Behind the Shock Machine (28 page)

Despite this, Williams showed no signs of stress on the tapes. In fact, between appointments he could often be heard whistling, singing, and joking with McDonough as he prepared for the next appointment. He often exercised his pleasant singing voice during breaks. He seemed to move effortlessly in and out of his role, as the following interlude shows.

Williams: One more thing before you go: please indicate here on a scale, all things considered, how you feel about participating in the experiment. . . . We do appreciate having you here and you giving us your time and so forth.

Subject: It’s very interesting.

Williams: I think you’ll find it very interesting. You’ll be glad you were in it.

Subject: Thank you. Goodnight . . . Goodnight.
[Door opens and closes]

McDonough: Where’s the key to the can?

Williams: It’s open. I opened it before.

McDonough: I need to go to the can.

Williams: So do I.

McDonough: I gotta puke.

Williams: You gotta puke? Then go puke.

[Door opens and closes. Williams is now alone]

Williams:
[crooning]
In your Easter bonnet / With all the frills upon it. . . . Oh, I could write a sonnet / About the moon on your Easter bonnet.
[Pause, then he leans into the microphone]
Subject 2303. That was Subject 2303. Subject 2304 coming up.
⁶

At first, I thought this was a kind of callousness on Williams’s part. Then I thought that perhaps if he was upset by what was happening, he wasn’t the sort of man who would want to show it. But just as I would never be able to know whether Keith or Mark had the more accurate recollection of John Williams, I could never know if I was right about this, or if I had misread the man completely.

Bob McDonough turned the pages of a photo album he had brought along to show me. We sat in a deserted television room upstairs in Yale’s Graduate Club, just a few miles from where Bob and his family lived in New Haven.

Father and son looked alike. Bob McDonough was taller and slimmer than Jim McDonough, but he had the same open, jovial smile.

I had found Bob through his blog,
Derailed: One Man’s Story of His Life On [and Off] the Rails
, an entertaining account of Bob’s adventures as a railroad conductor. When Bob had graduated from Southern Connecticut State University with a bachelor’s degree in English, he had no clear career plans, so he applied for work on the railroad until he worked out what to do with his degree. That was twenty-one years ago. “I’m almost the age my father was when he did the experiment, but I’m bald—he still had some hair—and the little hair I have is gray” while his father’s was black. He continued, “Thankfully, I’m taller and thinner than he was. I do suppose we sound alike, but I’m judging that from the little dialogue I heard him speak in the film
Obedience
.”

Bob never knew his father. He had written on his blog:

My father had died just two weeks prior to my third birthday and I have no recollection of him. We used to have an 8x10 picture of him that hung over the TV in the den of my mother’s house. This picture was an icon for me, a photo of someone from the past, not known but idolized. Much like the pictures of Jesus, Pope Paul and John F. Kennedy that my grandfather had hanging on the walls in his house next door. When anybody spoke of my father this was the picture I had in my mind’s eye.
⁷

Although Bob was the youngest of McDonough’s nine children—four daughters and five sons—and the one with the least experience of his father, he had taken a keen interest in the obedience experiments. And he was proud of the resemblance between them. He told me, “I’ve been to see some of the
Obedience
footage at the Sterling Library at Yale. The librarian who was in charge of the archive was very helpful. She thought I looked and sounded like my dad.”

Bob showed me a typical photo of his father, laughing up at the camera, a friendly-looking man wearing glasses and a suit and tie, balancing a hat on one knee. “Back in the early sixties, people dressed like that to go to a ball game. It’s hard to believe now, but everyone would wear a hat and coat and tie at all times. My brother tells stories of passing the baseball with him, but he would still be in suspenders and a tie.”

Like John Williams, Jim McDonough was a devout Catholic and a keen singer. He was used to performing: he led the church choir, played the saxophone and the clarinet, and for a time worked as a nightclub singer. He emceed a number of local functions, particularly at the West Haven Irish American Club, where he was a founding member. “He wasn’t afraid to stand up in front of an audience and sing or give a speech or tell a joke,” Bob told me.

Milgram chose Jim for the role of the learner precisely because he seemed like the sort of fellow you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed him on the street. “He was white, slightly overweight, he wasn’t overly handsome. He was Joe American,” said Bob.

Jim kept his job secret from his family. One of his sons used to drop him off and pick him up, but nobody, including his wife, knew exactly what this second job involved—and certainly not that he played the role of victim hooked up to a shock machine.

Bob told me that the first anyone in the family knew of it was one night in 1974. Bob’s brother John was watching television at his girlfriend’s house and rang home excitedly to tell his mother to turn on the set because “Dad’s on the TV!” “And she said, ‘What are you talking about?’—because my dad had been dead nine years—and he said, ‘He’s on TV, they’re hooking him up to electrodes, they’re shocking him.’” Milgram’s book had just been published, and
The Phil Donahue Show
was screening footage of the experiments. The family rushed to the television and couldn’t believe what they were seeing. McDonough was being strapped into a chair by a man in a lab coat who was asking if he had any questions. Jim replied, “About two years ago I was at the veterans’ hospital in West Haven, and while I was there they diagnosed me with a heart condition—nothing serious—but as long as I’m having these shocks . . . how strong are they? Are they dangerous?” The man in the lab coat reassured him that “although the shocks may be painful, they are not dangerous.”

The family watched, aghast, as the shocks began, and McDonough’s protests and cries escalated each time he received one. But it was a short television segment, quickly over.

It was the first time that Bob had seen his father moving and talking. Until this, his one vague memory was of standing on a chair beside him, watching him shave. Then again, he wasn’t sure if that really was a memory or something he had made up to fill the space.

Bob’s mother, Kathryn, remembered something about an experiment at Yale, but she had never heard of Milgram. Once the program was over, she left an urgent message with the show’s producer for Milgram to call her. She wasn’t certain whether her husband had been shocked or not. Milgram called the next day. “My mother spoke guardedly to Dr. Milgram at first, at least until he reassured her that my father wasn’t harmed in any way. He profusely apologized for any misunderstanding that the film may have caused.” Milgram sent her a copy of his book with the following inscription:

To Mrs. James McDonough,

I thought you might like to have a copy of this book. As you know, your late husband was part of the research team I directed at Yale University. It was a pleasure to work with him, and he was a very fine man.

Sincerely,

Stanley Milgram

New York

April 1974

Soon after, the McDonough family managed to borrow a copy of the film and a projector, and the whole clan—the nine McDonough children, their mother, and four in-laws—crowded into the living room to watch it. “My brother got a bedsheet and tacked it up to the wall,” Bob remembered. He was twelve at the time and had fun making shadow puppets on the wall. But once the jumpy old black-and-white movie started, the impact of what he was watching began to sink in. Despite the fact that the film had no sound and the picture was very grainy—or perhaps the bedsheet simply needed washing, Bob joked—“everyone had goose bumps watching it, and I think that was mostly what we were concentrating on, rather than the experiment and the ethics of it. It was more of a home movie than this messed-up concept, you know.”

Twenty years later, after he had bought his own VCR, Bob tried to borrow the movie on video, but the librarian told him that it was available only to universities. Yet when she learned that Bob’s father had been involved in the experiments, she got in touch with Alexandra Milgram, who sent him a copy. It was the first time that Bob had heard his father talking, and he was overcome. “Hearing him speak for the first time made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I teared up and I got a lump in my throat.” He watched the video over and over, wiping the tears from his eyes, and he remembered how pleased he was to find that they had the same smile, the same mannerisms.

When Milgram was interviewing Jim for the job of learner in August 1961, his wife was three months pregnant with Bob. It’s likely that the prospect of another mouth to feed was what led Jim to take on a part-time job. “Emmett, my oldest brother, remembers that the
railroad wasn’t happy with my father taking the part-time job with Milgram. They had just promoted him to head auditor, and he was now considered an executive. I guess they thought having a second job below him.” Bob shrugged. “He had nine children to feed, so he needed the job.”

Perhaps it was this that made Bob so interested in, as well as proud of, his father’s involvement. After all, it was his father’s job to come out, happy and jovial, and reassure subjects that he was unharmed. “I’m glad that these people were relieved and he was able to slap them on the back and shake their hand. I’ve heard through the press there may be one or two people who claim they weren’t debriefed and have been carrying guilt around with them for years. If that’s true, I feel badly.”

On the other hand, Bob figured that his father, like Milgram’s obedient subjects, was probably just doing what he was told, without thinking too much about the ethics. After the family had watched the film, “no one questioned the ethics of it.” That came later, when they were saying, “‘You know, was it right for him to put people through this?’ And everybody said, ‘Nah, it’s Milgram’s fault.’” He laughed.

In the months after I met him, Bob was unfailingly enthusiastic and helpful. He worked in shifts and once used his free time in New York to track down a story for me in the New York Public Library before taking the train back to New Haven. Another time, he joined Tom Blass and me at a New York restaurant for breakfast, this time dressed in his conductor’s uniform. We swapped documents—he sent me a copy of Milgram’s inscription, I sent him a copy of the interview notes Milgram wrote about his dad. I got the feeling that every new piece of information about the experiments, whether or not it mentioned Jim McDonough, somehow brought him closer to his father.

Bob confirmed one of my suspicions: that in a community as close-knit as New Haven, some of the subjects must have known either Jim McDonough or John Williams. Bob described a strange twist of events on the day his father collapsed and died. The morning of Monday, January 4, 1965, Jim McDonough woke up early
and, because it was cold, went outside to start the car, then came back in, where his wife had a bowl of oatmeal waiting. “When he sat down to eat, he suddenly grabbed the edge of the table and his face twisted. My mother, thinking he was teasing, told him to quit kidding around. He then fell off the chair and onto the floor. My sisters ran across the street to get Mr. Clifford because he was a New Haven fireman.” Harold Clifford had actually been a subject in the experiment himself, but luckily there were no lasting hard feelings between the men. As Bob McDonough told me, “There he was shocking my father, and three years later here he is coming to the rescue.”

Harold rushed across the road and attempted to revive Jim, but Jim was dead by the time he got to hospital. Jim McDonough was so well liked that the line of mourners waiting to pay their last respects at a funeral home in the center of Yale’s campus stretched out the door and right around the block. Milgram had left for Harvard by then and was not among them.

Bob told me that he was still good friends with Harold’s three children. “We still stay in contact with one another. But I often wonder what our relationship would be like if Harold had gone all the way to ‘XXX.’”

You won’t find Bob Tracy’s name in the acknowledgments of Milgram’s book
Obedience to Authority
, even though everyone else he employed is named there. And it’s unlikely Milgram sent him an inscribed copy, either.

Tracy had worked as one of Milgram’s actors and, by coincidence, Bob McDonough worked with Tracy’s son at the railroad. He told me that Bob Tracy Jr. would be happy to talk to me.

Tracy had initially been recruited for condition 6, which was identical to condition 5 except for the actors. To test whether his actors’ personalities and appearance affected obedience, Milgram replaced McDonough with Tracy, a tough-looking man in a crew cut, and substituted Williams with a man called Emil Elgiss, who, he said, was “softer in his presentation.” Tracy was, according to Milgram, “lean, and hard looking and frequently clenches his fists.” During
the experiment, he wore an old sports jacket, an army shirt, and no tie. Emil Elgiss, the experimenter, was “a far more cultivated, refined individual, who possesses about him a certain soft inertness, that almost borders on passivity.”
⁸
What would happen, Milgram wondered, if the learner looked stern and the experimenter looked gentle?