The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  While he would not presume to offer advice to anyone now considering action as extreme as what he participated in at Media, he hopes such people would give it long and careful thought. “That burglary is an example of what someone can do, or try to do, as a citizen. But when you take an action like that, you own the consequences. I was not prosecuted for the break-in, or for distributing those FBI files to the media. Nevertheless, the consequences for me—personally, emotionally, spiritually—have been fairly significant. I know that at the age of twenty-two, I acted with a clear conscience. I also know that I could not possibly have foreseen the full range of effects of my actions then. Over the last forty-plus years, as I have grown older, thinking about this has made me more careful about how my actions are likely to affect others. Still, in spite of that, I think I can make a pretty good case that, on balance, the Media burglary produced more good than harm.”

  22

  Unconditionally Positive

  SUPPORTING THE VIETNAM WAR was as natural for Keith Forsyth as getting up in the morning. Like Williamson, he followed his father in such important matters, giving hardly any thought to it. Then, in the first semester of his freshman year at the College of Wooster in Ohio, his mind was split open by a small book. It caused him to give the war a great deal of thought. In fact, he spent that entire semester searching for evidence that the war was justified and should be supported. He wanted to continue supporting it, but now he wanted to do so on a sound, rational basis rather than simply as an echo of his father.

  If the U.S. State Department had not failed to provide him with the government’s rationale for the war and why it should be supported, Forsyth might not have been standing outside the Media FBI office trying to pick the lock on the night of March 8, 1971.

  Only a couple weeks after he arrived on campus in the fall of 1968, another freshman, a guy named Chuck who lived down the hall from Forsyth, gave him Peace in Vietnam: A New Approach in Southeast Asia and urged Forsyth to read it. Today he can’t remember Chuck’s last name. He has no idea where Chuck is, what work he does, or what kind of person he has become, but Forsyth is certain of one thing about Chuck: He owes the opening of his mind to him.

  Forsyth took Chuck’s advice. He read the book with a great deal of interest. “I remember saying to myself, as I was reading the book, ‘This can’t be true. This is America.’ ” The book set forth the contemporary history of Vietnam and made the case, in a straightforward, nonpolemical way, that the United States should not be at war in Vietnam, had no vital interest in being at war there, and, beginning with its support of the French colonial interests there, had worked against, not for, the best interests of—or even the possibility of—democracy in Vietnam.

  This made Forsyth so angry that if it hadn’t been for two aspects of the book, he thinks he would have dismissed its message immediately. First, its tone was reasonable, and it was heavily documented, qualities that appealed to this serious college freshman who loved science and philosophy. Second, it was published by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. Forsyth was raised as what he calls “a plain vanilla Protestant,” first a Baptist and then, as his parents moved up economically, a Presbyterian. “I was raised in a very religious family. By that time I was still interested in religion, but I felt organized religion had problems with hypocrisy.” But Quakers were another matter. In contrast to other Christian denominations, Forsyth thought, Quakers had “very high moral principles and a relatively low level of hypocrisy.…They had a reputation for being really honest and living up to their beliefs.

  “So, I’m thinking to myself, ‘They wouldn’t be saying this stuff if it wasn’t true.’…Here are these people who couldn’t possibly tell a lie because their consciences wouldn’t permit them, here they are saying all these horrible things about what our government, the land of the free, the home of the brave, is doing to these defenseless people in Vietnam.…It clashed with all the things I had been taught about America. My father’s a very patriotic guy. He’s one of those rags-to-riches stories.…And he supported this war. I had all this patriotism. That’s the way it was in the ’50s and the ’60s, especially in the Midwest. That whole aura of conformity, patriotism, the whole thing. I believed it all. So now the Quakers were saying something else. They were describing how we were behaving someplace else, Vietnam. It didn’t fit with my ideas of what this country was like.

  “It changed my life.”

  The profound shift in his opinion about the war did not take place until later, after he searched to either verify or dispute the claims made in the book. At first, Forsyth didn’t accept what he read. He couldn’t. He remembers that his sense of my-country-won’t-do-wrong was too deep to allow immediate acceptance of these critical claims. He thought the Quakers must have made a mistake, that perhaps this book represented uncharacteristic behavior on their part. Surely they had misunderstood the history of Vietnam and the actions of the U.S. government there.

  Published in 1966, the book was a report by a special working group appointed in 1965 by the board of directors of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization founded in 1917 that conducts service programs throughout the world, one of which recruits conscientious objectors to work in war zones with war victims. As he read, Forsyth learned that the AFSC first expressed its concerns about Vietnam in 1954, warning at that early date that Quakers were “profoundly disturbed with the pressures for United States military intervention in Indo-China. On the basis of long Quaker experience in international service we are convinced that nothing but disaster lies down this road.”

  From the public record, the working group documented the United States’ rejection of at least seven efforts prior to 1966 to negotiate an end to the war. It documented lies made to the public about the war by the Johnson administration five years before such lies were revealed in the Pentagon Papers, the secret official history of the war that became public in 1971. Forsyth felt demoralized when he read that a series of “false premises and mistaken assumptions … have shaped United States public opinion and policy toward Vietnam and much of Southeast Asia for years.” In an analysis that bears a striking resemblance to criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the study group wrote:

  It is not the military credibility of the United States that is lacking, but credibility in matters of rationality, political maturity and legal and moral responsibility. In the eyes of a large part of the world, United States conduct in Vietnam has already brought its credibility with respect to these nonmilitary qualities into question. Much can be done to restore American credibility and honor if the United States will abandon its clearly calamitous policy of reliance upon military means to achieve impossible political ends.

  The freshman from Marion, Ohio, was riveted. He had not been paying much attention to the war. That was for adults. And all the adults he knew had subtly conveyed the impression that he should always trust his country to do the right thing. Now he was reading something that conveyed a very different impression. With policies built on false premises and mistaken assumptions, he read, “it is understandable how the United States can be moving inexorably down the road of no return. But this is not the only path open. The politically relevant [italics in original] alternatives now facing the Administration are to continue escalating the war or to start de-escalating immediately and, in accordance with political realities, to make an effort to negotiate a ceasefire and a political settlement calling for the orderly withdrawal of United States military forces.”

  After a series of specific recommendations for changes in war policies, the working group urged that “American understanding must go beyond turning from destructive to constructive approaches. It must become aware of the subtle and dangerous assumption that the United States can determine the course of the whole world.…We must refurbish the American dream and seek ways to enlarge it into a world dream. But we must remember that we Americans are only a small portion of the dreamers.”

&n
bsp; IF THE CASE made by the Quaker group was true, a rather shaken Forsyth thought, then his country had made some very big mistakes that had resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths, not to mention deaths still taking place. Though the book seemed to be well documented, Forsyth still found the claims very difficult to believe. This former member of Youth for Christ, an international evangelical group that focuses on converting young people to Christianity, did not easily slide out of his unquestioning patriotic assumptions, even when presented with facts.

  Now, for the first time, he raised questions about the sweeping patriotism he had inherited and blindly accepted. He wasn’t a very political person, but he thought about political issues, and “to the extent that I had any politics, it was pretty much what rubbed off from my parents. They were politically conservative … and I was conservative. I handed out flyers for [Republican presidential candidate Barry] Goldwater in 1964.…I had accepted the high school civics propaganda that America can do no wrong and has done no wrong. I had no reason to doubt it.”

  Keith Forsyth and cousins at their maternal grandparents’ home in Marion, Ohio.

  He decided he needed to know more—much more. Because what he had read challenged his basic assumptions, he set out to learn what reputable scholars, government officials, and other war analysts had written on this subject. At the campus library he made a list of all the books in print on Vietnam and the war there. He bought a few of them. He borrowed others from the library. At his request, the campus librarian got more books on Vietnam via interlibrary loan from other campuses in the Midwest. The books poured in, twenty-some altogether. In his search to find the truth about American involvement in Vietnam, he became a constant presence at the campus library that fall. He devoured every book he could find on the history of Vietnam and the American war there. Forsyth read them cover to cover. He wasn’t studying what the College of Wooster wanted him to study as a freshman, but he was studying very hard. He had become a student of the Vietnam War. His regular studies suffered, but he didn’t care. He thought it was more important to learn whether his country had become something altogether different from what he thought it was.

  Forsyth finished reading the books on Vietnam four weeks after he finished Peace in Vietnam. They were written by U.S. and foreign scholars. The books did not make a pitch for pacifism, and they were not overtly political. He described them as “mostly dry academic tomes,” books written by historians and other scholars and experts. More to the point of what was on Forsyth’s mind, these books corroborated the historical facts and analysis in the Quaker book that led to his research. “This is really far out,” Forsyth remembers thinking. He was surprised and confused at the general agreement he found among writers. He was upset. He did not want to believe what he was reading: that his country was fighting an unjust war. He thought there must be other books that would make the case for the war. He remained convinced that despite all the evidence he had read, there must be more to this. “I couldn’t believe this whole thing had happened with absolutely no merit whatever to why we’re there.

  “So I called the State Department.”

  When he called the main State Department number provided by an operator, in the usual ways of large government bureaucracies, he was transferred from one office to another several times. As each new person came on the line, he explained that he was a college student calling with a request for information about the U.S. government’s policy on the Vietnam War. It was not clear if his question was a puzzle, unexpected, or unwanted, but no one seemed to be able to respond to it. The patriotic kid from Ohio persevered until he was finally transferred to someone who listened to his question.

  He recounts the conversation this way: “Look, I’m a college student and I’m studying Vietnam. I’m reading all these books by all these professors, and they are telling me that we have no moral right to be in Vietnam. I assume you guys must not agree with that.” He asked for the names of articles and books that supported the government’s position.

  “He told me he’d send a few pamphlets they had. I said I would appreciate that, but, ‘Besides the stuff that the government publishes, is there any independent material, anything written by human beings out there who don’t work for the government who think this war is a good idea?’ ” There was a pause as the official asked the question of someone else in the office.

  The official came back on the line and gave Forsyth the name of one book. Forsyth thanked him and said he was surprised there weren’t many books that supported U.S. policy. An eager student, he found the State Department–recommended book and immediately read it, hoping it would provide the well-reasoned justification for the war he was looking for.

  “Now, I was eighteen at the time,” says Forsyth as he recounts his quest to understand U.S. credibility in Vietnam, “and I remember saying to myself, ‘I would be ashamed to publish a book of this quality.’ It was full of unsubstantiated assertions. By this time I was used to reading very elaborately documented books about the war, about the country. This book that they had referred me to had no documentation and made wild statements, such as ‘All of a sudden the democratic government of Vietnam appears.’…It was poorly written in every sense of the word. And this was the only book he referred me to supporting the other side.”

  Forsyth called the State Department again and reached the man who had recommended the book. He told him he had read the book and that he was disappointed in the quality of it and wanted to read more books. He asked the man if he could provide a list of books by authors who supported the U.S. military role in Vietnam. To Forsyth the logic was simple: If the United States had decided to fight this war, its officials must have very strong and respectable reasons for doing so, ones that would make all Americans understand and support the war. The official said he would call him back. When he did a few days later, he said, “There aren’t any more. That’s the only one.”

  After Forsyth failed to get the Department of State to recommend books that made the case for the war, he searched more on his own. “I looked hard. I’m a pretty thorough guy.” He came up with nothing. At that point, Forsyth finally was willing to believe and trust what he had read about the case against the Vietnam War.

  What happened next, he says, was a reaction, not a decision. He explains the difference. “If you are walking down a street and see somebody walk up to a stranger and blow their brains out for no reason, you would have a reaction to that. You wouldn’t decide what you thought about it. You would know immediately, you would react.” That, he said, happened to him at the end of his long search to find convincing arguments in support of the war in Vietnam. He felt as though he did not have a choice. Once he had completed as much research as he thought it was possible to do through the written material available in English at that time and through his source at the State Department, he reacted. He went from being an apathetic college student from suburban Akron who didn’t think much about the world beyond himself and his friends to figuring out how he would accomplish the goal that now was his deepest concern:

  Stop this war.

  His doubts removed, he had come to believe the war represented values that were the antithesis of what he had assumed were American values. For Forsyth, “From then on, the Vietnam War was about 90 percent of what I was interested in.”

  Challenged about his claim that he had no choice except to act, he acknowledges that his reaction was not inevitable, that he could have made a choice—that he could have read the same information and chosen to disagree with it or be either neutral or apathetic. Sure, he says, “when I read the book I could have stopped after the first few pages and said, ‘Yeah, the war in Vietnam is wrong, but it’s so depressing I don’t want to hear about it anymore,’ and thrown the book away. Or I could have said, ‘I got courses to take and coeds to chase, too bad about this.’ But I don’t see what I did next, becoming part of the peace movement, as a choice. I’m a person who takes things seriously.…When I read something that went
against my opinion, I was shocked and had to find out if I was wrong. I did everything I could to learn both sides. Then, after I did that, I had a new opinion. I had no choice at that point.” He was then an eighteen-year-old freshman with, as he looks back on it, a corrected opinion, a lot of anger, and a strong need to do something about what he had discovered.

  In addition to feeling angry, he said, “I felt hurt. I felt personally manipulated, lied to. It still pushes my buttons. I felt a lot of righteous indignation that somebody would be saying one thing and doing the opposite—protecting democracy in Vietnam while they are instead destroying the possibility of democracy—I immediately started wondering what was the story with all these grown-ups that put us in this situation. It wasn’t my responsibility to have to read this book prior to being eighteen years old. But here are all these other people that are grown up, and they don’t seem to be asking any questions. The war’s been going on for years by then. What’s the story with them?”

  Forsyth tried to talk with his father about the war. He always has considered himself to be a lot like his father. “He’s a relatively independent, critical thinker. That’s where I picked up that quality. And I just couldn’t fathom how he could be going along with this.…Part of what I was thinking was that if I didn’t have a college deferment [from military service], my ass would be over there with people shooting at it. And, I thought, if you’re going to send your son over to a war, you’d better be damn sure that it’s right to send me.”