The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  But, prosecutor John Barry asked the major, did the inequities in the system justify “private individuals breaking into the buildings in the middle of the night”? It is unlikely that Barry, or anyone else in the courtroom, could have anticipated the answer. The major startled nearly everyone when he said, “If they plan another raid, I might join them.”

  Howard Zinn told the jury that civil disobedience seems like an outrageous outlaw idea but actually is “at the center of American democratic philosophy.” Called by Ridolfi as an expert witness on civil disobedience and the history of the Vietnam War, he testified that the Camden defendants had acted in the tradition of the people who defied the Fugitive Slave Acts and freed slaves before the Civil War. Such actions, he said, have been necessary “all through history in order to win justice for people.” He warned against clinging to the idea that “we must obey the law … that the law is holy.…It’s a very bad education we all get because it misses the distinction between law and justice.”

  Zinn’s greatest impact that day may have been how he profoundly saddened but also inspired Betty Good, mother of defendant Bob Good. Testifying on a Friday, Zinn said the Pentagon Papers “showed very clearly that the United States was not in Vietnam for purposes of liberty and democracy and humanitarian and self-determination reasons.” The secret memos in the Pentagon Papers, he said, “were saying again and again, when talking about why we were in Vietnam, and why we were interested in Southeast Asia—they were talking about tin, rubber and oil … about the resources of Southeast Asia.”

  As Zinn emphasized that idea again—that the United States was in Vietnam for resources: tin, rubber and oil—Mrs. Good, seated in the front row, could not suppress the impact of this revelation. She left the courtroom and sobbed in the hallway. She was inconsolable. That weekend she asked her son to put her on the stand on Monday. A few other parents of defendants had testified about the values they had imparted to their children. Bob Good was not sure what his mother would say. She and his father had strongly questioned his decision to become a conscientious objector and his later decisions to engage in acts of civil disobedience to oppose the war. She had come to Camden to offer moral support but without fully approving of what her son had done in Camden. He was cautious as he stood before her in the courtroom and asked her a general question about how she and his carpenter father had raised him on their farm near Sharpsville in western Pennsylvania.

  Never in a courtroom until she came to Camden to provide moral support for her son, Betty Good faced the jurors and first told them the story of two of her ten children, Bob and Paul. Bob, she said, for three years had lived as though the Vietnam War was next door, as though he could see the killing, hear the bombs, as though he was responsible for it and responsible for stopping it. And Paul, who she said was Bob’s closest brother, had proudly joined the Army and gone to Vietnam.

  She described driving Paul to the airport in Pittsburgh six years before the day she was testifying. She and her husband were proud their son wanted to serve his country. As Bob would say when he testified, “That’s what you did where we came from.” Paul’s flight to Vietnam that day marked the first time he was on an airplane. Less than two months later he was killed in the Mekong Delta and brought home to Sharpsville, where he was buried with full military rites.

  Mrs. Good told the jury that, like her son Paul, she had not paid much attention to the world outside Sharpsville and also had not paid attention to what the U.S. government was doing in Vietnam. She had just assumed officials knew what they were doing and that the war was necessary to keep communists from attacking the United States. She looked at jurors steadily as she said, “We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. I know I am. I am ashamed of the day I took my son to that airplane and put him on. I’m ashamed of any pride that I had when taps were played. And I did have pride then. I am proud of my son because he didn’t know. A kid that never had a gun in his life.…And to take that lovely boy and tell him, ‘You are fighting for your country.’ How stupid can we get? He was fighting for his country! Can anybody stand there and tell me now he was fighting for his country?”

  Mrs. Good told the jury that the realization that her son Paul had not died for his country had come to her only as she listened to Zinn three days earlier in the courtroom. “Tin, rubber and oil” had been echoing in her mind ever since she listened to him discuss the history of the war. “And the public was told the main U.S. interest was in saving Vietnam from Communism” and “to save Americans from attack.”

  She apologized for her past tendency to blame every new idea Bob had on communism. “I was hung up on it. I feel that is the way most of us middle-class Americans are. We’re so hung up on communism … that we don’t know what our own government is doing.…I can’t understand what we’re doing over there. We should get out of this. But not one of us raised our hand. We left it up to these people—the defendants—for them to do it.”

  Betty Good surprised her son and transfixed many, if not everyone, in the courtroom, including Judge Fisher. Bob Good asked his mother if there was anything else she wanted to say. “Well, yes,” she replied. “There’s one thing I had in mind to say, that when you were arrested you sent me the most beautiful letter. And if I thought I was going to be up here, I would have brought it.” Turning to look at the jurors again, she said, “He spelled it out for us, why he was doing this, how he felt it was something he had to do and indeed put the blame back on us because of the way we brought him up: that he was doing this for the country, not against the country.”

  Bob, moved deeply by his mother’s words, was about to tell her she could step down from the witness stand when he realized he had forgotten to invite the prosecutors to cross-examine her. When he did so, the judge nodded to Barry that he could proceed. “We have no questions, your honor,” said the prosecutor. Mrs. Good’s testimony was uncontested.

  IN HIS SUMMATION to the jury, Barry reminded the jurors that at that time in Washington another burglary, the Watergate burglary, was the center of controversy. Those burglars, like the Camden burglars, he said, thought they were doing something that served a greater political good.

  Kairys emphasized the FBI’s complicity in the crime in his closing remarks: “Neither the FBI nor the defendants placed any value on those pieces of paper in the draft board office. To the defendants, they were nonliving matter that had no right to exist. To the FBI, they were part of the machinery of war but a part of that machinery that was expendable to discredit antiwar movements.” He urged jurors to realize that, as Judge Fisher would say in his charge to the jury, “they could acquit if they felt government participation in setting up the crime had gone to ‘intolerable’ lengths that were ‘offensive to the basic standards of decency and shocking to the universal sense of justice.’ ” As the judge noted in his charge to the jury and Kairys said in his closing remarks, under a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a decision to acquit could be reached on the basis of government overreaching activity even if the defendants had a predisposition to commit the crime.

  Making the case for nullification by the jury, Kairys told the jurors that the defendants, out of passionate opposition to the Vietnam War, had engaged in civil disobedience because “they saw a conflict between law and morality, between law and life.…They made the same choices we would want German people to make when Jews were being killed, the same choices we would want Americans to make when black people were in slavery.”

  AS THE DEFENDANTS WAITED for the jury’s verdict, some of them were optimistic. Others were fearful. They knew they had had a fair trial, one where they, unlike the defendants in most antiwar trials of that era, had been permitted to make the case against the war and the case for their decision to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in protest of the war. But from the beginning defense attorneys had warned them that the chances of all jurors agreeing to acquit all defendants was highly unlikely. It had not happened in any antiwar trial to date. Kairys had cautioned them that acqu
ittals were especially unlikely for crimes committed during wartime that involved breaking into a federal building in the middle of the night and destroying war-related government property. He firmly believed they should be found not guilty on the basis of the standards of nullification and because the government had wildly overreached when the FBI reignited plans for the break-in and forced it to take place despite defendants’ repeated wishes that it be canceled, but he thought acquittals were unlikely.

  The defendants thought Michael Doyle was clever but unrealistic when he, during closing remarks to the jury, told the jurors they would have the last word, and then, pausing, smiled and amended his statement: “No, you will have the last two words.”

  On the fourth day of jury deliberation, word went out on a telephone tree that the jury had reached verdicts. Over the next few hours, defendants and their supporters, lawyers from both sides, U.S. marshals, court staff, and journalists drove on that gray and rainy Sunday afternoon from their homes throughout the greater Philadelphia area to be present to hear the verdicts announced.

  The atmosphere was tense and somber as the Camden defendants and many supporters gradually filled the large courtroom to capacity. Unable to find seats, latecomers lined the perimeter of the room. In the front, the defendants sat, as they had throughout the trial, around long tables clustered on the left front side, angled so all of them faced the judge. On the right side, the four prosecutors sat at a single long table.

  The hum of conversations stopped when Judge Fisher entered the courtroom. From the bench, he prepared the audience for a tedious process. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I am going to bring the jury in in a minute. Before I do, I just wanted to request of everyone, if they would, we have to go through this by defendant and by count, each individually, and it will be quite a bit of time consumed. If we could have no demonstrations, no matter what the verdict is on any defendant or on any count, out of courtesy to the jury, because they are very tired, and we just wouldn’t be able to get through it if there was a lot of noise. So I especially request that.

  “Okay. Bring them in.”

  The jurors filed in and took their seats. Kairys remembers searching jurors’ faces for clues. Some of them established eye contact. A good sign, he thought. But, he realized, mostly they just looked wiped out.

  The court clerk asked the jury foreman, James Lomax, if the jurors had agreed on a verdict. “Yes,” said Lomax.

  “How say you? How do you find the defendant, Terry Edward Buckalew, on count one of the indictment?”

  “We, your honor, find him not guilty.”

  Asked about each of the other six counts as to Buckalew, Lomax responded “not guilty” six times.

  The defendants, who were standing as the foreman read, some with their heads bowed at first, were now glancing at one another. Their faces were filled with surprise and hopeful could-it-be expressions.

  Judge Fisher, apparently sensing a trend, interrupted the process. “Mr. Lomax,” he asked, “do you have any different verdicts than that on any count for any defendant?”

  “None different, your honor.”

  A slight smile creased the judge’s face.

  The courtroom was silent for a split second. Then there was an explosive gasp as the striking result was absorbed: all twenty-eight defendants had just been acquitted of all the crimes for which they had been tried.

  Someone started to sing “Amazing Grace.” Neither the judge nor the prosecutor objected. It was clear neither of them considered it a disruption. People found it difficult, though, to sing through their tears, soon evident on faces throughout the courtroom.

  The defendants moved, at first almost as if they were in a stupor. They could not believe what they had just heard. They hugged one another. Their faces were portraits of disbelief, relief, and, finally, overwhelming happiness.

  As though in another universe, directly across from the defendants, the four prosecutors stood at their table, looking slightly out of place as they motionlessly watched the defendants’ moving reactions to their unexpected triumph. Carolyn Ellis, one of the assistant prosecutors, impulsively turned and hugged a spectator in the front row as she said, “Tell them congratulations for me.” And then she rushed from the courtroom.

  Chief prosecutor John Barry stood at his place at the prosecutors’ table for a few minutes. Three defendants who were hugging one another realized, as they released their embrace, that Barry had approached and was standing in front of them. Most of the other defendants paused and watched in silence as this improbable scene unfolded. Barry, who had presented the case against them for five months, at first put his hand forward to one of the defendants and shook hands in what looked like a typical end-of-trial formal courtesy congratulatory gesture. But he and the defendant soon dropped this hesitant formal approach and warmly embraced. Awkwardly at first and then more easily, Barry moved from defendant to defendant, each time his handshake turning into an embrace. He had seemed testy at times during the trial and determined to get convictions. Now that had dissolved.

  Barry returned to the prosecutors’ table. There were tears in his eyes as he walked up to where I was standing in the first row, directly behind the prosecutors’ table. We had never met, but he knew that, standing there with pad and pencil, I was a journalist. He reached for my hand. As he shook it, he said, “It ended the way it should have ended.”

  In numerous ways, the trial was historic. It was, said Supreme Court justice William Brennan, “one of the great trials of the twentieth century.”

  LARGELY UNNOTICED in the middle of this jubilant crowd celebrating this, the first acquittal of all defendants in any antiwar trial, were Media burglars John and Bonnie Raines. Like everyone else in the courtroom, they were radiant—smiling widely, thrilled, amazed at the verdicts, and shedding a few tears of joy. They had special reasons to be so happy.

  This was the case that was supposed to have led to their arrest. These defendants had endured the threat of forty-seven years in prison for crimes the FBI had aided and abetted, all in order to find and arrest the Media burglars. John and Bonnie felt relief and joy for the Camden defendants. They also felt relief and joy for themselves. It was as though these defendants had been stand-ins for them—which, in a way, they had been.

  As they quietly shared the warm spirit of the spontaneous courtroom celebration of the Camden defendants’ victory and freedom, John and Bonnie couldn’t help letting themselves wish, just briefly, that they might be arrested and have a similar trial in which their stealing and revealing FBI secrets would be on full display in a courtroom—their rationale for the burglary would be explained, their trove of important documents would be discussed. Their testimony, they dared to think, would change hearts and minds in the courtroom and in the public as news stories reported to the outside world what transpired during their trial. For people who had been keeping their involvement in the Media burglary a secret for more than two years by that time, and who expected to continue to keep it a secret the rest of their lives, as all of the Media burglars had promised one another they would, this was quite a fantasy.

  John Raines let his fantasy of a great trial—a trial similar, he liked to think, to the Camden 28 trial—roll in his mind several times in the next few years. In his fantasy trial, he hoped the burglars would be represented by John Doar, the distinguished lawyer who during John’s summers in the South had played a powerful positive role there as an attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. As their attorney in the Media case, according to John’s fantasy, Doar would help the burglars develop a defense that would make clear that they had burglarized the Media FBI office in order to reveal information to the public and Congress about FBI practices that were illegal and dangerous to democracy—practices that suppressed dissent.

  John Raines’s fantasy was a mixture of hope moderated by fear: hope that if they were arrested they would have a good trial, and fear that they might actually be arrested. He thought
he should prepare in case they were. He had gained weight in recent years and decided he should become a thin person. For about a year, he stayed on a strict diet of cottage cheese and fruit and lost sixty pounds. He is proud that he never gained weight again. He resumed playing tennis during that year of dieting and has played regularly ever since. Once he lost the weight, he bought a fine dark suit. If the need arose, he was ready to make a good appearance in court as a defendant.

  John and Bonnie enjoyed thinking that if the Media Eight—what they assumed their group would become known as if they were arrested—went to trial, there surely would be a great concluding moment when they, too, would be acquitted for what they had done. They hoped a jury would recognize that the burglary they had carried out should be regarded not as a crime but as a service to their country.

  WHEN THE CAMDEN TRIAL ENDED, the Philadelphia FBI office was still investigating the Media burglary. In this third year of the MEDBURG investigation, FBI officials still claimed they were certain Grady was the leader of the burglars and that evidence would be found to link him to the Media break-in. After Hoover’s death in May 1972, acting FBI directors had tried to keep the MEDBURG investigation on track, but bureau officials’ attention inevitably was diverted by other crimes that were center stage in Washington by the time the Camden defendants were acquitted. In addition to the Watergate burglars facing trials, the top Department of Justice officials who played major roles in both the MEDBURG and Camden cases—Attorney General John Mitchell, Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst—had resigned their government positions and soon would be charged and eventually most would be convicted in connection with their roles in Watergate-related crimes.