A Letter From The Publisher: Aug. 12, 1966

IT is not often that a man involved in a criminal situation appears on the cover of TIME. When we do have such a cover story, its chief concern is not so much that man and his specific deeds as it is the broader, often sociological implications of what he did. Thus when Caryl Chessman, the convicted kidnaper and sex offender, appeared on the cover (March 21, 1960), he was the center of a worldwide dispute over the moral and legal ramifications of capital punishment. Lee Harvey Oswald, this era’s most infamous psychotic killer, appeared (Oct. 2, 1964) as the world considered the Warren Commission report, and the U.S. worried over the problems involved in providing security for the President of the U.S.

This week, while the murder of eight student nurses in Chicago is still starkly in the public memory, our cover story turns to the problem of the psychotic and society as illustrated by the still more immediate case of Charles Whitman, perpetrator of the worst mass murder in recent U.S. history.

Why do such acts of madness occur? What, if anything, can be done to prevent them? These were the central questions to which the TIME team assigned to the story addressed itself. On that task force were 48 correspondents in the U.S. and abroad and 15 editors, writers and researchers in New York. They dealt with information from literally hundreds of sources, including interviews with 40 psychiatrists and psychologists.

What they found is divided into four stories, three of them in THE NATION.

“The Madman in the Tower” explores the forces at work in the life of the killer, pieces together the significant details of his hours leading up to the rampage, reconstructs the multiple crime, and notes the strange role of capricious fate in placing victims within range.

“The Symptoms of Mass Murder” examines the relationships between society and potential killers, finding that mass murder is by no means a modern or American phenomenon and suggesting that contemporary civilization—without abusing civil liberties—can do much more to reduce the dangers.

“A Gun-Toting Nation” studies the increasingly controversial subject of weaponry and the law, finds that Americans, amid a remarkable dearth of effective legal control, own more guns than any other people.

In what is essentially a sidelight, “Covering a Massacre,” in PRESS, reports on how Austin’s KTBC radio and television station, owned by Lady Bird Johnson and her daughters, and usually geared to the relatively quiet pace of a college and capital town, covered one of the wildest days in the city’s history.

The cover picture, of the killer and his pet dog, came from a roll of film in a camera found in his effects. With it was a polite note that is in itself a comment on the complexity of the problem of the psychotic in society. It asked that the finder have the film developed, and ended: “Thank you, Charles J. Whitman.”