The Burglary (72 page)

He has been married and divorced twice. The graphic arts business he started in 1975 eventually failed after twelve years, leaving him $80,000 in debt. As a matter of principle, he refused to go into bankruptcy and instead scrimped and saved for years until he paid all his debts. He says, “I think I have had my share of struggles in life, and made more than my share of mistakes. During the most difficult times, I have even experienced depression and near despair. I am not what most people would call a wealthy man, but my needs are met and I have been able to give something back. I have a passion for my work and it gives me great satisfaction. So while my life has not been a bed of roses, I am grateful for an underlying sense of optimism and good humor which has always carried me through the tough times.”

A tremendous source of his happiness is being part of the lives of his daughter, Jessica, born in 1978, his son-in-law, Mike, and his two granddaughters—Aelea, born in 2004, and Raven, born in 2008.

As he started to erase his old identity as a resister, Williamson says, “it was clear to me that what I thought about the way the world should work really didn't make much difference to the world, and that the world was a lot bigger than I was.…I was going to have to figure out some kind of way to make peace with it. And that,” he says, “was the beginning of an odyssey for me which was about the ending of my focusing on the world and trying to fix the world's problems and the beginning of my turning that vision inward to try and discover whether I was the best person I could be.

“I stopped blaming my parents, and I stopped blaming society, and I stopped blaming the economic system and I stopped blaming people's indifference and I stopped blaming racism and sexism and everything else for the way things were, and I started thinking more and more … about who I was, and whether I was becoming everything that I could be. That began to be the question around which I framed my life.”

During this evolution, he apologized to his parents and siblings for the anguish his resistance against the war had caused them. From the time he left college to live in a poor neighborhood in North Philadelphia, through his years as an antiwar activist, his parents were repeatedly shocked by his actions. When he was arrested in Camden, they were mortified, a reaction that was deepened when an official in their small community wrote a letter that was published in the local newspaper stating how ashamed he was that someone from Runnemede was involved with people who broke into
draft boards. With sadness, he recalls, “My parents felt shamed in their own community.”

Williamson moved from being an intensely engaged political activist to becoming apolitical and then later a conservative with libertarian leanings. He worked behind the scenes in 1982 as a speechwriter for the Republican candidate for governor of New Mexico. He laughs as he suggests, undoubtedly correctly, that he is probably the only Media burglar who voted not only once but twice for both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The writings of conservative economists
Friedrich Hayek and
Thomas Sowell have strongly influenced his thinking in recent years.

There was a time, Williamson says, when he was tempted to enter politics himself, but he cured himself of that delusion by considering the spectacle of trying to explain to voters how someone who opposed the Vietnam War by breaking into draft boards—and the FBI—could have become a conservative. “Virtually every voter would be able to find something completely distasteful about me in either my past or my present.”

AS WILLIAMSON REBUILT
his life, he seldom thought of his acts of resistance—including the Media burglary. At times he viewed them as having little significance beyond whatever their personal meaning was to each individual burglar. With the passage of time, the memories and the personal meaning of his own resistance became a smaller part of the “odyssey I've been through since then.”

One evening, about fifteen years after the burglary, he was perusing the Albuquerque television listings and noticed that one station would be broadcasting a documentary on the FBI. His reaction was a little like the interest stirred by reading a news item about an old high school friend one hasn't seen in many years. He decided to watch it.

As the program started, the narrator announced that in 1971 a group of people, who were never found, burglarized the small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Williamson was puzzled. He wondered why the reporter was talking about “our burglary.” The reporter went on to say that much of what is known about how the FBI operated under J. Edgar Hoover is a result of the Media burglary—that the burglary was seminal in the passage of changes to the Freedom of Information Act and various reforms in the FBI.

“Well, I remember being dumbstruck that somebody apparently thought that our little action was that important.…Until that moment, I never thought it had any long-range impact.”

By the time the program ended, he was seeing the Media burglary in a somewhat different light. “The thing that impressed me about it was that here I am, just some guy, and my friends and I pulled this thing off. And it had an impact.

“I still get chill bumps when I realize that the Media burglary started a long chain of events that caused reforms.…And we didn't even know what we were doing. We had no idea whether our risk would result in anything.…It's very gratifying to know that people … think that we performed a service to our country. That's what we intended to do. I know our hearts were pure in that regard.”

His gratification that the Media action produced some positive results in terms of more openness in the FBI in particular and government in general has also been tempered by his sobering view that the law of unintended consequences works both ways. Williamson thinks the revelations that came out as a result of the burglary probably also contributed to the increasing cynicism and distrust Americans felt then—and continue to feel now—about their government. He thinks much of that distrust is probably deserved. But he also thinks that, in some ways, it has made it more difficult for leaders at every level of government to do what they think is right. “Four American presidents believed the
Vietnam War had to be pursued. They may have been wrong about that on any number of levels, but I have
come to respect the fact that they had more information than I did, and I have come to believe they all did what they thought was right. That does not change the fact that I also did what I thought was right, and so did all of the other people I worked with back then … but it tempers it with a big dose of humility.”

At the center of Williamson's life in Albuquerque are his daughter, Jessica; her husband, Mike; and their two children, Aelea (
foreground
) and Raven, seen here in January 2012 with Williamson.

Since the night Williamson shined a taped flashlight's narrow beam on open FBI file cabinet drawers, guiding fellow burglars in the dark, he has become a much more conservative person. Nevertheless, he views his radical act of burglarizing an FBI office as a patriotic act that gave him a sense of accomplishment then and now, notwithstanding his concerns about unintended consequences. “That was an exciting time,” he says, “and it was one of the times in my life when I felt most alive. I don't regret it.”

While he would not presume to offer advice to anyone now considering action as extreme as what he participated in at Media, he hopes such people would give it long and careful thought. “That burglary is an example of what someone can do, or try to do, as a citizen. But when you take an action like that, you own the consequences. I was not prosecuted for the break-in, or for distributing those FBI files to the media. Nevertheless, the consequences for me—personally, emotionally, spiritually—have been fairly significant. I know that at the age of twenty-two, I acted with a clear conscience. I also know that I could not possibly have foreseen the full range of effects of my actions then. Over the last forty-plus years, as I have grown older, thinking about this has made me more careful about how my actions are likely to affect others. Still, in spite of that, I think I can make a pretty good case that, on balance, the Media burglary produced more good than harm.”

22

S
UPPORTING THE VIETNAM WAR
was as natural for Keith Forsyth as getting up in the morning. Like Williamson, he followed his father in such important matters, giving hardly any thought to it.
Then, in the first semester of his freshman year at the
College of Wooster in Ohio, his mind was split open by a small book. It caused him to give the war a great deal of thought. In fact, he spent that entire semester searching for evidence that the war was justified and should be supported. He wanted to continue supporting it, but now he wanted to do so on a sound, rational basis rather than simply as an echo of his father.

If the U.S. State Department had not failed to provide him with the government's rationale for the war and why it should be supported, Forsyth might not have been standing outside the Media FBI office trying to pick the lock on the night of March 8, 1971.

Only a couple weeks after he arrived on campus in the fall of 1968, another freshman, a guy named Chuck who lived down the hall from Forsyth, gave him
Peace in Vietnam: A New Approach in Southeast Asia
and urged Forsyth to read it. Today he can't remember Chuck's last name. He has no idea where Chuck is, what work he does, or what kind of person he has become, but Forsyth is certain of one thing about Chuck: He owes the opening of his mind to him.

Forsyth took Chuck's advice. He read the book with a great deal of interest. “I remember saying to myself, as I was reading the book, ‘This can't be true. This is America.' ” The book set forth the contemporary history of Vietnam and made the case, in a straightforward, nonpolemical way, that
the United States should not be at war in Vietnam, had no vital interest in being at war there, and, beginning with its support of the French colonial interests there, had worked against, not for, the best interests of—or even the possibility of—democracy in Vietnam.

This made Forsyth so angry that if it hadn't been for two aspects of the book, he thinks he would have dismissed its message immediately. First, its tone was reasonable, and it was heavily documented, qualities that appealed to this serious college freshman who loved science and philosophy. Second, it was published by the
American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. Forsyth was raised as what he calls “a plain vanilla Protestant,” first a Baptist and then, as his parents moved up economically, a Presbyterian. “I was raised in a very religious family. By that time I was still interested in religion, but I felt organized religion had problems with hypocrisy.” But Quakers were another matter. In contrast to other Christian denominations, Forsyth thought, Quakers had “very high moral principles and a relatively low level of hypocrisy.…They had a reputation for being really honest and living up to their beliefs.

“So, I'm thinking to myself, ‘They wouldn't be saying this stuff if it wasn't true.'…Here are these people who couldn't possibly tell a lie because their consciences wouldn't permit them, here they are saying all these horrible things about what our government, the land of the free, the home of the brave, is doing to these defenseless people in Vietnam.…It clashed with all the things I had been taught about America. My father's a very patriotic guy. He's one of those rags-to-riches stories.…And he supported this war. I had all this patriotism. That's the way it was in the '50s and the '60s, especially in the Midwest. That whole aura of conformity, patriotism, the whole thing. I believed it all. So now the Quakers were saying something else. They were describing how we were behaving someplace else, Vietnam. It didn't fit with my ideas of what this country was like.

“It changed my life.”

The profound shift in his opinion about the war did not take place until later, after he searched to either verify or dispute the claims made in the book. At first, Forsyth didn't accept what he read. He couldn't. He remembers that his sense of my-country-won't-do-wrong was too deep to allow immediate acceptance of these critical claims. He thought the Quakers must have made a mistake, that perhaps this book represented uncharacteristic behavior on their part. Surely they had misunderstood the history of Vietnam and the actions of the U.S. government there.