Larry McDonald

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of September, 1983, Soviet fighters shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 before it reached Seoul. Lawrence Patton McDonald was among those killed. He was a physician from Atlanta, Georgia, and a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives. His voting record was the most conservative of any Democrat in Congress. Three of his congressional colleagues had been expected to make that same trip to South Korea. None of them were on that plane. What shaped this man, what drove his politics, and how did he come to be flying alone?

• 2. Emory, Iceland, and Ideology

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  McDonald was born on the 1st of April, 1935, in the eastern part of Atlanta, in DeKalb County. General George S. Patton was a distant relative. After attending several private and parochial schools in the city, McDonald graduated from a non-denominational high school in 1951. He studied history at Davidson College from 1951 to 1953. At the age of 17, he entered the Emory University School of Medicine. He graduated from Emory in 1957, then served his internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. His specialty training took him to the University of Michigan Hospital, where he studied urology under Reed M. Nesbit. After completing that training in 1966, he returned to Atlanta to practice medicine with his father.

  From 1959 to 1961, McDonald served as a flight surgeon for the United States Navy at the Keflavík naval base in Iceland. There, he told his commanding officer that the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik was doing things that helped communists. His commanding officer replied that McDonald simply did not understand the big picture. During his Iceland posting, McDonald married Anna Tryggvadottir, an Icelandic national. They would have three children: Tryggvi Paul, Callie Grace, and Mary Elizabeth.

  Back in Atlanta after his Navy service, McDonald ran the McDonald Urology Clinic and joined the anti-communist John Birch Society in 1966 or 1967. According to his first wife, he hosted thousands of people in his living room for Birch Society-inspired lectures and documentaries. His preoccupation with politics eventually led to the end of his first marriage. He made one unsuccessful run for Congress in 1972. In 1975, he married Kathryn Jackson, whom he had met while giving a speech in California. He served on the Georgia State Medical Education Board from 1969 to 1974, including a term as its chairman.

• 3. Outlier in His Own Party

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  In 1974, McDonald ran for Congress against incumbent John W. Davis in the Democratic primary for Georgia's 7th congressional district. His central argument was that Davis had been one of only two Georgia congressmen to vote in favor of mandatory school busing. He also attacked Davis for receiving political donations from out-of-state groups that favored busing. McDonald won the primary in an upset. The general election nearly went against him as well. His Republican opponent, J. Quincy Collins Jr., had been an Air Force prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. Collins nearly defeated McDonald despite the poor national showing of Republicans that year, a year still shadowed by the Watergate scandal.

  McDonald described himself as a Democrat cut from the cloth of Jefferson and Jackson. One scoring method published in the American Journal of Political Science ranked him second in conservatism across both chambers of Congress. The ranking covered the period from 1937 to 2002. The only member ranked more conservative over that span was Ron Paul, who was McDonald's closest confidant in the House. The American Conservative Union gave him a perfect score of 100 every year he served, with one exception: in 1978, he scored 95. He also earned perfect or near-perfect ratings from the National Right to Life Committee, Gun Owners of America, and the American Security Council.

  McDonald admired Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was a member of the Joseph McCarthy Foundation. He hired former staffers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to continue their research on left-wing groups. That research was shared with law enforcement. An admirer of Austrian economics and a member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he advocated returning to the gold standard. He pushed for tight monetary policy during the stagflation of the late 1970s. In his congressional office, McDonald kept a portrait of Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator. He called the welfare state a "disaster" and favored handing control of the Great Society programs to state governments. He said foreign aid was a budget "you could take a chainsaw to." He opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, citing FBI evidence that he said showed King had been manipulated by communist agents. At his official district residence, McDonald reportedly kept about 200 firearms.

  McDonald rarely addressed the House floor directly, preferring to insert his views into the Congressional Record. His insertions on the Socialist Workers Party were eventually collected into a book, Trotskyism and Terror: The Strategy of Revolution, published in 1977.

• 4. The Anti-Communist Network

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  In 1979, McDonald co-founded the Western Goals Foundation alongside John Rees and Major General John K. Singlaub. According to The Spokesman-Review, the organization aimed to "blunt subversion, terrorism, and communism." Its founders saw it as filling a gap left by the disbanding of the House Un-American Activities Committee. McDonald had long argued that the FBI had been dangerously weakened during the 1970s.

  In 1983, McDonald became chairman of the John Birch Society, succeeding Robert Welch. By the time of his death, Western Goals faced a lawsuit from the ACLU. The organization was accused of obtaining illegal Los Angeles Police Department intelligence files that had been ordered destroyed in 1975. Western Goals had computerized those files into a database on a $100,000 computer in Long Beach. The computer was housed at the home of an attorney with ties to the U.S. intelligence community. Many of the files concerned individuals from Ronald Reagan's time as Governor of California. There was speculation that Western Goals was using the files to put pressure on figures in the Reagan administration.

  McDonald also stirred controversy with his medical views. He advocated laetrile as a treatment for patients in advanced stages of cancer, despite the medical consensus that it was quackery. In 1976, a court ordered him to pay thousands of dollars to settle a malpractice lawsuit related to his laetrile practice. An investigation by the Atlanta Constitution that same year uncovered a further problem. A Georgia doctor connected to McDonald was directing laetrile patients to write their payment checks to the Larry McDonald for Congress campaign.

  The ACLU's lawsuit and the speculation about blackmail were both still unresolved when McDonald boarded his flight in August 1983.

• 5. Two Days in New York

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  McDonald had been invited to South Korea to mark the 30th anniversary of the United States-South Korea Mutual Defense Treaty. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Senator Steve Symms of Idaho, and Representative Carroll Hubbard of Kentucky were to make the trip alongside him. On Sunday, the 28th of August, 1983, bad weather diverted McDonald's flight from Atlanta to Baltimore. He arrived at JFK Airport in New York to find he had missed his connecting flight to Seoul by two or three minutes.

  A Pan Am Boeing 747 was headed to Seoul that night and could have carried him. McDonald chose to wait for the next Korean Air Lines flight, drawn by the lower fares. Two days passed at JFK while he waited. Hubbard eventually gave up on the trip entirely, canceling his reservation and accepting a speaking engagement in Kentucky. Helms tried to join McDonald but also found himself delayed.

  McDonald took seat 02B, an aisle seat in the first class section. KAL 007 lifted off at 12:24 AM local time on the 31st of August. The flight was scheduled to stop in Anchorage, Alaska, roughly 3,400 miles away. The plane sat in Anchorage for an hour and a half, being refueled, cleaned, and reprovisioned. Passengers were offered the option to leave the aircraft, but McDonald stayed on board, catching up on his sleep. Helms had managed to reach Anchorage by then. He came to McDonald and asked him to transfer to a different KAL flight, KAL 015. McDonald did not want to be disturbed and declined. A fresh crew took over, and KAL 007 departed at 4 AM local time, beginning a 4,500-mile crossing to Seoul's Kimpo International Airport.

  General Anatoly Kornukov commanded the Soviet forces that intercepted KAL 007 after the plane entered Soviet airspace. Helms, who had personally invited McDonald off the plane in Anchorage just hours before, was not aboard.

• 6. Martyr and Memorial

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  Among McDonald's supporters, his death was almost immediately interpreted as an assassination carried out as part of a communist conspiracy. According to his widow, President Reagan was reluctant to take strong action against the Soviet Union in response to the shooting. He was remembered as a martyr by American conservatives.

  A special election was held to fill McDonald's seat in the House. Former Governor Lester Maddox stated publicly that he intended to run for the seat if McDonald's widow chose not to. Kathy McDonald did run, but she lost to George "Buddy" Darden.

  On the 18th of March, 1998, the Georgia House of Representatives named a stretch of Interstate 75 the Larry McDonald Memorial Highway. The resolution cited a desire to preserve "the memory of the sacrifice and service of this able and outstanding Georgian." The named portion runs from the Chattahoochee River northward to the Tennessee state line. Among his more than 150 bills was one to place statues of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver in the United States Capitol.