09. S

Pen pals
S and I met in person for the first time in May of 1970. Born and raised in Kentucky, S was a dreamy-looking part-Cherokee lady. By day she worked as secretary to the manager of a defense plant just outside of Boston. By night she was an anti-war renegade, into macramé and tie-dye clothing, vegetarian and macrobiotic food, organic growing, meditation, rock music, wild dancing, country living, the antiwar movement. Tiny, dark-eyed, quick, her straight-as-an-arrow dark hair fell down to her waist, and to keep on keeping-on she drove a metallic green GTO sporting a heavy duty suspension, 4 on the floor and nearly 400 horsepower.

S and I started out as pen-pals! During the Christmas season of 1969, her greeting card stuck out among the hundreds that showed up at the Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center. The Quakers had put an effort into publishing lists of "Prisoners for Peace", including most draft offenders, deserters, draft board raiders, corporate headquarters raiders and others, and cards and letters had arrived in my name in disturbing numbers: there were guys in Morgantown who got nothing at Christmas.

One of the cards came from Boston, a town I really liked the few times I'd been there, back during high school, back when things looked like easy street in the shape of partial scholarships to Boston U, or Northwestern, maybe even Harvard, and I'd been there to get a feeling for the town, in fact just before I was asked to stop coming to high school.

S and I struck up a friendship via cards and letters. Originally we were to meet in D.C. during my furlough from prison. A problem turned up during the furlough and she couldn't come as planned, and of course had no idea I would not be returning to prison. At that point I wasn't even sure myself that I would go through with the disappearing act, since while the death threat was real, it was "only" a threat - there might be a way out - while the threat of a 5 year sentence for escape from federal prison was no threat at all: it was supposedly a sure thing.

Boston, Mass
As it turned out, Boston found its way onto my itinerary underground, and S and I took a chance at meeting - a very chance-y move, considering that the prison by then certainly had gone through my things and noticed all the letters from her. In fact she was contacted by the prison officials in Morgantown a number of times in May and possibly June, trying to convince her - in case she should hear from me - to convince me to return: they promised they hadn't alerted the FBI and promised not to transfer me to another penitentiary, as long as I showed up very soon.

Things didn't turn out that way. Eqbal Ahmed was not happy about the meeting between S and me, and insisted I keep to his rules about modes of transport, telephone usage and so on, and so we finally met around the time of my birthday in May of 1970. It was something of a blind date, and while the attraction was clear, the general ambience - fugitive draft-board raider meets beautiful young defense-plant employee - had its complications. But we stuck it out, and met again, and it began to be clear that we were onto something.

At one point in June or July we got to borrow the keys to a fantastic apartment, taking up the top floor of a tiny centuries-old building in the heart of Cambridge, Mass. We walked out into a sunny afternoon one day to get some food, and I spotted that bright green GTO parked near the flat, and I freaked! I scolded S, told her I had to split, and did so - quick. I thought maybe the stress was getting to be too much for her, or even worse, that she had been convinced to stretch our rules, like never parking near where I happened to be staying.

I assumed my cover was blown and followed Eq's instructions in case of a breach, which set in motion a chain of events leading to my being moved to a safe place. This particular time it probably entailed New York City again, and once again Jesuit Missions, with Rose's Jamaican cooking, late-night debates with Ned, Ed McG and others, now and then even more lavish dinners at Woodstock College. It may instead have been in an old house where I spent a couple weeks, right down the street from the original Sleepy Hollow in Ossining, new euphemism for Sing Sing, in New York.

This scene, this "underground", for going on four months, had meant taking part in retreats to help plan further non-violent "actions", and debate generally on strategy, though my voice at those meetings, while listened to - a courtesy in part I assumed, due to my having already paid my dues, having taken part in an action, gotten arrested, tried and jailed, and now escaped - hadn't a lot of influence, nor value: I still was in every sense a kid. And yet I was welcome to take part in some sort of discourse none of us really knew how to approach.

Resource or liability
As the summer wore on, it became apparent that I was at least as much a liability as a resource for all these tremendous friends and co-conspirators, being a real and tangible burden, so while it somehow felt cool, I imagine - to my budding 19-year-old late 60's early 70's way young and certainly a little stir-crazy and strung-out and sure-let's-make-a-revolution kind of mind - this existence was getting just a little heavier than expected.

Families in Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, D.C., Ohio had opened their homes to me, to Mary Moylan, Dan Berrigan and others in roughly the same situation, thus exposing themselves to the risk of extreme consequences. And remember: Nixon and his murderous hacks had all the high cards, at least it seemed, and were in any event calling the shots, back when three was a crowd.

Power of non-violence
1970 was in all a pivotal year for our micro-movement: we were in some sense all of us pacifists, absolutely dedicated to the non-violent approach to revolutionary change: we understood to our core the nearly invincible strength of determined highly visible non-violent resistance.

Dissenting views - in the wider movement - existed, but didn't trouble us. On a humorous note, I recall a short sort-of-argument with Ned Murphy's little old mother in the Bronx. She had been a Red Cross nurse during the Irish war many decades earlier, and now that she had more than one like her son in the same room, she made her standpoint clear: "You're all a bunch of sissies - I say pick up the gun!" Ned was 33 at the time, and his mother must have been around 70, perhaps more. Ned told me after we left that an important part of her nursing work 50 years before entailed hiding guns under the floorboards of Irish ambulances.

We could laugh about her experience, which wasn't laughable, and her views, which weren't laughable either, but whenever any of those voices in the movement which believed violence was a useful method had tried to impose their views on our group and our approach, they met compact resistance, since our beliefs were not a construction, but a deduction, and the result of a calculated risk that obviously has worked miracles in many cases, as it did in India, as it did in the Deep South of the United States, as it may one day do in Tibet.

An important element of the non-violence equation was - then as now - objective media exposure, and while large parts of mainstream media were anything but supportive of the antiwar movement, on the whole it was far easier in those days - before internet and the blogosphere - to figure in mainstream discourse regarding the war and its relation to poverty, racism, sexism, and other elements of American domestic predatory politics and culture. An entity as venomous as Fox News and its belligerent co-conspirators did not figure then, and while the Smothers Brothers and others like them finally did go down, on the way down they had effects almost unimaginable today.

COINTELPRO
The summer of 1970 was also a watershed for violence apparently issuing from, but mostly directed against, various parts of our wider movement for social equality, for racial equality, for gender equality, for sexual freedom, for inner freedom, for an end to the war and an end to war-making in our names. While the documents removed by "The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI" from the Media, Pennsylvania FBI-office, in March 1971 (and don't look at me: I was already in Toronto, with Jesuits, or maybe Quakers) finally proved the existence of a pattern of secret government subterfuge not completely understood until the decades-long COINTELPRO programs were finally admitted to publicly in black and white, at the time in 1970, nobody could be sure who was committing the few really violent acts being directed against symbols of the war machine, like bombings. We hard-liner pacifists were convinced that it wasn't anyone on our side. As it turned out, groups which threw bombs, once caught, inevitably turned out to include government agents as well as crazies.

Since it has been proven through FOIA-releases and those documents taken from the FBI's Media, Pennsylvania office that Hoover's COINTELPRO efforts, which never have been completely exposed to public view, included a great deal of illegal activity including lethal violence as well as financial support for violent anti-antiwar groups, in fact COINTELPRO together with its CIA-counterparts (see Secrets by Weir and MacKenzie) might very well have been behind most or all of the violence which took place back then. In societies not experiencing war right in their own streets and fields, anti-war people are not the enemy, and in such times and places they do not make bombs, nor do they carry guns.

There's something happening here
In the summer of 1970, Black Panthers were being assaulted and killed, even openly assassinated, and even less extreme political leaders were being assassinated. Ordinary people were being framed, draconian laws were being perpetrated all over an unsuspecting country, and the Indochinese war was raging unabated, swallowing large chunks of my generation, yet swallowing endlessly larger numbers of natives to SE Asia.

Many of us who survived this era recall a pervasive atmosphere of threat, a sense of imminent and real risk, a general tone of paranoia, made all the more pervasive by design, as we have come to discover, by COINTELPRO, by the CIA, by their yet-unknown counterparts, and desperate moves suffused the entire world in which we found ourselves. Our very survival was threatened, as was our micro-movement and the larger social movement to which we adhered, a movement which was way too splayed out to function well as one, was yet too large, too extensive, too wide-spread, too just in its demands and righteous in its views, but simply too determined and too committed not to succeed, yet look at what it was costing.

Expectant
During the stay in Ossining, S communicated that she had an important message for me. Like many parents-to-be I had dumbed myself into not knowing what was coming. I had to get up to Boston and see her. A few days later I managed to convince my contacts to arrange a meeting with Dan Berrigan - I needed advice. Just before this, S told me the news - a baby was on the way! This had not been on our agendas, and we worked a lot to get our heads around it. Friends at Women's Lib in Boston tried to persuade us to terminate, but neither of us could speak that language. Options weren't rife, if we were to be a whole family: I would need to either remain "underground", but leave the Catholic Left, take a new name (I already had a new name), move to a new part of the country, and establish a new life there, or flee from the United States. The same options applied to S, who in the one scenario would also need to change her name. After an agonizing confrontation with these less pleasant elements of the new situation, we decided to decide what to do in another week.

Dan and I met just days before he was arrested by the FBI on August 12, 1970, since I saw his smiling face and peace sign while being escorted by the FBI in the news soon after our meeting. We met at the home of an influential educator and author just outside Boston, and the only persons in the room during our talk were Dan, myself and our host's young child. There was a lot to talk about, since while he had some access to information on developments above-ground, among the group loosely called the Catholic Left, I had spent four months in that group, and Dan hadn't taken part in any of the retreats I had attended.

The key issues in these meetings revolved around questions of strategy for effective non-violent resistance to the war, and as noted earlier, particular attention was being paid to the difference between "stand-by actions" and actions in which the participants either didn't make themselves known at first, or even at all. In fact, this alternative to "stand-by" actions made the complications it entailed evident right in the name: "hit-and-run". Dan had opinions on the subject, and I recalled his opinions having been actively defended at the retreats.

On the situation in which S and I found ourselves, Dan used his singularly Socratic approach to help me discover that either of the options mentioned above would be fine. Not choosing one of them - for instance in order to stay underground and continue taking part in the planning of actions - was not an option, but he mentioned specifically that there were Jesuits in Canada that would help us if we were to go there, and seemed to feel leaving the country would be a good idea. Dan and I got back together with our hosts around now and shared some refreshments. On the way out, Dan gave us his blessing, and I felt invigorated by the new purpose and direction our meeting had helped uncover.

Escape velocity
S and I got together again the following day, and decided I would travel to California, and decide the rest there, probably continuing up to British Columbia. We still hadn't given up entirely on the option that entailed settling down somewhere else in the USA with new names. Later the same day I got to New York City, where I shared the news with Ned. He had just been granted extra money for traveling by his superior, and we began to plan the trip. We would get bus tickets to Cleveland, where someone could drive me further west.

According to the plan I would probably continue out to California and then make my way straight to British Columbia, having anticipated that my movement across the border might be problematical, but less so there than in the east. S and I would meet in BC and decide the next steps from there. The plan was somehow for the move west and north to be leisurely and pleasant, all things considered, but this was not to be...

Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome