(Second of three blogs related to this subject)
There
are two elements of the San Francisco milieu that directly bear on the
story of Dan White's murder of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George
Moscone that are rarely or never covered.
First was the hysteria that was building from the first reports seven days prior to the the Dan White rampage about the deaths in Jonestown of hundreds of San Franciscans. By Friday, three days prior, the number of deaths were believed to be more than 900 people. The tension, distress, anxiety and hysteria were palpable in the City. I wrote about it a few months ago. This hysteria affected everyone including Dan White.
Second was the
history of Mayor George Moscone and the San Francisco Police
Department. George considered the SFPD to be out of control. At the time at least 50 policemen were dangerous rogues who were a
law unto themselves. The 50 were also active in the Police Officers Association,
the union later headed by Paul Chignell. Mayor Moscone's solution was to
appoint an outside professional policeman to be the chief: Charles
Gains. Gains recruited the first openly gay policeman, the first Asian
policeman and moved the police department much closer to the values of
San Francisco.
The white traditional police in San Francisco hated Chief Gain. They hated him with a vehemence not seen until Lefties started hating President George W. Bush 30 years later. The police boiled with hatred so intense that among policemen it was common to talk about who would get into a bar fight with Chief Gain and shoot him.
Gain knew about the murderous talk among the rank and file and he knew about the plans to shoot him.
Months before Dan White killed Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk, Chief
Gain held a press conference in which he publicly declared that he
would no longer wear a pistol. He made this declaration into a photo opportunity announcement in front of a the American flag and the San Francisco flag
while sitting at his desk.
With the opportunity to kill the chief and claim self-defense gone, the rogue police force began directing their hate at the man behind Chief Gain, Mayor Moscone. The daily vituperation directed at Mayor Moscone was often accompanied by hatred of the 'liberal forces' that the police believed had destroyed San Francisco and turned it into a gay/hippy town.
Dan White was a former San Francisco policeman. For years after he left the department and in 1977 for the entire year while he was on the Board of Supervisors, he regularly had coffee with two other police officers at a coffee shop on Ellis near Van Ness across from the old Northern Station. One of the police was Paul Chignell, the other was my source.
As Dan got to know the Mayor and his fellow supervisors during 1977, he joined the other two policemen at morning coffee in expressing their personal and departmental hatred of the mayor, and two supervisors: one was Harvey Milk, whom they called a fag and the other was Carol Ruth Silver a very strong liberal who wore boots and drove an old pick-up truck (a woman I dated during this period).
PS. Ironically the photo of the former Northern Police Station is now a Harvey Milk Center.
