Behind the Shock Machine by Gina Perry

Author:Gina Perry
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781595589255
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

MILGRAM’S STAFF

On his university’s website, J. Keith Williams, dressed in a suit and tie, smiled at the camera. He was fair-haired and pale-skinned. Unlike his father, he wore glasses. And unlike his father, whose photographs showed a man stern and unsmiling, Keith grinned easily. He was pleased, and thanked me, when I told him he looked like his dad.

Keith taught in the physician-assistant program at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and I caught him between classes in the lab. He shared with me his memories of his father. Keith remembered going to Yale with his dad one night, when he was about nine, to pick up a check from a Dr. Milgram. They parked in one of Yale’s side streets, and John told his son that he’d have to stay in the car. “He said I couldn’t come inside with him because it was secret. And I remember he left me sitting in the car, and it was dark, and all the buildings were stone with ivy growing on them; it was a little bit spooky.” I imagined the young Keith, circa 1961, sitting in the front seat, twiddling the radio knob, wanting to hear a human voice in the dark street—and never guessing that, in the building just a few feet away, some of the most famous and controversial experiments of the twentieth century were taking place and his dad was part of them. Little did Keith know that his dad’s stern demeanor would one day be famous.

I was curious to know whether John was as commanding and serious as he appeared. It was John, after all, who personified what Milgram called a “malevolent authority.” Keith laughed and agreed. The role of the disciplinarian came naturally to his father. Keith’s grandfather had been a strict authority figure, too, and John’s three years in the military had reinforced his commanding air. In addition, John—the oldest of three sons, like Keith—had responsibility thrust on him from a young age. He married in 1951, when he was twenty-one, just out of the air force and a freshman at college. In 1956, his father had a stroke that left him paralyzed down the left side, and John and his small family, who had been living in a third-floor flat in New Haven, moved back into the Williamses’ family home to help John’s now-disabled father run the family business—a forty-four-seat restaurant—and contribute to the mortgage. By 1961, when the experiments began, they had only just moved out of the family home and into their own place in Southbury, Connecticut. John took the job at Yale because he needed the money. He was supporting his wife, Roberta, and eight-year-old Keith, and his high school science teacher’s salary wasn’t enough. In addition, Roberta was expecting another baby.

Keith remembered that, when he was a boy, his father “could be a little petulant, a bit short-tempered.” When I asked him to elaborate, he told me, “He was quite strict with me. . . . My father and I were a little distant at times when I was growing up because he was such an authoritarian.

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