-Caveat Lector-
DAN WHITE -- b. 1926. d. October 21, 1985.
Dan White had been an Army paratrooper in Vietnam.
When he returned home to San Francisco in 1969 he joined the
San Francisco Police Department. In 1973 he left the force and
joined the fire department where he won many awards for bravery.
In 1977 he ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and
won. The following year he resigned, saying that he could not
live on the $9,600 he received. When he tried to rescind his
resignation, fellow Supervisor and gay activist Harvey Milk
adamantly opposed White's return. On the day that Mayor George
Moscone was going to announce White's replacement, Dan White came
a-calling, and with him he brought a .38 caliber revolver. He
entered City Hall through the basement and when he found Moscone
and Milk, he shot them to death.
Dan White had been a highly decorated soldier, policeman and
fireman, but that is not what he will be remembered for. History
will remember Dan White as the 'junk food assassin' who claimed
that his senses had become clouded from too much sugar. Thus
arose 'The Twinkie Defense'. White was convicted of voluntary
manslaughter and served five years in Soledad State Prison.
On October 21, 1985, less than two years after being
paroled, Dan White entered his San Francisco garage, hooked a
rubber hose to his car's exhaust pipe and replaced sugar with
carbon monoxide.
His upright marker reads "Daniel J. White (1926 - October
21, 1985), Sgt. U.S. Army, Vietnam."
"Dan White demanded his city supervisor job back. Mayor
Moscone told him it was not going to happen. He poked his head
out of the office to tell his secretary that he'd be a few
minutes and then led White into a small sitting room behind the
mayor's ceremonial office.
"White asked him again if he'd reappoint him. And again
Moscone said "No".
"White pulled his revolver, lunged from his chair, and
pressed it into Moscone's chest. Twice he fired. The dum-dums
flattened, expanded and fragmented as they hit bone, just like
they were made to do.
"Moscone fell, face down. White, who'd learned how to kill
during basic training, straddled Moscone, leaned over, and pumped
two more shots into the Mayor's brain.
"He walked out of the office, reloading his gun ..."
"... White screamed at Harvey Milk, accusing him of cheating
him ... He fired his revolver into Milk's gut. The second shot
nicked Milk and pierced his chest in a nonvital region. White
pursued Milk and delivered a third shot to the back, a fourth
shot to the base of his skull, and, to make certain that Milk was
dead, a fifth shot at point blank range through Milk's head .."
from http://www.notfrisco.com/colmatales/moscone
The Martyrdom of Mayor George Moscone
Part Three
by Joel GAzis-SAx
The Pure-Hearted Assassin
"A good man cracked" is how White's lawyer, Douglas Schmidt,
explained it to the jury. Prosecutor Tommy Norman pressed for
the death penalty, but he never used the word "assassination",
though that is what it was. Dan White ASSASSINATED Mayor George
Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. To the other members of the
Board of Supervisors, to the media, to the legislators in
Sacramento, it was an assassination. But twelve jurors called it
something else: voluntary manslaughter. And in a twisted way,
George Moscone and Harvey Milk received the blame for their own
murders.
This is what happened on Monday, 27 November 1978:
Over the weekend, White had heard the news that he was not
going to be reappointed to his supervisorial seat. A
Thanksgiving Day Chronicle editorial said: "White has only
himself to blame for his troubles. If he has any gift at all for
self-appraisal, he must be kicking himself." He was. He'd spent
the night restlessly pacing his house, eating cupcakes, reading
books about the Irish Revolution, and ignoring the entreaties of
his wife to come to bed. In the morning he dressed, loaded his
.38 with some ordinary rounds and pocketed another load of
dum-dum bullets. He slipped the gun into his shoulder holster
and put on his suit jacket to hide it. An aide picked him up and
drove him to City Hall.
City Hall was equipped with metal detectors. The mayor,
city supervisors, and other high-ranking officials were allowed
to sidestep these, but White was no longer a member of the club.
He climbed through a basement window that led into a city
engineering lab. Here he was confronted by the occupant, but he
identified himself and explained that he'd lost his key and had
to get in. Reluctantly, the engineer let him go on.
White went upstairs to the mayor's office. Here he faced an
entrance watched by the mayor's personal bodyguard. As he
hesitated, one of Moscone's secretaries saw him and invited him
through a side entrance. Dan had no appointment, but Moscone's
secretary, Cyr Copertini, got him in right away. She asked the
mayor if he wanted someone to sit in on the meeting with him:
Moscone said no. White went in and Cyr watched the clock so that
White would not eat up too much of the mayor's time.
In the office, White demanded his job back. Moscone told
him that it was not going to happen. He then offered White a
conciliatory drink. He poked his head out of the office to tell
Cyr that he'd be a few minutes and then led White into a small
sitting room behind the mayor's ceremonial office. He left again
and returned with a drink for himself and for White. He sat down
in his chair. White asked him again if he'd reappoint him. And
again Moscone said "No". White pulled his revolver, lunged from
his chair, and pressed it into Moscone's chest. Twice he fired.
The dum-dums flattened, expanded and fragmented as they hit bone,
just like they were made to do. Moscone fell, face down. White,
who'd learned how to kill during basic training, straddled
Moscone, leaned over, and pumped two more shots into the Mayor's
brain. Dan did not bother to use the fifth shot. He'd done his
murderer's work.
But he was not through. He reloaded the gun and walked out.
Cyr Copertini had heard the four cracking reports and was
looking out the window, looking for a backfiring car. White
slipped out and ran across City Hall's rotunda. He used a
passkey which his aide had given him and let himself in the back
door to the supervisor's office. Dianne Feinstein saw him along
the way. She called to him as he passed, but he ignored her. He
passed Harvey Milk's office. Milk was standing, waiting to sign
a $3000 promissory note. White demanded to see Milk in private.
Milk smiled nervously and led him inside. Milk was in a happy
mood that morning: Moscone had told him that he was not
reappointing Dan White, and a few weeks before, Moscone had
single-handedly defeated the statewide Briggs Initiative, which
would have started a witch-hunt against gays and lesbians.
Dan screamed at Harvey, accused him of cheating him. Milk
smiled, perhaps in placation, perhaps in glee at White's tantrum.
This was too much for White who unleashed the force of his
metal killing engine into Milk's gut. The second shot nicked
Milk and pierced his chest in a nonvital region. White pursued
Milk and delivered a third shot to the back, a fourth shot to the
base of his skull, and, to make certain that Milk was dead, a
fifth shot at point blank range through Milk's head.
Dianne Feinstein found Milk only moments after White left.
When she announced the deaths of the Mayor and Supervisor Milk to
the press, Harvey's blood was still on her skirt.
White rushed from the office. He saw a city worker he knew
on the stairs and greeted her cheerfully. He went to the parking
lot, got into his aide's car, called his wife from a Doggie
Diner, and then went up to Saint Mary's Cathedral to pray and
wait for her. When she arrived, he said simply "I shot the Mayor
and Harvey." She embraced him and felt for his gun, begging him
not to kill himself. Until he turned himself in at the North
Station, she held it fast.
In White's mind, his act had a terrible beauty. He knew the
act of killing was ugly. But he also looked to someone to assure
him that it had all been for a good cause.
He did not have to look far. When news that the hated mayor
and the gay supervisor were dead reached the fourth floor of the
Hall of Justice, sporadic cheering broke out.
His "interrogation" by White's former teammate Frank Falzon
seemed to be geared towards providing White with an excuse for
his actions. Perhaps Falzon was merely being kind to an old
friend. White whimpered that he'd been falsely accused of graft.
He insisted that this whole affair had come upon him like a storm
over which he'd had no control.
"I never killed anyone before, I never shot anyone before,"
the former Marine sergeant who'd led patrols in Vietnam insisted.
"I didn't even know if I wanted to kill him, I just shot him."
As Dan White fretted about his nasty temper, the mayor's
wife, Gina, and his mother, Lena, arrived at the Moscone's Saint
Francis Woods condominium to a crowd of reporters. Mrs. Moscone
got out of the car, went into their home by a back entrance, and
collapsed in tears. She and her mother-in-law had learned of
George's death on the car radio. A few minutes later, a
delegation from City Hall which included acting mayor Dianne
Feinstein, City Attorney George Agnost, Chief Charles Gain, and
Feinstein's financial consultant [now husband] Richard Blum,
arrived. They spent fifteen minutes with the family. What
amazed all who came into contact with the Moscones was their
complete lack of malice toward the Whites.
This generosity was not reciprocated by the San Francisco
Police. Friends of the Whites raised $50,000 to help Mary Ann
through the tough times.
Crueler partisans printed up T-shirts calling to "Free Dan
White". And police took the opportunity to do a little
gay-bashing of their own, raiding bars and beating up the
clientele. The officers on the line made it no secret that they
saw Dan White as a hero. Normally, they would be calling for the
death penalty for the man who had shot the mayor. But this was
their friend, Dan White, who'd won them the statewide baseball
pennant once.
And the mayor was George Moscone, who'd appointed the hated
Charles Gain to be their boss. And dead with Moscone was Harvey
Milk, the "candypants" supervisor. They saw to it that their
Danny got special treatment. They came to visit him and make
light his hours in the cell. They brought him special treats and
foods from nearby restaurants.
On the outside, Dan's friends and family were looking to
help their Danny avoid the gas chamber.
Cyanic gas was introduced as a gentler means of execution
after several horrific stories about the electric chair charred
the public into second thoughts about capital punishment. The
victim was strapped into the chair. He was advised not to hold
his breath, but to breath deeply. Then the chamber was
evacuated. Instead of pulling a demonic claw to send forth a
shock wave, a button was pushed. In a nearby chamber, a cyanide
capsule dropped into a vat of acid. A fan pushed the vapors into
the chamber. The victim choked as the yellow-green gas ripped
out his lungs. Often a man would take three or four minutes to
die in this "painless" fashion.
Mary Ann, Ray Sloan, Dan's friends on the force, and his
backers did not want this to happen to Dan. The Whites employed
Douglas Schmidt, a young lawyer who had stunned the city by
getting a young Chinese hoodlum a lesser sentence than his
cohorts for a spectacular shooting in a Chinatown restaurant.
Schmidt devised for White what some have called the "Twinkie
Defense". A better summary is "Poor Dan White was so abused by
people down at City Hall. It was only natural that he should
lose it and shoot George Moscone and Harvey Milk."
The city's beleaguered progressives watched the trial with
hope and horror. Prosecutor Tommy Norman sought a hanging jury.
What he got was made up of people like Dan White. Perhaps as a
prosecutor, he'd eased in mind in other cases by telling himself
the lie that prejudice and hatred had nothing to do with a jury's
decisions. These white people could be counted on to produce a
verdict for the death penalty as they always did. If this was
what Norman believed, he was kidding himself: If you threw out
the gay and the ethnic minorities and the liberals who hated the
death penalty, what you had left were people who would be Dan
White's friends.
After Norman brought on witnesses like Frank Falzon who
helped the defense make its case that White really hadn't meant
to kill the mayor and Milk, Schmidt brought on a battery of
psychiatrists who testified that White was suffering from
depression and was not responsible for his actions. All of them
spoke of Dan White's long-standing and untreated depression. Dr.
Martin Blinder identified White's addiction to junk food as a
signs of the disorder. In the outraged popular version of
Blinder's testimony which followed the trial, Blinder was made
out to say that the Twinkies had made White do it.
Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver was called to rebut defense
claims about White's incapacity claims, but she was so skillfully
manipulated by Schmidt that she seemed the very personification
of the evil at City Hall which had goaded poor Danny into this
heinous act. Schmidt tormented the single mother in his
cross-examination. He asked her if she was gay. Shocked, she
said she wasn't. What Schmidt had succeeded in establishing in
the minds of his white working class jurors was that Supervisor
Silver was a whore whose word could not be trusted. Against
Silver, Schmidt set the long suffering Mary Ann White, the
married woman, the mother of the White's son Charlie, the woman
who had put up with Dan's foul moods and frustrations. White
himself did not testify
The jury found White guilty only of voluntary manslaughter.
In other words, even though White had taken the trouble to load
his gun in advance, to use the most lethal ammunition, to carry
extra bullets, to climb through a window to avoid the metal
detector, to sidestep Moscone's bodyguard, to reload after
killing Moscone and then walk across City Hall to hunt down
Harvey Milk, Douglas Schmidt had convinced the jury that there
had been no premeditation. Moscone and Milk had brought it on
themselves. White would receive only five to seven years for the
double murder.
White Night**
The verdict disrupted the complacency of the Castro lounge
scene. Individuals marched out of the bars and formed a mob
which marched up Market Street towards City Hall. They invited
their friends to join them, chanting things like "Dan White was a
cop", "Dan White, Hit man for the New Right", "Avenge Harvey
Milk", and "Kill Dan White". One ditty ran: All-straight jury /
No surprise / Dan White lives / And Harvey Milk dies."
What caught everyone down at City Hall and the Hall of Justice
by surprise was this "gay and lesbian riot." Street cop lore had
it that "pansies teased hair": if you beat on them, they just
squalled a bit and hid. These "pansies" had had enough, though.
They broke windows at City Hall, splashed red paint on the steps,
and burned a line of baby blues. When riot police came to
disperse them, they fought back.
The second half of the "White Night" was a police riot,
presaged by an attack on an anti-death penalty coalition protest.
As the main march surged towards them, police stalwarts
charged up the City Hall steps, tore down the nonviolent
demonstrators' loudspeaker system, and hid inside.
After the commotion around City Hall had died, gangs of cops
hid their badges and invaded the Castro. Police leaped through
the windows of the Elephant Walk (a popular bar), swinging their
clubs, and banging both employees and customers over the head.
As a new mob of gays formed to repel this police invasion, Chief
Gain arrived on the scene and ordered his men to leave. For
once, they listened to him.
While this happened, Dan White sat in his cell listening.
Perhaps then it began to occur to him that he was no hero; that
he'd not killed a tyrant and his henchman, but had assassinated
two good men. Plenty of good men cracked. Some cracked in
childhood when their alchoholic fathers beat them. Some cracked
in war zones when shrapnel tore off the foreheads of their pals
and brought the guts of both the enemy and the friends into their
laps. Some cracked when they followed orders and shot children.
Some cracked on street drugs. Some cracked because they'd been
made to work too much overtime or lost their job or had had a
fight with their wife. Towards these, the supporters of White
would have turned a deaf ear. But White had friends on the
police. He was a good-looking, straight, white boy. He could
afford the best help there was. Moscone and Milk, both of whom
opposed capital punishment, would not have asked why White was
not given the death penalty, but why other, less advantaged
persons with equal or greater claims to the diminished capacity
defense than White did not receive equal treatment under the law.
White served his time at Soledad, in a special compound
reserved for criminals who had committed spectacular crimes.
Here he befriended another assassin, SIRHAN SIRHAN.
In 1984, he was released on parole in the Los Angeles area.
After a year, he was a free man.
Dianne Feinstein, who everyone agreed had pulled the city
together after the assassinations, publically asked White not to
return to San Francisco. Once, he'd been treated to tea in her
home: now she would not have him in her city. He came back
anyways; taking up residence in the Excelsior District, where
neighbors and friends tried to hide his presence from the curious
and the vengeful.
In all the uproar about the "Twinkie Defense", something
which Dr. George Solomon had warned about seven years previous
went unnoticed: if Dan White did not receive a heavy enough
sentence, he would kill himself. As Dr. Blinder later explained
to the Chronicle: "People who commit homicide are very high
suicide risks. We explained at the time of the trial that he was
acting out of depression. He'd suffered a lot of losses -- lost
his job, his status as a supervisor, and out of his depression
came the homicides ... The fact that he could never deal with his
feelings is why he killed two people in the first place. People
who don't know how to deal with feelings effectively, how to say
I'm troubled, help me --the ones with the stoic, macho facade--
are the ones who will then go out and act in an extreme fashion."
Somewhere deep inside him, Dan White knew he'd done wrong.
At the same time, he still coveted the martyrdom he'd handed the
unwanting George Moscone and Harvey Milk. Two books, three
plays, and an Academy Award winning film had been made about the
crime. In not a single one of them was he the hero.
On 21 October 1985, he said goodbye to Mary Ann as she went
to teach school on Treasure Island. He went in the house, made
arrangements to see his brother Tom at 1 pm and wrote three notes
(one to his brother, one to his mother, and one to his wife).
When he'd explained himself, White went into the garage. There he
created his own gas chamber by running a hose from the exhaust
pipe of his 1979 yellow Buick LeSabre into the passenger
compartment. A tape of an Irish ballad, its bitter words
recalling late injustices of the British in northern Ireland,
went into the stereo. He rolled up the windows and waited. His
was a priveleged death. Dan White would breath none of the
searing vapors that other murderers gulped in San Quentin's
lethal chamber. Assuaged that he was oppressed by lyrics of the
song, Dan White entered the tranquil sleep of carbon monoxide
poisoning, a dreaming which ended as nobody can know except,
perhaps, the spirit of Dan White.
____
**The name "White Night" alludes to DAN White. "White night" was
also the code phrase used by the Reverend Jim Jones to signal the
mass suicide and slaughter at Jonestown.
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