What it takes to win

Hard work and being smart only get you so far. After that it gets complicated.

When I was 14, I won first prize in the National History Day competition in Washington, DC. I know this probably doesn’t sound very impressive. Even within the elite world of nerdy high school contests, National History Day isn’t like the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee. No one is making indie documentaries about how intense and quirky this competition is. It’s not even your state championship scholastic bowl, and most likely you’ve never heard of it. But it was a big deal to me at the time, and I worked really hard to earn the title, and the gold medal that now sits in an old shoebox in the top of a closet at my mom’s house is a big one.

There’s also a more painful side to this story that has to do with.. well.. for lack of a better word, cheating. I guess I should call it cheating. Lying, at least. But I don’t even know. It’s been almost 30 years, and well.. life and life lessons are just complicated.

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First, I should explain exactly what National History Day is, both because it’s relevant to this story and it’s actually pretty cool. NHD is an annual nationwide high school and middle school competition that still exists today and is sponsored by various non-profit foundations. High school and junior high students enter either individually or as a group, and each individual or team exhaustively researches a particular historical event or person or whatever and produces a thing that tells that story. There are categories for written historical paper (self-explanatory); historical performance (write and perform a one-act play or monologue that depicts some historical event); historical display (basically put together a mini museum-type exhibit that tells a story); and historical documentary (make a YouTube video or similar and tell your story that way). If it all sounds like a history teacher’s way of competing with the annual science fair to capture over-achieving kids’ hard work and attention, well — that’s exactly what it is.

In 1994, I entered the NHD competition in the individual audio-visual / documentary category. Obviously, this wasn’t a YouTube thing at the time. Most kids worked through their school’s A/V department or media club and did a short ten minute documentary on VHS. My extremely rural and not-at-all-well-funded public high school in Missouri farm country didn’t have anything like that. The only video equipment that existed within the entire school was literally a bulky VHS camcorder that belonged to (of course) the football team. Thus, I created my media story using technology that was laughably outdated even for 1994 — that is, a carousel slide projector.

Lo-fi 90s hipster tech

The theme of the competition that year was “Geography in History,” and my presentation had to do with the United States’ forcible relocation of Pacific Islanders living on Bikini Atoll in 1946. Post-WWII, the United States had a lot of Cold War nuclear weapons testing to do, and we weren’t about to perform those tests on U.S. soil, so our military arrived on the shores of Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific and invited (encouraged?) (mandated?) the island inhabitants to move elsewhere so that our government could set off a bunch of atomic bombs and perform the tests there. “Operation Crossroads” as it was called resulted in a staggering twenty-four nuclear tests at the Bikini site between 1946 and 1958.

Operation Crossroads. Honestly what the fuck, but I digress.

The nuclear tests, predictably, ravaged Bikini, killed everything in the lagoon, and left the whole area more or less uninhabitable for the foreseeable millennia. The chosen relocation islands for the displaced Bikinians turned out to be utterly ill-suited, without sufficient plants or fish to support an island population, and many of the islanders starved. The remaining population has been moved multiple times by the United States government in the decades since, and each time the situation hasn’t worked out quite as hoped. Today, many of the descendants of Bikini live in the South Pacific still, but they are dependent on (meager) government assistance and supplies and their once self-sufficient and sustainable island paradise is long gone. It’s an infuriating story that absolutely needs to be told, and I was glad I got to work on a piece that helped raise awareness about it. Also, the NHD judges liked the end product, because my slide show presentation won first place at our regional competition in southwest Missouri, then won first at the state level in Columbia, and finally won first in the nation at the national competition at the University of Maryland in College Park.¹ All of which is pretty cool, I guess.

That part about the cheating, though. It’s at this point that I have to talk about Mrs. Kilmer.² Mrs. Kilmer was my history teacher. She was one of three history teachers at the combined middle school/high school I attended, and she was, to put it mildly, a formidable presence. Loud, overbearing, aggressive in style, a fantastic lecturer, and utterly demanding in what she expected of students — she was the driving force behind History Day at my high school. History Day was Mrs. Kilmer’s thing, and her students were good at it. She won a lot. Other schools would send entire squads of multiple entrants to the competition, but Mrs. Kilmer hand-picked a single student or two each year who she thought was willing and capable of putting in the necessary work, and she told that student or students — you’re it. You’re the one competing this year. There was no audition or discussion of potential topics or anything like that. She picked the winners, end of discussion, and then she worked them to death. Of course, most high schools have a Mrs. Kilmer of some sort — a debate coach, a band teacher, or a swim team coach or whoever — someone who has the relentless drive to win and has something of a cult following within the school. We all respected her and were, naturally, terrified of her.

My documentary presentation on Bikini was accompanied by an exhaustive bibliography of books, magazines, contemporary source material, and academic research — easily 80 or 100 sources, only a tiny fraction of which I had actually read. Internet research was only barely sort of a thing in 1994, and most of it had to be done through a college library. A 14-year-old would have no idea where to start, but Mrs. Kilmer was an old hand at this, and she spent hours at the local college gathering sources, reading microfiche, and ordering books from across the country using inter-library loan. Some of the hard copy sources were original from the 1940s and impossible to actually lay your hands on without an archivist’s help.

There was also an audio track (played off of a cassette tape) that accompanied my slide show. The audio track was where I narrated the story, telling the plight of the Bikini people, and it followed a script that was organized and written by Mrs. Kilmer. I recorded the audio at a local radio station where Mrs. Kilmer was friends with a country music DJ who let us use the professional studio free of charge. The DJ (his name was Bob) did the actual work of recording the audio over numerous takes, and then he mixed it, added some ocean waves and Oppenheimer-esque sound effects where appropriate, spliced it (manually, with reel-to-reel tape, mind you), and added backing music. Bob reduced it all down to a single audio cassette that I played alongside the carousel projector slide show.

In case I haven’t made it clear — putting this presentation together was an unbelievable amount of work. But it wasn’t necessarily my work. The script wasn’t mine. I hadn’t done the research myself. I hadn’t mixed the audio or selected the backing track or made the key choices about which of the hundreds of photos collected through research should be turned into slides to go with the narrative. The whole thing took hundreds and hundreds of hours of effort — from librarians, a DJ/audio engineer, and a teacher who had worked in this competition for at least a decade or more. But none of the actual decisions were mine. I was a vessel for competing, but not really anything more than that. When the judges would ask me questions after the presentation — grilling me on my knowledge of the subject matter and how I put together my documentary — all of my answers were rehearsed fabrications based on work that Mrs. Kilmer had done, but I hadn’t.

Maybe some of that is to be expected though, right? No 14-year-old just “knows” how to do a historical documentary. At the higher levels of competition, the adults are contributing a lot to make sure everything comes together. Was I any different from the science fair kid whose dad was a research chemist and had access to all the cool science toys and methods? I mean, I’ll admit — I’m sure there were other students in the competition who, unlike me, had actually done all the work for their project themselves. But their end product wasn’t as good as mine, and I had the benefit of an over-bearing, over-involved coach who really wanted to win. But so did everyone else whose coaches really took the competition seriously, you know? If figuring out how much help/direction from your coach is “too much” is really just a line drawing exercise, I’m sure my contest effort probably sat on the “wrong” side of that line. But I’m also not really sure where that line even belongs.

One thing I am sure about though is that part of my little Bikini documentary was definitely 100% faked. One of the “oh wow, a 14-year-old did this?!” moments in the 10-minute documentary came from a voice-over clip narrated by Esther — an actual refugee of Bikini who I interviewed for the documentary and whose gut-wrenching story was spliced into the audio track amidst photos of destitute, homeless islanders. Except… how do I say this. Esther was actually the mom of one of my classmates. She was Polynesian — it’s true that she had grown up in the South Pacific. But not Bikini.³ She’d never been to Bikini. And I didn’t interview her. Esther read a script written by Mrs. Kilmer that was based on a first-hand account of one of the surviving islanders that she had found in the research. I can’t really defend this, except to say.. I mean.. it made for a good story. People do some shady stuff when they want to tell a good story.

Not where Esther is from.

Anyway. This little documentary won first prize in the National History Day competition in 1994. I got to visit DC for a week in June (my first-ever trip on an airplane), and I got to visit all the museums and monuments. I stayed on the University of Maryland campus and got to meet contestants from the other 50 states.⁴ And I won. I got a big write-up in the home town newspaper. It was a thing. But also .. I’m a little embarrassed by it.

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The thing is … looking back .. I don’t love how this all unfolded. But I’m not really sure I regret this episode. It afforded me opportunities I just wouldn’t have had otherwise. It wasn’t fair that my entry in the contest was faked and my actual creative control over the product was essentially zero. But sitting here all these years later .. now that I’m a lawyer and I deal with rules and what “ought” to happen as a matter of my daily work — I’ve ended up with a pretty conflicted view of what “fair” even means.

Are the rules for a contest like this inherently fair? Is “fairness” just what happens by default when everyone does exactly what’s expected of them, and no one pushes the boundary of what’s appropriate? Was it fair that I was competing in a contest where everyone at the national level went to much fancier high schools with much fancier professional video equipment instead of me and my rinky-dink little slide projector? Was it fair that I had to fundraise for the trip by holding literal bake sales on the grocery store parking lot and begging the local civic groups and businesses in town for contributions so that I — me, just one student — could afford to go to DC? That I was essentially a hayseed kid from a Mizzourah farm town who wanted to visit Washington, DC — a trip that anyone lucky enough to live on the east coast could just do as a matter of course? If we were all judged “equally” based on our own merit, but there was an ocean of difference between the opportunities and access that I had when compared to the other kids — was that still fair?

I don’t want to make it sound like I was a roiling cauldron of class resentment at the age of 14.. but I really wasn’t at all sure what I thought about these things. I’m still not. I knew Mrs. Kilmer wanted to win. And I knew that I wanted to win, too, but it wasn’t as personal for me. It wasn’t going to validate something in me, the way it would with her. Were I in her shoes, there’s no chance that I would have taken total control of the project like this and made it so that a grown adult was essentially competing with middle schoolers. But there’s no denying that as a 14-year-old I did benefit from this experience.

I never would have gotten the chance to visit Washington, DC as a teenager, absent Mrs. Kilmer and the National History Day competition. My family certainly couldn’t afford for us to take that kind of trip. There were no school clubs or community organizations that raised that kind of money (or even had an interest in doing so). It just wasn’t a thing that was available to me in the place and time where I grew up. The History Day competition was a special thing for me that allowed me access to something the smart kids from the bigger high schools and major cities could just take for granted. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that, without that trip to DC that summer, I might never have started to see myself as someone who belonged in a city. I might never have come back to DC to intern during law school, and thus probably never would have returned to live there for nine years after I graduated. My life, as it exists now, the path that I’m on — living in a big city with a big city job and big city friends and feeling comfortable in big city environments — it can in some way be traced back to Mrs. Kilmer and National History Day. Which… is just overwhelming to think about. My History Day presentation was a fraud, but.. it was the thing I needed to help me get where I (didn’t yet know I) wanted to go.

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I want to close this out with one more observation about competitions and winning. I don’t want it to sound like Mrs. Kilmer “taught me to win at all costs” or that “cheating is what it takes to get ahead” in this corrupt and unfair world. But what I can say is that Mrs. Kilmer absolutely taught me what the difference is between people who are just competing and people who intend to win. Like.. it’s fine to be smart and to have a talent for something. It’s good to apply yourself and work hard. It’s essential to do those things, in fact, if you want to be taken seriously and give it your best shot. But the people who win — the ones who get to the very top of the game (be it History Day, or elite positions in any other super competitive aspect of life) — they got there because they did more than just be smart and work hard. They did a lot more. Maybe they have more money, or maybe they have more inside connections, or sheer luck, or maybe they bent the rules where the needed to and justified the whole thing to themselves later — but there’s way, way more to it than just being “good” at the thing. Because being good only barely gets you in the door. What’s required to dominate the field — at the highest level where the most competitive, most obsessed people are doing all they can — you have to be better than every one of those people, and not just everyone else. It’s a lot harder than just “I’m smart and I work hard.”

So yeah. I don’t think it’s surprising that “cheating” (or what we might call cheating) takes place there — because people do want to win so badly.⁵ And frankly, this level of singular obsession — it really isn’t for me. I’m glad that I’ve settled in a bit to where I stand in life, and I don’t want to win that badly — either in competitions specifically or just in the rat race of trying to rack up professional achievements and status. I sorta pity those who do, because I mean.. the pressure to cut corners is overwhelming. I’m glad History Day and Mrs. Kilmer gave me a tiny window into what that mindset is like. But I’m going to leave it at that.

1. I do have a VHS recording somewhere that contains a copy of the presentation. Of course, I lack a machine to play it on, so it’s really just kind of a pointless memento more than anything. I haven’t seen the tape in at least 25 years.

2. Not her real name.

3. Specifically, Esther was from Pohnpei — an island in Micronesia. It’s about 600 miles from Bikini over open ocean. So.. not close.

4. I remember meeting the contestants from Hawai’i and hanging out with them in the lobby of the dorm. They introduced me to sushi for the first time. But it was about 95 degrees that day, and the dorm wasn’t air conditioned, and the sushi hadn’t been refrigerated. I gagged hard. That was the last time I had sushi for a while.

5. See for example this unbelievable story about psychology PhDs at Harvard who are accused of having faked their test data in a study about honesty of all things. Yikes.