The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  But now, in his eighties, he wonders if he did not think much about such matters because he may have “had too much confidence” in those days. After the first draft board raids were successful, he recalls no longer being very fearful. “That was foolhardy,” he says now, “given all the things that could have gone wrong.” He remembers that he never thought the Media burglary would not be successful. He never really thought anyone would be arrested. “I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t plan for it. At times, I thought about the possibility of going to prison. I thought that life in prison might take place for me, but I think I just pushed it aside.” He thinks now that that attitude was a mistake.

  He doesn’t recall being aware at the time that there were others in the group, especially John Raines, who were very fearful about what might happen to their families as a result of the burglary. “I think I was probably more irresponsible in that respect,” he says. “I know John and Bonnie did do a lot of thinking about these matters. I wasn’t really thinking through the consequences of getting caught. I was assuming it wouldn’t happen.”

  Actually, Ann Morrissett said she did not want to talk with Davidon about his resistance activities. In an interview, she told me she paid as little attention as possible to that part of her husband’s life. She regarded the burglaries with disgust, as an egotistical macho exercise. She was particularly disgusted by the burglary of the FBI office. Her rejection of such resistance was evident at their home the morning after the burglary. When Davidon left for Media early the evening of the burglary, he reminded her that the break-in would take place that night and that he might not be home until the next morning. He arrived home about 6:30 a.m. He remembers telling Ann at breakfast that “everything went well last night.” Both of them think she may have said nothing in response. He had just experienced what was one of the most important accomplishments of his life, and it was not discussed. That was a stark contrast to the spirit of jubilation and relief the Raineses experienced as they sat at breakfast that morning with their children.

  According to both Morrissett and Davidon, they had few heart-to-heart conversations about important matters, including Davidon’s resistance activities. They had very similar worldviews but disagreed on some of the methods of accomplishing their goals. As Davidon has searched in recent years for an explanation of how he handled these matters, he has often been sad but also philosophical. “Families that are close share things naturally,” he said. “Some families don’t have that kind of close relationship.…Too close an involvement of people who are not directly involved can in some situations interfere with what you really want to get done,” he says as he assesses why two people, he and Ann, who had very similar values, did not talk much about his resistance activities. “Building the warmth and closeness within the family is a crucial value but not the only value.” They were divorced in 1978 after fifteen years of marriage.

  Interestingly, during that time, Davidon said, he got a glimpse of what a warm household could be like from some of the Catholic activists. The large Davidon-Morrissett home on the Haverford campus was strategically located midway between Washington, D.C., and New York, and several times small groups of the Catholic resisters stayed at the house on their way to those cities. Many years later, Davidon still remembers their visits warmly. When they were there, he said, the house would come alive with the “great life, great spirit of these people. It impressed me. I suppose because it was a contrast, both from the specifics of my life at home at that time, and also, I guess, from my personality.”

  In 1987, Davidon and Maxine Libros, a psychotherapist, were married. They talked freely with each other about their pasts. Libros was proud of Davidon’s resistance. She didn’t know him at the time he was an activist, but she knew of him through her long friendship with his brother and sister-in-law. She admits that if she had been married to Davidon in 1971, she, like Morrissett, may not have had much enthusiasm for, or at least may have been frightened by, the prospect of his burglarizing an FBI office. It was good, she said, to be in love with him and share his life many years after his resistance when she was free to admire his courage and accomplishments but not have the burden of worrying about the risks involved.

  Davidon and Maxine Libros married in 1987. She did not know him during his resistance years, but she was proud of what he accomplished during that time. (Photo by Betty Medsger)

  During their years together, Libros and Davidon often talked about the Vietnam War and resistance to it. One evening during a joint interview, as they discussed the Media burglary, Libros’s pride in his role was obvious. She smiled warmly as Davidon described some of the methods of resistance he and others used. She admitted that she questioned the value of some of them. As she searched for the words to describe her reservations, he helped her. “You aren’t quite sure that this was the best way to build opposition to the war?” he asked. She nodded yes. So did he. “Even I wasn’t always sure this was the best way to build opposition,” he acknowledged. He paused as he contemplated what both of them had just said. Then he described the pained conclusion he reached years ago. Sure, he disliked some of the methods he had used, perhaps especially burglary, but he refused to let himself become frozen by such concerns. He was humbled, even troubled at times, but never frozen. She understood. Despite her minor reservations, she applauded what he did then.

  At the time Davidon married Libros, he was still very interested in various social issues, but he was not consumed by them, as he had been years earlier. He now cherished personal happiness as he never had before, and experienced it with Libros until her sudden death in July 2010 from an aneurysm. By that time, he had Parkinson’s disease and, unable to live alone, moved from Philadelphia to a residence for seniors near his daughter, Sarah Davidon Hoover, who lives in Colorado. (Her former husband, Alex Hoover, is not related to the late FBI director.)

  In his renewed close relationship with daughter Sarah, a member of the pediatrics faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Davidon occasionally talks with her about the profound impact his resistance could have had on his wife and daughters. Sometimes he cries as he thinks about how his actions then “might have drastically changed our lives.” She comforts him at such times by dwelling on her appreciation of what he did and on the fact that she is grateful to have this chance to renew a close relationship with him. Davidon is deeply pleased that Sarah is appreciative of his past. After studying the impact of the Media burglary, she told him she was proud of his place in history, not a description he ever would use for what he did, but one that brought a smile to his face when she said it.

  Daughter Sarah was amused when she read the word-by-word transcripts of the FBI recordings of conversations on the family’s home phone, the bugging a result of an order by Attorney General John Mitchell. Their home phones were tapped from November 24, 1970, through January 6, 1971—precisely the period when Davidon was recruiting the Media burglars and making arrangements by phone for meetings with each of them. After the tap had been on for about two weeks, the FBI director informed the attorney general in a memo that “this surveillance has produced highly significant information to corroborate Davidon’s involvement” with the Catholic activists. However, Hoover and bureau investigators thought the conversations they recorded were related to the Harrisburg case, when in fact they probably were related to the burglary of the Media office. In any event, agents in the Philadelphia office, where the transcripts were made, apparently thought the tap was not productive and succeeded in convincing the director not to reinstitute it after January 6, 1971. By then the burglary team had been formed and casing was about to begin. One recorded comment by Davidon—that he had been up all night lately and needed to collapse—could have been taken as a clue but apparently was not.

  One of the transcripts is a precise record of Ruth Davidon, then seven, talking with a little friend about her birthday party and asking if the cake would be vanilla or chocolate. In another transcript, Bob Willi
amson is recorded briefly chatting with one of the Davidon daughters and asking her when Davidon would be home.

  Ruth Davidon did not learn about her father’s role in the Media burglary until 1992. Now an anesthesiologist in San Francisco and twice a finalist for the U.S. Olympic women’s rowing team, she eventually realized that she had learned some lessons from her activist parents that most children probably do not pick up from their parents. For instance, “I was an adolescent before I realized that being apathetic was an option.” Their approach to life has made her take for granted that “when you see something wrong, you should act to try to fix it.” Even some of her games were affected by her parents’ activism. When other kids played phone, Ruth remembers that they might say, “I can’t talk now, I have to go shopping.” Not Ruth. When she pretended she was an adult who didn’t have time to talk on the phone, she would say, “I can’t talk now. I have to go to a meeting.”

  As a little girl in 1971, Ruth remembers, she kept hearing a strange term used to describe her father—“unindicted coconspirator.” “We, the family, would go to parties at friends’ houses, and people would come up and say, ‘Oh, here’s the unindicted coconspirator!’ They were laughing and treating him well. So I went to school and said, ‘My dad’s an unindicted coconspirator.’ The teacher looked amazed and said, ‘Indicted? Your father’s been indicted?’ I could tell that the teacher didn’t think it was a good thing. I started to be quieter about my parents.

  “I remember asking my dad, ‘Are you going to jail?’ When he would say he might, I would cry and say things like, ‘It’s not worth it. Can’t you just stay home with me and don’t do this stuff anymore?’…The concept of jail was so scary.”

  When Davidon told Ruth years later that he was one of the Media burglars, she was proud. “I feel good about what he did, but it’s easy for me to sit here now and say that because I’m so happy and healthy and have a great life.…It’s easy for me now to say, ‘I’m glad he did it because it was for such a good cause.’ I think he did the right thing, but if he had gone to jail for twenty years, and I was in drug rehab today, I might think differently.”

  Like her sister, Ruth Davidon hopes she “would have the courage he had if something drastic happened that needed a response. I’d want to be able to make sure my children were okay, cared for and emotionally okay, but I want to be able to take risks.” Perhaps the most important lesson she learned from him: “I want what I say and what I do to be consistent.”

  Sarah Davidon Hoover remembers sitting in a backpack on her father’s back at several antiwar rallies. Even when he was not a speaker, she had a vague sense that he was liked and respected as a leader. People would gather around him to ask his opinion. When she discovered later the seriousness of some of his endeavors, she said, she realized that “pretty typical people can do atypical things and make a difference.”

  FEARFUL THAT decreased opposition to the war would encourage Nixon and his war advisers to think the American people didn’t care about the war, Davidon thought it was important to keep pressing the point—this war must stop—even after all the jeopardy he had accumulated at Media. He continued to move from one action to another, some of them potentially very dangerous, in order to remind people that the war still raged in Vietnam. These actions, he said, flowed from his commitment to Albert Camus’s belief that it was necessary “to keep alive a living society within the shell of the dying one.”

  At critical times, Davidon believed, a life should be useful. Without realizing it, he had forced himself to answer the profoundly challenging question posed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the midst of his deep despair about the Third Reich. As Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and resistance fighter who was hanged by the Nazis on orders from Adolf Hitler, contemplated the very heavy responsibilities of conscience posed by being aware of extreme injustice, he wrote in a letter sent from prison in 1943: “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we learnt the art of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.”

  Finally, Bonhoeffer asked, “Are we still of any use?”

  Davidon asked himself that question throughout the Vietnam War. He concluded that to be of use during the war he should keep trying to find ways to oppose it and to invite others to do so as well. It was that desire to defeat despair and keep hope alive in the midst of a seemingly endless war that made him push fear aside and move from one act of resistance to another. He continued during those years of repeated resistance to dislike the idea of breaking and entering, of destroying property, of risking personal confrontation with a guard. He hated the use of deception. But he hated the escalation of the war more. He hated the possibility that the FBI had created a police state and that no government officials would act to determine if that was true.

  “When you feel, as I did, not only in the case of the prosecution of the Vietnam War, but also in many things being done by your government,” Davidon said, “it feels as though the forces you are fighting are so huge in comparison to what we can influence. At times like that, how do you keep alive the struggle to influence? It was a matter of keeping alive a sense of purpose and accomplishment when the forces seemed so overwhelming.

  “Not just Media, but a lot of other actions were important to me, to others, in just building that sense that the struggle isn’t futile.…Sometimes we accomplished more than we had reason to expect, as in Media. It was a long shot. We didn’t know if we would find anything important. Other times, we never knew if we accomplished anything—the draft boards, deactivating bombs, we didn’t know. But it gave voice and a sense of purpose. It built little pockets of life that made sense at a terrible time.”

  On November 8, 2013, after having had Parkinson’s disease for many years, Davidon passed away in Colorado. His daughter Sarah was with him as he died a peaceful death.

  25

  You Didn’t Do That

  NAH, you didn’t do that.”

  When a stunned Nathan Raines was finally able to speak, that’s what he said to his parents when they told him that one night, a couple days after his second birthday, they were part of a group that burglarized an FBI office. As they told him, Nathan, in his late teens by then, could not believe what he was hearing. He took it in slowly, disbelieving but also realizing that his parents—this good-looking, hardworking couple, people he knew so well, the people who had nurtured him through physical disaster as well as very happy times—were not joking.

  “To me it was like some World War II spy novel. I couldn’t believe my parents … four children, a station wagon … had been involved in something this elaborate.” They once were burglars? Nah.

  Bonnie and John Raines revealed their big secret to each of their four children separately. After initially expressing shock, each child moved through a range of reactions as they absorbed this stunning information from their parents. The Raineses told them the basic information and then provided more details as each child asked questions. They had always planned to tell the children at some point. “It was such a significant part of our lives,” says Bonnie Raines. “I think we felt that there really wasn’t any way of their finally understanding their parents without knowing that.”

  After learning their parents’ secret, each of the children asked questions over weeks, even years. None of them could imagine their parents carrying out a burglary. They could not imagine their mother, wearing gloves, her beautiful black hair hidden under a stocking hat, casing an FBI office. Or their dad waiting in a getaway car—the old family station wagon they remembered so well—in a dark parking lot. Though the children were adults when the Raineses finally told them, even then they didn’t tell them the most frightening parts—for instance, that the FBI came to the house shortly after the burglary and directly asked John Raines if he was involved in Media. They saved that news for later.

  Like his th
ree siblings, Nathan thought often about what his parents had told him. He kept asking questions. It was like adding pieces to a complex mosaic: what they did, how they did it, why they did it, what it meant to them, and what it meant to the country. Then, like his siblings, he moved beyond the basic facts and questions to profound questions:

  How could they have been that brave?

  How did they develop the skills necessary to succeed in pulling off a burglary?

  How was it possible for them to care so much about a cause that they were willing to risk going to prison for many years?

  That question led to the most difficult one of all:

  How could they have cared so deeply about anything that they were willing to risk having the family severed?

  The Raineses explained the promise they had made to each other to try to find the courage to resist great injustice together. They told the children they had made arrangements for them to be raised by Uncle Bob and Bonnie Raines’s parents, Dorothy and Andrew Muir, if they went to prison. The children loved Uncle Bob, and they loved the Muirs, but they could not imagine what it would have been like to live for years with them while their parents were in prison. More precisely, they could not imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their parents.

  When they were first told about the burglary, each of the children asked if their parents were still in danger of being arrested. They were relieved to hear that they felt sure the FBI was no longer interested in them and that their freedom no longer was threatened. But just imagining what might have happened was very painful for each of the children, as it was for the Raineses. “Thank God things didn’t go wrong,” says Nathan.