THE REAPING: What the O.J. Simpson Murder Case Did to America Read online

  ****

  I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for this book. As always, I thank my steadfast literary representative, Ian Kleinert of Objective Entertainment in New York City. Also, thanks to Lloyd Robinson of Suite A Management, Beverly Hills, who handles my movie and screenplay work. I thank my mother, Inge Travers, and the memory of my wonderful dad, both of whom encouraged me even with my early writing efforts, which took years to bear financial fruit. My daughter, Elizabeth Travers Lee, remains my inspiration, but in the last year, two people came into my life who gave me reason to live and dream: the beautiful Sherri Ann and her great son, young Daniel. Thanks from the bottom of my grateful heart.

  STEVEN R. TRAVERS

  [email protected]

  (415) 456-6898

  The calm before the storm

  In the 1980s, the Securities and Exchange Commission made numerous arrests for insider trading. It was the “go-go” Ronald Reagan era, as depicted by Oliver Stone’s Wall Street; in the eyes of the Left at least a period not of national prosperity, but of greed.

  Tacit in this accusation was the notion that the greedy could only be white males. Once the protected class of world society, in a post-modernist lens they were increasingly the single group that could be publicly mocked and excoriated by their betters in the media and academia. The courts, too, felt free to lavish rights upon all their victims for centuries of oppression and extortion.

  All wealth, it was believed, emanated not from hard work or the creation of goods, services and needs the world wanted and was willing to pay for in a capitalist system, but from the poor. How a man with $1 million could steal $5 million from a man with only $500 could not be explained using logic, reason or mathematics, but it did not stop the accusation from being leveled. Or, as Stone had Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gecko “explain,” the world was a “zero sum game” in which wealth was never created, only stolen from the oppressed.

  Lost amid headlines heralding the arrests of such luminaries as Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Charles Keating, and Barry Minkow was a man who escaped the public scrutiny of the others. It was a simple arrest for insider trading, like many before it and many after it. Most stories revolving around this arrest were short AP pieces, but if the reader made it to the end of the article, the fact this insider trading artist was African-American caught a few eyes here and there.

  This was an odd dichotomy, for having a black stock broker arrested for insider Wall Street access in many ways said as much about newfound black freedom in America as Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He may have been a criminal, but he had something no blacks ever had in the past: access. He was on the inside, not on the outside looking in. Wall Street was the clubbiest of white, virtually all-male fraternities. Membership usually meant graduation with a Harvard or Wharton MBA; family connections in the right boardrooms and brokerage houses; Republican credentials and robber baron capitalistic ethics. Or so the story went, but just as Stone’s famed characters Gekko and Bud Fox were scrappy outsiders pushing their way in, so too was the Reagan era. It was a free market in which any and all were free to participate; to succeed or fail, then get up and try again. It was the Gold Rush of the 20th Century.

  Blacks were free to take their shot at the brass ring. Hard-fought political freedoms having been attained, now they had economic freedom, to succeed or fail. Born equal and, like all Mankind, into equal corruption and sin, they were no less likely to fall prey to the corrupting power of . . . power, as anybody else.

  With the freedom to succeed or fail came the freedom to act out. The “gentleman black” had been around for centuries, embodied by the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Actors like Sidney Poitier, who once embraced Communism, became apolitical, choosing instead to play non-threatening, wholesome characters in movies that white people could love them in. The black athlete had long been thought of as a “Christian gentleman,” embodied by the quiet, church-going family man Elston Howard, who upset no pinstriped apple carts in his successful career with the New York Yankees.

  But by the 1980s, such behavior was no longer mandatory. African-Americans could embrace the anti-white rhetoric of hip-hop and rap music, openly accusing the police of racism and unbridled violence against them. Black politicians like Jesse Jackson built their success on the “race card,” enriching themselves by virtue of their ability as community organizers to threaten boycotts by crowds of blacks howling racist chants at large corporations willing to pay them just to go away.

  A new breed of black militant had arrived on the scene of athletic endeavor in the 1960s. Jim Brown, Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson, to use three obvious examples, were proud, educated and unwilling to play by the old rules. They spoke their minds and, in the case of Jackson, were among the first crop of professional sports stars who made enough money to challenge the status quo; to enter an economic level on par with team owners.

  But none of them approached the popularity of O.J. Simpson. O.J. was one of the greatest athletes in all of American history, but in the pantheon of all-time superstardom, had never quite passed Brown’s place in history. Yet his popularity dwarfed that of Brown, not to mention Gibson, Jackson, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, or any black stars of his era. Only in recent years have the likes of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson begun to come close, but as a pitchman and sex symbol with universal cross-over appeal, O.J. Simpson was the king of celebrity blacks.

  This guy had it all. He was a total hero on both the West and East Coasts, having grown up in San Francisco before starring collegiately in Los Angeles, and professionally in New York. He was a corporate ad man’s dream, his iconic running through airports for Hertz Rent-a-Car, with a sweet little old (white) lady urging him to, “Go, O.J., go,” being one of the great strokes of Madison Avenue brilliance. Or there was O.J., schmoozing with Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell, the happy, smiling black man welcomed into every household in the U.S. for the phenomenally successful Monday Night Football games. There was O.J., teamed with the uproarious Leslie Nielsen, playing to great laughter the comically off Nordberg, constantly meeting great disaster courtesy of Nielsen’s pratfalls in the Naked Gun movie franchise. Finally, there was his wife Nicole, who was more than just a beautiful blonde. She was a goddess, the picture of the high cheekboned, long-necked Nordic vision of Valhalla dreams, delivered in full sexual flower to a black man. There could be no more total payback for centuries of racism and bigotry than to take what the white man held most dear, his women. This Simpson did freely and without rancor from either side. The change was complete. America entered the 1990s confident they were in a post-racial society. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was let out of jail and ascended immediately to the presidency. All was well. The black man was now “free” to obtain insider information, to get into the same kind of trouble as his immoral, greedy white counterparts.

  It was the calm before the storm.

  June 1994

  1994 was a time of transition in America, and in Los Angeles, California. The old ways were being transitioned out, to be replaced by a new set of rules. The Los Angeleno Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California, had presided over the Presidency between 1981 and 1989. Many – conservatives at least – would argue he was the best President of the 20th Century, one of the towering, Rushmore figures to be compared with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower.

  Reagan faced much vitriol and contempt from Democrats and liberals, in and outside the United States. It would be inaccurate to state otherwise, to minimize how much hatred was directed at President and Mrs. Nancy Reagan, yet time seems to have tempered the memory. Radical liberal “comedian” Bill Maher, for instance, displayed on his show a certain amount of fondness for Reagan, disputing the notion that he was not loved by one and all. But Maher represents a vitriol, which is vehement, loud and vicious, aimed by opponents at Bill Clinto
n, by opponents at George W. Bush, and by opponents at Barack Obama, that dwarfs the opposition rhetoric aimed at Reagan.

  Whatever “fondness” the “loyal opposition” may have felt for President Reagan, no amount of modern Presidential-politics rancor is greater that that aimed at one of his predecessors, the fellow Californian Richard M. Nixon. Their names were always linked; similar in age, both conservatives from the same state, yet Nixon earned much of his rancor by virtue of his ultra-partisanship, his paranoia, and of course Watergate was an exception to any rules then or now.

  The California of Nixon, Reagan and their immediate beyond was still conservative, Republican, and even Christian. This was the state shaped by the Chandler family, owners and publishers of the Los Angeles Times, wholly the shapers of Nixon’s meteoric early career. They reliably delivered their massive electoral votes to Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush. In 1994, the nation appeared to undergo an enormous case of “buyers regret” over the surprise election of Bill Clinton over Bush in 1992. This resulted in mid-term Congressional GOP sweeps unprecedented at least in the modern era. Included in this tsunami of Republican triumphs in the Senate, House, governorships and state legislatures were a near-total conservative overhaul of California politics. Under conservative Republican Governor Pete Wilson, the Golden State saw sweeping GOP victories in their Congressional caucus and in the state legislature. Even liberal San Francisco elected a man named Frank Jordan, who was officially a Democrat but ran as a moderate, near conservative. He was as close to a Republican as the City would elect. The mayors of the two largest American cities, Los Angeles and New York, were Republicans (Richard Riordan and Rudolph Giuliani, respectively). Both were already credited with cleaning up corrupt, crime-ridden, dirty cities, a direct refutation of the methods long used by urban Democrats.

  The enormous conservative revolution of 1994 was orchestrated for the most part by two men, neither of whom was Reagan, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, slowly descending into the last twi-light decade of his storied life. One was an elected official, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Brilliant and egotistical, he symbolized the South’s complete transformation from Jim Crow Democrats to Constitutionalist Republicans, embodied by his highly successful Contract With America (which Clinton derided as the Contract On America). The other was a portly college dropout and one-time disc jockey from Cape Girardeau, Missouri named Rush Limbaugh.

  Single-handedly beginning in 1988, Limbaugh had created conservative talk radio. For six years he alone was the conservative media, or what Limbaugh called “equal time.” There were no others. There was no Fox News. America got its news and opinions from decidedly liberal sources, yet absent opposing views, most did not realize the liberalism spoon-fed them by the likes of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Bill Moyers, and Dan Rather was not moderate, down-the-middle journalism.

  For decades, Americans beginning in school and continuing through generations of adulthood, were told as outright fact by the networks, the “paper of record” and Hollywood, that McCarthyism was a “witch hunt” and Vietnam a “quagmire.” Only when Reagan won the Cold War were triumphal conservative voices beginning to ring free, shouting from the rooftops that the Venona Papers, the unearthed Soviet archives, revealed Nixon had been right, Alger Hiss was a paid Soviet spy; McCarthy was more right than he realized, Communist spies had shaped the U.N.; and that 100 million men, women and children were murdered by Communism, a fact that shed new light on why the United States opposed such an ideology in Vietnam and around the world.

  ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and with Otis Chandler finally dispatched, even the Los Angeles Times, found all events on Earth newsworthy, it seems, with the single, sole exception of Venona, or British Minister Margaret Thatcher’s admonition that Reagan won the Cold War “without firing a shot.” It was if Franklin Roosevelt could have discarded Adolf Hitler into what Reagan liked to call the “dustbin of history” absent 400,000 dead G.I.s.

  Suddenly, however, a large segment of the American public (the Right) was increasingly uninterested in whether ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the L.A. Times, approved of their ideas, methods or accomplishments.

  20 million people were tuning in to Rush Limbaugh. Every day.

  Since the earliest record of man, or as Christians would advocate, since Original Sin, slavery was a “natural” construct of the human condition. Great empires were built on slavery. When Persian, Greek and Roman armies swept through the provinces, military victory was quickly followed by a consolidation of captured resources. Among these were the surviving, defeated populations. Nubile women and young boys were turned into prostitutes to feed the varied sexual appetites of the elite. Working-age males were sent to the quarries, the pits, the pyramids, gladiatorial grounds, or whatever forced existence was their fate.

  The Bible tells the story of forced labor and slavery. Egyptians enslaved Jews.

  Every race enslaved every other race. Over the course of centuries, the white race gained the upper hand, its Western Civilization becoming the dominant political, military and cultural inventor, shaper of minds, and thinker of intellectual thoughts. Tasked with protecting their vested interests in a dangerous world, white Europeans won their wars and established dominance. Slavery continued. The Greek philosophers, considered “Great” according to the syllabi of Cambridge and Oxford, never gave slavery a second thought, any more than their admonition that a woman’s role was not to be noticed by men in public. One of the most discomfiting facts in liberalism is that most of the greatest men, most brilliant accomplishments, and enlightened ideas, were brought to the world courtesy of “dead white males” who owned slaves, or did not particularly question slavery, and had a dim view of black people. This has been the driving force of modern liberalism, particularly in education, in which creating a false universe denying these truths drives them to distraction. (It can be argued that it was the most propelling motivation in the life, and political rise, of Barack Hussein Obama.)

  Then along came America. When the United States came into being in the late 18th Century, they found themselves the inheritors of a large African slave population. The Founding Fathers were motivated chiefly by two philosophical ideals, those of the Greek philosophers and that of the Lord Jesus Christ. Belief in a God who knew their thoughts, who advocated that they treat their neighbors as themselves, and was judging their actions, did not coincide with the owning of living flesh. Thus did the Founders create a Constitution that advocated the Democracy first propelled by the Greeks, and stated the maxim that “all men are created equal by their Creator.”

  But what to do about the slaves inherited by the British, Spanish and Dutch slave trades that brought them to work the fields of the New World? A solution was found. The slave trade would come to an end. The slaves would die of old age. End of slavery. But many slaves were allowed to marry and have children. Slavery did not die with the end of the slave trade. The young America would have to end slavery on their own. Thus, some four score and seven years after the birth of freedom, did a thriving institution that had been part of the world economy through all history, end as legitimate trade between nations. It ended in America. It did not end because another nation came to America, defeated America in battle, and imposed “morality” upon the beaten Americans. Americans, using laws written and implemented by Americans, in America, ended it. America is where slavery came to die.

  Over the next 100 years, African-Americans fought to enshrine the freedoms inherited by President Abraham Lincoln’s successful prosecution of the Civil War, and his subsequent sacrifice at the altar of liberty. There were many heroes, sung and unsung, in this great struggle, but over time it became most apparent that the world of athletics was a key proving ground of the Civil Rights Movement.

  In 1936, Olympic champion Jesse Owens’s victories at the Berlin Olympics showcased the black spirit. Shortly thereafter
, the black boxer Joe Louis’s victory over Adolf Hitler’s handpicked favorite, Max Schmeling, consolidated national resolve. Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in 1947 was the keystone of civil rights achievement in sports.

  But Los Angeles, California was the promised land. Life in L.A. was not Heaven for blacks, any more than it was for the Mexicans, the Chinese, or any of the many other ethnic and religious groups who came after the Civil War, after World War I, and after World War II; it was just better than any other place. The Chinese, for instance, tell endless tales of woe; of great prejudice towards the “coolies” who built the trans-continental railroad, yet they endured every hardship imaginable to come here. There had to be something in America that was lacking anyplace else in the world.

  For blacks, acceptance was grudging, but with accomplishment it did come. Sports played a big role. The University of Southern California’s first All-American football player was an African-American named Brice Taylor, who rumor has it beat out John Wayne for the starting position. UCLA immediately welcomed blacks when they opened for business. Games between the integrated Trojans and the Bruins featuring Jackie Robinson, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode in the 1930s, played before enormous throngs at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, were veritable social statements.

  In 1956, USC traveled to the University of Texas with several black players. Despite admonitions from Texas that the blacks not be allowed to stay in the team hotel or play in the game, coach Jess Hill resisted, let them stay, and play. Running back C.R. Roberts gained 251 yards in the first half, securing a 44-20 Trojans victory. 14 years later, an integrated USC team traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, where they beat the segregated Crimson Tide, 42-21 in a game generally credited with ending, once and for all, segregation in Southern collegiate sports.

  Opportunities for black athletes, chiefly offered by USC football coach John McKay and UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, began a golden era in Southern California sports. Trojans football for two decades beginning in 1962, experienced dominance unmatched by any university in history. The same can be said of Bruins basketball between 1963 and 1975.

  The building of Dodger Stadium, a sports palace like none other, ushered in a baseball renaissance. The Rams were a powerhouse, the Raiders Super Bowl champions. The Lakers were the greatest show in pro basketball.

  But in the 1990s an odd sense of mediocrity settled on Los Angeles. The L.A. Times became officially politically correct, a term that seems to have originated out of the “year of the woman” election of 1992. During the course of Democrat sweeps in both chambers of Congress, Bill Clinton benefited from the votes Ross Perot stole from George H.W. Bush to capture the White House. Among the numerous women elected that year, two were Jewish Democrats from San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

  This represented a profound shift in socio-political power in the Golden State. Until then, conservative men from the Southland dominated California. The election of Senators Feinstein and Boxer came on the heels of a decade of shifting sports power, too, all leaning towards Northern California. USC football and UCLA basketball were downgraded significantly. The San Francisco 49ers established themselves as the greatest in dynasty in the NFL. The Oakland A’s were a baseball juggernaut, and in 1989 the A’s met cross-bay rival San Francisco in the World Series, while both the Angels and Dodgers slumped.

  Finally, Los Angeles was given the ultimate insult when in 1994 both the Raiders and Rams played their last seasons there. The Raiders added salt to the wound by moving back to Oakland.

  Former segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace once granted an interview to a man named Jeff Prugh, at the time the Atlanta bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. In response to pointed questions about the lack of civil rights for blacks in the South, Wallace retorted that it was Los Angeles that burned when the Watts riots broke out in 1965; that during all the years Alabama was segregated, the L.A. Times employed no black reporters; that the scene of the worst racial strife was not in Birmingham, but in liberal Boston, which fiercely resisted bussing.

  Wallace’s bristling accusations were kickback against a pervasive, relatively unstable view that California, and Los Angeles in particular, had of itself; the race-neutral, diverse land that got it right. But when in 1970, USC’s integrated Trojans schooled ‘Bama, hidden under the surface was a festering racial anger fed by controversy over who should start at quarterback, the African-American Jimmy Jones or the white Mike Rae.

  California was built on imagery, much of it emanating from Hollywood, most of it mythical in nature. The movies, TV shows and advertisements showed happy whites and blacks getting along with each other. The surf vibe of The Beach Boys and the sweet melodies of The Righteous Brothers suggested mellowness mixed with white adoption of black musical sounds. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner hosted a TV show in which talented, hip black comedians and musicians mixed easily with beautiful white Playmates.

  These images held together from the Watts riots until 1991. The camcorder was now prevalent in society, and early in that year a man had one at the ready when he observed a black motorist named Rodney King stopped by the Los Angeles Police Department. He decided to film the encounter.

  King was a big, burly man, with a long police record, who was hopped up on PCP. The stop occurred after a high-speed chase in which he attempted to escape the cops. Surrounded by officers, King got out of the automobile and attacked the police. Using nightsticks and boots, they hit and kicked King into submission. De-sensitized from the PCP, King kept resisting, and the cops reacted with greater and greater force. Finally, the bloodied, pacified King was handcuffed and sent to jail. All of it was captured on film.

  The only major 24-hour-a-day cable news network at the time was CNN. They edited the tape, removing for the most part footage of the aggressive, hopped-up King getting out of the car and starting a fight with the police, as well as King’s refusal to be pacified easily. All that was shown, over and over and over, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for month and months, were white L.A.P.D. officers beating King to a pulp with nightsticks.

  The officers were identified, and chief of police Daryl Gates was raked over the coals as a racist white cop. The officers were charged, and just to be extra PC, President Bush insisted that they not only be forced to defend themselves against accusations of brutality under the color of authority, but added federal civil rights violations to the charges, as well.

  In order to assure a fair trial for the cops, the court case was moved to Simi Valley, an all-white suburban enclave in neighboring Ventura County. King never testified, because he had made so many inconsistent statements about what had happened he would have been caught in a lie. Blacks were outraged first by these developments, then in 1992 their acquittal by a white jury. The streets of Los Angeles exploded in one of the worst riots in American history.

  One white motorist, Reginald Denny, was dragged from his truck by blacks and beaten nearly to death, but the most ironic aspect of the riots was that it consisted mostly of blacks looting the businesses of, and attacking, fellow blacks. Liberal Hollywood was stunned. For years they pretended, and portrayed, blacks as peaceful, law-abiding victims of white racism, but the image of violent, rampaging black criminals loosed upon the streets of L.A. was jarring. There were numerous reports of good liberals calling the likes of Charlton Heston and other gun owners trying to obtain weapons in case the blacks got too close to their property.

  Even further irony was the fate of King. Recovered from his injuries, he urged Los Angeles, “Can’t we just get along?” His beating was one of the best things that could have happened to him, like a boxer who survives a fight with the champ for a big payday. His injuries were short-term but the money he received in a settlement allowed him to live a life of leisure, which included a passion for surfing, until his drug addiction led to death in 2012.

  But the King beating, and subsequent L.A. riots, changed black-white relations forever. The South
, which had not seen anything like it since Birmingham and Selma, settled into the form of a collectively smug “I told you so,” convinced that in reality, whites and blacks in Dixie had a shared history and understanding of each other that made them more honest, in comparison to the “fake Pepsodent beach boy smiles” of white Californians, which basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said his UCLA classmates flashed at him before calling him by the N-word “behind my back.”

  Indeed, the South was by 1992 a Republican lock. It was the GOP, led by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, who husbanded Dixie into the mainstream of American politics. Racial opportunity and equality came swiftly in all walks of life, but race remained the elephant in the room. At the 1992 Republican National Convention, the fire-brand conservative Pat Buchanan described a “culture war” between the Right and the Left that enveloped all walks of life, from education, to race relations, to religion, to abortion, to gay marriage, and beyond. He described national Guardsman walking a lonely, dangerous beat on the streets of Los Angeles, maintaining order after the riots, tacitly making it look like a street battle between righteous whites and black criminals. The liberal press lambasted him as a demagogue and race-baiter, claiming his speech sounded better “in the original German.”

  President Bush tried to distance himself from its tone, probably a mistake in an election lost where Perot captured 19 percent of the vote, most otherwise ticketed to Bush in a race won by Clinton by 3.5 percentage points.

  The election of Clinton, billed as the “first black President,” along with liberals friendly to the African-American cause in 1992, raised hopes, but by 1994, having failed to pass national health care and with the economy floundering, blacks were impatient with the status quo. The King beating left them convinced that the police were their enemies. All efforts at political correctness were met with scorn, viewed as fake and condescending.

  Rap and hip-hop music, long considered underground, took center stage in the early 1990s, with the most foul, misogynistic, violence-prone lyrics imaginable. One group, calling themselves Niggaz Wit Attitude (N.V.A.), produced a song that basically consisted of the constant screaming refrain, “F—k the police.”

  Conservatives were happy to point this out, along with black violence during the riots, which they viewed as the Great Society run amok. In 1964-1965, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” which along with voting rights included massive handouts in the form of welfare, health care, and affirmative action quotas. One of his top aides, an idealistic New York Democrat named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, cautioned LBJ against the Great Society in favor of what he called “benign neglect,” which could be interpreted as a call to let African-Americans rise by dint of their own hard work and good efforts. The Democrats disdained this approach. The result was a disaster as great as any ever perpetrated on the American public.

  Between the end of World War II and 1967, blacks had made steady gains in economic income and education. In 1967, the Great Society combined with the Summer of Love, an influx of narcotic drugs on the streets, to send them spiraling downward, arguably in all the years since. Most of the whites caught up in the drug culture were from middle class families who nursed them back to health. Many blacks lacked that safety net. The inner cities became cesspools of crime, prostitution, and drug abuse, the welfare state robbing African-American families – the cornerstone of black Christian life – of fathers.

  Had Adolf Hitler and the KKK joined forces to orchestrate the worst possible outcome upon black people, they could not have succeeded more completely than what in fact happened, courtesy of their “friends,” liberal America.