Bo Gritz, Right Wing Lunatic, Is Dead
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Bo Gritz is dead. One of the largely forgotten figures of the late 20th century, Gritz played a critical role in the development of the paranoid, conspiracy-theory-driven reality of today’s world. He is not worth remembering outside of this, as he was a self-promoting clown show of lies and propaganda, but he had an outsized role on late 20th century American culture as it turned toward creating myths about why the nation lost in Vietnam and seeing big government and liberals as conspiracies to attack our liberties, all of which helped lead to figures such as Donald Trump rising in the Republican Party and to the presidency.
Born in 1939 in Enid, Oklahoma, Gritz was a tough kid with a tough childhood. His father was killed in World War II and his maternal grandparents raised him. He was a troubled kid and got expelled from school. The family did have some money though and he was sent to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia to straighten him out with some military discipline.
Immediately upon graduating from high school in 1957, Gritz enlisted in the Army. Although he was an enlisted man, people saw possibility in him and he attended Officer Candidate School. By 1963, he was a captain and was promoted to major in 1967. This put him in line to go to Vietnam. He was involved in some intense fighting in the Vietnam War. He commanded a detachment made up of a mix of American, South Vietnamese, and Cambodian soldiers that were basically mercenaries for whatever America needed. This meant special missions that included investigating shot down airplanes and recovering their black boxes if possible.
For all of this, Gritz was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became an important Army insider. He commanded special forces in Latin America from 1975 to 1977, became Chief of Congressional Relations for the Defense Security Agency, and worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense. But in 1979, he retired from the military. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t still involved. It means he was doing covert work that was easier to do outside the military structure, such as going to Afghanistan to train the mujahedeen.
As this went on, he became obsessed with the idea that the Vietnamese communists were holding any number of American prisoners of war. In fact, this is a good moment to consider the POW/MIA craze of the 1980s. It was so difficult for a lot of Americans to understand why we had lost the war in Vietnam. They were not prepared to say that the entire operation was badly considered from the beginning, that being a wannabe colonialist power attempting to intervene in a post-colonial civil war had a lot of potential to go very badly. So it had to be someone else who had cost the US the war. It was the government unwilling to do what it took to win the war. Or maybe it was the anti-war hippies and their protests. Or maybe it was the unpatriotic media. But whatever it was, it was someone else’s fault, someone who had sacrificed a generation of young American men. Of course, the government had indeed sacrificed a generation of young American men, but saying the war was just a bad idea and all these people died for a stupid cause wasn’t something people were willing to say.
These ideas began manifesting themselves in some fascinating cultural ways. First, there was the idea that soldiers were spat upon as they returned home. This is both absurd and, today, is conventional wisdom. When I ask my students about this — students who often know very little about American history before they get to my class — they have almost all heard it. The problem is that there is zero evidence that it ever happened. None. Not a single documented case, as the scholar Jerry Lembcke explored in detail. And let’s be clear, despite the narrative that the media cost the nation the war, in fact, the media was extremely anti-protestor, especially early in the war. Had this happened, the media would have been all over it. But they weren’t. It doesn’t even get mentioned in any American media publication or other cultural product until the early 1980s. Then this became a core idea of Rambo and the narrative got set in stone. Moreover, this is nonsense because the antiwar movement was inherently pro-soldier. The vast majority of antiwar protestors didn’t care about Vietnam or communism one way or the other. They just didn’t want to go fight the war and they wanted to bring the soldiers home.
This was the kind of thing that led people like Gritz into resentment and crazy conspiracy theories. Part of this, also mainstreamed by Rambo and other early Vietnam reflections in the movies, is that the government abandoned unknown but large numbers of prisoners of war in Vietnam. In fact, Gritz may have been the inspiration for the Rambo character. Again, these myths about POWs was just flat out untrue. The Vietnamese government had a whole lot bigger fish to fry than to still hold American prisoners of war after the war was won. It had to build a society, overthrow the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and fight a war with China, all before 1980. But Gritz became a huge promoter of this idea. This became a mantra of late 20th century American conservatism. Even today, you see POW/MIA flags up in all sorts of public places — even though there have not been any but a few American POWs in a half-century, despite our wars in the Middle East. But good luck saying we should take those silly conspiracy theory flags down! They are now part of American identity. This is, at least in part, Bo Gritz’s contribution to American life. Great.
Specifically, Gritz fundraised to take trips to southeast Asia to get the boys home. He got other right-wing loons such as Ross Perot and Clint Eastwood to fund these trips. At first, the Defense Department was at least slightly interested in making sure no one was left over there, but the government soon realized Gritz was an unhinged lunatic. In fact, the only thing that came of it was that, while in Laos, one of the anti-communist Laotian guerillas he worked with was killed and one of the Americans in his search party was kidnapped for ransom! If anything, Gritz created prisoners of war!
Moreover, Gritz was breaking all sorts of laws. He had to turn himself in to the police in Thailand for his operations out of that country smuggling military equipment into Laos. Moreover, one of his comrades was later convicted for smuggling explosives around these operations; though Gritz was not prosecuted, there is no way he didn’t know about this and encouraged it. But although he faced up to 30 years in prison in Thailand and although the Vietnamese definitely wanted him imprisoned, Gritz never served a day.
Now, Gritz was a massive self-promoter along the way. He was an extremely highly decorated officer. He just loved his own personal history of covert operations and he saw the world as needing more men like him. So he kept it up. He went to Burma in 1986 because he still believed there were POWs and also believed the huge Burmese opium baron Khun Sa knew where they were. So even though Sa was an international criminal, Gritz went over and interviewed him. He got Sa to get on video and make claims that leading Americans, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, were involved in his opium smuggling operations.
This all led Gritz into ever wilder conspiracy theories. He was smart enough to realize that while he was a right-winger, there were potential advocates for his ideas on the far Left too and so he tried to bring conspiracy theorists of different political stripes together at various conferences, to some success. After all, when you are a conspiracy theorist, your actual politics on the issues really make no difference because they aren’t what are driving your engagement and your life.
By the early ‘90s, Gritz was all-in on the far-right ideas around the “one world government” under the auspices of the United Nations and represented in the US by George HW Bush’s “New World Order” speech. Gritz became a total conspiracy theorist in domestic life too, the kind of that the Southern Poverty Law Center has followed for years.[1] He went into the deepest area of American horrors, the idea that there was a gigantic conspiracy that attacked the true Americans — the straight, conservative, war-loving, white man. In 1998, he wrote, “Do you see the sign, the scent, stain and mark of the beast on America today? [...] Are you willing to submit and join this seedline of Satan? […] Look to those who are openly antichrist. […] [W]ho in the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, Godless laws, adultery, New Age international banking, entertainment industry and world publishing? Wherever you find perversion of God’s laws you will find the worshippers of Baal with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism.” Whew, OK then.
Naturally enough, all this led weirdo right-wing parties to nominate Gritz for their national campaigns. In 1988, something called the Populist Party nominated him for VP, but he dropped out when he discovered David Duke was the presidential candidate. He thought it was going to be the corrupt congressman from Ohio, Jim Traficant, who I guess was respectable enough compared to Duke! But this debacle didn’t stop him from becoming the party’s presidential candidate in 1992, and it was all very stupid with rants against the Federal Reserve and the New World Order. Naturally, he only got 0.1 percent of the vote nationally, but he cleared two percent in Idaho and almost four percent in Utah, demonstrating the power of extremism in the Rocky Mountains. Some of this is also explained by Gritz’s 1984 conversion to the Mormon faith, which has provided some of the most virulent right-wing extremism in American politics, including more recently the Bundy family takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, one of the events that presaged the rise of Trump.
As he aged, Gritz moved deeper into antisemitism. He became a follower of Christian Identity theology, common among highly radicalized Mormons, which argues that the Israelites of the Bible are actually whites and not Jews and thus whites are the “chosen people.” That this is complete nonsense makes no difference, as it never does for racists and/or conspiracy theorists. In 2000, Gritz claimed, “Jews, feminists, sodomites and other liberal activists may install Gore over an apathetic moral majority. […] Runaway abortion, anti-Christ/God and globalism are certain.”
In 1996, Gritz and his son Jim kidnapped two children in Connecticut. One of their other lunatic followers claimed her husband had engaged in “Satanic sexual abuse.” The Gritz decided to go save the boys. Of course all they did was get themselves arrested for it and there was zero evidence of this woman’s charges. Gritz later called the whole thing “the biggest mistake of my life.” Yeah, well, I can think of a few more you might want to consider!
None of this looney tunes conspiracy theories helped Gritz’s personal life. In 1998, his wife left him. He dressed up in all his military regalia, took his truck from his community to the town of Kamiah and shot himself in the chest. He failed to kill himself. People noted the irony that a man who had bragged for decades on his excellent marksmanship had failed to shoot correctly with the gun pressed against his own chest. Others thought it might well be a fraud, yet another publicity stunt or a way to get his wife back.
Didn’t make any difference in how he saw the world anyway. Gritz later created what he called a “constitutional covenant community” near Orofino, Idaho. This was hardly his first highly armed right-wing community. He first tried this near Kamiah, Idaho, bordering the Nez Perce reservation, in 1994, but he left it after the suicide attempt. Then he moved to Nevada to create something called the Fellowship of Eternal Warriors, merging his brand of right-wing off-Christian theology with antisemitism and homophobia, which had really risen in the right-wing crazy world by the early ‘90s, with attempts in Oregon and Colorado to create state law against gay people.
Despite all of this, Gritz was the guy people called when other crazy right-wingers were in trouble. He spent a week in the forests of North Carolina trying to get the abortion clinic and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph to surrender. But his most prominent moment was when he became the intermediary between the government and his fellow right-wing extremist Randy Weaver when the FBI descended upon the latter’s compound at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. This whole thing was a disaster for the government. Weaver shot and killed a federal marshal, the FBI killed his wife and son. To his credit, I guess, Gritz got Weaver to surrender to end the bloodbath. And in fact, Weaver only ended up serving 18 months in prison and that was for the original charge that brought the FBI to his compound, not for killing the officer. I guess in this country, you can get away with killing the cops if you are a white right-winger. Other Gritz attempts to intervene in favor of far-right causes went less well. He tried to intervene in the next big standoff between the government and a right-wing extremist group, the so-called Freedmen, on their compound in Jordan, Montana. Amazingly, Gritz thought the Freemen were too crazy for him and he bailed. And to be clear, this was a man who tried to invade the Florida hospital where doctors finally pulled the plug on Terry Schiavo in 2005.
But there was one thing that really mattered more than anything else — The Big Grift. He would sell anything to his fellow extremists. He had a deal called SPIKE — Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events. This was a 12 part video series that was supposed to prep you for the war to come. But the war to come, I mean who wouldn’t make money on that? He charged people an arm and a leg for these videos. And that really says it all, doesn’t it. Right wing revolution for profit!
Well, that’s Bo Gritz for you. This very bad, no good, terrible man is dead and so, in a sense, is an era of American history we have not really dealt with. Once we pull down the pointless POW/MIA flags, we will have moved beyond Gritz’s insanity. Until then? Bo Gritz remains with us in spirit.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/bo-gritz
His brother, Cheese Gritz, is not a bad fellow.
"Bo Gritz"? Srsly?