Thirty-six years ago, Charles Whitman used the 307-foot symbol of University of Texas, the UT Tower, to commit what was then the largest simultaneous mass murder in American history.
Armed with a small arsenal, Whitman gunned down 45 people, killing 14. “The Sniper in the Tower,” as Whitman has come to be called, shocked a nation and brought into debate issues such as domestic violence and the balance between civil liberties and public safety.
Thirty-six years later, a similar situation is taking place. An unknown sniper has gunned down 11 people in Washington, D.C., killing nine. The sniper has managed to strike deep fear into an already shaken public psyche.
“There are some interesting parallels between what the person in D.C. is doing and what Whitman did in terms of the randomness,” said Rosa Eberly, an associate professor of English at Penn State University. “What you have is randomness in chronological time over a couple of weeks versus randomness from the top of a tower in a particular state.”
Eberly was on a tenure track at the University of Texas before going to Penn State. She taught “UT Tower and Public Memory,” a course for students to “read, write and deliberate together about different kinds of memories of the tower, using the tower shootings as a case study to learn more about rhetoric, writing, deliberation and public memory.”
A sense of “panic and trauma” was experienced immediately after the tower shootings. Eberly said the same could be applied to today’s sniper.
“I think you get a sense from both of these incidents and other school shootings of public trauma,” Eberly said. “I think of the word[s] ‘trauma’ and ‘panic’ [as] particularly appropriate to both of these incidents.”
Experts in media studies have claimed the around-the-clock news coverage of the sniper is injecting unnecessary panic into those people in the immediate vicinity of the sniper attacks.
William Livingston, senior vice president of the University of Texas and witness to the UT Tower attacks, noted there was only one media outlet covering the attack, unlike four or five that might cover such an event today.
“There was a single television station in Austin at the time, and from somewhere they had a long-distance camera aimed at the tower,” Livingston said. “There were no interviews, no movement of the camera. It was simply aimed at the tower. You could see little flakes of dust from the tower occasionally, and you could see a little movement up there when he would move around and fire another shot, and you could see when a bullet hit the tower from somebody who was shooting at Whitman.”
A recent Newsweek poll has reported 47 percent of those polled were either very or somewhat concerned that someone in their family might become a victim of a sniper attack. The belief that someone could fall victim to an attack of that nature is something Livingston said nobody could have envisioned in 1966.
“When I first realized something serious was happening, I was in my own office dictating to my secretary, and we heard popping, but you don’t think, ‘Oh, my goodness, someone is at the top of the tower shooting,'” Livingston said. “What we thought was that it was cars backfiring on the street. And then the rumble of activity, the rustle of unease spread across the campus.”
Today, Eberly said most students come to Texas with little or no knowledge about the history of the towers. When the student finally learns the history, Eberly explained, their entire outlook on campus changes.
“Fewer and fewer undergraduates come to campus with historical knowledge of it at all. If anything, it is legend,” Eberly said. “The impact is more when students come to campus and learn about it. When students who came to campus and didn’t know about the tower shootings learned about them in historical detail, they said the campus wasn’t quite the same for them anymore and that they really lost a sense of security, which I took no joy in. It was almost like the very idea of taking responsibility for learning history has a consequence on who we imagine ourselves to be and what our relationship is to the place we are.”
Today, the tower remains closed to the public except on escorted tours provided by the University of Texas police. A 1988 survey given to Texas students revealed 88 percent of students said they supported reopening the tower, including 78 percent who said they would be willing to pay higher fees for the increased security, which would be needed.
Still, UT administrators say they believe the tower may never return to a state of pre-1966 normalcy, citing safety reasons.
In 1996, a caller dialed into KLBJ-AM, a radio station in Austin, Texas, and was asked if he can ever look at the tower without thinking of the attack.
“No, you just can’t do it. It’s part of it,” the caller said. “It’s one of those events with which you measure your lifespan and what were you doing on the day of the sniper incident.”
For the families of nine people in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., the sniper of 2002 may be the instrument by which they measure their lifespan.
