Thursday, June 7, 2012

Red Light Romney: Summoning the Ghost of Caryl Chessman


When Mitt Romney was a college freshman, he told fellow residents of his Stanford University dormitory that he sometimes disguised himself as a police officer – a crime in many states, including Michigan and California, where he then lived. And he had the uniform on display as proof.”

--Joe Conason, “Did Young Mitt Romney Impersonate A Police Officer?  Another Witness Says Yes”[1]

Born in St. Joseph, Michigan, Caryl Chessman was a criminal with a long record who spent most of his adult life behind bars. He had been paroled a short time from prison in California when he was arrested near Los Angeles and charged with being the notorious ‘Red Light Bandit.’ The ‘Bandit’ would follow people in their cars to secluded areas and flash a red light that tricked them into thinking he was a police officer. When they opened their windows or exited the vehicle, he would rob and, in the case of several young women, rape them. In July 1948, Chessman was convicted on 17 counts of robbery, kidnapping, and rape, and was condemned to death.”

--Wikipedia Article on Caryl Chessman[2]

Given what I already knew about Willard Mitt Romney’s character, the most surprising thing about the disclosure of his youthful impersonation of a police officer is that it conjured memories of a notorious criminal who was executed more than half a century ago.

I was in sixth grade in California when Caryl Chessman was executed on May 2, 1960.  His case was a topic of intense debate at the time, and one of my earliest political memories is of opposing the death penalty on my elementary school playground.  Chessman, Romney and I were all born in Michigan, and Romney would have been in seventh grade at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills when Chessman was executed in California.  The Chessman case was a national cause célèbre, but whether Romney was aware of it is a matter of conjecture.

Nonetheless, Romney’s classmates describe a modus operandi strikingly similar to Chessman’s.  Joe Conason quotes Robin Madden: 

“He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father,” George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. “He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler.”  http://www.nationalmemo.com/did-young-mitt-romney-impersonate-a-police-officer-another-witness-says-yes/

Conason further reports:

In The Real Romney, a biography published by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman this year, another former friend recalled how Romney had “put a siren on top of his car and chased two of his friends who were driving around with their dates.” The two friends were in on the scheme, but the girls were not. There was beer in the car trunk, according to a prearranged plan. Mitt told his two counterparts to get out of their vehicle and into his car. Then they drove off, leaving the girls behind.
“It was a terrible thing to do,” said one of his accomplices, a Cranbrook classmate named Graham McDonald.

To be sure, leaving the girls behind is not akin to raping them.  Still, reports of Romney’s use of Chessman-like deception to inflict suffering on others for his own pleasure add weight to the Washington Post’s account of his history of bullying at Cranbrook.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-prep-school-classmates-recall-pranks-but-also-troubling-incidents/2012/05/10/gIQA3WOKFU_story.html.

Moreover, the reports establish that Romney began adopted patterns of deceptive behavior at a young age.  His pervasive pattern of blatantly lying in his presidential campaign has been extensively documented, by Richard Cohen http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-enviable-ability-to-ignore-the-truth/2012/04/16/gIQACwTUMT_story.html, Eugene Robinson http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/romneys-distortions-about-obama-do-us-a-disservice/2012/05/28/gJQA9JuTxU_story.html, and many others.  As Rachel Maddow has reported, Romney brazenly stands by his lies even after they have been exposed.  http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/07/12113493-links-for-the-67-trms.

Willard Mitt Romney may not be the moral equivalent of the Red Light Bandit, but he has conclusively demonstrated that he is unfit to be President of the United States.