The taste for violence is as pervasive in Elaine's account as is the appetite to justify it in the name of the revolutionary cause. She describes the scene in Huey's apartment just after he had pistol-whipped the middle-aged black tailor Preston Callins with a .357 Magnum. (Callins required brain surgery to repair the damage): "Callins's blood now stained the penthouse ceilings and carpets and walls and plants, and [Huey's wife's] clothes, even the fluffy blue-and-white towels in the bathroom." This is Elaine's reaction to the scene: "While I noted Huey's irreverent attitude about the whole affair, it occurred to me how little I, too, actually cared about Callins. He was neither a man nor a victim to me. I had come to believe everything would balance out in the revolutionary end. I also knew that being concerned about Callins was too costly, particularly in terms of my position in the party. Yes, I thought, Callins."
Elaine deals with Betty's murder in these pages, too. "I had fired Betty Van Patter shortly after hiring her. She had come to work for the party at the behest of David Horowitz, who had been editor of Ramparts magazine and a onetime close friend of Eldridge Cleaver. He was also nominally on the board of our school. . . . She was having trouble finding work because of her arrest record." This is false on every significant count. Betty had no arrest record that Elaine or I knew about. I was one of three legal incorporators of the Learning Center and, as I have already described, the head of its Planning Committee. Finally, I had met Eldridge Cleaver only once, in my capacity as a fledgling editor at Ramparts. (Elaine's purpose in establishing this particular falsehood is clearly to link Betty to a possible plot: "I began wondering where Betty Van Patter might have really come from. . . . I began re-evaluating Horowitz and his old Eldridge alliance.") Elaine continues:
Immediately Betty began asking Norma, and every other Panther with whom she had contact, about the sources of our cash, or the exact nature of this or that expenditure. Her job was to order and balance our books and records, not to investigate them. I ordered her to cease her interrogations. She continued. I knew that I had made a mistake in hiring her. . . . Moreover, I had learned after hiring her that Betty's arrest record was a prison record — on charges related to drug trafficking. Her prison record would weaken our position in any appearance we might have to make before a government body inquiring into our finances. Given her actions and her record, she was not, to say the least, an asset. I fired Betty without notice.
Betty had no prison record for drug trafficking or anything else. "While it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter," Elaine concludes, "I had fired her, not killed her."
Yet, the very structure of Elaine's defense is self-incriminating. The accurate recollections that Betty, who was indeed scrupulous, had made normal bookkeeping inquiries that Elaine found suspicious and dangerous, provides a plausible motive to silence her. The assertions that Betty was a criminal, possibly involved in a Cleaver plot, are false and can only be intended to indict the victim. Why deflect guilt to the victim or anyone else, unless one is guilty oneself?
Violence was not restricted to the Panthers's dealings with their enemies, but was an integral part of the party's internal life as well.
In what must be one of the sickest aspects of the entire Panther story, this party of liberators enforced discipline on the black "brothers and sisters" inside the organization with bull-whips, the very symbol of the slave past. In a scene that combines both the absurdity and pathology of the party's daily routine, Elaine describes her own punishment under the Panther lash. She is ordered to strip to the waist by Chairman Bobby Seale and then subjected to ten strokes because she had missed an editorial deadline on the Black Panther newspaper.
A Taste of Power inadvertently provides another service by describing how the Panthers originally grew out of criminal street gangs and how the gang mentality remained the core of the party's sense of itself even during the heyday of its political glory. Elaine writes with authority, having come into the party through the Slausons, a forerunner of the Bloods and the Crips. The Slausons were enrolled en masse in the party in 1967 by their leader, gangster Al "Bunchy" Carter, the "Mayor of Watts." Carter's enforcer, Frank Diggs, is one of Elaine's first party heroes: "Frank Diggs, Captain Franco, was reputedly leader of the Panther underground. He had spent twelve years in Sing Sing Prison in New York on robbery and murder charges." Captain Franco describes to Elaine and Ericka Huggins his revolutionary philosophy: "Other than making love to a Sister, downing a pig is the greatest feeling in the world. Have you ever seen a pig shot with a .45 automatic, Sister Elaine? . . . Well, it's a magnificent sight." To the newly initiated Panther, this is revolutionary truth: "In time, I began to see the dark reality of the revolution according to Franco, the revolution that was not some mystical battle of glory in some distant land of time. At the deepest level, there was blood, nothing but blood, unsanitized by political polemic. That was where Franco worked, in the vanguard of the vanguard."
The Panthers were — just as the police and other Panther detractors said at the time — a criminal army at war with society and with its thin blue line of civic protectors. When Elaine took over the party, even she was "stunned by the magnitude of the party's weaponry. . . . There were literally thousands of weapons. There were large numbers of AR-18 short automatic rifles, .308 scoped rifles, 30-30 Winchesters, .375 magnum and other big-game rifles, .30 caliber Garands, M-15s and M-16s and other assorted automatic and semi-automatic rifles, Thompson submachine gunss, M-59 Santa Fe Troopers, Boys .55 caliber anti-tank guns, M-60 fully automatic machine guns, innumerable shotguns, and M-79 grenade launchers. . . . There were caches of crossbows and arrows, grenades and miscellaneous explosive materials and devices."
I remember vividly an episode in the mid-1970s, when one of the Panther arms caches, a house on 29th Street in East Oakland, was raided by the police and one thousand weapons, including machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank guns were uncovered. Party attorney Charles Garry held a press conference at which he claimed that the weapons were planted by the police and that the 29th Street house was a dormitory for teachers at the Panther school (which it also, in fact, was). Then Garry denounced the police raid as just one more repressive act in the ongoing government conspiracy to discredit the Panthers and destroy militant black leadership. Of course, all right thinking progressives rallied to the Panthers' support.
And right thinking progressives are still rallying. How to explain the spectacle attending the reception of Elaine's book? After all, this is not pre-glasnost Russia, where crimes were made to disappear into a politically controlled void. The story of the Panthers' crimes is not unknown. But it is either uninteresting or unbelievable to a progressive culture that still regards white racism as the primary cause of all ills in black America, and militant thugs like the Panthers as mere victims of politically inspired repression.
The existence of a Murder Incorporated in the heart of the American Left is something the Left really doesn't want to know or think about. Such knowledge would refute its most cherished self-understandings and beliefs. It would undermine the sense of righteous indignation that is the crucial starting point of a progressive attitude. It would explode the myths on which the attitude depends.
In the last two decades, for example, a vast literature has been produced on the "repression of the Panthers" by the FBI. The "Cointelpro" program to destabilize militant organizations and J. Edgar Hoover's infamous memo about the dangers of a "black messiah" are more familiar to today's college students probably than the operations of the KGB or the text of the Magna Carta. In A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown constantly invokes the vai specter (as she did while leader of the party) to justify Panther outrages and make them "understandable" as the hyper-reflexes of a necessary paranoia, produced by the pervasive government threat. A variation of this myth is the basic underpinning of the radical mind-set. Like Oliver Stone's fantasies of military-industrial conspiracy, it justifies the radical's limitless rage against America itself. On the other hand, ev
en in authoritative accounts, like William O'Reilly's Racial Matters, the actual "Cointelpro" program never amounted to much more than a series of inept attempts to discredit and divide the Panthers by writing forged letters in their leaders' names. (According to O'Reilly's documents, vai agents even suspended their campaign when they realized how murderous the Panthers actually were, and that their own intelligence pranks might cause real deaths.) Familiarity with the Panthers' reality, suggests a far different question from the only one that progressives have asked — Why so much surveillance of the Panthers? — namely: Why so little? Why had the FBI failed to apprehend the guilty not only in Betty's murder but in more than a dozen others? Why were the Panthers able to operate for so long as a criminal gang with a military arsenal, endangering the citizens of major American cities? How could they commit so many crimes — including extortion, arson and murder — without being brought to the bar of justice?
The best review of Elaine's book and the best epitaph for her party are provided ironically by Elaine herself. In the wake of the brutal and senseless whipping of Bobby Seale by a leader insane with drugs and political adulation, and a coterie too drugged with power themselves to resist, she reflects: "Faith was all there was. If I did not believe in the ultimate rightness of our goals and our party, then what we did, what Huey was doing, what he was, what I was, was horrible."
* * *
*In a lengthy investigative article for the New Yorker, which appeared in 1970, Edward Jay Epstein systematically punctured this myth and provided evidence for all to see that it was a hoax. But nobody paid any attention.
10
Johnnie's Other O. J.
(1997)
I FIRST HEARD THE NAME GERONIMO PRATT in the early 1970s, I during a late night conversation with Huey Newton, the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, now deceased. Pratt was the leader of the Los Angeles branch of the party and had been recently convicted of a robbery-murder in Santa Monica. The victim was a young elementary school teacher named Caroline Olsen, who was accosted with her husband by two gunmen on a Santa Monica tennis court on December 18, 1968. Caroline and Kenneth Olsen were ordered to lie down and give up their cash and jewelry, which they did. As the two predators left the scene, however, one of the gunmen emptied his .45-caliber weapon into their prone bodies, wounding Kenneth and killing his wife. Nearly two years later, Geronimo Pratt was charged with the murder and eventually convicted, despite the efforts of Johnnie Cochran, then a young, unknown attorney on the make, to present him as the victim of a police conspiracy.
It was not just the murder conviction that made Pratt a figure of interest to me at the time. Other Panthers had had run-ins with the law. But Pratt was a special case because Newton and the party, and their followers in the New Left, had hung him out to dry. Even though Pratt was a Deputy Minister of Defense and ran the Los Angeles party, there were no "Free Geronimo" rallies organized in his behalf, as there had been for Newton himself. Even more damningly, Newton and the other Panther leaders — Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, and Elaine Brown — flatly denied the alibi with which Pratt sought to save himself. He had claimed he was at a Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of the murder. The refusal of those who attended the meeting to confirm this story, as much as any other fact, sealed Pratt's fate.
There were "political" factors behind this decision to abandon Pratt to his legal fate. He had, in fact, been expelled from the Black Panther Party shortly after the murder of Caroline Olsen for his support of an anti-Newton Black Panther faction led by Eldridge Cleaver, the more violent wing of the party that had accused Newton of "selling out" the "armed struggle." To show their authenticity, Cleaver's followers had formed a Black Liberation Army, which had already launched a guerilla war in earnest in America's cities. Pratt was the party's "military expert" and had fortified the party's headquarters for a shoot-out with police, deploying machine guns and other automatic weapons in a firefight in which three officers and three Panther soldiers were wounded. At the beginning of August 1970, when Pratt was kicked out of the party, another member of the violent "Cleaver" faction, Jonathan Jackson, marched into a Marin County Courthouse with loaded shotguns to take hostages in an episode that cost the lives of a federal judge, Jackson himself, and two of his cohorts. Pratt had supported Jackson and his plan to use the hostages to liberate his brother George from San Quentin, where he was awaiting trial for murder.
The evening Huey and I talked about Geronimo, he explained to me that Pratt, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was psychotic, a "crazy man" who had not only committed the Santa Monica murder, but actually enjoyed violence for its own sake. Huey attributed Pratt's aberrant behavior to his war experience, although in fact he had not met Pratt prior to his military discharge.
And that was the way it remained for me for twenty-five years, during which time I discovered that Newton himself was a coldblooded killer and the Panthers a political gang that had committed many robberies, arsons, and murders. By the time Johnnie Cochran brought the case of Geronimo Pratt before a national public, I was almost ready myself to give Newton's enemy the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps some other Panther had killed Caroline Olsen and used Pratt's car in committing the crime, as his supporters maintained. Perhaps the murder weapon, a distinctive .45 caliber model used in the military and identified by several witnesses as belonging to Pratt had actually belonged to someone else, as he claimed.
But there was a detail from that conversation with Newton that I could never forget and yet never quite believe either. Pratt was so crazy, Newton told me, that "he couldn't get an erection unless he was holding a knife in his hand." This detail would come up again in the aftermath of Pratt's release in the late spring of 1997, when an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Everett Dickey, agreed with Cochran, who was still on the case, that the prosecution had wrongfully concealed from the original jury the information that their key witness, a former Panther named Julius Butler, was a police and FBI "informant. It was Butler who had identified the .45 as Pratt's weapon and-even more damning — claimed that Pratt boasted to him that he had killed Caroline Olsen. It was Butler — and the adroit use Cochran made of him — that led to Pratt's being granted a new trial. Johnnie Cochran and a compliant press named him a "hero" and "victim of injustice."
In the tapestry of Johnnie Cochran's political career, the case of Geronimo Pratt has been a central thread. A young Johnnie Cochran, just setting out on his career in the law, was Pratt's counsel in the original trial. By his own account, it was the Pratt case that "radicalized" him, persuading him that America's criminal justice system was unfair to black men. It showed him, too, that his failure to play the "race card" had led to the conviction of his client. He resolved never to make this mistake again. When Cochran later took on the legal battle that made him famous, he told his client, O. J. Simpson, under indictment for the brutal murder of his wife and an innocent bystander, 'I'm not going to let happen to you what happened to Geronimo Pratt." After getting Simpson acquitted, Cochran visited the imprisoned Pratt and reiterated the promise he had made that he would never rest "until you are free."
Johnnie Cochran's defense strategy made the two cases into the legal equivalent of Siamese twins. Cochran had rescued Simpson from almost certain conviction by focusing on officer Mark Fuhrman and alleging a racist police conspiracy to plant evidence that would frame a popular black hero. In the Pratt case, Cochran focused on chief prosecution witness Julius Butler and alleged an FBI-sponsored "Cointelpro" conspiracy to frame a political hero who was black. As in the Simpson case, Cochran's indictment of the law as conspiratorial and racist was the heart of the appeal that freed Pratt. Indeed, the Simpson case was itself a factor in the Pratt appeal. The climate of public opinion had been so turned against law enforcement by Cochran and other racial demagogues that all the defense had to show was that Julius Butler, the prosecution's chief witness, had had contacts with the law prior to the trial (but well after the murder). That proved sufficient to taint the
verdict. In playing the race card for Simpson, Cochran also put it on the table for Geronimo Pratt.
It was this use of the race card, along with that odd comment Huey had made to me over twenty years earlier, that led me to inquire into the decision to give Geronimo Pratt a "new trial" and inevitably-since the only eyewitness to the murder, Kenneth Olsen, was also now dead-to free him.
To understand the flimsy construction of the argument that prompted this decision and eventually freed Pratt, one has to look at the court's original rejection of an almost identical appeal Pratt made in 1980 which reviewed in detail every significant point of the case. At that time, Pratt was supported in his petition by a blue ribbon list including Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Congressman Pete McCloskey, current San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, the ACLU, the president of the California Democratic Council, and the chair of the Coalition to Free Geronimo Pratt. The central claim made by Pratt's defenders then has not changed in nearly twenty years: "A totally innocent man has languished in [prison] since mid-1972. . . . He was sent there as the result of a case which was deliberately contrived by agents of our state and federal governments. . . . [His] conviction was the result of a joint effort by state and federal governments to neutralize and discredit him because of his membership in the militant Black Panther Party."
This time the nation's press bought the argument whole. But the facts, summarized in the earlier opinion from the court record, reveal the argument to be a political fiction. Though the information that follows was easily available to reporters, none of it made its way into the reams of newsprint that described and celebrated Pratt's release.
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 12
