The long-drawn Vietnam War created a dramatic backlash in the USA social psyche. Side by side with the civil rights, peace and love movements in the urban city areas and university college campuses, drug use and chemical dependency spread nationwide. Over time, vivid pictures of violence in Vietnam sustained by TV and published reports, and corroborated by returning veterans and Newsweek and Time magazines, plus incessant riots in major USA cities, with drugs playing significant roles in audacious clashes with the police and the military, began to blur the differences between crime, punishment and socialized violence.
First, it was the USA that was underwriting the political and defense risks for South Vietnam. The French had tried earlier and failed. Inside the American society, insurance companies, the lead underwriters of economic and some political risks, were accelerating their organizational evolution, technology and capacity building to cope with a much more complex society.
It is in this milieu that James Payne, a blue-blood and a rising corporate attorney, was charged with doing the unthinkable; pouring a large portion of concentrated sulphuric acid on his would-be lover, Virginia Vitelli, also a rising advertising executive in Manhattan, New York City. His victim lost both eyes and became permanently blind. The dramatic trial that followed this gruesome incident played out for a couple of years, mirroring the loss of sensibilities on crime, violence and punishment in the larger society.
Was the stage for these events set by the socio-psychological impact of the Vietnam War and its frustrations on Jim Payne’s generation? Did Jim Payne’s generation become immune to love, affection, pain and violence? What roles did the Risk Underwriters play?
