William Pierce of National Alliance is dead

By Dennis B. Roddy
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Writer
July 23, 2002

William L. Pierce, the former physics professor who left academia for the darker reaches of neo-Nazism and became the founder of The National Alliance and the model for far-right terrorists including Timothy McVeigh, died today at his compound in Mill Point, W.Va. He was 69.

"About 10 days ago he was diagnosed with late-stage, incurable cancer," said a Pierce associate, Roger DeMarais. "He came home Saturday with not hope and he died today."

DeMarais said Pierce spent his last week dictating orders, including how to select a successor.

A onetime follower of American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, Pierce developed the National Alliance from an earlier organization, the National Youth Alliance, created during a 1969 meeting in suburban Pittsburgh called by fellow racist Willis Carto.

Pierce came to preside over an octopus of ventures, including a publishing house, a weekly radio broadcast and a skinhead music label called Resistance Records. It was under a pen name, Andrew Macdonald, that Pierce drew his greatest notoriety.

Pierce authored "The Turner Diaries," a racist fantasy of a white uprising against Blacks and Jews that included a truck bomb attack on a federal building. Timothy McVeigh, who delivered a truck bomb to the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, drew his inspiration for the attack from the book, as did an earlier American terrorist, Robert Mathews.

Mathews was founder of "The Silent Brotherhood," also known as "The Order." The group carried out a series of bank robberies and the murder of a Jewish talk show host in Denver before its members were killed or captured.