THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Thursday, March 12, 2020 |A
Search
And Surprise
The Lost Family
By Libby Copeland
(Abrams Press, 294 pages, $27)BOOKSHELF| By Amy Dockser Marcus
T
he stories keep coming. You, or perhaps a sibling,
spouse or friend, take a DNA test expecting to fill out
missing branches on the family tree, learn about a
far-flung relation, or discover a distant connection to
royalty or celebrity. Instead, the results deliver utterly
unimagined surprises. The past comes rushing in and
jostles settled assumptions and understandings.
When any of us buys a consumer DNA test, “we are
embarking on a vast social experiment, the full implications
of which we can’t yet know,” writes Libby Copeland in “The
Lost Family,” a fascinating account of lives dramatically
affected by genetic sleuthing. Ms. Copeland, a former editor
and reporter at the Washington Post, suggests that the size
of DNA databases, now estimated at more than 25 million
people, is a big part of what makes them so valuable.
Family historians and genealogists have used them to find
long-lost relatives but also sperm donors who were
promised anonymity or birth parents who participated in
closed adoptions. Some people are eager, even grateful, to
make connections; others don’t want to be found.
Among the most vexing of the challenges prompted by a
DNA test is the one posed by hidden, and suddenly revealed,
details of family lineage. In Ms. Copeland’s most extended
and absorbing portrait, she describes the investigations of
Alice Collins Plebuch, now
in her early 70s, who after
a career in data processing
was enjoying retirement in
Vancouver, Wash., when
she took a DNA test that
changed her life. Her data-
crunching skills had already
come in handy when she
decided, years before, to
delve into the family
genealogy. Initially she built
her family tree by combing
through historical records and
family Bibles. On her mother’s
side, she traced one branch all
the way back to England in the
1500s. But when she turned her
attention to her father, she had many
questions and very little to go on. From the outset, much
of Jim Collins’s family history was a mystery.
It was known that Jim Collins’s mother had died when
he was a baby and that his father had given up the three
children to a Catholic orphanage in Sparkill, N.Y., where the
boy had remained until the age of 15. To support himself,
according the family lore, he played pool for money and
ran errands for gamblers. Eventually he joined the Army,
met Ms. Plebuch’s mother and got married. The couple
went on to raise seven children. For Ms. Plebuch, her
father’s Irish roots and Catholic faith remained the core
of his identity, but she wanted to know more about his
ancestry. So in 2012 she turned to a DNA testing service,
assuming that her own DNA would offer additional clues
beyond the few facts she had turned up.
At the time, DNA testing was not as popular or
accessible as it is now. People were largely on their own
when they tried to understand test results and navigate
surprises. So Ms. Plebuch wasn’t sure where to turn when
the testing service sent her its report. Instead of the full
Irish, English and Scottish ancestry she expected, the test
indicated that a significant portion of her DNA could be
traced to Eastern Europe and European Jewish ancestry.
The news shocked her. At first, she wondered whether
she was truly the biological child of her parents. She
persuaded other family members to get tested too. The
tests revealed that she and her siblings did indeed share
the same mother and father. The secret, it turned out, lay
in the genetic origins of her father, unknown even to him.
“He was not who he thought he was,” Ms. Copeland writes.Ms. Plebuch’s effort to solve the mystery of her father’s
life makes for fascinating reading. She takes courses in the
science of DNA testing. She compiles spreadsheets of data.
Her growing expertise is critical to her quest. Even more
crucial is her ability to elicit the sympathy and participa-
tion of people who are biologically related but utterly
unknown to her. By helping her understand the changing
narrative of her life, they write themselves into her story.
Eventually she discovers how her father, a Jewish baby
from Eastern Europe, ended up with Irish Catholic parents.
But the most poignant parts of the story arise not so much
from the revelation itself as from her family’s efforts to
wrestle with it. There is sadness when they reflect on their
father’s hard road but also a recognition that they all exist
because of a surprising twist in their father’s fate. “The
vagaries of history had led them here,” writes Ms. Copeland
of the family members, “so they had to make peace with
it.” The Collins siblings and some of their cousins take a
cruise together. Just a few years earlier, they had not even
known the others existed.
In the course of her research, Ms. Copeland hears dozens
of stories from a burgeoning community of “seekers...
obsessed with figuring out just what’s in their genes.” Many
are grateful for what they learn, even when there is no happy
ending. Linda Minten discovers, from a DNA test at age 51,
that she was adopted. When she tracks down her birth
relatives, they don’t want to develop a relationship with her.
Ricki Lewis takes a DNA test that leads her to discover that
her late father was not her biological parent; she was
conceived through sperm donation. A newly found half-sister
shares data with her that Ms. Lewis uses to make a high-
stakes medical decision.
Ms. Copeland notes that the marketing campaigns for
companies such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA encourage
people to believe that their genes can explain almost
everything about their lives, a claim that the personal stories
in the book belie. During a visit to Ancestry’s headquarters
in Lehi, Utah, Ms. Copeland sees a room filled with artifacts
that Ancestry collects, such as yearbooks and wills, before
they are digitized and made accessible to customers. She is
struck by the endless labor involved: As quickly as records
are saved, more are made. It’s not surprising that, in the
search for identity, even as one question is answered,
another emerges. For many people, the struggle to find
meaning in genealogical inquiry is never quite over.Ms. Dockser Marcus is a Wall Street Journal reporter in Boston.A lot of people are taking advantage of DNA
testing and other ways of tracing their origins.
They’re not always prepared for what they find.Biden Was Right to Back the Iraq War
‘M
y friends are dead
because of your
policies,” a man
shouted at Joe Biden the
other day. “You are disquali-
fied, sir.” He was referring to
Mr. Biden’s October 2002 vote
for the Iraq war. But Mr. Biden
should be proud of that vote.
Recall the history. Presi-
dent Bush, in his January
2002 State of the Union ad-
dress, stated that Saddam
Hussein had “plotted to de-
velop anthrax and nerve gas
and nuclear weapons for over
a decade” and had “something
to hide from the civilized
world.” He later warned that
if Iraq didn’t submit to in-
spections, the U.S. and allies
mighthavetohavetogoto
war with Iraq.
In October Congress passed
a joint resolution empowering
Mr. Bush to deploy armed
forces “as he determines to be
necessary” to defend Amer-
ica’s security “against the
continuing threat posed by
Iraq.” Mr. Biden was one of 29
Democrats to vote in favor. In
February 2003, Secretary ofState Colin Powell told the
United Nations Security Coun-
cil that Saddam was secretly
developing weapons of mass
destruction. But it turned out
Saddam resisted inspections
because he lacked WMD, not
because he had them.Assuming that he would
soon be attacked, Saddam re-
vealed to his generals that he
had no WMD. If Saddam’s
own generals had believed he
had WMD, one can hardly
fault U.S. intelligence for com-
ing to the same conclusion.
The U.S. invaded Iraq in
March 2003, and before the
end of the month had de-
feated Iraqi troops and taken
control of the country. U.S.
troops had to go over Iraq
with a fine-toothed comb be-
fore officials could conclude
with certainty that there were
no WMD.
In December 2003, U.S. ser-
vicemen found Saddam in an
underground hideout. Before
he was executed, he told in-
terrogators that he wanted
Iran to believe he had WMD.
Iran was an archenemy he had
fought in a bloody stalematefrom 1980 to 1988. Saddam
also said he wanted to recon-
stitute his nuclear program to
compete with Iran and Israel
in nuclear weapons.
Saddam Hussein was a
cruel tyrant who used chemi-
cal WMD against Iraqi Shiites
and Kurds and against Iran in- In 1990 he conquered
Kuwait, forcing the U.S. to go
to war to reverse the inva-
sion. Saddam was a menace to
the region and the world, and
Mr. Biden was right to sup-
port the war that deposed
him.
Mr. Stearman, who served
on the National Security
Council staff under four presi-
dents, is author of “An Ameri-
can Adventure, From Early
Aviation Through Three Wars
to the White House” (Naval
Institute Press, 2012).By William Lloyd
Stearman
‘Disqualified’? He
should defend his
2002 vote with pride.OPINION
B
ernie Sanders badly
needed to win the Michi-
gan primary. It was 2016,
and he’d lost eight of 12 Super
Tuesday contests to Hillary
Clinton and split delegates al-
most equally in the four con-
tests the following weekend.
It looked impossible: The
EPIC/Free Press poll said he
trailed in Michigan, 31% to Mrs.
Clinton’s 56%. But in a shocker,
the Vermont socialist upset the
front-runner, 49.7% to 48.3%,
and gained enough ground to
stay in the race until the Demo-
cratic convention.
This year Mr. Sanders again
needed a reset in Michigan, but
he didn’t get it. Just the oppo-
site: Rural Michigan flipped and
crushed him. He also lost every
county in Missouri, the closest
primary contest in 2016. He
barely missed the 15% delegate
threshold in Mississippi and
lost in Idaho. He won a much
smaller victory in North Dakota
than he did four years ago and
leads narrowly in Washington
state, where votes are still be-
ing counted.
Most Democratic leaders
and pundits believe the contest
is over—and it almost certainly
is. As of Wednesday, Mr. Biden
has 801 delegates. He needs
1,190 more for the 1,991 neces-
sary for a first-ballot victory,
or 49.9% of the outstanding
delegates. Splitting the vote
from here on will give the for-
mer vice president the win. Mr.
Sanders has 657 delegates and
must take 1,334 for a majority,
or 55.9% of what’s left.
Victory will look even less
Biden Can’t Lose, at Least Until November
attainable for Mr. Sanders af-
ter next week, when Arizona,
Florida, Illinois and Ohio vote.
In 2016, Mrs. Clinton swept all
four. And the remaining con-
tests offer little hope: In 2016,
Mr. Sanders collected only
44.8% of their delegates, not
markedly different than the
45.6% of all delegates he re-
ceived that year.
If next week doesn’t go well
for Mr. Sanders, the sugges-
tions—demands, really—that
he concede to Mr. Biden will
multiply. That might have a
big impact on the typical po-
litico hoping to curry favor
with party grandees.But Mr. Sanders is neither a
conventional candidate nor a
party man. A lifelong indepen-
dent socialist, he sees himself as
leader of a movement seeking a
revolutionary takeover of the
Democratic Party and a trans-
formation of the government
and country. Sharing his ag-
grievement over what they con-
sider a rigged nominating sys-
tem, many of Mr. Sanders’s
backers will encourage him to
keep fighting, even with pretty
slim chances for a multiballot
convention. Because the scrappy
left-winger still wants to influ-
ence Mr. Biden’s choice of run-
ning mate and get the party on
record for a socialist agenda, hemay well stay in the contest as
long as his resources allow.
Mr. Sanders also may think
he’ll do better in a one-on-one
race, raising the stakes for Sun-
day’s debate. It’s perhaps the
senator’s last chance to slow
the Joe-mentum. But his usual
attacks on Mr. Biden’s record
on Iraq and trade are too back-
ward-focused. Voters are more
concerned with future perfor-
mance, including vision and fit-
ness for the job. Yet raising
questions about Mr. Biden’s
mental acuity—his ability to
string coherent sentences to-
gether—is hard to do without
offending some voters.
On Wednesday Mr. Sanders
said he will ask Mr. Biden
where he stands on Medicare
for All, climate action, college
debt and a “racist criminal-jus-
tice system.” If he can’t be the
candidate, sounds like he
wants to write the platform.
Mr. Biden isn’t a particu-
larly good candidate, so why is
Mr. Sanders running worse
than in 2016? Partly because
the longer Bernie was on
stage, the more concerned tra-
ditional Democrats became;
his praise of Fidel Castro crys-
tallized their fears. Also, don’t
forget that Mrs. Clinton was a
dreadful candidate not only in
the 2016 general election, but
in the primaries as well.
Looking ahead, Mr. Biden
must figure out how to keep
Bernie’s Brigades voting Dem-
ocratic this fall. Many of them
think they’re more likely to
take over the party if President
Trump beats Mr. Biden.
Some Sandernistas appar-
ently believed that in 2016.Drawing on a YouGov/Harvard
study, Tufts Prof. Brian Schaff-
ner suggests 12% of Mr. Sand-
ers’s 2016 primary supporters
voted for Mr. Trump. This
would have resulted in Mr.
Trump picking up around
48,000 Sanders voters in Mich-
igan, which he carried by
10,704 votes; 51,000 in Wiscon-
sin, which he won by 22,748;
and 117,000 in Pennsylvania,
which he took by 44,292. That
sort of defection Mr. Biden may
not be able to afford.
While obtaining a delegate
majority, Mr. Biden must also
conciliate the Sanders voters.
He shouldn’t do that by moving
further left. He’s already made
himself a juicy target for Re-
publicans by agreeing with
many goofy nostrums of the
left during this primary, em-
bracing the framework of the
Green New Deal and free health
care for illegal aliens. Nor
should he speculate about fu-
ture cabinet appointments:
Nothing says smug and entitled
like doing that this early.
The former vice president
must keep campaigning as if
it’s South Carolina’s make-or-
break moment, while attempt-
ing to conciliate Bernie’s
backers by emphasizing their
common ground and greater
goal of replacing Donald
Trump. This will be hard to
do: Many Sanders supporters
are irreconcilable.Mr. Rove helped organize
the political-action committee
American Crossroads and is
author of “The Triumph of Wil-
liam McKinley” (Simon &
Schuster, 2015).Sanders is down and
probably out, but
will all his supporters
unite behind his rival?By Karl Rove
The Demo-
cratic presi-
dential pri-
mary race is
effectively
over. Bernie
Sanders can’t
win. The rate
of turnout in
primaries
among the
millennial so-
cialists who are his base does
not match turnout among Joe
Biden’s voters, most notably
black Democrats. These reali-
ties won’t change for Mr.
Sanders. Indeed, they will
worsen, and for one reason—
the coronavirus.
The American public has
become preoccupied with the
spread of this uncertain
health threat. Enthusiasm is
leaking quickly from the Dem-
ocrats’ once-entertaining gal-
lery of presidential candi-
dates, which at the outset
included a self-help guru, a
congresswoman from Hawaii,
the mayor of South Bend, Ind.,
and of course a Marxist Ver-
mont U.S. senator who wasn’t
even a Democrat. It was fun
while it lasted.
Then came Covid-19. It was
telling that on Wednesday, as
Mr. Sanders held his delu-
sional news conference, vow-
ing to press on, the World
Health Organization at that
moment officially declared the
coronavirus a global pan-
demic. In the time of coronavi-
rus, everyone is looking for
The Democrats Self-Quarantine
safe havens. For Democrats,
sheltering in place means en-
dorsing and voting for Joe Bi-
den, a gaffe pandemic.
American politics has be-
come so crazy that people are
starting to think everything is
a black swan, just one unfore-
seen event after another. But
the Biden nomination is no
black swan. It was predictable
and perhaps even comforting
in its inevitability.
Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorse-
ment of Mr. Biden before the
South Carolina vote will re-
main the signal event of the
2020 Democratic primary.
What followed was an all-at-
once burst of endorsements
for Mr. Biden from every cor-
ner of the Democratic Party.
Not just the usual Washington
figures, but governors, small-
town mayors, statehouse rep-
resentatives, dogcatchers.
When it became obvious
that Mr. Sanders was at risk of
losing the pivotal Michigan pri-
mary, whom did he send in as
ballast? Jesse Jackson and two
members of “The Squad”—
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and Rashida Tlaib. Ms. Tlaib is
at least from Michigan though
manifestly with less clout there
than on Twitter.
Of its nature, modern media
changes the narratives of our
lives on an hourly basis, con-
veying the notion that every-
thing is being disrupted, and
that a new generation of influ-
encers like AOC, with their In-
stagram skills, are driving the
disruption, nearly always for
the better. New media made
Bernie look like an unstoppa-
ble force, carried forward on a
wave of progressive 20-some-
things. Then reality intruded.
It turns out the Democratic
Party is only minimally inter-
ested in self-identifying with
socialism and overwhelminglyabout traditional party self-
preservation. Much more so
than Republicans, the Demo-
cratic Party is a highly inter-
connected ecosystem of in-
cumbency and patronage
dependent on a predictable
flow of public money and lib-
eral philanthropy that lubri-
cates every cog of the party’s
sprawling machinery. When
they think of the U.S. economy,
this is it.
Even more revealing than
the Clyburn endorsement was
the report that on Sunday eve-
ning former Democratic Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid of
Nevada called his former aide
Faiz Shakir, who is now Mr.
Sanders’s campaign manager,
to tell him personally that he
was endorsing Mr. Biden. As
Hyman Roth said, “This is the
business we’ve chosen.”
Mr. Sanders’s fatal problem
is that his agenda, a legislative
fantasy, was totally abstracted
from the pedestrian realities
of life in the Democratic Party.
Ditto his base of dreamy so-
cialist supporters and gentry
liberals, such as the Google
workers who routinely walk
off the job over alleged genderoffenses and the like. Liberal
politicians are willing to in-
dulge this stuff only so long as
this otherworldly vote flows in
their direction.
None of this resolves the
party’s underlying divisions.
Joe Biden is no Barack
Obama. Mr. Biden is best seen
as the moderate winner of
“Democratic Survivor.” If Mr.
Biden’s candidacy had col-
lapsed, as it did in 1987 and
2008, Democratic primary
voters would have defaulted
to last moderate standing, as
Mike Bloomberg reasonably
assumed.
Now the party is stuck with
a 77-year-old guy who is bi-
zarrely prone to picking fights
with factory workers. It’s
hardly promising when the
candidate running on a return
to civility and normalcy looks
increasingly like a different
version of Trumpian road rage.
The coronavirus has put an old
phrase on everyone’s lips: We
are in uncharted waters. And
so it is with this presidential
election, which could come
down to voters having to
choose between the two nomi-
nees’ mental conditions.
The next event, assuming it
occurs, is this Sunday’s debate
between Mr. Biden and Mr.
Sanders—in an empty room.
Team Biden will tell their con-
tender to rope-a-dope Bernie
to a draw. That’s not Bernie’s
game. In his news conference,
Mr. Sanders promised to de-
mand in the debate that the
former vice president sign on
to his stump speech’s familiar
laundry list of progressive de-
mands. Mr. Biden’s assent, in
some significant measure, will
be Mr. Sanders’s price for de-
livering his substantial base of
outsiders to the quarantined
Democratic Party.
Write [email protected].Everyone is looking
for safe havens. For
Democrats, that
means Joe Biden.
WONDER
LAND
By Daniel
Henninger
Biden in Nevada Feb. 20.MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES