The Burglary (78 page)

After those bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Davidon lived with—and lived to stop—the possibility of annihilation. His dissent became that simple and that complex. It was about a decade later, he said, that he grew more politically sophisticated and became affiliated with other physicists who spoke at public gatherings in Chicago about the dangers of nuclear power. He gave speeches about the enormous military power government leaders now held and could use in the public's name.

The unsettling, ugly modern truth Davidon lived with after August 1945 evoked in him an enduring clarity about the potential for the annihilation of humankind that most Americans probably never felt until September 11, 2001, the day the Twin Towers were struck and destroyed. As arms analyst
Jonathan Schell wrote in the
Nation
a month after 9/11, “When the attacks occurred, the thought that flashed spontaneously into millions of minds was
that our world has changed forever.…It was … a bone-deep recognition of the utter perishability of all human works and all human beings in the face of human destructive powers.…The destruction of the Twin Towers … was a taste of annihilation, a small piece of the end of the world.” As in 1945, when the United States bombed Japan, Schell wrote, on 9/11 the most profound question was asked by millions: “What was safe?” The damage, of course, was much greater in the Japanese bombings, but for Americans, who had never experienced an attack on the mainland until 9/11, the fear seared into the nation's psyche was profound.

Fear, of course, was not new to Americans in 2001. It has stalked the American landscape many times, including during the years of the Vietnam War. Some Americans feared that enemies of the United States would use nuclear weapons against the country and thought that the United States should be prepared to retaliate against such attacks—either at home or in other countries, such as in Vietnam—and therefore must maintain large stockpiles of such weapons and build ever more powerful nuclear weapons. But Davidon and many other people who opposed the United States' use of nuclear weapons also were afraid. They were afraid not only of the possibility that other governments might use nuclear weapons, but also of how their own government might use its vast supply of such weapons in Vietnam.

During the 1950s, the time when
Cold War fears intensified, Davidon also became concerned about the power of the evolving values of his generation. They were building suburbia, acquiring more money and possessions than any previous generation had. They were proud that they had saved the world from fascism. At the same time, perhaps because of Cold War fears, they fell silent, rarely asking questions of government officials about important policies and actions taking place then, including the expansion of the country's nuclear arsenal.

Davidon thinks the silence of his generation after World War II, especially in the 1950s, diminished an important part of the American spirit—the impulse to question and to understand what the government is doing in the name of its citizens. He sees a sad irony in the fact that many of the people who made up what became known a few decades later as the Greatest Generation were largely silent when leading American officials—Senator
Joseph McCarthy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover key among them—labeled citizens who questioned government policies as un-American in the 1950s and early 1960s. His generation's silence, he thinks, created a habit of silence that by 1964 contributed to the fact that most Americans accepted
without question the major decision by the administration of President Lyndon Johnson to send troops to Vietnam.

DAVIDON THOUGHT
of silencing his own protest after the
Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. He had moved to Haverford College the year before and was looking forward to life as a scholar and researcher. So determined was he to remove himself from the scene of protest that he accepted a position as a professor of physics in New Zealand, thinking that was the only way he could escape deep engagement in protest over U.S. nuclear and war policies would be to leave the country. When he realized that such a move would mean being unable to see his son Alan, who lived with Davidon's first wife in the Chicago area, for extended periods of time, Davidon resolved to stay at Haverford College.

Having made that decision, he threw himself into activism on campus and in the Philadelphia area. He often contemplated theoretical physics matters during his years when resistance dominated his life, but his physics research, started at the University of Chicago, the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies, and Argonne National Laboratory, was put aside until after the Vietnam War. Probably few, if any, of the activists he worked with closely knew that their pleasant physics professor companion spent some of their long silent waiting periods together doing challenging mathematics and physics problems in his head. “One of the nice things about theoretical work is that you can do it wherever you happen to be,” he says, smiling mischievously as he thinks of some of the places where he contemplated mathematical problems—in parked cars on side streets while monitoring late-night light patterns in the windows of federal buildings and in a closet while waiting for a security guard to walk by on his last round of the evening.

After the Media burglary, it was as though Davidon could not stop his activism, despite the potential jeopardy he had accumulated. In both small and large ways, his resistance activities continued for a little more than a year. Perhaps because he had read the burglars' initial statement of purpose at a public gathering just days after the burglary—remarks that led to the first story published about the burglars' explanation of what they had done—journalists called him from time to time that spring to inquire about getting documents from the Media files. He never said he had the files, but he told them he would see what he could do. Invariably, they anonymously
received what they wanted. Only once did a reporter ask him if he was involved in the burglary. It was a student reporter for the Haverford campus newspaper. Davidon remembers evading the question and advising the student to write only what he knew. He continued to anonymously mail packets of copies of previously unseen stolen files to journalists about every ten days through mid-May.

Nothing Davidon did after the FBI burglary would have as much impact as the burglary had, but he continued to feel compelled to find new ways to oppose the war. He did so in two daring acts, neither of which involved other people from the Media group. In March 1972, a year after the Media burglary, Davidon was standing in an unlikely spot—by a railroad car filled with bombs in the middle of a field in the rich and gently rolling farmland of York County in southeastern Pennsylvania. This unusual circumstance was, of course, not an accident. Someone who lived in that farming community had told Davidon he had noticed that bombs destined for Vietnam were stored in open railroad cars that appeared to be accessible.

Earlier, Davidon and others had made it more difficult for a few thousand men to be drafted by stealing draft records. Now he warmed to the idea of making the bombs inoperable and, in the process, drawing the attention of local people to the fact that their local economy depended in part on producing weapons used to kill Vietnamese people. The bombs had been manufactured at the nearby
American Machine and Foundry Company (AMF) plant and were going to be shipped to Vietnam.

Davidon and two other people went to the field a few times and walked along the tracks, surveying the surrounding area and examining the bombs. They developed a plan to damage as many of them as they could. Following Forsyth's example at Media, in order to avoid having tools that could be traced to a hardware store, they made their own, including modified pliers designed to strip the threads on the bomb casings. New tools in hand, one evening they climbed into the dark railcars and worked for hours among the MK82 bombs, removing the caps and stripping the threads on the casings of hundreds of them. They carefully watched their surroundings inside and outside the railcars and talked softly and as little as necessary as they worked in the dark. Their concerns for security seemed to be unnecessary. They saw no guard—no one, in fact—near the plant or the railway cars during casing or as they worked inside the cars.

A few days later, several reporters, including this one, received a small bulky manila envelope that contained a news release typed in the same italic font that appeared on the letters sent a year earlier with each new packet
of stolen FBI documents sent to journalists. With the release was a copy of one of the documents that had been stolen from the Media office and a dark green threaded disk. The last item, as the news release explained, was the plastic cap of one of the 500-pound bombs that a group that called itself the Citizens' Commission to Demilitarize Industry had removed when its members stripped bombs at the AMF plant and “rendered [the bombs] unusable.”

In the news release prepared and sent anonymously by Davidon, he wrote that there were links between the FBI burglary and the damaging of the bombs. First, he noted the similarity of their names—the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI and the Citizens' Commission to Demilitarize Industry. “Our two commissions,” he wrote, “are responsible for these actions,” the burglary of the FBI and the damaging of several hundred casings for MK82 bombs made for the U.S. Navy by the AMF Company. “In addition to objectives and methods, we also share the typewriter on which this and other statements have been typed.”

That message must have infuriated the FBI agents who were still searching for the people who had burglarized the FBI office. Now, a year after the break-in, not only had the FBI not arrested the Media burglars or found the typewriter or copiers the burglars had used, but here were anonymous people publicly announcing that they had just used the typewriter the FBI had failed to find in connection with yet another invasion of government property.

Writing for himself and the others, Davidon said the new commission members were not grandiose in their assumptions about the potential impact of their sabotage:

In his continuing acts of resistance, Davidon wanted officials and the public to know that despite the government's power, it could be confronted in ways that embarrassed it and diminished that power, even if just a little. He wanted people to see that the giant Goliath was vulnerable to small Davids, especially when Davids joined together. He and some other Davids surprised Goliath one more time before Davidon ended his resistance.

A HEADLINE IN
the Wednesday, May 31, 1972,
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
—“3 Air Force Jets Are Sabotaged at Willow Grove”—topped a story that was prominently played in all local news media that day. The previous day had not been a routine Memorial Day at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station. In the wee hours of the morning, three U.S. Air Force Hercules C-130 transport planes, each large enough to carry ninety-two people or up to thirteen tons of cargo, were sabotaged at the station, eighteen miles north of Philadelphia along a main highway. Such planes were routinely used in Vietnam for carrying a wide variety of missiles, and the planes on the station grounds were ready to be sent there.

Electrical and hydraulic lines were cut on the four-engine turboprop transports and some parts were removed sometime after 11 p.m. on May 30. Officials were shocked when they discovered the sabotage at about 6 a.m. when ground crews tried to run routine preflight checks of the planes. They were inoperable. A tool compartment in one plane was open. Hydraulic hose lines to the brake systems and electrical wiring exposed around the undercarriage had been cut. On the exterior of one of the planes, someone had painted in bold red letters
BREAD NOT BOMBS
along with a large peace symbol.

The public information officer at the base told reporters the next day that whoever the saboteurs were, they knew how to cripple the planes. He said officials feared the sabotage might have been an inside job. An inspection of the two-mile perimeter fence showed no evidence, he said, that anyone had broken through or climbed over the fence. Officials were perplexed about how anyone could have entered and left the field undetected. “It is not known how these people got aboard the base or managed to elude Navy and
Air Force security patrols,” the PI officer said. “I am certain they did not come through the main gate,” he told a reporter. “Visitors at night must be cleared by a telephone call from the person they wish to see.” He also said there was “no evidence that the saboteurs broke through or went over the fence.” The damaged green-camouflaged planes were parked that night on a concrete ramp about half a mile from the busy north-south highway that was the eastern border of the fenced field. They had returned from flights at 11 p.m. that night. When the sabotage was discovered, security was tripled immediately at the base.

Yet another Citizens' Commission anonymously took responsibility for this sabotage. This one, the Citizens' Commission to Interdict War Materiel, anonymously announced that it had damaged planes at Willow Grove as a protest of the Vietnam War. A person who said he spoke for that group called the
Evening Bulletin,
as well as other Philadelphia-area news media outlets, and described the damage the group had done. The details he provided matched the damage described by the Navy public information officer when he was contacted a short time later.