Madness
He seemed like a normal kid…
The oldest of three brothers raised on South L Street in Lake Worth, Florida, [Charles] Whitman attended St. Ann’s High School in Palm Beach, where he was a pitcher on the school’s baseball team. Charles and his brothers all served as altar boys at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, and he chose the Confirmation name “Joseph” for himself.At the age of 6, he had scored 138 on an IQ test. Six years later, he was among the youngest to ever achieve Eagle Scout, to his father’s delight. He took five years of piano lessons.
When Whitman was 14, and still serving as an altar boy, his Scout leader Joseph Leduc completed seminary and served as the priest of Sacred Heart for a month. Leduc was a family friend, who had accompanied Whitman and his father on several hunting trips. This was also the year that he finally overcame his habit of nervously biting his nails. At the age of 16, Whitman underwent a routine appendectomy. The same year, he was hospitalized following a motorcycle accident.
When he graduated high school, he joined the Marines…
At first Whitman did quite well in the Corps, earning a Good Conduct Medal and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal at Guantanomo Naval Base in Cuba. He also scored an eye opening 215 out of a possible 250 points on the shooting range, receiving a Sharpshooters Badge. Trying to prove his father wrong and be successful, Whitman applied for a Naval Enlisted Science Education Program scholarship, which would help him earn an engineering degree at a selected school. Whitman got the award, and was expected to enter Officer’s Candidate School upon the completion of his degree. In September of 1961 he enrolled at the University of Texas.
But despite all that promise, something awful happened five years later :
It’s a story that’s too familiar. Someone disturbed through emotional or physical trauma loses control and acts out a violent fantasy. It’s not because they play video games or listen to aggressive music or watch violent movies or don’t go to church. Oppressive security measures and an obsessive push to rid our culture of unpleasant imagery won’t make us safer. Despite what those desperate to finding an easy fix to a complicated (and probably unsolvable) problem would have you believe, sometimes people just snap.
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Whitman didn’t just snap. He confided to a professor that he had begun to feel very agressive and think violent thoughts weeks before the killing spree. The autopsy found a tumor that was affecting the aggression centers of his brain.
Comment by Jayson — April 16, 2007 @ 3:30 pm
Let us not forget that this came in the middle of a string of high-profile shooting events in the US, including the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X in previous years, and those of MLK and RFK a couple of years later.
And Vietnam, of course.
Comment by darrelplant — April 16, 2007 @ 3:43 pm
I recommend the film The Deadly Tower, which had Kurt Russell portraying whitman. Russell made the shooting scene utterly terrifying by being completely quiet and emotionless, as though he were doing something as routine as washing dishes.
Comment by Maldoror — April 16, 2007 @ 4:02 pm
It’s also believed by many that a disformation in his brain that led to psychological trauma:
from Wikipedia “It was revealed during the autopsy that Whitman had a cancerous glioblastoma tumor in the hypothalamus region of his brain. Some theorised that it may have been pressed against the nearby amygdala, which can affect emotive passion. This has led some neurologists to speculate that his medical condition was in some way responsible for the attacks. [4][5].”
It was also part of a debate in the NY Times magazine some weeks back.
Comment by adam — April 16, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
Interesting no one mentions his “training” in the Marines as a factor. Support the troops!
Comment by SteveB — April 16, 2007 @ 4:46 pm
Adam, you left off the next sentence in that quote :
“The findings of a brain tumor, however, were later discredited as a causitive factor in the shootings.”
Comment by greg — April 16, 2007 @ 4:59 pm
Marine Corps training didn’t make that young man go into the tower and shoot all of those people. Neither did it make him stab his mother and wife to death. The Marines didn’t supply him with the weapons he used. In fact, the Corps might not even have made him a better shooter–he was pretty crack to start with.
This man had serious emotional problems, and he knew it. Check out how he wanted his life insurance to be spent (if it paid off).
The Columbine kids weren’t in the service.
So you can’t blame the USMC for Whitman any more than you can blame video games or music for Harris and Klebold.
Comment by Jude — April 16, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
Most people who study Whitman at any length conclude that the relentless abuse he suffered at the hands of his tyrannical father is probably what made him a sociopath. We can’t simply shrug off the fact that people “snap” and do things like this on a regular basis. There’s a reason that men “snap” and women don’t. There’s a reason that men particularly obsessed with hyper-masculine culture snap. And no, it’s not video games.
Comment by Amanda Marcotte — April 16, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
Greg, I usually agree with you, but you are wrong about this one. Violence begets violence and the US has a culture of violence. With an even larger population, this kind of thing is far rarer in Europe, for example. Videogames, movies and all the rest of it don’t cause this by themselves, but they are enablers, particularly if you are already on the fringe, weapons are easy to find, and social acceptance, even worship, of war and violence is high.
“Sometimes people snap” is a poor substitute for thinking about this problem as what it is, a problem.
How about waiting to find out who this guy was before reaching facile conclusions?
Comment by M Aurelius — April 16, 2007 @ 8:01 pm
greg,
I’m not sure where you found that quote (it’s not after what I cited from the Charles Whitman Wikipedia page). Nevertheless, Whitman’s tumor has hardly been widely “discredited,” mostly because of evidence like this:
http://brainmind.com/Amygdala44.html
“Several days prior to climbing the tower, Charles Whitman wrote himself a letter:
‘I don’t quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter…. I don’t really understand myself these days… Lately I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate. I consulted Dr. Cochrum at the University Health Center and asked him to recommend someone that I could consult with about some psychiatric disorders I felt I had…. I talked to a doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overcome by overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.’
Post-mortem autopsy of his brain revealed a glioblastoma multiforme tumor the size of a walnut, erupting from beneath the thalamus, impacting the hypothalamus, extending into the temporal lobe and compressing the amygdaloid nucleus (Charles J. Whitman Catastrophe, Medical Aspects. Report to Governor, 9/8/66).
The amygdals appears capable of not only triggering and steering hypothalamic activity but acting on higher level neocortical processes so that individuals form emotional ideas . Indeed, the amygdala is able to overwhelm the neocortex and the rest of the brain so so that the person not only forms emotional ideas but responds to them, sometimes with vicious, horrifying results.”
And if you have a TimesSelect account I suggest this article that discuses the issue in detail:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50910FE3E550C728DDDAA0894DF404482&showabstract=1
Comment by adam — April 17, 2007 @ 12:20 am
Madness…
…
Trackback by University Update — April 17, 2007 @ 1:24 am
Marine Corps training didn’t make that young man go into the tower and shoot all of those people.
I was remarking on the fact that no one had mentioned this as a factor in his actions, I wasn’t claiming it was the sole cause of his actions.
Just as Tim McVeigh’s experience burying Iraqi soldiers alive with his tank might have taught him something about the value of human life, and the need to cause some “collateral damage” if you want to send a message?
Don’t you think there’s a connection between the fact that our government promotes the use of overwhelming force to solve its problems while training thousands of young men to kill, and the fact that some of those young men then go on to, you know, kill?
Comment by SteveB — April 17, 2007 @ 5:30 am
Regarding the brain tumor and Wikipedia: Wikipedia is NOT a scholarly source. The article does not state why the tumor as a cause “was discredited.” In Richard Restak’s book “The Brain” (Restak, by the way, is an M.D., who has written numerous books about the brain) he mentions Whitman’s tumor and states that the medical knowledge of the time was so primitive that they could not determine whether the turmor had any effect on his behavior. At that time the effect of a tumor applying pressure to the hippocampus and the amygdala was speculative, but that was then. Wikipedia is a good starting point, but one should never rely on any information it provides as definitive. If anyone can find a scholarly article (such as from JAMA or the Lancet, etc.) that disputes the effect of a tumor on the region of the brain in question, then you have something.
Comment by S Dunlap — April 17, 2007 @ 7:23 am