Gary Lavergne’s a Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders, Book Review Example

In his 1997 work A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders, the American non-fiction writer Gary Lavergne examines the infamous 1966 killings carried out by Charles Joseph Whitman, who, firing from various locations on the University of Texas campus, killed seventeen individuals, while also wounding thirty-two. Lavergne takes an approach to his subject in which he can be said to attempt to re-construct the biography of Whitman up to the point of the killings, thus providing an etiology of the event on an individual level, attempting to dissect the possible logic behind Whitman’s own decision. Accordingly, it appears that Lavergne provides a unique reading based on an almost phenomenological viewpoint into the mind of the killer, in so far as he attempts to trace how Whitman’s own life experiences may have informed his decision to take the lives of the others. At the same time, however, Lavergne also references other unconscious and purely medical factors which may have influenced Whitman, such as the brain tumor which was discovered after his autopsy. In this regard, Lavergne’s text is most valuable as an example of how the historian may attempt to re-construct an event carried out by a single individual through a diverse causal chain leading to an ultimate effect, in this case, Whitman’s committing of the infamous murders.

Lavergne’s historical attempt to approach the tragedy largely from the perspective of Whitman’s personal biography is nevertheless also influenced by a recognition that true historical truth behind a given event may always remain ambiguous; this ambiguity, however, is best left to those who have directly experienced a given tragedy. The historian, in contrast, must seize the methodological imperative to understand the logic behind events. Hence, he writes in the introduction to the text, in the context of a victim, that “there is wisdom in accepting what happened in Austin, Texas on 1 August 19666, as something that can never be understood” (Lavergne, xiii), such explanations “for society, and institutions, the crime looms too large to be forgotten.” (Lavergne, xiii) Lavergne thus prefaces his text and his logic for fleshing out this narrative as almost a form of social imperative: it is not enough to merely call the event a tragedy – the historian also possesses a social obligation to understand why tragic events do in fact occur.

In this regard, Lavergne’s text can be understood as an attempt by the historian to de-mystify traumatic events in the national consciousness. As he notes in the introduction, “it is no longer enough to look upon the University of Texas Tower and sigh, “This is where the bodies began to fall”, because the story is larger than that.” (Lavergne, xiii) In other words, it is a simplification of the historiographical task to merely assert that the Whitman murders introduced America to the phenomenon of public and seemingly random mass murder. This approach elides the very real individuals involved in the tragedy. To conceive of the murders in this non-analytical way is essentially to resign to a certain historical inevitability of Whitman’s decision: this, however, is a wholly unscientific approach, in so far as it overlooks the very real etiology behind the shootings. Lavergne’s task, in this sense, is to add a degree of theoretical and historiographical rigor to the Whitman subject matter.

This general aim is reflected in the structure of the book itself. The opening chapters of the book place a profound emphasis on Whitman’s own personal biography, suggesting here that the existential decisions and contexts of Whitman’s life played crucial roles in the eventual murders. Hence, incorporating both threads of early childhood to Whitman’s military career in Cuba, Lavergne paints the portrait of an individual who fell, as noted by his spouse, increasingly into “bouts of depression”, (65) whereas Whitman himself felt that he “suffered from some physical malady. Specifically, he thought something was wrong with his head; and he also feared that he was sterile.” (65) Arguably, such a chronicling of the various causes that may have contributed to the shootings is the strength of these opening chapters: Lavergne, at this stage of the work, does not endeavor to impress upon the reader any definitive conclusions regarding the subject matter. Rather, with an objectivity necessary to the composition of relevant historiography, Lavergne merely gives himself to the role of a re-constructor of etiology, alluding to possible reasons for the killings. What emerges from this biographical approach is a psychological profile, which aims to combine the scientific aspects of the latter with historiographical methods to yield a rigorous account. Lavergne is conservative in his assessment, but does not leave any possible relevant aspect out of his account.

Furthermore, Lavergne places a profound emphasis on the aforementioned phenomenological perspective of Whitman. Lavergne appears faithful to trying to understand specifically what Whitman felt as his life slowly fell apart, leading to the killings. In this approach, the reader gets a broader sense of how Lavergne himself conceives of history: history is composed of the actions of individuals and the events these individuals precipitate. In order to therefore understand history we must attempt to understand precisely the viewpoints of the individuals who create history.

This approach allows Lavergne to avoid making conclusions based on the aforementioned “inevitability” of the event, in so far as the latter’s interpretation as introducing America to public mass shootings was somehow the destiny of America itself. Such an interpretation is simply too simplistic, in the sense that it attributes some type of ghostly essentialism to a society. Rather, Lavergne emphasizes the individuals that constitute society, and thereby, for example, in the last chapter debunks interpretations of the event made by supporters of gun control who “pointed to Whitman’s weapons as the real culprit.” (260) Lavergne avoids such characterizations by providing a detailed account of the various threads that may contribute to a psychologically disturbed individual.

In this regard, Lavergne’s text greatest strength is perhaps its acknowledgement of the complex structure that yields any given historical event. Multiple causes of an event are always possible and any aversion of this acknowledgment is a historiographical error. Furthermore, the complexity of the human psyche is also present in Lavergne’s account, showing the insides of a traumatized individual. From this perspective Lavergne’s text is not only about the specific Whitman murders, but provides the reader and especially the student of history an insight into how historiography should be realized: an attention to the complexity of phenomena involved in an event, on the social level, and above all, on the individual level, in so far as it is individuals who ultimately produce historical events.

Works Cited

Lavergne, Gary M. A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1997.