Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (41 page)

In the classroom, I expected a great deal of participation from the students. I badgered them until they showed they knew the material and could both defend their arguments and attack mine. There was no ill will in my technique and everyone was on an equal footing. In fact, if someone said, “You’re full of shit, Professor Emanuel, and here’s why,” I gave them an A. For the most part the students did well
and gave positive feedback. But invariably I’d receive a critical evaluation from one of them.

Eventually, a sophomore confronted me about my teaching style. Adam Berger may have been the sharpest student I ever saw at Harvard. A brilliant reader who would one day represent the interests of the northern spotted owl and environmentalism in the courts, he responded beautifully to my rapid-fire style. But he wanted me to know that some of the others felt intimidated to the point where they were becoming unreceptive. One day he followed me out of class and walked me home.

“What’s your goal?” he asked me.

“The goal is to make them their absolute best.”

“Well, if someone feels humiliated then they aren’t going to be able to learn from you. It means you have fucked up.”

Adam was right. In order to succeed with all my students, I had to be more careful about showing them that it was all right to be wrong, as long as you stayed in the game, and that they could join the fray without putting their dignity at risk. Again, I’d fallen back on old habits, but I was grateful to Adam.

Still, there were some criticisms I could not contain. I felt the culture of medicine was too often dominated by imperious physicians who intimidated underlings to the detriment of their education and the care of patients. The big chiefs at teaching hospitals could be dangerously authoritarian. I saw this as an institutional problem and began to consider ways that I could work on the system of medicine instead of treating individual patients. I had to accept that despite my parents’ expectations and urging, I was never going to be a doctor like my father, with thousands of grateful patients and a long record of clinical victories. But I could dive into the developing field of bioethics and begin to address the problems of structure and the thinking that got in the way of quality care. The course I set for myself was risky. It might even lead me to academic Siberia. But I was no longer Jonny Emanuel moving in a direction determined by my status as the eldest brother. I was Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and it was time for me to be fully committed to my own path.

Rahm had blazed his own trail, too. He was no longer the fellow my
father described as “getting the maximum out of the minimum amount of work.” Instead he was a rising star in the world of politics, known for his willingness to do the maximum in order to achieve as much as humanly possible. I had seen the change coming in the mid-1980s, when Rahm was learning the fund-raising trade. He would not shrink from calling anyone, even the parents of our friends in Wilmette, and would press them hard for donations. If they agreed to give a thousand dollars he would say, “I won’t let you embarrass yourself that way.” Then he would either say that he was going to hang up and let them think about it or say, “I’ll put you down for two thousand.” Rahm got what he wanted 99 percent of the time. In those few cases when the “ask” failed, nothing anyone said to him ever seemed to hurt him. He just went on to the next objective.

Rahm’s resolve was precisely the trait Governor Clinton wanted in a key member of his team. However, on the day that I bicycled to Brookline to sit in on his meeting with Rahm, I knew little about Clinton the candidate, and what I did know gave me pause. The latest poll gave him just 9 percent of the vote, compared with 18 percent for Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, and 30 percent for New York governor Mario Cuomo, who hadn’t even declared his candidacy. How, I wondered, would Clinton make up the distance between himself and the front-runners and what risk would Rahm take by joining him instead of one of the leaders in the race?

I was a fifth wheel at the meeting of just four people, but part of Clinton’s charm is that he never treats anyone like an outsider. He listened when I explained my work and said something about how I might contribute to his deliberations on health-care reform. I promised to send him my ideas and then kept quiet. As the two of them got down to business, I sensed immediately that Clinton was clearly a master of his craft. Clinton was very good at complimenting Rahm in precisely the way Rahm wanted to be recognized. Rahm impressed me with his focus and seriousness—and his ability not to be sucked in by the compliments.

As they talked, I could feel Clinton’s charisma and recognize the way that he was positioning himself to appeal to a segment of the electorate—white, male, rural, conservative—that the party had trouble attracting. Rahm recognized the strength of this strategy, which combined the liberal-leaning politics he favored with a somewhat more conservative approach to issues like welfare reform. Shifting into problem-solving mode, Rahm asked Clinton several questions about his campaign’s finances and then began talking about “the two diasporas” that could be tapped for immediate donation. One of these diasporas was the American Jewish community, which Rahm knew well. The other was made up of wealthy Arkansan Democrats, including many who had left the state to find fortune and fame elsewhere in the United States.

Rahm was aware of the Arkansas political elite because he had worked for both Dale Bumpers, one of the state’s senators, and for Congressman Beryl Anthony, who had chaired the DCCC from 1989 to 1990. Although he spoke to Clinton with confidence about getting the job done, and agreed to take it on, after the candidate left Rahm was pessimistic about their chances of success in everything he said to me. This is the way Rahm always responds to challenges. He builds a huge and convincing case for a disastrous outcome, and uses the fear this generates to motivate himself and those around him. Rahm keeps up the negativity even as good things happen and polls swing in his direction. I guess it works for him, but anyone who wants to collaborate with him over the long haul must learn to discount most of the gloomy things he says.

In the first weeks of his stint with the Clinton campaign, Rahm contacted every donor and potential ally he could. When he asked me for help I chipped in five hundred dollars, which was a substantial sum for me at the time, and gave him a list of friends and colleagues who might be inclined to donate. Gradually the money began to flow and the campaign was armed well enough to press on through New Hampshire, where Clinton would finish a respectable second, with 25 percent of the vote, compared to 33 percent for Tsongas.

My brother worked for Clinton because he thought he had the
right policies, the best political instincts, and the star power to make a winning candidate. Rahm would serve proudly in the Clinton White House and go on to a career that would require another book to describe in any detail. Time would also prove that Ari found in Hollywood a perfect outlet for his energy, imagination, and ambition. And I, the careful planner who tried to prepare for every contingency, faced a future with more twists and turns than I ever expected. The one thing that would remain constant, and grow stronger with time, would be our connection to one another.

In 1992, in the wake of Clinton’s election, Rahm proposed a pact that required us to be together every Thanksgiving. We have kept the agreement ever since, adding spouses and children as they came along. Over the years, we have rotated the venue each year, moving from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington on a triennial cycle. This tradition meant that even as we distinguished ourselves as individuals our brotherhood was never broken. That, it seems, was perhaps one of the most important values imparted to us by our parents and our experience growing up Emanuel.

“Smulevitz, that is S-M-U-L-I-V-I-T-Z.”

“No, no,” I said. “It is E like Emanuel, V like Victor, I like Idiot, T like Tom, and Z like Zeke. Smulevitz.”

I was spelling my grandfather’s last name for
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, who was in Chicago to write about my brother Rahm winning election and becoming the city’s first Jewish mayor. When we cleared up the spelling issue Maureen said, “Zeke, I have to meet your mother tonight at the party.”

“Why?”

“To find out what she put in the cereal!”

“Maureen, how sexist of you! How do you know it wasn’t my father who was the critical factor in our success? Maybe it was our genes, not how my parents raised us at all. Or maybe it was the influence of the firstborn. Or the influence of all three of us on each other. Why are you so sure it was my mother?”

I have to give Maureen credit for consistency and perseverance. She has been asking me that question incessantly for the last five years. Not that she was alone. I’ve heard a version of the “cereal question” hundreds of times, from friends, colleagues, interviewers, and people
I just happen to meet. I understand why someone might be interested in the secrets of our apparent success, but I am more struck by the widely held assumption that the single component most responsible for our success must be our mother.

I suspect this reflex is based on two factors. The first is an enduring, idealized image of the American family before the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s. The traditional picture suggests that mothers did all the important parenting while fathers existed on the periphery of family life, playing a supporting role at best. Like all clichés, this idea has some basis in overall truth but falls apart when you get down to specifics. My father may have worked tremendously hard and long hours at the hospital and office, but he exerted an enormous influence on us through this example. We were also influenced, in big ways, by our grandfather the “Big Bangah,” friends like the Glasses, and the neighborhoods and schools we knew as kids.

The second is the bias that favors nurture over nature. Many people want to believe that parents’ consciously imparted influence, in the form of values, education, and even nutrition, determines how their children will turn out. It’s a natural point of view. To think otherwise would require us to acknowledge that our ability to shape our children is limited, and that we have little control over many of the traits they will develop over time.

As a scientist I know genes exert real influence not just on our physical and social characteristics, but also in how nurture ultimately impacts us, often by changing how our genes are expressed. Ultimately, it is not either nature or nurture. It is them working together. For example, male assertiveness and its more animalistic cousin, aggression, have a hereditary basis. (Think survival of the pushiest.) The same is true for traits like physical stamina and strength, which still matter in our world despite the fact that life no longer requires us to run miles across the savannah in the hunt for game. In modern life, physical resilience lets you work longer hours and maintain peak performance at your desk or in a classroom. By the same token, an extra-aggressive personality, when channeled properly, will get you closer to the top in most competitions.

In our case, the exuberant energy remarked on by almost everyone who knows us probably comes directly from our father’s DNA. Ben Emanuel’s workdays often ran to fourteen hours or more and then he would be on call often every other weekend, and yet he never seemed to tire. He also remained slim and physically fit long into middle age, without any formal—or informal—exercise routine. Rahm, Ari, and I all have developed our own workout regimens: I’m a runner and squash player, Rahm’s a swimmer and bicyclist, and Ari’s a big golfer and weight lifter. Nevertheless, our dad’s genes have predisposed us to be high-energy and make it easier for us to stay fit.

Other genetically borne traits common to Emanuels include the dyslexia and attention deficit disorder that afflict the three of us brothers to varying degrees. Here the general DNA connection is well established but we have never formally worked out the precise hereditary pathway. Our mother, while a voracious reader, is a notoriously awful speller. Were she a kid today, I am sure she would be diagnosed with a learning disability. Stories from our father’s youth suggest he was the type of kid who was eager for stimulation and had trouble sitting still. My guess is that something in the combination of their DNA brought out more extreme versions of dyslexia and hyperactivity in us. Rahm and I got the bad-spelling part of dyslexia. (It was only in middle age that I learned bad spelling is a manifestation of dyslexia.) Ari, of course, has the classic dyslexia, with his extreme difficulty with reading. All of us had “ants-in-the-pants” syndrome, which made us wilder than most boys and, consequently, more likely to run afoul of authorities. Ari was a perpetual-motion machine, but both Rahm and I were plenty fidgety. I used to bounce my legs throughout the classroom day.

On balance, the traits passed to us through our genes have included gifts as well as deficiencies and have required us to adapt and compensate. However, as much as we recognize our parents in ourselves, we can also see that the transfer of traits has not been entirely consistent. For example, my mother and father are both quite graceful on the dance floor. You could see this trait in Rahm’s ballet, but I have to work hard to avoid klutzing up wedding receptions and bar mitzvah
parties. Similarly, my father has tremendous auditory acuity. This shows up in his amazing ability to pick up languages and his deep appreciation for music. He can actually identify particular musicians, conductors, and orchestras from a few notes of a recording. Not one of us got his ear. While we might enjoy a night of music, we would struggle to distinguish one classical composer from another. As for languages, it is enough to say that we speak English better than the Bushes, although our vocabulary may occasionally appear limited to four-letter words.