The Story (6 page)

I was lucky. Being in the right place at the right time for a journalist has always been important.

My good fortune began at birth: I am American. Each time I return from a reporting trip to the Middle East or the Soviet Union, or Africa, I am relieved that I live in a secular country whose leaders are chosen—and can be gotten rid of—in authentic elections, and where people generally obey laws that are approved by citizens, not dictated by God or an autocrat. Though I am aware of my country's many failings, I have never doubted that the United States is a miracle.

My husband, Jason Epstein, a publisher, editor, and an intimidating intellectual, winces when I say this. His patriotism is more nuanced than mine. He believes that to be an American is, as Henry James said, a “complex fate”—more complex, in fact, than James himself could have imagined. Jason knows America's history far better than most and deeply regrets President George Bush and what his election twice reveals about the electorate.

Where does it come from, my unshakeable faith in America's basic decency? Partly from my exposure as a journalist to cruelty and corruption elsewhere. But it also comes from the other most important man in my life.

One journalist attributed what he called my “dramatic way of looking at the world” to my father's career in show business.
¹
Though the writer got much about me wrong, that observation was on the mark. My father's life was nothing if not dramatic.

Bill Miller, Jewish and Russian-born, was one of those larger-than-life, self-made Americans. A vaudeville “hoofer” turned talent agent, he became a successful nightclub owner and influential entertainment impresario. If you grew up in New York during World War II, you have probably heard of, and perhaps visited, the Riviera, his Jersey nightclub on the Englewood Cliffs in Fort Lee adjacent to the George Washington Bridge, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. If you went to Las Vegas after we moved there in 1953, when New Jersey condemned the Riv to build a highway, you may have seen one of his shows in the sixties or seventies.

Nightclubs, Vegas, and show business were Mob territory. And though he insisted that he was not connected—a lengthy FBI investigation reached a similar conclusion—my father shared the reflexive anticommunism pervasive in such circles. He was conservative and a patriot. His hero was Ronald Reagan, whom he knew and considered America's greatest president.

America meant salvation. Had my grandfather not dragged him and his five siblings out of their Russian village near Pinsk, he never tired of reminding us, the Millers would have died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, like so many of his relatives, or lived in the prison of “Communist Russia,” as the Soviet Union was known in my home.

His childhood was an immigrant cliché. He came to America in 1905, a year old, and helped his poor father at the pushcart twelve hours a day, six days a week. My grandfather would rather die than work on the Sabbath, my father told me proudly. Americanized “Bill” had no such compunctions. He worked every day, but never finished high school.

My mother, Mary Theresa Connolly, was my father's polar opposite. The Connollys, my mother's Irish-Catholic family, had immigrated to America illegally. Though my mother was born in Chicago, her entire family was deported to Canada when she was a toddler. Three years later, my grandfather got a visa to return.

My mother and father lived the American dream. The Jewish go-getter married the pretty Irish-Catholic showgirl and lived happily ever after—until their marriage ended when I was sixteen. My father's late nights, talent-scouting trips far from home, and entourage of gorgeous showgirls whose company he seemed to prefer to ours finally drove my mother to drink and despair.

Until then, my younger sister, Susan, my older half brother, Jimmy, and I knew little but privilege. There were large homes with swimming pools and rose gardens, private schools and lessons of all kinds, two ill-tempered but fiercely protective dachshunds, and a nanny also imported from Germany. I could never fathom why my father, who because of the Holocaust hated all things German, wanted German dogs and hired an austere German spinster to help raise his children. He was a complicated man.

An hour away from Las Vegas was something else that shaped my life far more than show business. The site was off-limits to most of us at the time, but living under its shadow marked me in ways I understood only later.

The dog had melted. The rumor raced through my first-grade class at John S. Park Elementary School in Las Vegas a few days after “Harry” was detonated at dawn at the Nevada Proving Ground, sixty-five miles northwest of my home.

A family in Indian Springs, twenty-five miles from ground zero, had returned home after the test to find their pet a puddle of blood and bones. The government, we were told, had supposedly suppressed news of the incident.

There probably never was a dead dog. But there were dead sheep—over four thousand, by some claims; about a quarter of the southern Utah and Nevada herds—as well as dead pigs, rabbits, cattle, and other livestock for miles southeast of the blast. Then the goats turned blue, literally.

Just before the detonation on May 19, 1953, a strong wind altered the meteorological conditions that the US Atomic Energy Commission had mistakenly anticipated. Radioactive debris of the test spread to St. George,
a tiny farming town in neighboring Utah. Rather than evacuation, which might have “alarmed” the local population, according to AEC files declassified nearly three decades later, residents were advised to “shelter in place” with their doors and windows shut until the radioactive danger “passed.” On a major freeway near the site, some forty cars registered low but above-average levels of radioactivity. The AEC instructed car owners to hose down their vehicles and themselves. Neither the unusually rainy weather nor the flu-like symptoms that some residents reported were connected to the blast, the commissioners told us. Even the radioactive “snow” found as far away as Rhode Island did not stir much debate.

I remember Harry—or “Dirty Harry,” as the test was eventually called. Trudy Siebenlist, our nanny, had set my alarm for a quarter to five in the morning to ensure that I wouldn't miss the historic event. It was pitch-black when I crept out of the bedroom. I slipped out the front door of the ranch house we had recently bought near the Las Vegas Strip.

I sat with our cat on our crabgrass and cactus lawn, waiting. At exactly five o'clock, night became day. Was I dreaming? Did I really see or just imagine the flash that lit up the skies? It wasn't the familiar yellow, pink, and lavender of a Nevada dawn. In my childhood memory, it was ripe red—beautiful, and irresistibly terrifying. Brighter than a thousand suns, as nuclear historian Robert Jungk wrote later.

The flash was followed by stillness, a slight smell of iron in the air, and a metallic taste on my tongue; the sensation you get from licking a spoon after the ice cream is gone. TV broadcasters said the test was visible as far away as Idaho.

I was only six and in first grade, but I sensed that the bomb was special. I knew that being so close to something so dangerous made us different: I was living next to what American officials told us was a major “battlefield” of the Cold War on the “frontier of freedom.”

There was a debate in Las Vegas about whether it was wise to test nuclear bombs in the atmosphere so close to a major population center. But skeptics were drowned out by the media and our town fathers, my own among them. Nuclear testing was our patriotic duty, insisted Hank Greenspun, the influential publisher of the
Las Vegas Morning Sun.
His closeness
to the AEC and Pentagon officials and access to “inside” information had influenced my father and other Vegas entrepreneurs about the need to continue testing on American soil to “maintain our lead” over the “Reds.” Atoms, Greenspun said, were as “American as apple pie.”
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People concerned about the safety of testing were unpatriotic and undermining the city's economy, Greenspun argued in his influential column, Where I Stand, which was required reading in our household. Las Vegas depended on tourists. The testing was one of the city's “natural” attractions. President Truman's designation of Las Vegas as an area “critical to national defense” made it eligible for federal funds for housing and infrastructure that were paying for its phenomenal growth. Frivolous accounts and rumors spread by a few “sensation-seeking reporters” threatened not only America's national security but also the city's welfare. When the AEC issued a press release attributing the death of sheep in Utah to “unprecedented cold weather,” Greenspun warned that “panic can spread where no danger exists.”

My mother said nothing, but was not persuaded. Occasionally she would confront my father about her fears. I listened to what became a familiar refrain behind their bedroom door: Vegas was no place to be raising children. The Mob, drinking and gambling, drugs and whores were bad enough, but now her children were exposed to radiation. She missed New York. She hated the sun and the sandstorms, the dry air, the cactus. She had found a dead rattlesnake in the garage. Could radiation have killed it? Had my father heard about the blue goats? Or the dog that had melted? Couldn't we move, as we did eventually, to Los Angeles?

The AEC's public relations campaign aimed at making Nevadans “feel at home with neutrons trotting around” and to encourage “local pride in being in the limelight,” according to now declassified government memos written shortly before the tests began, was effective. The commission's two-pronged strategy sought to convince those near the site that the tests were safe and vital to national security. If the United States was to win the arms race against the Reds, we had to test. A March 1953 editorial in the
Deseret News
, the daily published by the anticommunist, progovernment Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, called the nuclear trials “tragic and insane.”
However, it concluded, “so long as we live in an atomic world, we must and will continue to learn more about this power and how to survive it.” After the first test at the site two years earlier, the paper's lead editorial, mirroring those of papers throughout America, had celebrated the dawn of the testing age: “Spectacular Atomic Explosions Mean Progress in Defense,” the editorial's headline proclaimed. “No Cause for Panic.”
³

Every detonation in Nevada, the AEC assured us, was being “carefully evaluated” to protect our safety. After six full years of open-air nuclear tests, the government claimed to have confirmed that fallout from the tests had “not caused illness or injured the health of anyone living near the test site.”

America's arsenal of thirteen weapons in 1947 had increased to fifty by the time I was born a year later. I memorized the names of the tests the way other kids learned the names of presidents. “Able,” in 1951, the first test at the Proving Ground, as the Nevada Test Site was then known, was followed twenty-four hours later by “Baker,” a more powerful, eight-kiloton device that awakened much of the city. Then came “Easy” and “Fox,” almost three times as powerful as “Baker,” the blast wave of which had shattered show windows in two Las Vegas car dealerships minutes after detonation.

The bomb, like the radiation, was all around us—as much a part of my childhood as jacks, roller-skating, skipping rope, and, this being Vegas, strippers. A warning poster from the Clark County Civil Defense Agency was attached by magnets to our fridge door reminding us to keep a “well-balanced” supply of food on hand and a list of telephone numbers to call in an emergency. Since most Vegas homes had no basements, my parents argued for months about whether to build a bomb shelter in the backyard. My mother won. The underground, blast-proof shelter that my father purchased from a friend—“wholesale,” not “retail,” as he had boasted to my unimpressed mother—was not installed and was given to a friend.

She did yield to my appeals to take us to J.C. Penney to see the display of some fifty mannequins two weeks before they were blown out of bed in a colonial two-story home, complete with aluminum venetian blinds, that had been built for a sixteen-kiloton test at the site. The plastic people were used to assess the impact of the blasts by the Federal Civil Defense Administration, which was subjecting US soldiers, animals, and plants to
ever more powerful bombs to determine blast and radiation effects. The mannequins were a major attraction for the department store chain, which proudly announced that it had donated their clothing for the test. Equally popular were the “before” and “after” photographs of the “Annie” house tests published in the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
, accompanied by a warning: “These mannequins could have been real people; in fact, they could have been you. Volunteer now for Civil Defense.”
⁴

In 1956, ranchers who had lost sheep and other livestock sued the AEC in federal district court. The judge accepted the government's argument that the animals' deaths had been caused by “inadequate feeding, unfavorable winter range conditions, and infectious diseases.” The lawsuit received little publicity.

By the late 1950s, as the novelty of atomic testing waned and alarm about safety and radiation was growing, Greenspun and other city elders tried to allay fear and generate buzz to keep visitors coming to Vegas and parking along Highway 95 to watch the tests. One of their solutions was “Miss Atomic Bomb of 1957,” aka Lee Merlin, a beaming bathing beauty whose outstretched arms welcomed fellow Americans to Vegas, her swimsuit covered demurely by a mushroom cloud.

Even after our family left Vegas for Miami Beach and then Los Angeles, my fascination with all things nuclear continued. I tore labels off Kix cereal boxes to send away for atomic bomb rings and other nuclear paraphernalia. Mom drew the line on Christmas tree ornaments, refusing to let me order the silver bulbs decorated with symbols of the atom. Christmas was about peace, not death. She also nixed the salt and pepper shakers that topped the Formica breakfast tables of many Vegas families: Fat Man and Little Boy, America's bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.