance of understanding the whole game, not just focusing on moves or pieces that seem tantalizing or even brilliant in the moment. Kasparov and other masters programmed the game to force tough decisions and consequences on the players. The idea was to get the players to be more deliberate and thoughtful with every move—and always ask why a particular move was valuable, and whether it would hold its value as the opponent mounts his defense. But players were too impatient.

“Players would immediately click on whatever caught their eye and, if unhappy with the result, jump back and try again, or they’d go off in a totally different direction. They ignored most of the menu choices we worked so hard to perfect.”

Kasparov argues that this sort of reactive play reflects how people in all fields make decisions about their lives. On countless decisions—investments, home purchases, jobs, relationships, kids’ schools, and indeed sports and games— “players” tend to click impulsively and then back out if it doesn’t work and click something else. This would be fine if all we were doing was playing chess.

But from the office to fields of battle to Kasparov’s own struggle for the heart of Russia, the stakes are much higher, and the proper strategy that much more crucial. Can Kasparov and his allies challenge Putin’s thugocracy? When Putin leaves the board, can he anoint a new king more powerful than all the pawns that Kasparov and other reformers assemble? And which side can win the queen, knights, bishops, and rooks?

Even more important, can Kasparov and his allies get the Russian people to open themselves to the fantasy–and, just maybe, plot out the reality–of a free Russia?

THIS SPRING, Al Gore testified before Congress on global warming, which he considers an imminent threat to the survival of the planet. When Sen. James Inhofe began his questioning, he dismissed Gore outright, referring to “peer-reviewed scientists” who are “radically at odds with your claims.”

Gore paused, as if to say three “one-one thousands.” Then he wondered aloud what it would take to connect with someone as skeptical as the Oklahoman. Finally, he suggested that he and Inhofe meet privately for a meal so they could talk about the issue away from the TV cameras.

And Bill Ury smiled.

William Ury is the Harvard Law professor who, with his colleague Roger Fisher, wrote Getting to Yes, the basic text on negotiation at all levels. The principles of Yes have been used to resolve hostage situations, legislative maneuvering, peace negotiations, arms talks, and hundreds of other situations where implacable foes adopted the Groucho Marx line, “No matter what it is or who commenced it, I’m against it.”

The principles of Yes work because they express the ideals that we learned as children but often forget in the heat of argument: Listen to others. Don’t get personal. Try to get something for both sides. Look for a win/win solution. Be concrete, but don’t get rigid. Set objective criteria.

This spring, Ury followed Yes with what he calls a “prequel”—The Power of Positive No, published by Bantam Dell. He already has a prominent disciple for his new book in Gore, who participated in a Ury-hosted retreat that brought together critics and skeptics of global warming. In that retreat, Ury taught both sides to say No better, and Gore applied the techniques in answering Inhofe.

massachusetts has become the capital of negotiation studies. Larry Suskind’s Consensus Building Institute at MIT has trained hundreds of people to make conversation, as opposed to combat, a central feature of politics. Two Red Line stops away, Ury’s Global Negotiation Project, based at Harvard, works to resolve political conflict all over the globe—whether it’s the millennial struggles in the Middle East, the ideological clashes in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, or the growing struggle over the environment. And don’t forget the Albert Einstein Institution, the leading source of information about nonviolence as a form of political action, which Gene Sharp runs in his East Boston rowhouse.

But smart negotiation has not played an adequate role in Massachusetts politics. According to Ury, the problem might not be that we have a hard time getting to Yes, but that we don’t know how to get to No first. So we go along with undesirable ideas—like the Big Dig, along with its multibillion-dollar “mitigation” projects, and the convention center in South Boston. Or we avoid taking up good ideas, like the expansion of charter schools or the creation of business improvement districts, because of the shrillness of opponents. The result is an undercurrent of frustration, which occasionally explodes in anger.

What is so hard about saying No? We do it all through our lives, starting in the misnamed “terrible twos.” Ury quotes the financial giant Warren Buffett, who is baffled why so many people have a hard time with the word: “I sit there all day and I look at investment proposals. I say, No, No, No, No, No, No—until I see the one that is exactly what I am looking for. And then I say Yes.”

In The Power of a Positive No, Ury argues that people avoid uttering the two-letter word because they confuse it with total rejection. We have to deal with people even when we disagree, and we don’t want to say something that might hurt future interactions. We also live in a manic age, full of distractions and demands that make it easier to just say yes. As a result, we have become a nation of accommodators and avoiders.

“No may be the most important word in our vocabulary, but it is the most difficult to say well,” Ury writes. “At the heart of the difficulty in saying No is the tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship.”

Ury outlines a three-stage process of constructive dialogue. In the first stage, we reach inside to find our deepest values—what Ury calls the “Yes!” statement. Being clear on those values helps you move to the next step and say “No” to demands that run counter to them. Finally, the issue moves to a request for both sides to find common ground, which Ury signifies as “Yes?”

The Yes!/No/Yes? process mirrors the structure of storytelling, from Athens to Hollywood. In Act I, the hero develops and affirms his deepest values. In Act II, he confronts a great foe that requires him to fight back. In Act III, the great struggle opens new possibilities for all concerned.

No requires more than rejection, as the experience of city politics shows. Neighborhoods regularly say No to even benign projects —housing, parks, schools, new commercial development—that would alter their neighborhood in any way. The No of NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) can poison community life for years. Ury prefers a No that does more than block a project, one that opens the conversation to new possibilities.

I know a nonprofit developer who struggled for years to build affordable housing on an open lot in the Roslindale section of Boston. Neighbors repeatedly rejected the idea in community meetings and zoning board hearings. The developer’s response was to call the neighbors racist and to vow to fight for the housing until he won.

Ury would instead get the developers and neighbors in a room for a long conversation about what the community needed and what it feared. Very often, a community’s intense rejection of change can be tied to being wronged in the past. When the wrong goes unaddressed—or is denied —the wounds can fester. Ury would try to learn everyone’s deepest desires and fears (their Yes!) and then tell them how they can say No in such a way as to open the discussion to new possibilities. The toughest challenge of negotiation is respecting the other side no matter what.

“A positive No respects rather than rejects, even when you’re saying No to someone you don’t like,” Ury told me. “Everyone has as a birthright of basic respect. The first time I taught this course at Harvard Law School, we were in the midst of the war, and the students said, ‘What about Saddam Hussein? Does he deserve respect?’ and I said yes. Professional hostage negotiators [say] the only way to get through [to hostage-takers] is to treat them with politeness and respect. It’s the key to opening their mind.”

The most important part of a good No might be having a Plan B: an alternate plan to use when the other side won’t accept your answer. More than any other part of a negotiation, having a Plan B can force a stubborn opponent to respond.

Suppose Gov. Mitt Romney had listened to his budget advisors on the plan to rebuild the Greenbush commuter line to the South Shore. The administration had lots of good reasons to kill the $500 million project, adopted as part of the “mitigation” agreement to get the backing of the Conservation Law Foundation for the Big Dig in the waning days of the Dukakis administration. When Romney took over the Corner Office, he could have said No to the project, which will do little to improve transit and reduce auto usage—if he had had a Plan B.