Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  In August the police—Catholics again—rioted in Chicago and the Russians sent tanks into Prague. The first event guaranteed the defeat of the Democratic candidate and the second meant that the Republican candidate—or so he said—could not reveal his secret plan for ending the war. In China the Red Guard had begun their rampage, but we didn't care about China yet.

  In October Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, a divorced man. The Vatican newspaper called her "a public sinner." But now even cardinals began to dissent—authority was in shambles everywhere—when Cushing of Boston countered, "Leave the poor woman alone."

  November gave us Nixon.

  On December 10 Thomas Merton, with whom we began, having left his Kentucky monastery for the first time in over twenty years, was in Bangkok for a meeting of Zen and Christian monks and masters, an effort toward East-West reconciliation. He was electrocuted while trying to plug in a fan. By now even the most benign American contact with Southeast Asia seemed dangerous, tragic, violent and absurd.

  And on Christmas Eve, the last week of the year, the American military elite, our astronauts, preached the homily from the moon. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," one of them read, looking back at us, a blue ball hanging in nothing. "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

  Some people were undone by that string of jolts and others were made by it, their energies focused and the essentials of their lives revealed. Michael was one of these, though perhaps he would not have been, frankly, but for me and Carolyn.

  After leaving Saint Joseph's, he'd lived with us in Brooklyn. The suspension of his faculties as a priest disoriented him, and he turned to us for the support and friendship he was not getting from his fellow clergy. Oh, there were always a few renegade Jesuits hanging around, junior editors from America or young faculty and graduate students whom I'd bring over from Fordham thinking the clerical company would cheer him up. But the radical priests, as Paul Simon called them, were hotshots, hypnotized by their own flamboyance. What seemed to attract them to Michael was his bad standing. The New York press had made much of his conflict with Spellman, and the young antiwar priests and seminarians who sought Michael out seemed to regard such ecclesiastical disapproval as a high achievement. Michael didn't feel that way about it. He was never comfortable with rebels, and he hated it when events made him one.

  It was during that time, when he was our guest and before he moved into a small apartment of his own in the East Village, that he and I began to sit up late at night, rediscovering the things that had made us friends. We were both drinking too much, but the booze helped.

  During those late-night sessions, Michael talking with an abandon I'd never experienced in him, I first began to perceive the shape of this story. Korea, Lennie Pace, Tim O'Shea, the seminary, the flap with Robert Moses, Vietnam, Spellman, Jack Howe, Nicholas Wiley, Inge Holz and Suu Van Pham. I began to understand what had happened to Michael and why his confrontation with the cardinal, so long postponed, had left him at the mercy of a paralysis of guilt. During that period of his living with us I watched him struggle to fight it off.

  One night we were sitting in the living room. Carolyn had gone to bed. Michael and I were sprawled in opposite corners of the same couch because it faced the window that framed the skyline of Manhattan, on which each of us let his eyes play. Surreptitiously I looked at him occasionally. He wore his gauntness more easily by then. His thin, ascetic visage had become the essence of his good looks. I, on the other hand, having quit smoking, had entered a period of overweight. His leanness, like his boldness, represented a kind of rebuke to me. His dark hair was longer than mine, and it made me feel foolish that this priest should have been handsomer, more stylish than I was. I didn't like how he made me feel. Sometimes the silences that fell between us were awkward ones and it had been so repeatedly that night.

  "What's wrong, Durk?" he asked at last.

  I shook my head. "Nothing's wrong, Michael."

  "Have I overstayed my welcome?"

  "Hell, no, you kidding?"

  "Something's bugging you."

  I smiled at him. "There was a time when you'd have let it bug me. You used to believe in holy reticence."

  "So anyway..."

  I worked on my drink for a few minutes and considered whether to say it. Hell, Michael Maguire was a city-wide symbol of integrity. He had his problems with Church authority, and his defiance of it had very nearly derailed him emotionally, but to a lot of the rest of us he'd become the focus of moral opposition to the war. He was already an exemplar. And what did that make me? I was a two-bit professor at a second-rate college, a sometime contributor to small-circulation journals. My professional and even personal concerns, which ordinarily seemed worthy of the best energy of my life, seemed at times like that with Michael, when the silence was on us, utterly trivial. How noble he was! How pure! How unfettered by the banalities of raising a family or earning a living! My job was to correct papers and hire instructors and chair committees and pen scathing insights so that I could pay plumbers and keep my child in barrettes and give my wife the rent money for her studio. Carolyn's work was just being noticed by the midtown galleries. One of my main jobs was to encourage her. I knew what a rare artist she had become. I considered it a privilege to pay her bills. But that was a further clamp on me, wasn't it? And clamps Michael would not have understood. His job, after all, was to speak the truth to power. I forced a smile. "You're a hard act to be in the same ring with, Michael. First a fucking war hero. Now you're threatening to become an antiwar hero. Or is it war antihero?"

  "Come off it, Durk. What am I doing? A little draft counseling, what's that?"

  "Maybe it's not what you're doing, Michael, but what you are. Tell me the truth. You think I'm just a wad of intellectual pretension, don't you?"

  "No."

  I laughed. "You're just afraid I'll throw you out if you say it."

  "I'm not afraid of that. You know how I feel about those diehard resisters, Durk. Come on. They drive me crazy. They think you're bourgeois, sure. But I don't. Shit, I'm bourgeois!"

  "No, you're not. You're a radical now, Michael, whether you like it or not. And folks like me feel a little uncomfortable around folks like you. A little judged."

  "I don't judge you. Who the fuck am I to do that? You know the truth about me."

  "What truth?" I stared at him. I was going to make him say it, admit it. Of course I knew.

  "That I should have taken on the cardinal seven years ago."

  If Carolyn had set herself on fire, I thought, he would have. That I nearly said that revealed to me how drunk I was. I checked myself and forced yet another laugh. "But if you had, then you and Caro would be the couple whom I was visiting. There's the irony, Michael. Is that the regret you feel?"

  He shook his head. "What's the point of a regret like that? I'm just saying that I'm not judging anybody. We all have to live with the choices we make, eh?"

  "Right. But see, I live with mine, and I live with yours. That's all I mean. I build a life that I think is mine, or mine and Carolyn's, or mine and Carolyn's and Molly's, and then, lo and behold, I see that I've built it on a little raft that bobs along in your wake. I'm a raft, Michael, see? And you're a fucking battleship."

  He grinned. "But we're in the same bathtub?"

  "I guess so."

  "I won't be here forever, Durk. I promise."

  "That's not what I'm talking about, Michael. If I feel uneasy it has to do with me, not you. I want you here. So does Carolyn. We love you, Michael."

  Michael looked away from me, I thought because I'd embarrassed him. But then I realized he was staring at someone. I turned. Carolyn was standing in the doorway, in her bathrobe. Her hair was down to her shoulders. How long had she been there?

  "You fellows going for the record?"

  "Are we keeping you awake?" Michael asked.

  I resented his solicitude. It was easy for him to be g
racious because she wasn't his wife. She wasn't the symbol of his domestication. Of course I loved her, and of course I pitied him for not having her, but also—and powerfully at that moment—I hated the feeling of being hemmed in, bound by a hundred responsibilities. Sure, I'd have liked to stop the war. I'd have liked to open myself more fully to the great dramas of the time. But I couldn't and, finally, she was why. I couldn't even shoot the shit with my old buddy. Who the hell was she to sneak up on us? Who the hell was she to criticize our drinking? How I wished, for that moment, to be free of her, of Molly, of my chairmanship, of my house, of my wry, aesthetic, essentially passive sensibility. I wanted to be like Michael: free, pure, simple, direct, alone.

  Carolyn shook her head. "Molly was up." She crossed to our couch and sat between us. She rested a hand on each of us.

  "The Blessed Trinity," I said, and crossed myself.

  Carolyn looked at me with disarming warmth, and I felt guilty for resenting her. "Can I get you a drink?" I asked.

  "I'd love some wine."

  I stood and started for the kitchen. Michael said, "Bring some bread, would you?"

  "Sure."

  I didn't think anything of his request. I brought bread and cheese, together with Carolyn's wine. When I'd put the tray on the coffee table Michael said, "Would you guys mind terribly? Praying with me?"

  Carolyn and I exchanged a quick glance. The Mass? Bread and wine? Did he mean the Mass?

  "Jesus, I'm a little drunk, Michael. So are you."

  He sat up and leaned across us, a hand on Carolyn and a hand on me. "You two are so good to me. I love you so much. I never thank you."

  "Sure you do," I said, backpedaling. I couldn't handle the confusion of modes. I was a liberal Catholic. My faith was more important to me than ever, and I wasn't cowed by rubrics or regulations. Home liturgies were common among our circle, particularly with Michael as celebrant since he was not allowed to offer Mass publicly, but not in the middle of the night, not as an act of real intimacy, not shorn of everything but a French roll, a glass of muscatel and sentimental blurry-eyed gratitude. Why couldn't he just thank us, kiss us on our cheeks and pass out like other drunks?

  But Carolyn said, "That would be nice, Michael."

  He took a piece of the bread I'd brought. "Just something simple," he said. He lifted the bread. We all stared at it. After a long silence, a silence that transformed our mood, he spoke softly, naturally, as if to someone who was really there. "Blessed are you, Lord God of the Universe, for through your goodness we have this bread to offer, fruit of the earth and the work of human hands. Let it become for us a spiritual food." He paused and looked at each of us. I could feel my reluctance falling away. What was it that drew me in? His intensity, perhaps. His feeling. His, well, holiness. He halved the bread and said, "He took bread and broke it and gave it to his friends, saying, 'Take this and eat it. This is my body. It will be broken for you.'"

  Then he gave it to us. I ate it and felt as I did a calm come over me. I hadn't known how hungry I was until he fed me.

  Carolyn ate and leaned against me. I put my arm around her and felt the relief of one whose only love has returned from a long journey. We watched and listened while Michael blessed the wine. When we drank, the three of us, so quietly, so tenderly, each from the one glass, it was possible to believe that, yes, God was with us.

  When Michael first threw himself into work against the war, his purpose was simple and relatively uncontroversial. He was not drawn to street demonstrations or to giving great speeches. He was invited to be on the platform in Washington in October of '67 with Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer, Dr. Spock and William Sloane Coffin, but he refused. He attended the demonstration, but as one of the thousands. Nor was he among those who chose to get arrested at the Pentagon. The self-celebration of the leading resisters made him uneasy. It was to the practical and undramatic activity of draft counseling that he gave almost all of his energy. He spent long hours every day in conversation with young men in a small room in the Protestant chaplain's office at NYU. Ministers, and eventually even priests, from all over the city referred their "Greetings"-panicked boys to him. In his mind they were a procession of Nicholas Wileys, and if he was compulsively at their service it was only in part to oppose the war. In their trying to decide whether to be objectors or to fake their medicals or to claim to be homosexuals or simply to refuse induction and split, he wanted to give them the support and constructive advice that no one had given Nicholas; that lack, Michael thought, was what had killed him.

  He became an expert in the Selective Service laws, which were toughened several times in that period, and he began to train other draft counselors. As the Justice Department, even under Ramsey Clark, who would come to seem wildly left-wing after John Mitchell, became more aggressive in enforcing draft laws—the army needed more than a million young men in its draft pool now and could not allow the system to break down—Michael became more adept at finding ways to draw out the appeals process and to outflank the VFW fogies who sat on local draftboards. The situation heated up when indictments started coming down not only on the radicals who burned their draftcards and on the ministers, like Coffin, who supported them, but also on kids who, unable to get C.O. status, were laying low, hoping to avoid having to choose between Vietnam and Canada. Pushed by indictments or the threat of them, Canada was it, of course, for thousands, and Michael became part of the network of clergy who helped boys get there. He told me one night that every time he drove back from Montreal he felt he was returning to a damned country that had decided in some perverse, unconscious way to punish itself by banishing the very best of its children.

  They were his children, his sons, his Lennies and Nicholases, terrified kids with the balance of their lives in jeopardy. He could not simply watch them, in that primordial image of our generation, falling from the cliff or being pushed from it, from the field of Rye. He had to find a way to catch them. He had to find a way to share their jeopardy and he had to find a way to strike real blows, at last, against the war.

  Hence draftboard raids. Hence the destruction of Selective Service files.

  It was after midnight, the early hours of December 17, 1968. Merton was dead a week, Bobby Kennedy six months, Spellman a year, JFK and Ngo Dinh Diem five years, and Pope Pius XII ten. Michael and three others, another New York priest and two young Catholic peace workers, were, for their parts, more alive, more alert, more pumped with hunter's nerve than ever. They were inside the federal building in downtown Newark, New Jersey. It had been closed for hours.

  The Selective Service office was on the fourth floor, two floors above the office of the U.S. Attorney for Northern New Jersey. There had been draftboard raids by Catholics in Baltimore, Catonsville, Milwaukee and the Bronx already, but this was the first one conducted at night by people who did not intend to be arrested. It was not their purpose to make one grand gesture before going to jail. They wanted to do as much damage to the Selective Service system as they could, for it had dawned on people by then that it was the war machine's one exposed and vulnerable gear. Thousands of young men in various cities had already been reprieved when their files were destroyed by having blood or homemade napalm poured on them, and Michael Maguire and his coconspirators wanted to multiply that number by tens and hundreds.

  Michael was the first to leave his hiding place. He had been huddled since before the building closed in a rarely used and flimsily locked mop closet in the men's room off the main post office lobby. Now, following the thin beam of his flashlight, he crossed that lobby quickly, went into the stairwell and down to the basement snack bar. He rapped on a storage room door once. The lock was thrown and the door opened quickly. Father Pete Bryant raised a hand, then followed. They were both dressed clerically, blacks and collar, unusual for priests like them by then, but their clothing was the color of night, and if they were arrested they wanted to be taken from the start for what they were. They were also wearing surgical gloves, the clerical dress of burglars
.

  They went back up the stairs quietly and quickly. On the second floor were postal offices where clerks worked. Michael knocked once on the ladies' room door. Jerry Dunne and Joe Reilley had crouched for the hour before the building closed on the same toilet in a booth they'd marked with an out-of-order sign. Now they came out promptly, young men in their mid-twenties. Jerry was a draft counselor whom Michael knew well, and Joe was his roommate, a math teacher in a Catholic high school in Queens. Pete Bryant worked in a parish in Harlem, and he was the one who'd made the point that by hitting the draftboard in downtown Newark, it would be young blacks, mainly, whose files the government would lose. Why should white kids be the only ones spared a vicious death in Asia?

  Another advantage Newark had—the main one—was that the federal building, like many in the centers of older cities, was not alarmed or guarded at night, and the locks were common ones. Both Bryant and Maguire had learned what they could about picking them and were in fact by then as proficient at it as the average petty burglar. The doors to the offices, also, were paneled in the old-fashioned style, with frosted glass. Jerry Dunne carried tools and suction cups to cut through it if they had to.

  They didn't. In minutes they were on the fourth floor and seconds later, having picked a simple tumbler lock—there was a dead-bolt lock that might have stymied them, but the last clerk out had neglected to throw it—they were inside the sprawling, cabinet-lined mammoth room of the Newark Selective Service office. The two younger men had cased the place with visits and they knew what they were after. They led the way to the bank of files where the I-A forms were stored. Each of the four took a separate cabinet and began to empty its contents into one of the two laundry bags he'd brought; then on to the next cabinet and the next until, within minutes, each man had both his bags stuffed with the papers that identified the thousands of New Jersey boys who were even then in the process of being drafted. Hauling their bags on their shoulders, like Santa's helpers, they left the office. On the glass Michael scrawled with a grease pencil, "Stop the killing! Stop the war!"