Midland, Texas, November 6, 1963

Midland, Texas, November 6, 1963
by margieburns on August 24, 2005 09:59AM (CDT)
http://www.margieburns.com/blog

If George W. Bush’s indifference toward loss of human life deserves analysis, some partial explanation may be found in his own family history, as in yesterday’s blog. He must have known of his grandmother’s death in his childhood, even while his youngest brother was being named after the husband who had caused the fatality. If he later needed any further confirmation of a young boy’s growing-up view that respectable people overlook unpleasant events, he received it in further chapters of his life.

On November 6, 1963, the young Laura Welch, driving with a teenaged friend, ran a stop sign on a highway intersection near her home town of Midland, Texas, colliding with another vehicle driven by another teenager. The other driver, a classmate of hers named Michael Douglas, was killed. An accurate and balanced account of the crash is provided at http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/laura.asp.

Contrary to speculations on the topic, there is no reason to think the collision other than an accident. That is – and try remembering all the loose accusations of “murder” surrounding Hillary Clinton after Vince Foster’s suicide, here – anyone who wants to reason about the fatality has to begin with one firm cognition: there is no evidence. That’s square one.

For years, U.S. deaths on the road totaled as many annually as all the number killed in the Vietnam War. Highway speed limits were usually 70, meaning that drivers often went 100. Miss Welch herself was only two days past her 17th birthday -- approximately one year and 363 days shy, give or take a year or two, of the age when she should rationally have been allowed to take the wheel alone, much less egged on with another teenager in the car. There is no reason to suspect that she wanted to ram another car – a fantasy that admittedly has been acted out on the road, and not only by teenagers, although many of the actors are not around to explain their thinking to us. Ethics aside, she and her friend were on their way to a party, in all likelihood engaged in conversation, and by far the most probable explanation for her running the stop sign is simple inattention. If she saw the other car at all, or registered seeing it, she might have had a fleeting back-of-the-mind notion, the kind that we universally get when we’re about to do something stupid, that she would cross the intersection before it – flat land and Big Sky, displaying miles and miles of Texas, can be visually deceptive – or even that the other car would clear the intersection before she got there, or at worst even of indulging a little “chicken” gamesmanship: let the other guy stop. It’s the kind of thing that has been known to happen, and the consequence – the death of a popular and likeable young guy, and the irrevocable loss to his family – was beyond any conceivable intent of a seventeen-year-old.

That said, the accident was still her fault, and every consequence for her personally was minimized. The police did not test anyone for alcohol but stated that alcohol was not a factor; the exact speed of the culpable driver is obscured in the police report; no charges were filed. People around were so horrified at a consequence so out of proportion with the offense – running a stop sign – that the general move among adults locally was to lessen the disproportion, perhaps to regain some sense of control; in a crash that caused a death, apparently the driver at fault did not get even a ticket for running the stop sign. Nor was there, of course, any civil litigation. Ironically, all this contemporary palliating – to protect a 17-year-old girl – contributed to the Internet rumors 40 years later.

She has never discussed publicly what made her run the stop sign and may not remember by now. I cannot imagine fully what such an event would have done to me at seventeen; I do know that I would have been wrung out with guilt. Probably one initial reaction would have been to connect the incident with exuberance or cockiness, and to become firmly repressed – no more enthusiasms, at least not audible enthusiasms; no careless vocalizing.

Any psychic efforts that month to deal with or to submerge the event, however, were complicated by public events on an incomparably larger scale. On November 22, two weeks after young Michael Douglas’s memorial service, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Thus the high schooler, trying to begin senior year, would have had dinned into her – as did the rest of us – a ceaselessly implied equation between “loner” and “lone gunman,” reinforced globally by the unforgettable photo that every school kid saw, of a somber white-shirted Lee Harvey Oswald holding his rifle. So much for keeping things to yourself; if there was any moral to the story, it was that being a hearty partier was at least better than some alternatives, and neither a borrower nor a loner be. Two days later, there was a further complication; Oswald himself was gunned down, on television, at point-blank range, by a shady nightclub character called Jack Ruby. Partying, or night life, was evidently no panacea to what ailed individuals either. Perhaps some sort of careful balancing act was required.

I deeply pity the seventeen-year-old girl that Miss Welch was at the time. But the silence of Texas First Lady Laura Bush in the period when First Lady Hillary Clinton was being accused of “murder” – almost entirely by Bush media supporters – is less deserving of pity. Surely she could have condemned the vile spewing that displayed, at best, a chronic and probably genuine ignorance of depression and other mental diseases and, at worst, deliberate lying about issues of mortality and careless accusations about the single most heinous felony, homicide.

Or perhaps condemning those attacks was exactly what she could not do, because they were instigated in the first place by the probability that her husband would be running for the White House and thus that she would become the first First Lady ever to have killed someone. In other words, perhaps those attacks were a deliberate pre-emptive strike.

Next up: Houston
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