The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  Forsyth and Williamson were children of American small towns that were supposed to be idyllic in every way, including lack of controversy. In Williamson’s Catholic home in Runnemede, New Jersey, and Forsyth’s Baptist home in Marion, Ohio, the Vietnam War—the issue that drove their resistance—was avoided. The war seemed to always hover in their families, as it did in homes throughout the country as sons and daughters started contesting their parents’ views of it. In such homes, the war often sat at the edges of family conversations, a subject that could cut and injure at any time.

  With World War II a vivid memory, their parents desperately hoped war never would take place on American soil. That hope contributed to their solid support of the Vietnam War and to their belief, an echo of national leaders’ statements on war policy, that the United States should fight communism “there” so it would not have to fight it “here.”

  Williamson and Forsyth stood out from the other Media burglars in another striking way. Five months after the Media burglary, both of them were arrested at Camden. Despite being acutely aware that even as they agreed to raid the Camden draft board, hundreds of agents were then frantically searching for the Media burglars—most intensively in the Powelton Village neighborhood where they lived—they decided to be part of the Camden group. They did so, of course, without knowing the FBI believed the Media burglars were part of the Camden burglars.

  Camden affected Williamson and Forsyth in very different ways. Williamson immersed himself in the case, enjoying many aspects of trial preparation and the trial itself. Forsyth abandoned the group. He wanted to have as little connection as possible to the case. He was angry at himself for agreeing to participate in the raid. He regretted his decision to do so. He thought it was perhaps the most foolish thing he had ever done, especially in light of the fact that, almost from the moment he said yes, he thought the group was disorganized and headed for disaster. But for reasons not entirely clear to him, even years later, he did not drop out, not even after the informer, Robert Hardy, offered him a gun as they sat in Hardy’s truck, where conversations—unknown to Forsythe, of course—were piped directly to an FBI office and overheard by agents. Hardy suggested Forsyth might like to use it. Forsyth refused to touch it.

  Federal agents arrest Keith Forsyth (third from right) the morning after the raid on the Camden draft board in August 1971. (Photo: Camden Courier-Post)

  After the arraignment of the Camden defendants, Forsyth had very little contact with anyone in the Camden group and immediately started establishing a different focus in his life, a process that Williamson didn’t start until after the Camden trial. Forsyth stayed away from the trial. He did not even regularly follow news reports on the unusual developments taking place in the courtroom. He wanted to be away from it, both physically and emotionally. He chose to avoid thinking about the fact that he might be convicted for something he thought was ill-conceived and that he should not have joined. When the Camden trial ended, he was surprised and, of course, glad that he was acquitted instead of convicted. Still, he had little interest in what led to the unexpected acquittal. His interest would be rekindled in the group and the trial twenty years later. He would become involved in community and union organizing. He continued to oppose the war until it ended, but he no longer was an antiwar activist.

  WILLIAMSON CONSIDERED CAMDEN his enduring safety valve. Media was a big secret he could not discuss, and living with that secret was sometimes an uncomfortable burden. Camden, on the other hand, was the opposite. Everything about it was completely open. Camden, especially with its not-guilty verdicts for all, was something very special he could discuss with anyone. He did so until, eventually, he got immersed in a new life.

  He later looked back on the trial as having many positive aspects, including being fun. He enjoyed developing trial strategy, he enjoyed philosophical exchanges with all involved, and especially he enjoyed the warmth of the community of defendants. But the beginning of Camden, the night of the arrests, was not fun. Williamson doesn’t remember the details of some incidents from that period of his life, but he recalls his arrest that night with keen precision. He was standing on the parapet outside the window of the dark draft board office. From inside, other burglars were handing him large canvas bags stuffed with Selective Service records. He knew the file drawers and cabinets were almost empty and the job was about to end when suddenly—as he grabbed another large stuffed bag as it was hefted out the window and added it to the stack of bags on the parapet—he heard a loud clatter of feet below getting closer and closer as they rushed up the fire escape. He turned slightly and there, facing him, was a man, an FBI agent, pointing the barrel of his gun at Williamson. He recalls that it nearly touched his nose. The man and the other agents behind him yelled, “Freeze!” Again and again they yelled, “Freeze!”

  “Just like in the movies. I mean really yelling. Deep guttural level. And so I did—I pretty much froze at that point.”

  “I remember the feeling of being in shock and being numb.” One of the agents arrested him on the parapet. Then somehow, he doesn’t remember how, they pulled him through the window. The next thing Williamson remembers is that “we’re all laying on the floor.” He was facedown, with an FBI agent’s foot in the center of his back.

  Williamson was stunned, but not surprised.

  He had assumed that something like this was bound to happen since June 1969, when he attended the crucial meeting at Iron Mountain—the name John Peter Grady gave an old Episcopal church, St. George’s, in the Bronx, where some of the Catholic resisters occasionally met and where Grady’s unsuccessful 1968 campaign for Congress was based. It was at this meeting that some people in the Catholic peace movement decided to move from symbolic actions like the Catonsville Nine action in 1968 to clandestine actions, such as draft board raids conducted at night with the goal of actually—as opposed to symbolically—damaging the draft system and fleeing rather than waiting to be arrested.

  Knowing that discussion of this critical change in strategy would take place at this meeting, Williamson immersed himself in the writings of highly respected advocates of nonviolent resistance—Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” Louis Fisher’s biography of Mohandas Gandhi, and several writings by Martin Luther King. “I knew Gandhi had been a mentor to King, so I wanted to understand him.…It was against that backdrop that I went to this meeting. I went strongly committed to nonviolence and determined that nothing I would do would cause harm to anybody.”

  He remembers that after lengthy and sometimes tense discussion, about half of the approximately twenty people there agreed that they felt they were likely to have more impact if they moved away from symbolic acts of resistance and engaged instead in clandestine actions designed to actually slow down the government’s ability to draft young men. People who attended the meeting recall that Daniel and Philip Berrigan opposed that change in strategy and continued to believe that symbolic public actions followed by immediately accepting responsibility were likely to have a more positive impact on the public.

  As Williamson absorbed the thoughtful but difficult discussion, he decided to cast his lot with the group that wanted to do clandestine actions. He was impressed by the case made for that approach by various people, especially John Peter Grady. The Berrigans’ ideas still continued to permeate Williamson’s thinking about conscience and about the war, as they did for other people in this part of the peace movement, including the other people who went to Media.

  After it was settled that some people supported and other people opposed the new strategy, Williamson recalls, the people who made a commitment to clandestine action stayed to discuss how they would move ahead—the caution needed, the potential dangers to such resisters and to people they might encounter inside draft boards. They discussed at length the harm they might inadvertently cause guards in federal buildings. They wrestled with the question of “what would happen if a guard walked in and caught us while we were in a draft board.” That co
ncern arose from their belief, based on observation, that most guards in federal buildings were older men, people they assumed never expected anything to go wrong on the job. Given that, they feared the guards might be so shocked if they found burglars inside a draft board office when offices were closed that they would have a heart attack. That led to a lengthy discussion on how to be a calming influence in such a situation, on how to assure someone they were not being threatened. He does not recall that they discussed the possibility of a guard being armed and therefore a threat to burglars. Finally, Williamson says, Grady hammered home then and many times after that day the importance of being realistic about the personal consequences of these more aggressive nonviolent acts of resistance: that they might be arrested and pay a very heavy price. Williamson took that to heart and waited for it to happen. Arrest and imprisonment, he felt certain, would be the inevitable consequences of the decision he made that day.

  WILLIAMSON’S THINKING had changed radically from the time he left Runnemede, his suburban hometown in the southwestern part of New Jersey, until the day of the meeting in the Bronx. He appreciated his hometown and realized his parents had provided what seemed like the perfect environment, a good home for their children in a community that had good schools and streets where children could ride their bicycles any time of the day and be safe. The perfect nature of his world was pierced for him for the first time when President Kennedy was assassinated. “Until that time I was very insulated and protected.…I had the sense that nothing bad would ever happen in the world.…I grew up in such a way that I wasn’t aware that bad things happen.” The assassination of President Kennedy “planted the seed of a kind of—the word that comes to mind is ‘realism.’ I really did live a very insulated life as I was growing up. Children think in almost magical terms. Well, I guess I had a sort of magical sense that God was looking out for all the good people, and that they would all be protected.…So when Kennedy was killed it was a tremendous shock. I think it was the beginning of a realization that the world was not always a nice place. That there was in fact evil and it could touch our lives.”

  Williamson absorbed and expressed the dominant views of his small town. As a high school junior, he wrote and delivered a speech critical of draft card burners for the American Legion Oratorical Contest.

  Short and very thin then as now, after Williamson was introduced at a Legion speech competition, he would slowly walk toward the center of the stage, pausing to sniff dramatically as he looked all over the stage for the source of an odor. Then, in a strong voice, he would announce, “I smell smoke!” After a dramatic pause, he would look squarely into the faces of the audience and declare, “It is the smoke of burning draft cards, and it hangs over our nation like poisonous smog.” He would then make a case for the justness of a war to prevent the spread of communism, the importance of the rule of law, the duty of citizens to respect it, and the dangers posed by the draft card burners’ open defiance of it. He was fervently dedicated to this message. His speech won at the county and district levels, and he won second place at the state level, winning a college scholarship from the Legion that helped pay for his education at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia.

  At St. Joseph’s College, Bob Williamson (left) was on the committee that invited prominent people to speak on campus, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, pictured here with Williamson, 1968. (Photo: Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, © Temple University Libraries)

  By the time he said yes to Davidon’s invitation to consider burglarizing an FBI office, Williamson saw the war very differently. The change started when he wrote a paper on cluster bombs during his freshman year at college. In his research, he discovered that the manufacturer of these weapons, then being used in Vietnam, pointed out in corporate literature that the “advantage” of the cluster bombs was the widespread and diffused destruction they caused (including the killing of civilians). That assessment jolted Williamson and prompted him to start asking questions about the war. He had similar objections to the indiscriminate destructive power of napalm. When Martin Luther King spoke at St. Joseph’s in January 1968 and gave his reasons for opposing the Vietnam War—even in the face of criticism from his colleagues in the civil rights movement—Williamson took his message to heart.

  A few months later, the night King was assassinated, Williamson was playing pool with some friends. One of them laughed and made a racist remark about King as they listened to the news that he had just been killed. Williamson burned with anger and sadness. He made a decision. “I realized that night I was getting to be a person whose principles were real important to me. I was at the point where I realized you had to take a stand for your principles.”

  Now, after that meeting in the Bronx, he was committed to living his principles in ways that involved very serious risks. Instead of dressing up as Death, as part of an antiwar street theater group he had been performing with in the past year in Philadelphia, Williamson now prepared to raid draft boards. He took Grady’s warning seriously. He thought he would probably be caught the first time he broke into a draft board, but to his amazement, after raiding four draft boards and an FBI office, he still had not been arrested.

  That luck changed at Camden. The expected finally happened on the parapet. He assumed his arrest in Camden also meant that his plan to have no plan for his future also would prove to have been wise. Feeling absolutely certain he would go to prison for years, he thought he would have plenty of time to think about the rest of his life.

  Bob Williamson thought he would be convicted in Camden. Between his arrest and trial there, he visited New Mexico.

  When it was clear the Camden trial would not get under way for at least a year, Williamson decided that after two years of continuously opposing the war and moving from one act of resistance to another, “It was probably time for me to have a little bit of fun before I went away to prison for forty years.” He went west. Some feminist friends he had lived with in Philadelphia were visiting Albuquerque. They liked the area and urged him to join them. That trip and the beautiful countryside it introduced him to transformed the geography and purpose of his life.

  He had never been west of Ohio. Instead of going the fast interstate route, he purposely took a slow scenic route, watching the topography of the country change for two weeks as he drove. He camped in Oklahoma, where he saw a truly big sky for the first time. After he arrived in Albuquerque, he joined his friends near Taos. They left the campsite after a few days, and he spent a couple weeks alone there, soaking in nature.

  For the first time in about three years, something besides the war grabbed and held his attention. “For a young guy who hadn’t been noticing nature for many years, if ever, the absorption with it now was healing,” he says. “It was cool in the morning. It warmed up throughout the day. And there was always a thunderstorm right before dusk. And then a magnificent sunset. They were orange and purple and red.…The sunsets really were magnificent.…The area was unspoiled and very beautiful. It was very quiet, and so it was good for me. I let my hair grow, and I enjoyed where I was.”

  He continued to assume he would be going to prison and decided he should get ready for it. With that in mind, he hoped he could store memories of the peaceful and spectacularly beautiful New Mexico landscape so he would be able to retrieve and relive them for solace during the long days ahead in prison. He began what became a lifelong meditation practice. That too, he thought, would come in handy in prison. His time in that mountain meadow provided a rich respite.

  In late 1972, the Camden trial beckoned and Williamson drove east. He became deeply absorbed in doing legal research and helping develop trial strategy. During the trial, he enjoyed cross-examining some of the witnesses, especially the FBI agent who had arrested him at Camden. Judge Fisher permitted him to use copies of some of the stolen Media files as the basis of questions he posed to at least one agent. He referred to the Media files again when he testified, claiming that rea
ding the files and learning about the illegal activity of the FBI had convinced him to continue raiding draft boards. That’s why, he testified, he said yes when he was asked to participate in the Camden raid.

  Williamson played a significant role in the defendants’ efforts to gain the judge’s trust and make him feel at ease with them. When the trial opened in February 1973, Williamson, as well as others, sensed that Judge Fisher was afraid this large group of defendants would be unruly. Memories were still fresh regarding the raucous nature of the 1969 Chicago Seven trial of people for allegedly conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Each new antiwar trial after that one was seen as a potential repeat of the Chicago trial with defiant defendants and defiant judges in the mold of the Chicago judge, Julius Hoffman. “I could understand his concern,” says Williamson of Judge Fisher’s rigidity in the early days of the trial. “There were so many of us. Most of us were representing ourselves. I had hair all the way down my back and often wore my dashiki. We were very different-looking—from each other and from the people who usually appeared in court.…Our goal was to tell our story, to explain why we had done what we had done, and to call on the jury, as an act of conscience, to make a statement about this war by finding us not guilty.…We had to get him to see that we had no intention of turning his courtroom into a ‘circus,’ ” a term Judge Fisher had used in a warning to the defendants right before the trial opened.

  With that goal in mind, Williamson met with Judge Fisher shortly after the trial started and told him that he was going to do something tangible to reassure the judge that the defendants were sincere, reasonable people. He would be on a juice fast for the duration of the trial. It was a private gesture, not a publicity stunt, Williamson assured the judge. No one would know about it except the judge, the defendants, and the lawyers. He recalls that the judge’s “demeanor changed.…His first reaction was concern. He didn’t want me to hurt myself … he frequently asked me, in the hall or in chambers, how I was.”