Free The Story by Judith Miller Page A

between Barnard and graduate school in Brussels and London with my half brother Jimmy, who had started producing what became some of the Rolling Stones’ greatest hits. Jimmy—who would tragically die at age fifty-two of heroin-related liver failure in 1994—was a son from my father’s second, brief marriage. Since we hadn’t spent much time together when we were young, I loved getting to know him. Though he was only six years older, he was already establishing himself as a musical force in London, the center of the sixties music revolution.
    An avid R&B drummer and composer, Jimmy had remixed what became the Spencer Davis Group’s first big American success—“Gimme Some Lovin’,” whose driving beat made it a megahit in 1967. When Steve Winwood broke away to form his own rock group, Traffic, Jimmy produced its albums, too, among them the rock classic Mr. Fantasy.
    Although I had enrolled at the London School of Economics, I quickly lost interest in my courses, preferring to watch Jimmy work—usually from midnight to dawn. Unlike other producers, he rarely stayed behind the glass wall separating him and the engineer from the musicians in the recording studio. When Jimmy got into the music, a friend recalled, he would abandon his giant console where tracks were mixed and appear in the studio, accompanying the musicians on drums, singing along in harmony, or adding an original sound to a track: a washboard, a whistle, a flute, a tambourine, finger cymbals, congas, castanets, and, my favorite, the cowbell that opened the Rolling Stones’ classic “Honky Tonk Women.”
    Eddie Kramer, Jimmy’s protégé and his favorite recording engineer, said years later that my brother was a true “musical impresario,” who, like our father, knew how to bring musicians together, rehearse them ’til they dropped, and excite them about their work. Jimmy was “unstoppable,” he told an interviewer. 4
    Jimmy was just starting to work with the Rolling Stones when I arrived to live in London. Though the reigning dean of rock today, Mick Jagger was anxious back then about bucking the prevailing trends, Jimmy told me. Friends were showering him with unsolicited, contradictory advice about what to record next. Jimmy weighed in emphatically: stick to your roots, he told Jagger. Be who you are, advice he gave everyone he loved, which I, too, would take to heart.
    As much as I loved the musical scene, I knew that it would not be the focus of my life—and I missed America. So when I had a chance to apply for a full scholarship in a master’s program at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, I leapt at it. (The school, too, was short of women grad students. My class had four women and fifty men.) Thanks to Princeton, I fell in love with the Middle East and journalism.
    In the summer of 1972, Princeton sent me to Jerusalem to write a paper required for my degree. The topic was one of Israel’s early grassroots campaigns to stop the government from building an ugly housing compound on a hilltop overlooking Jerusalem, the eastern half of which Israel had annexed after the ’67 war. 5
    My academic paper reflected none of the excitement I felt. After I finished my research in Israel, I traveled through Cyprus—Israel was then isolated from its Arab neighbors—to Cairo; Amman, Jordan; and Beirut, Lebanon. After interviewing officials and as many ordinary people as I could, since I didn’t speak either Hebrew or Arabic, I was sure there would be another Arab-Israeli war—and soon. I had seen much that wasn’t showing up in the newspapers. I sent an essay to the Progressive about a group of Israelis who called themselves “black panthers.” These young Jews from North Africa, imitating their American counterparts, were protesting Israel’s discrimination against Jews from Arab lands. The