Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Chapter 8)

Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.   

Chapter 8: Better Things for Better Living

In September, Indianapolis pastor Edward A. Steele III hears a Christian radio promo for a Christian Anti-Communism Crusade dinner at which I’m speaking. He’s a Yale graduate and doesn’t want me to harm the Yale brand by associating it with what he sees as a crackpot group. Steele also sees my poor understanding of Christianity and has pity. I’m grateful that for four days in the backyard of his Indianapolis manse he leads me through the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Paul’s emphasis on original sin that all of us share puts into theological terms what I read in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book, The Gulag Archipelago: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” No one could be more anti-Communist than Solzhenitsyn, a Russian who survived an eight-year sentence to a hard-labor prison camp—but he knows sin is widespread.

Soon my desire to be honest is put to the test. In October, after a second speech in Indianapolis, a major CACC funder asks whether Martin Luther King Jr. was a Communist Party member. I say, “No.” Schwarz tells me I should have finessed the answer by saying, “There’s no written evidence that he was” (wink, wink). At the next speech, the question about MLK arises again. When I was a Communist, I believed in lying when politically useful. But I can’t wink physically, and now as a Christian I can’t wink figuratively, either. Bearing false witness for fundraising purposes is wrong.

Fred Schwarz realizes I won’t be useful with his hard-right donors. He generously offers to continue my salary for another nine months as I set up a CACC youth organization. There’s one catch: I can do it anywhere except in Indianapolis, where I would disturb his funders. But that’s exactly where I believe Susan and I will most benefit spiritually: Pastor Steele is committed to instructing us in our faith.

I don’t think the “youth organization” will work, but it’s financially tempting. Susan and I, with our almost-five-month-old baby, have no significant savings. We could stay in our inexpensive California apartment two blocks from the beach—but we know our Christian understanding is still weak. 

Here’s another pivot point. We ask ourselves whether our faith is real. Money can be one factor among many, but what does it say about us or other Christians when it becomes the prime determinant? Are we willing to trust God? We do, and on November 1, 1977, the fourth anniversary of my realization that God exists, we leave southern California’s comfortable climate and head east.

Pastor Steele’s church goes through a split. He and his family have to move from their comfortable manse into an apartment. The furnace in the cheap house we rent fails as Indianapolis has its coldest winter in decades. For a week we move into the spare bedroom of Steele’s new apartment, then into another apartment that costs more than I had budgeted.

Nevertheless, November and December are good months for us. Trading a house by the Pacific for icy Indianapolis is madness, but at least it’s madness centered on God. In January, it’s time to go to work on going to work. I can fall back into newspapering, but with my journalistic experience and a PhD, maybe I’m marketable to a corporate public affairs department.

I’ve never set foot in a corporate headquarters. Yale and Michigan programs in American Studies have ignored big business. Nevertheless, I’m ready to reach for the bauble just off the blanket. A corporate move strangely parallels my decision six years earlier to join the Communist Party USA, allied to the Soviet Union. To fight American imperialism, join a big and powerful alternative empire. To defend free enterprise from academic and media assaults, join a big and powerful corporation. Or so I think.

I mail one hundred individually typed letters to one hundred large corporations. Ninety-seven either ignore the letters or give desultory responses. Three—Standard Oil of Illinois, Monsanto, and DuPont, players in the beleaguered oil and chemical industries—offer interviews. Although I’ve never been a speechwriter, DuPont public affairs execs like the idea of having a competent writer with an American Studies PhD ghostwriting for corporate heads with chemistry PhDs.

In March 1978, we move to Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont has its headquarters. Executives advise us to buy the most expensive house with the biggest mortgage we can afford, but my parents never owned a home, and I’m wary about golden handcuffs that could take away our freedom. After a year, we buy a $32,000 row house that’s two miles from DuPont’s central, downtown buildings. To get there I walk past blocks of decrepit bars and homes, but we do fine on half my salary and retain our independence by banking the rest. I’ll later advise students to live modestly so as to maximize liberty.

With this approach, Susan and I find contentment in our Wilmington lives. We join a church and have our second child.  Monday through Friday, I walk to work at 7:30 a.m. At 5 p.m. she picks me up. I learn about business and gain tutoring from a biochemicals division manager who chafes at some DuPont  bureaucracy. He describes the difference between an “attaboy”  and a “gotcha” company: the first inspires entrepreneurial innovation, and the second emphasizes the avoidance of mistakes.

Before DuPont, I’m a writer. In Wilmington I learn to rewrite, since a speech draft for a top DuPont executive wends its way through the offices of the public affairs director, the chief economist, the company’s top lawyer, and so on. “Attaboy” and rewriting will become the foundations of my work as an editor.

Professor Charlie Reich says no one can be happy in a corporate job, but I’m for three years satisfied doing my little bit to keep the economy going. The central DuPont building displays a mural, thirteen feet high and sixteen feet wide with three sections, like a medieval triptych. The left panel depicts a wilderness family burdened by the hard chores of survival in a 

preindustrial age where life is nasty, brutish, and short. In the center a shining figure, a god identified as “Chemistry,” stands with a book in one hand and a raised beaker in the other. The right panel shows a rapturous family enjoying a leisurely life via the products developed by chemical wizards. The work’s title, of course, is DuPont’s longtime slogan, “Better Things for Better Living through Chemistry.”

That slogan can also be idolatry. My main speech-writing assignment is with Dick Heckert, the 6’3″, 220-pound (shoe  size 14EEE) chemist turned senior vice president (and, in 1981, president). He’s a member of the theologically liberal Presbyterian Church USA congregation. I’m in the theologically conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

A bit of Presby bonding provides an opening to ask questions that a junior speechwriter would not normally raise with a corporate president. On one afternoon, I ask whether the triptych reflects a mechanical view of life. He replies, “Any guy who has a mechanical view of life, who doesn’t care what happens when we stop breathing one day, well, he’s an idiot.” Taking a deep breath, I ask him, “What do you think happens?” Heckert says, “The answers are unknowable. Maybe some people call themselves atheists, but they don’t know either. No one knows a damn thing. That used to bother me, but it doesn’t tear me up a lot anymore.”  Our discussion continues, without resolution.

Soon after that meeting DuPont’s public affairs director offers me a promotion: “You’ll be responsible for managing press and public interaction on all safety and health concerns at DuPont plants.” It’s customary to shout yes when opportunity knocks loudly. But I ask for some time to learn what the job entails.

The PR files I’m given show that speech-writing has been shielding me from some corporate public relations realities. One folder shows how in 1974 DuPont fools a New York Times reporter checking if the company’s past use of chemicals could cause bladder cancer. DuPont public relations staffers steer her toward a small scoop so the excited reporter misses a bigger story involving payments of hush money. She ends up with a tepid story not on the front page but on page thirty-seven.

The promotion I’m offered means I would run the next manipulation of a reporter who knows little about chemistry. Still, the new job signifies upward movement toward the corporate inner ring. One of the crafters of DuPont’s quiet triumph in 1974 says he’ll talk to me about it. He closes his office door and says, “I told the top guys I didn’t like it, but they said, ‘It’s the job of public relations to lie. Do it.’”

One more factor in deciding whether to accept the promotion is the state of my father. He worked during World War II in a factory making warship boilers and may have been exposed to the same chemicals as DuPont workers. Now he has bladder cancer. My mother writes, “He could hardly walk. He refused to get into a wheelchair at the emergency area of the hospital.”

The position I’m offered is useful, since journalists and the public need accurate information, but it will probably require lying at times. Bladder cancer caused by a DuPont process is in the past, but other problems will arise. Decision time comes down to a basic question: Will I be willing to bear false witness?

I say no. Pivoting away from a promotion signals the end of my corporate upward mobility. But in 1982 I use vacation time to write articles in Fortune and the Wall Street Journal about business-government relations and philanthropy. That leads to a job offer in 1983 from the Smith Richardson Foundation, a neoconservative group. It would require our family to move to New York City.

Another option emerges via a three-line ad in the trade magazine Editor & Publisher. The University of Texas at Austin journalism department has an opening: teach two courses each semester and write articles, maybe books. Less pay than at DuPont or Smith Richardson, but enough.

The decision comes down to two questions: How valuable is the opportunity to write freely? Do we want more children? Our two children are company, but four’s a crowd in a New York City apartment or condominium. The Smith Richardson president offers an expense account—“You’ll never eat a bad restaurant meal again”—but I choose Texas over New York. He warns me, “No one will ever hear of you again.”