Walter Leonard, was a physician who counted Hollywood stars such as John Wayne among his patients.
He believed his was a family of survivors in a country founded by survivors—the disenfranchised, mavericks who had either fled or been kicked out of the Old World. His mother, Nancy, had Irish heritage—but Jim liked to stress that her background was “Black Irish” (Irish who had dark hair and eyes as descendants, according to legend, of Spaniards who landed on the Western seaboard of Ireland in 1588, after surviving the defeat of the Spanish Armada.). He would talk of how a grandmother on his mother’s side survived the great earthquake of 1906 as an eight-year-old. His paternal grandfather, Charles Sr., survived a gas attack in France during the First World War. He had come to America from Austria to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and, upon arrival at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, he shortened the family name from Koppensteiner to Kopp. Jim liked to claim that his grandfather spoke “every continental language” and worked as a translator in Alsace-Lorraine interrogating POWs for the allies during the war. He died young, at 42, from chronic health defects due to the gas attack.
Jim admired his father greatly—the doctor of laws, corporate lawyer, former Marine. Chuck Kopp had won the Award of Merit from the San Francisco Bar Association, was a leader of the Boy Scouts of America. With his political connections and influence, Jim believed his dad to be a “maker of kings.”
Politically he had conservative roots. His parents were solid Nixon people. Jim said that his father had worked to help put Richard Nixon in the White House and, later, helped Ronald Reagan get elected governor of California. In the living room hung a photo of Chuck Kopp with Reagan at a reception. Jim said his dad was offered a post as a cabinet aide in the first Nixon administration, but turned down the offer because moving the family from California to Washington was too big a move. Later in his life Jim believed that he could contact former Nixon administration officials for advice, or to vet potential enemies.
It was a fact that in December 1969 Nixon appointed a man named Jesse Steinfeld as his surgeon general, and that Steinfeld had lived across the street from the Kopps back in South Pasadena when Jim was a boy. Jim told the story that his dad helped smooth the way for Jesse to land the surgeon general’s position by putting in a good word for his old neighbor. Many years later, reached on the telephone, 76-year-old Jesse Steinfeld said that the story was possible, but he could not remember it specifically.
Jim’s mother was active in her church and also with work, a home care service she founded called Nancy’s Nurses, running it out of the house on Via Lerida. She was also active in politics, working for local Republicans, and a member of the John Birch Society, a fiercely anticommunist organization led by Robert Welch, inaugurated in 1958. It became known as a looney-right movement, most often cited for its contention that Dwight Eisenhower, five-star American general, D-Day commander, and two-term president, was himself a communist.
The John Birch Society became, one of the most powerful post-war groups in America, with 100,000 members. One-quarter of those members lived in California. Charitably, Birchers were mostly conservatives holding Washington accountable for defending freedom in the face of Soviet expansion. Less charitably, the society capitalized on a McCarthyist ethos of conspiracy, grand schemes and secret government plots that appealed to base paranoia. This sense of mission, fighting a moral battle against a powerful, ubiquitous, left-wing enemy allied to the federal government, harmonized well with Jim Kopp’s sense of personal destiny. ***
Given his background it was an odd choice for Jim to enroll at the ultra-liberal University of California at Santa Cruz, which was just 10 years old, an invention of the sixties. The campus was gorgeous but unconventional. UC Santa Cruz sprawled, laid out over farmland and forests of redwoods. It looked more like a nature retreat than a university. There were courses like “The Chicken in History,” which critics relished invoking as representative of all you needed to know about UC Santa Cruz and its brand of pop-intellectualism. It represented everything Jim Kopp would ultimately disdain: left wing orthodoxy, a godless peace-and-love doctrine that was morally blind to the real world—an anythinggoes ethos.
He could have gone to any school. His family had the resources and he was intelligent, especially in science. The reason he went to this school was because he followed his heart. Her name was Jenny. His girlfriend. They lived together for a time, he said, in an offcampus apartment. He could focus on Jenny at school, and study a world you could fit on the head of a pin, the microscopic world of biology, and embryology. They lived together his senior year.
At that time, he was not actively engaged in the abortion debate, although he did hold a position. It had been in January 1973 when the verdict was issued in the case of Roe v. Wade, in which the United States Supreme Court essentially legalized abortion, ruling that the termination of an unwanted pregnancy is up to a woman and her doctor. The court ruled that state criminal abortion laws violate a constitutional “right of privacy” and must therefore be struck down. The issue had made its way to the dinner table debate in the Kopp household. Jim was instinctively opposed to the decision, following his mother’s lead.
Did Jenny really get pregnant? Accounts got muddy over the years. He told some friends that Jenny had had an abortion and did not tell him about it. He said that her abortion crushed him, brought him to tears. A transforming experience. Later he denied the story. He admitted that he had offered to drive her to an abortion clinic, but said it turned out she was not pregnant. The fact he had found himself willing to help her get an abortion upset him.
In 1976, he graduated from Santa Cruz with an honors degree in biology. “By and large,” wrote his college evaluator, Jim’s work “has been superior from the outset, particularly in the sciences.” Jim succeeded academically, and failed in his personal life. Jenny left him to pursue studies at the University of Texas. Broke Jim’s heart, some said. He didn’t want to give up on her, though. The story went that he followed her to Texas for a time, spent a semester there working at the University of Texas in a laboratory. He returned to California and the Bay Area, moved south to pursue postgraduate studies in embryology at Cal State Fullerton.
As for abortion, the young Jim questioned it, but it was still an intellectual exercise; the act itself did not yet register with him as something singularly evil.
Joan Andrews was raised on a farm in Lewisburg. Her family claimed to be the first Catholics to settle in that part of the state and she grew up feeling part of an embattled religious minority. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the neighboring town of Pulaski. The KKK, haters of blacks and many others, including Catholics, burned a cross right in the front yard of her Catholic girls’ school.
Young Joan had a particularly inquisitive mind. She was unafraid, even at a young age, to reflect upon darkness. She heard about the Holocaust, and, not long after she was first able to read, she went to the library and read books about it. She felt it inside, not just sympathy or intellectual curiosity, but a burning need to protect the weak. It can’t be left to the law, the politicians, the democratic process. Leave it to the establishment, trust the state, the wisdom of the people, and you end up with Auschwitz. Her older brother served in Vietnam. As a teenager, Joan begged her parents: “Let me go, let me just volunteer to go over.” It’s not that she was hungry for combat. Her family had a pacifist bent. But you must protect the victimized. And sometimes that requires force. Gandhi was a pacifist, the kids were told, but far worse than engaging in violence when faced with a moral crisis is to do nothing at all.
Picture Joan Andrews one afternoon around Christmastime 1958. She is all of nine years old, holding the lifeless body of the newborn baby boy:
The baby limp, a pale, broken doll. The pain in Joan’s small face, the tears, as she cuts off a piece of her hair to bury with little Joel. Mom had delivered the baby at home. Joel had lived, but briefly. Mom had phoned dad at the school where he was principal, and Joan came right home. They immerse the baby in baptismal water. The family speaks in whispers. He was perfect, so perfect. They put him in a small box, then each of them cuts a lock from their hair to make a bed for him inside. The vigil complete, they bury him in the backyard. Stillborn? Fetus? No. Joel is a baby. A child of God. Joan’s brother.
Fast-forward to 1973, and a 24-year-old woman from Tennessee stands on a sidewalk outside a women’s health clinic in Chicago. Joan Andrews is at the abortion clinic—the mill, the death camp itself. That’s where they were killing the babies, she thought. She could all but feel the devil’s presence. She was a meek-looking woman, her eyes didn’t look directly at you when she spoke, but angled away, as though avoiding any hint of confrontation, as if she were staring at images that only she could see. What should she do? She wasn’t exactly sure. Disarm them? In 1973 there was no active anti-abortion counterrevolution to speak of. She felt alone. Joan turned and walked away from the clinic. She would start with some little things, small protests, until she heard a louder calling from God.
