The Burglary Read online

  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”:

  I hope your lives are about something more than sabotage. I’m certain it is.…I hope, indeed, that you are as uneasy about its meaning and usefulness.…

  How shall we speak … to the people? We must never refuse, in spite of their refusal of us, to call them our brothers. I must say to you as simply as I know how: if the people are not the main issue, there simply is no main issue and you and I are fooling ourselves.…

  No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being. That’s a very hard statement. At various stages of the movement some have acted as if almost the opposite were true, as people got purer and purer.…

  When madness is the acceptable public
state of mind, we’re all in danger, all in danger; for madness is an infection in the air. And I submit that we all breathe the infection and that the movement has at times been sickened by it too.…In or out of the military, in or out of the movement, it seems to me that we had best call things by their name, and the name of this thing, it seems to me, is the death game, no matter where it appears. And as for myself, I would as soon be under the heel of former masters as under the heel of new ones.…

  The question now is: what can we create? I feel at your side across the miles, and I hope that sometime, sometime in this mad world, in this mad time, it will be possible for us to sit down face to face … and find that our hopes and our sweat, and the hopes and sweat and death and tears and blood of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, have brought to birth that for which we began. Shalom to you.

  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.

  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 activists—priests 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 nonviolent 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:

  • 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 preme
ditated 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.

  • 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.”

  • Three members of the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground)—Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins—were 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.”