The Burglary (69 page)

BY THE TIME
Welch formally notified Clarence Kelley in March 1976 that he had closed the Media burglary investigation, Kelley had gone through a profound change. From the time he became director in 1973, he had been compelled repeatedly by numerous investigators to answer countless questions about Hoover's past at official hearings. By the spring of 1976, Kelley had abandoned his initial total commitment to the Hoover traditionalists. As files he had earlier tried to prevent from becoming public were exposed, he realized that many of Hoover's actions could not be defended.
By 1976, Kelley felt so strongly about what he had come to think of as Hoover's abuses that he decided to apologize to the American people. He did so in a speech two months after. Welch closed the MEDBURG case, on May 8, 1976, at
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri:

Welch agreed.

21

P
OST-BURGLARY LIFE
varied greatly for the Media burglars. Because they kept their promise not to be in touch with one another in order to minimize the likelihood of arrest of one leading to arrest of any other member of the group, they never knew the struggles each of them endured.

For Bob Williamson and Keith Forsyth, the youngest burglars, it was difficult to move ahead into normal lives after their resistance ended. It turned out that age made a difference in resistance. Unlike the older burglars, Forsyth and Williamson had to rebuild their lives and start over. The process involved profound changes, including disengaging from people and from issues they had cared about deeply. Rebuilding was at times a painful challenge. In different ways, each of them crashed before they found a satisfying new life.

For several years, both Forsyth and Williamson became so detached from their resistance past that they didn't even realize what the Media burglary had accomplished—the chain of important revelations and reforms the burglary initiated. The other burglars privately experienced a growing sense of accomplishment throughout the 1970s as they absorbed the unfolding story of change and revelations at the FBI. In contrast, it would be more than a decade until either Forsyth or Williamson fully understood the significant impact of the burglary. Consumed during their resistance years with informing themselves daily about what was happening in Vietnam
and Washington, after their resistance years they turned inward and took less interest in what was going on in their former world of antiwar political activism.

The different impact of the burglary on the younger burglars can be understood, to some degree, in the very different nature of the post-burglary daily lives of the older and younger burglars.

The older burglars were cushioned by daily obligations. They continued to go to work each day, all of them advancing in their careers over time. They continued to pay mortgages, make home repairs. They continued to nurture their children, play with them, watch their progress in school, watch their minds become curious, watch them learn to love. The daily tasks and responsibilities that absorbed them before the burglary continued to absorb them afterward. In a sense, there was no break for them.

For the younger burglars, there was a big break between their past in resistance and their unknown future. When their resistance ended, Williamson and Forsyth had no answer to the basic question, “What next?” The very thing it was assumed would make resistance easier for younger people—a lack of personal obligations and responsibilities—was actually what later made their lives more difficult. They had none of the daily obligations that often are not only a heavy burden but also the threads of the fabric that holds a life together, that gives a person a sense of purpose and fulfillment.

Because Williamson and Forsyth had dropped out of college to work to build opposition to the war, they had no traditional formal higher education degree, no career or even career plans, no commitment to an ongoing relationship, and no children who depended on them. When they gave up nearly everything to oppose the war full-time, they sacrificed developing the threads that weave a life together. As they made that sacrifice, it didn't seem to matter to them. Their goal—waking up Americans to what was happening in Vietnam—was so important to them that they thought little at the time about what they were forgoing. They may not have even thought they were making a significant sacrifice. Forsyth and Williamson, like other people who dedicated themselves then to nonviolent resistance to the war, willingly lived modestly, reducing their needs so they could live on small incomes—Forsyth as a cabdriver, Williamson as a caseworker for a state agency—while they spent most of their time working on their primary commitment.

Williamson and Forsyth were also different from the older burglars in other ways. They did not grow up hearing about the
Holocaust and having
a burning desire to prevent such atrocities. They had no memories of the United States bombing Hiroshima. They were children during the early years of the
civil rights movement in the South, though racial justice had become part of their burning desire to fight injustice. The roots of their resistance grew primarily from the
Vietnam War and the tumultuous events of the late 1960s.

As Williamson puts it, they “came of age in a time of assassinations and war.” They grew up with a vague, and later gnawing and raw, awareness that major disasters were taking place: first the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, then the assassinations in 1968 of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy; the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians at My Lai; and the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970.

Forsyth and Williamson were children of American small towns that were supposed to be idyllic in every way, including lack of controversy. In Williamson's Catholic home in Runnemede, New Jersey, and Forsyth's Baptist home in Marion, Ohio, the Vietnam War—the issue that drove their resistance—was avoided. The war seemed to always hover in their families, as it did in homes throughout the country as sons and daughters started contesting their parents' views of it. In such homes, the war often sat at the edges of family conversations, a subject that could cut and injure at any time.

With
World War II a vivid memory, their parents desperately hoped war never would take place on American soil. That hope contributed to their solid support of the Vietnam War and to their belief, an echo of national leaders' statements on war policy, that the United States should fight communism “there” so it would not have to fight it “here.”

Williamson and Forsyth stood out from the other Media burglars in another striking way. Five months after the Media burglary, both of them were arrested at Camden. Despite being acutely aware that even as they agreed to raid the Camden draft board, hundreds of agents were then frantically searching for the Media burglars—most intensively in the Powelton Village neighborhood where they lived—they decided to be part of the Camden group. They did so, of course, without knowing the FBI believed the Media burglars were part of the Camden burglars.

Camden affected Williamson and
Forsyth in very different ways. Williamson immersed himself in the case, enjoying many aspects of trial preparation and the trial itself. Forsyth abandoned the group. He wanted to have as little connection as possible to the case. He was angry at himself for
agreeing to participate in the raid. He regretted his decision to do so. He thought it was perhaps the most foolish thing he had ever done, especially in light of the fact that, almost from the moment he said yes, he thought the group was disorganized and headed for disaster. But for reasons not entirely clear to him, even years later, he did not drop out, not even after the informer, Robert Hardy, offered him a gun as they sat in Hardy's truck, where conversations—unknown to Forsythe, of course—were piped directly to an FBI office and overheard by agents. Hardy suggested Forsyth might like to use it. Forsyth refused to touch it.

Federal agents arrest Keith Forsyth (third from right) the morning after the raid on the Camden draft board in August 1971. (
Photo: Camden Courier-Post
)

After the arraignment of the Camden defendants, Forsyth had very little contact with anyone in the Camden group and immediately started establishing a different focus in his life, a process that Williamson didn't start until after the Camden trial. Forsyth stayed away from the trial. He did not even regularly follow news reports on the unusual developments taking place in the courtroom. He wanted to be away from it, both physically and emotionally. He chose to avoid thinking about the fact that he might be convicted for something he thought was ill-conceived and that he should not have joined. When the Camden trial ended, he was surprised and, of course, glad that he was acquitted instead of convicted. Still, he had little interest in what led to the unexpected acquittal. His interest would be
rekindled in the group and the trial twenty years later. He would become involved in community and union organizing. He continued to oppose the war until it ended, but he no longer was an antiwar activist.

WILLIAMSON CONSIDERED CAMDEN
his enduring safety valve. Media was a big secret he could not discuss, and living with that secret was sometimes an uncomfortable burden. Camden, on the other hand, was the opposite. Everything about it was completely open. Camden, especially with its not-guilty verdicts for all, was something very special he could discuss with anyone. He did so until, eventually, he got immersed in a new life.

He later looked back on the trial as having many positive aspects, including being fun. He enjoyed developing trial strategy, he enjoyed philosophical exchanges with all involved, and especially he enjoyed the warmth of the community of defendants. But the beginning of Camden, the night of the arrests, was not fun. Williamson doesn't remember the details of some incidents from that period of his life, but he recalls his arrest that night with keen precision. He was standing on the parapet outside the window of the dark draft board office. From inside, other burglars were handing him large canvas bags stuffed with Selective Service records. He knew the file drawers and cabinets were almost empty and the job was about to end when suddenly—as he grabbed another large stuffed bag as it was hefted out the window and added it to the stack of bags on the parapet—he heard a loud clatter of feet below getting closer and closer as they rushed up the fire escape. He turned slightly and there, facing him, was a man, an FBI agent, pointing the barrel of his gun at Williamson. He recalls that it nearly touched his nose. The man and the other agents behind him yelled, “Freeze!” Again and again they yelled, “Freeze!”

“Just like in the movies. I mean really yelling. Deep guttural level. And so I did—I pretty much froze at that point.”

“I remember the feeling of being in shock and being numb.” One of the agents arrested him on the parapet. Then somehow, he doesn't remember how, they pulled him through the window. The next thing Williamson remembers is that “we're all laying on the floor.” He was facedown, with an FBI agent's foot in the center of his back.

Williamson was stunned, but not surprised.

He had assumed that something like this was bound to happen since June 1969, when he attended the crucial meeting at Iron Mountain—the name John Peter Grady gave an old Episcopal church, St. George's, in the
Bronx, where some of the Catholic resisters occasionally met and where Grady's unsuccessful 1968 campaign for Congress was based. It was at this meeting that some people in the Catholic peace movement decided to move from symbolic actions like the Catonsville Nine action in 1968 to clandestine actions, such as draft board raids conducted at night with the goal of actually—as opposed to symbolically—damaging the draft system and fleeing rather than waiting to be arrested.