The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  Under California’s “Little Lindbergh Law,” a defendant who moved a victim even a few feet, or from one car to another, could be found guilty of kidnapping, and “sodomy” (in these instances, forced fellatio) was considered an unspeakable perversion, so Chessman found himself in very serious trouble. His trial, which took place from April 29 to May 21, 1948, received lurid media coverage. When it was over he was convicted of “kidnapping and sexual assault,” and the judge, Charles Fricke, who had sent more defendants to the gas chamber than any other judge in state history, sentenced him to death.33

  Arriving at San Quentin’s death row on July 3, Chessman was searched, photographed, fingerprinted, and issued the prison identification number 66565. Consigned to North Block, fifth floor, he ended up in Cell 2455, a clammy and lifeless concrete tomb that was 10.5 feet long, 4.5 feet wide, and 7.5 feet high, with a solid steel door. The only furnishings were a hard metal cot, a tiny wooden table with an overhanging shelf, a steel commode and sink that were bolted to the wall, and a stool. There was no window to the outside world. The only thing he could glimpse through the bars was a government-issue clock that relentlessly ticked away his remaining time. It was there that he would spend the rest of his life.

  One of the most momentous events in his new life occurred a month after his arrival, when he received a typewriter. He used it to tap out his first diary entry. “A fool, incontrovertibly, is a fool is a fool,” he wrote.34 The typewriter proved to be the instrument of Chessman’s salvation. He banged out letters, legal briefs, petitions for writs of certiorari, and, ultimately, a book-length manuscript about the profound personal transformation he was undergoing on death row.

  A previous convict on San Quentin’s death row, David Lamson, had successfully challenged his conviction in the Supreme Court and published a popular book, We Who Are About to Die (1935), describing his thirteen-month ordeal on the condemned block. Lamson had not only avoided the hangman’s noose, but he had also cleared his name, his book was made into a classic movie in 1937, and he became a celebrity.35

  Although Chessman lacked Lamson’s privileged background, his writing soon attracted the interest of his lawyer, Rosalie Asher, and a literary agent, Joseph E. Longstreth, and others such as the courtroom mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. Somehow he managed to avoid execution for six long years, and he was still fighting. In 1954 his memoir was published as Cell 2455, Death Row: A Condemned Man’s Own Story. It became a national best seller, selling more than half a million copies and translated into eighteen languages. A year later it appeared in movie theaters as Cell 2455 Death Row, directed by Fred F. Sears and starring William Campbell.36

  His autobiography, told in the third person and filled with intimate details about his family and sexuality, received rave reviews and struck a chord with the American public. “No condemned criminal,” one critic wrote, “has ever produced so literate and lucid a piece of selfanalysis.”37 In the meantime, he evaded execution, sometimes by as narrow a margin as a few hours, by invoking scores of hair-splitting but life-saving legal technicalities, which added to his fame as a genius jailhouse lawyer. And somehow he managed to maintain his calmness and grace in the face of the most intense personal, legal, and literary pressures.

  Over the next several years Chessman followed up his initial triumph by writing more best-selling books and magazine articles.38 He also was portrayed in movies, news broadcasts, documentary films, and countless articles circulated throughout the world. Accounts depicted him as a psychopath, sex fiend, rebel, wily jailhouse lawyer, con man, fall guy, poster boy for rehabilitation, and literary genius. On March 21, 1960, his likeness appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the gas chamber in the background—an iconic mark of distinction for both him and the chamber at that critical time. His apotheosis from three-time loser to worldwide celebrity amounted to one of the great personal transformations in American history. Chessman’s case, through his writings and all the coverage about him, shined a spotlight on many festering issues in crime and punishment. Foremost was the death penalty, and to a lesser extent the gas chamber in particular.

  Like other famous cases before his—Tom Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs—Chessman’s struggle became a political cause célèbre, even though, unlike the others, he was not overtly political. Instead, much of the fight on his behalf was waged on “humanitarian” grounds, although, as one commentator observed, the “cat-and-mouse game” also “provided an outlet for incipient anti-Americanism, as well as the expression of honest doubts about law and justice in the United States.” Some of his supporters included the actors Marlon Brando and Shirley MacLaine, television host Steve Allen, writers Norman Mailer, Aldous Huxley, and Dorothy Parker, and throngs of demonstrators from Rio de Janeiro to London and New York to Sacramento. Every day newspapers throughout the world reported new developments in his drama. The Vatican, through its newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, appealed to the courts and the governor to spare his life. University students in Montevideo threatened to picket President Eisenhower during his visit there unless the execution was stopped. In the face of such pressure, Governor Edmund G. Brown of California, a Democrat, issued a sixty-day reprieve, causing many abolitionists to think they had won.39

  But the reprieve set off a political firestorm in the United States. When it was revealed that Brown said his decision had been influenced by the State Department, out of concern for potential embarrassment to Eisenhower during his trip to South America, many American conservatives cried federal interference. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a Republican candidate for president, accused the State Department of being “weak-kneed,” and the pro-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina complained that federal officials had become “less and less able to discern” what was a “domestic” question. When Brown tried to defuse the crisis by proposing legislation to abolish the death penalty in California, his approach triggered more attacks from the political right. Comments by Vice President Richard Nixon in favor of capital punishment were assailed by leaders of Reform Judaism organizations, who said Nixon’s statement “demonstrates an ignorance of the scientific studies which prove that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime.”40

  By then, thirty-five nations and nine U.S. states had abolished capital punishment, and the trend throughout the Western world seemed to be running against the death penalty.41 An April 1960 poll found that sitting governors outside the South opposed capital punishment by a six-to-one ratio.42 But both houses of the California legislature refused to pass Brown’s abolitionist legislation.

  Chessman, meanwhile, continued his barrage of legal appeals, raising one argument after another. The courts rejected them all. On April 30, 1960, he and his attorneys were allowed to hold a long morning news conference at San Quentin. In it the condemned convict steadfastly reasserted his innocence and held out hope for gubernatorial clemency that would save his life.43

  But after receiving eight stays of execution, on May 1, 1960, Chessman’s legal luck appeared to have finally run out. Media from around the world rushed to San Quentin, where hundreds of protesters, many of them Catholic, camped out alongside the road with signs saying, “CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS MURDER” and “EACH MAN’S DEATH DIMINISHES ME,” and banners bearing such messages as “THE WORLD IS WATCHING US.” Through that night they continued their vigil.

  Chessman’s ninth scheduled appointment in the gas chamber proved to be his last. Sixty witnesses, about two-thirds of them reporters, crammed into the first-floor room adjacent to the execution room. Five guards sat on a bench outside, one for every observation window. Just after 10 A.M. on May 2, Chessman was escorted into the small octagonal steel chamber with its dark green walls and strapped into one of its two sturdy chairs. Wearing a white shirt, new blue jeans, and socks, he showed no emotion. After two guards strapped him in and walked out, he glanced over at two reporters he knew and mouthed out the words, “Tell Rosalie [Asher, his attorney]
I said good-bye. It’s all right.” Then he half-smiled. Reporter Harold V. Streeter noted, “He grimaces but managed a deep breath. His face with its hawk-nose and protruding lower lip goes back as though he was looking at the ceiling.”

  At 10:03:15, a click was heard and potassium cyanide pellets dropped from a container under the chair into a basin of sulfuric acid solution. Fumes began their ascent. “Now Chessman’s mouth falls wide open,” the AP reporter wrote, in a dispatch sent round the world. “His fingers which once typed out four books and numerous court appeals on his death row typewriter twitch nervously. The head darts involuntarily forward but falls back again. The mouth makes convulsive movements. It almost seemed like it was trying to form a shouted word.” Nearby, the telephone rang and witnesses winced when they heard the mumbled words. Once again, the call had come too late. This time, the notice of a judge’s one-hour reprieve had failed to prevent the execution.44

  Another reporter, John R. Babcock, who witnessed Chessman’s execution from only two feet away, later recalled, “The thrashing and gasping continued for five to eight minutes of excruciating agony and pain as he slowly suffocated. After a total of approximately nine minutes, the prison doctor evidently had pronounced Mr. Chessman dead. Next, a metallic voice came over the loudspeaker…. The voice referred to Mr. Chessman by his inmate number rather than his name and gave the details of the exact times at which Mr. Chessman was prepared for execution, brought to the gas chamber, when the pellets were dropped and when he was pronounced dead. Then I distinctly recall the voice saying, ‘that’s all, gentlemen.’”45

  Caryl Chessman was thirty-eight years old.

  His gassing unleashed a wave of revulsion across the globe and contributed to scores of anti-American outbursts. Students in Uruguay shouted, “Assassins!” Police in Stockholm mobilized to head off vandalism at the U.S. embassy. A headline in Italy read, “Chessman Killed in the Gas Chamber; Cruel America.” Demonstrations also occurred in Brazil, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy, France, and other countries.

  As one historian later put it, “The fight to save Caryl Chessman [had been] the most important attack on capital punishment in American history.”46 Much of the most heated opposition had occurred abroad, in nations considered friendly to the United States, yet somehow it seemed not to have engendered such an enormous outcry at home. Foreigners seemed to be more agitated about American capital punishment than Americans were. Most Americans remained uneasy or oblivious. The greatest domestic response occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the weeks and months that followed, Chessman’s execution became a rallying cry in Berkeley’s burgeoning Free Speech Movement, and a touchstone for Beatniks’ poems and folksingers’ laments. Author Paul Goodman cited the killing as “violently, sickeningly, sadistic, pornographic, and vindictive.” Prison reformers questioned the wisdom of executing someone who not only hadn’t taken another life but who also had proved such a model of rehabilitation. Young lawyers and activists contemplated what they could do to attack the death penalty itself. And American diplomats worried about how their country’s death-penalty policies might injure America’s standing in the cold war.47

  At the precise moment this was happening, another global event that would have an impact on the gas chamber began to unfold. It started after Israeli intelligence agents located a murderer they had been pursuing for years. The suspect, who was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the name Ricardo Klement, was actually the fugitive Nazi war criminal SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Adolf Eichmann, fifty-four, who had been head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945 and chief of operations in the deportation of three million Jews to extermination camps. A key figure in implementing Hitler’s Final Solution, Eichmann, known to the Jews as the “Angel of Death,” had supervised the creation and operation of the death camps. After the war Eichmann had managed to escape and eventually made his way to South America. He had destroyed all evidence of his former identity as best as he could, even cutting away the SS tattoo he carried under his left armpit. But once the Mossad obtained proof of his true identity, on May 11, 1960, they kidnapped him and took him to Jerusalem for extensive interrogation and trial. Word of Eichmann’s arrest was announced to the world on May 23.

  An Israeli tribunal heard extensive testimony about his slaughter of Jews in Nazi death camps, and Eichmann himself acknowledged his moral guilt but maintained that his role was minor.48 The evidence against him included extensive testimony by survivors and a Russian film from Auschwitz showing a gas chamber that looked from the outside like an ordinary brick warehouse.49 The trial, which received worldwide news coverage, was controversial in some quarters, primarily because Eichmann had been illegally seized in violation of international law years after the last of the Nuremberg criminals had been pardoned. On December 13, 1961, the former Nazi was sentenced to death, and following the rejection of an appeal to the Supreme Court for clemency, he was executed by hanging close to midnight on May 31, 1962.

  The Eichmann case revived attention on the Nazis’ use of the gas chamber against the Jews. It also raised haunting questions about the nature of culpability for crimes against humanity and how to punish such crimes. In anticipation of the verdict, the noted British historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper published an essay entitled “Eichmann Is Not Unique,” in which he argued that the human capacity to commit horrible crimes, including genocide, was much more widespread than generally acknowledged. “Seen historically and in perspective,” he wrote, “anti-Semitism is only the most obvious expression of a more general social and psychological phenomenon. That is why it may easily be stirred into life again.” In Europe the Final Solution had applied to Jews and Gypsies, but members of other groups and classes had also been targeted for elimination. For Americans, warnings such as Trevor-Roper’s carried other implications, especially given the nation’s historical treatment of blacks and Native Americans as well.50

  Writer Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker and later expanded her articles into a best-selling book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she explored “the banality of evil.” In it she argued that rather than representing evil incarnate, as many sought to depict him, Eichmann was actually just an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in advancing his career. His evil actions stemmed from the seductive power of the totalitarian state and an unthinking adherence to the Nazi cause. His only defense during the trial was, “I was just following orders.”51

  Interestingly, some social commentators of the period who were arguing for capital punishment took to invoking the image of Eichmann as a criminal, which he certainly was. Yet abolitionists attacking the gas chamber might just as readily have cited him as an example of an executioner, for he was that, too.

  For intellectuals, perhaps the most influential statement of the period about the death penalty was the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” written by Nobel Prize–winning author Albert Camus in 1957. Camus was a leading voice against totalitarianism and a critic of capital punishment on philosophical grounds. 52

  At the same time as the Chessman execution and Eichmann’s arrest, Americans were also flocking to read or watch, among other works, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1947 book, 1955 play, 1959 movie), depicting the life of a Jewish teenager in hiding from the Nazis before she was ultimately caught and sent to her death; Exodus, by Leon Uris (1958 book, 1960 movie), about the founding of Israel; Judgment at Nuremberg (1959 television play, 1961 movie), about ethical issues raised by the war crimes trials; and William L. Shirer’s best seller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), regarding the history of the Nazi regime.

  The image of the gas chamber hung over all of them: humanizing and ennobling the victims, exposing the executioners and holding them accountable, and detailing the rise and fall of fascism that had engulfed the world. While the American gas chamber and cyanide executions of Chessman and others were not mentioned in any of them, and Chessman’s works specifically a
voided mentioning the Nazis, they all inhabited the same arena and raised many of the same issues. Thoughts about one infected thinking about the other.

  Historian Peter Novick has argued in The Holocaust in American Life (1999) that the American concept of “the Holocaust” gradually gained ground in the public awareness during the 1960s. Until then, many American Jews did not tend to stress the special quality of Jewish suffering. This was because it might have drawn attention to the fact that many Eastern Jews were sympathetic to Communism when International Communism was such a bogeyman to most Americans. What caused the situation to change, in Novick’s view, was the television coverage of Eichmann’s show trial in 1961. He suggests that to meet the need for an English word to translate the Hebrew “Shoah” (catastrophe, destruction), the word holocaust emerged as the preferred term, and it has been used ever since. The Holocaust did not become capitalized, he says, until after the Six Day War of 1967, when Jews again presented themselves as being threatened with extinction.53

  The powerful image of the Holocaust affected not only Jews. It also intensified the guilt experienced by prison staff who participated in the executions. As one San Quentin veteran of the period later explained, “You know, in Hitler’s Germany, the Nazis killed people who were simply nuisances: the mental defectives, the Gypsies, and mentally ill people. They were killed not because they committed a crime, but because they were inconvenient for a society to have around. Now we have a lot of people in this society who are nuisances, who are inconvenient, and I would be afraid that a society that became too comfortable with killing people would extend that charter, so to speak, to dispose of other groups.”54