Ex-governor’s Charlottesville book renews debate over blame
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — As former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuli e travels the country promoting his new book about a deadly white nationalist rally, others involved in the mayhem nearly two years ago are pushing back at his characterization of the events.
Charlottesville’s former mayor said the book “blames everyone else,” and the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia called it an e ort to “pass the buck.” Some of the anti-racism protesters injured during a car attack after the rally confronted McAuli e at a book talk in Washington on Thursday, accusing him of supporting a police response that was widely criticized as too passive.
For his part, McAuliffe said the book isn’t about assigning blame, it’s about remembering a seminal moment in the nation’s history and taking steps to make sure nothing similar happens again.
“Racism is alive and well in this county, it exists today in our country, and we need to do something about it,” McAuli e, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who in April ruled out a 2020 presidential run, said in an interview Friday. “That’s the overarching theme of the book.”
“Beyond Charlottesville: Taking a Stand Against White Nationalism” o ers the governor’s account of preparations ahead of the Aug. 12, 2017 rally, which drew a loosely connected mix of far-right extremists for the largest gathering of its kind in at least a decade. The Associated Press received an advance copy of the book, which went on sale Tuesday.
It also describes his and other state officials’ roles in managing the events as they unfolded — including his interaction with President Donald Trump and his reaction to the deaths of two state troopers who had been monitoring the rally in a helicopter that crashed — plus more general reflections about his time in office and about how to move forward and address the legacies of racism.
Large crowds of heavily armed, mostly young, white men chanting racist slurs converged in a downtown park Aug. 12, and hundreds of counterprotesters showed up, too. Street fighting exploded before the scheduled event could begin and went on for nearly an hour in view of police until authorities forced the crowd to disperse.
As counterprotesters were marching peacefully through a downtown street, an avowed white supremacist who kept a photo of Adolf Hitler on his bedside table plowed his car into them. Heather Heyer , a 32-year-old paralegal, was killed and dozens more were injured.
A scathing independent report by a former federal prosecutor released several months later found problems at the state and local level, including a lack of planning, poor communication and a law enforcement plan that put o cer safety over public safety.
McAuliffe, who doesn’t mention that report, writes in the book that he knew “without a doubt that we’d done everything we could at the state level to prepare” ahead of the rally but that the city “did itself no favors.”