A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  Dr. Tiller could have easily taken a different career path and avoided danger, but he became, as he once put it, “a willing participant” in the abortion war, committing himself to it until death. The flowers by his casket made a fitting final statement about his beliefs: you can’t really protect women or men from their choices, so let them have their own lives and trust the process. Given the history of society’s efforts to control women’s sexuality and reproduction, this remained a revolutionary idea. No wonder it disturbed and frightened some people so deeply.

  XXXXII

  One pallbearer in Wichita was Dr. Warren Hern. Four days after the service, the Boulder physician wrote a letter to President Obama, calling on the chief executive to look at Tiller’s death in the larger context of investigating and stopping domestic terrorism. Over the years, Hern had received “thousands of death threats” and it was “past time for this continuing anti-abortion terrorism and violence to end…We need your help—now.”

  The following day, Hern expanded on this theme during an address at Denver’s Temple Emmanuel, the same synagogue where almost twenty-five years earlier to the day, Alan Berg had been memorialized. The speakers at Tiller’s funeral had tried to avoid controversy, but that had never been Hern’s style. He didn’t narrow his focus on Tiller’s assassination, but described the environment that had surrounded and supported it, an environment about to explode across America into more racial and religious violence.

  “In the highly specialized world of late-term abortion for women with desperate needs,” he said, “George and I were each other’s only peers. Within two weeks after starting to do abortions at Colorado’s first freestanding, nonprofit abortion clinic in Boulder in 1973, I started getting obscene death threats in the middle of the night. I slept with a rifle by my bed at my house in the mountains, and I expected someone to try to kill me…

  “After two dozen clinic bombings in 1984, FBI Director William Webster said that the incidents weren’t terrorism because ‘we don’t know who’s doing it.’ Since those times, the anti-abortion rhetoric has been filled with descriptions of doctors as ‘baby killers,’ ‘mass murderers,’ and ‘child killers.’ The anti-abortion fanatics call themselves ‘pro-life’ while they are killing doctors and other health workers who help women…‘Pro-life’ is not a neutral, descriptive term. It is a dagger of psychological warfare that is backed by hate and terror…a profound libel and insult to those who help women. Words kill, and the phrase ‘pro-life’ is an obscene and grotesque sophistry…

  “Fox News TV host Bill O’Reilly, who calls himself ‘pro-life,’ made an obsession of obscenely referring to Dr. Tiller as ‘George Tiller, the baby killer.’ He repeated this epithet dozens of times. He demonized and vilified Dr. Tiller on the public airwaves. This is called ‘target identification.’ This is electronic fascism…”

  Because of his outspoken response to Tiller’s murder, Hern would soon get a call from an O’Reilly producer in New York, asking him to appear on the show to debate the abortion issue. Hern had been on Fox before, with the talk show host Sean Hannity, who’d angered the physician by referring to him as “Mr.” instead of “Dr.” Following Tiller’s death, Hern was expecting a call from Fox and was prepared for it. He had his own ideas about how to conduct an on-air interview between himself and O’Reilly, and when the call came in, he would give the producer an earful.

  Hern said at the synagogue, “We don’t have to invade other countries to find terrorists. They are right here, killing abortion doctors…

  “[Dr. Tiller] represented the value of the individual adult human being as opposed to state control of individual lives. He represented a thought. The man who killed Dr. Tiller tried to kill a thought. The idea that an embryo or fetus is equal to, or more important than, the life of a cantankerous adult doctor is no longer a sick private delusion. It is a collective psychosis masquerading as religion that has become a political force threatening democratic society…The main difference between the American anti-abortion movement and the Taliban is about eight thousand miles…

  “I am now, once again, under the twenty-four-hour protection of heavily armed U.S. marshals. They risk their lives for me…The American anti-abortion movement is opposed to the rule of law, a secular society, the American Constitution, representative government, personal freedom, democracy and thought. The spirit of true freedom, the security of its citizens, the peace of civil society, and the soul of America is at stake here. Dr. Tiller’s assassination is the latest blow to that freedom.

  “Wake up, America.”

  On the day of Tiller’s funeral, Roeder called the Associated Press from jail and spoke about the crime. His comments quickly became public, and one was provocative enough to change his legal status.

  “I know,” he told the AP reporter, “there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.”

  Hearing this, Judge Warren Wilbert bumped the inmate’s bond from $5 million to $20 million.

  But this did not keep “similar events” from happening across America.

  Within twenty-four hours of Tiller’s death, a father and his nine-year-old daughter were gunned down in southern Arizona. The police arrested Shawna Forde, leader of the anti-illegal-immigration group Minutemen American Defense, as the key suspect in the murder of Brisenia and Raul Flores. The day after Tiller was killed, Private William Andrew Long of the U.S. Army had just completed basic training and was volunteering at the west Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting office before taking an assignment in South Korea. While smoking a cigarette outside the building, he was shot dead and an eighteen-year-old fellow soldier, Private Quinton I. Ezeagwula, eighteen, was seriously wounded. The alleged gunman, Abdulhakim Muhammad, age twenty-three, told investigators that he wanted to kill as many army personnel as he could “because of what they had done to Muslims in the past.”

  Echoing Roeder, Muhammad then made a collect call to the Associated Press from the Pulaski County jail.

  “I do feel I’m not guilty,” he told the AP. “I don’t think it was murder, because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason.”

  Muhammad’s actions were multiplied several months later when Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a military psychiatrist and a Muslim, allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty others. Hit by return fire, he survived the worst mass shooting ever at an American military base. Hasan was about to be deployed to an Afghanistan war zone and was enraged over how U.S. military personnel treated Muslims and the racial and religious slurs he’d heard at the base. The United States was conducting a “war on Islam” and he wanted “to do good work for God.”

  On June 10, the day Dr. Hern wrote President Obama asking for help with domestic terrorism directed at abortion doctors, eighty-eight-year-old James von Brunn charged into the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., armed with a rifle. The museum draws about 1.7 million visitors a year and sits across from the National Mall and within sight of the Washington Monument. It houses exhibits and records from the Holocaust, and that evening it planned to debut a play about the Nazis’ victim Anne Frank and the American civil rights martyr Emmett Till. In 2002, two white supremacists had plotted to build a fertilizer bomb, like the one Timothy McVeigh had used in Oklahoma City, to level this museum.

  A few days before Von Brunn came to the museum, President Obama had visited the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany.

  “There are those who insist the Holocaust never happened,” he’d said at Buchenwald. “This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”

  James von Brunn had an anti-Semitic Web site and was the author of Kill the Best Gentiles. Internet writings attributed to him said that the Holocaust was a hoax and decried a Jewish conspiracy to “destroy the white gene pool…At Auschwitz, the ‘Holocaust’ myth became Reality, a
nd Germany, cultural gem of the West, became a pariah among world nations.” Back in 1981, while carrying a revolver, a knife, and a sawed-off shotgun, Von Brunn had entered the room next to where the Federal Reserve Board was meeting. Because of high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties, he hoped to take board members hostage, but his actions ended in a conviction for attempted kidnapping. In 2004 and ’05, he’d lived briefly in Hayden Lake, Idaho, for many years home to the Aryan Nations compound that recruited the men in the Order who killed Alan Berg.

  When Von Brunn burst into the Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10, several thousand people were looking at exhibits. He emptied his rifle, killing an African-American security guard, thirty-nine-year-old Stephen T. Johns, before being shot and hospitalized in critical condition (he died in early January 2010).

  “This outrageous act,” President Obama said after the assault, “reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”

  The Secret Service reported that death threats against Obama himself were up 400 percent since he’d taken office, the highest level ever for an American president. Two preachers, Wiley Drake in Buena Park, California, and Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, made no secret of their prayers for Obama’s death. On the Internet, the president’s enemies were gearing up to sell T-shirts, teddy bears, bumper stickers, framed tiles, and notepads carrying a biblical quotation from Psalms 109:8: “Let his days be few…Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.”

  Three days after the shooting by Von Brunn, the longtime Republican activist Rusty DePass added to the racially charged atmosphere spreading across the country by making a reference to First Lady Michelle Obama on Facebook. A gorilla that had escaped from a zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, he said, was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors—probably harmless.”

  XXXXIII

  One day before Von Brunn’s attack, the Tiller family surprised many on both sides of the abortion issue by announcing that it was permanently closing WHCS.

  “It was,” said Julie Burkhart, “the right thing to do. It had to happen.”

  “We are thankful,” said Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, “that Tiller’s clinic will not reopen and thankful that Wichita is now abortion-free.”

  Nancy Northup, president of New York City’s Center for Reproductive Rights, stated that the end of WHCS “illustrates the ongoing harassment endured by abortion providers [and]…leaves an immediate and immense void in the availability of abortion.”

  That “void” had now spread to most parts of the United States. According to 2005 statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank focused on sexual and reproductive health, about 87 percent of American counties had no abortion providers. In Kansas it had been 96 percent before the Tiller homicide.

  Following the pronouncement, Roeder called the CNN reporter Ted Rowlands and declared the WHCS closing “a victory for all the unborn children.” While not admitting to killing Dr. Tiller, he said that if he was tried and convicted of the crime, “the entire motive was the defense of the unborn.”

  With Tiller dead, his clinic gone, and a turbulent era in Kansas politics finished, I decided to contact someone I’d been thinking about since the physician’s demise. Paul Morrison’s law office was in Olathe, where he now worked as a defense attorney, and I was curious about his views on the murder and the shutting down of WHCS. Who could say what would have happened if he’d never met Linda Carter? Or if Dr. Tiller had never gone on trial because of the Inquisition? Since the sex scandal that had led to Morrison’s resignation as attorney general in late 2007, he’d tried to keep a low profile and seemed taken aback by my call, making it very clear very fast that he didn’t want to discuss any of these matters.

  “My opponents,” he said in a weary voice, “always painted me as a big pro-choice supporter, but that really isn’t true.”

  When I attempted to pose a question about what had happened to Tiller, the former DA cut me off.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, “all I’m trying to do right now is make some money.”

  Then he hung up.

  I dialed another lawyer, Dan Monnat in Wichita, who’d had several weeks to absorb the recent events.

  “It’s a real shame,” he said, “that the history of the world is so much about the loss of our human champions, particularly in the arena of civil rights. That’s what this fight is really all about—the right of a woman to choose is a civil right and the slaying of a doctor who allows a woman to make those choices and enjoy that civil right is a political assassination. How do self-serving politicians like Phill Kline and his minions not take some responsibility for the death of someone they unfairly and repeatedly demonized in the press by name-calling and frivolous prosecutions?”

  How had the loss of Dr. Tiller affected him personally?

  He didn’t respond immediately, but sounded as if he were shuffling some papers on his desk, in an attempt to maintain his composure.

  “It’s our duty as lawyers to help a family in crisis,” he said, “but then the emergency subsides and things eventually settle down. The media attention starts to fade away. Time passes and the quiet moments set in when you’re alone with your thoughts and it dawns on you that someone’s energy and life and vitality are not in your life anymore. You feel that—you feel the absence of it. You realize that you’re never going to experience somebody’s sense of humor and humanity again. Ever.”

  He was silent for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “People are free to speak their mind against abortion and to protest against it, but it’s illegal to block a woman’s access to a clinic or to kill a doctor. These criminal acts are nothing but terrorism. If your goal is to change the abortion law, change it through legal channels.”

  As Tiller’s death continued to resonate and spring became summer in 2009, something building beneath the country’s surface for years and intensifying since the Obamas moved into the White House was fully unleashed. Widespread rage erupted against the new president as he tried to go forward with his administration and his plans to reform health care. From coast to coast, people organized protests against him and carried signs comparing him to Adolf Hitler. One racially unsettling poster showed him wearing pancake makeup and a splash of red lipstick, like the Joker in a Batman movie. The “Tea Party” demonstrations against the president and his plan to change health care were just coming into vogue. A nationwide movement of citizens calling themselves “birthers” constantly questioned Obama for not having a proper birth certificate, even though this issue had been resolved to the satisfaction of the American public and U.S. voting laws long before the 2008 election. In Denver, for example, the talk show host Peter Boyles put up on his Web page this headline above an image of American schoolchildren honoring the new chief executive: “BARACK OBAMA KIDS AND HITLER YOUTH SING FOR THEIR LEADER.”

  Not to be outdone, State Senator Dave Schultheis of Colorado compared the president to the September 11 terrorists.

  “Don’t for a second,” he tweeted, “think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.”

  Fox’s Glenn Beck, meanwhile, homed in on the issue that had shaped so much of American history and driven the first Civil War.

  The president, Beck stated, had “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. This guy is, I believe, a racist…The Manchurian Candidate couldn’t destroy us faster than Barack Obama. If you were planning a sleeper to come in and become president of the United States, this is how he would do it.”

  In the wake of such rhetoric, the same thing began happening to the Obama family that had earlier happened to Alan Berg and George Tiller, once they’d repeatedly been identified as targets of hatred. A man standing on a street corner in Maryland held up a placard reading “Death to Obama” and “Death to Michelle and Her Two Stupid Kids.” In New Hampshire, a protester brought a holstered gun to a polit
ical gathering, and a North Carolina man pled guilty to threatening Obama, after calling 911 twice from his trailer south of the Virginia border and declaring that he was going to assassinate the president. The Alan Berg story was back with a vengeance, reaching into the top levels of the American government and affecting the new president in ways none of the rest of us could really imagine. What conversations did he and the First Lady now have about the safety of their family? And how did this impact his thinking or acting on public policy issues?

  The story I’d personally tried to avoid since the late 1980s no longer seemed avoidable. About an hour after Dr. Tiller was killed, I was contacted by a woman I’d grown up with who told me about the crime before this news had been released to the media. Then I learned that a nurse who’d worked on one of Tiller’s last operations at Wesley Medical Center was from my hometown, along with a police officer who’d been assigned to the case minutes after the shooting. My sister’s first-grade teacher was Scott Roeder’s grandmother and the Kansas militia had an outpost in my native county.

  In mid-June, I packed a bag, rented a car, turned up the satellite radio, and headed for Wichita, moving toward a reality I’d been pursuing, in one form or another, for at least twenty-five years. Or maybe it had been pursuing me. Hate groups across the country were up more than 50 percent and white supremacists were reuniting with a renewed sense of purpose. The new American civil war, which appeared to have faded for a few weeks after Barack Obama had become president, was in full force.

  Driving through western Kansas, I saw a billboard showing a huge image of Jesus rising out of a wheat field, holding stalks of grain in his hand and trying to recruit for Christianity. Numerous signs along I-70 held messages like “Abortion Kills What God Created.” The billboard and signs made me uncomfortable, as they had every previous time I’d driven this road back to my hometown. They were a part of where I was from, a part of me I couldn’t escape, a part of the war that was affecting countless Americans. With the Grateful Dead playing in the background, I drove and thought about President Obama, whose African father was black and whose white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, came from just outside Wichita. Racial discomfort and racism itself were things the president had known intimately since birth. I wondered if he, like so many of his countrymen, had learned to live with a divided heart—with love for his homeland and family, but with shame for the sins that lay very close to his bones and his blood.