The Burglary (76 page)

Forsyth finds pleasure in the fact that he and his parents have found one common ground: They agree that most people in elected office are scoundrels. He doesn't think most are taking money from dubious deals. They are scoundrels, he believes, because “they are gutless. Their purpose in life is to get reelected. They are afraid to stand for something.”

The most important part of his rebuilt life is his family. He cherishes them. He found it difficult when his sons—Adam, born in 1983, and Micah, born in 1986—were growing up to imagine how he could devote time to political work as well as to nurturing the family he and his wife,
Susan Grossinger, created. He worried about the impact on his children of his lack of political engagement, but it seemed necessary to at least take a breather, if
not a permanent leave, from being political in order to build the professional and personal parts of his life, those parts he ignored until 1981.

Keith Forsyth and his wife, Susan Grossinger, in 1987.

Forsyth hopes Adam and Micah will not be afraid to make hard decisions, such as ones that might involve making a sacrifice in order to help other people. As soon as they were able to listen to stories, he started telling them his story. Since they were very little, they've known that Daddy went to jail once for being against the war. “I told them there was a war going on and that … a lot of people thought it was a good idea, and a lot of people thought it was a bad idea. And Daddy thought it was a real bad idea. I tell them that a lot of innocent people were getting killed and that when things like that happen people ought to try to stop it. I tell them that I tried to do that.”

The portrait Forsyth paints of himself in those early years of protest and organizing includes patches of frustration, anger, and personal distress. It's obvious that some of the memories are painful. “The frustration is still there,” he says. “I don't access it very often because it gets me upset, and there's no point to it. Today he analyzes politics in a different way from how he did in the early 1970s. While he still has strong opinions about various issues, he sees more ambiguity now than he saw during the Vietnam War. He has also shifted in his view of the public. “I don't regard our problems today as solely the fault of the leaders. I think that at that time I tended to see the American public as a bunch of gullible little lambs who were being led down the primrose path by these nasty, manipulative politicians and chairmen of General Motors and other companies.…My opinion of the population is different now. Let's put it this way: I think the American people, the majority of them, are sufficiently well educated and free from worrying about whether they are going to be carried out in the middle of the night by secret police and free enough from starving to death that they can take more responsibility for the way they vote and for the way their government is run.”

That's the attitude he hopes Adam and Micah will have, that sense of being responsible that he acquired from his parents and that he then redirected into his work against the war after
Peace in Vietnam,
the book Chuck gave him, set him on a new course.

AT SOME POINT
—while Forsyth was getting an education, building a profession, becoming a husband, nurturing two sons with his wife—he made peace with his past, with his assessment of the people he walked away
from after Camden and with the person he was then. His frustration and feelings of futility about failing to stop the war gradually dissipated. Forsyth's memories of those years still can evoke powerful traces of the frustration and pain he felt then, but those reactions now take a backseat. They have been largely replaced by a deep pride and satisfaction in what he and the people he worked with then, especially his fellow Media burglars, did in those days when millions of Americans wanted their government to end the war in Vietnam.

In a sign of his acceptance of his past and of his renewed respect for his former colleagues in the Catholic peace movement, Forsyth was present in 2003 when the federal judges of New Jersey, in an extraordinary act, sponsored, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Camden verdict, a daylong reunion of the Camden 28 defendants and others associated with the trial—prosecutors, an FBI agent, some witnesses, the son of the deceased judge, the widow of the deceased chief prosecutor, a federal judge herself, and even the informer. It took place in the same courtroom where the trial occurred, with the graying defendants sitting in an expanded jury box. During the 1973 trial, Forsyth had no interest in working with fellow defendants to create the open courtroom atmosphere in which the judge permitted them to explain the history of the war, the basis of their opposition to the war, and why they had broken laws in order to draw attention to what they regarded as an unlawful action—the war itself. Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of the trial, Forsyth was fully engaged in this courtroom he had shunned then. He sat with his fellow defendants in the jury box. It was obvious that now he was proud of what the defendants had accomplished in the trial, and he was happy to join them in celebrating and examining the unusual trial, that era, and the personal commitments that had spawned their resistance.

In contrast to all the other people who commented at the reunion, Terry Neist—the only FBI agent at the reunion and one of the two agents in charge of the Camden informer in the months leading up to the arrests and also one of the agents who investigated the Media burglary—made it clear at the reunion that he was still angry about the verdict.
“We are a nation of laws,” he said. “They broke the law. They should have been found guilty.”

Forsyth spoke up. He was diplomatic as he responded to Neist in an agreeable but firm voice that was heard clearly throughout the courtroom. “Terry raised important points,” said Forsyth. “We
are
a nation of laws, and for good reasons. Most of us take that very seriously. Deciding when to break the law is not a trivial decision or a light decision. I hope that if I was presented today with the same issues, I would have the courage to make the
decision I made when I was a child of twenty-one. I hope the young people out there listening will try to make the right decision today.” His comments were greeted with murmurs of approval throughout the audience that packed the reunion courtroom.

The frustration and sense of failure that once dominated Forsyth's assessment of that period in his life were completely absent one day as he summed up what the acts of resistance he carried out in his youth mean to him now:

“It's one of the few decisions I made, one of the few things I ever did, that I feel unconditionally positive about.…I had to decide whether it was going to be just an opinion about which I would shoot off my mouth and not do anything, or was I really going to be serious and do something? … I spent a lot of time thinking about that.…I weighed the personal risk. I asked myself how much risk I was willing to face for an opinion.…That's one of those times when people were called on to take a position one way or another. I'm proud of the position I took.…There are a lot of other things in my life that are just sort of neutral. I get by from day to day like everybody else … sometimes doing things I'm ashamed of.…But I feel great about what I did then.”

23

R
ON DURST REMEMBERS
the pleasure of hearing people talk about the burglary. “I remember being proud and not being able to tell anyone.…That was okay. The action spoke for itself.” But the secrecy the burglars imposed on one another led to some unusual ways of getting approval. “It was a funny thing. I was getting indirect feedback through the news media and through people at parties.…They'd comment on what a wonderful thing had happened with Media, and they'd say it was incredible what this was doing to the FBI. People thought it was absolutely wonderful. They would wonder who had done it. I would have liked to have said, ‘I was one of the people who did it.' But I didn't. I knew I was getting compliments and a lot of support—though they didn't know they were giving it to me.…I was getting a lot of feedback from seeing the stories in the news media.…I was excited and very pleased.

“I was always looking over my shoulder, but it was a funny thing to be in a situation where you have done something that was against the law and yet you are proud of it. I'd look over my shoulder in a kind of fearful way, but the fear was attached to a feeling of pride and not to shame or guilt.” Durst was briefly considered a suspect, but he was never called or visited by the FBI.

The roots of his willingness to say yes when Davidon asked him what he thought of burglarizing an FBI office grew from tragic family stories that started shaping his conscience and his resolve to stop injustice when he was a child. The stories were horrendous. Whole generations of both his father's and mother's families were killed during the
Holocaust. His parents escaped and brought with them stories of Nazi brutality that were
permanently etched in his mind. These stories of profound loss filled many family conversations when Durst was growing up. As a small boy, he felt sorrow and anger for the enormous loss of life, including aunts and uncles he never had the chance to know. His anger about that tragic loss stayed with him, and as he became an adult it helped shape his decisions about the kind of life he would live. He could not believe average Germans after the war when they said, “I didn't know.” Nor could he accept the claim of Nazi soldiers that they should be excused because “I was taking orders.”

Later, his family lessons echoed in his response to the war in Vietnam. As the number of people killed added up to many thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians, he examined his anger about the Holocaust in new ways. He raised questions with himself that he had not considered before. “It's very easy to live in the United States and point at Germany and say, ‘Why didn't you follow the laws of your conscience?' That's easy to do. It's harder to do it in the present, in your own situation.” He thought about the passivity of German bystanders, of average German citizens, and he compared their reactions to the reactions of Americans to Vietnam. Sure, many Americans cared, but, he thought, not enough of them. Too many Americans were passive and seemed satisfied to let the killing continue, or not to explore why it was happening.

Earlier, Durst had easily adopted the fierce cry about the Holocaust: “Never again!” As his outrage about the Vietnam War grew, he heard the same cry in a new way. He told himself that the cry should also mean that such brutal killing must never happen again against
any
people—not in Auschwitz, not in My Lai, not in Cambodia. This compelling demand fueled his resistance to the Vietnam War.

As Durst edged closer to more serious resistance, he was perplexed by what he saw as a fundamental change in official American policies as reflected in its aggression in Vietnam in contrast to its role in creating the Nuremberg trials after World War II. In those trials, judges from Allied countries—including U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson—from 1945 to 1949 presided over the trials of more than one hundred Nazis for leading a war that was in violation of international treaties and involved brutal crimes against humanity. For the first time, the international community, organized primarily by the United States, agreed it had a moral and legal obligation not to let perpetrators of war crimes get away with impunity; they would be held responsible for their crimes. The United States and those grand principles established at Nuremberg seemed to be synonymous. Until Vietnam, said Durst.

By 1970, Durst was puzzled that the United States could have gone to such great lengths to enshrine those principles at the end of World War II but twenty years later was waging a war in Vietnam that increasingly was seen, in the eyes of more and more Americans and the international community, as one that could not be justified and that was needlessly causing the killing of thousands of people each year.