According to his teachers at the University of Michigan, where he majored in political science, Richard Wishnetsky was a brilliant young man. John Higham, professor of history, once described his qualities as follows: “1. intense intellectual curiosity and genuine excitement about ideas; 2. strong sense of the importance of philosophical beliefs, especially natural law; 3. great clarity and logical rigor of thought; 4. judicious and scholarly but nevertheless lively way of handling problems. Personally, he is polite, likable and extremely eager. Although not without some decided convictions, he is keenly aware of not having most of the answers.” Frank Grace, professor of political science, had a similar impression of Richard: “I have never known a young man more eager to learn and more willing to expend the effort which learning requires. He is supremely gifted and will in my opinion become an original and creative scholar.”

In his junior year, Richard was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and upon his graduation in 1964, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for further study at the University of Detroit. It was not his academic career, however, that gave him the most satisfaction according to Jonathan Rose, his dormitory mate, who said, “Richard considered the high point of his student life the time he had a chance to touch President Kennedy after that famous speech given at Ann Arbor on founding the Peace Corps. He talked about joining the Peace Corps for a long while after that, then he talked about attending the London School of Economics, but neither of those things happened, unfortunately.”

Some who knew Richard in Ann Arbor maintain that a direct line can be drawn between his reaction to the assassination of Kennedy and the later events in his life. Because the assassination disturbed him so deeply, it may also have impressed him with the remarkable extent to which a public outrage can affect private individuals, and it may have activated his sense of the necessity for rigid, absolute answers to questions he had previously been willing to explore with tolerance and patience.

In any case, Richard Wishnetsky's life apparently took a new turn the summer following the assassination, when—after graduation from Michigan-he went on a trip to Israel. There, he became intensely interested in one of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic sects and its idea of a “holy life.” He had received some religious training at Detroit's Conservative Shaarey Zedek congregation, of which his parents were members, but prior to his trip he had exhibited no great concern with matters of faith. In September 1964, after his return home, he began work on a master's degree in sociology at the University of Detroit. Soon, however, he was including courses in comparative religion and spending more and more of his time reading theology.

Changes were also occurring in his personal life. He had moved into an apartment with two other young men, one of whom, Patrick J. Burke, later reported: “Occasionally he would talk about what he thought was wrong with the world or about thinking the Jewish people were not living up to the tenets of their religion. At first it all was in the nature of calm discussion, which grew gradually more excited as the weeks went past. After a few months, Richard started talking against specific people.” Often upset and irrational, Richard would argue senselessly and viciously with his parents, friends, and professors, then fly into tantrums, knocking over furniture and threatening violence. According to Dr. Sander J. Breiner, a psychiatrist, and a friend of the Wishnetsky family, “From a quiet and well-mannered individual, Richard turned into a poor-mannered and bellicose young man. Where he used to discuss issues and listen to others' opinions, he suddenly knew all the answers and was argumentative. He began to issue pronouncements.”

Though he quickly alienated most of his teachers and allowed his academic work to deteriorate, Richard did manage to make at least one friend among the faculty of the University of Detroit—Joyce Carol Oates, a writer, and a member of the English department. Richard walked into her office one day in the spring of 1965 and engaged her in what was to be the first in a series of long conversations. “It was all there on that first day,” Miss Oates has said, “the latent violence, the scornful refutations, the sense that the majority of people are somehow wrong and therefore contemptible. But he had flashes of insight and good humor; he was charming. He could recognize at times his own audacity, his table-pounding egotism, and nod in agreement with my sometimes harsh judgments of him—in those occasional tender moments of self-illumination that made him unforgettably human.”¹

In the course of these talks, Richard told Miss Oates that “if God did not exist, life was not worth living and he would commit suicide.” Moreover, he once mentioned casually, “with a smile, that if he did commit suicide—which he would not—it would be in the synagogue during Sabbath services.”

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In May of 1965, on the advice of a family physician, Richard's parents asked their son to submit to psychiatric testing and therapy. Richard agreed, but after a few visits to a psychiatrist, he abandoned treatment. Shortly thereafter, following one of his tantrums, his parents picked him up at his apartment at four A.M. and placed him in the Haven, a private mental institution in nearby Rochester.

On July 29, 1965, with Richard still in the Haven but bitterly unhappy and anxious to leave, his father, Edward Wishnetsky, the owner of an insurance agency, petitioned probate court for Richard's admission to Ypsilanti State Hospital. At the time, Mr. Wishnetsky said of his son:

He has been extremely hostile, belligerent, and threatening recently. He has threatened to smear his family with scandal although in reality there is no scandal to spread. He has threatened to burn up his mother's car and the family home. He broke his mother's golf club in a fit of anger. He also broke a large glass table top at home. He has threatened to smear the University of Detroit with scandal if they did not prematurely release his scholarship funds to him so that he could use these funds to go to Europe instead of to the university. He has been extremely hyperactive, does not sleep, makes innumerable phone calls day and night, says he is going to get a date with President Johnson's daughters. He is at times very depressed, alternating with a very agitated, frenzied behavior. Although very bright, he uses his intellect to verbally slaughter those around him in a very belligerent and hostile manner.

Statements from two doctors, who maintained that Richard was mentally ill, a danger to himself and others, accompanied Mr. Wishnetsky's petition, which was granted: on August 19, 1965, Richard entered the state hospital. Ten days later he was permitted the freedom of the hospital grounds, and on September 9 he left the institution permanently with the help of an attorney he knew. The court, acting on the advice of two psychiatrists at the hospital, later ruled that Richard be officially discharged.

In one of their conversations, Richard told Dr. Breiner that “he thought his stay in the hospital was one of the best things that ever happened to him, although he didn't make it clear why. And he appeared to be calmer. Before he went into the hospital, he'd often say things like, ‘There's nothing wrong with me, it's the world,’ but after he got out he recognized he had a problem.” Indeed, after his stay in the hospital, Richard paid several visits to two psychiatrists, one of whom wrote to the court on December 3, saying: “At the present time, he seems very well controlled. He is working well in his relationship with me and I do not anticipate the need for hospitalization.”

Yet Richard stayed with neither doctor very long and—according to Dr. Breiner—was constantly running away from people who might have been able to help him. Dr. Breiner recalls that “Whenever I talked to Richard about his problem, he would smile and say, ‘I know . . . but.’”

The fall and early winter of 1965 were a chaotic time for Richard: living at home with his parents but disappearing without a word for days at a time; running to and from psychiatrists, friends, and acquaintances, all terribly worried about him; returning to his former roommates to blame them for his troubles and insisting they were against him since they had not tried to get him out of the hospital; attending classes at Wayne State University in Detroit and giving religious lectures on the campus; visiting in Brooklyn, long after midnight, with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who advised him to study Judaism thoroughly and to wait until he was fifty before turning to comparative religion; working as a substitute teacher in Detroit public schools; writing tormented letters which he left unmailed.

One such letter, dated October 20 and later found with other personal writings and belongings, reads:

I think too much. I don't think enough. I want to be me—I am only the welter of my anxieties, fears and superficialities. I do not walk, I stumble. I do not live, I respond to stimuli. I do not live, I exist. I am not a man, just a body. I live, yet I am dead. The only anguish I experience is that of self-pity and becoming aware of my own horrid, pervasive, unacceptable and contemptible selfishness, my own inability to love. When I am not miserable I am a phony.

The same letter includes a prayer:

Let my life be a testimony to Thy diverse truths, let it be one of beauty and of justice, for its roots shall be in love and reason. Oh, God, I want to live! Let me! And then let my life go beyond justice, beyond vengeance; let it emerge into the pure understanding of mercy.

Through all of this, Richard continued to dream and plan on an impressive scale. Earlier in the year he had applied for admission to the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought to work with Mircea Eliade, Saul Bellow, and Hannah Arendt. Admission was granted and Eliade agreed to supervise his work on a thesis involving a study of “the creation and destruction of philosophy”—its creation begun by Aristotle and its destruction initiated by Descartes and completed by Nietzsche.

Richard had also applied to, and was accepted by, the university's divinity school, where he wanted to work with Paul Tillich. But on October 22, two days after Richard wrote his prayer, Paul Tillich died of a heart ailment at the age of seventy-nine.

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On February 1, 1966 Richard began writing a tract entitled, “Fantasy Regarding an Assassination of Robert S. McNamara” which eventually covered six pages in longhand. It contains an apology for his imagined murder of the Secretary of Defense, along with a bitter, rambling commentary on himself and the world in which he was trying to live. He begins:

My act was motivated by philosophical and social reasons, not political ones. It is a protest, the registration of an outrage, a dire warning. Its author entertains no illusions as to its bringing about any immediate substantial change in the American scene. At present I do believe there will be a change in the future—a change for the worse. The selfishness, stupidity and vanity of men shall succeed in triumphing over whatever goodness there is, the ultimate being obliteration, both spiritual and physical, of this planet. Hail brave new world! Hail nothingness!

Of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Richard writes:

[He] symbolizes that which I despise—the business mentality which is more concerned with material matters than human matters—the kind of mentality (Protestant ethic) which is most responsible for the dehumanization of society, the prostitution of intellect, resulting in a very bright but neither wise nor profound man. . . . He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. How much did Mr. McNamara take into consideration the killing of innocent Vietnamese which has resulted from American bombings, for this killing is murder?

He is full of bitter contempt for the quality of American life:

The church has become a hypocrisy whose structures no longer find genuine residence in the souls of those who hear them. And most importantly and most sadly of all, the family is swiftly becoming—if it has not already arrived there-shot to hell. . . . I am part of the bastard progeny of this nation. We are building not men, but a generation of barbarians and mediocrities who recognize and will breed no value higher than their paltry selfish selves. Zombies. . . . Judaism in America does not need to worry about anti-Semitism destroying it from without. The American Jewish community is destroying itself from within. Shaarey Zedek is a synagog which bears witness against God.

About himself, Richard writes:

My life will probably end with a whimper—a depressed whimper. Possibly with a bang. Since I cannot live like a man, I hope to die like one. I am entering the final stage of unreality. . . . You say that I am sick—you are right. You dismiss me because I am sick—in that you are wrong. . . . The dark side of creativity is sickness. . . . Anyway, in our society to be normal is to be sick, to be hung up on loneliness, insecure about one's stature, uncertain about one's self, overly concerned about pleasing everybody, being ‘nice’ all the time-damn niceness! . . . not offending anyone, so that one winds up pleasing no one and, to boot, not knowing who or why one is.

Richard included a “last will and testament” in this document, leaving whatever money he possessed to the Jewish National Fund and the Lubavitcher Hasidim. Two days later, on February 3, he traveled to Toledo, Ohio, where the laws governing the purchase of firearms are less strict than in Michigan. In a Toledo pawnshop he paid $72.05 for a twenty-year-old .32 caliber Colt revolver with its former five-inch barrel sawed off to one inch. (Two weeks before, the pawnshop had bought the gun for $10.00.) Back in his parents' home, Richard tested the weapon in the basement and—according to a friend-stated that firing the gun gave him a “sense of power.”

On Monday, February 7, Richard reported to the Fort Wayne army induction center for examination and was promptly found unacceptable for military service. The next day he returned to the psychiatrist he had not seen for two months. Richard's parents were heartened by his apparent renewal of interest in treatment, but on Thursday, their son once more disappeared from home without a word.

On Friday evening, February 11, Richard checked into a small Detroit hotel. In a large leather satchel, he carried a change of clothes; toilet articles; a number of books, including The Brothers Karamazov, a Bible, works by Ortega y Gasset and Nietzsche; some records featuring the Soviet Army Chorus and Band, Joan Baez, Igor Stravinsky, Arturo Toscanini, and Theodore Bikel; and his gun.

In his copy of The Brothers Karamazov, Richard had underlined a passage which describes Alyosha, the gentle and forgiving Karamazov; in the margin he had written, “Me.” The passage reads:

. . . Add to that that he was to a certain extent a young man of our times, that is, honest by nature, demanding truth, seeking it, believing in it, and believing in it, demanding to serve it with all the strength of his soul, yearning for an immediate act of heroism and wishing to sacrifice everything, even life itself, for that act of heroism.

Apparently he did not give similar attention to the lines that immediately follow:

. . . these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.

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The saturday morning of February 12, 1966—Lincoln's birthday—was unseasonably warm, with the temperature near 40 degrees and a light mixture of rain and snow falling. Late that morning, Richard arrived at the huge, impressive synagogue of Congregation Shaarey Zedek in suburban Southfield, northwest of Detroit—a building which presents a massive and oblique triangular thrust to the western sky. Dressed neatly in a suit and tie, he unobtrusively took a seat in front and listened to Rabbi Morris Adler speak about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. The point of the sermon was that Lincoln-destroyed at the apex of his service to mankind by a deranged and frustrated critic—was a truly religious man even though he did not belong to any church.

Rabbi Adler, a tall, bearded, barrel-chested man of athletic build, was an eloquent speaker who bore his learning lightly. A scholar and theologian of considerable repute, he had contributed articles and essays to numerous magazines and had written and edited several books on the Talmud. A school had been named after him in Israel, where he had recently spent a year on sabbatical, and two honorary doctoral degrees had been conferred on him in the past few years.

As a young man, Rabbi Adler, now fifty-nine years old, had been a chaplain in the Pacific theater during World War II. Among other things, he was known in Detroit for his work in interfaith relations—this very service was being attended by a hundred and twenty-five visitors from various churches. He was also active in civic affairs: chairman of the United Auto Workers union's public review board, vice-president of the Community Health Association, member of the Governor's Committee for Higher Education, member of the Citizen's Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities, and president of the Zionist Organization of Detroit.

“A rabbi practices the most unspecialized profession in the universe,” he had said not long before, “but my association with the young people is, for me, the most satisfying part of my work.”

Richard Wishnetsky, sitting quietly with a gun in his pocket, was in a position to know all of this. He had often talked to Rabbi Adler and during the year past had frequently sought his counsel. Rabbi Adler, in turn, was familiar with Richard's problems and had been trying to draw him away from the abyss that threatened to engulf him.

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Rabbi Adler finished his sermon at approximately 11:40 A.M. and returned to his seat on the bimah² next to thirteen-year-old Steven Frank, whose bar mitzvah had been celebrated during the service. As a cantor began to chant the Kaddish, Richard moved calmly but swiftly to the front of the bimah, raised his gun and fired a bullet into the high, vaulted ceiling of the Sanctuary. A moment of stunned silence followed. Then Richard shouted to the two cantors, the president of the congregation, and the Frank boy, all of whom were on the bimah, “In your seats! Off the bimah!” They hesitated but then obeyed when Rabbi Adler said, “You had better do what he says. This boy is sick.”

Richard climbed the steps to the pulpit at the center of the bimah and turned to face the congregation of over seven-hundred people, including his father, mother, and sister. The rabbi remained in his seat, about fifteen feet away. Richard placed his gun on the pulpit, unfolded a piece of paper, grabbed the microphone, and began to read a statement. A tape recorder, used to record the rabbi's sermon, continued to turn, thus capturing the speech and sounds of what followed.

“This congregation,” Richard read in a clear and self-possessed voice, “is a travesty and an abomination. It has made a mockery by its phoniness and hypocrisy of the beauty and spirit of Judaism. It is composed of people. . . .” He stopped as he noticed a member of the congregation moving toward him. “Off!” he shouted. The rabbi motioned the man away. “Go back down,” he said quietly. “I know this boy.”

“It is composed of people,” continued Richard, “who on the whole make me ashamed to say that I am a Jew. For the most part. . . .” Here his audience began to stir and he said firmly, “Everybody quiet. It is composed of men, women and children who care for nothing except their vain, egotistical selves. With this act I protest a humanly horrifying and hence unacceptable situation.”.

Richard turned to his right, revolver in hand, to face Rabbi Adler. In a soft, almost tender voice, he said, “Rabbi . . .” and then shot the seated man in the left forearm. Amid wild screams from the audience, the rabbi rose and Richard took a few steps toward him. At almost point-blank range Richard fired again. This time the bullet pierced the rabbi's yarmulke and entered the left side of his head behind the ear. As the screaming from the audience reached a wild intensity, Rabbi Adler fell heavily to the floor. Richard now placed the gun barrel against his own head and fired a shot through his brain. He reeled and stumbled backward for seven or eight feet, then fell on his back.

The two men, the rabbi and his young assailant, were rushed to immediate surgery in separate hospitals nearby. After lingering in life for nearly five more days, Richard Wishnetsky died early in the morning on Wednesday, February 16, 1966. He was buried that same afternoon, following a private service. The eulogy was spoken by Rabbi Irwin Groner, an assistant at Shaarey Zedek, who said: “How could these qualities and tendencies reside within one human spirit? Love and hate! Intelligence and madness! The search for clarity and the acceptance of fantasy! ‘The heart's devious—who can know it?’”

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In the ambulance which took him from Shaarey Zedek to the hospital, Rabbi Adler gained consciousness from time to time, asking for his wife. At the hospital it was discovered that the bullet, rather than penetrating the skull, had flattened against it, sending minute bone fragments into vital areas of the brain. A team of prominent surgeons performed two operations, after which Rabbi Adler was placed in an intensive-care ward. The doctors explained that they could do nothing further.

The rabbi remained in the ward for more than three weeks, without regaining consciousness. His wife was almost constantly at his side. She had been one of the first to reach her fallen husband on the bimah, and one of the first to console the horror-stricken Wishnetsky family.

Prayers were offered for Rabbi Adler in churches throughout the country, and messages of sympathy poured in from all over the world. Rabbi Morris Adler died early in the morning on March 11, 1966, and was buried two days later. Over six-thousand people attended the funeral, described as the largest in the history of Detroit.

Earlier, a note had been discovered, written by Richard before the fatal day; in it he spoke of what he was planning to do as though it had already been accomplished:

My distorted, disoriented voice, either barely uttered or tremendously violent, gives you a slight horrifying glimpse into the dehumanized future that awaits you and your unfortunate children, who will be healthy, comfortable and secure beyond your fondest dreams and just as diseased. Since I feel that I am no longer able to make any significant creative contributions I shall make a destructive one. What happened in Shaarey Zedek happens only once in a lifetime. . . . Suffer in your frozen hells of apathy, boil in the self-hate of outraged impotence. Listen to my voice, you deaf ones. Listen to how sick, sad, lonely and forlorn it is.

¹ From an article in the Detroit Free Press, March 6, 1966.

² The platform from which services are conducted.