The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  AS THE DAY the burglary was to take place grew close, there were logistical challenges the burglars could not remove. First, residents of the building, all of whom used the same door and open interior stairwell the burglars would have to use, might come and go at any time during the evening. These spontaneous actions could not be avoided; they could only be endured, and the burglars could not be sure they could be endured securely. The burglars’ greatest protection against this problem would be Forsyth breaking in so quickly the night of the burglary that any burglar, including him, would be seen in the hallway only fleetingly. That’s why they cheered him on each night in the attic as he repeatedly picked the lock, continuing to reduce the time it would take to break in.

  Another unsolvable challenge was huge: County courthouse guards stood twenty-four hours a day across the street from the FBI office at a guard station immediately inside the clear glass front door of the Delaware County Courthouse. The burglars carefully observed the movements of the courthouse guards for weeks. Finally, they reached a certain and unwelcome conclusion: It would be possible for the courthouse guard to see the burglars when they arrived and when they left. Not only was the front door of the FBI building visible to these officers, but at least one of the rooms in the FBI office, the corner room, also was visible from the courthouse guard’s observation station.

  They could do nothing to avoid being within the line of sight of the courthouse guard who would be on duty that night. There was no time when they could be certain they could rush in or out of the building when the guard would not be watching them. They realized they should expect him to be watching them, from just yards away—as they entered the building, as they left the building with overhead lights shining on them both inside and outside the door, as they loaded the getaway cars, and as they drove away.

  The best the burglars could hope for was that the guard on duty the night of the burglary would look at them in a mindless, distracted way and would not think about whether it was odd that four people were walking out of this small apartment/office building late at night, each of them carrying suitcases so heavy they strained to carry them and lift them into the trunks of waiting cars. Surely average burglars would have refused to bet their success on whether a guard would be mindless as he watched them. Not these people. The certainty of having their crime observed by a trained government county guard did not prompt them to question moving ahead.

  MEANWHILE, the burglars’ plans progressed. Then, just a few days before the burglary was to take place, they were confronted with what could have been a fatal threat to their plans. A person who had been part of the group from the beginning arrived at a regular working session one evening and announced that he no longer would be part of the group. This was stunning information. He was a man of few words, and if the burglars’ memories are accurate, he offered few, if any, words of explanation that night as he told them he was quitting and then left. Perhaps even more remarkable is that none of the burglars expressed their shock to him that evening. None of them remembers asking him why he was leaving. Nor do they remember asking him to agree not to reveal the group’s secret plans. He had been with them since that first meeting in December. He knew every detail of what they were about to do. And now he was gone. Only two of them, the Raineses, saw him again.

  As with the other threats the burglars faced—Davidon being named recently in an indictment in a sensational antiwar case; the likelihood of a courthouse guard watching them as they arrived and left the FBI building; the possibility that people who lived in the building could see them at any time that night in the hallway outside the FBI office—they seemed to absorb this news and convince themselves that his leaving the group was just another problem to endure. Though they realized that he now had the power to destroy the burglary—not to mention their lives—the burglars don’t remember discussing his departure with one another after he left. That puzzles some of them now. By leaving, he ripped open that curtain they had intended to keep securely closed forever to protect them and their secrets. He now stood outside their curtain with full knowledge of what they were planning to do. They had no idea what he might do with that knowledge.

  IT WAS ALMOST March 8. Most of the burglars remember feeling confident the week before the burglary. Perhaps the source of their confidence was simply strong determination braced by courage. Perhaps they also were a little reckless. Some combination of unusual qualities made it possible for them to view the unavoidable threats they would face as worth the risk.

  Any one of the threats that were beyond the burglars’ control could easily have defeated them. But none of the burglars ever asked the group to consider whether any of those threats posed too great a risk. Failure seemed to be beyond their imagination.

  5

  Time Out for White House Meeting

  BY THE WEEKEND before the Media burglary, William Davidon had few worries about how the break-in would go. Without that confidence, he probably would not have been willing to travel to Washington that Saturday morning for a meeting at the White House. The circumstances were unusual. Here was the mastermind of the burglary of the Media FBI office, just two days before the burglary was to take place, on his way to meet with President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Even more improbable, Davidon and the other two people who would meet with Kissinger that morning were all unindicted coconspirators in the recent indictment that charged Catholic peace movement activists with conspiring to bomb tunnels under federal buildings and kidnap Kissinger. These three people were supposed to have been part of the alleged plot.

  Was this a bad joke or a stroke of clever diplomacy between a key architect of the Vietnam War and some of the strongest opponents of the war?

  Davidon had a lot on his mind as he boarded an Amtrak train at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station that Saturday morning. He was ambivalent about this meeting. He was very busy. He still had burglary duties to perform that weekend. The meeting with Kissinger, he assumed, might be only a media stunt, one of those staged events that take place not because something important happened but, instead, to give the impression later that something important happened. He didn’t think the three of them would influence Kissinger, but he welcomed the chance to try, as he welcomed any chance to make the case against the war. So he said yes to the invitation. Besides, as a chief architect of the escalation of the war since Nixon became president, Kissinger had indirectly played a major role in Davidon’s increasingly narrowing the focus of his life to efforts to stop the Vietnam War. How could he say no to a meeting with Kissinger? Frankly, given the indictment, Davidon was a little surprised that Kissinger had agreed to it. That he did suggested that, in addition to his war strategy talents, Kissinger might have a sense of humor.

  There already were signs of wit on Kissinger’s part about the indictment. Shortly after it was announced, he feigned seriousness when he told reporters he understood that the plot to kidnap him had been created by “three sex-starved nuns.” When that remark was criticized, he wrote a letter to Terence Cardinal Cooke, the archbishop of New York City, apologizing for it. Some nuns wondered why he apologized to Cooke instead of to them. He found another way to joke about his possible kidnapping. He told reporters that following the announcement of the indictment, his staff had written to President Nixon “stating that under no conditions am I to be ransomed.” The target of the alleged plot didn’t seem to be taking it very seriously.

  Davidon and the two other activists, Tom Davidson and Sister Beverly Bell, met outside a side entrance to the White House that morning and told guards they had an appointment with Kissinger. When they passed through the first door, a metal detector set off an alarm. The problem was easily detected. Davidson had brought a bag of blue-and-white metal buttons that were boldly emblazoned with the question “Kidnap Kissinger?” The guards laughed when he opened the bag and revealed the buttons. They all wanted one. Davidson obliged, and for at least a few hours that Saturday uniformed White House guards
wore the buttons as they monitored security.

  The three were cleared by Secret Service agents before they were escorted to the room where they waited for Kissinger. Apparently security at the White House was a bit lax on Saturdays. When Department of Justice officials learned a few days later that White House guards had worn “Kidnap Kissinger?” buttons, they were not amused. They probably also were not amused that Kissinger had met with people the department had officially said were part of a plot to kidnap him.

  This rather unusual meeting was arranged by Brian McDonnell, a twenty-seven-year-old pacifist from Philadelphia, who had fasted in the spring of 1970 for thirty-seven days in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, in protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. He had sat on the ground day after day encouraging people to discuss the war. During that time, he and Kissinger were introduced to each other by a mutual acquaintance, actress Shirley MacLaine. Kissinger occasionally spent evenings with McDonnell at his Quaker meetinghouse living quarters in Georgetown. McDonnell said he despaired about not being able to get Kissinger into the “nonviolence bag,” and Kissinger said he despaired at not being able to “build a bridge between those who care and those who do,” a dichotomy McDonnell rejected. Despite their philosophical differences, a warm friendship developed between them. Just a few months after they met, McDonnell’s wife, Alice, was brutally murdered in Philadelphia. Kissinger quietly went to the memorial service without drawing public attention to his presence. He continued to be in touch occasionally with McDonnell until McDonnell died in Los Angeles in 2003.

  It probably was because of Kissinger’s affection for McDonnell that he agreed to meet with these three people who allegedly had conspired to kidnap him. It’s also a safe bet he would not have met with them if he had believed there was a real plot to kidnap him. For his part, McDonnell, like Davidon, always was looking for ways to keep the conversation going between people who opposed the war and those who conducted it. It was in that spirit that he arranged for this unusual group of four to meet.

  After setting off the metal detector, the three activists were escorted to the Situation Room in the basement of the White House, a room with a very large map of the world on one wall, and where many Vietnam War strategies had been discussed and crucial decisions made. As they waited for Kissinger, they were served tea in fine china teacups that bore the seal of the U.S. Navy, a fitting touch for Davidon, a Navy veteran. When Kissinger entered the room, the three activists stood and each of them shook his hand. He took a seat at the head of the table, in front of the map of the world, with Davidon seated beside him. Kissinger immediately turned to Sister Beverly, sitting on his other side, and apologized to her for his flippant “sex-starved nuns” comment. He then set the parameters for their conversation. He would not talk about any aspect of the kidnap/bombing conspiracy case with them. Other than that, he said, anything could be discussed. Kissinger said they could make the conversation public, but he would not initiate doing so. For the next seventy-five minutes they talked about the war.

  Davidon remembers being impressed at first with the fact that Kissinger seemed to be “genuinely listening to us.” He thinks it was very early in the meeting that he tried to discuss nuclear warfare, the issue that was Davidon’s deepest concern. Kissinger, he recalls, refused to dismiss the possibility of the United States using nuclear warfare in the continuing war in Vietnam. Everything, he said, was being considered, and he wasn’t willing to discuss reasons for removing nuclear options.

  On the surface, the conversation seemed casual. “My guess is that he was pleased it was not a shouting match, that we were having a thoughtful discussion,” Davidon said years later. “But as I looked around the room, I wondered what other kinds of discussions went on in that room. I felt Kissinger was one of the brighter people in the Nixon administration, brighter and more skillful at doing terrible things.”

  The next week, in an interview with Mary McGrory, then a Washington Star columnist, Davidon described the White House meeting as “bittersweet” and Kissinger as “an excellent listener.…He is part of a decision-making system which is grossly brutal. There we were, accused of wanting to bomb, sitting with a man whose policies had brought about a bombing that was actually going on as we talked. I was talking to a man who considers mass murder in certain circumstances justified. I told him I thought the war had no legitimacy.” (McGrory had wanted to talk with Davidon the following Monday, but he told her he would be too busy—at a burglary, but he didn’t say that—to talk with her then, so he made an appointment to call her the night after the burglary. The call to her was noted by the FBI in its records of his phone calls.)

  Tom Davidson, then twenty-five, thought the conversation with Kissinger was surreal. Years later, he described it as “nice and sort of fun. It was polite discourse, but then he mines Haiphong after the nice discourse.” He felt that in the end “we had a polite conversation with an engaging enemy.”

  What Davidson recalls most vividly about the session was Davidon’s attempts to get Kissinger to discuss the United States’ use of napalm in Vietnam. During that part of their meeting, Davidson was surprised by Davidon and appalled by Kissinger. When they worked together as activists, he had always seen Davidon as a “straightforward, easygoing guy.” Now, in the presence of Kissinger, he saw an unexpected intensity in Davidon’s usually relaxed face. “He came on pretty strong, in ways I hadn’t seen. All of a sudden his face changes, and he’s hammering Kissinger about the use of napalm in Vietnam.”

  Napalm was a very controversial aspect of the war. Now, in the Situation Room in the White House, Davidon and his two fellow activists faced a top official who had the power to stop the use of the syrupy jellied gasoline that was manufactured for the government by Dow Chemical Company and dropped from planes to burn forests, villages, and people. Davidon described the terrible damage caused by napalm. “It was a little scary watching it,” said Davidson of Kissinger’s reaction to Davidon’s well-documented comments about the inhumane use of the weapon. “Kissinger just absorbed it and went on. He kept deflecting the facts.…To be four feet across a table from him. I was afraid I would scream.”

  The exchange about napalm was especially meaningful for Davidson because it was when he had learned about his government’s use of napalm in Vietnam that he abandoned his life plans and rushed into the peace movement, and eventually into acts of resistance against the war. A few years before that White House meeting, when he was a college student in North Dakota, Davidson had listened one day as a speaker on his campus described how the United States used napalm in Vietnam. He said it was routinely dropped from planes and that it seriously damaged the landscape but, more important, seriously burned and often killed Vietnamese children. The speaker’s comments angered Davidson. He remembers passionately confronting the speaker: “Our government would never do that!”

  “The person insisted it was true,” he recalls. “I went to the library and found photographs and articles that said it was true.” He was astonished. Like many Americans who became opponents of the war, Davidson had a gut reaction to learning that such brutality was being carried out by his government. Like Forsyth, he decided he had to leave college and work against the war. He remembers thinking, “If my government is doing that, I have to stop it.” That realization changed the direction of his life for the next fifteen years, if not forever. He refused to fight in the war and became a conscientious objector, the first in North Dakota since World War II. The son of an Episcopal bishop, he worked full-time for ten years trying to stop the war, participating in various acts of civil disobedience and resistance, including raiding draft boards in 1970. Davidson, like some of the FBI burglars, increasingly had found the locus of his activism in the Catholic peace movement. After the war ended, he delivered medical supplies to Vietnam, helping to meet a critical need in the war-devastated country.

  Kissinger later wrote that he met with the three activists as an attempt “to transcend the bitte
rness of the public dialogue” about the war. In his 1979 memoir White House Years, he wrote of the meeting:

  Gently, they expressed their deep and passionate opposition to the war; but they had no idea how to end it. The problem for me, on the other hand, was to translate inchoate ideas—however deeply felt—into concrete policy. Ours was the perpetually inconclusive dialogue between statesmen and prophets, between those who operate in time and through attainable stages and those who are concerned with truth and the eternal.

  Kissinger’s guests that day were, indeed, concerned about truth. In fact, they yearned for truth in the conduct of the war and in the administration’s dealings with Congress, with the public, and in war negotiations. Their concerns about the role of truth were heightened three months after the White House meeting when the lies that were so much a part of government communication about the Vietnam War from its beginning were revealed when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the war. It was then that Kissinger referred to Ellsberg as “the most dangerous man in America,” a comment that became the title of the 2009 documentary about Ellsberg’s act of resistance in releasing the secret history.

  Thoughts about “the eternal,” which Kissinger strangely seemed to think were a part of the antiwar activists’ motivation, were irrelevant to his three visitors that Saturday, as he must have known. That interpretation by him, one often made by secular people about people they think are motivated primarily by religious views, allows the listener to dismiss the speaker as preoccupied with heaven and hell and therefore irrelevant to and not interested in the world as it is and as it could be. It was, however, the present, not eternity, that consumed and motivated these three people, just as the present consumed Kissinger. They were interested in the world as it is—as it was then—and how Kissinger was affecting the world by escalating the war. They did not see themselves as prophets. They too were interested in the attainable, but they saw peace as attainable through negotiations that included a willingness to reverse policy, admit error, tell the truth about the past and present of the war. Most important, they wanted the Nixon administration to be willing to stop the bombing, stop the fighting. They thought that what the United States had started it could and should end.