The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  As they drove away from Bonnie’s parents’ home, waving goodbye, the Raineses had an enormous sense of relief and gratitude for the promise and moral support they had just received. On the drive to Glen Lake and the respite it promised, they realized again that part of their original willingness to risk arrest and imprisonment came from the confidence they had that these loved ones, her parents and John’s brother and his wife, “cared a great deal about us and our children, and that if the worst happened, those four people would strategize about how to care for the children.” They also realized now—ten years after they met and nine years after they married—that they were able to take the serious risks they took at Media “because we thought our marriage could stand up under considerable stress and pressure.”

  In the backseat, unaware of the lofty thoughts of their parents, Lindsley, Mark, and Nathan couldn’t wait to go swimming in the lake. Bonnie and John felt the same way. At his family’s secluded lakeside home, they thought, at last they would push the pressure of being wanted by the FBI to the back of their minds. They would relax, soak up the sun, motor on the lake, and let the wonderful peacefulness of this green, tranquil, remote place soothe their souls. Exposing J. Edgar Hoover had by now brought on an exhaustion they hoped Glen Lake would cure.

  It was great to see the familiar old red frame house come into view. As they turned up the dirt lane, even the memory that agents from the nearby Traverse City FBI office knew where the house was—they had come here the previous summer looking for Daniel Berrigan, then underground and refusing to voluntarily turn himself in to begin serving his sentence for his Catonsville Nine conviction—didn’t diminish their certainty that they were about to begin the first truly relaxed and happy days they had had since long before the burglary.

  Just twenty-four hours later, it turned into the worst vacation ever.

  The day after they arrived, Bonnie and John, the children, and their two dogs leisurely walked down the hill to the dock after breakfast. They felt so good about being in this old familiar place and knowing that their children also loved being there. Their outboard motor was resting on top of the boat hoist. Nathan was walking behind them, so they aren’t exactly sure how the catastrophe occurred. A two-year-old should not have been able to do what Nathan did. He released the safety catch on the boat hoist, causing the handwheel to whip around powerfully. Nathan’s head got caught in the wheel and he was knocked out. The Raineses blanch many years later as they remember, as though it happened yesterday, the moment they turned around and saw Nathan unconscious on the dock. They thought he was dead. Later that day, a doctor told them that, given the great force that hit his head and whipped his small body, it was amazing he was alive.

  Their station wagon was parked up the hill, near the house, impossible to reach quickly. But Chuck Knight, a neighbor, was at the next dock and, hearing their screams, ran over and said he would drive them to the hospital twenty-three miles away in Traverse City. His car was nearby. John carried the bleeding and unconscious Nathan to Knight’s car. Off they went, speeding down country roads, John cradling Nathan in his arms. Bonnie gathered Lindsley and Mark and the two dogs together and walked with them as fast as she could up to the house, where she told John’s parents what had happened, jumped into the station wagon, and sped away toward the hospital.

  Meanwhile, as Knight raced to the hospital on narrow roads, his car ran out of gas. Bad luck was abundant that day. Knight flagged down a stranger, who drove John and Nathan the remaining miles to the hospital.

  After a few hours at the hospital, they were assured that Nathan would live, but, they were told, he had been injured very seriously. He had sustained severe trauma on the left side of his head. For several weeks he remained paralyzed on his right side and could not speak. Compensating for the paralysis, he began using his left hand and would remain permanently left-handed. It was a very long and slow recovery. Immediately after they left the lake, it included a period of treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore while the entire family lived for several weeks in the pool house on the grounds of Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s Maryland estate. They were there because John Raines had been hired by the Shrivers to help organize an international conference on bioethics in fall 1971 to mark the opening of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, the international center for teaching and studying bioethics the Kennedy family had recently established at Georgetown University.

  In the aftermath of Nathan’s near-catastrophic accident, the Raineses felt a deep longing to provide endless love and safety for their children. During the month at the lake and during the time they lived at the Shrivers’ place, Bonnie Raines remembers, “We gave that little boy a lot of tender loving care.…We realized how incredibly blessed we were that we still had him.” They wrapped all of the children in a strong cocoon of love in an effort to make the memories of Nathan’s tragedy go away and to help all of them feel completely secure. They did so knowing that at that time FBI investigators were frantically looking for the Media burglars.

  They were just a few months beyond having dangerously lived out a principle that was very important to them: that parents’ responsibility to protect and nurture their children should not exempt them from being activists and, in times of crisis, engaging in nonviolent resistance that could entail serious risks, including leaving their children and going to prison. They still believed in that principle now, even as they were more aware than ever of how much their children needed them. During this time, in the aftermath of Nathan’s accident, the Raineses recall, they never regretted what they had done that night in Media, but their hearts ached at times as they thought about the pain their arrest would cause the children and themselves. Resisters together just four months earlier, now they were strong nurturers together desperately hoping they would never be arrested.

  As far as they knew, their involvement in Media was still a locked secret, with the man who dropped out of the group the only person besides the other six burglars who had a key that could lead to the arrest of any of them. But Sargent Shriver, founder of the Peace Corps under John F. Kennedy, and of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the federal agency that created President Johnson’s War on Poverty, shocked John Raines one day that fall. John and Shriver were in the backseat of Shriver’s car, with then liberal and now conservative theologian Michael Novak a passenger in the front seat as all of them were being driven to a meeting related to the upcoming ethics conference. Out of the blue, Shriver, who less than a year later would be George McGovern’s running mate in the presidential election, turned to John Raines and said, “John, I think you may have been involved in that Media FBI thing.”

  During Nathan’s long recovery from his serious injury the summer after the burglary, the Raineses felt an acute need to protect their children—at the same time they were afraid they might be arrested at any moment.

  Raines was astounded. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem like an appropriate time to ask Shriver why he thought that. He decided it was better to let the subject die as quickly as possible. But he and Bonnie have always wondered what made Shriver, whose brothers-in-law John and Robert Kennedy often struggled with Hoover while they were in office, think John was involved in the Media burglary.

  John remembers that after Shriver’s comment that day he forced himself to try not to show his great surprise and said simply, “Sargent, I don’t have the balls for that kind of thing.” Shriver looked at him and said, “Yeah, I think you do.”

  THE RAINESES ALWAYS ASSUMED, based on the interview of John by the two agents, that he was a key suspect. He was, but perhaps his filibustering with the agents had an even deeper impact than he thought. The Raineses never knew, of course, that in a June 2, 1971, memorandum, John was eliminated by investigators as a MEDBURG suspect. That status was confirmed again when his name appeared on a June 28, 1971, list of MEDBURG suspects who had been eliminated.

  13

  Being American While Black and Other Insights from Med
ia

  THE MEDIA FBI FILES were significant for what they revealed about how Hoover operated the FBI rather than for what they revealed about the individuals and organizations the bureau spied on. Little, if any, of the information about people and organizations was about either the planning or the commission of a crime. Very little of it even revealed subversive expression. Much of it was extraordinarily mundane—like the transcription of a tapped conversation of a Philadelphia woman who called a friend and told him, in a phone conversation she did not know was being recorded by the FBI and would be transcribed and placed in an FBI file, that her baby was due in four months. Or the transcribed conversation of a man placing a collect call to “a female identified as Mom,” as the FBI notes explain, in Illinois and asking her to send seventeen dollars so he could get a ride to visit her. She said she would.

  A review of all the Media files revealed that efficient operations, governed by many rules, were created by Hoover to order, absorb, and maintain the bureau’s collection of surveillance files on an ever-expanding number of people. But to what end? Ultimately, this information that outraged Congress and many other people when it was revealed by the Media burglars seemed to be, in a word, useless.

  The spying constituted harassment, invasion of privacy, and violation of the right to dissent, but it had little or no connection to effective law enforcement or intelligence gathering—the important and only official missions of the FBI. The Media files provided the first evidence of what would become clear as much more evidence was gathered later: The FBI’s spying operations did not lead to the prevention of any bombing, for instance, by the Weather Underground or any other group that planted bombs in that era. And the files led to few, if any, arrests after such bombs were detonated. Whatever the FBI was doing as it invaded lives, it was not preventing violent crimes or building cases on which arrests and successful prosecutions could be based. The carefully constructed spying system, aimed primarily against blacks and antiwar activists, seemed to create an illusion—to the FBI—that it was defeating enemies. The files seemed to indicate that Hoover lacked the capacity to shape an approach to either law enforcement or intelligence gathering that safeguarded civil liberties or protected Americans from violence.

  MORE THAN ANYTHING, the Media files offered “the public and Congress an unprecedented glimpse of how the U.S. government watches its citizens—particularly black citizens,” wrote Washington Post journalist William Greider in an analysis of all the files the summer after the burglary. Despite the fact that the files had been removed from a very small bureau office in a predominantly white area, they revealed details of the bureau’s policies and actions that made it clear the FBI conducted massive spying on African Americans, most of it unjustified. It did so in ways, he wrote, that were as unreasonable as it would have been for the bureau to have spied on all lawyers who engaged in politics because, “as everyone knows, some lawyers in politics turn out to be crooks.”

  The overall impression in the Media files of how the FBI regarded black people was that they were dangerous and must be watched continuously. To become targets of the FBI, it wasn’t necessary for African Americans to engage in violent behavior. It wasn’t necessary for them to be radical or subversive. Being black was enough. The overall impression in directives written by Hoover, other headquarters officials, and local FBI officials was that the FBI thought of black Americans as falling into two categories—black people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on other black people for the FBI. The latter group was to be recruited by the bureau to become part of its vast network of untrained informers.

  The files also provided the first documentary evidence of Hoover’s inability, or refusal, to differentiate people as individuals rather than as stereotypes of either a race or an ideology. One of the results of that failure on his part was that any organization devoted to racial equality risked being labeled subversive by the FBI and becoming subject to infiltration by the bureau. Local branch offices of organizations widely known to be constructive and nonviolent were infiltrated by the FBI: the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the NAACP. That pattern, it was learned later, was reflected in bureau behavior for years toward those and other nonviolent organizations throughout the country. It was learned later that NAACP officials had been under continuous FBI surveillance since 1923.

  As required by directives from headquarters, African Americans came under the FBI’s watchful eye everywhere—in churches, in classrooms, on college campuses, in bars, in restaurants, in bookstores, in their places of employment, in stores, in any social setting, in their neighborhoods and at the front doors of their homes. Probably few people suspected that the bill collector at their door was an FBI informer.

  A blanket approach was used for both the spies and the spied-upon. All black people were eligible to be targeted, and in most parts of the country all agents were required to participate in operations designed to spy on black people—mostly by finding and hiring informers to do the spying.

  New bureaucratic terms were created for these operations. Every field office was required to establish a “Racial Squad” to coordinate coverage of what the bureau labeled “Racial Matters.” “Ghetto” informers were a subset of the group the bureau called “Racial Informants.” These informants infiltrated groups the FBI considered to be black nationalist and black revolutionary groups, including in one category groups that were known to be violent as well as ones known to be nonviolent. “Ghetto” informers surveilled people who lived in black neighborhoods.

  Every agent, not only agents on the Racial Squad, was required by headquarters officials to have at least one “ghetto informant” who reported to him. In Philadelphia, the bureau divided the city into fourteen areas, with agents required to establish “ghetto informants” in each. During that period, every agent in the Washington, D.C., office was required to recruit at least six “ghetto informants.”

  Exceptions could be made to the requirement that every agent recruit racial informers, but only under what, in the bureau’s parlance, was considered a special circumstance—the absence of black people in the community served by the bureau office. Despite what would seem obvious as a result of demographics, an exemption from recruiting black people to inform on black people in a community that had no black people could not be taken for granted. A fairly elaborate bureaucratic process was required to assure that an agent who worked in a white area was not penalized for not having black informers. A bureau rule specified, “If an individual RA [resident agency, small FBI offices like Media] covers only a county which does not encompass any municipality containing a ghetto, so specify by memorandum form 170-6 with a copy for the RA’s error folder, so that he will not be charged with failure to perform.”

  Most agents are believed to have taken these requirements seriously. They hired as many racial informers as the bureau stipulated, had frequent contact with their racial informers, and, as required, submitted reports at least once every two weeks on what the informers told them they had observed. There was some cynicism about these operations. Bob Wall, an agent who left the bureau during this era, said some agents “found” their racial informers by selecting names at random from phone books. They listed them in official files as their informers, but never contacted any racial informer and routinely wrote fake reports to fulfill the requirements. The reports—even the real ones—seldom involved serious discoveries that required law enforcement action or crime prevention responses. Perhaps numbed by the volume of reports, officials did not notice the contempt of some agents for this and other time-wasting work required by Hoover and other officials at Washington headquarters.

  One of the assignments given to “ghetto informers” was to ascertain when riots would take place. In one Media file, an official in the Philadelphia office reminded local agents: “Whether or not a riot does occur, the Bureau holds us responsible to keep the Bureau, the Department [of Justice] and the Wh
ite House advised in advance of each demonstration. The Bureau expects this coverage to come through informant sources primarily. In addition, we must advise the Bureau at least every two weeks of existing tensions and conditions which may trigger a riot.” This information “can only come from a widespread grass-roots network of sources coupled with active informant coverage by individuals who are members of subversive and revolutionary organizations.”

  Once again, information flowed in, apparently without regard for whether it was accurate or served any purpose except to meet requirements that a certain number of informer reports be submitted to headquarters on a regular basis. No pending riot was discovered through these channels.

  Bureau officials suggested the types of people who should be recruited as informers. A 1968 assignment to build a large network of informers throughout the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia included these recommendations about the types of people who should be hired for the “Racial Informant—Ghetto” category: “men honorably discharged from the armed services, members of veterans organizations and the like”; friends, relatives, and acquaintances of bureau employees; “employees and owners of businesses in ghetto areas which might include taverns, liquor stores, drug stores, pawn shops, gun shops, barber shops, janitors of apartment buildings, etc.” The Bureau also suggested that agents establish contact with “persons who frequent ghetto areas on a regular basis such as taxi drivers, salesmen and distributors of newspapers, food and beverages. Installment collectors might also be considered in this regard.”