Though the Raineses found it difficult not to feel hopeless as the war continued, they also were still essentially optimistic people. That was part of why they had become activists. They believed that active dissent could cause change. But after 1968, they had lost much of their optimism. Increasingly, confidence in the federal government was replaced by alienation. For them and many other people, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, more than anyone, symbolized the loss of hope in the government. In 1964, as a senator, he had been crucial in the development and successful passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in public facilities. But as the war in Vietnam continued, Humphrey tumbled precipitously from being a source of hope among liberals to being a source of despair and anger. In a forceful private memo to President Johnson in February 1964, he had strongly opposed the war, but, his opinion coldly rejected by Johnson, Humphrey soon publicly reversed his position, condemned people who opposed the war, and openly speculated, as Johnson did—despite contrary evidence—that antiwar protests were supported by money from foreign governments.
Like William Davidon, the Raineses felt hope was becoming scarce. Like him, they also were looking for more powerful nonviolent ways to protest the war. Their path into more serious resistance was very similar to Davidon’s. One of John’s graduate students—Sister Sarah Fahy, a nun who was the daughter of Judge Charles Fahy, a senior judge then on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.—introduced them to people in the Catholic peace movement. The Raineses found their optimism renewed, as Davidon did, by the Catholic resisters. John remembers being impressed by the fact that the Catholic peace movement resisters were “angry, but they also were optimistic and hopeful.” The Raineses—whose protest and resistance grew originally out of a “deep liking for the country rather than a deep hatred of the country”—came to feel they shared common ground with the Catholic activists. “They wanted to do something that would have effect, not just cause havoc,” says John. “They wanted to do things that would have real consequences.”
The Raineses joined about two dozen people organized by the Catholic peace activists in a draft board raid in North Philadelphia in February 1970. Less than a year later, they accepted Davidon’s invitation to consider burglarizing the Media FBI office. In doing so, they did indeed do something that had real consequences for the country.
THE MEDIA BURGLARY had real consequences for the country and also in the Raineses’ lives. They felt direct pressure, probably more than any of the burglars, from a series of events. There was the visit from the man who abandoned the group and told John and Bonnie he was thinking of turnwing all of the burglars in to the FBI. There was the Xerox technician who carried away from John Raines’s office the drum of the copier he had used to copy hundreds of the stolen files. There were the two agents who came to the Raineses’ home about two months after the burglary and asked John directly if he was involved in Media and left just minutes before Bonnie returned home. Each of these incidents gave them reason to fear that arrest might be imminent.
The personal toll was heavy at times, so much so that they decided never to take part in an act of resistance again, at least not one that involved such great risk. “Not long after Media,” John recalls, “Bonnie and I began to realize that was the end.…Media would be the last thing we would do. We had taken on all the jeopardy we could.”
Though they would add no more new jeopardy, their old jeopardy remained a frequent companion, often touching and scaring them. Bonnie describes their lives after the Media break-in as “a sustained period of worry and concern. That went on for five years.” Though the level of intensity varied, it was always there. Throughout the first six months after the burglary, she said, “we talked a lot with each other about what we had done. Every morning, when you went to get the paper, you’d wonder if you would read that you were a suspect, or read that someone’s fingerprint had been found. Maybe there will be an article on some angle the FBI has picked up. Maybe someone was brought in for questioning. There was always that half expectation that something was going to crop up. You were always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Bonnie dreamed about the search for the Media burglars. The dreams were more like nightmares. She would dream agents were closing in on them, surrounding their house, about to knock or break in. Then she would wake up, groping in the first moments to understand what was a dream and what was reality. Then relief. FBI agents were not breaking into their house. But the fear always lingered.
She remembers seldom driving during those years without looking in the rearview mirror and wondering if the driver behind her was an FBI agent. If there were two men in the car, she really worried; FBI agents usually traveled in pairs. Both she and John often thought they were being followed, were about to be pulled over, arrested, and, in a moment, their lives changed forever. She remembers sometimes being in the middle of a conversation with one of the children—“You dropped your teddy bear, sweetheart”—and noticing that there were two men in the car behind her and that the car seemed to be awfully close. She often drove, in those post-burglary days, with one eye on the road, one eye on the car in the rearview mirror, her heart with the children in the backseat, and a knot of fear in her stomach.
Over the years, when friends occasionally commented in the presence of the Raineses about the “amazing revelations” in those FBI documents stolen at Media, the Raineses would nod in agreement, and then share with each other what they hoped looked like meaningless glances. They kept their egos in check. They depended on their inner confidence and each other for the approval that might have come from other people acknowledging their significant accomplishment. Bonnie thinks the need to live as though the burglary always would be a secret “induced a certain level of maturity in us.” But sometimes they wished they could share their big secret. Keeping the secret meant Bonnie never was able to tell her feminist friends about her great breakthrough—that years earlier she had taken risks that led to very important information becoming known to the American people about their government. She could not tell them she had discovered that she could be brave.
Gradually, they slipped into completely normal lives. Like many of their friends, said Bonnie, “we became a dual-career couple trying to hold things together.” Each of them found different outlets for professional work that satisfied their need to improve society. She finished her long-time-coming master’s degree at Temple University and moved eventually from working in daycare centers to a series of top leadership positions in organizations where she worked with teachers, social agencies, and legislators in developing policies and legislation designed to improve the lives of children, especially poor children. One of her accomplishments later in her career was convincing high school administrators to provide instruction in parenting—the most important role most people are likely to have in life, but a role for which there is little or no formal preparation.
As life became more normal, John Raines focused on publishing in order not to perish on the path to academic tenure. A book he wrote for that purpose, Attack on Privacy, published in 1974, included research that was far more original than the people who evaluated it during his tenure review may have realized. It was a treatise on the various organized forces in society, including the FBI, that invade citizens’ privacy and change people from citizens to what he called “passive system inhabitants.” He included his analysis of direct excerpts from at least four of the documents stolen from the Media office—properly footnoted, of course.
On the book jacket, John is described as a professor who has “given a great deal of attention to the intersection of public issues and matters of conscience and spirit.” Indeed, he had given a great deal of attention—not to mention action—to such matters. Perhaps none of his readers, except his wife and other Media burglars, understood that he had specific actions, not only profound ideas, in mind when he wrote the last paragraph of the book:
Freedom and dignity … remain fragile accomplishm
ents. They depend upon rules and conventions and self-restraints, most of which cannot be systematically supervised. They depend upon persons who have many opportunities of corruption and are daily exposed to the retribution of angered interests and powers. In the end they depend upon the few who stay alert and who are able when necessary to pay prices, and upon the many who pay their prices in other ways but are willing to say “no” when the trespass of liberty becomes sufficiently blatant and the times sufficiently critical.
During this time, John also participated in home duties more than he had in the past. Until then, Bonnie had assumed responsibility for multiple roles at home and at work. Now John did more work in the home, including more childcare. They both enjoy recalling that he was so deeply involved in taking care of Mary when she was an infant that when she cried out in the night, often it was Daddy she asked for.
IN THE MORE THAN forty years since the burglary, the Raineses have continued to find pleasure in talking with each other about it. Eventually they talked about it less frequently, but once in a while they look at each other with a special look—a mixture of satisfaction and amazement. Each of them recognizes the look. The memories bring a smile. One of them breaks the silence, usually with a laugh, and says, “Can you believe we did it?” At such times they again feel a deep, quiet incredulity. And happiness.
Sometimes, in those special moments, one of them says, “How could we have possibly expected to get away with it?”
“It just seemed impossible,” says Bonnie, “that somebody didn’t make some huge mistake, or somebody didn’t spill the beans.…We just had to go on faith that nobody would spill the beans and that none of us had made some awful mistake. But you couldn’t help wondering.”
At other times, they talk simply of their “wonderful secret.”
They both agree that they became savvier about power because of the burglary. They think they are more certain than most people that it is possible to cause change, even in very large and powerful institutions. John thinks the experience made him a different academic than he otherwise would have been. Beginning with the Freedom Rides in 1961 and through Media in 1971, he said, “I think I’ve been in moral places that most of my colleagues haven’t been. I was less obsessed with authorities.…I think it meant that it was hard to scare me. I’ve never kissed ass in the department, even when it was made pretty clear that if I wanted this or that I needed to kiss ass. I just didn’t do it. They didn’t have the power to punish and reward me. Fear and the need to please authority were not a part of my adult life after those experiences. That probably was to my disadvantage. I would have gotten promoted earlier, perhaps, if I’d been willing to play some of the smaller politics of academic friendship, but that was simply uninteresting. Academic politics became very boring for me. I was interested in the larger political scene, not in academic politics.”
Despite the heavy impact of the burglary on their lives, Bonnie Raines sees the burglary as an aberration in an otherwise rather normal and law-abiding life that continued to be fueled by a sense of urgency about injustice and lack of equity. The burglary was, for her, a stepping-stone toward confidence. “It made me know,” she said, “that I can do something in the way of social change. It was an important step in that direction. I came to realize I have a lifelong need to be contributing to social change. I think it also made me fairly realistic about the limits of our government and the abuse of power.”
As the political temperament of the country became both more conservative and more apathetic, beginning in the late 1970s, the Raineses realized that what they did in 1971 might now seem “outrageously risky.” Some people, says John, might think, “How could you be so foolish? My God, you were not only husband and wife; you were father and mother of three children. How could you have put them in that kind of jeopardy?”
“I live with that,” says John. “The answer I have to that is, if all of us simply did what we thought was safe, that would let people who want to take our government away from us do that.” There are different ways to protect children, your own and other people’s children and grandchildren, he says. Sometimes it means protecting them from having their freedoms taken away by powerful institutions. That, he says, was part of what motivated them in 1971. Thinking of the arrests and sentences that never happened, he says, “But is it nice forty years later … knowing that we got away with it? Sure.…That’s great.”
At the time, they recall, it did not seem unreasonable, let alone outrageous to engage in such a radical act. It felt like an appropriate response to the outrageous behavior of the government in terms of both the war then being waged and the massive spying they thought was being done against American citizens.
Resistance was not really such a big deal, says John. “Courage was natural. It was all around you. What now might look courageous to some people, and outrageous to others, seemed more natural then.” Sure, he was afraid, “stomach-knotting” afraid in the South and in the days right before the burglary and the night of the burglary. Even so, he looks back on those actions and regards them as having been “nearly natural” things to do under the circumstances.
“It was an utterly different climate then,” he recalls, warming to the memories. “There were deep divisions then, but thousands of people jeopardized their freedom—refusing the draft, burning draft cards, blocking railroad cars loaded with napalm bound for shipment to Vietnam, walking from Selma to Montgomery, sitting in bus stations.…There was an entirely different climate about being a public person.” By a decade later, he recalled, politics was regarded as “dirty and not something to try to influence.” People stopped, he said, being willing to pay a price to change something they thought was wrong.
“That was not the strange time,” he likes to think. “This is the strange time. We stole FBI files and gave them to the press because we had confidence in the public, in the processes of public discourse. And we were right. The government did take the material we stole and eventually conducted hearings and tried to change how the FBI operated.…I think we desperately need to have a rebirth of our sense of the importance of politics and the importance of public discourse. And gain confidence that good things, not just corrupt things, can come from that.
“It is important to understand that we did not think of ourselves as especially heroic or courageous. We probably didn’t even think of those words. We thought of ourselves as taking an important risk that would be well received by many people and that would be used to bring about change if we were right about what we would find. And we were.
“We did not, for a minute, think of ourselves as being Don Quixotes. We thought of ourselves as being very accurate about the political possibilities.…And we would not have undertaken the action if we had not thought it was in tune with the times, thought it would not be received by many. It would have been utterly foolish to have taken on that kind of action if we thought the world was not prepared to receive it.…
“We did not feel helpless. We were not an island different from the sea around us. We never felt like isolated islands. We felt like part of the sea of that time.” It also helped that “we were young, we had incredible amounts of energy and idealism. We felt potent and felt we could manage almost anything.”
Bonnie Raines agrees. When asked how it was possible to move forward with the burglary despite seemingly forbidding obstacles—among them fear that the FBI knew about the burglary and had placed that second lock on the FBI office door they thought was not there before that night and the abandonment of the group just days before the burglary by someone who knew every detail of their plans—she, like John, finds the explanation mainly in the nature of that era. “The times called for and supported bold actions,” she said. “We were just conceited enough to believe that we were smart, strategic, and patient, and also that perhaps it fell just to us and not others to expose the FBI in a credible and compelling way.”
Perhaps more than any other Media burglar, John Raines enjoys recalling the
spirit of that earlier time, the years that prepared them for Media. As he and Bonnie sit in the old Glen Lake home of his parents, where by now their children and their grandchildren have developed an abiding affection for the old house and the fun and family closeness they experience there every summer, he looks out from the screened porch, across the tops of the fruit trees on the slope that rolls down to the lake, and he lets the memories flow. A bit of the preacher he turned away from becoming and the resister and professor he became all rise to the surface and blend as he reflects on the times and spirit that nurtured and motivated eight people in 1971 to risk their futures to protect dissent.
Bonnie Raines (front row, right) and John Raines (behind her, third from right) with their four children, three of their seven grandchildren, plus their childrens’ spouses and friends. Throughout their lives, such gatherings have made them acutely aware of the family life they would have lost if they had been found and imprisoned. (Photo by Betty Medsger)
“It was a time when a president could say, ‘My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’ He could say those words not in a vacuum, but in a country that was ready to hear those words.
“It was a time when the Peace Corps was formed and people were waiting to join it.
“It was a time when southern cops were shown on national television on Sunday night beating up people in Alabama, and by the next day so many people were trying to fly to Alabama that major airlines had put extra planes on, getting thousands of people to Montgomery by midday Monday.
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