COLUMN ONE : Life and Death of an Activist : ‘Wild’ Bill Gandall wanted his passing used to rally the faithful. It also offers an elegy for the dedicated political adventurers of a faded era.

The crowning moment of “Wild” Bill Gandall’s final campaign found him on his hands and knees, crawling up the steps of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in protest against the Persian Gulf War.

All around was chaos, the kind of confusion the 82-year-old had survived as a Marine in the Nicaraguan bush and a recruit in the Spanish Civil War. Knocked to the ground as demonstrators surged toward the building’s doors, Gandall dragged himself past nightstick-wielding federal police. At the top of the steps, the old man steadied himself with his cane and spoke briefly to reporters before he was hustled away and handcuffed.

“You only die once,” he said.

Two months later, William P. Gandall was found dead in his wheelchair in a sunlit Long Beach hospital dining commons. Once a museum piece of an anti-war movement weakened by solid American support for the Gulf conflict, Gandall is now being offered up as a movement martyr.

Relatives and activists accuse the U.S. Federal Protective Service of hastening Gandall’s death by roughing him up and failing to provide proper medical attention during the Jan. 16 demonstration--claims police deny and a coroner’s autopsy contradicts. The brutality alleged is a far cry from the Rodney G. King beating, which has brought national attention to such law enforcement behavior. Instead, protesters say, it amounts to the failure to treat an old man with the care his age required.

Even as Gandall’s death rallies peace activists desperate to reinvigorate their cause, it also serves as an elegy for a fading American archetype. Gandall was a real-life counterpart of the tough, committed characters found in the novels of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, political adventurers who reached their prime in the troubled decade before World War II. He lived life full-bore, fighting with the Marines in Nicaragua in 1926 and against Fascists in Spain in 1936, enduring the demoralization of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s--quarreling and rabble-rousing all the while.

If Gandall’s last act of protest seemed almost a suicidal risk for an elderly man with a heart pacemaker, it becomes clearer in the context of his past. He came of age in an era with little moral or political ambiguity, a foot soldier in a movement whose leftist idols had yet to be tarnished and whose enemies came without redeeming human shades of gray. Compared to the educated, issue-oriented activists who have dominated national protest since the Vietnam War, Gandall and his generation were blue-collar internationalists who mapped their lives by activism.

“I don’t think we will see their kind again,” said Harvey Klehr, an Emory University political scientist and historian of the American left. “In the 1930s and the 1940s, the left had the power to elicit tremendous commitment. These people marched off to war and lost their lives, all in the name of anti-fascism. It’s hard to imagine that kind of fervor again.”

On his Long Beach hospital bed, Gandall asked his daughter, Kate, a New York film student, to carry on. “He told me to make the most out of his death,” she said.

So Kate Gandall has begun laying groundwork for a lawsuit against federal police. Anti-war organizers put out calls in leftist circles for witnesses. Last Sunday, a day after the old soldier was buried in a Riverside veterans cemetery, 100 people--former Spanish Civil War soldiers, unionists, communists and war resisters--sprawled out in the vaulted chapel of a Unitarian church near MacArthur Park. They were there for Gandall’s memorial service--a rite they videotaped to energize activists in other cities.

The church’s main stage was draped with the gold and red banner of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the battalion Gandall and 3,300 American adventurers joined in 1936 to fight against Gen. Francisco Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War. Folk singers in long dresses trilled anthems from that conflict. Only a few octogenarian brigade members who fought with Gandall knew the words.

Steve Orel, a bearded organizer who was host of the memorial, called the dead man “Brother Bill,” an old union title as musty as the mourners’ worn velvet seats. “This is not just a memorial service,” Orel said, “but also a protest to a system that would beat an 82-year-old man.”

The eulogists portrayed Gandall as a victim. Despite a history of heart surgery, they said, he had been a flinty old man, strong enough to endure a week’s bus trip last January from Florida to Los Angeles. His encounter with federal police, they contended, left him enfeebled--requiring emergency surgery for a ruptured duodenal ulcer. For two months, they said, Gandall spiraled downward toward death.

“Bill was so alive before the demonstration,” Kate Gandall said. “He was a broken man afterward.”

That shaky circumstantial chain--progressing from alleged police beating to emergency surgery, to complications and death--is refuted not only by police and the Los Angeles County coroner, but also by an independent pathologist hired by Gandall’s daughter.

“We looked for any sign of old or new bruises and we found nothing,” said the pathologist, Dr. Griffith Thomas. Federal police spokeswoman Mary Filippini said authorities are “confident he was not abused in anyway.”

Yet, in a hospital interview that Kate Gandall videotaped with her father, the old man claimed that he was struck by federal officers before and after his arrest. “Never in my work have I seen such rotten, vicious police behavior,” he muttered, an air tube poking from his nose. He was never charged in the incident.

Over his life, Wild Bill Gandall witnessed more than his share of vicious behavior. As an 18-year-old U.S. Marine in Nicaragua, he had even dished it out. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Gandall joined a force of 3,000 Marines who invaded Nicaragua in 1926 to crush a rebellion by Augusto Sandino--the namesake of the country’s current Sandinista party.

More than 50 years later, Gandall confessed regretfully in public forums and in unpublished memoirs that he and his fellow Marines “missed no opportunity to prove that civilization was a thin veneer.” A bantam rooster in fatigues, he answered only to his superiors, swaggering drunkenly through two years in Nicaragua as if the country was his private playground.

For decades, Gandall was haunted by memories of participating in gang rapes, burning villages and standing by while soldiers tortured and disemboweled rebel prisoners. He left the Marines in 1928, soon after an incident in which he joined a group of drunken soldiers at a party in Managua’s main cemetery, cavorting with prostitutes and scattering the bones of the dead.

“It was a terrible desecration,” he said, his final summation of an experience that did not immediately radicalize him, but sewed seeds of guilt that eventually transformed him.

Spain was easier on his conscience. It was a natural destination for a union man who roamed the country during the 1930s like labor’s Johnny Appleseed, organizing elections and fomenting strikes. At the battle of Ebro, Gandall was hit by shrapnel and saw a close friend die. Pinned down by gunfire, he listened to the man’s fading screams, then crawled forward to find the dead man’s body covered with ants.

“We came back changed men,” said John Day, a nursing home resident who drove ambulances with Gandall.

World War II was Gandall’s last great conflict--and his undoing. Posted in London with the Army, his only battles were with his commanding officer, one Capt. William E. Jenner, who apparently was put off by Gandall’s politics. A decade later, in August, 1954, Gandall was summoned to Washington to appear before a Senate committee investigating communist subversion. Its chairman was his old nemesis, Jenner, then a Republican senator from Indiana.

Gandall had never told his wife, Mary, whether he was a party member. She remains doubtful, convinced that “he was never much of a joiner.” He took the 5th Amendment before the committee, a tactic that cost him his new career as movie publicist.

Unable to save himself, Gandall took after Jenner. Pacing as the inevitable questions arose, Gandall shook his finger at the Indiana senator, announcing that on duty as a military policeman, he often escorted Jenner, “tight as hell,” from pubs and brothels.

“I remember it, and there is many a sergeant that saw you drunk and disorderly,” Gandall shouted as Jenner hammered his gavel. “We saw you with your hair down. We did not call you the ‘captain of the night’ for nothing.”

Gandall was fired from his movie job a day later. The next decade was “our only interval of quiet,” his wife recalled. With a son and a daughter to support, she found steady work as an advertising copywriter. But her husband’s insistence on putting his beliefs first finally took its toll. The couple split up in 1967, pitching Bill Gandall into a manic-depressive tailspin.

He underwent analysis, then shock treatment, finally taking refuge alone in Palm Beach, Fla., his boyhood home. There, he added the “Wild” to his name, becoming known as an irksome gadfly who disrupted community meetings. From his cracker-box apartment strewn with newspapers and mementos, he was a regular caller to radio talk programs--an opinionated old man among late-night blatherers.

When Klansmen and Nazis marched last year to irritate local Jews, Gandall showed up in military fatigues and crutches, throwing himself in front of the thugs. Police led him away gently--as they always did. Janice Graham, a Palm Beach activist, said she warned Gandall that “ ‘if you want to play in our ballgame, you risk getting hurt.’ He couldn’t absorb the same kind of punishment we could.”

Desperate to find a lofty new cause, Gandall brightened when he learned late last year that anti-war protesters planned to occupy a “peace camp” in Iraq to stave off the Gulf War. He told his ex-wife he would travel cross-country to raise the $3,000 he needed to join them.

“I said: ‘Bill, you’re 82 years old!’ ” Mary Gandall recalled. “You’ve had triple heart bypass surgery, you’re out of your mind!”

He was unmoved. “I just have to do one more big thing,” he said.

He boarded a bus the day after Christmas, arriving in Los Angeles with two heavy suitcases--one for his clothes, one for clippings about past hurrahs. Basing himself in a Spartan Santa Monica youth hostel, Gandall called on old Hollywood contacts to raise cash for the Iraq trip. One was movie director Oliver Stone, whom Gandall met after writing Stone in the vain hope of glorifying his life on film. The director interrupted work on “The Doors,” giving Gandall $2,000.

“How could I turn him down?” Stone said later. “This was Don Quixote, one of the last true believers.”

By mid-January, it was too late to enter Iraq. The borders were closed. Besides, there were daily demonstrations and teach-ins to attend. On Jan. 16, the day the war started, Bill Gandall joined 2,000 protesters in front of the Federal Building. The old soldier appeared in a veteran’s cap and camouflage jacket--and underneath, his pacemaker. Walking stiffly on a metal brace, he moved to the front of the crowd, head to head with helmeted federal police.

Earlier demonstrations at the building had been peaceful, with protesters and police hewing to a nonviolent script. This one was different, recalled veteran protester Blase Bonpane. There were new activists, younger, “angrier and perhaps a little impatient.” There were also new police reinforcements, unfamiliar with the politesse of previous rallies.

Protesters claimed later that some of the newer officers panicked, swinging their clubs when young demonstrators rushed to block the doors with a sit-in. All the police had “crowd control training,” said Filippini, the federal police spokeswoman. “They reacted properly.”

Gandall’s friends have yet to produce witnesses to his treatment by police. Bonpane and Steve Orel both claim that protesters they saw standing near Gandall were all prodded and struck--hard--by nightsticks. News videotapes of the protest show numerous such scenes.

In the interview taped by his daughter, Gandall claimed that after he was hauled inside the building, police “tied my hands together, they pushed me on the floor and hit me with their nightsticks.”

Again, there are no witnesses. One protester, Bob McCloskey, a Service Employees International Union official, said he saw a shaken Gandall forced to stand against a lobby wall. Both men were taken down to a holding area, where Gandall complained that he felt faint and needed to sit down. When federal officers did not respond, McCloskey said, he took up Gandall’s cry.

“They put him on a low cart with no back,” McCloskey said. “Finally, after I complained some more, a clerk got him a chair.”

Gandall continued to moan. “He said, ‘I need to lay down, I feel hot,’ ” McCloskey said. “His eyes were rolling back.” Several guards checked the old man, leaving without showing much concern, he said.

Ten minutes later, McCloskey said, he saw Gandall carried away on a stretcher, an oxygen mask covering his face. “I don’t feel they responded quickly enough to his complaints,” McCloskey said.

“It might have been possible that they didn’t notice his problems at first,” Filippini said, “but from what I was told by commanders at the site, when they did notice he was having difficulty, we got a nurse down there.”

Gandall was taken to Harbor--UCLA Medical Center, where he underwent emergency surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer. Pathologist Thomas acknowledged the possibility that hard pokes by nightsticks might have “precipitated” the ulcer’s rupture. He added that the ulcer was most likely a “pre-existing condition.”

Lacking signs of bruises, Thomas insists the autopsy showed that “there was no police brutality that had anything to do with his death.” Coroner spokesman Bob Dambacher said Gandall recovered from surgery long before he succumbed to heart disease. “It’s a natural death, that’s all,” he said.

Transferred from Harbor General after he showed faint signs of recovery, Gandall shuttled during the next two months between a convalescent home and Long Beach Community Hospital. Several Spanish Civil War comrades visited the weakened old soldier. One was Day.

“He had a lot of tubes in him,” Day said. “It was terrible to see such an end to someone with such high principles.” Day left a stack of left-wing books for the man to read.

Wild Bill Gandall died March 29. A volunteer nurse found him alone and unconscious, slumped in a wheelchair in the hospital’s dining room.

Kate Gandall flew from New York to talk with lawyers, gather her father’s few possessions and make funeral arrangements. She chose a remote plot in Riverside, ordering a tombstone with the inscription: “Lifelong Anti-Fascist.” She huddled with several of her father’s anti-war friends, using her editing skills to splice together a videotape of the old man and his history.

The video progresses from grainy black-and-white film clips of Marines and Spanish Civil War troops to color images of her father’s last stand on the Federal Building steps. One of the final scenes captures his slow crawl upward. Copies were distributed at a sparsely attended press conference called as an opening shot in the effort to salvage something from Wild Bill Gandall’s death.

“This was what he wanted,” Kate Gandall said. “He wanted to do something dramatic, one more thing. He always said you need a moment of drama to build a movement. He would have approved.”