The Davidian Massacre:
_ Disturbing Questions About Waco Which Must Be Answered

_
By Carol Moore
_
Gun Owners of America & Legacy Communications. 488 pp. $8.

The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation

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By Dick J. Reavis
_
Simon & Schuster. 304 pp. $24

Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America

_
By James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher
_
University of California Press. 242 pp. $24

.95

.

Armageddon in Waco:
_ Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict

_
Edited by Stuart A. Wright
_
University of Chicago Press. 387 pp. $49.95 cloth, $15.95

paper.



When you have a sore tooth, your tongue just won't leave it alone. For
some of us, the tragedy at Waco in 1993 is like that—an unhealed wound
in the body politic. Four books have appeared in the past several months
that probe the Waco trauma and offer insights into what went wrong and
what should be set right.

Carol Moore's mass paperback is the most recent offering and the only
one to include reflections on the recent inconclusive and turbulent
House hearings last fall, which brought on some knowledgeable witnesses
who had not hitherto been heard, but drowned their evidence in partisan
bickering by committee members who did not know what questions to ask or
what had already been answered in the criminal trial last year but
wanted maximum TV exposure. Much was made of the CS gas that was
injected into Mt. Carmel by some four hundred "ferret rounds," for
example, but little note was taken of forty times as much of the same
gas sprayed by tanks. The soluent of the ferret rounds was methylene
chloride—a hazardous material as toxic as CS—but what was the soluent of
the tanks' spray? Ethanol was found in the bodies at autopsy, suggesting
a highly flammable soluent. That question was not explored.

Carol Moore has written a polemic against the government worthy of the
organization to which she has devoted more than two years of work—the
Committee for Waco Justice, which has staged demonstrations in
Washington to protest what they view as crimes by the federal agencies.
Her book is copublished by Gun Owners of America and highlights issues
of interest to opponents of gun control and of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms, but it is not untrustworthy because of that.

Of the four works reviewed here, it is the most thickly packed with
details, complete with emotive characterizations and imputation of
sinister motives to government agents. But the author is not just a
polemicist. She rejects some allegations as unlikely, such as the claim
(made in the civil suit brought by Ramsey Clark on behalf of Mt.
Carmel's heirs and survivors) that the FBI planted an explosive on top
of the concrete vault where the women and children had taken refuge,
blowing a hole in the ceiling and killing all within. Moore inclines to
the view that the tanks had already skewed the frame building on its
foundations so that stairways were shattered: the Davidians could not
escape from the second floor, and the FBI agents could not ascend to
plant a thermite bomb. (But the large hole still is unexplained; how did
it get there?) If one reads this volume with a critical eye, one can
learn a lot from it that is not available elsewhere (such as information
from the 1993 Congressional hearings, which Carol Moore attended).

Journalist Dick Reavis left his job in Dallas to spend a couple of years
researching the Waco incident because he was distressed to discover that
no other journalist was probing beneath the FBI's handouts. As part of
his research—perhaps the hardest part—he steeped himself for six months
in the Bible and in the theological lore of the Adventist movement,
which had been going on for a century and a half before David Koresh
came along. He read tracts and listened to tapes of Koresh, and the
result is that more than a sixth of the book's pages are devoted to
explaining the conceptual world in which the Davidians lived—which the
Feds and their "expert" advisers never did penetrate.

Reavis also interviewed surviving Davidians, read the 7,500 pages of
trial transcript (it turns out that the copy I got when in Waco was from
his set) and the 18,000 classified pages of transcripts of negotiations
from the fifty-one day siege. (Reavis won't reveal how he got them,
except to insist he did nothing illegal.) His book is rich in detail,
though perhaps not so rich as Moore's. He simply relates the narrative
in a straightforward, factual way without much interpretive "spin." This
is probably the best book of the four if one wants a single survey of
the situation from a nongovernmental perspective.

James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher are professors of religious studies at
the University of North Carolina and Connecticut College, respectively.
They have written a more scholarly treatment of the subject that focuses
less on the details of the events at Waco and more on the dynamics of
what brought them about.

Their chief subject is the role and influence of the anticult movement,
not so much on the ATF and FBI in their actions of early 1993, but in
the formation of a pervasive anticult animus and stereotype that has
become endemic over the past two decades in the American public's
thinking—or rather nonthinking—about new or "oddball" religious groups,
and that naturally affects federal agents, juries, judges, and
reporters. Tabor and Gallagher trace the coverage of the Waco events by
mass media, quickie books, TV talk shows, and "documentaries"—almost all
of which purveyed a hostile misunderstanding of the situation. For more
than a year the public was getting only one side of the story, since
those who could have supplied "the other side" were incommunicado—under
siege, in jail, disregarded, or dead.

This volume understandably highlights the effort by Tabor and Philip
Arnold of the Reunion Institute in Houston to reach David Ko-resh during
the siege through his own sphere of discourse and to suggest a slightly
different scenario for the Seven Seals that would not involve a violent
confrontation. As a result of their efforts, Koresh began to write his
exposition of the Seven Seals and sent out a letter on April 14
promising to surrender when he finished. (Tabor and Arnold estimate that
at the rate he was working, he should have completed work in a week or
two.) The FBI brushed off their efforts on the grounds that this was
just another delaying tactic by Koresh. He completed an introduction and
the First Seal on Sunday night, April 18, but the gas attack began the
next morning. His secretary, Ruth Riddle, barely escaped the fire and
brought out on a computer disk what he had done. It was later recovered
and transcribed and is appended to the Tabor-Gallagher volume.

The unfinished essay by Koresh proves the FBI was wrong about Koresh's
promise, but they didn't know that at the time. They had only the
experience of the preceding weeks, which looked like shifty stalling to
them because they never understood what motivated the people they were
confronting. The government has produced some forty plastic-wrapped
charred firearms allegedly found in the ruins of Mt. Carmel (but won't
let independent firearms experts examine them), and those are supposed
to prove that the search and arrest warrants—and the raid to serve them—were justified. But ex post facto evidence does not prove anything about
justification of decisions made before such evidence was known—in either
case.

The fourth book is a collection of essays by academic and other
observers, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the Waco
tragedy. Stuart Wright, professor of sociology at Lamar University in
Beaumont, Texas, has done a good job in recruiting and coordinating
these analyses of the perplexing melange that is Waco. Anson Shupe and
Jeffrey Hadden analyze the five narratives competing for the attention
of the public, and James Richardson dissects the cross-pressures on the
reporters trying to interpret the unfolding events with constant demands
from their editors for copy and with a paucity of data available beyond
the daily press briefings staged by the FBI. Robert Fogarty relates the
little-known stories of the tragic ends of other religious innovators of
recent centuries. Bill Pitts of Baylor explains the lineage of Seventh-day Adventist offshoots that became Davidians, and then Branch
Davidians, and then "Students of the Seven Seals" under Koresh. David
Bromley and Edward Silver describe the evolution of the Mt. Carmel
community from "patronal clan" to "prophetic movement." John R. Hall
suggests how the anticult-fostered image of Jonestown was persistently
projected on Mt. Carmel through the atrocity anticipation of "mass
suicide." Ed Gaffney reviews the legal and constitutional
considerations, concluding that the warrants were not stale or
insufficient (which only shows how the concept of "probable cause" has
deteriorated), but that the method used to serve them was excessive.

These four works are labors of concern for which we should be grateful
to their devoted authors, who will not grow rich on the proceeds. They
provide needed balance to the two years of government stonewalling that
reached new heights at the House hearings. The prevailing view in
government circles has been that the law enforcement actions at Waco—aside from a few missteps in execution—were necessary, justified, and
right. These four volumes and their various authors have one thing in
common: they contend that what happened there was unnecessary,
unjustified, and wrong. Which version will prevail only history will
tell.