American History Revised (69 page)

1964
On a cold March night, returning home from work at 3:00 a.m., Kitty Genovese was brutally murdered. At the time, nobody noticed—just another
homicide in the Queens borough of New York City. Two weeks later the
New York Times
ran a front-page story, “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call,” reporting that thirty-eight witnesses watched her being stabbed repeatedly, and never once during ninety minutes did anyone come to her rescue. (Only at the end did one witness finally call the police.)

Overnight, the Kitty Genovese case made front-page headlines across the country and became a textbook case for psychologists and social scientists. Coming at a time of national trauma, three months after the Kennedy assassination, “the thirty-eight witnesses who watched their neighbor die” touched the national consciousness like an electric jolt. “Thirty-eight!” people said over and over. “Thirty-eight!” Many citizens saw the witnesses’ apathy as a sign of the moral collapse of America: “Dear God, what have we come to? … Are we living in a jungle?” When newspapers did follow-up stories, they didn’t talk to the witnesses, they interviewed sociologists and psychologists and other third-party experts who had a field day pontificating about group social behavior. One expert suggested the murderer vicariously gratified the sadistic impulses of those who witnessed it: “They were deaf, paralyzed, hypnotized with excitation. Fascinated by the drama, by the action, and yet not entirely sure that what was taking place was actually happening.”

Fair to say if the expert had been there, but of course he hadn’t. Yes, there was a murder. But the story of thirty-eight witnesses who witnessed the knife stabbing and did nothing is incorrect, so much so that the prosecutor described the witnesses as virtually useless in testifying at the murderer’s trial. The prosecutor said he could find only five or six people who saw or heard anything—not thirty-eight. “I don’t know where that came from, the thirty-eight,” he said. Even the half-dozen people couldn’t give enough evidence for a conviction; the murderer was arrested on a fluke, and convicted for life only because he confessed.

What really had happened? This sensationalist story began when a newspaper editor had lunch with a frustrated city police commissioner. Now, police commissioners have a lot on their mind, ranging from accusations they aren’t doing enough about crime … to lack of cooperation from the citizens they are trying to serve. Both concerns came to the fore during this luncheon. Out of the blue, the police commissioner suddenly blurted, “That Queens story is one for the books. Thirty-eight people had watched a woman being killed, and not one of them called the police.”

In other words, it was the public’s fault. The editor assigned the story to a junior reporter who came back with an article that was quickly published and subsequently won an award for excellence from the Newspaper Reporters Association of New York. Alas, the reporter—and subsequent reporters from the
Times
—never
interrogated the witnesses about exactly what they saw or heard, and when. All they were interested in knowing were the witnesses’ explanations for their “assumed” apathy. Certainly the comments appeared quite damning. “We thought it was a lovers’ quarrel,” said one witness. “I didn’t want my husband to get involved,” said another. “We went to the window to see what was happening, but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street. I put out the light and we were able to see better.” “I was tired, I went back to bed.” Why not call the police? “I don’t know.”

But the most interesting comment, one that all outsiders failed to grasp, was: “I wish everyone would leave us alone.” What exactly did this mean? Was it another expression of bland apathy, or did it signal something deeper? Was this a community of “Stepford wives,” or was it a community numbed into submission by relentless accusations?

Some forty years went by, and eventually people started asking more in-depth questions about exactly what had happened. Certainly there were a lot of inconsistencies. It was a freezing cold night, with windows closed tight, so how could witnesses hear what they thought they might have heard after they had learned to their horror what had occurred? How could they see the assailant when the attack took place under the shadows of a tree? How could they see “the third stabbing” when there were only two? Why should they become suspicious when there was a bar nearby, and people frequently got into shouting arguments at 3:00 a.m.? And last but not least, this being an era before there were 911 emergency phone lines, where were the phone calls that other witnesses claimed they had made to the police precinct? Were the police pointing at the witnesses to clear themselves?

In an example of citizen activism to correct history similar to Robert Edsel’s (see
Chapter 2
), a local lawyer named Joseph De May started conducting exhaustive research on the Genovese killing and found many discrepancies. In 2004 the
New York Times
, which had once bragged that “seldom has the
Times
published a more horrifying story than its account of how thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding, middle-class citizens watched a killer stalk his young woman victim,” ran a quite different story. Titled “Kitty, 40 Years Later,” the article gave credence to De May’s findings that “the great majority of the thirty-eight so-called witnesses did not see any part of the actual killing; and that what most of them did see, was fleeting and vague.” Also giving credence to De May was the
Financial Times
of London, which cited De May for eviscerating the
Times
’s original story. In 2007 there appeared a lengthy article in
American Psychologist
analyzing the witnesses’ alleged behavior. The article stated up front, “The story of the thirty-eight witnesses who remained inactive during the murder of
Kitty Genovese is not supported by the evidence.”

For forty years it was a powerful story that sold a lot of newspapers and unleashed a frenzy of recrimination. But it didn’t happen the way the
New York Times
said it did.

1967
In the middle of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, the U.S. Navy sent a spy ship into the eastern Mediterranean to do a little snooping. An order sent five times from Washington DC that the ship stay one hundred miles from shore was never received, so in the heat of a war the ship cavalierly patrolled international waters fifteen miles off the Egyptian coast. Nearby were several Soviet ships, presumably also monitoring the Israeli-Arab war. On board the USS
Liberty
were Russian and Arab translators, but no Hebrew translators—a most curious omission given the ship’s location, and one that soon proved deadly.

On a clear, sunny day, the ship—flying the American flag—was spotted by Israeli reconnaissance planes. Because of the lack of Hebrew translators on board the ship, communication between the ship and the planes was impossible, and the planes went away. Six hours later, fighter jets suddenly arrived, attacking the
Liberty
with machine-gun fire. At the appearance of torpedo boats, the
Liberty
responded with its own machine-gun fire, prompting the torpedo boats to release several torpedoes. As the sailors lowered their rubber rafts to escape the burning ship, they were strafed. When the captain finally managed to communicate that the ship was an American one, the Israeli attackers stopped and backed off. A day later, the Israeli government issued a formal apology to the United States. Thirty-four American sailors were dead and seventy-five severely wounded.

In the uproar that followed, Israel claimed a case of mistaken identity, saying it had been assured by the United States that there were no American ships in the area and so it had confused the
Liberty
with an Egyptian ship known to be in the area, the
El Quseir.
How an air force as highly trained as Israel’s could make such a blunder struck many people as inconceivable. The
Liberty
was twice as big as the
El Quseir
, with a superstructure of satellite dishes and antennae that made it “look like a lobster.” The ship had a prominent identifying number on its hull that read “5-GTR” (GTR stands for General Technical Research, the designation for American spy ships). “I never believed that the attack on the USS
Liberty
was a case of mistaken identity,” said naval commander Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Added the secretary of state, Dean Rusk: “I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation….I didn’t believe their explanations then, and I
don’t believe them to this day.” “Unbelievable,” said presidential advisor Clark Clifford. Even more blunt was CIA director Richard Helms: “The Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.”

The Israeli government, giddy over its trouncing of Egypt in the Six-Day War, took a hard line. It refused to conduct a full-scale investigation like the United States demanded; instead it produced a report by a low-level officer with no experience in espionage or flying. No interviews of the Israeli pilots who attacked the
Liberty
in broad daylight were conducted. Nor were there any interviews of government officials who might have ordered the attack. When the United States complained about the lack of serious investigation, the Israelis took the offensive and said the United States was partly to blame because it had failed to alert Israel of the
Liberty’s
presence. Israel claimed the novel theory that any boat traveling at more than twenty knots—even in international waters—must be “hostile.” It claimed the
Liberty
had been traveling at twenty-eight knots (nearly twice the
Liberty’s
maximum), had failed to identify herself, was engulfed in black smoke, and “behaved suspiciously.”

Such gall outraged leading members of the American military. But the United States was caught in an awkward position: how to explain the presence of a U.S. spy ship in a war zone? Certainly the Arabs and Egyptians would not be happy knowing a U.S. intelligence ship was in the area, presumably feeding information to the Israelis. The U.S. also had a dilemma explaining to the American public how a staunch ally could dare attack one of its ships. What kind of an ally was this? Finally, the timing was most inauspicious: President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had their hands full, coping with mounting problems in Vietnam. The last thing they wanted was a mini-war in the Middle East, especially with a presidential election coming up.

Clark Clifford, the staunchest supporter of Israel in the entire administration, smelled a rat: “Something had gone terribly wrong—and was covered up.” He urged a tough line: “Handle [the incident] as if Arabs or USSR had done it.” But political considerations reigned. Led by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and executed by Admiral John McCain (father of the 2008 presidential candidate), a gag order was imposed on all the sailors of the ship. When the National Security Agency director concluded that the attack “couldn’t be anything else but deliberate,” Assistant Secretary of State Cyrus Vance told him to keep his mouth shut. The
Liberty
, which was held up in Malta being repaired and painted, was off-limits to the media: they would never get a chance to photograph it riddled with torpedo explosions and 821 shell holes, “shot up as a tin can on a firing range.” Even the conservative columnist William F. Buckley was appalled at the gag order: “Is the
Liberty
episode being erased from history? So it
would seem … What has happened to our prying journalistic corps and our editors, normally so indignant of attempted suppression of the news?”

In the meantime, the commander of the
Liberty
, William McGonagle, was put up for the Medal of Honor. Almost always, this award, the nation’s highest award for heroism, is presented by the president at the White House. Not in this case. Due to the sensitivity of the
Liberty
incident, the award was given to McGonagle at the Washington Navy Yard by Admiral Moorer, while the president stayed at the White House and handed out diplomas to high-school students. A “back-handed slap,” said Moorer. No White House press release announcing McGonagle’s award was ever issued.