Before Trump, There Was William Calley

Both were villains celebrated as heroes, but Calley—in many ways the victim Trump pretends to be—tired of bad publicity and died in obscurity.

William Calley actually posed for this grimly ironic cover photo. He was a cold-blooded murderer, but he wasn’t what you’d call bright.

Obituaries aren’t ordinarily the Washington Post’s strong suit; if you want to read a good one, you must turn to The New York Times. But the Post’s July 29 obituary of William Calley was an exception. It was the best Calley obit, full of detailed information and a multitude of links to source materials. (Newspapers have in recent years gotten very stingy with such links because they take readers away from the newspaper’s website.) The Post’s Calley obit was also the first, because by the time Calley died, age 80, at a hospice in Gainesville, Florida, he and his family had learned the hard way that even though Calley was made the fall guy for the My Lai massacre, where in March 1968 he presided over the killing of 504 unarmed civilians, Calley was also a mass murderer, and mass murderers don’t get favorable press.

Calley, it turns out, had been dead three months when the Post finally broke the story. The Post found out about it from one Zachary Woodward, “a recent Harvard Law School graduate who said he noticed Mr. Calley’s death while looking through public records.” According to Woodward’s LinkedIn entry, Woodward worked seven years for Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, much of that time as a press aide. According to the Post, Calley’s son, Laws Calley, “did not immediately respond to requests for additional information,” and “other efforts to reach Mr. Calley’s family were unsuccessful.”

I can’t say that I blame them. After his avalanche of notoriety in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which included an ill-considered interview with Esquire (cover reproduced above) and publication of a grotesquely self-justifying memoir in 1971, Calley reportedly said he wanted to “sink into anonymity” and carried an umbrella with him to block news photographers from taking his picture. Whoever filled out Calley’s death certificate checked “no” on the part that asked whether the deceased ever served in the U.S. armed forces.

In his 1970 book My Lai 4, Seymour Hersh writes that the one thing every soldier he interviewed agreed on was that Calley had no business being anybody’s commanding officer. He was a junior-college dropout with a checkered employment history who was initially rejected when he tried in 1964 to enlist because of a hearing defect. Accepted two years later, Calley was recruited for officer training school because the Army—partly because of universities shutting down unpopular ROTC programs—was desperately short on junior officers. Calley graduated 120th in his class of 156, calling to mind the hoary joke, “What do you call someone who graduates at the bottom of his class in medical school?” Punchline: “Doctor.”

My latest New Republic piece is about how Calley stumbled into being, arguably, a Founding Father of MAGA. You can read it here.