David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

their experience, weren’t they? They were in the middle of a war. They couldn’t change that fact. But they were freed of the kinds of fears that can make life during wartime unendurable.
    Dyslexia is a classic example of this same phenomenon. Many people with dyslexia don’t manage to compensate for their disability. There are a remarkable number of dyslexics in prison, for example: these are people who have been overwhelmed by their failure at mastering the most basic of academic tasks. Yet this same neurological disorder in people like Gary Cohn and David Boies can also have the opposite effect. Dyslexia blew a hole in Cohn’s life—leaving a trail of misery and anxiety. But he was very bright, and he had a supportive family and more than a little luck and enough other resources that he was able to weather the worst effects of the blast and emerge stronger. Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn’t. There are two—which brings us back to Jay Freireich and the childhood he could not allow himself to remember.

4.
    When Jay Freireich was nine years old, he contracted tonsillitis. He was very sick. The local physician—Dr. Rosenbloom—came to his family’s apartment to remove his inflamed tonsils. “I never saw a man in those years,” Freireich said. “Everyone I knew was a woman. If you saw a man, he was dirty and in overalls. But Rosenbloom—he had a suit and tie and he was dignified and kind. So from the age of ten I used to dream about becoming a famous doctor. I never thought of any other career.”
    In high school, his physics teacher took a shine to him and told him he should go to college. “I said, ‘What do I need?’ He said, ‘Well, probably if you get twenty-five dollars, I think you can make it.’ It was 1942. Things were better. But people still weren’t very well off. Twenty-five dollars wasn’t small stuff. I don’t think my mother had ever seen twenty-five dollars. She said, ‘Well, let me see what I can do.’ A couple of days later, she appeared. She had found a Hungarian lady whose husband died and left her money, and believe it or not, she gave my mother twenty-five dollars. Instead of keeping it, my mother gave it to me. So here I am. I’m sixteen years old. And I’m very optimistic.”
    Freireich took the train from Chicago to Champaign-Urbana, where the University of Illinois was located. He rented a bedroom in a rooming house. He got a job waiting tables in a sorority house to pay his tuition, with the added bonus that he could feed himself from the leftovers. He did well and was accepted to medical school, after which he began his internship at Cook County Hospital, the major public hospital in Chicago.
    Medicine in those years was a genteel profession. Doctors held a privileged social position and typically came from upper-middle-class backgrounds. Freireich was not like that. Even today, in his eighties, Freireich is an intimidating man, six foot four and thick through the chest and shoulders. His head is oversize—even for a body as large as his—making him seem bigger still. He is a talker, fluent and relentless and loud, his voice inflected with the hard vowels of his native Chicago. In moments of special emphasis, he has the habit of shouting and pounding the table with his fist—which, memorably, once resulted in his shattering a glass conference table. (The immediate aftermath was later described as the only time anyone had ever seen Freireich silenced.)
    At one point, he dated a woman from a much more affluent family than his. She was refined and sophisticated. Freireich was a bruiser from Humboldt Park who looked and sounded like the muscle for some Depression-era gangster. “She took me to the symphony. It was the first time I’d ever heard classical music,” he remembered. “I’d never seen a ballet. I’d never seen a play. Outside of our little TV that my mother purchased, I had no education to speak of. There was no literature, no art, no music, no dance, no nothing. It was just food. And not getting killed or beaten up. I was pretty raw.” 1
    Freireich was a research associate in hematology in Boston. From there, he was drafted into the army and chose to complete his military service at the National Cancer Institute, just outside Washington, DC. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant and dedicated physician, the