The Conflagration at Waco
The following is a condensed version of "The Conflagration at Waco" by Mike Pulliam, published at Law & Liberty.
In Rashomon fashion, the horrific 1993 showdown between federal law enforcement officers and David Koresh and his followers at the Mount Carmel compound outside Waco tends to be perceived in different ways, depending on one’s perspective. Over 80 persons, including four ATF agents and many children, tragically died during the encounter. The widely-covered events inspired Timothy McVeigh to plot the Oklahoma City bombing two years later. What really happened at Waco?
Was the protracted siege, which ended in a catastrophic inferno, the fault of a manipulative, child-abusing, polygamous cult leader who prophesied—even provoked—a fatal encounter with the authorities? Or was the appalling outcome, which came on the heels of the ATF’s and FBI’s 1992 debacle at Ruby Ridge, due to the poorly-conceived, overly-aggressive, and ineptly-executed tactics of federal authorities?
Texas-based historian Jeff Guinn, in his extensively-researched account of the conflagration, Waco, assigns blame to both sides. Guinn specializes in giving a “deep dive” into figures and events superficially familiar to Americans through contemporaneous news coverage or popular mythology. His previous books have featured Charles Manson, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Jonestown tragedy, among other topics. In Waco, Guinn concludes that the only wholly-innocent victims in this epic disaster were the 23 children consumed in the fire.
The group typically referred to as the “Branch Davidians” was an apocalyptic spin-off from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1935, an SDA adherent named Victor Houteff established a compound outside Waco, which he named Mount Carmel, in the belief that only 144,000 believers would be saved when the world ended—the Second Advent. In the succeeding decades, the movement changed names, and even physical locations, under a series of different leaders following Houteff’s death in 1954.
A small band of followers remained in the Waco area when, in 1981, a Bible-quoting 21-year-old drifter and aspiring musician named Vernon Wayne Howell arrived at Mount Carmel. Howell, who later changed his name to “David Koresh,” eventually prevailed in a violent power struggle to lead the group, and remained in control until the fateful showdown in 1993.
Guinn argues—convincingly, to my mind—that Howell/Koresh parroted the writings of a turn-of-the-century charismatic cult leader named Cyrus Teed, who pronounced himself “Koresh,” after the Old Testament prophet Cyrus, and professed to be divinely appointed to receive messages from God and to interpret the cryptic Book of Revelation concerning the conflict that would precede the Second Coming. The parallels between Teed’s teachings and those of Howell/Koresh are striking.
Was Howell/Koresh a charlatan, a madman, or a sincere believer who got caught up in the megalomania of cult leadership? No one will ever know for sure, but his approximately 85 followers at Mount Carmel blindly obeyed him, and most died as a result. The facts of the ATF’s disastrous effort to execute a lawful search warrant and to arrest Howell/Koresh on February 28, 1993, followed by a 51-day showdown with the FBI, are well known, due to the extensive news coverage and the various subsequent investigations, congressional hearings, and reports regarding the fiasco. Guinn summarizes those events thoroughly, but—more importantly—illuminates the nefarious role of the enigmatic Howell/Koresh.
Howell/Koresh was a man of prodigious sexual appetites. In 1984, he married Rachel Jones, the 14-year-old daughter of long-time Branch Davidians. In 1986, even before he assumed control of the Mount Carmel compound, Howell/Koresh announced that God had instructed him to take an additional wife, and he did—the daughter of another follower. Soon the divine instructions were clarified to entail multiple additional wives, including Rachel’s sister. Before long, his divine harem numbered a dozen or more, split between Waco and California. “Sham marriages” with stand-in husbands were orchestrated to protect Howell/Koresh from bigamy or polygamy charges.
He ultimately declared that all married couples in the compound had to surrender their conjugal rights; men (other than himself) must remain celibate and all women became wives of Howell/Koresh, available to him at his whim. The abundance of wives produced a bounty of children. Guinn reports that “at any given time he had several wives in various stages of pregnancy.” Some of his “wives” were as young as 12, and others were barely older: ages 14 and 16. He even made sexual overtures to pre-pubescent girls, some as young as ten. Eventually, 11 different Branch Davidian women bore him a total of 17 children; Howell/Koresh prophesied a Biblical command to father 24 offspring. Some wives left prior to the 1993 showdown, taking their children with them. The rest would perish when the compound was consumed in a firestorm of unknown origins.
The Waco siege was a watershed event during the 1990s. The deadly conflict received sensational media coverage and the final conflagration was vividly captured on video. Americans were horrified, and polarized, by what they saw. Some saw harmless eccentrics burnt alive by an overbearing federal government. Others saw defiant law-breakers, led by a sexual predator, repeatedly refusing to submit to the authority of law enforcement officers, heedless of the certain consequences. Observers tended to see what they wanted to see.
Thirty years later, Jeff Guinn has written the definitive account of the tragedy, which--while balanced overall—assigns a great deal of the blame to an imperious and reckless cult leader who will forever be remembered as David Koresh.
Mark Pulliam writes from East Tennessee. A Big Law veteran, he retired as a partner in a large law firm after practicing for 30 years. A contributing editor to Law & Liberty since 2015, Mark also blogs at Misrule of Law. He considers himself a fully-recovered lawyer.
