Blood and Politics (55 page)

Unlike Beam, Temple had not served in Vietnam, never been a Klansman, and shied away from violent revolutionary rhetoric. Born in 1961 and raised in upstate New York, Temple claimed he had worked for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority before learning in 1986 “who my Heavenly Father was and who I am and who our race is.”
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He became a dedicated Identity adherent and an open admirer of Hitler’s National Socialist Germany.
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While living in Cortland, New York, during this period, he wrote more than three thousand dollars in bad checks, as a protest, he said, against the banking system, and he was subsequently convicted of a felony. Despite this incident, Temple never lost the taste for working within larger constituencies. He moved to Montana and with his wife, Sue, established a large family and became a small-town Main Street businessman.
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He also wrote regularly for a monthly tabloid,
The Jubilee
, which promoted Christian Identity, and coordinated the Gritz presidential campaign in western Montana. He was a busy man who had stood with the others protesting the FBI at the foot of Weaver Mountain.

Three days after the Spokane expo, Temple and Beam helped launch the post-Weaver campaign in Naples, Idaho, the village nearest Ruby Ridge. Forty people met in a local resort lodge, established committees, and picked officers and a name, United Citizens for Justice. They decided their initial goal was to ensure that a local grand jury convene and indict federal agents for murder. This United Citizens meeting was quite unlike the congress held by Aryan Nations at its compound in the weeks after Gordon Kahl’s death in 1983. Plans there to elevate Kahl to martyrdom had never reached beyond readers of
The Spotlight
and a handful of activists. And it was Bob Mathews and his Order bandits who had followed Kahl, virtually assuring that he remained known more as a perpetrator than as a victim.

At Naples, by contrast, longtime movement activists joined with unaffiliated local residents angry at the injustice done the Weaver family. Here Temple pulled the train of events into the mainstream, not into the underground. When Louis Beam arose in this assembly, he used his best rhetorical skills to argue for a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, a course of action that his friend Kirk Lyons was considering. “Randy Weaver and his family had a grip on the rope of liberty,” Beam intoned. “As their bloody hands slipped off, we must be ready to take it up.”
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Two weeks later, October 6, Beam was the featured speaker at another United Citizens for Justice meeting, this one in Sandpoint, Idaho, twenty-two miles down the highway from Naples. More than two hundred attended. Beam told the crowd he was living “in a small East Texas community raising black-eyed peas and blond-haired children until I heard about the events in North Idaho,” a down-home aw-shucks line he repeated on multiple occasions. Chris Temple also spoke, explaining that “we” had opposed the Soviet Union for the past fifty years but “should have been worrying about people who have been minding the store here.”
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Thus the post-Weaver campaign started in the spot where the hearts of local people ached the most. But Chris Temple and Louis Beam, among others, were hard-eyed strategists, intent on creating a new nationwide movement, beyond the border of Weaver’s home state. The next step was Colorado.

To fulfill the late-night promise made at his summer Bible camp, Pete Peters convened a meeting of 160 “Christian men” on October 22 in Estes Park, a quiet resort town at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. For two and a half days they met in committee, deliberated in plenary sessions, and engaged in the kind of one-on-one conversations known, in the parlance of business professionals, as networking. They made decisions in the name of Jesus Christ and Yahweh, sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and otherwise conducted themselves in a manner of quiet resolve appropriate for their surroundings, a YMCA facility abutting the park. No guns were waved, and even the most heated rhetoric seemed to have the blood drained out of it. (A brief second of excitement bubbled when a police surveillance team was discovered taking pictures.) Otherwise, not much indicated that this meeting would become the foundational moment for a new militia movement in the 1990s.
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Peters made no secret of the meeting. He mailed out notification and registration forms to everyone on his Scriptures for America list. He sent a pro forma invite to William Barr, President Bush’s attorney general, who didn’t bother to respond. The roster of those who either declined the invitation or did not answer it at all is as instructive as the list of those who did attend. James Dobson of Focus on the Family did not even answer Peters’s invitation, despite their mutual opposition to civil rights for gay men and lesbians. Similarly, the Rutherford Institute, a legal advocacy group, said no. “The Rutherford Institute will not send a representative . . . and will not participate in the Randy Weaver matters.
These matters are not within the guidelines of cases in which the Institute becomes involved.” Christian Identity pastors were still officially off the grid for these two mainstays of Christian nationalism.

David Duke did not respond either, despite Peters’s entreaties. Having made the transition from Klan wizard to Republican politician, Duke was apparently not quite ready to revert.
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Bo Gritz’s buddy Jack McLamb, after hemming and hawing, decided not to attend, a decision that might have been influenced by Gritz, one of the few not to receive an invitation. Although Peters had tried to use Gritz as a courier to Weaver, both men remained at odds after Gritz refused to endorse Peters’s call for the “death penalty for homosexuals.”

Willis Carto and William Pierce did not attend this gathering either or send emissaries. Pierce in particular had no taste for any meeting of “Christian men.” Once the postmeeting action started, however, they both would participate in the Weaver aftermath, each after his own strategic fashion.

Who was there at this foundational moment? As might be expected, Peters’s fellowship of Identity pastors, who usually functioned as a council of elders at other camp gatherings, acted in a similar fashion over this weekend. Most of the male members of Peters’s LaPorte congregation also attended. So did a small tribe of Aryans, headed by the aging Richard Butler. (Butler was given the platform to confess publicly that he was a “bigot.”) Add to this plaid shirt affair a very few faithful gray-suited souls more typically found lobbying Congress than mixing it up with the mountainside Aryans. The total number of “Christian men”: 160.

Louis Beam starred at the podium. He used the occasion to retell the story of his own persecution at federal hands, his arrest in Mexico prior to the Fort Smith trial, and the bravery of wife Sheila during the shootout with the federales. (The marriage with Sheila broke up five years later with the young wife claiming she wanted nothing to do with her husband’s Hitlerite racism.) Beam called for a new unity among militants, but he did not publicly discuss his longtime strategic goal, to create a decentralized and clandestine arm of the movement. Nevertheless, in his semiofficial report of the meeting, alongside the committee decisions and audiotape advertisements, Peters republished Beam’s three-page 1983 essay “Leaderless Resistance.”

Almost ten years after their first articulation alongside Robert Miles’s notes for an underground in the
Inter-Klan Newsletter
, the essay and strategy obviously were being revived, and not just by Beam. A group calling itself the Divine Ways and Means Committee put itself on record as supporting “vigilante action” and other acts it described as “carrying out directives from God.” A second group, calling itself the Sacred Warfare
Action Tactics (SWAT) Committee, specifically endorsed leaderless resistance: “Whatever resistance is done should be done without an earthly leader. Because we have been INFILTRATED as a nation [emphasis in original].” Among the examples of resistance the committee cited was an incident in the Book of Judges when “Ehud put a sword in the fat belly of King Eglon.”
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(Biblical violence always seemed more justified than the contemporary kind.)

Kirk Lyons, Beam’s attorney from the Fort Smith trial, addressed the meeting with the stature of a veteran movement man for all seasons. Lyons was trying to elbow his way into the Weaver case and told the crowd that he would represent the family in a civil suit against federal agents—despite the fact that Randy Weaver had already signed with another criminal defense attorney. “We’ve got to be part of this, gentlemen,” he told the assembly. “We have got to make sure that we as Christian Israelites are represented.”
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Despite his perpetual pleas for financial support, Lyons also understood the significance of the developing situation. His movement was changing direction, and the Weaver incident was a pivot point. “This is the fight of the decade,” he argued. “This is the crucible. This is the turning point.”

Chris Temple, Beam’s pal from United Citizens for Justice, amplified that point. The movement had arrived at a strategic moment. As horrible as the murders of Sam and Vicki Weaver had been, Temple said, the killings provided a great opportunity. “All of us in our groups,” Temple told the assembly, “. . . could not have done in the next twenty years what the federal government did for our cause in eleven days in Naples, Idaho . . . what we need to do is to not let this die and go away.”

Temple and Lyons both argued the same point: mobilize all available resources around the Weaver case. Accomplishing just this would mark a change. The movement had a tendency to leave its dead and wounded untended and undefended, a sore spot for those who believed
all
the defendants at Fort Smith should have been supported.
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They often complained that the left had a better record helping unpopular defendants in the courtroom, as well as remembering those who went to prison. But Lyons and Temple thought the Weaver case could be different. Weaver’s son and wife had been killed in a bald case of abuse by federal authorities. Randy himself was criminally guilty of only a misdemeanor gun charge. And his up-on-the-ridge version of Christian Identity looked relatively harmless to the naked eye, like a leave-me-alone variant of Armageddon theology. By movement lights, the Weaver case equaled religion and guns, a good combination of organizing issues. To take advantage of this opportunity, Temple argued for a new kind of unity, not just among white supremacists but between white supremacists and
others—particularly their cousins on the Christian right who were neither biological (racial) determinists nor explicitly anti-Semitic.

“We need to remember the Muslim’s saying that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. You know, we’ve got a common goal . . . to restore Christian government in this land so that our people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and any strangers that live among us, until we take care of that problem—so that everyone can live their lives free of fear.”
¹²

Despite the grammatically challenged phrasing, everyone in the room understood its meaning,
“any strangers that live among us, until we take care of that problem.”
In Identity parlance, “strangers” are nonwhites.
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Temple argued for a strategic shift, a two-stage revolution. First, build unity to establish a “Christian government.” In other words, deemphasize rhetoric and direct action on race, perhaps even build alliances with some willing black or brown people, during the revolution’s first stage. Attack the federal ZOG. Later “take care” of the problem of the non-whites. Of all the overwrought verbiage at Estes Park, the most important was this enunciation of a shift in strategy by Chris Temple and Kirk Lyons.

For Temple’s two-stage strategy to actually work, a few patriots, not known as white supremacists but intent on establishing a Christian government over a Christian nation, had to be available for building an alliance. Thus add Steve Graber and Larry Pratt to the expanding list of characters at Estes Park. Under most circumstances, Steve Graber would have been an unlikely attendee for a meeting dominated by such men as Peters, Beam, and Lyons. But as noted, this was not an ordinary, everyday meeting. Graber was a devout Mennonite from central Kansas, an attorney, and a former regional organizer for the aforementioned Rutherford Institute. Graber made sure everyone else understood that he was “not here as part of the Rutherford Institute.” He understood that Peters’s Christian Identity was not his. “I’m not here to embrace your theology and I know you’re not here to embrace my theology.” Graber also told the assembly that he understood that associating with the likes of Louis Beam and Richard Butler would not enhance his career as an attorney or a community leader. “I’m associated with the Lord Jesus Christ, plus or minus nothing,” he told the Christian men. Nevertheless, “unprecedented attacks” on God’s people required a response. “We are in a spiritual battle,” Graber averred. At another point he hinted at his own End Times theology. “We are in a time when God is wrapping things up.” Despite his manifest differences with so many of the attendees,
Graber had advice for all: be confident, stay in God’s way, and make an unemotional presentation of your facts. God’s people, assuming the assembly was of God’s people, would prevail.

The presence of a person like Graber, who followed a more widely accepted fundamentalist theology, embodied the type of alliance that Chris Temple’s strategy required. But the perfect partner was Larry Pratt, who resided at the axis of religion and guns . . . and the militia.

Larry Pratt did not look like a militiaman. He presented himself as something akin to a mild-mannered accountant: glasses, gray suit, and grandfatherly. He exuded faithfulness and loyalty. And although he didn’t mention these facts publicly, he had been married to his wife, Priscilla, for three decades, had four children, and was a devout member of Harvesters Presbyterian Church of America. He spoke softly, almost sotto voce, and understated his ideas for emphasis, rather than turn bellicose. Yet as he stood before Pete Peters and the assembly of Christian men, he was already a self-confessed veteran of what he called spiritual warfare. He had served two years in the Virginia legislature as an antiabortion, antitax representative. He had directed a constellation of conservative organizations in the Washington, D.C., area, much like other figures on the Christian right. Unlike most others, however, he had also traveled extensively in Central America and the Philippines, witnessing to the gospel of armed citizen militias. As the executive director of Gun Owners of America, a public-interest lobby headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, with a hundred thousand members nationwide, he arrived at Estes Park with the largest constituency of any of the speakers. For Pratt, detailing the intricacies of antigun legislation and advocating for a militia was all in a day’s work, and he did both that weekend.