As Durst edged closer to more serious resistance, he was perplexed by what he saw as a fundamental change in official American policies as reflected in its aggression in Vietnam in contrast to its role in creating the Nuremberg trials after World War II. In those trials, judges from Allied countries—including U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson—from 1945 to 1949 presided over the trials of more than one hundred Nazis for leading a war that was in violation of international treaties and involved brutal crimes against humanity. For the first time, the international community, organized primarily by the United States, agreed it had a moral and legal obligation not to let perpetrators of war crimes get away with impunity; they would be held responsible for their crimes. The United States and those grand principles established at Nuremberg seemed to be synonymous. Until Vietnam, said Durst.
By 1970, Durst was puzzled that the United States could have gone to such great lengths to enshrine those principles at the end of World War II but twenty years later was waging a war in Vietnam that increasingly was seen, in the eyes of more and more Americans and the international community, as one that could not be justified and that was needlessly causing the killing of thousands of people each year.
“There comes a time,” he decided, “when one has to break the laws of the land, when well-thought-out civil disobedience is necessary to maintain a righteous and reasonable state.…I couldn’t stand seeing all those people dying for a war that didn’t make any sense.” His determination not to be a passive bystander increased when Davidon focused his attention on the possibility that the FBI was spying on activists and suppressing dissent. He had engaged in smaller acts of civil disobedience in the past year. He decided it was time for him to take a bold step. He was ready to follow one of the principles enshrined at Nuremberg: that sometimes laws should be broken.
In the years since the burglary, Durst has become relatively prosperous. Living for many years far from the Philadelphia area, he says he still has essentially the same values he had then. As an investor, for instance, he said he refuses to invest in companies that profit from war. In other ways, his priorities have changed. He gradually focused more on personal needs, family needs. “After a while I didn’t pay as much attention to issues.” He hopes he still has the capacity to refuse to be passive in the face of great injustice—to act again as he did at Media, “in a way that made a difference.”
Like an artist who feels as though he has just created a fine painting, perhaps his best, Ron Durst was radiant one day as he recounted in careful detail the execution of the Media burglary and then summed up the satisfaction he felt years later. “It was a wonderful, well-conceived act of civil disobedience. It was much more than we hoped it would be. It’s something that I’m really proud of. It’s not something that I can put on my résumé, but to me it’s one of the most significant things I’ve done in my life.”
FOR SUSAN SMITH, the agony of never being sure if she had removed a glove and left fingerprints while she was in the FBI office continued for many years, as did her yearning to be able to share the experience with friends. The yearning “gradually faded but never went away,” she says. “There was no time when there was a clear break, and I suddenly felt, ‘Well, it’s over now.’ Instead, it thinned out and became a thin line.”
But she thinks “the Pandora’s box we opened” was well worth the price of whatever torment she endured. “The immediate impact, the unraveling of what the FBI was doing, would have been enough. But the long-term impact, the revelation of COINTELPRO, the legitimizing of the complaints that had been made but ignored. The image of the wonder boys shattered; they no longer were the invincible. Even those on the left who regarded the FBI as an enemy tended to regard them as all-powerful. After the burglary, one of the things we achieved was to show they were not.”
Like John Raines, Smith was a veteran of Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964. She didn’t talk about her time there very much, but it had been a powerful experience—life-threatening but ultimately very gratifying.
While she worked in the northeastern corner of Mississippi, Smith lived with three other civil rights workers—one of them black, two white—in an old unpainted, dry-as-kindling farmhouse. It had four rooms, an outhouse, and an outdoor water spigot. It was down a dirt road near a wooded area. No other houses were within sight. Two weeks after they moved into the house, they were wakened one night by a series of explosions—gasoline bombs, they learned later—on the front porch. Tall flames quickly engulfed the front of the old house, a perfect tinderbox. Each of them woke up shouting to the others to get out of the house. But, Smith remembers, “as soon as we stood up and started shouting, gunfire—rifle and shotgun fire—hit the front of the house. We ran to the back and dove out the back windows and hit the ground.” They stayed flat until the gunfire ended. When they inspected the house after the gunfire stopped, they saw that the walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, all just above waist level. It was difficult to think the fire had not been set so the four of them would become easy to target as they fled the raging fire.
A few weeks later, a mechanic removed a brake pin in her car, something that could have led to a serious accident. One day, as she stood beside her broken-down car along a country road, she was told to get out of Mississippi or face the fate of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers brutally killed a few months earlier. She was frightened, but she refused to be intimidated. She stayed through the autumn.
When she went to the South, there was clarity, even purity, she thought later, about what she did. Your actions were laid out for the entire world to see, to judge, to accept or reject. Those conditions met the criteria for what she thought was the ideal political life—a life that was visible and could be judged by your actions. By contrast, though the burglary was done for the public, it was hidden from the public.
Smith’s conflict over the type of resistance Davidon now invited her to participate in arose in part from what she learned as a college student from the writings of Hannah Arendt, a leading political philosopher of the twentieth century. Arendt left Germany in 1933, settled in New York, and wrote about the struggle to grasp the origin and import of totalitarian movements and how they affected moral and political judgment. With Arendt, Smith shared the conundrum posed by having both a respect for the rule of law and also a certainty that the law, as either applied or ignored by a government, sometimes needed to be changed, challenged, or disobeyed.
As she thought about whether to participate in the Media burglary, an unusual kind of fear—that prison would be worse than death—haunted her.
Smith, thirty-seven at the time, looked at it this way: She thought that she would rather be dead soon than be in prison forever, that she would rather sacrifice her life than her freedom. “In Mississippi all that was at risk was my life. In the burglary, all that would be at risk was twenty to thirty years in prison. Now, this may seem strange, but I don’t have any problem risking my life.…When you’re dead, you’re dead. I mean, that’s it. It’s over. But when you’re in prison, you’re spending twenty to thirty years in prison. What does it mean to live in prison? Now, obviously, lots of people with long sentences have made a lot out of their lives in prison. But I couldn’t quite see spending twenty to thirty years in prison as being a really good thing.”
When Smith thinks about her two main resistance experiences, she regards Freedom Summer in Mississippi as the most important experience of her life and the Media burglary as the most difficult experience of her life. She still appreciates the purity of helping register black people to vote in Mississippi. She’s always felt regret about the secrecy surrounding the Media burglary even though she understood then and now that it was necessary.
For Smith, something profoundly important was missing in the months and weeks after the burglary.
Public resistance, she knew from past experience, “generated a powerful sense of community and solidarity.” Because the resister
s were hiding, the Media burglary could not do that. “That was a loss. There wasn’t that sense of solidarity waiting for you, that kind of euphoria. I missed the joy. I think about the freedom songs we sang in Mississippi. There even was a joy in facing the tear gas together. But that definitely was not true for what we did at Media. There could be none of that. That was very hard, that sense of isolation.”
24
Building Little Pockets of Life
THE LOVE OF DISSENT that propelled William Davidon in 1971 to protect dissent with fierce devotion almost seems to have been part of his DNA. In 1938, at age eleven, he traveled by bus from his home in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, the same neighborhood where novelist Philip Roth grew up, to a rally in nearby Jersey City to protest Mayor Frank Hague’s decision to forbid Norman Thomas, a pacifist and socialist and one of the leading orators of that time, from speaking in Jersey City because the mayor did not like Thomas’s ideas.
Little William Davidon could not understand why the mayor would want to stop someone from expressing his ideas. Beginning with that early inspiration, he’s never stopped cherishing the freedom to dissent.
In his bedroom, Davidon listened daily to his family’s radio as he taught himself how to take the radio apart and reassemble it. As he did, he occasionally heard speeches by Thomas. He was affronted in a simple but profound childlike way that anyone would try to keep Thomas from speaking. The eleven-year-old Davidon had no idea, of course, that the man whose disregard for dissent he had protested was even more corrupt and powerful than Tammany Hall bosses across the harbor in New York City. Nor did he realize at such a tender age that the attack on dissent he had protested made national headlines and that a lawsuit brought by Thomas and the American Civil Liberties Union resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court declaring the mayor’s prohibition against Thomas’s speaking to be unconstitutional.
Mayor Hague often discussed his bizarre hatred of basic rights. His strange rationale matched ones expressed years later by J. Edgar Hoover. “We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and free press,” Hague once said. “Every time I hear these words, I say to myself, ‘that man is a Red, that man is a Communist.’ Whenever [you] hear a discussion of civil rights and the right of free speech and the rights of the Constitution, always remember you will find [him] with a Russian flag under his coat.”
Davidon’s very early appreciation of dissent was learned among friends and from what he observed in his community, not from his parents. Neither of them, either by example or by words of encouragement, expressed an interest in their son’s support of the right to dissent. He remembers neither of them endorsing his evolving political interests. His mother, Ruth Simon Davidon, was apolitical. When her son went to city hall that day to protest, she “wasn’t unhappy, but she wasn’t supportive either. She just was not too concerned,” Davidon recalls. His father, Jack, an itinerant civil engineer who worked for companies that built harbors and other major construction projects, was away a lot, traveling from town to town during the week and coming home only on weekends. Davidon remembers being told that his father had to travel because few companies hired Jewish engineers then. Consequently, the only way his father could get work was by driving many miles from job to job. When Davidon searches his memory, he cannot recall that he and his father ever talked to each other about the crucial issues of the day that were unfolding and starting to be of interest to him. He likes to think his father had views similar to his. He remembers him as a good man, but someone who was silent most of the time and who revealed very little about what he was thinking.
There was much silence in the Davidon home, but the streets of Newark spoke volumes. Davidon thinks the nature of that early World War II period, so full of tragedy in the United States and around the world, was the crucial early incubator of his values and interests. In his Weequahic neighborhood, where his family moved shortly after he was born in 1927 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he remembers “a lot of poverty and conspicuous injustice.” The impact of the Depression and the war was very visible in Weequahic. People were out of work. Beggars were on the streets. There was a lot of sadness, as countless families grieved the loss of their sons at war and the horrific tragedies taking place in Europe and Asia.
He continued to be interested in such matters as a freshman at Purdue University, but he thought the university was primarily interested in producing as many engineers as quickly as it could for the war effort. A friend suggested the University of Chicago would be a more compatible environment for his intellectual and political interests. He transferred there and earned all of his degrees—bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in physics—at the University of Chicago. His undergraduate studies there were interrupted when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
It was on August 6, 1945, that the direction of Davidon’s lifelong protest was set. It was on that day that the United States dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, destroying the city and killing 150,000 Japanese people. Three days later the United States dropped another bomb, “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000. Countless thousands of people in both cities were permanently disabled, as were future generations of children whose parents carried genes damaged by radiation.
For a great many people, the dropping of those first atomic bombs was cause for celebration. Japan surrendered and World War II ended. Davidon did not celebrate. He felt more like grieving than celebrating. He wanted the war to end, but not in this brutal way.
He immediately recognized the enormous threat that existed, beginning that day, when the United States unleashed a force that from then on would endanger the world. If nuclear arms were not stopped, the war of the future, he realized, could lead to no future. As a young physicist, he understood the scientific knowledge that had been used to build the bombs. He was beginning to realize that national leaders, even those with stated peaceful intentions, might decide to use nuclear weapons, the mightiest known to humanity, to destroy their enemies, and in the process also destroy circles of life far beyond their real or perceived enemies. His opposition to nuclear arsenals was increased by a realization the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr later expressed: that the danger of atomic war was as great from miscalculation as it was from intentional provocation.
After those bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Davidon lived with—and lived to stop—the possibility of annihilation. His dissent became that simple and that complex. It was about a decade later, he said, that he grew more politically sophisticated and became affiliated with other physicists who spoke at public gatherings in Chicago about the dangers of nuclear power. He gave speeches about the enormous military power government leaders now held and could use in the public’s name.
The unsettling, ugly modern truth Davidon lived with after August 1945 evoked in him an enduring clarity about the potential for the annihilation of humankind that most Americans probably never felt until September 11, 2001, the day the Twin Towers were struck and destroyed. As arms analyst Jonathan Schell wrote in the Nation a month after 9/11, “When the attacks occurred, the thought that flashed spontaneously into millions of minds was that our world has changed forever.…It was … a bone-deep recognition of the utter perishability of all human works and all human beings in the face of human destructive powers.…The destruction of the Twin Towers … was a taste of annihilation, a small piece of the end of the world.” As in 1945, when the United States bombed Japan, Schell wrote, on 9/11 the most profound question was asked by millions: “What was safe?” The damage, of course, was much greater in the Japanese bombings, but for Americans, who had never experienced an attack on the mainland until 9/11, the fear seared into the nation’s psyche was profound.
Fear, of course, was not new to Americans in 2001. It has stalked the American landscape many times, including during the years of the Vietnam War. Some Americans feared that enemies of the United States would use nuclear weapons against the country and thought that the United States should be prepare
d to retaliate against such attacks—either at home or in other countries, such as in Vietnam—and therefore must maintain large stockpiles of such weapons and build ever more powerful nuclear weapons. But Davidon and many other people who opposed the United States’ use of nuclear weapons also were afraid. They were afraid not only of the possibility that other governments might use nuclear weapons, but also of how their own government might use its vast supply of such weapons in Vietnam.
During the 1950s, the time when Cold War fears intensified, Davidon also became concerned about the power of the evolving values of his generation. They were building suburbia, acquiring more money and possessions than any previous generation had. They were proud that they had saved the world from fascism. At the same time, perhaps because of Cold War fears, they fell silent, rarely asking questions of government officials about important policies and actions taking place then, including the expansion of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Davidon thinks the silence of his generation after World War II, especially in the 1950s, diminished an important part of the American spirit—the impulse to question and to understand what the government is doing in the name of its citizens. He sees a sad irony in the fact that many of the people who made up what became known a few decades later as the Greatest Generation were largely silent when leading American officials—Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover key among them—labeled citizens who questioned government policies as un-American in the 1950s and early 1960s. His generation’s silence, he thinks, created a habit of silence that by 1964 contributed to the fact that most Americans accepted without question the major decision by the administration of President Lyndon Johnson to send troops to Vietnam.
The Burglary Page 56
