Eyes

These are the eyes of the man I believe committed a cold-blooded murder 32 years ago. Various photographs of him arrived in my in-box today. Although he is a nice-looking man, respectable, well-spoken, intelligent, accomplished, I have reasons to believe he also is a man who carries dark secrets, one of which is that he murdered an innocent woman who got placed in harm's way because she had a skill -- bookkeeping -- and a man trying to be helpful recommended that she be hired by a progressive political group he supported.

This second man, not the killer, was a brilliant intellectual, a red-diaper baby, and a serious student of the history and theory of political thought. But, rather than pursuing what would have been, inevitably, a successful academic career, he joined the ranks of many of us in the Sixties who simply brought whatever skills and passion we had to the Movement that was sweeping across college campuses at that time.

The parallels and differentiating circumstances with the present moment in American history are striking. Then, like now, the country was embroiled in an unwise war in a distant Third World country, whose culture, history and passions we understood poorly, if at all. A paranoid national security apparatus convinced a series of Presidents, both Republican and Democrat, that what was at stake in Vietnam was the frightening prospect that the Domino Theory would prove to be true.

As it turned out, we lost that war. The people our leaders branded as out enemy defeated the U.S. We exited the country abruptly -- desperate people falling off helicopters filled to capacity lifting off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

It was a humiliating moment to be an American.

But the Domino Theory turned out to be a fiction,

Today, this discredited theory is being resuscitated by the Bush administration, in defense of its unpopular and failing effort to secure the oil reserves of Iraq. The reasoning they advance is that if we don't make a stand in Iraq against the "terrorists," this enemy will use Iraq, Iran, and Syria to launch new attacks against us.

Back when he was a leftist, the intellectual mentioned above joined many efforts to change American society and foreign policy so that the errors of Vietnam and the ugliness of racism might be erased from our society.

But when my friend's mother turned up dead, floating in the Bay, he experienced a life crisis few of us can imagine. He'd gotten this innocent, well-meaning bookkeeper her job. She'd done what all-honest bookkeepers and accountants do -- raise questions about irregular practices she noticed that could easily get the group in trouble.

But this due diligence made her suspect in the eyes of the group's leader, who at the time was running for a political office.

My belief, given the evidence I have seen, is that the man whose eyes are captured above, killed my friend's mother at his leader's request.

Will he ever be charged with this crime? Probably not. The D.A. of Alameda County decided a long time ago that he didn't want to take on this group and its constituency. The cops in three districts -- Berkeley, where she was kidnapped; Oakland, where she was seen and held; and Fremont City, where her battered boby with a crushed skull was finally found, weeks after her killer had dumped her in the Bay -- were all reluctant for various reasons to aggressively pursue this case.

After all, it lacks what an old attorney friend called "prosecutorial romance." Who wants to open up and re-experience our collective pain from that era? And how could the evidence that exists convince any Bay Area jury to convict this now substantial man of such a heinous crime?

No, it probably will never happen. This man will most likely never face the consequences having ended someone else's life.

But there's one thing he cannot do. He can't change the exression in his eyes. His are dead eyes. These killing eyes give him away.