Waco

by David Thibodeau

  “The press are so far back you guys could come and blow us away [and]… give any story you wanted,” Steve told the feds.

  This, of course, was precisely the FBI’s intention. The agency didn’t want the media to watch as military vehicles vindictively flattened a couple of outbuildings on our property and even rammed a station wagon abandoned by the Waco Tribune-Herald. They didn’t want video cameras to record the tanks trashing a mobile home, crushing the kids’ go-carts, trikes, and bikes, flattening Paul Fatta’s custom El Camino, knocking over a fishing boat and the bulldozer we’d rented to excavate the tornado shelter, and skimming the ground of our cemetery, disturbing the graves.

  However, they did allow the media to film as they demolished the auto shop away from Mount Carmel, ignoring the building owner’s protests. The FBI obviously hoped to publicly reveal part of our “stockpile” of firearms; but the only incriminating evidence found in the auto shop’s ruins was six shotgun shells.

  I talked to the FBI negotiators several times after that. An agent named Cox tried to question me about the heavy weaponry, including antitank guns and rocket launchers the ATF alleged we were hiding. I tried to tell Cox that we didn’t have such armaments, but he countered with the lie that David had admitted having antitank rockets, .50-caliber rifles, and automatic weapons. His tone at the end of this exchange was openly insolent.

  Despite official restrictions, or perhaps because of them, journalists by and large vigorously set about demonizing us, creating a climate in which federal agencies and their political masters were allowed, even encouraged, to wipe us out. Conjured into a bunch of maniacal weirdos by the press, we were dehumanized and made ripe for murder.

  This potent, twisted contribution of the media to Mount Carmel’s tragedy was later described by sociologist Constance A. Jones and public policy analyst George Baker in an essay included in the 1994 book From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco.

  “The deaths at Waco were caused in part by the creation of a ‘media event’ through the media’s use of inflammatory language and images,” they wrote. “The probability of a violent outcome was increased by pandering to stereotypical assumptions about non-traditional religious behavior.…

  “Television framed the conflict in terms of good versus evil. As the… siege wore on, whatever violent images the camera had on file, such as the [February 28] assault, or even the last images of Jonestown, were repeatedly aired. Because of the element of suspense induced by narrative and inflamed by visual clues, viewers were prepared, and came to anticipate, that the siege would culminate in a dramatic climax.… The ante at Waco was upped because of the intervention of television reporting. Lives were endangered because the story line was created and embedded in a pernicious dualism which legitimated the ‘authorities’ and discouraged unconventional perspectives and opinions.”

  A prime example of this “pernicious dualism” was displayed on the March 25 episode of Oprah. In front of millions of viewers, and while we were in the midst of the siege, the popular host linked David’s name with that of Jim Jones by inviting Jones’s former attorney as a man who “understands the cult mentality.” Oprah’s program that day was titled “Inside Waco and Other Cults.”

  On the show, Oprah tried to manipulate Jeannine and Robyn Bunds into admitting that we were all under David’s diabolical spell. Though Jeannine repeatedly denied this, Oprah kept pushing. “Did you, at the time, recognize that—that it was indeed a cult and that you were being brainwashed?” she persisted.

  “No. I didn’t feel that way at all,” Jeannine replied.

  “Do you believe he’s evil?”

  “I don’t believe that he is evil,” Robyn Bunds answered.

  “Authorities were able to take actions against the Davidians with such immunity because they [the media] and members of the general public shared a view of Koresh and his followers and the situation that allowed, even required, such actions,” stated James T. Richardson, professor of sociology and judicial studies at the University of Nevada–Reno and an expert on new religions.

  Richardson and others have pointed out the crucial role the media plays in distinguishing between “worthy” and “unworthy” story subjects. People or groups that the press decides are worthy of sympathy are described in ways that predispose viewers and readers to look upon them kindly. Those whom the media choose to demonize are shown in a light that distances them from public compassion. As Richardson remarked, “The dehumanization of those inside Mt. Carmel, coupled with the thoroughgoing demonization of Koresh, made it easier for those in authority to develop tactics that seemed organized for disaster.”

  In general, the media treated our tragedy as a kind of TV miniseries replete with titillating issues like religion, guns, child abuse, sex, and violence. Day after day, for more than seven weeks, the audience heard lurid stories of wild sex, biblical rantings, beaten babies, and armed fanatics ready to fight and die for their crazy notions of heaven and hell at the command of a madman. On April 20, one day after the all-consuming fire and at the height of public shock over our tragedy, an ABC News special, “Waco: The Decision to Die,” hosted by anchorman Peter Jennings, featured an interviewee who described David as the “spitting image of Charles Manson.”

  A major example of this crude characterization of David and our community was a TV movie of the week, “In the Line of Duty: Ambush at Waco,” rushed into production during the siege, shown on NBC in May 1993, and rebroadcast many times since. In the film, David was shown in the most damning light as a charismatic, Jim Jones–style monster obsessed with young girls.

  However, in an address given at the 1997 memorial service for the people who died in Waco, the TV movie’s writer, Phil Penningroth, recanted his role in shaping the NBC film. “Within days of the ATF raid, the Davidians, and especially Koresh, were demonized as the Jews were in Germany before World War II,” Penningroth said. “As we all know now, the government and the media painted a portrait of Koresh and Davidians that I now believe was insidious, malevolent, and ultimately destructive. To my everlasting shame and regret, I added to that distorted view. I pray that soon, very soon, other artists, other journalists, will recognize the truth of what happened here four years ago.”

  Too little, too late, Mr. Penningroth.

  In an ironic twist, the FBI became a victim of its own connivance. One of the negotiators we were talking to during the siege complained of the heat the feds were getting from the press: “The bosses back in D.C. look at this thing on TV or USA Today, and they don’t see anything happening.” Having fed the media vicious tales, officials saw them amplified in a rising public pressure that eventually forced their hand.

  It may well be that if the media had been allowed to come into Mount Carmel and see that we weren’t a bunch of fanatical maniacs, helpless slaves to David’s will, then the FBI might have found it harder to gas and burn us. Personally, though, I doubt it. In the words of linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, groups labeled as “cults” are automatically living in a land beyond “the bounds of acceptable premises.” In today’s media-saturated climate, the word “cult” is an instant road sign for the audience: WARNING: WEIRDOS AHEAD. All thought is stopped, all questions skewed, as the Oprah episode revealed. Even the most basic question—What exactly is a cult?—is shoved aside.

  Cult. This damning word surfaced early on in the Waco drama, and it tainted almost everything that followed.

  Much of the material collected by the ATF to prop up its shaky original affidavit was based on tracts supplied by the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), the most active anticult group in the United States. Later, the FBI accepted a memorandum from CAN that characterized David as “antisocial and narcissistic” and ready to use “any ruse, pretext, trick, deception or force necessary to achieve his personal goals.”

  Following this formula, FBI spokesman Bob Ricks characterized David as a lying, manipulative “punk,” a “con artist.”

  CAN’s main man was a self-st
yled “deprogrammer” named Rick Ross. Ross first appeared on our horizon in early 1992, when he was hired by the family of David Block to stop him from quitting his job and moving to Mount Carmel. Block was a hip young guy who worked in the Hollywood film industry. I first met him at the Melrose Avenue house, before he came to visit Mount Carmel. He was drawn to David’s teaching, but he had a hard time accepting the sexual setup in the community.

  Block was talked into undergoing a voluntary “deprogramming,” and Ross turned his head around, transforming Block into a vocal critic of Mount Carmel. Block’s and Ross’s claims added fuel to the complaints of Marc Breault and the other former members of our community that had sparked the original investigation by the Texas Department of Child Protective Services in early 1992.

  Apart from providing the feds with his “expert” information on our “cult,” Ross also thrust himself forward as a would-be TV personality. He was a guest on the March 10 Donahue talk show, along with Kiri Jewell and my mother. However, Ross’s public career was soon cut short. He was arrested in connection with a deprogramming action in the state of Washington, charged with unlawful imprisonment and conspiracy to kidnap a young man and force him to renounce his membership in a Pentecostal sect. Ross was ordered to pay $2.5 million in damages.

  During the siege a Methodist minister, Joseph Bettis, wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno that “from the beginning, members of the Cult Awareness Network have been involved in this tragedy. This organization is widely known for its use of fear to foster religious bigotry.” And a consultant engaged by the government to review the FBI’s performance after the fact criticized the feds for not taking into account “the numerous legal challenges to the tactics employed by Mr. Ross in extricating members from the groups he hates.”

  However, the use of the c-word persisted in official usage. The Treasury Department’s September 1993 review of the ATF assault declared: “The Review is quite aware that ‘cult’ has pejorative connotations, and that outsiders—particularly those in the government—should avoid casting aspersions on those whose religious beliefs are different from their own.” However, in a sly sleight-of-hand, the Treasury review offers a dictionary definition of the term “cult” as “a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious,” leading to a conclusion that “in light of the evidence of the conduct of Koresh and his followers set out in this report, the Review finds ‘cult’ to be an apt characterization.” In other words, our community was, in the official view, declared to be “spurious.”

  The feds’ contemptuous attitude toward us was subsequently noted by four consultants engaged after the siege was over to advise the government how to deal with “persons whose motivations and thought processes are unconventional.” The consultants were brought in by Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Ron Noble.

  “During our first round of briefings, especially in our conversations with the hostage negotiators who had been involved in Waco, the most striking finding was the FBI’s near total dismissal of the religious beliefs of the Branch Davidians,” stated Nancy T. Ammerman, a professor of theology and one of the four consultants. “For these men, David Koresh was a sociopath, and his followers were hostages… everyone involved fell victim to the images inherent in the label ‘cult.’”

  Remarking on the general antipathy most law enforcement people bring to unorthodox religions like ours, Ammerman noted that few law enforcement officers think any clear-minded person would choose to let his life be led by Scripture. These attitudes, she added, “did not make them [the negotiators] tone-deaf so much as it made them unsympathetic.” Quoting Max Weber, Ammerman dubbed the agents who’d confronted us as “religiously unmusical.” She added: “But they were also blinded by the structures of their own agencies and their own standard operating procedures.”

  Ammerman admitted that she, too, once shared some of this attitude: “I was sufficiently influenced by this widespread assessment of Koresh as incomprehensible ‘Bible babble’ that I was surprised when I first began to listen to and read his teachings. They are but a variant of what could be found in many fundamentalist and millennialist churches.… The assessment of these beliefs as ‘incomprehensible’ reflects the biblical ignorance of many public officials and news reporters and the power of the term ‘cult’ to render all other attempts to understand as unnecessary.”

  Even the mainstream Seventh-day Adventist Church hurried to disown any connection with us. Concerned that fallout from our bad repute might sully their name, the Adventists rushed a public-relations damage-control team to Waco to deny that the Branch Davidians had grown from their tree. Sadly, the now-accepted, international church forgot that it, too, was once considered a mere cult.

  History suggests that a cult graduates into a church if it outlasts its founders. The Romans regarded Christianity itself as a Judaic cult for several centuries, until its persistence earned official respect. The Mormons, too, have similarly evolved. David Koresh drew his direct lineage from Victor Houteff and the Rodens, and his teachings might have outlived him, despite any failed apocalyptic prophecies. After all, the Adventists survived their “Great Disappointment” (the 1844 failure of Jesus’s resurrection predicted by William Miller), and several lesser disappointments, to become an organization owning its own schools, colleges, and hospitals. If things had turned out differently, the name “Branch Davidian” might one day have become as unremarkable as “Mormon” or “Adventist,” and David Koresh would be just another William Miller: a patch in the crazy quilt that is American fundamentalism.

  “While officially neutral about religious doctrine, the state in America has historically been involved in the most severe conflicts involving alternative and minority religions,” writes sociology professor Charles L. Harper. “In the nineteenth century, officials were often helpless to intervene or looked the other way as mobs and vigilantes harassed Shakers, Roman Catholics and Mormons.… In the twentieth century… the conflicts between the state and alternative religions take the form of (sometimes primitive) investigations by regulatory agencies protecting their own interests and ‘turf,’ such as the rights to control taxation, licensing, and legal compliance in general.”

  James D. Tabor, a professor of religious studies from the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, said that “cults are ‘dangerous’ in American society, not merely for what they might do to an unfortunate few, but what they actually do to the uneasy many.” Tabor continued: “Cults explicitly endeavor to get us to examine what we care most about and to consider unsparingly whether we are satisfied with the state of the world.… The eagerness to condemn ‘cults’ masks an unwillingness to confront ourselves and to question our society.”

  Having been tagged a “cult” by the government and the media, we became fair game, removed beyond the bounds of common sympathy. And the taint has stuck to us, discrediting anything we might do to help people understand the more subtle and complex reality we lived in.

  We took a while to grasp this fact. Early on, after the FBI had cut us off from the world, we hung out a naive message scribbled on a banner made from a bedsheet. It said, “God Help Us, We Need Press.” Trouble was, as it turned out, we had too much press—and it helped to kill us.

  Though the FBI as a whole had contempt for our beliefs, there were nuances within the agency about how to “handle” us. To put it bluntly, the argument was this: Should we be talked out or booted out?

  From the start, the FBI brass characterized the Mount Carmel standoff as a “Hostage/Barricade rescue situation.” Hostage Rescue Team commander Jeff Jamar’s macho style involved a constant show of force while favoring vulgar acts like allowing agents to “moon” our women, give us the finger as they circled the building in their Bradleys, and loudly and openly refer to us as “motherfuckers” and “cocksuckers.”

  As I mentioned earlier, it was soon apparent to us that there was tension between the negotiators and the action guys. “I’ve got all kinds
of bosses and commanders around here,” one negotiator complained, intimating that he and his colleagues resented the tactical team’s pressure for “results.” One negotiator later revealed that “the tactical commander said that, left to them, they would have routed the Davidians in the first week.” Interviewed on television two years later, this same agent lamented the “tremendous chasm between tactical people and negotiators. I knew the dangers to those kids if we went tactical.”

  Kevin Clements, director of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, who later conducted a review of the Mount Carmel events for the FBI, made the crucial point that the key to any conflict negotiation is to speak the language of the people you’re dealing with, have personal contact, initiate a process of de-escalation and conciliatory gestures, and bring in a neutral third party. “You need to understand the logic or illogic of a group’s ideas, not just draw up a menu of battle strategies,” he noted. Clements is no amateur: The Institute has guided conflict resolution involving religious questions in Northern Ireland, the Soviet Union, the trans-Caucasus, and the Middle East.

  Early on, experts attached to the FBI Behavorial Science Unit had strongly advised the Bureau against an antagonistic approach toward us. “It would appear that we may unintentionally make his [David’s] prophecy come true, if we take what he perceives to be a hostile or aggressive action,” stated an internal FBI memo discussing the imagined possibility that we’d all commit suicide. “Do the opposite of what Koresh is expecting… consider moving back.”