San Francisco's Most Tragic November Ever, Part II: Assassination at City Hall

Already Reeling From the November 18, 1978 Massacre of More Than 900 People in the Jonestown Mass Murder-Suicide in Guyana, San Franciscans Are Shocked Again Nine Days Later By the Twin Assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk



Before November 1978, the deadliest event to rock San Francisco was the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. But over a ten-day period that began 30 years ago this week, more than 900 people from the San Francisco Bay Area lost their lives in two back-to-back tragedies -- one of which occurred thousands of miles away, the other right inside San Francisco City Hall. On November 18, hundreds were killed in a mass murder-suicide at the People's Temple compound at Jonestown, Guyana. Nine days later, George Moscone (pictured above, right), the mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk (left), a first-term member of the city's Board of Supervisors who was the nation's first openly gay elected official, were assassinated in their City Hall offices. At first, there were suspicions that the City Hall murders were related to the People's Temple massacre, but no evidence has ever surfaced to link the two tragic events. (File photo by the San Francisco Chronicle)


(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Thursday, November 20, 2008)

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SPECIAL REPORT
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By SUSAN SWARD
San Francisco Chronicle

(Part II of a two-part series.)

SAN FRANCISCO -- On November 27, 1978, Dan White took his gun and headed for City Hall.

Within 24 hours, a city already reeling in shock over a deadly tragedy that killed hundreds of San Franciscans nine days earlier at a religious compound in far-away Guyana would be plunged into an even deeper trauma.

White grew up in San Francisco. A conservative Irish Catholic, he was elected to the city's Board of Supervisors in 1977 by campaigning as a defender of traditional values.

An intense, rigid man, White revealed how he saw the city in a message to voters: "You must realize there are thousands upon thousands of frustrated, angry people such as yourselves waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate the malignances which blight our city." The city was in danger from "splinter groups of radicals, social deviates and incorrigibles," he said.

After 11 months in office, White impulsively resigned, citing financial problems. White's backers wanted him back on the job, and they persuaded him to ask Mayor George Moscone to reappoint him. At first, Moscone agreed. But he changed his mind after lobbying from Supervisor Harvey Milk and others who saw the resignation as an opportunity to remove a political foe.

Moscone had been raised in the city and was a star on the St. Ignatius High School basketball team. As a city supervisor and state Senate majority leader in Sacramento, Moscone had wielded considerable power through his combination of brains, wit and charm.

ASSASSIN WHO KNEW CITY HALL WAS ABLE TO SNEAK IN FOR HIS KILL

At City Hall that day, White climbed through a basement window and avoided the building's metal detectors. He went to Moscone's office and shot him. He then found and killed Milk, the nation's first openly gay elected official.

Moscone was 49 and Milk was 48.

Initially, some feared that a rumored People's Temple hit squad might have done the deed, as the twin assassinations came just nine days after the Jonestown massacre in Guyana where more than 900 San Franciscans -- most of them African-Americans -- were either shot to death by armed guards or died from poisoning after being forced to drink fruit punch laced with cyanide.

White ended that speculation, however, when he surrendered to police.

With Moscone's death, Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein became mayor, the first woman to hold the post. She served for nine years, winning a second term in a landslide after easily turning back a recall attempt in 1983. In 1992, she was elected to the U.S. Senate.

The year after the assassinations, White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, after his lawyers argued he had been suffering from depression at the time of the crimes.

But the verdict enraged many in the city's large and politically influential gay community, who felt it was far too lenient, and crowds of protesters burned police cars and stoned City Hall in the so-called "White Night Riots," the most violent outburst of rage by gays since New York's Stonewall Riots a decade earlier that is credited with launching the modern gay rights movement.

White served five years, one month and nine days in prison. Less than a year after his parole ended, White committed suicide, using a hose to funnel carbon monoxide into a car in his garage in San Francisco. He was 39.

Years later, former homicide Inspector Frank Falzon said that while on parole White confided that he had planned to kill Moscone, Milk and two other officials. White didn't locate his other targets, Assemblyman Willie Brown and liberal Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver. To White, the four were most responsible for destroying the old San Francisco he loved.

MOSCONE'S PLACE IN HISTORY OVERSHADOWED BY MILK'S

Today, many agree that Moscone's place in history has been eclipsed by Milk, whose assassination and role in what was then known as the gay liberation movement are the topic of books, documentaries and the recently released movie "Milk," which stars Sean Penn in the title role of the slain supervisor.

"Harvey had a social movement that he became the symbol of," said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York. "And what George represented -- a kind of urban liberalism that worked across race, class, gender and sexual orientation boundaries -- doesn't have the same natural constituency.

"But at the end of the day, you have to come around to see the great value of what Moscone was attempting to do," he said.

Gays feel forever in Milk's debt.

Harry Britt, who after the assassinations succeeded Milk on the Board of Supervisors, said Milk often spoke of the violence in America toward those outside the mainstream -- including gays. Before he was slain, Milk taped several versions of his political will.

One included a sentence that many today consider his epitaph: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door." Britt said Milk's assassination had just that sort of effect on many gays.

"All our denial of being gay was shattered by that bullet that claimed Milk's life," Britt said. "And we were confronted with the urgency of accepting being gay, and the only way to be gay was to be powerful."

Richard DeLeon, a professor emeritus from San Francisco State University and an expert on the city's politics, said the memory of Moscone should be kept alive.

Moscone "included the excluded" in city government, DeLeon said. "His sheer ability to form an alliance with Milk and be inclusive of gay values was very distinctive." Moscone "allowed Harvey to achieve the stature of a leader in a way that might not have been possible with another mayor," he said.

ASSASSINATIONS CHANGED THE COURSE OF SAN FRANCISCO POLITICS

Whether White's motive for the assassinations was to settle a personal score with Moscone and Milk or to target liberal politicians he despised on principle, the effect of the assassinations was to change the city's political climate.

By assassinating Moscone and Milk, White nudged the city's politics toward the middle of the road. On this subject, Feinstein herself has said, "I do think I brought the city to the center."

To some, the most visible result of Moscone's death is San Francisco's skyline of downtown high-rises.

During the Feinstein years, the city approved construction of more than 22 million square feet of office space, equal to almost 13 Bank of America buildings. That is about 29 percent of the city's total high-rise square footage today.

Under Moscone, it wouldn't have happened -- at least not to that extent, some analysts say.

"Moscone was one of the first slow-growth leaders who began to take a stand against this untrammeled, unregulated growth downtown, and he never had a chance to follow through," said DeLeon, author of a book on San Francisco entitled Left Coast City.

"Developers desperately wanted to transform San Francisco," DeLeon said. "And Moscone would have used that as bargaining leverage to extract more community benefits, such as preservation, affordable housing and a whole range of things we now take for granted."

But others see the new city skyline as inevitable.

"The change from manufacturing to finance, high-rise development, the switch to a city where your kids can't afford to buy a house, shifting immigration patterns, the fact the city is no longer the white, European city it was then -- all of that would have happened without the killings," said Richard Sklar, who was hired by Moscone to run the city's massive sewer rebuild and served as the Public Utilities Commission's general manager under Feinstein.

THE LEGACY OF MOSCONE, MILK AND THE JONESTOWN VICTIMS

In San Francisco today, the city's convention center and a Marina playground bear George Moscone's name, and Harvey Milk's name is on many facilities, including a Eureka Valley library.

Moscone's grave is at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, a suburb south of San Francisco. Milk's friends say they put his ashes in the Pacific Ocean off the Marin Headlands north of the city. And on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay, at Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery, the bodies of hundreds of Jonestown victims are buried.

Beyond preserving the names of the dead on monuments, DeLeon says, the city should "continue to struggle to interpret" the mark that the era of the assassinations and Jonestown left on San Francisco.

"The forces at work with Moscone and Milk, progressive and utopian in many ways at the time, have slowly become accepted as established politics in the city and in some cases the nation - with the emerging gay movement, community power outside City Hall, downtown plans managing growth," he said.

"And Jonestown showed San Francisco that if the force for change is allowed to run amok ... it will implode - even when some of the motives behind it were for social justice."

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Volume III, Number 76
Special Report Copyright 2008, The Hearst Newspapers.
The 'Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2008, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

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