The Burglary (7 page)

In November 1970, just a month before he rose in the House chamber to speak about Hoover, Anderson had been elected to his fourth term in the House from his Tennessee district west of Nashville. He had received 82 percent of the vote, one of the highest margins of victory in Congress. Also notable was this World War II hero's move from hawk to dove in the last two years, a change in which the Berrigans had unintentionally played a supporting role.

A trip Anderson made to Vietnam in the summer of 1970 greatly increased his doubts about the war. He went there with Representative August F. Hawkins, Democrat from Southern California, and a congressional aide,
Tom Harkin, who has been a Democratic senator from Iowa since 1985. Military officials tried to keep them from achieving the goal of their trip—touring what had become known as the “tiger cages” at the large South Vietnamese prison on Con Son Island, fifty miles off the coast of South Vietnam. Built by the French in 1862 as a penal colony, during the U.S. war in Vietnam the prison was managed by South Vietnam and supported and condoned by the United States.

Anderson and Hawkins managed to force their way into the buildings that contained the tiger cages, five-by-nine-foot cells beneath a floor, each containing three to five prisoners, about four hundred prisoners in all, men and women. The only openings on the cages were the spaces between bars on their tops. Many of the prisoners were political prisoners, students who were imprisoned after being arrested during antiwar demonstrations in South Vietnam because they were suspected of being communists. Anderson and his companions observed firsthand that the prisoners were treated cruelly. The catwalks above the cages were lined with buckets of lime, which the guards periodically dumped through the bars onto the prisoners. They were frequently beaten severely, fed rotten food and rice mixed with sand, urinated on from the catwalk, and shackled for days at a time.

Anderson, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, was appalled that his country condoned such treatment of prisoners by its allies. He also was appalled by his House colleagues' reaction to the detailed report he and Hawkins submitted to them. Instead of acting on the report, many condemned them for conducting the inspection and refused to include more than a few lines of their report in a congressional committee document.

As Anderson increasingly questioned the conduct of the war, he had read exhaustively about it from a wide array of writers. Among the books that impressed him most were ones written by Daniel and
Philip Berrigan. Through them, he came to understand why some people who were strongly
opposed to the war had resorted to resistance, such as the resistance the brothers had engaged in at the Catonsville draft board and for which they were serving time.

Hoover's accusations about the Berrigan brothers in testimony the day after Thanksgiving deeply disturbed Anderson. He found it difficult to believe that Philip or Daniel Berrigan could have contemplated, let alone planned, violent acts of protest, such as bombing and kidnapping. Three days after Hoover made his claims, Anderson drove from Washington to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, to question the brothers about Hoover's accusations. He believed their face-to-face claim to him that they were not involved in any such conspiracy and that they remained deeply committed to nonviolence. Reassured, in a letter to Hoover he expressed confidence in the Berrigans' continuing commitment to nonviolence and questioned the fairness and veracity of Hoover's accusations against them.

“If there is any substance to your allegations,” Anderson wrote, “I respectfully submit that it is your duty to arraign them before a federal grand jury to seek an indictment. If on the other hand, there is no substance … then certainly we should expect an explanation, if not an outright retraction.” The matter at hand, Anderson wrote, transcended the Berrigans and added to “a growing tendency on the part of our executive branch to employ the tactics of fear and to be less than candid in dealing with the public.”

A stranger to criticism, let alone such strong criticism, from a member of Congress, Hoover was angry. He was especially angry that Anderson had made his letter public. After chiding him for that in a December 2 letter, Hoover insisted that “you may be assured my testimony was predicated on the results of careful investigation. All information developed regarding this matter is being furnished to the Department of Justice which has the responsibility for initiating prosecutive action.”

After this exchange of letters, Anderson, still convinced that the director's accusations against the Berrigans were false, rose to speak on the floor of the House on December 9. He identified himself as a longtime admirer of Hoover and the FBI as he told the assembled members of Congress:

“We have suffered many casualties in the Vietnamese war. Most of our domestic and international problems are either caused by this unwanted, undeclared war or are intensified by it. It is now distressingly evident that one of the most ardent, devoted and presumably unassailable public servants in the lifetime of our Republic is, in a sense, a casualty of that same war.” Anderson said he was speaking of J. Edgar Hoover. The director, in his recent testimony before the Senate committee, Anderson told his
colleagues, had ignored the due process clauses of the Constitution; he had made his charges in public, through the Senate, rather than in the courts, where they belonged; and in doing so he had resorted to “tactics reminiscent of McCarthyism.”

Some members of the House tried to force Anderson to stop speaking. Refusing to be intimidated, Anderson continued. His remarks were unprecedented public criticism of Hoover, especially in these chambers where Hoover always had been treated royally. In the heated discussion that followed on the House floor, ardent Hoover supporters rose to defend him.
One of the staunchest defenders was Brooklyn Democrat
John J. Rooney, the very powerful chair of the House Appropriations Committee, who had been hosting Hoover's successful appearances before that committee and shepherding his budget increases for decades.

A short time later, Hoover secretly began retaliating against Anderson in the way he had forcefully, and always secretly, done for years against the few people who dared to criticize him. Curt Gentry described
Hoover's smear campaign against Anderson in his 1990 biography
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
. Call girls in Washington were shown a photograph of Anderson and asked if he had been one of their clients. None of them said they recognized him, but FBI agents in Nashville found a madam who, when she saw the photograph, said Anderson “might” have visited her place of business several years earlier. That was good enough for Hoover. With that “evidence,” he scribbled “whoremonger” on a memorandum about Anderson, put it in his secret files on members of Congress, and informed the Nixon White House that Anderson patronized prostitutes.

It was a brutal attack. A former aide to Hoover years later told Gentry, “Anderson's scalp was hung out to dry as a warning to others who might entertain the same notion.” Hoover succeeded. Not only did his attack discourage other members of Congress from questioning his accusations about the kidnap-bomb plot, but in 1972 the FBI's smear campaign contributed significantly to Anderson, previously one of the highest vote getters in Congress, being defeated in his bid for reelection.

After these two events—Hoover's accusations against the Berrigans and Congress's circling the wagons to protect the director when Anderson raised questions about those accusations—it was evident to Davidon that Congress could not be expected to investigate whether the FBI was suppressing dissent. It seemed even more likely now that the documentary evidence needed in order to investigate the FBI could be gotten only by people willing to risk their freedom by burglarizing an FBI office.

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D
AVIDON MADE
a list of people he thought would be willing to consider his question. He focused on those he had worked with on a draft board raid. He liked many of them. He especially liked John Peter Grady, the leader of several of the raids and the person most responsible for the move by some Catholic peace activists from symbolic actions to clandestine draft board raids.

Grady stood out as a leader and as a personality. As Father
Michael Doyle, a priest from Camden, New Jersey, who knew Grady well, said of him, “
John's personality was like a big fish in the pond. He created a lot of circles, a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, a lot of laughter, a lot of celebration.” Davidon enjoyed those qualities in Grady, but because security would need to be very strict for Media—more strict than it had been for any of the clandestine actions previously done by Catholic activists—he felt that quieter “fish,” ones that would not generate circles of excitement, were essential for the FBI project. For that reason, he decided Grady should not be asked to be part of the Media group. After the group was formed, the others agreed with Davidon's assessment: Grady was a great guy and a person they respected, but not the right person for this project. This turned out to be an even wiser decision than they could have imagined. After the burglary, the FBI immediately targeted Grady as not only a participant in the Media burglary but as the leader of the group.

The people who said yes to Davidon's invitation to consider burglarizing an FBI office were diverse in various ways. They ranged in age from twenty to forty-four. They included three women and five men—a religion
professor, a daycare center worker, a graduate student in a health profession, another professor, a social worker, and two people who had dropped out of college to work nearly full-time on building opposition to the war. Though all of them owed their awareness of burglary as an act of resistance to the Catholic peace movement, only one of them was a Catholic. Four were Jews and three were Protestants. They knew one another, but they were not close friends. Bonds developed among them as they tackled Davidon's idea. Four of them were parents of young children. None of them had ever thought of doing anything as extreme as burglarizing an FBI office.

DAVIDON FIRST POSED
his question to John and Bonnie Raines. John was a veteran of resistance. He went south nearly every summer during the civil rights movement, beginning in 1961 when he was a
Freedom Rider testing racial integration on interstate transportation from St. Louis to Little Rock and through Louisiana. His experience in the South and Bonnie's experience as a teacher in East Harlem had transformed their lives.

By the time Davidon asked them his unusual question, John Raines was a professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia, and Bonnie was the director of a daycare center and was studying for a graduate degree in child development at Temple University.

They were stunned by Davidon's question as they met with him one evening at his home. At first, they thought his question was strange and forbidding. So did Davidon's wife,
Ann Morrissett. She recalled years later that she thought Davidon was proposing another draft board raid. Then she heard him ask, “What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?” She remembered being repulsed by the idea. “I couldn't believe my ears.” She said, “Leave me out,” and quickly exited from the conversation in the living room and went to the kitchen. Morrissett regarded such a burglary with disdain, if not contempt. She thought the draft board raids were largely a macho exercise and that a raid on an FBI office was even more macho. She recalled years later that when she first heard the FBI mentioned, it occurred to her that “if they thought they could get away with burglarizing an FBI office, perhaps they are out of control.”

As Davidon explained his rationale to the Raineses that evening, John and Bonnie found themselves agreeing with him. They too had begun to think the FBI might be infiltrating the peace movement. But breaking into an FBI office? They thought it was impractical, could not be done. Besides, it was unlikely that significant records would be found there. Surely, they
thought, important and sensitive FBI records, including ones that dealt with suppressing dissent, would be kept only in the FBI's Philadelphia office or at bureau headquarters in Washington.

Bonnie and John Raines decided shortly after they were married in 1962 that they would risk their freedom in order to oppose injustice.