Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (24 page)

From the start, Haworth was aware that his job was to be at least as much a diplomat as it was to be a policeman. Anything his police did they were going to be doing on national television. “‘Pleasant’ is not the right word. But it was accommodating,” he says. “We were very accommodating. I mean, my direction to my troops through my lieutenants was ‘Look, they [the protestors] have a job to do. We have a job to do. Okay?’ It’s hot. It’s miserable. It’s nasty out here, you know? And we’re all just waiting, literally, for this woman to pass away.

“From a legal standpoint, we did it in the beginning. We established that this is where we’re going to allow you to protest. We’re not going to allow you to be on the sidewalk. We’re going to keep that clear because we’ve got a school down there.”

Haworth’s third deployment to the neighborhood came in March 2005. At the end of February, Pinellas-Pasco County Circuit Court Judge George Greer again had ordered the removal of Terri Schiavo’s PEG tube. Absent a successful appeal, his order would go into effect on March 18.

(At this point, Greer had been the judicial point man on the case for over five years, consistently ruling in favor of Michael Schiavo and against his in-laws. Greer’s rulings were just as consistently upheld in the state appeals courts. As a result, not only was Greer asked to leave his church but a North Carolina man offered to kill Greer for $50,000. The same man set the price on Michael Schiavo’s head at five times that. The FBI arrested him.)

Around the hospice, and out on the police lines, there was a sense that the endgame had been reached. Haworth sensed
a desperation among the demonstrators. “They would grasp onto anything,” he recalls. “If Jesse Jackson came, maybe he could save the day. If there was a federal subpoena, maybe that could save the day. Maybe, if there was a piece of federal legislation that everybody flies back from [George W. Bush’s ranch in] Crawford, Texas, to get done, that’ll be it, you know? They kept waiting for it and, you know, our whole position was that she’s in the dying process and we were there to keep the peace. That’s what our job was.” Haworth personally spent several hours on duty in Terri Schiavo’s room on Beech Street.

“We always,” he says, his voice catching just a bit, “had someone on her.”

Haworth struggled for control as much as anyone else did against the heedless momentum of the events around them. The event of the thing seemed totally unstrung. After three years of seeing their children walk a gauntlet every morning, school administrators finally evacuated the Cross Bayou Elementary School. The last straw was a threat that came in through the FBI. A man had warned that he would take the school hostage and kill a child for every ten minutes that nourishment was withheld from Terri Schiavo. The decision to evacuate was made on Easter Sunday. To Marcia Stone, the principal at Cross Bayou, it felt like a surrender.

She’d come to education because being a stewardess had seemed too dangerous. Flying for National Airlines, Stone had broken her foot when the flight she was working had flown through a hurricane. A career in education had seemed like a safe and sane alternative. Now, she was being forced to abandon her school in the face of a threat that she was not allowed to communicate fully to her staff because of security concerns.

“That Saturday night, I sent out the message to my staff that I want you to trust me on this, that we must vacate the school,”
she recalls. “So, the next day, Easter Sunday, the staff met me here and I still couldn’t give them any details even then.” On Monday, Stone talked to the parents of her students, and she couldn’t give them any details, either.

One thing that Haworth and Stone shared was affection for Michael Schiavo. “I like Mike a great deal,” Haworth says. And Stone had a connection to the case because her son-in-law, Patrick Burke, had worked at Palm Gardens Nursing Home, the first place Terri had been taken after her cardiac arrest. Burke had been the first physical therapist to work with her.

“Michael was just incredible, my son-in-law said,” Stone explains. “My son-in-law said, ‘I can save her,’ you know, with the therapy. Eventually, he worked through the reality of ‘She’s never going to get any better,’ and Patrick said that this was the first real incident where he realized, no matter what he did, no matter what anyone did, that there was brain death.”

All of these people—Haworth, and Stone, and the people working at Woodside—watched in amazement as the detachment of the coverage from the actual facts reached a mad crescendo. Hospice officials, forbidden by law to discuss the specifics of the case, watched medical professionals with only the most tangential connection to the case trotted out to convince the nation that Terri Schiavo could walk and talk and was demanding to be freed from her captors. They watched as people accused them of letting Terri’s lips crack and bleed, as though there weren’t an entire protocol for mouth care for people in her situation, and as though the hospice staff weren’t following it just as they followed it for every patient. Some of the families of the other residents wanted them to respond, angrily and publicly, to defend hospice care against the slanders of people who didn’t care what damage they did. They could not.

“There were people in our community who got a little mad
at us,” says Louise Cleary, the hospice’s spokesperson. “They wanted us to come out stronger. They wanted us to defend ourselves. They wanted us to say, you know, ‘We’re the good guys.’ But we really did stick to the story that this is not our story to tell, that we just happened to be the hospice where Terri was.”

Almost everyone involved inside the hospice was frustrated beyond endurance. Elizabeth Kirkman, whose volunteer work had been so extensive that she had been congratulated personally by both presidents Bush and by Governor Jeb Bush, wrote the governor a scathing letter condemning his meddling. “It was unsettling to us,” Elizabeth said. She and her husband went out of their way to make sure their living wills were ironclad.

Annie Santa-Maria had to work harder than most to keep from lashing out. “To have the staff here listen to the Schindler family lawyer, and the Schindler family out there, saying, ‘Oh, Terri. We’re going to have you home by Thanksgiving. You’re going to be eating turkey with your friends and family,’” she recalls. “They would be saying they had these yuck-it-up conversations with someone who’s not responding. We’d be aghast. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. But nobody knows that. But that’s what the country’s hearing—that we’re killing somebody who has limited dialogue ability. And none of it was true.”

Ultimately, the
Columbia Journalism Review
published a study that concluded that “coverage of the Schiavo case [has] consistently skewed toward the emotional over the factual…. With its performance to date in the Schiavo case, the press is displaying a tell-tale tendency for tabloid-style exploitation in the guise of serious reporting.” The Gut, faith-based as always, was in the saddle and driving events.

Bizarre, almost otherworldly slanders flew through the air. A nurse named Carla Sauer Iyer appeared on both Fox and CNN,
claiming that Michael Schiavo had poisoned his wife with insulin. She also claimed she’d heard him shout, loudly, “When is the bitch going to die?” Neither network noted that Judge Greer had nearly laughed the woman out of his courtroom almost two years earlier. (On CNN, an anchor named Kyra Phillips breathlessly reported the complete canard that Iyer had come forward for the first time that day.) However, nobody frosted the people at the hospice more than did Sean Hannity of Fox News. “He’s a peculiar piece of work,” says Cleary. “He’s not the kind of journalist who’s interested much in the truth, let’s say.”

At one point, Hannity got caught on camera coaching some of his interviewees to be harsher in their assessment of Michael Schiavo. It was Hannity—along with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC—who brought to the nation the spectacular charlatanism of William Hammesfahr, a doctor who’d been one of many brought in to evaluate Terri Schiavo as part of the seemingly endless litigation over the previous five years. Hannity relentlessly pointed out that Hammesfahr had been “nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine.”

In fact, a Florida congressman once wrote a letter to the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine on Hammesfahr’s behalf. That’s not how one gets nominated for a Nobel Prize. (If it were, Hannity could “nominate” himself in the category of distinguished letters.) Hammesfahr had told Judge Greer that he could rehabilitate Terri Schiavo. Judge Greer had rejected his findings outright and called him a self-promoter. Previously, he’d been only one of dozens of medical professionals who’d collided with the case, but now he suddenly became useful. He popped up in a number of media outlets, including the
Los Angeles Times
and on CBS. He argued that Terri could be rehabilitated. That she could be speaking within two years. The people working at the hospice gazed in angry fascination. None of them would have been surprised to see Hammesfahr on television
claiming that, in no time at all, he could have Terri Schiavo playing linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“How is it possible,” Hannity would intone in meat-headed awe, “we’re in this position if you have examined her. You were up for a Nobel Prize. This is mind-boggling to me.” Hammesfahr was a television star, an actor in the drama. He had a role to play: presenter of the Other Side of the Argument, to whom fair-minded people were somehow obligated to pay heed, no matter what nonsense he spouted. No place was more fair-minded at that point than the Congress of the United States, which somehow managed to go out of its way to make everything infinitely worse.

“What is really frightening,” says Elizabeth Kirkman, that once-beloved Point of Light for the Bush family, “is that we’re so gullible that crazy people scare us, and they scare our politicians into foolish, foolish decisions. And that, to me, is just mind-boggling—that our politicians are such wusses that they are so swayed by this kind of thing.”

JUDGE
Greer’s final order mandated that Terri’s PEG tube be removed for good on March 18, 2005. On that evening, Annie Santa-Maria was in her office. A federal marshal was there with her. That afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives had voted to subpoena Michael Schiavo and several doctors, some hospice personnel, and all the equipment being used to keep Terri Schiavo alive. It also subpoenaed Terri herself to come and give testimony. So the marshal stayed with Annie to make sure that she was there to receive her subpoena, and to take delivery of a subpoena demanding testimony from a woman Annie knew could no longer move or speak or think.

In anticipation of Terri’s passing, Annie had contacted a local
Catholic priest who was on call to deliver the last rites if necessary to the residents of the hospice. She was unaware that Terri’s parents had contacted their own priest. The two men encountered each other in the lobby outside Annie’s office. Voices were raised to an unholy volume. It looked very much as if a full-scale clerical hooley might ensue. Annie moved to break it up. The marshal blocked her way. He was sorry. She had to stay in her office. She couldn’t go break up a fight between two priests because she had to stay there and wait for a subpoena to be served on a woman who was, for all practical purposes, dead. A few minutes later, the Schindlers were outside, telling the world that the hospice wouldn’t let them send a priest to give Terri the last rites.

(Later, Annie tried to explain to her mother what had happened. “I said, ‘Mother, that’s just not true,’” Annie explains. “‘That woman had last rites many times over.’ And my mother said, ‘Why would a priest lie about that?’”)

The last-minute intervention by both the Congress and the president reflected the Schindler family’s last throw of the dice. They’d lost, time and again, in the state courts. They wanted an act of Congress that would then be upheld in the federal system. Remarkably, and to the astonishment of everyone at Woodside, they got what they wanted. Senate Bill 686 was filed and debated and, improbably, passed into law on a resoundingly bipartisan basis, although the U.S. Senate bravely did so on a voice vote only.

The bill was not merely aimed at one woman in Florida. A memo that circulated on the floor of the Senate described the case as a “great political issue” for Republicans going forward. The bill was aimed at voters in Pennsylvania in 2006, where incumbent senator Rick Santorum, who’d shown up at the hospice to pray with the Schindlers, had a tough reelection fight,
and at voters in Iowa who would caucus in 2008 to pick the next Republican nominee. For its Democratic supporters, the bill would serve to blunt future attacks on them from the same quarters, even though every poll consistently showed that the public overwhelmingly wanted the federal government to butt out of the case. To vote for the bill was a careful act of preemptive cowardice.

Senate Majority Leader William Frist of Tennessee was one of the people with serious designs on those Iowa Republicans in 2008. Frist was also a licensed physician and an accomplished cardiac surgeon. After viewing a carefully edited videotape provided by Terri’s parents, Frist proceeded to diagnose her from fifteen hundred miles away. She was not in the persistent vegetative state that her doctors claimed. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay agreed: “Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead. She talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort.”