Looking at 76 years...For my part in our demonstration at the Jesup Blair Draft Board, which was: walked through the front door which had just been unlocked by a worker who went off to mow the grass, opened filing cabinets, and poured black paint into the drawers (our blood had been less than artfully splashed on a wall by one of our number) and tried to spread it - uh-oh: no gloves! no brush! - into and among the draft files, the State of Maryland and the United States brought charges including interference with the Selective Service Act, destruction of government property, mutilation of government records, conspiracy, aiding and abetting each other, breaking and entering, crossing state lines with intent to commit a felony, defacing a national monument, defacing Maryland park property, defacing U.S. government property, and who knows what else, altogether amounting to 76 years in prison.
During the action, Montgomery County police officers arrived on the scene, but they ducked out pretty much at once. I vaguely recall some other level of police - perhaps state troopers - showing up and being similarly non-committal. Shortly after, FBI agents showed up, and we were asked to immediately cut that the heck out. We were hand-cuffed and moved out to police cars, and driven from there to the Silver Spring police station. There was an appearance before a judge there, and charges were brought, though I can't recall which ones - in any event they were later to be dropped.
StirAfter a short rest in a cell in Silver Spring, we were driven to the Federal Building in Baltimore where another ceremony was performed, presumably all the main charges were brought, bail set, and then we were separated and transported to different parts of the federal lockup of the Baltimore City Jail.
The week at the BCJ before bail was made was mostly uneventful, though the legal machinations due to the action were being launched with a not-guilty plea to both state and federal charges. Early on my lawyer Harold Buchman had talked about and later that summer convinced me to leave the path of moral rectitude and cop a plea - thus shamefully personifying the preposterous phrase "pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order", immortalized by that insidious idiot not to say insipid ignoramus of law and order felon Richard Nixon's venally vainglorious not to say vacuously vapid and equally felonious Vice Pres Spiro T. Agnew, who claimed to have discovered said tendency in the likes of your author.
Copping a pleaThus my plea was changed from not-guilty to 76 years worth of charges, to nolo contendere to a single federal 3-year charge (mutilation of government records), which is tantamount to granting the prosecution victory by walk-over. Come to think of it, Spiro Agnew himself copped the same plea, when he entered a nolo contendere plea in federal court to charges of federal tax evasion, part of a complex plea bargain which cost him his chunk of the White House, three years probation and a $10,000 fine.
The upside of the plea bargain for Agnew was that all other criminal charges including state charges for taking bribes while governor of Maryland were dropped. Still, eight years later, during a civil suit in Maryland, he was made to repay the quarter-million dollars in bribes it was proven that he took while governor of that great state - one wonders how much he really took, both as gov and Vice Pres. Certainly it can't compare to the riotous fortunes being assembled by the present (2008) veep...
Ups and downs of the nolo pleaLike Agnew, I had been made to understand that a nolo contendere plea entailed ups and downs: the only up I can recall was that the other 73 years worth of state and federal charges were dropped, while the downsides included eliminating the courtroom process as a forum in which to work against the war. Years later another untoward side effect became apparent, in that by not having been convicted of interference with the Selective Service Act (a 5-year charge), I was not a potential recipient of President Jimmy Carter's first official act as President, i.e. his unconditional amnesty to (most) draft offenders.
In a deposition made by the Dept of Justice, probably in 1980 or '81, to the office of the Pardon Attorney, occasioned by my clemency application to Reagan, it was argued that the wording of Carter's amnesty ("...This pardon does not apply to ... persons convicted of or who may have committed any offense in violation of the Military Selective Service Act, or any rule or regulation promulgated thereunder, involving force or violence...") precluded my even being considered for clemency, since pouring blood and paint on draft files is a forceful, yea a violent act.
Yes, you read it here first: pouring paint onto draft files, potentially preventing real deaths of real persons (American draftees, or their Southeast Asian targets, or both), is a forceful not to say violent act. But of course the papers I defaced were worthless in comparison to the precious bodies of SE Asian children that, thanks to actions like ours, might be spared the lifelong curse of napalm. The same goes for those 3x5 cards and other files we defaced: worth zero compared to the draftees they represented, draftees whose lives and sacred honor we were trying to save, in my case armed with paint and my own blood. And no brush and no gloves: what a mess!
Tricking us into war - againIn any event, my change of plea would appear to have made it even theoretically impossible to use the courtroom to discuss the relative priorities of a government which had tricked its own people into one more illegal war, which by the middle of 1969 had spiraled, together with the rest of American reality, completely out of control. Concerning the so-called Bay of Tonkin incident which was the pretext for the war itself, and regarding the unofficial-official version, already in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson declared: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there". And as we learned after NSA-files were made public in 2005, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was not relative spin, it was entirely made up.
Summer of love, on the runThe summer of 1969 was, put simply, strange: Strange Days had tracked us down. A review of any time-line of the period will show that half our generation was literally trapped into taking sides in what has been proven to be an illegal war, and we found ourselves spinning in a cultural maelstrom. Resistance to the draft was getting way out of hand: actions against draft boards were multiplying, and they were becoming effective: potential draftees were finally disappearing, leaving the system altogether, and with the wording of the law at the time, a draftee whose information was expunged from the system really disappeared, and there was no legal way to require him to re-register for the draft. At the same time, a whirlwind of induction refusals were jamming city jails, federal courts and federal prisons; and tens of thousands of draft-age men, often with their entire families, simply pulled up roots and re-located north of the Canadian border.
Exactly how many ever fled to Canada ("sneaked into Canada", as my AP-reporter had put it) is an issue which many would apparently like to discuss. Certainly Canada has official figures, though there are reasons to believe they may have been sanitized in recent years. In the past few days, I have found internet sources with widely differing claims as to how many fled to Canada, ranging from 2,500 to over a hundred thousand.
Only a small percentage of the total number of draft resisters/evaders/dodgers and deserters ever made it to Sweden, and the official figure given me by the Swedish Immigration Board in 2001 is that exactly 800 Americans were accorded some sort of permission to stay in Sweden for Vietnam war related reasons.
Not until 20 or 25 years after the Vietnam war had ended did I discover that a single one of our number (your author) was actually accorded political asylum by Sweden - probably the Swedish authorities were not interested in advertising the fact. Regarding numbers in Canada, the figure I heard in American exile circles while I was living there - mostly in Toronto, with short periods in Ottowa and Montreal - in 1970-71 was that there were supposedly 60,000 draft resisters in Toronto alone, a smaller but not small number in Vancouver, altogether perhaps around 100,000, a figure I imagine to be more accurate than the ridiculously incorrect figure 2,500.
Federal Bureau of Intimidation: COINTELPROThe summer of 1969 saw Hoover declaring the Black Panther Party the single most important threat to freedom, followed closely by all the rest of us. The notion that the Nixon administration might be systematically committing illegal and even violent acts (otherwise known as terrorism) against the antiwar movement (and the Panthers, and the American Indians, and the feminists, and the Young Lords, and Women's Lib, and the civil rights movement, and the student movement, and the Chicanos, and United Farm Workers, and so on) - in fact doing many of the things presently allowed under the Patriot Act - figured wildly in the paranoid visions of some of us, your author included, yet this was denied vehemently by Hoover, Nixon and the rest of their criminal gang.
However, as Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing once wrote: paranoids usually have every reason to be. The FBI got away with their denials, too, on the whole, until their covert bubble burst as the first proof of the existence of the COINTELPRO conspiracy turned up a couple years later when an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania was broken into by a group calling itself the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI, none of whom were ever apprehended. Downwind, FBI agents began to resign from the Bureau, and some blew the whistle on COINTELPRO's illegal operations.
The group that on March 8, 1971 invaded the Media FBI office reportedly removed all its documents, including a large number of official not to speak of top-secret ones, sending copies to news media around the country. Much of the news media had its own groove though, then as now, as more recently described by more honorable journalists including Robert Parry, Greg Palast and others, and many editors and broadcasters turned the material over to the authorities without blinking an eye.
The material they so readily abandoned included documentary proof that the FBI, together with other U.S. Government agencies, had been breaking a wide range of laws since the 1950's at least, in order to combat what they saw as the forces of subversion, chaos and anarchy, in other words me and my friends.
Not until Congress investigated the matter in the middle '70s was official confirmation of COINTELPRO given, with barely a glance at the sort of venomous chicanery Hoover and his minions were dealing. There are many links on the web describing COINTELPRO, replete with details regarding its methods, including forged correspondence, mail-theft, identity theft, warrantless wire-tapping, media manipulation, assault and battery, planting drugs, planting bombs, even planting bullets in sleeping people, otherwise known as assassinations.
In a terse public communique upon what was claimed to be formal termination of the program, the government made it clear that similar operations would continue to take place, though not systematically like COINTELPRO, but only "on a case-by-case basis", and while not without oversight, yet under even stricter security - this time nothing would be left to chance.
Most likely the COINTELPRO effort never so much as wavered, but simply changed its name, its camouflage, its organizational status, its funding, more recently its brazenness, since now, the same figures that populated that seamier side of American politics are or have been in or near power in Washington, D.C. for several decades.
The FBI is everywhere (if you believe it)Among the documents supposedly found in Media was one from Hoover which tried to impress on field agents the director's belief in the importance of convincing Joe Public that the FBI was everywhere, literally: agents were to be seen lurking behind every telephone, inside every mailbox, right across the street, sitting in that car over there, hiding behind that curtain across the way.
Most of mass media's willing participation in the COINTELPRO programs, for instance by not outing the conspiracy once documentary proof was provided, lends further credence to the reporting of Parry, Palast and a small number of other fearless journalists and writers, to the effect that a substantial part of the mainstream news media (not only Fox, which never looked like a fair and balanced news organization, but never intended to) is and has for a long time been under the control of clandestine elements of the less pleasant powers that be.
Facing the music, changing keyAfter an amazing summer, spent for my part in New York, Washington, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Glacier Nat'l Park (where I heard on the radio about Nat'l Guard units being called out to help deliver food and medical supplies to something going on in a place called Woodstock), I headed back to Baltimore, and prepared to face my own music.
In the middle of September, 1969, 4 months after our action at Local Board 53 in Jesup-Blair Park, I returned to what I expected to be the beginning of my trial at the Federal Building in Baltimore, MD, where my lawyer Harold Buchman met me on the way into the court-room. In accordance with Buchman's advice, earlier that summer I had entered a nolo-contendere plea as detailed above, but in the interim I had seen the ethical error of my ways, in one respect: I had decided to withdraw the nolo contendere plea and face the original charges with a not-guilty plea. I had spoken by phone with the judge (Roszel C. Thomsen) ahead of time to confirm that he would allow the change of plea.
In retrospect, my own lawyer Buchman didn't seem able to get his head around what I was saying on the phone, and I was obviously unable to get my head around the fact that he was missing my point, and I was certainly missing his, as events would show. It may be that Buchman was acting out of concern for me, believing that to change the plea would be to open me up to the risk of a far harsher sentence than 3 years. Judge Thomsen had responded to my telephone query in such a way that I understood the trial would unfold as originally planned, and so the appearance in Baltimore would be a formality, and I expected a date would be set for a proper trial.
Party time (not)Regarding my own state of mind in the courtroom that day, a planning party was to take place that evening in D.C., where a few friends and I would sketch out strategy for a more out-front trial. Instead, a very few minutes into the proceedings in Baltimore, it all appeared to my beginner's legal mind to have been suddenly interrupted by the judge, who in a stern and rather formal voice pronounced my sentence: 3 years in federal prison. Buchman was not a bit riled by this, which was disconcerting to say the least.
"Three years in federal..." - say what?! The shock of this sound-bite, together with Buchman's attempts to calm me down, made it difficult for me to see my way clear to what was transpiring, and while they dragged me out, I shouted out questions of the Court regarding recourse, appeal and so forth, but the stark reality of what had happened didn't hit home until I found myself back in the Baltimore City Jail federal lockup. What I gleaned on the way through various holding cells, including a short talk with Buchman, who "would get back to me" with details on the future, was not a lot, but something to the effect that the nolo contendere plea had been made somehow indelible and there was no turning back, and specifically there was no route of appeal.
Heavy musicA long-lost factoid that recently came back to me (found in a letter I wrote from prison in October 1969, a copy of which my mother recently showed me), was that I had gotten the highest sentence so far of any of the draft-board raiders with the exception of Phil Berrigan, who had taken part in two actions. This I apparently knew already in the courtroom that morning.
Another long-lost factoid, re-discovered in the same letter, was that I was apparently informed upon sentencing and now and again afterward that I had been subjected to adult sentencing rules. In fact, a few months later, it turned out I had been sentenced under the Federal Youth Corrections Act. I don't yet understand the reasons for the discrepancy, but as I have understood it, under the FYCA the ordinary rules for parole didn't hold, so there was no reason to expect release after 1/3 time for good behavior. During my time at KYC, I didn't know this. As later events would show, counselors and others including the warden at the prison in which I spent the most time (Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, West Virginia) held that I would be released after 1 year, i.e. 1/3 of the sentence). But in the Baltimore City Jail that day in September 1969, all I knew was "three years", and "no right of appeal".
Baltimore City Jail, Federal Lock-upI freaked. A few hours later, after the mandatory butch haircut, strip search, donning of a surplus state police uniform which served as prison garb, I found myself in a cell together with a very large and not very friendly African American man who'd been there in the federal lockup during a long hot summer for interstate flight after having shot a man during an armed bank robbery. Can't recall his name, but I do recall thinking archetypally "Blackman", and I do recall his tone: he was not only very big and very black, he also informed me Honkycracker that he was calling the shots Whiteboy Muthafucka: my ass was his - literally.
Boy did I freak. What's your beef Honkycracker Whiteboy Muthafucka? I tried to explain our act of, um, civil disobedience ("sir" might have felt appropriate...), but I was not getting real far. In fact, so far, the whole scene was really getting very un-real. He was looking at 10-15 years, maybe more, and hears I attacked the government itself and didn't even get "a nickel" - typical Honky judge, give a Honky Whiteboy Muthafucka less than a nickel.
I didn't know this could be in the cards. I was in a state of extremely high alert, and heard a radio later on recount the result of my "trial". I was losing it. Here I was, tricked out of a trial, tricked into a federal prison sentence, stuck here sweating my head off on a hot September night, inside a claustrophobic cell with a huge black psychotic killer who owned my ass: where was there to go?! After having gotten commissary funds and a pack of Lucky Strikes, and in a relatively calm frame of mind, toward midnight, I chanced upon a razor blade hidden between my mattress (top bunk) and the wall. A few hours later, I slipped into sleep, blood running out of both arms.
Suddenly, something's wrong: Blackman's face is next to mine, or at least his eyes are, shining in the gloom of a Baltimore City Jail morning. He is standing there, shaking me awake, hissing at me, there's blood all over his clothes, even on his hands, all over his mattress, and moreover: I'm still here! As I came to understand, this was a new ball-game for him - he was pretty shaken up: here his lair is invaded by a honky freak with a cause, a cracker who gets himself into stir on purpose, then tries to off himself, using Blackman's personal and exceptionally illegal contraband razor-blade.
I underwent immediate transformation, from Blackman's meat to his private patient. During the week I spent in his cell, before being moved out to a federal penitentiary, Blackman managed to smuggle his razor blade out and bandages in, managed to sneak me past The Man for showers, showed me how to hide the bandages in my sleeves. The wounds weren't discovered until the next full strip search, at the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, a week or ten days later. I imagine Blackman was happy to see me go - I dunno: I wasn't going to miss him.
Lunacy on the roadLeaving the Baltimore City Jail, I was transported by two United States Marshals (note that the U.S. Marshals answer to the Executive and not the Judicial branch, thus these guys worked directly under Tricky Dick!), a father and son team it turned out, from Virginia, deer and partridge hunters when they got the chance.
In downtown Baltimore I got stupid, dreaming of an escape hatch: I asked them how they would react if at the next light my friends surrounded the vehicle with machine guns and asked them to please let me go. The son was riding shotgun - he instantly dropped the door of the glove compartment and raised a heavy-looking revolver and replied that I would be the first one to go down. I backed down and said that luckily nothing of the sort was planned. Must have been all the bad vibes in the city jail, I'm not usually that rude.
Can't recall exactly where they took me on the way to Ashland, but it took two or three days and nights to get there. I vaguely recall Roanoke, Virginia, maybe Charleston, W. Va. - three different jail cells on the way to Kentucky. One of them was across the street from a dance hall or a bar with live music - it was a hot September night, warm and muggy, good country music was slipping in past the bars, I could even see stars.
Funny, though - ending up in Kentucky: I had no family there, no relations or contacts, and these guys took many driving hours to get there. As it turned out, after the war, after so many of us had spent sizeable chunks of our lives in prisons and stockades and in exile, we understood the government was not only bad news in big things, they were bad news in petty ways as well. Nearly anyone that had to spend time in prison due to an antiwar crime ended up far enough away from family that visits became difficult if not impossible.
Stir-craziness in Ashland, KentuckyImage from Ashland: the barracks I ended up in housed probably 80 guys, all living in a single dormitory. There were maybe 30 or 40 draft resisters in all at Ashland. Many were educated and had managed to get jobs in the library, the infirmary. My vague memory is that Ashland had a license plate manufacturing facility, and perhaps manufactured postal bags. I was only there a few weeks, and during that time worked in the kitchen. The dorm radio was playing pieces by bands that had been at Woodstock, a few weeks in the past, Come Together was rising on the charts, Leary was running for governor in California.
One day we got an idea: how many tiles are there in that bathroom? The bathroom was something like ten toilets, as many sinks and showers, with these little tiny tiles. We were maybe 10 draft offenders in that "cottage" who really got into the project - kept us occupied for hours, totally freaking everyone else out, including the guards. Folie à dix has still not made it into the DSM, but we did our best. Redefining reality, making something ridiculous - our imprisonment for wanting to stop the killing - into something even more ridiculous. Escaping in a sense.
Somehow my mother's husband got the ear of someone at the Bureau of Prisons, and they moved me within weeks from Ashland to the experimental Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center, a minimum security facility just outside Morgantown, West Virginia. It housed federal offenders between the ages of 18 and 26, and my recollection is that a stipulation was that one's sentence could be no longer than 3 years, and no draft offenders allowed. I have no idea how he pulled that off.
Morning MorgantownDuring my time in federal prison, I got a handful of visits from family and friends in D.C., New York, Cleveland - most of them entailed traveling time on the order of 8-10 hours each way. Some had it better at Morgantown, like "Dud" - his beef was holding a nickel bag of grass - whose rich parents flew their own plane down from Indianapolis to see him twice a month, or Ralph - an extremely pleasant and brilliant young Quaker who'd gotten time for refusing induction - his parents lived in Morgantown and met him as often as they were allowed, which was weekly.
Obviously the government had no intention of easing our time, in particular taking boys (we were all boys, both those who'd refused induction and spent time in prison, and deserters who spent time in stockades) from the north and sticking us together with a lot of total weirdos from the south, some of them KKK, some worse, if you can imagine...
The Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center was apparently an incredibly expensive experiment - about 200 inmates (we were "students", the prison was our "campus") and nearly as many staff. We were segregated in accordance with the results of a diagnostic workup that took nearly a month to complete. There were a few guiding principles, and one was that segregation according to diagnostic category could improve the rehabilitative aspect of one's stay in prison, and all were to be provided therapy suitable for their supposed frame of mind.
Oddly, one of the theoreticians behind the Morgantown experiment was Timothy Leary, whose map of interpersonal relations (Leary, T., 1957. Interpersonal diagnosis of personality. New York: Ronald Press) was taken as bible by the people running KYC. Leary, who had already been fired from Harvard, was winning in the polls in his contest for governor - against Ronald Reagan - just before his arrest for a marijuana cigarette, for which he got a ten year prison sentence.
I ended up in a "cottage" for "immature-subcultural" types. I never figured out if this meant I was not yet fully "subcultural", or belonged to an immature subculture... Other groupings were "psychotic", or it may have been "psychopathic", "neurotic", "simply immature", etc. Everyone in our cottage was offered transactional analysis. Another principle used in Morgantown was "behavioral modification". We got "points" for everything, and lost points for things as well - it was like getting fined. Points could be converted to commissary cash, or used for privileges, like town visits.
Honor, death and rumors of deathAfter having made "honor", highest of three status levels at KYC, with privileges such as home furloughs, on the way to the electronics shop where I spent half of my weekdays, I was accosted by two guys from the "psychopathic" or "psychotic" cottage - can't recall what it was called for sure, only that it was in a separate end of the prison grounds from the other cottages and had no windows visible from the outside. They explained that they had learned that I was a commie, and they averred that commies were for killing, and explained that I would be killed by them shortly, and suggested I relax since there was no way I could stop them. They pointed out the general direction of the field in which they planned to plant my 18-year-old body.
What a bummer! Here I was having done more than half of the time I would have to do - counselors and others were certain their support for my parole at 12 months would go through - but release was still several months away. There was no telling "the Man". There were rumors of a death that had taken part earlier in another cottage, and we all believed them, and nobody had supposedly been charged, so as far as I could tell it was entirely reasonable to assume they could pull this off. What a bummer!
I was actually still unsure, when I left on the furlough, whether or not I would return or go through with splitting, since I knew that an escape conviction usually meant the maximum sentence = 5 more years. Just to up the ante on the freakiness quotient of everything going on around me at the time, a few nights before I was to leave on the furlough, I noticed one of these huge luna moths we saw in our valley from time to time, beating on my window. I started to get out of bed to go and check it out, but it brushed past my head - then I heard that high-pitched squeak: a bat!
Like lightning in under the sheet: "Guard! Guard! There's a bat in my room! Guard! Guard!" I managed to muster the wherewithal to get out from under the sheet and flee the room, where I noticed about 20 of my fellow prisoners, as wide awake as I was. Inside of a minute, we were everywhere, trying to bash that bat, poor thing. Someone finally managed to down the death image, and we got to go back to bed. He survived a couple days in a cardboard box, little tiny guy causing all that trouble.
Then came the day of the furlough, and not five minutes before I was to be driven to Morgantown's miniature airport, a cloudburst exploded onto our valley, and the furlough got called off! The warden Roy Gerard changed his mind when the sun came out after a few minutes, and they drove me out quick. Then another cloudburst on the way! Sunshine when we got there, quickly paid for the ticket, and managed to get to the plane not a full minute before take-off.
The plane had two stops on the way - they may have been Charleston, W.Va. and Winchester, Va. On one of the landings, in the middle of an absolutely torrential downpour, I catch the eye of the stewardess as we both turn our heads to peer out the window through the rain at the runway - straight down at it! We were close to 90 degrees from horizontal, and the wing looked to be a couple of feet from the tarmac! As we both visibly whitened, a sickly feeling in our bellies (in mine at least), the pilot must have leaned way back on that stick, as the plane zoomed straight back up into the sky.
The rest of the journey was uneventful, but by the time I stopped shaking in Washington, when my perspective shifted to one of relative freedom and especially relative freedom from the fear of being killed by a couple of right-wing wackos in a prison in the hills of West Virginia, I bolted - I was sure I would be killed if I returned, and reporting them to the Man would probably just hasten that. Thus as I saw it I really had no choice but to not return. It was the middle or end of April, 1970 - not until the middle of April 1975 did the government finally charge me for escape from a federal prison, worth those 5 more years...
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
