Walter Kopp attended Berkeley after graduating from Redwood, en route to the University of Colorado for his master’s in hospital administration. What would Jim do? His roots required that it be something special. His father had once told him that one day Jim would be a small part of something very big.
Jim was convinced that his forefathers’ experiences were indicators of his own destiny. A great-grandmother on his mother’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, “a strikingly beautiful woman.” His maternal grandfather, Walter Leonard, was a physician who counted Hollywood stars such as John Wayne among his patients.
He believed his was a family of survivors in a country founded by survivors—the disenfranchised, mavericks who had either fled or been kicked out of the Old World. His mother, Nancy, had Irish heritage—but Jim liked to stress that her background was “Black Irish” (Irish who had dark hair and eyes as descendants, according to legend, of Spaniards who landed on the Western seaboard of Ireland in 1588, after surviving the defeat of the Spanish Armada.). He would talk of how a grandmother on his mother’s side survived the great earthquake of 1906 as an eight-year-old. His paternal grandfather, Charles Sr., survived a gas attack in France during the First World War. He had come to America from Austria to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and, upon arrival at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, he shortened the family name from Koppensteiner to Kopp. Jim liked to claim that his grandfather spoke “every continental language” and worked as a translator in Alsace-Lorraine interrogating POWs for the allies during the war. He died young, at 42, from chronic health defects due to the gas attack.
Jim admired his father greatly—the doctor of laws, corporate lawyer, former Marine. Chuck Kopp had won the Award of Merit from the San Francisco Bar Association, was a leader of the Boy Scouts of America. With his political connections and influence, Jim believed his dad to be a “maker of kings.”
Politically he had conservative roots. His parents were solid Nixon people. Jim said that his father had worked to help put Richard Nixon in the White House and, later, helped Ronald Reagan get elected governor of California. In the living room hung a photo of Chuck Kopp with Reagan at a reception. Jim said his dad was offered a post as a cabinet aide in the first Nixon administration, but turned down the offer because moving the family from California to Washington was too big a move. Later in his life Jim believed that he could contact former Nixon administration officials for advice, or to vet potential enemies.
It was a fact that in December 1969 Nixon appointed a man named Jesse Steinfeld as his surgeon general, and that Steinfeld had lived across the street from the Kopps back in South Pasadena when Jim was a boy. Jim told the story that his dad helped smooth the way for Jesse to land the surgeon general’s position by putting in a good word for his old neighbor. Many years later, reached on the telephone, 76-year-old Jesse Steinfeld said that the story was possible, but he could not remember it specifically.
Jim’s mother was active in her church and also with work, a home care service she founded called Nancy’s Nurses, running it out of the house on Via Lerida. She was also active in politics, working for local Republicans, and a member of the John Birch Society, a fiercely anticommunist organization led by Robert Welch, inaugurated in 1958. It became known as a looney-right movement, most often cited for its contention that Dwight Eisenhower, five-star American general, D-Day commander, and two-term president, was himself a communist.
The John Birch Society became, one of the most powerful post-war groups in America, with 100,000 members. One-quarter of those members lived in California. Charitably, Birchers were mostly conservatives holding Washington accountable for defending freedom in the face of Soviet expansion. Less charitably, the society capitalized on a McCarthyist ethos of conspiracy, grand schemes and secret government plots that appealed to base paranoia. This sense of mission, fighting a moral battle against a powerful, ubiquitous, left-wing enemy allied to the federal government, harmonized well with Jim Kopp’s sense of personal destiny. ***
Given his background it was an odd choice for Jim to enroll at the ultra-liberal University of California at Santa Cruz, which was just 10 years old, an invention of the sixties. The campus was gorgeous but unconventional. UC Santa Cruz sprawled, laid out over farmland and forests of redwoods. It looked more like a nature retreat than a university. There were courses like “The Chicken in History,” which critics relished invoking as representative of all you needed to know about UC Santa Cruz and its brand of pop-intellectualism. It represented everything Jim Kopp would ultimately disdain: left wing orthodoxy, a godless peace-and-love doctrine that was morally blind to the real world—an anythinggoes ethos.
He could have gone to any school. His family had the resources and he was intelligent, especially in science. The reason he went to this school was because he followed his heart. Her name was Jenny. His girlfriend. They lived together for a time, he said, in an offcampus apartment. He could focus on Jenny at school, and study a world you could fit on the head of a pin, the microscopic world of biology, and embryology. They lived together his senior year.
At that time, he was not actively engaged in the abortion debate, although he did hold a position. It had been in January 1973 when the verdict was issued in the case of Roe v. Wade, in which the United States Supreme Court essentially legalized abortion, ruling that the termination of an unwanted pregnancy is up to a woman and her doctor. The court ruled that state criminal abortion laws violate a constitutional “right of privacy” and must therefore be struck down. The issue had made its way to the dinner table debate in the Kopp household. Jim was instinctively opposed to the decision, following his mother’s lead.
Did Jenny really get pregnant? Accounts got muddy over the years. He told some friends that Jenny had had an abortion and did not tell him about it. He said that her abortion crushed him, brought him to tears. A transforming experience. Later he denied the story. He admitted that he had offered to drive her to an abortion clinic, but said it turned out she was not pregnant. The fact he had found himself willing to help her get an abortion upset him.
In 1976, he graduated from Santa Cruz with an honors degree in biology. “By and large,” wrote his college evaluator, Jim’s work “has been superior from the outset, particularly in the sciences.” Jim succeeded academically, and failed in his personal life. Jenny left him to pursue studies at the University of Texas. Broke Jim’s heart, some said. He didn’t want to give up on her, though. The story went that he followed her to Texas for a time, spent a semester there working at the University of Texas in a laboratory. He returned to California and the Bay Area, moved south to pursue postgraduate studies in embryology at Cal State Fullerton.
As for abortion, the young Jim questioned it, but it was still an intellectual exercise; the act itself did not yet register with him as something singularly evil.
Lewisburg, Tennessee
Joan Andrews was raised on a farm in Lewisburg. Her family claimed to be the first Catholics to settle in that part of the state and she grew up feeling part of an embattled religious minority. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the neighboring town of Pulaski. The KKK, haters of blacks and many others, including Catholics, burned a cross right in the front yard of her Catholic girls’ school.
Young Joan had a particularly inquisitive mind. She was unafraid, even at a young age, to reflect upon darkness. She heard about the Holocaust, and, not long after she was first able to read, she went to the library and read books about it. She felt it inside, not just sympathy or intellectual curiosity, but a burning need to protect the weak. It can’t be left to the law, the politicians, the democratic process. Leave it to the establishment, trust the state, the wisdom of the people, and you end up with Auschwitz. Her older brother served in Vietnam. As a teenager, Joan begged her parents: “Let me go, let me just volunteer to go over.” It’s not that she was hungry for combat. Her family had a pacifist bent. But you must protect the victimized. And sometimes that requires force. Gandhi was a pacifist, the kids were told, but far worse than engaging in violence when faced with a moral crisis is to do nothing at all.
Picture Joan Andrews one afternoon around Christmastime 1958. She is all of nine years old, holding the lifeless body of the newborn baby boy:
The baby limp, a pale, broken doll. The pain in Joan’s small face, the tears, as she cuts off a piece of her hair to bury with little Joel. Mom had delivered the baby at home. Joel had lived, but briefly. Mom had phoned dad at the school where he was principal, and Joan came right home. They immerse the baby in baptismal water. The family speaks in whispers. He was perfect, so perfect. They put him in a small box, then each of them cuts a lock from their hair to make a bed for him inside. The vigil complete, they bury him in the backyard. Stillborn? Fetus? No. Joel is a baby. A child of God. Joan’s brother.
Fast-forward to 1973, and a 24-year-old woman from Tennessee stands on a sidewalk outside a women’s health clinic in Chicago. Joan Andrews is at the abortion clinic—the mill, the death camp itself. That’s where they were killing the babies, she thought. She could all but feel the devil’s presence. She was a meek-looking woman, her eyes didn’t look directly at you when she spoke, but angled away, as though avoiding any hint of confrontation, as if she were staring at images that only she could see. What should she do? She wasn’t exactly sure. Disarm them? In 1973 there was no active anti-abortion counterrevolution to speak of. She felt alone. Joan turned and walked away from the clinic. She would start with some little things, small protests, until she heard a louder calling from God.
Science did much to fuel the growing pro-life movement in the 1970s. The field of fetology was a new frontier, unveiling some of the mystery of what was developing inside a woman’s uterus, using new technologies like electronic fetal heart monitoring, hysteroscopy, radio-immuno chemistry, and, most of all, ultrasound, in 1976.
The visual, and emotional, impact of ultrasound was enormous. Not only was it a revolutionary technology for monitoring the fetus from a medical standpoint, it was also a new weapon for the pro-life side of the debate. The ultrasound used sound waves to outline and project the image of the fetus. Now doctors and patients could watch the movements of the fetus, consider its shape, size, gender, watch it swallow, urinate. The ultrasound humanized the fetus. In 1984, a movie called The Silent Scream radicalized some who watched the grainy images of a fetus being terminated.
“The child is extremely agitated,” intoned the narrator. “Even though the suction tip has not touched it. We see the child’s mouth open in a silent scream, a child threatened with extinction. The heart rate has sped up, it does sense aggression in its sanctuary. It is moving away, in a pathetic attempt to escape. The body is now being torn, systematically, from the head.”
The figurative slap in the face for Jim Kopp on abortion came in 1980. As part of his research at Cal State Fullerton, he worked on a project at Stanford Hospital involving nerve reconnection for Vietnam veterans with spinal-cord injuries. He would one day tell a court of law how the incident had been the turning point for him. He said he knew a doctor:
She takes him down to visit the morgue, in the bowels of the hospital. Jim stands by a long metal table with a paper bucket at one end. He looks inside the bucket at the aborted fetus. Birth defects, six fingers on one hand, genitalia not properly developed. Sees the doctor, instrument in hand, flipping this fetus—this baby—back and forth. She’s doing it so casually, like a rag doll. This nice, intelligent woman probably feels she’s doing nothing wrong, seems proud, because she has detected some of these defects. Recommended the abortion.
“Glad we found the defects in time, in-utero,” the doctor observes. “When you see stuff like this it reminds you why you believe in abortion.”
His gray-blue eyes focus, Jim’s face freezes in an intense stare, taking it all in, processing the information.
The scientist in him—and that’s how he thought of himself, as a scientist—could look at it dispassionately, perhaps, but something else was speaking to him. He had never seen a baby that had been—killed—before. His mind spun. He was stunned. At conception, 23 chromosomes from the sperm meet 23 chromosomes from the egg. A blueprint of a unique individual is formed, right there. And, now, destroyed. It was coming together for him, had been for some time. His research on embryos helped support what he was feeling in his heart, that abortion killed an innocent human life. And if this is so, what is the abortionist engaged in? Murder? How could it be otherwise?
“Show me a counterargument, based on science, or faith, or something, anything,” he thought. “I’m from Missouri, so show me!”
He had seen the mind of God in his research, felt a love and compassion he had never felt before for anyone or anything. He was connecting with the unborn child.
In 1981 Jim’s sister Marty died of cancer at just 32 years old. Marty, attractive, rebellious against her father’s discipline had gone north to Oregon, “the commune scene,” as Jim called it, and never returned. First Mary, now Marty, had died from the disease. Jim felt powerless to stop the death of his sisters, just as he felt powerless facing another painful development in his family. His father had begun an affair with another woman.
Jim completed his thesis in embryology and had an article published in the International Journal of Invertebrate Reproduction and Development. It was titled, “A Preliminary Ultrastructural Study of Phragmatopoma Gametes.” (“The mature sperm morphology most strongly resembles that of certain mussel sperm, with weaker resemblance to other polychaete and mollusk sperms…”) He had enveloped himself in a microscopic world, a separate dimension, studying the science of conception itself.
In 1983, he graduated with his master’s degree in biology from Cal State Fullerton, with a 3.84 on a 4.0 scale—an “A” average. Biology backed up his conviction about the illegitimacy of abortion, from a clinical scientific perspective. But what to do about that? What action does one take, in a tangible way, but also spiritually?
He traveled to L’Abri, Switzerland, lived at a study center founded by Protestant theologian Francis Schaeffer. He heard about the center from a friend who had spent time with Schaeffer and returned transformed by the experience. Schaeffer was an influential man leading something of a Christian revival movement. He was pro-life and encouraged activism, even civil disobedience, to oppose abortion. “At a certain point it is the duty of the Christian to disobey the government,” he had said in a speech in Fort Lauderdale in 1982.
Jim took to quoting Schaeffer to others. “If you are a Christian,” Schaeffer had said, “then act like it.” Jim phoned his mother from Switzerland. He had an announcement to make. He had converted to Presbyterianism.
A man named Michael Bray was also at L’Abri. Bray was the 30-year-old son of an American naval officer. He was a former Maryland state wrestling champ, champion diver and football player. Mike Bray had followed his father’s path, becoming a midshipman. But he dropped out of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, hit the road, traveled. Bray met and spoke with Jim in Switzerland. Years later, Bray declined to get too specific about how well they knew each other. Jim Kopp, he said, was simply a young man searching for truth and trying to walk in it.
Bray had led a charmed life, but he felt a yearning to pursue something more enduring. He would become an American Lutheran lay minister, and later co-pastor of the independent Reformation Lutheran Church in Bowie, Maryland. He had long been pro-life. His search for spiritual fulfillment ultimately put dynamite in his hands.
In 1985 Bray and two other men were charged with eight abortion clinic bombings in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. At the time of his arrest, Bray had publicly argued against violence. He even belonged to a chapter of the Pro-Life Non-Violent Action League.
But Bray’s thinking, or at least the public expression of his thought, was changing, particularly regarding “use of force” in the abortion war. Thomas Aquinas set it out in his Summa Theologiae in the 14th century, defending violence for a defensive purpose: stopping an act of aggression in defense of oneself or another must be done with the moral certitude that great harm will be inflicted upon that individual if force is not used, and that the force will indeed stop it. And there was, in modern American law, something called “justifiable homicide,” or defensive killing. The state of Colorado even put a name to the type of vigilante-justice made famous in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies. Colorado’s law of self-defense for victims of violent crime is called the “Make My Day” defense. That law means, for example, that an occupant of a dwelling is justified in using any degree of physical force against a person who has unlawfully entered the dwelling, “if the occupant reasonably believes that the intruder has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime in addition to the unlawful entry and also reasonably believes that the intruder might use any physical force against any occupant.”
The logic, for some in the pro-life movement, was inescapable. If one starts from the notion that the unborn child is a life in bloom, then what of the attack by the doctor? What is the proper defensive response, given that the unborn baby is unable to respond? Bray was a dynamic speaker and became an influential voice for those gravitating to the fringe of the movement. Those who called themselves pro-life, but opposed “defensive action”—violence—in the abortion war, were, in Bray’s view, simply fearful of the truth, that there was no contradiction between a pro-life ethic and “supporting force.” He began working on a book that would outline his beliefs more completely. He called it A Time To Kill.
Jim Kopp worked in a mission in South America with the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and also in Africa. Back in California, he went to hear firsthand accounts from mothers who had fled from China, and who spoke of forced abortions in that country. It made perfect sense, a logical progression: free states sanction abortion, encourage it, then a totalitarian state forces it on its population. Jim was convinced he was the first westerner to hear from these women who were driven into hiding to have their babies, he was getting a unique perspective on all of it.
He returned to the house on Via Lerida for dinners with his family, from whom he increasingly felt estranged. Chuck Kopp didn’t understand why his youngest son wasn’t using his masters’ degree to build a career in biology. Bible translation? Where was Jim going with that? On occasions when the family was together the conversation would sometimes venture into abortion. Arguing against abortion were Nancy, Jim and Anne, who were devout Christians. Chuck and Walt were in favor of a woman’s right to choose. Jim expected nothing less from Walt, certainly. As someone in the hospital administration business, he was by definition, to Jim, a member of the Abortion Industry. Eventually the issue was kept off the table. Abortion was, thought Jim with a grin, rather like the proverbial Ol’ Uncle Harry showing up for Christmas dinner: you let him go and get drunk on the porch, you just leave his drinking be, you don’t go there.
There were larger problems than political issues threatening the family foundations. In the summer of 1981, Chuck, who was 59 years old, flew to Dallas for an insurance case trial. One August night, he attended a dinner party held for some of the principles. A legal secretary named Lynn Willhoite Hightower was there. She was 44, and four months removed from the divorce from her husband of 24 years. She saw Chuck Kopp walk in the door, and instantly wanted to learn more about him. Chuck had put on weight, was balding. But he had a presence.
Lynn was five-foot-three, with short dark hair. Some would later tell her that she looked like a younger version of Nancy Kopp. She had a Texas accent, a funny, gregarious manner, and six kids. Both were feeling their age, getting a little plump, was how Lynn thought of it. Chuck was feeling old in his marriage, was ripe for a change. Lynn, younger, feisty, funny, was it. They talked and hit it off. Chuck loved to talk, about any subject, and Lynn could hold her own, too. The verdict in the insurance trial was appealed. The case kept Chuck returning to Dallas for work, and to Lynn. They phoned regularly, wrote letters. He told Lynn that he had been divorced from Nancy for several years. Nancy found one of the letters and learned about the affair, filed for divorce, changed her mind, filed again. Lynn confronted Chuck, he admitted to her that he lied because he knew he’d lose her if he didn’t.
Some said Jim was unaware of his father’s affair and was shocked when it came to light. Jim claimed he knew exactly what was going on. Heck, his mother showed him the letters. It made him angry. Very angry. He had a bone to pick with that woman. Always would. Everyone felt they knew the gentle, bookish, prayerful Jim Kopp. They didn’t see what burned inside, the red glare that could, when provoked, film over his eyes, turn his pronounced jaw to stone:
Phone rings at Lynn Willhoite Hightower’s home in Texas. She picks up.
“Hello?”
“This is Jim Kopp speaking,” he said. “You stay the f—k away from my father.”