Between 1930 and 1933 the Soviet state ordered the Kazakh nomads to stop moving, took their animals for the state's meat quota, and drove the herds to collection points where there was nothing for them to eat, and a people that had lived on milk and meat for three thousand years lost nine animals in ten and four people in ten. The Kazakhs were not farmers. They were herders of the steppe, moving with the seasons between pastures with their sheep, horses, camels and cattle, living on kumis, mutton and the dried curd of the summer milk, with their wealth on four legs and their houses on carts. Moscow's man in Alma-Ata, Filipp Goloshchekin, who had organised the shooting of the Tsar's family in a cellar, called them backward and announced a Little October: the nomads would be settled on collective farms, their herds would be pooled, and the meat procurement quotas of the five-year plan would come from the animals. The brigades came and counted the livestock and took it. Herds were driven hundreds of miles to railheads and state farms that had no fodder for them, and died there in heaps, of hunger and the winter, uneaten. Families were ordered to stop in one place on a steppe where staying in one place kills every animal by the end of the season. The quotas were set on paper and enforced with guns, and a Kazakh who slaughtered his own sheep to feed his children was prosecuted for destroying state property. The numbers are the whole story: forty million head of livestock in Kazakhstan in 1929, four million by 1933. Sheep from nineteen million to under two. Camels, the animal that had carried the nation, from a million to seventy thousand. With the animals gone the people had nothing, because the people were the animals. They walked. More than a million fled, into China, into Siberia, into the towns where they died at the stations, and a million and a half stayed and died on the steppe, something like forty percent of all the Kazakhs alive, the highest death rate of any people in the Soviet famine. Whole clans vanished. The party in Alma-Ata reported that collectivisation was proceeding. Goloshchekin was shot by his own side in 1941. A nation built on milk and meat was converted by decree into a nation of grain farmers on land that grows no grain, and the state's ledger had the herds on it as a quota to be delivered, by the ton, dead or alive. The animals had been feeding the Kazakhs for three millennia. The state fed them for three years.

In November 1941 the richest man in America drove his twenty-three-year-old daughter to a hospital in Washington without telling her mother, had two surgeons drill holes in her skull and cut into the front of her brain while she sang God Bless America to them, and when the singing stopped she had a mental age of two and the family did not speak her name for twenty years. Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and the first girl, and she was slow. A nurse at the birth had held Rose Kennedy's legs together for two hours while they waited for the doctor, and the baby had been starved of air. She learned to read and write, but late, and in a family where the boys were being bred for the presidency and the girls for the right marriage, she was the one who could not keep up, the one who had to be coached and watched and given the simpler part in the photograph. She was also, by every account, the prettiest of them, and when the family went to London in 1938 she was presented at court in a white dress and curtsied to the King without a mistake. Then she was twenty-one, and the trouble started. Moods. Rages. Slipping out of the convent school at night and coming back in the morning and not saying where. The nuns said she might be meeting men. For Joseph Kennedy, who was managing his sons towards the White House and could not have a daughter who might get pregnant or get talked about, that was the end of it. He had read about a new operation. Walter Freeman had promised the newspapers it calmed the agitated, and Joe Kennedy had never in his life been told that a thing he could pay for would not work. Rosemary was given a mild sedative and kept awake. Freeman and his surgeon, James Watts, opened the skull on both sides and Watts pushed a blade into the frontal lobes and swept, while Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and sing, and count backwards, so they would know how far to go. They went until she was incoherent. Then they stopped. She came out of it unable to walk or speak. Years of therapy got her a few words and a limp. Joe moved her to a private hospital in New York and then to a convent school in Wisconsin, told the family she was teaching the retarded in the Midwest, and never went to see her. Rose, her mother, was not told what had been done until long after, and did not visit for twenty years. The brothers and sisters, including the one who became President, were told she was away. When Joe had his stroke in 1961 and could no longer manage the story, Eunice went to Wisconsin and found a woman of forty-three who did not know her, and came home and started the Special Olympics. Rosemary lived to eighty-six, in the convent, and died in 2005 with her surviving sisters at the bed. The brother who became President had signed the first federal mental health law in 1963, and the family has said she was the reason. Freeman kept operating for another twenty-six years. His notes on Rosemary have never been released. That is what the expert's confidence looks like when it meets a powerful man with an inconvenient child. The science was published. The father was certain. The daughter sang to the surgeon until she could not. Every institution that has ever decided it knows what is wrong with you and how to tidy it has the same two ingredients in the room, and the person on the table is still the only one who pays.