The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  Judge Fisher’s visible apprehension about the defendants melted fairly quickly. Each morning, as he took the bench, he scanned the faces of the defendants, their attorneys, and the prosecutors, establishing eye contact with many of them. His relaxed and expectant look suggested he was looking forward to whatever might happen in court that day.

  Williamson maintained his secret juice fast throughout the three-month trial. Already very thin, he lost twenty pounds during the trial, but he remained healthy and energetic. He remembers savoring the celebratory spaghetti dinner, cooked by codefendant Peter Fordi, that broke his fast a few hours after the verdict was announced. Pasta may never have tasted so good.

  Throughout the trial, Williamson felt he and his fellow defendants were creating an important record—not only about what they had done but also about the important role of resistance in American history and about the history of the Vietnam War and how that history had driven them to raid the Camden draft board. He was grateful the judge allowed them considerable leeway in giving testimony about their motivation. But despite how well the trial had gone, Williamson had no illusions about winning. “I don’t think any of us expected what happened.”

  “When they said ‘not guilty’ after ‘not guilty’ after ‘not guilty,’ it was just the most unbelievable experience. I’ll never forget the exhilaration we felt, and the gratitude we all felt toward the jury, and their courage in returning those ‘not guilty’ verdicts. And it was also a very humbling experience.…Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience was a guide for me, and part of the deal is that if you do the crime, you do the time. So, again, I expected to be arrested. I expected to go to prison.…I don’t think there was anyone, certainly at the defense table, who expected it to be an acquittal. We had no idea. None. I can’t stress that too much because it was just such an incredible shock to be found not guilty by these people.…It was deeply moving, it was very emotional.” He remembers hugging fellow defendants and being approached by the prosecutor, who shook his hand and wished him well. “I don’t remember what he said. I just remember what he did. He was very gracious.”

  Then, several minutes later, one of the FBI agents who had been involved in the case from the beginning “came up to me in the men’s room and congratulated me and wished me luck. It was as though he was saying, ‘It’s okay now. We’re going to let this go. We’re going to move on now.’…I didn’t feel triumphant. That wasn’t really the feeling. It was more like grateful.”

  Even in his toughest times years later, Williamson was always able to evoke again the emotion of that moment when he suddenly realized that the jury had acquitted him and all of the defendants. In his living room many years later in Albuquerque, as he recalls the moment when verdicts were announced, his eyes fill with tears, as they did that day in Camden. He still finds it hard to believe that the jury voted as it did. “It was really something.…It was an unbelievable thrill.”

  SOON AFTER being acquitted at Camden, Williamson was faced with a new question: Now what? “The expected ending—that I would go to prison—didn’t happen. I was free. The war by then was clearly coming to an end.…Watergate was well under way. And I had no idea who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. My assumption had been that I would go to prison, that I would spend however many years in prison and those years would give me ample time to reflect on the next step. Instead, the government wasn’t going to be providing me with room and board, and I needed to find some way to more or less take care of myself.”

  About three months after the trial ended, Williamson had a deep realization that he needed to “get away from all these people. As much as I loved them, as much as we’d all been through together.…My friends, almost without exception, were like, ‘It’s on to the next battle.’ But I wanted the war to be over.”

  In Philadelphia at that time, he recalls, “What you do all day is you’re figuring out … how to stop the government.…It’s nonstop. I mean, it just never ends. It’s one meeting after another.…As spirited as those discussions were, there was also an element of groupthink. I felt I would lose myself if I stayed there any longer. And, fortunately, I had this place to come to.”

  “This place” was New Mexico. The beautiful mountains, deserts, and glorious sunsets lured him west again. Life had been good there in the months between the arraignment and trial. As soon as Williamson had enough money, “I decided I was going to New Mexico. I came out here and got a job driving a school bus part-time, lived in a cabin up in the mountains, chopping wood, carrying my own water … and I lived alone for, oh, a good year and a half.”

  He felt content at first in New Mexico. Years later, he said New Mexico rescued him all those years ago. If he had not moved west, Williamson feels he would have become frozen in time. But there also were very difficult times during his earliest years in New Mexico. He spent a lot of time meditating. He smoked a lot of dope. He had some friends. But he didn’t have a purpose. And he was very lonely.

  When he read years later about how NASA prepared astronauts for life after traveling in space, Williamson wished the resistance community could have done what NASA did. As astronauts were being trained for a trip to outer space, they were also required to have a second goal, one they wanted to achieve after they returned from their dramatic voyage in space. NASA learned, says Williamson, “that when people have set their sights on something for a long period of time and … devoted themselves to achieving it, and when that goal has been reached and is over with, a lot of people … then go into a deep depression because they don’t know who they are without the definition they got from the original goal.

  “Well, that’s what happened to me. My entire self-image was that of an antiwar crusader, an antiwar resister.”

  Williamson found that most of the people he met in Albuquerque didn’t seem very interested in his resistance past, and they weren’t as consumed with politics as he had been. He had mixed feelings about this reaction. On the one hand, he had just been through several extremely eventful and dramatic years. From his perspective, it was, if nothing else, quite a story. But on the other hand, there was something very refreshing about living among people who were more interested in who you were now than in who you used to be, and more interested in your character than in your political views. Eventually, he reached the point where he rarely talked about “the old days.”

  It was difficult to decide what he was going to do with his life. He no longer could accept the conclusions of many of his old friends in the resistance movement. “Since the world is unfair, they thought we should be in rebellion against ‘the system’ and not cooperate with it in any way, live our lives blaming the system, speaking out against it at every opportunity and being in resistance to everything it stands for.” Williamson no longer was willing to live that way.

  As he struggled with his first steps toward a new purpose in life, he nearly hit bottom once when a relationship that meant a great deal to him didn’t work out. He decided to leave New Mexico. “I wanted to get as far away from Albuquerque as I could get and still be as far away from Philadelphia and New Jersey as I could get.” He jumped at the chance to drive to Miami when a friend wanted to relocate there.

  It was the winter of 1974. Williamson had no money and no food by the time he arrived in Miami, and he pawned his guitar for cash. He was living in his Volkswagen, trying unsuccessfully to find a job. One night, he got “an unbelievably bad toothache, the worst pain I had ever felt.” Sitting in his car, he started feeling very sorry for himself. Reflecting back on his life to that point, he remembers complaining to God: “I’m a good person. I risked my freedom to try to stop a war and make my country a better, a more just place. Here I am, and I’m alone, I don’t know anyone here, I’m broke, I’m hungry, I’m in pain, and no one cares.”

  As he sank deeper into his misery that night, he suddenly had a powerful insight, which he describes as a spiritual experience. He realized that he alone was responsible for his situat
ion. He had chosen to be alone in a strange city. He had no money because he hadn’t earned any. No one else was responsible for his situation; he alone was. If it was going to change, it would be up to him to change it.

  While he was a college student, Williamson and other students who lived in North Philadelphia did volunteer work for an organization that helped renters negotiate with landlords to repair their apartments.

  Almost forty years after that night, he still had trouble putting the experience of that insight into words. “I wasn’t sitting there, calmly and rationally thinking through my dilemma and devising a solution. I was in excruciating pain, sobbing, one of the absolute lowest emotional points in my life. And suddenly, I was filled with this awareness of an idea, and everything sort of stopped for a minute.

  “I have tried to put the realization into words, but my words don’t really do it justice. Since that night, I have had my share of bad days, but on that night something fundamentally changed in me. Since that night, there have been times when I wanted to feel sorry for myself, but I just couldn’t sustain the self-pity anymore. From that night on, at some level, I knew better.”

  This insight was followed by the quick realization that his toothache had gone away completely. The next morning, Williamson walked into a small newspaper and got a job. That soon led to a job at a larger newspaper in Miami Beach, where he developed skills as a production manager, skills he used later when he returned to Albuquerque and started a graphic arts business.

  During Williamson’s search for new meaning in his life, he says he got tremendous value from participating in what was called “est”—Erhard Seminar Training, intensive seminars created by Werner Erhard in the 1970s and attended by thousands of people. Williamson found est particularly helpful “because it emphasized personal responsibility, which it defined as neither blame nor credit, but rather a willingness to operate from the assumption that I am responsible for the way I experience life. This was not presented as a truth or a dogma. It was simply a way of looking at life that I found empowering. I realized that if I lived my life from the point of view that I was truly the author of my own life, I might end up being right or wrong about that, but in the meantime, I would have been far more resourceful than if I had acted as if the outcomes in my life were determined by outside forces.…As a result of est, I understood and accepted myself—warts and all—far more than I had up to that point in my life. I also found that it became possible for me to be far less judgmental of others as well—particularly people in public life whom I had never met and had no actual personal experience of.”

  For the past twenty-five years, Williamson has worked as a business coach, holding online meetings and seminars to help clients achieve personal and business goals. He does some pro bono coaching and has served on nonprofit boards in his community.

  Bob Williamson with his daughter, Jessica, age six, in 1984.

  He has been married and divorced twice. The graphic arts business he started in 1975 eventually failed after twelve years, leaving him $80,000 in debt. As a matter of principle, he refused to go into bankruptcy and instead scrimped and saved for years until he paid all his debts. He says, “I think I have had my share of struggles in life, and made more than my share of mistakes. During the most difficult times, I have even experienced depression and near despair. I am not what most people would call a wealthy man, but my needs are met and I have been able to give something back. I have a passion for my work and it gives me great satisfaction. So while my life has not been a bed of roses, I am grateful for an underlying sense of optimism and good humor which has always carried me through the tough times.”

  A tremendous source of his happiness is being part of the lives of his daughter, Jessica, born in 1978, his son-in-law, Mike, and his two granddaughters—Aelea, born in 2004, and Raven, born in 2008.

  As he started to erase his old identity as a resister, Williamson says, “it was clear to me that what I thought about the way the world should work really didn’t make much difference to the world, and that the world was a lot bigger than I was.…I was going to have to figure out some kind of way to make peace with it. And that,” he says, “was the beginning of an odyssey for me which was about the ending of my focusing on the world and trying to fix the world’s problems and the beginning of my turning that vision inward to try and discover whether I was the best person I could be.

  “I stopped blaming my parents, and I stopped blaming society, and I stopped blaming the economic system and I stopped blaming people’s indifference and I stopped blaming racism and sexism and everything else for the way things were, and I started thinking more and more … about who I was, and whether I was becoming everything that I could be. That began to be the question around which I framed my life.”

  During this evolution, he apologized to his parents and siblings for the anguish his resistance against the war had caused them. From the time he left college to live in a poor neighborhood in North Philadelphia, through his years as an antiwar activist, his parents were repeatedly shocked by his actions. When he was arrested in Camden, they were mortified, a reaction that was deepened when an official in their small community wrote a letter that was published in the local newspaper stating how ashamed he was that someone from Runnemede was involved with people who broke into draft boards. With sadness, he recalls, “My parents felt shamed in their own community.”

  Williamson moved from being an intensely engaged political activist to becoming apolitical and then later a conservative with libertarian leanings. He worked behind the scenes in 1982 as a speechwriter for the Republican candidate for governor of New Mexico. He laughs as he suggests, undoubtedly correctly, that he is probably the only Media burglar who voted not only once but twice for both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The writings of conservative economists Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell have strongly influenced his thinking in recent years.

  There was a time, Williamson says, when he was tempted to enter politics himself, but he cured himself of that delusion by considering the spectacle of trying to explain to voters how someone who opposed the Vietnam War by breaking into draft boards—and the FBI—could have become a conservative. “Virtually every voter would be able to find something completely distasteful about me in either my past or my present.”

  AS WILLIAMSON REBUILT his life, he seldom thought of his acts of resistance—including the Media burglary. At times he viewed them as having little significance beyond whatever their personal meaning was to each individual burglar. With the passage of time, the memories and the personal meaning of his own resistance became a smaller part of the “odyssey I’ve been through since then.”

  One evening, about fifteen years after the burglary, he was perusing the Albuquerque television listings and noticed that one station would be broadcasting a documentary on the FBI. His reaction was a little like the interest stirred by reading a news item about an old high school friend one hasn’t seen in many years. He decided to watch it.

  As the program started, the narrator announced that in 1971 a group of people, who were never found, burglarized the small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Williamson was puzzled. He wondered why the reporter was talking about “our burglary.” The reporter went on to say that much of what is known about how the FBI operated under J. Edgar Hoover is a result of the Media burglary—that the burglary was seminal in the passage of changes to the Freedom of Information Act and various reforms in the FBI.

  “Well, I remember being dumbstruck that somebody apparently thought that our little action was that important.…Until that moment, I never thought it had any long-range impact.”

  By the time the program ended, he was seeing the Media burglary in a somewhat different light. “The thing that impressed me about it was that here I am, just some guy, and my friends and I pulled this thing off. And it had an impact.

  “I still get chill bumps when I realize that the Media burglary started a long chain of events that caused reforms.…And we
didn’t even know what we were doing. We had no idea whether our risk would result in anything.…It’s very gratifying to know that people … think that we performed a service to our country. That’s what we intended to do. I know our hearts were pure in that regard.”

  His gratification that the Media action produced some positive results in terms of more openness in the FBI in particular and government in general has also been tempered by his sobering view that the law of unintended consequences works both ways. Williamson thinks the revelations that came out as a result of the burglary probably also contributed to the increasing cynicism and distrust Americans felt then—and continue to feel now—about their government. He thinks much of that distrust is probably deserved. But he also thinks that, in some ways, it has made it more difficult for leaders at every level of government to do what they think is right. “Four American presidents believed the Vietnam War had to be pursued. They may have been wrong about that on any number of levels, but I have come to respect the fact that they had more information than I did, and I have come to believe they all did what they thought was right. That does not change the fact that I also did what I thought was right, and so did all of the other people I worked with back then … but it tempers it with a big dose of humility.”

  At the center of Williamson’s life in Albuquerque are his daughter, Jessica; her husband, Mike; and their two children, Aelea (foreground) and Raven, seen here in January 2012 with Williamson.

  Since the night Williamson shined a taped flashlight’s narrow beam on open FBI file cabinet drawers, guiding fellow burglars in the dark, he has become a much more conservative person. Nevertheless, he views his radical act of burglarizing an FBI office as a patriotic act that gave him a sense of accomplishment then and now, notwithstanding his concerns about unintended consequences. “That was an exciting time,” he says, “and it was one of the times in my life when I felt most alive. I don’t regret it.”