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

recruited blood donors. The father of one of his patients was a minister, and he brought in twenty members of his congregation. Standard procedure in blood transfusions in the mid-1950s was steel needles, rubber tubes, and glass bottles. But it turned out that platelets stuck to those surfaces. So Freireich had the idea of switching to the brand-new technology of silicon needles and plastic bags. The bags were called sausages. They were enormous. “They were this big,” said Vince DeVita, who was one of Freireich’s medical fellows in those years. He held his hands far apart. “And you have this kid, who is only this big.” He held his hands much closer together. “It was like watering a flowerpot with a fire hose. If you don’t do it right, you put the kids into heart failure. The clinical director of NCI at the time was a guy named Berlin. He saw the [sausage] and said to Jay, ‘You’re insane.’ He told Jay he was going to fire him if he kept doing platelet transfusions.” Freireich ignored him. “Jay being Jay,” DeVita went on, “he decided if he couldn’t do it, he didn’t want to work there anyway.” The bleeding stopped.

7.
    Where did Freireich’s courage come from? He’s such an imposing and intimidating presence that it is easy to imagine him emerging from his mother’s womb, fists already clenched. But MacCurdy’s idea about near and remote misses suggests something quite different—that courage is in some sense acquired.
    Take a look again at what MacCurdy wrote about the experience of being in the London Blitz:
    We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
    Let us start with the first line: We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid. Because no one in England had been bombed before, Londoners assumed the experience would be terrifying. What frightened them was their prediction about how they would feel once the bombing started. 7 Then German bombs dropped like hail for months and months, and millions of remote misses who had predicted that they would be terrified of bombing came to understand that their fears were overblown. They were fine. And what happened then? The conquering of fear produces exhilaration. And: The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
    Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all. Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma associated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It created a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.
    The next chapter of David and Goliath is about the American civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King Jr. brought his campaign to Birmingham, Alabama. There is one part of the Birmingham story that is worth touching on now, though, because it is a perfect example of this idea of acquired courage.
    One of King’s most important allies in Birmingham was a black Baptist preacher named Fred Shuttlesworth, who had been leading the fight against racial segregation in the city for years. On Christmas morning in 1956, Shuttlesworth announced that he was going to ride the city’s segregated buses in defiance of the city’s laws forbidding blacks from traveling with whites. The day before the protest, on Christmas night, his house was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was trying to do to Shuttlesworth what the Nazis had been trying to do to the English during the Blitz. But they, too, misunderstood the difference between a near and a remote miss.
    In Diane McWhorter’s magnificent history of the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Carry Me