reports of cocaine were for endiewrps for soldiers -- endurance for soldiers. so, yes, the idea of how to make a better killing machine whether through chemistry or arms or whatever has been with us for quite some time, yes. yes, ma'am. >> hi. >> hi. ..

11 years old, the greatest kid in the world, and very ambitious in his class. is in sixth grade and wants to get all as. i was that kid. i never told her, you need to come home with all as, and i worried about that behavior because if she doesn't get all as -- and sometimes she is not going to or has not -- you start this cycle about feeling bad about yourself, about beating up on yourself to the point you're hurting so bad you might try something that can make you feel good, and parents -- one thing i have done -- the other night, she was talking about not getting an a. i said, you're a great kid. it doesn't matter what your agreed and is you're going to be a great adult. and we need to do that as parents and adults and mentors in our society, and there are so many things in society that are

designed to bring you down, tear you down, and not enough to pick you up. i think that's our job as part of the community. perfectionism is silly because we're humans. no one is perfect. i screwed up 20 times before i got here today, and probably screw up 20 more times. that doesn't mean i can screw up all the time. doesn't mean i can use that as an alibi. but we have to learn how to love each other, and that's something we're losing and have to be very careful about. >> if i could just complete that. part of what you're bringing up is the need to disassociate compulsion from addiction. in popular culture of americans, all thought of as the same, and they both have to do with this sense of internal resolve, which is difficult to -- >> i'll beat it.

i can do it. sometimes you can't. no one wants to hear that, in their inner head or external. and you got to work -- all of us, i do, too, have to work on that. >> first i want to make a quick comment on the you of psycho stimulus in the military, in the second world war it was not confined to axis troops. it was particularly bad in japan, not only in the military but in war-related industries to increase production, leading to a huge epidemic of -- the drug of caught was amphetamine and cocaine. this is not confined to germany. my question has to do with the difference in sort of the time course of addiction. hall tadd verse freud. my impression is freud's problem was relatively prime derivative,

and hallstad said it was lifelong episode or problem. and you mentioned there hey have been differences in the root of administration they used. >> i said it clearly. >> there's a large literature at which the way drugs get to the brain, not only influences their cute effects but thunder e their long-term effect in changing the brain. so might that be a factor that can'ts for their nature history? >> absolutely. the great thing for using cocaine as your drug of abuse, if you're writing about it, it's guaranteed -- almost guaranteed to be a dramatic story because the window from abuse to addiction to bad stuff is very small. alcoholism, on the other hand, you can be using for quite some time before everything goes crazy, and even heroin abusers

and opium users can go for quite some time, but cocaine, no. the root of administration is very important. i had no medical ethics and a lot of rope and a lot of drugs i could make everybody in this room an addict in a week using the right substances and the right roots of administration, and as i said earlier, tended to either mix a little bit in a glass of water ask drink it, and later freud said he painted his nose or what we might call noting or sniffing cocaine. which is, by the way, not terribly efficient way of taking cocaine. you lose 95% of the kick -- only 5% is available by snorting it. it's a very wasteful way of using your drug, and most drug addicts like to get everything out of and it they learn quickly not to do that. smoking crack cocaine is a wonderfully efficient way of taking cocaine because the lungs

contain basically a football field, an area of blood vessels the blood will transfer over and right to the brain. and similarly injecting it is a superb direct route to the brain. so the difference between wow, and wow! , and the more you go wow! the more you habit uate to that sentence. the dose and route of administration is critical to 0 how quickly your addiction will progress, and that's true of halstad and he was never able to kick it. freud probably was in a 12-year period. >> i want to recommend to you all this marvelous book, an anatomy of addiction, by dr. and

professor howard markel. i want to thank you for coming, and i want to thank c-span and the institute of humanities and the book fair and the library, thank you, howard markel. >> thank you. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's web site, howardmarkel.com >> up next, journalist mike weiss talks about the killing of san francisco mayor george moscone and supervisor dan white in november of 1978. this is about an hour. >> good evening and welcome to tonight's meeting of the

commonwealth club of california. i'm steven seiber. i will be your mott raider for tonight's program. we also welcome our listening audience and invite everybody to visit us as commonwealth club.org. our speaker is journalist and author mike weiss. in 1978 and 1979, mike did extensive reporting on the assassinations of mayor george moscone and supervisor harvey milk while working for rolling stone and time magazine. tonight mike is here to discuss this book "double play:." "double play" is about a time in the city's history that is iconic, informative, and devastating. it provides an intimate look into the lives of three men who came to city hall from divergent paths. and mike details how city hall

impacted them and the events leading up to the assassination. mike has great compassion for the shocking event of the day. mike weiss was an award-winning reporter for the san francisco chronicle and is a recipient of the edgar award from the mystery writers of america for his narrative account of the assassination. please welcome mike weiss. [applause] >> thank you, steven, and thank you to the members of the club for inviting me. i'm very pleased to be here. i want to assure you i'm get to let everybody get out of here before dark, which is not much of a promise on the longest day of the year. what i'm going to do tonight is

simply recreate the assassinations and the trial that followed and the events that followed that, leading through to the time of dan white's suicide, and try to answer some of the questions i know still trouble people who think about this sad event in the city's history. bend this down a little. when dan white went down to city hall to assassinate mayor george moscone and his fellow supervisor, harvey milk, he definitely had a plan. he was methodical in its preparation and execution. he oiled his gun, he filled the gun with five cartridges and then took ten extra karl contributory negligences out of their styrofoam slots which involved pulling each one out individually, and wrapped them in a handkerchief and put them

in his pocket. he shaved and showered and put on a suit and tie. he told the aide who picked him up on his way to city hall that he planned to give george and harvey a piece of his mine. he borrowed denice's car keys so there was a getaway vehicle ready. he entered city hall through the polk street steps, sow that the police on the metal detector was not known to him so he reversed course, went outside, found a window on the side of the building, climbed through the window, went up a back staircase, hesitated again at the door to the mayor's office because he knew on the other side of that door was the mayor's security detail. waited for a clerk to come along, door was open, snuck in the back door. he killed george moscone by emptying his former service

revolver into him, and the last two shots he straddled mess scone knee's fallen body and put the last shots in the back of his head. then he crossed city hall, 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 or the fly have of a book by leon uris, and when he turned hicks in at northern station and 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. am i 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, and my entire life, i don't think i've 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, many thousands came. but hundreds and hundreds, feeling exposed and vulnerable and frightened and fewer you 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 -- you had light of the burning cars and their sirens 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, very strongly that the trial itself failed to provide satisfactory answers to most of the questions that san san san -- san franciscoans had about the events. the trial in the end didn't tell anybody a great deal why harvey -- dan white killed his fellow office holder. the question whether it was because harvey was gay still lingers in many people's minds. what we now days call -- and we also wondered, i think, at the time, had dan white got away

with what 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 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 town. as his good friend, willie brown, said about george, he said george's only problem is when he has had two drinks he thinks he is invisible. and george was swept into office

in 19 -- well, not swept but he won the election in 1976 with the backing of gays and neighborhood organizations, with a new force in city politics that was spear-headed by the burton brothers and willie brown and their democratic machine. george moscone was part and parcel of that. harvey milk's background was very, very different. harvey came from new york. he was a smart new york jew, liked to crack wise, and he had a background in finance and the teeter. he had been in the navy, played football in high school. but eventually he became the rosa park of the gay movement, 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. of course, he was, which was quite an extraordinary thing. especially because at that anytime 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. i was, as far as i can tell, the first time 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 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 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 force, 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 outsider, who immediately -- a very tactful move on his part -- removed the american flag from his office and was very much hated by his rank-and-file so in many police stations on the bulletin board was a picture of police chief charles gain, who was seep at george moscone's creature in the cross-hairs of a gun. dan white, like george moscone, grew up in san francisco, but whereas george grew up in the marina, dan grew out 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 flapping on hundreds

of clotheslines, all the sheets well worn. he had absolutely no background in politics. he had been -- 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 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 thought that the way it would work in 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 the idea that would prevail was the idea that hat six votes bought there were 11 members on the board of supervisors and that in order to be a successful politician at city hall, more than anything 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 fascinate by him, and dan was certainly fascinated by harvey, dan felt that both he and harvey represented a city hall constituencyies that had not previously been spoken for in city hall. nonetheless, the two men didn't see eye-to-eye ideology include, they oftenned 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. 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 hi salary had had fallen to $9,600 a year. he had a sweetheart least at pier 39 because he was a supervisor, a hot potato market. his wife worked down there and his son was carted down to the potato stand. dan felt very, very pressured by all 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 tennerred his resignation. he thought he was under pressure before. now he really came under pressure. all the people who relied on him at city hall. the police officers association,

the firefighters, 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 to him that he now felt able to go on, and george said, sure,'ll give you your job back. which didn't sit well with george's con stint opportunities, including harvey who basically told him, you'll never be reelect mayor because dan white is the magical sixth vote. if you return him the board of supervisors, we liberals will continue to lose the close votes so george moscone changed his mind. he promised 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, key moment in

understanding dan white -- because the first people i talked to about dan white were his friends friends and his col, 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 to his high school baseball coach, a guy named jim whitt, and he had taken a certain -- had a sympathy with dan white because dan white lost his father under very humiliate circumstances when he was 15 or 16 years old. he was a little bit lost and a little bit angry, and jim wit saw him as a standup guy and made him captain of the baseball team. and one day he gave dan white the bunt sign. he asked dan white to bunt. and dan white knew the signs and instead he ignored it and hit everybody, and after the inning jim whitt said, 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 then, when i looked at his career, i saw a very different career. i didn't see a guy moving through a series of 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 -- first half is about events i just described in a good deal more detail than i'm able to go into them tonight. the second half of the book is about the trial, and the reason for that is -- that is the reason -- one of the reasons i called the book "double play." it's called toy double play" because there were two assassinations and because dan white and the homicide detective

who took that confession and 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 state championship, but was also called "double play" because as someone who lived through the events, is a 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 hear very little to do with the background i 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, 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 the defense, but it was also true that we here in san francisco had a need to understand what hat happened, had a need to see how it impacted our sew -- society, how 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, and then the jury verdict. the prosecutor in this case, the chief prosecutor in the office of district attorney, joe

fratus, was a man named tom norman. i think he won convictions in 97 trials. he was a very successful career prosecutor, and he told his boss, joe fratus, this was the best first degree case he had ever seen in this life. fratus had an agenda of his own. 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 fratus 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 were also antideath penalty, and so they ended up having in the jury box, a jury that satisfied tom norman, his normal hanging jury. but the defense attorney, schmidt, saw something completely different. looking at the same panel that satisfied norman, schmidt saw a jury much like he hoped for but never expected to get. excuse me. i have to decide whether or not i can read with my glasses off. nine of the 12 had lived in san francisco for 20 years or more, knew first hand was was changing. there will more catholics than noncatholics and four of the women were old enough to be dan white's mother. if you had to guess only one or two might have voted for george

moscone. they were a representative sample of the scold new san francisco working class, pretty good cross-section of the kind of people who felt repressed and neglected by the political system, housewives and clerical workers, a mechanic and a couple of printers and the wife of a jailhouse employee, most of them spent the better part of their lives in poor and modest neighborhoods south of twin peaks. this was the jury the defense got. it was exactly the jury it wanted. and -- the first important witness for the prosecution -- and perhaps the most important witness they could have called -- could have been me most important witness they called what 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. -- and he was prepared to testify that they were deliberate and vial lent 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 delves had con -- defense had conceded from the beginning, the obvious, dan white killed these two guys. he confessed on tape. there was no question he killed

them. rather, the 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 punished. they 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 gold blood. it just doesn't happen. so let's find out what did happen. they seized the narrative. 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, trying to make the game proceed at the pace and in the style which they prefer. and that's exactly what schmidt and sheerer did by posing the question that way. their argument was simple. dan white cracked. he had been mentally ill all along. with severe depression, although nobody noticed. he had never seen a shrink 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 to take no notice of the testimony. he might have been catatonic, and yet he wasn't, as steve

sheerer, his other defendant lawyer told me, he wasn't catatonic. i played chess with him in jail. but you have to adopt some persona for a public ceremony like a trial, and that was dan white's persona. sat there like the shell of a man, and his lawyer who resembles him physically, strode around the courtroom as if to say, this is my client. and it worked. the defense called psychiatrists and psychologists that in the heat of passion dan white cracked and was not able to execute a plan. his capacity to do that was diminished to such a degree that he was not legally culpable for murder. there was, however, a diminished capacity law, one exception. if the killing was taken in revenge, then you cannot invoke

or you could 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 and the thousands of pages of trinity did the prosecutor ever utter the word revenge. not one time. it was an oversight bred in hubris, tom norman and joe fratus, thought they had a sure thing, slam dunk so they never addressed, let alone answer 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 admire what they accomplished. they took a cold-blooded murder and got him off more or less.

it was an amazing event. in his summation, doug schmid, 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 psychiatristists and psychologists in the courtroom, i asked myself? they're not scientists. they're prop begannists. they're like a paid political advertisement. if just once, just one time, a psychiatrist or psychologist testifying at a trial testified unfavorably to the side that was paying him, then i might have a different view of their profession when it's used in behalf of a defendant. but they don't do that. and dan white served his anytime soledad, 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 that he was there, he called up his old friend, frank, asked him to visit him in los angeles, and while frank was there, he told him the truth. he said, yeah, i went down to city hall that day to kill george and harvey, and i also wanted to kill willie brown and carol silver, another supervisor. perhaps more than anything else, what that final confession made clear to me was something i had already believed based on he 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 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 conjugal visit, and 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 because his wife insisted oned. he was taking lithium for his depression, the first time, as far as i can tell, he received n any treatment of any kind for the underlying mental illness that has gotten him off. and then, -- just one second -- here we go -- with marriane 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 note books in a stays under the stairway. the last trientry was not neat and crowd. i it was scrawled across the page. my dearest marriane, he last journal entry is written to express my ever faithful love for you and our children. your devoted husband, danny, october 21, 1985. he returned the brief case to its place, and now he readied his own gas chamber. a 1973 buick la sabre in his garage. he attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and ranked through the rear window. he sat in the car with the doors

closed. he clutched family photos and in the tape deck he played a song, what's done is done, and what's winds won, and what's lost is lost, and gone forever, in the town i loved so well, you would have thought dan white had enough of martyr dom. he hadn't. 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 is 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 just go through a few of them quickly because i know time is running 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 twice -- run twice unsuccessfully for mayor: she told her friends she was not going to run for office when her term as supervisor was up. what's good towing withdraw from politics. on the day of the assays -- assassination, it was she who made the announcement in a pink pant suit splattered with blood from having been one of the first people to harvey milk and having harvey milk's blood all

over her, and her good performance as mayor catapulted her career forward and she has become the most powerful democratic poll mission the state of california and has been for quite a long time now. and because she became mayor, and moscone -- was no longer mayor, the skyline changed, much more dramatically, quickly, rather than it would have under moscone know, who was alive riff groups who opposed a rapid expansion of downtown. so the city skyline, si politics and representation in congress changed dramatically as a result of dan white. district elections, which is what brought dan and harvey, were discarried by the voters at that time, although later reinstated. in the legal area, the

diminished capacity defendant was -- well, the legislature tried to eliminate diminished capacity defense. they passed bills intended to do that, although it's still possible to conduct a state of mind defense, yet you have to frame it a little bit differently but the same kind of defenses are still being put forward. and of all the consequences of his acts, 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 harvey's assassination, 100,000 people showed up in washington for a gay rights march, and most --

many of them were carrying pictures in 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. harvey's life and death became the subject of an opera, an academy award winning documentary and the 2008 movie, "milk" which earned sean pen an oscar for his portrayal of harvey. it's a testament to unintended consequences, that although dan white did not kill harvey milk because he was guy, the assassination of a leader galvanized a movement and assured harvey's place in history. dan white is all but forgotten. george moscone has his name on a convention center and a playground where he passed part of his youth, but harvey milk will live forever. [applause]

>> old journalist never die, they just keep on making their deadlines. >> thank you, mike weiss, author of "double play" for your participation this evening. i'm the chair of the club0s forum and i will be moderating the question and answer period. and we have quite a few. >> oh, good. >> your description of the white night riots was fascinating to me. it happened when i was quite young. all the detail you brought out with dianne feinstein upstairs and the crowd trying to tear down the building, throwing tear gas in the building. it was really chaotic, and carol

ruth silver got hit in the face with a rock. what was going on inside? >> 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 dish heard this grunting, 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 a dike on bikes addressed in leathers and built like sonny liston, and the was a lady cop, and the two of them were just standing there throwing hay makers at each other. they were pounding on each other. that was one of the things that led in me to say this wasn't a riot, it was a fight. it wasn't incentury rex of law avoiding people who felt

exposed, vulnerable, and angry. >> what do you think whoa have happened to george moscone. >> if he lived? >> yeah. >> you know, he might well have been re-elected. might not have been. i talked to many people of both opinions. he would have gone on in a career in politics, i'm certain. >> dianne feinstein -- >> i don't think george was that big. i hope i'm not offending anybody. i thought he was a very goodarch although the wisdom now is that he was a terrible mayor. gaffen newman is supposed to be a tarp terrible mayor, barack obama is a terrible president. >> fairly -- all three men were of modest means, absolutely. all three men could have been described as having working class upbringings. >> it's hard to imagine.

>> gavin has money? >> if someone with three calamities and would like you to rank them. the earthquake of 1989, the zodiac murders and the assassination of mayor moscone. >> very different events. the earthquake of '89 had terrible consequences. people died and people lost their homes but i was kind of fun. for those of us who weren't directly injured or suffered great losses, it was a very exciting time and was one of those wonderful times in the face of particularly natural tragedies 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 in his place in the marina and see if he could salvage some possessions. the zodiac killings weren't a single event. they were over a period of time. more dramatic to me was the

patty hearst kidnapping and the s.l.a. forcing the hearst family to contribute free food around the city. that was a pretty good deal. i don't know how to rank them because they're so different, each from the other. i wrote about all three of them. guess they're interesting enough to write about. >> dan white was very connected with ireland in a misty kind of coffee table book kind of way. >> yeah. the wanted to de -- he saw his irish heritage has 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 his -- 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 did take out irish citizenship, which he was entitled to. i believe it was his mother or grandmother -- one of them had been born in ireland and he was entitled to irish citizenship.

he didn't write anything and he ran out of money and he asked marian, his wife to please send him money to come home, and she said, only if you see a shrink. so he came home. and that's how come he began to see dr. lunde. >> they honey mind in ireland? >> yes. >> with problems in the bedroom? >> yes, definite problems. marian was a very important element in the trial. she is a woman of great dignity, and reserve, and she sat there every day looking frayed and worried half to death, sitting behind dan on the other side of security glass, and then she testified for her husband. >> what did did the folded are up book jacket mean? >> 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 this city for a long time, were being opressed, supplanted by knew people who wanted to change the city in unacceptable ways. so he saw a connection of the oppression of the irish by the english, and the oppression of the older san franciscans by newer san franciscans, and he had also had a powerful draw because it was his homeland. >> is that what drew him to the hot potato? >> what drew him to the hot potato was that warren simple montana, who wanted to build the hot potato, neated a lot of permits and dan white was a supervisor so he got the best stand on pier 349, right when you came in the door. the first stand in there you can get yourself some potatoes. >> there wasn't a lot of discussion about dan white's

time at soledad. was he accepted in the prison population? >> he was kept in isolation. he was considered to be at risk and a danger. someone who was kept in isolation with him, nearby cell, they were released for an hour a day to run. they both could run at the same time on the track, was sirhan sirhan. so, it was like a festival of assassins. >> were you a fan of the true crime genre before you wrote your book? >> 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

functioning, 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 was an event that 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 penn, 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 a great job and took him out to dinner or lunch and calmed him down and things went on. >> someone asked, it's been my experience that gun toting conservatives are always in their hearts counter. 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 the defense would succeed? >> yes. when the confession was played. the confession was played by the prosecution. it was the inspector, who introduced the confession, and i was listening closely to the confession and i thought it was completely self-serving. one of the things 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 to the jury box, and people were crying.

jurors were crying. what they heard was the raw emotion of this obviously shell-shocked man. i mean, 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 trial? >> playing the confession? no. if the prosecution habit played it, the defendant -- defense was prepared to play it. the jury heard the confession in one way. i, as a person, who felt this is a heinous crime and that george moscone and harvey milk were people i had voted for, heard it completely differently. >> dan had a stable home life. >> um, there were a lot of kids. they grew up in pretty rough section of the valley and there were a lot of kids, and then after his dad died -- that was a

terrible event in his life -- his mother married another fireman, and i forget the exact number but there were like 17 siblings and stepsiblings in the family. in fact on the day of the assassinations -- one of the things we have done with this in 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. also includes many of the police transmissions, on the day of the assassinations, and the first police dispatcher you hear is a woman, and then later switches to a man. the woman was one of dan white's sisters. he was the on-duty 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.

>> a love hung himself -- was that weeks before? >> i didn't realize it was that close. i have to read the book. >> it seems interesting that dan had a wife and family and harvey had all this turmoil. that -- 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 been -- ever been elected mayor. i'm sure he would have tried. if not that, he would have tried for an assembly seat. he would have become in historical terms another important early gay politician, not the person he became, not the subject of films and books and so on. >> there's a question about the twinkie defense. >> okay. >> it was much bigger issue in

the newspapers. yeah? >> the twinkie defense -- thank you. the twinkie defense -- the phrase "twinkie defense" was made up by a satirist, paul was also at the trial. he was, quote, covering it for playboy. i think it took him two years to get the piece into playboy. but paul once won a slow bicycle race so that's not surprising. but one of the psychiatrists -- one of the points that the psychiatrists and the psychologists were making, the defense picked up on, was that dan white, who had been very concerned with his good health and physically 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 blender, -- martis available for hire if anybody wants him -- mentioned that he had eaten some twinkies, and so it got seized upon -- it was a throwaway line in a piece of garbage testimony. it had almost nothing to do with the trial. but it became the phrase by which the trial was known. history is formed in very peculiar ways you know. >> it was very critical where dan reloaded. >> absolutely. the prosecution blew it. in his confession, dan white said, unequivocally, he reloaded over in harvey milk's office, before asking harvey milk to join him in killing him. but the defense contend that dan white reloaded over george moscone's body.

these two people were a block apart. we all know city hall. one office on one side of city hall, the other office on the other side of city hall. the defense contended that dan white reloaded over george moscone instinctively out of his police and army training. that was not true. dan white reloaded just before he called harvey into his office, and once again, the prosecution just -- they allowed the defense to make that argument and they didn't just shoot it down by replaying the tape where dan says, i reloaded in my own office, because clearly that would be indicative of first degree murder. if you kill somebody -- you've killed somebody and then you run a block across city hall and then you reload your weapon and kill somebody else, that does seem as the it's deliberate, doesn't it? so, again, the prosecution just -- i mean, tommy norman thought he had a slam dunk case wi