Last Year's Lesson: George Moscone and Harvey Milk Assassinated - Nov. 27, 1978

George Moscone and Harvey Milk were assassinated on this day in 1978.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, here's a rerun for today, brought to
you by Tracy V. Wilson. We hope it makes previous
episodes for this date easier to find in the feed.
Welcome to this day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot com and from the desk of Stuff you
missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick

(00:20):
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's November.
On this day. In nine, San Francisco Mayor George Musconey
and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by former supervisor Dan White.

(00:40):
White had resigned seventeen days earlier, but he had tried
to be reinstated as a member of the Board of Supervisors.
But while the mayor had initially said that he would
be able to return to his job, when he made
this request, the mayor refused. Mayor Musconey had run on
a platform of social progress and inclusion, and while in
office he had appointed women and people of color and

(01:03):
gay people to government positions. White, on the other hand,
had campaign with the slogan of unite and fight, and
in one pamphlet he had said, quote, I am not
going to be forced out of San Francisco by splinter
groups of radicals, social deviats, and incorrigibles. He had also
voted against a gay rights ordinance in San Francisco. The

(01:23):
mayor had seen an opportunity to replace White with somebody
who was more in line with his own goals. He
had tried to pass a number of reforms before White's resignation,
and they had consistently failed by one vote. So on
the day of the murders, Mayor Musconey was planning to
announce White's replacement, but on the morning of the seven,

(01:45):
White entered the building through a window to bypass metal detectors.
He entered Musconey's office and shot him four times, and
then he went into the office of Harvey Milk in
the supervisor's chambered down the hall and shot him five
times before leaving the bill holding. Later on, he said
that there were others he had planned to kill at
city Hall as well. Acting Mayor Diane Feinstein, who had

(02:08):
been the person to discover Harvey Milk's body, made this
announcement quote as president of the Board of Supervisors. It's
my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Musconey and
Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. The assembled
crowd was stunned and very vocal, and once they were quieted,
she continued quote, the suspect is Supervisor Dan White. White's

(02:33):
defense when this came to trial was diminished capacity, and
that has come into common parlance as the twinkie defense.
But that idea is really a myth. There were some
mentions of junk foods in one psychiatrist testimony in this trial,
but it was really about being under a huge amount
of stress and prone to cycles of depression. So the

(02:56):
testimony about junk food wasn't that Dan why ate a
bunch of twinkies and this caused him to commit murder.
It was that the junk food based diet was a
symptom of his struggling mental health, and that it also
exacerbated the existing underlying problems that he was having. The

(03:17):
twinkie defense nickname was spread through news coverage but doesn't
actually describe how junk food came up in the trial.
Even though he had confessed to the crime and he
had reloaded his gun before approaching Harvey Milk, Dan White
was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. He was
sentenced to seven years eight months in prison and would

(03:39):
ultimately serve a little more than five years. The verdict
led to a public outrage, including what came to be
known as the White Knight Riot and a candle light
march from San Francisco's Castro District to city Hall. California
later abolished the diminished capacity defense in part because of
its successful use in Dan White's trial. He took his

(04:00):
own life after getting out of prison. In in a
lot of ways, the assassination of Harvey Milk has overshadowed
that of Mayor Musconey. Milk was one of the first
openly gay elected officials in the United States, and he
was a known public figure and activist in San Francisco.
How or whether homophobia affected White's actions and the jury's

(04:23):
verdict has been debated in the years since all of
this happened, and Milk himself has become a lot more
widely known in the context of the gay rights movement.
But the mayor was Dan White's primary target, and in
addition to Harvey Milk, he had planned to target to
other elected officials, and according to reports, White blamed all
four of them for his loss of his position as supervisor.

(04:47):
Thanks to Eves jeff Cope for her research work on
Today's podcast, and thanks to Casey Pigraham and Chandler Mays
for their audio work on this show. You can subscribe
to the Stay in History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast,
wherever real to get your podcasts. You can tune tomorrow
for another story about pirates. Yeah,