-Caveat Lector-
The Martyrdom of Mayor George Moscone
by Joel GAzis-SAx
http://www.notfrisco.com/colmatales/
Part Two: Two Catholics
St. George and St. Daniel Stylite, the namesakes of the two
Catholics who found themselves at opposite ends of a gun one
November, missed being contemporaries by a century. All we truly
know of St. George is that he was martyred around 303 A.D. at
Lydda, Palestine. He may have been a soldier. As time passed,
he became a savior. The need for a military saint led to some
embellishments to the life of the saint, beginning in the sixth
century. Twelfth century manuscripts added the dragon which St.
George obligingly killed for some villagers in return for their
being baptized. In romantic versions of the myth, he gets a
princess.
Against the example of the robust, almost lusty St. George,
St. Daniel the Stylite is a hard character. A monk who rejected
the distracting society of his abbey, he followed the example of
St. Simeon and erected a pillar upon which he lived for
thirty-three years. He refused to come down, even for his
ordination. Gawkers received sermons and corrupt monarchs dire
prophecies. He died on his pillar: followers took him down at
last to lie in the earth after a bleak life spent close to
heaven.
The compassionate politics which led Moscone to speak for
the interests of the poor, gays, women, and other downtrodden
groups was derived from a strong liberal tradition within the
Church. Progressive Catholics like Catholic Worker Movement
founder Dorothy Day and Trappist monk Thomas Merton were the new
saints for a movement which sought to improve the lot of the
poor, oppose capital punishment, lobby for a nuclear test ban,
and create a genuine and accessible democracy for all.
Post-Vatican II progressive Catholics labored for Peace and
Justice. They gave their church theologies of liberation and a
new appreciation of ethnic minorities and social outcasts.
Moscone lent a hand both as a state senator and as mayor to those
Catholic agencies which sought to care for and improve the lot of
the disadvantaged. When Sister Columba of the Sisters of the
Good Shepherd wanted to sell their shelter for wayward girls so
that it could be turned into a home for disturbed children,
Moscone only exacted a prayer for the health of his daughter. In
some Catholics' eyes, he was a worldly saint.
But not all the city's Catholics appreciated Moscone's
progressive piety. Some felt he'd betrayed the church's pro-life
doctrine. Others felt that his support of gay rights and his
adultery made him a bad Catholic. When he ran for Mayor in 1975,
he was opposed by a fellow Italian-American Catholic: the
supervisor and realtor John Barbagelata. Barbagelata capitalized
on Moscone's suspect status with the Catholic community by
treating him as unclean. In their televised debates, the
supervisor refused to shake Moscone's hand. His campaign
insinuated to the press that Moscone was an adulterer and a drug
addict: a bad Catholic. The state senator was forced to
declare: "I am a devout Catholic. By devout I mean that I do not
let the socioeconomic pressures of neighborhood Catholicism tell
me what my Church is all about."
Moscone won the 1975 election by a mere 4445 votes.
Barbagelata did not give up. As a supervisor, he blocked
many of Moscone's programs. In 1977, he mounted a recall effort
against Moscone which had, as an additional goal, blocking the
implementation of a 1975 city initiative to divide the city into
eleven supervisorial districts. District elections allowed new
hearts and minds to aspire to office. A campaign for supervisor
could now be funded without appeal to the downtown power brokers.
Candidates such as gay activist Harvey Milk and single mother
Carol Ruth Silver could not win in at large elections because of
prejudices among the City's west side voters and the high cost of
campaigning city-wide; but they had a chance when the electoral
territories were their own neighborhoods. Barbagelata knew that
district elections meant a power shift that threatened the
interests of his pro-growth patrons. Progressives with no love
for the pro-growth policies of previous mayoral administrations
would change the way things were done. When District elections
survived the recall, Supervisor Barbagelata saw his power waning
and declined to run for reelection.
In some parts of the City, though, district elections
intensified the voices of those who feared that progressives were
transmogrifying their home town.
Down in the Excelsior District, a valley neighborhood on the
south side of the city filled with the kind of neighborhood
Catholics which Moscone had distinguished himself from, one
candidate circulated brochures which said: "I am not going to be
forced out of San Francisco by splinter groups of radicals,
social deviates and incorrigibles. You must realize that there
are thousands upon thousands of frustrated, angry people such as
yourselves waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate
the malignancies which blight our beautiful city." Excelsior
residents were then urged to "UNITE AND FIGHT BEHIND DAN WHITE."
When District elections were repealed but a few years after
Barbagelata's recall campaign failed, repeal supporters argued
that supervisorial districts inevitably let fanatics like Dan
White win.
Like Moscone, Dan White was a Catholic, but of the Irish
strain. Italian Catholics came from an unoppressed society where
the Church was the main source of faith. Irish Catholicism, on
the other hand, had fought to survive under occupation by English
Anglicans. Where Italian Catholicism could afford to be lenient,
the black-robed Jesuits who looked after Ireland's flocks came
down hard on any deviation from Church doctrine. Sin was to be
punished, by the club if necessary.
Dan White's arm of the Church saw sin as weakness. Where
George Moscone's Catholicism could accept having flawed leaders,
White's called upon them to exhibit an austere perfection. The
great Irish poet, W.B. Yeats knew the dangers of this when he
wrote: "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart."
Dan White began his life in Long Beach, California on 2
September 1939. Though this did not make him the native San
Franciscan he claimed he was, White had played on the streets of
the City long enough to be accepted as one. He grew up fearing
the Church's authority, but also sensing a personal right over
things around him. His father was a fireman, a hero who had
saved a boy's life by talking him down from a radio tower. After
Charlie White's death, Dan sought to be like him. In wanting to
be a hero, Dan set himself up for an impossible life, lived on
behalf of a people who were themselves facing the unstoppable
metamorphosis of their community. The Irish and Italian worked
who lived on the south side believed that their lives were
slipping away from them as new immigrants and wealthy young
professionals pushed them out of their old neighborhoods. The
reasons were economic: the financial powers were seeking to
undercut the power of the Irish and Italian unions by bringing in
Asians and Latinos who would work for less. And they wanted the
houses for their own. Rather than join the progressive forces
which sought to preserve neighborhoods and livelihoods, in their
anger the southsiders were duped. They blamed the disintegration
of their way of life not on those who shamelessly manipulated
local economics for private gain, but on the "immoral" lifestyles
practiced by a set of newcomers, San Francisco's gay community.
The people of the south side knew many demons: from city
officials who closed their libraries and health centers or
determined where the stop signs went to the young, black
neighborhood toughs "from the projects". Catholic leaders like
Father Tom Lacey urged them to "stand up for themselves". He
talked back to Police Chief Charles Gain and threatened to lead a
march up Interstate 280 bearing a casket if Gain didn't place a
stop sign at a corner where one of the parish's teachers had been
killed. He believed that the way to handle young toughs was to
give them a good licking. A disciple of Saul Alinsky, Lacey
believed in confrontation. And, like the young fireman he
anointed to champion the cause of District 8 San Franciscans, he
viewed the growing gay community as a cancer.
"By choosing to run for supervisor," White told his campaign
audiences, "I have committed myself to the confrontation which
can no longer be avoided by those who care."
Commitment was a new thing to Dan White, who had quit his
high school baseball team in mid-game after arguing with the
coach; who'd come back from a tour in Vietnam to join the police
force in 1969, left it to go to Alaska to become a writer like
his hero Jack London, and then return to join and quit it for
good; and who'd womanized and drank with the best of them until
he dropped his last mistress to marry Mary Ann Burns.
White had always lived an idealized ascetic's life. He
bragged to friends that as long as he had his mattress and his
books, he'd be happy. After he married Mary Ann, he both changed
and he didn't change. By all accounts, Mary Ann White was a nice
person who struggled to understand and support her husband. It is
doubtful that Mary Ann shared Dan's passionate intensity. Dan had
black moods which Mary Ann dreaded. If a new challenge like
running for supervisor lightened his mood any, Mary Ann would
give her whole soul to its realization. She loved him. She just
wanted to ease Dan's pain.
Looking back at Dan White's campaign and supervisorial
career, it becomes clear that he was an unstable man who
reflected the worst in his handlers. Sometimes the flaws were
large, like the homophobia of Father Tom Lacey or the conniving
hunger for power of his chief political advisor, Ray Sloan.
Others told him to stand up -- stand up for God's sake Dan! If
Mary Ann contributed to any dire tendency in Dan, it was to his
naiveté about how things got done around City Hall. With
Mary Ann's help, Dan lived on a pillar, sheltered from the
stressful but necessary realpolitik of urban councils.
Dan understood that there WAS a game, but he could never
figure out how to play it. For one thing, he didn't realize that
he still had to make a living. When he won the election, he had
to resign his fireman's job. Ray Sloan asked Dan how he was
going to make it on $10,000 a year with a wife and a baby on the
way. Dan sanguinely replied that as long as he had a mattress and
his books, he'd be fine. He was an innocent who believed that
everyone thought as he did. Dan and Mary Ann gave out roses to
the supervisors and candy to the secretaries as if these gifts
would win him good will. For another, he didn't know how to make
deals. In the weeks following the passage of Proposition 13,
he'd given his word to Mayor Moscone to support a package of
business taxes which would help keep the city afloat. At the
last minute, he changed his vote. When he had a chance later to
regain Moscone's favor in a plebiscite on which voting machines
the city would use, he voted against the mayor's preference. Dan
wanted to wheel and deal, but he didn't understand how to give.
White was instrumental in helping to pass the city's first
gay rights law, but he overestimated his ability to buy off the
conscience of Harvey Milk, who voted to support the Youth Campus
which Dan and his neighbors detested. The Sisters of the Good
Shepherd had the Mayor's support. Moscone did not want to keep
sending disturbed children out of their neighborhoods to the
state hospital at Napa: wouldn't they do better in familiar
surroundings? When Sister Columba spoke to Dan White, however,
he did not listen. Dan treated her like one of the sweet little
sisters of parish myth: a meek, mousey, Christian woman whose
work came after the wills of her parishioners. If the Catholics
who fed and supported her didn't like her work, she HAD to stop
it. Dan's problem was that from his lofty vantage point, he
couldn't see beyond his neighborhood or, more narrowly, beyond
his friends and himself. He offered the Sisters no alternate
plan. He did not trouble himself with their commitment to care
for the children. Once out of his parish, they became someone
else's concern, not his.
He tried to buy votes against the campus with his votes.
Dan repressed his homophobia long enough the committee that
drafted the nation's first gay rights law. For this great
concession, he was certain Milk would be obliged to vote against
the Youth Campus. Milk, however, agreed with the Mayor. Though
he joked to his aides that he would rather that the Campus go in
Pacific Heights where Dianne Feinstein's lived, he felt it had to
go somewhere. The gay Jew voted to back the chaste Catholic
sisters. By a 6-5 vote, the Youth Campus went into District
Eight. In Dan's mind, Milk had betrayed him.
Dan began to see the Board of Supervisors as a selfish bunch
who put their own egos above the good of the City. Diversity
puzzled Dan. It was difficult for Dan to discriminate between
his own self interests, the interests of his handlers, and the
interests of his constituents. He assumed that they were all the
same. His vote against Moscone's business taxes package brought
him new support from downtown interests who paid off his campaign
debt. One new admirer, Warren Simmons, arranged for Dan to get
space at his new Pier 39 development. What Dan didn't get was
that the lease on the Hot Potato wasn't given to him because he
was a decent fellow; he got it because he voted like the Chamber
of Commerce wanted. Ray Sloan quit his job as aide to help the
Whites get it going. He was surprised when Dan tried to turn his
new living into an escape hatch.
Folks at City Hall saw less and less of Dan White. He
dreaded the Monday evening Board meetings. He avoided his
office. When one of his aides entered his office looking for a
document, she found his desk clear and its drawers empty except
for a stapler and a few paperclips. He was disgusted with his
fellow supervisors, particularly Harvey Milk and John Molinari.
They lied. They cheated. They never voted for what was right
like he did. They didn't even know how to play baseball.
Neighborhood activist Goldie Judge came downtown to look at Dan
one day and thought she saw a ghost. When at City Hall, Dan
lived in a hallucination. He didn't pay attention to committee
meetings. He was far away, perhaps dreaming of being a hero,
perhaps mentally counting the potatoes he had to peel that day.
Perhaps he entertained the disembodied whispers of his cop
friends who amused themselves with juicy rumors about George
Moscone.
Moscone was then embroiled in a test of wills with the city
police. The mayor championed the rights of minority officers who
were suing the city for discrimination in hiring and promotion.
George wanted to make an out-of-court settlement with the
officers, giving them much of what they demanded. In the mayor's
heart, he sensed that the demands were just. But the mostly
white police saw the mayor as a sellout. They were also none too
happy with his appointment of political outsider Charles Gain as
their Chief. Gain shared Moscone's views. He infuriated his men
by having all the cars painted baby blue. He also consorted with
people like Margo St. James and was photographed at COYOTE's
annual Hooker's Ball arm-in-arm with St. James and a transvestite
named Wonder Whore.
Most unforgiveable in the eyes of the cops was the way that
Moscone kept getting special favors. Over the years, they'd
looked the other way while he dallied with prostitutes. In
Moscone's libertarian and progressive mind, the police had better
things to do than to chase down poor women. Vice cops, who
fulfilled their sense of duty by following single women on the
streets or by peeking through ventilators into department store
bathrooms, detested having to let George go again and again. So
they talked behind his back. Sometimes they spoke of
assassinating him. One lie they told was that Moscone controlled
the City's cocaine trade. Dan began to believe was that Moscone
was not the pure-hearted hero he should have been.
Dan's disgust led him to resign on 10 November 1978. His
handlers, who'd been carefully nurturing the young supervisor
were caught by surprise. White's resignation gave George Moscone
the sixth vote that he needed to push through his reforms. This
could not stand. Ray Sloan knew that the Chamber of Commerce had
put good money into Dan. He met with White and convinced him to
ask for his old job back.
Moscone was inclined to give it to him, but a technicality
gave progressives on the Board and activists in District Eight
time to act. White had delivered his resignation to the mayor's
office. When Board Clerk, Gil Boreman, heard about it, he went
up to the mayor's office, got a copy of the letter, took it down
to his chamber, and stamped it with the seal of the City of San
Francisco. This made the resignation official. Moscone, who was
prepared to just tear up the letter, delayed to get an opinion
from City Attorney George Agnost. Agnost told him that it was
too late to rescind White's withdrawal.
When the progressives and liberals on the board heard about
the resignation, they went to Moscone. John Molinari, Harvey
Milk, and others made it clear that they believed that White
should not get his job back. Meanwhile down in District 8,
neighborhood activists led by Dan's onetime campaign manager
Goldie Judge held a rally of their own. They accused White of
neglecting the concerns of his constituents to be the pawn of the
Police Officers Association and the Chamber of Commerce. White
and Sloan appeared at the rally. There were words. Several old
friends of White denounced him and Dan denounced them back.
Television news cameras caught it all.
Moscone gave White the chance to prove that his constituents
wanted him, but the xeroxed form letters and petitions that White
produced were not convincing. The mayor had another headache at
the time: his former Housing Authority chairman, the Reverend JIM
JONES, had fled town in advance of a series of stories damning
his People's Temple. Progressive politicians valued the Rev.
Jones because he could reliably turn out pool of precinct
canvassers. What they did not realize was that these
"volunteers" were slave labor. The People's Temple tortured
dissidents. Harvey Milk didn't trust them. As the stories came
out, liberal Democratic representive Leo Ryan flew with his staff
and reporters to Guyana. There they met Jim Jones face to face,
saw the heart of darkness that was Jonestown, and were on their
way back to the plane when members of the Temple ambushed them.
On 18 November 1978, Ryan was killed.
This was an embarassment to Moscone. He could hear the
chortles of his most probable opponent in the next election,
Supervisor Quentin Kopp, as he followed the story. The mayor,
who had not been successful in getting his program through the
Board with its 6-5 pro-business majority, began to listen to Milk
and Molinari. He could get the board to settle with the minority
officers. His progressive crusade could be passed and
implemented. Something could be done to take the attention away
from Jonestown. Meanwhile, Dan White, who craved for publicity,
found his own story buried by the Guyana news. The Sunday before
Thanksgiving, he was watching television with Ray Sloan, his
wife, and some aides. Everything was coming up Jonestown. White
shook his head and whined "One day I'm on the front page and the
next day I'm swept right off."
He spent the next week trying to get back on it.
He made it.
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