Low Profile for a Legend

By John Leo

Joan Rivers sent a LOVE AND KISSES telegram offering to help out with the bail money. "Thug Buster" T shirts began to appear on the streets of New York City, and an aspiring rock group wrote a song in his honor ("I'm not going to give you my pay/ Try and take it away/ Come on, make my day/ They call him the vigilante"). The red-bereted Guardian Angels jingled canisters in front of subway straphangers, collecting for his defense. But Bernhard Hugo Goetz, the 37-year-old electronics expert who shot four black teen-agers in a New York City subway car last month, refused to cooperate with the makers of his blossoming legend. Spurning all offers of financial aid, he gave a single, halting interview to the New York Post last week. "I'm amazed at this celebrity status," he said. "I want to remain anonymous."

After six days in jail, charged with attempted murder and possession of a weapon, Goetz made bail with $50,000 of his own money. Stopping in at his cluttered downtown apartment, he asked a handyman to remove a WELCOME HOME BERNIE banner and a collection box for his defense fund that had been installed in the building's lobby by his fellow tenants. Pursued by several reporters and photographers, Goetz drove through the Holland Tunnel to a shopping center in Union, N.J.

At a diner he was gawked at; customers and workers cast sideways glances at the celebrity in their midst and spoke approvingly of his violent act. Waitress Irene Wienckoski asked for his autograph, and Goetz responded with a cryptically high-toned message: "To Irene--To be trusted is a better compliment than to be loved." Across the street he stopped at a Toys "R" Us store to buy a toy fire engine, just as he did in December when he fled Manhattan, driving north through New England, before turning himself in to police in Concord, N.H. Dashing hopes that the mysterious fire engine might turn out to be a revelatory, memory-jogging "Rosebud" in his case, Goetz explained that the toy was a gift he had promised to a young boy: the previous fire engine had been confiscated by overzealous police.

Goetz began his leap from anonymity on the afternoon of Dec. 22, when he was riding in a seedy subway car in lower Manhattan along with some 20 other passengers. The four youths, according to witnesses, were acting in a rowdy, intimidating manner. When they approached Goetz and asked him for $5, he replied, "I have $5 for each of you," and fired five bullets from a nonlicensed .38-cal. handgun, wounding all four and shooting two in the back. Then he fled. According to the prosecution, Goetz intended to kill the teen- agers, although he did not consider himself to be in a life-threatening situation. One of the four, Darryl Cabey, 19, who was shot in the spine and is paralyzed from the waist down, slipped into a coma at the hospital last week and was listed in critical condition. Goetz is due in court this week to learn if he will be indicted. District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has refused to grant immunity to Goetz or to the youths in exchange for testimony. As a result, both the shooter and his victims have refused to appear before a grand jury.

Without any help from Goetz, who has kept a notably low profile, passions roused by the shootings were running high. When New York police set up a special hot line to seek evidence in the case, they were deluged with phone calls backing Goetz; many of the well-wishers suggested that he run for mayor or receive a medal. Like many radio talk-show hosts, Clark Weber of Chicago station WIND has been swamped with pro-Goetz calls. "They won't let it go," he said. "There's an intense frustration out there, and it bothers me." Bob Grant, a contentious radio personality at New York's WABC, startled his listeners last week by saying that Goetz had not done the job right. "The essence of what I said," explained Grant later, "was if he had learned how to use that gun, they all would have been dead in the first place."

Pugnacious New York Daily News Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote several bitter columns accusing the white Goetz and his supporters of racism. As Cabey's condition worsened, Breslin wrote, "Those who thought it was fine for Goetz to shoot a black in the back, even if it paralyzed him for life, now conceivably could be asked to raise their cheers for death." But much black opinion has come down on Goetz's side. Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, called Goetz "the avenger for all of us" and offered to raise defense money. "Some black man ought to have done what he did long before," said Innis. "I wish it had been me." Innis called for a "volunteer peace officer" force of armed civilians to roam the streets. "After enough criminals get blasted," he said, "they will conclude that crime does not pay."

President Reagan was asked about the Goetz case at midweek, certainly the first time a subway shooting had surfaced at a presidential news conference. His comment: he sympathized with public frustration about crime, but citizens could not take the law into their own hands.

Most editorials have agreed with the President's unimpeachably balanced view, but here and there some anger has flared. The Wall Street Journal said it did not condone violence, but asked, "If the 'state of nature' has returned to some big cities, can people fairly be blamed for modern vigilantism? Is it more 'civilized' to suffer threats to individual liberty from criminals, or is it an overdose of sophistication to say individuals can never resort to self-protection?" The Milwaukee Journal, also insisting that violence should not be condoned, noted that in the wake of the Goetz case a hit-and-run driver in New York City had been caught and beaten by an enraged mob. Said the Journal: "Authorities must recognize that their own failure to protect citizens itself breeds crime." The Boston Globe viewed "pistol- packin' Bernhard Goetz" with alarm: "With no psychiatric evaluation yet made, he may resemble Richard Speck more than Wyatt Earp."

Letters-to-the-editor nationwide have been heavily pro-Goetz. In Atlanta, the Journal and the Constitution reported last week that they had not yet received one anti-Goetz letter. "It's been amazing," said Constitution Letters Editor John Ghirardini. The Journal said many notes began the same way: "While I do not support violence, I think Goetz was right." Hundreds of letters have gone to Goetz and his friends. One man, who identified himself as black, even wrote to one of the wounded youths: "Take time to think that whitey didn't do you in. You sure get no sympathy from us peace-loving, law- abiding blacks. We will even contribute to the guy that taught you a lesson . . ."

"This is far more than a New York City story; it's a story of human nature," said Geoffrey Alpert, director of the University of Miami's Center for the Study of Law and Society. "It's something we'd all like to do. We'd all like to think we would react the way Goetz did." But Kelsey Dorsett, a black leader and president of the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce, is troubled by the glorification of Goetz. Said Dorsett: "I'm so afraid that the New York situation might serve as a catalyst to justify people taking justice into their own hands."

Walter Berns, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, argued that the angry pro-Goetz sentiment, based on moral indignation about crime, is a healthy sign. "It's an expression of an honest and decent sentiment," he said. "Anger, coming from someone who has not been personally victimized by a criminal, is an expression of concern for fellow citizens. That expression should not be derided or despised."

Los Angeles Clinical Psychologist Rex Beaber offered a psychological- political analysis: The primitive unconscious of man is inherently vengeful, and civilization dawns when citizens, by social contract, yield the administering of vengeance and justice to the state. That contract has broken down in America, he believes. "People are saying, 'As an individual citizen, I wish to revoke my contract because you didn't do what I expected you to do.' "

Afew therapists thought that Goetz may have been pushed to violence by two traumatic incidents in his life: a previous mugging, and his father's trial on a morals charge. Goetz was attacked by a mugger in 1981 and thought his assailant had escaped justice. Actually the man served a jail term of four months. When Goetz was 13, his father, a wealthy businessman in Rhinebeck, N.Y., was convicted of sexually molesting two 15-year-old boys. After an appeal, the father pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, disorderly conduct. "One can hypothesize that the trauma his father sustained made him feel very helpless, motivated him to make sure that another such situation would never occur to him," suggested Psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk, director of the Trauma Center of Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. Perhaps, the psychiatrist added, Goetz "took revenge for all he had suffered."

Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner saw nothing wrong with the public support for a victim of crime who fights back. "To live today in urban America means that you are severely at risk and essentially helpless to deal with the problem of crime. When someone comes along to make you feel you are not helpless, then everyone collectively throws their hats in the air."

In Georgia, Lumpkin County Sheriff Kenneth Seabolt has been raising money for Goetz. Seabolt did not condone the illegal gun, but said, "I'm glad to see someone who's got enough guts to stand up for his rights." The sheriff's actions outraged the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Rev. Joseph Lowery. "When someone sworn to uphold the law raises money to help a lawless individual, somebody ought to check into that," he said. "We want to make a hero out of Goetz, which was made a little easier because the four victims were black. Do we long for the days of Wyatt Earp and Dodge City? That's where we're headed."

Why all the sentiment for Goetz? "It may simply indicate that there are no more liberals on the crime and law-and-order issue in New York, because they've all been mugged," said Harvard Professor of Government James Q. Wilson, author of Thinking About Crime. "Therefore the normal partisan divisions no longer obtain in a situation of this sort."

Wilson said that cases similar to the subway shooting occur constantly around the country. Indeed, in Beverly Hills on New Year's Eve, an 81-year-old retired jewelry merchant shot and killed a 26-year-old mugger with an illegal handgun. The mugger's father said that he would have fired too, and the deputy district attorney announced, "We're not going to put an 81-year-old man in jail." The incident passed with little public attention.

The Goetz case, however, is the stuff of myth: a frail, law-abiding citizen, bullied as a youngster, badly beaten by a mugger, gets a gun and lashes out at his tormentors. Like most myths, there is something in the story line to satisfy almost all who read about it. Still, Goetz is not a clear-cut hero. Psychologically, he may have been punishing the four youths for his earlier mugging. He had made some racist comments in the past, and clearly used more force than the situation called for.

Yet Goetz, flawed or not, was caught in a menacing situation. When a group of street toughs crowd in close, asking for the time or a few dollars, most New Yorkers recognize the onset of a mugging. The youths were hardly innocents. The four have had a history of brushes with the law that have included nine convictions, twelve outstanding cases and ten bench warrants for non- appearances in court. The hospitalized Cabey is awaiting trial on charges of robbing three men with a shotgun.

Certainly Goetz's quirky, guileless behavior fits the requirements of the myth better than Actor Charles Bronson's righteous and mean-spirited avenger in the film Death Wish. (Said Bronson last week: "I was raised to believe that if you have snakes in your backyard, you have to stomp on them.") Goetz talked to New York City police for three hours without a lawyer, providing most of the evidence that may be used against him. So far he has avoided any sense of triumph or self-justification, and his few public statements contain little that anyone can disagree with. "You know," he said, "I hope something good comes of all this."

With reporting by Jack E. White/New York, with other bureaus