Robert S. Griffin - The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce

The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds:

An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce

by Robert S. Griffin

Copyright 2001, Robert S. Griffin

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the author.

ISBN 0-7173-7845-4

Cattle die, and kinsmen die, And so one dies oneself; One thing I know that never dies: The fame of a dead man's deeds.

--Pre-Christian Norse poem.

To my parents, Walter and Helen Griffin

CONTENTS

Preface i

1. Introduction 1

2. First Contact 17

3. Early Life 26

4. George Bernard Shaw, et al. 43

5. Adolf Hitler 61

6. The John Birch Society 80

7. George Lincoln Rockwell 84

8. The National Alliance 112

9. Revilo P. Oliver 128

10. The Turner Diaries 143

11. Pierce on The Turner Diaries 155

12. Timothy McVeigh 161

13. Our Cause 167

14. Cosmotheism 178

15. Alexander Solzhenitsyn 198

16. Bob Mathews 202

17. To West Virginia 217

18. Hunter 223

19. Pierce on Hunter 238

20. William Gay ley Simpson 244

21. World War II 258

22. Pierce and Jews 282

23. Racism and Hate 315 24 Schooling 324

25. Men and Women 337

26. The New World Order 353

27. Pierce's Vision 368

28. The Leadership Conference 382

29. Last Contact 397 Acknowledgments 400 Notes 401

PREFACE

It was a little after 7:00 p.m. on one of the pleasant summer evenings I had come to expect in the mountains of West Virginia. I was waiting for William Pierce in his cluttered, book-lined office in the National Alliance headquarters building. I had been living in this remote area on Pierce's property for over two weeks at that point. When I had come to his office a couple of minutes before, I was surprised to find that Pierce wasn't there. We were well into a series of interviews I was conducting with him in the evenings, and he'd always been here when I arrived. I assumed that something had held him up and that he would be along in a minute or two. I set up my tape recorder and went over the notes I had put together about the areas I wanted to explore during that night's session.

I had just finished going through my notes when out of the corner of my eye I saw someone come in through the door to the left of where I was seated. It wasn't Pierce but rather his new wife, with Pierce right behind her. That surprised me; always before, Pierce had been alone.

"Bob, could you and I talk after you talk with Bill?" Pierce's wife said in her halting, heavily-accented English and in her polite and gentle way. She had come from Eastern Europe to West Virginia less than a year before. She and Pierce had not met before she came, and after she was here only a month they married. Pierce's wife is an attractive woman of about fifty I would guess, with auburn hair and very fair skin. She had taught art to children in her native country. I was taken by her calling him "Bill." She was the only one who lived or worked on the property who did. To everyone else, including me, he was Dr. Pierce. She seemed on edge about something. She was usually smiling and upbeat, but not now.

"Oh, why don't you two talk now," Pierce interjected gruffly. "You don't have to wait until later."

With that, Pierce's wife sat down on the nearest of a row of chairs that face Pierce's desk. I was seated a couple of chairs away from the one she sat on. Pierce went around his desk and took a seat behind it.

There we were, the three of us. It was silent for a moment. There was tension in the air, but I had no idea what it was about.

Pierce's wife turned and faced me. "I have something to ask of you," she said. She seemed shaken.

"Is there something wrong?" I asked.

"I'm afraid," she replied.

"Afraid?"

"Bill gets letters from people who say they are going to kill him. I was here for four months before I knew that. I didn't know that!"

"You do look frightened," I said.

"I've asked Bob [Bob DeMarais, an aide to Pierce] if something happens to Bill to help me return to my country."

I didn't know what to say, and up to that point Pierce hadn't said anything.

"In your book," she continued, "please don't use my name or say where I am from. And please don't show my picture. I am afraid something will happen to me if people know who I am."

I said I didn't want to see her afraid like this, and that I would use some other name for her, and that I wouldn't say what country she was from or use her picture.

"Thank you," she said. "That is very nice of you."

At this point, still seated, she dipped her hand into her pants pocket and pulled out a pistol. I jumped. "I carry this everywhere I go," she said as she held the gun neck high in her right hand to display it to me.

I was speechless and stared at the gun.

"Don't be waving that gun around, it's loaded!" Pierce barked.

"You maybe think it is silly I have a gun," she said to me, the pistol now in her lap. "But Bill wears a gun all the time. He has it right next to him when he goes to sleep."

As a matter of fact, Pierce had a holstered weapon strapped to his waist at that very moment--!'d gotten used to that.

I reiterated that I would protect her identity.

So I will call Pierce's wife Irena in the book. It is the only name I have changed.

INTRODUCTION

At 9:02 on the morning of April 19th, 1995, the front half of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was demolished by an earth-shaking blast. The building's imposing columns crumpled and its massive windows shattered. The first floor exploded up into the second, and the top seven floors of concrete and steel came crashing down one onto the other until the roof rested on the level of what had been the third floor. Cables and shorn girders spewed into the street. Gas, smoke, and dust clouded the sky. Scores of people, covered in blood, dust, and plaster and crying and confused, stumbled out of the building with shards of glass embedded in their skin and their bones broken. One man lay dead in a huge crater next to the building, his body in flames. Another man wandered around missing his left arm. A young woman ran back and forth screaming, "My baby is in there!" 1

The Oklahoma City bombing killed one hundred sixty-eight people, including nineteen children.' Oklahoma City Police Sergeant Lynn McCumber helped pull forty-nine bodies from the wreckage. But there was the face of a boy he had to leave behind that he says haunts him in his dreams to this day. Using an infrared camera, McCumber detected the shape of a small head and four fingers. He shined his flashlight into a crawl space and saw the open eyes of a child. "I crawled under the rubble and put the child's head in my hand," McCumber said later. "And I knew he was dead. And there was nothing I could do." 3

At 10:22 that same morning, April 19th, Oklahoma State Highway Patrol Trooper Charlie Hanger, a twenty-year veteran of the force, was driving along his stretch of Interstate 35 when he passed a bright yellow Mercury Marquis without a license plate. The old car, a 1970s model, wasn't speeding and it wasn't being driven recklessly; it just had no license plate. 4 Hanger slowed down and slipped in behind the Mercury and pulled it over. As he stepped out of his patrol car and into the cool spring air, he felt a bit chilly in his short-sleeved brown uniform. The driver's door of the yellow car parked up ahead swung open, and underneath the open door Hanger saw two lace-up black combat boots drop to the pavement. Hanger froze for a moment behind his door, using it as a shield. Fifteen

miles up the road two weeks before, a motorist had fired a 9 mm at a fellow trooper during a routine traffic stop like this one, and that was fresh in his mind. But then the driver of the Mercury up ahead stood up and started walking toward him and Hanger could see both his hands.