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The political spectrum in America isn’t from left to right. It’s from top to bottom. Marie Flickinger knows up from down as well as Baker Botts and Bush & Cheney. The EPA ombudsman worked for the people on the bottom. Dubya Bush’s administration—like his daddy’s—works for the people on top. Therein lies the motive for the killing of the ombudsman.

“There are things you can do when you have power,” said Hugh Kaufman, who has been at the EPA since Richard Nixon created the agency in 1970. “But you don’t do them—because of the harm they can cause a year, two years, or five years down the line.” Kaufman helped write the Superfund law, and when Ronald Reagan tried to undermine the Superfund program, Kaufman’s whistleblowing sent one EPA official into retirement and another to jail. (Reagan’s EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, resigned and the Superfund program administrator, Rita Lavelle, did six months in jail and five years’ community service after Kaufman revealed they were diverting Superfund money to Republican Party supporters.) Whitman’s dismantling of the ombudsman’s office is precisely the sort of thing a public official with power can do—but shouldn’t.

“This is such a loss,” says Flickinger. “Without Bob that office is going to be a joke.” She’s right, unless the new ombudsman, Peggy Boyer, was joking when she said, “The ombudsman’s job is not to monitor, and when people have questions, provide answers.” Boyer was responding to the whining neighborhood environmentalists living around Denver’s Shattuck Superfund site.

“I don’t even know where to call,” said Deb Sánchez. With her husband and two children, she lives three hundred feet from Shattuck’s radioactive pit. She has years invested in a fight to get the waste out of her neighborhood.

Every Superfund site has a Deb Sánchez, or a Bob Spiegel, or a Marie Flickinger pushing the government to do the right thing in their neighborhoods. But this administration has disconnected the last-hope number you used to be able to call.

8.

Ready to Eat?

Did I keep last year’s resolution to eat less cheeseburgers? The answer is, yes, to the extent that I’m now comfortable in having a cheeseburger today.

—GEORGE W. BUSH AT THE COFFEE STATION, CRAWFORD, TEXAS, DECEMBER 31, 2002

Rittenhouse Square, six blocks southwest of Philadelphia’s City Hall, looks like some elegant sliver of Manhattan. Art students sketch the Romanesque façade of Holy Trinity Church. Old chess players share wooden benches with young lovers. Strollers cross the diagonal walkways in one of the five squares set aside by William Penn for his Greene Country Towne. The statue of “Billy Penn” himself is perched safely atop City Hall, and had he been placed facing a slightly different direction, the great Quaker would have been able to gaze down on Dr. Frank Niemtzow taking his daily walk around the square with his wife, Rosalie. The doctor lived in the elegant Dorchester, two buildings west of Holy Trinity. In 2002 he was ninety-eight years old and still completely with-it; if a ninety-eight-year-old can be said to be spry, Dr. Niemtzow was. He graduated from medical school in 1928, served in World War II, and invested most of his life’s energy in a medical practice in Freehold, New Jersey. There, in 1949, he delivered and then attended to the sore throats and earaches of a child named Bruce Springsteen, just as he had delivered and attended to hundreds of other children born in that small corner of the USA. After sixty years of practice in Jersey, Frank and Rosalie retired to the Rittenhouse Square high-rise. In winters they closed up the Philadelphia condo and opened their house on Longboat Key in Florida. Rosalie died in 1996, but six years later the doorman of the Dorchester was still watching over the doctor as he crossed Eighteenth Street so he could walk in the park or soak up the sun while sitting on one of the wooden benches engraved with the names of Philadelphia’s Jewish and Gentile aristocracy.