74 APPENDICES
I. Author’s Biography and works
James B. Stewart lives in Manhattan. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
He has written on such subjects as the Time Warner–A.O.L. merger, the post-prison
S.E.C. investigation of Michael Milken, Disney, the Clintons, and Steinway.
In 2005, Stewart published “DisneyWar,” his book on the internal rift among
the top brass at the company. Selections from the book first appeared in The New
Yorker. His 2002 book, “Heart of a Soldier,” which traced the life of a single victim
of the September 11th attacks, grew out of his New Yorker article “The Real Heroes
Are Dead.” In 1996, he published “Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries,”
a book about the Clinton White House and the Whitewater affair. He is the author of
four other books, including “Den of Thieves” (1991), about Michael Milken, Ivan
Boesky, and the nineteen-eighties junk-bond scandal; “The Partners” (1983); “The
Prosecutors” (1987); and “Blind Eye” (1999), based on an article originally
published in the magazine, about Dr. Michael Swango. That book won the Edgar
Allan Poe Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America.
Stewart is the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia
University. He was a founding editor of SmartMoney, in 1992, and still writes a
column for the magazine. His weekly column for SmartMoney.com also appears in
the Wall Street Journal. Stewart was the front-page editor of the Wall Street
Journal from 1988 until 1992. He began at the paper in 1983 and during his tenure
there won many awards for his reporting. In 1987, he and the deputy news editor,
Daniel Hertzberg, received a Gerald Loeb deadline-writing award for their coverage
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of the Ivan Boesky insider-trading scandal. In addition, Stewart and Hertzberg shared
a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism and a 1987 George Polk Award for
financial reporting for their coverage of the 1987 stock-market crash and their profile
chronicling the downfall of the investment banker Martin Siegel. The two also
received a 1988 Gerald Loeb Award.
Before joining the Journal, Stewart practiced law at the firm of Cravath,
Swaine & Moore, in New York City. He left the firm after three years, in 1979, to
become executive editor of The American Lawyer magazine.
II. Summary of the novel
Dr. Michael Swango came from an unloving home dominated by a tyrannical,
cruel, and often absent father and a loving but inadequate and frustrated mother. He
graduated as the valedictorian from his Catholic high school in Quincy, Illinois, in
1972, attended Millikin University for two years, enlisted in the Marines for two
years, and then graduated summa cum laude from Quincy College, having already
started on his road to fraud by falsifying his military record when applying to the
college.
Enrolling at Southern Illinois University’s medical school in 1979, Swango
quickly stood out because of his odd, militaristic, and antisocial behavior. He failed
to graduate with his class in 1982 because of what Stewart describes as startlingly
apathetic and fraudulent activity on an obstetrics and gynecology rotation. By that
time a macabre circumstantial association was already evident between his presence
and patients' deaths. Although he came within one vote of expulsion, Swango
graduated in April 1983, bound for a neurosurgery residency at Ohio State University
(OSU). It is at this point that the conspiracy of silence begins.
