"Killing The Real President"
by James A. Swan, Ph.D.*
The phone rang. I picked it up. "We've got one for you," said an overworked social worker.
"What's special about this one?" I asked. After my daily schedule of neurotics unable to find love, workaholic aerospace industry administrators, and depressed housewives, I was looking for a change of pace in my counseling practice. Periodically the King County Criminal Justice System would ask me to do an evaluation of an incarcerated individual who they judged to be "difficult to communicate with." Often this had meant Indians, but the thief who insisted that he was a raccoon, and so stealing things from others was his "right," was truly a memorable interview. But that's another story.
"He says that he wants to kill the president."
Whoa. As I heard the words "kill the president," a triple dose of adrenaline shot through my veins. "Have you contacted the FBI?" I asked, knowing that anyone who states that they want to assassinate the president automatically becomes a matter for the national security boys in the sharkskin suits. I always felt uneasy about those guys when they showed up to question me about a client or a student at the university where I teach. Always unannounced. A light knock at the door. Then before you can get up and see who's there, in comes this guy in a gray conservative suit and spit-polished-shined boxy shoes. Quickly closing the door, he says "Dr., may I have a moment of your time?" As if I had a choice. You know that he means more than a moment, but what can you do? The guy is carrying a gun, and besides, there is all that speculation about the connection between the FBI and IRS guys who do audits.
"Actually, they suggested you. They felt that you might be able to help us make some sense out of this one."
"Wow, that's a compliment, I guess," I replied, said "good-bye," and hung up the phone.
After the last depressed housewife of the day had left, I slipped on my trench coat and rain hat, walked out into the mist of a rainy Seattle fall afternoon, and sloshed the five blocks to the King County Police headquarters. The jail was situated on the upper two floors.
Ascending the stairs, to keep my skiing legs in shape, I soon was catching my breath in the waiting area while the deputy checked my credentials. As she typed my name into the computer, I looked out the window. Across the bay the sun was shining on the snow-capped peaks out on the Olympic peninsula to the west. With all the research on how windows with gloomy views make people feel depressed, I always felt that it was ironic that prisoners had the best views in the building, even if it was from behind iron bars.
"Okay, go to booth 13. A caseworker will bring him in," she said, pushing the button to deactivate the security system so I could enter the outer chamber of the jail. Whenever I passed through this portal, with the buzzer sounding and the "door open" sign flashing, images of police movies would flash through my head, and I started looking for escaping serial killers or mobsters. Never happened.
On the other side, you could immediately tell the convicts from the police, attorneys, and various human services professionals that came into this ecotone of the jail by the way that they dressed. But as a shrink, clothes never got much reaction from me, at least when the style was gift of the state. When I wanted to know something about a person, I first looked at body language. The forward hunch of the man with a knot in his stomach was usually like wearing a sign "guilty" with flashing red letters.. The ramrod stiff posture of the ex-marine dock worker with visible bruises and scars on his face suggested someone with a pretty rigid and narrow world view backed up by a hair trigger temper. The shifty, quiet walk of a burglar was an occupational asset. The swaggering gait and wry, angry smile of a sociopath scam artist who ran insurance frauds to take away old people's pensions always made me wish that physical punishment like caning was legal.
As I approached my interviewee, I always looked at their eyes: the windows of the soul. The eyes of people behind bars are almost never quiet, unless they've been in for a long time. Those who are awaiting trial have trouble creating convincing masks to hide the fear that leaks out through their eyes. Those who know they are going down for the count and are pissed as hell will always telegraph their violence through the fire that streams out through their eyes. Some people are good at hiding guilt in their eyes. Those are the ones to stay away from.
I had come to be aware that usually I would feel something in my body before I met the person I was to interview. Call it psychic or whatever you want, when I was going to talk with a violent person, my gut was almost always tight and my shoulders and neck became tense, even before they showed up. It was as if I was unconsciously preparing to defend myself. If a person was obviously guilty and felt remorse, more often than not, I would feel an enormous heaviness in my shoulders and a tightness in my neck, as if I was somehow sharing their burden of guilt. This is the stuff that no one teaches you about being a shrink. Once you get your degree, you can throw away the theories, because what walks into your practice will change you, often as much as you change them. People who aren't prepared for that part of the psychotherapy are a primary reason why shrinks have such a high suicide rate.
As I sat waiting, looking out the window as some seagulls were fighting with the crows and pigeons for a piece of doughnut that a cop had just tossed out between the bars on a window, what I noticed was that I felt sadness. I almost wanted to cry. I couldn't figure out if this was the man that I was about to interview, or myself, but God it was heavy.
Moments later a middle-aged female social worker appeared, leading a short, slender man in orange coveralls who was wearing hand cuffs and leg restraints. He had blond, short-cropped military-style hair and there was a distant look on his face. His head was down, as if he was hiding something. His gait was a little unsteady. What hit me immediately was a large scar that sliced across the frontal region of the head. It was like a superhighway cutting through a wheat field.
As he sat down, the social worker said, "This is Frank."
I made it a practice to not look at a person's file before I met them for an evaluation. I had learned that the people who wrote these things up were, more often than not, heavily biased in their assessment. Cops get paid to catch the bad guys and get fired for hauling in the wrong ones. It's hard to admit making a mistake, and with the rising tide of civil suits against police, I had found that the case files seemed to grow larger, regardless whether they were accurate or not, just to protect asses.
Frank looked at me; not raising his head, but by raising his eyes. He knew who I was. Then he quickly looked down again.
"Hello Frank," I said introducing myself. "I'd like to ask you some questions."
I extended my hand. Reluctantly, he took it, shook it quickly and withdrew. He was sweating profusely, I noted.
Frank began to fidget nervously. I noticed that his right hand seemed to twitch a little and he had a slight nervous tick in the corner of his mouth. Might be a neurological condition here, I noted mentally.
I asked several questions. How old was he? Where did he live? Was he single or live alone? He grunted one-word answers, suspiciously looking up at me in between questions. It was now clear that Frank did have a reservoir of anger in him. It flashed through his eyes like lightning bolts each time I probed his personal life. But just as quickly as the anger would rise up, I could see another emotion rise up that would quench it, like throwing water on fire.
A little paranoid. Possible violent tendencies, but probably not serious, was my initial assessment. I was looking for the insane madness of a Charles Manson, the political fires of a Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan, or the infantile explosiveness of a John Hinckley. Anyone could attempt to kill a president, but what was the motivation that would actually make some one really want to do it? My initiative hit was that Frank was not crazy, but he was a little like a caged animal. My challenge was to figure what his inner cage was all about, as well as what kind of animal was pacing back and forth within in.
"He says that he hears voices that tell him to kill the president," the social worker said calmly. Voices. Displacement -- a convenient way to disown emotional affect -- imagine that someone else is telling you to do it rather than owning the emotions that are driving you. That was the conventional psychological interpretation. Or was he an undeveloped medium? Every once in a while a potentially gifted medium tries to reject their gift and ends up in psychological hell. In an earlier age people called them shamans and worshipped people who heard voices in the air. Today we call them schizophrenics and wonder why our lives feel spiritually empty. After working with Indians for years, I never ruled out the mediumship possibility completely. And as Carl Jung once said, there's an "Indian" living inside each of us. He or she is that part of us that is in harmony with the place that we live.
When she brought up his "voices," Frank became very agitated. His body language and emotional feeling gave me the distinct impression that he was a walking war zone, but frankly, he did not seem much different than the half a dozen street people I had passed on the way to the jail. This guy didn't seem like much of a threat to anyone, except himself.
When Frank would not speak more than one word at a time, I asked the social worker to tell me about how he was living and why he was arrested.
"He's homeless. Has been out on the street. Refuses a shelter. The reason he's here is that he keeps breaking into buildings. He is fairly clever with his hands and can pick locks easily. He never takes anything. Once he gets in, he locks himself in rooms. It's as if he keeps wanting to put himself away. This has happened half a dozen times. The reason why we called you in is the voices that he says keep telling him to kill the president."
Frank looked at me quickly and nodded as she finished. The look in his eyes struck me that I was looking into the face of someone more like a peer than run of the mill wino.
"Before you ask any more questions, you'd better read this," she said, pushing the file toward me. Reluctantly, I opened it. Almost immediately I was shocked to see that Frank had a Master's degree in engineering from the University of Washington. I made a comment about it and he became more agitated. A guard advanced a step toward him in case he was about to explode. Instantly, Frank reined in his anger and slumped forward again. He grunted out his date of graduation, June 1978, four years previously.
Not out of touch with reality, I noted. We all have our inner storms and imaginary realities we visit. Psychotics simply lose contact with home base. Frank did not seem like the classic psychotic who hears angels and devils, but he was clearly pissed about something.
I read on....
"Frank worked with the National Oceanographic Administration for two years," it said. "He worked on sonar and seemed to have a special ability for machines." The report went on that Frank had begun to have mild epileptic seizures, "Petit Mal," as they are called in the medical texts. Frank had received medication, and returned to work. The seizures, however, gradually became more severe, advancing to the "Jacksonian variety," where waves of uncontrolled trembling pass through the body, sometimes accompanied by unconsciousness. A doctor had concluded that it seemed that the intense listening to "pings" over headphones for hours at time had seemed to trigger his seizures. He had been relieved of his post on a research boat in the Pacific and assigned to a desk job on dry land. Being transferred to the status of paper-pusher had upset him and his epilepsy became worse.
There are drugs that help a good number of epileptics -- phenobarbital, dilantin, mesantonin, etc. -- but none are totally effective. Frank was taken to a state hospital where electro-shock therapy was the most popular mode of treatment for just about anything a pill couldn't subdue. It, too, made him worse. "Grand Mal" seizures began to consume him into wild, uncontrolled, shaking, kicking and slobbering-at-the-mouth convulsions. Frank became terrified of his loss of control and began to retreat inward into confusion and self-doubt. It became increasing hard for people to have a conversation with him, which was the reverse of his once out-going personality.
At the time, some psychiatrists were experimenting with a surgical procedure to treat epilepsy. It involved opening a rather large hole in the front of the skull and cutting a series of nervous tissues in the brain, which were felt to be over-firing, causing the seizures. It wasn't a lobotomy, just a physical shutting down of communication to a region of the brain thought to be the site of the turmoil that was causing the seizures.
The operation had been performed. As I finished reading this, I looked up at the scar on Frank's head. I personally felt such a procedure should be a matter of last resort. Frank seemed to sense my feelings and for the first time our eyes met and a spark of understanding flashed between us.
The report went on to say that after the operation, Frank's condition progressively degenerated. He was released from NOA. The government tried to place him in a half-way house, as a counselor for juvenile delinquents.. The job lasted six months. Frank had become violent one day, hit someone and was fired.
Because of all his troubles he had to move in with his family. This soon became a burden they could not handle as both his seizures and fits of violence were growing worse. His family could not support him and they became afraid of him. He was hospitalized for a time, but he was not technically "sick," nor was he legally insane. He knew the difference between right and wrong and he felt bad about his outbursts. It was the inability to control himself that was sending him into a deep, dark hole. In the era of the closures of the large state mental hospitals that Jack Kennedy said would be replaced with community mental health centers, (that never got built or worked the way they were supposed to) Frank found himself living alone in a tiny rooming house existing on unemployment. He spent days at the library, becoming well-informed, but unable to do anything with himself.
This condition made him increasingly depressed, which led to drinking. He was able to hold down menial labor jobs for a short time, but invariably he would get into arguments or show up late for work looking disheveled. He never told anyone the dirt and cuts and bruises on his body were because he'd had a seizure. He was too proud. They assumed he was a bum and soon he could not find work or afford a place to live.
Frank refused charity. He took to the streets. When he was not drunk or immersed in his illness, he spoke and acted like an acoustical engineer with a graduate degree from a major university. He was not dumb, nor was he conventionally crazy, but people were treating him as both. This would drive anyone mad.
Finally, Frank had begun breaking in to buildings. That had led him to me.
I closed the file and sighed deeply. Phil Ochs once wrote a song "There but for fortune might walk you or I." The words to the song came to mind as I looked at Frank. He had even been a counselor for a time.
I could have written my report at this point. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the operation had traumatized his brain, rather than helping ease his seizures. He was like a lab rat in a failed experiment. My own anger was rising rapidly as I looked at the man across the table from me. Some studies have found that as many as 50% of patients suffer from some kind of inappropriate medical care or malpractice. I had seen my share. Were I in his shoes, I probably would have wanted to kill too. By why the president?
I have this gift for crawling into other people's minds and finding places that no one else seems to know exists. Frank seemed to sense my empathy. "Frank," I said, "Do you keep getting in trouble because you are afraid you will do something bad?"
Tears streamed down his face. His slammed his fist on the table and shouted "Yes!" Christ, he was putting himself in jail to prevent himself from hurting someone. Considering all the things he'd been through, the fact that he still held on to his sense of right and wrong made him more a hero than a criminal.
I motioned the nervous guard away. Okay, we had the puzzle worked out. I could write a report based on what I knew. Chances were that Frank would be out in the street in a day or two, but the pattern would probably continue. The thought crossed my mind that at some point he could go off the deep end and try to kill someone, even a visiting president. I knew I was treading on thin ice. The stress of the interview could push him into a Grand Mal, but the voice in my head kept saying "Don't back down."
The idea popped into my head that I should try to enter into Frank's world, not merely label his condition as an organic disorder worsened by what I considered medical mayhem. "Frank," I said, "This is a safe place. You can't kill anyone here. I want to talk with your voices. What do they say? Can you let the voices speak through you?"
Frank became very frightened. His knees and his hands shook. I reassured him that he was restrained, several guards were nearby and I would not let him hurt me or the social worker, who had drawn as far away from us as possible.
"Kill the president," he said in a quavering voice, like a little child calling out for a parent.
"Say it louder," I suggested.
"Kill the president," he said, with a little more strength.
"That doesn't sound like a voice that I'd worry about," I challenged.
"Kill the fucking president!" he shouted. His hands pounded onto the table and a torrent of rage poured out of his mouth. He was shaking and trembling with symptoms of a Petit Mal seizure, but he did not lose consciousness. My inner voices said "Keep it up."
I really didn't know where I was going with this. Catharsis was useful, but it probably would not have much of any long term value. Frank paused in exhaustion, but there was still a gleam in his eyes that said he was holding on to this reality. Suddenly an idea popped into my mind. "Frank," I said, "close your eyes." He did. Shaking and trembling like a leaf in a wind storm, he hung in there. Then I said, " Imagine you are like inside a movie theater. Now look around and see if you can see who the voices are telling you to kill? His picture will be on the screen."
Frank followed my instructions.
"Do you see him?"
"Yes!" he said, barely able to control himself.
"What does the president look like?"
"He's wearing a white coat..... Like Dr. Jones." A look of total astonishment swept across his face. He had broken through the fear that was fragmenting his life. He had faced his voices, and then seen the object of his hatred. It was an imposing authority figure, perhaps a little like a president: someone who had once had considerable control over Frank's life. He began sobbing. The odor of urine became apparent and a guard stepped up and led him away. I opened Frank's file and found what I had expected. The doctor who had performed the unsuccessful operation on Frank was a "Dr. Jones."
I never saw Frank again. The social worker said that he told her that his voices had gone away and so he was released. She said that he had asked her to help him find a good lawyer. I suspect that by now Frank is a wealthy man, and if he is throwing darts at a wall to express his hatred, I'll bet his target will not be a picture of the real President of the United States.
*From 1972-1982, James had a part-time private practice as a psychotherapist in Oregon and Washington.