‘Hate’ Book Evocative, If Not Perfect

One of the highlights of my career was to watch at New York City Hall as the city of Coeur d’Alene received the first Raoul Wallenberg Award for human rights.

On that cold January day in 1987, the Big Apple toasted Coeur d’Alene and its three representatives: Ray Stone, Bill Wassmuth and Larry Broadbent.

The Times published a column praising Coeur d’Alene for its steadfast battle against racism. Bayard Rustin, the late civil rights giant, delivered a stirring speech before the world’s media, claiming New Yorkers could learn much from the example of our lily white North Idaho town. And each of the Idaho representatives talked eloquently about human rights: Stone, the feisty mayor who once helped liberate a small Nazi concentration camp; Wassmuth, the priest whose home racists had bombed a few months before; and Broadbent, the chain-smoking undersheriff with a heart as big as he was.

Later, Wassmuth and I visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral, around the corner from our hotel. I figured Father Bill, as a Catholic priest, was making a pilgrimage. I didn’t realize at the time that he already was struggling with his vow of celibacy and soon would leave the priesthood to marry and devote himself to human rights. Nor did I know he was so shaken by the bomb that shattered his Haycraft Avenue home in September 1986 that he began drinking heavily.

Now, Wassmuth has written a historical novel. The book tells his story and relives some key moments from early days of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. The 285-page paperback, “Hate Is My Neighbor” ($14.95, Stand Together Publishers, P.O. Box 425, Ellensburg, Wash. 98926), should serve as a good primer for anyone interested in the history of the area’s neo-Nazis and human rights movement.

However, readers should be warned that Wassmuth and co-author Tom Alibrandi were striving to capture the mood of the times and not necessarily for factual accuracy.

That’s apparent on various occasions. They had to manufacture dialogue among Aryans - at a cross burning supervised by Robert Mathews, at the scene of the murder of fellow racist Walter West, as leader Richard Butler and his secretary, Betty Tate, welcome newcomers to the Aryan Nations compound.

They also used the literary device to describe a press conference at which Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler is being badgered with questions from - me, “an olive-skinned reporter from the Spokane newspaper.” I never attended such a press conference, although I have interviewed Butler several times.

In another portion, the authors wrote that a local reporter attending a task force meeting at the old North Shore was sympathetic to the Aryan cause. I know the section was merely for effect in telling a story. But nothing could be further from the truth. From the start, The Spokesman-Review and to a lesser extent the Coeur d’Alene Press were solidly in the task force’s corner.

Nitpicking aside, however, the book delivers on a number of fronts.

It tells how the local human rights movement began decades ago when some cowards painted racist graffiti on the Hayden restaurant of Jewish owner Sid Rosen. How Keith Gilbert taunted a multiracial Post Falls family in those bygone days and became the first racist in Idaho to be convicted of harassment. How Richard Butler arrived here from southern California thinking he’d found fertile soil for his supremacist creed, only to be thwarted.

More important, it keeps alive the memory and deeds of those who opposed Butler and his followers, none more so than Broadbent, the loveable cop who died before his time in 1995. The book follows Broadbent as he evolves - from a small-town cop who thinks Nazism died in a Berlin bunker with Adolf Hitler to a true believer in the dangers of the neo-Nazi movement locally. On one occasion not reported in the book, Broadbent told skeptical Coeur d’Alene business owners that the task force had prevented Kootenai County from being overrun by supremacists.

Indeed, a racist transplant from California recently griped about the passion for human rights he found in North Idaho.

The local human-rights activists who risked much to combat hatred in those early days made a difference: Wassmuth, Tony Stewart, Marshall Mend, Dina Tanners, Rick Morse, Norm Gissel, Skip Kuck, Walt Washington, Dana Wetzel and others. They’re all in the book. So is the tongue-in-cheek reason task force members asked Wassmuth to lead them: As a priest, he was single and lived in a brick house.

“Hate Is My Neighbor” is not the definitive work on the remarkable human rights movement in North Idaho. That book still needs to be written. But it does provide a good overview of what happened. It explains how a group of dedicated people prevented Butler from fulfilling his dream to make the Inland Northwest into a haven for racists.