A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  In the early 1980s, a band of extremists began attending the church on the Aryan Nations compound outside Hayden Lake, Idaho, where they heard one hate-filled anti-Semitic sermon after another. They believed in Identity Christianity, which held that the Anglo-Saxon tribes that had settled Europe and America were the real descendants of the Jews of the Old Testament, and all others were frauds. In the fall of 1983, they went into the woods, swore an oath of loyalty to one another, and decided to act out the novel. Based on the sermons and their beliefs, they identified their first target, and on June 18, 1984, four men traveled to Denver and gunned down Berg in his driveway, shooting him twelve times in the face and torso at point-blank range.

  Soon after the murder, I found myself standing in front of the Aryan Nations compound, researching a book about the assassinated talk show host and those who’d killed him. The compound was sealed off by a chain-link fence and had a watchtower, armed guards, a rifle range, German shepherds, and Doberman pinschers. On a wooden shed were two words painted in red and blue letters: “Whites Only.” The rifle range held Stars of David, used for target practice, and the inhabitants inside the fence called these twenty acres of land the “Heavenly Reich” or “God’s Country.” Richard Butler, who ran the compound and preached the sermons that had motivated the men in the Order, claimed that he had nothing to do with Berg’s death. He was just practicing his right to free speech under the First Amendment.

  Like Dr. Tiller, Dr. Hern, and so many others, I too was being drawn into the war infecting my country. When it became known in neo-Nazi circles that I was writing a book about Berg and his killers, I received threats and was informed by associates of the Order that I (as a white man) was betraying my race. Some told me I was in danger, and this brought on nightmares of jack-booted thugs kicking in my front door and taking me away. By the time the book was complete, I wasn’t sleeping enough, drank too much, was in the middle of a painful divorce, and was having the kind of meltdown that no escape—whether through music or otherwise—could dampen. The book had brought on all the unexamined feelings, especially about my father, that I’d never confronted or felt, until now. I needed a healing that went beyond politics.

  The second civil war that had started tugging at the seams of America about a hundred years after the first one wasn’t a war between the states, or about anything as concrete as the emancipation of slaves. It was a much more subtle struggle between different perceptions and ideologies, different states of mind. The core issues were intensely private, personal, painful, and emotional, and spoke to very different views of the American future, as the conflict gradually moved away from the fringes and into the mainstream. After the Berg book, I never wanted to touch this subject again.

  VI

  In 1991, the nation’s most rabid anti-abortion organization, Operation Rescue, led by Randall Terry, picked Wichita for its largest event ever. Terry had selected the city for one overriding reason: George Tiller worked there. Yet Wichita was not their first choice. In October 1990, Terry had come to Boulder and prayed outside Dr. Hern’s office for the physician’s death (in 1993, Terry would appear on a Christian Broadcasting Network program and invite radio listeners to assassinate Dr. Hern). Before the so-called Summer of Mercy, Operation Rescue protesters met with a Boulder SWAT team officer named Jerry Hoover, who told them that Dr. Hern had the backing of the community. Long known for its activism, Boulder in the 1980s had passed a “bubble law,” making it illegal for abortion protesters to get closer than eight feet from women entering clinics.

  A group of prominent local citizens from the University of Colorado and elsewhere rallied behind Dr. Hern and women’s reproductive rights, signing a petition that declared, “We will not accept terrorism in our state.”

  The police also gave the physician an assist.

  “Jerry Hoover explained to Operation Rescue,” says Dr. Hern, “that many people in Boulder didn’t like them and it was going to be bad for them here. If they tried anything at my clinic, the police were going to have a hundred officers on hand. My office would resemble an armed camp and I’d go on television and say very bad things about them. It’s okay to protest abortion, but if they made threats against us, I was going to tell them to go fuck themselves. So they changed their mind.”

  And turned to Wichita. It had long been called the birthplace of the nation’s aircraft industry, but was about to become better known as the abortion, or anti-abortion, capital of the United States.

  Seven years earlier, Terry had begun his crusade in Binghamton, New York, a college town near the Pennsylvania border, by protesting the local abortion clinic. His wife, Cindy, couldn’t conceive, so she stood with her husband outside Binghamton’s Southern Tier clinic, begging women going in for abortions to change their minds and let her adopt their baby. By that fall, the clinic was receiving bomb threats.

  Terry’s background was remarkably similar to many other leaders of the anti-abortion movement: he was a white male who as a teenager had been drawn to drugs. He wanted to escape a drunken father who’d beaten him, and he liked to fantasize about becoming a rock star. He was a seeker, on a quest for meaning and purpose, and he had a born-again Christian experience in his early twenties. As a street-corner preacher, he witnessed to others, even when he worked at McDonald’s. Not long after his conversion, a minister laid hands on the young man and consecrated him to go out and serve God in some special way. What could he possibly do to fulfill such a grand and noble mission?

  One day, according to James Risen and Judy L. Thomas, authors of The Wrath of Angels, an account of the anti-abortion movement, Terry began to weep uncontrollably and had a vision in which God chose him to do something extraordinary—something that wouldn’t merely affect individual lives, but alter and improve the course of human history. His purpose had suddenly become clear: protecting unborn children and stopping abortion in America. God had declared that abortion was murder. At least 50 million babies had died in the abortion holocaust, according to those in Terry’s movement, making it a far worse atrocity than the concentration camps of World War Two (Terry’s followers sometimes referred to themselves as “survivors of the holocaust” that had begun on January 22, 1973, the day the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade). In their eyes, abortion was simply evil and had to be halted by any means at hand.

  No other political or religious issue unleashed more heated rhetoric or more grandiose dreams—or more hatred of the women who actively supported abortion. It was the dividing line in a war between the sexes.

  “I despise feminism,” Terry once said, “because it is out to destroy…the Christian heritage of motherhood and what it means to be alive.”

  Another abortion leader, Joseph Scheidler, described his ambitions more bluntly, “We take away their [the feminists’] right to fornicate.”

  The fight was primal, and the protests against Roe v. Wade had started right after the Supreme Court decision came down. Justice Harry Blackmun, who’d written the opinion, received tens of thousands of pieces of hate mail and countless death threats, and was shot at in 1985—the first and only Supreme Court justice to have that distinction. Between 1983 and 1985, the anti-abortion movement bombed 319 medical clinics; at that time about 1.5 million women a year were getting abortions. In 1988, Randall Terry launched Operation Rescue with a protest in New York City and co-opted the civil disobedience strategies used so effectively by the Democratic left a few decades earlier in the civil rights movement. They disrupted everyday life (traffic and business) and got arrested in order to draw attention to their cause. Until now, the right and particularly the religious right had never attempted anything like this, but in Atlanta, during the 1988 Democratic Convention, Terry-led forces lay down in the crowded streets, crawled through the legs of police officers, and generated havoc. Twelve hundred people were arrested, including their leader.

  Like many others jailed for their anti-abortion convictions, Terry closely identified with Saint Paul in the Bible, who’d
had a blinding, transforming vision on the road to Damascus and was incarcerated for promoting the new religion called Christianity. The original evangelist, Paul spent his time in prison writing epistles that became part of the New Testament. In sacrificing his freedom for God’s law when he was certain that man’s law was wrong, Paul was destined to become the patron saint of the anti-abortion movement.

  The Atlanta protests were followed by similar ones in Los Angeles in 1989. Demonstrators were injured and the city conveyed the clear message that the movement wasn’t welcome there. By the summer of 1991, Operation Rescue hadn’t launched a major event for a couple of years and was faltering, with a splintered leadership (Randall Terry and Keith Tucci now both led the group). The organization was looking for an infusion of energy and a revitalization of its message. They needed to put a human face on their enemy. The place was Wichita and the face was George Tiller’s.

  Come to Kansas, Terry wrote to Operation Rescue members before launching the Summer of Mercy in 1991, because “Our God is the God of Second Chances…God is doing something here we have never seen before, but always hoped and prayed for. Now it seems God is answering our prayers. He’s giving us another chance.”

  “The nation’s most notorious killer,” Keith Tucci wrote when recruiting troops, “practices his demonic trade in Wichita, killing babies until ‘birth.’ George (Killer) Tiller advertises nationally and internationally to solicit women in the second and third trimesters [of pregnancy].”

  The Operation Rescue faithful answered the call and began flocking to Kansas. The “Summer of Mercy” started on July 15, as hundred-degree heat settled onto Wichita, the sunlight and humidity quickly soaking anyone who stepped outside. Into this furnace came thousands of pilgrims from across America committed to ending abortion, with thousands more about to join them, alarming the municipal government and nearly overwhelming the Wichita Police Department. Protesters kicked off the event by gathering en masse on business streets and singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” Hoping to avoid trouble, city officials decided to accommodate the visitors, and Tiller himself agreed to shut down his clinic for a week. The other four local abortion clinics did the same.

  “Wichita didn’t yet understand,” says Julie Burkhart, who later worked with Tiller and ran his political action committee, “that these people were not reasonable. If you gave the protesters an inch, they took a mile.”

  Even though it was closed, demonstrators gathered outside Tiller’s office, a low cement structure just off Kellogg, a major highway through Wichita. An American flag flew above the clinic and floodlights, a locked gate, and chain-link fence stood at the rear, with electronic surveillance cameras recording everyone who came near. The windows had been covered with bricks and no sign out front announced the nature of the business going on inside Women’s Health Care Services, which looked as bland as possible. Even the address numbers on the face of the building had been partially scraped off. The Wichita police brass believed that closing Tiller’s office and the other clinics would defuse the situation, but it only emboldened Operation Rescue. As Terry proclaimed victory for his troops—who’d now turned Wichita into an “abortion-free city”—thousands more protesters heard the news and headed for south central Kansas.

  During its first week, the Summer of Mercy remained mostly peaceful, with the WPD closely watching the protesters and waiting for them to leave town. When that didn’t happen, the cops moved in on Tiller’s clinic, determined to reopen it. As the heat gathered and thickened on the streets, the police came in patrol cars and on horseback, nightsticks at the ready, meeting resistance on every inch of the searing pavement. Across the sidewalk outside Tiller’s office and on the small strip of asphalt running alongside it, protesters lay down and refused to move. When the police showed up at WHCS one morning at six a.m., the anti-abortion forces were already standing seven deep in front of them, waiting to get arrested.

  As Terry had hoped, Operation Rescue found a few sympathizers among local law enforcement (some of the cops had relatives participating in the Summer of Mercy and protesting at Tiller’s clinic). Mayor Bob Knight had anti-abortion leanings and Police Chief Rick Stone was a moderate. What Terry hadn’t envisioned was encountering the wrath of Wichita’s U.S. District Judge Patrick Kelly, outraged over the Summer of Mercy. He was committed to keeping Tiller’s clinic open and ordered protesters to stop blocking the clinic WHCS or face a $25,000 penalty for the first offense and twice that for the second.

  When presented with a copy of Kelly’s order, Terry threw it on the ground.

  “We fear God, the supreme judge of the world,” he said, “more than we fear a federal judge.”

  Kelly arrested Terry and jailed him for eight days, sending in federal marshals to keep WHCS in operation.

  With more and more anti-abortion evangelicals arriving in Wichita and occupying the streets outside his clinic, Tiller returned to work in a specially armored Chevy Suburban. On July 30, two weeks into the Summer of Mercy, scores of protesters pressed into the WHCS driveway and shoved two dozen marshals and police officers into a fence. By sunset that evening, more than 200 people had been arrested. When Tiller came to his office on August 2, another 100 blocked his entry, including Randall Terry. Freed from jail, he strolled up to the physician’s open car window.

  “You can laugh now,” Terry told him, “but you’ll pay someday.”

  “Too bad,” the doctor shot back, “your mother’s abortion failed.”

  By noon, another 124 people had been arrested at the clinic, but returning home at night was no reprieve for Tiller. For six straight weeks that summer, protesters camped on the dirt road outside his country home and constantly yelled at his wife, children, and friends as they came and went. Before the event was finished, it would generate 2,700 arrests.

  At the height of the protest, Kansas’s Republican governor, Joan Finney, traveled to Wichita and offered her backing to the anti-abortion movement, as the Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell had done earlier in Atlanta.

  “I am pro-life,” Governor Finney told an adoring crowd. “My hope and prayer is that Wichita’s expression of support for the right to life for unborn babies will be peaceful, prayerful, and united in purpose. I commend you for the orderly manner in which you have conducted the demonstration.”

  VII

  On August 5, sixty-three more protesters were arrested at Tiller’s clinic and Judge Kelly reached his breaking point. When he ordered Operation Rescue to post a $100,000 “peace bond” for any damages caused, a thousand more abortion foes gathered outside WHCS to chant slogans and block the entrance. Federal marshals moved them aside so that patients could come in for medical care. Terry didn’t want to go back to jail, so he decided to go over Judge Kelly’s head and appeal to a higher authority. He traveled to Kennebunkport, Maine, President George H. W. Bush’s summer home, thinking that Bush would back him. The president refused to see him, but Terry was about to get a boost from U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. The U.S. Department of Justice, without consulting the White House or the president, filed an amicus brief on behalf of the protesters, calling for Judge Kelly’s most recent order to be overturned.

  “I am disgusted with this move by the U.S.,” Judge Kelly told a federal lawyer, “and that it would put its imprimatur on this conduct. I will ask you to please report that to the attorney general personally.”

  Kelly then did something sitting judges almost never do, appearing on national television on ABC’s Nightline to vent his feelings. The Department of Justice, he said, had given protesters a “license to mayhem” in Wichita. Without his injunctions, there would be “blood in the streets.”

  The Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Kelly’s injunction and chided him for speaking out on TV. He soon received three hundred hate calls and had to be protected by U.S. marshals after a protester jumped him during an evening walk near his home. The situation h
ad become too hot for Terry in Wichita, so he skipped the rest of the Summer of Mercy, fearful of getting arrested again. He looked on from afar as a fifteen-year-old girl, along with her five brothers and sisters (one age ten), sat down in front of cars trying to enter Tiller’s clinic. Fortunately, none was hurt. On August 20, thirty protesters charged WHCS and tried to scale the six-foot-high fence. They were arrested, sending Judge Kelly into another outburst.

  “It is war,” he thundered from the bench, ordering $10,000 fines for Operation Rescue leaders and $500 fines a day for the next ten days.

  In late August, pro-choice activists, who’d been caught off guard by the size and strength of the Summer of Mercy, held their own rally downtown. Five thousand people came out to hear speeches by Eleanor Smeal, head of the Feminist Majority Foundation, Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women, and Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League.

  “Randall Terry, go to jail!” the crowd shouted. “We’re pro-choice and we’ll prevail!”

  Wichita was now the base to two angry, committed constituencies at odds in the city streets. Their outrage had culminated in front of Dr. Tiller’s clinic, the first act of a drama that would shape Kansas politics for the next two decades.

  On August 25, 1991, as the Summer of Mercy came to a close, 25,000 people joined prayers and voices at the football stadium at Wichita State University.

  “We submit today that we will not rest,” Reverend Pat Robertson told the cheering audience, “until every baby in the United States of America is safe in his mother’s womb. We will not rest until the land we love so much is truly, once again, one nation under God.”