American History Revised (79 page)

Vice President Richard Nixon, lurking in the shadows, drew the obvious lesson: stonewall, and you just might get away with it. A dangerous lesson.

1963
It is a fact of maritime and aeronautical physics that ice is a phenomenon to be avoided wherever possible. Ice causes metal and rubber to become brittle, and prevents the easy flow of air and
water. This is hardly rocket science, just plain common sense—especially when it’s happened before. But unfortunately some people never learn, even if the first time it happened it was the greatest maritime disaster of all time.

Fifty-one years after the
Titanic
, she was the finest, largest ship of its kind ever built—a marvel of nautical engineering. The ship had so many redundant technologies and backup systems she was deemed unsinkable: “There were backup systems that even backed up the backup systems.” She was also the most luxurious, far more spacious and roomy than sister ships. The man chosen as captain was one of the top captains available, and crewmen eagerly signed up to serve on this prestigious new boat. After passing its sea trials, the ship left port and headed out into the Atlantic.

The first of the U.S. Navy’s modern class of submarines, the USS
Thresher
could dive deeper, run quieter, and run longer than any other submarine. She was America’s ultimate weapon in the Cold War.

On her maiden voyage into the Atlantic, she sprang a leak (a commonplace occurrence on submarines). But before the crewmen could fix it with their wrenches, the water shorted out the
Thresher
’s electrical system and the backup system. That, in turn, shut down the ship’s nuclear reactor. Hovering a thousand feet beneath the surface, working in pitch blackness and with no power, the crewmen resorted to manually blowing the electric-powered ballast tanks. Here they encountered a design flaw: on the blow valve were strainers to protect it from sand particles. The process of blowing caused moisture to form on the strainers. Now, this was not a problem per se—any more than the
Titanic
encountering ice conditions in the North Atlantic was a problem—but under certain circumstances it could be fatal. In the
Thresher
’s case, where the calamity happened at a depth of one thousand feet, the cold water and increased pressure turned the moisture into ice, thereby clogging the drain valves.

Unable to force the water out while new water was coming in, the ship sank to 1,500 feet where it imploded like an eggshell and crumbled to the sea bottom, all 129 lives lost. So much for the most advanced ship in the world, the safest vessel in the United States Navy.

Just because an accident happens twice—first the
Titanic
, then the
Thresher—
doesn’t mean it can’t happen a third time. In 1981, disaster struck again. The space shuttle
Challenger
had trouble from the beginning, when its maiden voyage was postponed four times because of fuel leaks. Unlike previous spacecraft that could only be used once, then discarded, the
Challenger
was allowed to perform multiple missions. On its tenth trip, disaster stuck. Just seventy-six seconds into its flight, it exploded and all lives were lost. The cause: ice-cold conditions had
caused rubber O-rings on the booster rockets to become brittle, allowing red-hot exhaust gases to escape and burn through the wall of the shuttle’s liquid-fuel tank.

But this had come as no surprise: everyone knew the O-rings were a potential problem: “Guidelines prohibited launch if the temperature on the nose cone of the external fuel tank fell below 45°F.” The night before launch, the temperature was 18 degrees. NASA assembled a three-way telephone conference involving thirty-six people representing NASA and its contractors, to discuss the problem. There was bitter dissent from the primary contractor’s engineers, but they lost out. When one of the engineers went home and his wife asked what was wrong, he told her, “Oh, nothing, honey, I had a great day. We’re going to launch tomorrow and kill the astronauts. That’s all.”

The following morning found much of the shuttle shrouded in ice. No matter, the flight proceeded.

So ended the maiden voyages of the most advanced ocean liner and submarine, and the tenth voyage of the spacecraft. Maybe the next time someone will pay closer attention to temperature conditions. Sure enough, the United States government in 2006 announced that it will soon launch its most ambitious extraterrestrial mission to date: sending an unmanned probe to Europa, one of the moons of the planet Jupiter, to explore Europa’s subsurface water ocean.

Water? Perhaps it should try “ice.” Jupiter is a very, very cold place.

2001
Any huge man-made edifice, no matter how well engineered, is a potential disaster waiting to happen. It behooves designers, therefore, to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

The collapse of the World Trade Center raised parallels with an equally dramatic disaster a century before, the sinking of the
Titanic.
Both were regarded as indestructible, and in both cases the majority of deaths came not from the actual calamity, but from lack of safety measures enabling people to escape.

The
Titanic
, you will recall, stayed afloat for almost three hours—plenty of time for everyone to get off. The reason so many died was that there were not enough lifeboats. Yet at the U.S. Senate investigation and the British Board of Inquiry hearing, it was pointed out that the
Titanic
actually had four times the number of lifeboats required by safety regulations at the time. Obviously the safety regulations were woefully out of date. Same for the World Trade Center: in conformance with local building codes, the 110-story towers had only three stairwells, the same number as a building with six stories.

Future history books will not remember
because it came to such a dramatic end, but the World Trade Center ranked among mankind’s greatest engineering marvels, a modern-day equivalent to the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. Completed in 1972, the towers were designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 aircraft. They were so well built that they survived the 1993 basement bombing with no problem. Every day, for decades, they withstood wind loads thirty times the force of an airplane crashing into them. In fact, the buildings were so solid and soundproof that when the South Tower fell, most of the people in the North Tower had no idea what was happening two hundred feet away (though the rest of the world knew).

How could two buildings staying up for so long—the North Tower (hit first) for
102 minutes, and the South Tower for fifty-seven minutes—result in so many deaths? The answer is hubris. It never occurred to anyone that a 747 airliner is quite different from a 707, especially one full of tons of jet fuel. It never occurred to anyone that more than one floor might be totally incapacitated at once. Certainly the building management never bothered to have regular bimonthly fire drills so everyone knew exactly what to do in case of emergency. Each floor, it was assumed, could make do with its own survival communications system, fire extinguisher system, and communications system (just as an ocean liner’s hull is divided into several watertight compartments to contain overflow).

This painting, by Venetian artist Ludovico de Luigi in 1986, is meant to portray centuries of aspirations, hopes, and dreams. Coming from a city slowly sinking into the sea and fearful of “seeing Venice for the last time,” he pinned his hopes on New York. Little did he know that he was seeing the Twin Towers for the last time.

As in the
Titanic
, there was no immediate sense of urgency. Don’t go to the lifeboats, don’t go down the stairwell, just stay where you are and wait until help arrives. The New York City Fire Department told tenants of the World Trade Center to stay put, and sent firemen up to rescue them. The firemen, each weighed down by 80–150 pounds of equipment, took precious time struggling up the stairs in a race against time. Most of them barely made it up to the fortieth floor when everything came to an end. Like the
Titanic
, which could not get out enough SOS signals, the rescue teams at the World Trade Center did not have proper radios to communicate with each other. Police radios worked on one frequency, fire department radios on a different frequency, and neither could penetrate the thick walls of the mighty World Trade Center. When the fire department realized the cause was hopeless and tried to contact the firemen to order for them to evacuate immediately, it could not reach them.

On the
Titanic
, 1,506 died in 1912; 2,749 died in the World Trade Center in 2001. Most of these deaths could easily have been avoided.

I
n 2005 I visited Gore Vidal at his magnificent cliffside home in Ravello, Italy, and told him I was writing a book on America’s forgotten past. He remarked dryly, as if I didn’t already know, “American history is a big subject.”

Indeed. This book covers a big subject. Yet the fact remains that a book is only as valuable as what you can learn from it and act upon. A book like this, with its hundreds of snapshots that have a message, runs the risk of leaving the reader at the end with the feeling, “Well, so what?”

This is a book not with two hundred messages, however. It has three.

First, read more and keep learning. If a story particularly intrigues you, go to the footnotes and source material and plunge into them. I endeavored to identify the key themes, but all events are complicated and complex. Whatever you read more of, read it thoroughly so you can remember it and share it with friends—as Abraham Lincoln did. In-depth learning of one or two subjects is more valuable than scattershot familiarity. True excellence requires concentration.