On This Day in History
"I insist that things are getting worse and worse."
Dear Readers,
The top of the front page of the New York Times for Sunday, August 17, 1975, carried a photo of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had reported to President Ford on his talks with Israeli and Egyptian diplomats. “We’ve been making progress,” he said. Another story examined the possibility that the City of New York might default on its bonds. (The famous Daily News headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD would appear about two months later.) Another story reported that a federal judge had declined to order a busing plan in Detroit to promote the desegregation of public schools.
Toward the bottom of the page was a headline “Latin-American Drug Sales Criticized.” The story looked at a research study funded by the Consumers Union that revealed the many ways that multinational drug companies marketed dangerous drugs to countries with weak regulation. A draft manuscript was provided to the Times by the author of the study, Robert J. Ledogar. The Times reporter highlighted several claims made by the study and then sought comment from major drug companies. Inevitably, the corporate response amounted to, as a Pfizer spokesman put it, “We abide by the laws in each of the countries in which we operate.” There was one response that went a bit beyond that. Ledogar had raised concerns about a drug called Conmel, a brand of dipyrone sold by the Winthrop division of Sterling Drug. Dipyrone was not allowed to be sold in the United States as a pain reliever, but the Times noted:
A packet of Conmel obtained by the researchers in Brazil suggested that the drug be used for “migraine headaches, neuralgia, muscular or articular rheumatism, hepatic and renal colic, pain and fever which usually accompany grippe, angina, otitis and sinusitis, toothaches and pain after dental extractions.”
The explanation given to the Times by a Winthrop spokesman is, um, interesting: “The labeling of Conmel clearly states it is ‘for sale under medical prescription’ and each package contains a caution on [blood disease], even though this warning has been found to apply largely to Anglo‐Saxons.”
Robert Ledogar went on to publish his study in book form later that year. I have a copy in front of me today. With an introduction by Ralph Nader, Hungry for Profits is a sober, fact-filled examination not just of the ways drug companies operated in Latin America but of how multinational food corporations and agribusiness interests consistently operated with little concern for the health and well-being of the poor in the countries from which they generated their fat profit margins. Claiming land for sugar plantations, exploiting workers, changing dietary habits for the worse . . . “The principal contribution of the U.S. food industry to the diets of Latin Americans has been and continues to be the empty calories of Coke and Pepsi,” he wrote.
The 1970s saw a growing awareness, at least on the political left, of what global corporations were up to. Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller published their influential book Global Reach: the Power of the Multinational Corporations in 1974. (Barnet was a founder with Marcus Raskin of the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies. Raskin was the father of the fiery Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin.) A boycott of the Nestlé company was launched on July 4, 1977, in protest of the ways the Swiss MNC pushed infant formula around the world. Nader was making headway with his campaigns against corporate power; in 1980 he founded a publication called Multinational Monitor. Ledogar was in this stream; he became in later years the best kind of caring humanitarian, working for the American Friends Service Committee and UNICEF in Africa and Central America.
I’ve seen the bright green cover of Hungry for Profits on the bookshelves of nearly every house of any in-law I’ve visited in recent decades. Bob Ledogar was my uncle by marriage. He died on July 2 in Northampton, Massachusetts, just a month short of what would have been his 92nd birthday.
Bob was a learned and soft-spoken man who had no illusions about the effect his home country had around the world—he’d seen the worst of it. In his youth he chose to enter the seminary and became a Maryknoll priest in 1959. Ten years later he changed course and left the priesthood. “I left because I had lost my faith. Now I am an agnostic,” he wrote in a soon-to-be-published memoir, which he finished just weeks ago.
His moral bearings seemed to have never swerved at all. The opening line of his book on Latin America captures his approach perfectly: “In writing this book, we have tried to keep rhetoric to a minimum and avoid, wherever possible, the shrill tones of moral outrage.”
And yet of course he was outraged, as so many of us are these days. I remember getting a note from him three years ago after I cited a comment by Montaigne in one of my newsletters. Montaigne had written:
“I insist that things are getting worse and worse . . . . It is favorable for me that the ruin of this kingdom comes at the same time with the ruin of my years.”
Approaching 90, Bob let me know he felt that way sometimes, too. Death, he implied, would at least be a liberation from the torments of the daily news. And yet . . . some time after that, I learned from Alice, he ventured out of his Manhattan apartment to visit the Neue Galerie art museum and enjoyed a long lunch with Alice and her sister Amy, two of his several nieces. He spoke, I’m told, about reading Paradise Lost with members of his book group. The language was so beautiful, he said, it made him happy to still be alive.
It was another of Bob’s nieces, Nancy, who suggested he leave New York City and come to Northampton for his final months in hospice. Nancy and her husband Jeff are our next-door-neighbors, so we benefited from regular lunches and dinners with Bob. What startled me was how tenaciously Bob was trying to stay alive, even though the doctors had (accurately) predicted he had only a few months before cancer would bring him to the end. He insisted on getting out for (extremely slow) strolls with his walker, or sometimes just taking laps in the long hallway within the house. He knew that movement was necessary.
Then the days came when he just ran out of strength. He departed without all the painful and soulless life extension he might have had in a hospital, trying to “fight” cancer. He had family members at his side. He had what my friend Ann Neumann describes in her wonderful book The Good Death. Ann notes another development that was underway in the 1970s: “a revolution in medicine took place in that decade, developing innovations that could keep the lungs and heart functioning indefinitely.” The hospice movement was a reaction to the attempts to prolong the dying process. “There is no good death,” Ann writes. “It always hurts, both the dying and the left behind. But there is a good enough death.”
It seemed to me Bob had a pretty good death, thanks to Nancy and Jeff. He didn’t really want to go. But he knew he’d had a good life, and he must have taken solace from that in his final days.
The Dots & Arrows newsletter was not meant to be my version of the Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died.” It was intended to be a self-promotional vehicle for my exploits as a bowler, and secondarily as a writer. (You’ve all enjoyed by now my tales of bowling misadventures in the recent Baffler, right?)
Anyway, I try to only send one missive per month, because the world is inundated in too much email. Like Becca Rothfeld—one of the best newsletter writers who is always trying to quit the habit—said:
However, I wish to return soon with some thoughts on sports and fame, and also a few reflections on radical Finns. There’s more to say. Always more to say.
Nice tribute, Dave. Very sorry for yours and Alice’s loss.