Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  For her part, Carol of course supported the assault weapons ban but chose not to do it in the overtly public way Sposato did. She has taken other steps to try to stop gun violence. She helped found the San Francisco–based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit dedicated to the memory of the people who died in the 101 California shooting. She is still on its board. She also served on the board of the Jack Berman Advocacy Center, at the American Jewish Congress, the mission of which was to “diminish the unacceptable levels of violence in our society through legislation, direct service, and public education.” Carol explained that the advocacy center aimed to “address some of the social problems, cultural problems around guns, and starting young. The idea was to provide training in conflict resolution for young people.… How to use words instead of guns.” She is involved with the Jack Berman Award of Achievement, awarded annually by the California State Bar to a young lawyer who has been involved in public service law.

  In 2014, Carol ran for office—to be a state judge in California—and lost in the general election, after winning the primary. She served as a mayoral appointee on the San Francisco Police Commission. After more than twenty years in private law practice in San Francisco, she started her own mediation services practice to try to resolve legal disputes outside the court system.

  Despite what happened to her husband, she said she felt “deep sadness” for Gian Luigi Ferri. “While my house was being filled—filled with friends, family, people that loved me, people that loved Zack, playing with him, trying to keep his life kind of on a keel even though he’s sensing that there’s somebody in this life that’s usually holding him each day that’s not—there’s something amiss.… Ferri’s body is lying unidentified by anybody in the morgue and sat there for two weeks before a distant relative in Italy could take the body. He was friendless. He was emotionally disturbed. He’d been planning this because he was angry at the law firm and the work that they had done for him some time before. It wasn’t even that it was current. It wasn’t that he got the information yesterday about his real estate business that went under. He went to the trouble of going to Nevada to buy firearms. He just was a man in a terrible state of mind. Nobody could do anything but pity him and feel badly for him. Don’t get me wrong, I am furious that Jack died and with the loss of him, but my anger comes from our culture, our loss, the availability of the guns, and that nobody does enough about it. That’s where my anger is. It happens over and over.”

  * * *

  ZACK BERMAN FIGURED OUT at a relatively young age that his father had been killed. At his preschool program, he noticed that other kids would make Father’s Day cards. He saw other kids’ fathers pick them up after school. “The questions came early around what happened to his father,” Carol said. Carol urged Zack to play the violin. But that was not for him. Then she suggested the piano, which she and Jack had hoped he might play. But that, too, did not fly. Ultimately, Zack focused on the saxophone, which had been Jack’s favorite instrument, although Zack would have had no way of knowing that. “Zack decided on his own that his path was going to be saxophone and he picked up the saxophone, and true enough throughout high school he was always first-chair sax and he did tenor sax after a while, alto sax/tenor sax, and so on,” Carol explained.

  In September 1998, Zack threw out the first pitch at a San Francisco Giants baseball game, at Candlestick Park, to celebrate “Stop the Violence Day.” He was a big Giants fan. Zack, then in first grade, told a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner that he was chosen “Because I lost my dad. By violence. By a gun. Someone shot him.” He threw the pitch most of the way from the mound to home plate. His mother told the paper that Zack had a sadness that set him apart from his classmates at San Francisco Day School. “Throwing this first pitch allows him to do two things,” she said in 1998. “It helps him to feel like he’s doing something to stop violence. It empowers him. And it empowers all these first-graders to join with him to help stop violence.”

  He once used his mother’s dictation device to record his thoughts about what happened to his father. “I don’t know why this bad man did this to my father, period,” he said. “My father is a good man, period.” Carol thought, understandably, that Jack’s murder made Zack “angry” and, being a smart kid, he asked a lot of questions about what had happened and why. In elementary school, Zack started “Peaceful Streets Kids Club,” had T-shirts and posters made up. Local businesses put the posters in their windows. The group participated in a “gun melt” at city hall, where guns were melted down into a sculpture. “There were mixed reactions of families around us,” Carol explained. “There were some families that were really enthusiastic and they wanted their kids to be participating with Zack and thought it was a really great thing, and understandably, there were other families that may have disagreed with kids that young being aware of such a serious matter and involved in it, and also a little fearful.”

  Throughout his life, Zack has tried to keep a positive attitude about the tragedy that befell his family. “I’ve definitely adapted to it in a way that I like quite a bit,” Zack told me. “I’ve been a lot more independent than I probably would have otherwise just because had I had that sort of male role model I probably wouldn’t have taken so many risks growing up or sort of thought outside the box and been as adventuresome as I was.” He spent a lot of time up at Lake Tahoe, mountain biking on his own. He cycled. He skied. He felt invincible, always crashing his bike or on his skis, without consequence. One day, when he was around thirteen, he crashed his bike and punctured a tendon in his leg, which ended up making one of his legs “significantly shorter than the other one,” he said. Then, two years later, while biking, he was hit by a pickup truck. He broke several vertebrae in his back and had a head injury. Suddenly, he felt less invincible. “Physiologically it changed everything and also mentally it changed everything,” he said.

  Instead of giving up, he focused his energy on racing road bikes and doubled down. “The commitment to racing—which involves a whole lot of crashing and a whole lot of watching your teammates crash and sometimes quit the sport because of crashes that are so potentially life changing—it really just sort of brought a new angle into the cycling,” he said. “I got a lot more serious about it than I otherwise would.”

  He applied to Andover and visited the school with his mother. She kept telling him that if he were to go there, she would move to Andover and rent a house in town so he could be a day student. “I thought that completely defeated the purpose of going to boarding school so I basically decided she had ruined that one,” he said. He can’t remember if he ended up getting accepted, but he made it clear during the interview process that he wasn’t all that interested in going to Andover if his mother was going to be living nearby. He ended up at the private San Francisco University High School.

  Zack had a dream of becoming a professional cyclist. In 2009 and 2010, he rode for the Whole Athlete–Specialized Junior under-23 team, made up of the best young racers in the country. Specialized made him a custom bike to fit his different leg lengths. He competed in around twenty races, usually finishing in the middle or the back of the pack.

  He applied to the colleges and universities with the best cycling teams. He also tossed in an application to Tulane since there was no required essay and no application fee. In the end, he had a choice between the University of Colorado–Boulder and Tulane. He chose Tulane. He made the decision on his own. “I reach most of my decisions on my own,” he said. He was an English major and graduated in 2014.

  For the moment, he has given up racing bikes. He still rides, though, and rides fast. He works in a cycling shop. He has taken up surfing. He heads out to Linda Mar Beach, in Pacifica, about fifteen minutes south of San Francisco, where the surf is smaller. In August 2015, he enrolled at University of California–Santa Cruz law school. He felt it was important to specialize in some professional area in order to make a more substantive contribution to society. He thinks he wants to practi
ce law and also try something entrepreneurial. “It’s probably what every lawyer says,” he said. “Of course when I get all wrapped up in practicing law I’ll probably just practice law like everybody else.”

  * * *

  ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the shooting at 101 California Street, a group of more than one hundred people gathered in front of the plaza to remember the massacre. By then, the Pettit & Martin law firm had dissolved. Jack’s firm, Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, would be dissolved the following year. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that there were “not many tears,” just “lingering pain” and “aching sadness.” Carol attended the ceremony but Zack, then six, went to a baseball game instead.

  On the tenth anniversary of the killing, families lit candles, said prayers, and scattered flowers. Most of the widows and widowers had remarried, although Carol had not. “Sometimes it seems like a hundred years, and other times it seems like yesterday,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But the sadness is there.” In 2007, the mass killings at Virginia Tech University dredged up the bad memories for Carol of the 101 California killings, as did the 2012 killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In 2013, on the twentieth anniversary of the 101 California murders, both Carol and Steve Sposato were interviewed by the local NBC affiliate in San Francisco. Sposato said that while he owned guns and understood why people would want to own guns, his view was that the ownership of semi-automatic weapons was unacceptable. “Where I draw the line is saying that anybody, regardless of [his] mental state, can circumvent the system and buy a firearm,” he said. “I have a problem with that and I think most Americans do. I don’t think anyone needs more than a ten-round clip.” For her part, Carol said she hoped that in twenty years, the American people’s philosophy about the need to own firearms would have shifted in the wake of one mass killing after another. Carol and Sposato joined together with Senator Feinstein to hold a fund-raising event for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

  Meanwhile, the owners of 101 California have steadfastly refused to erect any kind of memorial at or near the building. “They said that they did not want to be the site of the biggest bloodshed in the history of the city,” Carol said. Their logic was perverse and absurd, of course. The building was the site of a mass murder whether they chose to memorialize it or not. “They did not want that reminder,” Carol continued. “They did not want that shadow on their building. They refused, so there’s nothing.”

  Will

  THE BIRTH BY CESAREAN SECTION of Will Daniel’s older brother, Clifton, on June 5, 1957, had been front-page news in the New York Times. Clifton’s mother was Margaret Truman, the only child of President Harry Truman and his wife, Bess. Not only was he the first grandchild of the former president, his father Clifton Daniel was then well on his way to becoming the managing editor of the New York Times.

  The Daniels lived in New York City, in a triplex apartment at 830 Park Avenue, on the southwest corner of 76th Street, and the Times’ article about Clifton’s birth breathlessly recounted the former president’s visit to the city to see him. The paper reported that President and Bess Truman had arrived at Penn Station at 11:15 a.m. on June 7 after a train trip aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, which had left the Trumans’ home in Independence, Missouri, two days earlier.

  Speaking to the waiting press corps, Truman, who was wearing a light-blue double-breasted suit, a light-blue tie, and a white Panama hat, said of his grandson that he was “an entirely healthy baby boy.” From Penn Station, the Trumans were whisked off to Doctors Hospital, on East End Avenue, to see their grandson and their daughter. On June 10, the Times ran two photographs of the newborn Clifton Truman Daniel—both taken by his father—one of his grandparents looking into the nursery, and the other a close-up of him.

  Just shy of two years later, William Wallace Daniel—or Will, as he was known—was born on May 19, 1959, to considerably less commotion than that bestowed upon his older brother. The New York Times made no mention of Will’s birth until four months later when Gay Talese, then a cub reporter flitting between writing sports and obituaries at the Times, wrote about another visit his grandfather made to New York City, in part to see baby Will. The Trumans were staying at the Carlyle Hotel, on Madison Avenue, as became their wont, and the former president’s visit to see Will seemed like more of an afterthought, although in a brisk, early-morning walk up Madison Avenue, he did pontificate to the pack of reporters following him on the need to stop coddling children. “The peach tree switch and the mother’s slipper are the best things in the world to make a kid behave,” Truman said, adding there were too many babysitters taking care of children. “It’s the mother’s duty to run the family and the father’s duty to see that it’s done,” he continued. “Some parents are lazy. They want to go to too many parties.”

  But in a series of interviews a few months later with his biographer, Truman made clear he would not interfere in the raising of his grandchildren. It was a promise he nearly kept. “These youngsters have a good father and a good mother, and I think they’ll understand how to raise their children,” he said. “It can’t be done with undue interference from the ancestors, and I’m not going to do that.” He said he doubted whether “a President ought to have any descendants” because of the pressure children and grandchildren inevitably have in living up to the family name. “Take the Roosevelt family as an example,” he said. “They’re always watching what they do because their name is Roosevelt. That’s true of Theodore Roosevelt’s family; it’s true of Franklin Roosevelt’s family, and it makes it a very difficult situation.” He said he hoped Clifton and Will would have teachers “who will put them in their place when they try to be smartalecks on account of the fact that they’re descendants of a man who has been in the White House.” Asked what he wished for his two young grandchildren, “I want them to be good citizens,” he said. “I want them to forget that they had a granddad who was President of the United States and go ahead and make a name and record for themselves.”

  In fact, Will Daniel would spend his whole life trying to forget his grandfather was the president of the United States. It wasn’t easy.

  There was no presidential kinship on the Daniel side of the family but there was plenty of southern respectability. Will’s grandfather Clifton Daniel Sr. was twice elected mayor of Zebulon, North Carolina, and owned the first telephone in the town. His phone number was 1. His only son, Elbert Clifton Daniel Jr., was born in 1912. The family did not have a lot of money—nobody did in rural North Carolina in those days—but managed to scrape enough together to get by. Son Clifton had no interest in farming and “displayed a premature aversion to dirt,” according to a towering profile of Will’s father by Gay Talese that was later part of his monumental book The Kingdom and the Power about the New York Times.

  Just before the market crashed in 1929, Clifton Junior enrolled at the University of North Carolina. He was an editor of the Daily Tar Heel, but only after he had been fired from the paper early on for “being, or for seeming to be, a bit cocky with a senior editor,” Talese wrote. After graduating in 1933, Daniel spent a year working for a small paper in Dunn, North Carolina, before moving on to one of the state’s two most important newspapers, the Raleigh News & Observer. (Coincidentally, fifty years later, I got my start as a daily journalism reporter at the Raleigh Times, the N&O’s sister paper.) Like many an ambitious person, Daniel wanted a job at the New York Times. His first interview at the paper was short and not particularly fruitful, and he was not surprised he did not get the job. He turned down an offer to work for the World-Telegram, in New York, after it offered to pay him $35 a week, less than he made in Raleigh. Instead, in 1937, he moved to New York to work for the Associated Press, which agreed to pay him $50 per week. He buddied around town with Thomas Wolfe. Two years later, the day before the British declared war on the Germans, he moved to Washington with the AP. He was the youngest person in the bureau and covered many military-related topics in and around Washington. In November
1940, age twenty-nine, he headed overseas, by boat, first to Bern, Switzerland, and then to London.

  He stayed overseas for the next fifteen years. In February 1944, the New York Times finally hired Clifton Daniel to cover the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Daniel covered troop movements into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. In 1945, he was in Paris and wrote elegantly about what he witnessed. After the war, he wanted to be the Times’ London bureau chief but didn’t get the job and instead bounced around the Middle East, London, and Germany, covering the dramatic realignment of the world. In 1954, when no one else would, he volunteered to replace the legendary Harrison Salisbury as the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. Stalin had died eighteen months earlier and Khrushchev was busy remaking Soviet society. As the only permanent correspondent of a Western, non–Communist Party newspaper in the Soviet Union, he had to work his butt off to get stories. He didn’t sleep enough. He pushed himself to the physical limit. He developed an ulcer and lost between thirty and forty pounds on his already thin frame. He appeared at the Big Four Conference, in Geneva in July 1955, looking so gaunt and frail that word got back to the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, in New York. He ordered Daniel home.