“I said to her, ‘Look, I’ve spoken at these events and they’re very emotional, so know that it’s okay to show your feelings. You’re talking to 4,500 soldiers going off to war, and some of them will not be coming back. We know that and they do, too. And your son is one of them. So don’t be embarrassed if you cry.’ ”
He pauses, then resumes, speaking slowly and deliberately for emphasis. “I have never,” he says, “seen such a detached and self-absorbed speech to deploying soldiers. Her lack of emotional involvement was scary. Her speech was all about her. Then, at the end, it was suddenly, ‘Go! Fight! Win!’ That was the moment I lost the last of my faith in Sarah Palin.”
JOHN STEIN didn’t want to talk to me. He said that recalling his last years in Wasilla and Sarah’s campaign against him made his heart sink. I kept trying to persuade him. Eventually he stopped answering my e-mails.
In mid-June, at a social gathering in Wasilla, I met Clyde and Vivian Boyer. Clyde was Catherine Taylor’s ex-husband. He and Vivian, who were just returning from a trip to Russia, now lived in Homer, the town 222 miles south of Anchorage that lies at the very end of the North American road system. Because there are not six degrees of separation among Alaskans, but fewer than one, they also knew John Stein. They said they’d contact him about talking to me. A week later, they wrote back: “John responded that he doesn’t have the emotional energy at this time to talk to you.”
I kept trying. I e-mailed Stein the story about T. C. Mitchell getting fired by the Frontiersman. He wrote back, “And you wonder why I don’t want to go there. Makes me want to puke.” But at least he wrote back. That gave me the chance to guilt-trip him.
I wrote, “To the extent that those who can keep the record straight decline to do so—and emotional exhaustion with Palin is certainly understandable—it becomes easier for her people to repaint the past and thus more effectively position her to run for president in less than two years. It will be a lesser book without my having access to your recollections. You were there, in the cross-hairs, during her first step up the ladder. I’d be sorry to have to publish without your input.”
His sense of civic virtue finally outweighed his entirely understandable desire to refrain from dredging up such a harrowing chapter from his past. He wrote back, “You SOB, and I mean that in the most friendly and collegial way. Reliving that period will be both painful and engaging. My heart is not in it. You had better come here. I can pick you up at the airport. Let me know your itinerary. I have a bedroom and bath for your use. We can cook king salmon I caught yesterday. There is a cat in the house.”
I stayed overnight in Anchorage on June 28 and caught the early flight to Sitka in the morning.
As promised, he’s waiting for me. Stein is sixty-five years old and about to retire as executive director of the Sitka Sound Science Center, a nonprofit “dedicated to increasing understanding and awareness of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of the Gulf of Alaska through education and research.”
John Stein (illustration credit 13.1)
We have a quick lunch, then he’s off to a meeting at the science center, which gives me a chance to stroll through picturesque Sitka on a rare sunny day. I’m not a photographer, but I snap a picture of a small piece of the Sitka Harbor.
(illustration credit 13.2)
Stein drives a battered blue pickup. He lives with his cat, three miles east of town. His oldest son, Reber, thirty-two, who is running for a seat in the Alaska statehouse, and his youngest son, Jackson, twenty, live in Sitka. Two other sons live out of state. His second wife, to whom he was married while mayor of Wasilla, died of breast cancer in 2005.
He shows me to comfortable private quarters downstairs. When I come back up, I’m faced with an awkward moment: after putting all this effort into persuading Stein to see me, I have to request a slight delay. In the chaos of my departure from Lake Lucille—my attention deficit disorder tends to make all my departures chaotic—I neglected to record the Spain-Portugal World Cup match, being played this afternoon, Alaska time.
“I don’t suppose you’ve been following the World Cup,” I say.
“Of course I have. Day before yesterday I saw Argentina run all over Mexico.”
“Don’t they look great? I think they’re going to win it. Messi is definitely the best player in the world.”
“So there’s a match this afternoon?”
“Spain-Portugal.”
“That’s a big one. Let’s watch it. We’ll have plenty of time to talk later.”
Spain wins 1–0 on David Villa’s goal in the sixty-third minute, his fourth of the tournament.
IT’S DINNERTIME and clouding over. The sun is an infrequent visitor to Sitka skies. Stein carries his freshly caught salmon out to the deck and turns on his gas grill. His cat follows, lost in an impossible dream.
The salmon, predictably, is delicious. Not quite as good as it would have been on my Traeger, but memorable. You’d have to stomp on a fresh-caught king in a manure pit and then boil it in yak piss for a week to render it anything less than sublime.
After dinner we sit down with coffee and start to talk. We talk for hours, as he shares his recollections of Wasilla and Sarah. Much of the information in earlier chapters about Sarah’s years in Wasilla politics comes from our conversation that night. At bedtime, he summarizes: “If Sarah had a political philosophy, it would be ‘You don’t have to know anything about anything: just pray, and the answer will come out of thin air.’ ”
It’s pouring in the morning, but my flight doesn’t leave until 6:00 PM, so Stein decides to give me an all-weather tour of the island, which will culminate at the Fortress of the Bear, a facility at which brown bear cubs orphaned in the wild are taken for protection and training until they can be shipped on to zoos. We start with a visit to his son Reber, who is just gearing up for his state House of Representatives run against the Republican incumbent.
Sitka, which occupies the western side of Baranof Island (the eastern side is virtually uninhabited), is as different from Wasilla as two Alaskan cities of approximately the same size could be. Many non-Alaskans probably know the fictitious Sitka of Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union better than the real thing.
The actual Sitka is, by area, the second largest incorporated city in the United States, exceeded only by Yakutat, on the south coast of Alaska’s mainland. Sitka covers more than six times the square mileage of Jacksonville, Florida, the largest city by area in the Lower Forty-eight. By Alaskan standards, the climate is balmy, with the average low in January scarcely below freezing (though the average high in August is only sixty-three). On the other hand, rain or snow falls more than 250 days a year. Sitka gets so much rain that they sell freshwater to India for distribution in the Middle East.
The way it’s raining this morning, they could fill a whole tanker before noon. We pull into Reber’s driveway and trot to his front door, where we remove our shoes before entering (standard etiquette throughout Alaska). He’s affable, but busy, as befits an underdog political candidate. He’s also got a long memory, as befits a man whose father lost his job to Sarah Palin.
“One of her problems,” John Stein says, over excellent espresso that Reber has made on his home machine, “is that, in her mind, if you can’t write it on a bumper sticker it’s too complicated to try to understand. That’s why she always speaks in jingles.”
“What I remember,” Reber says, “is how angry Sarah and Chuck and Sally always were. Todd wasn’t around much then, but every time there would be an event for the two candidates, Sarah and her parents would be there and they’d be so hostile. It was really off the scale, like they felt we were about to disclose something awful and they were reacting in advance.”
After lunch we drive to the Fortress of the Bear. The “fortress” consists of two three-quarter-acre clarifier tanks left over from an abandoned pulp mill, each with walls fifteen feet high. Inside each, a natural bear habitat has been created. There are only two bears i
n residence at the moment, a few having just been shipped to the Bronx Zoo, but they are clearly enjoying their stay.
The caretaker calls them, and they come to a steel-barred window at the edge of one tank. The caretaker raises a metal door just high enough for one of the bears to put his snout through, but not high enough so he can open his mouth.
“Get as affectionate as you want to,” the caretaker says. “This might be your only chance to kiss a brown bear.”
The rain subsides as Stein drives me to Sitka’s tiny airport. “My question about Sarah,” he says, “is if God wants her to be president, why didn’t God equip her with education enough to have at least basic knowledge of geography, science, and social systems?”
“You mean so she wouldn’t say she could see Russia from her house?”
“She never said that,” he says, smiling. “She said she could see rush hour.”
I’M BACK at my house half an hour before the end of June. Sarah has just made a speech at California State University Stanislaus, for which she received a $75,000 fee. She told her audience it was no wonder Ronald Reagan had always had such a sunny disposition: after all, he’d grown up in the “Golden State” of California and had received his education at “California’s Eureka College.”
Even though he’s her greatest political hero, she didn’t know that he grew up in Illinois, where Eureka College is located, about halfway between Normal and Peoria.
(illustration credit 13.3)
I START JULY by making sure there’s enough seed on the deck railing for my resident squirrel.
He comes around every day, usually in late afternoon. Often I’m not there, but when I am I feed him. He’s grown incredibly tame. I think we’ve developed an understanding. There are those who consider both of us pests, and for the moment each of us is pretty much alone in the world, so we might as well be friends—at least until I run out of birdseed. Between the grebes and kissing a brown bear in Sitka and now this little fellow, who one evening actually eats out of my hand, I’m starting to feel like Joseph of Assisi.
The recently fired Frontiersman editor, T. C. Mitchell, comes over for lunch. We have hamburgers and beers on my deck. He says there’s nothing I can do to help him. We don’t talk much about his editorial and not at all about Sarah. Instead, we talk about our earlier days in Alaska and we decide to try to get together to see a Mat-Su Miners Alaska League baseball game before too long.
Months later, after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the Frontiersman would issue a further apology for Mitchell’s editorial.
We know first-hand the weight of words. As a commenter on our Facebook page was quick to point out … we made national news last year with our own careless use of inflammatory words. Words we used in an editorial invoking Alaska’s self-defense laws were meant in jest, but readers didn’t see it that way. Your reaction to our blunder was swift, loud and lasting. The editorial went viral and we could only watch in dismay as commentators on radio, television and the Internet threw our words back at us in condemnation. Red-faced, we apologized repeatedly for our carelessness. And we repeat our previous apology.
I don’t need an apology from Mitchell. We’ve all made careless mistakes. It’s not like he drew a bull’s-eye around my head and left it up on his Facebook page for months.
I DRIVE TO Palmer, back to Vagabond Blues, to meet with Reverend Howard Bess, who at least won’t try to loan me a gun.
I met Bess for the first time in the fall of 2009, as I began my Alaskan research on Sarah. With the possible exception of Daniel Berrigan, he’s probably the most engaging man of the cloth to whom I’ve ever spoken at length. At eighty-two, he could walk me into the ground. With wit, reason, knowledge, and passion he also can talk pretty much anyone into submission.
Howard Bess (illustration credit 13.4)
Bess is less than thrilled by Sarah’s continuing presence on the national political scene. Her religious extremism is what most alarms him. “Hers is a dualistic Christianity,” he says, “in which everything and everyone is either good or evil. If you disagree with her you’re not just a bad guy, you’re evil and you must be defeated.”
Bess points out that Sarah could exist only in America. “This is the only country on earth that has this freewheeling evangelicism, not responsible to any hierarchy. There’s no vertical structure, but there’s a vast horizontal reach, through networking. What that can lead to at worst—and it doesn’t always, and I mean no disrespect to evangelicals, many of whom are friends of mine—is not just disrespect for other points of view, but a warrior mentality, where your life becomes all about stamping out anything you construe as evil.”
Bess doesn’t question Sarah’s sincerity. “I’d be a lot happier if I thought she were cynical and doing things for selfish reasons, but she’s not. She absolutely believes these are what the evangelicals call the Last Days. She absolutely believes, as she’s told Phil Munger, that the earth is six thousand years old and that dinosaurs and man once lived together. And she absolutely believes that Jesus will return to earth during the course of her life. These beliefs are at the core of everything she says and does. She is locked into that worldview. If you don’t appreciate how totally she is governed by these beliefs, you’ll never understand Sarah Palin.”
There is no doubt, Bess tells me, that “Sarah feels chosen. She feels called. It’s a common theme in the Bible that God calls certain people to do certain things. And I have felt this in my own life. Why am I a minister? Not because I went through some rational process, but because I felt God calling me. Everything I’ve done in my life since has been in response to that calling. So when I say she feels chosen, or called, or annointed, I’m not being patronizing: I respect that. I honor that.”
“Why her?” I ask.
“She doesn’t know. But she knows in her heart that it’s true.”
“Really?”
“All religion is nonrational. God calls Moses and says, can you lead a bunch of slaves out of Egypt? Now, I don’t mean that literally—I take it mythologically—but the point is that God calls people to do things that appear to be impossible. And Sarah has that sense of calling. She knows herself to be on a mission from God.”
“But let’s say she lies and she hurts people and she’s a hypocrite. How can that be part of God’s calling?”
Bess laughs in delight. “Because,” he says, the teacher concluding his lesson in triumph, “if you’re on a mission from God to destroy evil, there are going to be all kinds of expendables along the way. Collateral damage. It’s irrelevant when you look at the stakes involved.”
I start to close my notebook, but he stops me. He’s enjoying himself.
“Our little children’s summer theater group just put on a play that I went to before coming over here. It was called The Amazing Mr. Fox. It starts off with the fox killing lots of chickens. All the kids, naturally, feel sorry for the chickens and hate the fox. But then it comes out that the fox needs to feed his family: Aha, we never thought of it that way. There are little foxes to worry about, too. And to the amazing Mr. Fox, the chickens are expendable.”
“And the moral?”
“If anybody gets in her way, Sarah says, ‘Tough luck, you’re a chicken.’ ”
FOURTEEN
ON MONDAY, October 10, 2005, Sarah filed a letter of intent with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, saying she intended to seek public office the following year. She didn’t specify the office, nor did she say whether she planned to run as a Republican or an independent.
“I don’t know yet if my run is for governor or lieutenant governor. I haven’t ruled out any of the scenarios that people have been rumoring about,” she told the Frontiersman. “I just want to do what is right for Alaska. If that means running as an independent for lieutenant governor, then I’ll do it.”
The following Sunday, October 16, she attended services at the Wasilla Assembly of God. During her campaign for lieutenant governor, Sarah had sw
itched her allegiance to the Wasilla Bible Church, which was marginally less extreme in its views and had a significantly larger congregation.
But now she went back to her roots, having arranged for a special blessing from a guest preacher, Reverend Thomas Muthee, of Kiambu, Kenya. Muthee had given nine sermons at the Assembly of God church during the previous five days. He’d first gained fame in Pentecostal circles in the late 1980s by claiming to have used prayer to drive a witch called Mama Jane out of the city of Kiambu, just as Sarah’s longtime spiritual mentor Mary Glazier had driven a witch out of Alaska.
The tale Muthee told to Pentecostal congregations around the world was that Mama Jane had been amusing herself by arranging fatal traffic accidents in front of her house. He proclaimed, “Mama Jane either gets saved and serves the Lord, or she leaves town. There is no longer room in Kiambu for both of us!” Her response was to cause a triple fatality.
Muthee’s followers swarmed all over her house, wanting to stone her. In the ensuing melee, police encountered her pet python. One of the officers, recognizing that the snake was a “demon,” shot and killed it. With the snake’s death, according to Muthee, “the demonic influence was broken,” Mama Jane left town, and the streets of Kiambu were again safe for driving.
Muthee’s claim to have recaptured Kiambu for Christ by breaking Mama Jane’s demonic hold on the city coincided with the 1989 publication of a book called Taking Our Cities for God, by a Pentecostal preacher from Los Angeles named John Dawson. The book resonated throughout the Pentecostal universe as a spiritual call to arms. Dawson believed that “satanic forces manifest themselves in the culture of the city,” and that only “strategic-level spiritual warfare” (SLSW) could defeat them.