The same day Allard was laid to rest, I engaged in a series of phone conversations with my editors at the New York Times Magazine. I said that working out what happened to Allard and Dennis would make a great story, but before I took the assignment, I wanted to warn them that I would have to deal with the incident between Dennis and Allard in the motel in 1964. Given that it was a pivotal encounter between two parties to an eventual homicide, I didn’t see that there was much choice. They agreed and said only to make sure anything I wrote was within the boundaries of good taste and “Times standards.”
A few days later I left my home in California and started following the story East. I wanted to attend a court appearance by Sweeney in early April.
As it turned out, I was setting out on a reporting journey that would end in a magazine article and later this book. It brought me face to face with both the absolute isolation Dennis had fallen into and the hold Allard still had over those who had known him. His remarkable network of friends and connections, as I would learn, continued even after his death.
When the day came for Dennis’s appearance in court, I sat in the front row of the dingy courtroom. It was only a brief legal motion, his lawyer told me, and Dennis would be present for ten minutes at most, but he promised to try and get me a brief courtroom visit when the appearance was over. Dennis eventually came in from the holding cells dressed in his street clothes, his upper lip pulled down to cover the wreckage in his mouth. He listened with interest until the proceedings were over, and then the judge granted a one-minute courtroom visit.
I wasn’t sure whether Dennis would even remember me. As yet, I had no idea he had been visited by my voice in a Portland supermarket only two months before. When we were face to face, Sweeney made no introductory remarks, even though we had last seen each other in 1968. He just looked straight at me.
“Ten years without change,” he said. “Such a long time without change and now all this on top of it.”
I dealt with the “sexual question” in two places in the copy I eventually filed with the Times Magazine. One paragraph included what apparently happened in the motel room, how Dennis characterized it, its effects as reflected in his discussion of it with other people, and an allusion to the fact that several of those other people had themselves had the same experience with Lowenstein. No generalizations were drawn or big words used. This paragraph summarized what information I had then, prior to undertaking the extensive reporting effort for the book. The second paragraph, elsewhere in the piece, was an explanation of chronic paranoid schizophrenia, in which I mentioned that paranoia regarding a homosexual approach was a symptom.
Within several days after the piece was filed, the magazine’s editorial offices received phone calls from a national columnist based in New York, a New York City councilman, and a former member of the U.S. delegation to the UN. All of them said they wanted to make it “clear” that any allegations that Allard Lowenstein was a “homosexual” were absolutely “unfounded” and amounted to character assassination. Not long thereafter, I got my first phone call from the magazine asking for an explanation, which I provided.
Dennis Sweeney told the story of that encounter to at least five people, including me, and I had talked to the rest. All of their conversations with Dennis occurred prior to any overt symptoms of his chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Interviews I conducted with a half dozen other protégés who had had similar experiences with Lowenstein substantiated that his approach to Dennis was consistent behavior, rather than an isolated occurrence. I myself had had such an experience, and numerous other sources said they had heard stories of similar incidents. I pointed out that the word “homosexual” was not even used in what I had written. In total, 150 words were involved.
In another vein, I also argued it was not character assassination to indicate that people, Lowenstein included, are complex. Besides, this was a homicide committed by a man suffering from a mental aberration, one of whose symptoms in men is sexual confusion and extreme paranoia about homosexual approach. The victim in this case was someone the perpetrator believed had once made such an advance. If it had happened between two Puerto Ricans with knives on the subway, I noted, there would be no question but that the subject would be recognized and dealt with.
The editor at the magazine agreed with everything I said and hung up. Several days after that, the editorial offices of the Times Magazine received a message from a onetime columnist and former press secretary for Bobby Kennedy who had also been a friend of Allard’s. He just wanted to let the Times know that this guy they had working on the Lowenstein story was also collecting money for the Dennis Sweeney Defense Fund.
I called the former press secretary back myself. I pointed out that there was no such thing as the Dennis Sweeney Defense Fund. No money for legal defense was being collected by anybody, much less me. I was surprised he hadn’t bothered to check that out himself, I said. I also pointed out that my profession was journalism; I was good enough at it to have a contract with the New York Times Magazine, knew the rules of reporting, and had followed them in every story I had ever written. I did not collect money for anybody I was writing about. On top of that, since he and I had met several times, he knew how to get my phone number, and I said I thought he owed me a call before slandering me to my employer.
He wanted to know whether I was going to write anything about Lowenstein with “sexual connotations.”
I said I would write whatever I thought was relevant to the homicide I was being paid to explain.
He said allegations of that sort would be a “cheap shot,” taken when Allard could no longer defend himself from “vindictive” attempts to “ruin his good name.”
I said that complex sexuality did not discredit a person. People who assume it does are manifesting a level of intolerance that Allard himself certainly never shared.
But there was a family with young children involved, he said.
I said I was sorry about that.
He said that nothing on the subject was worth mentioning. If I went ahead and used it, he and I must be “different kinds of journalists.”
I agreed that we probably were.
By the end of May, my story was finished, had gone through the editorial process, and was ready to be published, but it was still not yet scheduled for any particular issue. Around that time I had a long phone conversation with one of Allard’s former protégés now living in California. I mentioned to him the people who were swarming around my story like jackals on fresh meat.
“Amazing,” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of shit I used to do for Allard twelve years ago. It’s the protégés first duty. Allard always had to be defended from ‘spurious attack’ by people with ‘questionable motives.’ Now that’s you.”
I said nothing.
“Lowenstein speaks from the grave,” he added, attempting a joke.
I did not laugh.
My story eventually ran in the August 17, 1980, issue of the New York Times Magazine under the title “Bloody End of ’60’s Dream.” As printed, it contained no reference to any encounter in any motel room between Allard and his assassin in 1964.
The only account of that “sexual question” to reach print I during the first year after Allard’s death was in a long story written by Teresa Carpenter, published in the Village Voice on May 12, 1980, and reprinted in a shorter version by the Washington Post on May 18. Carpenter wrote:
There was a suspicion, even back in Stanford, that Lowenstein never dealt quite honestly in personal matters. There was an undeniable tension between Lowenstein and the young men in his following. “I know that many of us, most of us, had passes made at us from Al,” says a friend of both Sweeney and Lowenstein from the Stanford period. Often they weren’t overt proposals, “but clearly testing … to be offered an overnight room and to discover that there was one bed.” After the shooting, in fact, there were rumors that Lowenstein and Sweeney had fallen out as the result of a lover’s quarrel … . (Now, from his cell in Riker’s Island, Sweeney denies they ever had a relationship. Once while he and Lowenstein were traveling through Mississippi together, they checked into a motel. According to Sweeney, Lowenstein made a pass and Sweeney rebuffed it. Sweeney is not angry with Lowenstein, he claims. Nor does he feel any shame. Ifs just that Lowenstein wasn’t always aboveboard.)
Several weeks later, a response to Carpenter’s allegations appeared in a letter to the Washington Post signed by 15 members of Congress. “Measured against even the loosest journalistic standards,” they wrote, the Voice story was “grossly deficient,” “rife with unsubstantiated assertions and gratuitous innuendo,” “deeply offensive,” and “completely at odds with reality.” “Dennis Sweeney’s life is certainly worth examining,” the letter continued. “But the examination … should not include farfetched and ridiculous gossip … . Many of her assertions are not only unsubstantiated but patently false.” With the letter’s publication, the “controversy” over Allard’s sexuality disappeared for the rest of 1980.
It surfaced again in 1981 as an offshoot of that year’s Pulitzer Prize scandal. The Pulitzer committee’s first choice for the feature award, a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict by a woman writer from the Washington Post, turned out to have been fabricated, and the committee’s replacement was an entry from the Village Voice of three stories written by Teresa Carpenter. One of them was “From Heroism to Madness,” her story about Dennis Sweeney and Allard Lowenstein. Although at least one member of the selection panel later claimed that the award had been for “the best of the entries,” an account of a murder committed by a released mental patient, and not for the article about Lowenstein and Sweeney, Carpenter’s selection reactivated Lowenstein’s “defenders.”
This time the “defense” was led by James Wechsler, a New York Post associate editor and a friend of Lowenstein’s for over 20 years. On April 12, 1981, he went after Carpenter in a Post column. “Miss Carpenter,” he charged, “was guilty of irresponsible defamation of a dead man … a mélange of unattributed gossip-mongering and political malice that could shadow the lives of Lowenstein’s family—and especially his three children, now 13, 11 and 10.” It was reportedly Wechsler’s hope to generate enough pressure to force the Pulitzer committee to withdraw her award. In the interest of discrediting Carpenter’s story, both Wechsler and Larry Lowenstein, Allard’s brother, also filed complaints with the National News Council, an “independent” body funded by several foundations, whose self-designated purpose is investigating citizens’ complaints about their treatment by the news media. The Council normally operated under a rule that no complaints can be filed more than 90 days after publication, but, according to its later report, awarding the Pulitzer to Carpenter “clearly” made such restrictions “moot.” In their complaints, both Larry Lowenstein and Wechsler said that “the Voice article was a distorted portrayal” of Allard.
In investigating the complaints, the News Council staff identified four issues of contention. The second of the four was “whether there was validity in incorporating homosexuality as a potential motive in the slaying.” When their final report was issued, the News Council cited six different sources by name who all said that the question of “homosexuality” was “inaccurate,” “the sort of thing you would hear from people who were hostile to him,” and a “kind of gossip or keyhole rumor.” I too was contacted by the staff—but no part of my information was woven into the final conclusion. I told the Council officials that Sweeney had told me about an “approach,” that I had interviewed several other people to whom he had told the story, that I myself had experienced a similar “approach,” and that I had interviewed more than a half dozen young men who had had the same experience. I said I thought Carpenter’s piece had problems, not the least of which was that it created the impression that she had interviewed Sweeney when in fact she had not; nevertheless, if the News Council came out saying the question of sexuality had no bearing, they would be inaccurate and embarrassed. None of my statements was mentioned in their report, and the Council concluded, with one dissenting vote out of 15, that “the complaints” were “warranted.”
The embarrassment began not long after the Council issued its report. Instead of suppressing the sexual question or causing the Pulitzer committee to rethink its award, the activity of Lowenstein’s “defenders” provoked a second round of media curiosity. This time, the issue of sexuality was interwoven with reports of possible behind-the-scenes manipulation of the press and efforts at censorship. Several articles on censorship appeared; others were researched but not published or aired by at least one national magazine, one newspaper, and one national television program.
The apex of this second media wave came in July 1981 with the appearance of a long article in the New York Native, a small but respected gay newspaper.
Starting with the assumption that homosexuality was not discrediting to anyone, the Native was apparently able to locate a number of gays who were prepared to discuss their contact with Allard on the record. “Holding a man was what he told me he liked to do,” said one man identified by name. “It was something he liked to do with men he cared about. It was something he felt comfortable doing with men who felt comfortable doing it with him, as part of the intimacy. He did have a type that he was intimate with: Wasp, jock, and it helped if you were a student body president.”
Perhaps the most moving comment in the Native article came from a former director of the National Gay Task Force. “He [Lowenstein] asked if he could talk to me privately,” the man recalled. “He looked to see that he was out of earshot, and said, ‘You have been through a lot with your family, and your wife, and I wonder if I could talk to you about that.’ He said it might be better to meet someplace less obvious.” The two men then had a series of three private meetings in the mid-1970s. The gay organizer recounted:
Each time it was to talk about the fact that he was bisexual, that he loved his wife very much and loved his family. He wanted to know about my experience with my kids. I think his biggest concern was how my kids had reacted when I told them … . He did indeed have gay relationships; he made it very clear that he did. He made it very clear that that was how he perceived himself. The only thing we talked about in his personal involvement was whether one could sustain a bisexual relationship. He wanted to know if it was possible to have [his wife] know and approve and make space for a male somewhere on the scene. I told him I thought it was theoretically possible, but my observation was that it really didn’t work. That was upsetting to him … . As far as I could tell, he hadn’t told much of anyone. Our conversations were predicated on nobody knowing … . He was seriously and deeply concerned about what the costs of a public disclosure would be to him and his family and only a little bit about the cost to his political career … . He … said he wished others didn’t have to go through the hell he was going through.
The controversy has ebbed since the Native’s story appeared, but it will no doubt linger for a long time around the edge of conversations where the late Allard Lowenstein’s name comes up. Nowhere in the course of the controversy has Dennis Sweeney made a public comment on Lowenstein or the murder, and the chances of his doing so seem increasingly slim.
The closest thing to such a comment is kept in a manila file in I the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The file contains the reports of three psychiatrists who examined Sweeney and a 31-page letter written in 1980 by Sweeney and addressed to his attorney. During 1981, the D.A.’s office allowed a National News Council member and Teresa Carpenter to examine the documents. The Dennis Sweeney the paperwork describes was clearly deranged by even the most stringent of legal and psychiatric standards.
“Born in 1943,” one psychiatrist noted, “he stated that his birth took place in a military camp since his father was in the service. The defendant stressed the importance of this information because at the time the military was carrying out secret experiments and that he was used as a subject. He believes that devices were implanted in him at that time.”
The “devices” eventually generated “voices,” and much of the file is devoted to trying to track and analyze Dennis’s private chorus. According to another examining psychiatrist, Sweeney’s “auditory hallucinations are derogatory, threatening, and insulting to his masculinity with an implication of homosexuality.” According to Sweeney, the voices can be divided into two general categories: The first were those of “family and friends,” and the second was “a small group of Jews from New York directing me to whom I should marry. Since I was being treated like a guinea pig with a bombardment of sound waves, they extrapolated that I should be married like a guinea pig and, judging from the treatment I was getting, provide a family of experimental rats whose origin could not be thought of as having anything to do with myself and who would be the result only of … self-preservation such as inmates experienced in the Third Reich … . Had I more understanding of the racial antagonism felt toward gentiles by Jews,” Sweeney noted, “and the vanity some Jews feel … my depression would have been lessened.”
Needless to say, the voices only intensified as time passed. “Voices in the shower,” Sweeney wrote, “would remind me of a coworker’s mistake and suggest ‘wouldn’t you like to give him the bump?’ … . a female [sic] voice would say, ‘you’re wasting yourself. You should be working for us.’ And another implied that I was effeminate and making homosexual overtones to the neighbor by having cleaned the shower in the bathroom which we shared … One of them kept referring to me as Sben Whoona which I took to be a Jewish nickname for recalcitrant, blue-eyed, Aryan types.” One of the psychiatrists reported that “in 1973, Mr. Lowenstein’s voice became distinct among all the voices. He [Sweeney] saw him [Lowenstein] … and told him how the persecution interfered with his life and relationships with women, how when he was near a woman the effect was to cause him to say ‘wrong words which come to my lips: obscene remarks about their bodies; do you want to screw?; should I buy a prophylactic?'” At his stepfather’s funeral, the voices, another of the reports maintained, “also designated images or gestures as if defecating on the coffin.”
Apparently, the voices Lowenstein was leading made a qualitative leap into new dimensions in 1978 or 1979. As Sweeney explained, “Mr. Lowenstein’s voice over the previous six years had been telling me with whom I should be spending my time and whom I should marry. Of late, it had grown weary of peering down at me so I decided to interpret his claim … as an expression of frustration of trying to make me a feudal liege, so I wrote him a letter. I said I had no respect for any of the movements or ideologies he had lived to spawn in the 1970s and that I would not even be a member of his following. I told him I wanted to be forgotten as soon as possible.” Henceforth, as one psychiatrist observed, “the Lowenstein forces would demonstrate their own power and punish him for being recalcitrant by attacking others.” In Sweeney’s words, “the man [was] killing others to make me feel like a coward.”
Dennis held Allard responsible for the Chicago plane crash on Memorial Day of 1979 in which almost 200 people were killed, a collision between a Coast Guard cutter and an oil tanker off Florida in February of 1980, and several other disasters. After the death of Thurman Munson, he heard Allard say, “I have killed the most popular Yankee but no one in New York City will stand up to me or stop me.” Over and over again, he heard Lowenstein repeat, “Why didn’t you stand up to me? I am inflicting violence and harm on people and no one will stop me.” Finally, Dennis noted, “the pattern of these New York Jews insulting and fighting with my family when it was me they had been acquainted with overcame my restraint against wasting time.” Sweeney, one report stated, “now felt that not only his own life was in danger but that of many people in the world. He had to confront the perpetrators.”
Dennis Sweeney’s account of the final denouement in Lowenstein’s office was matter of fact in tone. “I explained to him that I wanted to return to my home in Oregon,” Sweeney wrote, “but that before I could so with any ability to function, I needed his word that insofar as he was aware of any anger or vendetta against me by himself and a few others, that he restrict it to myself and not cause any harm to anyone near or dear to me. He said that he couldn’t give me that kind of pledge and that he thought I should see a psychiatrist. If I needed any help in doing so, he would be glad to assist. He said I had to begin by helping myself … . I then took the gun out of my pocket and said that in the light of what I had seen, his statement was not good enough for me, and I began to fire.”
I made my last attempt to visit Dennis in May of 1980. I had prepared to visit him three times before, but each time, I called ahead to Riker’s Island at the last minute only to find that 844-80-833, Dennis Sweeney, had been switched to another unit or his visiting days changed. My fourth attempt was made from Washington, D.C. This time my phone call confirmed that he would be available for visiting the next day, and I took the first shuttle flight up to La Guardia in the morning.
Riker’s Island can be seen as one lands at the airport, but none of the La Guardia cabbies knew how to get me there. Finally, one got directions and, after a five-minute ride, dropped me at the guard post commanding the foot of the causeway connecting the prison island to the mainland. A drizzle was falling, interspersed with sharp gusts of wind. I waited for the public bus to take me to the institution. At the visitors’ entrance I took a number and waited my turn to sign in at the reception windows. When my number was finally called, I registered to visit Dennis Sweeney, was cleared through the metal detector, and moved into a second room where I waited for a prison bus to take me and the other visitors out to the unit getting visits that day. By then, I had been at Riker’s for an hour and a half.
The prison bus finally stopped at a big, gray building; visitors passed first through a chain-link fence that was locked behind us, then through a solid steel doorway and into a concrete waiting area lined with benches. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Dennis. By my calculations, he was guaranteed to spend at least the next 30 years locked up somewhere. Finally, one of the custodial officers came out of a door in the far end of the room and asked who was here to see Sweeney.
I said me.
He said Sweeney had been moved that morning to the prison hospital wing and couldn’t have a visit until the next Wednesday.
It took me another hour to extricate myself from Rikers Island and get back on the public bus across the causeway. At the bus stop, I stepped out into the rain and paused for a moment to look back at the tangle of wire and gun towers behind me.
I suppose it was somehow fitting that Dennis Sweeney was unreachable to me. His is one of the saddest stories I know. According to one of the district attorney’s psychiatric reports, Sweeney still “believes Mr. Lowenstein is not dead, that ‘the bullets were tampered with or he [Lowenstein] was wearing a bulletproof vest.’ He believes this because [Sweeney says] ‘I hear his voice in the atmosphere … pushing women at me, threatening my life by using other inmates against me.’ [Sweeney] believes no new tragedies have occurred because he ‘stood up to them like a man.'”
On February 23, 1981, Dennis Sweeney was finally found “not responsible by reason of disease or defect” and committed to the New York State mental health system, where he remains hospitalized today.
I made my only visit to Allard’s Arlington grave in June of 1980. It was a muggy day, not unlike the one on which Allard had arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, 17 years before. His final resting place was easy to locate just by flowing with the flood of tourists headed for John F. Kennedy’s memorial.
Kennedy’s grave sits on the top of a gentle knoll and is marked by an eternal flame. As you face it, the left-hand slope drops off most sharply, pitching down to a shaded glen where the only headstone is that of the President’s brother, Bobby. To the right of John’s marker, the knoll slopes away more gradually to a concrete walk and then an open buffer of grass before a hillside of simple white headstones begins. The place for JFK is set apart and protected by a chain strung from stanchions. Right outside the chain, closer to it than any other, is Allard Lowenstein’s grave. That section of graves had apparently been closed for years, but a spot for Allard was arranged by a call from the White House.
When I was there, no permanent marker had yet been planted, and the location was marked by a green metal name holder stuck in the sod. “Lowenstein,” was handwritten on a card attached to the frame. I noted that Allard’s closest neighbors were Augustus Joseph Wellings, Rear Admiral, USN, 1897-1956, and Robert Staling Mathers, Commander, USN, 1913-1957. Before I could see much more, the guards came up and said I was not allowed to walk on the grass. I pocketed my notebook and headed back for the parking lot.
I am sure a more formal headstone has been erected for Allard by now, but I prefer to remember the temporary one he had that June. It looked as if he still might up marker and catch the first flight out, having merely rested briefly before his next call.
I will miss Dennis and I will miss Allard. They were both extraordinary people who lived through an extraordinary time, and the extraordinary thing that happened between the two of them finally convinced me that the extraordinary time had come to an end. I will miss it, too.
Dreams Die Hard 