eisenhower knowing, i think, to some degree this was going to make eisenhower, if he succeeded, a historic figure and, perhaps, a political figure. but i think it's a kind of a nice story about america that these two very different people, um, did have, did have common views on a critical issue and that we were fortunate as a country to have the service of the two of them simultaneously. and that the world that they inherited and dealt with is the world that we know today. so -- [applause] >> [inaudible] if you have a question, please, come up to the microphone. >> thank you, mr. terzian, for that wonderful lecture. um, i'm a huge fan of "the weekly standard" and have been

for many year. one of the things i most appreciate about it is that the articles there frequently portray franklin d. roosevelt in an appreciative and admiring light. it's one of the few conservative periodicals that does this. i recently defended finishing dr to a -- fdr to a professor, and my question to you is if by some miracle roosevelt had lived to finish his fourth term, what do you think his take on stalin would have been? what would their relationship have been like? >> well, let me just make a comment on your earlier. the weekly standard likes fdr. and we like the sort of

roosevelt/truman/kennedy approach to foreign policy in the democratic party. when i took my present job, um, i was putting my various things in my office. and one of them, they have a few over here in the library, i have a clock which has -- it's franklin roosevelt, it's this little statue of fdr, and he's standing sort of holding the clock as if it's a, um, a ship's wheel. and it says at the wheel of the new deal. and i put it on this table behind my desk, and i remember our editor, bill kristol, come anything and looking at that and saying it's truly a neoconservative office. we have a shrine to fdr here. [laughter] i think, you know, who knows? i mean, it's always difficult to tell what historic figures would think about anything after their death. i mean, democrats are always lecturing republicans

confidently about what lincoln would think about things, you know, he'd be horrified by the republican party today. um, some -- [laughter] somebody asked, somebody asked me the other day on a panel what would, what would people like franklin roosevelt think of annie wiener. [laughter] -- anthony weiner. and i said, first of all, the first 20 minutes of my answer would be explaining to him about computers and the internet and twitter which many people alive today don't fully comprehend. so, i mean, it's an unanswerable question. however, to answer your question i think roosevelt gets an unfair rap about that. i think that, i mean, 25 words or less, i think at yalta he was, he and churchill were presented with a fait accompli. i mean, the red army was in west, was in germany and poland and czechoslovakia. it was not their fault.

it was hitler's fault that they were there. i don't think, you know, the soviet union at that time was our ally. i don't think there was any -- i think they did what they could, but thanks to the germans the russians were where they were. and i think short of suddenly making war on our ally who had just defeated the germans, it makes no sense to me. and certainly, i mean, roosevelt famously thought that his charm could, perhaps, manipulate stalin to some degree. i think he underestimated the degree to which stalin was psychopathic about things and impervious to the sort of charm that roosevelt could exert. um, but there's a lot of evidence if you look at roosevelt's correspondence, certainly, toward the end of the war that he was under no illusions about either stalin or soviet intentionings at the end of the war -- intentions at the end of the war. now, where that would have led,

i mean, i tend to think the truman administration was the roosevelt administration as it would have proceeded. it certainly was many of the same people. um, so to answer your question, i think that roosevelt was, um, his thinking evolved a little bit in dealing with the soviet union. but i think on the whole he had no illusions about, about what the soviet, the nature of the soviet union, certainly stalin. >> thank you. >> sure. >> this is a country of immigrants. roosevelt family came early. they were in trade, china trade, international. it's a mindset, it's right down to the roots of who he was. he was an international -- >> right. well, that was developed, that was the delano family. actually, it was in the china trade, but you're right, of course.

>> when, when roosevelt hosted, hosted, um, winston churchill, his family said my family were, you know, among the first families here. churchill said, and my family greeted them because churchill -- [laughter] was from his american roots, an american india. >> right. >> these people were international, global figures in their roots. i think we have to remember that. now, if you're from kansas, you're in the middle of the country. eisenhower's in the middle of the country. if you're at all enterprising, you reach out. eisenhower was an international figure. my father happened to know him as a cadet at west point, as commandant general of west point and as president. my father was an international-type person. that's a lower social order, but he knew these people. >> well -- >> you know, they're international people. we're immigrants. we're world people. >> no, that's an excellent

point, and i would make one other point about eisenhower which is often ignored. he was, he was from kansas, but he was a german-american. and he was, he was very conscious of the fact that he was a german-american. and one of his, one of the reasons eisenhower was especially aggrieved at the end of world war ii when he saw what the germans had done when he visited, um, bellson and some of the other concentration camps, he felt a personal shame as a german-american. and he famously said at bellson, and it's an interesting sentiments with modern resonance that he said he was viewing the atrocities and the carnage and the piles of bodies and what not, and he said that he wanted to make sure that this was publicized as much as possible because all through this war people have complained that they don't understand what we're

fighting for. if they see this, they will at least comprehend what we're fighting against. so, um, eisenhower's germanness -- by the way, i drove up here, i have a smart car, so i took the sort of back route through pennsylvania, and i wanted to avoid 95 if possible. and went through gettysburg which is, which is, of course, where the great german wave of immigration moved west from philadelphia and down into virginia, and that's where eisenhower's forebearers were from. people often wondered why he settled in gettysburg after world war ii, and it was actually an ancestral area for him. so -- >> unfortunately, we've run out of time. mr. terzian will be signing copies of his book right after the session. i invite you to go over there if you want to have a book signed and thank him again for --

>> thank you. thank you very much. [applause]

>> when dan white went to city hall to assassinate mayor george moscone me and his fellow supervisor, harvey milk, he definitely had a plan. he was very methodical in its preparation and its execution. he oiled his gun. he filled the gun with five cartridges and then took ten extra cart trimmings out of their styrofoam slots which involve pulling each one out individually. couldn't just dump them, and wrapped them in a handkerr chef and put them in his pact. -- his pocket. he shaved, showered, put on a suit and tie. he told the aide who came to pick him up in his car on his way to city hall, that he planned to give george and harvey a piece of his mind. he borrowed the car keys so

there was a getaway vehicle ready. he entered the city hall through the polk street steps, saw that the policeman on the metal detector was not known to him. he knew a lot of cops, was a cop himself, and he was now a city supervisor, so he reversed card, went outside, found a window on the outfield of the building, climbed through the window, went up the back staircase, hesitated again at the door to the mayor's office because he knew on the other side of the door was the mayor's security detail. waited for a clerk to come along. door was opened and he snuck in the back door. he killed george moscone by emptying his former service revolver into him. the last two shots he straddled moss cone knee's body and put shots into the back of his head, and then across city hall -- reloaded, crossed city hall, and assassinated harvey in exactly

the same way, and even provided a kind of explanation to what happened. he had ripped off and put into his jacket pocket the cover of the fly leaf of a book called, ireland, terrible beaut y, and when he turned himself in at northern station, and he was asked if he had anything to say, he simply handed over that piece of paper that he was carrying in his pocket as an explanation. aim talking loud enough to be heard? good. at his trial, several months after these carefully planned and executed events, he was convicted not of premeditated murder but of the lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter. dan white would serve only about six years in state prison. that night, the night of his verdict, city hall came under attack. in my entire life, i don't think

i have ever seen anything that gave me more shivers than what happened at city hall on the night of the dan white verdict. hundreds and hundreds of people, thousands came but hundreds and hundreds feeling exposed and vulnerable and frightened and furious, literally attacked the seat of government. they knocked down pieces of stone and metal. they smashed the windows, and they set afire nine police cars. so that the whole scene took on a huge aspect. you had the light of the cars and their sigh recents bleating and the crowd chanting, and cops and protesters fighting each other, literally in the street. it wasn't a riot. it was a fight. at any rate, i had been there for every day of the trial, and i was there again in civic center that night.

and after the trial i felt very strongly that the trial itself had failed to provide satisfactory answers to most of the questions that san franciscans had about those terrible events. the trial in the end didn't tell you a great deal about why dan white assassinated harvey milk, his fellow office holder. it certainly didn't get into any question of whether harvey was killed because he was gay. a question that still lingers in many people's minds. was this what we would now daze call a hate crime? and we also wondered, i think, at the time, had dan white got away with what so clearly seemed to be a cold-blooded murder. as we'll see, he eventually confessed to his having a plan on that day, but that was many years later after justice or injustice had been done.

so, it was to answer those questions that i undertook to write the book. george moscone was a native san franciscan. he had served in the state senate where he rose to a leadership position. he was a little bit of what we would call in later years a prince of the city. he drove an alfa romeo. he closed many a joint throughout the town. as his good friend, willy brown, said about george, george's only problem is when he has two drinks he thinks hes invisible. and george was swept into office in 19 -- well, not swept but he won the mayority in 1976 with the backs of gays and neighborhood organizations, with a new force in city politics that was spearheaded by the

burton brothers and willy brown and their democratic machine. george moscone was part and parcel of that. harvey milk's background was different. harvey came from new york. was a smart new york. >> liked to crack wise, and he had a background in finance and the theater. he had been in the navy. he played football in high school. but eventually he became the rosa parks of the gay movement. he was the fellow who stood up and went to the front of the bus and said, i'm going to be a city supervisor. i'm gay and i'm going to be elected. and of course, he was, which was quite an extraordinary thing. especially because at that time in the city in the mid-'70s, san francisco was undergoing an integration crisis. maybe the only gay integration crisis in history, but it certainly was an integration crisis. it was, as far as i can tell, the first final in human history that large numbers of homosexual

people openly lived in one neighborhood and made it their neighborhood, and demanded their full rights, and protections of the law. and it was an historic moment, and it did cause a great deal of consternation. the rest of san francisco, whether of good will or ill, simply didn't know how to cope very easily with this new phenomenon. and so there was an enormous amount of tension in the city. and there was also an enormous amount of tension over george moscone becoming mayor because of his coalition, because of the way he had routed the more traditional city hall forces, and also because of the way he lived. it was not unusual in those days for cops to say to people, would you like to hear my george moscone tapes? and another thing he did is he appointed a police chief who was an outer, -- outsider, who

immediately removed the american flag from his office, and was very much hated by his rank-and-file. so that in many police stations, on the bulletin board was a picture of the police chief in the across -- cross hairs of a gun. dan white grew up in san francisco, but whereas george grew up in the marina, dan grew up in the southeast corner of the city, in those faded neighborhoods where, if you stand on the hilltop and look down over visitation valley you can see sheets and underwear flaps on clothes lines, all the sheets well worn. he had absolutely no background in politics. he had wanted to be a writer. he had become a policeman. he had become a fireman. eventually he became a city

supervisor. but he only had a high school education. and, therefore, he brought with him to city hall a kind of high school civics idea of how politics was conducted. dan white was very naive, and he thought that the way it would work on the board of supervisors was that every supervisor would put forward his ideas and the best ideas would prevail. george moscone and harvey milk knew better than that. they knew thigh idea that we veil was the idea that had six votes and that in order to be a successful politician at city hall, more than any other skill, you needed to be able to count to six. dan white didn't know how to do that. and yet, he had a certain kinship with harvey milk. the two men had a very complex and very hard to fathom relationship.

harvey obviously -- he made a lot of fun of dan but he was somewhat fascinated by him. and dan was certainly fascinated by harvey. dan felt that both he and harvey represented at city hall constituencies that had not previously been spoke for in city hall. nonetheless, the two men didn't see eye-to-eye idea logically. they often voted against each other's most important pieces of legislation. dan white found himself being defeated again and again and again. he was very ineffective supervisor. at the same time he lost his job as a fireman because the city attorney ruled he couldn't hold that job and be a supervisor so his salary had fallen to $9,600 a year, which is what supervisors were paid.

he had a sweetheart lease because he was politician, at pier 39. he started a hot potato stand, but his wife was down there working, their little son charlie was often being carted down to the potato stand. dan felt very, very, very pressured by all of this. and then in the face of all that pressure, he resigned, abruptly, and without having spoken to many people about his plans on november 10th. he simply tendered his resignation. he thought he was under pressure before. now he really came under pressure. all the people who relied on him in city hall, the police officers association, the firefighters, the chamber of commerce, lots of people put pressure on him to change his mind. so he went back to george moscone, who was a man who didn't like to say no, and he explained him that a lot of -- he now felt able to go on, and george said, sure, i'll give you

your job back, which didn't sit will with george's constituents, including harvey, who basically told him that's your job, you'll never be re-elected mayor because dan white is the magical six until vote. if you return him we liberals will lose the close votes, and so george moscone changed his mind '. he had rock missed dan white he was going to tell him what his decision was, but he didn't do that. dan white found out because a reporter called him at home and told him that the next day george moscone was going to be appointing somebody else to his seat. for me a key moment in understanding dan white -- because the first people i talked to about dan white were his friends and his colleagues, and they all described him to me as a leader and a man among men and a gung ho kind of guy, but i talked too his high school baseball coach, guy named jim

whitt, who had coached him at wilson high school, and jim whitt had taken a certain -- had a sympathy with dan white, because dan white lost his father under very humiliate circumstances when he was about 15, 16 years old. and he was a little bit lost and he was a little bit angry, and jim whitt saw him as a standup guy and made him the captain of the baseball team, and one day jim whitt told me, he gave dan white the bunt sign. he asked dan white to bunt. and dan white knew the signs. he was the captain of the team. instead he ignored it and hit away, and after the inning, when he came into the bench, jim whitt said to him, dan, why did you do that? i gave you the bunt sign. and dan white's response was to pull off his jersey, throw it down, stomp on it, and walk off the field and he never came back and played for that team again. that was an important story to me because it told me something. it told me dan white was a

quitter. and now when i looked at his career, i saw a very different career. i didn't see a guy moving through a sears reof leadership positions. i saw a guy cutting and running, again and again and again. when things got tough, he got going. the second half of my book -- the first half is about the events i just described and a good deal more detail than i'm able to go into them here tonight. the second half of the book is about the trial, and the reason for that -- and that is the reason one of the reasons i called the book "double play." it's got that title because there were two assassinations. dan white and the homicide detective who took that confession and then many years later took a real confession from dan white privately, had been the double-play combination, shortstop and second baseman on a police baseball team that won a state championship, but it was also

called "double play" because as someone who lived through the events as i know a lot of people in this room did, and then lived through the trial, there seemed to be an almost complete disconnect. what was being portrayed in the courtroom seemed to have very little to do with the background that i have already described to you. the assassinations provoked a silent candle-lit march on city hall. but the verdict provoked a riot. it was the event that people just could not tolerate. dan white's lawyers, who did an excellent job, were not very interested in what people thought. doug schmidt, his chief attorney said to me when hi asked him a question about this, society has nothing to do with this. only those 12 people in the jury box. matter.

but that's not true. it was true enough for doug schmidt, having to conduct a defense. but it was also true that we here in san francisco had a need to understand what had happened,ed a a need to see how it impacted our society. hat a need to see how this act of utter incivility affected the union of civil people. all trials begin and end with the jury. first jury selection. then the jury verdict. the prosecutor in this case, the chief prosecutor in the office of district attorney, joe frattus, was a map named tom norman. i think he had won conviction inside 96 or 97 murder trials. a very successful career prosecutor, and he told his boss that this was the best first degree case he had ever seen in

his life. fratus had an agenda of his own, the district attorney. he wanted to be mayor and he had a little bit of a problem. his problem was that he could not be seen as going soft on dan white. this was a murder prosecution. there was a death penalty waiting for dan white if he was convicted of first degree murder. but fearful of being seen as soft on dan white, tommy norman and joe frattus decided to bump all potential jurors who were opponents of the death penalty. now, that was not a very clever strategy because most people who are antideath penalty had voted for george moscone and harvey milk, who are both also antideath penalty. so they ended up having in the jury box a jury that satisfied tom norman. it was his normal hanging jury.

he worked well with these juries in the past. but the defense attorney, schmidt saw something completely different. looking at the same panel that satisfied norman, schmidt saw a jury much like he had hoped for but never expected to get. excuse me. i have to decide whether or not i can read with my glasses on. nine of the 12 lived in san francisco for 20 years or more, knew firsthand what was changing. there were more catholics than noncatholics and four of the women were old enough to be dan white's mother. if you had to guess you had say only one or two at most might have voted for george moscone. they were a representative same of the scold new san francisco working class, good cross-section of the kind of people who felt opressed and neglected by the political system. housewives and clerical workers for insurance companies and banks and corporations, mechanic

and a couple of painters, printers, and the wife of a jailhouse employee. most of them spent the better part of their lives in the faded stretches of poor and modest neighborhoods south and east of twin peaks. so this was the jury that the defense got. it got exactly the jury it wanted to. and -- the first important witness for the prosecution -- and perhaps the most important witness they could have called -- could have been the most important witness they did call -- was the coroner, boyd stevens. under the law only the coroner could legally speculate as a witness based on the evidence he had testified to, whether the killings had been carried out as deliberate acts, and boyd

stevens had brought with him two mannequins which he kept back stage. they weren't in the courtroom. they were in the area of -- the judge's office, and he was prepared to testify that they were deliberate and violent and vicious acts. however, before he had a chance to do that, tommy norman completed his examination of him. doug schmidt, very happy that boyd stevens had not been invited to give his opinion, didn't even cross-examine him. because the defense had conceded from the beginning the obvious, dan white killed these two guys. he confessed to it on tape. there was no question he killed them. rather, his defense attorneys put to the jury a different set of questions. their questions were, why? why had a good man like dan white, a man who had never -- as far as anyone knows, committed a crime before in his life, do

this heinous thing? and how must he be punished? because the defense took the position he had to be bun issued, but the said this is not murder. this is a less serious crime, and they had a mantra which they repeated again and again and again during the trial, good people, fine people, with fine backgrounds, simply don't kill in cold blood. it just doesn't happen. so, let's find out what did happen. they seized the narrative. one of the things i thought watching the trial there was not a whole lot of difference between a trial and a basketball game. in a basketball game, both teams are trying to seize the momentum. they're trying to make the game proceed at the pace and in the style which they prefer. and that's exactly what schmidt did, by posing the question that

way. their argument was simple. dan white had cracked. he had been mentally ill all along, with a severe depression, although nobody noticed. he had never seen a shrink and it had never been diagnosed, and as if to underscore that, dan white sat there throughout the trial, like something of a zombie. the shell of a man. he stared straight ahead. he showed no expressions on his face. he seemed touting -- to take no notice of the testimony. he would have been catatonic and yet he wasn't, as his other defense lawyer told me, he wasn't catatonic, i played chess with him in jail, but you have to adopt some persona for a trial, and dan white sat there like a shell of a man, and his lawyer, who resembled him

physically, strode around the courtroom, young and handsome and vigorous, as if to say this who is this man was until this tragedy befell him. it worked. the defense called four psychiatrists and a psychologist to support their theory that under pressure and in the heat of passion, dan white cracked and he was not able to execute a plan. his capacity to do that was diminished to such a degree that he was not legally cullable for murder there was in the diminished capacity law, one exception. if the killing was taken in revenge, then you cannot invoke or you do not invoke a diminished capacity defense, and of course, dan white's killings had been acts of personal and political vengeance, but never once in the weeks of the trial, in the thousands of pages of transcripts, did the prosecutor,

thomas norman, ever utter the word revenge. not one time. it was an oversight bred in hubris. tom norman and joe frattus thought hey had a sure thing, slam-dunk, and so they never even addressed, let alone answered the question, the jury most wanted to have answered. how did a handsome young working class hero, with a background so much like their own, do something that horrible? it's easy to admired ware they accomplished. they took a cold blooded murder and got him off, more or less. it was an amazing event. in his summation, doug schmidt, who never attends church and is not a god-fearing man, invoked god 21 times in 48 minutes. but the trial raised another

question for me as well. why are there psychiatrists and psychologists in this courtroom? i asked myself. i mean, they're not scientists. they're prop -- program began daist. they're like a paid political advertisement. if just one time the psychiatrist or a psychologist testifying at a trial testified unfavorably to the side that was paying them, i might have a different view so their profession when it's used in behalf of a defendant. but they don't do that. in dan white served his time in sole dad. he was released in january of 1984. paroled to los angeles. lived there for a year. during the time -- never going to make it -- during the time he was there he called up his own friend frank, and asked him to come down and visit him in los angeles, and while frank was was there he told him the truth.

he said i went down to city hall to kill george and harvey and also wanted to kill willy brown and carol, another supervisor. perhaps more than anything else, what that final confession made clear to me was something i already believed based on me rye research. dan white didn't kill harvey because he was gay. he killed harvey because harvey was one of the people who defeated and humiliated him at city hall. he wanted to kill harvey as part of a gang of four. after his years of parole in los angeles, and against the wishes of mayor dianne feinstein, he returned to san francisco. he had no job. there were threats on his life. he now had three kids, including one who had been conceived in a

con con jugal visit and had downs syndrome. he wasn't living at home because he and his wife decided it was too dangerous to the children. he had just begun seeing a shrink. one of the shrinks who testified in his behalf because his wife insisted on it. he had just begun taking lithium for his depression. the first time as far as i can tell he received any treatment of any kind for the underlying mental illness that had gotten him off. and then with marian and the kids gone for the day, dan was free to make his preparations. he wrote a final journal entry. pulling out a worn brief case where he kept his notebookses in that he kept under the space in a stairway.

the last entry was not neat. it was scrolled across the entire page. my dearest marian, my last journal entry is within to express my ever faithful love for you and our children, your devoted husband, danny, october 21, 1985. he returned the briefcase to its place, and now he readied his own gas chamber. a 1973 buick in his garage. he attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and ran it through the passenger side rear window, sealing the gap with a towel. he sad in the buick and pulled the door closed. he clutched family photos. in the tape deck he but a mournful irish ballad of suppression and rebellion. what's done is done and what's won is won and what's lost is lost and gone forever in the town i loved so well.

you would have thought that dan white had enough of martyrdom. he hand. he turned the key in the ignition. his final act was to condemn himself. perhaps convict and condemn himself, and thus he quit on those who needed him most, his wife, his three small kids, who would grow up without a father, as dan had in fact grown up, fatherless himself. the consequences of this terrible crime and terrible miscarriage of justice are still being felt today. in my view, it was the crime of the 20th century in san francisco. i think perhaps only the patty hearst kidnapping could possibly compete with it. and it changed many things. i'll go through a few of them quickly because i know time is run short and we want to do questions and answers.

the first, was it created dianne feinstein. i've been prompted i have five minutes. dianne feinstein had won -- run twice unsuccessfully for mayor she told friends she was no longer going to run for political office when he term was up. she was going to withdraw from politics. on the day of the assassinations, as i'm sure everybody in this room knows, it was she who made the announcement in a pink pant suit that was splattered with blood from having been one of the first people to harvey milk's body and having harvey milk's blood all over her, and of course, her good performance as mayor catapulted her career forward, and she has become as we know the most powerful democratic politician in the state of california and has been for quite a long time now. and because she became mayor, and george moscone was no longer

mayor, the city moved in a more conservative way, particularly in regard to manhattannizeation, which i don't have to explain in this room, i suppose. the skyline changed much more dramatically quickly than it would under moscone who was allied with the groups who opposed a rapid expansion of downtown. and so the city skyline, the city's politics and our representation in congress all changed dramatically as a result of dan white. district elections which is what brought dan and hard destroy city hall, -- discarried by the voters at that time, although later reinstated. in the legal area, the diminished capacity defense was -- well, the legislature tried to eliminate the diminished capacity defense. they passed bells spendded to do that. but it's still possible to conduct a state of mind defense. you have to frame it a little bit differently but you can --

those same kind of defenses are still being put forward. and of all the consequences of his act, probably the one that he least intended was this one. the biggest change dan white wrought was unintended. the acceptance of gay people here and in many other places across the country was inspired in part by the martyrdom of harvey milk. in fact within a couple of months of the -- of harvey's assassination, 100,000 people showed up in washington for a gay rights march, and most -- many of them were carrying black cards and pictures that invoked the memory of harvey milk. in death, harvey's influence grew far greater than he had any reason to expect it would have been had he lived. his life and death became the

subject of an opera, an academy award winning documentary, and the 2008 movie money milk" which earned sean penn an oscar for his betrayal of harvey. it's a testament to unintended consequences, that all though dan white did not kill harvey milk because he was gay, the assassination of a courageous and pioneering leader, assured harvey's place in history. dan white is all but forgotten. george moscone has his name on convention center and playgrounds but harvey milk will live forever. [applause] >> joel journalists never die. they just keep on making their deadlines. thank you, mike weiss. author of "double play."

thank you for your participation this evening. i'm the chair of the clubs forum and i'll be moderating the question and answer period, and we have quite a few. >> oh, good. >> your description of the white riots was fascinating to me. all the detrail you brought out with dianne feinstein upstairs and the crowds trying to tear down the building, throwing tear gas in the building. it was chaotic, and carol ruth silver got hit in the face with a rock. can you talk more about how crazy it was for dianne feinstein and what was going on inside? >> well, city hall was packed with police officers and they were also being held back at the sides, but at the point at which city hall did come under attack, the police were released, and one of the really interesting

things i saw that night was i heard this grunting and banging behind me, and i was just standing in the middle of the riot, and i turned around and there were two women. one was dike on bikes, addressed in leathers and built like son any liston, and the other one was lady cop who was also built like sonny liston, and the two of them were standing throwing hay makers at each other. they were pounding on each other. that was one of the thing that led me to say this wasn't a riot. this was a fight. the important this thing it was incentury rex of law abide people who felt exposed, vulnerable, and angry. >> what do you think would have happened to george moscone. >> if he lived? >> yeah. >> might well have been re-elected mayor. might not have been. i talked to many people of both opinions. he would have gone on in a career in politics, i'm

absolutely certain. >> would dianne feinstein -- >> i don't think george was that big myself. i hope i'm not finding anybody. i hope no friends or relatives of georges are here. i thought the was a very good mayor, although the pop -- the received wisdom now is that he was a terrible mayor. but gavin newsome is supposed to be a terrible mayor. barack obama is a terrible person. >> george wasn't from tremendous money? >> oh, not at all. >> the d. >> all three men were of modest means, absolutely. all three meanmen could be described as having a working class upbringings. >> it's hard to imagine after willy and gavin, mayors that have been so affluent -- . >> gavin has money? [laughter] >> so if someone lists three cal lambties and would like you to rank them, the earthquake of 1989, the zodiac murders murdere

assassination. >> they're different events. the earthquake had terrible consequences, people died and people lost their homes but it was kind of fun for those who weren't directly injured or suffered great losses, it was very exciting time and was one of those wonderful times in the face of particularly natural trappeds in which people come together and behave very well, and i'll never forget the picture of joe dimaggio standing in line with other people hoping to get back into his place in the marina and see if he could salvage some of his possessions. the zodiac killings were -- the warrant a single event. they were over a period of time. more dramatic to me was the pat ty hearst kid naping and the sla forcing the family to serve food around the city. i don't know how to rank them. i wrote about all three of them so i get they were interesting enough to write about.

>> dan white was very connected with ireland in a misty kind of coffee table book kind of way. >> yeah. he wanted to be -- he saw his irish heritage as having given him the gift of writing. he very much wanted to be a writer, and i read some of his stuff. it's very, very stiff, as dan was himself. after he was released from parole, and during the time when he was mostly living in san francisco, he actually went over to ireland to write, but he didn't write anything. he took out irish citizenship, which he was entitled to because it was his mother or grandmother -- one of them had been born in ireland and therefore he was spiteled to irish citizenship. he didn't write anything and he ran out of money and he asked marian, his wife to please send him the my to come home, and she said, only if you see a swing, and he came home and that's how he began to see the doctors.

>> they hob any mooned in hireland. >> in ireland. >> with problems in the bedroom. >> yes, definite problems in the bedroom. marian testified to that during the trial. marriane was a very important element in the trial. she is a woman of great dignity. and reserve. and she sat there every day looking fragmented and worried half to death, sitting behind dan on the other side of the security glass, and then she testified for her husband. >> so what did the folded up book jacket mean? >> well you know, i think dan white saw the situation in san francisco as being oppressive, that the old established irish and italian but primarily irish families who had run the city for a long time, were being opressed, supplanted by these new people who want ted change the city in unacceptable ways so

he saw a connection between the oppression of the erich by the english, and -- irish by the english, and the oppression of the older san franciscans by newer san franciscans and also had a powerful draw because it was his homeland. >> is that what drew him the hot potato? >> what drew him to the hot potato was that warren simmons, who wanted to build the hot potato, needed a lot of permits and a lot of help at city hall, and dab white was a supervisor so he got the best stand on pier 39, right when you came in the door. get yourself some potatoes. >> there wasn't a lot of discussion about dan white's time at soledad. what were his prison years like? >> he was kept in isolation. he was considered to be at risk and at danger. someone who was kept in isolation with him nearby isolation, they were released

for an hour a day to run. they both could run at the same time on the track with -- was sirhan sirhan. so, it was like a festival of assassins. >> were you a fan of the true crime genre? >> no. no. i like to read novels. >> what happened to dan's two kids? >> well, i mean, the down's syndrome son still lives with his mother, and although i'm told he is quite highly functional, and dan's oldest son, charlie, left the state and visits occasionally. he actually came to san francisco when they were shooting the film "milk," and

sean penn had him on the set as his guest. that event caused a great deal of consternation on the set. several people -- i have had two different people tell me they called the cops because it was pretty frightening. here's sean pen portraying harvey milk and here was dan white's son, and he seemed to be somewhat angry. but everything calmed down april. parentally sean penn did did a great job and took him ute to dinner or lunch and calmed him down and things win on. >> someone asked, it's been my experience that gun toting conservatives are always in their hearts cowards. what is your opinion? >> i would endorse that in this case. i can't imagine a more cowardly act than shooting two unarmed men. >> was there a moment during the trial when you knew that the defense was going to succeed in. >> yes. when the confession was played. the confession was played by the

prosecution. it was -- dan white's old double play partner who introduced the confession, which he had taken on the day of the assassinations, and played it. and i was listening closely and i thought it was completely self-serving. one thing that struck me right away was that dan white only cried when he was talking about how hard his wife worked and how his kid had to go to a baby-sitter. he never showed any emotion when talking about harvey milk and george moscone, nor did he show any concern whatsoever for their friends and family and the people they had left behind, and so i thought it was a cold and self-serving confession, and i turned the jury box and people were crying. jurors were crying. what they heard was the raw emotion of this obviously shell-shocked man. he was a mess when he gave that confession, and that's what they heard, because they wanted to believe in him.

>> was that the big tactical error of the whole trial. >> playing the confession? >> no, because if the prosecution hadn't played it, the defense were going to play it. they knew it would play that way with the jury. that's why the jury was so significant. they heard the confession in one way. i as a american who felt that this was a heinous crime and that george moscone and harvey milk were people i voted for, heard it completely differently. >> soen dan had a stable home life -- >> mmm, there were a lot of kids -- they grew up in pretty rough section of the valley and there war lot of kids, and then after his dad died -- a terrible event in this life -- his mother nature another fireman, and i forget the exact up in but there are like 17 syringes and stepsiblings in the family. one of the things we have done

with the new edition is in the back of the book we included a dvd that includes dan white's entire confession. you can listen to it for yourself and see what you think. but it also includes many of the police transmissions, on the day of the assassinations, and the first police dispatcher you hear is a woman, and later switches to a man. the woman is one of dan white's sister, the onduty dispatcher that day. >> in the weeks or months leading up to the tragedy, harvey milk had been through quite turbulent times as well in his personal life? >> yeah. i don't remember what it was. >> love hung himself -- was that just weeks before? i think it was just weeks before. i didn't realize it was that close. i have to read the book. >> it seems interesting that dan -- his wife and a family and

harvey had all this turmoil, but it's crazy. >> yeah. >> what do you think would have happened to harvey if he had lived? >> i mean, i don't know. no gay person had ever been elected mayor. i'm sure he would have tried. or if not that. he would try for an assembly. so i think he would have gone far but would have become in historical terms another important early gay politician, period, not the person he became. not the subject of operas and academy award winning films. >> there is much about the twinkie defense. >> the twinkie defense -- thank you. the twinkie defense -- the phrase twinkie defense was made up by a satirist.

paul was at the trial. he was, quote, covering it for playboy. took him two years to get the piece into playboy, but paul once won a slow bicycle raise -- race so that's not surprising. one of the psychiatrists -- the -- one of the points the psychiatrist and psychologies were making was that dan white, who had been very concerned with his good health and his -- a very strong athletic kind of guy. he had abandoned his usual good dietary habits and was gorging on junk food and feeling sorry for himself and hoping around the house in his bathrobe, and one of the psychiatrists, martin linder, -- marty is available for hire if anybody wants him -- mentioned that he had eat 'some twinkies, and so it got seized uponit was