The Burglary (86 page)

As the political temperament of the country became both more conservative and more apathetic, beginning in the late 1970s, the Raineses realized that what they did in 1971 might now seem “outrageously risky.” Some people, says John, might think, “How could you be so foolish? My God, you were not only husband and wife; you were father and mother of three children. How could you have put them in that kind of jeopardy?”

“I live with that,” says John. “The answer I have to that is, if all of us simply did what we thought was safe, that would let people who want to take our government away from us do that.” There are different ways to protect children, your own and other people's children and grandchildren, he says. Sometimes it means protecting them from having their freedoms taken away by powerful institutions. That, he says, was part of what motivated them in 1971. Thinking of the arrests and sentences that never happened, he says, “But is it nice forty years later … knowing that we got away with it? Sure.…That's great.”

At the time, they recall, it did not seem unreasonable, let alone
outrageous to engage in such a radical act. It felt like an appropriate response to the outrageous behavior of the government in terms of both the war then being waged and the massive spying they thought was being done against American citizens.

Resistance was not really such a big deal, says John. “Courage was natural. It was all around you. What now might look courageous to some people, and outrageous to others, seemed more natural then.” Sure, he was afraid, “stomach-knotting” afraid in the South and in the days right before the burglary and the night of the burglary. Even so, he looks back on those actions and regards them as having been “nearly natural” things to do under the circumstances.

“It was an utterly different climate then,” he recalls, warming to the memories. “There were deep divisions then, but thousands of people jeopardized their freedom—refusing the draft, burning draft cards, blocking railroad cars loaded with napalm bound for shipment to Vietnam, walking from Selma to Montgomery, sitting in bus stations.…There was an entirely different climate about being a public person.” By a decade later, he recalled, politics was regarded as “dirty and not something to try to influence.” People stopped, he said, being willing to pay a price to change something they thought was wrong.

“
That
was not the strange time,” he likes to think. “
This
is the strange time. We stole FBI files and gave them to the press because we had confidence in the public, in the processes of public discourse. And we were right. The government did take the material we stole and eventually conducted hearings and tried to change how the FBI operated.…I think we desperately need to have a rebirth of our sense of the importance of politics and the
importance of public discourse. And gain confidence that good things, not just corrupt things, can come from that.

“It is important to understand that we did not think of ourselves as especially heroic or courageous. We probably didn't even think of those words. We thought of ourselves as taking an important risk that would be well received by many people and that would be used to bring about change if we were right about what we would find. And we were.

“We did not, for a minute, think of ourselves as being Don Quixotes. We thought of ourselves as being very accurate about the political possibilities.…And we would not have undertaken the action if we had not thought it was in tune with the times, thought it would not be received by many. It would have been utterly foolish to have taken on that kind of action if we thought the world was not prepared to receive it.…

“We did not feel helpless. We were not an island different from the sea around us. We never felt like isolated islands. We felt like part of the sea of that time.” It also helped that “we were young, we had incredible amounts of energy and idealism. We felt potent and felt we could manage almost anything.”

Bonnie Raines agrees. When asked how it was possible to move forward with the burglary despite seemingly forbidding obstacles—among them fear that the FBI knew about the burglary and had placed that second lock on the FBI office door they thought was not there before that night and the abandonment of the group just days before the burglary by someone who knew every detail of their plans—she, like John, finds the explanation mainly in the nature of that era. “The times called for and supported bold actions,” she said. “We were just conceited enough to believe that we were smart, strategic, and patient, and also that perhaps it fell just to us and not others to expose the FBI in a credible and compelling way.”

Perhaps more than any other Media burglar, John Raines enjoys recalling the spirit of that earlier time, the years that prepared them for Media. As he and Bonnie sit in the old Glen Lake home of his parents, where by now
their children and their grandchildren have developed an abiding affection for the old house and the fun and family closeness they experience there every summer, he looks out from the screened porch, across the tops of the fruit trees on the slope that rolls down to the lake, and he lets the memories flow. A bit of the preacher he turned away from becoming and the resister and professor he became all rise to the surface and blend as he reflects on the times and spirit that nurtured and motivated eight people in 1971 to risk their futures to protect dissent.

Bonnie Raines (front row, right) and John Raines (behind her, third from right) with their four children, three of their seven grandchildren, plus their childrens' spouses and friends. Throughout their lives, such gatherings have made them acutely aware of the family life they would have lost if they had been found and imprisoned. (
Photo by Betty Medsger
)

“It was a time when a president could say, ‘My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' He could say those words not in a vacuum, but in a country that was ready to hear those words.

“It was a time when the Peace Corps was formed and people were waiting to join it.

“It was a time when southern cops were shown on national television on Sunday night beating up people in Alabama, and by the next day so many people were trying to fly to Alabama that major airlines had put extra planes on, getting thousands of people to Montgomery by midday Monday.

“It was a time when LBJ could announce a war on poverty. Think about that. Poverty was something to go to war against. It was a war to win, to spend millions and billions to win. And he could get the votes in Congress because they thought there were enough people in this country then who believed poverty was an enemy that should be defeated rather than something that should be blamed on the poor.

“It was a time when literally hundreds of thousands of people would get in cars and fill East Coast highways, get on trains, and travel to New York and Washington, again and again, for massive rallies against the Vietnam War.

“It was a time of the best music we've produced.…It began with the freedom songs in the South, then the Beatles. The energy that was in the music and the counterculture—along with the drugs and some of the craziness—the sheer energy of that time was astonishing.

“It was a time when I found Catholics could be radical, and nuns could be the most radical of all.

“It was a time when I discovered the wonderful liberality of the Jewish conscience.

“It was a time when black people in the South taught me courage.

“It was a time when I as a WASP finally discovered and became close to the moral resources of all these other communities.

“It was a time when [Senator Eugene] McCarthy's delegates to the 1968 Democratic convention were gassed by Chicago police, beaten by them on national television, and chanted to the cameras, ‘The whole world is watching,' and knew that the world
was
watching.

“It was a time when Hubert Humphrey, even after the huge disaster of the Chicago '68 convention, would have won the election if the liberal antiwar folks like myself had had better political judgment about how much was at stake in that election.”

A look of profound despair crosses his face—his deep regret—for what he now regards as a profoundly foolish belief he held then: that it was more important to punish Humphrey for his failure to take a strong stand against the war than it was to prevent Nixon from being elected. This memory moves him to shift to the painful memories of what flowed from that election—more war and more certainty at the Nixon White House about staying the course in Vietnam.

“It was a time when Richard Nixon rimmed the White House with Washington, D.C., buses, bumper to bumper, while thousands of antiwar demonstrators filled the Washington Mall. And he bragged to the country that while he was protected by the buses he watched a football game.”

Most important, though, says John Raines, “It was a time when we still believed we could and should be a good nation, not just a powerful nation.”

Near the end of his vivid recall of that time, he is high from the memories he has evoked. “What an exciting time it was,” he says, almost sounding as though it's a surprise that such a good time existed, a time when people were passionate about justice.

Bonnie Raines agrees, but she is slightly uncomfortable with his occasional emphasis on the past. The woman whose sketched face became well known to FBI agents throughout the country—the woman J. Edgar Hoover believed was the key to solving this case that he considered one of the worst things that ever happened to the bureau in his forty-seven years as its director—hesitates to dwell too much on the past.

“Yes, it was exciting,” she says, “but we differ on that. You can feed off that more than I can. I tend to say, ‘Well, okay, but what do we do now?' ”

“Now,” says John.

His soft echo of her last word is not a question but rather is recognition of being pulled back to reality, something Bonnie occasionally does when she thinks he is sinking into too deep an appreciation of the past, however remarkable and important it was. He acknowledges the wisdom in her concern. He, too, is realistic. He acknowledges that the accomplishments of the
burglary and its aftermath are fragile. “Government intimidation and surveillance are never farther away than the next unpopular war or movement.”

He sometimes despairs about “now.” “America has lost some of the freedoms that we fought for and thought we had won back in the '60s and early '70s. We're back to square one. We're back to having to fight. We the people, once again, have to fight for an America that belongs to all Americans, not to just the special few Americans who have a lot of money and can use that money now freely to influence elections and drown out the voice and the meaning of the vote of … the people.”

Bonnie agrees. “I worry. I worry very much about what it's going to take to change the climate in this country right now. And the silence of the ordinary people who just accept. Even when certain activities are exposed, they are just accepted.…It's not just about what's going on in America. It's global—the huge inequality gap of wealth in the world and in this country.…There has to be a generation that picks those problems up and says, ‘These are the ones we're now going to attack.' ”

Despite the realities of “now” that Bonnie often introduces into their conversations, she savors the big secret of what they did on March 8, 1971, as much as John does. That special smile that has appeared countless times over the years when they reminisced about the burglary is on their faces now.

“That was a fairly good moment in time, wasn't it?” says Bonnie.

John couldn't agree more. “It was wonderful.”

26

A
FTER ALL
of the evidence of abusive behavior by the FBI had been placed on the table—the
Media files, the COINTELPRO files Carl Stern sued to have the FBI release, and the massive documentation and testimony gathered by the
Church Committee—efforts were initiated to prevent such abuses from taking place again. Reformers soon discovered it was nearly as difficult to put reforms in place as it had been to compel the FBI to open the files of J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI.