The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  “I told the people in the group, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore.’ There weren’t any long goodbyes. I just said, ‘This is the end for me, see you later.’ It sounds kind of cold, but I wasn’t in it for the social aspect.…I felt closer to the people I lived with than I did to them.…They [the people he lived with] were all involved in some kind of progressive politics, though some were more into macramé than they were into anything else. But to the extent that I had emotional attachments, it was to the people I lived with.…The resistance work was strictly business as far as I was concerned. I think I was atypical. I think to most people in the Catholic Left, the group was like a family, but not to me.”

  Not until years later was he able to feel deep satisfaction about what he accomplished in those days. Like Williamson, he did not fully recognize the significance of what the Media burglary revealed, and the large public reaction to the revelations, until several years later, after he had rebuilt his life. “It took me five to ten years to figure that out.

  “In terms of the antiwar movement and that period of my life, it was downhill from then on. That was the beginning of my period of frustration. Actually, I was frustrated from the day I read that book in 1968 on, but I mean really frustrated [by mid-1971]. As long as I was doing more, and more, and more, somehow that helped to keep my frustration at bay. The war was still going on, and it didn’t look like it was going to end anytime real soon. I couldn’t think of anything to do except to get down in the grassroots and try to change people’s minds about things.…At the time that seemed the most effective thing to do.

  Forsyth put away his lock-picking tools, which were rather well worn by mid-1971. He returned the standard items to the various toolboxes from which he had borrowed them. He kept the ones he had made for a while and then threw them away. Almost immediately after he got out of jail following his arrest in Camden, he called someone who was doing community organizing. A short time later he moved to Kensington, then a largely working-class and poor neighborhood in Philadelphia.

  For most of the next ten years, Forsyth was first a neighborhood organizer and later a union reform organizer in a factory owned by the Budd Company, a metal fabricator and major supplier of body components for automobile manufacturing companies. During these years, he said many years after he left organizing, “I wanted to change America. I was fired with the zealot’s vision.” But after a few years, Forsyth found the work less and less satisfying. His lack of satisfaction may have come in part from the nature of the particular group he was working with. Members consumed themselves with constant criticism of one another, a sharp contrast to the warm, friendly atmosphere of the Catholic peace movement.

  By 1981, Forsyth said, he knew “this is not me anymore.” By that time, “the most immediate thing was how personally painful it was, the way we were attacking each other and expecting perfection.…A lot of the people I was working with, I started wondering what it would be like if they were in charge of the government, and whether that would be such a good idea.…I was the most zealous of the zealous, and when I finally woke up to what I was like, from a human point of view, I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

  Finally, the “missionary attitude” drove him out of organizing. Increasingly, he was bothered “by the relationships we had with the people we were supposedly organizing. The missionary thing was always there … that sense that Father knows best, that we knew best.…We said we were trying to empower people, but we were pushing our own agenda, and there was always an undercurrent of not being completely up front about exactly what we were doing.…You say you’re trying to save the world.…But we treated people like recruitees.…It’s still a source of pain to me now when I think of that missionary attitude.”

  At the end of this period of his life, Forsyth again “didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had to get out, so I did.” In 1981, at age thirty-one, he was a veteran of intense political involvement, with thirteen years of experience under his belt: campus organizing at Wooster, long-term community and union reform organizing in Philadelphia, an acquittal in the very unusual Camden trial, and no arrest in his biggest coup, the Media FBI burglary. “If I have any regrets, it’s that I wasn’t able to keep up.…I just got real tired and real discouraged.”

  AS HE CLOSED the organizing chapter of his life, Forsyth decided to build a new life. He analyzed his skills, his interests, his needs. He decided to utilize his strong penchant for being precise and methodical. He went back to college and earned two degrees—a bachelor’s degree in physics from the State University of New York at Albany and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Drexel University. He became an electrical engineer, his father’s profession.

  He likes this work. It provides him with a refreshing contrast to an aspect of political work he found extremely distasteful. In political life, he found, “if you’re fanatic enough, you can justify anything in the name of some principle. If you’re a good enough arguer—and I met some champion debaters—you can make green red and red green. I’d go home after some debates and say, ‘What the hell did I just agree with? Am I out of my mind?’

  “That’s one of the reasons why I gravitated toward engineering.…What I do now, when it’s all done and it comes time to turn on that switch, it either works or it doesn’t.…If smoke comes out, you screwed up, you’re wrong, you made a mistake, and you can’t blame it on anybody else. If it works, I get the credit. If it doesn’t work, I get the blame, and that’s the way I like it. You can’t bullshit your way around.”

  Since then he has worked for companies and also worked independently, operating his own consulting business, Forsyth Electro Optics, from his home in Manayunk, a neighborhood high on a hill above the Schuylkill River on the western edge of Philadelphia. His work has included such projects as designing equipment that uses light in the operation of lasers, fiber-optic systems, electronic cameras, and other devices. He advises companies and individuals on the feasibility of systems they have designed.

  Forsyth hastens to point out that though he is not active politically, he hasn’t rejected his progressive beliefs. “I have a lot of bad things to say about the left and about my own involvement in the left. I’m not active, and I’m very cynical about the prospects for change, but I have no sympathy for these reconstructed people who say, ‘We made a mistake. Nixon was right all along.’…That stuff makes me puke. I’m not reconstructed in that sense.”

  His relations with his parents have improved. He often has differed with them on politics. Usually, “I find that they don’t convince me, and I don’t convince them.…My attitude now is that I’m not going to try to convince them.…If they say something that I really disagree with … I’ll say something about it, but I don’t get hot about it anymore. I just stop and think, ‘There probably is another side to this,’ and let it go. At that time, I couldn’t let it go. At that time, what they thought was really important to me.…When you’re a kid, especially if you grew up in a real close family, your parents’ beliefs have a weight that they don’t have after you’ve become an adult. At that time I felt betrayed: How can you support this war, how can you do this to me?”

  Forsyth finds pleasure in the fact that he and his parents have found one common ground: They agree that most people in elected office are scoundrels. He doesn’t think most are taking money from dubious deals. They are scoundrels, he believes, because “they are gutless. Their purpose in life is to get reelected. They are afraid to stand for something.”

  The most important part of his rebuilt life is his family. He cherishes them. He found it difficult when his sons—Adam, born in 1983, and Micah, born in 1986—were growing up to imagine how he could devote time to political work as well as to nurturing the family he and his wife, Susan Grossinger, created. He worried about the impact on his children of his lack of political engagement, but it seemed necessary to at least take a breather, if not a permanent leave, from being political in order to build the professional and perso
nal parts of his life, those parts he ignored until 1981.

  Keith Forsyth and his wife, Susan Grossinger, in 1987.

  Forsyth hopes Adam and Micah will not be afraid to make hard decisions, such as ones that might involve making a sacrifice in order to help other people. As soon as they were able to listen to stories, he started telling them his story. Since they were very little, they’ve known that Daddy went to jail once for being against the war. “I told them there was a war going on and that … a lot of people thought it was a good idea, and a lot of people thought it was a bad idea. And Daddy thought it was a real bad idea. I tell them that a lot of innocent people were getting killed and that when things like that happen people ought to try to stop it. I tell them that I tried to do that.”

  The portrait Forsyth paints of himself in those early years of protest and organizing includes patches of frustration, anger, and personal distress. It’s obvious that some of the memories are painful. “The frustration is still there,” he says. “I don’t access it very often because it gets me upset, and there’s no point to it. Today he analyzes politics in a different way from how he did in the early 1970s. While he still has strong opinions about various issues, he sees more ambiguity now than he saw during the Vietnam War. He has also shifted in his view of the public. “I don’t regard our problems today as solely the fault of the leaders. I think that at that time I tended to see the American public as a bunch of gullible little lambs who were being led down the primrose path by these nasty, manipulative politicians and chairmen of General Motors and other companies.…My opinion of the population is different now. Let’s put it this way: I think the American people, the majority of them, are sufficiently well educated and free from worrying about whether they are going to be carried out in the middle of the night by secret police and free enough from starving to death that they can take more responsibility for the way they vote and for the way their government is run.”

  That’s the attitude he hopes Adam and Micah will have, that sense of being responsible that he acquired from his parents and that he then redirected into his work against the war after Peace in Vietnam, the book Chuck gave him, set him on a new course.

  AT SOME POINT—while Forsyth was getting an education, building a profession, becoming a husband, nurturing two sons with his wife—he made peace with his past, with his assessment of the people he walked away from after Camden and with the person he was then. His frustration and feelings of futility about failing to stop the war gradually dissipated. Forsyth’s memories of those years still can evoke powerful traces of the frustration and pain he felt then, but those reactions now take a backseat. They have been largely replaced by a deep pride and satisfaction in what he and the people he worked with then, especially his fellow Media burglars, did in those days when millions of Americans wanted their government to end the war in Vietnam.

  In a sign of his acceptance of his past and of his renewed respect for his former colleagues in the Catholic peace movement, Forsyth was present in 2003 when the federal judges of New Jersey, in an extraordinary act, sponsored, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Camden verdict, a daylong reunion of the Camden 28 defendants and others associated with the trial—prosecutors, an FBI agent, some witnesses, the son of the deceased judge, the widow of the deceased chief prosecutor, a federal judge herself, and even the informer. It took place in the same courtroom where the trial occurred, with the graying defendants sitting in an expanded jury box. During the 1973 trial, Forsyth had no interest in working with fellow defendants to create the open courtroom atmosphere in which the judge permitted them to explain the history of the war, the basis of their opposition to the war, and why they had broken laws in order to draw attention to what they regarded as an unlawful action—the war itself. Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of the trial, Forsyth was fully engaged in this courtroom he had shunned then. He sat with his fellow defendants in the jury box. It was obvious that now he was proud of what the defendants had accomplished in the trial, and he was happy to join them in celebrating and examining the unusual trial, that era, and the personal commitments that had spawned their resistance.

  In contrast to all the other people who commented at the reunion, Terry Neist—the only FBI agent at the reunion and one of the two agents in charge of the Camden informer in the months leading up to the arrests and also one of the agents who investigated the Media burglary—made it clear at the reunion that he was still angry about the verdict. “We are a nation of laws,” he said. “They broke the law. They should have been found guilty.”

  Forsyth spoke up. He was diplomatic as he responded to Neist in an agreeable but firm voice that was heard clearly throughout the courtroom. “Terry raised important points,” said Forsyth. “We are a nation of laws, and for good reasons. Most of us take that very seriously. Deciding when to break the law is not a trivial decision or a light decision. I hope that if I was presented today with the same issues, I would have the courage to make the decision I made when I was a child of twenty-one. I hope the young people out there listening will try to make the right decision today.” His comments were greeted with murmurs of approval throughout the audience that packed the reunion courtroom.

  The frustration and sense of failure that once dominated Forsyth’s assessment of that period in his life were completely absent one day as he summed up what the acts of resistance he carried out in his youth mean to him now:

  “It’s one of the few decisions I made, one of the few things I ever did, that I feel unconditionally positive about.…I had to decide whether it was going to be just an opinion about which I would shoot off my mouth and not do anything, or was I really going to be serious and do something? … I spent a lot of time thinking about that.…I weighed the personal risk. I asked myself how much risk I was willing to face for an opinion.…That’s one of those times when people were called on to take a position one way or another. I’m proud of the position I took.…There are a lot of other things in my life that are just sort of neutral. I get by from day to day like everybody else … sometimes doing things I’m ashamed of.…But I feel great about what I did then.”

  23

  Very Pleased … Missing the Joy

  RON DURST REMEMBERS the pleasure of hearing people talk about the burglary. “I remember being proud and not being able to tell anyone.…That was okay. The action spoke for itself.” But the secrecy the burglars imposed on one another led to some unusual ways of getting approval. “It was a funny thing. I was getting indirect feedback through the news media and through people at parties.…They’d comment on what a wonderful thing had happened with Media, and they’d say it was incredible what this was doing to the FBI. People thought it was absolutely wonderful. They would wonder who had done it. I would have liked to have said, ‘I was one of the people who did it.’ But I didn’t. I knew I was getting compliments and a lot of support—though they didn’t know they were giving it to me.…I was getting a lot of feedback from seeing the stories in the news media.…I was excited and very pleased.

  “I was always looking over my shoulder, but it was a funny thing to be in a situation where you have done something that was against the law and yet you are proud of it. I’d look over my shoulder in a kind of fearful way, but the fear was attached to a feeling of pride and not to shame or guilt.” Durst was briefly considered a suspect, but he was never called or visited by the FBI.

  The roots of his willingness to say yes when Davidon asked him what he thought of burglarizing an FBI office grew from tragic family stories that started shaping his conscience and his resolve to stop injustice when he was a child. The stories were horrendous. Whole generations of both his father’s and mother’s families were killed during the Holocaust. His parents escaped and brought with them stories of Nazi brutality that were permanently etched in his mind. These stories of profound loss filled many family conversations when Durst was growing up. As a small boy, he felt sorrow and anger for the enormous loss of life, including aunts and uncles h
e never had the chance to know. His anger about that tragic loss stayed with him, and as he became an adult it helped shape his decisions about the kind of life he would live. He could not believe average Germans after the war when they said, “I didn’t know.” Nor could he accept the claim of Nazi soldiers that they should be excused because “I was taking orders.”

  Later, his family lessons echoed in his response to the war in Vietnam. As the number of people killed added up to many thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians, he examined his anger about the Holocaust in new ways. He raised questions with himself that he had not considered before. “It’s very easy to live in the United States and point at Germany and say, ‘Why didn’t you follow the laws of your conscience?’ That’s easy to do. It’s harder to do it in the present, in your own situation.” He thought about the passivity of German bystanders, of average German citizens, and he compared their reactions to the reactions of Americans to Vietnam. Sure, many Americans cared, but, he thought, not enough of them. Too many Americans were passive and seemed satisfied to let the killing continue, or not to explore why it was happening.

  Earlier, Durst had easily adopted the fierce cry about the Holocaust: “Never again!” As his outrage about the Vietnam War grew, he heard the same cry in a new way. He told himself that the cry should also mean that such brutal killing must never happen again against any people—not in Auschwitz, not in My Lai, not in Cambodia. This compelling demand fueled his resistance to the Vietnam War.