They killed him because he cared too much. He hurt no one but himself, and no doubt his dedication had driven him past the point of socially accepted behavior; but his death brings shame to us as a nation, because it demonstrates that both common sense and compassion have been leached out of our national character to a degree heartrending to consider. We are, finally, no better than Richard Nixon, who went to the windows of the White House, saw hundreds of thousands massed in the streets to protest, snickered, and went back to watch the Super Bowl.
I tell you his name because it has been just two weeks since Wednesday, December 8th, and you’ve already forgotten who he was: his name was Norman Mayer, he was a mad saint, and he loved us enough to die for our sins.
He was the man in the blue jumpsuit and motorcycle helmet who, at 9:30 AM, Eastern Standard Time, drove his white 1979 Ford van up close to the main entrance of the Washington Monument, stepped out, and began a ten-hour act of humanism that culminated at 7:23 PM with his needless death.
Professionally-lettered on the side of Norman Mayer’s van was a placard that read #1 PRIORITY: BAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
He drove past the Park Service rangers, a little more than two weeks before Christmas, the time of celebration of the birth of a Prince of Peace, and he handed one of the them who had come running a manilla envelope on the outside of which was written his determination to speak only to a reporter . He told the ranger he had 1000 lbs. of TNT in the van, and if we didn’t begin a “national dialogue” on the threat of nuclear weapons, he would reduce the 555-foot-high obelisk to “a pile of rocks.” He held in his gloved hands what the saturation tv coverage kept referring to as “an ominous black control box.”
It was, in fact, a harmless joystick mechanism used to fly model airplances. There was no “radio gear in the knapsack.”
There was not, as any fool with common sense knew from 9:30 AM on, even one stick of TNT in that van. Nor, as simple logic would have shown, was there ever a moment’s danger from “the menacing terrorist who held the Monument hostage.”
Everthing he did, from the moment he pulled up to the obelisk, till the moment he lay handcuffed to the steering wheel of his van, shot four times and dying from a bullet wound in the head, was the action of a compassionate man who understood just how bloody we have become. And who gave his life to prove the point.
At seven AM Los Angeles time on that Wednesday morning, after having written all night and being unable to sleep, I was tuned to Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, as the first live on-site pictures of the “emergency” broke in on regular telecasting. I saw the van tight to the main entrance of the Monument, I listened to the explanation of what had happened, was happening, and the first thought that came to me was, “It’s a bluff. He hasn’t got any dynamite in that truck!” I knew it. Common sense dictated the conclusion; it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes and deductive logic to know the truth. Everything the man in the black helmet did led one’s reason to the conclusion. It was a bluff.
Within an hour of the start of the siege, the police and FBI knew who he was. They knew he was an old man, 66 and deeply committed to the banishment of nuclear weapons. They knew he was no international terrorist, no crazed killer, just a wild old man trying to make a point. More important, they knew that a half ton of TNT would barely scratch the surface of the Monument. But property is more important than human life.
He demanded nothing for himself. No ransom, no great sum of money, no fast plane to take him out of the country, no release of Red Brigade assassins. He merely wanted us to talk. He just wanted to plead with us to expand the dialogue. He was as one with the millions across the world who have marched and pleaded this last year. Marched and pleaded for the right of the human race to live out its days wihtout the mushroom-shaped shadow blighting our joy. Yes, he was an extremist; yes, he was bereft of his senses; but he did not deserve to die.
Within a few hours his actions bespoke that intention. Had there been a scintilla of compassion, rather than macho posturing, in any of the authorities handling the situation, it need not have ended as it did. But there was none. Not on the part of Associated Press reporter Steve Komarow, who spoke to him five times; not on the part of Capt. Robert Hines, commander of the Park Service police, who preened and pontificated before tv cameras like on of those satraps on a road repair crew who is given the red flag to stop traffic and becomes a martinet with that puny power; not on the part of the White House advisors who moved Ronald Reagan’s luncheon out of the room facing the Monument. And not on the part of our noble President who, like Richard Nixon, saw what was going on and shrugged, and ignored his responsibility.
And when, shortly after seven o’clock that night, Norman Mayer came to his senses and was terribly frightened by his own boldness, and tried to flee, to return to the anonymity from which he had emerged…they blew him away. When the first FBI special agent reached the van, the old man was lying there mumbling, “They shot me in the head.”