The Burglary (4 page)

Pope Paul VI, successor to
Pope John XXIII, pushed the Catholic peace mandate further. As the first pope to visit the United States, in October 1965, at a mass he celebrated before a large audience at Yankee Stadium he called for the United States to end the war in Vietnam. He issued the call again in a major speech at the United Nations at its twentieth anniversary ceremony and when he met privately with President Johnson at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. At the United Nations, Pope Paul invoked remarks from John
F. Kennedy: “ ‘Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.' It suffices to remember,” the pope told the international gathering, “that the blood of millions of men, that the numberless and unheard-of sufferings, useless slaughter and frightful ruin, are the sanction of the pact which unites you with an oath which must change the future of the world.” The pope raised his fist high and in a passionate voice said, “No more war, war never again! Peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.”

Spellman had always given the remarks of popes the highest respect, but now he made an exception. Shortly after Pope Paul's forceful antiwar speeches in New York, Spellman publicly stated an opinion that was diametrically opposed to what the pope had said: “Less than victory is inconceivable.”
Standing before troops in Vietnam two months later, Spellman said, “This war in Vietnam … is, I believe, a war for civilization.” He had been blessing the war for years, and had even urged its start many years earlier with President Eisenhower and members of his cabinet.
Spellman's role in promoting the war was so important, wrote
James Carroll, that “the Vietnam war began as Spellman's war before it was Lyndon Johnson's war, or even Robert McNamara's war.” Carroll, a
Boston Globe
columnist and author, is the son of the late General
Joseph F. Carroll, confidant of Hoover and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War.

Despite the fiercely pro-war pronouncements of Spellman, many American Catholics enthusiastically embraced the new ideas from Rome. In addition to responding to the push for peace from Rome, they were encouraged by the teachings on peace of
Dorothy Day, founder of the
Catholic Worker movement, who served poor people in soup kitchens in New York and other cities, and by the teachings of
Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk based at Our Lady of Gethsemane Abbey on a mountaintop in Kentucky. Formed primarily by young Catholics, the Catholic peace movement was based on a deep commitment to nonviolent protest. Often missing in histories of that era's antiwar movement, it was one of the most effective parts of the peace movement during the Vietnam War.

As the Catholic peace movement grew in influence in the mid-1960s, Spellman was infuriated. Jesuit authorities in New York and Rome were appalled when he demanded that they silence and banish to another country the Reverend Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and the best-known leader in the Catholic peace movement, but they complied. He was exiled to South America and, on Spellman's orders, his whereabouts were kept secret from his family and friends and he was prohibited from communicating with
them before he left. As he waited to leave, no Jesuit community would let him live at their residence. Finally, Jesuits at Georgetown University let him stay in a Quonset hut on the edge of the campus.

Spellman's authoritarian treatment of Berrigan, especially his demands that he be banished and forbidden from doing peace work, was a turning point for many in the American church and in the Catholic peace movement. Even some Catholics who didn't agree with Berrigan's views on the war were upset by how Spellman had treated him. Protests against the cardinal for his action against Berrigan were one of the first signs that American Catholics were taking seriously the teachings of the
Second Vatican Council, including those that called for Catholics to be active rather than passive in regard to church teachings and authority.

After repeated protests in support of Berrigan throughout the country, but especially in New York, his supporters placed a full-page ad in the
New York Times
on December 12, 1965, that was headlined “Open Letter to the Authorities of the Archdiocese of New York and the Jesuit Community in New York City.” Stated his supporters in the ad, “The issue here is simply freedom of conscience.” They asked the cardinal a crucial question: Could a priest “speak out on Vietnam only if he supports the American action there?”

Spellman eventually relented and let Berrigan return the next year. He returned to New York on March 8, 1966, and three weeks later he led a peace march of interfaith clergy, people who had opposed his exile and warmly welcomed him back to help lead the peace movement. As
Murray Polner and
Jim O'Grady wrote in their book on the Berrigan brothers,
Disarmed and Dangerous,
the large group walked by numerous churches and synagogues and then stopped to pray on Fifth Avenue in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral, where, as the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman presided.

Davidon was attracted to the Catholic peace activists because of their search, by late 1969, for more aggressive forms of nonviolent resistance. He first met people in the Catholic peace movement a few months after some of its members, including Daniel Berrigan, were convicted for the resistance act for which the Catholic movement is probably best known—the public raid in May 1968 of the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland.
Nine of them—including Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip—burned draft files with homemade napalm in the draft board parking lot while they waited for police to arrive and arrest them. Because Davidon had recently been impressed by the writings of the Berrigan brothers, he said yes when a woman who was part of the Catholic peace movement invited him to have
dinner with about a dozen members of the movement. He had been especially impressed by the play Daniel Berrigan wrote,
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine
. It drew directly from the transcript of the group's 1969 trial, including this statement made by him to journalists as the nine watched the records burn and waited for the police to arrive:

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”

Davidon found the resistance ideas and methods of the Catonsville Nine compelling. Berrigan's poetic writing and the stark trial testimony resonated deeply with Davidon's values. Years later, he recalls that the play made him “take seriously these kinds of things as a possibility” for himself. “I don't think I would have even considered such steps had it not been for Dan Berrigan.”

Davidon shared Berrigan's deep concern for the people in the peace movement who had despaired and turned to violent protest. Berrigan spoke of his respect for them and also of his concern about their violence in a letter he wrote to people in the Weather Underground and released for publication while he himself was underground as he briefly avoided beginning his sentence for his Catonsville conviction.
He sent the letter a couple months after the March 1970 explosion at the Greenwich house where three members of the Weather Underground were killed when a bomb they were building accidentally exploded. He was critical of violence in both government and the peace movement.

“Dear Brothers and Sisters, Let me express deep gratitude that the chance has come to speak to you across the underground, …” he wrote. There was a need, he continued, for “a new kind of anger which is both useful in communicating and imaginative and slow-burning, to fuel the long haul of our lives”:

Those ideas meshed completely with Davidon's as he searched for new, stronger ways to protest and hoped violence would be stemmed in both the government and on the fringes of the peace movement.

WHEN DAVIDON FIRST MET
people in the Catholic group, he was impressed by their commitment to nonviolent resistance. He was startled, though, when he discovered that recently they had used a new method: burglary. Their goal with this approach was to slow down the operation of the draft system by breaking into draft boards at night while they were closed and stealing as many Selective Service records as possible. Unlike the symbolic acts they had carried out earlier, including Catonsville, in this new phase of the Catholic resistance they hoped to flee, never be arrested, and continue to steal more records in order to make the conscription of young men more difficult.

At first, Davidon thought the group was what he was looking for: people engaged in aggressive nonviolence. But burglary? That was not something he ever wanted to do. It was not what his and their heroes, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, had done. Nor was it what either Daniel or Philip Berrigan had done. The brothers had engaged in public resistance and then waited to be arrested. But as Davidon examined what the Catholic
group had accomplished, he had to admit that they had used burglary very effectively. More than five hundred people in this loosely structured movement, located primarily in the Northeast and upper Midwest, had burglarized dozens of draft boards and removed thousands of Selective Service records. Despite FBI investigations, very few of them had been arrested.

As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft board office was always locked. There was no padlock to replace, as they had done at a draft board raid in Philadelphia a few months earlier, and no one in the group was able to pick the lock. The break-in technique they settled on at that office must be unique in the annals of burglary. Several hours before the burglary was to take place, one of them wrote a note and tacked it to the door they wanted to enter: “Please don't lock this door tonight.” Sure enough, when the burglars arrived that night, someone had obediently left the door unlocked. The burglars entered the office with ease, stole the Selective Service records, and left. They were so pleased with themselves that one of them proposed leaving a thank-you note on the door. More cautious minds prevailed. Miss Manners be damned, they did not leave a note.

Sometimes they destroyed the files they stole. Other times they sent them to the young men whose records they had stolen. Each file was sent with an anonymous letter that explained to the young man that his file had been removed from official files by antiwar activists, and they hoped he would take advantage of this disruption of the system to think carefully about the war and whether he wanted to serve in the military. Each recipient was given contact information for the draft counseling offices closest to his home. Davidon appreciated the irony years later that his last duty in the Navy during World War II was typing separation papers for people leaving military service, and now during the Vietnam War he typed letters trying to discourage people from entering the military.

As Davidon thought about whether he should be willing to raid draft boards with the Catholic activists, he worried that what he once would have opposed doing he now thought might be acceptable. He probed his motivation. Given the madness of those days, he asked himself: Am I moving toward more effective protest, or am I moving down a slippery slope toward violence? The question was chilling. As he contemplated the challenge the question posed, he reminded himself that the war was escalating in new and terrible ways, and national leaders still didn't seem to be listening. He
became convinced that neither he nor his new colleagues, the Catholic peace movement draft board raiders, would let themselves go down that slippery slope. He had come to regard them as so grounded and disciplined in their commitment to nonviolence as both a humane way to live and as a strategy against war and for peace that he did not think it was possible for them to move into violence.

Davidon with daughters Ruth and Sarah (in stroller) near his home on the Haverford College campus around the time of the Media burglary.