The Motive of Dan White

Generally, consensus seems to be that the motive for Dan White’s killing of Milk and Moscone was his failure to get his job back. SFWeekly emphasizes that betrayal was his main motivator, as opposed to homophobia, in this article. In his own confession, Dan White makes clear that he was under a lot of pressure due to his job situation, and that as Harvey Milk and others were against him regaining his position as a city supervisor.

Dan White also allegedly admitted while in Soledad prison that he intended to kill four people when he went to City Hall, including Carol Ruth Silver and Willie Brown. Dan White’s list therefore included two Jewish people, one an openly gay man and one a woman, and an African American man. While the movement to prevent him to regain the office he resigned from was almost certainly his primary motivator, with a list as diverse as that it is difficult to imagine that bigotry was not another key motivator. This especially feels true given that White has been noted as having “made it clear that he saw himself as the board's defender of the home, the family and religious life against homosexuals, pot smokers and cynics.”

Obviously, with such a suspicion about murder, the next step is research. Unfortunately, there is not as much evidence to support the gut feeling I had as I had liked, but there does seem to be some evidence to be found in a breakdown of FBI documents requested under FOIA by MuckRock. It documents evidence of at least one individual having knowledge of Dan White’s homophobic attitudes, which can be seen in this piece from an FBI file:

Additionally, White’s antisemitism was apparently so well known to the individual interviewed by the FBI that murder wasn’t an unreasonable leap for a Jewish person (but was about Mayor Moscone):

This file also indicates awareness of threats to Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, and another official whose name was redacted, though Elias, the person who claimed to have reported them to the bailiff, also reports having not been taken seriously.

The last piece of the MuckRock analysis of the file, which edges even more into the realm of conspiracy theories, is the possibility that the San Francisco Police Department were at least aware of the plan to kill three people at city hall, with a report of cheering from the police depatment, as well as laughter from the police dispatcher. Additionally, an officer asked if they should send a third ambulance, which is both in line with the list of people above (two Jewish people and the Mayor), and according to Wahl, the person who wrote the letter in the FBI file about the police, the number of bullets Dan White brought with him to City Hall.

There is no substantial evidence to a city wide conspiracy that I have found yet, however, and thus that remains the land of potential for now. In the case of Dan White's possible homophobia, racism, and antisemitism, however, the excerpts from the FBI file in conjunction with general knowledge of how people like Dan White have tended to respond to rejection, definitely calls for care about the nuance in his potential motive as reducing it simply to the betrayal of not getting his job back risks being overly dismissive of the social issues that remain issues in our society today.

For 14 February