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What made him such a terrifying killer?

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Could the United States have avoided entering the Vietnam War?

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What was the reason this started and how were people 'hunted'

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Could the United States have avoided Pearl Harbor?

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What makes Dahmer such a twisted killer?

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What made Ted Bundy such a successful serial killer?

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How did the contributions of women impact the Civil War?

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How did Douglass' advocacy define his legacy?

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Yes, ‘Night Stalker’ is a real story. How serial killer Richard Ramirez was ultimately caught.

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The Netflix show “Night Stalker” is a four-part documentary series on serial killer Richard Ramirez.

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What made this case so horrifying?

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How did segregating schools negatively impact children?

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Source: getty

By Pippa Raga

Jan. 27 2021, Updated 11:21 a.m. ET

Richard Ramirez would go on to become a Satanist and convicted serial killer, found guilty of 13 counts of murder, five counts of attempted murder, 11 counts of sexual assault, and 14 counts of burglary, all crimes he committed within the span of 14 months.

He was sentenced to serve 19 death sentences and ended up passing away of natural causes while awaiting execution on California's death row.

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But was the so-called "Night Stalker" destined to go down this path of heinous crimes? We explore Richard Ramirez's childhood to understand when and how exactly the dangerous predator turned and started terrorizing Californians in the 1980s.

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"Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez Was Heavily Influenced by an Older Cousin

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By Pippa Raga Jan. 27 2021, Updated 11:21 a.m. ET Richard Ramirez would go on to become a Satanist and convicted serial killer, found guilty of 13 counts of murder, five counts of attempted murder, 11 counts of sexual assault, and 14 counts of burglary, all crimes he committed within the span of 14 months.

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Netflix's latest docuseries Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer opens on a flourishing Los Angeles-the city is hosting the 1984 Olympics, both the Queen and the Pope had recently visited, and crime is on the decline. But things quickly turn dark as the city is haunted by an active serial killer linked to dozens of chilling crimes. The horrific four-part series details the crimes of the Night Stalker (later identified as Richard Ramirez), a serial kidnapper, burglar, rapist, and murderer who terrorized the city from the spring of 1984 up until his August 31, 1985 arrest. Netflix's documentary relies mainly on interviews with survivors, police officers, and news footage to examine those grim months in Southern California.

Primarily told from the perspectives of detectives Gil Carrillo and his seasoned partner Frank Salerno, as well as the family members of victims and survivors, the documentary captures greater Los Angeles area's frustration and fear in the months the Night Stalker evaded capture. It focuses on the crimes, the evidence, the investigation, and the lives that Ramirez tainted and took, without revealing Ramirez's name until the third episode, or his picture before the fourth and final installment. The doc chooses to focus on the investigation and the victims, largely leaving the killer's background out of the story.

Richard Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas in 1960, and was the youngest of five siblings. According to the , when Richard's cousin Miguel Ramirez returned home from the Vietnam War when Richard was 12, he showed him photos of Vietnamese women he said he had raped, tortured, and killed. When he was 13, Ramirez witnessed his cousin shoot his wife in the face, killing her. He dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles when he was 15 years old, where he began burglarizing homes to fund his drug addiction. Ramirez was arrested twice for auto theft in 1981 and 1984, and spent several months in jail.

Richard Ramirez was 24 years old at the time of his first known murder. Night Stalker details the months he spent breaking into homes at night and attacking men, women, and children alike, sexually assaulting, mutilating, and murdering innocent Californians. He often left pentagrams or other occult symbols on the walls of his crime scenes, where he tortured his victims with knives, hammers, tire irons, thumb cuffs, and pistols. After the long, frustrating hunt chronicled in Night Stalker, Ramirez's photograph was released to the media and he was at the end of the summer of 1985 soon after a civilian spotted him on a bus.

Ramirez's televised trial began in 1989, and lasted several weeks. Frank Girardot, a journalist who covered the trial for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a Southern California radio station that "it involved a lot of gruesome testimony and a lot of theatrics from the defendant. He would draw pentagrams on his hand, and hold it up for the cameras, he would smile at people." Ramirez knew he had a cult-like following of satanists and suitors in attendance, and would put on a show for them. At one point during the already deeply upsetting trial, a juror was found beaten and shot inside her home. It was soon after discovered that her boyfriend had committed suicide after leaving a note admitting that he killed her.

Ramirez's defense team did not provide a potential motive for his client's horrific crimes, stating in court that "We felt and he felt he didn't particularly want to lay his life out for the public and the court to scrutinize." At the trial's end, Ramirez was found guilty of all charges against him-13 murders, 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries. He never expressed remorse. After he was sentenced to death, he to the press: "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland."

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As Netflix's documentary shows, Ramirez attracted the affections of many women during his trial and his years in prison. What the documentary omits is that he wed one of those admirers from prison. Richard Ramirez Doreen Lioy, a freelance magazine editor, in 1996-she first began writing letters to him in 1985 when she first saw him on television after his arrest. She wrote to him daily, visited him in prison, and attended his trial, even after her family her. "He's kind, he's funny, he's charming," she told in 1997, asserting that she believed her husband was innocent. Lioy wore a gold wedding band herself, but Ramirez wore a platinum one, as he told her "Satanists don't wear gold."

Richard Ramirez spent 23 years on Death Row in California's San Quentin Prison until he died of lymphoma in 2013 at the age of 53.

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Netflix's Night Stalker Doc Details the Hunt For Richard Ramirez. But There's More to the Story.

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Netflix's latest docuseries Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer opens on a flourishing Los Angeles-the city is hosting the 1984 Olympics, both the Queen and the Pope had recently visited, and crime is on the decline. But things quickly turn dark as the city is haunted by an active serial killer linked to dozens of chilling crimes.

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Cite

Article Details:

Was a Bad Childhood to Blame for 'Night Stalker' Richard Ramirez Becoming a Serial Killer?

The following content contains disturbing accounts of violence and sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised. Beginning in June 1984 Richard Ramirez, the ill-famed "Night Stalker," went on a killing spree in California, mutilating and murdering at least 13 people. For over a year, Ramirez crept into houses in the wee morning hours and raped and tortured his randomly selected victims.
Born on February 29, 1960 in El Paso, Texas, Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was the fifth child of Mexican immigrants Mercedes and Julian Ramirez. His mother worked at a boot factory, where she was exposed to chemical fumes when she was pregnant with him. All his siblings had birth defects, ranging from respiratory difficulty to bone deformities. At age two, a dresser fell on Richard's head, causing a large forehead laceration. At five he was knocked unconscious from a swing and started experiencing epileptic seizures.

In the definitive book about Ramirez's life, The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez, Philip Carlo, who spent over 100 hours with the killer at San Quentin Prison's Death Row, says Ramirez claims his father was physically abusive to his entire family. At 12, he was exposed to photos of raped and dismembered Vietnamese women by his older cousin, veteran Miguel Ramirez, who later shot his wife in front of "little Richie." Ramirez eventually became addicted to drugs and dropped out of high school.

A&E True Crime spoke with Dr. Scott Bonn, criminologist and author of "Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World"s Most Savage Murderers," about what he thinks were the powerful catalysts for the makings of a serial killer.
[Stream Invisible Monsters: Serial Killers in America in the A&E app.]
Ramirez's early years were marked by childhood trauma, abuse and addictions but he also suffered from medical conditions. Do you think he was born or made into a serial killer?
There's always a question of whether serial killers are born or made. I believe Richard Ramirez was a sociopath as opposed to a psychopath. A psychopath is absolutely incapable of feeling any normal range of emotions, and that was the case with Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown. Ramirez, on the other hand, was prone to emotional outbursts, very spontaneous and volatile. A sociopath is developed through life experiences and manufactured in society. Also, unlike Bundy or Gacy, who planned their murders meticulously, Ramirez randomly picked homes to break into. A psychopath wouldn't do that. A psychopath needs control.

So, yes, all these factors I believe contribute. But what seems to happen with some serial killers-and it happened with Jeffrey Dahmer, the BTK strangler and Bundy-is that right around puberty, sex and violence fuse in their minds and they become aroused by violence. When his cousin showed him those photographs, Ramirez became sexually aroused. And it was right around the age of 13.
[Watch Monster in My Family: The Nightstalker: Richard Ramirez on A&E Crime Central.]
Why was Ramirez so 'random' in who he killed (from young couples to children to elderly women)?
There is this tendency to think that serial killers are one-size-fits-all and that's absolutely not true. There's a typology of serial killers. Ramirez was a "thrill killer" (like the Zodiac in San Francisco in the 1960s).

When he broke into someone's home, he didn't know what he would find. He made up his mind on the spot: Would he rape the woman, strangle the man or shoot the man? There are no absolutes in criminology, but sociopaths are more likely to commit what we call disorganized crimes.

He mutilated and savagely beat his victims, and performed acts of sodomy on many of his female victims. What drove him to become such a sadistic killer and rapist?
It was all about this need for stimulation and satisfaction and the thrill. Why did he rob? Partially for the money, but also for excitement. Sex and violence were all a grand adventure for him.
Related Features: Manson, Wuornos, Ramirez: 3 Famous Killers with Exceptionally Screwed-Up Childhoods Ted Bundy's Childhood: Lonely Boy to Window Peeper to Serial Killer Why Are Some Women Sexually Attracted to Serial Killers?
In one of his incomplete murders, Ramirez attempted to strangle a girl with a phone cord but saw sparks emanating from the cord and realized she was still breathing. Immediately, he fled the house believing that Jesus had intervened to save her. Did he have delusions? Was that a subtle epiphany of guilt?
To the extent that he believed Satan was his benefactor, then it would make sense that something symbolic like that was consistent with his belief system. But Ramirez was not insane from either a clinical or a legal perspective in the U.S., [which would] mean you don't know it was wrong to kill at the time of the crime. Ramirez knew it was wrong. He simply didn't care and had an appetite for killing. A sociopath is not medically ill according to the American Medical Association.

Why was he such an avowed Satanist?
He was very disturbed, but also a complete narcissist. He loved notoriety. He had groupies who flocked to his trials. He had dark good looks and, dressed only in black with sunglasses on in the courtroom like a movie star. He basked in that attention. He absolutely loved being the enigma people couldn't understand.

When Ramirez first heard that the court had sentenced him to death he snarled, 'Big deal. Death always comes with the territory. See you in Disneyland.' Why did he never show any remorse over his bloodshed?
Because he was a sociopath. Sociopaths can form bonds with certain individuals and circumstances-unlike psychopaths-but generally speaking they have no remorse. And he fit that profile.

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Was a Bad Childhood to Blame for Richard Ramirez Becoming a Serial Killer?

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A&E True Crime talks with Dr. Scott Bonn, criminologist and author of the book, 'Why We Love Serial Killers' about what he thinks were the powerful catalysts for the makings of a serial killer.

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Richard Ramirez, who claimed to be inspired by Satan when he killed at least 14 people in the "Night Stalker" attacks that terrorized California in 1985, died on Friday in a hospital in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 53.

Sam Robinson, a spokesman for San Quentin State Prison, where Mr. Ramirez was on death row, announced the death, The Associated Press reported. No cause was given.

The killings began on June 28, 1984, when Mr. Ramirez slit the throat of a 79-year-old woman, Jennie Vincow, during a burglary. They ended when an angry mob, recognizing him from his mug shot released to the news media, beat him and held him until the police arrived to make an arrest on Aug. 31, 1985.

Most of the killings were committed before dawn during residential burglaries in Los Angeles County, and all were markedly coldblooded, involving savage beatings, mutilations and sexual assaults.

His weapons included guns, knives and hammers, and his victims were both men and women, ranging from a 6-year-old to octogenarians.

Mr. Ramirez left occult symbols at crime scenes, most often an inverted pentagram as a mark of the devil. As frightened Angelenos raced to buy guns and locks, the news media named the mysterious killer the "Night Stalker."

Four years after his arrest, a jury found Mr. Ramirez guilty of all 43 crimes of which he was accused. These included 13 counts of first-degree murder, one of second-degree murder and many more of rape, burglary and sodomy. He was sentenced to death.

As he awaited execution at San Quentin, Mr. Ramirez was linked to other murders, in one case by traces of DNA, but never tried for them.

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was born in El Paso, Tex., on Feb. 28, 1960, the last of five children of Mexican immigrants. His father worked for the Santa Fe Railway and his mother for a boot factory.

A picture of his life emerged from interviews and court testimony. In the fifth grade, he was found to have epilepsy. In the seventh grade, he started sniffing glue. He began spending nights at cemeteries.

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Richard Ramirez with a pentagram on his hand in a Los Angeles courtroom in 1985. He left occult symbols at crime scenes. Credit... Lennox McLendon/Associated Press

When he was 12, Richard's cousin Miguel Ramirez returned from the Vietnam War, and they began spending time together. They smoked marijuana, and his cousin showed Richard photos of Vietnamese women he said he had raped, tortured and killed. When he was 13, Richard was present when his cousin shot his wife in the face, killing her. (Miguel Ramirez, in part because of his war record, was sentenced to seven years in prison.) By then Richard had begun burglarizing homes. He dropped out of high school after less than a year.

Shortly after turning 15, Mr. Ramirez moved to Los Angeles, where an older brother helped him refine his burglary techniques. He became addicted to cocaine, which he paid for by selling things he stole. He spent several months in jail for auto theft.

After his first known murder, in June 1984, he lay low until March 17, 1985, when he attacked Angela Barrio, 22, outside her home and shot her before entering the house. He then shot and killed her 34-year-old roommate, Dayle Okazaki. Ms. Barrio survived when the bullet ricocheted off the keys she was holding.

Mr. Ramirez continued his home invasions, usually through a window that had been left open. He became known for mutilating corpses, gouging out one woman's eyeballs. Though he varied his routines, witnesses and surviving victims were able to provide the police with a description: Hispanic, with long hair and a foul smell.

One victim, who had been forced by Mr. Ramirez to declare her love for Satan and perform oral sex on him, was able to glimpse his car, an orange Toyota station wagon. A teenager who spotted the car, identifying it from news reports, wrote down half its license plate number.

The car turned out to have been stolen, and the police found it where Mr. Ramirez had abandoned it. They obtained a fingerprint from the mirror and identified Mr. Ramirez from his criminal records, then released his photo to the news media.

When Mr. Ramirez tried to steal another car, its owner, who was under the car working on it at the time, identified him as the "Night Stalker." A mob soon formed and began beating him with an iron post before the police arrived to rescue him and take him into custody.

At his trial, Mr. Ramirez wore black sunglasses and flashed a two-finger "devil sign" to black-clad Satanists who attended the trial. Eight witnesses - including six women who had survived his attacks - identified him as the assailant or placed him at crime scenes. More than 1,600 potential jurors had to be interviewed to find 24 (including 12 alternates) who could promise to be impartial about Mr. Ramirez.

As he left the courthouse after being convicted, he offered a one-word comment: "Evil."

While on death row, he married Doreen Lioy, a freelance magazine editor, in 1996. She had begun writing to him in 1985 after his arrest, and he proposed in 1988, choosing Ms. Lioy over other correspondents who were also hoping for a relationship with him.

She bought a gold wedding band for herself and a platinum one for Mr. Ramirez. "Satanists don't wear gold," he had explained to her.

Information about other survivors was not available.

Six weeks after they had voted to convict Mr. Ramirez, the jury returned to ask that he be put to the death.

"Big deal," Mr. Ramirez said. "Death always went with the territory."

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Richard Ramirez, the 'Night Stalker' Killer, Dies at 53 (Published 2013)

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Richard Ramirez, who claimed to be inspired by Satan when he killed at least 14 people in the "Night Stalker" attacks that terrorized California in 1985, died on Friday in a hospital in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 53. Sam Robinson, a spokesman for San Quentin State Prison, where Mr. Ramirez was on death row, announced the death, The Associated Press reported.

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While his crimes only spanned a year, the Night Stalker was unfortunately prolific. After a string of burglaries, rapes, and murders between 1984 and 1985, Ramirez was convicted in 1988 on 13 counts of murder, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries. Ramirez had no discernable pattern, either - his victims were white, Asian, Latino, and he broke into both apartments and houses across Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ramirez's childhood also played a part in the style and nature of his crimes, having been exposed to violence and Satanism at a young age.

Richard Ramirez is born on February 29, 1960, in El Paso, to a Mexican immigrant couple. He's the youngest of five children. At age 10, Ramirez begins smoking weed after hanging out with his cousin, Miguel Ramirez. His cousin, a Vietnam War veteran, would also show Ramirez photographs of the women he abused, including some posing with a severed head.

On May 4, Miguel fatally shoots his wife, Jessie, in the face during a fight while Ramirez is present. A few months later Ramirez moves in with his sister, Ruth, and her husband, Roberto. Roberto is a "peeping Tom" and would take Ramirez along with him on his after-dark acts. In 1977. Miguel is released from Texas State Mental Hospital after being found not guilty of Jessie's murder by reason of insanity. During this time Ramirez also gets a job at a Holiday Inn, where he breaks into hotel rooms to steal from guests and even attempts to rape one.

Ramirez relocates to California, where the majority of his crimes occur.

Ramirez's first known murder happens. Nine-year-old Mei Leung, a Chinese-American girl, is murdered in the basement of the San Francisco hotel where Ramirez was living. She is raped and stabbed to death before Ramirez hangs her body from a pipe. It is not initially identified as being part of his crime spree, however. In 2009, his DNA matches a sample obtained at the crime scene. In 2016, officials disclose a second suspect was likely present due to DNA evidence, but they are not publicly identified due to lack of evidence.

Ramirez's first identified Night Stalker crime occurs. Jennie Vincow, 79, was found murdered in her Los Angeles apartment, nearly decapitated. Ramirez's fingerprint is found on a window screen he removed to enter the apartment.

Ramirez attacks Maria Hernandez, 22, outside her home in Rosemead, CA. He shoots her in the face but she survives after a bullet ricochets off a set of keys. Her roommate, Dayle Yoshie Okazaki, is also fatally shot in the head by Ramirez.

An hour later, Ramirez heads to Monterey Park, where he shoots Tsai-Lian "Veronica" Yu twice after pulling her out of her car. Media calls Ramirez "The Walk-In Killer" and "The Valley Intruder."

Ramirez enters a Whittier, CA home he previously burglarized. He fatally shoots Vincent Charles Zazzara, 64, in the head while he's asleep. His wife, Maxine Levenia Zazzara, 44, wakes up from the gunshot. Ramirez beats her and searches the room for valuables. Maxine escapes the binds and grabs a gun that isn't loaded. Ramirez shoots her three times, then stabs her, gouges out her eyes, puts them in a jewelry box and leaves. He leaves footprints in the flower beds and bullets at this scene match those from his previous attacks.

Ramirez breaks into Bill and Lillian Doi's home in Monterey Park. He shoots Doi in the face, beats him unconscious, and then binds Lillian, searches their home for valuables, and then rapes her. Bill Doi dies at the hospital.

Ramirez drives a stolen car to Monrovia, CA, and breaks into Mabel "Ma" Bell and Florence "Nettie" Lang's home. He attacks Lang with a hammer, binds her in the bedroom, and then binds and attacks Bell. He uses Bell's lipstick to draw a pentagram on her body and the walls of both of their bedrooms after raping her. The women are found two days later alive, but Bell eventually dies due to her injuries.

Ramirez drives the stolen car to Burbank and breaks into Carol Kyle's home. He binds Kyle and her son, 11, then has the son point out where the valuables are. He rapes Kyle, binds the son to her, and flees.

Ramirez drives the stolen car to Arcadia, CA, to Mary Louise Cannon's home. He knocks her out with a lamp and stabs her with a knife from her kitchen. She is found dead.

Ramirez heads to Sierra Madre, CA, where he attacks Whitney Bennett, 16, with a tire iron as she sleeps. He then tries to strangle her with a telephone cord, but the cord sparks and Bennett begins to breathe. Ramirez flees, believing Jesus saved her. Bennett survives the attack.

Ramirez breaks into Joyce Lucille Nelson's Monterey Park home. He burglarizes her home, then beats her to death, leaving a shoeprint on her face. He then enters Sophie Dickman's home, handcuffs her at gunpoint, tries to rpae her, and steals her jewelry. He tells her to "swear on Satan" that he stole everything of value in her home.

Ramirez buys a machete and drives a different stolen vehicle to Glendale, CA. He enters Lela and Maxon Kneiding's home, kills them with both a machete and gun, and burglarizes their home. He then drives to Sun Valley, breaks into the Khovananth home, and fatally shoots Chainarong Khovananth. He rapes and beats Somkid Khovananth, binds their eight-year-old son, and forces Somkid to point out valuables in the home. He also forces her to "swear to Satan" that she isn't hiding money.

Ramirez breaks into Chris and Virginia Peterson's home. He shoots Virginia in the face, then shoots Chris in the neck and tries to flee the scene. Chris fights back but Ramirez manages to escape. The couple survives.

Ramirez breaks into Sakina and Elyas Abowath's home. He fatally shoots Elyas, who was sleeping. He then handcuffs, beats, and rapes Sakina while demanding their jewelry. He ties up their three-year-old son.

By this point, Ramirez has left Los Angeles for the San Francisco Bay Area. He breaks into Peter and barbara Pan's home. He shoots Peter in the head, then beats and rapes Barbara before fatally shooting her. He uses lipstick to draw a pentagram and write "Jack the knife" on a bedroom wall.

Ramirez drives to Mission Viejo in a stolen orange Toyota. James Romero, Jr.'s 13-year-old son hears Ramirez outside their home and wakes up his parents. Ramirez flees, but the family manages to glimpse the color and make of his car and part of the license plate number.

Ramirez then breaks into Bill Carns and Inez Erickson's home. He shoots Carns three times in the head and tells Erikson he's the Night Stalker and that she must swear to love Satan. After raping her, he tetlls her, "Tell them the Night Stalker was here." Erikson later gives officials a description of Ramirez and they are able to find the stolen car in Los Angeles. There's a single fingerprint on the mirror that matches Ramirez's. "We know who you are now, and soon everyone else will," officials say when releasing an 1984 mugshot of his. "There will be no place you can hide."

Ramirez takes a bus to Tucson, AZ, to visit his brother. He returns to California the next morning. His mugshot is all over newspapers, which he notices. He attempts to carjack a woman's vehicle, but a group of bystanders pursue him. One manages to hit Ramirez in the head and they pin him down until police arrive.

Jury selection begins for Ramirez's trial on July 22. At his first appearance, Ramirez yells, "Hail Satan!" and has a pentagram on his hand.

Ramirez's trial is delayed because one of the jurors is a no-show. The juror, Phyllis Singletary, is later found shot and killed in her apartment. The jury wonders if Ramirez is behind her death, but it is later determined that her boyfriend killed her and then committed suicide.

Ramirez is convicted on 13 counts of murder, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries, putting him on death row.

Ramirez dies aged 53 of health complications at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, CA.

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A Detailed Timeline Of Night Stalker Richard Ramirez' Crimes

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While his crimes only spanned a year, the Night Stalker was unfortunately prolific. After a string of burglaries, rapes, and murders between 1984 and 1985, Ramirez was convicted in 1988 on 13 counts of murder, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries.

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Los Angeles mob attacks “Night Stalker” serial killer | August 31, 1985 | HISTORY

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Richard Ramirez, the notorious “Night Stalker,” is captured and nearly killed by a mob in East Los Angeles, Californi…

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There have been countless books written about the war in Vietnam as the United States was involved in a very costly war in terms of human loss and what the conflict did to tear apart our country as a whole. But could the war in Vietnam have been avoided in the first place? In the closing days of World War II, the US' OSS (Office of Strategic Services) had sent a team in Indochina to work with the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh. He pleaded to the US and President Truman to help Vietnam gain its independence. His pleas were ignored, Truman and the US backed the French to take back their colonial empire and the rest is history.

Was Ho's plea a clever Communist tactic just to get economic support from the US and help a fledgling country get on its feet? Or was he, as tried to portray himself, a fervent Vietnamese nationalist who just wanted to free his people? The answer may never be known completely but the truth may be a little bit of both.

Ho Chi Minh traveled in his formative years, gained an education from the French school in Hue and traveled abroad first on a steamer to France and later lived in the United States for a short time working menial jobs in Harlem and Boston.

After World War I, he went to France, got into politics, especially when it came to Vietnamese independence. He wrote letters to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and US President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles peace talks asking for civil rights for the Vietnamese people. Ho pointed out that the self-determination proposed in the peace talks should include Vietnam and end the French colonial rule there. He asked for freedom of the press, freedom of association and assembly. Supposedly he claimed that his hero was George Washington who freed America from British colonial rule. But it all fell on deaf ears.

During this time, he fell under the sway of French socialists and became a member of the Parti Communiste Français (FCP). He studied in Moscow and moved to China where he taught young people at Whampoa Military Academy. He bounced between Europe and Asia until World War II broke out and in 1941, Ho returned to Vietnam to take control of the Viet Minh Independence Movement.

Ho commanded 10,000 guerrillas of the Viet Minh known as the "men in black" in fighting not only the Japanese occupation forces but those of the Vichy French as well. In April 1945, Ho met with Archimedes Patti the OSS Station Chief in Kunming, China. The two struck a deal where the Viet Minh would provide intelligence on the Japanese and rescue downed US aircrews. The US would supply them with communications gear, and small arms as well as the training to properly use them.

In July of 1945, the OSS parachuted a team into Vietnam codenamed the "Deer" team, about 70 miles west of Hanoi. They were met by the Viet Minh and treated as heroes. They were brought to the austere headquarters of the Viet Minh where the team found Ho close to death suffering from malaria and dysentery. He was treated by the medics where he made a full recovery.

During the training to teach the Viet Minh how to use the US bazookas, light machine guns and hand grenades, the OSS' interpreter PFC Henry Prunier, from Worcester, Mass. was teaching a Viet Minh, named Mr. Van how to throw grenades with the overhand lob which was foreign to the Vietnamese. Mr. Van's real name was Vo Nguyen Giap who later defeated the French and led the war against the Americans. Once Ho learned Prunier was from Massachusetts, he regaled him with his stories about his time in Boston.

The Viet Minh rescued a downed US pilot and Ho personally brought him to China to return him to American authorities. There he asked to meet Claire Chennault, who led the Flying Tigers in the early days of the war. Ho still talked to the OSS men about Vietnamese self-determination and asked them if he was any different than George Washington.

With the war winding down, Ho began writing letters to now President Harry Truman who took over after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in April. Roosevelt favored Vietnamese self-determination. Ho in his letters, the first was written on August 17 began to ask Truman for help. His letters were ignored, however State Dept. cables from the time speak of Ho and his Communist leanings and it was clear that the US was not going to support him, despite the recommendations of the OSS team leader Major Allison Thomas and later Aaron Bank. Bank met with Ho and although he had Communist leanings felt like he was worth supporting.

Thomas in his reports to the OSS Station in China downplayed the Communist side of Ho's personality and tried to play on the nationalistic side of things. "Ho definitely tabooed the idea that the party was communistic" since "the peasants didn't know what the word communism or socialism meant-but they did understand liberty and independence."

With the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945, Ho and the Viet Minh entered Hanoi and proclaimed their independence. His choice for their own Declaration of Independence mirrored the words of Thomas Jefferson.
"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." "This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free."
Ho wanted US support for the Vietnamese independence movement and asked for our help in not allowing the hated French from returning to their colonial empire.

That was not to be, the US began to tacitly and then actively support the French return to Vietnam. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1950s where Ho Chi Minh finally broke with his attempts to cultivate American favor.

Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist? Yes but more so, he was a fervent Vietnamese nationalist. After suffering under French rule for so long, it is doubtful he wanted to replace the French controlling his country with bosses from Moscow and Beijing calling the shots. But he was a pragmatist, he couldn't take on the French alone and if the US wasn't going to help then he was going to seek out those who would.

In a footnote to all of this, Prunier, the OSS interpreter, several times turned down opportunities to join the CIA after the war. Instead, he returned to Massachusetts and the family masonry business. However, in 1995 the U. S. Indochina Reconciliation Project, which had been established a decade earlier as a non-profit group to help facilitate relations between the United States and countries in Indochina asked him and the surviving members of the OSS "Deer Team" to return to Vietnam.

Giap remembered his OSS trainer and grabbing an orange, he aped the overhand movement that Prunier had trained him in 50 years prior. "Yes, yes, yes!" Giap exclaimed. Another Vietnamese soldier kept grabbing Prunier's arm and calling his name. The Americans were stunned that they were held in such high esteem so many years later. Prunier donated his uniforms and papers from the OSS mission to the Vietnamese Museum of Military History in Hanoi. There they are prominently displayed and the museum's Director General Le Ma Leung, who was a veteran of Khe Sanh, called Prunier's donation "one of the most significant historical contributions that the museum had ever received."

We'll never know if the US could have held sway over Ho Chi Minh and turned him away from the Russians and Chinese. Even if the US had gotten involved in Ho's bid for independence from France, would Vietnam have gone Communist? It is a great question and we may never really know the answer. Chances are they probably would have but the US lost an opportunity to stop a war from ever happening at the cost of 58,000 American lives.

Photo Courtesy: OSS archives

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Could the war in Vietnam been avoided? The Case of Ho Chi Minh and OSS | SOFREP

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There have been countless books written about the war in Vietnam as the United States was involved in a very costly war in terms of human loss and what the conflict did to tear apart our country as a whole. But could the war in Vietnam have been avoided in the first place?

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The military historian Max Boot takes on the counter-insurgency maven Edward Lansdale.

For almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. Millions died in that struggle. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted. We got nothing for it.

We got nothing for pretty much everything we tried in Vietnam, and it's hard to pick out a moment in those thirty years when anti-Communist forces were on a sustainable track to prevailing. Political and military leaders misunderstood the enemy's motives; they misread conditions on the ground; they tried to beat unconventional fighters with conventional tactics; they massacred civilians. They pursued strategies that seemed designed to produce neither a victory nor a settlement, only what Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers but once a passionate supporter of American intervention, called "the stalemate machine."

Could the United States have found a strategic through line to the outcome we wanted? Could we have adopted a different strategy that would have yielded a secure non-Communist South Vietnam? Max Boot's " The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam " (Liveright) is an argument that there was a winning strategy-or, at least, a strategy with better odds than the one we followed.

There were two major wars against the Communists in Vietnam. The first was an anticolonial war between Communist nationalists and France, which, except for a period during the Second World War, when the Japanese took over, had ruled the country since the eighteen-eighties. That war lasted from 1946 to 1954, when the French lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu and negotiated a settlement, the Geneva Accords, that partitioned the country at the seventeenth parallel. The United States had funded France's military failure to the tune of about $2.5 billion.

The second war was a civil war between the two zones created at Geneva: North Vietnam, governed by Vietnamese Communists, and South Vietnam, backed by American aid and, eventually, by American troops. That war lasted from 1954 (or 1955 or 1959, depending on your definition of an "act of war") to 1975, when Communist forces entered Saigon and unified the country. The second war is the Vietnam War, "our" war.

The more we look at American decision-making in Vietnam, the less sense it makes. Geopolitics helps explain our concerns about the fate of Vietnam in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Relations with the Soviet Union and China were hostile, and Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula were in political turmoil. Still, paying for France to reclaim its colony just as the world was about to experience a wave of decolonization was a dubious undertaking.

By 1963, however, "peaceful coexistence" was the policy of the American and Soviet governments, Korea had effectively been partitioned, and the Sino-Soviet split made the threat of a global Communist movement seem no longer a pressing concern. And yet that was when the United States embarked on a policy of military escalation. There were sixteen thousand American advisers in South Vietnam in 1963; during the next ten years, some three million American soldiers would serve there.

Historians argue about whether a given battle was a success or a failure, but, over-all, the military mission was catastrophic on many levels. The average age of American G.I.s in Vietnam was about twenty-two. By 1971, thousands of them were on opium or heroin, and more than three hundred incidents of fragging-officers wounded or killed by their own troops-were reported. Half a million Vietnam veterans would suffer from P.T.S.D., a higher proportion than for the Second World War.

People sometimes assume that Western opinion leaders turned against the war only after U.S. marines waded ashore at Da Nang, in 1965, and the body counts began to rise. That's not the case. As Fredrik Logevall points out in his study of American decision-making, " Choosing War " (1999), the United States was warned repeatedly about the folly of involvement.

Intervention in Southeast Asia would be "an entanglement without end," France's President, Charles de Gaulle, speaking from his own nation's long experience in Indochina, told President Kennedy. The United States, he said, would find itself in a "bottomless military and political swamp." Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, told Kennedy that sending in American troops would be a disastrous decision. Walter Lippmann, the dean of American political commentators back when political commentary had such titles, warned, in 1963, "The price of a military victory in the Vietnamese war is higher than American vital interests can justify."

De Gaulle and Nehru had reasons of their own for wanting the United States to keep out of Southeast Asia. But Kennedy himself was keenly aware of the risks of entrapment, and so was his successor. "There ain't no daylight in Vietnam, there's not a bit," Lyndon Johnson said in 1965. "The more bombs you drop, the more nations you scare, the more people you make mad." Three years later, he was forced to withdraw from his reëlection campaign, his political career destroyed by his inability to end the war. The first time someone claimed to see a "light at the end of the tunnel" in Vietnam was in 1953. People were still using that expression in 1967. By then, American public opinion and much of the media were antiwar. Yet we continued to send men to fight there for six more years.

Our international standing was never dependent on our commitment to South Vietnam. We might have been accused of inconstancy for abandoning an ally, but everyone would have understood. In fact, the longer the war went on the more our image suffered. The United States engaged in a number of high-handed and extralegal interventions in the affairs of other nations during the Cold War, but nothing damaged our reputation like Vietnam. It not only shattered our image of invincibility. It meant that a whole generation grew up looking upon the United States as an imperialist, militarist, and racist power. The political capital we accumulated after leading the alliance against Fascism in the Second World War and then helping rebuild Japan and Western Europe we burned through in Southeast Asia.

American Presidents were not imperialists. They genuinely wanted a free and independent South Vietnam, yet the gap between that aspiration and the reality of the military and political situation in-country was unbridgeable. They could see the problem, but they could not solve it. Political terms are short, and so politics is short-term. The main consideration that seems to have presented itself to those Presidents, from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon, who insisted on staying the course was domestic politics-the fear of being blamed by voters for losing Southeast Asia to Communism. If Southeast Asia was going to be lost to Communism, they preferred that it be on another President's head. It was a costly calculation.

There were some American officials, even some diplomats and generals, who believed in the mission but saw that the strategy wasn't working and had an idea why. One of these was John Paul Vann, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who was assigned to a South Vietnamese commander in 1962, at a time when Americans restricted themselves to an advisory role. It seemed to Vann that South Vietnamese officers were trying to keep their troops out of combat. They would call in air strikes whenever they could, which raised body counts but killed civilians or drove them to the Vietcong. Vann cultivated some young American journalists-among them David Halberstam, of the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan, of United Press International, who had just arrived in Vietnam-to get out his story that the war was not going well.

Vann didn't want the United States to withdraw. He wanted the United States to win. He was all about killing the enemy. But his efforts to persuade his superiors in Vietnam and Washington failed, and he resigned from the Army in 1963. He returned to Vietnam as a civilian in 1965, and was killed there, in a helicopter crash, in 1972. In 1988, Sheehan published a book about him, " A Bright Shining Lie," which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and is a classic of Vietnam literature.

"The Road Not Taken" is the story of another military figure sympathetic to the mission and critical of the strategy, Major General Edward Lansdale, and Boot says that his intention is to do for Lansdale what Sheehan "so memorably accomplished for John Paul Vann." Boot's task is tougher. Sheehan was in Vietnam, and he knew Vann and the people Vann worked with. He also knew some secrets about Vann's private life. Boot did not know Lansdale, who died in 1987, but he interviewed people who did; he read formerly classified documents; and he had access to Lansdale's personal correspondence, including letters to his longtime Filipina mistress, Patrocinio (Pat) Yapcinco Kelly.

Lansdale was at various times an officer in the Army and the Air Force, but those jobs were usually covers. For much of his career, he worked for the C.I.A. He was brought up in California. He attended U.C.L.A. but failed to graduate, and then got married and went into advertising, where he had some success. In 1942, with the United States at war with the Axis powers, he joined the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the nation's first civilian intelligence service and the precursor of the C.I.A. During the war, Lansdale worked Stateside, but in 1945, shortly after the Japanese surrender, he was sent to the Philippines.

It was there that he had the first of his professional triumphs. He ran covert operations to help the Philippine government defeat a small-scale Communist uprising, and he supervised the candidacy of a Filipino politician named Ramon Magsaysay and got him elected President, in 1953. To assist in that effort, Lansdale created an outfit called the National Movement for Free Elections. It was funded by the C.I.A.

This was Lansdale's modus operandi. He was a fabricator of fronts, the man behind the curtain. He manipulated events-through payoffs, propaganda, and sometimes more nefarious means-to insure that indigenous politicians friendly to the United States would be "freely" elected. Internal opposition to these leaders could then be characterized as "an insurgency" (in Vietnam, it would be termed "aggression"), a situation that called for the United States to intervene in order to save democracy. Magsaysay's speeches as a Presidential candidate, for example, were written by a C.I.A. agent. (The Soviets, of course, operated in exactly the same way, through fronts and election-fixing. The Cold War was a looking-glass war.)

In 1954, fresh from his success with Magsaysay, Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam by the director of the C.I.A., Allen Dulles, with instructions to do there what he had done in the Philippines: see to the establishment of a pro-Western government and assist it in finding ways to check Communist encroachment. (The Communists in question were, of course, Vietnamese opposed to a government put in place and propped up by foreign powers.)

As Boot explains, Vietnam was a different level of the game. The Philippines was a former American colony. Almost all Filipinos were Christians. They liked Americans and had fought with them in the war against Japan. English was the language used by the government. The Vietnamese, by contrast, had had almost no experience with Americans and were proud of their two-thousand-year history of resistance to foreign invaders, from the Chinese and the Mongols to the French and the Japanese. There were more than a million Vietnamese Catholics, but, in a population of twenty-five million, eighty per cent practiced some form of Buddhism.

The South Vietnamese who welcomed the American presence after 1954 were mainly urbanites and people who had prospered under French rule. Eighty per cent of the population lived in the countryside, though, and it was the strategy of the Vietcong to convince them that the United States was just one more foreign invader, no different from the Japanese or the French, or from Kublai Khan.

In 1954, Ho Chi Minh, the President of North Vietnam, was a popular figure. He was a Communist, but he was a Communist because he was a nationalist. Twice he had appealed to American Presidents to support his independence movement-to Woodrow Wilson after the First World War, and Truman at the end of the Second-and twice he had been ignored. Only the Communists, he had concluded, were truly committed to the principle of self-determination in Asia. The Geneva Accords called for a national election to be held in Vietnam in 1956; that election was not held, but many people in the American government thought that Ho would have won.

Lansdale knew neither French nor Vietnamese. For that matter, he couldn't even speak Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines. (In the Philippines, he is said to have sometimes communicated by charades, or by drawing pictures in the sand.) Yet, as he had done in the Philippines, he managed to get close to a local political figure and become his consigliere. In the Philippines, Lansdale could choose the politician he wanted to work with; in Vietnam, he had to play the card he was dealt. The card's name was Ngo Dinh Diem.

Diem was the personification of the paradoxes of American designs in Southeast Asia. "A curious blend of heroism mixed with a narrowness of view and of egotism . . . a messiah without a message" is how one American diplomat described him. He was a devout Catholic who hated the Communists. One of his brothers had been killed in 1945 by the Vietminh-the Communist-dominated nationalist party. During the war with France, he had spent two years in the United States, where he impressed a number of American politicians, including the young John F. Kennedy. In 1954, the year of the French defeat, he was appointed Prime Minister by the Emperor, Bao Dai, a French puppet who lived luxuriously in Europe and did not speak Vietnamese well.

Diem was a workaholic who could hold forth for hours before journalists and other visitors to the Presidential Palace. A two-hour Diem monologue was considered a quickie, and he didn't like to be interrupted. But Diem did not see himself as a Western puppet. He was a genuine nationalist-on paper, the plausible leader of an independent non-Communist South Vietnam.

On the other hand, Diem was no champion of representative democracy. His political philosophy was a not entirely intelligible blend of personalism (a quasi-spiritual French school of thought), Confucianism, and authoritarianism. He aspired to be a benevolent autocrat, but he had little understanding of the condition Vietnamese society was in after seventy years of colonial rule.

The French had replaced the Confucian educational system and had tried to manufacture a new national identity: Franco-Vietnamese. They were only partly successful. It was not obvious how Diem and the Americans were supposed to forge a nation from the fractured society the French left behind. Diem's idea was to create a cult of himself and the nation. "A sacred respect is due to the person of the sovereign," he claimed. "He is the mediator between the people and heaven." He had altars featuring his picture put up in the streets, and a hymn praising him was sung along with the national anthem.

This ambition may have been naïve. What made it poisonous was nepotism. Diem was deeply loyal to and dependent on his family, and his family were an unloved bunch. One of his brothers was the Catholic bishop of the coastal city of Hue. Another was the boss-the warlord, really-of central Vietnam. A third brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, lived in the Presidential Palace with his wife, Tran Le Xuan, a woman known to the press, and thus to the world, as the Dragon Lady, Madame Nhu. She operated as Diem's hostess (he was celibate) and was free with her usually inflammatory political opinions. American officials in Saigon prayed that the Nhus would somehow disappear, but they were the only people Diem trusted.

Nhu ran the underside of the Diem regime. He created a shadowy political party, the Can Lao, whose members swore loyalty to Diem, and he made membership a prerequisite for career advancement. According to Frances FitzGerald's book " Fire in the Lake " (1972), he funded the party by means of piracy, extortion, opium trading, and currency-exchange manipulation. He also created a series of secret-police and intelligence organizations. Thousands of Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty were arrested, tortured, and executed by beheading or disembowelment. Political opponents were imprisoned. For nine years, the Ngo family was the wobbling pivot on which we rested our hopes for a non-Communist South Vietnam.

The United States had declined to be a signatory to the Geneva Accords-which had, after all, effectively created a new Communist state-but Lansdale's arrival in Saigon on the eve of Diem's official appointment was a signal that we intended to supervise the outcome. And the American government was always prepared to swap out South Vietnamese leaders when one seemed to falter-a privilege we bought with enormous amounts of aid, some $1.5 billion between 1955 and 1961. It is to Lansdale's credit that Diem survived as long as he did.

After landing in Saigon and setting up a front, the Saigon Military Mission, Lansdale began sending infiltrators into North Vietnam (violating a promise that the United States had made about respecting the ceasefire agreed to at Geneva, though the North Vietnamese were violating the accord, too). The agents were instructed to carry out sabotage and other subversive activities, standard C.I.A. procedure around the world. But almost every agent the agency sent in underground somewhere was captured, tortured, and killed, usually quickly, and this is what happened to most of Lansdale's agents. People survive in totalitarian regimes by becoming informers, and those regimes were often tipped off by double agents.

The Geneva Accords provided for a three-hundred-day grace period before the partition in order to allow Vietnamese to move from North to South or vice versa, and Lansdale, using American ships and an airline secretly owned by the C.I.A., arranged for some nine hundred thousand Vietnamese, most of them Catholics and many of them people who had collaborated with the French, to emigrate below the seventeenth parallel. (A much smaller number immigrated to the North.) These émigrés provided Diem with a political base.

Lansdale's most important accomplishment was helping Diem win the so-called battle of the sects. The French defeat had left a power vacuum, and groups besides the Vietminh were jockeying for turf. In 1955, three of them united in opposition to Diem: the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, religious sects, and the Binh Xuyen, an organized-crime society with a private army of ten thousand men.

Diem neutralized the religious sects by the expedient of having Lansdale use C.I.A. funds to buy them off. Boot says the amount may have been as high as twelve million dollars, which would be a hundred million dollars today. But the Binh Xuyen, which controlled the Saigon police, remained a threat. Worried that Diem was not strong enough to hold the country together, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, sent cables to the American embassies in Saigon and Paris authorizing officials to find a replacement. Lansdale warned Diem that U.S. support was waning, prompting him to launch an attack on the Binh Xuyen. The Binh Xuyen was routed, and Dulles countermanded his order.

To secure his winnings, Diem called for a referendum to determine whether he or Bao Dai, the former Emperor, should be head of state. Diem won, supposedly with 98.2 per cent of the vote. He carried Saigon with 605,025 votes out of 450,000 registered voters. Lansdale's main contribution to the campaign was to suggest that the ballots for Diem be printed in red (considered a lucky color) and the ballots for Bao Dai in green (a color associated with cuckolds). Boot does not mention that this simplified Nhu's instructions to his poll watchers: he told them to throw out all the green ballots.

With Diem's consolidation of authority, Boot says, Lansdale reached "the apogee of his power and influence." In 1956, he left Southeast Asia and took a position in the Pentagon helping to develop special forces like the Navy SEALS and the Green Berets. He enjoyed a brief resurgence with Kennedy's election, in 1960. Kennedy was a Cold Warrior, but he was not locked into a Cold War mentality. He liked outside-the-box types, and he liked Lansdale and even considered appointing him Ambassador to South Vietnam. But the State Department and the Pentagon did not like outside-the-box types and they certainly did not like Lansdale, who remained in the States and was assigned to head Operation Mongoose, charged with devising methods for overthrowing Fidel Castro.

Lansdale does not seem to have been directly involved in the notoriously wacko assassination plots against Castro (the poisoned cigar and so on), but Boot suggests that he knew of such plans and would not have objected to them. He did come up with a scheme for an American submarine to surface off the Cuban coast and fire explosives into the sky. Rumors, introduced inside Cuba by C.I.A. agents, that Castro was doomed would lead Cubans to interpret the lights in the sky as a sign of divine disapproval of the regime.

In the mid-seventies, in a statement to a congressional committee, Lansdale denied proposing the scheme (Boot says he lied), but it was consistent with his usual strategy, which, in the case of Cuba, was to fund an indigenous opposition movement whose suppression would give the United States an excuse to send in troops. A lot of brainpower was wasted on those anti-Castro schemes. Castro would run Cuba for another forty-five years. The country is now ruled by his brother.

Lansdale was reassigned to Vietnam in 1965, but Diem was dead. He had been deposed in 1963, in a coup d'état to which the American government had given its approval. He and Nhu were assassinated shortly after they surrendered. (Madame Nhu was in Beverly Hills, and escaped retribution.) There were celebrations in the streets of Saigon, but the event marked the beginning of a series of coups and government by generals in South Vietnam. Short of withdrawal, the United States now had no choice but to take over the war.

By 1965, therefore, when Lansdale arrived for his second tour of duty, the American military was fully in charge. It had little interest in the sort of covert operations Lansdale specialized in. The strategy now was "attrition": kill as many of the enemy as possible. "Life is cheap in the Orient," as General William Westmoreland, the commander of American forces, explained to the filmmaker Peter Davis-who, in his documentary "Hearts and Minds" (1974), juxtaposed the remark with scenes of Vietnamese mourning their dead, imagery already familiar from photographs published and broadcast around the world. Lansdale was not able to accomplish much, and he returned to the United States in 1968.

In 1972, he published a memoir, " In the Midst of Wars," in which he was obliged to recirculate a lot of cover stories-which is to say, fabrications-about his career. Reception of the book was not kind.

Lansdale's private life turns out to have been a little sad. From the letters Boot quotes, it is clear that Pat was the love of his life. "I'm just not a whole person away from you," a typical letter to Pat reads, "and cannot understand why God brought us together when I had previous obligations unless He meant us for each other." But Lansdale's wife would not give him a divorce, and he reconciled himself to trying to keep the marriage alive. He suffered for many years from longing and remorse. When Lansdale was with his wife, Pat dated other men. There appear to have been no significant dalliances on his part. Only after his wife died, in 1973, were he and Pat married.

"The Road Not Taken" is not the first book devoted to Edward Lansdale, and it is not quite of the calibre of "A Bright Shining Lie," in part because Boot can't provide the ground-level reporting that Sheehan could. But it is expansive and detailed, it is well written, and it sheds light on a good deal about U.S. covert activities in postwar Southeast Asia.

Boot is a military historian, a columnist, and a foreign-policy adviser who has worked with the Presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. He has been highly critical of Donald Trump, and describes his social views as liberal, but he has been a proponent of American "leadership," a term that usually connotes interventionism.

One might therefore have expected his book to adopt a revisionist line on Vietnam-to argue, for example, that the antiwar media misrepresented the military situation and made it politically impossible for us to prosecute the war to the fullest of our capabilities. He clearly wants to suggest that the war was winnable, and he believes that Lansdale's approach was the wiser one, but he is cautious in his analysis of what went wrong. It was a war with too many variables for a single strategic choice to have tipped the balance.

Interestingly, and despite some prefatory claims to the contrary, "The Road Not Taken" does not really transform the standard picture of Lansdale. Everyone knew that he was C.I.A., and that he combined an affable and artless personality with a talent for dirty tricks. Boot's Lansdale is not much different from the one FitzGerald sketched in "Fire in the Lake," back in 1972. "Lansdale was in many respects a remarkable man," she wrote:

He had faith in his own good motives. No theorist, he was rather an enthusiast, a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of goodwill with some concern for "the little guy" and the proper counterinsurgency skills. He had a great talent for practical politics and for personal involvement in what to most Americans would seem the most distinctly foreign of affairs.

If anything, Boot tries to moderate some of Lansdale's received reputation. Sheehan, in "A Bright Shining Lie," called South Vietnam "the creation of Edward Lansdale." Boot thinks this is an exaggeration, and a lot of his book is committed to restoring a sense of proportion to his subject's image as a political Svengali, or "Lawrence of Asia." So why did he write "The Road Not Taken"? And why should we read it?

In many ways, Lansdale was a throwback. He operated in the spirit of the old O.S.S. He treated all conditions as wartime conditions, and so did not scruple to use whatever means necessary-from bribes and misinformation to black ops-to achieve ends favorable to the interests of the United States. Like the man who created the O.S.S., General William (Wild Bill) Donovan, he was a backslapper who prized informality and was indifferent to such bureaucratic punctilio as "the chain of command." He was a freelancer. He made his own rules.

That is exactly what his C.I.A. masters wanted him to do. And it is why, after the American military took charge in Vietnam and bureaucratic punctilio was back in style, his influence waned and he was put on the shelf. Techno-strategists like Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, had no use for Lansdale. They did not even find him entertaining. They looked on him as a harebrained troglodyte.

Still, McNamara's strategy failed. Did Lansdale know something that McNamara and the rest of Kennedy and Johnson's "best and brightest" did not? Boot thinks he did, and one purpose of his book is to revive Lansdale as a pioneer of counter-insurgency theory.

Lansdale was a proponent of the "hearts and minds" approach. He believed in the use of subterfuge and force, but he rejected "search and destroy" tactics-invading villages and hunting out the enemy, as American forces did repeatedly in South Vietnam. It was a search-and-destroy mission that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians at My Lai, in 1968.

Tactics like this, Lansdale saw, only alienated the population, and he advocated what he called "civic action," which he defined, in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1964, as "an extension of military courtesy, in which the soldier citizen becomes the brotherly protector of the civilian citizen." In other words, soldiers are fighters, but they are also salesmen. They need to sell the benefits of the regime they are fighting for, and to do so by demonstrating, concretely, their commitment to the lives of the people. This is what Lansdale believed that the Vietcong were doing, and what the Philippine rebels, who called themselves the Hukbalahap, had done. They understood the Maoist notion that the people are the water, and the soldiers must live among them as the fish.

As Boot notes, Lansdale was by no means the only person who believed that the way to beat the Vietcong was to play their game by embedding anti-Communist forces, trained by American advisers, in the villages. This happened to be the theme of " The Ugly American," by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, which was published in 1958 and spent an astonishing seventy-eight weeks on the best-seller list. Lederer and Lansdale were friends, and Lansdale appears in the book as a character named Colonel Hillandale, who entertains locals with his harmonica (as Lansdale was known to do).

"The Ugly American" was intended-and was received by many-as a primer on counter-insurgency for battlegrounds like Vietnam. Although the title has come to refer to vulgar American tourists, that was not the intention. In the book, the "ugly American" is the hero, a man who works side by side with the locals to help improve rice production. He just happens to be ugly.

Boot, oddly, doesn't mention it, but the United States was engaged in civic action in South Vietnam from the beginning of the Diem regime. Through the Agency for International Development, we had been providing agricultural, educational, infrastructural, and medical assistance. There was graft, but there were also results. Rice production doubled between 1954 and 1959, and production of livestock tripled. We gave far more in military aid, but that is because our policy was to enable South Vietnam to defend itself.

In the pursuit of civic action, though, there was always the practical question of just how South Vietnamese troops and their American advisers were supposed to insinuate themselves into villages in the countryside. It was universally understood, long before the marines arrived, that in the countryside the night belonged to the Vietcong. No one wanted to be out after sunset away from a fortified position. John Paul Vann was notorious for riding his jeep at night along country roads. People didn't do that.

What was crucially missing for a counter-insurgency program to work, as Lansdale pointed out, was a government to which the population could feel loyalty. Despite all his exertions as the Wizard of Saigon, pulling Diem's strings from behind the curtain, he could not make Diem into a nationalist hero like Ho. As many historians do, Boot believes that the Diem coup was the key event in the war, that it put the United States on a path of intervention from which there was no escape and no return. "How different history might have been," he speculates, "if Lansdale or a Lansdale-like figure had remained close enough to Diem to exercise a benign influence and offset the paranoid counsel of his brother." But Boot also recognizes that events may have been beyond Lansdale's or Diem's control. "Perhaps Lansdale's achievements could not have lasted in any case," he says.

Probably not. Lansdale was writing on water. The Vietnam he imagined was a Western fantasy. Although the best and the brightest in Washington shunned and ignored him, Lansdale shared their world view, the world view that defined the Cold War. He was a liberal internationalist. He believed that if you scratched a Vietnamese or a Filipino you found a James Madison under the skin.

Some Vietnam reporters who were contemporaries of Lansdale's, like Stanley Karnow, who covered the war for a number of news organizations, and the Times correspondent A. J. Langguth, assumed that the artlessness and the harmonica playing were an act, that Lansdale was a deeply canny operative who hid his real nature from everyone. Boot's book suggests the opposite. His Lansdale is a very simple man. Unquestioned faith in his own motives is what allowed him to manipulate others for what he knew would be their own ultimate good. He was not the first American to think that way, and he will not be the last.

The English writer James Fenton was in Saigon, working as a journalist, when Vietcong troops arrived there in 1975. He managed, more or less by accident, to be sitting in the first tank to enter the courtyard of the Presidential Palace. Fenton described the experience in a memorable article, "The Fall of Saigon," published in Granta in 1985.

Like many Westerners of his education and generation, Fenton had hoped for a Vietcong victory, and he was impressed by the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army when they marched into the city. But he stayed around long enough to see the shape that the postwar era would take. The Vietnamese Communists did what totalitarian regimes do: they took over the schools and universities, they shut down the free press, they pursued programs of enforced relocation and reëducation. Many South Vietnamese disappeared.

Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and Ho's body, like Lenin's, was installed in a mausoleum for public viewing. Agriculture was collectivized and a five-year plan of modernization was instituted. The results were calamitous. During the next ten years, many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled the country, most of them by launching boats into the South China Sea. Two hundred thousand more are estimated to have died trying. "We had been seduced by Ho," Fenton concluded. What he and his friends had refused to realize, he wrote, was that "the victory of the Vietnamese was a victory for Stalinism." By 1975, though, most Americans and Europeans had stopped caring what happened in Southeast Asia.

Then, around 1986, the screw of history took another turn. Like many other Communist states at the time, Vietnam introduced market reforms. The economy responded, and soon Western powers found a reason to be interested in Southeast Asia all over again: cheap labor. Vietnam is now a major exporter of finished goods. It is a safe bet that somewhere in your house you have a pair of sneakers or a piece of electronic equipment stamped with the words "Made in Vietnam." ♦

An earlier version of this article misidentified Max Boot's role in past Presidential campaigns.

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“the road not taken: edward lansdale an the american tragedy in vietnam”

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The military historian Max Boot takes on the counter-insurgency maven Edward Lansdale.

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In 1962, an idealistic young American named Frank Scotton joined the US Information Agency in the hope of being posted to South Vietnam. At that moment, the country was undergoing a fraught transition, with a communist-nationalist insurgency gaining strength and the US redoubling its efforts to help keep it at bay. Before flying to Saigon, Scotton met with three lieutenants from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). When they asked him if he knew any Vietnamese, he replied that he did not, but could speak French. One of the ARVN officers broke the awkward silence by observing, "That is the colonial language."

In 1964, a young diplomat named Howard Simpson, normally stationed at the US embassy in Saigon, found himself attending a high-level meeting in Honolulu where the key decision-makers were debating how to proceed in Vietnam. In the two years since Scotton had prepared for his posting, the situation in South Vietnam had deteriorated alarmingly: political instability was rife and the insurgency was growing. Yet to Simpson, the potential solutions bandied about in Honolulu seemed divorced from the reality on the ground. "I soon learned that the lessons of recent history were not on the agenda," he recalled. "I could have shut my eyes and imagined myself sitting through a briefing at the French high command in 1953."

Scotton and Simpson were all too aware of how bad it looked when they and their fellow Americans knew virtually nothing of the country they were committed to saving. But at least they recognised their ignorance. The larger misfortune was that many, probably most, other Americans didn't care. As a US Special Forces colonel told a reporter: "You don't need to know the gook's language 'cos he's gonna be dead. We're going to kill the bastards."

US soldiers used to wonder why they were hated when all they wanted to do was help Vietnam, while the Vietnamese wondered why Americans committed so much blood and treasure to a country they knew so little about. Paradoxes such as this abound in the history of the Vietnam War, which is one reason it continues to attract historical interest 50 years later.

****

Two new overviews of the war, Max Hastings's Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy and Geoffrey C Ward's The Vietnam War, join the constantly growing list of titles on the conflict. Both are huge, door-stopping books covering the full arc of American involvement, from its very initial stages during the Second World War to the ignominious evacuation of Saigon in April 1975. Both cover most of the highlights that will be familiar to many readers, but also unearth new people and perspectives.

Both also have the ironic virtue of paying more attention than previous histories to the Vietnamese experience of the Vietnam War. Americans dominated earlier accounts for reasons good and bad, but recent years have seen greater effort paid to highlighting the Vietnamese who fought on all sides. Hastings and Ward move back and forth from the perspective of an American marine to that of a Vietcong guerrilla to that of an ARVN soldier, often in relating the same battle. The result is a much fuller and richer picture than we've had before.

In particular, both authors prominently feature the role of the Communist Party politician Le Duan as the real driving force behind North Vietnam's bid for national reunification. The party leader Ho Chi Minh may have been the face of revolution, but around a decade ago historians, such as Columbia University's Lien-Hang Nguyen, realised Le Duan had called the shots. Hastings rightly portrays him as a ruthless butcher.

Ward's book is a tie-in to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's critically acclaimed ten-part television documentary, which aired last year on PBS and the BBC. It feels the part, less a book than a script. Ward serves up an endless string of vignettes of what happened, usually relayed through extensive quotation of people involved, but he offers virtually no insight into why things happened the way they did. This approach was effective in the riveting Burns-Novick documentary, which grounded itself in the emotion of personal reminiscence and deployed evocative music and photos from the period, but what works on screen falls flat on the page. For those who know nothing about the war, Ward's book will be a useful introduction. But for those who have some familiarity, The Vietnam War 's 764 pages of text will feel as the jungles and rice paddies did to US soldiers 50 years ago: a total slog.

The book's real insight comes in five short, intriguing essays written by other historians; the contributions by Edward Miller and Fredrik Logevall are particularly good. But even they can't compensate for the rest of the book's lack of analytical bite.

Hastings's Vietnam is altogether different. It has the same encyclopaedic comprehensiveness as Ward's book, but it is engaging, provocative, and insightful too. Hastings expertly probes well-known figures but also uncovers lost individuals such as Scotton and Simpson. Neophytes and experts alike will find Hastings's book stimulating, informative - and above all, riveting.

"County fair" operations in Vietnamese villages offered medical care and entertainment that promoted US values and habits

****

Vietnam held no interest to the United States before the Second World War, but thereafter the tiny country assumed an importance out of all proportion to its size. In 1940, Japan took advantage of France's fall to Nazi Germany and began encroaching on French Indochina. The next summer, the Japanese military moved into northern Vietnam, triggering a US embargo of strategic exports to Japan. The Japanese needed to fuel their stalling war machine in China, and so had to find an alternative supply of resources. They turned to south-east Asia, occupying the region in December 1941. But in order to pre-empt an inevitable American response, the Japanese first had to knock out the US navy's Pacific fleet at the Hawaiian base of Pearl Harbor.

After the war, France tried to re-establish its colonial authority in Indochina. American officials were torn: they disliked French colonialism, which they saw as retrograde, but Washington needed French co-operation against the Soviets in Europe. The lesser of two evils won out, and the US sent assistance to France during the First Indochina War, which began in 1946. When that war ended, with the French defeat at the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the US forced the division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with the communists shut out of what was now being called South Vietnam. Through the rest of the 1950s, Washington spent billions on a new type of endeavour: "nation-building". Vietnam became another of the Cold War's divided countries, alongside Germany, Korea and China/Taiwan.

However, what worked elsewhere failed miserably in South Vietnam. Where stalwart US allies in other divided nations demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and, in West Germany, liberal democracy, South Vietnam seemed to be artificially superimposed on an alien landscape. It was Ho Chi Minh in communist North Vietnam who instead held the allegiance of the Vietnamese people. Americans were seen as neocolonial puppet-masters, not unlike the French before them. The US stood for democracy and self-determination, but in Vietnam it appeared to be on the wrong side of history.

Hastings captures this essence of the American experience in Vietnam, foremost the original sin of hubris that convinced them they could succeed where previous empires - Chinese, Japanese and French - had failed. One of the running themes in both Hastings and Ward's accounts is the Achilles heel of South Vietnam, especially its rampant corruption. Both authors are careful to emphasise that the war involved struggle and sacrifice by millions of ordinary South Vietnamese civilians and soldiers who genuinely didn't want to live under communist rule. For good reason, the conflict should be understood first and foremost as a civil war among Vietnamese, with outside intervention layered on top of everything. Had the United States never entered the fray, there would still have been a violent struggle for the future of Vietnam.

Hastings is also entirely correct to argue that the communist Vietcong and their sponsors in Hanoi were every bit as bloody as the South Vietnamese and their sponsors in Washington - we shouldn't romanticise the communists simply because their cause might appear more worthy. Yet no matter how brutally the Vietcong and Hanoi behaved, their claims to political legitimacy, combined with South Vietnam's inability to assert those same claims successfully, was crucial in determining the war's outcome.

John F Kennedy quickly discovered this fatal paradox when he became president in January 1961. Though he promised to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty", JFK's rhetoric soared well beyond his actual policies. He was instead cautious and pragmatic by temperament, and even if he ran unnecessary risks, especially in Cuba, he also hesitated over Vietnam.

When JFK was assassinated in November 1963, he still didn't know how to handle the crisis in Vietnam. South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem, may have been America's ally, but he was increasingly un-co-operative - "a puppet who pulled his own strings" in the famous characterisation of a frustrated US official at the time. In the spring of 1963, Diem's regime cracked down on a group of dissident Buddhists in the old imperial capital of Hue, triggering a wave of political unrest across South Vietnam that included Buddhist monks calmly burning themselves alive in protest.

This, historians agree, was the most critical moment for American involvement. The US probably could have walked away from the mess without incurring too much reputational damage - it had tried to save South Vietnam but the country was simply too far gone. Instead, it plunged deeper into the morass of someone else's civil war.

Diem's fate was sealed when US officials, learning that his government was sending secret peace feelers to the Vietcong, sponsored a coup on 1 November by a junta of ARVN generals. Yet while the generals were practiced at war, they were clueless at governing. Taking advantage of the chaos, the Vietcong stepped up the pace of its insurgency. Three weeks after the coup, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK in Dallas. Kennedy's successor, the indomitable Lyndon B Johnson, immediately vowed not to be the first president to lose a war. Nearly 60,000 US troops and approximately two million Vietnamese, in both the North and the South, would forfeit their lives to this promise.

Once LBJ "Americanised" the war in 1965, and the US military assumed control from the ARVN, South Vietnamese sovereignty was effectively over. No longer could Saigon claim the noble objective of national self-determination. North Vietnam subsequently suffered from a US campaign of sustained bombing known by its code name "Rolling Thunder", but this merely reinforced its own claim to be the standard-bearer of one Vietnamese nation against foreign powers.

Partly for these reasons, the war that followed, from 1965 to the withdrawal of American forces in 1973 and the final defeat of South Vietnam in 1975, was an uphill struggle for the mighty US military. America's advantages in technology and firepower were ill-fitted to the Vietnamese terrain and political context, whereas the communists' supposed disadvantages - their basic military hardware and lack of an industrial base - actually gave them a cutting edge.

As one would expect, Hastings is especially good on the military history of the war. If famous episodes such as the My Lai massacre get short shrift, Hastings makes up for it by introducing readers to other important but little-known battles, such as Daido; unfamiliar people, such as the sinister, Strangelovian military analyst and "bombing guru" Leon Gouré; and underappreciated problems, such as the teething troubles of the M16 rifle. The anti-war movement, though, is mostly absent.

In Hastings's hands the tactical and strategic dimensions of the war illuminate its political difficulties, rather than, as is more usual, the other way around. But he is equally adept at assessing the political and diplomatic deliberations that dragged the US into the mess in the first place. Hastings is absolutely correct to criticise General William Westmoreland's strategic failings while excoriating even more harshly Johnson and his civilian advisers for pushing Westmoreland to do the impossible. Defence secretary Robert S McNamara comes in for particularly strong yet justified criticism for the duplicity with which he escalated the conflict.

****

The first deployment of US troops waded ashore at Danang in March 1965. Ward recounts that as they marched past a nearby village, an old peasant shouted, "Vive les Français!" He wasn't being sarcastic - he simply saw foreign troops and assumed that the French had returned. Almost exactly ten years after the arrival of those first marines, North Vietnamese soldiers overran the US embassy in Saigon. Amid the debris, they found on the floor a framed quotation by TE Lawrence: "Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way and your time is short."

When Henry Kissinger became Richard Nixon's key adviser on Vietnam, he memorably quipped, "We will not make the same old mistakes. We will make our own." They made both, just as Kennedy and Johnson had before them, but no mistake was more damaging than appearing to be a colonial power waging a war in the name of freedom. No military strategy, no matter how ingenious, could overcome such a fatal contradiction in such an inherently political conflict.

Future presidents would continue to make these same old mistakes. One of Hastings's only missteps in this masterful account comes when he makes the strange observation that "It is sometimes said that there are no parallels between Vietnam and the West's 21st-century struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan." I can't say I've heard it said. Quite the opposite, in fact, and there are many good books devoted to the topic of how America's misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan resemble the disaster in Vietnam. Even George W Bush himself - though more often his critics - compared the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

Elegiacally, Hastings's last sentence explicitly links Vietnam to Iraq. Both wars share many traits, but one above all others: they were totally avoidable. A US war in Vietnam wasn't inevitable by 1964-65. There was no consensus for war in Washington, in the media, or among the public at large, and Johnson had other options open to him, as some of his advisers constantly pointed out.

For this reason, the subtitle of Hastings's book, An Epic Tragedy, is somewhat misleading. Tragic tales centre on people who cannot escape their fate, try as they might. But America's war in Vietnam wasn't a matter of fate; it was entirely escapable, a matter of choice even more than circumstance. The real tragedy, as both of these books show, befell the Vietnamese people in a war they neither chose nor wanted.

Andrew Preston is professor of American history at Clare College, Cambridge and is co-editing volume two of the "Cambridge History of the Vietnam War"

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
Max Hastings
William Collins, 722pp, £30

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History
Geoffrey C Ward and Ken Burns
Ebury, 826pp, £25

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In 1962, an idealistic young American named Frank Scotton joined the US Information Agency in the hope of being posted to South Vietnam. At that moment, the country was undergoing a fraught transition, with a communist-nationalist insurgency gaining strength and the US redoubling its efforts to help keep it at bay.

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The vietnam war could have been avoided 3 times I do not have enough time to explain everything, But I will hit the high lights. Vietnam could have been a Free democratic society without a bullet ever being fired for its independence over the brutal french rule. Most people do not know but Ho chi Minh lived in america for a little while and he loved our countries idea on government. However President Wilson refused to see at the peace talk at the end of world war 1. Ho chi minh asked to see him but was not granted the permission. So, Wilson fourteen point of light was for White europeans only and that woudl have been the first time. The next time was world war II before President Roosevelt died he had staated that the french were piss poor rulers and the vietnam should govern itself. He died and then President truman decide to fight Communism. He did not listen to Roosvelts adivsor or the CIA agents who wokred there with Ho during World war II. (Note it was not the CIA then it was called something else and I have not woke up all the way I am still drinking coffee). Ho chi minh was communsit because they helped him help his people when everyone else did not want too. I would believe we americans would too, in order to beat off a brutal colonist government. Then of course after the French Indochina war and the french were defeated at diem something or the other, the new United nations peace accords agreed to two seperate countries with a general election within I believe it was 3 years or so. Then President Eisenhower found out by polling that Ho chi Minh would when so the general elections never took place. The American evolvement takes place. So, that is that, study it for yourself read plenty before deciding. Another reason Vietnam is struggling is we had sanciations against them. (please forgive spelling I am in a rush Wife calling). The american people can never understand the vietnamse culture until they study their history and then their present. My wifes side of the family says it was a war between the north and south and america supported the south. She does not like what I write on this subject but I have wrote several papers on this topic. She is to emotional because she lived through it and I never did. I saw the peaceful playgrounds of america when she was see this in person. well Good day take care and god bless you all.

Vietnam Interactive Portfolio, permanent message archive. Copyright© E. Kenneth Hoffman, 1995-2005

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The war could have been avoided 3 times.

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The vietnam war could have been avoided 3 times I do not have enough time to explain everything, But I will hit the high lights. Vietnam could have been a Free democratic society without a bullet ever being fired for its independence over the brutal french rule.

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Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key architect of the Vietnam War, said Monday that the conflict could have been halted more than a decade before it ended or avoided altogether.

McNamara, 81, told Reuters in an interview here following a weekend conference with former top Vietnamese policymakers that it was clear both Hanoi and Washington had missed chances to halt a war that cost more than 3.6 million lives."I think in some respects it could have been avoided," he said. "If it hadn't been avoided, I think it could have been terminated much, much earlier."

For example, he said, Vietnam and the United States had failed to study fully a proposal made by France's General Charles De Gaulle in the early 1960s for neutrality in Vietnam.

"It got very short shrift," he said. "And yet in discussing the subject here it appears to me that we could each have been in roughly the same position we're in today . . . had we accepted neutralization along the lines de Gaulle probably had in mind in 1962-64. So that was a missed opportunity."

McNamara, who served as defense chief under the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations before leaving office in 1968, oversaw the buildup of U.S. combat troops and personnel in Vietnam and Indochina in a war that eventually proved unwinnable.

In memoirs published in 1995, he sparked controversy by saying that he and other U.S. policymakers had been "terribly wrong" to have allowed the conflict to escalate.

McNamara, who last visited Hanoi in 1995 just months after the mormalization of diplomatic ties, said he now felt the risks of Vietnam succumbing to Chinese or Soviet control - a tenet of the so-called domino theory - had been overstated.

"Did we exaggerate the danger? I think so," he said. "It is less and less likely to me that they (the Vietnamese) would have permitted a unified, independent Vietnam to be used as a Chinese base or Russian base for extension of Chinese or Soviet hegemony across Asia. And yet that's what we feared at the time."

But McNamara added that U.S. concerns about the risks associated with an all-out invasion of North Vietnam - including the possibility of a nuclear war with China - had nonetheless been justified.

He said delegates to the conference had learned that Vietnam's late President Ho Chi Minh and its former Prime Minister Pham Van Dong had visited Beijing twice during the early 1960s and received assurances from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai that Chinese combat forces would help counter any U.S. invasion.

"What I've heard here makes it (an invasion of North Vietnam) sound even more dangerous. Thank God we didn't do it."

The Vietnam War ended in 1975 with the fall of U.S.-backed Saigon.

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Vietnam War could have been avoided, McNamara says

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Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key architect of the Vietnam War, said Monday that the conflict could have been halted more than a decade before it ended or avoided altogether.

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Essentially in this period of time, as Vietnam became an American war, as President Johnson was thrust into the presidency after the assassination of President Kennedy, November of 1963, the president was motivated mainly by two things: one, to become elected in his own right in 1964, and then to pass the Great Society legislation in 1965.

He viewed Vietnam, principally, as a danger to those domestic, political goals. So what he wanted was advice from the military that would allow him to make decisions on Vietnam that did not place those goals in jeopardy. So even though it was clear to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many others that it was time for a decision, a clear decision between an American war and disengagement from Vietnam, that sort of discussion really didn't even take place.

What happened is the president's advisors and the secretary of defense, in particular, developed a strategy to meet the president's concerns. That was the strategy of so-called "graduated pressure." It was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption that limited military actions, covert actions, against North Vietnam under OPlan 34A, beginning in January '64, and then limited bombing strikes against North Vietnam would convince Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese leadership to desist from its support for the Vietnamese communists in the south.

Now there are all sorts of problems with this thinking. One of the problems was mirror imaging the enemy and, in fact, applying, in this case, the rational man theory of English common law to Ho Chi Minh. In fact, there were memos written in this period of time that they would establish a common law pattern of attacks to convince Ho to do the rational thing. So, of course, this misunderstands, again, the nature of war. The fourth continuity in the nature of war is it didn't mention war is a contest of wills. And war and acts of war unleash a psychological dynamic that really don't allow you to have any kind of rational prediction of what the future or course of events are going to be.

The other thing, and we see this even today when we think about the application of standoff, long-range capabilities to war, is that really when you take standoff actions against an enemy, you are leaving decisions in the hands of that enemy, what they're going to do next. So the only way you can really compel an outcome is to have the military force able to compel the outcome. This is consistent with Thomas Schelling's writings about coercive forces. It's that brute force option that makes those actions short of that brute force option more effective in the area of dissuasion, or coercive diplomacy.

Really, from that point on, the Vietnamese communists and Ho had the initiative, and responded in ways that I think were actually eerily predictable. There were war games run in 1964-the Sigma war games -that were eerily prophetic in predicting the future course of events in the war. What happened, though, is that the president and the secretary of defense did not want the best military advice from the chiefs. In fact, in a phone call to Lyndon Johnson during when all these decisions were being made, he says to the president, "Hey I'm taking a divide and conquer approach with the chiefs and it's coming along pretty well." Essentially telling him, "Hey, you're not going to get really effective advice from them."

So what he was trying to do was keep them divided so that they wouldn't give him advice that could be used against his policy. He wanted to prevent any kind of a policy debate and he was deceiving the American people about the nature of America's commitment. It was not only counterproductive because it really removed what could've been an important corrective to what was, at least in retrospect, an unwise policy. But it was undemocratic. It delivered circumvention of the Constitution of the United States.

I think the criticism the chiefs said that at the time-and there were criticisms of each other later-was that they were a party to that because instead of drawing out the long-term cost and consequences of the war in a way that would help the president make that decision, they instead took a foot-in-the-door approach. Go along with this graduated pressure, get the first bombing runs off, and get the first troops committed under the idea that they would be able to argue over time for a more resolute application of force and the sources necessary to achieve the outcome.

This manifested itself during several meetings. One of them is, I think, quite revealing in which the chief says it's going to take at least 100,000 troops to make a difference-this is in the summer of 1965-and the president says, "I can't give you 100,000 troops." Then goes the next chief, "What do you think, 100,000 troops?" And he goes, "I can't give you 100,000 troops. Mothers would come out of their kitchens and take their aprons off," he said. And he turned to Robert McNamara who was sitting next to him and he said, "Let me tell you a story." He said "Imagine that you're in a small town and you have a business and you need to keep your business afloat. You need to go to the bank for your loan and it's Mr. McNamara's bank. You say, 'Hey I need $100,000 to keep my business going.' And Mr. McNamara tells you, 'I can't give you $100,000, but I can give you $5,000.' What do you do? Take the $5,000 and do the best you can, or just let your business go under?"

This is how we went to war without a strategy. This is how we confused activity with progress in the Vietnam War and didn't consider long term costs and consequences.
Transcript of full lecture

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U.S. Policy Mistakes in the Vietnam War (Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster) | Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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Essentially in this period of time, as Vietnam became an American war, as President Johnson was thrust into the presidency after the assassination of President Kennedy, November of 1963, the president was motivated mainly by two things: one, to become elected in his own right in 1964, and then to pass the Great Society legislation in 1965.

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What if? Those two words are easy to ask, whether about our own lives or world history. But the answers can be haunting-a different choice might have created a better opportunity or prevented a tragedy. Just consider the U.S. response to Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Vietnam's independence on.

Vietnam had been a French colony before World War II started. After France fell to Germany in 1940, Japan seized control of Vietnam, but allowed French officials and troops to administer the country. Seeing an opportunity to liberate Vietnam, Ho made his way to Vietnam from China in early 1941. It was the first time in three decades that he had set foot in his homeland. He had spent thirty years in exile, living in the United States, Britain, France, and Russia among other places.

Ho and his initial few followers operated in primitive conditions in mountainous jungles along Vietnam's border with China. Local Vietnamese slowly joined his cause. With time, Ho's forces, known as the , effectively wrested control of several of Vietnam's northern (and remote) provinces. In March 1945, with the war in Pacific having clearly turned against Japan, Tokyo seized direct control of Vietnam and evicted French troops. The Viet Minh used the resulting confusion to seize even more territory.

The Viet Minh's success attracted the attention of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA. In March 1945, an OSS officer met with Ho in Kunming, China. The two men quickly struck a deal. The OSS would equip the Viet Minh with radios and some light arms. In return, the Viet Minh would give the OSS intelligence, harass Japanese forces, and try to rescue American pilots shot down over Viet Minh-controlled territory.

A small number of OSS operatives parachuted into northern Vietnam in mid-July 1945 to help train the Viet Minh. This so-called Deer Team found Ho deathly ill, "shaking like a leaf and obviously running a high fever." They treated him for malaria and dysentery, and he recovered quickly. Looking forward to what would happen after Japan's defeat, he asked his American guests, "your statesmen make eloquent speeches about . . . self-determination. We are self-determined. Why not help us? Am I any different from . . . your George Washington?"

Ho's question quickly became relevant when Japan surrendered in mid-August. With the Japanese defeated and French forces long gone, the Viet Minh moved into Hanoi unopposed. It marked the first time Ho had set foot in his country's biggest city. The streets were draped with Viet Minh flags. Talk of independence was in the air. Ho did not disappoint.

On September 2, 1945, in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands, Ho declared Vietnam an independent nation. He began his speech with words familiar to any American schoolchild:

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

Ho started by quoting Thomas Jefferson's famous words for a reason: He desperately wanted U.S. support. Having it would prevent France from trying to reassert control over Vietnam and help keep Vietnam's powerful neighbor and historical adversary China at bay. Seeking U.S. support seemed a reasonable goal. President Franklin Roosevelt'sopposition to European colonialism was well known. He had insisted that the 1941 Atlantic Charter, issued jointly by the United States and Great Britain, contain a provision stating that both countries "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." FDR wanted the United States firmly on the side of anti-colonialism, and liberation movements across the globe took him at his word.

But FDR wasn't alive to read Ho's speech. Harry Truman now sat in the Oval Office. Anti-colonization wasn't his cause. He viewed Southeast Asia through the lens of Europe. His priority was seeing that a successful French government grew out of the ashes of World War II. And the French were clamoring to reclaim their colonies. Sacrificing the interests of an obscure Asian country that hadn't even merited a U.S. ambassador before World War II was a small price to pay to help secure stability in Europe. When a letter from Ho seeking U.S. support arrived in Washington in September 1945, passed along by a supportive OSS agent, it went unanswered. So did that arrived in February 1946 with a similar message. By then, French forces had begun returning to Vietnam. War would quickly follow.

Ho's appeals for U.S. support would not be Washington's last opportunity to chart a course different from the one it ultimately chose in Vietnam. As the historian has shown in his terrific books Embers of War and Choosing War, Truman and his successors passed by many other "off ramps" on the road to the American war in Vietnam. But in retrospect, Ho's bid for U.S. support in 1945 might have been the best chance to avoid the fighting that would leave more than 58,000 Americans dead, see more than 150,000 wounded, and deeply divide the country.

Would Vietnam have become a loyal American ally and budding democracy had Washington thrown its support behind Ho in late summer 1945? Perhaps. But perhaps not. Yes, Ho was a committed Vietnamese nationalist. He was also a committed communist. He wasn't shy about ordering the deaths of his political opponents. When the Viet Minh finally defeated the French and won control of North Vietnam in 1954, he instituted policies that led to the executions of thousands of Vietnamese. Even if Ho had shunned violence, a multitude of events or disagreements could have derailed any lasting U.S.-Vietnamese partnership.

So we will never know the answer to the "What if" question on Vietnam. History is lived once. It can't be replayed. But we can wonder.

This first appeared courtesy of CFR here.

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If History Had Gone a Little Differently the Vietnam War Never Happens

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What if? Those two words are easy to ask, whether about our own lives or world history. But the answers can be haunting-a different choice might have created a better opportunity or prevented a tragedy. Just consider the U.S. response to Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Vietnam's independence on.

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A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials

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One town’s strange journey from paranoia to pardon

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In January of 1692, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village became ill. William Griggs, the village doctor, was called in when they failed to improve. His diagnosis of bewitchment put into motion the forces that would ultimately result in the hanging deaths of 19 men and women. In addition one man was pressed to death; several others died in prison, and the lives of many were irrevocably changed.

Time Period Of The Salem Witch Trials

To understand the events of the Salem Witch Trials, it is necessary to examine the times in which accusations of witchcraft occurred. There were the ordinary stresses of 17th-century life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A strong belief in the devil, factions among Salem Village families and rivalry with nearby Salem Town combined with a recent small pox epidemic and the threat of attack by warring tribes created a fertile ground for fear and suspicion. Soon, prisons were filled with more than 150 men and women from towns surrounding Salem; their names had been "cried out" by tormented young girls as the cause of their pain. All would await trial for a crime punishable by death in 17th-century New England - the practice of witchcraft.

Historical Background of the Witch Trials

In June of 1692, the special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) sat in Salem to hear the cases of witchcraft. Presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton, the court was made up of magistrates and jurors. The first to be tried was Bridget Bishop of Salem who was found guilty and was hanged on June 10. Thirteen women and five men from all stations of life followed her to the gallows on three successive hanging days before the court was disbanded by Governor William Phipps in October of that year. The Superior Court of Judicature, formed to replace the "witchcraft" court, did not allow spectral evidence. This belief in the power of the accused to use their invisible shapes or spectres to torture their victims had sealed the fates of those tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer. The new court released those awaiting trial and pardoned those awaiting execution. In effect, the Salem Witch Trials were over.

As years passed, apologies were offered and restitution was made to the victims' families. Historians and sociologists have examined this most complex episode in our history so that we may understand the issues of that era and view subsequent events with heightened awareness. The parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and more modem examples of "witch hunting" like the McCarthy hearings of the 1950's, are remarkable.

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Salem Witch Trials Of 1692 | Landmarks, Events, & More

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Find information about local museums, historical events, happenings, and attractions in Salem related to the Witch Trials of 1692

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In January of 1692, nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece of Salem Village minister Reverend Samuel Parris, suddenly feel ill. Making strange, foreign sounds, huddling under furniture, and clutching their heads, the girls' symptoms were alarming and astounding to their parents and neighbors. When neither prayer nor medicine succeeded in alleviating the girls' agony, the worried parents turned to the only other explanation; the children were suffering from the effects of witchcraft. As word of the illness spread, others began to fall ill with the same alarming symptoms. The afflicted complained disembodied spirits were stabbing them, choking them, and jabbing them with pins. Soon names were cried out as the afflicted began to identify these specters. Neighbors, acquaintances, and total strangers were named in the statements and examinations that followed. Over the course of the year 1692, between 150-200 people were jailed for witchcraft. Ultimately, 14 women and 5 men were hanged, one man was tortured to death, and at least five people perished in prison. This was the largest series of witchcraft trials to ever take place in North America, and would be the last large-scale witch panic to take place in the English colonies.

To understand the events of the Salem witch trials, it is necessary to examine the times in which these events occurred. There were the ordinary stresses of seventeenth-century life in Massachusetts Bay Colony; a strong belief in the devil, the recent smallpox epidemic, the ever-present threat of attack by Indigenous tribes and their French allies, boundary and border disputes between neighbors. These factors alone created a fertile ground for fear and suspicion. However, these fears were made worse by a growing factional conflict in Salem Village, rising inflation, and the removal of the Massachusetts Bay Charter in 1684. To many it seemed the Puritan ideal of a "City on a Hill" was slipping away, decades of work suddenly pulled from their grasp. Many wondered if Satan's forces had infiltrated their new land.

When a new charter finally arrived in May of 1692, the growing number of witchcraft accusations prompted newly appointed Governor William Phips to hastily create a special court, the Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to determine), to oversee these cases. As a special court created amidst an ever increasing witchcraft panic, the magistrates made a series unusual procedural choices- the most dangerous being the decision to allow the use of spectral evidence. At this time, some believed witches were able to project a ghostly version of themselves beyond their physical body, which could be sent to torment unsuspecting victims.

The first to be tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer was Bridget Bishop of Salem Town. Goodwife Bishop was found guilty and hanged on June 10. Eighteen people, from all stations of life, followed her to the gallows on three successive hanging days. Finally, due to a combination of factors, including numerous petitions and letters authored by the accused, their family members, and local ministers, as well as the accusation of individuals from the highest levels of society (including the Governor's own wife!) Governor Phips disbanded the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October.

Trials resumed in January of 1693, this time with a new court, the Supreme Court of Judicature, the same court we use in Massachusetts to this day. This court differed from the first in that it no longer accepted spectral testimony. With this controversial evidence gone, most were found not-guilty and released. Though a few convictions, from both the old and new court, remained, in late January Governor Phips stepped in once again and issued last minute reprieves. The Salem witch trials were over.

As the years passed, some offered apologies for their role in the witchcraft trials and restitution was eventually paid to many of the victims and their families. In 1697, the Massachusetts General Court ordered a day of fasting and prayer in atonement for errors made by the colony, including the witchcraft trials. On this day one judge, Samuel Sewall, and 12 jurors, came forward to apologize for their roles in the Salem witch trials. The other magistrates never admitted there had been a miscarriage of justice, going to their graves believing they did what was best for the colony.

Though a resolution was passed by the General Court in 1711 which reversed the attainder (restored the civil liberties) in the case of many of those condemned in 1692, seven individuals were not included by name, and thus technically remained convicted of witchcraft. In 1945, a bill was introduced into legislature to clear six names, headed by descendants of Ann Pudeator. Twelve years later, a resolution was passed that pardoned "Ann Pudeator and certain other persons." However, these "other persons" were yet to be formally named. Five of the missing names were finally added to the resolve in October of 2001, formally declaring the innocence of Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Margaret Scott, and Wilmott Redd. Unfortunately, one last name, that of Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was missed in the 2001 resolve. Inspired by a talk given by historian Richard Hite, a group of middle school students in North Andover, Massachusetts, took it upon themselves to clear the remaining name. This last case was finally resolved in the summer of 2022.

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1692 Salem Witch Trial Education | Salem, MA History

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Examine the times in which the Salem Witchcraft occured by visiting the Salem Witch Museum. Visit the museum in Salem, MA to ask our historians your questions. Learn about the true occurrences by touring the historical monuments/resources in salem and surrounding towns.

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What really happened during the Salem Witch Trials - Brian A. Pavlac

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More than 300 years ago, twenty people were put to death for the "crime" of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. The most horrific part? The Salem Witch Trials happened under the auspices of "the law." To understand and commemorate this dark period in our country's legal history, we're looking back at the court proceedings and laws during the Salem Witch Trials and their impact on the American legal system.
From Hocus Pocus to The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, it's clear that people love witches. In fact, witches are the most popular adult Halloween costume year after year. But those frivolous and fanciful witches we know today-cackling in black garb and pointy hats with broomstick in hand-have evolved a great deal over the past several centuries.

More than 300 years ago, it was a felony to practice witchcraft in the American colonies, defined by English law as acting with magical powers bestowed by the Devil. But it wasn't until legal failings, mass paranoia, and Puritan religious and societal rules converged against a backdrop of economic and political uncertainty that the most horrifying witch-hunt against innocent people occurred in Colonial Massachusetts.

During the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft. Twenty of those people were executed, most by hanging. One man was pressed to death under heavy stones, the only such state-sanctioned execution of its kind. Dozens suffered under inhumane conditions as they waited in jail for months without trials; many of the imprisoned were also tortured, and at least one died in jail before the hysteria abated in 1693.

So much of the tragedy of the Salem Witch Trials comes down to the failure of the court and the laws during that time: Laws that made such things as visions, dreams, and even the testimony of spirits permissible evidence. And a court that accepted accusations so flimsy they would seem laughable today if they weren't so horrifyingly unjust...

Accusations Spread

The Salem Witch Trials occurred just as Europe's "witchcraft craze'' from the 14thto 17thcenturies was winding down, where an estimated tens of thousands of European witches, mostly women, were executed.

The chilling mayhem unfolded during the winter of 1692 in Salem Village, now the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, when three girls allegedly having strange visions and fits were "diagnosed" with bewitchment by a doctor.

"Many modern theories suggest the girls were suffering from epilepsy, boredom, child abuse, mental illness, or even a disease brought on by eating rye infected with fungus," according to The History of Massachusetts blog. Sheer vindictiveness is now considered a plausible explanation as well.

The girls blamed their odd behavior on three women considered social outcasts, including Tituba, a slave, whose confession may have been coerced. Soon a wave of witchcraft allegations throughout the year swept up more than 200 accused witches, including at least one child.

Local magistrates questioned the accused and determined whether any charges were to be brought against them. As paranoia spread, residents of Salem soon found themselves facing accusations from friends, neighbors, and families.

"Bearing false witness and committing perjury were considered felonies in Salem; under normal conditions, those convicted of such charges were prosecuted in public forums. During the witch trials, however, individuals convicted of perjury could save themselves from public humiliation by accusing their neighbors," according to the First Amendment Encyclopedia.

The Puritans believed physical realities had spiritual causes. For example, if the crops failed, the Devil may have played a role. With this worldview, it was not a stretch for them to accept 'spectral evidence' of spirits and visions-which was the primary evidence used as proof of guilt during the Salem Witch Trials.

Evidence points to several factors that may have contributed to the mass hysteria: "An influx of refugees from King William's War with French colonists, a recent smallpox epidemic, the threat of attack from Native Americans, a growing rivalry with the neighboring seaport of Salem Town, and the simmering tensions between leading families in the community created the perfect storm of suspicion and resentment." Many historians believe the "witches" were also victims of scapegoating, personal vendettas, and social mores against outspoken, strong women.

Of course, underpinning it all was the Puritans' deeply held and extraordinarily influential religious beliefs-which were also central to their legal system.

Early Witchcraft Laws

The so-called Witchcraft Act of 1604 served as the primary English law for witchcraft, deeming it a felony. A witch convicted of a minor offense could be imprisoned for a year; a witch found guilty twice was sentenced to death.

In 1641, the General Court, the legislative body of the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, wrote the Body of Liberties, the first legal code established in New England. This collection of civil and criminal laws and rights included witchcraft among its capital offenses. Citing Biblical sources for its authority, it stated: "If any man or woman be a witch that is, hath, or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death. Exod, 22. 188; Deut. 13.6, 10; Deut. 17. 2, 6."

In practice, few witches were executed in Colonial America prior to the Salem Witch Trials. In the English tradition, clear and convincing proof of a crime was needed for a conviction. Confessions, especially with other evidence and testimony of at least two trustworthy people, constituted the best proof.

Though the Salem Witch Trials predated the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights protections by almost a century, legal scholars say the accused witches were largely "deprived of the rights to which they should have been entitled under English common law."

Changes in the American Legal System

During the epidemic of witchcraft accusations in Salem, the legal process changed. The trials followed the temporary suspension of the Colony Charter due to political and religious tension between the colony and England. A new governor and a new charter from England arrived in 1692, but the General Court did not have enough time to create any laws.

On May 27, 1692, Governor William Phips ordered the establishment of a Special Court known as the Court of Oyer and Terminer (which translate to "to hear" and "to determine," respectively) to decide the cases. Without specific colony laws, the judges accepted " spectral evidence," which included testimony about dreams and visions.

The Puritans believed that physical realities had spiritual causes. For example, if the crop failed, the Devil may have played a role-and Satan could not take the form of an unwilling person. So if anyone claimed to have seen a ghost or spirit in the form of the accused, that person must be a witch. With this worldview, it was not a stretch for Puritans to believe in spectral evidence, which was the primary evidence used as proof of guilt.

In October, Increase Mather, then president of Harvard, denounced the use of spectral evidence: "It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned," he said. Not long after, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

In January 1693, the newly created Superior Court of Judicature began hearing the remaining witch trials. The judges could not accept spectral evidence and most of the remaining trials ended in acquittal. Phips pardoned the rest.

Enduring Lessons

In 1957, Massachusetts formally apologized for the events of 1692: "The General Court of Massachusetts declares its belief that such proceedings, even if lawful under the Province Charter and the law of Massachusetts as it then was, were and are shocking, and the result of a wave of popular hysterical fear of the Devil in the community..." The Massachusetts state legislature was still exonerating accused witches as recently as the early 2000s.

Today, the Salem Witch Trials continue to capture popular imagination. Less than 20 miles from Boston, Salem has turned its dark history into a thriving tourism industry, with witchcraft-themed shops, eateries, tours, and several museums.

The town commemorates the tragedy of that era with the Salem Witch Trial Memorial and has preserved many buildings and other historic sites associated with the trials, so future generations-and jurists-can learn how mass hysteria can lead to mass injustice.
Robin Farmer is a professional writer based in Richmond, Virginia. Learn more about the (much less scintillating) history of New England Law | Boston here.

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salem witch trials impact american legal system

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A True Legal Horror Story: The Laws Leading to the Salem Witch Trials

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More than 300 years ago, twenty people were put to death for the "crime" of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. The most horrific part? The Salem Witch Trials happened under the auspices of "the law."

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O Christian Martyr Who for Truth could die
-- Words written by John Greenleaf Whittier and inscribed on a monument marking the grave of Rebecca Nurse, one of the condemned "witches" of Salem.

From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens languished in jail for months without trials. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended.

Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Nothing about this tragedy was inevitable. Only an unfortunate combination of an ongoing frontier war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies can account for the spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that occurred in the spring and summer of 1692.

Rev. Samuel Parris

In 1688, John Putnam, one of the most influential elders of Salem Village, invited Samuel Parris, formerly a marginally successful planter and merchant in Barbados, to preach in the Village church. A year later, after negotiations over salary, inflation adjustments, and free firewood, Parris accepted the job as Village minister. He moved to Salem Village with his wife Elizabeth, his six-year-old daughter Betty, niece Abigail Williams, and his Indian slave Tituba, acquired by Parris in Barbados.

The Salem that became the new home of Parris was in the midst of change: a mercantile elite was beginning to develop, prominent people were becoming less willing to assume positions as town leaders, two clans (the Putnams and the Porters) were competing for control of the village and its pulpit, and a debate was raging over how independent Salem Village, tied more to the interior agricultural regions, should be from Salem, a center of sea trade.

Sometime during February of the exceptionally cold winter of 1692, young Betty Parris became strangely ill. She dashed about, dove under furniture, contorted in pain, barked like a dog, fell dumb, babbled nonsensically, and complained of fever. In one moment that must have shocked her father, she threw a Bible across a room. The cause of her symptoms may have been some combination of stress, asthma, guilt, boredom, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional psychosis. (The symptoms also could have been caused, as Linda Caporael argued in a 1976 article in Science magazine, by a disease called "convulsive ergotism" brought on by ingesting rye--eaten as a cereal and as a common ingredient of bread--infected with ergot. (Ergot is caused by a fungus which invades developing kernels of rye grain, especially under warm and damp conditions such as existed at the time of the previous rye harvest in Salem. Convulsive ergotism causes violent fits, a crawling sensation on the skin, vomiting, choking, and--most interestingly--hallucinations. The hallucinogenic drug LSD is a derivative of ergot.) Many of the symptoms or convulsive ergotism seem to match those attributed to Betty Parris, but there is no way of knowing with any certainty if she in fact suffered from the disease--and the theory would not explain the afflictions suffered by others in Salem later in the year.)

Other girls Betty knew began to exhibit similar symptoms. Abigail Williams tried to launch herself into the air. Eleven-year-old Ann Putnam and two seventeen-year-olds, Mercy Lewis and Mary Walcott, began to exhibit highly unusual behavior as well. Four, then five, then six girls acting so bizarrely. What could be happening? Was it possible the Devil was at work?

Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather had recently published a popular book, "Memorable Providences," describing the suspected witchcraft of an Irish washerwoman in Boston, and Betty's behavior in some ways mirrored that of the afflicted person described in Mather's widely read and discussed book. Mather concluded Memorable Providences with this thought: "I am resolved after this, never to use but just one grain of patience with any man that shall. . . impose upon me a denial of devils or of witches. I shall count him down-right impudent if he assert the non-existence of thing which we have had such palpable convictions of."

It was easy to believe in 1692 in Salem, with an Indian war raging less than seventy miles away (and many refugees from the war in the area) that the devil was close at hand. Sudden and violent death occupied minds. In 1692, few doubted that Satan was real or that he acted in the world. The Devil sowed disease and bad fortune; he orchestrated natural catastrophes.

When his own nostrums failed to effect a cure, William Griggs, a doctor called to examine the girls, suggested that the girls' problems might have a supernatural origin. The widespread belief that witches targeted children made the doctor's diagnosis seem increasingly likely.

A neighbor, Mary Sibley, proposed a form of counter magic to the Parris family Indian slave, John. Sibley told John to bake a rye cake containin Betty's and Abigail's urine and to feed the cake to the family dog. ( Why a dog? Dogs were believed to be used by witches as agents to carry out their devilish commands. The cake could draw the witch to the animal, perhaps even transfer the witch's spell to it. Nice try, but it didn't work.) The witch cake experiment infuriated Reverend Parris. The minister publicly reproached Sibley for bringing counter-magic into his parsonage. He called it "going to the Devil for help against the Devil.")

By late February, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam and Elizabeth Hubbard, a sixteen-year-old neice of Dr. Griggs, were also choking, shuddering, and showing other signs of witchcraft affliction. Thomas Putnam begged his daughter to identify who might be responsible for her odd behavior. She supplied three names.

On a rainy February 29, Thomas Putnam and three friends rode from Salem Village to Salem Town to press formal charges of witchcraft against three women. Acting on the charges, the constable arrested Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, a slave working in Reverend Parris's parsonage. Tituba was an obvious choice, likely named because of her practice of sharing with the girls tales of omens, voodoo, and witchcraft from her native folklore ( LINK TO TITUBA'S EXAMINATION). Good was a beggar and social misfit who lived wherever someone would house her ( LINK TO GOOD'S EXAMINATION) ( LINK TO GOOD'S TRIAL), and Osborne was old, quarrelsome, and had not attended church for over a year.

The Putnams brought their complaint against the three women to county magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, who ordered the suspected witches to appear the next morning, March 1, 1692, in Ingersoll's tavern. When hundreds showed up, the examinations were moved to the meeting house. The pews of the meeting house were crowded with curious farmers. The two justices of the peace sat at a table in front of the pulpit. After an opening prayer, Justice John Hawthorne wasted no time in getting down to business. "Sarah Good," he asked, "what evil spirit do you have familiarity with?"

At the examinations, the girls described attacks by the specters of the three women, and fell into their, by then, perfected pattern of contortions when in the presence of one of the suspects. The consistency of the two girls' accusations suggests strongly that the girls worked out their stories together. Ann Putnam and Mercy Lewis were also reporting seeing "witches flying through the winter mist." With the prominent Putnam family supporting the girls' accusations, their accusations would be taken seriously.Other villagers came forward to offer stories of cheese and butter mysteriously gone bad or animals born with deformities after visits by one of the suspects.The magistrates, in the common practice of the time, asked the same questions of each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had they seen Satan? How, if they are were not witches, did they explain the contortions seemingly caused by their presence? The style and form of the questions indicates that the magistrates thought the women guilty.

Meanwhile, the number of girls afflicted continued to grow, rising to seven with the addition of Susannah Sheldon as an accuser. According to historian Peter Hoffer, the girls "turned themselves from a circle of friends into a gang of juvenile delinquents." (Many people of the period complained that young people lacked the piety and sense of purpose of the founders' generation.) The girls contorted into grotesque poses, fell down into frozen postures, and complained of biting and pinching sensations. In a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, the suspected affliction of the girls became an obsession.

"Examination of a Witch"

The matter might have ended with admonishments were it not for Tituba. After first adamantly denying any guilt, afraid perhaps of being made a scapegoat, Tituba claimed that she was approached by a tall man from Boston--obviously Satan--who sometimes appeared as a dog or a hog and who asked her to sign in his book and to do his work. Yes, Tituba declared, she was a witch, and moreover she and four other witches, including Good and Osborne, had flown through the air on their poles. She had tried to run to Reverend Parris for counsel, she said, but the devil had blocked her path. The transcript includes this exchange:

Q: Where did you go?

T: Up to Putnams & make me hurt the Child.

Q: Who made you go?

T: Man that is very strong & these two women, Good and Osborne, but I am sorry.

Q: How did you go? What do you ride upon?

T: I ride upon a stick or pole & Good & Osborne behind me. We ride taking hold of one another. Don't know how we go for I saw no trees or path, but was presently there.

Tituba's confession succeeded in transforming her from a possible scapegoat to a central figure in the expanding prosecutions. Her confession also served to silence most skeptics, and Parris and other local ministers began witch hunting with zeal.

Soon, according to their own reports, the spectral forms of other women began attacking the afflicted girls. Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, and Mary Easty ( LINK TO EASTY'S EXAMINATION) ( LINK TO EASTY'S PETITION FOR MERCY) were accused of witchcraft. During a March 20 church service, Ann Putnam suddenly shouted, "Look where Goodwife Cloyce sits on the beam suckling her yellow bird between her fingers!" Soon Ann's mother, Ann Putnam, Sr., joined the chorus of accusers. Dorcas Good, four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, became the first child to be accused of witchcraft when three of the girls complained that they were bitten by the specter of Dorcas. (The four-year-old was arrested, kept in jail for eight months, watched her mother get carried off to the gallows, and would "cry her heart out, and go insane.") The girls' accusations and their ever more polished performances, including the new act of being struck dumb, played to large and believing audiences.

Arrest warrant for suspected witchcraft

Stuck in jail with the damning testimony of the afflicted girls widely accepted, suspects began to see confession as a way to avoid the gallows. Deliverance Hobbs became the second witch to confess, admitting to pinching three of the girls at the Devil's command and flying on a pole to attend a witches' Sabbath in an open field.

Jails approached capacity and the colony "teetered on the brink of chaos" when Governor Phips returned from England. Fast action, he decided, was required. Phips created a new court, the "court of oyer and terminer," to hear the witchcraft cases. Five judges, including three close friends of Cotton Mather, were appointed to the court. Chief Justice, and most influential member of the court, was a gung-ho witch hunter named William Stoughton.

Chief Judge William Stoughton

Mather urged Stoughton and the other judges to credit confessions and admit "spectral evidence" (testimony by afflicted persons that they had been visited by a suspect's specter). Ministers were looked to for guidance by the judges, who were generally without legal training, on matters pertaining to witchcraft. Mather's advice was heeded. the judges also decided to allow the so-called "touching test" (defendants were asked to touch afflicted persons to see if their touch, as was generally assumed of the touch of witches, would stop their contortions) and examination of the bodies of accused for evidence of "witches' marks" (moles or the like upon which a witch's familiar might suck) ( SCENE DEPICTING EXAMINATION FOR MARKS ). Evidence that would be excluded from modern courtrooms-- hearsay, gossip, stories, unsupported assertions, surmises-- was also generally admitted. Many protections that modern defendants take for granted were lacking in Salem: accused witches had no legal counsel, could not have witnesses testify under oath on their behalf, and had no formal avenues of appeal. Defendants could, however, speak for themselves, produce evidence, and cross-examine their accusers. The degree to which defendants in Salem were able to take advantage of their modest protections varied considerably, depending on their own acuteness and their influence in the community.

The court of oyer and terminer convened on June 2, 1692, in Salem Town. Technically, Salem Village was part of Salem Town, on the northern outskirts. But the two locales were very different in many respects.

The first accused witch to be brought to trial was Bridget Bishop. Almost sixty years old, owner of a tavern where patrons could drink cider ale and play shuffleboard (even on the Sabbath), critical of her neighbors, and reluctant to pay her bills, Bishop was a likely candidate for an accusation of witchcraft ( LINK TO EXAMINATION OF BISHOP). The fact that Thomas Newton, special prosecutor, selected Bishop for his first prosecution suggests that he believed the stronger case could be made against her than any of the other suspect witches. At Bishop's trial on June 2, 1692, a field hand testified that he saw Bishop's image stealing eggs and then saw her transform herself into a cat. Deliverance Hobbs, by then probably insane, and Mary Warren, both confessed witches, testified that Bishop was one of them. A villager named Samuel Grey told the court that Bishop visited his bed at night and tormented him. A jury of matrons assigned to examine Bishop's body reported that they found an "excrescence of flesh." Several of the afflicted girls testified that Bishop's specter afflicted them. Numerous other villagers described why they thought Bishop was responsible for various bits of bad luck that had befallen them. There was even testimony that while being transported under guard past the Salem meeting house, she looked at the building and caused a part of it to fall to the ground. Bishop's jury returned a verdict of guilty. One of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, aghast at the conduct of the trial, resigned from the court. Chief Justice Stoughton signed Bishop's death warrant, and on June 10, 1692, Bishop was carted to Gallows Hill and hanged, the first victim of the Salem trials.

The hanging of Bridget Bishop

As the summer of 1692 warmed, the pace of trials picked up. Not all defendants were as disreputable as Bridget Bishop. Rebecca Nurse was a pious, respected woman whose specter, according to Ann Putnam, Jr. and Abigail Williams, attacked them in mid March of 1692 ( LINK TO EXAMINATION OF NURSE). Ann Putnam, Sr. added her complaint that Nurse demanded that she sign the Devil's book, then pinched her. Nurse was one of three Towne sisters, all identified as witches, who were members of a Topsfield family that had a long-standing quarrel with the Putnam family. Apart from the evidence of Putnam family members, the major piece of evidence against Nurse appeared to be testimony indicating that soon after Nurse lectured Benjamin Houlton for allowing his pig to root in her garden, Houlton died. The Nurse jury returned a verdict of not guilty, much to the displeasure of Chief Justice Stoughton, who told the jury to go back and consider again a statement of Nurse's that might be considered an admission of guilt (but more likely an indication of confusion about the question, as Nurse was old and nearly deaf). The jury reconvened, this time coming back with a verdict of guilty ( LINK TO NURSE TRIAL). On July 19, 1692, Nurse rode with four other convicted witches to Gallows Hill.

Why was Nurse, a respected church-going woman, convicte? Nurse's quarrel with the Putnams and the testimony regarding her spat with Houton over his pig's rooting in her garden indicates how, as the summer progressed, the trials became not just a way of ridding the Village of old eccentrics; they also became a way to settle old scores.

The trial of Rebecca Nurse

Persons who scoffed at accusations of witchcraft risked becoming targets of accusations themselves. One man who was openly critical of the trials paid for his skepticism with his life. John Proctor, a central figure in Arthur Miller's fictionalized account of the Salem witch hunt, The Crucible, was an opinionated tavern owner who openly denounced the witch hunt. Testifying against Proctor were Ann Putnam, Abigail Williams, Indian John (a slave of Samuel Parris who worked in a competing tavern), and eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Booth, who testified that ghosts had come to her and accused Proctor of serial murder. Proctor fought back as best he could, accusing confessed witches of lying, complaining of torture, and demanding that his trial be moved to Boston. The efforts proved futile. Proctor was hanged. His wife Elizabeth, who was also convicted of witchcraft, was spared execution because of her pregnancy (reprieved "for the belly").

No execution caused more unease in Salem than that of the village's ex-minister, George Burroughs. Burroughs, who was living in Maine in 1692, was identified by several of his accusers as the ringleader of the witches. Ann Putnam claimed that Burroughs bewitched soldiers during a failed military campaign against Wabanakis in 1688-89, the first of a string of military disasters that could be blamed on an Indian-Devil alliance. In her interesting book, In the Devil's Snare, historian Mary Beth Norton argues that the large number of accusations against Burroughs, and his linkage to the frontier war, is the key to understanding the Salem trials. Norton contends that the enthusiasm of the Salem court in prosecuting the witchcraft cases owed in no small measure to the judges' desire to shift the "blame for their own inadequate defense of the frontier." Many of the judges, Norton points out, played lead roles in a war effort that had been markedly unsuccessful.

Among the thirty accusers of Burroughs was nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, a refugee of the frontier wars. Lewis, the most imaginative and forceful of the young accusers, offered unusually vivid testimony against Burroughs. Lewis told the court that Burroughs flew her to the top of a mountain and, pointing toward the surrounding land, promised her all the kingdoms if only she would sign in his book (a story very similar to that found in Matthew 4:8). Lewis said, "I would not writ if he had throwed me down on one hundred pitchforks." At an execution, a defendant in the Puritan colonies was expected to confess, and thus to save his soul. When Burroughs on Gallows Hill continued to insist on his innocence and then recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly (something witches were thought incapable of doing), the crowd reportedly was "greatly moved." The agitation of the crowd caused Cotton Mather to intervene and remind the crowd that Burroughs had had his day in court and lost.

The hanging of George Burroughs

One victim of the Salem witch hunt was not hanged, but rather pressed under heavy stones until his death. Such was the fate of octogenarian Giles Corey who, after spending five months in chains in a Salem jail with his also accused wife, had nothing but contempt for the proceedings. Seeing the futility of a trial and hoping that by avoiding a conviction his farm, that would otherwise go the state, might go to his two sons-in-law, Corey refused to stand for trial. The penalty for such a refusal was peine et fort, or pressing. Three days after Corey's death, on September 22, 1692, eight more convicted witches, including Giles' wife Martha, were hanged. They were the last victims of the witch hunt.

Some of the most moving words about the Salme hysteria can be found in the petitions written by the condemned witches. Mary Easty, in her petition to Governor Phips and the judges of the court, blamed her convictions on the "wiles and subtleties" of her accusers. Then she wrote: "I am now condemned to die. The Lord knows my innocence. . .I petition your honors not for my own life, for I know I must die and my appointed time is set, but that no more innocent blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go."

By early autumn of 1692, Salem's lust for blood was ebbing. Doubts were developing as to how so many respectable people could be guilty. Reverend John Hale said, " It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil's lap at once." The educated elite of the colony began efforts to end the witch-hunting hysteria that had enveloped Salem. Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, published what has been called "America's first tract on evidence," a work entitled Cases of Conscience, which argued that it "were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned." Increase Mather urged the court to exclude spectral evidence. Samuel Willard, a highly regarded Boston minister, circulated Some Miscellany Observations on Our Present Debates Respecting Witchcraft, which suggested that the Devil might create the specter of an innocent person. Mather's and Willard's works were given to Governor Phips.

The writings most likely influenced the decision of Phips to order the court to exclude spectral evidence and touching tests and to require proof of guilt by clear and convincing evidence. With spectral evidence not admitted, twenty-eight of the last thirty-three witchcraft trials ended in acquittals. The three convicted witches were later pardoned. In May of 1693, Phips released from prison all remaining accused or convicted witches. Salem's nightmare was over.

Governor William Phips

By the time the witch hunt ended, nineteen convicted witches were executed ( LINK TO LIST OF DEAD), at least four accused witches had died in prison, and one man, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death. About one to two hundred other persons were arrested and imprisoned on witchcraft charges. Two dogs were executed as suspected accomplices of witches. As a side note, Tituba recanted her confession--an act that enraged Reverend Parris. In retaliation, Parris refused to pay the jailer's fee to get his slave out of prison. Tituba spent some thirteen months in jail until an unknown person paid seven pounds for her release.

Scholars have noted potentially telling differences between the accused and the accusers in Salem. Most of the accused lived to the south of, and were generally better off financially, than most of the accusers. In a number of cases, accusing families stood to gain property from the convictions of accused witches. Also, the accused and the accusers generally took opposite sides in a congregational schism that had split the Salem community before the outbreak of hysteria. While many of the accused witches supported former minister George Burroughs, the families that included the accusers had--for the most part--played leading roles in forcing Burroughs to leave Salem. The conclusion that many scholars draw from these patterns is that property disputes and congregational feuds played a major role in determining who lived, and who died, in 1692.

The repentence of Samuel Sewall

A period of atonement began in the colony following the release of the surviving accused witches. Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, issued a public confession of guilt and an apology. Several jurors came forward to say that they were "sadly deluded and mistaken" in their judgments. Reverend Samuel Parris conceded errors of judgment, but mostly shifted blame to others. Parris was replaced as minister of Salem village by Thomas Green, who devoted his career to putting his torn congregation back together. Governor Phips blamed the entire affair on William Stoughton. Stoughton, clearly more to blame than anyone for the tragic episode, refused to apologize or explain himself. He criticized Phips for interfering just when he was about to "clear the land" of witches. Stoughton became the next governor of Massachusetts.

The witches disappeared, but witch hunting in America did not. Each generation must learn the lessons of history or risk repeating its mistakes. Salem should warn us to think hard about how to best safeguard and improve our system of justice.

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The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: An Account

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Welcome to Famous Trials, the Web's largest and most visited collection of original essays, trial transcripts and exhibits, maps, images, and other materials relating to the greatest trials in world history. "Famous Trials" first appeared on the Web in 1995, making this site older than about 99.97% of all websites.

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A look back at the intelligence failures and oversights that led to the successful Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

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Here's What You Need To Remember: Japanese military planners studied the attack and used it as a model for the attack a little over a year later. Had the Royal Navy's attack at Taranto not occurred Pearl Harbor might not have been targeted, at least not in an air attack.

The old proverb " for want of a nail " serves as the basis for many "what if" scenarios, notably where one small moment can have unseen consequences.

In the case of the history of the Second World War, a question is asked as to how Imperial Japan could have won the conflict and in many ways it could come down to the want of a nail. This is a topic that has been explored in detail by The National Interest, The Diplomat and by numerous "alternative history" authors. A victorious Japan - albeit with some help from Nazi Germany - was the basis for much of the story of Amazon's The Man in the High Castle, which was based on the novel of the same name by noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

However, for Japan to have truly succeeded may have involved not targeting the United States at all which may have filled the sleeping giant with a terrible resolve.

For the Japanese, it was never an issue of whether Pearl Harbor could have been avoided, but rather if the attack was even the best course of action. The attack as it happened did awake the sleeping giant that was America, and more importantly, it failed to be a knockout blow that made it impossible for America to continue the fight. While Japan did essentially conquer the Philippines and Wake Island within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor those territories could have been taken without attacking Pearl Harbor.

It is questionable whether Americans might have been so "gung ho" to go to war for the Philippines while it is doubtful most American civilians had ever heard of Wake Island. Simply put, Americans might not have been eager for a war to defenda de facto colony half way around the world. Even if it occurred the U.S. Navy might have been lured into a sending out its battleships and aircraft carriers, which the Japanese might have been able to destroy. Such a loss might have broken any resolve the giant had.

Japan actually sealed its fate the minute the attack on Pearl Harbor began. It might not be traced back to the loss of a single nail, but numerous factors including the size of its industry, lack of significant allies in the region and ability to control the territory it seized were all factors.
Could America Avoid Pearl Harbor:
The other half of the question is how America could have avoided Pearl Harbor. The short answer is that it is one of intelligence failures and underestimating the Japanese - but as noted above the hawks in the American military, as well as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, needed the attack as a way to convince the nation to join the fight against the tyranny of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

There are countless theories on whether Roosevelt - or for that matter Great Britain's Winston Churchill - knew that the sneak attack was coming. The truth is that it is unlikely. Military leaders don't allow such attacks to happen because it is impossible to control the outcome. What if the attack was early and the carriers were sunk, what if the oil facilities were destroyed or what if the Japanese invaded and occupied Hawaii. Those were risks no war leader could take no matter how badly he might have wanted an excuse for war.

However, it is likely that Roosevelt expected an attack, but the when and where were still most certainly unknowns.

In answering the question, how could America have avoided Pearl Harbor one needs to look further back - well beyond the oil embargos of the early 1940s some ninety years.

For Pearl Harbor to have been truly avoided, it could be argued the course to Pearl Harbor began on July 8, 1853, when American Commodore Matthew Perry led his four ships into Tokyo Bay and sought to reestablish regular trade between Japan and the western world.
The Consequence of Opening of Japan:
Japan had previously been open to the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch - but each sought to "civilize" the Japanese by bringing western culture and religion. Within a few decades the western powers were expelled and only the Dutch were allowed minimal trading rights via Dejima, a small artificial trading island located in Nagasaki.

By the end of the nineteenth century other western powers followed America's lead and imposed their conditions on the Japanese. This resulted in a modernization of Japan, which included the Meiji restoration that brought an end to the Tokugawa shogunate and ended the Edo (Tokugawa) era that lasted from 1603-1867 and restored control to the Emperor.

The Japanese soon adopted the ways of its enemies and this included a western trained military. The Army had French and later German advisors, while the Navy sought British advisors and British built warships. Japan was able to defeat its ancient rival China, gaining Taiwan and Korea as colonies for its slowly growing empire.

In 1904-05 the island nation that just half a century earlier was barely a regional power defeated Imperial Russia in a bloody war after launching a surprise attack on the Russian Navy at Port Arthur - an event that should have served as a warning to American military planners in 1941! The attack was designed to neutralize the Russians, but the decisive battle was at the Tsushima Straits where the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo Heihaciro engaged the Russian fleet and destroyed eight battleships.

During World War I less than a decade later Japan fought on the side of the Russians and helped the British capture the German colonyof Tsingtao in China, while Japan also occupied the Marianas, the Caroline Islands and Marshalls. However, Japan continued to eye territories in China as well as the American held Philippines for future expansion.

This chain of events likely wouldn't have happened had Perry not "opened" Japan. That isn't to say that Japan wouldn't have modernized but perhaps the course may have been different. Without the restoration of Emperor the Boshin War wouldn't occur, and as a result there may not have been any rapid reforms to the military.

Of course other nations in the region saw forced trade and modernization - some such as Siam (Thailand) that were able to maintain independence, while others like Annam and Tonkin became protectorates and then outright colonies of a western power. Japan's path was along the lines of the former, and it sought to not only emulate the west militarily but to build economic and trade spheres as well.
The Naval Treaties:
The biggest "for want of a nail" moment that could have changed the course of world history came during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, where the world's largest naval powers gathered to discuss naval disarmament. The goal was to limit the number of battleships that the major powers could possess - despite the fact that battleships really didn't prove their worth in the recently concluded First World War.

The treaty set a ratio of warship tonnage that allowed the United States and UK to have five hundred thousand tons compared to Japan's three hundred thousand tons. However, some classes were left unrestricted, notably cruisers. While efforts were made to close such loopholes other were left open. The subsequent London Naval Treaties attempted to modify the limits, but Japan didn't sign. The Imperial Japanese Navy also began to construct aircraft carriers, with the Hōshō - roughly translated its name is "Phoenix flying" - being the first true purpose-built carrier.

Even with its carrier force Japan may not have attacked Pearl Harbor had it now been for the British Royal Navy's attack on the Italian Regia Marina at anchor in the harbor of Taranto in November 1940. With just the one carrier HMS Illustrious - joined by two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and five destroyers - and just twenty-one dated Fairey Swordfish biplanes, the British attacked the Italian fleet sinking the battleship Conte di Cavour and heavily damaged two additional battleships.

Japanese military planners studied the attack and used it as a model for the attack a little over a year later. Had the Royal Navy's attack at Taranto not occurred Pearl Harbor might not have been targeted, at least not in an air attack.

Yet the path to the Japanese campaign in the Pacific wasn't limited to a single event; it was a long path to the war, one that began in 1853 and was paved in 1904 - and that may have made it all but unavoidable.
Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This article first appeared earlier this year.

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Here's How America (and Japan) Could Have Avoided Pearl Harbor

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Here's What You Need To Remember: Japanese military planners studied the attack and used it as a model for the attack a little over a year later. Had the Royal Navy's attack at Taranto not occurred Pearl Harbor might not have been targeted, at least not in an air attack.

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It may be asked: Could the United States have stayed out of war in the Far East by appeasing Japan and abandoning China to enslavement?

Most authorities agree that such a step would merely have postponed the day of reckoning, when our own Pacific territories would have been chosen as the next victims. To back down in 1941 would not only have been dishonorable, it would have been very unsound policy on the part of the United States. We could not have afforded to abandon the long-established principles governing our policy in the Pacific.

For over a century America has occupied a unique position in the Far East. The United States has no territorial ambitions in China. For many years our basic foreign policy has been to safeguard China from aggression. In 1899 and 1900 the United States took the lead in international agreements to observe the "Open Door" (equality of trading rights in China) and to preserve the independence and territorial integrity of China. Both, these principles were reaffirmed by the United States, Japan, and other nations in the Nine Power Pact of 1922.

Uncle Sam stands firm

For many years Japan looked upon Russia as her chief potential enemy. But after 1931 the Japanese began to see in the United States the foremost antagonist to their program of expansion. After Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931 the United States repeatedly protested the violation of international law and of treaties which both nations had signed and ratified.

In our doctrine of nonrecognition, announced by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson in 1932, we refused to recognize transfers of territory brought about through violation of the Paris Peace Pact or any other international agreement. In 1937, after the outbreak of the undeclared war with China, President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull expressed American disapproval of Japan's acts of aggression.

These protests would not have caused the militarists much anxiety if we had not backed them with mounting restrictions on the export of war materials to Japan during 1939-41. When the United States terminated its trade treaty with Japan in 1939 and followed this up in 1940 by advising American citizens to leave the Far East, the Japanese realized that we were not bluffing.

In July 1941, President Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets in the United States. This move brought all financial and -commercial transactions in which Japanese interests were involved under the control of our government.

Just before the battle

In April 1941, the Japanese opened negotiations, apparently as a method of stalling for time. The proceedings dragged on for eight months. Even though the prospects of a just and peaceable conclusion appeared slight, the American representatives made every effort to find the basis for such a settlement.

On November 26, 1941, Secretary Hull proposed a program that offered Japan free access to needed raw materials, freer access to world markets, financial cooperation and support, withdrawal of our freezing orders, and an opportunity to negotiate a new trade treaty with us. In return, Japan was to abandon its aggressive policies and practices. These proposals were coldly received by the Japanese. It was clearly evident that nothing could avert a showdown except a change in Japanese policy. Japan would not give up its program of swallowing Asia piecemeal, and the United States would of condone it.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese representatives in Washington presented Secretary Hull with Tokyo's final answer. It was a document accusing us of "scheming for the extension of the war" and conspiring with Great Britain and other countries against Japan's efforts to establish peace in Asia. Secretary Hull told the Japanese representatives, "In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions."

But the real Japanese answer had been delivered more than an hour earlier at Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor.
From EM 15: What Shall Be Done about Japan after Victory? (1945)

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Could the United States Have Avoided a Showdown? | AHA

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It may be asked: Could the United States have stayed out of war in the Far East by appeasing Japan and abandoning China to enslavement?

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Seventy-five years ago, at 7:55 a.m. on December 7, 1941, a Japanese strike force unleashed 353 warplanes on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Pacific Fleet's base on Oahu, Hawaii. Relations between the United States and Japan had been worsening-Japan had invaded China in 1937 and then, in 1940, allied itself with Italy and Germany-but the attack was a shock.

Within minutes, much of the Pacific Fleet had been destroyed, more than 2,000 Americans killed, and the United States dealt a massive psychological blow."Nothing as catastrophically unexpected, as self-image shattering, had happened to the nation in its 165 years," writes Steve Twomey in his new book, Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack. What's worse, it could easily have been prevented. (Find out how five people survived the atomic blast at Nagasaki at the end of World War II.)

Speaking from his home in Montclair, New Jersey, Twomey explains how notions of racial superiority made the Americans underestimate the Japanese, how a war game simulation of such an attack had been run and then ignored, and why Pearl Harbor stunned the nation even more than 9/11.

A preventable catastrophe, caused by incompetent leadership, racist stereotypes, and an arrogant belief in the invincibility of the United States-is that a fair assessment of Pearl Harbor?

That's extremely fair. I use the phrase "Assumption fathered defeat," and it did on many levels, both big and small. All through 1941, there were newspaper articles touting the superiority of the [United States] Navy. There was also an assumption in Washington that the Pacific Fleet had been alerted and was ready, which wasn't the case. It goes all the way up to the racial assumptions about the potential ability of the adversary. From big things to small things, America was complacent about where things stood on December 7.

If you read the American magazines and newspapers in 1941, it's amazing how the Japanese were considered a funny, curious people, who were technologically inept. They were supposedly physiologically incapable of being good aviators because they lacked a sense of balance and their eyes were not right. It was even believed that the Japanese were bad pilots because, as babies, they would be carried on the backs of their big sisters and got bounced around, so their inner ear was knocked askew. [Laughs]

But the most important mistake was that the American Pacific Fleet commander, Husband Kimmel, all through these days when he knew things were getting more tense, chose not to begin air reconnaissance, which was the sole means by which he could make sure that he was safe.

However, if you are going to pin the label of incompetent leadership on anyone, it should go to Harold Stark, chief of naval operations in Washington. There were clues coming in that he should have read more accurately. Several days before the attack, the Japanese had ordered the burning of all documents at Japanese embassies. And on December 6,a coded Japanese message showing that an attack was imminent was intercepted. But the message Stark wrote to warn the forces out in Hawaii was ambiguous in its warning and could be misunderstood-and it was.

Put us on the sea on the morning of the attack. It must have been carnage.

The best way to describe it is to talk about Husband Kimmel. It was a Sunday morning and he was about to play golf with the commander of the Army on Oahu. He had a large house that sat on a rise overlooking the harbor, and he was there when he was told in a series of phone calls that an air attack was underway.

He walked out into the yard and looked down on the harbor as Japanese planes swarmed above his ships. It was the most stunning moment of his life. He realized immediately that this was catastrophic.

The aviators were some of Japan's finest pilots and, in contrast to all the press and publicity of 1941, they were very good. The greatest damage was caused by 40 Japanese torpedo planes. That was shocking because the Americans thought Pearl Harbor was too shallow to drop torpedoes. The Japanese had solved that problem by attaching extra fins to the torpedoes, so they didn't dive too deeply.

The single most devastating explosion came when a bomb plunged into the forward magazine of the battleship Arizona. The ship all but disappeared in a purple cloud of smoke that rose a thousand feet into the air. Most of the people killed on December 7 were killed in that explosion. In all, there were about 2,400 fatalities, and 17 or 18 ships out of about a hundred warships in the Pacific Fleet were destroyed.

It's important to note that, militarily, the attack was less horrific than people think. It was more a psychic strike on America. There were no American aircraft carriers in the harbor at that time. One was on the West Coast and two were at sea.

Six months later, one of those two [at sea] was essential to the greatest American victory of the Pacific war when the American fleet surprised and ambushed the Japanese, sinking four of the six aircraft carriers that had participated in Pearl Harbor.

One of the battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor also ended up off the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, providing cover for American, British, and Canadian troops on D-Day.

The story of Pearl Harbor is also the story of two naval commanders, Kimmel and Isoroku Yamamoto. Give us a psychological profile-and explain how and why Yamamoto outfoxed his opponent.

Yamamoto and Kimmel were extremely different in personality. Yamamoto was a very sentimental guy, a bit of a romanticist. He also was, at heart, a gambler. He liked to tell people that if he had another life, he would live in Monaco and play the gaming tables. He pushed the plan for Pearl Harbor against the objections of many within the Imperial Navy. At one point, he said, "You have told me that this is a great risk, but I like speculative games and I'm going to do this."

Kimmel was very much a disciplinarian, a by-the-book, laser-focused guy who tolerated no deviation from rules and regulations. He was obsessed with taking the offense as soon as war broke out, which in a way is a good thing. But he should have gone much more to a defensive posture, and he didn't because he didn't want to. He wanted to go attack somebody. That was the reason he didn't send out search planes. He wanted to use them for his grand offense as soon as the war broke out.

Kimmel did not think a surprise attack was a possibility. The Americans had actually war-gamed the possibility that Japan could do this, but it was like one of those mental exercises you do for the record but don't take to heart.

Kimmel also didn't have a sense of the looming power of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers were only about 20 years old as a weapon. It was hard to imagine how much damage could be inflicted if 350 planes suddenly arrived from the sea, because that had never happened before. Nobody had put together a fleet with so many aircraft carriers at one time as the Japanese did on December 7.

Satellite technology, massively improved radar, and espionage make it unlikely that such a surprise attack could occur today. Talk about the difference between then and now.

We have to remember that in that day and age there were no satellites peering down, revealing all. So when the Japanese set sail on November 26, 1941, we did not know that. In their journey 3,000 miles across the Pacific, they never encountered a commercial ship, a search plane, a warship, and were never seen from above. It was the essential ingredient of their plan. They had to achieve surprise. If they didn't, everything would have failed.

I don't think there will be another Pearl Harbor because the ability to detect movement of armed forces is so much better, not just with satellites but also with listening devices and the ability of nations to suck up the radio transmissions of their opponents.

We can have a Pearl Harbor these days, but it will be pulled off by independent actors, such as on September 11, 2001. And those kinds of surprise attacks will probably always occur. But I don't think we will have a classic military confrontation that begins with a massive, surprise attack that the victim never saw coming.

Tease out the similarities between Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

It's a bit ghoulish to compare tragedies as to which was worse, so I'm not going to do that. But in both cases the sudden arrival of mass destruction and death pulverized America's sense of itself. I would offer this difference. As soon as the attack became news in 1941, Americans knew they were immediately in the midst of a giant world war and that their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers were going to be going off to war in faraway places.

It was popular to say that 9/11 changed everything, but it didn't in the way Americans in 1941 knew it was going to change. America had been sitting out the war while France, Britain, Russia, and others were at war with Germany. Pearl Harbor changed that overnight.

What can we learn from Pearl Harbor today?

It's wise, in management, to allow your subordinates to be creative and come up with their own solutions. But it's not wise to then consciously remain ignorant of the choices they've made.

A second thing, which is particularly true of what happened with Admiral Kimmel, is that you shouldn't let your desires color new facts. Kimmel just wouldn't switch from what he wanted to do to what he should be doing.

Finally, if you've commissioned someone to do a report on something and they come back and forecast the future, don't forget it! One of the most remarkable things about Pearl Harbor is that the nature and scope of the attack were exactly forecast only a few months before it happened by an admiral and a general.

The admiral was on Oahu in the days before the attack. But no one went to him and said, "You know the scenario you talked about where aircraft carriers might sneak up on our island? That may be happening right now because we cannot find the location of most of the Japanese aircraft carriers." No one said that. He was ignorant-until the bombs started falling.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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How Racism, Arrogance, and Incompetence Led to Pearl Harbor

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Seventy-five years ago, at 7:55 a.m. on December 7, 1941, a Japanese strike force unleashed 353 warplanes on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Pacific Fleet's base on Oahu, Hawaii. Relations between the United States and Japan had been worsening-Japan had invaded China in 1937 and then, in 1940, allied itself with Italy and Germany-but the attack was a shock.

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How (Almost) Everyone Failed to Prepare for Pearl Harbor

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The high-stakes gamble and false assumptions that detonated Pearl Harbor 80 years ago

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From our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all. Even as the war consumed large portions of Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was no clear consensus on how the United States should respond.

The US ambivalence about the war grew out of the isolationist sentiment that had long been a part of the American political landscape and had pervaded the nation since World War I. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were either killed or wounded during that conflict, and President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic plan to ensure permanent peace through international cooperation and American leadership failed to become a reality. Many Americans were disillusioned by how little their efforts had accomplished and felt that getting so deeply involved on the global stage in 1917 had been a mistake.

Neither the rise of Adolf Hitler to power nor the escalation of Japanese expansionism did much to change the nation's isolationist mood in the 1930s. Most Americans still believed the nation's interests were best served by staying out of foreign conflicts and focusing on problems at home, especially the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the late 1930s, aiming to prevent future involvement in foreign wars by banning American citizens from trading with nations at war, loaning them money, or traveling on their ships.

But by 1940, the deteriorating global situation was impossible to ignore. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and had conquered Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Great Britain was the only major European power left standing against Hitler's war machine. The urgency of the situation intensified the debate in the United States over whether American interests were better served by staying out or getting involved.

Isolationists believed that World War II was ultimately a dispute between foreign nations and that the United States had no good reason to get involved. The best policy, they claimed, was for the United States to build up its own defenses and avoid antagonizing either side. Neutrality, combined with the power of the US military and the protection of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, would keep Americans safe while the Europeans sorted out their own problems. Isolationist organizations like the America First Committee sought to influence public opinion through print, radio, and mass rallies. Aviator Charles Lindbergh and popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin were the Committee's most powerful spokesmen. Speaking in 1941 of an "independent American destiny," Lindbergh asserted that the United States ought to fight any nation that attempted to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. However, he argued, American soldiers ought not to have to "fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours."

Interventionists believed the United States did have good reasons to get involved in World War II, particularly in Europe. The democracies of Western Europe, they argued, were a critical line of defense against Hitler's fast-growing strength. If no European power remained as a check against Nazi Germany, the United States could become isolated in a world where the seas and a significant amount of territory and resources were controlled by a single powerful dictator. It would be, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, like "living at the point of a gun," and the buffer provided by the Pacific and Atlantic would be useless. Some interventionists believed US military action was inevitable, but many others believed the United States could still avoid sending troops to fight on foreign soil, if only the Neutrality Acts could be relaxed to allow the federal government to send military equipment and supplies to Great Britain. William Allen White, Chairman of an interventionist organization called the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, reassured his listeners that the point of helping Britain was to keep the United States out of the war. "If I were making a motto for [this] Committee," he said, "it would be 'The Yanks Are Not Coming.'"

Public opinion polling was still in its infancy as World War II approached, but surveys suggested the force of events in Europe in 1940 had a powerful impact on American ideas about the war. In January of that year, one poll found that 88% of Americans opposed the idea of declaring war against the Axis powers in Europe. As late as June, only 35% of Americans believed their government should risk war to help the British. Soon after, however, France fell, and in August the German Luftwaffe began an all-out bombing campaign against Great Britain. The British Royal Air Force valiantly repelled the German onslaught, showing that Hitler was not invincible. A September 1940 poll found that 52% of Americans now believed the United States ought to risk war to help the British. That number only increased as Britain continued its standoff with the Germans; by April 1941 polls showed that 68% of Americans favored war against the Axis powers if that was the only way to defeat them.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, ended the debate over American intervention in both the Pacific and European theaters of World War II. The day after the attack, Congress declared war on Imperial Japan with only a single dissenting vote. Germany and Italy- Japan's allies-responded by declaring war against the United States. Faced with these realities and incensed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, everyday Americans enthusiastically supported the war effort. Isolation was no longer an option.

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The Great Debate | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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From our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all.

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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m., December 7, 1941, was one of the most important events in United States history. It prompted the United States government to join World War II in both the Pacific and the European theaters. It also showed the people of the United States that living in an isolationist country did not mean they were safe from attack. The lesson was a sad one to learn and one that came with a high price. Despite the relative success of American involvement in World War II, some people have speculated that the United States could have prevented the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war with the Japanese that ensued. This is true for many reasons. However, avoidance would have come with a price of its own.

Did We Know About a Possible Attack?

Looking back, we know that the United States military and government were aware of several clues that an attack from Japan was imminent. Relations between the two countries were crumbling. The Japanese were spreading propaganda about the United States. It seems they were gearing up for war even before the government of the United States realized that Japan was capable of it.

After the war, documents belonging to the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, were discovered. According to those papers, Grew had received intelligence from the Peruvian ambassador to Japan indicating that an attack on Pearl Harbor was being planned. Grew received this information on January 27, 1941 - nearly a year before the attack took place. Grew passed this information along, but his information was cursory at best, and he seemingly believed it to be unlikely. Later, Grew blamed the attack and the U.S. involvement in World War II on President Roosevelt.

Precursors to the U.S.-Japan Conflict

Tensions between the U.S. and Japan had risen over interests in China. Japan had been at war with China. By the time warnings of hostilities against the U.S. began surfacing in Japan, Japan was in alliance with Italy and Germany. The United States had interests in China and did not want Japanese troops in the country. Furthermore, Japan's alliance with Italy and Germany meant that it was at war with the British Empire.

If Japan had been successful in China, it would bring Axis powers one step closer to defeating the British. This would not have been good for the U.S. Therefore, despite the U.S. position of non-involvement in the war, they were inadvertently becoming involved by their opposition to Japan's presence in China. Japanese authorities resented this. Unbeknownst to the U.S. at the time, Japan was planning a retaliation.

Jockeying for Position

The United States placed an embargo on oil and iron ore trade with Japan in July of 1941. They also "requested" that Japan remove their troops from China. This was roughly six months after the first official warning of a planned attack on Pearl Harbor had reached government officials. Japan needed U.S. oil to wage their wars. Of course, the embargo exacerbated things. The Prime Minister of Japan, Prince Konoye, decided to arrange a meeting with President Roosevelt in Hawaii, to discuss possible solutions. Roosevelt agreed but changed the place of meeting to Alaska. However, the meeting kept being put off; ultimately, it never took place. In October, Konoye was replaced as Prime Minister by the less peaceful-minded Tojo Hideki.

During all of this, the U.S. government did not believe that the Japanese would wage war with them. Although there were many ships, troops, and aircraft in Pearl Harbor due to rising tensions with the Japanese, defense issues at the base appear to have been unguarded because of an underestimation of the opposition. Had the U.S. government seen the validity of the threat of war with Japan, and had they heeded warnings, the harbor could have been much better defended. However, could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been avoided altogether?

The Attack on Pearl Harbor In Retrospect

Had President Roosevelt met with Prince Konoye, as Joseph Grew later suggested that he should have, would the Japanese have aborted their plan to attack Pearl Harbor? They probably would not have, unless the United States agreed to lift the embargo. The United States could not lift the embargo without an agreement from Japan that they would leave China. It is highly unlikely that Japan would have left China. They only wanted that embargo lifted. With it, there was no reason for them to maintain peace with the United States. So, the attack on Pearl Harbor was probably unavoidable this way.

If the U.S. military had been more prepared for an attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese may have aborted their plan to attack. However, they may well have simply attacked elsewhere. Perhaps if the United States had heeded warnings coming from Japan, they could have gathered more intelligence and gauged the situation better. Perhaps they would have initiated the war. The Pearl Harbor attack had been a long time coming.

References:

ICE Case Studies: "The Way to Pearl Harbor: US vs. Japan," retrieved 6/7/10
New York Times, retrieved 6/7/10
U.S. History, retrieved 6/7/10
Propaganda Matrix, retrieved 6/7/10

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Attack on Pearl Harbor: Could it Have Been Avoided?

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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m., December 7, 1941, was one of the most important events in United States history. It prompted the United States government to join World War II in both the Pacific and the European theaters.

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

On page 98 of Jeffrey L. Dahmer's Ohio high-school yearbook is a photograph of 45 honor society students lined up shoulder to shoulder, their hair well combed, their smiles confident.

One senior three rows from the top has no smile, no eyes, no face at all: his image was blacked out with a marking pen, reduced to a silhouette by an annoyed student editor before the yearbook went to the printer.

That silhouette was Mr. Dahmer in the spring of 1978, a couple of months before he says he killed his first victim, with a barbell. It was 13 years before he confessed to one of the most horrific strings of slayings in modern times.

With grades that ranged from A's to D's, Mr. Dahmer fell far short of honor society standards, but he sneaked into the photo session as if he belonged. No one said a word until long after the shutter had clicked.

In all the years he cried out for attention, it was one of the few times he got caught. By then he had taught himself to live behind a mask of normalcy that hid his often contradictory emotions. It was a mask no one pulled down until one night last month, when a man in handcuffs dashed out of Mr. Dahmer's bizarrely cluttered apartment in a tough Milwaukee neighborhood, called the police and stammered that Mr. Dahmer had been trying to kill him.

The authorities say that at least 17 other men did not get away: that Mr. Dahmer drugged their drinks, strangled them and cut up their bodies with an electric buzz saw; that he discarded bones he did not want in a 57-gallon drum he had bought for just that purpose; that he lined up three skulls on a shelf in his apartment, but only after spraying them with gray paint, to fool people into thinking that they were plastic models, the kind an aspiring artist or a medical intern might study.

Once, he told the police in Milwaukee, he fried a victim's bicep in vegetable shortening and ate it.

Some criminal psychologists see traits in Mr. Dahmer that they have studied in mass killers like Theodore Bundy, who was was electrocuted in Florida in 1989 after a 15-year trail of violence that investigators believe took the lives of at least 30 young women across the nation, or John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted in 1980 of the sex killings of 33 young men in Chicago.

"We're dealing with some of the same dynamics that we can see in Gacy: the dysfunctional family, a guy who denies his homosexual feelings to erase whatever shame he might feel in committing these acts, who destroys the people who attracted him in the first place," said Ted Cahill, who wrote a book about the Gacy killings. "He's punishing himself and punishing them at the same time."

The police report said he did not kill his next victim until roughly a year later, this time at his grandmother's house. He told the police he met the man at the 219 Club and gave him sleeping pills after they had sex. Then he strangled the man after he dozed off. He said he also drugged his third victim at his grandmother's house. Talking of Everything Except the Darkest Side

Mr. Dahmer was arrested in 1986 for taking photographs of a 14-year-old boy and was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. The killings resumed, he told the police, when he was released after serving a partial sentence. He was seeing a parole officer at the same time.

He said that in 1989 he had sex with a man, drugged him and stabbed him with a hunting knife. Then he dismembered the body in the bathtub and used hydrochloric acid to destroy the bones.

Mr. Dahmer said his next killing, two months later, followed the same routine: sex, drugs in a drink, death and dismemberment. "Subject states he began getting quicker at cutting up the bodies," the police report noted.

What unfolded in his sessions with the parole-probation officer, Donna Chester, was a partial look at his life. She was unavailable for an interview last week. But her impressions of Mr. Dahmer recorded in an 81-page document that was released by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, give no indication that Mr. Dahmer set off alarm bells during their chats.

The reason was that he seemed to talk about everything except the killings.

He sometimes expressed interest in talking about his sexual orientation, but often could not bring himself to say what was on his mind. "Client states he knows he prefers male partners but client feels guilty about it." Ms. Chester wrote.

He also talked about family tensions. "He is uncomfortable with his family," she wrote after a session, "because (1) his father is controlling, (2) he has nothing in common with his brother who attends college and (3) he is embarrassed by his offense." He said he had talked with his mother and that she had told him she knew he was gay but that it did not matter.

Money was also on his mind. Ms. Chester wrote that Mr. Dahmer "gets angry at people who make a lot of money, saying "why are they so lucky?' And he 'hates' them for having so much."

Ms. Chester told Mr. Dahmer he had a good job, but he was frustrated that he always seemed short of cash and that the life he longed to lead was beyond his means. But for all of Mr. Dahmer's complaining about finances, his job appeared to be going well. He earned about $9 an hour at the candy factory and took home $250 to $300 a week, depending on how much overtime he put in.

Soon that security was in jeopardy. On July 8, Mr. Dahmer told Ms. Chester he was in danger of losing his job because of arriving late or not showing up.

On July 14, just days before his arrest, he told Ms. Chester he had been dismissed. He told her he had overslept after spending all day visiting his grandmother in a hospital.

The police reports indicate that the killings became more frequent as things at work deteriorated. He told the police that he killed on June 30, July 4 and July 19.

Three days after that last killing, he was arrested shortly after the man in handcuffs fled his apartment and flagged down police officers.

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17 Killed, and a Life Is Searched for Clues (Published 1991)

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

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Jeffrey Dahmer's killer explains why he did it - CNN

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Christopher Scarver says serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would play creepy jokes on inmates, such as making fake, bloody limbs from prison food and ketchup.

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Twenty-five years ago, the cannibal serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer met his own demise. Beaten to death Nov. 28, 1994, in a Wisconsin prison by a fellow inmate wielding a metal bar, it was a violent end to a sadistically violent existence.

Dahmer confessed to killing 17 boys and men between 1978 and 1991, when he finally was captured in Milwaukee.

According to federal records that are now part of the Chicago Sun-Times' growing "The FBI Files" database, investigators' post-conviction interviews with Dahmer show the questions he was asked and many of his answers were, as might be expected, not for the faint of heart.

It's been well documented that Dahmer's murderous spree might have ended sooner and with less carnage had the police been more on-the-ball during encounters with him prior to his 1991 arrest.

But it might have been even sooner, according to a 1992 prison interview with an FBI agent and a police detective in which Dahmer spoke of an incident from the early 1980s. Discharged early from the Army because of his drinking, Dahmer moved to south Florida and, broke, took to sleeping on the beach after working long days at a sandwich shop.

Dahmer told them that one night he was "going back to the beach . . . to the place where I had, you know, my sleeping area set up, and there were some other guys there, and they, I almost got knifed 'cause they didn't know who I was. They thought I was trying to rob them or something."

He also told his interviewers [File 2, pages 183-184]: "I would hate going back to the beach to sleep . . . and so I'd stay up drinking till maybe 3 in the morning, and this one time I got mugged. The guy took a hundred from me."

Because he was living in Florida at the time 6-year-old Adam Walsh was infamously abducted from a Sears store at the Hollywood Mall and beheaded, Dahmer was asked in the same prison interview whether he had anything to do with the boy's death.

"Nothing . . . nothing," Dahmer said, mentioning that he'd come clean about other killings "to clear my conscious of everyone," so "it wouldn't make any sense to be trying to hide that."

When one of the interviewers said maybe he didn't want to admit killing a child, given that Florida had the death penalty, Dahmer said he wanted to die. "If that would get me the death penalty I'd, I'd admit to it," he said.

One of the interviewers told him [File 2, pages 186-190], "We want the right person that's responsible for his murder."

Dahmer also was asked whether were there "any events in your childhood that you attribute to you for becoming a serial murderer?"

"No, none," he said.

"The alcohol?" an interviewer asked.

"It's still a mystery to me, you know, lots of people are big drinkers, and they don't go out and do this . . . I don't know," Dahmer said.

He said he did have a certain type he looked for [File 2, pages 194-195]in potential victims: men who were the "Chip and Dale type" - along the lines of the male striptease Chippendale dancers - with "good looking swimmers type build."

Asked whether there was "any order you would go in" when dismembering a victim - Dahmer often knocked out his victims with sleeping pills, choked them, cut them apart and sometimes ate their flesh but also held onto body parts - the infamous killer at first seemed unsettled. But soon he opened up in graphic detail: "Just slit from the sternum . . ."

"You're into necrophilia?" he later was asked.

"Right, and that led to the cannibalism, just one thing led to another," Dahmer responded.

"The obsession?"

"Right." [File 2, pages 199-201.]

Dahmer told his interviewers he couldn't stop killing.

"I was trying everything from grave robbing to actually stealing a mannequin out of a Boston store . . . to placate the desire without having to hurt anybody," he said.

"But it . . . never worked, and one thing led to another." [File 2, page 202.]

Dahmer talked about trying to turn victims into "zombies," toying with the occult and visiting male "striptease acts" in Chicago, where some of his victims came from.

Asked whether he had a religious background when younger, he said: "Although I always felt that there was something more than just this life . . . I never really wanted to think about a religious background because I was involved in such horrible things." [File 2, pages 203-215.]

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Jeffrey Dahmer's FBI files offer glimpses of what was inside the mind of the serial killer

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Twenty-five years ago, the cannibal serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer met his own demise. Beaten to death Nov. 28, 1994, in a Wisconsin prison by a fellow inmate wielding a metal bar, it was a violent end to a sadistically violent existence.

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It was shortly after midnight in 1991 when Cola Styles and her cousin were outside the family's Milwaukee apartment and they saw a dazed and injured naked boy.

The child was Konerak Sinthasomphone, a member of a Laotian family who, 10 years ago, fled their country in hopes of achieving the American Dream. However, no one could have anticipated the horrific nightmare that awaited them.

Styles, who for decades was reluctant in sharing her story, is coming forward in a new documentary titled "Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of a Monster." The Investigation Discovery (ID) special is part of "ID Presents: Nine at 9," which offers new shows running nightly at 9 p.m. on the true-crime network.

Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer and cannibal whose gruesome crimes continue to shock the world since his 1991 arrest, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate at age 34 in 1994. At the time, Dahmer was in a Wisconsin prison where he was serving 15 consecutive life sentences.
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Sinthasomphone was one of Dahmer's victims. In 1989, Dahmer was convicted of second-degree sexual assault for fondling Sinthasomphone's brother, who was 13 at the time.

According to court records, Dahmer offered the child $50 to pose nude for photos at his home. The former candy factory worker was freed after spending 10 months in jail and was placed on five years of probation.

Dahmer insisted he would become a productive member of society upon his release and avoid committing any more "deplorable" crimes.

"I could tell [Konerak] was injured," Styles, who was 17 at the time, recalled to Fox News. "At first I thought it was a gang initiation. It was clear that he needed help. He couldn't stand and was very lethargic. There were cuts and scrapes all over his body. Then I saw a thin stream of blood running down his thighs. When he saw me, it was like a prayer had been answered. He looked at me as if I knew him. He came and reached out to me like a child and fell. I held on to him on the ground."
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"I tried talking to him but he couldn't respond," Styles continued. "But he had a look in his eyes like he was thankful. I kept wiping his head because he was sweating so much. I didn't know if it was from drugs or what exactly. But I kept saying it was all going to be OK. I don't know what came over me, but nothing held me back in caressing and comforting him at that moment."

As the women called police, Styles said they noticed a man who approached them, insisting there was no need. He said the boy's name was Jim, a houseguest, who was drunk.

Styles said she didn't buy it.

"When I told him we dialed 911, he joked that Jim had wandered off from being drunk," she said. "But then the name kept changing from Jim. And when he saw I wasn't buying it, I did see a streak of evil in him. And then he was handling the boy in a rough way, trying to take him away. There was a lot of yanking and twisting his arm, just being really aggressive."
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According to Styles, she struggled with Dahmer, who was trying to snatch the boy away from her.

"I just couldn't understand why he was giving me such a hard time knowing help was on the way," she said. "I just didn't have a good feeling. And at that point, he was telling me to mind my business. He kept saying, 'This has nothing to do with you. This is my friend.' And when I kept asking for his friend's name, the answer would change."

When police finally arrived, Dahmer told them that Sinthasomphone was 19 years old and a lover who had too much to drink. Sinthasomphone was actually 14.

They believed him.
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When Styles and her cousin tried to tell the officers Sinthasomphone was actually in trouble, she claimed they refused to listen. According to the New York Times, the officers went with Dahmer to his apartment nearby with Sinthasomphone. Styles never saw the child again.

The women quickly told Styles' aunt about the encounter, the Chicago Tribune reported. When the matriarch called the station to check in on the boy, police said it was nothing more than a lover's quarrel.

According to the outlet, when Styles' aunt read in the newspaper that Sinthasomphone was reported missing days later, she called police again. They told her someone would contact her. But, according to the family, no one ever did.

Dahmer met most of his victims at bus stops, bars, malls and adult bookstores in Chicago and Milwaukee, the New York Times reported. He would lure them to his home with promises of beer or money in exchange for posing nude.
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Dahmer would then spike their drinks, strangle and stab them while they were unconscious, the outlet noted. He would go on to consume some of their remains and store the parts of several others in his refrigerator and various containers.

The murderer was finally arrested in 1991 after one victim broke free and ran into the street with handcuffs still dangling from his wrist.

Dahmer later described how, after drugging some of his victims, he would drill a tiny hole in their skulls and inject hydrochloric acid to induce a "zombie-like state." The killer testified he had already injected diluted acid into Sinthasomphone's skull when he was discovered wandering naked in a daze.

Dahmer also revealed that after officers left his home on that fateful day, he gave the youth another injection - one that would kill him.
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In 1993, Sinthasomphone's family sued the city and three police officers, including two who were fired over the incident. The third cop, a rookie, was put on probation.

Styles said Sinthasomphone's death left her "completely messed up."

"All the police had to do was listen to me," she said nearly in tears. "I did what you're supposed to do, which is to help someone in need. I was devastated by what happened to Konerak. He had made it out. He had his freedom. I wrote [Dahmer] a letter, but I'm not sure if he ever got it. And when he died, I didn't feel anything. But I was angry with the police - just literally sick with them. For years, I felt like I failed."

Today, Styles said she's grateful cellphones now allow citizens to document incidents involving police, which can be instantly shared on social media -- something that didn't exist at the time. But the guilt still lingers.
EX-JEHOVAH'S WITNESS RECOUNTS SEXUAL ABUSE IN DOC, ORGANIZATION DENIES TRYING TO COVER IT UP LAS VEGAS SHOOTING SURVIVORS RECALL 'CHAOS AND TURMOIL' OF HORRIFIC NIGHT, MEETING RESCUER, IN NEW DOCUMENTARY
"I just feel like I could have done more," she said. "If I could go back in time, I would have done things differently. I would have just put him in the car and drove to the nearest hospital. There is no victory here. I knew in my heart, he felt that he was going to make it, that everything would be OK. I just hope he isn't forgotten."
"Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of a Monster" airs Monday, May 25 at 9 p.m. on ID. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Jeffrey Dahmer witness says she saw 'a streak of evil' while trying to rescue victim from grisly fate: doc

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It was shortly after midnight in 1991 when Cola Styles and her cousin were outside the family's Milwaukee apartment and they saw a dazed and injured naked boy. The child was Konerak Sinthasomphone, a member of a Laotian family who, 10 years ago, fled their country in hopes of achieving the American Dream.

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An old high school yearbook photo of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is giving people the chills on social media.

One of Dahmer's classmates, Mike Kukral, shared the image on Investigation Discovery's TV special " Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of a Monster."

Did this moment with the yearbook give anyone else chills? #JeffreyDahmer pic.twitter.com/mAY4KDyYRN
- Investigation Discovery (@DiscoveryID) May 26, 2020

The show also featured an interview with Ronald Flowers, who survived an encounter with Dahmer and described the experience:

Ronald Flowers survived #JeffreyDahmer. "The last thing I saw was the floor and his shoes. It was sheer terror." pic.twitter.com/PWhS77wN5q
- Investigation Discovery (@DiscoveryID) May 26, 2020

Dahmer was convicted on 15 counts of murder and was sentenced in 1992 to 15 life terms in prison. He and another inmate were beaten to death in prison in 1994 by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver.

Scarver later told the New York Post that Dahmer would make fake limbs from his food and douse them in ketchup as "blood" to taunt the other inmates.

"He would put them in places where people would be," Scarver told the newspaper in 2015. "He crossed the line with some people - prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant - but he was not one of them."

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Jeffrey Dahmer's Classmate Reveals Chilling Photo Of Future Serial Killer

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An old high school yearbook photo of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is giving people the chills on social media. One of Dahmer's classmates, Mike Kukral, shared the image on Investigation Discovery's TV special " Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind of a Monster." Did this moment with the yearbook give anyone else chills?

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North Twenty-fifth Street is only a couple of miles from downtown Milwaukee, yet it contrives to feel dislocated, apart. There is an air of listlessness about the neighborhood, as if ambition here has been sat upon and the future is questionable. The small detached houses with verandas were obviously once pretty, even elegant, but now they stand like ghosts of a happier time, and you do not walk down the street without listening for footsteps behind you.

The Oxford Apartments at No. 924 is an interruption of the street's pre-war architecture, a modern two-story building with a cream-colored façade. It looks, and is, cheap. Outside hangs a large American flag. When I passed two months ago, it hung limply at half-mast.

The scene of a crime is nearly always a soul-damaging place, but almost none in modern American history compares to the spectacle that awaited police in Jeffrey Dahmer's small second-floor apartment. For once that anodyne term "human remains" was horribly accurate. Apartment 213 contained seven skulls and four heads, three in a free-standing freezer, one in a box on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. In the freezer compartment of the refrigerator there were assorted body parts. In a blue fifty-seven-gallon barrel there were headless torsos, mutilated pieces of human bodies, hands, and assorted limbs. There were also more than a hundred photographs of people taken at various stages of dismemberment, most so disgusting that even seasoned police officers could not look on them without feeling faint.

In all, Jeffrey L. Dahmer has been charged with thirteen counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree murder, though he has confessed to having killed seventeen men: Steven Hicks, Steven Tuomi, James Doxtator, Richard Guerrero, Anthony Sears, Raymond Smith (also known as Ricky Beeks), Edward Smith, Ernest Miller, David Thomas, Curtis Straughter, Errol Lindsey, Tony Anthony Hughes, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy, Joseph Bradehoft. That so many were named within a few days of Dahmer's arrest on July 22, and all of them since, is attributable not merely to the forensic skills of the Milwaukee County medical examiner but also to the confessed serial murderer's own wish to assist in every way toward positive identification.

The Milwaukee City Jail has been a smoke-free zone since July, and Jeffrey Dahmer, a pack-a-day man, is reduced to sniffing smells from the air vents in his cell when prison guards have a smoke. But he is transported by two detectives from the jail to the Milwaukee Police Department one floor below for his sessions with investigating officers, and there he is allowed to smoke as many cigarettes as he likes. (Dahmer is now in the Milwaukee County Jail.)

It is noticeable how subdued Dahmer is now, despite the lack of cigarettes. His confessions are made not in any spirit of bravado or satisfaction, but in abject remorse. His lawyer, Gerald Boyle, is on record as having referred to Dahmer's "anguish." The word may even be too mild to describe the depths of introspective horror which now afflict him.

That a man should be capable of what Jeffrey Dahmer says he has done is in itself a mystery of human destructiveness which is in no way diminished by the spate of "serial killers" revealed in recent years. That he is also in distress, and as appalled as we are by the contemplation of his own acts, compounds the mystery by lifting him from the simple category of a monster whom we can view from a fascinated and safe distance into an uncomfortably recognizable human being. As the scores of journalists who descended upon Milwaukee pieced together Dahmer's history, he gradually emerged as disconcertingly ordinary, even unremarkable, until the secret dissolution of his personality finally erupted upon the world.

We must not treat Dahmer the way he treated his victims, as objects in a fantasy, but must try to inhabit his world, to imagine what it might be like to live inside the head of Jeffrey Dahmer. This is not impossible, for there was a case in England in 1983, so similar in detail, character, and motive, as to make one blink in disbelief.

Dennis Nilsen, a highly intelligent thirty-seven-year-old civil servant with a penetrating gaze and a dark sense of humor, was arrested in February 1983 and charged with six counts of murder and two of attempted murder. He quickly confessed to having killed fifteen men, three in his attic apartment on Cranley Gardens and twelve at a previous address, also on the outskirts of north London. Nilsen worked as an executive officer at a government-sponsored employment agency, and in the evening went to pubs and gay bars for a drink and a chat. Sometimes he took people home with him, and sometimes he killed them. He would wait until they were drunk and sleepy, then strangle them with a tie. (Dahmer gave his victims a drugged drink, strangled them with a strap or his bare hands, and once used a knife.) Having accomplished this, he would look after the body, care for it, wash and clean it, dress it, put it to bed, sit it in an armchair, and often masturbate beside it. (Dahmer is alleged to have told the police that he once had anal penetration with a corpse.) Some days later, Nilsen would place the body under the floorboards. When the space there became crowded or the stench became overpowering, perhaps several months later, he took the bodies out, dismembered them with a kitchen knife, and burned them on a bonfire in the backyard. Once he was in the Cranley Gardens attic flat, without access to a garden, he sliced the bodies into two-inch strips and flushed them down the toilet (he was eventually caught when the plumbing backed up as a result). The heads were boiled on the kitchen stove. (Dahmer seems to have dissected the corpses almost immediately. He used an electric saw, and acid baths for disposal. The heads were boiled and saved.)

There is a tragedy for the people who died, and another for those who carry death with them.

Nilsen referred to the evening of his arrest as "the day help arrived." I first met him two and a half months later, and we had corresponded for three weeks before that. I interviewed him for eight months before his trial, read his own fifty-volume prison journals, and wrote a book about his case, Killing for Company, published in Great Britain. Nilsen is the first murderer to present an exhaustive archive measuring his own introspection, and his candid, articulate reflections allowed a unique opportunity to enter the mind of a mass murderer, a mind that is frighteningly similar to Jeffrey Dahmer's.

In his "normal" manifestation, Dennis Nilsen is an engaging companion, well-spoken, intelligent, and very persuasive. From the letters we had exchanged, I expected someone who was sensitive and introspective. At our first meeting, however, I saw an assertive man, bristling with confidence and swagger, amazingly relaxed as he slouched with an arm over the back of his chair, totally in command and behaving as if he were interviewing me for a job. He gave an impression of intellectual intensity, coupled with a surprising truculence. I soon learned that this was a radical political streak exaggerated by his having to spend countless hours confined with nobody to speak to.

Nilsen is tall, slightly stooped, with a mild but persistent Scottish accent and a natural disposition to hold forth on all manner of subjects. His argumentativeness has frequently brought trouble upon him as a discontented prisoner who is forever pointing out that prison rules should be obeyed by prison governors as well as inmates. His dark sense of humor, too, has often been criticized. During his first interrogation Nilsen, a smoker like Dahmer, asked what he was supposed to do without an ashtray; when told he could just flush the butts down the toilet, he replied that the last time he did that he was arrested. He once told me that if a film is ever made of his case, "they will have to put the cast in order of disappearance."

When I went to see him in August at Her Majesty's Prison Albany on the Isle of Wight (where he is serving a life sentence), to talk about Dahmer's alleged crimes, Nilsen was reluctant at first to address the subject. He looked at me in unaccustomed penetrating silence for a long while, and it was clear that he was contemplating scenes he would far rather banish to the past. Then, in beginning to explain the motivation behind the horrifying deeds he and Dahmer have in common, Nilsen made an observation on the film The Silence of the Lambs, a movie about serial murderers which he has not seen, though he knows the book. He said that the depiction of Hannibal Lecter, the dangerous, cerebral killer, is a fraudulent fiction. "He is shown as a potent figure, which is pure myth," Nilsen said carefully. "It is his power and manipulation which please the public. But it's not at all like that. My offenses arose from a feeling of inadequacy, not potency. I never had any power in my life."

Eventually, Nilsen was willing, even eager, to examine the case of Jeffrey Dahmer in detail. The comments he made and the letter he subsequently wrote to me, giving his understanding of Dahmer's mind, appear later.

Jeffrey Dahmer's legal representative is Gerald Boyle, an ebullient, gregarious man who is recognized all over Milwaukee and always greeted with genuine glee. You feel that people know he is a man of heart, good-natured and generous, and as often happens with those who enjoy life rather than complain about it, he is no longer slim. He is just over fifty, but with hair prematurely white, and his Irish ancestry has endowed him with both a sense of humor and a sense of natural justice. His older brother is a Jesuit priest. Boyle himself is a believer without being dogmatic.

Boyle has known Dahmer for three years; they first met in 1988 when Dahmer was charged with child molestation. "It was completely impossible to imagine then," says Boyle, frowning with emphasis and bewilderment, "that he had already killed a number of people. No sign whatsoever. Never once suspected."

Boyle hopes that a proper examination of his client's case may open the way to discern the cause of his tragic torment. "If we can illuminate the condition which afflicts people like Jeffrey Dahmer," he says, "we might have done some little thing for humanity." He has engaged a distinguished forensic psychologist, Dr. Kenneth Smail, to report on Dahmer's state of mind.

The facts of Dahmer's case, once stripped of invention and exaggeration, are straightforward enough. ("Forty percent of what has been printed in the papers is untrue," Dahmer has said recently.) The son of Lionel Dahmer, a chemist, and his first wife, Joyce, Jeffrey was born in Milwaukee but brought up in Bath Township, Ohio, in a middle-class setting. His parents were incompatible and spent so much energy in argument that they had little left to devote to him. They were "constantly at each other's throats," he has recalled. His abiding memory of childhood is of isolation and neglect. He had no close friends, no one with whom he felt at ease and affectionate. He withdrew into a private world wherein he could create his own stories, fantasies that always turned out right as long as no one jostled them.

At Revere High School in Richfield, Ohio, Jeffrey did reasonably well, but was once again noticeably solitary. He played clarinet and tennis, but quite clearly did not belong with any group. Like many friendless children, he took to playing the fool, acting in a bizarre manner to claim attention. According to one classmate quoted in the press, he would bleat like a sheep in class, or fake an epileptic fit. Such are the measures to which the outsider resorts in order to win admission. If that does not work, one can always hijack admission, as Jeffrey apparently did by twice slipping into group photographs of his high school's honor society, where he did not belong. When the photograph was published in the school yearbook in his senior year, his image was blacked out.

Meanwhile, there are reports that he enjoyed skinning dead animals and scraping the meat off with acid. (Many of these reports have come via his stepmother, Shari Dahmer.)

"Dahmer's 'buzz' comes from the whole continuing ritual exploitation of the victim's passivity."

The atmosphere at home had become worse since the birth of Jeffrey's younger brother, David, to whom so much demonstrative affection was offered that Jeffrey was left to draw the conclusion that he was somehow unworthy. Lionel and Joyce finally put an end to their unfortunate marriage in 1978, he having done his best to stay away from her in the last months. They fought bitterly over custody of their younger son. When the divorce was effected, Joyce packed her bags and took off with David, then twelve, leaving Jeffrey to fend for himself. He was eighteen, a morose and sullen figure, heavily hurt by desertion. There was no one to whom he could turn for solace. He was anyway so secretive by then that he never revealed himself for fear that the "self" would be unattractive and misprized. A few weeks later, he picked up a hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, and brought him home. When Hicks said he should be moving on, Jeffrey smashed him in the head with a barbell and strangled him, dismembered his body, crushed the bones with a sledgehammer, and scattered the remains in the woods. Hicks was effectively obliterated, by a man he did not know, because he had threatened to abandon him.

After one semester at Ohio State University, Dahmer dropped out and enlisted in the army for a period of six years. After only two, however, he was discharged under a section of the Military Justice Code that covered drug and alcohol use. He habitually drank himself into a stupor. It was yet another way of turning his back upon a world where he felt he did not belong.

At this point, he went to live with his paternal grandmother, Catherine Dahmer, in West Allis, near Milwaukee, and took a job in a blood bank. By 1985 he was working at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company as a general laborer, a job he held until July 15 of this year, one week before his arrest. He was still a "loner," except that he occasionally brought home young men whom he had met casually at a gay bar. Lionel Dahmer and his new wife, Shari, decided that this was too much for the aging grandmother to cope with, and said he must leave to find a place of his own. What none of them knew was that, by April 1989, three of the men whom Jeffrey had taken to the house in West Allis never left it.

Dahmer's erratic behavior had attracted the attention of the law, though not of the homicide squad. State Fair Park police charged him with disorderly conduct in August 1982. He was convicted and fined. In 1986 he was arrested for exposing himself to children; he later claimed that he had merely been urinating and had no idea he was observed. The charge of lewd and lascivious behavior was commuted to disorderly conduct, and on March 10, 1987, he was found guilty and sentenced to one year on probation.

Then, in 1988, Dahmer picked up a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy, offering him fifty dollars to pose for photographs. He gave the boy a drink laced with a sleeping potion, and fondled him. Dahmer was charged with second-degree sexual assault and enticement of a child for immoral purposes. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years, but as he expressed contrition the sentence was stayed to one year's detention and five years' probation, with the eight years suspended upon future conduct (they will now automatically have to be served in full). This meant he could keep his $9.81-an-hour job at the chocolate factory and return to the jail in the evening. He was also to receive psychological treatment to deal with his sexual confusion and his dependence upon alcohol.

Nilsen speculates that claims of Dahmer's cannibalism are probably "wishful thinking."

That was three years ago. Dahmer is now apparently shocked to discover that the boy involved in this offense was the brother of Konerak Sinthasomphone, whom he murdered in May. He had no idea they were related.

Because of a heavy caseload, his probation officer did not insist on making visits to Dahmer's apartment, but always consulted with him at her office. He seemed willing and cooperative. Her reports indicated that Dahmer felt some guilt about his preference for male partners. His mother, who had moved to Fresno, California, spoke to him by telephone for the first time in five years and indicated that his homosexuality caused no problem as far as she was concerned.

Two of the speculations which have grown like fungus since July are that Jeffrey Dahmer hated black men and despised homosexuals. According to several sources close to him, neither is true. It has been suggested that he is homosexual by default-that his sexual orientation was not a preference but a compensation for the impossibility of having a relationship with a woman-but in reality he is a genuine homosexual who has had difficulty coming to terms with the fact. And he insists that there is no racial significance in the fact that most of his victims were black. On the contrary, it is more than probable that he invited them back to his apartment because he liked them.

A young man named Kenny Magnum was quoted by The Washington Post as saying, "He killed six of my friends, and you know, before all this, I would have said he was a regular guy." That, indeed, is the crux of the matter-Dahmer's "normality." Jeffrey Dahmer is tall, lean, well built. Those who have met him say that he looks you in the eye as he talks, instead of darting glances to the floor or meditating in the middle distance, as dissemblers often do. He has a ready smile, but is shy and tentative. All this relates to the sober Dahmer. Army and work colleagues have told of his dramatic change of character when drunk. He would turn aggressive, dogmatic. One person described how he would become loquacious with drink, and then tedious, until he felt he had to walk away from Dahmer to avoid boredom.

Neighbors are quoted as saying he was well mannered and polite, though he kept himself to himself. Taxi drivers found him intelligent. One of them recalls driving him back from the shop where he bought the fifty-seven-gallon barrel which he would subsequently use to dispose of unwanted remnants of his guests.

Other taxi drivers frequently took him from the apartment to a restaurant called the Chancery, where he would dine alone. Sometimes they picked him up at the 219 Club on South Second Street, a popular downtown gay bar.

That, too, is relatively normal. Though the 219 Club stands anonymously enough on a grim, featureless street where you expect to find only warehouses and used-car lots, once I stepped beyond the simple door, I could have been in Paris or London. Rather than a grim, sleazy, furtive joint with mysterious dark corners and strange smells, it is a cheerful and robustly pleasant place, serving generous cocktails at decent prices and boasting a bright dance floor lit with special effects. Patrons are clean and assertively happy. Jeffrey Dahmer would not look at all out of place in such a venue, and he didn't. One man at the bar, who asked to remain anonymous, told me, "Sure, I saw him in here a number of times. Good-looking guy. I would have gone home with him right away if he'd asked me."

Dennis Nilsen receives one visitor a month. He submits your name to the Home Office and, if it is approved, you arrive on the appointed day at the appointed hour and a guard walks you into Albany prison. After passing through several guard stations and steel doors, you arrive at a small square table in the prison visiting room, surrounded by other such tables, at which prisoners and their girlfriends hold hands and gaze at each other. Guards sit around the edge of the room, but they cannot hear conversations.

Even in his simple prison uniform of blue denim trousers and blue-and-white striped shirt, the same as everyone else, he stands apart, and glances indicate he is recognized. Nilsen thinks his notoriety is a fiction of the press, but that is because he tries to forget the emotional import of what he did, and the rest of us cannot.

When I visited Nilsen recently, he knew that I wanted to ask him for his opinions of Jeffrey Dahmer. He had read several accounts of Dahmer's case in newspapers that warders had left lying around, and had heard reports on BBC radio. Though he was initially reticent on the subject, Nilsen is a perceptive, talkative man with intellectual pretensions, and he was soon willing to analyze Dahmer from his own unique perspective. As usual, he began by taking refuge in humor, moving his chair opposite me "because we don't want anyone to get ideas."

Dennis Nilsen is the son of a Scottish mother and a Norwegian father who met during the Second World War in Scotland and separated soon afterward. He does not remember seeing his father at all, and was brought up by his mother and grandparents. An insecure, melancholy little boy, Nilsen worshiped his adventurous, seafaring grandfather. One day when he was six years old, Nilsen was excited when his mother asked him to come and see "Grandad." She took her son into another room, where a long box lay on trestles, and lifted him up to look inside. In the box was his grandfather. The taboo against the mention of death had disastrous consequences for the boy: the image of the loved one and the image of the dead object were fused.

The confusion of love with inanimate bodies became sexual when Nilsen was eight. He nearly drowned as he waded from a beach near his home into the North Sea; he was rescued by a teenager who then molested him as he wavered in and out of consciousness. (Dahmer's father reportedly told police that when Jeffrey was eight he was sexually molested by a neighbor boy. Dahmer has said he has no memory of the incident. His father now says the assault never occurred.)

At school Nilsen was friendless and, like Dahmer, a bit of a joker. He spent twelve years in the Army Catering Corps, where he learned his butchering skills. (Dahmer learned all about the disposal properties of acid by virtue of his father's having been a chemist.) He also discovered an alternative to solitary sex: "The novelty of one's own body soon wore off and I needed something positive to relate to," he remembered later. "My imagination hit on the idea of using a mirror. By placing a large, long mirror on its side strategically beside the bed, I would view my own reclining reflection. At first always careful not to show my head, because the situation needed that I believe it was someone else. I would give the reflection some animation, but that play could not be drawn out long enough. The fantasy could dwell much longer on a mirror image which was asleep." Later, the fetish involved makeup "to erase the living colour."

After leaving the army, Nilsen lived alone in various flats in London. Though promiscuous, he was surprisingly puritanical about the life he was leading. Anonymous sex, he wrote, "only deepens one's sense of loneliness and solves nothing. Promiscuity is a disease." Like Dahmer, he felt guilt about his homosexuality, and he, too, brushed with the law when he picked up a boy who fell asleep in his flat after drinking, and woke up to find himself being photographed. A tussle ensued, but following an interview at the police station no charges were brought. The camera is an essential element in both Dahmer's and Nilsen's cases, for it is one of the props of the florid fantasy life that eventually swallowed up both men.

Nilsen made one attempt at a domestic relationship, but it was doomed and lasted only a matter of months. Dahmer has never had an enduring relationship, though there was one association that went on for two and a half months. Both men were confirmed outsiders, looking at the real world from an imprisonment not of their own choosing, but which they learned to cherish for want of anything else. "I had always held within me a fear of emotional rejection and failure," wrote Nilsen. "Nobody ever really got close to me. . . . There was never a place for me in the scheme of things. . . . My inner emotions could not be expressed, and this led me to the alternative of a retrograde and deepening imagination. . . . I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark endless dirges." This may also represent an accurate portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer's frame of mind.

"The loner has to achieve fulfillment alone within himself," writes Nilsen once more. "All he has are his own extreme acts. People are merely supplementary to the achievement of these acts. He is abnormal and he knows it."

Nilsen reached the point where he felt utterly useless and superfluous to society. "Loneliness is a long unbearable pain. I felt that I had achieved nothing of importance or of help to anyone in my entire life. I would think that if I drank myself to death my body would not be discovered until at least a week after (or longer). There was no one I felt I could call upon for real help. I was in daily contact with so many people, but quite alone in myself." (Dahmer is also apparently convinced that, even before the murders, there was no source of pride for him, nothing he could point to in his past with any degree of satisfaction.)

At the end of 1978, Nilsen spent six whole days with his dog over the Christmas period, until he went out for a drink the evening before New Year's Eve and met a young man, whom he invited back. In the morning the man would be leaving. Nilsen decided he would keep him. The man was strangled in his sleep. Thus began what he has disconcertingly called his recruitment of "a new kind of flat-mate." Dahmer is alleged to have admitted that his first victim, Steven Hicks, was killed at the moment when he realized the boy was going to leave. Thereafter the pattern was disastrously repeated, with each departure a threat of abandonment, a death of its own.

In both cases the pattern took some time to establish itself. A whole year elapsed between Nilsen's first murder and his second, some six and a half years in Dahmer's case. Nilsen's frequency of killing gradually escalated into a desperate, unstoppable orgy of panicky destructiveness, with seven men murdered in one year. Dahmer's last four victims died within three weeks. "Each one seemed to be its own last time," wrote Nilsen, who insists that the term "serial killer" is inaccurate because it suggests the intention to repeat. "You might as well call Elizabeth Taylor a serial bride," he adds dryly.

It is painful for any of us to survive without a proper sexual and social identity, and for this we need to be in touch, sporadically if not constantly, with human goodness. Both Nilsen and Dahmer appear to have been denied this advantage. They each resisted tactile contact. Nilsen's mother admitted to me that she could not cuddle him as a baby; she wanted to, but he appeared to repel demonstrations of affection. The Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted Dahmer's stepmother, Shari, as saying, "He couldn't embrace, he couldn't touch. His eyes are dead."

It is common in semi-autistic children and adolescents to hold this kind of distance, but it is debatable whether the condition is genetic, or whether adults should be held accountable for it. At any rate, it may engender in the long term an unassailable habit of distrust. Dahmer's probation officer noted that his general outlook toward people was "basically mistrusting." In the same interview Dahmer said that if he could change anything in his childhood it would be the way his parents behaved toward each other (he would "change that parents didn't get along").

This ingrained suspiciousness makes it difficult for such people to express any emotion apart from anger, and renders them liable to attribute to others certain attitudes and feelings without checking if they are true or justified. It becomes slightly easier to imagine, then, that Dahmer's victims may have unwittingly stumbled into a private drama in which they played a role foisted upon them by his interpretation of their attitude or indifference. They could not have intuited the deep, frustrated aggression which lay beneath that retiring façade.

Hence the purpose of fantasy in Jeffrey Dahmer's life. He told the police that he had been lost to fantasies from childhood. Even as an infant he had been withdrawn, living privately in his own dreamworld. Gradually, the fantasy life became more important than life outside it, and he emerged only reluctantly to face practical realities. Imperceptibly, the private, cherished world of fantasy took the place of the real world, diminishing the value he might place on real people.

There is nothing inherently bad about fantasy; indeed, it is very common and quite harmless. To the lonely child it is a solace, and must be welcomed. It may take hold if the loneliness is not relieved in adolescence, however, and grow larger and more complex in adulthood. Once fantasy becomes more beloved than reality, it cannot be held in check, and risks breaking through the barrier into real life. People from the real world are often unaware of the terrible danger they run in coming close to such intensity.

This is how Dennis Nilsen expressed the feeling which might have possessed Jeffrey Dahmer: "I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime." And again: "The need to return to my beautifully warm unreal world was such that I was addicted to it even to the extent of knowing of the risks to human life. . . . The pure primitive man of the dream world killed these men. . . . These people strayed into my innermost secret world and they died there. I'm sure of this."

There is a Manichaean touch to this awful vision which would come as no surprise to a theological student, for it is axiomatic that the man imprisoned in fantasy has forsaken the world of God to pursue his miserable life in the vivid, seductive, intoxicating world of Satan. (Jeffrey Dahmer's favorite movie, which he watched again and again, is Exorcist II, and it would be hard to find many films more satanic.) It is not at all unusual for murderers to feel that they are a battle-ground for opposing forces-darkness and light, God and the Devil, good and evil-or that they are two people in one, the "bad" identity being held responsible for wicked deeds and the "good" one chastising him. To an extent, this is true of all of us, but the repetitive murderer illustrates the condition most starkly. "I always covered up for that 'inner me' that I loved," Nilsen wrote. "He just acted and I had to solve all his problems in the cool light of day. I could not turn him in without also destroying myself. In the end he lost. He still lies dormant within me. Will time destroy him? Or was he only lost temporarily? When I was on my high, [my dog] would become sometimes frightened. She was only a simple dog but even she could see that it was not the real Des Nilsen . . . She would go off to a quiet corner and hide. She would greet me the next morning as though I had been away . . . dogs know when your mind has been changed in a drastic way."

Dahmer's mind grew so distorted as to require nourishment in death, but the "normal" guy whom people saw in the street or at the 219 Club disapproved of his conduct. Dahmer's contrition after his conviction for molesting a child was genuine enough. In July of this year he issued a statement through Gerald Boyle, apologizing to the families of the dead "for all the heartache he caused." It would be facile to dismiss this as simple hypocrisy.

Dennis Nilsen said that at the actual moment of killing he was in the grip of an overwhelming compulsion. "My sole reason for existence was to carry out that act at that moment," he wrote. "I could feel the power and the struggles of death . . . of absolute compulsion to do, at that moment, suddenly." He claimed that he had no power of responsibility at the time, and that, afterward, he was inhabited first by fear, then by "a massive and suppressed remorse." The police had shown him a picture of one of his victims, for identification. "I looked at a photo of Martyn Duffey today," he wrote to me, "and it shocked me seeing him so lifelike in that photo and dead, gone, destroyed by me. I can't stop thinking about it. I am . . . amazed that all this-from beginning to end-could ever happen." Dahmer has also recently spoken of "compulsion."

With both men, the agents which facilitate loss of control and smother the inhibitory mechanism are music and alcohol. Dahmer listened to heavy-metal rock bands like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, Nilsen to Shostakovich and Abba. Dahmer would use an eight-track player with headphones and retreat into his "own little world"; the second of Nilsen's victims was actually strangled with the cord of his headphones as he was listening.

Nilsen drank great quantities of Bacardi and Coke; Dahmer drank almost anything that was available, but especially beer and martinis. Many witnesses quoted in the press have attested to his extraordinary Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when drinking. A colleague from Dahmer's army days, David Rodriguez, said, "He's a likable guy, except when he's drinking he's different." His bunkmate in the Eighth Infantry Division at Baumholder in West Germany, Billy Capshaw, said Dahmer became moody and menacing when drinking. "You could tell in his face that he wasn't joking. It was for real. That's why it bothered me. It was a whole different side. His face was blank." Even his stepmother told The Plain Dealer, "He has a terrible drinking problem. It makes him a different person."

Nilsen wrote, "The pressure needed release. I took release through spirits and music. On that high I had a loss of morality and danger feeling . . . If the conditions were right, I would completely follow through to the death."

As a result of this disastrous loss of control, the aftermath of each killing involved a careful reconstruction of self and sanity. Nilsen said that he sometimes could not remember the actual moment of murder, but would find a dead body in the morning and realize that it had happened again. He would then have to walk the dog and go to work as part of his "normal" life. The New York Times quoted police sources to give an account of Dahmer's second murder, the first in Milwaukee (this does not appear in the official criminal complaint against him). He met the man at the 219 Club and went with him to the Ambassador Hotel. There they both got drunk and passed out. "When he [Dahmer] woke up, the guy was dead and had blood coming from his mouth." Dahmer then left the body in the hotel room, went to a store and bought a suitcase, returned to the hotel, and put the body in the suitcase. He called a taxi and went to his grandmother's house in West Allis, where he was then still living, taking the suitcase with him.

All this sounds callous and chilling, as indeed it is when all we are required to do is imagine it. If you actually have to do it, it is a devouring nightmare. Dahmer had not killed for six and a half years. He probably thought it would never happen again. Then it did. He had to emerge quickly from the episode of what psychologists call "dissociation" (when he was controlled by fantasy and not by reason), and reassemble his personality on the spot. He had to rediscover his emotion, his feeling, his self, and what he found would horrify him. Most devastating of all would be the knowledge, the near certainty, that he would do it again. To continue living with the recognition that you have the hands and heart of a killer is to walk in a permanent hell. As the crimes sped up and Dahmer was eventually surrounded by human debris, his personality teetered on the verge of total disintegration. There is a tragedy for the people who died, and another for those who carry death with them.

It is even possible that Jeffrey Dahmer dimly feels some kind of "shared" tragedy with the victims, as if they have all suffered from indifference and neglect and are united in this dramatic dénouement. If this is true, it is, pathetically, the closest Dahmer has ever felt to anyone, and that death should be required to effect this "togetherness" is an eloquent judgment upon his state of mind. Nilsen very often identified with the people he killed, envied them almost. Describing the moment of "coming to" after a murder, he wrote, "I stood in great grief and a wave of utter sadness as if someone very dear to me had just died. . . . I sometimes wondered if anyone cared for me or them. That could easily be me lying there. In fact a lot of the time it was." Elsewhere, he wrote, "I was engaged primarily in self-destruction. . . . I was killing myself only but it was always the bystander who died." One of the reasons Nilsen was able to murder so many men was that most of them were young, single, unemployed drifters-nearly invisible when they were alive, forgotten when they disappeared. Of Dahmer's victims, The New York Times said, "Some of them were like Mr. Dahmer himself, people of whom society did not take much notice."

We have only to pursue this line of thinking a little further to tangle with the vexed matters of necrophilia and cannibalism, both of which may be relevant to Dahmer's case; for the desire to identify with the victim, to be at one with him, to share his fate, cannot in the end be more graphically expressed than by eating him.

Necrophilia is often misunderstood because it is generally held to mean sexual congress with a corpse, whereas that is only one manifestation of the disorder. It was certainly appropriate to John Christie, who murdered six women in a London house in the 1950s, because he could only perform sexual intercourse if the women were dead; he killed them in order to have sex with them. But there are other necrophiles: those who steal corpses and hoard them, those who like to sleep in cemeteries, and those who find death beautiful. Necrophiles are difficult to recognize, but according to Erich Fromm's findings they often have a pallid complexion (as does Dahmer), and they speak in a monotone (Dahmer's voice is reportedly almost devoid of expression or inflection). They are fascinated by machinery, which is unfeeling and antihuman. (Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, played with car engines for hours on end. Both Nilsen and Dahmer are keen on photography and movies.) They are pedantic about dates and details, i.e., "facts" rather than "feelings" (Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf sadist of the 1920s, had precise recall of murders he had committed thirty years before; this trait also applies to Dahmer and Nilsen), and see things in black and white rather than color (Nilsen called himself the "monochrome man"). They also feel happy with routine, however bizarre, because it, too, is mechanical. (In high school, Dahmer reportedly developed a ritual walk to the school bus-four steps forward, two back, four forward, one back-from which he never deviated.)

One kind of necrophile is the "lust murderer," for whom the act of killing provides excitement: when he felt the urge and had no victim at hand, Peter Kürten would break the neck of a swan in the park and drink its blood. But there is an entirely different necrophile who is appalled by sadism and entranced by the sight of a dead body. Nilsen's crimes place him in this category, and Jeffrey Dahmer may possibly represent a variation of the type. There are stories of Dahmer's having conserved the corpses of animals when he was a child, and there is the even more telling admission that he drugged his victims with a sleeping draft. To the cynic, this may appear to be the easiest way to ensure that the victim could not fight for his life, but it may just as readily show that Dahmer loved the look of an inert, unmoving body. He used a drug (Halcion) to sedate young Sinthasomphone, the Laotian thirteen-year-old whom he fondled in 1988, and made no attempt to kill him.

The Milwaukee Sentinel unearthed the interesting information that Dahmer had once been evicted from a gay bathhouse. While other men were intent upon making contact and perhaps having sex, Dahmer would invite a man to his private room and offer him a drugged drink. It happened so many times that he was told not to come back. One of the men was unconscious for three hours. "His interest in me didn't seem to be sexual," the man recalled later. "It seemed to be to get me to drink. Maybe he was experimenting with me to see what it would take to put someone out." It is much more likely that he wanted to gaze upon, and touch, a body which did not resist his attentions. It is like the game of "playing dead," a pretense children use to explore and touch one another's bodies without fear of reprimand.

Dennis Nilsen's experience may offer yet more clues. For him, the dead body was an object of beauty, even of veneration. "I remember being thrilled that I had full control and ownership of this beautiful body," he wrote of one victim. "I was fascinated by the mystery of death. I whispered to him because I believed he was still really in there." Of his last corpse, Stephen Sinclair, he wrote, "I entertained no thoughts of harming him, only concern and affection for his future and the pain and plight of his life. . . . I had a feeling of easing his burden with my strength. . . . I just sat there and watched him. He looked really beautiful like one of those Michelangelo sculptures. It seemed that for the first time in his life he was really feeling and looking the best he ever did in his whole life." Later Nilsen said that the man had never been so appreciated before. Nilsen also called his actions "misplaced love out of its time and out of its mind."

The uneasy truth is that necrophilia is often the most extreme perversion of something which is essentially good, the love instinct. In On the Nightmare, Ernest Jones divided necrophiles into two types: those who have a "frantic aversion" to being deserted, like Periander, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, who is reputed to have had coitus with his wife, Melissa, after her death; and those who want union with the dead, either to give love and solace or to express hatred. Both categories have their application in Nilsen's case, and both may have something to teach us about Dahmer. Nilsen masturbated over or beside the corpse, and Dahmer has told the police he had "oral sex" with a dead body on more than one occasion.

"I think that in some cases I killed these men in order to create the best image of them," wrote Nilsen. "It was not really a bad but a perfect and peaceful state for them to be in." He experienced "a feeling of oneness" with the corpse. Dahmer has likewise expressed the desire to join somebody, to be "at one" with another person. The most vivid way in which this can be achieved is by taking the flesh of another into one's body.

Necrophagy, or the eating of corpses, is an extremely rare aberration, though some grisly instances of it have been recorded in detail by J. Paul de River, a specialist in the field. It is essentially the most desperate measure to which one may resort in a desire for human contact, and is pitiful as well as repulsive. Jeffrey Dahmer confessed under interrogation that he had saved the heart of one of his victims "to eat later," and there is another report that he placed biceps in the freezer. In effect, this was a way of "keeping" someone with him, in other words, a perversion of the romantic notion "to have and to hold."

However ghastly we may find the practice, cannibalism actually has a long history among some civilizations and has often been considered honorable by those tribes which have entertained it as a noble ritual. Indeed, a strong echo still exists in our society, for what is more symbolically cannibalistic than the sacrament by which Christians take the body and blood of Christ into themselves? In this context, it is interesting that Nilsen (who never admitted to necrophagy) frequently uses words like "purification" and "sacred" and "this almost holy feeling" when describing his behavior toward those who died at his hands. Of his last victim he wrote, "Here in this cell he is still with me. In fact I believe he is me, or part of me."

It is Nilsen's opinion that claims of Dahmer's cannibalism are probably not true. "He is talking subconsciously," Nilsen told me in our recent interview. "It's a kind of wishful thinking. What he really wants is spiritual ingestion, to take the essence of the person into himself and thereby feel bigger. It's almost a paternal thing, in an odd way." Significantly, Milwaukee Police Chief Philip Arreola told The Milwaukee Journal early in the investigation that "the evidence is not consistent" with cannibalism, implying that none of the body parts which littered the apartment supported Dahmer's contention.

(Somewhat tentatively, I asked Nilsen if he had ever been tempted to eat parts of his victims. As usual, he used his strange brand of humor to disguise an unpleasant subject. "Oh, never," he replied. "I'm strictly a bacon-and-eggs man.")

When all these fantasies subside, the horror of the real event obtrudes once more. In the days and weeks following his arrest, when Nilsen had been "rescued" from the nightmare of his London flat and forced to ponder upon what he had done, he described himself as "unclean." It was after the eleven days of his long confession to the police that he reached the lowest depths of remorse and self-loathing. "My mind is depressively active," he wrote. "The details of this case are horrible, dark and alien . . . I must be a really terrible, horrific man. . . . I am damned and damned and damned. How in heaven's name could I have done any of it?" There was one particular killing which he could not bear to think about; when the subject was raised his eyes filled with tears, and he left the interview room rather than be vanquished by emotion.

There are again parallels here with Jeffrey Dahmer. According to several sources, he, too, feels "damned," beyond redemption, unforgivable. He, too, feels the pain of having done things more heinous, in his own eyes, than anyone else. Though he has not been seen to shed tears, he is known to view with foreboding the likely retelling of his actions in court.

According to Nilsen, Dahmer would have felt, on his arrest, an immediate sense of relief that it was all over. "He couldn't leave his apartment. He was trapped, stuck in that prison as in a tomb. There was both attraction and repulsion and at the moment it's repulsion which will predominate. He will feel an immediate sense of relief that it's all over, followed by oppressive guilt and shame. He will need to get through this somehow and find some self-esteem to help grow towards maturity. Whatever institution he goes to will be better than the prison he has been carrying around with him, because people will be there, and he will not be alone anymore."

Nilsen also thinks that Dahmer might not have properly "come out" yet, and that had he felt less ambiguous about his homosexuality the murders might conceivably not have occurred. In prison, Nilsen wrote a poem which dramatically confused the notion of killing men as one crime and loving men as another, with the subtext that guilt for the latter might be replaced by guilt for the former. The poem reads, in part:

Confusion in the fact of being evil,
"Born into evil, all the time?
When evil is the produce
Can there be a doubt?
When killing men has always been a crime. . .

There is honour in killing the enemy,
There is glory in a fighting, bloody end.
But violent extirpation
On a sacred trust,
To squeeze the very life from a friend?

Sentencing the fact of being evil,
Dying of evil all the time.
When love is the produce,
Can there be a doubt?
When loving men has always been a crime.

"When Dahmer lost his job," continues Nilsen, "he lost the only visible means of normality. After that, things could only get worse. Had he not been caught, bodies would have been coming out of the window. He was feeling like an alien in a hostile environment, without any roots whatsoever."

Nilsen's last glimmer of self-esteem was to hold on to his "innocence," by which he meant not to deny that he had killed, but to give voice to the feeling that he had in some way been used by a power to which he had surrendered control. He could see both the angel and the devil in himself, and the survival of his self-regard depended entirely upon his keeping that angel, however tiny and weak, in view.

It sounds as if Jeffrey Dahmer is not yet able to see the angel. He is still in despair, his present position confirming his black view of himself as an outsider whose life serves no purpose, who would be better off dead. And yet he did not rest until he had identified all the victims. The police, unable to make official comment, allow the inference that he was not only cooperative but even helpful. "If I can restore names to them all," Dahmer said, "at least that is something good I can do."

Nilsen talked about Murder Under Trust, "under my roof and under my protection-the most horrible thing imaginable." But it was not the most horrible thing he did. Philosophically and emotionally, we must all recognize that we are capable of killing, but we shrink from the desecration of corpses. When I told Nilsen that it was this which defined the gulf that separated him from the rest of humankind, he remonstrated with me and told me my moral values were confused. His reasoning was that, while it was wicked to squeeze the life out of a person, it was harmless to cut a dead body, which was only a thing and could not be hurt. This was, I had to say, logical but inhuman. Respect for the dead goes beyond civilization to the very marrow of our bones, to essential concepts of worth and spirit. It may be illogical, but its absence, to the common man, points to madness.

There was one particular day when I forced myself to face this madness, and my life has not really been the same since. I had previously written about eighteenth-century history or twentieth-century literature, and was quite unused to delving into the dark recesses of mental disorder. I found myself at ease with Dennis Nilsen, and asked the police to show me the evidence of what they had found in his London flat, to remind myself of what he had done. They were reluctant, for they knew what disastrous effect the photographs could have. There were two brown cardboard boxes containing photographs of progressive discovery, starting with the house, then the door of the apartment, then the bath, from beneath which protruded two human legs, then the black garbage bags, and the contents of the bags, and so on. I could look at only twelve of them before I was overwhelmed with pity for these poor young men, reduced to refuse. It breaks one's heart, too, to think of little Konerak Sinthasomphone, who tried to escape from Jeffrey Dahmer and was brought back, or of Tony Hughes, the deaf-mute who went trustingly to Apartment 213 and might have found no way to protest what was happening to him. These images enter the brain, and nothing can ever dislodge them.

How could Dennis Nilsen, with quasi-scientific curiosity, inform me that the weight of a severed head, when you picked it up by the hair, is far greater than one might imagine? Clearly, to be able to make such a comment, to dismember the bodies of people he had seen when alive, and to continue living surrounded by their pieces, demonstrates insanity. This is the res ipsa loquitur argument-"The thing speaks for itself"-which is circular but correct.

Despite the common sense inherent in the proposition, it is difficult to convince juries of it, because they somehow feel the murderer is thereby being excused. Juries cannot bring themselves to consider that a person can know what he is doing, but have no emotional awareness of it at the time; that if the emotional factor is drained from him he is like an automaton. When Nilsen was convicted in 1983, the jury was initially divided down the middle on the question of his mental responsibility, and came back to seek further guidance from the judge, who introduced the nonlegal and nonpsychiatric concept of evil. "A mind can be evil without being abnormal," he declared. He seemed more certain about the matter than any philosopher since Socrates, and his certainty sent Nilsen to prison rather than to a mental institution.

In the state of Wisconsin, the American Law Institute test of insanity (which has progressed somewhat from the 1843 M'Naghten test) requires that Jeffrey Dahmer show that he suffered from a mental disease or defect which significantly reduced his capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his acts, if he wishes to establish nonresponsibility for them. A predilection for fantasy over reality and consequent incompetence in determining reality may point in this direction, but there is strong resistance to what has been called "the power of the psychiatric excuse."

My book on Nilsen was called Killing for Company for good reason. Dead people became his companions. Most of them died because Nilsen believed they would soon go home and he did not want them to. He wished to keep them, to cherish them, to be with them, so he killed them. Jeffrey Dahmer has likewise admitted that the decision to kill was made when his "friend" wanted to leave. On the day of his arrest, he had eleven "friends" to keep him company-all skulls or severed human heads. If this does not indicate a mental disease or defect that impaired his ability to distinguish wrong from right, reality from fantasy, it is difficult to know what might.

There has been a rash of cases, especially in America, that postdate the Boston Strangler of the early sixties (Albert De Salvo), then thought to be a killer without parallel, and that surpass him in the horror and magnitude of their crimes. There is every reason to conclude that murderers like Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer are becoming progressively less rare and may well come to represent a type of "motiveless" criminal who belongs predominantly to the twentieth century.

The public does not really want to find the reasons for this, and who, perhaps, should blame them? They are content to read a crazy catalogue of odious incidents and go no further. As I wrote about Nilsen in 1985, sympathy with murder is unthinkable; it is even safer not to understand. But this craven attitude amounts to abnegation of responsibility. The murderer takes his place in the jumbled kaleidoscope of the human condition. So, too, does his audience. For them to enjoy the display of crime, detection, and retribution, while refusing to be drawn into a steady contemplation of themselves as audience, and of the subterranean disturbances which the case echoes, would be fruitless.

Bertrand Russell called Spinoza the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers, and ethically the most supreme. This seventeenth-century Dutch Jew of Portuguese descent was despised by Jews and Christians alike for his lack of prejudice. "I have striven not to laugh at human actions," he wrote, "not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."

From his prison cell, serial killer Dennis Nilsen speculates about Jeffrey Dahmer's motives

Friday the 23rd of August 1991

Thanks for the (all too brief) visit. My first observation of D is that he had two primary social factors working against him. The first is that obviously recurring theme of being "a loner." The second is that (to use the American phrase) he was born on the wrong side of the tracks. I guess that in his most early formative years his immediate household may have been female-dominated (with or without the presence of a passive male adult). As is often the case with serial killers "he always secretly wanted to be someone " as an adjunct to his lifelong world of fantasy (where he is already powerful and potent). In "real" society he feels that he is a dispensable "nobody" as insignificant as those whose remains adorn his private world (his apartment).

The dichotomy is that his power aspirations are not easily transferable into the real world because he has not been endowed with the overt powers of viable drive and ambition in interpersonal relationships in the real world. He achieves "sexual" fulfillment by acts of power of conquest to render the threatening potency of another man into the absolute and manageable state of passivity. He "fears" the potency of real men because he is by nature a wan and socially shy personality. His need for feelings of self-esteem are usually satisfied only in his fantasies (imagination) because he cannot garner such fruits from live people. He needs a totally unresisting, passive model of a human being in order to "cross the bridge" temporarily into "society." (Being human he needs "fulfillment" in the human three-dimensional world of real flesh and blood.)

It is significant that a common view of the Stone Age depicts a potent male clubbing a sexually desirable female into unconsciousness and "wedding" her by an act of copulation with her passive body. Here we have the ingredients of power/violence rendering the desired person into a state of extreme passivity followed by sexual release for the conqueror. It is the opposite poles of gross action and gross passivity that attract. This is the constant in the serial-killing conundrum whether the victim is male, female or child. Dahmer's "buzz" comes from the whole continuing ritual exploitation of the victim's passivity. Each expressive sequence in the ritual gives sexual and self-esteemed satisfaction. It is a grossly perverted psychosexual act of copulation and like normal acts of copulation the satisfaction is of relatively temporary duration. The ejaculation is merely the biological release of inner pressure as is necessary for this human cycle of peaks and troughs.

D is buzzing with excitement and power (his heart rate is pounding at maximum speed) as he "lives out" his omnipotence. (It's the only time in his life when he feels in his fantasies.) This is while he is stripping, washing and handling his unresisting spouse. These are all acts of possession and expression of extreme dominance. Perhaps subconsciously he is regressing back to his first (and only) memories of human touch, dependency, security and comfort. (As a very small boy being soiled, undressed, washed, powdered, dressed and "laid out.") After this brief and early period of clear identity and security he drifts away into the wan growing little boy devoid of warmth, touch and comfort. As all humans will do if they cannot satisfy their needs in reality he has drifted to a substitute world where his imagination creates false fodder to feed his hunger. As conditioning advances he finds it less and less easy to relate to other people. Psychologically speaking Dahmer becomes both victim and predator (an easy accomplishment in one's imaginary world). Brian, this is what you described in me as "virile male in performance and passive female in spirit" (an ungovernable mess of contradictions).

His unfolding aberration escalates in accordance with to what degree he is detached from reality (for example, what is termed NECROPHAGY is an extreme example of extreme detachment). This is manifested in "going all the way" in eating the heart of one's victim/spouse. (If you have the power to eat a man's heart this demonstrates your extreme power to possess and his extreme passivity.) The painting and display of the victim's skull is a constant reminder of one's potency.

The paradox is that D cannot hate his victims because his objective is achieved by exercising his will to sexual power and potency. The need is "love" for him and death for the hapless victim. Dahmer is "forced" to unnaturally seek to accede to the demands of his natural instinctive drives. He is perhaps partially aware that his "love" is really for himself or a created entity within his deranged personality. It seems clear that his personality will remain disordered in the absence of a self or presented therapy to help him come to terms with the engine of his acts.

P.S. I'm still in the dungeon.

13 Horror Movies for Wimps

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North Twenty-fifth Street is only a couple of miles from downtown Milwaukee, yet it contrives to feel dislocated, apart. There is an air of listlessness about the neighborhood, as if ambition here has been sat upon and the future is questionable.

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By the time the authorities caught up with Jeffrey Dahmer, in 1991, even the perpetrator was astonished by his crimes. "It's hard for me to believe that a human being could have done what I've done," he said, "but I know that I did it."

A serial killer and sex offender, Dahmer became known in the tabloids as the Milwaukee Cannibal. He raped, murdered and dismembered 17 boys and men, sometimes preserving their body parts as mementoes, sometimes dabbling in cannibalism.

He has subsequently inspired books, plays, documentaries, a novel, by Joyce Carol Oates, and two rather glamorous biopics: The Secret Life, from 1993, and Dahmer, starring Jeremy Renner, from 2002.

Dahmer didn't have to wind up a monster, if only the adults in his life hadn't been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent

Marc Meyers's My Friend Dahmer is a sobering riposte to these earlier, often sensationalised representations. The film is adapted from the autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, from 2012, by the cartoonist John Backderf, aka Derf, who had been friends with Dahmer at high school in the 1970s.

"The idea of a portrait of a serial killer as a young boy was interesting to me," Meyers says. "I initially thought I was going to create a fictional story using composite details, a kind of road map towards becoming a serial killer. I was also, just separately, looking at graphic novels whenever I could. So when I came across My Friend Dahmer I thought it was a blessing. Here was the concept, but even better: a real story all laid out."

Meyers eschews Backderf's troubled omnipresent narration, but he remains rooted in the source material, by working certain panels into shots of the film and by honouring the author's original intention as laid out in a prose introduction: "It's my belief that Dahmer didn't have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn't have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn't been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent," Backderf writes. "Once Dahmer kills, however - and I can't stress this enough - my sympathy for him ends. He could have put a gun to his head."

My Friend Dahmer: the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, aka the Milwaukee Cannibal, after his arrest in 1991. Photograph: Curt Borgwardt/Sygma via Getty

My Friend Dahmer: John Backderf, who wrote the original graphic novel, and Marc Meyers. Photograph: Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic/Getty

Backderf invited Meyers to stay with him after the director finished his first draft of the screenplay. "We drove around where they grew up, in Akron, and visited the high school they went to, and we talked a lot about that time. That stuff helped me figure out how the characters would really move through the exact spaces."

Ohio locals were surprisingly welcoming of the production. Car collectors loaned period vehicles to the film. Others contributed period furniture and other props. Many were keen to share recollections that were worked into the screenplay.

"It's 40 years later, so everyone there has pretty much moved on with their lives," Meyers says. "All of the crew is from Ohio. The teenagers we used as extras had parents who went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer. They knew the book, and, like Backderf, some insisted that they had other friends who were stranger than he was in high school. All of them were horrified by what happened later in his life, but they did understand that there was a moment in time when he was just another teenager. He was maybe more troubled than they realised. But when the news broke, years later, it was a surprise to the friends he grew up with."

The things they were saying were so mean, throwing around words like 'faggot'. Teenagers can still be cruel, but there's an awareness of how damaging words can be

Meyers's film allows for its subject's unhealthy preoccupation with roadkill and the confused murderous desire he feels for a local jogger, yet it studiously avoids the more horrific aspects of the story. His Dahmer, like Backderf's, exists in broad daylight, as he puts it.

"I'm not an expert in serial killers," Meyers says. "Like everyone else, I'm attracted to true crime stories, and I've watched Making a Murderer and those sorts of entertainments. But I'm not one of those people who devours books on serial killers. Everything in the movie came out of the book. We really only cared about the guy in high school up to graduation. So I stayed within that framework."

Consequently, in My Friend Dahmer, Jeff Dahmer - brilliantly played by the former Disney star Ross Lynch - is an awkward teenager struggling to make it through high school with a severely dysfunctional family. He barely copes with his unstable, uncaring mother, who is played by Anne Heche, and at school he drinks and fakes seizures and "spaz-outs", antics that win over a group of other outsider teens, who form the Dahmer Fan Club, headed by Derf Backderf. But Dahmer remains a lonely and increasingly damaged kid.

"On set I realised we were making a politically incorrect film," Meyers says. "Because they're so politically incorrect by our standards. That felt oddly refreshing. The things they were saying to each other were so mean, throwing around words like 'faggot'. Teenagers can still be cruel, but there's an awareness of how damaging words can be. We really have progressed as a species, in that we are sensitive to the different kinds of people around us. They aren't."

My Friend Dahmer: Ross Lynch as Jeff Dahmer and Alex Wolff as John Backderf

There has been much positive chatter about My Friend Dahmer's countercasting. The actor who plays Derf, Alex Wolff, came to prominence starring alongside his older brother Nat in the Nickelodeon musical comedy television series The Naked Brothers Band. Ross Lynch gained recognition as Austin Moon on the Disney Channel show Austin & Ally and with the family band, R5.

"A Disney kid doing Dahmer? It's an easy contrast," Meyers says. "But look at the talent that has emerged through the Disney Channel. Look at Ryan Gosling, for example. The Disney Channel is full of talented workaholics, who are professional from a very early age. I knew it was a big pool of talent. But when we sat down with Ross I just enjoyed talking to him.

"Like most kids that age, unless they've heard his name in a rap song, he wasn't even aware of Jeffrey Dahmer. We met over 100 actors. A handful selected themselves for reasons of likeness. But he was different. He was very present. He's a dancer originally. He studied Dahmer on YouTube. He knew the posture and the gait. He thought through the spazzing, all the physical stuff. He was perfect."

My Friend Dahmer opens on Friday, June 1st

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At school with a serial killer: growing up with Jeffrey Dahmer

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By the time the authorities caught up with Jeffrey Dahmer, in 1991, even the perpetrator was astonished by his crimes. "It's hard for me to believe that a human being could have done what I've done," he said, "but I know that I did it."

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Source: Getty Images

By Joseph Allen

May. 26 2020, Published 3:18 p.m. ET

Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most perverse and prolific serial killers in American history. From 1978 to 1991, he murdered and dismembered 17 boys who ranged in age from 14 to 36. His victims were all men, in part because of the fantasies Dahmer indulged in that mingled sexual arousal with dissection.

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When did Dahmer commit his first murder?

Dahmer committed his first murder just weeks after he finished high school. Prior to committing the murder, Dahmer realized he was gay and began to fantasize about dominating and controlling a submissive male partner, according to his own admissions. Dahmer eventually developed a fantasy that involved attacking a male jogger he found attractive and using his body for sex. He even planned an attack on the jogger that ultimately fell through.

Source: Getty Images

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Dahmer's first murder was of Stephen Hicks, a 19-year-old hitchhiker that he picked up and convinced to come back to his house for drinks. Eventually, Hicks was ready to leave, but Dahmer didn't want him to. Dahmer struck him twice from behind with a 10-pound dumbbell before strangling him to death. The next day, he dissected Hicks' body in the basement and then buried him in a shallow grave in his backyard.

Dahmer didn't commit another murder for years afterward.

After Hicks' murder, Dahmer tried to resume living a semi-normal life. He enrolled at Ohio State before flunking out because of alcohol abuse, and then he enrolled in the U.S. Army. While in the army, two soldiers claimed they were raped by Dahmer. His performance in the army gradually deteriorated as a result of his alcohol abuse, and he was eventually discharged because he could no longer complete his duties.

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After a brief stint in Florida, Dahmer returned to the Midwest, and his fantasies of control and domination were eventually reawakened. He began to frequent gay bars in Milwaukee, and eventually managed to pick up his second victim, Steven Tuomi. He claims that he only planned to drug and rape Tuomi, but woke up to find that his chest had been crushed. Dahmer had no memory of doing this.

Source: Getty Images

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After Tuomi's murder, Dahmer began to actively look for victims.

While he waited years after murdering Hicks, Dahmer began to actively look for victims after he murdered Tuomi. He killed several more times through 1990, when he moved out of his grandmother's house and got his own apartment. Within a week of moving into the new apartment, he had committed his sixth murder, and in the next two years, he killed 11 more times.

Dahmer was finally apprehended for the murders in July of 1991, when Tracy Edwards consented to returning to Dahmer's apartment in exchange for $100. When Dahmer made his intentions for Edwards clear, Edwards managed to escape. Later that night, he flagged down Milwaukee police and explained what had happened.

After entering Dahmer's apartment, one of the officers Edwards had flagged down found polaroids that Dahmer had taken of his earlier victims. Following the discovery of this evidence, Dahmer was arrested, and he was eventually convicted of 16 of the 17 murders that he had committed.

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Jeffrey Dahmer Killed and Committed Shocking Acts on 17 Boys Before He Was Caught

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By Joseph Allen May. 26 2020, Published 3:18 p.m. ET Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most perverse and prolific serial killers in American history. From 1978 to 1991, he murdered and dismembered 17 boys who ranged in age from 14 to 36.

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Who Was Ted Bundy?

Ted Bundy was a 1970s serial murderer, rapist and necrophiliac. He was executed in Florida's electric chair in 1989. His case has since inspired many novels and films about serial killers.

Ted Bundy's Parents and Siblings

Eleanor Louise Cowell, who went by Louise, was 22 years old and unmarried when she gave birth to her son Ted. Ted's father may have been Lloyd Marshall, an Air Force veteran and a Penn State graduate, according to Ann Rule, a coworker of Ted's and the author of the book The Stranger Beside Me. Other sources had Ted's father's name as Jack Worthington, while some rumors had it that his father was also his grandfather. Because Ted's birth certificate lists his father as "unknown," his biological father's identity may never be confirmed.

In 1951, Louise married Johnnie Bundy. While Ted took his name, he reportedly didn't have much respect for his stepfather, whom he resented for being too uneducated and working class. Johnnie and Louise had several children together.

Louise was working as a secretary at the University of Puget Sound and still married to Johnnie in the 1970s when Ted was accused of his crimes. She refused to believe the charges for years, although she changed her stance after he confessed.

Early Life

Bundy was born in Burlington, Vermont, on November 24, 1946. Bundy started life as his mother's secret shame, as his illegitimate birth humiliated her deeply religious parents. Louise delivered Ted at a home for unwed mothers in Vermont and later brought her son to her parents in Philadelphia.

To hide the fact he was an illegitimate child, Bundy was raised as the adopted son of his grandparents and was told that his mother was his sister. Eleanor moved with Bundy to Tacoma, Washington, a few years later, and soon married his stepfather Johnnie.

From all appearances, Bundy grew up in a content, working-class family. He showed an unusual interest in the macabre at an early age. Around the age of 3, he became fascinated by knives. A shy but bright child, Bundy did well in school but not with his peers.

As a teenager, a darker side of his character started to emerge. Bundy liked to peer in other people's windows and thought nothing of stealing things he wanted from other people.

Photo: Getty Images

Education

Bundy graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology in 1972. He had been accepted to law school in Utah, although he would never earn his degree.

While a student at the University of Washington, Bundy fell in love with a wealthy, pretty young woman from California. She had everything that he wanted: money, class and influence. He was devastated by their breakup. Many of Bundy's later victims resembled his college girlfriend-attractive students with long, dark hair.

By the mid-1970s, Bundy had transformed himself, becoming more outwardly confident and active in social and political matters. He even got a letter of recommendation from the Republican governor of Washington after working on his campaign.
READ MORE: How Ted Bundy's Education Facilitated His Career as a Serial Killer
Victims

Bundy confessed to 36 killings of young women across several states in the 1970s, but experts believe that the final tally may be closer to 100 or more. The exact number of women Bundy killed will never been known. His killings usually followed a gruesome pattern: He often raped his victims before beating them to death.

While there is some debate as to when Bundy started killing, most sources say that he began his murderous rampage around 1974. Around this time, many women in the Seattle area and in nearby Oregon went missing. Stories circulated about some of the victims last being seen in the company of a young, dark-haired man known as "Ted." He often lured his victims into his car by pretending to be injured and asking for their help. Their kindness proved to be a fatal mistake.

How Ted Bundy Was Caught

In the fall of 1974, Bundy moved to Utah to attend law school, and women began disappearing there as well. The following year, he was pulled over by the police. A search of his vehicle uncovered a cache of burglary tools-a crowbar, a face mask, rope and handcuffs. He was arrested for possession of these tools and the police began to link him to much more sinister crimes.

In 1975, Bundy was arrested in the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, one of the few women to escape his clutches. He was convicted and received a one-to-15-year jail sentence.

Prison Escapes

Bundy escaped from prison twice in 1977. The first time, he was indicted on murder charges for the death of a young Colorado woman and decided to act as his own lawyer in the case. During a trip to the courthouse library, he jumped out a window and made his first escape. He was captured eight days later.

In December, Bundy escaped from custody again. He climbed out of a hole he made in the ceiling of his cell, having dropped more than 30 pounds to fit through the small opening. Authorities did not discover that Bundy was missing for 15 hours, giving the serial killer a big head start on the police.

Chi Omega Sorority House Break-In

After Bundy's second escape from prison, he eventually made his way to Tallahassee, Florida. On the night of January 14, 1978, Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. He attacked four of the young female residents, killing two of them. On February 9, Bundy kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl named Kimberly Leach.

These crimes marked the end of his murderous rampage, as he was soon pulled over by the police that February.

The most damning evidence connecting Bundy to the two Chi Omega murders at FSU were bite marks on one of the bodies, which were a definitive match to Bundy.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S TED BUNDY FACT CARD

Trial

Bundy's good looks, charm and intelligence made him something of a celebrity during his trial. Bundy fought for his life but was convicted and spent nine years on death row appealing his death sentence.

Conviction, Death Sentences and Appeals

In July 1979, Bundy was convicted for the the two Chi Omega murders at FSU. He was given the death penalty twice. He received another death sentence in 1980 for the murder of Kimberly Leach.

Bundy appealed, trying to take his case as high as the U.S. Supreme Court, but he was turned down. He also offered information on some of unsolved murders to avoid Florida's electric chair, but he could not delay justice forever and was executed in 1989.

Elizabeth Kloepfer, Ted Bundy's Girlfriend

In 1969, Bundy began a six-year relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer, whom he met in a Seattle bar. Kloepfer was a single mom of a young daughter and struggled with alcoholism. Bundy took care of her, and she said he was "warm and loving."

By 1974, Kloepfer started to suspect Bundy's crimes. When she questioned him about odd behaviors, like keeping a meat cleaver in his desk, he used his charm to deflect her concerns.

Kloepfer secretly went to the police with her suspicion of Bundy's involvement in prominent local murders, but they didn't believe he was the killer. The pair remained together, although they grew distant when Bundy moved to Olympia the following year.

In 1975, Kloepfer went to police again, this time with evidence that helped them to arrest the serial killer. Bundy had confessed to Kloepfer over the phone from his prison cell that he had tried to kill her and couldn't resist his impulses when he felt "his sickness building in him," she later wrote. She broke ties with Bundy for good and wrote a book about her experience.

Photo: Bettmann/Corbis/Getty Images

Wife and Daughter

In February 1980, Bundy married Carole Ann Boone, a mother-of-two whom he'd dated before his initial arrest, in a courtroom during the penalty phase of his trial. He proposed and she accepted in the presence of the judge, making the marriage legitimate in Florida. The couple had met six years earlier when they both worked at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia, Washington.

Boone gave birth to a daughter, Rose, in 1982, and she named Bundy as the father. Not much is known about Rose today.

Boone eventually realized Bundy was guilty of the crimes. She divorced him three years prior to his execution, according to Rule's book, A Stranger Beside Me. Boone stopped visiting Bundy during the last two years of his imprisonment.

Death

On January 24, 1989, Bundy was executed around 7 a.m. at the Florida State Prison in an electric chair sometimes known as "Old Sparky." Outside the prison, crowds cheered and even set off fireworks after Bundy's execution.

Bundy's body was cremated in Gainesville, and no public ceremony was held. Before he was executed he requested his ashes be scattered in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, where he murdered at least four of his victims.

Bundy in Popular Culture

Movies

An infamous national figure since his Florida trials, Bundy's life has been the subject of countless books and documentaries trying to shed light on this brutal killer's crimes. Well-known movies include:

The Deliberate Stranger was a 1986 television movie featuring actor Mark Harmon as Bundy.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile debuted in 2019 at the Sundance film festival, with Zac Efron as Bundy and Lily Collins as Kloepfer. The film's title comes from Judge Edward Cowart's post-sentencing remarks to Bundy.

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes was released that same year. The documentary features archival footage and audio recordings of Bundy made on death row along with present-day interviews.

Books

Several notable books have been published on Bundy's crimes, including:

The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy the Shocking Inside Story, published in 1980 by Rule, a coworker of Bundy's at a crisis hotline. Rule describes how she gradually realized Bundy was a serial killer and then draws from their ongoing correspondence, which lasted until just shortly before Bundy's execution.

The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy was written by Bundy's ex-girlfriend Kloepfer about dating and loving a serial killer. It was published in 1981, while he was on death row.

Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer, published in 1989 by author Stephen Michaud and journalist Hugh Aynesworth, this collection of stories was created from more than 150 hours of interviews with Bundy.

Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy's Last Lawyer, published in 1994, was written by Polly Nelson, a newly-minted lawyer who was offered Bundy's case pro-bono by the Washington, D.C. law firm where she worked just weeks before he was scheduled to be executed.

I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD That Changed My Life, published in 2016 by Rhonda Stapley, who was brutally attacked by Bundy in Utah in 1974 but survived and, after battling PTSD, wrote a book about her experience.

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Ted Bundy was a 1970s serial murderer, rapist and necrophiliac. He was executed in Florida's electric chair in 1989. His case has since inspired many novels and films about serial killers. Eleanor Louise Cowell, who went by Louise, was 22 years old and unmarried when she gave birth to her son Ted.

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While on a ski trip in Colorado with her fiancée, Caryn Campbell, 23, went upstairs to her room at SnowMass Inn to get a magazine. Her fiancée watched her get in the elevator and her friends greeted her when she emerged upstairs in the hotel's hallway. But they never saw her again. Campbell had somehow vanished. One month later, her body was found beaten and bruised in a ditch nearby.

Two months later, Julie Cunningham, 26, was walking to a restaurant to meet a friend after her shift at a ski resort in Vail. She too, was never seen by her friends again.

Considered by the FBI as "society's most infamous and notorious serial killer," Ted Bundy was the mastermind behind these murders - and countless others - during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976, Bundy was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison - but this was before police connected him to over 30 murders that spanned across seven states. After two trials, Bundy was finally sentenced to death. He was executed on January 24, 1989.

Bundy's horrifying murders are the center of Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, a docuseries on Amazon Prime. The series tells Bundy's story from the women involved, including his ex-girlfriend Liz Kendall (a.k.a. Elizabeth Kloepfer) and her daughter, Molly. Watch the trailer:

The serial killer was also the subject of the feature filmExtremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron and Lily Collins, and the four-part Netflix series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.

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Below, take a closer look at the serial killer who devastated the nation.

Rocky start

Bundy, born Theodore Robert Cowell, was from Burlington, Vermont, and was raised by his mother Eleanor Louise Cowell. His father's identity was never confirmed as he was not involved with Bundy's upbringing. According to Biography, he showed odd behaviors at an early age. Despite being well-liked, attractive, and well-educated, Bundy's unstable childhood led to his isolated tendencies and petty theft.

However, he came into his own when he met Kloepfer, his longtime girlfriend, while studying at University of Washington. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1972. The next few years of Bundy's life were riddled with romance, self-discovery, and a newfound confidence.

Targeted approach

This confidence led him to kill innocent young women who slightly resembled Stephanie Brooks, the woman who first broke his heart. It's unclear when Bundy began his killing, but the first known murders were in the 1970s, according to the FBI. In 1974 - the year Bundy moved to Utah for law school - several young women were reported missing in Idaho and Utah. Many of them were found dead with indications that they were raped, beaten, and strangled.

He followed the same pattern: acting injured, luring a young woman to help, beating her with weapon, raping her, and then killing her. He used his good looks to his advantage but if that didn't work, he posed as a police officer or firefighter to entice women. Oftentimes, he used a plaster cast, sling, or crutches, to show the women that he was injured. Regardless of the circumstance, the FBI noted that Bundy was always well-researched and meticulous about the dead body's disposal.

Ann Rule, a former ally of Bundy's, described him in her book, The Stranger Beside Me, as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after."

Initial arrest

In 1975, he was linked to the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, an 18-year-old from Salt Lake City, Utah. When pulled over, police found a crowbar, face mask, rope, and handcuffs in his car. At this time, Kloepfer, who was still with Bundy, contacted police with tips that he may be the one responsible for the horrific murders throughout the state. He was convicted and sent to prison for 15 years.

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Series of escapes

Bundy first escaped from prison during his transfer to Aspen. But, he was found eight days later. Ignoring the advice of his friends, family, and lawyers, Bundy attempted to escape again - and this time proved to be more successful than his last. He climbed through a crawlspace in his prison cell, broke through a hole in the ceiling, and changed into street clothes found in the jail keeper's closet. He stole a car and made his way to Tallahassee, Florida, according to Biography.

Bundy at the Leon County Jail during the Chi Omega trial.

Once in Florida, he rented a room at Florida State University under the alias Chris Hagen. According to the Chicago Tribune, on January 15, 1978, Bundy entered the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University and attacked Margaret Bowman, Kathy Kleiner, Lisa Levy, and Karen Chandler. Bowman and Levy died from injuries of the attack. After leaving the sorority house, he attacked another FSU student, killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, and attempted to kidnap another young girl.

Kimberly Leach, 12, was killed by Bundy.

Trials and death

Bundy was one of the most sought-after man in the country. On February 15, 1978, Bundy was captured by police in Florida and arrested for the murders of Bowman and Levy. On July 24, 1979, he was convicted of the Bowman and Levy murders, three counts of attempted first degree murder, and two counts of burglary. The trial judge imposed death sentences for the Bowman and Levy murders. Bundy was sentenced to death by electrocution for the third (and final) time in February 1980.

While on trial, Bundy and his family stood firm in his innocence. "Ted Bundy does not go around killing women and little children," his mother told The News Tribune in 1980. "And I know this, too, that our never-ending faith in Ted - our faith that he is innocent - has never wavered. And it never will."

Bundy died by electrocution on January 24, 1989 at 42 years old. Before he died, he confessed to 30 homicides, but according to the FBI, "we may never know the total extent of his devastation."

Dig Deeper Into Ted Bundy's Story

Amanda Garrity Associate Lifestyle Editor As the Associate Lifestyle Editor for GoodHousekeeping.com, Amanda oversees gift guides and covers home, holidays, food, and other lifestyle news.

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Everything You Need to Know About Ted Bundy Before Watching Amazon's Chilling New Docuseries

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While on a ski trip in Colorado with her fiancée, Caryn Campbell, 23, went upstairs to her room at SnowMass Inn to get a magazine. Her fiancée watched her get in the elevator and her friends greeted her when she emerged upstairs in the hotel's hallway. But they never saw her again.

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Ted Bundy was one of the world's worst ever serial killers.

He confessed to the murders of at least 36 women and girls but police believe he was responsible for the deaths of more than 100.

Bundy's killing spree throughout the 1970s was finally halted when his own girlfriend gave his name to the authorities.

Elizabeth Kendall, Bundy's girlfriend, will speak for the first time about what life was like with the killer in the new Amazon documentary, Ted Bundy: Falling For A Killer.

On January 24, 1989, Bundy's reign of terror was over for good when he was put to executed in the electric chair.

Huge crowds had gathered outside and were chanting 'burn, Bundy, burn' as the murdered breathed his last.

On the surface, the rapist and killer seemed like a model citizen. He was a law student and even worked in a suicide prevention centre.

But in 1974 his violence and brutality were exposed for the first time when he attacked a student with a metal rod, leaving her with brain damage and in a coma for 10 days.

Just a month later, he carried out his first murder when he broke into student, Lynda Ann Healy's flat, knocked her out, dressed her and carried her out to her car.

She was never seen again but a partial fragment of her skull was found in the place where Bundy dumped many of his bodies.

This was a pattern he would repeat again and again with his victims, all of them young women or girls.

He would often claim he needed help carrying something to his car so he could lure them in, attack them, bind them and then carry them to a remote location to rape and kill them.

Bundy even resorted to wearing a fake leg or arm cast to appear more vulnerable.

Horrifyingly, Bundy would often spend the night with his victims and return to have sex with their dead bodies again and again until they were too decomposed or had been eaten by animals.

On some occassions Bundy also ate part of the victim's flesh so he could fully "possess" them.

In one chilling explanation he said: "You feel their last bit of breath leaving their body. You're looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!"

Devastatingly, as the number of women who were vanishing increased, Bundy's name was passed to police but officers didn't believe someone as upstanding as him could be responsible.

It finally seemed the law had caught up with him when he kidnapped and attacked a young woman who managed to escape.

Carol DaRonch had managed to flee and in 1975 Bundy was jailed for 15 years.

But a cell was no match for the serial killer and just two years into his sentence, while acting as his own lawyer after being indicted over the death of a Colorado woman, he jumped out of the jailhouse library window and disappeared.

He was caught eight days later but in December the same year, 1977, he climbed out of a hole in the ceiling of his cell and fled to Florida, where he picked up his murder spree where he had left off.

At least seven more murders followed, including four in the same dorm room.

Bundy was arrested a few days after killing what is thought to be his final victim, 12-year-old girl, Kimberly Leach.

He represented himself in court and he was sentenced to death on February 10, 1980.

Bundy even used one of his trials to take advantage of a bizarre law that allowed him to marry Carole Ann Boone during her testimony.

Their daughter was born in 1981 while her father waited to die on death row.

Even after his death, Bundy had one final torment for his victims.

He asked for his remains to be cremated and scattered in the Cascade Mountains in Washington.

It was the site where he had dumped the bodies of at least four of his victims and his final wish was honoured.

It has been reported that he wanted his ashes scattered in the mountains because he had had "so many good times and happy memories there".

Bundy hounded his victims, even in death.

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Ted Bundy's horrifying dying wish linked him to his victims forever

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Ted Bundy was one of the world's worst ever serial killers. He confessed to the murders of at least 36 women and girls but police believe he was responsible for the deaths of more than 100. Bundy's killing spree throughout the 1970s was finally halted when his own girlfriend gave his name to the authorities.

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On the face of it, Ted Bundy presented as the perfect young man. Well-spoken and good looking, he was a law student who even worked on a suicide prevention phone line.

But in reality, he was a twisted monster who butchered at least 36 young women and girls in one of the bloodiest killing sprees in history.

He was only caught and caged when his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall gave Bundy's name to police and was executed 32 years ago today.

Elizabeth told her side of the story in Amazon documentary, Ted Bundy: Falling For A Killer last year.

For years in the 1970s, Bundy targeted young women and girls. Raping, killing them and then dumping their bodies.

In one final sick insult to those he had murdered, he would often return to where he had abandoned the bodies and have sex with their corpses.

Bundy only stopped this final indignity when the body became too decomposed or had been eaten by animals.

He would also collected several of his victims' heads as sick trophies and would perform sex acts on them after covering them in make-up.

In a further gruesome confession, Bundy even admitted to eating parts of his victims' bodies so he could "possess" them and they would become part of him.

The killer claimed he was addicted to murder, saying: "You feel their last bit of breath leaving their body. You're looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!"

Bundy was finally arrested, tried and sentenced to death.

He was executed by electric chair on January 24, 1989 and following his death, scientists were determined to find out what had turned this seemingly upstanding citizen into a monster.

Bundy's brain was removed and a series of experiments carried out to determine why he had carried out his horrific crimes.

Certain brain injuries have been linked to criminality by some researchers.

And Bunday had told the detective who was instrumental in bringing him to justice that when he felt the urge to rape and kill, it was like a "chemical tidal wave washing through his brain".

He compared it to being addicted to drugs.

But when scientists examined Bundy's brain, it was found to be totally normal, with no legions, injuries or deformities.

His body was then cremated and Bundy's final wish was honoured, with his ashed scattered on the same mountain where he had dumped several of his victim's bodies.

His reign of terror had begun in 1974 when he broke into the basement of an 18-year-old student, beat her and sexually assaulted her with a metal rod.

She was left in a coma for 10 days and suffered with her brain injury for the rest of her life.

Bunday had no previous criminal record. but just a month later he committed his first murder.

He broke into another student's flat, Lynda Ann Healy, knocked her out, dressed her and carried her out to her car.

She was never seen again but a partial fragment of her skull was found in the place where Bundy dumped many of his bodies.

He preyed on the kindness of many of his victims, donning a fake leg or arm cast, and asking them to help him carry something to his car.

Then, he would bludgeon them until they were unconscious before raping, killing and them dumping them.

Long before he was finally captured, several women came forward to say they had been approached by 'Ted'.

Three women, including one of his ex-girlfriends, even pointed the finger directly at Bundy, but police didn't believe his claims because he was such an upstanding member of society.

Bundy was accepted into law school and moved to Utah but his thirst for violence only increased.

He picked up a hitchhiker, who he raped, strangled and then dumped in a river, before returning to her body the following day to take snap shots and dismember her.

Bundy raped and strangled 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox in Salt Lake City and buried her body.

The 17-year-old daughter of a police chief, Melissa Anne Smith, was abducted by Bundy as she left a pizza parlour.

Her body was found nine days later, with a postmortem indicating she may have remained alive up for to a week following her disappearance.

Bundy seemed to view murder as a sport and even admitted he had an "off season" where he would pick women up to keep his skills sharp and then free them.

He seemed to take just as much pleasure in running rings around the police with what he believed was his far superior intelligence.

In 1975 he was arrested for kidnapping Carol DaRonch, one of the few who survived his attacks, and jailed for 15 years.

But just two years later, while acting as his own lawyer after being indicted over the death of a Colorado woman, he jumped out of the jailhouse library window and disappeared.

He was caught eight days later but in December the same year, 1977, he climbed out of a hole in the ceiling of his cell and fled to Florida.

What came next was truly horrifyig.

Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University and raped and killed four women in just 15 minutes in January 1978.

He battered Margaret Bowman to death with a chunk of firewood then stranled her with a stocking.

Next, he beat and strangled 20-year-old Lisa Levy before sexually assaulting her with a bottle, ripping one of her nipples and leaving a deep bite in the flesh of her buttocks.

He then bludgeoned death two other students, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner, who were sleeping in an adjoining bedroom.

His last known killing was 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, who his kidnapped from school, raped, murdered and then dumped her body under a pig shed.

A few days later Bundy was finally arrested because his Beetle was stolen.

After confessing to 36 murders, Bundy was jailed and it has been reported that he was repeatedly raped by four men while he waited for execution on death row.

When the day of his execution came there were huge crowds outside, screaming 'burn, Bundy, burn'.

He was put to death in the electric chair.

Eleanor Rose, the mother of one of his victims, Denise Naslund, said: "For everything he did to the girls - the bludgeoning, the strangulation, humiliating their bodies, torturing them - I feel that the electric chair is too good for him."
Did you watch Ted Bundy: Falling For A Killer? Share your thoughts in the comments section below...

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Ted Bundy's brain was cut out after execution and tested in grisly experiment

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On the face of it, Ted Bundy presented as the perfect young man. Well-spoken and good looking, he was a law student who even worked on a suicide prevention phone line. But in reality, he was a twisted monster who butchered at least 36 young women and girls in one of the bloodiest killing sprees in history.

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Is This Why Ted Bundy Became a Murderer?

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Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist and serial-killer expert, explores a provocative thesis in Alex Gibney’s new documentary Crazy, Not Insane.

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Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy's murder spree ended when he was caught shortly after attacking several women at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Justice is Served

Ted Bundy was found guilty of all charges on July 24, 1979 and sentenced to death.

He died in the electric chair at the Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989.

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Ted Bundy: The serial killer's final years

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Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy's murder spree ended when he was caught shortly after attacking several women at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Ted Bundy was found guilty of all charges on July 24, 1979 and sentenced to death. He died in the electric chair at the Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989.

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In 1977, Theodore (or Ted) Robert Bundy (1946-1989) escaped from custody while being transported to Colorado to stand trial for murder. Salt Lake City issued an escape warrant that prompted the FBI's involvement.

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In 1977, Theodore (or Ted) Robert Bundy (1946-1989) escaped from custody while being transported to Colorado to stand trial for murder. Salt Lake City issued an escape warrant that prompted the FBI's involvement.

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Netflix and the world's obsession with true crime stories continues in 2019 with its four-part docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which launched in January 2019, and the controversial Bundy biopic, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil & Vile, which launched May 3 on the streaming service. The documentary digs far deeper into his history, from how it all started to how Ted Bundy was eventually caught, but the biopic also includes the story of the traffic stops that would put Bundy's eventual trials in motion.

But first, some context. The notorious serial killer, born Theodore Robert Bundy, confessed to around 36 sex killings before his death. However, the doc, which uses audio recordings of an interview with Bundy in his jail cell, notes that conspiracy theorists speculate he was actually involved in the deaths of 100 women. The film also includes interviews from lawyers, journalists, and even a woman who survived being kidnapped by Bundy to explain how the murderer was finally stopped and captured.

Of course, the time period had a lot to do with why he was able to escape capture for so long. Despite being a criminal referenced with the likes of Charles Manson and Jack the Ripper, the term serial killer wasn't widely used at the time of Bundy's murdering spree in the 1970s. The lack of technology and DNA testing made it difficult to connect Bundy to the murders that spanned across California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, and Florida. Many sources in the documentary alarmingly reference Bundy's status as a student and his "handsome" appearance as reasons people doubted he could be a killer. So when it came down to it, the simplest thing unraveled it all: Multiple, completely coincidental traffic stops (after Bundy escaped prison twice!) were ultimately what led to Bundy's arrests and death. Extremely Wicked, though controversial for its seemingly sympathetic view of Bundy, does show these admittedly dumb mistakes that led to Bundy's demise.

The Netflix docuseries, however, explains the series of events in detail. Despite the initial string of murders and disappearances in 1974 near Seattle, Washington, it wasn't until Bundy relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah for law school in August of 1975 that he was first on the police's radar. In the early hours of the morning, Bundy was driving down a street in his Volkswagen Beetle with his lights off when a patrol officer in the area happened to notice him. When the officer commanded Bundy to stop, he disobeyed and the policeman arrested him for what initially seemed like a misdemeanor. Police then found a gym bag in the car with a ski mask, ice pick, and torn sheets as well as handcuffs that resembled the same restraints Bundy used to kidnap a woman who survived his attack, Carol DaRonch. DaRonch, who is interviewed in Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, then identified Bundy in a lineup and he was convicted of kidnapping. But, of course, the story doesn't end there.

Following the conviction, Bundy was extradited to Colorado and put on trial for murder. Somehow the felon (who, again, was being tried for murder!) was left alone and he was able to escape the prison in Aspen, Colorado in June of 1977. He was missing for days. It was yet another fluke accident that caused him to be recaptured after he made a U-turn in a stolen vehicle.

Oh, and there's more. Bundy broke out of his cell, again.

Just a few months later, in December of 1977, a guard found a pile of books in Bundy's jail cell bed and realized he had escaped through the ceiling. Even though Bundy was put on the FBI's Most Wanted List, he evaded capture for 46 days(!). Bundy's final act on the run was a high speed chase in Pensacola, Florida, in a stolen vehicle, with 21 stolen credit cards.

After being found guilty of murdering two women in Florida on July 24, 1979, Bundy was also charged and found guilty of murdering a 12-year-old girl in November of 1979. He received the death penalty for both crimes. He attempted to escape the electric chair for years, managing to get his execution date pushed back multiple times. He was executed on January 24, 1989 at the Florida State Penitentiary. He finally confessed to most of his murders from 1973 to 1978 two days prior.

But if it hadn't been for that initial routine traffic stop in 1975, this story might have played out very, very differently.

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How One Mind-Blowingly Simple Mistake Stopped Ted Bundy

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Netflix and the world's obsession with true crime stories continues in 2019 with its four-part docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which launched in January 2019, and the controversial Bundy biopic, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil & Vile , which launched May 3 on the streaming service.

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Women had a vital role in America's early conflicts - participating, supporting, and organizing. Studying their involvement gives a broader understanding of the...

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Spring 1993, Vol. 25, No. 1 By DeAnne Blanton © 1993 by DeAnne Blanton Disguised as a man (left), Frances Clayton served many months in Missouri artillery and cavalry units. (By courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library) It is an accepted convention that the Civil War was a man’s fight…

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The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

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Nursing the War's Wounded

"When I realize what I have stood against"

Neither the Federal nor the Confederate government was prepared to respond adequately to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. Two major armies in the eastern frontier - the Army of the Potomac (North) and the Army of Northern Virginia (South) - engaged in a long series of battles, including one at Antietam Creek in Maryland on September 17, 1862, which proved to be the bloodiest single day of the war. Local civilians, especially women, were highly motivated to do what they could to alleviate the suffering. In addition, many women who lived in the District of Columbia or other regions within the Eastern Seaboard volunteered their services to the Union Army and engaged in nursing in Maryland - assisting army surgeons on the battlefield, conveying medical supplies to armies, and staffing hospitals.

Much of this work was carried out on an ad-hoc basis and not all army medical staff welcomed the presence of women in war zones. Women of the lower social classes worked for meager wages, while women of the higher social classes often worked as volunteers. The necessities of the war undermined the prevailing assumption that military battlefields and hospitals were no place for women. Lack of full recognition and acknowledgement by the Federal government of women's contributions, however, persisted throughout the war and beyond.

Numerous women helped provide medical care at Maryland's hospitals and battlefields. The Emmitsburg, Maryland-based Sisters of Charity overcame prejudice against women and anti-Catholic sentiment through their effective work with sick and wounded soldiers. Clara Barton left her work as a clerk in Washington, D.C., and attached herself to the Army of the Potomac. By the end of the war Barton had established a national reputation as an effective organizer of medical relief efforts on battlefields in Maryland and northern Virginia. Later in her career she was instrumental in establishing the American National Red Cross.

Harper's Weekly, October 11, 1862, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Beyond surgery and hospital work, women were also engaged in letter-writing, the provision of refreshments, and performing miscellaneous errands for injured soldiers. These women wait outside a hospital in Hagerstown, Maryland.

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Letter from Clara Barton to Harriette Reed, 1900.
Clara Barton Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
"... When I realize what I have stood against-,the props so slender, the weights so heavy, the way so dark, the fingertips so few,-the abyss so deep, & so rocky--the brain whirls as from a dizzy height-I dare not think of it-but step by step I hold my way- ..." The "Full details" button links to an entire folder of Barton correspondence with Reed. To view this particular letter go to pages 8-9 of the digital document viewer.
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Clara Barton, circa 1860s.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Full details

During the Civil War, Clara Barton formed a close relationship with Mrs. J. Sewall (Harriette) Reed of Massachusetts. Reed had served with Barton during the war and worked with her later in the American National Red Cross. In 1900 Barton attempted to secure more formal recognition by the Federal government of the American National Red Cross, including exclusive rights to use of its insignia. Writing from her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, Barton conveyed to Harriette Reed some of the emotions that came with her work in promoting the Red Cross. By extension, one could assign these thoughts to her travails during the Civil War.

Research Tips

Nursing is probably one of the best-known contributions by women to the war effort. Popular images of the Civil War recurrently depicted women as nurses. Illustrations of the day romanticized white, middle and upper-class women's contributions to nursing, including writing letters for incapacitated, wounded soldiers; sitting for long hours by soldiers' bedsides; and supplying them with baskets of comforting food. While these illustrations provide some historical evidence, they also overlook other women's contributions. Poor women and African American women frequently worked as laundresses or cooks in support of hospital operations, but we do not often see them depicted in images from the time period. Critically examining and evaluating images, especially illustrations and staged photographs, is an important part of historical inquiry.

Image from Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, 1885
Rare Books Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.

" ... He never spoke again, but to the end held my hand close, so close that when he was asleep at last, I could not draw it away. Dan helped me, warning me as he did so that it was unsafe for dead and living flesh to lie so long together; but though my hand was strangely cold and stiff, and four white marks remained across its back, even when warmth and color had returned elsewhere, I could not but be glad that, through its touch, the presence of human sympathy, perhaps, had lightened that hard hour."

Louisa May Alcott, best-known for her literary career including her famous work Little Women (1868), volunteered as a nurse late in 1862. She served in the Maryland region, tending to wounded soldiers, until she was diagnosed with typhoid pneumonia the following year. Her book Hospital Sketches documents this period of her life. "John" was a soldier who died in Alcott's presence.

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Correspondence with Members of Congress, circa 1890
Clara Barton Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.

The Women's Relief Corps, an auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic, proposed Federal government pensions for women who served as army nurses in the Civil War. The image link at right leads to various responses from members of the U.S. Congress to proposed legislation in 1890. Several of these Congressmen had personal recollections of having been nursed back to health by women during the Civil War.
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Women as Soldiers and Spies

"...I am other than my appearance indicates"

Women served on the battlefield in various roles: nurses, doctors, vivandières (canteen carriers), daughters of regiments, flag bearers, laundresses, cooks, prostitutes, seamstresses, scouts, soldiers, and spies. Examples of women in Maryland volunteering as soldiers and spies during the war exist, but accounts of such feats by women are often difficult to confirm.

Women in Maryland with Southern sympathies were occasionally accused of spying and suffered the consequences. Federal forces and informants carefully watched the homes and families of known Confederate soldiers. In Baltimore in 1863 any secessionist activity was taken seriously. Confederate flag-waving, selling secessionist sheet music, writing letters to Confederate soldiers, and entertaining wounded Confederates, were all punishable offenses. At one point, Union General Robert C. Schenck reportedly rounded up women who appeared to be spying and sent them to live behind Confederate lines. Euphemia "Effie" Goldsborough of Talbot County and Baltimore, Maryland, suffered this fate. Goldsborough worked as a Confederate nurse at Antietam and at Gettysburg and was later accused of spying. She was forced to live in Virginia until July 1865, when her father brought her back to Baltimore.

In 1866, S. Emma E. Edmonds, a Unionist, described her escapades on battlefields behind enemy lines in her popular book, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-fields. While Edmonds was not from Maryland originally but rather a Canadian, she wrote of her experiences in Maryland, especially at the battle of Antietam. During the aftermath of the battle, Edmonds, who was herself dressed in soldier's garb, found a dying soldier on the battlefield. She quickly realized that the soldier was actually a woman, gave her comfort, and did not reveal the soldier's gender to others taking care of the wounded and the dead. Whether Edmonds's work is fact or fiction is uncertain.

Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 1866
Rare Books Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
S. Emma E. Edmonds with a dying female soldier in the aftermath of the battle of Antietam, from her book Nurse and Spy in the Union Army.

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Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 1866
Rare Books Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
According to her book, S. Emma E. Edmonds, shown here dressed as an upper-class white woman during the Civil War, took advantage of the war to cross gender and racial boundaries. On various occasions in her narrative Edmonds purports to have disguised herself successfully as a white, male soldier; an African American, male slave; and an African American, female slave.
Full details

Research Tips

Nursing is probably one of the best-known contributions by women to the war effort. Popular images of the Civil War recurrently depicted women as nurses. Illustrations of the day romanticized white, middle and upper-class women's contributions to nursing, including writing letters for incapacitated, wounded soldiers; sitting for long hours by soldiers' bedsides; and supplying them with baskets of comforting food. While these illustrations provide some historical evidence, they also overlook other women's contributions. Poor women and African American women frequently worked as laundresses or cooks in support of hospital operations, but we do not often see them depicted in images from the time period. Critically examining and evaluating images, especially illustrations and staged photographs, is an important part of historical inquiry.

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Nursing the War's Wounded "When I realize what I have stood against" Neither the Federal nor the Confederate government was prepared to respond adequately to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

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New Expectations

War quickly permeated and transformed every aspect of life in the South in the spring of 1861. The Confederacy's leaders realized that they could only win the war with the full moral and material support of its women. As husbands and fathers departed for the battlefield and politicians and journalists urged civilians to do their patriotic duty, white women were confronted with the strange new expectation of demonstrating authority and civic involvement.

The exigencies of war encouraged white women to develop a political outlook and prove their patriotism, in contrast to the antebellum period when they were considered too delicate and pure to become entangled in the public world of politics. Many Confederate women sewed presentation flags for local regiments or became involved in organizations that sponsored every cause from aiding soldiers to supplying hospitals to arming gunboats. Others contributed through unofficial channels, such as making and sending food and clothing to enlisted men. Some vocalized their newfound political identities in letters to government officials, newspapers, and even their husbands. A few Southern women went as far as becoming spies or disguising themselves as men and enlisting in the army to demonstrate their patriotism.

During the antebellum period, for women to become involved in these sorts of activities would have been almost unthinkable, but during the war they were permitted, and even encouraged, to do so. Most white women exercised their newfound political power in ways that helped diminish the radical implications of their involvement, such as centering their attention on traditionally feminine concerns of food and family. Enslaved women, ironically, were motivated by the same concerns to rebel against the Confederate government by a variety of means, including running away.

Another, and perhaps more problematic, effect of the war required women to assume and exert power, a position for which they had been considered temperamentally unfit during the antebellum years. With traditional male authority figures absent from families and communities, women faced the difficult task of convincing themselves and the rest of Southern society to recognize their new authority and abilities. In many cases, women took over the management of shops, farms, and plantations. Black and white mothers struggled to provide shelter, nourishment, and safety for their families, and they faced additional challenges in disciplining their children without a father's assistance. Slaveholding women faced the additional challenge of supervising and providing for slaves. While some women enjoyed their new independence, the ever-increasing demands of the war drained the patriotism and self-confidence of many others.

Work

The outbreak of war drastically depleted the civilian workforce. Women were the obvious replacements, and they filled positions previously held by men as well as those specially created by the demands of war. Motivated by everything from patriotism to poverty to a sense of vocation, many white women found themselves working outside the home and earning money for the first time in their lives. The Southern shortage of labor was so severe that even some black women, free and enslaved, found new opportunities to work for wages. The unpaid labor of enslaved women across the Confederacy also formed a critical component in supplying the war effort. The presence of so many women in the workplace intrinsically challenged the widely accepted doctrine of separate spheres-the male, public domain of politics and business, and the female, private world of household and family. This guaranteed that the workforce would never return to its prewar status and began a redefinition of women's place in American society.

Class and race played crucial roles in determining which Southern women were likely to seek work outside the home and what duties they would perform. Wealthy white women often had the privilege of volunteering, rather than working for wages, and they were frequently awarded positions of greater authority. Enslaved women represented the majority of Southern women workers. Immigrants, working class women, and free women of color constituted the majority of paid workers, primarily because they desperately needed a steady source of income. Black women, both enslaved and free, held positions subordinate to white women and generally performed the more unpleasant and physically demanding tasks.

Medical work was one of the most significant ways that Confederate women contributed to the war effort. Women rarely worked as nurses outside the home in the antebellum period, but numerous wartime factors, including the lack of available manpower and Confederate women's close proximity to battlefields, demanded their increased participation. Although the precise number of women in the South who volunteered or hired their services is unknown, thousands of black and white women nursed, cooked, cleaned, sewed, and did laundry for military hospitals during the war.

Most Confederate nurses were working class and enslaved women who endured the grisly and dangerous conditions. A relative minority of middle- or upper-class Southern women left their homes to become nurses. These women typically had the leisure to volunteer their services, usually temporarily at hospitals established in homes and churches. Some founded and operated hospitals, such as the celebrated "Captain" Sally Tompkins, who opened Robertson Hospital in the home of Judge John Robertson in the Confederate capital at , which had the lowest mortality rate of any military hospital during the Civil War. Of women who made nursing a profession, only those with the calmest stomachs were appointed to field hospitals by surgeons familiar with their skill and conduct under pressure. Most women, however, worked or volunteered in established military hospitals at military depots and near battlefields. In Virginia, where so much of the war was fought, there were many such opportunities, both temporary and for the duration of the war, for dedicated women to provide essential physical and psychological care to sick and wounded soldiers.

The most genteel and well-paid positions were reserved for middle- and upper-class white women. The Confederate government, particularly in Richmond, hired them to sign banknotes at the Treasury, sew uniforms for the Clothing Bureau, and sort letters at the post office. Schoolhouses and academies across the Confederacy hired them to nurture and instruct children and youths. Some were embarrassed to admit they needed a paycheck, while others reveled in a newfound sense of achievement and independence.

Working class and poor women, both black and white, often entered into occupations that their wealthier counterparts considered distasteful. Factories in larger cities-particularly Richmond, also the industrial capital of the Confederacy-employed hundreds of women, whose small hands and presumed manual dexterity were considered ideal qualifications for tasks such as making ammunition. Prostitution constituted a major source of employment anywhere that soldiers were stationed. Although women generally gained little prestige or wealth by engaging in such professions, they were united with working women across the Confederacy in finding ways to survive amid tumultuous economic conditions and in broadening the scope of women's work.

Dissent

The majority of Southern women eventually withdrew or altogether denied their support from the Confederate government. For the duration of the war, enslaved women sought to escape or subvert slavery. Many poor, working class, and even some middle- and upper-class white women came to believe that the Confederate government did not protect them or represent their interests, or simply that the cost of continuing the war was too great. This erosion of Southern women's support for their government ultimately undermined the war effort and contributed to the fall of the Confederacy.

Some women were opposed to the Confederacy from the beginning of the war, and demonstrated their dissent in a variety of ways. Many enslaved women thwarted their owners' efforts to use their labor by doing everything from slowing their work to running away. Some women remained loyal to the United States throughout the war, and many expressed their Northern sympathies by feeding and quartering Union soldiers, hiding escaped Union prisoners, or, like Elizabeth Van Lew, even serving as spies. As women suffered increasing privations on the home front, many previously loyal Confederates began voicing their discontent in diaries, newspapers, and letters to the Confederate government and loved ones on the battlefront. Their actions revealed not only the depth of their restlessness, but their insistence that government take action to alleviate their suffering.

This development was perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the Richmond Bread Riot. On April 2, 1863, a group of Richmond women, most of them poor and many of them wives of volunteer soldiers, marched to the Governor's Mansion. They demanded to speak with Virginia governor John Letcher and insisted that he do something to help provide food, which was costly and scarce. Some women were armed with axes, clubs, and knives, and someone began chanting, "Bread or blood!" Letcher's response did not appease them and they swept down the city's main thoroughfares, smashing into shops and stealing bread and anything else that caught their fancy. The riot raged for several hours until Letcher (not Confederate president Jefferson Davis, as incorrectly identified in some accounts) called out the Public Guard to disperse the mob. The event was widely publicized and sparked similar riots across the Confederacy. It spurred the Confederate government to take action and establish a state-sponsored welfare system to address the needs of its poorest citizens, and provided evidence of the growing level of civil discontent.

Conclusion

The creation of the Confederate nation required Southerners to reconsider many of their time-honored assumptions about the differences between men and women and among women of different race and class. Poor and once-wealthy women found themselves toiling at the same labors to eke out a living under difficult circumstances. Women surprised others, and themselves, with their ability to perform the many tasks previously thought too difficult for them to comprehend or accomplish. This redefinition continued into the postwar years, as millions of newly freed black women explored the meaning and limits of freedom, and white women forged a place in a new society. Ironically, that accomplishment went largely unacknowledged by the interpretation of the war, which explicitly lionized "Old South" womanhood.

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War quickly permeated and transformed every aspect of life in the South in the spring of 1861. The Confederacy's leaders realized that they could only win the war with the full moral and material support of its women.

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Even though women weren't legally allowed to fight in the Civil War, it is estimated that somewhere around 400 women disguised themselves as men and went to war, sometimes without anyone ever discovering their true identities.

Bonnie Tsui is the author of She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers in the Civil War, which tells the stories of some of these women. I spoke with the San Francisco-based writer about her research into the seldom-acknowledged participation of women in the Civil War.
Why weren't women allowed to fight in the Civil War?
At the time, women weren't perceived as equals by any stretch of the imagination. It was the Victorian era and women were mostly confined to the domestic sphere. Both the Union and Confederate armies actually forbade the enlistment of women. I think it was during the Revolutionary War that they established women as nurses because they needed help on the front when soldiers were injured. But women weren't allowed to serve in combat. Of course, women did disguise themselves and enlist as men. There is evidence that they also did so during the Revolutionary War.
How did they do it?
Honestly, the lore is that the physical exams were not rigorous at all. If you had enough teeth in your head and could hold a musket, you were fine. The funny thing is, in this scenario, a lot of women didn't seem any less manly than, for example, the teenage boys who were enlisting. At the time, I believe the Union had an official cutoff age of 18 for soldiers, but that was often flouted and people often lied. They had a lot of young guys and their voices hadn't changed and their faces were smooth. The Confederacy never actually established an age requirement. So [women] bound their breasts if they had to, and just kind of layered on clothes, wore loose clothing, cut their hair short and rubbed dirt on their faces. They also kind of kept to themselves. The evidence that survived often describes them as aloof. Keeping to themselves certainly helped maintain the secret.

When the women were found out, did it provoke an uproar?
Even in the cases where these women were found out as soldiers, there does not actually seem to be much uproar. More or less, they were just sent home. The situations in which they were found out were often medical conditions; they were injured, or they got sick from dysentery or chronic diarrhea. Disease killed many more soldiers than bullets did. You're sitting in camps among all these people who are in close quarters. There wasn't a lot of knowledge then about bacterial infection and particularly in close quarters there wasn't much chance to prevent it.

There is some documentation that shows that some soldiers that were discovered as women were briefly imprisoned. In the letter of one [female disguised as a male] prison guard, it said that there were three [other] women in the prison, one of whom was a major in the Union Army. She had gone to battle with her fellow men and was jailed because she was a woman. It's really interesting hearing about her being a woman, disguised as a man, standing as a prison guard for a woman imprisoned for doing the same thing.
What was the motivation on the part of the women you studied? Did it seem pretty much the same as the men?
It absolutely did. I think by all accounts, the women seemed honestly to want to fight in the war for the same reasons as men, so that would range from patriotism, to supporting their respective causes, for adventure, to be able to leave home, and to earn money. Some of the personal writings that survive show that they were also running away from family lives that were really unsatisfying. You can imagine that perhaps they felt trapped at home or weren't able to marry and felt that they were financial burdens to their families. If you profile the substantiated cases of these women, they were young and often poor and from farming families, and that is the exact profile of the typical male volunteer. If you think about that, girls growing up on a farm would have been accustomed to physical labor. Maybe they even would have worn boys' clothing to do farm chores. But then there are also some cases in which women follow their husbands or a brother into battle, and so there are at least a couple of those cases in which female soldiers were on record of enlisting with their relative.
What duties did the women perform?
They did everything that men did. They worked as scouts, spies, prison guards, cooks, nurses and they fought in combat. One of the best-documented female soldiers is Sarah Edmonds-her alias was Frank Thompson. She was a Union soldier, and she worked for a long time during the war as a nurse. You often can't really draw a delineation between "civilian workers" and battle, because these people had to be in battle, tending to soldiers. They were often on the field or nearby trying to get to the wounded, so you could argue that it was just as dangerous for them to work as nurses as to be actively shooting and emptying gunfire.
What is another one of your favorite stories from your research?
One of my favorite stories of the Civil War era is of Jennie Hodgers, and she fought as Albert Cashier. She enlisted in Illinois and she fought the entire Civil War without being discovered and ended up living out the rest of her life as a man for another fifty years. She even ended up receiving a military pension and living at the sailors' and soldiers' home in Illinois as a veteran. The staff at the home kept her secret for quite sometime, even after they discovered that she was a woman.

Even though it seems pretty outstanding that women were disguising themselves as men and going off to fight, it seems like actually they were accepted amongst their peers. This kind of loyalty to your fellow soldier in battle did in certain cases transcend gender. It's pretty amazing; there was a lot of respect.

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Even though women weren't legally allowed to fight in the Civil War, it is estimated that somewhere around 400 women disguised themselves as men and went to war, sometimes without anyone ever discovering their true identities. Bonnie Tsui is the author of She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers in the Civil War , which tells the stories of some of these women.

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It was called the most terrible crime ever committed in Indiana, and half a century later, that title still holds. On October 26, 1965, police found Sylvia Likens's emaciated corpse-covered with more than 150 wounds ranging from burns to cuts-sprawled on a filthy mattress in the Indianapolis home of 37-year-old Gertrude Baniszewski, mother of seven and the architect of the girl's gruesome death.

The details of her demise, revealed at the 1966 trial, defy belief. Sylvia's carnival-worker parents boarded her and her sister Jenny with Baniszewski for $20 a week. But when one of their checks arrived late, Baniszewski took out her frustration by beating the girls. Weeks of escalating horror followed. The attacks, focused almost exclusively on Sylvia, grew ever more violent and sadistic. Several of Baniszewski's children and a gaggle of neighborhood kids, some as young as 10, watched or joined in. None reported what they saw.

"A lot of people have compared this to Lord of the Flies," says attorney Natty Bumppo, a former Indianapolis Star reporter who covered the case. "But that was just a bunch of uncontrolled children. In this case, they had an adult supervising what they were doing. It wasn't children going wild. It was children doing what they were told."

What's even more mind-boggling is that the crime's perpetrators all eventually walked free-some after absurdly short prison sentences. Here's what happened to this tragedy's principal players.
TIME SERVED: 20 YEARS
Originally found guilty of first-degree murder, Gertrude (or Gertie, as she was sometimes called) was sentenced to life in prison-a judgment confirmed by a 1971 retrial. During her years at the Indiana Women's Prison, she was considered a model prisoner and earned the nickname of "Mom." In spite of widespread public outcry, she was paroled in 1985. She moved to Iowa, changed her name to Nadine Van Fossan, and died of lung cancer on June 16, 1990. She never took responsibility for her crimes, claiming she "couldn't remember" her actions. "I never thought she was insane," Bumppo says. "I thought she was a downtrodden, mean woman."
TIME SERVED: 7 YEARS
When Gertrude, a sickly asthmatic, didn't feel up to "disciplining" Sylvia, she relied on her oldest child, Paula, to help out. Which she did, enthusiastically. She was 17 at the time, and it was rumored that she and Sylvia disliked each other from the start. In 1966, Paula was convicted of second-degree murder, but when her conviction was overturned in 1971 on a technicality, she pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter rather than face a retrial. She got 2-to-21 years but, in spite of attempting a prison break, was paroled in March 1972 and released completely in March 1974. She changed her name to Paula Pace and wasn't heard from again until 2012, when she was discovered living in the small Iowa hamlet of Marshalltown and working for the school system in the neighboring town of Conrad. Pace/Baniszewski, the mother of two grown sons, wasn't charged with any additional crimes but was fired from her job for providing false information on her employee application. Since then, she has once more slipped off the grid.
TIME SERVED: NONE
The second-oldest of the Baniszewski children, Stephanie was 15 at the time of the crime. Though she admitted to participating to some degree in Sylvia's abuse, she was granted a special trial and then all charges against her were dropped, likely because she agreed to turn state's evidence against her family. She reportedly changed her name, married, had children, worked as a teacher, and now lives in Florida.
TIME SERVED: 2 YEARS
The third-oldest of the Baniszewski children and an active participant in Sylvia's torture, John was 12 when she died. Convicted of manslaughter, he became the Indiana State Reformatory's youngest inmate, serving just two years before being released. He changed his name to John Blake and drifted aimlessly before experiencing a religious epiphany that, he said, helped him see the error of his ways. Allegedly the only member of the Baniszewski clan to show public remorse for his deeds, he made no attempt to hide his past and even spoke about it publicly on occasion. Reportedly a lay minister and real-estate agent with a wife and three children, he died of cancer in 2005 at age 52. In a masterpiece of understatement, he once told a reporter that "My mom was a very selfish, self-centered woman."
TIME SERVED: NONE
Fourth-oldest of the Baniszewski children, Marie was 11 when the torture took place. No charges were brought against her. She testified during the trial, becoming the sole member of the Baniszewski family to cry on the stand during questioning. She reportedly still lives in Indiana.
TIME SERVED: NONE
Fifth-oldest of the Baniszewski children, Shirley was the youngest of the family to actively participate in Sylvia's torture. Although the 10-year-old heated a needle that was used to burn the victim, she was never charged with any crime. Her whereabouts today are unknown.
TIME SERVED: NONE
Because he was only 8 at the time, James was not arrested nor called to testify, although some reports suggested he played a role in the crime. Of all the Baniszewski offspring, the least is known about him.

Dennis Lee Wright Jr.
NOT CULPABLE
The youngest of the Baniszewski children, Dennis was a newborn when Sylvia met her fate. He was the son of Gertrude's lover, Dennis Lee Wright Sr., who abandoned the family shortly after his namesake's birth. Supposedly, he was placed in foster care and was later adopted by the White family, who changed his name to Denny Lee White. He died in 2012 in California.
TIME SERVED: 2 YEARS
A neighborhood kid and Stephanie Baniszewski's boyfriend, Hubbard was a full participant in Sylvia's torture. His "contributions" included using her as a practice dummy for judo flips and punches and shoving her down the basement stairs. Convicted of manslaughter, he served only two years before being released. His attorney, Forrest Bowman Jr., remembers running into him in the early 1970s when he stopped at a near-downtown gas station where Hubbard happened to work. "He was very effusive and said, 'Come inside, I want to introduce you to my boss,'" Bowman recalls. "I said sure. That was the last contact I had with him." Oddly, Hubbard never changed his name and reportedly remained in the Indianapolis area most of his adult life. He was tried for another murder in 1982 but acquitted. He also reportedly lost his job in 2007 when the movie An American Crime, about the Sylvia Likens case, debuted. He died in June of that year in Shelbyville.
TIME SERVED: 2 YEARS
Another neighborhood kid who tortured Sylvia, Hobbs performed the infamous act of helping to carve the words "I am a prostitute and proud of it" into her stomach with a large needle. The macabre task was begun by Gertrude, but when she became too fatigued to finish, Hobbs stepped in. Convicted of manslaughter, he served a short sentence and died of cancer in 1972 at age 21.

Sylvia's father was a carnival worker who decided to leave his kids with a third party while he and his wife, Betty, were on the road. His only "crime" was that he didn't vet the Baniszewski home more thoroughly before leaving two of his daughters in Gertrude's custody. "We [he and Gertrude] got to talking, and she said she would take care of the children and treat them like her own," he recalled at the trial. Lester apparently believed her, because during several subsequent trips to the house-the last on October 5, just weeks before his daughter's death-he noticed nothing out of order. Not that there was much to see, considering the only portions of the Baniszewski abode he ever entered were the living room and, once, the kitchen. He reportedly died in February 2013 at the age of 86 in Fontana, California.

Visibly devastated, Sylvia's mother gave only short responses on the witness stand at the trial. She divorced Lester in 1967, remarried, and died on May 29, 1998, at age 71. She was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, where she shares a headstone with her brother.

In the midst of the ordeal, Sylvia's sister Jenny-who was also boarded at the Baniszewskis'-reportedly called their older sister Dianna for help. Believing that the girls were simply grumbling, Dianna initially ignored the plea. But her suspicions were raised when Gertrude wouldn't let her in the house for a visit. She then spotted Jenny, who said she wasn't allowed to talk to her and ran away. Dianna contacted social services, but when a worker showed up at the Baniszewski residence, Jenny told her (on threat of punishment from Gertrude) that Sylvia had run away. No further action was taken. Dianna made headlines recently when she and her husband, Cecil "Paul" Knutson, both diabetics, got lost in the California backcountry and were stranded in their car for two weeks with nothing to sustain them but rainwater, a pie, and some oranges. Knutson didn't survive the ordeal, dying of a heart attack after the first week. Dianna, near death, was discovered and rescued by off-roaders.

Perhaps because she was crippled by polio, Jenny didn't suffer nearly as much abuse as her sister Sylvia did. From the beginning, she had opportunities to tell neighbors what was going on, but she didn't because she feared she would make things worse. Indeed, one of the enduring mysteries of the case is why neither she nor Sylvia sought help before things escalated. "I speculate that there was never any experience in Sylvia's life, up to the time she went into Gertie's house, when she learned that people would come to her aid," says Bowman, Hubbard's attorney. "She wasn't conditioned to believe that anyone would help her." Sylvia finally succumbed to her injuries after months of torture. Hobbs, the neighborhood kid, contacted the police to report the death. When the police arrived to collect her sister's body, Jenny reportedly told them, "You get me out of here, and I'll tell you everything." A Beech Grove resident, she died in 2004 at the age of 54.
This article appeared in the October 2015 Issue.

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The Murder of Sylvia Likens 50 Years Later - Indianapolis Monthly

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It was called the most terrible crime ever committed in Indiana, and half a century later, that title still holds. On October 26, 1965, police found Sylvia Likens's emaciated corpse-covered with more than 150 wounds ranging from burns to cuts-sprawled on a filthy mattress in the Indianapolis home of 37-year-old Gertrude Baniszewski, mother of seven and the architect of the girl's gruesome death.

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The following story is upsetting, but it's part of the reason Sylvia's CAC is here today. Reader discretion is advised.

How one of the most tragic stories in our state's history began our mission to protect and care for children of abuse from every corner of our community

Sylvia Likens

In October 1965, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens died after being held captive for nearly three months. Her death sparked action across police departments, prosecution, and the halls of the Indiana General Assembly, plus movies and books.

Before leaving for a lengthy work-related trip and undergoing immense financial stress, Sylvia's parents departed Lebanon and left her with a caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski in Indianapolis. As a teenager, Sylvia babysat, hung out with friends, did chores and small jobs, loved the Beatles, and lived an otherwise typical life.

In the summer of 1965, Sylvia and her sisters moved into Baniszewski's home at 3850 East New York Street. They continued to live as teenagers do, singing, skating, earning modest incomes during the summer break, and doing housework.

The financial hardship of Sylvia's father continued, and payments to Baniszewski for boarding began to wane. Angry, Baniszewski began beating the children in the home across their buttocks. By August, the beatings exceeded a dozen a week, often for benign issues like eating too much food.

Soon, Baniszewski was focusing on Sylvia. Later testimony would reveal Sylvia was beaten and abused regularly after school and on weekends. She was deprived of food, and later still resorted to eating food out of garbage cans.

Her sisters and Baniszewski began turning on Sylvia, becoming bitter at her appearance and having claimed to have a boyfriend. She was accused of spreading rumors about Baniszewski, which was unfounded. The boyfriends of her sisters also began to turn on Sylvia.

By the end of the summer, Sylvia was being raped, verbally tormented, assaulted with objects physically and sexually, starved, beaten, burned, and forced to commit humiliating or heinous acts. Baniszewski eventually forbade her from attending school and she was held captive in the home.

Why didn't anyone do anything?

After a failed escape attempt, and then the eventual death of Sylvia from escalating torture, like burns followed by rubbing salt in wounds, police found "the most sadistic" and "awful crime" they had ever seen.

Neighbors reported to police they sometimes heard her screams, or someone asking for help. But in 1965, no one felt compelled to come forward. The notion being, "It wasn't their business or place to intrude on someone else's household." One neighbor said the screams stopped around 3:30 am on the morning of October 26, 1965. By 6:30 that afternoon, she was dead.

Her teachers and other adults likely noticed the open sores, bruises, or early signs of abuse. They just didn't feel empowered to say anything.

The tragic legacy of Sylvia Likens

An autopsy revealed over 150 separate strikes against her body. They included burns, muscle damage, nerve damage, a swollen vaginal cavity, fingernails broken backward, and she had reportedly bitten through her lips.

Taken back to Lebanon, she was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery on October 29, 1965.

The trial, testimony, and indictments were all jarring to everyone who read about the story. Baniszewski and others were punished and jailed for their crimes. In 1970, the Indiana Supreme Court reversed the convictions because the trial court refused motions for a change of venue and separate trial. A subsequent retrial led to a guilty plea. She was released in 1972, subsequently tried for murder again, and sentenced to life in prison. She changed her name and was paroled in 1985 and died five years later in relative obscurity from lung cancer in 1990.

The uproar of her case, media attention, release, and other crimes led to considerable changes. Sylvia's case is credited with Indiana's Mandated Reporter law, requiring everyone in Indiana regardless of age or profession to report any suspicion of child abuse to law enforcement.

Prosecutors and police began to understand the investigation of child abuse and neglect more. Schools and other child-first organizations began to understand more, too, and identify the signs of abuse.

Sylvia's tragic death shocked an entire state and community into recognizing the horrors of child abuse in a way no case had before or since.

Sylvia's CAC is named in her honor. We work every day to remember her name, honor her life, and protect children in Boone County from the same anguish and torture Sylvia endured.

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Sylvia Likens and "Indiana's most terrible crime" - Sylvia's CAC

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The following story is upsetting, but it's part of the reason Sylvia's CAC is here today. Reader discretion is advised. How one of the most tragic stories in our state's history began our mission to protect and care for children of abuse from every corner of our community In October 1965, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens died after being held captive for nearly three months.

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Fifty years ago, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens was found tortured to death in the Indianapolis home of her caretaker, Gertrude Baniszewski, who was later convicted of first-degree murder in what's been called the most terrible crime ever committed in Indiana. In this essay, John Mikulenka ponders how the case went from a local tragedy to something affecting people worldwide. In his video, he interviews the newspaper reporter who covered Baniszewski's trial. Click here for the full story and video.

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Sylvia Likens Archives - Limestone Post Magazine

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I was five when it happened. Eleven when I learned about it. My parents both worked full time, so I was always in the hands of a caretaker. What happened to Sylvia Likens touched some powerful fears - of being scapegoated, tormented by other children, abandoned by loved ones.

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This story was originally published in 2015.
On Oct. 26, 1965, Indianapolis police were called to a home on East New York Street where they found the body of a 16-year-old girl. A coroner later counted 150 wounds on the body.

The girl was Sylvia Likens.

She was the daughter of carnival workers who in July 1965, as they headed out on the road, left her and her sister Jenny in the care of an impoverished, pill-popping mother of seven named Gertrude Baniszewski.

What happened afterward, said Spurgeon Davenport, the Indianapolis Police Department's homicide chief and a 35-year officer, was "the most sadistic act I ever came across."

Further details unfolded in the coming months and were reported in the newspapers. The story became more shocking with each report.

Indianapolis news archives tell of the horrific murder of Sylvia Likens

Several Beat Slain Girl, 16, Police Told
Indianapolis News, Oct. 28, 1965​
The investigation indicated numerous young persons, plus the woman with whom the girl was staying, beat and tortured her over an extended period, police said.

Police Told of Tortured Girl's Last Days
Indianapolis Star, Oct. 28, 1965
The 16-year-old girl was systematically beaten and tortured over a three-week period by at least 10 persons, probably more, police said.

Why Did Sylvia Die?
Indianapolis Star, Oct. 31, 1965
Gertrude Baniszewski told police that Sylvia had spread rumors at Tech High School that two of the mother's children by a previous marriage, Paula Baniszewski, 17, and Stephanie Baniszewski, 15, were prostitutes.

"My children are real religious children," she said as she sat in the police lockup wearing a green jail dress and brown sweater.

Full House for Torture Death Hearing
Indianapolis News, Nov. 2, 1965
An attorney looked at the overflow crowd in Municipal Court 6 and said, "If some of these people had been this concerned about Sylvia earlier, she probably would be alive today."

Court Told Of Sylvia Likens Torture
Indianapolis Star, Jan. 13, 1966
Two 12-year-old children, testifying at a habeas corpus hearing yesterday ... said other children rubbed salt into Sylvia's wounds, threw her downstairs and off chairs, and sprayed her with a hose.

Girl In Slaying Case Ordered Held In Hospital
Indianapolis Star, Jan. 19, 1966
Judge Saul I. Rabb ordered yesterday that Miss Paula Baniszewski be kept in Marion County General Hospital while convalescing from childbirth. She gave birth to a girl Thursday, and Rabb said he thought the jail would be a poor place for convalescence. The baby was named Gertrude, after Paula's mother.

The Baniszewski trial
The first-degree murder trial began in April. There were five defendants: Gertrude Baniszewski, 37, and two of her children, Paula Marie Baniszewski, 18, and John Stephen Baniszewski, 13, and two neighbors, Richard Dean Hobbs, 15, and Coy Hubbard, 15.Gertrude Baniszewski pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. The four teens pleaded not guilty.
Likens Death Is Called Work Of A 'Madman'
Indianapolis Star, April 30, 1966
A weeping Jenny Likens was led from Criminal Court Division 2 yesterday as huge photographs of the fantastically mutilated nude body of her sister were shown.

The photos showed numerous deep cuts and round, dark punctures all over Sylvia's body. The entire left side of her face was discolored from the loss of skin.

One doctor yesterday described Sylvia's undernourished, scarred, punctured, discolored body as "the work of a madman."

There were indications Sylvia had suffered intense pain, said deputy coroner Charles R. Ellis, noting that her lips were "essentially in shreds," indicating she "had been chewing on the lip." All her fingernails were broken backward, he said.

Sylvia Foresaw Death, Sister Sobs
Indianapolis News, May 2, 1966
The sobbing sister of Sylvia Marie Likens today quoted her as saying, "Jenny, I know you don't want me to die. But I am going to die. I can tell it."

Sister Ends Story In Likens Case
Indianapolis News, May 3, 1966
Jenny wiped away tears from her eyes several times as defense attorneys riddled her with questions about why she didn't aid her dying sister. Sixteen-year-old Jenny, crippled by polio when she was four months old, said she didn't get help because she was "scared for one thing ... and ... they kept beating on me."

Erbecker (Gertrude's attorney) asked, "You could have told the neighbors about this, couldn't you?"

Jenny, near tears again, answered, "yes, but that doesn't mean I wanted her to die."

Likens Trial Jury To Hear Daughter
Indianapolis News, May 7, 1966
In her statement Paula (Baniszewski) said, "In three months I beat Sylvia Marie Likens about 25 times," with a police belt. "I have pushed her down the stairs several times and knocked her down once," the statement read. "I have seen my mom beat Sylvia ... burn Sylvia with a cigarette, and also push her down the steps several times," the statement continued.

Both statements were read aloud to the jury. While Paula's statement was being read, Mrs. Baniszewski turned her head and glared at her daughter.

'I Was Sick,' Says Mrs. Baniszewski
Indianapolis News, May 10, 1966
Mrs. Gertrude Baniszewski said today she had taken so many pills on the day Sylvia Marie Likens died that "I couldn't remember what happened." The 37-year-old woman, one of five on trial for first-degree murder in Sylvia's slaying, said the drugs included "phenobarbital and other medication."

'Kids Kicked, Beat Sylvia': Mrs. Baniszewski
Indianapolis News, May 11, 1966
Gertrude Baniszewski denied she had any part in the torture slaying of Sylvia.

Boy Tells Court of Etching Sylvia
Indianapolis News, May 14, 1966
Richard Hobbs, 15-year-old neighbor of Gertrude Baniszewski, yesterday took the witness stand in his defense and told how he etched words on Sylvia Marie Likens' stomach and how he branded her. "Sylvia was in the basement. ... Gertrude called her upstairs to the kitchen," the boy said. "Somehow the conversation got around to tattooing," Hobbs said.

"Gertrude asked Sylvia whether she knew what a tattoo was"... and she said ..."You branded my children so now I'm going to brand you."

Mrs. Baniszewski selected a sewing needle and told Sylvia to take her clothes off, he said. He said the woman then pulled a chair up in front of Sylvia and wrote the phrase "I am a prostitute and proud of it" on a piece of paper.

Hobbs said the woman scratched the letter I and part of the "M on am" and asked him to finish because she was "getting sick."

"I etched in short light strokes," Hobbs said.

He also said he hit (Sylvia) four or five times during the etching because she "flinched."

2 Women Scuffle For Seat At Trial
Indianapolis News, May 16, 1966
Two women scuffled over a seat at the Sylvia Marie Likens murder trial today and one came off the loser - the lost seat and a cut hand. A big crowd stood outside Criminal Court 2 as the trial entered its fifth week and when the doors were opened at 8:30 a.m., the big rush for the 50 seats was under way.

Court authorities could not explain how the woman received the cut, but she returned after getting first aid.
The courtroom's 50 seats filled up quickly most days, but Judge Rabb sometimes allowed as many as 100 spectators to stand against the walls.
Mrs. Baniszewski Has 2 Sick Spells
Indianapolis News, May 17, 1966
Later, as a court-appointed psychiatrist was testifying, (Gertrude Baniszewski) became ill again and Judge Saul I. Rabb called a recess. The psychiatrist, Dr. Dwight W. Schuster, testified that in his opinion Mrs. Baniszewski was sane Oct. 26, 1965, the date Sylvia's death occurred in her home, 3850 E. New York, and is sane now.

Sylvia's Torture Compared To Nazis' Brutality
Indianapolis News, May 18, 1966
Holding a picture of Sylvia's mutilated body, (Gertrude Baniszewski's lawyer William) Erbecker paced in front of the jury box asking, "Is that the actions of a sane and normal person or the actions of a person who has lost contact with reality?"

He said, "How can anybody look at that woman and say she's sane?

"You'll have to live with your conscience the rest of your life if you send an insane woman to the electric chair."

2 Sob As They Get Life Terms In Likens Case
Indianapolis News, May 24, 1966
Gertrude Baniszewski, 37, and her 18-year-old daughter Paula, this afternoon were sentenced to life imprisonment. ...

Mrs. Baniszewski's 13-year old son, John Stephen, and two neighborhood boys, Coy Hubbard, 15, and Richard Hobbs, 15, all were sentenced to 2-to-21 year terms at the State Reformatory on manslaughter charges.

Mrs. Baniszewski and her two children who were convicted burst into tears when Judge Rabb read the sentences. Mrs. Baniszewski, sobbing audibly, held John Stephen in her arms.

Then what happened?

In 1966 Star reporter John Dean, who covered the trial, wrote a book about it, "The Indiana Torture Slaying," which sold 125,000 copies. Dean later became a lawyer, and he changed his name to Natty Bumppo. He practices in Brownsville, Ky.

Richard Dean Hobbs, Coy Hubbard and John Stephen Baniszewski were released from the State Reformatory in Pendleton on Feb. 27, 1968. Hobbs died four years later of cancer. Hubbard married and had five children and died in 2007. John Stephen Baniszewski died in 2005.

In 1971, the Indiana Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Gertrude and Paula, saying that jurors had been prejudiced by publicity and that the trials should have been held separately. At a second trial Gertrude was again convicted of first-degree murder. She was paroled in 1985. She changed her name to Nadine Van Fossan and moved to Iowa and died of lung cancer in 1990.

Paula pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in August 1971. She was released from prison on Dec. 6, 1972. In October 2012 a school district in Conrad, Iowa, received an anonymous tip. One of its teacher's aides, 14-year veteran Paula Pace, described by The Star as "a quiet and friendly woman who often helped students," was previously Paula Baniszewski from Indianapolis. Pace/Baniszewski was promptly fired.

Jenny Likens married and had a son and a daughter and lived in Beech Grove. She died in June 2004.

In June 2001, a memorial to Sylvia Likens, a 6-foot granite block, was unveiled in Willard Park, 1700 E. Washington St. Several hundred people attended the dedication ceremony, including Fred Lawrence, a high school classmate of Sylvia's who on Oct. 26, 1965, happened to be walking past the Baniszewski house as Sylvia's body was carried out. "She's always been on my mind," Lawrence told The Star.

In 2008 a film about Sylvia Likens' murder, "An American Crime," aired on Showtime.

The Baniszewski house, which was frequently vacant and had become a neighborhood nuisance by drawing curiosity seekers, was demolished in April 2009. "I'm glad they leveled it," Mary Weaver told The Star. She lived down the block and as a child knew Sylvia Likens. "Maybe now she'll be at peace."

In May 2015, Sylvia's older sister Dianna Bedwell, who as Dianna Shoemaker had tried to check on Sylvia in the weeks before Sylvia's death, got lost driving in a remote area of California with her husband while on their way to their son's house. They were found two weeks later. She was taken to a local hospital for treatment. Her husband, Cecil Knutson, was dead. He died of a heart attack.
Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.

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Retro Indy: The Murder of Sylvia Likens, as told over 50 years ago

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This story was originally published in 2015. On Oct. 26, 1965, Indianapolis police were called to a home on East New York Street where they found the body of a 16-year-old girl. A coroner later counted 150 wounds on the body. The girl was Sylvia Likens.

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MURDERED: Sylvia Likens | Crime Junkie Podcast

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Syliva Likens was a beautiful, happy teenager until her parents left her in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski while they went on the road to work.

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By Dr. Noelle Trent

Director of Interpretation, Collections and Education

Frederick Douglass, an icon of American history, was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland in 1818. Born a slave, Douglass escaped to freedom in his early twenties. He rose to fame with the 1845 publication of his first book The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself. He fought throughout most of his career for the abolition of slavery and worked with notable abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Gerrit Smith. However, Douglass's fight for reform extended beyond the fight for abolition.

In 1848 he was one of a few men to attend the Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, this convention gave birth to the women's movement in the United States. During the Civil War, he advocated for the use of African American soldiers in the Union Army and would later become a recruiter for the United States Colored Troops. Douglass regarded the Civil War as the fight to end slavery, but like many free blacks he urged President Lincoln to emancipate the slaves as a means of insuring that slavery would never again exist in the United States. Immediately after the war, Douglass advocated for Constitutional amendments that would permanently change the status of African Americans in the United States. The change in the status of African Americans came in the form of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments which granted African Americans citizenship and the right to vote.

One of the major ways Douglass advocated for change was through his newspapers. In the early part of his career he worked for William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. In 1847 Douglass moved to Rochester, New York to publish his own newspaper The North Star. Through a merger in 1851, Douglass created a new newspaper entitled Frederick Douglass' Paper. In 1859, he began publishing a monthly paper entitled Douglass's Monthly. Due to the Civil War and his efforts to recruit black soldiers for the Union Army, Douglass stopped printing his newspapers in 1863. His last newspaper, The New National Era, was published from 1870 to 1874.

During and beyond Reconstruction, Douglass's advocacy would take on a different form as he used his appointments to demonstrate the capabilities of African Americans. In 1874, Douglass was appointed President of the Freedman's Savings & Trust Co., also known as the Freedman's Bank. Freedman's Bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress to educate and handle the finances of recently freed people. When Douglass became president, he was unaware of the bank's internal mismanagement; the bank closed four months into his presidency. Despite the bank's failure, Douglass believed that it demonstrated the willingness and ability of African Americans to manage their personal finances. In 1877, Douglass was appointed U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia. From 1889 - 1891 he served as U.S. Minister Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti. All of his positions, regardless of their successes and failures demonstrated African Americans could serve in the higher levels of government.

Douglass's advocacy for all people continued until his death in 1895. On February 20, 1895 after speaking at a local women's convention, he passed away in his mansion in Washington, DC. The legacy of Frederick Douglass was captured by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

"The life of Frederick Douglass is part of the legend of America. As a successful fighter for freedom a century ago, he can give inspiration to people all around the world who are still struggling to secure their full human rights. That struggle must go on until those rights are everywhere secured. By advancing that cause through law, democratic methods and peaceful action, we in America can give an example of the freedom which Frederick Douglass symbolizes."

On Friday, February 5, at 6:00pm, the National Civil Rights Museum presents "Frederick Douglass: The Making of an American Prophet," a concert theatrical about the great American abolitionist and social reformer, Frederick Douglass. The dramatization is preceded by a reception at 5:30, and followed by a panel discussion with Rhodes College History professor, Tim Huebner, and the museum's Director of Interpretation, Collections and Education and Frederick Douglass scholar, Dr. Noelle Trent.

The performance is a powerful story of Frederick Douglass, the American slave who escaped to freedom and became one of the most prominent abolitionists of his day, famous for his fiery oratory. It details Douglass' early years as a slave and the relationship to his later vision.

The production is free and open to the public. Online registration is encouraged.

Sources

Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass, New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Philip Foner, Frederick Douglass, A Biography, New York: Citadel Press, 1964.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself, 1845.

Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History, 1881.

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855.

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Frederick Douglass: Abolitionist, Journalist, Reformer, 1818 - 1895

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By Dr. Noelle Trent Director of Interpretation, Collections and Education Frederick Douglass, an icon of American history, was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland in 1818. Born a slave, Douglass escaped to freedom in his early twenties.

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He escaped from slavery, and helped rescue America.

Frederick Douglass, who has been called the greatest American of the nineteenth century, grew up as a slave named Frederick Bailey, and the story of how he named himself in freedom shows how complicated his life, and his world, always was. Frederick's father, as David W. Blight shows in his extraordinary new biography, " Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom " (Simon & Schuster), was almost certainly white, as Douglass knew early on, and there is something almost cruelly parodic in the grand name the child slave was given: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Escaping to freedom in 1838, at the age of twenty, and needing a new name-in part as a declaration of a reinvented self, in part for the practical necessity of eluding the slave-catchers-he chose to become Frederick Douglass, in honor of a character in a Walter Scott poem. (He added an extra "s" for distinction.)

What's curious is that this was a completely Southern choice, a tribute to the culture he was escaping. The South, as Mark Twain protested at length, had long been hostage to a cult of Walter Scott's neo-medievalism, one of the opiates of Southern "gallantry" that justified the concentration-camp culture as a leisurely and gracious one, a myth so durable that it shaped the most successful American movie ever made, " Gone with the Wind." But the choice is also a reminder that the wind in Romanticism, and in Walter Scott, could blow both ways, toward liberal nationalism and self-renewal as well as toward feudal nostalgia and hierarchy. Douglass's new name was as much a rejection of his slave name as was Malcolm X's rejection of his birth name, Little-but in this case the chosen name denoted not an absence but a presence. The name he chose inscribed him within a cultural tradition that he had been forced to inherit and chose to remake. This insistence on seeing past the evils of the Enlightenment in search of the light that was still left there made him one of the most radical readers of the American nineteenth century. No one was ever a more critical reader of the Constitution, or, in the end, a more compelling advocate of its virtues.

With Douglass, then, we have everything and its opposite-the slave wielding a sword of vengeance against the South who adopted the South's mythology for his own; the militant prophet of the truth that no compromise with slavery was possible who became a central pillar of pragmatic politics in the postwar era. In telling this great story, Blight, a historian at Yale, confronts one great difficulty: Douglass himself wrote his own life three times, each time thrillingly well, though each time with a slightly different purpose. Like the Gospels, each is written with a different ideological agenda. In 1845, " Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," was written as a straightforward abolitionist horror story, albeit an exceptionally humane and potent one. Ten years later came " My Bondage and My Freedom," a fuller and more nuanced-novelistic account of the same story. And then, in 1881, when he was in his sixties, he published " Life and Times of Frederick Douglass," in which this man, who had watched the ships go by in the Chesapeake Bay with a desperate sense of disbelief that anyone or anything in the world could be so free, was able to report on his journeys to Cairo and Paris and his reception in both as a man of state and of letters.

The prose style in the three memoirs alters under the pressure of the changing agenda: the first time pained and urgent, the second subtler and more considered, the last orotund and outward. Yet, as Blight shows, the tale Douglass wove about himself, from the first to the last volume, is remarkably faithful to what can be dug up independently about the facts of his early life. So Blight's biography, particularly in its early pages, is necessarily a kind of palimpsest: he dives back and forth beneath Douglass's texts, sifting and sorting and weaving.

The story, simply told, is that Douglass was largely spared the worst of slavery by inhabiting its more familial edges, at a time when who owned you and where you were owned shaped the course of your life as someone else's property. After he had been passed from his brutal first master to the man's kinder son-in-law, Thomas Auld, the transforming event of Douglass's life was his arrival in Baltimore, at the age of eight, to live with members of Auld's family. City slaves were better treated than country slaves. "A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on a plantation," Douglass wrote. "He is a desperate slaveholder who will shock the humanity of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave." As a child, he had, unusually, been treated more or less as an equal playmate of his first master's son, and soon Sophia Auld, the wife of Thomas's brother, began to teach him to read and write.

Absolute power, even when well meant, always becomes arbitrary. Sophia first took immense pleasure at Frederick's celerity as a pupil, and then, under the pressure of her husband's disapproval ("If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him"), turned violently against the boy's education. Frederick persisted, trading bits of bread with street urchins for secret reading lessons. Here, as elsewhere in his life, he defeated the expected racism of his fellows by the sheer magnetism of his manner.

He was also able to take advantage of the oppressor's hypocrisy: slavery being a Christian institution, it was important to expose the slaves to the Gospels. This meant that the innocent business of studying the Bible could be turned to the subversive aim of acquiring literacy. Having learned to read by literally buying words, Douglass had an intense sense of the power of language, of the double meanings of individual words; irony was ingrained in him. He heard the word "abolition," for instance, as a mysterious, forbidden incantation; he didn't know precisely what "abolition" meant, but he could tell from the murmur around it that it mattered enormously.

He loved Baltimore, but was wrenched out of it when he was fifteen and sent a year later to be "broken" in the backwoods by a cruel overseer named Edward Covey. Making up his mind that he would die trying to sustain his manhood, he attacked Covey, with the result, by no means guaranteed, that Covey backed off. Douglass thought this a proof of the powers of resistance, but he also knew that such resistance usually brought instant death or else shipment down to the plantations of the Deep South-a living death. In fact, he was shipped off to the backwoods, where he tried and failed to escape. Then a remarkable piece of good fortune came his way. Auld, for reasons still mysterious-from humanity or guilt or a buried sense of kinship?-meekly took him back to Baltimore and promised to free him after a seven-year hitch. It was, as Douglass came to recognize, the great salvation of his life. In 1848, he wrote an open letter to Auld, saying, "I entertain no malice toward you personally. . . . There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. . . . I am your fellow-man, but not your slave. " That letter was a kind of propaganda piece, to show the slave's moral superiority to his master, but it was sincere as well as shrewd.

In Baltimore that second, salvaged time, he fell in love with a free black woman, Anna Murray. It is still a little hallucinatory to be reminded that, in the border states, free blacks, second-class citizens but citizens still, lived side by side with those who were property. Murray emboldened Douglass to escape and he fled to freedom disguised as a sailor. The account of his flight north stops one's heart to read, so near did he come to apprehension. (A worker whom he knew from the docks saw him, recognized him, and-kept silent.)

In 1841, three years after he got a job as a laborer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he made a name speaking at the local A.M.E. Zion church, he was brought to an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, a booming whaling port, and made an impromptu speech that changed history. No one had ever heard an ex-slave speak with such precision and eloquence about his experiences. The eminent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his followers pressed him into service as a speaker, and Douglass spent the next fifteen years riding trains from one abolition meeting to the next while Anna, now his wife, who had come north after him, waited in New Bedford and raised an ever-growing crop of children. (They had five in all, including three sons who served in the Civil War, one of them surviving, improbably, the massacre of Robert Gould Shaw's regiment at Fort Wagner.)

Like many other young and still unformed activists who discover in themselves a gift for oratory, Douglass had to self-educate even as he was speaking. Young orators' tongues are formed before their minds are set. This happened to Martin Luther King, Jr., who had to inhabit a leadership position that he was not yet fully prepared to assume, as it did to Emma Goldman, an immigrant girl who became Red Emma almost before she mastered English. (In a more benevolent manner, it happened to Barack Obama -one eloquent speech turning him from a relatively green politician into a plausible Presidential candidate.) In each case, the challenge is to keep one's independence, and one's head, as others are trying to turn you into their megaphone.

Douglass passed from slave to celebrity in about a year and remained one for the rest of his life. He began the small list of people who are, in effect, the face of their movement. Gloria Steinem was not the most important feminist thinker of her time, or its most significant organizer, but she was the face of American feminism, for a reason. She embodied the reality, confounding to sexists, that a woman who looked like her could be a radical egalitarian about gender. Douglass embodied the reality, confounding to racists, that a black man could be charismatic, imposing, educated, and a voice for absolute emancipation. Douglass's charisma-along with his good looks-wasn't incidental. He was one of the most photographed men of the nineteenth century, as photogenic as Jack Kennedy a century later. In the photographic portraits (collected and contextualized in a 2015 volume titled " Picturing Frederick Douglass "), he sometimes looks like a fiercer George Washington-Roman nose, intense scowl of virtue, swept-back classical hair. In a new culture of reproduced images, these things counted.

Douglass's personal charisma involved, too, an unashamed sexual presence. His slave narratives are strikingly frank about the terrible erotics of slavery, and of black-white race relations, in a way that would not be acceptable in progressive discussions of race until the nineteen-sixties. In his first two memoirs, he writes bluntly about forced sexual relations between slave and master, and what perverse family relations they produced, including the fact that rape was turning the black slave population half white:

If the lineal descendants of Ham are only to be enslaved, according to the scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become an unscriptural institution; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who-like myself-owe their existence to white fathers and, most frequently, to their masters, and masters' sons. The slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master. The thoughtful know the rest.

His early memoirs find a balance between outrage and subtle irony-those angry, understated phrases: "an unscriptural institution"; "the thoughtful know the rest"-in describing the wrenching effects of slavery on the human soul. Pointing out that one would expect slave masters to be kind to their own children, he coolly analyzes the truth: "Men do not love those who remind them of their sins unless they have a mind to repent-and the mulatto child's face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child. What is still worse, perhaps, such a child is a constant offense to the wife. She hates its very presence." What would be a buried subject in most American writing about black-white relations was with Douglass overt, in a way that must have intimidated his followers and inflamed his haters.

Four relationships-three with white American men, one with a European woman-shaped Douglass's mature life and mind. He had a tutelary and then an adversarial relation with William Lloyd Garrison; then an admiring and allergic relation with John Brown; next, a prophet-and-politician relation with Abraham Lincoln; and, finally, a deep, romantic relation with a woman named Ottilie Assing. (Throughout this time he made his living, as best he could, as a miscellaneous journalist, beginning an anti-slavery weekly first called, poetically, the North Star and then, tellingly, changed, for branding purposes, to Frederick Douglass' Paper.)

The story of Douglass's relationship with Garrison is one of the key stories in American political history. They met and became friends at that 1841 gathering in Nantucket. Garrison, the most famous abolitionist of the period, was the headliner when Douglass was asked to tell the story of his life. Overwhelmed by Douglass's eloquence, Garrison asked the crowd, "Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property or a man?" Douglass went on the road as a Garrisonite.

Less than a decade later, they broke, bitterly and for life. Some of the bitterness arose from Douglass's uneasy sense that he was not so much being used as being put on display. One wonders if Ralph Ellison was aware of Douglass's relationship with Garrison when, in " Invisible Man," he wrote about his unnamed narrator's relationship with "the Brotherhood," a version of the Communist Party. They're strangely similar: the black man discovers a gift for oratory, is instantly pressed into propaganda service by a white radical organization, and has a deeply ambivalent relation with his new white friends, who are just a little too much like his old white masters.

Douglass's break with Garrison also derived from a decisive intellectual difference, one that still sculpts American politics-with the irony that the white crusader was the more conventionally radical actor, and the black ex-slave seemingly the more "moderate." Garrison was both a pacifist and a moral secessionist. He believed that the Constitution was so deeply implicated in slavery-including its creation of the small-state-favoring Senate-that it could not be salvaged. Douglass came to believe that the Constitution was a good document gone wrong-that, in its democratic premises, it breathed freedom, and that it needed only to be amended to be restored to its first purposes.

Douglass most forcefully offered this insistence in his 1852 "Fourth of July" speech in Rochester. It is a masterpiece of startling argumentative twists. He begins with unstinting praise of the values and character of the Founding Fathers-the only forewarning of dissent being his speaking of the events of the seventeen-seventies in the second person: your Founders did this . . . your history says that. Then he makes his thundering turn: "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie." Finally, he makes a still more surprising swerve, back toward the American center: the Constitution is solid, all that needs fixing is our way of reading it. "Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither."

The constitutional issue was, and remains, epic. All of American liberalism remains at stake in this choice-it is what divides Obama from Cornel West and his other critics on the left. For Garrison, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to abandon it. For Douglass, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to re-state the aim more forcefully and more inclusively. If the aim was in the document, the arc could yet be completed. He thought the aim was there, and the arc was possible.

The philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams, an astute reader of Douglass, sees him as drawn to the "possibility of refounding the Union on the basis of a reconstituted practice of citizenship." Douglass's belief in the integrity of the American Constitution made him, ironically, less willing to wait for legislative remedies and readier to use violence against the slave establishment. This became Lincoln's reasoning, too, evident in his legendary speech at Cooper Union, in 1860: the historical evidence showed that the signers of the Constitution considered slavery a national question, up for national debate. It wasn't a local or a states'-rights question. Wrongly decided once, it was still on the agenda of the nation as a whole. In the name of the Constitution, slavery was to be assaulted frontally. (How frontally Lincoln could not decide, until events overtook him as President.) For Douglass, this urge to fight for principle, while making sure that the fight could be won, shaped his strange push-and-pull relationship with John Brown, in itself a mini American epic.

As Blight relates, Douglass was, in the eighteen-fifties, drawn by Brown's courage during the Kansas question-the question of whether slavery was to extend into the new territories-and by the implacable nature of his antislavery views. Where even the Garrisonites condescended to blacks, Brown, as the Harvard historian John Stauffer showed in " The Black Hearts of Men" (2002), envied the courage and "manhood" of the escaped slaves, and was almost ashamed of his own whiteness. Yet Douglass was repelled by Brown's fanaticism: morally clear-eyed on the subject of slavery, Brown was crazy on the subject of what to do about slavery, moved by bloodlusts and Biblicism and incapable of reasoning about means and ends. Douglass dallied with Brown and then, abruptly, withdrew his support from the Harper's Ferry raid. Simple arithmetic, he saw, meant that it would achieve nothing and endanger the lives of any slaves who participated. Violent means would be necessary, but violence was justified only when it had a chance to prevail.

After the disaster of Harper's Ferry, some officials in New York tried to have Douglass arrested as a conspirator, and he prudently fled, first to Canada and then to Britain. It was a mistake on the part of his persecutors to force him into exile, however temporary. A huge hit as a lecturer in England and Scotland, he rallied the already strong antislavery forces there.

Moral consensus can shift with enormous rapidity. Not so very long ago, it was acceptable to cast the American Civil War as a tragic clash between two decent sides. In Ken Burns 's 1990 PBS series on the war, Shelby Foote declared, speaking through his soft beard with his gentle drawl, that the problem was that the North and the South somehow couldn't find a compromise. It has since become harder to deny the truth that slavery was the sole cause of the war. What made war inevitable, then, was the election of President Lincoln, a single-issue candidate who had made his name by calling for an end to slavery's extension and by recognizing it as an absolute evil. The one conceivable compromise that might have been tried was a gradual program of subsidized emancipation, but, as Lincoln discovered from his correspondence in early 1861 with Alexander Stephens, the eventual Vice-President of the Confederacy, the Southern ruling class had made up its mind: slavery or secession.

While slavery was the war's sole cause, however, it was not the war's sole or even its most important rallying cry. To the antislavery cause was added the pro-Union cause, a narrowly nationalist crusade. This aspect of the President's war-making is why Edmund Wilson impatiently compared Lincoln to Bismarck-both seen as iron-hearted nationalists who taught their people to die for the idea of national greatness. And there's no doubt that "We won't let you Rebs walk away with our one country!" was a more motivating cry at Gettysburg than "You must never again keep slaves!"

Douglass came to see that Lincoln had wrapped the right cause around the wrong cry. The ingenuity of the Gettysburg Address as a forensic argument lies in the way it made the two causes-nationalism and emancipation-seem one. The nation was born in the view that all men are created equal; slavery denies that view; if we lose the war, it shows the world that a nation with that premise cannot survive unfragmented; and therefore fighting for the Union is the same thing as fighting for its first principles. Douglass admired the somewhat sophistic logic.

During the war years, he spent a surprising amount of intellectual energy opposing what now seems to us an obvious chimera-a plan to resettle ex-slaves outside the United States, in Central America or the West Indies or Africa. Though Lincoln sometimes seemed sympathetic to this idea, "colonization" was always unrealistic. But it wasn't inherently a racist scheme, and not a few black leaders, including the great abolitionist Martin R. Delany, advocated what was, in effect, a form of black Zionism. Why, then, did Douglass think it so important to battle? It was because Douglass saw culture and civilization almost entirely in what we now call Eurocentric terms. He took his language and his lore and his moral categories from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott. He did not see these as the alien property of white people. He thought they were his, to own and to alter.

Douglass's relationship with Lincoln throughout the war has been beautifully detailed in " Giants " (2008), another book by John Stauffer, and Blight largely follows the same outlines of the dance between crusader and politician. Douglass was at first impatient and mistrustful of Lincoln, became somewhat more empathetic concerning his political struggles, and ended being a full-hearted admirer, enthralled by the intended scope of emancipation. Lincoln, for his part, came to understand that Douglass's moral vision was impeccably correct-and a critical undergirding for Lincoln's increasingly militant views. At the second Inauguration, Lincoln greeted Douglass at the White House reception not as "Mr. Douglass" but as "my friend."

It was during these years that Douglass brought his fascination with the European Romantics to a head, by becoming involved with one. Ottilie Assing was a German intellectual who came to Hoboken in the eighteen-fifties. Although her father's origins were Jewish, she considered herself German, and at a time when German in America was what Jewish would be later: the crucial liberal ethnicity. She interviewed the famous ex-slave in his Rochester home in 1856, fell passionately in love with him, even sometimes sharing the home with Anna and the rest of the Douglass family.

Douglass's biographers, including Blight, are uneasy about this relationship. On the one hand, our feminist principles want to make of Assing a model European woman of mind, a suitable intellectual partner for Douglass, a Harriet Taylor to his John Stuart Mill-which indeed she was, broadening his knowledge of, among other things, German poetry and philosophy. At the same time, the characterization feels unkind toward Anna Douglass, who had taken unimaginable risks in order to help Frederick escape slavery. Though Blight is cautious about drawing firm conclusions, it seems clear that Douglass and Assing had an erotic relationship. She wrote to her sister about how happy she was, even though the "external situation remains less than perfect"; and she wrote also of how it feels "when one stands in such intimate relation with one man, as is the case with me in relation to Douglass." When, later, she went back to Europe, she had his letters burned, and eventually committed suicide by cyanide, at least in part from loneliness.

She brought poetry into his life in every sense-with the reading she shared but also through the rich fantasy she created in which they would start a free, itinerant life together in Europe. As Blight writes, "Ottilie almost never gave up on her quest of drawing Douglass off to a new life in Europe; like spring itself, it was her annual recurring fantasy." This plan never seems to have existed at more than the level of fantasy-but then the level of fantasy is one of the most important levels at which things can exist. Elsewhere, she compared herself to another Ottilie, in a Goethe novel, who, Blight notes, "finds a tragic fate due to a form of spiritual adultery." We can overlook how exhausting commitment to a great cause can be, and Douglass had become bound to his. The dream of escape to the Alps with Ottilie was something to be free for.

Douglass's political life after the war's end and Lincoln's assassination may seem anticlimactic, and yet in many respects it is as important as what preceded it. He became, in one view, a conventional party politician. But there is a more positive way to see this migration from militancy. Stauffer's "Giants" showed us how much Douglass's prophetic force poked and prodded Lincoln toward righteousness, but Douglass himself was deeply affected by Lincoln's example of the power of liberal party politics to make real change happen. He became a proud pillar of the Republican Party-essentially, the same baggy assemblage of minorities and progressives and city people (and neoliberals) that we find in the Democratic Party today. Even as Reconstruction failed and Jim Crow overtook the South-a reality that Douglass spoke up against as passionately as he had spoken up against slavery-he devoted most of his time to the construction of black institutions. He helped build colleges; there was also a Freedman's Savings Bank, which, sadly, failed after he had agreed to run it. He received (to the dismay of many black contemporaries) a patronage post, as the U.S. Marshal of Washington, D.C., and was not above passing along a bit of juice to friends and family.

Blight has certainly written, in the book's texture and density and narrative flow-one violent and provocative incident arriving right after another-a great American biography. But when it comes to the postwar Douglass he perhaps succumbs to a moral anxiety that seems endemic in American academia, taking an ambivalent tone about Douglass's seemingly more conventional postwar path, and about aspects of Douglass's engagement with other kinds of liberation movements.

This is particularly true of his engagement with women's suffrage. We would have liked the struggles against the subjugation of women and of blacks to swim along in tandem. And to some degree they did. Douglass was one of the few men present at Seneca Falls in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped launch the modern American feminist movement. "The history of the world has given to us many sublime undertakings, but none more sublime than this," he said later. "It was a great thing for humane people to organize in opposition to slavery; but it was a much greater thing, in view of all the circumstances, for woman to organize herself in opposition to her exclusion from participation in government." (A greater thing, he thought, because it was less self-evidently cruel and more insidiously oppressive.) But, as the war ended and the eighteen-sixties progressed, there were deep differences between them, which, by our standards, were flattering to neither.

Douglass insisted that the Fifteenth Amendment and other protections of black suffrage were essential, even if they excluded women. In 1866, he wrote that, with women, "it is a desirable matter; with us it is important; a question of life and death," and he made reference to recent massacres of unprotected "free" blacks in New Orleans and Memphis. Later in the decade, he insisted, "When women, because they are women . . . are dragged from their houses and are hung from lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains bashed out upon the pavement . . . then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own." Northern middle-class white women, in this view, were free riders on the black man's struggle for liberation, with incomparably lower risks. Their "husbands, fathers, and brothers" could already protect them. (Intersectionality having not yet arrived, neither Douglass nor the white suffragists talked much about the special predicament of black women.)

Stanton, like her fellow-campaigner Susan B. Anthony, thought that Douglass failed to grasp that they were not a minority seeking protection by the ballot but a majority forever excluded from any exercise of political power, and declared that a government with the participation of black men as well as white men would merely "multiply the tyrants." They were incensed by the condescension they detected in him. And both Douglass and Stanton felt free to use the Drunken Pat argument, asking why the feckless, inebriated Irish immigrant had the vote when-depending on who was arguing-black men or white women didn't. None of it is to our taste: Douglass insulted women, Stanton insulted blacks, and both felt free to insult the Irish.

Yet we need to be charitable about the moral failings of our ancestors-not as an act of charity to them but as an act of charity to ourselves. Our own unconscious assumptions and cultural habits are doubtless just as impregnated with bias as theirs were. We should be kind to them, as we ask the future to be kind to us. To take a small example from this biography: Blight celebrates Douglass's escape from the South to the whaling town of New Bedford, where he first came into contact with the broader abolitionist circles. He doesn't mention the fascinating figures of the black whaling captains, whaling being one of the rare professions in pre-Civil War life where black men were sometimes trusted in positions of command. But the whalers participated in acts of unimaginable cruelty inflicted on creatures capable of feeling pain and fear-and future generations might well become as intolerant of cruelty to animals as we are of cruelty to people. As for the ethnic joking that pains Blight, it was an assertion of Americanness: no longer an outsider, Douglass could make after-dinner jokes about the Irish, right along with the rest of his countrymen. (To add to the pile of ironies, in 1884, a couple of years after Anna's death, he married another women's-rights campaigner, and a patrician white one at that, Helen Pitts, previously his secretary. Like Assing, she was fiercely devoted to him, and they did the world travelling that had been mere fantasy before.)

Much of the last two decades of Douglass's long life, before his death, in 1895, was spent on a kind of permanent victory tour, receiving honors while exasperating younger black leaders who, in the time-honored tradition, thought that the grand old man was far too grand and far too old to do the necessary work. But he never became morally inert. In 1877, Douglass sought out Thomas Auld, who was dying, to forgive him. "Frederick," Auld said, "I always knew you were too smart to be a slave, and had I been in your place, I should have done as you did." "I did not run away from you," Douglass replied. "I ran away from slavery."

That the distinction seems less clear to us-what was Auld but the living face of slavery?-than it did to Douglass is a sign of the complexity of the relationship, and also of the power of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness to penetrate a sensitive mind. For Douglass identified himself as a Christian throughout his life, and his gesture reminds us that slaves absorbed and reimagined the religion of their oppressors in their own morally original terms, as a permanent bulwark against persecution. Even during the reign of white terror that replaced the plantation concentration camps, the black church became the chief reservoir of social capital, and remained so right through Dr. King's time-one more way in which Douglass's life encompassed so much of what was to come.

In the end, Douglass fascinates us because he embodies all the contradictions of the black experience in America. A case can be made for him as the progenitor of the pragmatic-progressive strain that leads to Dr. King and, even more, to Bayard Rustin and Obama-disabused of illusions, but insistent that with time the Constitution can be realized in its fullness and that democratic politics are the way to do it. This Douglass is the friend of Lincoln, the man who sustained the necessary relations with institutional power-as Dr. King would do, however guardedly, with Kennedy and then with Johnson. Douglass understood that African-Americans were too small a minority to act without allies. A related pragmatism, prominent in his later writings, became the model of "self-reliance" of the kind that inspires one conservative strain of African-American thought, from Booker T. Washington to Clarence Thomas.

Yet Douglass can also be seen as the father of the most militant strain of resistance, the kind that insists on the uncompromising rejection of racism, with violence as a recourse when necessary. His confrontation with the brutal slave-breaker Covey is still a model of "manhood," of self-assertion in defiance of death. Lincoln remains the saint of American democracy, yet his ascent from the backwoods to the White House was, for all its rigors, a far easier ride. Lincoln read in the midst of farming chores; Douglass learned to read at the risk of his life. He had farther to go, and went wider in getting there. Such are the multitudes he contains; he is far from a nineteenth-century figure alone. In his legacy as prophetic radical and political pragmatist, in the almost unimaginable bravery of his early journey and the resilience of his later career, in his achievements as a writer, activist, crusader, intellectual, father, and man, the claim that he was the greatest figure that America has ever produced seems hard to challenge. ♦

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The Prophetic Pragmatism of Frederick Douglass

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He escaped from slavery, and helped rescue America.

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Born into slavery in February 1818, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) became one of the most outspoken advocates of abolition and women's rights in the 19 th century. Believing that "Right is of no sex, truth is of no color," Douglass urged an immediate end to slavery and supported Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other women's rights activists in their crusade for woman suffrage.

In his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, Douglass recounted his childhood as a slave in Maryland, detailing all the cruel treatment to which he and other slaves were subjected. In 1838 Douglass escaped from bondage and fled to New York City. His autobiography described the joy he felt upon his arrival in the North:

I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free State. I have never been able to answer the question with any satisfaction to myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate.

Douglass joined the abolitionist movement in 1841 and put his considerable oratorical skills to work as a speaker for the American Anti-Slavery Society. By 1847 he had moved to Rochester, NY, where he published the North Star, a weekly abolitionist newspaper.

Douglass was also active with the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, and it was through this organization that he met Elizabeth M'Clintock. In July of 1848, M'Clintock invited Douglass to attend the First Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY. Douglass readily accepted, and his participation at the convention revealed his commitment to woman suffrage. In an issue of the North Star published shortly after the convention, Douglass wrote,

In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman; and if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is, that "Right is of no sex."

Douglass continued to support the cause of women after the 1848 convention. In 1866 Douglass, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, founded the American Equal Rights Association, an organization that demanded universal suffrage. Though the group disbanded just three years later due to growing tension between women's rights activists and Africa-American rights activists, Douglass remained influential in both movements, championing the cause of equal rights until his death in 1895.

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Frederick Douglass - Women's Rights National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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Born into slavery in February 1818, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) became one of the most outspoken advocates of abolition and women's rights in the 19 th century. Believing that "Right is of no sex, truth is of no color," Douglass urged an immediate end to slavery and supported Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.

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Back to Frederick Douglass Exhibit

Who was Frederick Douglass?

Frederick Douglass in his library

Committed to freedom, Douglass dedicated his life to achieving justice for all Americans, in particular African-Americans, women, and minority groups. He envisioned America as an inclusive nation strengthened by diversity and free of discrimination.

Douglass served as advisor to presidents. Abraham Lincoln referred to him as the most meritorious man of the nineteenth century. In his later years Douglass was appointed to several offices. He served as U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia during Rutherford B. Hayes' administration and President James Garfield appointed him the District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds. In 1889 President Benjamin Harrison appointed him to be the US minister to Haiti. He was later appointed by President Grant to serve as secretary of the commission of Santo Domingo. Douglass had hoped that his appointments would open doors for other African-Americans, but it was many years before they would follow in his footsteps.

Frederick Douglass rose from slavery to become the leading African-American voice of the nineteenth century. At an early age, he realized that his ability to read was the key to freedom. All of his efforts from then on focused on achieving freedom. As a young man, he came into contact with black preachers and taught in the Sabbath School in Baltimore. Here he refined his reading, writing, and speaking skills. At age twenty, Douglass escaped north to freedom. He settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts with his wife Anna Murray Douglass and joined the abolitionist movement.

William Lloyd Garrison

Frederick Douglass was a compelling force in the anti-slavery movement. A man of moral authority, Douglass developed into a charismatic public speaker. Prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison recognized his oratory skill and hired him as a speaker for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

Wendell Phillips

Douglass worked with many notable abolitionists of the nineteenth century including Wendell Phillips and Abby Kelley. Douglass also had a close relationship with John Brown and his family but disagreed with Brown's violent tactics, dramatically displayed in Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859. With the abolishment of slavery at the close of the Civil War, Douglass then turned his attention to the full integration of the African-American into political and
economic life of the United States.

Fredreick Douglass

The antislavery crusade of the early nineteenth century served as a training ground for the women's suffrage movement. Douglass actively supported the women's rights movement, yet he believed black men should receive suffrage first. Demonstrating his support for women's rights, Douglass participated in the first feminist convention at Seneca Falls in July of 1848 where he was largely responsible for passage of the motion to support female suffrage.

Together with abolitionist and feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Douglass signed the Declaration of Sentiments that became the movement's manifesto. His masthead of his newspaper, the North Star, once read "Right is of no Sex - Truth is of no Color." A women's rights activist to the end, Douglass died in February 1895, having just attended a Woman's Council meeting.

This information was reproduced from a National Parks Service exhibit and is used with permission.

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Digital History enhances history teaching and research through primary sources, an online textbook, extensive reference resources, and interactive materials.

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Main Content

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818 along the Eastern Shore of Maryland. During his childhood, the wife of one of his owners taught Douglass the alphabet. Later, she was forbidden to continue because slave literacy was illegal in Maryland. Undeterred, young Douglass taught himself, recognizing that education could be "the pathway from slavery to freedom." 1 Experiencing the cruelty and moral injustices of the institution of slavery, Frederick Douglass successfully fled to the North in 1838 at age twenty by posing as a free black sailor and traveling via the Underground Railroad. Over the next six decades, he worked tirelessly to advocate for enslaved and free African Americans, rising to prominence in the United States government and throughout the entire country.

Upon arrival in New York City in 1838, Douglass was officially a free man, but he was also aware that there was much to be done to free those still in bondage. Douglass relocated to Massachusetts where he attended antislavery meetings and read abolitionist literature. In 1841, Douglass met William Lloyd Garrison, a famous abolitionist and editor of The Liberator, and began working for the cause as an orator-telling his story throughout New England and encouraging the end of slavery. ² After moving to Rochester, New York, in 1843, he and his wife Anna Murray-Douglass began facilitating the movement of enslaved fugitives to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

After publishing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave in 1845 and founding his own antislavery newspaper, The North Star, two years later, Douglass was the most famous African-American man in the country. ³ He decided to break ties with Garrison, his one-time mentor, believing that African Americans should lead the American abolition movement. Meanwhile, his eloquent speeches outlining the moral indignities of slavery garnered national attention, and bolstered the popularity of abolitionism throughout the country. In 1852, Douglass gave what is now his best-known speech, lamenting the state of American racial inequality: "What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?"
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham... There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. ⁴ What, then, has been gained to the anti-slavery cause by the election of Mr. Lincoln? Not much, in itself considered, but very much when viewed in the light of its relations and bearings... Lincoln's election ... has taught the North its strength, and shown the South its weakness. More important still, it has demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency of the United States.⁶
Douglass was also very involved in national politics, and as the presidential election of 1860 approached, he advocated for candidates with strong antislavery platforms. American voters received a ballot crowded with four candidates: Abraham Lincoln (Republican), John C. Breckenridge (Southern Democrat), Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat), and John Bell (Constitutional Union). Douglas's belief in "popular sovereignty," Breckenridge's pro-slavery platform, and Bell's aversion to the issue entirely left Frederick Douglass to endorse Lincoln and the Republicans, whom he believed were more antislavery than the divided Democrats. ⁵ With four primary candidates, a breakaway sect of the Democratic Party, and the hotly contested issue of slavery, the election itself was highly complex. Abraham Lincoln, elected president with less than forty-percent of the popular vote, successfully earned the majority of Electoral College votes. After the election, Frederick Douglass eloquently outlined the benefits of Lincoln's presidency:

At the same time, Lincoln's antislavery sentiments were lacking in the eyes of Douglass. While he is known to many today as the "Great Emancipator," Abraham Lincoln's own views on slavery were more multifaceted and convoluted than that title might imply, evolving significantly during the four years of his presidency. ⁷ Upon his inauguration, his moral outrage toward slavery was clear, but he made no political effort to outline a plan to emancipate millions of enslaved people throughout the country. His opinions often vacillated between the need to end the moral injustices of slavery while also gradually finding the "proper" solution for a country in turmoil. Early in his presidency, he sought to mollify slave states by preserving their constitutional right to maintain the practice of slavery. In many ways, Lincoln's true feelings about slavery were veiled by his desire to maintain the Union. Despite these intentions, his election to the presidency triggered the secession of southern states, and the Civil War began only a few months later in April 1861.

The two leaders shared a complicated relationship during Lincoln's time in office. President Lincoln's support of colonization efforts to displace free black Americans offended and angered Douglass. Lincoln, along with many antislavery politicians, believed that black and white Americans could not peacefully coexist post-emancipation. Thus, he proposed sending freed African Americans to Liberia or Central America-an idea popularized by the American Colonization Society, whose past members included former U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. ⁸ On August 14, 1862, President Lincoln invited a delegation of prominent black leaders (interestingly, this did not include Frederick Douglass) to the White House in order to discuss these ideas. Lincoln's proposition illuminated the limits of his ideas on equality: "It is better for us both to be separated... You may believe you can live in Washington or elsewhere in the United States the remainder of your life... This is (I speak in no unkind sense) an extremely selfish view of the case." 9 Click here to learn more about the enslaved households of President Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham... There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Frederick Douglass published a scathing response in Douglass' Monthly:
In this address Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy... though elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters, Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border Slave States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity.¹⁰
Though highly critical of Lincoln's sluggishness toward emancipation and his support of the racist underpinnings behind colonization, Douglass also respected the president, especially following the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In Douglass' Monthly, he wrote:
Abraham Lincoln... in his own peculiar, cautious, forbearing and hesitating way, slow, but we hope sure, has, while the loyal heart was near breaking with despair, proclaimed and declared: That on the First of January, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand, Eight Hundred and Sixty-three, All Persons Held as Slaves Within Any State or Any Designated Part of a State, The People Whereof Shall Then be in Rebellion Against the United States, Shall be Thenceforward and Forever Free.¹¹
Within the article, Douglass praised President Lincoln for the decision and assured readers of its legitimacy: "Abraham Lincoln may be slow, Abraham Lincoln may desire peace even at the price of leaving our terrible national sore untouched, to fester on for generations, but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature." ¹²

As the Civil War continued to rage, Douglass dedicated himself to recruiting African-American soldiers and encouraging equal pay and treatment for the enlisted. He recruited his sons, Charles and Lewis, to join the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and mass-produced broadsides of his enlistment speech: "Men of Color to Arms!" in March 1863. ¹³ To further his cause, Douglass decided to pay the president a visit at the White House on August 10, 1863. At this meeting, he urged the president to improve the treatment of African-American soldiers fighting to save the country. Douglass offered many critiques on the Union's misconduct toward black soldiers, and the president listened to his requests respectfully with rapt attention. More importantly, Douglass illuminated the importance of African-American enlistment for the Union cause, and Lincoln gave him permission to recruit in the South. ¹⁴

One year later, Douglass was invited back to the White House to discuss Lincoln's emancipation efforts; specifically, the president sought advice on how "to induce the slaves in the rebel States to come within the Federal lines" in order to ensure their freedom-especially with an election on the horizon, which Lincoln feared he might lose. At this meeting, prior tension between the two men began to disappear, and Douglass commented in his autobiography that "What [Lincoln] said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had even seen before in anything spoken or written by him." ¹⁵

After President Lincoln's second inauguration in 1865, Douglass met with him for the last time. Douglass made the trip to Washington, D.C. to hear the president's speech, and later attempted to visit him at the White House. White doorkeepers initially barred his entrance, based solely upon his race. However, Douglass negotiated his way into the East Room, where he was happily received by his foe-turned-friend. There, Lincoln said, "I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd to-day, listening to my inaugural address...Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it." ¹⁶ This meeting, where a formerly-enslaved man was greeted by the American president as a "man among men," resonated with Douglass for the rest of his life. ¹⁷

Less than two months later, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth during a trip to Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. Following his death, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln sent Douglass her husband's "favorite walking staff" in recognition of the relationship between the two men, and the impact that Douglass's advice had had on the president. ¹⁸ Douglass-as Lincoln's friend, critic, and adviser-perhaps best summarized his thoughts about the president during a speech in 1876, given during the unveiling of the Freedman's Monument in the nation's capital:
Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model...He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men... though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.¹⁹

About eight months after Lincoln's assassination, the thirteenth Amendment was ratified, formally abolishing slavery throughout the country. ²⁰ Frederick Douglass continued to fight for racial equality during the Reconstruction era, focusing on African-American voting rights, women's suffrage, and equality for all Americans. Later in his life, he served the country in many different capacities, working in the administrations of Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Benjamin Harrison in various positions including U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia, Recorder of Deeds, and Consul General to Haiti. ²¹ Click here to learn more about the enslaved households of President Ulysses Grant. His legacy is inestimable-a man born into slavery, who became the voice of a movement and a trailblazer who illuminated the path to equality in a time of vast disparity. His death in 1895 ushered in a new era of African-American activism led by intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, who carried the legacy of Douglass's cause forward into an uncertain century.

Special thanks to Ka'mal McClarin at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site for assistance with this article.

This article was originally published December 4, 2019

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Main Content Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818 along the Eastern Shore of Maryland. During his childhood, the wife of one of his owners taught Douglass the alphabet. Later, she was forbidden to continue because slave literacy was illegal in Maryland.

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Frederick Douglass' most important legacy was the use of his words to fight for the freedom and rights of African Americans. He used his oratory and writing skills throughout his life to communicate his desire to free African American slaves which led to the Emancipation Proclamation brought by President Abraham Lincoln. He then advocated for equal rights and opportunities for his fellow Americans as a Civil Rights leader. He published "The North Star" and "Frederick Douglass' Paper to convey his message. He used his oratory skills until the day he died when he came home to his wife after a Women's rights meeting and suddenly died of a massive heart attack. Douglass knew how special he was. Whenever he saw the opportunity, in his speeches and writings, he used his own symbolism against slavery and the dehumanization of human race.

In 1851 Frederick Douglass changed the name of his publication from "The North Star" to "Frederick Douglass' Paper"

Empowerment and Responsibility

Douglass devoted his life to abolish slavery but his work did not end when in 1861 President Lincoln ended the institution of slavery. Douglass fought for civil rights and to empower African Americans to develop their own skills and to take responsibility for their actions. Slaves were used to being guided and told what to do by their owners. Douglass believed that African Americans had to prove that they deserved citizenship. He was involved in the civil war as a recruiter of African American soldiers. He encouraged them to join the Union Army as he deeply believed that America would accept them if they were contributors to society.

Literature and popular culture

His speeches and publications are part of America's cultural history and of African American contemporary literature and politics. Douglass' three autobiographies are one of the strongest influences in the slave narrative literary genre. His influence can be felt today as references in hip hop songs.

People can shape their own future

Despite his difficult life and against all odds he taught himself to read becoming one of the most famous African Americans of the 19 th century. His story was an inspiration then as it is today. One of his most relevant messages may be his belief that people have the power to shape their own future. He believed that positive changes have cumulative effect and individual transformation would positively benefit society as a whole.

His vision was finally realized when Barack Obama became the first African American president of the United States on November 2008.

First African American President of the United States.

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Legacy and Significance of Frederick Douglass

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Frederick Douglass' most important legacy was the use of his words to fight for the freedom and rights of African Americans. He used his oratory and writing skills throughout his life to communicate his desire to free African American slaves which led to the Emancipation Proclamation brought by President Abraham Lincoln.

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abolitionist activities Abraham Lincoln Another Word to Colored Men autobiography biography birth Cedar Hill civil war compromise of 1850 early life Edward Covey emancipation emancipation proclamation escape from slavery first attempt to escape Frederick Douglass Home freedom historical landmarks Hugh Auld later years Liberator Lloyd Garrison Massachusetts Antislavery Society Men of Color to Arms new bedford President Lincoln proclamation publications reading school reconstruction recruiting black soldiers sabbath school self-made men ship caulker speech speeches Thomas Auld timeline underground railway union army videos Washington D.C.

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On this debut episode of our special Stories of the Civil War and Reconstruction Series, we examine the life of one of America's most influential abolitionists, orators, writers, and statesmen - Frederick Douglass. Growing up as an enslaved person in Maryland, Douglass set himself apart by learning to read and write at an early age. After escaping from slavery, Douglass moved to Massachusetts where he became involved with local anti-slavery groups and newspapers. Ardently advocating for abolition, Douglass toured the country with William Lloyd Garrison and spoke extensively about the relationship between the Constitution and slavery in America.
FULL PODCAST PARTICIPANTS
David Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University. An expert scholar on Frederick Douglass, Blight has written extensively on him. Blight's newest book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, will be released on October 2.

Noelle Trent is director of interpretation, collections and education at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jeffrey Rosen is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Constitution Center, the only institution in America chartered by Congress "to disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a nonpartisan basis."

Additional Resources
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The life and legacy of Frederick Douglass

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On this debut episode of our special Stories of the Civil War and Reconstruction Series, we examine the life of one of America's most influential abolitionists, orators, writers, and statesmen - Frederick Douglass. Growing up as an enslaved person in Maryland, Douglass set himself apart by learning to read and write at an early age.