What makes Stanford special? Knowing and doing are closely linked

Two boys in a remote village in Sierra Leone, where food and clean water -- but not smiles -- are hard to come by. (Photo by Michael A. Lindenberger)

Before coming to Stanford as a Knight Journalism Fellow last August, I hadn’t spent much time on campuses of truly elite universities. But I had brushed up against places like Columbia, Cambridge and Harvard closely enough, and often enough, to think I had a general idea of what value they have in contemporary society. But after eight months here on The Farm, I can see now that I had it all wrong.

The value of a place like Stanford isn’t just the caliber of teachers, the intensity of the research, or the whip-smart intelligence of the students, just about all of whom are brighter than me. It’s not even about the fact that so many talented and ambitious -- and let’s admit it, privileged -- people are thrown together in a single spot, slammed up against the pressure of time, though that’s certainly part of it.

In the first week of my third and final quarter here, I began to see just exactly what it is that Stanford offers that other schools, including the state schools I have earned my bachelors and law degrees from, can’t.

Let me explain by talking about two courses I am taking this quarter. Both courses have brought together graduate or professional students from a wide range of disciplines -- physicists with poets, law-students with MBAs, and economists with computer scientists.

Both courses tackle very large problems. One is about ‘financial engineering’ and the role a complicated financial products, like derivatives and credit swaps, played in the 2008 financial crisis. The other is about the way foreign investors’ surging interest in the enormous mineral wealth in war-ravaged and impoverished Sierra Leone has so far failed to enrich anyone but middlemen and, sometimes, the investors.

These are both very complex topics, as you would expect at graduate level of an elite university. They are both taught by deeply experienced teachers who can bridge the world between academic research and real-world impact. They also both rely on a tremendous amount of interaction between the students and practitioners who deal with the problems daily.

In the Wall Street class, we’re taught by Tanya Beder, chairman of SBCC Group and a Wall Street luminary, and we will be hearing from top government and private-sector officials throughout the 10-week term. The deputy chief of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve will be in, as will the primary author of the Dodd-Frank legislation -- along with a host of others.

The Sierra Leone class is taught jointly by renown political scientist Jeremy Weinstein (and former member of the National Security team for President Obama) and Jenny Stfanotti, a fellow at the Plattner Design Institute at Stanford. It's only bringing one major expert over to talk to us. But eight members of the class, including me, were invited on a nine-day fact-finding trip that took us to meet a host of top government officials in the West African nation's capital. From there, we headed deep into the nation's interior to meet the miners, farmers and landowners that are so deeply affected by the exploitation of the diamonds, gold and other underground wealth.

We saw need so raw that is hard to put into words. Babies with bellies distended from hunger and disease. A village where cholera had claimed 15 victims just three months before. Chiefs on the take and some fighting, fruitlessly, for the interests of their people. Investors with big dreams, and often big promises -- most of which went unpaid.

In meetings, with the top government officials throughout the capital, and in a half dozen villages deep into the malaria-plagued interior, we came away with a visceral sense of how human beings are being impacted by the problems we’ve been asked to study.

I think a lot of very good universities would take us this far, though many would lack the resources to bring students into such close encounters with the people making policy or living with its results.

What I think makes Stanford special, however, is its commitment to frame these courses as project-based efforts to find real solutions.

We’re not going to undo the financial mess from 2008 in our class in the law school. But the expectation is that the project teams will come up with not just a description of what went wrong, but also a recipe for what how to change things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

And then -- the crucial step -- the students are expected that their ideas will be pitched to government, investors and others willing to bet on change. What could happen next are policy changes, or maybe a company or technology that could help change the way Wall Street works. The examples of these kinds of real-world impacts are all over the campus.

In the end, it's that confidence that is the real difference-maker at Stanford.

In the Sierra Leone course, we’re working with a lawyer who founded a civil society organization in Sierra Leone that has trained scores of paralegals in some 19 villages -- places where no lawyers come and few citizens had anything like access to justice. Now their disputes are mediated, their grievances heard and negotiations with mining and agricultural companies can be observed by skilled advisors.

He is looking at ways to take these efforts on a large scale and attack head-on the injustices that have attached themselves to the exploitation of the wealth beneath the surface, deep in the interior of the country.

I don’t whether our rebooting government class will actually make things better in the villages, but as I think of the faces of the poor but smiling children’s faces I met there, I feel very good about the fact we are going to try, and that the university has expended enormous resources to make sure we have every opportunity to succeed, if success if possible.

So now that the end of this year at Stanford is near at hand, I can answer the question about what does an elite university do that other, more ordinary places don’t. It demonstrates to its students, and its faculty, that understanding the world deeply enough can lead to actually changing it. By rejecting the old city vs. tower divide, the gap between doing and thinking, Stanford is a place that shrinks the distance between the real world and the academy. It insists that knowledge and action are linked, best understood as two sides of the coin we call wisdom.

I hope that’s a lesson I take with me back into the world of journalism when I leave here.

Aaswath Raman is in his final quarter as a student, having just successfully defended his Ph.D. in applied physics. He joined six other students and me for a nine-day fact-finding trip to Sierra Leone as preparation for a joint class between the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the d.School. (Photo by Michael A. Lindenberger) 

What Grady Clay never forgot: It's the messy mix of people that makes cities magical

My project as a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford has been to look at new ways revenue might support online journalism centered around the city. The prototype, still very much in the garage, is Place -- The New City decoded: Place-based journalism for our century.

Take a look at the initial essay focusing on pioneering urban affairs writer Grady Clay, who died Sunday in Louisville at age 96. I had the pleasure of meeting Grady a handful of times, and he was as courtly and sly as you'd guess from his sparkling prose. Send ideas, feedback, suggestions or complaints to lindenbe@stanford.edu.

The piece begins like this:

“Journalist Grady Clay had a way with words and a fascination with places all his long life. He died Sunday at 96, and leaves a legacy as a writer, editor, author and citizen that his adopted home of Louisville, Ky., can be proud of – and the rest of the country can learn from.

By 1959, Clay had been on staff at The Courier-Journal for 20 years, minus time spent as a tank captain during the war, and his travels through a dozen U.S. cities had convinced him that something important was at work. The age of the internal combustion engine had come into its own, as another Kentuckian had put it, and in the suburbanizing rush into the future, cities as they had been understood for centuries were being subverted.

Against this tide, Clay sensed pebbles were gathering to offer resistance and maybe a new course. He called this quiet not-yet-born movement New Urbanism–and the name stuck.

“I can only say that all great movements start in murmurs. And I hear murmurs,” he wrote in the 1959 issue of Horizon, a manifesto of sorts whose language would have its echo in the charter of the Congress for New Urbanism, which paid him homage in 2009.

The murmurs came from people, mostly reporters and critics and other laypersons, who were asking a simple question that had then and still has big ramifications: What’s a city for, anyway?
”

— 'In a Lifetime Spent Writing About Cities, Grady Clay Put People First' http://www.kinglouey.com/?p=397

War-ravaged Sierra Leone is on the mend, and we're on our way

A child stands in the rain in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone August 22, 2012. Source: Reuters photo by Simon Akam, used by the Council on Foreign Relations.

A week from Friday, I'll be boarding a plane in San Francisco to New York, and from there to Belgium and then onto Sierra Leone, the war-ravaged but healing nation in West Africa. The airport is separated from the capital, Freetown, by the Sierra Leone River, and the drive around is a nine-hour ordeal. So we'll board a hover craft and arive amid the blur of the motor scooting us across the water.

Today is my 42nd birthday, and this is not a trip I'd been expecting to take to celebrate. All changed last week with a suprise invitation.

The trip has nothing to do with the reason I am at Stanford -- as a [John S. Knight Journalism Fellow][1] -- but in another way, it has everything to do with it. It's exactly the kind of unlooked-for experience with the potential to change not just my life but my way of thinking that has become almost commonplace since I arrived last summer.

So why am I going, really?

Answer: Sixteen of us here at Stanford have been asked to partner with a leading in-country civil society organization to study one of Sierra Leone's biggest problems, one with implications for resource-rich and yet poor nations all over the globe. Our goal is simple: To find a breakthrough solution that changes the way things work in real people's lives.

Our initial understanding of the challenge is this: Now that the civil war is over, and private investment is poised to again rain down on the diamond mines, how can that money and related opportunities find its way into the mining communities that need it so badly.

Diamonds are big business in Sierra Leone, which is otherwise poor. Average life expectancy is 48 years old.

The diamond fields cover about a quarter of the land mass -- some 7,700 square miles -- in the eastern and southeastern areas of the country, [according to a government site][4]. About 14 percent of the nation's workers toil in the mines, or in related jobs.

But you know most of that, if you've ever seen Leonardo Dicaprio in Blood Diamond or if you followed the 2007 trial of Charles Taylor at the Hague. The violence of the 10-year civil war claimed at least 75,000 lives but the violence has mostly stopped. United Nations peacekeepers have been out of the country for two years and two successful, and peaceful, elections have taken place since the end of the civil war.

The project-based course is called Rebooting Government with Design Thinking, and it's being taught by Dr. Jeremy Weinstein, former Google internation development executive Jenny Stefanotti and 'public architect' Liz Ogbu.

The 16 of us who are enrolled are divided into four groups of four. And out of each group two of us are traveling to Sierra Leone and two of us are staying behind to conduct what the scholars are calling "research into analagous conditions" -- in other words, how have nations whose economies (and subsequently, their politics) other than diamonds handled issues of economic justice. From oil-rich (and oil dependent) Venezuela to the eastern Kentucky coalmines (my contribution) there's a lot to learn.

But the eight of us headed overseas will be doing the field research in Sierra Leone to identify the stakeholders who comprise the entire "system" of the diamond economy, along with the political and social networks underpinning it. We'll interview representatives from every point along that complex vertebrae to understand how they interact with diamonds. We have meetings scheduled with activists, officials, reformers, mining executives, lawmakers and local bosses.

We're meeting with the vice president, and we're going to spend several days in the east at remote mining communities nearly a day's drive from the capital talking to workers and their families.

This is a class jointly offered by the law school, the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the political science department and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.School for short. It's a blend from heavy duty political science "systems approach" and the revolutionary user-centered approach to design that has earned such a loud reputation in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The entire trip to Sierra Leone is an extended form of what the d.School calls the empathy stage of its five-step process, and it is the stage that is most familiar to journalists.

The idea is that we talk to all the people above -- and others we encounter -- not to get answers, so to speak, but to hear their stories. To understand what their lives are like, what their routines are -- and the obstacles, hopes and leverages they have.

Armed with that information -- and it can be a deeply immersive interview -- we can begin to understand what their needs are. In fact, the idea is that we'd understand them better than they do -- better, anyway, than if we had simply come out and asked them, hey what do you need?

Henry Ford once said something to the effect of 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said. 'faster horse-and-buggies.'" Instead, he had a key insight -- they needed to get where they were going in a more reliable way wtih a further range and more comfortable ride.

He designed a solution.

In that sense, it's a much more powerful way of research than focus groups. We're not asking people to tell us how to fix Sierra Leone. We're asking them to tell us about their lives, and then we'll design solutions based on insights gathered from these conversations. We'll create fast, low-tech prototypes and iterate like hell -- changing them as we get feedback from the potential users.

Anyway, that's how the approach works at its simplest level.

It'll be a heady experience, and one I'll learn more about as I work with my colleagues and see what we see once we're on the ground. I'm not convinced we'll find something in the next eight weeks or so that will change lives, but I'm entirely on board with trying.

So I'll close with a promise to update this blog as I go. And I'd like to say a word about my team members. The d.School is nothing is not cross-disciplinary.

We're told that the class prompted nearly 100 applications from across campus. The team includes two graduate students from Lebanon, both studying technology, a law student who worked for President Obama's 2008 campaign and at the White House, an Italian professional basketball player who grew tired of her philosophy studies just as her knees were giving out and came to Stanford to get her Ph.D. in classics, a six-year graduate student who just defended his PhD in applied physics, computer programmers eager to refine 'their craft' and a recent Harvard Crimson alumnae who spent two years in Teach for America in Philadeplhia before coming west.

Just like the Knight Fellowships itself, the wonderful richness of my colleagues will prove to be the most powerful part of this experience.

An additional note about the photo above by Simon Akam of Reuters: I don't own the copyright, and will remove it on receipt of a request to do so.

From my archives: Hunter S. Thompson contemplates suicide

Rolling Stone magazine used this photo, without the heavy cropping, for its tribute to Hunter Thompson following his suicide in 2005. I wish i knew who shot the portrait. 

The famed and flawed journalist Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to death Feb. 21, 2005 -- bringing to a brutal end a life that had always been lived just short of too far over The Edge. Nine years before, I spent two midnight sessions speaking with the author of Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas for what had been planned as a long Q&A about his life as a writer, which had begun as a teenager in Louisville's Highlands neighborhood. I was chief political writer of his hometown's alt weekly and had only recently begun the diffifcult but necessary task of working my way out from under his towering influence on my writing.

The first interview, deep on a Sunday night about midnight mountain time, had ended well. "This is fine. Call me tomorrow night and we'll finish up," he had said, with perfect southern courtesy.

That would be cutting things close, as my deadline would be the following morning at 10 a.m., but I figured what the hell.

About 15 minutes into the second interview, past 1 a.m. Louisville time, he suddenly asked me: "Why are you wasting your time asking me all these questions? Don't you have a deadline?" I did, it was in about eight hours. "I am asking, because I want to know what you think about the questions," I replied.

"You're the one writing the piece. Write it," he said, irritated now. "But I'm not as interested in what I think. I want to know what you think."

"Everyone wants to know that," he snarled, angry now. "Fuck you!"

And the line went dead.

I remember I was sitting at the kitchen table in the little two bedroom apartment my roommate Grant and I had over an antiques shop on the now-fashionable (but not then) Market Street district just east of downtown. He was sleeping, and the place was eerily quiet, no surprise since we were the only residential unit in a block or two. On my laptop was maybe enough answers for half the long-form Q&A my editor and I had planned, if best. Spilled out across the table was a mound of books by and about Thompson I had been reading (mostly re-reading) furiously since managing editor Joseph Grove had called with the assignment two days before. It was 2 a.m., and my deadline for up to 4,000 words -- and I was paid by the word -- was at 10 a.m.

I did the only thing I knew to do. I went to bed and set the alarm for six o'clock.

In the morning, I groggily realized Thompson was right. What the story needed was an organizing intelligence, and for better or worse, it was going to have to be me who provided it.

My first goal was to convey to readers why Thompson, who was coming to Louisville to receive the key to the city later that week, mattered in the first place. It certainly wasn't because of the antics that by then he had become equally famous for. It was because of his writing. And I wanted to explore the idea of a second act. Clearly he was past his prime, and it seemed to me that to sidestep that reality would be a disservice to the brilliant early work.

You will find, I suspect, distracting some of the my authorial intrusions into the piece below. There are a few lines I wish I could take back. But the piece, written in a blaze of caffeine and fear and eventually a kind of high 17 years ago, stands up as an honest look at what made HST worth reading then, and now.

What made me ask him if he wished he had jumped? I am not sure I gave it a lot of thought. Maybe I was charmed by the eloquence of the words he had used to decribe those temptations of suicide. Maybe I suspected it was half showmanship and wanted to call his bluff? In any case, he had worried aloud that his Second Act would be dimmer than his first -- and he had been right.

When, nine years later, he actually did kill himself, I had forgotten that conversation at first. Only going back to read this piece, in service of a book review for one of the posthumous biographies, did I recall the conversation. I wish he had hung on. Some of his latter work, as historian Douglas Brinkley told me back then, had every mark of the once-routine brilliance. For my money his obituary of Richard Nixon, written two years prior to our interview, is one of the best written pieces of journalism from the 1990s.

But it wasn't to be the case. Thompson's note to his wife and son was brutal and brief:

*"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt." *

Hunter S. Thompson's homecoming: Twenty-five years after Thompson wrote "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," a group of Louisvillians is preparing to honor the city's most famous literary son

By Michael A. Lindenberger Louisville Eccentric Observer Dec. 4. 1996

It's been 42 years since a 17-year-old Hunter S. Thompson sat in the Jefferson County jail, contemplating his future. Anyone who has spent even a night locked up can tell you that jail has a way of working on your self-confidence, so his prospects might not have exactly glittered with promise from where he sat then. "I really had no choice," Thompson said in a telephone interview this week from his Woody Creek, Colo., ranch. "After getting out of Jefferson County jail, I really had no place to go but up."

At age 59, Thompson has remained at the pinnacle of American literary fame for 25 years, and will be back in his hometown Dec. 12 to be honored as, in the words of the historian Douglas Brinkley, "a true American original." This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," his seminal work examining the corruption of the American Dream by the forces of evil emanating from the Nixon Era.

Thompson has explained his book as an honest but failed attempt to record as directly as possible -- with no editing, no revisions, just straight camera-like reporting -- what happened during a strange, twisted trip to Las Vegas during a bleak and humorless period of American history.

"So now, six months later, the ugly bastard is finished," Thompson said in the jacket copy for the book. "And I like it -- despite the fact that I failed at what I was trying to do. As true Gonzo Journalism, this doesn't work at all -- and even if it did, I couldn't possibly admit it. Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true."

True or not -- and by whose definition, Jack? -- his failure has been the dream, the model and the example of excellence for just about every budding journalist since. "One thing people lose sight of, he's a natural writer," said Brinkley, who is the editor of the forthcoming four-volume collection of Thompson's letters, and who replaced Stephen Ambrose as director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies. "I mean it comes through. Wait until you see the letters he wrote when he was 18 years old. I mean, you and I wish we could write one today like that. He has a talent, as an athlete might, that is very rare."

That talent led him to write two other book-length masterpieces: "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail: '72," a collection of his dead-eye reporting and for-strong-stomachs-only commentaries for Rolling Stone during the 1972 presidential campaign, and his first book, Hell's Angels. But he had more than just awesome writing ability.

Early in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," a book Thompson said he "worked as hard as I could to beat ... in terms of economy, and I didn't come close," the narrator says that, "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

I asked Thompson whether he suspected himself of any particular virtues. "I am not going to claim -- you know Nick Carraway was fictional ... I could claim that in another voice ... But it is easier to be honest. ... I'm lazy and lying requires all kinds of work, you know when you start making constructs of a ... Reality, I found, is just about as weird as you could want it, as you could handle it.

"I have a story right here (in front of him) out of Beloit, Wis. Try this: Story out of Beloit -- `Man who chewed off ear ordered to trial: A Beloit man, charged with mayhem, for allegedly chewing off a man's ear because the man shot him in the penis, was ordered Thursday to stand trial.' It's hard to make up things weirder than that."

But he also said his wildly successful campaign book -- hailed even by The New York Times as the best of its genre -- boiled down to simply writing what he saw, and doing it honestly.

"It is also where you put yourself as a journalist," he said. "What you see depends on your point of view. A lot of people have said, Clare Booth Luce said, `All history is gossip'. Every once in a while you get in the position to see, you know, the reality of it.

"In the campaign book, I actually saw the reality of a presidential campaign. And the first time out it was a revelation to me. I thought I had covered campaigns before but I had never really been in the belly of the beast, and I just wrote some of that. And, yeah, I was honest.

"Uh, my judgments proved out to be pretty accurate. Nixon, you know, Watergate ... I am wandering here. I am off your question, but it's a hard question to answer."

Thompson is an admitted politics junkie, a vice he often accused Richard Nixon of sharing, but he says his enthusiasm for national politics has been severely dampened. "I am embarrassed that I endorsed (Bill Clinton in 1992). If you read that (article) I didn't really endorse him. I made the mistake of thinking about the lesser-of-two-evils argument again. It was like Nazi or neo-Nazi. That's not the local situation, but that lesser-of-two-evils argument, I have found to be, uh, it turns hell on you later. I am proud that I voted for Ralph Nader (in 1996), and I wouldn't be proud if I had voted for Clinton. Or Dole."

He said there is a widening difference between local and national politics.

"I have come to see that politics is the art of controlling your environment. Locally, that's where you can have that effect. And the presidential campaigns no longer offer that sense of participation. How's anybody going to think that a choice between Clinton and Dole (will affect their environment)? Or Ralph Nader for that matter.

"No, I have taken a temporary holiday from national politics. It may be permanent, I don't know."

On the local front, however, it's war as usual. A year ago last month, Thompson was arrested on a lesser DUI charge (driving while impaired) and he has been fighting since the arrest, which he says was politically motivated and planned by local rightwing yahoos. "They're definitely after me ... they got me right at the city limits because the cop saw me coming, and he had been chasing me all night and he was about to lose his jurisdiction. He was panicked."

According to the Aspen Times, lawyers for Thompson brutally worked over the arresting officer at a hearing earlier this year and, Thompson said, exposed him as a liar and a fraud.

"The cop lied in court repeatedly," he said.

"Well, it's coming up again for trial in March, and we're going to go all the way through to trial. There'll be no deal, no talking about it. There's at least one crooked cop on this force. ... It's politics. We're going to break this loop. It'll be a lot of fun. You'll hear about it."

We will all hear about it, for while Thompson is coming home next week for recognition as a premier American writer (and the best this city has ever produced), that recognition comes long after many people have formed impressions of him as just a drunken outlaw journalist, a dangerous drug fiend with keen political perception.

Until P.J. O'Rourke interviewed him last month in Rolling Stone, it was nearly impossible to read about Thompson without muddling through once again the details of, as Brinkley puts it, a life of flamboyance and excess.

O'Rourke's interview, Brinkley said, was so good because it focused on Thompson as a writer, which is after all what he has been all along, and not as a "drug icon or cartoon character."

"That's what we're doing here," Brinkley said. "It's the 25th anniversary of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and that's why we're doing this event in Louisville. It's time people recognized Hunter as a great American original.

Brinkley said he didn't fully recognize Thompson's genius until he began working with his letters. "I was just blown away. I have always enjoyed Hunter but also, I didn't take him as seriously. Jesus God, man, he writes letters. You're talking about a man who writes these compositions, three a day every day of his life."

Brinkley is right, of course. With Thompson, it is his writing that makes him matter -- something the Modern Library recognized when it included Las Vegas on its classics list, putting Thompson right between Tolstoy and Thackeray. It is also the writing, as any intelligent reading of his works will tell you, that has always mattered to Thompson.

It's hard to put that in perspective other than by just giving you a taste of the potion itself. So let's, as Thompson once said about Fitzgerald, "have a look at how the big boys write. Stand back.

Six months ago I was getting a daily rush out of watching the nightmare (of Watergate) unfold. There was a warm sense of poetic justice in seeing "fate" drive these moneychangers out of the temple they had worked so hard to steal from its rightful owners. The word "paranoia" was no longer mentioned, except as a joke or by yahoos, in serious conversations about national politics. The truth was turning out to be even worse than my "paranoid ravings” during that painful 1972 election.

But that high is beginning to fade, tailing down to a vague sense of angst. Whatever happens to Richard Nixon when the wolves finally rip down his door seems almost beside the point, now. He has been down in his bunker for so long, that even his friends will feel nervous if he tries to re-emerge. All we can really ask of him, at this point, is a semblance of self-restraint until some way can be found to get rid of him gracefully.

This is not a cheerful prospect, for Mr. Nixon or for anyone else - but it would be a hell of a lot easier to cope with if we could pick up a glimmer of light at the end of this foul tunnel of a year that only mad dogs and milkmen can claim to have survived without serious brain damage.

Or maybe it's just me. It is ten below zero outside and the snow hasn't stopped for two days. The sun has apparently been sucked into orbit behind the comet Kohoutek. Is this really a new year? Are we bottoming out? Or are we into The Age of The Fear?

Has the temperature dropped? The raw words tend to make one shiver. That comes from the pages of The New York Times on New Year's Day, 1974. They make me glad I was only two then.

Before we move on, have another quick look at what Brinkley is talking about, this time from Thompson's introduction to "Generation of Swine":

Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish - a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found out a way to live out there where the real winds blow - to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.

Those pieces are the kinds of things writers slobber for. And Thompson has been writing like that, and on a national scale, for at least 30 years.

It could have all turned out differently, though. When he was typing the introduction to "The Great Shark Hunt," the first volume of his Gonzo papers, in December of 1977, Thompson considered jumping off the balcony of his publisher's New York City office and into the Plaza Fountain. As he put it then

I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone ... and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into the Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.

Nobody could follow that act. Not even me ... and in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live - (13 years longer, in fact) - and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning. So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear - I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.

But what the hell? I probably won't do it (for all the wrong reasons), and I'll probably finish this table of contents and go home for Christmas and then have to live for 100 more years with all this gibberish I'm lashing together.

Thompson said this week that he had struggled since writing that with whether or not he should have jumped.

"Well, there's a part of me that thinks I should have jumped," he said. "But I would have missed a lot of fun. Dramatically, it would have been perfect had I jumped. Is that what you are asking me, whether I should have jumped?

"I wrestle with that. It's not the first time I had to wrestle with that. Yeah, I was up in New York again, a few weeks ago at press parties, I had a suite on top of the Four Seasons, with a huge terrace, that looked all over the city, and I could still see the Plaza Fountain."

Part of the difficulty of his not jumping is in the fact that his First Life has been a damned hard act for his second one to follow. As many letters as he has written, as many columns as he has faxed and as many headlines as he has made, it's hard to deny that what he wrote before 1977 was in a class all by itself.

But Brinkley says Thompson's second life has been enormously productive as well. "First off, not everybody writes three classic books -- "Hell's Angels," "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail: '72" – those are books that are really going to be all-time classics. So we tend in this country, I feel sometimes, to be hard on our artists -- meaning, people say, `Oh, Christ, Bob Dylan sucks, his last album was no good.' My god, the guy's got 35 albums. Give him a break. I feel a little bit that way with Hunter. I mean, he's 60 years old.

"But in recent years, he's done things like Generation of Swine, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Some of his recent pieces, which have been uncollected, are some of the best things he's done. I think the "Fear and Loathing in Elko," dealing with Clarence Thomas, and the one on Palm Beach with Roxanne Pulitzer are just classic. The Roxanne Pulitzer piece that he wrote in 1983 is just one of the great things about the growth of celebrityhood. Read it -- it is the O.J. case before O.J. So, I think he has some great gems that have gone through there.

"And, the writing of his novel, "Polo is My Life," that he is doing now, is really, really good. I think when it comes it will be another major novel for him."

He said Thompson's been revitalized by, among other things, the recognition of just how "kick-ass" his letters book is going to be. His novel will be published sometime following next May's release of the first letters volume, "Hunter S. Thompson: The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman."

In addition, Thompson conceded that he is negotiating a deal to write a regular column for Rolling Stone beginning next year. "Yeah, I am thinking about doing that," Thompson said. "I miss that immediacy of a daily, writing a story at night like you are doing and seeing it tomorrow. ... But I am going to try it, yeah. But they have a four-week lead time and I am not sure ... there's no presidential campaign, no war. ..."

Brinkley said the Rolling Stone column could begin as soon as next January, and would be in every issue. If that comes about, there'll be even more cause for Louisville to celebrate its famous son.

It's a strange world. Thompson admires Fitzgerald's work, and indeed there's a lot in "The Great Gatsby" that reminds one of Thompson. Neither writerwastes words, and both deal with the American Dream. Each seems to have hinted -- perhaps Fitzgerald did so more subtly -- that America is not what it should be. That something, somewhere, went wrong.

Fitzgerald ends his book by wondering how Gatsby's West Egg shoreline must have looked to the first Dutch settlers who long before saw it unblemished and representative of a whole world yet unspoiled by the excesses of Europe and of "civilization." He imagined it must have appeared as "a fresh green breast of the new world" and said that "for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder."

Thompson also spoke of unrealized potential when he described George McGovern in September of 1972 as "one of the very few men who have run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon."

Apparently, America, like Thompson, had a First Life full of splendor, and as we struggle through its second life now -- full of AIDS and fear and television whores and crooked cops -- we can't help but long for the glory and beauty of the First.

But Thompson is different from Fitzgerald. After all, he didn't jump. Fitzgerald died young from his excesses, while Thompson is still alive, despite all expectations to the contrary. He's alive and still producing, full of magic and necessary rage (even at reporters who ask ignorant questions).

Maybe Thompson's secret has to do with his honesty. "I am a writer and a journalist, and if people can't get it, (then) like Faulkner said, let `em read it again."

But my guess, for what it's worth, is that Thompson's edge begins with his hearing. He can hear the music in good writing, his own and others. That's why he likes Gatsby.

"That's the music in the writing. I'm a sucker for the music."

Behind the Maker's meltdown and recovery: A passion for bourbon in Kentucky

I asked the governor of Kentucky today whether he drank bourbon, and the phone went quiet. With the kind of patience you reserve for special cases, he replied: “You can’t be Kentucky governor and not be a bourbon drinker.”

In that moment Gov. Steve Beshear, in his second term after a landslide re-election in 2011, crystallized exactly why the dilution debacle, as some are calling it, involving Maker’s Mark distillery has been such big news in Kentucky.

Maker's Mark found itself in the center of a crisis of its own making last week, after it announced Feb. 9 that it would begin watering down the Samuels family’s famously smooth-tasting, handcrafted bourbon. “I saw it in the newspaper and then I saw it on national news,” Beshear recalled. “And I knew that this was going to grow as an issue very quickly.”

Maker’s Mark has been selling its bourbon the same way since 1958, when Bill Samuels Sr., replaced the family recipe with a new bourbon that would take longer to make and appeal to a wider audience – and fetch a higher price. Its success helped create a whole new category of spirits called premium bourbons. Despite scores of competitors, Maker’s Mark has hung onto an intensely loyal cadre of customers – too many, in fact, to have enough of the slow-aged bourbon to go around.

To get around the classic supply-and-demand mismatch, the son of the company’s founder had developed a solution he thought would boost supply without losing any of the taste. All it would require is adding about 7 percent more water – and that much less booze -- to each bottle. He swore most customers would never taste a difference.

Customers, and bartenders who the company relies on to be tastemakers, cried foul and took to Facebook, email and Twitter to announce plans to abandon the brand or fight to have the decision reversed. (For a Kentucky lament, see here.)

I began asking Maker’s Mark chairman emeritus Bill Samuels Jr., and his son, chief operator officer Rob Samuels, whether they were going to change their mind last Wednesday. The answer came Sunday, when they announced online that the plans to water down the bourbon that made their family famous were being scrapped immediately.

The turnabout was lightning fast, a credit to social media, to the early national exposure provided by a few major media outlets, and to the Samuels’ deep connection with their customers. The anguished appeals from so-called 'ambassadors' of the brand helped get the attention of the Samuels. Accompanying the reversal was a disarmingly direct mea culpa on Sunday, in a statement signed by both Bill Jr. and Rob Samuels. “You spoke. We listened. And we’re sincerely sorry we let you down.”

Reflecting on the turnabout Monday from his office in the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort, Beshear said the reversal and the apology were so fast, and so effective, he thinks the company will end up in an even stronger position. “I am certain they were sincere in the approach they were taking, but the truth is that at the end of all this the Maker’s Mark brand is only going to be better known than it was before,” he said.

Others were more skeptical. Writers have asked whether the whole debacle had been a clever, if risky, marketing ploy all along. Rejecting such speculation, the elder Samuels said there was no way he’d have gone through the past week on purpose. “This was about the worst four or five days of my life, and you wouldn't impose that on yourself unless you were really stupid,” he told Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Mark Boxley in a piece widely distributed on the web.

The formula for Maker’s Mark’s wild success has always been two parts marketing and one part quality product. It’s a story that has sold Maker’s Mark across the world. Sure it’s a story rooted in fact and claims that have stood up against scrutiny. But the romance people have with their square-bottled bourbon has as much to do with their love affair with the idea of Maker’s Mark as it is about the taste the liquor leaves in their mouths.

By suddenly suggesting to Maker’s Mark fans that the bourbon they’d been drinking all these years could just as easily be made with more or less water, that the 90 proof had been arbitrary all along, the company had courted disaster. The message was there was something flexible, impermanent about the elixir in your glass.

Forty years ago that might not have mattered. But in 2013, with dozens of competitors who can easily claim as good or better taste profiles, that romance with the idea of Maker’s Mark – the newfangled formula, the red bottles, the family stewardship, the slow aging process, in other words the exaltation of the inefficiency of the whole operation – is the product that sells. In that sense, the whisky is almost incidental.

Beshear seemed to understand that when we spoke Monday.

“Bourbon is very special to Kentucky and Kentuckians,” he said. “Bourbon is a Kentucky spirit. We have owned that spirit since it was invented. And it is very uniquely Kentucky. Ninety five percent of all bourbon is made right here – and to me the other 5 percent is just counterfeit. Bourbon occupies a special place in hearts and minds of Kentuckians, among both people who like it and those who don’t drink alcohol at all.”

The bourbon-drinking governor said he’s traveled all over the world talking to companies about opening facilities in Kentucky. Almost all of them want to talk about bourbon, he said. “I have traveled a lot of places in the world – China, India, Europe, Japan, Taiwan – and it’s amazing just since I’ve been governor how well known Kentucky bourbon has become. I can hardly think of a single restaurant I’ve been to anywhere in the world that doesn’t have some type of Kentucky bourbon or bourbons on their drink menu. I always look for that when I go. I want to see how far-reaching the industry has become. And around the world, Kentucky is known for a number of things: The Kentucky Derby, its horses and its bourbon.”

Of course with that increased recognition comes more demand for bourbon, the very development that had put the squeeze on Maker’s Mark in the first place. Its parent company, Beam Inc. of Illinois, asked the distillery if there were options they hadn't considered that would allow it to produce more bourbon to sell.

Now that the company has decided to keep the bourbon at 90 proof it will have to decide how to address the shortage. It began by sending a message over the weekend: Our customers, said Rob Samuels, have told us they would rather deal with shortages than see their whisky tinkered with.

Maker's may find themselves under pressure to raise their prices. Bill Samuels Jr. told me over the weekend that he doesn’t expect the company to do that, though he noted he no longer calls the shots as he once did. “Now, I am retired,” he said. “But we do have a culture around here. And that culture has always been ‘Don’t abuse your customers.’”

But the worry for Maker’s Mark isn’t that customers will feel squeezed by a price increase. The risk in upping the price is that it could give Maker’s loyalists permission, or a reason anyway, to shop around. What they will find on the shelves of their local liquor stores is a set of choices radically different from what was there just 5 years or 10 ago. (More in thie vein here.)

Beshear said he thinks Maker’s and its corporate owners understand the care they must take with how they present, and produce, their bourbon. “I think Beam understands what a special brand they have in Maker’s Mark and do want to make sure they take care of it, and treat it appropriately,” he said.

There is a lot more at stake than just the standing Maker’s has with bartenders in chic outposts, the governor suggested. “Bourbon in Kentucky is in its largest expansion since prohibition days,” he said. “Just this last year, there was more than $225 million invested in new distilleries, warehouses and visitors’ centers. Right now there are about 4.9 million barrels of bourbon aging in Kentucky – that’s more than the population of Kentucky, which 4.3 million.”

So he said there’s good reason to root for wisdom among the state’s bourbon industry leaders. There’s a lot riding on the way the companies grow.

All together, it’s enough to make a man want a drink. I asked him how he drank his own bourbon. Turns out he favors a mixed drink: bourbon mixed with ice. “There is only one way to drink a fine Kentucky bourbon.” he said. “And that’s on the rocks.”

And his choice of brands? He’s not saying.

“You also can’t be governor of Kentucky and take sides,” he said.

Q&A with Rob and Bill Samuels of Maker's Mark on outpouring of anger over proof reduction

*It's been a remarkable week for Maker's Mark bourbon drinkers and the two men who carry the flame of the brand of booze founded by T. William Samuels Sr, first marketed in 1958. Bill Samuels Jr., who for 35 years as CEO of his father's company built the iconic red-wax dipped bourbon into a powerhouse brand sold all over the world -- when supplies permitted.

The bourbon is slow to make, sitting in specially crafted barrels for six years before being bottled. Last Saturday, Feb. 9, Maker's Mark announced it would add water to its bourbon in the bottle to make its supply stretch further. Reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Tempers flared. Just a week and a day later, Bill Samuels Jr. and his son Rob Samuels, now chief operating officer of the distillery, changed course. In this extended interview, they discuss the role parent company Beam Inc played in the decision and what customers can expect in the weeks and months ahead as the supply shortage continues to make Maker's hard to find in some parts of the country. For more coverage, check my piece from Tuesdsay at Time.com, a elegiac blog post from Friday entitled Kentucky Sad: Makers Mark Decision Risks Its Legacy TIME, and Sunday morning's coverage of the decision to change course.

---

Lindenberger: When will this change take place, restoring the bourbon in your bottles to 90 proof? Rob Samuels: First thing, Monday morning.

Lindenberger: How long before the 84 proof is off the shelves? RS: “Of the bourbon we produced at 84 proof, a very small amount has left the distillery. (That will take a week or two to cycle through). But a lot of customers are asking about that, there is a lot of curiosity. Based on feedback we think this may be a collector’s item.

Lindenberger: One of the rationales you gave for this decision initially was the existence of a shortage. What of that? RS: There is a shortage. The demand is simply greater than the supply we have to meet it. But one thing we heard clearly from our customers is that they would rather deal with a supply shortage than have us change their whisky. Which means moving forward, we’re going to have work extra hard to balance inventories and manage our distribution to try to keep the bourbon on the shelves.

Lindenberger: Do you plan raise prices? RS: "We’re not even thinking about is pricing strategy. What we’re thinking about is restoring our bourbon to 90 proof Monday morning."

Lindenberger: I understand. But there aren’t many tools to deal with a supply-demand problem. You’re surrendering the tool you preferred – boosting supply. That imbalance won’t go away. Will you use higher prices to tamp down demand?

Bill Samuels Jr.: “In my 35 years as CEO we had multiple times when we had out-of-sync supply and demand situations. More than 20 times. Never once did we go to the pricing tool. Now, I am retired (and don’t have the final say), but we do have a culture around here. And that culture has always been ‘Don’t abuse your customers.’”

*Rob Samuels: *"There have been shortages before. There will be shortages in the future. We’re going to have to do our very best to manage them. The thing to remember … is that the bourbon made today is hand made exactly as it always has been. That’s what my father and I were most proud of. And that hasn’t changed."

Lindenberger: One of the key strategies you used Bill, was in the 1980s to travel around to American cities where elite bartenders and restaurateurs served high quality whisky. You convinced them to try your father’s brand, and over time they did just that. I’ve talked to upscale bartenders in Houston, San Francisco and elsewhere, and they are angry. Some said they’d no longer use Maker’s for their cocktails, or maybe not at all. Did that play a role in your decision?

*Bill Samuels: *"We heard the same thing from those bartenders, and that played a role in so quickly turning us around. They are part of the family. They not only helped us, they’ve done wonderful things for the (bourbon) industry in Kentucky. We didn’t want to harm that relationship."

Lindenberger: As a Kentuckian, I know this stuff is taken seriously there. Did you hear from the Governor about this? Bill Samuels: "I received very concerning emails from not one but four governors." Lindenberger: Four sitting governors? BS: "No, one current governor and three former governors. I am not going to tell you who they were but you know all of them."

Lindenberger: Tell me how this came about, the decision to back track. Whose call was it? And at what point did the Beam Inc. folks get involved?

BS: "It took me a little longer than it did rob. Because I am the one that had spent all that time testing the taste profile making sure that the changes wouldn’t impact the taste. So I spent half a day being offended, wondering why everyone didn’t think I was as smart as I thought I was. When I finally got over it and knew we were going to have to walk this back, I went to talk to Rob; he was already there." *RS: *There was just an overwhelming response, and it’s just been a week. The customers sent us a message.

Lindenberger: But when was the decision made? RS: This was two days ago or three days ago. It was our decision.

Lindenberger: What role did Beam Inc. play from the beginning? Had they asked you to find a way to boost supply? RS: "They saw what we experienced. There had been a surge in demand that we had never experienced. One of the ways we could address that was a supply change (by watering down the bourbon) if we could keep the taste profile consistent. And that is where all our focus was. They wanted to know, do we have all of our options on the table. Do we have options we haven’t considered?

"There was only one left that we could try. When we sent our note to our ambassadors (last Saturday, announcing the initial change) we felt we had identified a change that would increase our supply without interfering with the bourbon. We were wrong. The response from our ambassadors was negative. We heard from thousands of them. And so when we told the parent company, they were already there. They agreed. We need to return to the 90 proof."

Lindenberger: *So Beam Inc. did want you to expand supply, if you could. Was it their idea? *Bill Samuels: "This is something I guided as much as anything. I asked the same thing they were asking. Do we have any options? I said, we have never explored proof. Let’s see if we have any flexibility. And we did have a little. This reduced-proof bourbon went through a significant amount of our own tasting panels – and it measured up. We did all of that. The parent company did not do it." Rob Samuels: We thought we were advising them properly. And we screwed up. And we went back to them with our tail between our legs. They had been listening to the same feedback from our customers as we had been. It was a pretty easy discussion at that point.

Lindenberger: Were they angry at the misstep? Rob Samuels: Like us, everyone there has just been so proud of our customers. We recognized that their loyalty to our brand is pretty powerful stuff. Many thousands of emails … Lindenberger: You say thousands. Literally thousands? Do you have a count, or is that maybe an exaggeration? RS: No, literally many thousands. With today’s note to the ambassadors (announcing the reversal) alone, we had so many responses within the first 15 minutes, our servers crashed.

Maker's Mark reverses course, apologizes; iconic bourbon will remain 90 proof

**

Update: Bill Samuels Jr. and Rob Samuels speak about their decision to restore Maker's Mark to 90 proof.

**

A sitting governor and three former governors were among thousands of disappointed -- and in some cases outrage -- Maker's Mark drinkers who lashed out at the company for watering down its bourbon, Bill Samuels Jr. said in an interview with me this morning.

Thousands of drinkers -- including a sitting governor and three former governors -- howled their protests over the past week since Rob and Bill Samuels Jr., the bourbon family scions that run – but do not own – Maker’s Mark distillery said in an interview Sunday that they’d made a grave error in announcing last weekend that they’d water down their iconic brown liquor.

Many thousands of fans wrote or called in the past week to express outrage, both men said Sunday.

“We have been humbled by the overwhelming response,” said Rob Samuels, chief operating officer of the Loretto, Ky. distillery known for its red winter wheat-based, easy drinking bourbon. “What we heard from our customers loud and clear – and they were right -- is that this is about more than just taste.”

Beginning Monday morning, the distillers in Loretto will return the product to 90 proof, he said.

That means, they added, that the bourbon will likely remain in short supply in many parts of the country. “But our customers have told us they would rather put up with a shortage than have us change their whisky,” Rob Samuels said.

In announcing last Saturday that the bourbon would be watered down so it could be sold in more bottles, Maker’s Mark officials had said that some areas of the country –and overseas – had much more demand for the product they could supply.

Bill Samuels Jr., chairman emeritus and son of the founder, said he no longer runs the company, but he does not expect a price increase.

“In my 35 years as CEO we had multiple times when we had out of synch supply and demand situations,” he said. “More than 20 times. Never once did we go to the pricing tool. Now, I am retired, but we do have a culture around here. And that culture has always been ‘Don’t abuse your customers.’”

That culture has created a powerful loyalty to the brand, following Maker’s Mark from when it was a small, cult-like following largely in Kentucky, through rapid expansion in the 1980s as word about the wheat-flavored bourbon spread among major restaurants and bars in big cities – fueled always by the down-home marketing approach personified by Bill Samuels Jr. “We’ve been pretty busy for country folks,” he told me this morning.

But the loyalty has also stuck with the brand through at least purchases, most recently by conglomerate Beam Inc., which has a stable of dozens of liquors, including down-market titles like Jim Beam.

One question that will linger even as Maker’s returns to its 90 proof strength, is whether the loyalty the brand has won over the decades will survive unscathed – or whether the company will be seen as just one more outlet of corporate America.

Both Samuels said this morning that Beam officials had been asking them to explore options to increase supply as shortages materialized in some markers. But Bill Samuels Jr. said it had been his plan to tinker with the proof to expand supply.

“They were seeing the same things we were seeing,” Rob Samuels said. “And so they were asking, like we were, what are our options. Have we explored all of our options?”

His father, Bill Jr., said it was his contribution to say, “You know we never have really explored the proof. And so it was my idea as much as anyone’s.”

He said he worked hard, though hundreds of tastings, to come up with a proof strength that kept the Maker’s taste profile the same. “And we did have a little room there. It worked (without changing the taste).”

But it still seemed like tinkering to Maker’s fans, including high-end bartenders who are the modern-day successors to the tastemakers that Samuels used to make the brand an underground sensation in the 1980s.

I interviewed bartenders in San Francisco Saturday night, some of whom called the decision a “travesty” and said colleagues were considering pulling the brand from their shelves, though others said that was overreacting by a long shot.

“We heard from a lot of them, and that made a big difference,” Bill Jr. said. “It made the decision (to reverse course) easier. We really rely on them and appreciate what they have done for us and for the bourbon industry in Kentucky.”

The Samuels said the decision to reverse course was made a couple days ago, and the news was carried to Beam Inc. officials, who quickly agreed. “They’d been watching the reaction from our customers just like we had been,” Rob Samuels said.

Bill Jr. said, “we went with our tail tucked between our legs” but that the conversation was an easy one.

The big take away for both the Samuels and for their bosses at Beam Inc., said Rob Samuels, “was a lesson in jus throw great, how loyal our fan base is.”

The statement released Sunday said, “we won’t let you down again.”

Time will tell if fans accept that, or if they’ve taken the chance to move to another brand.

Initial story:

Maker's Mark executives, including the son and the grandson of the Kentucky bourbon's founder, apologized Sunday morning and said they had let their most loyal customers down. (For background on how, read my take from last week here, and in Time, here.

The upshot: The decision to water down their bourbon by lowering its proof from 90 to 84 has been reversed. The iconic, red-waxed dipped bottles will continue to be sold at full

"We’re humbled by your overwhelming response and passion for Maker’s Mark. While we thought we were doing what’s right, this is your brand – and you told us in large numbers to change our decision. You spoke. We listened. And we’re sincerely sorry we let you down."

The full statement is below, but for now it's worth just restating how far afield the Samuels had strayed in approving this proof reduction. Last night in two of San Francisco's most elite craft cocktail outfits, bartenders told me the response had been overwhelmingly negative. A travesty, one told me. Another said his colleagues from across the country were debating "removing it from their shelves."

Where did such passion, and then such anger, come from? It came from Maker's own success.

In 1980, Bill Samuels Jr. scored the marketing coup of his career when he managed to lure a writer from the Wall Street Journal to tiny Loretto to spill the secrets of his daddy's little-known bourbon.

"In producing its premium-priced Maker's Mark bourbon, it continues to use an intricate six-year aging process and a small bottling line that are models of inefficiency," the writer David P. Garino wrote on the front page, noting that nonetheless growth in sales had been steady each year since it began selling the slightly sweet, winter wheat-based (rather than rye-based) bourbon.

Suitors had lined up to buy Maker's Mark, but Bill Samuels Sr. kept them waiting. "I just won't talk to them," he said.

His son, now chairman emeritus, told the writer the distillery will stay small and, most importantly, the owner's philosophy will mean "zero compromise on the quality of our whisky."

In the last week, the Samuels told me that faced with a shortage, they had opted to water down their product rather than raise its prices. The idea is to keep it affordable, they told reporters.

But that had never been in DNA. The bourbon had first been marketed in 1958, and its first ad was a two-page spread in New Yorker magazine. Its tag line in 1980, said the Journal, was "it tastes expensive ... and is." Its ad copy, often, read: "For those who ask how good a whisky is. Rather than how much."

What changed over the years? A few things:

• Maker's advertising successes, backed up by a quality-oriented product that appealed to non-bourbon drinkers, created a new category of bourbon: Premium, quality-first brands. Over the past 15 years, the company in that category has grown raucous.

• Maker's is no longer considered a top-shelf bourbon. It's solidly upper middle class, with more expensive brands -- usually with higher proofs -- enjoying much greater cache among the same taste-making bartenders and restaurateurs who made Maker's famous in the first place. Pappy Van Winkle, which can sell for more than $100 a bottle, is the cult favorite now -- and it's scarcity hasn't changed that a bit.

But the biggest change is in ownership. Maker's is just one brand of many owned by Beam Inc, which sells Jim Beam by the riverful. It's much cheaper, not nearly as good, and immensely popular with drinkers looking for price, not taste.

So going forward, Maker's has two challenges: Will it repair the damage it did to its brand over the last week? And how will it navigate the odd middle ground it finds itself in: Too expensive to compete on price and too little respected to outcompete the most elite brands on status.

The best thing Maker's can hope for is that by acting quickly, the bubbling resentment over the decision last weekend will do it no lasting harm. The worst-case scenario is that the full-scale move away from its traditions, which is what the watering down decision was, will lay bare the uncomfortable truth about the bourbon industry: Even the most fastidious keepers of the flame of family-owned, traditional distilleries are really corporate employees of huge conglomerates.

I'm pulling for the Samuels to keep their brand on track and keep Maker's what it is: A damned good, if not great, bourbon with a marked fidelity to its roots. But the odds aren't going to be easy.

Here's the full statement released on facebook this morning:

You spoke. We listened.

Dear Friends,

Since we announced our decision last week to reduce the alcohol content (ABV) of Maker’s Mark in response to supply constraints, we have heard many concerns and questions from our ambassadors and brand fans. We’re humbled by your overwhelming response and passion for Maker’s Mark. While we thought we were doing what’s right, this is your brand – and you told us in large numbers to change our decision.

You spoke. We listened. And we’re sincerely sorry we let you down.

So effective immediately, we are reversing our decision to lower the ABV of Maker’s Mark, and resuming production at 45% alcohol by volume (90 proof). Just like we’ve made it since the very beginning.

The unanticipated dramatic growth rate of Maker’s Mark is a good problem to have, and we appreciate some of you telling us you’d even put up with occasional shortages. We promise we'll deal with them as best we can, as we work to expand capacity at the distillery.

Your trust, loyalty and passion are what’s most important. We realize we can’t lose sight of that. Thanks for your honesty and for reminding us what makes Maker’s Mark, and its fans, so special.

We’ll set about getting back to bottling the handcrafted bourbon that our father/grandfather, Bill Samuels, Sr. created. Same recipe. Same production process. Same product.

As always, we will continue to let you know first about developments at the distillery. In the meantime please keep telling us what’s on your mind and come down and visit us at the distillery. It means a lot to us.

Sincerely,

Rob Samuels Bill Samuels, Jr Chief Operating Officer Chairman Emeritus

Kentucky sad: Maker's Mark decision threatens its legacy

Should I drink it, or save it, now that Maker's at full strength will become a relic? (The photos below come from the University of Louisville photographic archives. The photo of the Old Crow sign on the right, was taken along east Broadway in 1959, the same year the first bottle of  Maker's Mark was sold. The building at left was the Morris Whiskey Company at 700 W. Market, in 1943.) 

Kentucky lacks a lot of things it needs, but it has managed over the years to spawn a handful of brands that make its sons and daughters proud, no matter how far from home they've wandered. There has always been basketball, bourbon, betting, and tabaccy to remind us where we come from, of course. But it's been up to a handful of brands to make us feel good about it. From KFC to the Twin Spires of Churchill Downs to Ale 8 soda from the Eastern Kentucky mountains, these products scream Kentucky the same way Dr Pepper and long-horned cattle scream Texas. 

Among them, the red-tipped bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon has always been the classiest of home state icons. And that's why it's been so sad to see the distillery take such a drubbing from the public in the days since it announced it was watering down its bourbon so it can sell more bottles. 

This hasn't gone over well. More than 5,600 people on Facebook responded to the piece I wrote for TIME on Tuesday. Hundreds more tweeted it out. The Atlantic's business channel, qz.com, had one of the first pieces on the change over the weekend, and a few thousand people responded to the story, too. Later this week, Forbes and Inc. writers chimed in with pieces asking whether the Maker's Mark had committed a form of "brand suicide."

What’s most surprising to me is that all of this seems to have caught Maker's Mark leadership by surprise. 

Bill Samuels Jr., now 71 and chairman emeritus of the distillery, resisted joining the family firm. His father and five generations before him had been bourbon makers. But he went a different route, studying rocket science, and attending the University of California at Berkeley and eventually earning a Vanderbilt law degree. When he did join the distillery, he took on the job of marketing what the Kentucky House of Representatives has called quirky regional bourbon, and made it a global icon "while staying true to his family's legacy of hand-craftsmanship."

The distillery itself in tiny Loretto in central Kentucky in the heart of bourbon country was the first in America to be named a national historic landmark and is the oldest continuously operating bourbon distillery in the world, according the House resolution extolling Samuels’ many contributions. 

Rob Samuels put the history this way: 

"My grandparents, their vision was to try to bring bourbon and good taste together," he told me during our interview Monday. "Prior to Maker’s Mark, the category was test of manhood, aggressive, bitter whisky. Their vision was handmade bourbon that would essentially appeal to people who didn’t like bourbon. … For the first 25 years, Make’s Mark remained this cult Kentucky brand beloved brand, only by Kentuckians. Beginning in the 1980s, bartenders in big cities and the nicest restaurants sought out and discovered and embraced Maker’s Mark. It was at that point that Maker’s Mark began to grow."

Bill Jr. is the man who brought the bourbon to those big cities, once he finally decided to join the company. He sold them on that quirky but easy-drinking regional bourbon. His approach was simple, but novel: He set out to introduce himself and the bottle to bartenders in large cities where he figured taste-makers were more likely to start a word of mouth campaign. It worked brilliantly, and continued into more recent decades with the widely seen and iconic billboard ads.  

On Monday, both Samuels told me they took pride in the family business that, in their words, created the premium bourbon category in America and helped trigger the explosive growth that has put them where are now: Too many bourbon drinkers and not enough Maker’s to go around.

During all those years, Bill Jr. told me Monday, his top job was to do what his father had always demanded: To keep an eye on the product and to ensure consistency. 

So when he told me that yes, he had signed off on the proof reduction, I came away a little sad. 

"What we are taling about is not really a news story," Bill Samuels said. "Other than the fact that it has become a news story, and we kind of thought it might. But it gives us an opportunity to pull everyone back to what our promise is: And that's a quality product that is consistent day after day, batch after batch, and year after year. That's the end of the discussion."

But it's not really. The discussion has been raging far beyond that since last weekend.

It's true, of course, what he says about the water. But he is missing something important. And coming from someone whose whole career was spent telling a story about Maker's, and making sure the product lived up to the tale, it’s hard to fathom that he is. 

Of course bourbons that come out of the barrels are mixed with water before they go in the bottle to get to the desired proof. But "the bourbon" that people know is the bourbon they pour out of their bottles, not the barrel-strength stuff that they never taste. 

Part of the magic formula for Maker's has been that it uses a certain amount of water to create a specific product. You add a bit more water and a little less of the booze out of the barrel, and you have a slightly altered product. And that's true whether or not it tastes the same, as both Samuels insist that it does. 

Bourbon experts I consulted say that the taste will change, though many drinkers won't notice. Some stated that the bourbon would no longer be part of the complex cocktails that characterize the craft cocktail craze underway in many big cities. If so, that's a sad turn of events for a product that got its biggest boost in just those sorts of cocktail-crazy bars decades ago. 

But the real damage has little to do with the taste of the bourbon. And that's the thing that I would have expected the elder Samuels to see right away.

"Maker's has cheapened their brand perception, even if the product is essentially almost identical," said Dianne Gleason, a friend of mine who doubles as president of Boulder-based Enfuego Strategic Communications. "It looks like corporate greed and cheapness, pure and simple, and it is completely antithetical to the company's ethos."

'Corporate greed' and Maker's Mark have never been in the same sentence before. And for good reason. The bourbon really is made by hand, and it really is true that Bill Samuels Sr. made it for more than a decade before even turning a profit, so committed was he to the idea of getting it right. 

The whole story that Bill Samuels has told over the decades has been rooted in a simple proposition. Summed up, it might go like this: We make our bourbon slow, and we make it right. When it’s done, you’ll be glad you waited. 

But it's also true that the Maker's Mark Distillery that Bill Samuels Jr.'s son Rob runs as chief operating officer is no longer the local artisanal shop it once was. These days, it's owned by Beam Inc, an out of state conglomerate that also sells mass-produced bourbons like Jim Beam and a host of other lesser known liquors. 

Rob Samuels insists the decision to change his grandfather's formula was his alone. He said the number of important customers -- bartenders and hotels especially - who couldn't get their hands on his whiskey frustrated him. It’s not hard to understand the pressure he was feeling.

When you put bourbon down for a six-year sleep, there is a lot of guess work about how much you'll want to have ready to sell when you finally wake it up and pour into those iconic red-tipped bottles.

Bill Jr. says he screwed up bad. Several years ago, he guessed wrong about how many bourbon drinkers in the world there would be in 2013 and 2014. They don’t have time to wait another six years for Maker's to make more. So by pouring about 7 percent less liquor into the bottles, the company gets to sell more bottles. He insists that most of us won't even notice the difference. 

But others will, and the real trouble is that the push back on the decision has caused thousands of drinkers to reconsider their relationship with the world's oldest bourbon distillery. Maybe, it will be time to try those fancier bourbons that Maker’s Mark’s success has engendered. 

Gleason sees a winner in this whole mess, but it won't be Maker's. “The only winner will be Knob Creek and smaller craft distilleries who have a brilliant opportunity to launch their own marketing programs off this big fumble,” she said. 

I bet we’ll see those billboards soon. 

None of this is meant to demonize either of the Samuels. But it strikes me as a serious mistake, and one many would be glad to see reversed. I’ve asked Maker’s Mark executives and the Samuels’ PR rep for a follow-up interview. I’d like to know if it’s possible they might reconsider. I may hear from them next week, I’m told. 

Meanwhile, there are larger worries than just Maker’s fidelity to its traditions. Bartender Alba Huerta, general manager of the very cool Anvil cocktail bar in Houston, told me this week that she’s worried about Maker’s decision because it could influence other, lesser-known distilleries to follow suit. After all, with more and more bars stocking scores of hard to find bourbons shortages will be increasingly common. 

She’s hoping – and I am guessing she is far from alone here – that the Beam-owned Maker’s sees its influence among other distilleries wane, and that those others reject the example and keep their products strong. 

If that happens, I guess we’ll keep a better bourbon supply on the shelves. But for this son of Kentucky, the news will stay just as sad.

Some photos of Louisville, because I feel like it

From December, 2012.

Telling stories about the Kentucky Derby, and you're invited to help

I am writing a feature on Louisville during the Kentucky Derby, and as I am scouring the field for research and readying my brain, I wanted to cast a wide net to other Louisvillians -- and one-visitors -- for their own memories of the Derby, especially told through the lens of what you ate and drank and did while you were there -- and where you did it, and with whom.

In other words, as I ready my story, I'd love to hear yours first. Leave me a comment below or an email to lindenbe@stanford.edu or hit me up on this newfangled social poster.