31 - TILTING THE BALANCE

image [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/Tiergarten_Nuernberg_Eingang.jpg/800px-Tiergarten_Nuernberg_Eingang.jpg?20080407151635]

The entrance to Nuremberg Zoo.

All of Muldoon and Harding's careful, deliberate maneuvering would have been pointless, without the right candidates to try and recruit.

But what is the right candidate?

Here, Harding and Muldoon found themselves facing the crucial issue that had been plaguing the selection process as a whole: which professional figures, and in which composition, would be ideally suited to deliver an assessment of Jurassic Park’s viability?

And here, again, what followed was not a theoretical or epistemological answer in a vacuum; but a contingent development that flowed organically and logically from the premise.

When it comes to Jurassic Park’s endorsement team, motivation holds a lot of explanatory power - but it’s not the only factor in play.

In terms of pure motivation, it’s likely that Harding and Muldoon were sincere in their shared motivation to find candidates that would genuinely bolster the endorsement team. Additionally, they had a verbal agreement to put forward one name each, and mutually support both candidates.

But they also faced a certain type of pressure.

Having decided to act against Hammond’s wishes, the two simply could not afford major mistakes, after all.

It would not be enough to select figures with impeccable professional backgrounds: they needed to be reliable enough, to trust with maintaining the secrecy of Jurassic Park. (1)

This introduced an element of personal trust and connection - mostly, it implied turning to former colleagues. In a sense, railroaded the choice, or at least restricted the pool of potential candidates, to fields where Muldoon and Harding had direct personal experience: their own.

In his long and storied career, Harding had of course worked with many professional figures that knew their way around animals - but there weren’t many that he would know well enough on a personal level with a role of this magnitude.

If he considered names other than his selection, he’s never shared so openly in the intervening years. But it’s easy to see how Dr Paul Joger fit the bill: a wildlife biologist with a PhD in Conservation Biology acquired in West Germany, Joger knew Harding’s from the time the two spent working with Nuremberg Zoo. (2)

Their genuine professional respect soon matured into personal friendship.

Employment in Nuremberg was always going to be temporary for both. Harding’s reputation as an expert of avian veterinary care was beginning to form, and Nuremberg was just one of many stops in his globe-trotting consultancy years. As for Joger, his primary interest was never in zoos.

After moving on from Nuremberg, Joger spent a decade working on conservation efforts surrounding large carnivores, particularly tigers in east Asia, while specialising in harmful human-wildlife interactions.

Like many other workers in the field at the time, he applied himself to overcoming acute issues such as local superstitions, and genuine points of attrition (like danger to livestock) that led to conflict between humans and large carnivores.

Joger and Harding maintained thick epistular correspondence over the years, and Harding trusted him on a personal level, and this came on top of the undeniable consideration that Joger could bring a lot to the table: experience with wild carnivores, experience with zoos, and a deep knowledge of harmful interactions between humans and wildlife.

It’s likely that the latter point weighed particularly heavily on Harding’s mind, at a time when he was still personally shaken by the Morales incident.

As for Muldoon, his more tumultuous background - with a past in the military, then as a hunter, and finally as a gamekeeper - had exposed him to a wider diversity of contacts over the years. But the only ones he truly kept tabs with, and that he could bring himself to trust, were his former comrades in arms.

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Some were still in active service with the British armed forces, but others had moved on with civilian careers, typically in consultancy.

One such contact was former Lieutenant Colonel Andrew-Lee Crane. After Muldoon had left the military, and Crane had received his officer billet, his career focused on emergency planning and response.

A steady rise through the ranks preceded a switch to a more lucrative civilian career, advising private and public endeavours on how to best prepare for medical emergencies, natural disasters, and security incidents.

Muldoon, of course, had supreme trust in his own judgement. No one can doubt the stark clarity of his vision for what Jurassic Park needed - starting with his wishlist for military hardware. His interpretation was that the major obstacle to the endeavour was Hammond constantly balking and second-guessing him.

All the same, Crane had more experience than Muldoon in processes, a logical consequence of their different backgrounds. He viewed Crane and himself as forming a complementary pair. A presence on the endorsement team would allow Crane to assess the park's fledgling emergency response plans, and advise on how to best iterate them.

Privately, he also looked forward to seeing Crane’s expression when he told him his plans included the deployment of a company of light tanks and a full complement of anti-air guns.

These tentative selections differed in critical ways from the rest, and not just in the spirit that drove them. Harding and Muldoon would be in violation of their NDAs if they reached out to them with a fully detailed offer. But they did place their calls, sounding out availability while dancing around the issue of secrecy.

They believed they could count on Joger and Crane to accept upon learning the full extent of the services being requested of them - another reason why it was so important to select people personally close to them. In any case, it was in their interest to present this acceptance as a foregone conclusion when the time came to put the matter to Hammond, and to the lawyers.

Much ink has been spilled over the names involved in the endorsement team, and for a good reason: they happened to be in a position to offer critical inputs, at a delicate time in the history of Jurassic Park. That is why they feature in this account as well, after all.

As always, however, it is important to keep things in perspective. For instance, it is useful to consider that Wu approved both names without reservations. So long as the candidates broadly matched the needed qualifications, Wu judged their actual identities to be of secondary importance. The true significance lay in the fact that they, Hammond’s “lieutenants”, were nominating them.

Already at this early point, Wu’s political instincts were beginning to develop.

He understood that, while important to the immediate issue of endorsement and the future viability of the park, the technical proficiency of Joger and Crane was not the most important element of this equation.

What actually mattered was the game of chess between them and Hammond. Wu did not involve himself directly in the selection of candidates because his sights were set higher, or rather, what preoccupied him the most was the potential for unintended consequences.

Even if everything went smoothly and without friction, Wu thought it would be naive to believe there wouldn't be further ramifications down the line. After all, InGen's very flexibility and vague internal structure, which enabled this move in the first place, also meant that any instance of tipping the balance of power might prove formative; might end up shaping the future structure of the company. (3)

There is one critical way in which the identity of the candidates actually did matter, however, even though Wu may not have fully realised this at the time. And this is where we come full circle on the decision to pursue candidates with a close personal relationship with Harding and Muldoon.

This decision was motivated by a set of pragmatic considerations, but it had the inevitable consequence of stacking the deck in one particular direction. And it was a distinct possibility that Hammond would interpret this in the worst possible light, depending on his mood.

The lines were being drawn, the overall picture delineated. What had started out as an ostensibly collaborative response to a workplace fatality was increasingly taking on a life of its own.

Specifically, as a battle for the future of the park. (4)

Footnotes:

(1) I think this train of logic is the best illustration for the reason behind having so many original characters in the endorsement team. I didn’t start out with a pre-made list; I tried to puzzle out which type of figure each decision-maker would be likely to draw upon in this context.

(2) It’s one of the biggest zoos in Europe. This would have been one of the early serious milestones in Harding’s professional ascendancy, while for Joger I envision it as an employment of convenience before his true career vocation can properly take off.

(3) Since the very beginning of B&A, descriptions of “present-day” Henry Wu have hinted at him being more than “just” a famous geneticist. I think this inflection point is a good place for his political trajectory to take the next step - with his competition with Sorkin having arguably been the first.

(4) The pieces are now on the board. Next chapter will deal with Hammond’s reaction, and after that - the visit will begin.