The Burglary (85 page)

It was then, in those New York years, that the Raineses made the promise to each other that made it possible for them to say yes to William Davidon's December 1970 question about burglarizing an FBI office. After much reflection in that New York apartment nearly a decade before his question, they promised each other that when injustice reached extreme levels, they hoped both of them, not just John, would be willing to risk their freedom to fight injustice. It was extremely difficult to make this promise, for their children were at the center of their lives. But so was their love of justice and their belief that
all
citizens should take responsibility for opposing injustice in times of crisis. They forced themselves to face a painful challenge that few people contemplated—joint resistance.

After John Raines completed his doctoral studies at Union Seminary in 1966, the Raineses moved to Philadelphia, where he became a tenure-track professor in the new Department of Religion at Temple University, where he still teaches part-time after retiring in December 2011. It was an exciting academic environment that suited him well, unique in the diversity of its faculty and courses: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and, a few years after he arrived, Muslim studies. Within little more than a year after he started teaching at Temple, Raines created one of the first courses offered in the United States on the Holocaust. Later he would be instrumental in the department's adding the study of Islam. It became a favorite place for Muslim graduate students from predominantly Muslim countries to study comparative religions and then encourage universities in their home countries to offer comparative religion studies instead of only the study of Islam.

Soon after they moved to Philadelphia, the Raineses were drawn to the large antiwar community there. Before long their home in the Germantown section of the city was a gathering place for antiwar activists who, over casual dinners prepared by Bonnie, discussed how to end the war in Vietnam. Bonnie's role as earth mother expanded. Often nearly everyone else talked strategy while she cooked big meals for them. She loved this environment, but sometimes a depressing thought gnawed at the edges of her soul: “You know you really aren't as good as they are.”

Though the Raineses found it difficult not to feel hopeless as the war continued, they also were still essentially optimistic people. That was part of why they had become activists. They believed that active dissent could cause change. But after 1968, they had lost much of their optimism.
Increasingly, confidence in the federal government was replaced by alienation. For them and many other people, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, more than anyone, symbolized the loss of hope in the government. In 1964, as a senator, he had been crucial in the development and successful passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in public facilities. But as the war in Vietnam continued, Humphrey tumbled precipitously from being a source of hope among liberals to being a source of despair and anger.
In a forceful private memo to President Johnson in February 1964, he had strongly opposed the war, but, his opinion coldly rejected by Johnson, Humphrey soon publicly reversed his position, condemned people who opposed the war, and openly speculated, as Johnson did—despite contrary evidence—that antiwar protests were supported by money from foreign governments.

Like William Davidon, the Raineses felt hope was becoming scarce. Like him, they also were looking for more powerful nonviolent ways to protest the war. Their path into more serious resistance was very similar to Davidon's. One of John's graduate students—Sister
Sarah Fahy, a nun who was the daughter of Judge Charles Fahy, a senior judge then on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.—introduced them to people in the Catholic peace movement. The Raineses found their optimism renewed, as Davidon did, by the Catholic resisters. John remembers being impressed by the fact that the Catholic peace movement resisters were “angry, but they also were optimistic and hopeful.” The Raineses—whose protest and resistance grew originally out of a “deep liking for the country rather than a deep hatred of the country”—came to feel they shared common ground with the Catholic activists. “They wanted to do something that would have effect, not just cause havoc,” says John. “They wanted to do things that would have real consequences.”

The Raineses joined about two dozen people organized by the Catholic peace activists in a draft board raid in North Philadelphia in February 1970. Less than a year later, they accepted Davidon's invitation to consider burglarizing the Media FBI office. In doing so, they did indeed do something that had real consequences for the country.

THE MEDIA BURGLARY
had real consequences for the country and also in the Raineses' lives. They felt direct pressure, probably more than any of the burglars, from a series of events. There was the visit from the man who abandoned the group and told John and Bonnie he was thinking of
turnwing all of the burglars in to the FBI. There was the Xerox technician who carried away from John Raines's office the drum of the copier he had used to copy hundreds of the stolen files. There were the two agents who came to the Raineses' home about two months after the burglary and asked John directly if he was involved in Media and left just minutes before Bonnie returned home. Each of these incidents gave them reason to fear that arrest might be imminent.

The personal toll was heavy at times, so much so that they decided never to take part in an act of resistance again, at least not one that involved such great risk. “Not long after Media,” John recalls, “Bonnie and I began to realize that was the end.…Media would be the last thing we would do. We had taken on all the jeopardy we could.”

Though they would add no more new jeopardy, their old jeopardy remained a frequent companion, often touching and scaring them. Bonnie describes their lives after the Media break-in as “a sustained period of worry and concern. That went on for five years.” Though the level of intensity varied, it was always there. Throughout the first six months after the burglary, she said, “we talked a lot with each other about what we had done. Every morning, when you went to get the paper, you'd wonder if you would read that you were a suspect, or read that someone's fingerprint had been found. Maybe there will be an article on some angle the FBI has picked up. Maybe someone was brought in for questioning. There was always that half expectation that something was going to crop up. You were always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Bonnie dreamed about the search for the Media burglars. The dreams were more like nightmares. She would dream agents were closing in on them, surrounding their house, about to knock or break in. Then she would wake up, groping in the first moments to understand what was a dream and what was reality. Then relief. FBI agents were not breaking into their house. But the fear always lingered.

She remembers seldom driving during those years without looking in the rearview mirror and wondering if the driver behind her was an FBI agent. If there were two men in the car, she really worried; FBI agents usually traveled in pairs. Both she and John often thought they were being followed, were about to be pulled over, arrested, and, in a moment, their lives changed forever. She remembers sometimes being in the middle of a conversation with one of the children—“You dropped your teddy bear, sweetheart”—and noticing that there were two men in the car behind her and that the car seemed to be awfully close. She often drove, in those post-burglary days,
with one eye on the road, one eye on the car in the rearview mirror, her heart with the children in the backseat, and a knot of fear in her stomach.

Over the years, when friends occasionally commented in the presence of the Raineses about the “amazing revelations” in those FBI documents stolen at Media, the Raineses would nod in agreement, and then share with each other what they hoped looked like meaningless glances. They kept their egos in check. They depended on their inner confidence and each other for the approval that might have come from other people acknowledging their significant accomplishment. Bonnie thinks the need to live as though the burglary always would be a secret “induced a certain level of maturity in us.” But sometimes they wished they could share their big secret. Keeping the secret meant Bonnie never was able to tell her feminist friends about her great breakthrough—that years earlier she had taken risks that led to very important information becoming known to the American people about their government. She could not tell them she had discovered that she could be brave.

Gradually, they slipped into completely normal lives. Like many of their friends, said Bonnie, “we became a dual-career couple trying to hold things together.” Each of them found different outlets for professional work that satisfied their need to improve society. She finished her long-time-coming master's degree at Temple University and moved eventually from working in daycare centers to a series of top leadership positions in organizations where she worked with teachers, social agencies, and legislators in developing policies and legislation designed to improve the lives of children, especially poor children. One of her accomplishments later in her career was convincing high school administrators to provide instruction in parenting—the most important role most people are likely to have in life, but a role for which there is little or no formal preparation.

As life became more normal, John Raines focused on publishing in order not to perish on the path to academic tenure. A book he wrote for that purpose,
Attack on Privacy,
published in 1974, included research that was far more original than the people who evaluated it during his tenure review may have realized. It was a treatise on the various organized forces in society, including the FBI, that invade citizens' privacy and change people from citizens to what he called “passive system inhabitants.” He included his analysis of direct excerpts from at least four of the documents stolen from the Media office—properly footnoted, of course.

On the book jacket, John is described as a professor who has “given a great deal of attention to the intersection of public issues and matters of
conscience and spirit.” Indeed, he had given a great deal of attention—not to mention action—to such matters. Perhaps none of his readers, except his wife and other Media burglars, understood that he had specific actions, not only profound ideas, in mind when he wrote the last paragraph of the book:

During this time, John also participated in home duties more than he had in the past. Until then, Bonnie had assumed responsibility for multiple roles at home and at work. Now John did more work in the home, including more childcare. They both enjoy recalling that he was so deeply involved in taking care of Mary when she was an infant that when she cried out in the night, often it was Daddy she asked for.

IN THE MORE THAN
forty years since the burglary, the Raineses have continued to find pleasure in talking with each other about it. Eventually they talked about it less frequently, but once in a while they look at each other with a special look—a mixture of satisfaction and amazement. Each of them recognizes the look. The memories bring a smile. One of them breaks the silence, usually with a laugh, and says, “Can you believe we did it?” At such times they again feel a deep, quiet incredulity. And happiness.

Sometimes, in those special moments, one of them says, “How could we have possibly expected to get away with it?”

“It just seemed impossible,” says Bonnie, “that somebody didn't make some huge mistake, or somebody didn't spill the beans.…We just had to go on faith that nobody would spill the beans and that none of us had made some awful mistake. But you couldn't help wondering.”

At other times, they talk simply of their “wonderful secret.”

They both agree that they became savvier about power because of the burglary. They think they are more certain than most people that it is
possible to cause change, even in very large and powerful institutions. John thinks the experience made him a different academic than he otherwise would have been. Beginning with the Freedom Rides in 1961 and through Media in 1971, he said, “I think I've been in moral places that most of my colleagues haven't been. I was less obsessed with authorities.…I think it meant that it was hard to scare me. I've never kissed ass in the department, even when it was made pretty clear that if I wanted this or that I needed to kiss ass. I just didn't do it. They didn't have the power to punish and reward me. Fear and the need to please authority were not a part of my adult life after those experiences. That probably was to my disadvantage. I would have gotten promoted earlier, perhaps, if I'd been willing to play some of the smaller politics of academic friendship, but that was simply uninteresting. Academic politics became very boring for me. I was interested in the larger political scene, not in academic politics.”

Despite the heavy impact of the burglary on their lives, Bonnie Raines sees the burglary as an aberration in an otherwise rather normal and law-abiding life that continued to be fueled by a sense of urgency about injustice and lack of equity. The burglary was, for her, a stepping-stone toward confidence. “It made me know,” she said, “that I can do something in the way of social change. It was an important step in that direction. I came to realize I have a lifelong need to be contributing to social change. I think it also made me fairly realistic about the limits of our government and the abuse of power.”