The Burglary (5 page)
Authors: Betty Medsger
Despite Davidon's initial reluctance to embrace the methods of the Catholic activists, by the time he decided to work with them, he had concluded that no other part of the peace movement was as effective or inspired as much hope during that hopeless time as they did. He regarded them as the most radical and courageous people he had met in the peace movement. He continued to work with the
Resistance and other groups, but now he found a new home with these activistsâpriests and nuns, ex-priests and ex-nuns, the young sons and daughters of working-class Catholics, and other people who embraced their commitment to nonviolent protest. They reenergized Davidon's activism and gave him the hope he was searching for. Reluctantly, he became a burglar.
As he became more involved with the Catholics, Davidon's identity among his colleagues in the Philadelphia peace movement became even more confusing. For years, some people had assumed he was a Quaker
because of his involvement with Quaker peace organizations. Or was he an Episcopalian? He occasionally worked with members of the
Episcopal Peace Fellowship, especially enjoying working with a peace activist Episcopal priest, the late Reverend
David Gracie. But now some people assumed Davidon was a Catholic. He became used to, and somewhat amused by, having a mistaken identity. Actually, he was a secular Jewish humanist who was willing to work with anyone, as were these Catholics, who shared his passion for non
violent protest in an effort to stop the war and the use of nuclear weapons. Probably no one from the scientific, academic, or Quaker organizations with which he had long been affiliated guessed he had added another identity: burglar.
THE DESIRE OF DAVIDON
and many other peace activists, including the people in the Catholic peace movement, to find stronger forms of resistance came in part from a powerful cascade of extreme developments from late 1969 through 1970, the year before the Media burglary. These developments greatly intensified reaction to the war. So extreme was that period that it was hard to keep track of what was normal in the military, in the White House, or in resistance to the war. People often thought nothing more shocking could happen. And then it would. This remarkable cascade of events started in a small hamlet in Vietnam, moved to a small campus in Ohio, to a Mississippi campus, to the financial district of New York, and then to the White House, where President Nixon dismissed most of the events as inconsequential:
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In November 1969, the world was horrified to learn that American soldiers had massacred 504 unarmed Vietnamese children, women, and elderly people in March 1968 in My Lai, a small hamlet in Vietnam. Several old men were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the backs of their heads while cowering in ditches, and some young girls were raped and then killed. Though the evidence of the massacre was well established when it was first reported by journalist
Seymour Hersh, President Nixon accused the press of inflating the case in order to “chip away” at support for the war. When Lieutenant
William Calley, the commander of the group, was convicted of premeditated murder in My Lai of twenty-two people (he was charged with killing 150) and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, Nixon
intervened and reduced his sentence to three months and ordered that he serve his time under house arrest instead of in prison.
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American officials lashed out at antiwar activists with extreme rhetoric in 1970. One of the most egregious attacks came from California governor Ronald Reagan, who in March 1970 declared that “if it takes a bloodbath to silence the demonstrators, let's get it over with.”
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Three members of the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground)â
Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and
Terry Robbinsâwere killed in an explosion they accidentally set off while making a bomb in a town house in New York's Greenwich Village on March 6, 1970.
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President Nixon announced in a televised address on April 30, 1970, that the United States was invading Cambodia after months of secretly bombing it. In immediate response, more antiwar protests took place the next day than ever before, including in towns and on campuses where antiwar protests had never taken place. This expansion of the ground war into Cambodia, along with the impact of the secret bombing the United States had been carrying out there for several months, killed many thousands of people, ravaged the countryside, and weakened the country in ways that set the stage for the takeover of Cambodia by the
Khmer Rouge and the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1978.
By the end of the war, the United States had dropped more bombs on Cambodia than it dropped in all of World War II in Europe and Asia.
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Two days after Nixon's Cambodia speech, Ohio governor
James Rhodes declared martial law at Kent State University and ordered the
Ohio National Guard to patrol the campus. Rhodes called the students “worse than the brown shirt and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst kind of people we harbor in America.”
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A day later, four students were killed and nine were injured, some of them permanently disabled, on the Kent State campus by National Guard gunfire as students assembled peacefully that Monday for a demonstration at noon. It was the first time Americans were killed while protesting the war.
A few days later, according to White House presidential counsel
John Dean, behind closed doors at a Department of Justice meeting, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called one of the slain
students a “slut” and seemed to have little interest in how they had been killed. No one was ever convicted of the killings.
 â¢Â Shortly after the shootings at Kent State, Representative
Tip O'Neill, Democrat from Massachusetts, said this on the House floor: “Look at the situation. No nation can destroy us militarily, but what can destroy us from within is happening now.”
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Nixon, at the urging of his staff, formed a
Commission on Campus Unrest to examine the causes of unrest, including the killings at Kent State. He rejected his commission's conclusions that White House policies and current social conditions in the United States were the cause of most student protest.
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Two students were killed several days after the Kent State shootings by local and state police one night at Jackson State University, a black campus in Jackson, Mississippi. Despite the fact that no students shot at police, and there was no evidence any students possessed guns, city and state police armed with carbines, submachine guns, shotguns, and service revolvers shot more than 460 rounds of ammunition at the windows of the dormitory where one of the killings took place. (The second student was shot dead on a nearby street as he carried milk home from a grocery store.) The shots by law enforcement officers shattered
every
window on one side of the dormitory. As at Kent State, no one was ever convicted for the killings.
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The Friday after the killings at Kent State, scores of students were bludgeoned in New York's financial district by hundreds of construction workers who rampaged through the streets attacking students with crowbars and other heavy tools wrapped in American flags. They did so as the students sang at a peaceful noon vigil at a day of mourning called for by New York mayor
John Lindsay to honor the slain Kent State students. To prevent the people they injured from receiving medical care, the construction workersâmost of them were from the building site of the Twin Towersâyanked down a Red Cross banner outside an emergency clinic that had been hastily set up at Trinity Church by New York University doctors. When
Michael Belknap, a lawyer with the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, tried to help a bleeding student, he was knocked down and stomped on his back by construction workers. “Someone yelled, âHe's a commie bastard. We ought to kill him,'Â ” Belknap told a reporter. The
Wall Street Journal
reported that financial district workers threw streams of ticker tape and
data processing punch cards from their windows in celebration of the violence taking place in the streets below.
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Twenty-two of those New York construction workers were honored at the White House a few weeks later by President Nixon. He thanked them for showing their patriotism the day they beat students. He gave them flag lapel pins, and they gave him a yellow hard hat like the ones they wore the day they assaulted students, seventy of whom were seriously injured.
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Vice President
Spiro Agnew wrote a letter of thanks to the union official who organized the attacks on the students,
Peter Brennan, head of the
New York City Building Trades Council. He congratulated him for his “impressive display of patriotism” the day of the attacks. When Nixon was reelected in 1972, the president rewarded Brennan, who was a leader of the movement to increase the number of labor Democrats who voted for Nixon in 1972, by appointing him secretary of labor.
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On August 24, 1970, a bomb exploded in front of Sterling Hall, a building that housed the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A thirty-three-year-old physics researcher and father of three young children was killed and four people were injured. Three people were convicted for the crime and a fourth suspect is still being sought by the FBI.
That was America in 1970.
It was an extraordinary time in the life of the country. Not since the Civil War had Americans been so divided. Nearly all of the divisions were related to the war. It became clear that year that the war that had been tearing Vietnam apart for many years was now also tearing apart the soul of Americaâin the heartland and in the cities, from coast to coast. Frustrations were higher and hopes lower in the peace movement than they had been at any time. Many people wondered if this war, which by now in reports from Vietnam was often called a bloodbath, would end.
People had been asking: Can there be peace in Vietnam? Now people also asked: Can there be peace at home?
IT WAS IN 1970
, that mad time, to use Daniel Berrigan's words, that Davidon became aware of another war: the war against dissent. As he moved from peace group to peace group that year, searching for more effective
ways to escalate opposition to war, he repeatedly heard a very troubling rumor. He heard it from people in various types of peace organizationsâacademic, scientific, religious, antidraft. They told him there were growing fears that there were FBI spies in their midst. Fear of informers was having a poisonous impact, he was told. People worried about whether the person who stood beside them at a demonstration was an informer. Some wondered about their neighbor, their colleague at work, or the new volunteer in the peace organization officeâwere they informers? Trust was fraying. Some people considered colleagues with such concerns to be paranoid and dismissed them.
Davidon listened carefully, but he was cautious. At first, he did not take the concerns very seriously. True to his reluctance to accept either speculation or conspiracy theories, he thought people might be exaggerating, or that their frustrations about the war, after so many years of failing to stop it, might be fueling irrational fears. But the concerns were repeated to him again and again. Very reasonable people from a diverse range of peace organizations expressed them.
By the fall of 1970, Davidon no longer doubted what people were telling him. He concluded that the rumor probably was true: Peace organizations had been infiltrated by informers. One of the nation's most powerful leaders, J. Edgar Hoover, he now feared, might have turned the
power of the FBI against people who opposed the war. Davidon thought about it constantly. If it turned out that the U.S. government was suppressing Americans' right to express dissentâincluding and especially dissent about the most crucial issues: the war, the use of apocalyptic weapons in the war, and racial equalityâthen much was at stake. Without the freedom to dissent without being spied on, Davidon thought, dissent was empty, erased, useless. Such spying, he thought, was gravely hypocritical in a nation that expressed great pride in being the land of the free. How could a government that claimed to be fighting a war for people's freedom in another country at the same time suppress its own people's right to dissent?
Finally, Davidon decided that it was as important to answer this questionâwas the FBI suppressing dissent?âas it was to oppose the war. Most people would have recognized the enormous inherent impediments to answering the question and concluded it would be impossible to do so, but Davidon decided the implications were simply too big, too importantâtoo damaging to the heart of democracyâto let it go unanswered. As he had done when he became deeply concerned about the development and use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, he now quietly did what he thought
was a citizen's obligation: He took responsibility for finding the answer to the question.
Davidon focused his scientifically trained mind on how to prove or disprove the persistent rumor that the government was spying on Americans for reasons unrelated to suspicion of crime. He analyzed what was known about how J. Edgar Hoover operated.
Little had been written about the FBI or the director, except for what had been ghostwritten by FBI staff and by the people the director referred to inside the bureau as “friendly” journalists. Prior to 1971, there had been very little public criticism of the director or the bureau except for occasional commentary by
Alan Barth in the
Washington Post
and Tom Wicker in the
New York Times.
The only reporting that raised questions about the FBI had been done by
Jack Nelson in the
Los Angeles Times
, a book by Nelson and
Jack Bass, and
Fred Cook's book and articles in the
Nation
magazine. As FBI policy dictated, journalists had been hampered by never having access to FBI records or officials, even after the Freedom of Information Act became law in 1966. From what he had absorbed about the director, Davidon had the impression that he was an extremely bureaucratic manager and an extremely conservative ideologue. That combination, he thought, could be a potentially potent and dangerous pair of defining characteristics when embodied in an extraordinarily popular and powerful person at the pinnacle of American law enforcement. He thought that if Hoover was a consummate bureaucrat, perhaps he kept and distributed within the bureau detailed records of his opinions and his operations. And, he thought, perhaps he also required those who carried out his orders to file detailed reports.