1995

by Campbell, W. Joseph

  The book was a commercial success, selling more than 650,000 copies41 and providing funds for Simpson’s legal defense. It was most striking in its narcissism and raging self-pity. “The first week I was in jail,” Simpson wrote, “I thought about Jesus being crucified.”42 He also wrote: “I felt there were three homicides. Some unknown killers murdered Nicole and Ronald Goldman; now the press was murdering me.”43 And: “My biggest concern is what all of this has done to me inside. I never really felt hatred before. But now I have, for the first time in my life. This bothers me.”44

  Simpson’s tape-recorded voice filled Ito’s courtroom early in the prosecution’s presentation of evidence. The recording was of an emergency call Nicole Simpson placed in October 1993. In it, she pleaded with a 911 operator to send help. O. J. Simpson was at her back door, cursing and bellowing with rage. He pummeled the door, trying to get in. “He’s O. J. Simpson,” Nicole Simpson was heard to say. “I think you know his record. He’s . . . going nuts.”45 The tape ran for fourteen uncomfortable minutes, filled with the sounds of Simpson’s wild tirade. His words were mostly indistinguishable. As the tape played, Simpson muttered a stream of commentary to his lawyers. They seemed only to half-listen to him.46

  In mid-February 1995, Simpson’s walled estate on North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood was center stage for a court-approved field trip by the jurors—an outing in a fourteen-vehicle caravan that also took them to the scene of the slayings. For Simpson, it was his first visit home since his arrest eight months before. He spent most of the time on the lawn outside his Tudor-style mansion, chatting with deputy sheriffs, his guards. At one point, Simpson ogled an alternate juror wearing tight jeans and long blonde hair. “Oh, man, look at her in those pants,” he was heard to say. “I want to get at her. . . . Look at her in those jeans!”47

  The trial’s dramatic turning point found Simpson again at center stage. This came in mid-June 1995 when Darden, one of the prosecutors, asked Simpson to face the jury box and try on the blood-stained brown leather gloves that the killer was believed to have worn in attacking Nicole Simpson and Goldman. One glove had been found at the murder scene; its mate was found by Fuhrman, the police detective, outside Simpson’s mansion.48

  Facing the jury box, Simpson appeared to struggle mightily in pulling the leather gloves over the latex gloves he was required to wear to avoid contamination. Simpson grimaced repeatedly and in a voice loud enough for jurors to hear, said: “Too tight.”49 The gloves did seem small for Simpson’s hands. But they likely had shrunk in the testing that they had been through. Still, the ill-advised demonstration had allowed Simpson to testify in effect, without having to face cross-examination.50 It was widely recognized as a pivotal moment in the trial,51 and it opened rifts within the prosecution team.52 The bungled demonstration inspired a rallying cry for defense lawyers—an idiom familiar twenty years later. In closing remarks at the trial, Johnnie Cochran recalled the glove demonstration and told jurors: “[R]emember these words; if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”53

  FIGURE 14. O. J. Simpson took center stage at a turning point of his double-murder trial. Prosecutors asked him to try on leather gloves believed to have been worn by the killer of Simpson’s former wife and her friend. The gloves did not fit. (Photo credit: Reuters/Corbis)

  Simpson found another way to testify without facing cross-examination in the trial’s closing days. In formally agreeing to waive his right to testify, Simpson stood and told the judge while the jury was absent that he “did not, could not and would not have committed this crime” and added before Ito cut him off: “I want this trial over.”54 Simpson’s statement had an air of spontaneity, but he had rehearsed it with his lawyers.55 The prosecution saw it for what it was—a dodgy move that allowed Simpson to insist on his innocence without testifying under oath. His statement was sure to reach sequestered jurors, through twice-weekly visits with their families. Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor, was infuriated. She dared Simpson to take the stand “and we’ll have a discussion.”56 Simpson did not respond and did not take the stand. He did not have to.

  Simpson was at center stage in the trial’s final act, the reading of the verdicts on October 3. He may have learned the night before that he was going to be acquitted. Jeffrey Toobin, author of a detailed book about the case, wrote that sheriff’s deputies guarding the sequestered jury told deputies guarding Simpson that “O.J. was going to walk.” They passed word to the defendant. It was, Toobin wrote, “the last leak in the case.”57

  When the second “not guilty” verdict was read in Ito’s courtroom, Simpson looked at the jurors and mouthed “thank you.” Cochran, standing behind him, clasped Simpson’s shoulders and rested his cheek on Simpson’s back in a gesture as much of relief as of celebration.58 The prosecutors seemed dumbstruck. In the gallery, Goldman’s sister Kim wailed in shock and disbelief. Minutes later, as the jurors filed from the courtroom, one of them turned and thrust his left fist in the air in a “black power” salute to Simpson.59

  Similarly stark and contrasting reactions greeted the verdicts elsewhere in the country. Television footage showed African Americans celebrating Simpson’s acquittal with hugs, cheers, and fist pumps—reactions that black novelist Dennis Williams likened to a jubilant “end zone dance” in a football game.60 Such images often were juxtaposed with shots of white Americans reacting slack-jawed to the verdicts, in shock and dismay.61 The disparate reactions were vivid and seemed to confirm what pollsters had detected throughout the trial: black and white Americans interpreted the evidence against Simpson quite differently. The clashing reactions to the verdicts also were interpreted as illuminating a yawning, race-based divide—as evidence of a lamentable state of race relations in America. The disparate reactions to the verdicts prompted much anguished commentary that America’s racial divide was more profound than had been understood.62 The stunning images “of blacks cheering while whites muttered or choked back tears when the verdict was announced chillingly captured the widening separation of interests that increasingly defines American life in the 1990s,” columnist Ronald Brownstein wrote in the Los Angeles Times.63 An article in the San Francisco Chronicle said: “Contrast the black students from Howard University in Washington shown cheering the verdict with the stone-faced disbelief of white UCLA students and you have a snapshot of U.S. race relations in 1995.”64

  Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote grimly the day after the verdicts: “We are two nations—one black, one white. Yesterday, one celebrated Simpson’s acquittal, the other did not.”65 The verdicts may have set race relations back thirty years, said David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a conservative think tank in Los Angeles.66 The British newsweekly the Economist declared that the verdicts made clear “what so many Americans—and so many of their friends abroad—had not wanted to believe. Thirty-odd years after the civil-rights revolution, America is two countries, not one. And they are growing apart, not together.”67

  Such interpretations have been strikingly resilient. At the tenth anniversary of Simpson’s acquittal, Toobin, who had covered the case for the New Yorker and wrote The Run of His Life: The People versus O. J. Simpson, said in an interview with the PBS Frontline program that “the only reason we will care about this case 10 years after, 20 years after, is what it told us about race in this country.”68

  But the lasting effects of the Simpson trial on race relations in the United States proved to be far less dramatic and more nuanced than they seemed in October 1995. Although it is undeniable that whites and blacks largely held conflicting opinions about Simpson’s guilt, the verdicts certainly did not set back race relations by thirty years. The outcome of the Simpson case dented but did not reverse the trajectory of gradually improving relations among blacks and whites in America.

  It is clear that perceptions of race relations in the United States suffered markedly in the trial’s immediate aftermath. This is evident in two Gallup polls conducted in O
ctober 1995. In both surveys, respondents were asked whether they thought “relations between blacks and whites will always be a problem for the United States” or whether “a solution will eventually be worked out.” Fifty-four percent of respondents to the survey taken October 5–7 in the trial’s immediate aftermath said they thought race relations always would be a problem. When the question was asked again in a poll October 19–22 after the reactions to the verdicts had solidified, and just after the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., nearly 70 percent of respondents said they thought race relations always would be a problem.

  FIGURE 15. Views about race. Americans’ perceptions of relations between blacks and whites became more negative after verdicts were reached in the O. J. Simpson trial. But perceptions have become more positive in the years since then. Shown here are the results of survey questions asked over the years about whether race relations will “always be a problem” in the United States or whether “a solution will be eventually worked out.” (Source: Gallup Organization)

  That result would be a low point in Gallup’s polling on that question. By early 1997, 55 percent of respondents said black-white relations in America would always be a problem. By spring 2001, the percentage of respondents saying relations would always be problematic had slipped to 47 percent. A poll conducted in June 2007 found that view was supported by 43 percent of respondents. In early November 2008, just after Barack Obama became the first African American elected to the U.S. presidency, only 30 percent of respondents said race relations would always be a problem. In Gallup’s reading in August 2013, that response was 40 percent. Fifty-eight percent said “a solution will eventually be worked out.”69 Although fluctuations intrude in the polling data, the overall trajectory since 1995 is that perceptions of race relations have been improving.70

  Other national data have suggested a deepening racial tolerance in the years after the Simpson verdicts. Notably, Americans’ approval of interracial marriage has climbed markedly since the mid-1990s. In 1994, 48 percent of respondents told Gallup they supported marriage between blacks and whites; 37 percent said they disapproved. Ten years later, 75 percent of respondents said they approved of marriages between blacks and whites. By 2013, 87 percent said they approved. The deepening levels of approval, Gallup said, follow “the trend toward increasing racial tolerance on other measures such as voting for a black president and an increasing belief in progress and equality for blacks in the U.S. more generally.”71

  Moreover, Gallup reported in 2013 that 72 percent of white Americans felt relations between blacks and whites were “very good” or “somewhat good,” sentiments shared by 66 percent of blacks. About 30 percent of all Americans said racial relations were “somewhat bad” or “very bad.”72 Black and white Americans differed sharply, however, in perceptions about the country’s criminal justice system. Twenty-five percent of white respondents and 68 percent of black respondents said in 2013 they believed the justice system was “biased against black people.”73 Those perceptions were strikingly little changed from twenty years before. In 1993, 33 percent of white respondents and 68 percent of black respondents told Gallup they believed the justice system was “biased against black people.”74 Such clashing perceptions about equality of justice in America provide a revealing framework for interpreting and understanding the disparate reactions to the Simpson verdicts in 1995.

  Even so, the anomalous character of the Simpson trial made it a weak case from which to generalize about a topic as thorny, complex, and multidimensional as race relations in the United States. A single, uncharacteristic case that centered around a single, wealthy defendant who before his trial was little invested in issues and controversies of race simply could not have transmitted a widely applicable message about the state of race relations in America. And to argue that the Simpson case did offer a singularly revealing assessment about race in America in the mid-1990s is to ignore other dynamics of the time—in particular, the popular appeal of Colin Powell, the black former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a hero of the 1990–91 Gulf War with Iraq. In 1995, Powell emerged as a strong prospective Republican candidate for president.

  FIGURE 16. Views of interracial marriage. Americans’ approval of marriages between blacks and whites has climbed steadily since the mid-1990s and now approaches 90 percent. Only 48 percent of respondents said they approved in 1994. (Source: Gallup Organization)

  Powell was described as the “most popular American of any color.”75 There was much talk at the time about “Powell-mania,”76 and news reports said popular esteem for the general had reached papal-like dimensions. He was characterized as “America’s unsullied presidential candidate, a natural healer in a divisive era, a blank slate on which Americans can write their dreams.”77

  Powell’s popularity was buoyed by a nationwide tour to promote his memoir, My American Journey, which came out in September 1995 to mostly admiring reviews.78 The memoir debuted atop the New York Times best-seller list on October 1, 1995,79 just as the Simpson trial was reaching its denouement. Powell’s tour was closely scripted but still attracted large and diverse crowds of admirers—“black and white, old and young, affluent and unemployed,” the Times reported.80 Some of Powell’s well-wishers waited hours in long lines for a chance to say a few words to the general and have him sign a copy of his book.81

  The clashing narratives presented by Powell-mania and the Simpson verdicts were not entirely overlooked in the early autumn of 1995. Ellen Goodman, a nationally syndicated columnist, called attention to the contrasting cases shortly after Simpson’s acquittal. “These two men,” she wrote, “have nothing in common except their skin color and our attention. But these are names and stories that we attach to a tough ongoing dialogue about race. The country that looks at this verdict is deeply divided, an apartheid of perceptions, an America of separate realities. But the same country that looks to Powell is not blinded by color. It’s united by overarching values and indeed longs for the reconciliation he personifies. The point is that both possibilities coexist in this best-of-times, worst-of-times moment in race relations.”82

  Goodman did not address the question, but she might have: How did one square the popularity of Colin Powell with the view that the Simpson verdicts had exposed deep racial divisions in America? An obvious answer was that the Simpson case was not all-revealing about race in America in 1995, that it was a misleading anomaly or an imprecise metaphor. (Another answer was that Powell and Powell-mania were antidotes, or perhaps palliatives, to the divisiveness of the Simpson trial. At the very least, as Carl Rowan, a nationally syndicated black columnist, observed at year’s end, “1995 wasn’t all downhill, racially speaking.”)83

  Powell’s prospects seemed promising, were he to make a run for the presidency. A poll taken in October 1995 placed him ahead of all likely Republican candidates in New Hampshire, home to the first presidential primary election in 1996. Among Republicans nationally, Powell led Senator Bob Dole, by then an announced candidate for president, by 34 percent to 29 percent, according to a New York Times–CBS poll. He also topped Dole and President Clinton in a nationwide survey measuring such elements of leadership as integrity, vision, and values.84 “The mania for Powell,” Clinton’s biographer recalled years later, “was driving Clinton to distraction.”85

  Powell, though, was ever-cautious and invariably hedged when asked about seeking the presidency in 1996. “If I ever do decide to enter politics,” he wrote in his book, “it will not be because of high popularity ratings in the polls. . . . And I would certainly not run simply because I saw myself as the ‘Great Black Hope,’ providing a role model for African Americans or a symbol to whites of racism overcome. I would enter only because I had a vision for this country.”86 Finally, in early November 1995, Powell announced he would not seek public office in 1996, saying that a run for the presidency was “a calling that I do not yet hear.”87

  Judge Ito’s decision to announce the verdicts at a specific hour88 helps explain
why the verdicts became a flashbulb moment of 1995. Designating a precise time for the announcement gave the lawyers and family members ample time to reach the courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. Designating a time also allowed anticipation to swell and ensured that the trial’s final act would be closely followed and widely watched. It further guaranteed that reactions to the verdicts would be scrutinized as well.

  The contrasting images of jubilation and despair that greeted the verdicts arguably were manifestations of pent-up anticipation, an upshot of a timed announcement. Scenes of jubilation among blacks and disillusionment among whites undoubtedly would have been far fewer had the verdicts been announced on the day the jury reached its decisions. Had the verdicts been announced promptly on October 2, there would have been little time for disparate reactions to congeal or crystallize in a communal, highly visible manner. The black-white reactions would not have been so striking or prominent. Without the timed announcement, the contrasting reactions to Simpson’s guilt or innocence would not have burst so dramatically into view as they did on October 3.

  The images of joyous blacks and dumbfounded whites in some ways masked a more subtle reality: the reactions suggested, said Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor and a widely quoted observer of the trial, that racial solidarity was more pronounced than it was.89 “I think it’s an exaggeration to say all African Americans were happy with the verdict or all whites were upset with the verdict,” Arenella said on the tenth anniversary of the trial.90 Not all whites felt that Simpson had cheated justice. Many whites believed the prosecution failed to present a persuasive, airtight case that overcame reasonable doubt. Simpson may well have killed his former wife and her friend, but the prosecution had not overcome the deficiencies that defense lawyers so frequently identified, especially in the sloppy collection, handling, and processing of DNA evidence.91