Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2017

The Current Transcript for October 13, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Our position is we do not agree with relocating dash fighters to create a problem somewhere else in this country.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: A U.S. Marine Corps General on the dilemma over what to do with the remaining ISIS or Daesh fighters still in Raqqa. ISIS lost control of its defacto capital yesterday, a major blow for an organization that brutalized the population in a grisly display of power and seeming invincibility. But despite the initial relief Iraq now represents an uncomfortable reality with the political situation with no clear way forward and a population traumatized beyond measure. In a moment, the end of the battle and the start of the struggle. Also today Donald Nichols was a masterful spy and strategist, murderously manipulative in the name of U.S. intelligence gathering.

SOUNDCLIP

He pushed people out of boats. He pushed people out of airplanes and he did all this with impunity. No one questioned him. It never was entered into his military service record.

AMT: Most of that record in the US military archives is curiously missing. But Donald Nichols was instrumental in the choices the US made to bomb and destroy major cities in North Korea, during the Korean War, wiping out an estimated 20 percent of the civilian population. It's that legacy that lingers more than 60 years later as the leaders of North Korea and the US exchange barbs, taunts and threats. In half an hour, how that messy past plays into a frightening future. And time for a bit of a love hack.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You make me want to be a better man.

VOICE 2: That's maybe the best compliment of my life.

So listen up Eli Finkel talks Love Hacks, marital satisfaction and how to invest in your partner … in an hour. And in our last word today a tribute to Gord Downie. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Raqqa free from ISIS but civilians still suffering, says terrorism expert

Guests: Nadim Houry, Samantha Nutt, Hassan Hassan

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Cheering and chanting]

AMT: Well that is the sound of celebration amidst the desolation of Raqqa. The northern Syrian city had been the so-called Islamic states last stronghold, the capital of the group's self-declared caliphate. But as those Kurdish soldiers celebrations attest to this city has been all but one back from ISIS. It has been a devastating battle leaving the city in ruins, but perhaps delivering a mortal blow to the jihadist group. Even before the last shot is fired, however the questions begin what will life look like now in the territories that ISIS has left? How to reclaim the future especially for women and girls in a region who escaped the group's grip? We have three guests standing by to consider these questions. And first I'm joined by Nadim Houry. He is the director of the terrorism and counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch. He was in Syria near Raqqa just three months ago and he joins us from Paris. Hello.

NADIM HOURY: Hello good morning.

AMT: What was your reaction when you learned that ISIS had lost control of Raqqa?

NADIM HOURY: Look clearly the defeat of ISIS in Iraq is as important for the military effort but also we're very concerned about the fate of the civilians in Raqqa city today because what we have seen on our last visit when I was in Raqqa province back in July, was that the post-war effort in these areas is not as well thought out and there aren't as many resources put into it as the military effort, which means that the civilians are suffering even after ISIS is defeated. Electricity water basic necessities hospitals these are all things that are going to be rebuilt. And so far no one really wants to take that responsibility.

AMT: At he hospital in fact was the scene of one of the biggest firefights just yesterday as they were trying to take the city once and for all, huh? The main hospital?

NADIM HOURY: Exactly, it was one of the last bases for ISIS in the city. The hospital actually visited it back in 2013. This was a key hospital. You know anyone who needed dialysis, you know pregnant women who need to give birth. Everyone was treated in this hospital and I was looking at the footage coming out of Raqqa yesterday. The hospital is destroyed to a large extent. And the key question is now who is going to get that hospital up and running. And the Western led coalition, the U.S. led coalition played a key role in the military victory but they have been a lot less assertive and visible when it comes to what they plan to do today. There's been some talk about you know supporting stabilization efforts but the U.S. and others want to stay away from any talk about being responsible for rebuilding which leaves a big question mark.

AMT: So when you were in Syria earlier this year, what did you see in the communities that had been rid of ISIS control how were how were they moving forward?

NADIM HOURY: You know, it was a very challenging situation. I mean the communities are exhausted. Many of them have been displaced multiple times, have lost their homes. They were on the one hand very relieved that ISIS had been you know pushed out of their areas. On the other hand they were also very insecure about the future. They were not sure who's going to control and govern them in the medium to long term. They were not sure about you know how to resume their life. Just to give you an idea in July most areas did not have electricity for more than two or three hours a day maximum. There were long queues for bread. They weren't sure if schools were going to reopen for September. There is not communication now in any of these towns, when we were there. It's very very challenging. I mean one of the most heartbreaking stories was a father whose daughter was killed actually by a coalition airstrike and her body was still under the rubble two months later because there was simply no equipment to dig her out. And when the father was asking help from the local authorities and from coalition forces he was not getting any positive answer.

AMT: So again that's what people are left to their own devices, their own morning, their own way to deal with it.

NADIM HOURY: Exactly and I think this is this is very short sighted. It should be part of the planning effort of the military effort to seriously consider the day after. I mean we were talking about reconstruction and civilian needs but also there hasn't been any serious consideration about who is going to be responsible and what judicial system is going to be able to process the hundreds and probably thousands of suspects that are now in detention. You know the Syrian democratic forces don't have their own state. There are some ad hoc tribunals that have been set up by Kurdish forces in Syria. But these courts are not set up to try such a large number and there are real issues around due process.

AMT: Well and I have to ask you to who gets to control that area in the end? Does that go back to Assad eventually?

NADIM HOURY: Well we'll have to see. I mean local people were very - you know when we were there this summer they were very worried because they didn't know if the Kurds were going to stay, or whether Assad is going to retake the area and the loyalties are divided as well. So there's a great sense of uncertainty which is the political situation. And you know the coming months will I guess tell us how this evolves. But there was also a great deal of uncertainty in terms of what even tomorrow will bring.

AMT: And I was flipping around online yesterday just looking at some of the wider pictures. There's so much rubble. How do you even start to turn that back into homes and schools and hospitals?

NADIM HOURY: And maybe if I can just highlight one key factor. I mean one of the reasons why reconstruction has been so complicated in the areas around Raqqa, but also some of the other areas north of Raqqa, is that the border with Turkey is completely closed because Turkey has decided that the Kurdish fighting forces in Syria known as the YPG. They associate them with being a terrorist group. So they have refused any aid to cross the Turkish border. So even though Raqqa is only 90 kilometers from the Turkish border, any aid that needs to make it there either has to go through permissions via Damascus or have to be shipped through the border with the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, adding hundreds of kilometers to the trip, which means that towns like Kobani which are literally across the border from Turkey cannot get any aid directly from the Turkish border.

AMT: Wow the complications are endless. Nadim Houry thank you for giving us some perspective on that.

NADIM HOURY: Thank you.

AMT: Nadim Houry director of terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch. We reached him in Paris.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds: Cheering and honking]

AMT: Still celebration and the immediate aftermath of the takeover of Raqqa. That's the sound of women celebrating their freedom on the streets of Raqqa. Yesterday the tape was released by the YPG the Kurdish group battling ISIS the one our last guest just mentioned in it. There is a potent image of liberation as a woman rips off a long black robe to reveal her leopard print outfit beneath. By all accounts life for women and girls under ISIS in Raqqa was brutally repressive. Many women who have escaped have told stories of rape, abuse, human trafficking. Dr. Samantha Nutt is the founder of Warchild Canada. She is a staff physician at Women's College Hospital in Toronto. She helps run a program in Iraq helping Syrian and Iraqi women and girls affected by ISIS. Four weeks ago she came back from a trip to Iraq where she heard many of their stories. And she joins me in our Toronto studio. Hi good morning.

SAMANTHA NUTT: Good morning.

AMT: So how much do we know about what women experience in places such as Raqqa well under ISIS control?

SAMANTHA NUTT: We know a fair bit because we've been hearing these stories now for a few years from young girls and women who were able to escape and from other areas that were cleared previously, and life was absolutely abhorrent, particularly if you were from an ethnic minority. We know the stories of many Yazidi women and girls and those are stories I've heard quite consistently I've been in Iraq three times now over the past year; stories of rape of abuse, of human trafficking, of being enslaved, being sold in markets, gifted to ISIS commanders. And these are the kinds of stories that are fairly consistent. And the degree to which women and girls would have experienced that can vary depending on which region they were from. But I mean there's no question that this was an effort a systematic effort to destroy and demoralize an entire generation of women and girls.

AMT: And we also know that they were trying to build a caliphate. They wanted to impregnate them. They were trying to build that up. That's like so nefarious on so many levels.

SAMANTHA NUTT: Yes they did. And that was also part of their policy of frankly ethnic cleansing. Tt was to try to as I said completely destroy this next generation.

AMT: So when we when we talk about the damage to women we're talking about the damage to the children they have now as well?

SAMANTHA NUTT: In some cases. Yes. I mean in some cases women and young girls, I mean I've interviewed girls that are 14 - 15 who ended up pregnant because of sexual violence on the part of ISIS commanders. And so what happens to them and what happens to their children, I mean the stigma, the tremendous stigma that is attached to many of these women and girls, it is something that communities are trying as best they can to address. But we need to remember we're talking about some fairly traditional patriarchal societies that hold onto some you know particular views that are making their transition extremely difficult.

AMT: Some of these women would be blamed for being the victims.

SAMANTHA NUTT: Well they would be considered tainted goods unfortunately. And so as much as there has been some community sensitization that's been happening on the ground to try to say look these women are women and girls are victims. They have to be reintegrated into their communities. They deserve your support. They deserve your compassion. Unfortunately the way that that plays out is that they are still seen… There is aura of suspicion that surrounds many of them that makes their transition and reintegration very very complicated.

AMT: So the women you have met, they would have been moved around. They would have been forced to be the so-called wife of an ISIS fighter and then another. Like, it was endless, was it not?

SAMANTHA NUTT: It was, it was endless. And the stories are horrifying and heartbreaking. I've interviewed young girls 15 years of age who talk about being roped together sold in markets. And that was after they were gifted to an ISIS commander who may or may not have had raped her before they decided to profit for her and send her back into market and give her to somebody else. They were held in captivity they were abused, assaulted, forced into indentured servitude. And if they tried to defy that, if they tried to escape then they were often beaten, some of them were killed or they were given - gifted again to someone else. I mean it's just an abomination.

AMT: How do you help women and girls who've been treated like that?

SAMANTHA NUTT: It takes a tremendous amount of time. You know the level of trauma that they have experienced, the physical abuse, the psychological harm that they have had to endure. They need an intense - Many of them have PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder. They need intensive programming over the long term. And your previous guest talked about this as well. We invest so much money in fighting the war and so little in the scheme of things and making sure that those who have suffered as a result of these kinds of atrocities have the supports that they need to rebuild their lives. These women and girls in our program has been focusing on this. They need psychological support and rehabilitation. They need community reintegration. They need vocational training some of them come from rural areas they are functionally illiterate. So their opportunities to provide for themselves and for their own children or are extremely diminished. And that is on top of the tremendous psychological trauma that they have.

AMT: And you've been working in Iraq. There's a whole bunch of women who need help now in Syria in that area around Raqqa, that's just been freed.

SAMANTHA NUTT: Absolutely. And the challenge has been for many international organizations has been going back and forth across the Syrian border. The Assad regime has really made that extremely complicated and has often penalized organizations that are working in more than one location. So that's an ongoing challenge for us. Many of those who are in Raqqa will come back across the border. There are a number of Iraqi women and girls who were trafficked across the border throughout this process. And the needs are enormous. We're talking about a population of hundreds of thousands of those who've been internally displaced as a result of Mosul, Raqqa and elsewhere. And I'm afraid that the next iteration of this conflict is just as brutal and just as bloody as what we have seen over the last few years.

AMT: What about the women who - They would have been Sunni women; some of them their husbands went to join ISIS. They're kind of stock. They now are the wife of somebody who's fighting… Are they being victimized? Were they victimized as well?

SAMANTHA NUTT: They were victimized to varying degrees. And the challenge now for many of those Sunni girls and women who were either detained by ISIS or who ended up marrying ISIS commanders or who lost their husbands during that period of time, is that they are under a tremendous amount of suspicion. So some of them have been detained along with their children. Some of them are - Their activities are being heavily monitored. So this is the question is it how do you build those bridges? How do you begin the long process of rehabilitation, particularly under the threat of sectarian violence and the ongoing divisions are taking place in the region? And we are talking about one time in Mosul and Raqqa, communities that were completely obliterated and destroyed that are riddled with IEDs, improvised explosive devices, so it's not even the case that you can move people back into their communities and begin the process of recovery. They're locked in camps and they are wholly dependent on the kindness of non-governmental organizations and local actors.

AMT: Okay Samantha thanks for giving us some perspective on that.

SAMANTHA NUTT: Thank you.

AMT: Dr. Samantha Nutt, founder of Warchild Canada, staff position at Toronto Women's College Hospital. Joined me in our Toronto studio. Before we leave the topic of Raqqa today I want to bring in one more guest who says celebrations over the liberation from ISIS may be premature. Hassan Hassan is a senior fellow at the rear Institute for Middle East Policy. He's the co-author of ISIS inside the Army of Terror. He's in Arlington, Virginia, hello.

HASSAN HASSAN: Hi good morning.

AMT: Good morning. I wonder what you're thinking that celebration around Raqqa, where they cleared it of ISIS. How optimistic are you about what that really means?

HASSAN HASSAN: I'm not too optimistic, obviously. I think on one hand this is all good news. ISIS reign of terror has ended in Raqqa. This is basically the first city that ISIS took in 2014. It was in January 2014. So it's been almost four years since ISIS took that area, that's when ISIS started to build this comprehensive program of governance before it declared its caliphate around six months later. But on the other hand, what we see today, the scenes coming out of Raqqa, There are reports coming out of Raqqa, the way they talk about things, how the situation is playing out there. It's quite you know sad. I mean Raqqa is a waste town now. It's almost completely destroyed. And the sad thing is that much of the destruction and civilian deaths have taken place in the city could have been avoided, in my opinion. Because the approach that was followed in Raqqa is not the same but the U.S. led coalition… You know the coalition has used annihilation tactics they surrounded the whole city. They didn't allow access points were kind of tied ISIS fighters would leave for example, the same way that they did in Mosul. And also they use the militia, sort of professional force like the Iraqi counter-terrorism force or service. They use the militia that it's not well-trained to navigate a city. And also a militia from outside Raqqa. They're not locals.

AMT: Right now. At the same time some of those ISIS fighters have escaped. What do you think is going to happen to that organization?

HASSAN HASSAN: So I mean if they escaped it's going to be another battle somewhere else. And I think that's why the United States has allowed for three years. They move from one area to another. They chase them down but there's always this strategy of allowing desperate fighters to leave if they wanted. Or civilian civilians who wanted to leave. So we have a situation similar to Raqqa which was western Mosul. That was also an area that was completely destroyed. Eastern Mosul was a lot better. I think the strategy was carried out quite professionally.

AMT: And you are from Deir ez-Zor in Syria. It was in ISIS grip. What's it like there now?

HASSAN HASSAN: My home town is still under ISIS. This is basically the next big fight against ISIS in the borderlands between Iraq and Syria. Both sides of the borders are still under ISIS control. And also this is going to be a – It is a whole different challenge in the fight against ISIS because this is the area where ISIS emerged in 2014. So this will define the next phase if ISIS desert based insurgency, or rural areas or bases in rural areas and that's what where the attack cities and towns.

AMT: Hassan Hassan thank you for talking to us today. Hassan Hassan, senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. He's the co-author of ISIS Inside the Army of Terror. He's in Arlington, Virginia. Well the CBC News is next and then we're going to talk about a man who was a seventh grade dropout. He had hardly any training but Donald Nichols became a master spy changing the fate of the Korean War.

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

It's like a great athlete or a gifted musician. He simply had theses instincts for how to do it.

AMT: The remarkable story of the king of spies and the very dark side of that man in our next half hour and what it means to the U.S. North Korea standoff as it exists today. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

'Perfectly happy sitting in on torture': Meet the U.S. spymaster from the Korean War

Guest: Blaine Harden

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come I'll be joined by Eli Finkel. He runs the relationships and motivation lab at U S University where he does research into what makes relationships work. He's got what he calls a marriage hack.

SOUNDCLIP

Spending the 21 minutes a year it takes to follow or procedure is perhaps the single best investment you will ever make in the quality of your life.

AMT: Eli Finkel joins me in half an hour. But first the spy they left out in the cold.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: And we can have mad men out there shooting rockets all over the place. Little rocket man. And by the way rocket man should have been handled a long time ago [Cheers].

VOICE 2: This is the first time any North Korean leader has directly addressed an international audience.

VOICE 3: He called Trump mentally deranged and a coward meeting a senile old person. Kim said the U.S. president had insulted him and the regime and pledged take the highest level of hard line countermeasures.

VOICE 4: He's watching us like he never watched anybody before. That I can tell you.

AMT: Well, the war of words seems to ratchet up a notch every day between the U.S. president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. Just yesterday the North Korean leader pronounced that war could break out at any moment as the U.S. and South Korea began joint naval drills off the country's coast. For all the current bluster it's worth remembering that 67 years ago the Korean Peninsula was involved in a protracted an ugly war. Thousands of Koreans, Americans, Chinese, Russians and Canadians were killed. And while the Korean War may seem like a long ago history to many North Americans, Koreans on both sides of the 38th Parallel are still living with its consequences. Blaine Harden is a former Washington Post bureau chief in northeast Asia and New York Times foreign correspondent, who focused on North Korea throughout his career. You may remember his book Escape from Camp 14: Documenting the Life of Shin Dong Hyuk, the only man known to have been born into a notorious prison camp in North Korea who actually escaped. Now he's written a book called King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America's spymaster in Korea and it explores one of the least known but most influential players in the Korean War and that has resonance for today. Blaine Harden joins me from Seattle. Hello.

BLAINE HARDEN: Hello.

AMT: So who was the spy spymaster Donald Nichols?

BLAINE HARDEN: Well Donald Nichols was a young, very young when he got to the Korean Peninsula, 23 year old agent for the army who arrived four years before the Korean War and then stayed through the Korean War for a total of 11 years on the Korean Peninsula. And while he was there he became the most important intelligence operative the United States had in Korea. He was relentless. He was brave. He was unscrupulous and he developed an incredibly close relationship to Syngman Rhee, who was the president of South Korea and America's puppet, at the time.

AMT: He predicts that war will break out on the peninsula before anyone else does. How does he know this?

BLAINE HARDEN: He knows this because he was ridiculous early for the war. He had good contacts - good intelligence contacts across the 38th Parallel into North Korea. So he knew that Stalin was supplying North Korea with aircraft, artillery and lots and lots of guns.

AMT: And so he warns his superiors. What kind of response did they give him?

BLAINE HARDEN: Well they tried to fire him, in fact. His memos, his reports were very precise and very alarming. The U.S. high command in the Far East at the time was headed by General Douglas MacArthur who was sort of presiding over the reintegration of Japan into the modern world and doing a very good job of it. But he didn't want to hear anything about Korea.

AMT: So remind us of the political landscape of the time. Korea is split into at the end of World War Two. Each side has its allies. Who are the players?

BLAINE HARDEN: Well what happened in 1945 at the end of World War II the United States was worried that Stalin's Soviet army would take the whole peninsula. So hopefully one night in August of 1945, two colonels in the White House drew a line across the peninsula, the 38th parallel. And the hope was that Stalin would stop and just take the northern half and the Americans would take the southern half. And that in fact is what happened in 45. But there was almost immediately fighting across that border.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNOUNCER: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed with Kim Il-Sung as its president. As Soviet troops withdrew, Kim dreamed of uniting Korea under communism.

BLAINE HARDEN: The two puppets that were installed, Kim Il-Sung in the north who was Stalin's guy was ambitious, ornery belligerent and wanted to control the whole Korean peninsula with arms and ideological window dressing from Stalin. In the south Syngman Rhee was exactly the same kind of character and who wanted to had the same goals. So there was a border friction from the get go.

AMT: And of course that border friction ends up with each side hunting down what they see as their enemies. South Korean - still a lot of terrible things that Nichols witnesses.

BLAINE HARDEN: What happened with Nichols is, as I said he became so close to Syngman Rhee. He called him ‘father’ and Syngman Rhee recalled him ‘son’, And Syngman Rhee he was consolidating his power in the south. There were lots of poor South Koreans who didn't like Syngman Rhee and who opposed him. And Syngman Rhee was a leader who killed his enemies. Nichols trained the police who did some of that killing and Nichols ended up living in this Demi mode of torture, mass killings, and severed heads. I found a picture of Donald Nichols standing on the roof of the South Korean army headquarters in Seoul next to a severed head in a bucket.

AMT: You got that picture in your book. I mean it's extraordinary because he is aware of basically atrocities of war crimes, or some kind of crime against humanity.

BLAINE HARDEN: He really lives in a world without rules and he was very lightly supervised. And he was at the beginning just a master sergeant who reported directly to an Air Force general. He didn't have to deal with lieutenants or majors or colonels. During the Korean War, he was attacked by his own men because he was sending some of them north as agents into North Korea and a very high percentage of them, approaching 90%, were killed if they were parachuted into North Korea. And these agents got very upset with the prospect of you know imminent death working for Nichols. So they attacked him in his barracks and he shot several of them in his own quarters that night, and he had such a loose leash that this incident was never part of his military service record.

AMT: Not only could he do what he wanted. You make the point is you trying to search the archives, the official archives to find out about this stuff, that they're either still classified or they're missing.

BLAINE HARDEN: The files should be available at this point, more than 60 years after the event. Some of them are findable through various means of misdirection in the airport air force archives in Montgomery Alabama. Thousands of them are still classified and they were in fact reclassified in 2011. But I did manage to get his military service record and talk to the people who fought with him. So I did get a very accurate picture of what he did and how he did it.

AMT: So war does break out in 1950.

SOUNDCLIP

I want to talk to you plainly tonight about what we're doing in Korea. The communists in the Kremlin engaged in a monstrous conspiracy to [unintelligible] apart freedom all over the world. And the best way to make the threat of aggression is for the peace loving nations to act together…

BLAINE HARDEN: When the war broke out there was a vacuum of intelligence as I said. And he quickly established himself as the best operator in the field. A one man more. Those are quotes from his generals. In the first three months of the war he did three remarkable things. He found weaknesses in the Soviet tank that was bedeviling the Americans and by salvaging one and finding where it could be attacked. He did the same with the MiG-15 aircraft which was also bothering the Americans in the air. He found a wrecked one and shipped the technical guts of it to the United States where it was analyzed and helped the Americans improve the F-86 fighter, which was the plane that could shoot down a MiG and as the war progressed the Americans did very well against the MiG. But most importantly and something that I discovered that hasn't been known, is that he had a team of North Korean defectors who had defected with battle codes of the North Korean army. So Nichols used this information to help save the Americans from losing the war. They were trapped in the Pusan perimeter, which is down in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. And the Americans were hanging on by their fingernails. Nichols broke battle codes and gave the American army - the American eighth army - usually 24 to 48 notice of any impending attack. And the Americans were able to rebuff those attacks until the Americans got brought in enough troops to attack and then destroy Kim Il Sung's army. And he won two of the three most important American medals for valor: The Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star and he deserved them.

AMT: He really was thinking ahead obviously by looking at the code breakers getting them ready before the war even broke out.

BLAINE HARDEN: He was thinking ahead. He had a very good strategic sense. I should also note that he had a seventh grade education and virtually no training at all. The only training he had from the military was six weeks of spy school in Tokyo, before he arrived in Korea. And he also developed this close relationship with Syngman Rhee so he could get any intelligence information the South Koreans had. He would get it and he would get it first, and then he would pass it on to his generals who would praise him and give them a promotion. He went from Master Sergeant to major in about five months.

AMT: And you make the point that before that you know Korea was sort of this place that the American - a lot of American military didn't really want to be there. And that line ‘gonorrhea, diarrhea, Korea, three things to fear’.

BLAINE HARDEN: It is true. It's true. That was the three things that all of the G.I. serving in Japan were afraid of ‘gonorrhea diarrhea and going to Korea’. Nichols wanted to go. He wanted an open field to run on and he found one. And then when the war broke out he was in the catbird seat. He was wildly brave and very clever. And yet he didn't have any moral underpinnings. He was perfectly happy sitting in on torture.

AMT: Well let's talk about that because you don't call it the Dark Reign of America's spymaster for nothing. You touched on the fact that he would essentially send people over that border expecting them to die, looking for any diligence.

BLAINE HARDEN: He knew that a large percentage of them would die. He also - when he was displeased by people who worked for him or people who were in the military around them - he would send them to their deaths. I have eyewitnesses who said that he'd dropped somebody over North Korea who had bothered a couple of generals that he knew and the South Korean army. He pushed people out of boats. He pushed people out of airplanes. And he did all this with impunity. No one questioned him. It never was entered into his military service record. He eventually lost support from the U.S. Air Force. He was too close to Syngman Rhee. Syngman Rhee continued after the war to kill his political enemies. In 1957 the Air Force came for Donald Nichols. They put him in a straight jacket in the middle of the night and took him away from his own - He had his own secret base near Seoul and they took him to the psychiatric ward of a military hospital in Japan, where he went crazy with anger because he didn't understand why he had lost his job and was suddenly locked up. Then they pumped him full of Thorazine, put him on an airplane and flew him to Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, where they gave him months of electroshock therapy. He said - he told his family in between when he could talk to them, he said: “The Air Force is trying to destroy my memory.” And then he was thrown out of the Air Force.

AMT: Well he was a man who knew too much, huh?

BLAINE HARDEN: He was. Nickols by having this hospitalization lost any credibility that he might have had. Had he chosen to speak out about the things that he knew.

AMT: There were stories about his sexuality as well. How did that play into his firing and how they treated him?

BLAINE HARDEN: That's not clear. The military never said explicitly that they knew about his sexual activities. Homosexuality of any kind was strictly forbidden and if you if you were found out to be a homosexual you are thrown out of the military in the 1950s. It's not clear that the military did throw him out for that. He was also a thief. He came home from the Korean Peninsula with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in bricks of cash that he kept in his brother's freezer in South Florida.

AMT: I'm beginning to see why they took those files away.

BLAINE HARDEN: [Laughs] What's so interesting about Donald Nichols is that he was instrumental in America's not losing that war. And in developing an intelligence understanding of what's going on in the Korean peninsula and then the Americans erased him.

AMT: Well you talk about his dark reign. But let's talk about some what the Americans actually did in the north, because there was a massive bombing campaign tell us the extent of it.

BLAINE HARDEN: Well it also relates to Donald Nichols. He was the primary target finder because he had the intelligence assets. So he found 80-90% of the bomb targets in North Korea. But the bombing was continuous. It was carpet bombing. It began just a few weeks after the Korean War started in 1950 and it continued for about three years. The Americans, by their own bomb damage assessments, destroyed every city in North Korea and most of the towns they often bombed with conventional weapons to knock down a city and then they burned it with napalm.

SOUNDCLIP

The 24th division left behind it a scorched earth and its withdrawal. If you can’t take it with you, [unintelligible] burn it.

BLAINE HARDEN: And the overall effect was the near total destruction of urban North Korea and the killing of at least hundreds of thousands of civilians. General Curtis LeMay - who is head of strategic air command during that period - he estimated that American bombs killed 20% of the North Korean population, which was about 2 million people out of 10 million. If the North Koreans had done the same thing to the United States in the 1950s, that would have been a death toll of 30 million.

AMT: You write that it still resonates as the Yankee genocide in ...

BLAINE HARDEN: It does. It does. And the reason it does is because a there's a fact based narrative there. And secondly North Koreans are forced to live in an information vacuum. Hearing what the regime tells them and having it reinforced with propaganda. For many it's as though the Korean War ended last Thursday.

AMT: Well I was just going to ask you to fast forward to now because Kim Jong Un, the father and grandfather before him, we see them through one prison in prison but their own history and their experience really does inform the leadership in the population now then.

BLAINE HARDEN: I think what's really interesting to understand is that North Koreans have fought one war during the existence of this country, and they fight it primarily against the Americans and they felt it primarily and the bombs that destroyed their cities. Since the Korean War the United States has been in at least 15 other wars. And because the Korean War ended in a stalemate, a most unsatisfactory finish for the Americans who liked to win their wars, even though they don't often win least recently, the war was forgotten. The North Koreans obsessively remember the war. The Americans are very vague about even if there was a war. And now with this current crisis emerging the focus of the North Korean people is clear. They remember what happened and Americans hearing the rhetoric now between their president and Kim Jong Un, this young strange looking dictator. They're just… They're puzzled. They're incredibly worried and they're somewhat in a fog about where this problem came from.

AMT: So how likely is it that North Korea will bow what the U.S. and other Western nations want, that it gives up nuclear weapons?

BLAINE HARDEN: It seems very unlikely these weapons are part of a game that North Korea has been playing for more than five decades. And that game is to use extortion to protect the survival of the regime. The regime has developed more weapons, more powerful weapons, medium range missiles now that can hit all of South Korea and all of Japan, including Tokyo the world's largest city. And the CIA believes that those weapons have nuclear tipped - have nuclear warheads that can be fitted on them. So those cities now are vulnerable to nuclear attack. And of course this summer North Korea has made big progress in intercontinental ballistic missiles that might be able to hit North America.

AMT: Given why they fear another attack would they prompt another attack or is that their defense capability that they're trying to show off? How do you read that?

BLAINE HARDEN: I don't pretend to know what Kim Jong Un thinks. But if you look at the record, and it's a long one, more than five decades of this intimidation and extortion using their weapons, the purpose of these weapons is to protect the regime. Kim Jong Un's grandfather and his father both died as old men of natural causes and the weapons systems, the repression of their own people. It's all designed to perpetuate the regime. It's not an offensive capacity in terms of what it's been used for, for almost all of North Korean's existence. So if I were playing the odds, I would say that's their game. Donald Trump does not seem to understand that. I think one of the advantages that the United States has is that a lot of the senior generals in the U.S. military have served in Korea. And I think that that is a mitigating factor in lowering the actual potential of war. Trump's rhetoric as it feeds off of the rhetoric of Kim Jong-Un is unprecedented since the war in raising tensions.

SOUNDCLIP

He has been very threatening, uh, beyond a normal state. And as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.

AMT: So who's the real wildcard? North Korea or the United States?

BLAINE HARDEN: I think the wildcard now is the rhetoric of Donald Trump.

AMT: So what needs to happen for this conflict and in anything but a bomb dropping war?

BLAINE HARDEN: Well you know it would be very useful if Trump would stop tweeting. I think that's the view of everybody on all sides of this conflict who've watched it. No one wants a war. The most likely scenario is that many many people could be killed in Seoul from artillery. Those weapons are there and they're certain to work. The questions about the nukes being fired and hitting their targets is still an open question. But you know Seoul now is a city of - greater Seoul is a city of more than 23-24 million people, half the population of South Korea one of our closest allies and also one of the most dynamic economies in the world. It is just an enormous risk and a potential nightmare - humanitarian nightmare that no one wants.

AMT: So I've got more questions about Nichols. He dies. Even in death, we're not really sure who he was.

BLAINE HARDEN: Nichols was a spy all his life. He was a pedophile when he was working in South Korea. He had South Korean air force intelligence officers procure young airmen and bring them to his quarters for sexual encounters at night. He kept that secret throughout his service in Korea and when he came back to the United States in the 60s, 70s and 80s, he continued to be a pedophile and covered it up largely until he was finally caught when he was in his mid-60s in the 1980s. So he operated very much as a sexual predator covering it up with his spy skills. And finally on his gravestone, he does not mention the U.S. Air Force which he served so well. He does not mention that he was a major and his gravestone forgets the Korean War.

AMT: He had a son too.

BLAINE HARDEN: He had a son who died in a tragic boating accident in the 1980s which… And it's not clear that this was his natural born son. But he did love the boy and was good to him.

AMT: It's an incredible story. It's very disturbing though to hear what they knew and what they pretended they didn't know about how he operated.

BLAINE HARDEN: It is disturbing and I think one of the reasons it hasn't been explored is because it's hard to find in the records and Nichols died anonymously. I got onto it because a North Korean fighter pilot defected in 1953 landed in near Seoul and asked to be taken to the Americans leader. And the person they took him to was Donald Nichols. The fighter pilot, who I wrote a book about, told me that Nichols was incredibly well-informed about the inner workings of the North Korean air force and the North Korean government. He was so astonished that an American like Nichols could exist. And so was I. And so that's when I started digging.

AMT: Fascinating stuff and important as we look at what's going on politically now. Blaine Harden Thank you.

BLAINE HARDEN: Thank you so much.

AMT: Blaine Harden in his latest book is King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America's Spymaster in Korea. Blaine Harden joined us from Seattle. Let us know what you think of what he had to say, as you watch this story continue to unfold in the modern day. We are @TheCurrentCBC on Twitter. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.c/ thecurrent, click on the Contact link. And stay with us in our next half hour. Our marriage is getting better or worse? Psychologist Eli Finkel has studied the question extensively. His answer is both. He'll explain and offer up his marriage hacks right after the break. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

How 'love hacks' can make your marriage better: author

Guest: Eli Fikel

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. For better or for worse.

SOUNDCLIP

We have given up the view that when you marry you have found a person who is going to give you everything. The one person who is going to give you what once an entire village used to provide. With whom you're going to have good companionship and children and family life and who's going to be your best friend and your trusted confidant and your passionate lover and your intellectual equal, presuming that such a thing is even possible.

AMT: Well that was part of my conversation last week with relationship therapist Esther Perel. We were talking about the state of modern marriage, specifically where we're talking about infidelity and what it says about marriages. According to Ms. Perel, one of the biggest problems plaguing marriage today is the sky high expectation we have of marriage. Eli Finkel’s work delves into understanding these changing expectations and what they mean for a marriage. He's a professor at Northwestern University in the apartment of psychology and the Kellogg School of Management. That's where he runs the relationships and motivation lab which conducts research into what makes relationships work. Eli Finkel's new book is called The All or Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work. He's in Evanston, Illinois. Hello.

ELI FINKEL: Hello good morning.

AMT: What do you think about what Esther Perel is saying? Do people expect too much of their marriages?

ELI FINKEL: Well. Yes and no. So I generally agree with her perspective that we ask a tremendous amount that we didn't used to ask. There are some senses in which we ask less if you cast a broader time horizon than she was using. For example we used to look for marriage you know literally for the basics of survival. You know the food, clothing, shelter, health care these were essential features that were part of marriage, another part of broader institutions. So in those senses we're asking less. But in terms of our emotional and psychological needs, yes we're asking a tremendous amount from our marriage.

AMT: And when you're talking about marriage you are talking solely people who officially get married in some kind of state and religious ceremony, or you talking people as well who live in committed relationships but maybe aren't didn't officially get married?

ELI FINKEL: The book itself is about marriage as an institution and how it has changed over time. So in that sense yes I'm talking about marriage in particular, but many of the insights generalize to people who have decided to make serious long term commitments to each other outside of some formal marital structure.

AMT: Okay, and what do we know about the consequences for mental and physical health when it comes to the quality of marriage and relationships?

ELI FINKEL: There are substantial. You know there's some work that looks at trying to predict overall quality of life and says “All right well how satisfied are you with your health and how satisfied are you with your job and how satisfied are you with your marriage” and it turns out that the strongest of all those predictors is the quality of your marital relationship. Now that wouldn't necessarily have had to be the case. You could have imagined that in an earlier era when the, you know, the primary romantic relationship the marital relationship was less essential in all the ways that Esther Perel and others have talked about, that the quality of the marriage would have been you know important but not quite as important. But that era is not this era. And today the quality of our primary relationship, the quality of our marriage is just essential in terms of predicting our overall happiness with our lives.

AMT: So what does research reveal about average marital satisfaction over time?

ELI FINKEL: It's getting a bit worse. You know the idea behind you know the title of the book is the All or Nothing Marriage and you know the idea is that the best marriages seem to be getting better. And that's something perhaps we can talk about in a bit. You're right to ask anyway about the average marriage so the average marriage is getting a little bit worse. We're no longer in an era of skyrocketing divorce rates the divorce rates seem to double to about 50% between 1960 and 1980. But since then has actually leveled off and even come down a little bit maybe it's in the 40 to 45% say in the U.S. for example. But the quality of the average marriage if you're just asking people like how satisfied are you with your marriage has come down a little bit. You know we're not talking crisis. But in general people were a bit happier in their marriages in the 60s in the 70s than they are today.

AMT: Why do you think that is?

ELI FINKEL: I think all of this stuff does revolve around expectations the sorts of things that Mr. Perel was talking about on your show. So as we look to our marriages to do all these emotional and psychologicalthings for us we make it less easy for the marriage actually to achieve those things. And this is one of the major themes among people commenting on marriage is why are we asking so much. We're simply asking too much and the marriage can't really accommodate everything that we're asking. And that had been my initial thesis when I started writing the book as well and there's a lot of a lot of truth to it. The idea being that a marriage that would have been satisfying say in the 1950s now is disappointing to us because our expectations have risen. But I think at the same time I'm not in the camp that says we're asking too little of our marriage, because asking a lot of the marriage puts within range - puts within reach the possibility that we can achieve all that stuff through the marriage and those marriages really are profoundly fulfilling in a way that would have been difficult to imagine in an era where we weren't seeking as much.

AMT: Okay so before we get to the All or Nothing Marriage you just pick up on something you said though. If marriage satisfaction declines over time, and the divorce rate is down, and people just decided they'd rather not get divorced because that doesn't look attractive either.

ELI FINKEL: Yes. I mean the trick about the divorce rate is that it's become hugely stratified by socioeconomic status or social class. So you know divorce rates are actually coming down substantially among people with a college degree. They're staying pretty stable among people with a high school degree and they're actually still skyrocketing among people with without a high school degree. But with regard to your juxtaposition of those two intriguing facts, yes, I think people who grew up in the wake of the divorce surge of the 60s and especially the 70s have indeed decided that they can soldier forth that divorce is something that we'd rather not do blithely. And so yes I think there are people who are hanging out in a marriage that's not scintillating but certainly doesn't reach whatever their current threshold is for deciding to end it.

AMT: Okay, so let's talk about the all or nothing marriage. Tell me about the all part of that. What did those marriages have that those average marriages where there's dissatisfaction don't have?

ELI FINKEL: Well they're meeting the expectations is the major difference. One of the things that was so fun about working on the book is you know, I'm a psychologist so research psychologist. So I do things like you know bring couples to the laboratory and I videotape them interacting, and then I follow them over time to see whether I can spot trends in the way they're treating each other that influence how the relationship develops over time. But to write the book I immerse myself in a range of other you know scientific or scholarly disciplines like history and economics and sociology. I realized that the marriage that we have today is highly culturally and historically relative. And even if we just focus on the U.S. or North America what you see is a trend sets that before industrialization marriage was really about these very basic needs. Some of your listeners will remember Abraham Maslow's hierarchy where he talked about the needs toward the bottom or the most basic needs being the physiological and safety needs. And marriage was really about that up until maybe 1850 or so when we started to industrialize. And then it changed as industrialization became more entrenched. We increasingly married for love and then starting around the 1960s. Now we still want to marry for love but you can hear people say things like “look I love the man. He's a kind person and a good father but I feel stagnant in the marriage and I'm not willing to stay in a marriage where I feel stagnant” even though there is real love here. And this is how you get to an all or nothing state of marriage. Is that achieving those needs, those deep psychological needs that we're looking for the marriage today, it is fulfilling in a way that exceeds what sort of fulfillment you can get when you're looking for more basic sorts of needs. Maslow talks about the higher need fulfillment for self-actualization for example. That's where you achieve you know deep serenity and richness of the inner life. And that's why I don't I don't put myself in the category of people who are scolding people to have lower expectations. My version is look if you want to make big demands of your marriage you're certainly welcome to do that. But you probably don't want to do it on the cheap. You don't want to do it without investing a lot of time and emotional energy in the marriage because you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

AMT: So what can the average married person do to improve their relationship and get closer to ‘The All’ marriage?

ELI FINKEL: I'm delighted you asked. So the book gets into some of this stuff too. So what happens in the book as I review the history and I frame it through sort of a psychological lens. And then I review evidence and say all right well how are we doing, given that we've changed our expectations of marriage are we in fact spending more time with our spouse to try to meet these new expectations. And the reality is not only are we not spending more time on average we're actually spending a bit less time, which is why I don't find it surprising that the average marriage is getting a little bit less satisfying. But this perspective boils down to a supply and demand perspective, right. It basically says you can ask for or demand of your marriage sort of whatever you like, but you're ill advised to do it if the marriage can't supply or can't meet the demands that you're placing on it so. So there are a few different solutions that we can adopt. One is we can increase the extent to which the marriage can actually meet the demands that we're placing on it. Second is we can lower our demands so that they align with what the marriage realistically will be able to provide us. And then there's a third possibility that I call love hacking which are sort of half-baked quick and dirty procedures we can do to make the marriage a bit stronger if we're not willing to lower our expectations. But we don't have the time or emotional wherewithal right now to go all in and invest in the marriage.

AMT: Such as?

ELI FINKEL: Well, there is a range. Yes there's a range of love hacks. I mean one of the ones that we developed at Northwestern is the adoption of a third party perspective, when you're having conflict in the marriage. This was a study where we recruited 120 married couples from Chicago and Evanston area all of them wrote every four months about the biggest conflict they had in their marriage over the previous four months. And then in the second year we randomly assigned half of our couples to engage in this additional procedure. So they also they continued to write about the conflict they had in their marriage but they also wrote for an additional seven minutes about the conflict from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved. The idea being that you can distance yourself a little bit from the conflict and get a little bit of perspective on it. And people did that procedure three times they did it at month 12, months 16, and month 20 of the study. And we found that that people in that condition in fact had more satisfying and more intimate marriages than people who weren't in that additional action and the reason why that's a love hack is it's 21 minutes over the course of a year and it doesn't even necessarily involve any coordination with your partner it's something that you can do on your own.

AMT: So you're basically telling them to take a step back and look at it in a different way.

ELI FINKEL: Exactly.

AMT: Nobody thought to do that? [Laughs] Sorry, I mean…

ELI FINKEL: I mean actually it's funny about the love hacks is I actually feel like many of the I love hacks I talk about in the book you could roll your eyes a little bit and be like “well you know is that really such a shock?” But I have to tell you, like, you know in my own marriage, when I'm in the midst of a pretty robust disagreement with my wife about something I don't find it simple to do that, right.

AMT: No, fair enough, but a couple months later would you not? Would you go like “oh gosh we had that big fight over that little thing”?

ELI FINKEL: No you're right you're right. What I think this manipulation does, what I think this intervention does is it makes people behave better in the moment, which means that you've said fewer things that you regret saying. And so you're right that two months after the conflict you're able to get this perspective without having to participate in this love hack. But what this like third party perspective procedure does is it says “Okay try to think about conflict this way. And as you're going through your everyday life what are the obstacles you might confront as you try to adopt that perspective in your in your everyday life around conflict.” And so people are better prepped to deal better in the moment with those and therefore they're less distressed by the conflict and happier in the marriage.

AMT: So they don't go down that rabbit hole, maybe as far, the next time, right.

ELI FINKEL: Exactly.

AMT: Because you also talk about making a gratitude list for example. What is that?

ELI FINKEL: Yes. Yes. I mean again all of the suggestions in the book are based on science. So this study is a very basic study where there's three conditions in the study. There's a control condition. There's a second condition in which you write about investments you've made in the marriage and investment's doesn't necessarily mean financial. It's could be a sacrifice that you've made for your partner or what have you. And then the third condition the gratitude condition is you write briefly about sacrifices that your partner has made. So look all of us can do this right you can spend five minutes in the shower or while heading off to sleep late at night and think “well are the things that my partner has done to make sacrifices that my partner has made, investments my partner has made in the marriage.” What's neat about it is, according to this research, even just going through this short process of focusing on little sacrifices, little investment your partner has made in the marriage makes you feel more grateful. And more importantly makes you feel a bit happier and a bit more committed to the marriage. These are again quick and dirty things that aren't going to take a bad marriage and make it a good marriage. But there are also things that we can do pretty easily even when we're sort of worn out, and there's two kids at home and there's a screaming crisis at work, to make things just a little bit better.

AMT: And again to take it like a little step back and get another perspective on the good things that are clouded by the drama of the moment.

ELI FINKEL: Yes I mean I like the way you frame that about taking a step back and getting perspective because the quote that I have to begin the love hacks chapter is from Marcel Proust who says “mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes.” And I have a bunch of suggestions about how we can you know metaphorically or literally travel to new places. Those are the sorts of all in the strategies that that we can use if we're really trying to shoot for the top of Maslow's hierarchy and we have the time and the energy to invest. So I don't agree that mystery shouldn't be about traveling to new places, but I totally agree with Proust that mystery can often be about looking with new eyes and not really about changing the objective circumstances of the marriage, but changing how we look at the marriage in a generous way.

AMT: Hmm because at one point everybody did and that that gets eroded.

ELI FINKEL: Yes. All of us, look, I mean all of us are going to get bored in a long term marriage. All of us are going to feel declining levels of passion in the marriage and yes all of us are going to be frustrated and even maybe rageful, not all of us will get too rageful but many of us will get too rageful at our partner. And that's part and parcel of trying to make one of these really emotionally intimate, high expectation long term marriages work. And you know the research is clear that the average marriage in fact most marriages will decline over time and how fulfilled we feel in them. And the book says all right you know if you're a passive observer to your marriage and say look let's just see how it plays out over the next 10 years or 50 years, you'll probably end up with a marriage that ends up declining in satisfaction over time. That's almost all marriages show that trend. And are there little proactive things we can do to try to keep things a little bit stronger and you know looks like science has caught up to the point where there are indeed things that we can do.

AMT: There's conflict in every relationship and we've talked on this program about tensions over divisions of labor or so-called emotional labor many women feel they carry in a relationship. We've voiced some of the comments from women about that. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Most men want a medal for doing routine chores. [Music] They're expert at listing the household tasks they've completed.

VOICE 2: Sadly most men don't see the connection of low sexual desire as it relates to female exhaustion from emotional labor.

VOICE 1: Women don't have time to write those lists, because the list would be too long. And the medals would be too heavy to wear.

VOICE 3: This is why I've stayed single and never had any children. I really didn't want to deal with such onerous expectations.

VOICE 2: If I spent time arguing with my mate about this stuff or debating who should do what, nothing gets done.

VOICE 1: My mother work practically full time, do all the cooking laundry, cleaning, shopping and organize all of her family.

VOICE 4: There are just certain things that go with a given territory. That's just how it is.

AMT: Okay, Eli Finkel before I get to you to respond to that. Now listen to two of the men who wrote to us.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My name is John Woodell Pine Lake, Alberta. As far as I've seen the old days of dad coming home, sitting on the couch while mom cleans up are gone. The dads I know are working in the yard, working on a house, doing things on the vehicles, coaching kids teams etc.. They might not be folding blankets, but they are contributing.

VOICE 2: This is Joe Crozier. We train our kids to use your words whenever they're stressed. Think about how many marriages you know that have run aground because of false assumptions such as: “Well she should know what I want” or “I shouldn't have to ask him”. Many marriages could have been revitalized as joyful, passionate unions through dialogue as mature and self-aware. So if you want help with budgeting or with weekly meal planning or organizing the kids birthday parties, or if you want more date nights or sex, talk about it as two mature adults.

AMT: Oh! Touché! Two mature adults. They're talking about tensions about who does what, you know, the kids, the sex. How closely does that reflect the marital tensions you see in your research?

ELI FINKEL: Oh those things are real. I mean the dedication to my book is to my wife Allison who thinks it's hilarious that I'm a marriage expert. You know the reason why I had that somewhat tongue in cheek dedication, is like look I mean these are the same silly acts - I don't want to call them silly. These are the same sorts of issues that you know we battle in our marriage and most people battle some variation on these things. In terms of the gender dynamics in particular I think it's important to keep in mind that there are two comparison points we can consider, when trying to make sense of gendered household responsibilities. One is all right well here we are in 2017 is it close to equal. And here I think women have a very - they're very justified in saying “look it's not equal” you know. Maybe something like two to one, right there doing maybe twice as much of the domestic labor as men are. And that is a source of real and legitimate frustration to many people. Another comparison that we can use that doesn't do anything to comment on the first one is we can talk historically. And I think the men that you mentioned might have been doing this right. So I think it is fair to say that relative to a generation and certainly two generations ago, things are more equitable in terms of both domestic labor and also outside of the house labor than they used to be. I actually think both of those trends are important to take seriously.

AMT: It's interesting as I was going through some here work I was thinking when you talk about the evolution of marriage from the 50s, where one person stayed home usually the mom. And you know now it's a different kind of dynamic. So you know who looks after the kids might be different. But what hasn't fall as we've evolved as couples and all of that like for men, our social structures have not evolved with us. Day care, stuff like support systems, have not evolved with us. So that is part of the struggle, right?

ELI FINKEL: Yes exactly. In fact if anything they've probably gotten a little worse. I mean look you know we kind of have ourselves to blame. Right we wanted our bigger house and our bigger plot of land and we moved out to the suburbs. Again I'm not speaking for everybody but I'm speaking about some broad trends. I mean in the 50s the suburbs just absolutely exploded. There was, I think at least in the U.S. it looks something like 13 million new houses built something like 11 million of them were in the suburbs. And what we did without fully realizing that we were doing it is we isolated the nuclear family. And yes we haven't really solved that problem sufficiently as a society in terms of thinking “Well all right if this is the way household units are going to function and if we are going to have dual career households, well how do the kids get raised?” We haven't really sufficiently dealt with that issue.

AMT: I have to ask do you have an ‘all’ marriage?

ELI FINKEL: Well it depends when you ask me. I would say these days are pretty good. But I talk openly in the book about periods that were pretty dark. In particular, I had a hard adjustment to parenthood. I just found it to be astonishingly disruptive and everything that that I loved doing sort of didn't have the time or the emotional wherewithal to do all of a sudden. And I remember a really pretty devastating trip that we took when my daughter was eight months old, to see my best friend. So we took a family trip and this had always been a source of great joy, these sorts of trips to see my closest childhood friend and we used to go, you know, typically it was like camping and all sorts of fun activities. And I was on the plane from Chicago to Seattle with my wife and my daughter and it turns out that traveling on a plane with an eight month old is really not at all fun. Not only for me is it unfun but for several rows near me it's unfun. And I said to my wife on that trip “I just need to stop trying to enjoy life right now”. And some of that was the depression talking, but I also think some of it was just realistic about the importance of recognizing what your current life circumstances are and realizing that if you're still seeking to get everything that you know the marriage was just before the first kid came, and having the same sort of outings, and the same sorts of conversations, and the same sort of non-exhaustive interaction, and the same frequency of sexual contact. You will end up disappointed for that period of time.

AMT: Eli we have to leave it there. Thank you for all of your thoughts today.

ELI FINKEL: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Eli Finkel author of the All or Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work. He is Evanston, Illinois. That is our program for today. And as you've been hearing on the news Gord Downie poetic lead singer of the tragically hip died last night, succumbing to brain cancer at the age of 53. The tributes have been pouring in. Tom Power and q will focus on Gore Downey's life, legacy and music in just a moment. CBC will have a one hour special today hosted by CBC Radio 2s Rich Terfry to celebrate the life of Gord Downie, but we leave you with Fiddler's Green from Gord Downie in the Tragically Hip.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: Fiddler’s Green by Gord Downie]

September seventeen

For a girl I know it's Mother's Day

Her son has gone alee

And that's where he will stay

The wind on the weathervane

Tearing blue eyes sailor mean

As Falstaff sings a sorrowful refrain

For a boy in Fiddler's Green

His tiny knotted heart

Well, I guess it never worked too good

The timber tore apart

And the water gorged the wood

You can hear her whispered prayer

For men at masts that always lean

The same wind that moves her hair

Moves her boy through Fiddler's Green

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Wednesday October 18, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

More Stories Like This