The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  In these conversations, Forsyth remembers, his father used to bring up World War II, “as though it was the same.…And I would say, ‘That’s totally irrelevant. World War II was a just war. We had to do what we did then. What you did was right and it was good. What we are doing now is the opposite.’ ” He felt a deep respect for the heroic way his father’s generation had met their obligations during World War II, but he couldn’t understand why they seemed to be blind to the injustice of this new war.

  FORSYTH DROPPED out of college in spring 1970 and lived at home while he thought about how he would work to stop the war. He considered transferring to a larger campus that would have a larger peace movement. He was thinking about his options when President Nixon made his announcement on April 30 that the United States was invading Cambodia. Later that night, a friend from Wooster called and asked him to return to campus to help organize demonstrations against the invasion. The campus was not very politically active, he recalls, but, as on countless other quiet campuses, many people there were furious about Nixon’s announcement and protested, many of them for the first time.

  Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on a Thursday evening. Protests started late that evening and continued through the weekend. On Monday, Forsyth was with friends in the newsroom of the Wooster student newspaper, mimeographing leaflets advertising a protest on campus. The teletype machine started click-clacking loudly, a sign that a story was about to come over the wire. Forsyth can’t remember now whether it was a scream, a cry, or a curse. He just remembers someone reading the story being transmitted let out a strong reaction. Everybody in the room quickly gathered around the teletype machine. They couldn’t believe what they read: Student protesters had been killed just minutes earlier and just forty-six miles away at Kent State University. Four had been killed and nine wounded by National Guardsmen who shot into the crowd gathered on the campus green.

  Until that moment, Forsyth’s rage against the war had been intellectual, based on what he had learned during his deep research. Now his rage was a visceral reaction—nearby students had been killed. People who probably had the same antiwar opinions he had.

  Ten days later, other killings accelerated Forsyth’s transformation to resister. He was still at Wooster organizing protests against the Cambodian invasion and the killings at Kent State when he woke in a friend’s dorm room to awful sounds on a radio. Other people were in the room. Whatever they were listening to was interrupted by a special news report. Everyone in the room hushed, trying to understand what they were hearing.

  “They played a tape,” Forsyth recalls. “A reporter or somebody had a tape of what happened.…They played this tape, and there was all this talking, and you could hear some cop on a bullhorn … and then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t like bang, pause, confusion. Instead, it was just like, all of a sudden, all this shooting started. I found out later it was individual weapon fire, but it sounded like one or two automatic weapons.…It was ten or twenty rifles and pistols and shotguns all being fired at once. The story that circulated later was that somebody shot at them and they shot back, which obviously was bullshit because there was not a bang and then a pause and then a bang.…It was just all of a sudden a big barrage that sounded like machine-gun fire.” Indeed, that was the case that night at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Students had fired no shots, but every window on one side of their dormitory was broken by police gunshots.

  Forsyth is emotionally drained after he recounts the memory of how he felt that night as he listened with Wooster friends huddled around that radio. In the moments that followed, he learned what it was he had just heard on tape: Two black students had been killed and twelve wounded as Mississippi State Police fired on students in a dormitory at Jackson State College, a black college. He pauses, and with a sense of finality, says, “And that was it for me.”

  “After Jackson State—” He loses his voice briefly, the anger and sadness present now as he remembers.

  “That was the moment when I really decided that something more than just the end of the Vietnam War was called for. There was a larger evil at work. I was already mad. I was already feeling enraged and betrayed. And after that it just multiplied.”

  When he learned what had happened to those black students and, over the next several days, as he saw how people reacted—and didn’t react—to their deaths, he experienced an epiphany about how little awareness he himself had of race. It had not been a part of his consciousness. He had grown up totally shielded from an awareness of race. Now, as he absorbed what the Mississippi police had done to these black students, he mourned them and also his own lack of awareness of how differently, how unjustly black people were treated in the United States. He thought of the omissions in his experience and knowledge about race. “There had been zero black people in my neighborhood or high school. In the town I grew up in, Marion, a small town in Ohio, there were black people, but I didn’t even find out about that until I was fourteen. I thought the whole town was white. I went downtown all the time, walking all over—well, I thought all over. Then, a friend, one summer day he and I went on a longer than usual walk. We found black people, a whole community of black people in that little town, and we didn’t know about them. They were really segregated. They didn’t go downtown to shop.…Nobody mentioned them. They just didn’t come up. As I thought about them after Jackson State, I thought about the fact that ever since I was a little kid, I knew all the best places to fish fifty miles around there, but I didn’t know there were black people three miles from my home. Isn’t that incomprehensible?”

  Keith Forsyth, age fifteen, on one of many fishing trips he took with his maternal grandfather, Robert Delno Hickok, a relative of Wild Bill Hickok. They caught northern pike this day on the north side of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, in 1965.

  He also remembered then what happened his senior year of high school when Martin Luther King was assassinated. “I had a civics class, and we didn’t even talk about his death, if you can believe that.” In the aftermath of the Jackson State killings, he remembered King’s assassination and asked himself: Why did they not talk about this event, King’s death, that, he now realized, had traumatized the country and at the time was discussed throughout the world?

  “All these memories hit me in the face after I listened to that tape. It started to wake me up. I started visualizing those black kids.…I knew I didn’t want to be shot, and I was sure they didn’t want to be shot.…I had a vague awareness of racism. I knew, for instance, some pillars of our church who were particularly racist. But it didn’t have the same importance to me as the war. It didn’t have the same impact. I didn’t think something needed to change.…Until Jackson State happened, it didn’t burn.”

  His idealized view of American society was now not just in question, as it had been when he first read Peace in Vietnam. Now it was in shreds. Whereas before he had assumed that American society was generally one giant middle class, with variations based largely on terrain, climate, and tastes, now he saw a society torn by racial injustice and by a herd mentality that caused many people not to question their government and its policies. “I started thinking more in terms of tactics and political effectiveness. I started reading books on political strategy and tactics and how to organize.…‘Effectiveness’ was a big word for me. I don’t remember my rationale, but resistance seemed like the next thing to do, the thing that would be effective. And I felt that it had to be nonviolent resistance to be tactically effective.” He wasn’t a total pacifist, but he was a pacifist by personality and strategy. He believed war could be justified and necessary, as he thought World War II was. But he believed violent protest was not only inhumane but also strategically counterproductive.

  His transformation now accelerated—from organizing demonstrations on the Wooster campus to deciding he was willing to break the law in order to protest government policies. His sense of personal responsibility for the war, aroused by his study of it, now dominated his thinking. “I
t’s our government, it’s our money going over there, it’s our policy, and they’re our politicians who are doing this,” he thought. “It’s our responsibility to do something about this.

  “I got that from my parents. I was raised with a strong sense of personal responsibility for things, everything from ‘Don’t sit in the mud with your Sunday clothes on’ to ‘Don’t take other people’s things.’ I had learned that you’re responsible for what you do, and while the content of some of my views had changed, that sense of responsibility had not changed. That’s still the centerpiece of my life.”

  BY THE END of May 1970, Forsyth had reached the point of awareness that the older Media burglars had reached before 1968. His awakening had begun in the fall of 1969. Until then, he had little concern about the traumatic events that transpired the previous year—the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the demonstrations and riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the election of Richard Nixon as president. “I was aware of all that [1968] stuff,” he says, “but I was still a kid from the Midwest. All that stuff wasn’t nearly as important to me as what impression I was making on girls.”

  After Cambodia, after Kent State and Jackson State, he made three decisions simultaneously:

  Get out of Ohio.

  Go to Philadelphia.

  Do resistance.

  Forsyth may not have known that W. C. Fields had written a famous epitaph for his tombstone that has fueled countless insulting jokes about Philadelphia: “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” It was not W.C.’s favorite place, except as an alternative to death. The jokes that followed included such gems as the one about the travel contest: The first prize is a week in Philadelphia, and the second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia. If Forsyth had known this harsh humor about the city, he would not have cared. Philadelphia was where he wanted to be. He had been told, correctly, that it was one of the best places for a would-be resister to go in 1970. People told him there was a big peace movement there. They were right.

  Forsyth went home after the campus demonstrations. A few days later, he went to the eastern edge of Akron and put out his thumb. With no apologies to W. C. Fields and lots of optimism about finding a place for the next stage of his life, he was on his way to Philadelphia. “I knew Philadelphia was a big city, so obviously there would be an antiwar movement of some size. I knew the Quakers were out here, so I figured this sounded like good, fertile ground for doing what I needed to do and learn what I needed to learn.”

  Not long after Forsyth arrived in the city, he picked up a flyer distributed by a group of people claiming responsibility for raiding a series of Philadelphia draft boards. When he saw that flyer, Forsyth says, “I knew I had found the kind of resistance I was looking for.…I got to the people I wanted to meet very quickly after that. I was introduced to people who introduced me to people … and pretty soon I met people who were also interested in doing acts of resistance against the war.…They were doing what I wanted to do. They had experience doing it, and they weren’t afraid of getting arrested. That’s all I needed to know.” That was the beginning of Forsyth’s nearly full-time resistance work.

  He applied the same methodical approach to preparation for resistance that he had applied earlier to studying the war. He assumed he should be prepared, as much as one can be, to face the possibility of arrest, trial, and short- or long-term imprisonment. He read studies on what happens to people when they go to prison, about how police treat people when they arrest them. “I thought about how I would feel about this. If I were to get arrested and sent to jail for five years, would I then change my mind and decide it wasn’t worth it? What would it be like to be in a cage for five years? Would I change my mind about the risk I had taken? What would I do every day? … I went through this in great detail with myself. I wanted to make sure if I was going to chicken out, I wanted to chicken out before and not during or after. And so I decided that it wasn’t going to be any fun, but it was no big deal.…I’m not a fragile personality type, so I decided I would be okay. I wasn’t worried.”

  FORSYTH REGARDED his chosen resistance base, the Catholic peace movement, as more like an amoeba than a disciplined political action group. Most of the time, he says, you felt “it wasn’t really an organization at all. It was just a bunch of people that felt the same way. I remember reading something in the paper by some PR turkey that portrayed us as this organization that was run by Dan and Phil Berrigan.…It was the antithesis of that. There were a lot of people involved who never met Dan and Phil. And there were a lot of people who should have met them because they could have learned something from the Berrigans. It was very loose and spread out, and different people did things in very different ways. Some wanted to get arrested. That was their philosophy—especially those close to Dan and Phil had that orientation. They felt, ‘We’re going to do this, and we’re going to take responsibility publicly and get arrested on purpose.’ They felt that increased the political impact to force the state to put them on trial and put them in jail.…That was a perfectly legitimate philosophy. I didn’t happen to agree with it, but I respected it.”

  Given his view, it was fortunate Forsyth became involved in this movement after it had switched from symbolic actions to clandestine burglaries of draft boards. “I wanted to disable draft boards. I wasn’t interested in being arrested. I wasn’t afraid of being arrested, but I wasn’t interested in being arrested. I wanted to be free so I could destroy as much of the Selective Service system as I could, or the Army.…I would have rather done it on Army bases”—destroyed records, made it hard to fight the war—“but they had barbed wire around bases.…Security was tight. And the only way you could do any damage there would involve injuring people, and I wouldn’t do that. My only choice was the draft boards.”

  It was his only choice until Davidon asked him, in December 1970, what he thought of burglarizing an FBI office, an option that of course had never occurred to him and perhaps not to anyone else except Davidon.

  Unlike some of the Media burglars, Forsyth says he didn’t live in fear of being found by the FBI after the Media burglary. All of his fear was concentrated in those intense hours he spent breaking into the office and thinking they should call off the burglary. Later, he thought the job had been done well and was confident no trails could lead to them. Consequently, in the aftermath of the burglary, he did not have sleepless nights, he did not worry about a knock on the door. He was never visited or called by the FBI.

  He remembers being “totally happy” hours after the raid when the group gathered at the farmhouse to begin the next stage of their work, sorting the documents they had stolen. But even as it became clear during the ten days the burglars read and sorted the stolen files that they had been successful beyond their wildest hopes, Forsyth started to disengage from the process. The satisfaction he felt soon after the burglary dwindled fast. “I really felt good about Media,” he said. “It was a great thing, but within a week after it was over, the effect on me had worn off. I knew we had done a good thing, but I quickly felt, ‘What am I going to do now?’ And I really didn’t know what to do now.” At movement parties, he was silent as he listened to people discussing in excited detail what the Media documents had revealed. “People were very pleased. But I wasn’t that excited about it. It didn’t have that much meaning for me. We did this and it was over, and now it was time to go back to work the next day,” he says. “That’s what it was like. You go to work and you do something and the project is finished and it’s successful. Your boss gives you a pat on the back. Well, you don’t quit your job then. You go back to work the next day and start up the next thing. That’s sort of how it was for me.”

  Within a short time, though, moving on to the next resistance project became difficult for Forsyth. “I was hoping somebody smarter than me would come up with a good idea and suggest it to me. But nobody did. And I came to realize the limitations of that whole draft board thing.…There are so many draft b
oards in the country. It was clear what we were doing was not causing them to suffer from a soldier shortage over there. The reality that we were this mouse gnawing on the elephant’s toenail was coming home to me more and more, and I got more and more frustrated. And very unhappy.…

  “In the beginning it was more satisfying,” Forsyth says. “In the beginning just the act of resistance was enough. As that started to wear off, the opportunity to do Media came along, and that escalation was enough. But then, once that was over, it was, ‘What do we do now?’ And the only good ideas I remember after that were about things that were not feasible because of the security.

  “I think in some ways Media made the draft board raid work even less satisfying because it seemed kind of like going backwards to a lower level.…My frustration level was rapidly increasing immediately after Media.”

  In late June or early July 1971, Forsyth was recruited to be part of the group that was planning the Camden draft board raid. It wasn’t the great idea he was looking for, but he agreed to participate. “Camden was bad news from the beginning, and I knew it was bad news.…I knew it was something I was getting myself into that I shouldn’t. But I was just frustrated, mad at myself and at everybody else, and said, ‘I’m gonna do it. I don’t give a shit.’ He felt awful afterwards. He felt that many of the people in the Camden raid never should have been there, that they had not been properly prepared. “And, of course, I had as much responsibility as anyone else to bring that up and try to deal with it, but I didn’t do it.”

  After Forsyth was released from jail and arraigned for the Camden raid, he said goodbye to this phase of his life. “Camden was my last contact with the Catholic Left.…I had just had it with that stuff. I felt like I had to do something different.…I had been with them a year, a very long year.…It seemed like forever. I decided that grassroots work was going to be more effective. I think my thinking was something like this: Resistance is not effective, it’s not working in the short run. We need to dig in for the long haul instead. I had a sense of accomplishment, but not a big one. Not a big one at all.” He readily acknowledges that his post-resistance attitude probably developed in part from the intense impatience often typical in youth. He had made a major change in his life in order to stop the war. When the war didn’t end, and he felt he might not be able to do more to make it end, he felt compelled to move on, to use his intense drive for another purpose.