Double Play: The Hidden Passions behind the Double Assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk
by Mike Weiss
Vince Emery Productions
496 pages, $39.95
THE NAME most closely associated with the modern gay movement in the U.S. is Harvey Milk. He was the first openly gay man elected to a prominent political office, that of San Francisco city supervisor. Although he represented a single city district, Milk knew he was living at a significant moment in gay history. During his campaign, he insisted that voters confront the fundamentalist threat of Anita Bryant in faraway Dade County, Florida. After his election, he worked tirelessly to defeat the Briggs Initiative that would have banned gay men and lesbians from working in California public schools. Milk was a charismatic orator, an engaging, imperfect, but fundamentally decent human being who was killed just as he was poised to become a national leader. His story inspired Randy Shilts’ book The Mayor of Castro Street, the film documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, an opera called Harvey Milk, and the 2008 movie Milk.
Mike Weiss was a reporter at the trial of Dan White, the city supervisor who killed Harvey Milk along with Mayor George Moscone. After being interviewed by Randy Shilts, he decided to turn his notes into a book. Double Play was first published in 1984 with the subtitle “The San Francisco City Hall Killings.” This choice of words was deliberate. Dan White confessed to the shootings, but as a result of a successful “diminished capacity” defense, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, not murder. White was given an amazingly light sentence and served only five years in prison. Less than two years after his release, he committed suicide. For the 2010 edition, Weiss uses the word “Assassination” in his subtitle, adds thirteen pages about what happened to the major characters in the thirty years since the trial, and includes a DVD that contains, among other things, Dan White’s recorded confession. He also presents one new revelation: the jurors believed that White did not go to City Hall intending to commit murder. But in 1984 White told his friend Frank Falzon, the officer who arrested him and took his confession, that the unexplained extra bullets he carried with him that day were intended for two additional targets, Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver and Willie Brown, speaker of the California Assembly. A final bullet was intended for himself. Years after White’s suicide, Falzon contacted Weiss to tell him this story, which, if true, confirms that Dan White acted with premeditation on November 27, 1978. Weiss is a conscientious reporter, particularly in relating the story of Dan White’s life and trial, which dominates Double Play. It is a thankless task. White is at best a pathetic figure whose father died when he was seventeen. Throughout the book, Weiss refers to White’s handsome Irish face, his muscular physique, and his athletic prowess. But his strong body masked a weak character. Even on the playing field, White could not escape his characteristic reaction to life’s challenges: quitting. The teenage White once tore off his jersey and stomped off a baseball field, angry at a coach who was trying to mentor the fatherless youth. In a similar fit of temper, he later quit the San Francisco police force and became a fireman. White was elected to office because of his good looks and newly instituted district elections that made it possible for him to win in a homogeneous enclave of middle-class voters. He proved a naïve supervisor who accomplished little. The tragedy in City Hall occurred because a frustrated Dan White impetuously resigned his position, and George Moscone declined to reappoint him when he asked for his seat back a few days later. Weiss’ detailed account of the days leading up to the shooting makes one thing clear: Dan White did not kill Harvey Milk because he was gay. White, with his rigid sense of right and wrong, was out of his depth when it came to the deal making and compromises of politics. When he could not regain his seat, he felt betrayed by Moscone and Milk and other liberal politicians who didn’t support him. He went to City Hall that day seeking revenge. The second half of Double Play is devoted to the trial of Dan White. Relying on his notes and the court transcript, Weiss makes it clear why the jury reached a verdict that caused a riot. The prosecutor was inept and the defense attorney cunning. What the press labeled the “Twinkie Defense” was actually based very little on White’s consumption of junk food. The testimony from psychiatrists hired by the defense amounted to “opinion mongering” about what was going on in White’s mind the day of the murders. What the loss of George Moscone and Harvey Milk meant to their families and communities was never mentioned. White sat mute and expressionless while details of his private life were exposed. His wife appeared daily and wept during her testimony. Because the prosecutor’s missteps were so obvious, one is not surprised by White’s “second confession” to Frank Falzon. In 1978 most people believed Dan White acted with premeditation and found his defense laughable—except that it worked. Weiss makes readers understand how an outrage against justice occurred, but he is not able to elevate his book above the level of scrupulous reporting. This is due to his cliché-ridden, hard-boiled prose and his unconvincing search for “significance.” He wants this episode to tell a larger story about San Francisco and our legal system but can’t make it work. Weiss vacillates between censure and pity for White, when what’s needed is a deeper understanding of what his story says about flawed American conceptions of manhood. Weiss believes that his assassination assured Harvey Milk’s place in history. In point of fact, Milk’s place is assured by the remarkable things he accomplished, by the life he lived, and by the man he was. Daniel A. Burr is an assistant dean at the Univ. of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he also teaches courses on literature and medicine.
